Chinese Power in Indian Ocean (1/2)

Chinese treasure ship (via Wikipedia)

In 1498, three ships — Sao Gabriel, Sao Rafael, and Sao Miguel — appeared in Calicut heralding a new era in geopolitics and world trade. Vasco da Gama would become immortal for finding a route from Europe to India, avoiding the Muslims who had a monopoly on overland trade. But for the residents of Calicut, this was not a major event. They were used to foreign traders and many foreigners lived in the Malabar coast. Even da Gama’s ships and crew of less than two hundred people was not a jaw dropper since they had seen huge Chinese ships with larger crew in Calicut port.
Much before Europeans became major players in the Indian Ocean, traders routinely sailed from the Malabar coast to the Swahili coast. During that time the Chinese built the biggest ships of the era and under Admiral Zheng He (pronounced Jung Huh) made seven voyages reaching as far as the Swahili coast. With such technology, the Chinese could have dominated trade, instead of the Europeans, but they did not. It is interesting to see why.
Ming and Zheng He
This story begins on September 10, 1368 when Ukhaantu Khan of the Yuan dynasty fled to Inner Mongolia unable to face the rebels under the leadership of Zhu Yuanzhang. These rebels would establish the native Ming dynasty. The third Ming emperor Zhu Di, wanted to improve trade, enhance the empire’s prestige, and encourage a tribute system for which he ordered an armada to be built.
Zhu Di’s admiral for the mission was Zheng He, a six and half feet tall two hundred pound man. This 34 year old Muslim originally named Ma Ho, was captured as a child by the Ming army from the Mongol village of Yunan. Like the Egyptian Mamluks, these slaves had career paths, but only after castration and so Zheng He eventually became the Grand Eunuch.
Even before the Ming dynasty, huge Chinese ships were spotted in Kerala. In 1340, Ibn Battuta, who was in Calicut, saw 13 Chinese junks wintering in the port. Ibn Battuta who had traveled in various type of ships and dhows in his travels from Morocco to India never mentioned much construction details in his accounts, but the Chinese ships impressed him so much that he wrote about three types of ships — the large junks, middle sized zaws, and small kakams. Ibn Battuta also expressed happiness at the privacy offered in their cabins that he could take his slave girls and wives and no one on board would know about it.
In 1330, Jordan Catalani, a Dominican monk saw them in Quilon and wrote that they had over 100 cabins and 10 sails. They were triple keeled and held together not by nails or metal structures, but the thread of some plant. Ibn Battuta wrote that these ships carried thousand men of which four hundred were soldiers.
Zhu Di’s ships, under the command of Zheng He sailed in 1405. There were 317 ships of which 60 were the large junks. These treasure ships held lacquers, porcelain, and silks. They carried a total of 27,000 men which included soldiers, carpenters, physicians, astrologers, cartographers and interpreters. Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan or Francis Drake would never command such a fleet nor as many men.
Under his leadership, the fleet made seven voyages trading, transporting ambassadors and establishing Chinese colonies. Three of those were to India, one to the Persian Gulf and three to the Swahili Coast and in the process he visited the Champa kingdom, Cambodia, Sumatra, Nicobar Islands, Ceylon, Maldives. One item which Zheng He took back to China was a giraffe; how the giraffe was transported on a ship passing through a rough ocean is not documented well, but it certainly amused the king. So did zebras which were called celestial
horses.
They called Calicut, “a great country” and people as “honest and trustworthy”. They had good opinion of the Zamorin and observed that Calicut had a highly structured society, well trained army and a harsh system of justice. In Calicut they traded using the language of the fingers.
(Read Part 2)

Bible's Buried Secrets (2/2)

(Abraham by József Molnár)

