REVIEW ARTICLE India and Beyond: Vedism, Hinduism, and the Continuity of Culture Herman Tull Published online: 9 December 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Asko Parpola, The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xviii + 363 pages. Richard K. Payne and Michael Witzel, eds., Homa Variations: The Study of Ritual Change Across the Longue Durée. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xviii + 418 pages. R. U. S. Prasad, The Rig-Vedic and Post-Rig-Vedic Polity (1500 BCE–500 BCE). Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2015. 210 pages. There are any number of significant obstacles in seeking to understand India’s oldest complex cultures, the Indus Valley Civilization and the Vedic Age that succeeded it. The obvious problems are, of course, the great antiquity of the period (carrying us back in time at least five millennia) and the sheer length of its existence, from the beginnings of the “mature” Indus Valley Civilization about 2600 BCE through the waning of Vedic culture sometime prior to the Mauryan period (fourth century BCE). Then, too, there are the perennial problems of the Indus Valley Civilization’s seemingly indecipherable script (more on this to follow), the overwhelming mass of the Vedic textual record (which also happens to be replete with obscure references), and the lacunae and vexing questions that exist at every turn: Where did these populations originate? How—if at all—did they interact? Adding fuel to this fire are & Herman Tull hermantull@gmail.com Department of Religious Studies, Lafayette College, 730 High Street, Easton, Pennsylvania 18042, USA 123 International Journal of Hindu Studies (2019) 23:325–330 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11407-019-09267-y