I found something interesting here regarding Mahabharata War's mention in world culture and civilizations.
The topic of this issue is the Mahabharata war in relation to world history and culture. We will begin the topic with a question we received sometime back:
"In the Mahabharata, the war seemed to have affected the whole world. We don't find so many references to such of a huge event in other cultures. Why are there no references to a great world event?"
There is reference to a great war both in the Mayan culture and in old Chinese traditions. They speak about a huge war that happened long, long ago; but they give no details. They only knew that such a war had occurred.
After any war two things happen. In certain regions, nothing develops for a long time; and in certain other regions everything expands very rapidly. The same thing has happened after the Kurukshetra war. In some places everything just stopped; there was no communication. These places became completely isolated from the rest of the world.
You can imagine the situation of those other kingdoms which were working under the fifty-four kingdoms, the Aryan empire. When a huge war like this is waged on the other side of the globe, and none of the kings ever returned, and their armies also didn't come back, what would be the state of communication?
These kingdoms would have become completely alien to everything. No one would have known what happened. The king with his entire army went to fight in the great war, and that's it. They just disappeared, never to be heard from again. The agents from the ruling kingdoms no longer came to collect taxes, no information was being sent from the world capital. Suddenly these former colonies are isolated and free. They don't have to pay taxes anymore, nor do they have to be subservient.
Naturally the new king would try to make a lot of indigenous effort to put forth their own culture. And if there were any texts left that said his grand father was a slave of Kaikeya, he would just burn it. They wouldn't want to keep such information.
The same thing happened in the modern World War, which was actually just a war around the world. But the Mahabharata war was one massacre at one single place, and nobody went back. None of the kings or soldiers returned to tell what happened.
It is described that the cremations were done there and the rituals were also done there. Even the widows of the other kings were adopted there by the capital, Hastinapura. Seven different types of cremations were done, like mass cremations, individual cremations, etc. After the cremations, the widows were all adopted by Hastinapura there itself. There was practically no one going back to their own countries, hardly a single channel of communication.
We can imagine if we were a distant country ruling under one of these fifty-four kings, the Aryan empire, and we see no one is returning from the battle, no communication is coming from the battle; what would we do? Immediately we would destroy the old information, that showed us as slaves to these Aryan kings, and emerge as a great self-manifesting empire like Egypt. This is exactly what they did.
The destruction caused by the war was not only external. The destruction of the war was also in the minds of the people. After those heavy astras were used, in the minds of the people anything subtle, anything delicate, anything perfectional was completely burnt out. It is just like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, till today you find the children are disabled. How many years has it been? It was only two primitive bombs. They were so gross and physical, but the radioactivity of that is still being seen today.
Even in the mythology of the Greeks it is there, only the time is looking different. The time frame does not look like it is the Mahabharata war, but the great Achilles fighting and other such stories of Greek mythology have a very close similarity to stories from the Kurukshetra war. In Greek mythology some of these stories are internally dated much before the time of the Kurukshetra war. The reason is because they wanted to have a separate identity, therefore they told it as though it happened at a much more ancient time. It may sound like mythology, but its just the histories which have been handed down from the Kurukshetra war by the bards and entertainers.
The bards and entertainers were not killed. This is an important point in understanding how this history has spread. At that time, war meant that during every evening they had theater, they had dance, they had jokers, etc. They had all varieties of entertainment, and none of these entertainers were killed. That was the rule according to dharma-shastra, they were not supposed to be killed. Everyone died on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, but all of these bards, poets and entertainers lived. This is how the stories were spread.
LINK http://veda.krishna.com/encyclopedia/warhistory.htm
There's more here. I quoted some important bits.
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