It was widely known in the ancient times that the kingdom of Kush (or Ethiopia) was an extension of the Vedic civilization of India. The earliest Ethiopian tradition says that they came from a land situated near the mouth of the Indus, and this has been confirmed by the testimony of Eusebius and Philostratus. Eusebius informs us that, “a numerous colony of people emigrated from the banks of the Indus, and crossing the ocean, fixed their residence in the country now called Ethiopia.” These earliest Ethiopians were a people highly civilized, and full of virtue and piety; their laws, their institutions, and especially their religion were celebrated far and wide.

Apollonius of Tyana, a charismatic philosopher from the 1st century CE, had travelled extensively throughout the world and held discussions with a large number of philosophers. In a conference with the southern Ethiopians, finding that they spoke much in praise of the Indians in general, Apollonius told them, "you speak much in favour of everything relating to the Indians; not considering that originally you were Indians yourself". Nilus the Egyptian had told Apollonius that, “the Indi of all people in the world were the most knowing; and that the Ethiopians were a colony from them, and resembled them greatly." The Encyclopaedia Brittanica confirms this: “all the ancients, both poets and historians, talk of a double race of Ethiopians; one in India and another in Africa”. The kingdoms of the Indians, the Egyptians and ancient Kush were widely regarded as part of one large global empire, and "India, taken as a whole, beginning from the north and embracing what of it is subject to Persia, is a continuation of Egypt and the Ethiopians." Even now, the culture and traditions of the Ethiopian people bear a closer resemblance to that of India, than to the rest of Africa. The traditional dress and ornaments of the womenfolk, the spicy cuisine which is mostly vegetarian, the rich musical traditions (along with the use of the bamboo flute and the tabla), the presence of the caste system, the respect shown to elders – all of this invoke memories of an enduring connection between Ethiopia and India.

The timeless familiarity of the ancient Indians with the kingdom of Kush is borne out by the detailed information about the geography of Ethiopia that is contained in ancient Sanskrit texts. When Lieutenant John Hanning Speke was planning his discovery of the source of the Nile in 1858, he relied on a map that had been reconstructed by Lieutenant Wilford from information contained in the ancient Puranic texts, with the assistance of some Pundits of Varanasi. In this map, the river Nile, referred to as the “Great Krishna” (because of its deep blue waters), was traced from a great lake called “Amara”. Speke later found that the name “Amara” is actually the native name of a district bordering Lake Victoria Nyanza. The map also mentioned that the real source of the Nile was the twin peaks known as Somagiri – “Soma” in Sanskrit stands for “moon” and “Giri” means “peak”. Somagiri, therefore, refers to the fabled “Mountains of the Moon” in Central Africa! Speke says in his book Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863):

“Colonel Rigby now gave me a most interesting paper, with a map attached to it, about the Nile and the Mountains of the Moon. It was written by Lieutenant Wilford, from the "Purans" of the ancient Hindus. As it exemplifies, to a certain extent, the supposition I formerly arrived at concerning the Mountains of the Moon being associated with the country of the Moon, I would fain draw the attention of the reader of my travels to the volume of the "Asiatic Researches" in which it was published. It is remarkable that the Hindus have christened the source of the Nile Amara, which is the name of a country at the north-east corner of the Victoria N'yanza. This, I think, shows clearly, that the ancient Hindus must have had some kind of communication with both the northern and southern ends of the Victoria N'yanza.”

Such detailed geographical knowledge of the Nile and Ethiopia indicates that ancient Kush must have been a colony of the ancient Indians, as attested by various Greek historians. This leads us to wonder: what would have led them to colonize a land that was so far from their ancestral homeland on the banks of the Indus?

Philostratus mentions that the Ethiopians, an Indian race, dwelt in India under the rulership of King Ganges. But when they slew their king they were inflicted by a host of natural calamities which forced them to leave their homeland. They founded sixty cities along the path of their emigration, until they settled in the fertile land of Kush. This suggests that the colonization of Ethiopia may have been triggered by a large-scale emigration of people from the Indus Valley due to various environmental catastrophes. At its peak at around 2500 BC, the Indus Valley civilization included the whole of Pakistan, parts of Northern India, Afghanistan, and southern Iran, covering an area of roughly 1.2 million sq kms with a population of over 5 million, and constituted the largest urban settlement of the ancient world.

Current research indicates that sometime around 1900 BC the Indus Valley civilization was plagued by a series of calamities. There was a long and devastating drought, followed by a series of cataclysmic earthquakes. Substantial portions of the Ghaggar Hakra river system (the “Saraswati” of the Rig Vedas) disappeared, and the Indus River changed its course. The princely state of Rajasthan turned into a desert. Parts of the civilization relocated to other sites along the Indus, and others migrated further eastwards to the fertile plains along the Ganges, and towards the southern parts of India. By around 1700 BC, most of the cities of the Indus Valley civilization were abandoned.

