Theo: My post this morning went shaheed due to a forum glitch or my sleepiness. Let's see: I learned a lot from this, but it does not shake my case.
1. The NASA image:
NASA acknowledged that the image is from STS. I think those images are in a library on the internet, but post-911, may have been blocked from public access like many GOTUS resources. These were advertised as taken by astronauts shooting out the window, usually with some 35mm camera. Nothing very automated etc, so you have to take it for what it's worth. Bade's post clarifies what is needed there, and that should be quite easy. What the image does is to give perspective, to something that can be seen quite well in pieces from, say, a helicopter or light aircraft.
2. Interpretations
For the above reasons, NASA does not get dragged into interpretation. Their PR person reasons correctly that if ppl are serious, they can use Earth Remote Sensing imagery, of which India has plenty, and figure out exactly what is there. It may be NOAA's territory, and anyway, NASA would be well advised to stay away from revealing details of subsurface features so close to the Indian/SL territorial waters. U can guess the reasons.
They have said that from their examination it looks like a chain of atolls.
U mean an atoll .. a chain of islands. True. That means that in some distant era, the land there was undulating a bit. Maybe the breaks between islands were short and shallow, but of course looked formidable to a pedestrian in an age of bow and arrow. The sea there is not calm, so crossing that would be a big deal.
I would ignore the part about the "100 Yojanas = 800 miles" etc. Those are poetic license. Look at the accounts of Yuvraj Singh's six sixers as they appear in his home village a few years hence and u'll c what I mean. Each shot will have cleared Table Mountain and gone into the Indian Ocean, and some will have reached orbit and still be there.
Hey, the width of the thing on GOOGLE can't be 3 or 4 Km. It's a few hundred yards at most, over most of it. Consider that Rameswaram Island itself is not 4 km across, IIRC.
Remember ancient Meluha (Indus) traded extensively with the Persian gulf and beyond. It is not unlikely that they had contacts into the Mediterranean.
Let's see the implications. This confirms another part of the modern yindoo counter to the "Aryan Tourist Theory". I agree that the Indus Valley towns were NOT the founts of Indian civilization - they were trading outposts of a large and well-established civilization, with industry, ports, urban engineering practices, and even coins/seals for currency. And that was certainly a PLAINS civilization, not a mountain one. So if there was communication of tall tales across India, it had to be FROM EAST TO WEST - and it also means that the Indus traders were telling the legends from MUCH EARLIER in their civilization. There is no evidence of sea-faring trade until about 5000 BCE, so this means that there was no naval option for crossing the strait.
I'm looking at Rajagopalachari's guide to the Ramayana. It says 'Setum'. First translation 'Bridge'. Why would they use that word if they have a perfectly good word for causeway in 'badvan'.
My sources are the Ramayana by Thunjath Ezhuthassan (TE) in Malayalam, which is pretty close to Sanskrit, and the Malayalam-English dictionary.
"Sethu" has 3 English translations:
(a) causeway
(b) bridge - but in the sense that it BRIDGES two places, enabling persons to get from A to B.
(c) dam
It is not "bridge" as in "hanging above water or air".
This has always baffled me. It is not like shipping was unknown to the Ramayan. Why build a cause way to travel a paltry 30 km's. Though it is rough, it relatively tranquil by ocean standards.
The ancients in Shri Ram (SR)'s time did not show any signs of having hanging bridges etc. SR used a boat to cross the Ganga (c/o Guhan) and the Mahanadi (c/o the shishyas of Agastya Muni). I suspect that in both cases, the boats were propelled by poles to the bottom, not by oars or sails. Getting across a sea of indeterminate depth, with waves, was probably very tough for them, as it is to most of us even today.
The Ramayan always implies that Ram crossed an ocean, there is no hint that he crossed an estuary. The ocean god even says shallowness is not possible but I will make the waters support just your army.
