Puranic chronology

Hindu scriptures

The Puranas contain stories about the creation of the world, and the yugas. Mahabharata, Ramayana and the Puranas also contain genealogies of kings, which are used for the traditional chronology of India's ancient history. Michael Witzel doubts the reliability of these texts, concluding that they "have clearly lifted (parts of) lineages, fragment by fragment, from the Vedas and have supplied the rest [...] —from hypothetical, otherwise unknown traditions— or, as can be seen in the case of the Mahābhārata, from poetical imagination."

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. Wendy Doniger, based on the study of indologists, assigns approximate dates to the various Puranas. She dates Markandeya Purana to c. 250 CE (with one portion dated to c. 550 CE), Matsya Purana to c. 250–500 CE, Vayu Purana to c. 350 CE, Harivamsa and Vishnu Purana to c. 450 CE, Brahmanda Purana to c. 350–950 CE, Vamana Purana to c. 450–900 CE, Kurma Purana to c. 550–850 CE, and Linga Purana to c. 600–1000 CE.

Puranic Chronology

The Puranas, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana also contain lists of kings and genealogies, from which the traditional chronology of India's ancient history are derived. The Vedic Foundation, for example, gives the following chronology of ancient India:

Mahabharata War

The historicity of the Mahabharata 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 BCE and 400 CE. 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 BCE. According to Professor Alf Hiltebeitel, the Mahabharata is essentially mythological. Indian historian Upinder Singh has written that:

Whether a bitter war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas ever happened cannot be proved or disproved. It is possible that there was a small-scale conflict, transformed into a gigantic epic war by bards and poets. Some historians and archaeologists have argued that this conflict may have occurred in about 1000 BCE."

Despite the inconclusiveness of the data, attempts have been made to assign a historical date to the Kurukshetra War. Popular tradition holds that the war marks the transition to Kaliyuga and thus dates it to 3102 BCE. A number of other proposals have been put forward:

Yugas

The Puranas contain stories about the creation of the world, and the yugas. There are four yugas in one cycle:

According to the Manusmriti, one of the earliest known texts describing the yugas, the length is 4800 years + 3600 years + 2400 years + 1200 years, for a total of 12,000 years for one arc, or 24,000 years to complete the cycle, which is one precession of the equinox). These 4 yugas follow a timeline ratio of (4:3:2:1).

According to Bhagavata Purana 3.11.19, which is dated at 500-1000 CE, the yugas are much longer, namely 1,728,000 years, 1,296,000 years, 864,000 years and 432,000 years

Indigenous Aryans

The Vedic-Puranic chronoly has been referred to by proponents of Indigenous Aryans, putting into question the Indo-Aryan migrations at ca. 1500 BCE and proposing older dates for the Vedic period. According to the "Indigenist position", the Aryans are indigenous to India, and the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. According to them, the Vedas are older than second millennium BCE, and scriptures like the Mahabaratha reflect historical events which took place before 1500 BCE. Some of them equate the Indus Saraswati Civilisation with the Vedic Civilization, state that the Indus script was the progenitor of the Brahmi, and state that there is no difference between the people living in (northern) Indo-European part and the (southern) Dravidian part. Subhash Kak, a main proponent of the "indigenist position," underwrites the Vedic-Puranic chronology, and uses it to recalculate the dates of the Vedas and the Vedic people:

[T]he Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati (or Indus) tradition (7000 or 8000 BC).

The idea of "Indigenous Aryanism" fits into traditional Hindu ideas about their religion, namely that it has timeless origins, with the Vedic Aryans inhabiting India since ancient times. The Vedic Foundation states:

The history of Bharatvarsh (which is now called India) is the description of the timeless glory of the Divine dignitaries who not only Graced the soils of India with their presence and Divine intelligence, but they also showed and revealed the true path of peace, happiness and the Divine enlightenment for the souls of the world that still is the guideline for the true lovers of God who desire to taste the sweetness of His Divine love in an intimate style.