Read Part 1
3. Monotheism did not happen instantly. (contd.)
Still the Israelites practiced polytheism,worshiping not just Yahweh, but also the fertility goddess Asherah and the Canaanite God Baal, though they were not supposed to. Whenever a major calamity fell on the Israelites, like the Assyrian invasion in 722 B.C.E and the Babylonian invasion followed by the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E it was blamed on polytheism.
Israelites were reminded that they had broke the covenant with God and hence were incurring his wrath. Still this was not taken seriously till the time the Babylonians exiled the Caananites. It was during this exile that one of the scribes of that era, known as “P”, took all the previous revisions and created the present version of the Bible. The documentary suggests that the Abraham story was created then, by this scribe, to enforce the concept of the covenant. The scribe lived in Babylon and Abraham was placed in the nearby Ur; Abraham’s goal was to reach the promised land, so was the dream of the exiles.
It was also during the exile that the observances like sabbath were emphasized. Israelites learned to pray in groups and to worship without a temple, king or priests. This was the formation of modern Judaism.
4. Archaeology disproves other events as well
Following the Exodus, as per the Bible, Joshua takes the Israelites into Canaan through a military conquest. Archaeology has found evidence of destruction in various settlements which seem to agree with the Bible. But on dating the sites, it was found to happen much before Exodus and among the 31 sites listed by the Bible, just a few showed signs of war.
Similarly there is no evidence of the First Temple as well which made Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian Authority official leading all peace talks with Israel to provocatively say that it was a Jewish invention. The problem is that the First temple lies below the third holiest site in Islam which makes archaeology impossible. The Bible has a detailed description of the temple and in fact there is a temple which matches this description at Ain Dara, in modern-day Syria.
Sometimes there is a kernel of truth in myths. But as we go back in time it becomes difficult to find even this kernel. The documentary says that, “Genesis is, for the most part, a compilation of myths, creation stories, things like that, and to find a historical core there is very difficult.”

5. Archaeology vs Scripture
While the documentary suggests that the concept of one God was evolved during the Babylonian exile, in fact for a brief period in Egypt, the Pharaoh Akhenaten had this concept of One God and he ruled before the time frame suggested for the Exodus? Is it possible that the small number of people who fled Egypt carried with them the seeds of this story? This possibility was not raised in the documentary.
While archaeology disproved many Biblical narratives, there are a few places where the text agrees, like in the case of the House of David. There was scepticism about King David, but on a victory stele dedicated by the king of Damascus, the words, “I slew mighty kings who harnessed thousands of chariots and thousands of horsemen. I killed the king of the House of David.” were found which makes David, the earliest Biblical figure to be confirmed by archaeology. He lived around 1000 B.C.E, as a petty warlord of a small chiefdom with few settlements.
Archaeology also shuts up the sceptics who claim that the entire Bible was an invention. A silver scroll with a Priestly Benediction earlier then the Dead Sea Scrolls by 400 years have been found. And those scrolls contain the word – Yahweh.
While this program enraged certain believers – for using government funding to prove there was no God – there is consensus, with some quibbles, that this program was a fairly accurate summary of a century of Biblical Studies.
Finally
Was the Bible, a book of faith, meant to be investigated like this as a historical document? According to William Dever, Professor Emeritus of the University of Arizona

We want to make the Bible history. Many people think it has to be history or nothing. But there is no word for history in the Hebrew Bible. In other words, what did the biblical writers think they were doing? Writing objective history? No. That’s a modern discipline. They were telling stories. They wanted you to know what these purported events mean.

And Carol Meyers, an archaeologist and professor of religion at Duke University

Too often in modern western thinking we see things in terms of black and white, history or fiction, with nothing in between. But there are
other ways of understanding how people have recorded events of their past. There’s something called mnemohistory, or memory history, that I find particularly useful in thinking about biblical materials. It’s not like the history that individuals may have of their own families, which tends to survive only a generation or two. Rather, it’s a kind of collective cultural memory.

Postscript: The website for this program is a treasure trove of information. The entire documentary as well as the transcript is available online. Besides this there are interviews with the scholars who talk about the writers of the Bible, foundation of Judaism, Archeology of the Hebrew Bible, Moses and the Exodus, The Palace of David and the Origins of the Written Bible. There is also an interactive timeline and a whole bunch of video extras.
Update (Dec 9): DIY Scholar has a list of online resources which will enhance the understanding of this period.