Fig 4: Map of the Indus Valley civilization, showing some of the important sites. Source: Wikipedia.

There was a large-scale westward migration of various Vedic tribes during this time. One of the migrating branches of the Vedic family was the Kassites or Kussites who first appear in Western Iran at about 1800 BC, when they attacked Babylonia in the 9th year of the reign of Samsu-iluna, the son of Hammurabi. The Kussites subsequently captured Babylon in the 16th century BC and ruled over it without any interruption for over 400 years. The Kussite pantheon of deities included Suriash (from Sanskrit Surya meaning the Sun), Maruttash (from Sanskrit Marut, a storm god) and Indas (from Sanskrit Indra, the king of the gods). Names of gods also appear in the names of Kussite kings, as is very typical among the Vedic people. Kussite kings established trade and diplomacy with far-flung kingdoms - Assyria, Egypt, Elam, and Hittites – and established royal alliances with them. They also governed with order, introduced advanced technologies, and followed the Vedic policy of honoring the customs and religious beliefs of the peoples whose land they occupied.

Although it is clear that the Kussites belonged to the Indo- Iranian stock of people, and worshipped Vedic deities, their exact point of origin still remains in question. The early Babylonian texts portray them as migrants from the “eastern mountains”. This was interpreted by some historians as a reference to the Zagros Mountains in south-western Iran. This is now doubted, since the Zagros Mountains could not have been the original homeland of the migrating Vedic tribes, and may simply have been one of the mountains that they crossed during their westward expansion. However, if we travel further east, we run into the majestic Hindu Kush mountain range, an offshoot of the mighty Himalayas, stretching between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For centuries, the Hindu Kush was recognized as the “mountains of India” or the “boundary of India”. It is of interest to note that the term “Hindu” is derived from the term “Sindhu”, which is the Sanskrit name of the river Indus; while the term “Kush” was always used in reference to the Kussites (or Kassites, Kushites). This means that the term Hindu Kush could be a reference to the mountain range which defines the “domain of the Kussites on the banks of the Indus” – the erstwhile Indus Valley Civilization. Many Sumerian inscriptions often refer to the Kussites as “Meluha-Kasi”. Interestingly, the ancient residents of the Indus Valley civilization were also referred to as “Meluha” (or Malaha, Meluhha, Mehluha). In fact, it is now accepted that “Meluha” was a term used in the Sumerian region for the Indus Valley civilization. The Sumerian cuneiform texts of the times of the Akkadian king Sargon (c. 2334 - 2279 BC) shows that Babylon had extensive trade with its neighboring countries, including Meluhha. Meluhha was described as a land of exotic commodities, and a wide variety of objects produced in the Indus region have been found at sites in Mesopotamia. Thus “Meluha-Kasi” must be a reference to the ancient Kussites of the Indus Valley.

There is a surprising lack of scholarly resources regarding the expansion of the Kussites, although ancient traditional sources constantly extol their numerous achievements.  One of the few scholarly works which addresses this topic is the book, History of civilizations of Central Asia, which was commissioned by the UNESCO, and included participating scholars from Iran, Afghanistan, India, China, Pakistan, Russia and Mongolia and a panel of experts from USA, UK, Turkey, Japan and Hungary . This monumental study concludes that the, “invasion of Babylonia by the Kassites – which caused the fall of the first Babylonian dynasty – was already obviously connected with the migrations of the Proto Indians.” The presence of the Indo-Aryan linguistic terms in the Kassite language, “speaks clearly for the assumption that the people of war-charioteers, which had induced the Kassites to invade Babylonia, belonged to the Proto-Indians.” The study further states that:

“It seems very likely that simultaneously with the movement of the Kassites – and in any case before 1700 BC at the latest, or perhaps even earlier, at the end of the third millennium BC – the immigration of Proto-Indian groups into Hurrian territory began, led by the class of war-charioteers (maryannu). They brought with them a new species of horse, more suitable for the war-chariot, a new method for horse training, described by Kikkuli, the man of Hurri, in a treatise written in Hittite, and a perfected form of the chariot. Through these important elements of their civilizations the Proto-Indians gave an impetus to the development of Hurrian society and, and to the organization of the Mitanni kingdom, many kings of which bore Proto-Indian names. The Proto-Indian tribal aristocracy spread also to Syria and Palestine where it brought about the formation of stage organization based on the class of war-charioteers. Proto-Indian linguistic influence was considerable on the vocabulary of horse-breeding, horse-training, social life and religion as shown by the following list of Proto-Indian terms borrowed by the Hurrians and other peoples of western Asia.”

