New Exodus Theory

Then comes the major event of the parting of the Red Sea. It seems the Hebrew word, Yam Suf was mistranslated as Red Sea while it actually means Reed Sea. Instead of looking for the sea scholars should have been looking for a lake. Based on the new evidence, the film makers find the location of the Reed Sea, a lake currently dried up, due to the Suez Canal. Again, the parting of the lake is attributed to the seismic activity.[Exodus Decoded (1) | varnam]

Besides this, archaeology too has not found any evidence of the Exodus, in the scale mentioned in 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.[Bible’s Buried Secrets (1/2) | varnam]

Still that has not prevented people from coming up with theories of the partition of the Red Sea.

Accepting the biblical account as a “possible ‘qualitative’ description of an event,” Florida State oceanographer Doron Nof set out to investigate whether the parting of the Red Sea is “plausible from a physical point of view.” Using a common phenomenon called wind set-down effect, he found that “a northwesterly wind of 20 m/s blowing for 10-14 h is sufficient to cause a sea level drop of about 2.5m.” Such a drop in sea level, Nof speculates, might have exposed an underwater ridge, which the Israelites crossed as if it were dry land. Although the event is plausible, Nof estimated that the likelihood of such a storm occurring in that particular place and time of year is less than once every 2,400 years.[La scienza e i miracoli dell’Esodo]

The Death of Chanakya

In Episode 2 of The Story of India, Michael Wood, journeys from Patna to Sravanabelagola following the footsteps of Chandragupta Maurya. According to Jain tradition, after a teacher warned Chandragupta about an impending famine, Chandragupta made Bindusara the king, took a begging bowl and walked to Deccan. Even now there is a cave with a carving of a stone foot, where the Mauryan emperor is believed to have starved to death (See from 35 min onwards)
But what about Chanakya? While most popular accounts of Chanakya end with coronation of Chandragupta Maurya’s coronation, Visakshadutta’s Mudrarakshasa is about events after the coronation where Chanakya tries to get the deposed minister of the Nandas, Amatya Rakshasa, to serve as the Emperor’s minister. We don’t know what happened after that.
The only information I could find about Chanakya’s life after this period is in the book The Lives of the Jain Elders by the Jain monk Hemacandra. This narration talks not just about the death of Chanakya, but also about the birth of Bindusara and associated palace intrigues.
According to Hemacandra, while Chanakya served as the Prime Minister of Chandragupta Maurya, he started adding small amounts of poison in the Emperor’s food so that he would get used to it; railway meals was not available then. This gourmet cuisine was prepared to prevent the Emperor from being poisoned by enemies.
One day a pregnant queen Durdha shared the food with the Emperor. Since poisoned food was not her staple diet, she died. Chanakya decided that the baby should not die; he cut open the belly of the queen and took out the baby. A drop (bindu) of poison had passed to the baby’s head, and hence Chanakya named him Bindusara.
After Chandragupta abdicated the throne, Chanakya stayed as the Prime Minister of Bindusara. One person who did not like this was Bindusara’s minister Subandhu who revealed to Bindusara that Chanakya was responsible for the murder of his mother.
On hearing that the Emperor was angry with him, Chanakya thought he had nothing to lose but his life. He donated a his wealth to the poor, widows, and orphans and sat on a dung heap, prepared to die by total abstinence from food and drink. Bindusara, meanwhile heard the full story of his birth from the nurses and rushed to beg forgiveness of Chanakya. But Chanakya would not relent. Bindusara vent his fury on Subandhu, who asked for time to beg for forgiveness from Chanakya.
Subandhu, who still hated Chanakya, wanted to make sure that he did not return to the city – alive. He arranged for a ceremony of respect, but unnoticed by anyone, slipped a smoldering charcoal ember inside the dung heap. Aided by the wind, the dung heap was on fire and the man behind the Mauryan Empire and the author of Arthashastra was burned to death.
R.C.C. Fynes writes in the introduction to the translation of The Lives of the Jain Elders that the stories told by Hemacandra are legend and not history. He has a point since there are no other sources to verify this story. Also it is told entirely from a Jain perspective which adds its own bias. But then most legends have a kernel of truth to them, only sometimes that kernel is hard to find.

A 3800 year old design

In September 2005, researchers built a boat which was similar to the one that plied the bronze age route between Sur in Oman and Mandvi in Gujarat and set sail. This boat, unlike the bronze age ones, had GPS, navigation lights, emergence beacon and life jackets. Also an Indian naval vessel followed it. On the maiden journey, the boat did a Titanic.
In Egypt, recently, they built a ship modeled on a 3800 year old design and set sail.