Bible's Buried Secrets (1/2)

(An 11th century Bible)

There is no evidence for Exodus as suggested by the Bible. That is one of the conclusions of the two hour NOVA documentary, Bible’s Buried Secrets, which aired on PBS on Nov 18th. This conclusion is not revolutionary; it has been suggested before, most recently by Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archaeologist.
The Exodus, the most repeated story in the Hebrew Bible immortalized by Charlton Heston, suggests that about six hundred thousand men and their families escaped Egypt and reached the promised land. A century of archaeological work has found no such evidence but has found that during the time of the Exodus, dated between the Merneptah Stele (1275 B.C.E) and the Zayit Stone (1208 B.C.E), the promised land, Canaan, had just 25 settlements with 3000 – 5000 inhabitants.
Does this mean that the story of Exodus is pure mythology.? The documentary says it is possible that a few people escaped from Egypt, but they were not Israelites, but Canaanite slaves whose story survived as poetry and was transcribed after 1000 B.C.E.
This deconstruction of the Exodus was not the primary goal of the documentary, but just a causality while finding the origins of the Israelites and their concept of one God in a polytheistic world. In this journey which combines Bible and archaeology, many such articles of faith were demolished much to the angst of certain believers who called for withdrawing government funding for PBS.

Many Biblical scholars commented that there was nothing new in the program and it just summarized a century of scholarship, but for the lay person who is interested in the confluence of history, archaeology and religion, there was much to learn.
1. Who were the Israelites?

The Israelites were not migrants from outside, but natives of Canaan. The original state of Canaan had a social collapse, not by Joshua’s invasion, but following a conflict between the elite and the commoners. Around this time there was the collapse of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian empire as well. The Israelites rise after this and they are made up of Canaan commoners, the few escaped slaves from Egypt, and dispersed people and there is a rapid rise in population from five thousand to 45 thousand in 200 years by 1000 B.C.E.
Looking for a new identity, radically different from the oppressive ancient Canaan society, these new Canaanites adopted stories of Moses, Abraham and Joshua to symbolize freedom, deliverance and conquest. To distinguish themselves from their polytheistic past, they came up with a monotheistic God, adopted from a desert people called Shashu.
2. The Bible was written by humans.

Noah’s flood, in one page lasts 40 days and 40 nights and 150 days in another. Sometimes Abraham calls God, Yahweh, elsewhere Elohim. All these suggest that there were multiple authors for the Bible which challenges the view that Moses wrote the first five books.
Mahabharata by tradition acknowledges this type of revision.

The epic itself claims to have been originally just 8,800 verses composed by Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa and called the Jaya. Later, it became 24,000 verses, called the Bharata, when it was recited by Vaishampayana. Finally, it was recited as the 100,000-versed epic (the Mahabharata) by Ugrashravas, the son of Lomaharshana. Thus, the tradition acknowledges that the Mahabharata grew in stages. [The Date Of The Mahabharata War]

In Biblical Studies, the Documentary Hypothesis states that the Bible was edited by scribes over a period of time. Based on language, the oldest one was found to be the book of Exodus, similar to how mandalas 2-7 are considered the oldest in Rig Veda and 1 and 10 the youngest.
3. Monotheism did not happen instantly.
While the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Babylonians and far away Indians worshipped many gods Israelites discovered the concept of one God. Where did they come up with this idea which survives to this day?
The answer lies in the journey of a small number of Caananite slaves from Egypt. They passed through a place called Midian (Jordan & Saudi Arabia), where a group of people known as the Shasu lived. According to the Egyptian texts, the Shasu lived in a place which was pronounced Yahu, which is similar to Yahweh, the patron god of Israel.

It is in Midian, according to the Bible that Moses first meets Yahweh in the form of a burning bush. When the Egyptian Caananites met the native Caananites, they told this story and since it was a powerful metaphor for freedom, it was adopted into the canon. The slaves attributed their freedom to the Midian God.

(to be continued..)

