The Epic-Puranic chronology is a timeline of Hindu mythology based on the Itihasa (the Sanskrit Epics, that is, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana) and the Puranas. These texts have an authoritative status in Indian tradition, and narrate cosmogeny, royal genealogies, myths and legendary events. The central dates here are the Bharata War and the start of the Kali Yuga.
These texts often discuss very long lengths of time, such as the widespread statement that Vaivasvata Manu lived 28 yuga cycles before the writer's time, which, if the usual yuga cycle of 4,320,000 years is meant, is 120 million years.
There are many possible variations of the timeline, because there are many of these texts and many different manuscripts of some individual texts, which sometimes contradict each other about what happened when and the lengths of time between them, although some events are fairly universal.
Western historians usually regard the Epic-Puranic chronology as partly mythical, though containing elements of fact. In particular, the prevailing Indo-Aryan migration theory, based on archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence, is that the Aryans entered India from Central Asia some time after 2000 BC, along with horses and the precursor of the Sanskrit language, meaning that most of the events in the epics and Puranas could not have taken place earlier than this. This contradicts the epics and Puranas, according to which many of the events that they describe took place much earlier than this and there have always been Aryans in India.
Among Indian authors, on the other hand, the historical accuracy of these traditions is a subject of lively (and sometimes politically charged) debate. The Epic-Puranic chronology is referred to by proponents of the Indigenous Aryans theory to propose an earlier dating of the Vedic period, and the spread of the Indo-European languages out of India, arguing that "the Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati Valley traditions (7000 BCE to 8000 BCE)."
Itihasa-Purana
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. Together they form the Hindu Itihasa. The Mahābhārata narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Bharata War, and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes and their successors. It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or purusharthas (12.161). The bulk of the Mahabharata was probably compiled between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE, with the oldest preserved parts not much older than around 400 BCE.
The Ramayana narrates the life of Rama, the legendary prince of the Kosala Kingdom. Various recent scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text range from the 7th to 4th centuries BCE, with later stages extending up to the 3rd century CE.
The Puranas (literally "ancient, old",) is a vast genre of Indian literature about a wide range of topics, particularly legends and other traditional lore, composed in the first millennium CE. The Hindu Puranas are anonymous texts and likely the work of many authors over the centuries.Gavin Flood connects the rise of the written Purana historically with the rise of devotional cults centering upon a particular deity in the Gupta era: the Puranic corpus is a complex body of material that advance the views of various competing sampradayas. The content is highly inconsistent across the Puranas, and each Purana has survived in numerous manuscripts which are themselves inconsistent.
The Mahabharata, Ramayana and the Puranas contain genealogies of kings, which are used for the traditional chronology of India's ancient history. Ludo Rocher in his book "The Puranas" (1986) provides a long list of chronological calculations based on Puranic lists with a warning that they are "often highly imaginative".
Chronology
Cyclic time and yugas
The Puranas are oriented at a cyclical understanding of time. They contain stories about the creation and destruction of the world, and the yugas (ages). There are four yugas in one cycle: Satya Yuga (a time of truth and righteousness) Treta Yuga Dvapara Yuga Kali Yuga (a time of darkness and non-virtue)
According to the Manusmriti ( 2nd CE), one of the earliest known texts describing the yugas, the length of each yuga is 4800, 3600, 2400 and 1200 years of the gods, respectively, giving a total of 12,000 divine years to complete one cycle. For human years, they are multiplied by 360 giving 1,728,000, 1,296,000, 864,000 and 432,000 years, respectively, giving a total of 4,320,000 human years. These four yugas have a length ratio of 4:3:2:1.
The Bhagavata Purana [3.11.18-20] ( 500-1000 CE) gives a matching description of the yuga lengths in divine years.
The Kali Yuga is the present yuga. According to Puranic sources, Krishna's departure marks the end of Dvapara Yuga and the start of Kali Yuga, which is dated to 17/18 February 3102 BCE, twenty years after the Bharata War.
These very long periods of time obviously present a problem for attempts to square the texts with archaeological evidence, as some characters are described as living in Treta Yuga or earlier, putting them before modern humans evolved. The word "yuga" sometimes seems to have been used for other lengths of time, such as a generation, a five-year cycle starting with the conjunction of the sun and moon in the autumnal equinox, or periods of 4800, 3600, 2400 and 1200 human years. Some authors have proposed that the accounts in question were originally referring to one of these shorter "yugas" and confusion occurred later.
Genealogies The epics and Puranas also contain many extensive genealogies of monarchs and sometimes of other people such as priests and scholars, which provides some idea of what happened when. Sometimes the timelines suggested by these are very different from those suggested by other information in the texts such as references to when in the Yuga Cycle events took place. An example is the date of the Bharata War, as discussed below. There are cases where the later sections of the Puranic genealogies are known to contradict other historical texts, or each other.
