Epic-Puranic royal genealogies

The Itihasa-Purana, the Epic-Puranic narratives of the Sanskrit Epics (Mahabharata and the Ramayana) and the Puranas, contain royal genealogies of the lunar dynasty and solar dynasty which are regarded by Indian traditions as historic events, and used in the Epic-Puranic chronology to establish a traditional timeline of Indian history.

Quotes

• True, the tradition, which is found in Epics, Puránas and astronomers, which knows nothing of an invasion but, on the contrary, has the IAs spreading out with their culture in all directions, and which places the R V (its arrangement) just before 3102, appears to be late, within, say, 1st-6th centuries CE. But we must not ignore the weighty evidence of the classical sources (the Megasthenes report c 312- 280 BC) giving related chronologies. Arrian (Indika 1, 9), Pliny (VI, 21, 4) and Solinus (52, 5)—all give dates of 6000+ for Indian royal genealogies: so this aspect of the tradition is at the very latest of the 4th century BC. I am not claiming here that the tradition is necessarily correct in all (though it could be in most of) its aspects but only that it is not as late as it seems at first sight.
  • Kazanas, N. (2002). Indigenous Indo-Aryans and the Rigveda: Indo-Aryan migration debate. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 30(3-4), 275-334.

• Fortunately the Puranic genealogies from the time of the founder of Buddhism onward can be tested by the evidence supplied by the Buddhist and Jain literature, dramas and inscriptions. (…) the mistakes regarding the names, the order of succession and the regnal years of kings are certainly not many.
  • (Bhargava 1998:2-3) , quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

• “If the Puranic genealogies from the time of the Buddha onward are almost faultless, the presumption naturally is that the earlier genealogies too are not mere figments of the imagination. (…) In the first place a large number of these names occur in the Vedic literature which is quite independent of the Purāṇas. Secondly, even those names which do not occur in the Vedic literature are so archaic that they could not have been coined by the authors of the present Purāṇas in whose time the style of names had completely changed.”
  • (Bhargava 1998:3-4) , quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

• “There are numerous synchronisms recorded in the Vedic, Puranic and epic literatures which are in consonance with the arrangement of names in the dynastic lists of the Puranas. These facts clearly establish the correctness of the arrangement of names in the Puranic genealogies.”
  • (Bhargava 1998:5), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

• The Puranic tradition, even if not in written form, existed already “in the Upaniṣadic period if not earlier” (Siddhantashastree 1977) and was mentioned in the Mahābhārata (18.6.97, “eighteen Purāṇas”) and in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (7:1:2-4).... These distortions are common fare in any appropriation of ancient history by later writers, and only corroborate that we are dealing with authors really trying to do history, though it was an embellished and ideologically streamlined history. So, we have to treat would-be historical information from the Purāṇas with care; but with that caveat, we dare provisionally to draw upon at least the Puranic genealogies. These are the hard core of their pretended narrative of the past.
  • Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins. quoting (Siddhantashastree 1977:8)

• Contrary to popular scholarly opinion, the genealogies found in the Puranas, which list over a hundred and twenty kings in one Vedic dynasty alone, fit into the new model of ancient Indian history. The Puranic records are far more trustworthy than has hitherto been assumed. They are the distillate of countless generations of remembered knowledge, especially knowledge concerning the vicissitudes of royal houses. They date back to the third millennium B.C.E. and earlier. Greek accounts point to the existence of Indian royal lists (perhaps coinciding with those of the Puranas) that are reported to go back to the seventh millennium B.C.E.
  • Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, and David Frawley. - In search of the cradle of civilization _ new light on ancient India-Quest Books (2011)

• They alone contain something like a continuous historical narrative, and it is absurd to suppose that the elaborate royal genealogies were all merely figments of imagination or a tissue of falsehoods.
  • AD Pusalker, [1], quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993)

• There is nothing in them (Puranic accounts), as far as I am aware, really inconsistent with the most ancient book we possess, namely, the Rigveda, and they throw much light thereon, and on all problems concerning ancient India.
  • Ancient Indian Historical Tradition by F.E. Pargiter, Motilal Banarsidas, Delhi-Varanasi-Patna, 1962. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• Admittedly, the Vedas are a defective source of history. As religious books, they only deal with historical data in passing. But that has never kept the invasionist school from treating the Vedas as the only source of ancient Indian history, to the neglect of the legitimate history books, the ItihAsa-PuraNa literature, i.e. the Epics and the Puranas. It is like ignoring the historical Bible books (Exodus, Joshua, Chronicles, Kings) to draw ancient Israelite history exclusively from the Psalms, or like ignoring the historians Livius, Tacitus and Suetonius to do Roman history on the basis of the poet Virgil. What would be dismissed as “utterly ridiculous” in Western history is standard practice in Indian history.
  • Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.