My Op-Ed in Mail Today: Obama Presidency

(An edited version of this article appeared in Nov 8, 2008 Mail Today)
Two books I read recently — John Adams by David McCullough and Blasphemy by Douglas Preston — have relevance to election of Sen. Barack Obama as the President of United States. The first book, a biography of second President, gave historical perspective on the selection of the 44th President while the second, a non-stop thriller, demonstrated why a President needs to keep his religion personal.
A Historic Achievement.
John Adams was the first President to live in the White House which was then known as the President’s House. Mr. Adams visited Washington City in 1800 and was appalled by the sight of the city with the heat and mosquitoes, but more so by the sight of slaves at work and their squalid cabins.
He moved into the President’s House alone, without an honor guard or entourage in October. A few months later he was joined by his wife Abigail who did not like what she saw in the South. According to McCullough, the sight of slaves working in her house left Mrs. Adams, who was from Boston, depressed.
Now, two hundred and eight years after the first resident of the White House, 233 years after Thomas Jefferson wrote, “all men are created equal” while owning slaves and 147 years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, a man of color will occupy the White House.
Though a lot has improved over the past two centuries, racial tensions are still present. The attacks on Sen. Obama during the campaign season showed that the possibility of a man of color occupying the highest office in the land had upset a minority. A site which claimed to sell funny t-shirts advertised shirts featuring a noose and Ku Klux Klan members chasing Obama. A Republican Party flyer in California featured a phony $10 bill showing Obama surrounded by racist imagery and recently federal authorities disrupted a plot of two white supremacists to go on a national killing spree and murder Sen. Obama.
The Democratic primaries too had drama. Sen. Hillary Clinton made comments which appeared to diminish the role of Martin Luther King Jr. and Pres. Bill Clinton dismissed Sen. Obama’s image as a “fairy tale” both of which generated outrage among African-Americans.
This victory is significant because Sen. Obama won it fair and square by competing on equal terms with his rivals. He did not milk “white guilt.” He did not have an advantage in the election and no seats were reserved for him. Sen. Obama instead ran as a post-racial candidate, comfortable in his Kenyan ancestry and mid western upbringing. Still the odds he had to surmount were enormous which makes this victory an important point in American history.
Blasphemy
In Blasphemy, a Large Hadron Collider type particle accelerator is activated below a Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona. The project’s goal — circulate protons and anti-protons in opposite directions, almost at the speed of light, and collide them to create energy levels not seen the since universe was a millionth of a second old.
Meanwhile a bunch of evangelicals turn against the project since they think it is a government-sponsored secular humanist war on Christianity. For them the opening words of Genesis contained exactly how God created the world and there was no need to investigate the Big Bang theory, the atheistic creation model. Rousing their followers, they flock to Arizona to shutdown this anti-Christian activity.
In Blasphemy, the particle accelerator is the President’s pet project. Also he has low opinion of the evangelicals. In contrast President Bush has always deferred to the evangelical base and their religiously-defined “family values” letting it define American policy.
Soon after he took office, President Bush funded research only on existing stem cell lines and twice vetoed legislation that would have lifted restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. Always obstinate in his opinion, Pres. Bush as Seed magazine noted, “turned the very act of defying science into an art.”
In her book The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa Helen Epstein writes about how President Bush’s billion dollar AIDS prevention program worked in Africa. Missionary organizations, funded by United States, have swept Uganda emphasizing abstinence only programs; the church is not in favor of contraception. The book has a humorous anecdote where a pastor on seeing a condom on a mascot used for education, sets it on fire, “in the name of Jesus.”
Separation of Scripture from Public Policy
United States was not created as a Christian nation and when it was launched the country did not have an official cult or official religion. In fact that was the only new thing in the American Constitution since federalism, independent judiciary, bicameral legislature, and tripartite administration existed either in theory or practice. In England the King was the head of Church as well as the State, but United States had the separation of Church and State from the beginning and that was unprecedented for those times. Recently when the Dalai Lama was asked what he would do if he got control over Tibet he replied that he would enforce the separation of Church and State the American way.
Though there is separation of church and state in the country, religious beliefs of the political leaders have played a part in elections. Faith is an important part of American life and every candidate asserts their religious credentials — even the liberals. Sen. Hillary Clinton, during the primary season, mentioned that her faith shaped how she sees the world. Sen. Barack Obama proudly says that he is a Christian; President Jimmy Carter calls himself a Bible evangelist.
All of them declare that Christian faith has provided them with a moral compass. The problem is when they use words in scripture to shape public policy and enforce it on fellow citizens and other nations. Thus in 21st century America there is a debate on the need to teach Creationism or “Intelligent Design” in public schools making it feel as if Pope Urban VIII is in charge.
Under President Obama, government support for embryonic stem cell research will increase. He supported it while in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate. Sen. John McCain, too would have supported stem cell research but with some fine print. He did not want to sacrifice moral values and ethical principles for scientific progress which means yes on adult stem cell research and no on the use of human embryos. McCain’s running mate was sure that she would not support stem cell research which would end in the destruction of life.
Abstinence programs are supported by Sen. Obama as well. But he knows that it cannot reduce teen pregnancy and believes that contraception has to be part of the education process. As one of the sponsors of Prevention First Act he is conscious about the need for funding family planning, ending insurance discrimination against contraception, improving awareness about emergency contraception.
After eight years of religious pandering America is about to move in a secular direction, where faith remains personal and stays away from the steps of the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This was the way it was always meant to be and the founding fathers — Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who were behind the separation of church and state — will be smiling.