Not according to TE. The sequence was:
1. They had a council to discuss options to get across the sea, including the Corps Commanders of the Vanara Sena and Lakshman. So that's where they surveyed all the options, and presumably the army ran up and down the coastline looking to see how old Ravana got across so easily (yeah, I know, he flew.. but let's reduce to human practicalities for the moment)
2. They decided to request help from Varuna, who is described as a minor Deva, not on the level of Indra etc. They tried for 3 days, and Varuna dissed them.
3. SR got mad (at least, impatient, because time was of the essence) and took bow and armed missile. On seeing which, Varuna came running over and begged protection and of course, promised help. More to the point, he snitched on the Asuras having a party over on an island to the north - and per TE, SR launched the armed missile over there and pest-e-sha'eed all the Pakis there. As a demonstration.
My interpretation is that the only promising route was occupied by this tribe led by Varuna, and he refused to cooperate until he was shown The Light. And then he showed them the way.
4. WHEN the way was seen, it was evident that it was not suitable for a landlubber army, most of whom probably did not know how to swim in a pond, much less the sea. So some construction was needed. Nalan was assigned the coordination of the task, being the son of ViswaKarma, President and CEO of VK Master Builders, Inc. There was nothing in VK's portfolio about building suspension bridges - just big constructions on solid ground.
5. They dumped rocks, whatever, to get the depth down to WADING depth. Which means that even in those days, there were many places where you had build up to reach WADING depth. Given the atoll topography, it is evident that the material was available LOCALLY.
Which means that Bade's test of non-local origin would fail, and prove nothing. There is no reference to anyone shipping material from far away - they did not have time. They just rolled rocks from higher places into places where they were needed - that was hard enough.
In some aspects, by allowing Ram to cross the shallow strait the enormity of the telling and version are reduced.
Sure, but after returning to Ayodhya, how do you explain to a bunch of gawking landlubbers what an atoll is? There was no GOOGLE and no NASA then. To them, what they had to do was one rock at a time, one step forward at a time, and the ocean waves were always crashing at them.
At the thinnest this 'cause way needed to be 30 meters wide at top, With minimum 30 meters depth. Allowing for some slump it needed to be about 100 meter wide @ the bottom. So a cross section of 2000 m2 x 30,000 meters long, after allowing for existing islands = 60 million cubic meters With wet dirt at about 6 tonnes per m3, this is 360 million tonnes of material. This amount of material does not just disappear away, even if it is below the water, where it is actually protected from rain.
Not by the above model. All they did was redistribute boulders from the higher parts of the atoll to the depressions, enough to WADE across. Per TE, SR was carried on the shoulders of a couple of the soldiers, to cross. Can you imagine any military general allowing that, unless there was a very good reason to stay above water? IOW, it was still some 4 or 5 feet deep, with waves on top of that.
Links to SL society: Now there I stand corrected, and am glad to have the evidence you presented:
http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/jul/04spec.htm
Quote:
Asiatic Society, 1799, refers to the bridge that is broken at three places. It also says "people call it a bridge; or otherwise it appears to have wood growing on it, and to be inhabited."
The Sethupatis of Ramanathapuram are called so because they were expected to protect the Sethu."
He further adds two other evidences, "The Madras Presidency Administration Report 1903 refers to the bridge as a glossary entry: 'Adam's Bridge is called the bridge of Rama. It really joined Ceylon to India until 1480, when a breach was made through rocks during a storm. A subsequent storm enlarged this and foot traffic then ceased.'[/quote]
I wonder what is the evidence of the state of the place pre-1480.
"The next is a book written by Alexander Hamilton in 1744, A New Account of the East Indies which describes his visit to 'Zeloan' by walking on the bridge."
Small problems here. (1) presumably, Hamilton did not walk over water to get from NZ to India in 1744, so he had access to boats. Why walk to SL?
(2) If the land connection was broken as of 1480, how did Hamilton walk across in 1744?
These, unfortunately, are the sorts of questions that neither the Holies nor the REDIFF editors tend to ask, or allow to be asked.
"In the Aganaanooru Sangam literature text also, there is a reference to Sethu and there are hundreds of references to Rama," Kalyanaraman added.