Pre-Bharata War kings and avatars
The Puranas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata contain lists of kings and genealogies, from which the traditional chronology of India's ancient history are derived. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Maurya court at Patna at 300 BCE, reported to have heard of a traditional list of 153 kings that covered 6042 years, beyond the traditional beginning of the Kali Yuga in 3102 BCE. The royal lists are based on Sūta bardic traditions, and are derived from lists which were orally transmitted and constantly reshaped.
Vaivasvata Manu The first king is Vaivasvata Manu, the seventh and current Manu of the fourteen manus of the current kalpa, the progenitor of humanity. According to the Puranas, he is the son of Vivasvat (also known as Surya), the Sun god, and his wife Saranyu. He is also known as Satyavrata and Shraddhadeva.
Vaivasvata Manu had seventy children, including Ila and Ikshvaku, the progenitors of the Lunar and Solar dynasties of the kshatriyas, which play a prominent role in the origin stories of the royal families of the Vedic period. The Mahabharata states that "it is of Manu that all men including Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Sudras, and others have been descended."
Tentative chronology
The Puranas have been used by some to give a tentative overview of Indian history prior to the Bharata War. Gulshan (1940) dates the start of the reign of Manu Vaivasvata at 7350 BCE. The Puranas give 95 kings in the Ikshvaku dynasty between Shraddhadeva Manu (aka Manu Vaivasvata), the progenitor of humanity, and the Bharata War. Dating the Bharata War at 1400 BCE, A.D. Pusalkar (1962) uses this list to give the following chronology: Pre-flood tradition and the dawn of history The great flood and Manu Vaivasvata The period of King Yayati (c. 3000–2750 BCE) The period of King Mandhatri (c. 2750–2550 BCE) The period of Parashurama, the sixth avatar of Vishnu (c. 2550–2350 BCE) The period of Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu (c. 2350–1750 BCE) The period of Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu (c.1950–1400 BCE) The Bharata War (c. 1400 BCE)
Bharata War
Popular tradition holds that the Bharata War marks the transition to Kali Yuga. The mathematician Aryabhata (6th century) calculated the Kali Yuga epoch, based on planetary conjunctions, as 18 February 3102 BC. This date has become widespread in Indian tradition. Some sources mark this as the disappearance of Krishna from the Earth. The Aihole inscription of Pulikeshi II, dated to Shaka 556 (634 AD), claims that 3735 years have elapsed since the Bharata battle, putting the date of the Bharata War at 3101 BC.R.C. Majumdar and A.D. Pusalkar ( eds . ), The History and Culture of the Indian People Vol I, p.272
Another traditional school of astronomers and historians, represented by Vriddha-Garga, Varahamihira (author of the Brihat-Samhita) and Kalhana (author of the Rajatarangini), place the war 653 years after the Kali Yuga epoch, corresponding to 2449 BC.AD Pusalker, op.cit. p.272
Puranic genealogies give a different date, saying that the war took place about 1,000 years before the beginning of the Nanda dynasty, leading to a date of about 1400 BC (F. E. Pargiter, comparing various different Puranas, suggested that the original number was 1,500 which was wrongly copied in various texts as 1000, 1015, or 1050, giving a date of about 1900 BC).
The historicity of the war is subject to scholarly discussion and dispute. The existing text of the Mahabharata went through many layers of development, and mostly belongs to the period between c. 500 BC and 400 AD. Within the frame story of the Mahabharata, the historical kings Parikshit and Janamejaya are featured significantly as scions of the Kuru clan, and Michael Witzel concludes that the general setting of the epic has a historical precedent in Iron Age (Vedic) India, where the Kuru kingdom was the center of political power during roughly 1200 to 800 BC. Professor Alf Hiltebeitel says that the Mahabharata is essentially mythological. Indian historian Upinder Singh has written that:
Despite the inconclusiveness of the data, attempts have been made to assign a historical date to the war.
Attempts to date the events using methods of archaeoastronomy have produced, depending on which passages are chosen and how they are interpreted, estimates ranging from the late 4th to the mid-2nd millennium BC.Gupta and Ramachandran (1976), p.246, who summarize as follows: "Astronomical calculations favor 15th century BCE as the date of the war while the Puranic data place it in the 10th/9th century BCE. Archaeological evidence points towards the latter." (p.254)
Vedveer Arya (author and MA in Sanskrit) gives the date of 3162 BC, by various arguments including interpreting the Aihole inscription as using the Old Shaka era which, based on a comparison of eclipses mentioned in inscriptions, he argues counts from 583 BC.The Chronology of India: From Manu to Mahabharata Comparison with the NASA list of eclipses that the author refers to shows that all BC dates in this article are out by one year (possibly due to the author misreading dates given in astronomical year numbering in the list), with 582 BC being given as 583 BC and so on. P. V. Holey states a date of 13 November 3143 BC using planetary positions and calendar systems.R. C. Majumdar and A. D. Pusalker (editors): The history and culture of the Indian people. Volume I, The Vedic age. Bombay : Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan 1951, p.320 (fn.4) K. Sadananda, based on translation work, states that the war started on 22 November 3067 BC. B. N. Achar used planetarium software to argue that the war took place in 3067 BC.