Maha Bharata

I read in Flying Saucers Have Landed a mention of "a mother civilization that preceded even that of India." This reference to India as a particularly ancient civilization prompted the thought that Bharat is a much older name for that civilization than India.

Two pages later, I found a reference to the Maha Bharata, written like that as two separate words. Surprisingly, even though I'm quite familiar with the maha- prefix, it had never occurred to me until I saw it written that way ("tunneled into" like Carroll's Under Ground) that Mahabharata is etymologically related to Bharat. I've never actually read most of the Mahabharata (only the Gita), but it's still strange that I'd never thought about the likely meaning of the name.

A further coincidence is that I was just thinking about the maha- prefix this morning. As mentioned in "Ladder-day Cinq," I had taught the signs of the zodiac to a group including the girl born on January 16. This drew my attention to the fact that she was born under the sign of the Makara (Capricorn), which made me think of my 2022 post "Maha-makara whiteboard telepathy."