The World of Eunuchs and Harems

It can be aptly summarised in one word — lopsided. It was a man’s world. Women were merely objects of pleasure, sex and bearing children. They were status symbols and the more you have in your harem, the higher your prestige. Akbar was said to have over a thousand: Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Arabs, Turks, Caucasians and Moors. They were kept in strict seclusion, guarded by troops of eunuchs and not allowed to go out without the Monarch’s permission. He spent his evenings with them to have his drinks, listen to music and have sex with one or two. He could not possibly enjoy a lot of them; that was beyond their prowess no matter how many kushtas (aphrodisiacs) they consumed. Mughal rulers never wrote about the sexual exploits. With severe censorship how did the sordid goings in harems get known? Eunuchs were occasionally allowed to go out, as were female servants. Bazars of cities like Delhi and Agra were full of salacious gossip of what was going on in the palaces. Foreigners like Tavernier and Manucci wrote about them in their memoirs.[When will Pakistan stamp out the jihadis?- Hindustan Times (LT Pragmatic)]

This is true of most harems; the women and eunuchs had their own politics which sometimes influenced succession. Gore Vidal’s Creation, for example, describes the intrigues in Xerxes’ harem. Also due to this you often see eunuchs as main characters in historical fiction since they could enter any room in the palace. The investigator in Jason Goodwin’s The Snake Stone, The Janissary Tree and The Bellini Card set in 19th century Istanbul is Yashim the Eunuch. The book I picked this week from the library, Anne Perry’s The Sheen on the Silk, set in 13th century Byzanthium, features a physician disguising as a eunuch to solve a murder mystery.
And of course, who can forget Zheng He

The story of Hypatia

There are two reasons to see the movie Agora when it is released: One, it is a gripping tale of the woman philosopher Hypatia who was murdered by Christian zealots in Alexandria in the 5th century; second, it stars Rachel Weisz. The Smithsonian had an article on her in this month’s issue.

With Cyril the head of the main religious body of the city and Orestes in charge of the civil government, a fight began over who controlled Alexandria. Orestes was a Christian, but he did not want to cede power to the church. The struggle for power reached its peak following a massacre of Christians by Jewish extremists, when Cyril led a crowd that expelled all Jews from the city and looted their homes and temples. Orestes protested to the Roman government in Constantinople. When Orestes refused Cyril’s attempts at reconciliation, Cyril’s monks tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him.
Hypatia, however, was an easier target. She was a pagan who publicly spoke about a non-Christian philosophy, Neoplatonism, and she was less likely to be protected by guards than the now-prepared Orestes. A rumor spread that she was preventing Orestes and Cyril from settling their differences. From there, Peter the Lector and his mob took action and Hypatia met her tragic end. [Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar]

Confucius Strikes Back

The most popular cinema in China recently was not Avatar, but (due to protectionist rules), a biopic of Confucius. During the Cultural revolution, the Communists were not big on the philosopher; there was a campaign against his ideas. During the 1919 May Fourth anti-imperialist cultural and political movement too Confucianism was regarded as incapable of responding to the challenges of the West: It held China back; it made China vulnerable.
This is quite evident from the 14th century episode of Zheng He when Ming fleets reached Kerala and sailed across the Arabian Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Swahili Coast. These were no ordinary fleets and for perspective we have to compare Vasco da Gama’s and Zheng He’s first voyages. Gama arrived in Calicut on two carracks and a caravel with a crew of 170 people; Zheng He’s first voyage to Cochin and Calicut had between 200 and 317 ships with a crew of 28,000 men.
While China could have monopolized the Indian Ocean trade that did not happen. One of the reasons China withdrew from these voyages was due to Confucianism.

The imperial bureaucracy sought to contain the expansionary ambitions of its sailors and the increasing power of its merchant class: Confucian ideology venerates authority and agrarian ways, not innovation and trade. “Barbarian” nations were thought to offer little of value to China. [The Asian Voyage: In the Wake of the Admiral]

The attitude towards Confucius has changed in the past three decades. He is popular not just among academics and the business community, but also among ordinary people. Yu Dan’s Confucius from the Heart: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World sold ten million copies in two years and Chow Yun-Fat is playing the philosopher in the latest blockbuster.
Besides Yu Dan’s book, one of the reasons for the surge in interest in Confucianism is due to the interest by parents. Though it was not taught in Government schools, Confucianism became popular in private schools and children can now recite from his books.
Confucianism is big with the Government too; they are setting up institutes named after him around the world to promote language and culture. The popularity of the philosophy works for them since Confucius promoted order, harmony and respect for hierarchy and authority. It can be used to justify authoritarianism.
But with this new found interest in Confucianism are the Chinese going to scale back on their global trade, support for Pakistan and North Korea and investments in Africa? The current administration is not going to commit the blunder of the Ming emperors. They know that this is good for cultural identity, but not for foreign policy.
Reference:

The Return of Confucius on NPR

Creating the Hebrew Bible

Jewish Ideas Daily had an interview with Dr. Irving Finkel who is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum. In this interview he talks about how the scriptures were created during the Babylonian exile to forge a religious identity. The PBS Documentary Bible’s Buried Secrets had mentioned this thesis before

The exile challenged the Judeans to refine their ideas about their single God. Thinking of God as an elusive abstraction did not serve to maintain cohesion. To complicate matters further, there were local theologians in Babylon who were also arguing for one god: their patron deity was Marduk, and they held that all the other gods were but manifestations of his powers. We have cuneiform records encapsulating this dispute among Babylonian theologians.
As a single god, Marduk contributed to the insecurity of Jewish belief. The great fear was that the Judean flock would succumb to idol worship or to marrying out, or both. If that happened, the population would disappear just like the Northern Israelites in Assyria. This threat engendered the need for the biblical text to be finished, in order to solidify the Judeans’ belief in their superior understanding of monotheism. What was needed was a theology.
So the “Jews” did something to prevent a replay of the Assyrian outcome. What they did was to produce the Bible, a work that practically screams out that it was written by humans. [But for the Grace of Babylon]

How Tom Hanks makes History Interesting

The current issue of Time features Tom Hanks on the cover. They have anointed him as America’s Historian in Chief for producing From the Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers, John Adams and The Pacific. The article then mentions his idea of making history interesting

What differentiates Hanks from the academic past masters is his conviction that the historical experience should be a very personal one. He harbors a pugnacious indignation against history as data gathering, preferring the work of popular historians like McCullough, Ambrose, Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin. He wants viewers to identify with their ancestors, allowing them to ponder the prevalence of moral ambiguity, human willpower and plain dumb luck in shaping the past. And he wants to be transported back in time, with a Sousa band banging the drum loudly.
As Hanks’ star rose in the 1990s, he sought out new sources of what he calls “entertainable historical knowledge.” Leon Uris’ fact-anchored novels — Mila 18, Armageddon and Exodus — taught Hanks to feel history in a way no high school teacher ever did, but the entertainment level had to be hyperkinetic to hold his attention. It was the same with most academic histories. “The writing is often too dull to grab regular people by the lapel,” he says.
The way he found was to make it a mix of spectacle and drama, drawing on his own cultural influences.
His favorite book as a teen was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which he thought was far scarier than any Hitchcock psychodrama because it had actually happened to a particular family in Holcomb, Kans. “Capote’s horror,” Hanks says, “has stuck with me.” Capote called his work a nonfiction novel — informed by reporting but drawing on the techniques of fiction for its dramatic power. It’s a fair description of Hanks’ productions, in which historical events and figures are drawn together along fictionalized story arcs, and characters have the psychological interiority of characters in novels.[Tom Hanks on ‘Pacific’ HBO Series, World War II, History]

Alcohol or Temples?

Besides the iMac and iPhone, one of the greatest inventions of mankind is agriculture. But an eternal question remains: what sparked the invention of agriculture? What motivated the hunter-gatherer to leave a foraging life, settle down and apply for a mortgage?

One theory says that following the Ice Age (Part 3), the environment dried out creating areas of deserts and oases. People were driven to areas with resources, like the Nile valley, and the population pressure led to innovation. In contrast to this shortage model, the abundance model tells that agriculture developed in areas, like the Fertile Crescent, where plenty of wild wheat grew.

There is another theory which says that the motivation was alcohol

Here is how the story likely began — a prehistoric human picked up some dropped fruit from the ground and popped it unsuspectingly into his or her mouth. The first effect was nothing more than an agreeably bittersweet flavor spreading across the palate. But as alcohol entered the bloodstream, the brain started sending out a new message — whatever that was, I want more of it! Humankind’s first encounters with alcohol in the form of fermented fruit probably occurred in just such an accidental fashion. But once they were familiar with the effect, archaeologist Patrick McGovern believes, humans stopped at nothing in their pursuit of frequent intoxication. [Brewing Up a Civilization]

This is related to the Social Competition model which explains that groups which were able to produce better goods for feast gained prestige and dominance relative to other groups. The earliest domesticated crops — wheat, millet — were also ingredients in alcohol. Thus it was not about substinence, but about getting friendly with strangers.