My article at ISN Zurich

While it is distressing that mobs can restrict cultural freedom, liberals should be concerned that our governments too act mala fide with élan. In 2006, The Da Vinci Code, based on a best selling novel of the same name by Dan Brown, was released in India. This controversial novel and movie propagated Donovan Joyce’s 1973 theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and their bloodline survives to this day. While it was not banned in Christian majority countries, this movie, which was cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification, was either banned or suspended in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Punjab.

My article on Cultural Liberalism was published by ISN Zurich. This article was originally published in Pragati and was also carried by Mail Today.

Our Voice in Our History

(An edited version of this article was published in the Aug 2008 issue of Pragati)
“The Indus Valley civilization dwarfed Egypt and Mesopotamia in area and population, surpassed them in many areas of engineering and was aggressive in globalization 5000 years back.” These are words from Andrew Lawler’s lead article in the June 2008 issue of Science magazine which had Indus Civilization as the cover story
Previously archaeologists believed that Indus people got their ideas from Mesopotamia and was a civilization without deep roots, but as per new evidence, Indus evolved from the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan. Archaeology has also found evidence of occupation in Harappa dating to 3700 B.C.E and in Farmana in India to 3500 B.C.E.
Writing about the religious beliefs of the Indus people, Lawler mentions that the proto-Shiva seal has fuelled speculation that the religious tradition of Indus helped lay the basis for Hinduism. While there are questions to be answered on their language, religion and form of government, decades of archaeology has changed the image of Indus from a xenophobic and egalitarian society to one which was vibrant and complex.
Though the article was fairly balanced covering excavations in Harappa, Baluchistan, and Kot Diji in Pakistan and Farmana, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi and Kalibangan in India, it had the usual western hatchet job, blaming Indian archaeologists for using Hindu texts as a guide. This is a no-no, we are told, because (a) it is inflammatory to the Pakistanis and (b) India has a large Muslim population.
The article has other issues too. Drought, as a reason for the demise of Indus, is scoffed at while many other reasons, including “change in a society that they say emphasized water-related rituals” is offered as an alternative. The western scholars quoted in the article themselves admit their theories are pure speculation, but the drying up of Ghaggar-Hakra around 1900 B.C.E is ignored, since it would involve a reference to the Rig Veda.
As Western scholars condescendingly set the rules of the games — a very different one from that practised in their own research centers — we need to evaluate what can be done. Whining about unfairness can be cathartic, but it does not solve the problem.
Different Standards and Inept Government
Few years back, Stanford University offered a course on the Historical Jesus which was an enquiry based on the scriptures. Biblical Archaeology is quite popular in Israel which has the same percentage of Muslim population as India. These techniques are considered communal in India.
After two centuries of searching and not finding anything spectacular, Biblical Archaeology in the past half century has morphed into the archaeology of the Biblical period. Archaeologists now say the Exodus did not happen, not by speculation, but after conducting extensive archaeology in Egypt. We too should not indulge in speculative archaeology, but first Indian archaeologists and scholars need to be unapologetic about knowing the scriptures and using them for clues.
Sadly this attitude cannot be taken by people who work for government funded institutions like the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and Universities. The Saraswati Heritage Project was canned by the government since it was seen as an attempt to push the antiquity of Indian civilization. (If these people were around in 1921, they would have halted archaeology at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa which pushed the antiquity of Indian civilization by many millennia)
Recently the Government of India cut funding for a major Sanskrit program in schools because – it is getting tad repetitive – India has a large Muslim population and there was a fear that it would instil religious and cultural pride among students. In such an atmosphere, it would be naive to expect the government to lead the battle in understanding our history. Instead of wasting time writing letters to ministers, we might be better off digging in our own backyard for Painted Grey Ware.
The second problem is mentioned in the Lawler’s article itself. Indian archaeologists have done excellent work, like R. S. Bisht in Dholavira and Vasant Shinde in Farmana, but they are slow to publish and collaborate. Bisht’s work has revealed “monumental and aesthetic architecture, a large stadium and an efficient water-management system”, but has largely been unpublished. The lack of data from people who had first access to the location helps in sustaining myths about the civilization.
Solutions
There is an urgent need to create institutions where scholarship is free of bureaucracy and political interference. One such institution — the Indus Heritage Center — funded by the Global Heritage Fund is coming up in Vadodara. Besides starting a Smithsonian class center in India, the center also plans to popularize the findings of Deccan College, the Department of Archaeology of Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and the Archaeological Survey of India.
There have been xenophobic comments regarding this institution due to the involvement of western professors, even though the professors don’t believe in the Aryan Invasion theory. The fear is that they will be applying western frameworks on our history resulting in misinterpretation.
But instead of complaining about west, it is time we adopted some of their techniques for popularizing history. Building a Smithsonian style museum is an insuperable problem for the cash strapped ASI which can barely manage the monuments under its care. The Indus Heritage Center model where private donors in association with various colleges build research centers in which native interpretation of history can happen should be considered. Right now there are few sincere individuals who are involved in correcting Western biases; their efforts are exemplary but not sufficient to make an impact.
Past many decades of research have found no archaeological evidence for the Aryan Invasion theory. It has been discredited through genetic research as well. The demise of Indus valley is understood to be due to hydrological changes. Still, pick up a book like Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, which is used as text book in graduate courses, and you will find that colonial politics is still alive and any divarication is branded as nationalism.
One Indus Heritage Center cannot change such entrenched ideas. To give the megaphone to differing voices, more Indus Heritage Centers which are financially secure are required. This dovetails into the larger debate about the need to free higher education and research from government control and facilitate an atmosphere where private capital can provide funding. With such freedom, scholars would be able to delve into research as they see fit, instead of surrendering to artificial political fears.
Five thousand years back our ancestor living in the Indus Valley sailed across the vast Arabian sea in reed boats with cotton sails and made the best of the Bronze age globalized world. It would be a shame, if we did not show even a fraction of their ingenuity in making our voice heard in a debate about our history.