OK, that's fine.
Kalyanaraman also speaks about thousands of copper, gold and silver coins with the word Sethu on them that have been recovered in Jaffna. They were issued circa the twelfth to fifteenth century.
Paranthaka Chola of the tenth century copper plates and the copper plates indicate that Aparajitavarman went to Sethutirtha.
This just means that they had a big bash over there. I did not know (and still don't) that Kings issued coins with commemorative stamps on them. IMO, they only issued coins with their mugshots on them, to eastablish that the coin was their property, like everything else. So what is this "sethu" coin?
"Krishnadevaraya's epigraph mentions that his territory extended from Sethu to Vijayanagaram."
Yes, but then why is not from Anuradhapura to Vijayanagaram? Why the break at the Sethu? Also, this would seem to establish the link from Prince Vijaya's territory in SL, to Orissa. Also, KDRaya was not a TN king.
Also Tamil kings have repeatedly ruled large sections of Lanka. Why do you think the LTTE problem exists. People have gone back and forth across the straits for many many centuries. I'm pretty sure you have talked about all this before so I'm baffled why you would say this after having visited the area many times.
Shows my ignorance, but let me point out that Jaffna Tamils .NE. Tuticorin Tamils. In fact, in SL, there is (was) a huuuuge class difference between the two, and in fact, between Jaffna Tamils and Indian Tamils from Madurai/ Ramanathapuram etc. So there are THREE very distinct connections to India:
1. Vijaya etc. with the Oriya script, connected to Sinhala culture.
2. Indian Tamils, connected through Dhanushkodi / Talaimannar
3. Jaffna - Chennai (and some points south of Chennai).
Jaffna was always very very distinct, from the rest of SL. The region immediately south of Jaffna on mainland SL was jungle, and Sinhala-dominated (until recent times with the LTTE fun), but generally undeveloped. The Sinhala culture dominated, from the Lowlands of Galle (south), the northern kingdom of Anuradhapura, and the central mountain kingdom of Kandy. The east, from Trincomalee to Matara, was something else, maybe some of everything. The east at Batticoloa developed into a Muslim enclave, and maybe was more connected to the Indian Tamils.
The Indian Tamils in Colombo were businessppl and professionals, and the ones in central SL were small traders and plantation workers, sneered-at by the Jaffna Tamils.
So the Tamil evolution in SL is much more complex than the Sethu connection - in fact very little seems to have come THROUGH the Sethu, which is my point.
The Legend
Here we come to the scientific temperament.
I'm sure you are all aware of Occam's Razor made popular by Jodie Foster in Contact.
What is easier to believe,
that a combination of wind, ocean and tide created a sandy discontinuous spit of land in an area that has a long history of submergence and emergence, similar to sandy spits of land observable else where on earth.
or An ancient king from the North, brought a huge army to the south, and set them to constructing a massive bridge, far from his supply lines, built it in a matter of days or at least less than 10 years, used trees and rocks of which there is no sign now, left no sign of where the 400 million tonnes or so of material came from, transported the material presumably from the mainland over a 3 km ocean inlet and thence to the end of the land, managed to put it all together without the ocean washing everything away (no trivial task), did all this while the simple artifice of a couple of hundred fishing boats carrying 20-30 men at a time could have taken a 100,000 of them all across in a matter of weeks, then proceeded to return the same way, and allowed all this material effort to melt away.
Sorry, but I disagree 400%. You just "proved" that the Great Wall of China could never have been built by humans.
Nor the great pyramids.
Humans, faced with great urgencies, do things that in retrospect appear absolutely fantastic. No, they did not have the time or resources to do a huge System Optimization - or to import technology. They had to do what had to be done, with what they had at hand. They did.
for greater acceptance of the facts.
Now you have waters rushing north-east to south east and along the opposite direction pushing material from the break up debris along the equilibrium points where waters meet, creating from the sand debris atolls and sand berms along a curved line perhaps. 