The Kussites were not the only Vedic tribe that migrated westward, as a consequence of the major cataclysms in the Indus Valley.  The Hittites appeared in the upper Tigris-Euphrates basin and ruled from their capital at Hattusa from around 1800 BC. To their south was the Mitanni, who ruled from their capital at Wassukanni (c.1475 BC). The Hittites and Mitanni had concluded a treaty in c. 1380 BCE, which we know as the Suppiluliuma-Shattiwaza Treaty, which invokes the Vedic deities Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatyas.

However, of all the Proto-Indian tribes that had migrated westward, the Kussites were the ones who had left their indelible footprints over vast swathes of Central and West Asia, and Arica. Hundreds of towns and cities came to be named after them – Kissia, Kossea, Kussara, Kashan, Kashband, Kashgar, Kashmir, Kashi and many many more. Jacob Bryant writes about them in the book An Analysis of Ancient Mythology: "I have mentioned that the Cushites sent out many colonies; and partly by their address and superiority in science, and partly by force, they got access among various nations. In some places they mixed with the people of the country, and were nearly absorbed in their number: in other parts, they excluded the natives, and maintained themselves solely and separate." However, in spite of their formidable achievements the contributions of the Kussites have been largely ignored by modern historians. In the History of civilizations of Central Asia, the editor Vadim Mikhailovich Masson laments that, “In the present writer’s opinion recent research tends to underestimate or even to deny the role played by Proto-Indians in Mesopotamia in general and in the Mitanni kingdom in particular.”

However, we can construct a picture of what really happened from various traditional sources. The Kussites conquered the southern part of Mesopotamia called Sumer and reached the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, where they founded many kingdoms, including that of Sheba (present day Yemen). The Kussites then crossed the Red Sea into Northeast Africa and established the renowned African kingdom of Kush. David Gibson mentions that “the descendants of Cush may have split, one part remaining in Asia, the other migrating to Africa to become the Ethiopia we still know to this day.” Hence, (as per the Encyclopaedia Britannica), “it cannot be doubted that the tribes on both sides of that branch of the sea were kindred nations.” Orientalist Edward Pococke describes this long march of the Vedic Indians from their ancient homeland to the fertile plains of Kush: "At the mouths of the Indus dwell a seafaring people, active, ingenious, and enterprising...these people coast along the shores of Mekran, traverse the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and again adhering to the sea-board of Oman, Hadramant, and Yemen (the Eastern Arabia), they sail up the Red Sea; and again ascending mighty stream that fertilizes a land of wonders, found the kingdom of Egypt, Nubia and Abyssinia."

Kush attained its greatest power and cultural energy between 1700 and 1500 BC, during the Second Intermediate Period of Egypt. This is nearly a 100 years after the Kussites first emerged in western Iran in c.1800 BC. This was the time when Egypt was run over by the Hyskos, and the Egyptian pharaohs had retreated to Kush. We know that Amun was the principal god of the Kushites of Ethiopia. Here he remained a national deity for centuries, with his priests at Meroe regulating the whole government of the country via an oracle, choosing the ruler, and directing military expeditions. The pharaohs Kamose and Ahmose would have been introduced to this new cult at this time, and had carried it into Egypt after evicting the Hyskos. In this manner, the worship of Jagannath would have travelled the long distance from its Vedic homeland to the kingdom of Kush, from where it was adopted by the victorious pharaohs of the 18th dynasty.
We also find the indelible footprints of Vedic temple architecture in the grand temple complexes set up by the 18th dynasty pharaohs. The magnificent temple complex of Luxor, whose construction started at c.1400 BC (during the reign of Amenhotep III) after the beginning of the New Kingdom, incorporated advanced Vedic knowledge. The Egyptologist R.A.Schwaller de Lubicz had conducted as 15 year on-site study of the Luxor Temple complex in 1952 and had concluded that the “the various sections of the human body had been incorporated into the proportions of the temple. He found that specific locations within the temple correspond to the seven Hindu Chakras (energy centers) in the human body. These locations actually stimulate experiences and feelings that dowsers and meditators are able to perceive consciously.” Thus, the onset of the New Kingdom in Egypt was marked by a sudden influx of Vedic ideas, which we find reflected in its religion, art and architecture.

Fig 5: An aerial view of the Kushite pyramids at Meroe, the capital of ancient Kush. (Source: Wikipedia)