Defining the Historian

(Asoka’s Edict in Greek and Aramaic. Found in Khandahar)

In an opinion piece in The Hindu, Upinder Singh writes highly about Marxist historians and offers the following criticism:

While making these valuable interventions and contributions, Marxist writings often tended to work with unilinear historical models derived from Western historical and anthropological writings. Texts were sometimes read uncritically, with insufficient attention paid to their problematic chronology and peculiarities of genre. Archaeological data were included, but the basic framework of the historical narrative remained text-centric. Initially, the focus on class meant less attention to other bases of social stratification such as caste and gender. Religion and culture were sidelined, or mechanically presented as reflections of socio-economic structures [Changing interpretations of early Indian history]

The bigger problem is in applying a 19th century model in analysing ancient India without accepting that people of ancient India lived by different codes and philosophy. For example, when you apply Marxist historiography, with the theme of of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes, on the Asokan empire, the results are ridiculous, but in India that passes off as serious research.

Continue reading “Defining the Historian” →

Astronomical dating of Odyssey and Mahābhārata (Part 2/2)

Read Part 1

There are two possibilities on how Homer knew about the eclipse which happened five centuries ago.

The eclipse details was passed down through oral tradition to Homer.
If Homer knew about Metonic and Saros eclipse cycles, he could have estimated the eclipse.

Currently there is no evidence that Greeks were interested in such precise observation of astronomical events. Since the eclipse did not pass through other major civilizations of the time, the data could not have come from elsewhere. The authors believe both theories to be outlandish.

Irrespective of the astronomical data, there is general consensus on the date of the Battle of Troy since the date predicted by the classical writers have been validated by archaeology. Plato gave a date of 1193 B.C.E, Eratosthenes, 1184 B.C.E and Herodotus, 1250 B.C.E. for the fall of Troy; the destruction layer in Troy VII has been dated to 1190 B.C.E.

Even though they could find a date which matches data from other sources, the authors of the paper make it clear that it is no indication that the Odyssey really happened. The paper, they state, only makes the case that if certain astronomical events listed are correct, then they refer to a historical eclipse.