Douglas fir from North America best resembled the cedar wood used by the Egyptians, in terms of strength and density. Naval architect Patrick Couser drew on better-known watercraft designs from ancient Egypt to design a ship which matched relief images seen on Hatshepsut’s funerary temple.
The 66-foot-long by 16-foot-wide ship was completed by October 2008 using ancient Egyptian techniques. Frames and nails didn’t enter the equation — instead planks were designed to fit like pieces of a puzzle. The timbers swelled snugly together after being immersed in the Nile River.[Sail Like An Egyptian | Popular Science]

They went down the Red Sea for about 150 miles, instead of the 2000 usually covered by these ships, and called it quits. The reasoning was simple: if modern ships cannot face pirates, what chance does a boat made of Douglas fir have?

The Indus Silk

Even though China formally started exporting it only after 119 BCE, silk, dated to much earlier period, has been found in Germany, Egypt, Mediterranean, and Central Asia. This silk, it was explained, came through contact with the Chinese. Now there is a new explanation: sericulture was known to other civilizations and a new paper reveals that the Indus people definitely knew about it.
The new evidence which comes from Harappa and Chanhu-daro show silk threads almost a millennium earlier than previously believed; the earliest find for silk in India was a thread found in Nevasa (1500 BCE). Now three silk fragments, which came from wild silk moth species, dated to the mature Harappan period (2600 – 1700 BCE) show that wild silk was used not just in China.
Previously it was believed that silk and the associated technologies — removing gum from silk and collecting silk strands on to a bobbin — were known only to the Chinese, but now we know that the Indus people too knew about it around the same time. The Chinese knew about silk weaving from 1600 BCE and had silk textiles a millennium back; the Indus discoveries are only few fragments used to connect copper-alloy bangles.
So for all the years of Mature Harappan, we have only three strands of silk. Does this mean that silk was not so important there or that it was not preserved well in the region or that the archaeologists were not trained to look for it specifically.? This finding, hopefully, is the beginning of new discoveries which will answer all those questions.
Reference: New Evidence for Silk in the Indus Valley

The Peaceful Indus People

In chapter 1 of the companion book of the PBS series The Story of India, which talked about bird songs and mantras, Michael Wood writes about Indus Valley. Excavations in the Indus Valley have, so far, not answered this question: how was the city administered? For 700 years, who managed trade or planned the cities? Who established the script, the standard weights and pottery.? We don’t know.

Besides these usual items, Wood brings up something which is rarely given prominence: Unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia, there is no evidence of war in the Indus.

But, the Indus cities had fortified walls. Archaeologists have found arrowheads, and spearheads, besides a small number of daggers and axes. Sir Mortimer Wheeler believed that the tools could have been used for hunting and not warfare. The walls, it is believed, were built to protect the city against flood or to impress. There is no evidence of swords or body armor or military equipment like swords or catapults. Even the Indus art does not depict warfare or killing. Probably the residents were concerned with defense and had no experience in warfare.

All this caused Mark Kenoyer to say it is possible that the Indus civilization, which evolved over a period of 4000 years from the local cultures of Mehrgarh, managed to resolve conflict without warfare. If so, this would be a unique example of living among the bronze age civilizations – an early example of ahimsa.

Why didn’t the Indus cities fight among themselves? One explanation is that they did a good job in the distribution of resources. The distribution was uneven, but most households had more than adequate supply of food hence mitigating the need to become a communist.

Still this claim of “peaceful” Indus is a bit over the top. Kenoyer himself is skeptic suggesting that battles could have been recorded on perishable material, like painted cloth or clay.

Reference:

War and Peace in the Ancient World by Kurt A. Raaflaub
The State at War in South Asia by Pradeep Barua
India by Michael Wood

Noisy Epics

The other day Amit at Digital Inspiration had a post about iSerenity, which “offers a relaxing web-based environment with soothing sounds and images designed to reduce stress and calm nerves.” If this site was available to ancient Babylonians and Sumerians, Western civilization would have got different myths.
The Babylonian epic Enuma Elis describes the reason for a major conflict – noise. Apsu, one of the primeval gods cannot sleep since his offsprings are making noise. So he has a simple solution: kill his noisy offsprings. The dossier containing this plan gets leaked and one of the offsprings, Ea, comes up with a brilliant solution: kill the person who is complaining. The offsprings win and Apsu gets killed.
Before the Enuma Elis, the Sumerians had a epic called Atra-Hasis. In this epic, the gods want to destroy humans because they have become noisy and the gods can’t get sleep. They try various tricks – plague, famine, and, drought; nothing works. The gods then take the draconian step of unleashing a flood. Again the dossier containing the plan gets leaked to Atra-Hasis by one of the gods, Enki. Thus Atra-Hasis builds a boat, carries animals and survives the flood which lasted seven days.
The Enuma Elis are Atra Hasis are important for their creation myths as well. In Enuma Elis, the creation of humans is a minor plot device. They were created by one of the gods, Marduk, to free gods from hard labor and this was the final act of creation. Atra-Hasis too explains how humans were created – from clay and wisdom. All these literary tropes, including that of a man surving the flood, were adopted by later near east religions.
References: MMW2 (Lecture 3), Enuma Elis , Atra-Hasis, Creation Stories of the Middle East By Ewa Wasilewska

How old are our mantras?

