Index

Four ways in.

An investigation of South Asian history built on primary sources, corpus data and published genetics — with the limits of each stated on the page rather than in a footnote.

Or read the research index — every page on the platform, grouped.

Evidence, and what it will not support.

Claim

Stated in one sentence, at the strength the evidence supports.

Evidence

Cited to text, corpus count, or dataset. Versions pinned.

Whose record

Who transmitted this, and what they gained from what it says.

Counter-evidence

The strongest case against, made properly.

What would change it

Named in advance, so the claim is falsifiable.

Those five fields appear on every entry. The third is the one that does the most work: almost every text in this canon was kept by people with an interest in what it says.

Instruments

Search all pages →

Things you operate

Interactive. The data is real, the gaps are visible, and the controls let you check the claim yourself rather than take it.

The Tirukkuṟaḷ

1,330 couplets on how to live, with no caste word and no Veda

Brāhmī

The earliest surviving names for it come from a Buddhist list and a Jain story

What travelled

Sanskrit, Śiva and the Buddha crossed the ocean. The caste order did not

The visitors

Three Chinese monks spent fifty years in India and wrote it down

The archive

What survives, and how much of it this platform has used

The unwritten

What the record cannot contain, and things named after their carriers

Map · time slider

Artifact Atlas

140 sites, 299 dated object-windows, 25 texts placed by localisation grade, 7 trade routes weighted by evidence strength. Verification badges are shown honestly — most are still grey.

Tests: 2 known non-errors, both adjacent-site coincidences

Chart · filters

The Endogamy Clock

Moorjani 2013 dates for 18 groups, split by whether the date means what it is usually quoted to mean. For most upper-caste groups it does not.

Needs rebuild on the three-way ancestry model

Arguments

Things you read

Each takes one mechanism and follows it through the sources.

Method

The Mechanism

Ask who benefits from a critique and you can predict what it leaves standing. Four revolts, sorted by whose revolt it was.

Place

Āraṇya

The tradition named its deepest layer after the wilderness, then burned it. Khāṇḍava, Ekalavya, Śambūka, and a corpus count showing the ascetic vocabulary is the newest in the Rigveda.

Provenance

Custody

Six text dossiers. Who kept each one, what they gained from what it says, and what survives the discount.

Language

What the Mouth Does to a Name

Sindhu → Hindu → India. tamiḻ → drāviḍa. Regular sound laws, annotated at every step — and a section on where resemblance is not derivation.

Knowledge

Two Skies

A lunar system of undetermined origin with a Babylonian–Greek horoscope laid on top. The Greek layer supplied the chart; the nakṣatra layer still supplies the clock.

Sources

Things you read for themselves

Primary material presented without an argument wrapped around it.

c. 6th–3rd c. BCE