While the date for the Trojan war was validated with extensive archaeology, Mahābhārata archaeology has been minimal. The dates for the war have a spread of two millennia; the Trojan war has a spread of 135 years. This date of 3097 B.C.E does not become credible unless it synchronizes with archaeological data. For example, horses play an important part in the epic and no horse remains dating to that period has been found in India^[1].

While Odyssey has only few astronomical references, Mahābhārata has many. Does this mean the composers of Mahābhārata observed astronomical events with great accuracy or did they painstakingly retrofit a later day story with historical astronomical events?

Rajiv Malhotra meanwhile asks if it really matters how old Mahābhārata is?

At the same time, one comes across many Hindu scholars who are chasing useless and chauvinistic bandwagons that are disconnected from today’s relevant issues. For instance, they seem to be obsessed with ‘proving’ the age of the Mahabharata or geographically locating the Vedas, as if any Hindus were converting because the Mahabharata is not proven to be old enough! They are like ostriches with their heads stuck inside the temple, ashrama and/or political arena, while the globalized world has already passed them by.[Myth of Hindu Sameness]

In fact does it really matter how old Odyssey is or if it really happened? For those interested only in the theology of Mahābhārata it does not matter if the epic was history or poetry from an imaginative mind. But let others who are curious investigate. That too is important.

It is also important to note that research based on astronomical data was carried out in a reputed American university and the results published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. This is treated as scholarship and is neither frowned upon, not considered taboo. The observations in the paper was carried by all major news sources and none of them passed judgement on this type of research. While the world now knows about the work of Marcelo O. Magnasco and Constantino Baikouzis, the work of Narahari Achar largely remains unknown, even in India.

Notes:

[1] The Bhimbetka rock shelters of the Paleolithic age have horse images, but they have not been accurately dated.

My op-ed in Mail Today: Cultural Liberalism

This was the same piece that was published in Pragati, but enhanced with few hundred words, based on suggestions from Ranjith and Oldtimer. Also thanks to Nitin for first publishing it in Pragati.

Governments usually ban books and movies when they think it has or can upset religious sentiments resulting in a break down in law and order. While that may be the official reason, the ground reality is that it is connected to politics. The Communists became a pot among kettles when they banned Taslima Nasreen’s book Dwikhandito in West Bengal and when Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya ordered the cancellation of the screening of “Taurus”, a film which showed Lenin in a less admirable light. With all these bans, the governments made it clear that they would rather appease than take an honorable stand.
…
As usual there will be mob violence and selective outrage, but let not the Iranian Ayatollahs and Bangladeshi fundamentalists be our role models. Instead, it is illuminating to read these lines which Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul wrote in the M.F. Hussain verdict, “A liberal tolerance of a different point of view causes no damage. It means only a greater self restraint. Diversity in expression of views whether in writings, paintings or visual media encourages debate. A debate should never be shut out.”[JPG/PDF]

The Spicy History of Malabar

(Calicut as seen in 1572)^[1]

On May 21, 1498, two Tunisian merchants in Calicut, Kerala, were surprised to see a European from Algarve, the southernmost region of mainland Portugal, walk into their house. Their conversation went like this

Tunisian: “What the devil brought you here?”
European: “We came in search of Christians and spices.”

The European was a degredado, a felon or an outcast like a converted Jew. As Europeans renewed world exploration once again in the 15th century, degredados, who were considered expendable, were first released onto the shore in strange lands. If this volunteer came back with his body parts intact, the brave sailors would follow.^[2]

This particular degredado had landed from a Portuguese ship and people of Calicut who were used to seeing foreigners knew that he was not Chinese or Malay. Suspecting that he was from the Islamic world they threw a few Arabic words at him and seeing no response, they took him to the house of the Tunisian merchants. Since the man was not harmed, the commander of the Portuguese carrack São Gabriel, Vasco da Gama, set foot on the ground in Kerala and became famous for doing what Christopher Columbus set to do five years back — naming random places, India.

If Vasco da Gama and the Tunisian merchants were to land in present day Calicut, they would be amused to see posters opposing globalization and anti-globalization rhetoric in the words of the rulers. The shocked foreigners would have told Malayalees that Kerala was a globalized land much before the time of Buddha till the 17th century and was wealthy too. Even the degredado, who would have known more history, would have rolled in Kapad beach hearing one of those Achyutanandan sing song speeches.

Continue reading “The Spicy History of Malabar” →