The Michael Wood documentary, The Story of India, which was telecast in six parts on PBS mentioned something interesting in the very first episode. Wood talked about the Out of Africa theory – the migration of humans 70,000 years back, from Africa along the shores of Arabian Sea into South India – and mentioned that all non-Africans in the world are descendents of these Indians. Nothing new in that.

Going in search of clues left by those ancient migrants in South India, he arrived at the house of a Kerala brahmin who is teaching his son mantras the way it has been done for millenia. Wood then shows the 2006 athirathram – a 12 day vedic ceremony – and mentions that certain sounds recited in this ceremony takes years to learn but have no meaning. When brahmins were asked for meaning, they did not know. They simply knew that it was handed down.
Since man is a speaking animal, we have always assumed that any word man says is in language, but some of those mantras are not in any known language. Hence these sounds, which are still recited today, are considered to have evolved before human speech.
Of Birds and Humans
Frits Staal of UC Berkeley thought that the claim that mantras are older than language was “preposterous.” In 1975 he helped finance an athirathram, which had not been conducted since 1956 due to financial constraints. Analyzing the sounds he came to the conclusion that mantras could belong to a pre-language era since:

Mantras are language independent: Anything in language can be translated whereas mantras remain the same in all languages.
Mantras, even though they seem to be in a language like Sanskrit, are not used for their meaning.
Mantras follow patterns, like refrain, which is not seen in language.

The clincher for the pre-language theory came when the sound patterns were analyzed to find the nearest equivalent in nature. The technique followed was like this: He took a mantra like Jaimintya Gramageyagana (45.2.1) which goes:

vo no ha bu / idam idam pura ha bu / pra va pra
vas ia ia ha yi / nina ninava tarn u vo ha bu / stiisa vi
sakhtaia Ya ha vi / dramutalyayi / o vi la /

It was split into patterns like AB / CB / DE/.. where A = vo no and B = ha bu. Comparing it to bird songs, it was found that the patterns were similar and such patterns were not found any where else.
As a side effect, by comparing the patterns of mantras and certain birds, it is possible to find which birds influenced the mantras. There is research which found patterns in the composition of Igor Stravinsky and a bird usually found in the region where he worked. Thus some of the mantra sounds were found to be inspired by the songs of Blyth’s Reed Warbler and Whitethroat – two birds which migrate to India.
There are examples of bird-human interaction in Vedas and Upanishads. Some vedic chools have been named after birds — like kausika after the owl or taittiriya after the partridge. D. D. Kosambi believed that Vedic clans were totemic. Then there is the story of Satyakama Jabala in Chandogya Upanishad who:

Critiques
Having established this similarity between bird song and mantra, the theory then takes off with a life of its own. There are vedic rituals for making rain and curing illness and similarly birds sing for building nests or attracting females; there are rituals and bird songs for various occasions. Then it was also found that bird sing – believe it or not – just for pleasure. So Staal extends the theory to say that, similar to skiing, dancing and music, mantras and rituals too are done for pleasure.
Between Staal’s athirathram in 1975 and Wood’s in 2006, one was held in 1990 near Thrissur which I attended for a day. This athirathram, which was extensively covered in Malayalam newspapers, was highly respectful and the words I heard were not “playful” or “pleasurable.” I can understand singing for pleasure, but am yet to meet a priest who said, “it’s a weekend and raining outside, let’s do a ganapati homam for pleasure.”
Prof. Staal thinks that not just the sounds, but rituals too are meaningless. But Wood writes that mantras, “work on emotions, the physiology, and the nervous system.” According to Wood, these rituals are a away of achieving heightened mental and physical state. So I am not sure if this research is of the Ganesha phallus quality. If you have seen any paper or book by anyone else, please leave a comment.
Postscript: Kosambi’s concept that Vedic clans were named after animals was criticized inThe Early Brahmanical System of Gotra and Pravara (Purusottama Pandita, John Brough). They wrote that it is equivalent to saying an Englishman with the surname Fox belongs to a totemic clan of that animal. Instead they suggest that the bird name could have come from the clan name.

Reference: Michael Wood has a companion book to the program. More details can be found in Staal’s paper, Mantras and Bird Songs, in which one quoted sentence reads: “there are mechanisms in existence which reinforce economical perfection in motor skills independently of the attainment of the ultimate biological goal in whose pursuit the learned movement is developed.” Staal’s book on this topic is available in limited preview mode in Google Books.

