Manu (Vaivasvata Manu)
c. 1500 BCE · Ayodhyā
Legendary progenitor of humanity and survivor of a primordial flood; the closest Hindu analog to the biblical first-man / Noah figure. No historical existence is implied. The date is a conventional placement at the dawn of the Vedic age. The associated law-text (Manusmṛti) is a far later composition and is not this mythic figure's dated work.
Manu, in the form Vaivasvata Manu, is a legendary progenitor of humanity in Hindu tradition and the survivor of a great deluge guided by Matsya, the fish associated in later tradition with Viṣṇu (in the earliest Vedic/Brāhmaṇa accounts the saving fish is unidentified, later linked to Prajāpati/Brahmā). Said to be the son of Vivasvan (Sūrya, the Sun god), he is traditionally the seventh of the fourteen Manus of the present cosmic age (kalpa) — the forefather of present, post-flood humanity rather than the first human of all creation — and the ancestor from whom the Solar (Ikṣvāku) dynasty of Ayodhyā descends. He is also remembered as the primordial lawgiver from whom the dharma tradition is said to flow, a wholly mythological figure distinct from the much later legal text (the Manusmṛti) that bears his name. His rescue from the flood in a boat that carried the seven sages and the seeds of life forms a shared narrative MOTIF with the Mesopotamian flood traditions (Utnapishtim / Atra-ḫasīs) and the Genesis account of Noah — a typological parallel across traditions, not a claim of influence or borrowing in any direction.
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Ayodhyā
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Ayodhyā
Ayodhyā, in modern Uttar Pradesh, India, was known in antiquity as Sāketa. According to the tradition recorded in later sources, the Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa — author of the Buddhacarita, an epic life of the Buddha — was born at Sāketa around the late first or early second century CE.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Manu (Vaivasvata Manu)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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