An astonishing book that will lead to rewrite the history of mankind. An unexplored world, a journey beyond the boundaries of human history. From over five thousand years India and Pakistan seem to guard jealously a forgotten past, a secret locked inside of the oldest traditions that human history knows. The journey starts from an highly evolved civilization but fall into oblivion, a culture that left to posterity a huge amount of texts transmitted orally and later merged into Hinduism. Traditions that speak of lost civilizations, wars fought between men and gods with highly advanced technologies and machines capable of flying in the air and in space called Vimana. Following the tracks and studies conducted in the ’70s by David William Davenport, has set new light on the events that led to the destruction of the city of Mohenjo Daro (Pakistan) and the disappearance of the Harappan civilization tying their story to submerged ruins discovered in the Indian Ocean and dated back to 10,000 years ago.

The concluding volume of a critical English edition of the monumental Indian epic The seventh and final book of the monumental Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the Uttarakāṇḍa, brings the epic saga to a close with an account of the dramatic events of King Rāma’s millennia-long reign. It opens with a colorful history of the demonic race of the rākṣasas and the violent career of Rāma’s villainous foe Rāvaṇa, and later recounts Rāma’s grateful discharge of his allies in the great war at Lankā as well as his romantic reunion with his wife Sītā. But dark clouds gather as Rāma makes the agonizing decision to banish his beloved wife, now pregnant. As Rāma continues as king, marvelous tales and events unfurl, illustrating the benefits of righteous rule and the perils that await monarchs who fail to address the needs of their subjects. The Uttarakāṇḍa has long served as a point of social and religious controversy largely for its accounts of the banishment of Sītā, as well as of Rāma’s killing of a low-caste ascetic. This seventh volume in the critical edition and translation of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa includes an extensive introduction and describes the complex reception history of the Uttarakāṇḍa, as well as exhaustive notes and a comprehensive bibliography.

The story of the kingdom that Ravana had ruled lay over the island like a fading, antique map. The edges of the story were frayed and there were lines disconnected by time, but the landscape it traced, exists. Demonized as he was after his death, the reign of King Ravana of Lanka, and his ancestors, the powerful Mayuranga, has long been obscured and shrouded in myth. Once, their kingdom is believed to have reached beyond the shores of the island, capturing lands across the seas—a kingdom of that magnitude was never seen again on Lanka. In a bid to shed light on this lost era, Sunela Jayewardene travelled through Sri Lanka, and listened to the storytellers and poets, researched Sri Lanka’s folklore, sifted through race and religion . . . to stitch together a history of a forgotten landscape. This remarkable, vivid book is the story Sunela learnt of King Ravana and the kingdom that he lost.

Mahābhārata (including Harivaṃśa) and Rāmāyaṇa, the two great Sanskrit Epics central to the whole of Indian Culture, form the subject of this new work. The book begins by examining the relationship of the epics to the Vedas and the role of the bards who produced them. The core of the work, a study of the linguistic and stylistic features of the epics, precedes the examination of the material culture, the social, economic and political aspects, and the religious aspects. The final chapter presents the wider picture and in conclusion even looks into the future of epic studies. In this long overdue survey work the author synthesizes the results of previous scholarship in the field. Herewith a coherent view is built up of the nature and the significance of these two central epics, both in themselves, and in relation to Indian culture as a whole.

Ravana, the demon-king antagonist from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem, has become an unlikely cultural hero among Sinhala Buddhists over the past decade. In Ravana's Kingdom, Justin W. Henry delves into the historical literary reception of the epic in Sri Lanka, charting the adaptions of its themes and characters from the 14th century onwards, as many Sri Lankan Hindus and Buddhists developed a sympathetic impression of Ravana's character, and through the contemporary Ravana revival, which has resulted in the development of an alternative mythological history, depicting Ravana as king of the Sri Lanka's indigenous inhabitants, a formative figure of civilizational antiquity, and the direct ancestor of the Sinhala Buddhist people. Henry offers a careful study of the literary history of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka, employing numerous sources and archives that have until now received little to no scholarly attention, as well as the 21st century revision of a narrative of the Sri Lankan people-a narrative incubated by the general public online, facilitated by social media and by the speed of travel of information in the digital age. Ravana's Kingdom offers a glimpse into a centuries-old, living Ramayana tradition among Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka-a case study of the myth-making process in the digital age.