[serialposts]

Battle of the Ten Kings

The Dasharajnya War or “war of 10 kings” was a turning point in the history of India because it firmly re-established the dominance of the Puru-Bharata Dynasty over smaller royal dynasties and tribal chieftans over the Sapta-Sindhu region going west towards present-day Afghanistan/Persia and east towards Uttar Pradesh. This Puru-Bharata Dynasty provided the continuity of leadership which is documented in the ancient scriptures of Sanathana Dharma (Hinduism) — particularly the Rigveda. The fact that this great story, which I believe must be raised to the standard of ‘epic’ in all fairness, is relatively unknown and forgotten is surprising and raises questions. When did this war occur? Where did this all happen? Why is it important and why should it be raised to the level of India’s two existing epics, namely the Ramayana and the Mahabharata?[Hindu Council UK (email from Rajeev Srinivasan)]

Niraj Mohanka has a long article on the Battle of the Ten Kings and dates it to 2900 BCE. One line in the article — the gifts given by Sudas to his priest Vasishta (2 chariots, 4 horses with gold trappings) — will make you wonder if there were horses at that time? Didn’t Aryans bring horses to India.? To find answers it is worth reading The Horse and the Aryan Debate by Michel Danino along with this.

[serialposts]

The Antikythera mechanism

A recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, used astronomical references in Odyssey to find the date on which the Greek hero Odysseus returned to his wife Penelope. Using three non-allegorical astronomical references, the researchers searched for a date between 1250 – 1115 B.C.E. where the astronomical references cohered and found that a date of April 16, 1178 B.C.E matched perfectly.

The authors of the paper believe that Odyssey is fiction and it was interpolated with valid astronomical data. But Homer lived five centuries after the eclipse and it is a mystery how he would have known about that event. One theory suggested in the paper is that, if Homer knew about Metonic and Saros eclipse cycles, he could have estimated the eclipse.

In fact the Greeks had a mechanical device which could do exactly that. Though sponge divers discovered the device in 1901, it was only recently that many mysteries of its mysteries were solved. The device called the Antikythera mechanism was thought to be an ancient mechanical computer.

A paper in Nature reveals that one dial on the bronze mechanism is a 19 year calendar based on the Metonic cycle and all 12 months in the calendar were identified. Also it was found that the mechanism was sophisticated enought to know which years had 13 months and which months had 29 or 30 days. The Babylonians too had a Metonic cycle based calendar, but it was not this precise.

Another dial on the mechanism was found to be the Saros eclipse prediction dial with an excellent prediction scheme. 18 eclipse glyphs were marked on the dial and it gave a perfect match for 100 start dates.

Homer could not have known about this particular device since it is dated to 146 BCE, when Corith, where the device was created, fell to Romans. Homer is dated to 8th century BCE and so far so such devices dating to that period have been found. So the mystery of how Homer knew about eclipses five centuries before him still remains.

Oh Piye!

In 730 BCE, Egypt was ruled by petty warlords and the civilization which would be the subject of many PBS documentaries had collapsed. One man, Piye, changed all that. In one year he subjugated every warlord and bought Egypt under his control. Piye and his successors not only united Egypt, but added many monuments including pyramids. Piye was a black pharaoh from Nubia (modern Sudan) and the Nubian history goes as far as the first Egyptian dynasty.

The fact that he was black did not matter to the ancient Egyptians. It also did not matter to the Greeks and Romans who knew that he was black and had art depicting it. Then, in the 19th century the Western scholars noticed.

Even famed Harvard Egyptologist George Reisner—whose discoveries between 1916 and 1919 offered the first archaeological evidence of Nubian kings who ruled over Egypt—besmirched his own findings by insisting that black Africans could not possibly have constructed the monuments he was excavating. He believed that Nubia’s leaders, including Piye, were light-skinned Egypto-Libyans who ruled over the primitive Africans. That their moment of greatness was so fleeting, he suggested, must be a consequence of the same leaders intermarrying with the “negroid elements.”

For decades, many historians flip-flopped: Either the Kushite pharaohs were actually “white,” or they were bumblers, their civilization a derivative offshoot of true Egyptian culture. In their 1942 history, When Egypt Ruled the East, highly regarded Egyptologists Keith Seele and George Steindorff summarized the Nubian pharaonic dynasty and Piye’s triumphs in all of three sentences—the last one reading: “But his dominion was not for long.”

The neglect of Nubian history reflected not only the bigoted worldview of the times, but also a cult-like fascination with Egypt’s achievements—and a complete ignorance of Africa’s past.[National Geographic Magazine – NGM.com]

Thus when a native civilization was found to have made great achivements, Western scholars wrote history to change them to light-skinned men who ruled over the dark skinned primitives. Where have we heard this before.?