The latest in the list of theories regarding the origin of agriculture suggests that it was the need to worship that made the foragers settle down; To support this new religious life style, they domesticated plants and animals. We had covered this few years back (1,2), but recently Newsweek had a major story on this topic in connection to the 11,500 year old temple at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a “Neolithic revolution” 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the “high” religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archaeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that “the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture,” and Göbekli may prove his case. [History in the Remaking]

Challenging the Secular Censorship

While the current tendency is to portray anyone who questions the Western/Marxist portrayal of Hinduism as a bigot, the picture is much complex, writes Jakob De Roover

A climate of implicit censorship has long dominated this field. Not quite as spectacular as the rise of ‘Hindu’ censorship, this is not the stuff of juicy journalism. But this kind of censoring is as harmful: it also moulds people’s minds in particular ways; it constrains their speech; it compels them to show compliance to certain dogmas in their writings; and, for the unlucky few, it may even end their careers. The difficulty is to identify the modus operandi of this form of censorship. Much like racism, it is only in certain blatant cases that one can say with certainty that it has occurred. Nonetheless, we have to try and circumscribe this obstacle standing in the way of a much-needed rejuvenation of the study of India. [How Free Are We?]

Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians documents such activities of censorship which was quite common and some of them were quite explicit. A prime example is a state circular from the Communist ruled state of West Bengal which censors the atrocities committed by Muslim invaders.
Jakob then documents the role played by Hindu-Americans in tackling this biased scholarship.

There is a cold war going on between the ‘Hindu-Americans’ (and a few academic sympathisers) and the mainstream scholars of Hinduism. Academics no longer fear being called ‘commies’, ‘reds’ or even ‘heathens’, but now ‘Hindutva’ has taken the place of such labels in the study of India. If one makes positive noises about the contributions of Indian culture to humanity, one runs the risk of being associated with ‘Hindu nationalism’ or with the NRI professionals who aggressively challenge the doyens of Hinduism studies. [How Free Are We?]

In fact in one of his recent lectures at UCLA on British India, the instructor (1,2,3,4) briefly mentions about the folks in Silicon Valley who hold some crazy ideas; as always the lunatic fringe is chosen to make generalizations. So more power to those who challenge shoddy scholarship.

The Earliest Satyagraha?

In 629 or 630 C.E., the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang reached the oasis city of Gaochang on his way to India. The king at that time was a Buddhist by the name of Qu Wencai and he was was thrilled to see the Master of the Law. He was so thrilled that he did not want the Master to travel West; he wanted him to stay in Gaochang.

This posed a problem and it started a diplomatic dance between the Master of the Law and the monarch. First the monarch sent a eighty year old master with this request. When that did not work, the monarch himself made the request. The Master praised the monarch’s goodness, but said that his heart disagrees. The monarch tried more praise: he said he had seen numerous teachers, but none as impressive as the master;he would provide for the Master till the end of his life; he would make all his subjects the Master’s disciples.

Nothing worked. Instead the Master explained why he was traveling to India – to correct the imperfect knowledge of Yogacara in China and to find the truth for himself. This angered the monarch and he threatened the monk with other means to resolve this debate.

Thus the stubborn monk faced a stubborn monarch. Faced with uncertainty, the Master told boldly that the the king had control over his body but not over his spirit, went into meditation, and refused to eat or drink. On the fourth day the monk almost fainted. The king felt guilty about the whole affair and gave permission for the monk to travel West.

This probably is one of the earliest use of hunger strike as a political weapon.

References:

Richard Bernstein, Ultimate Journey: Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment (Vintage, 2002).
Mishi Saran, Chasing the Monk’s Shadow (Penguin Global, 2005).

The Pharaoh's Ship

On Dec 29, 2009, archaeologists found the eighth in a series of lost chambers at Wadi Gawasis in Egypt. Previously seven chambers had revealed pieces of an Egyptian sea faring vessel.

Inside they found a network of larger rooms filled with dozens of nautical artifacts: limestone anchors, 80 coils of knotted rope, pottery fragments, ship timbers, and two curved cedar planks that likely are steering oars from a 70-foot-long ship. According to hieroglyphic inscriptions, the ship was dispatched to the southern Red Sea port of Punt by Queen Hatshepsut during the 15th century B.C. [Archaeologist Kathryn Bards Amazing Egyptian Digs]

This is not the oldest ship remains in Egypt; that credit goes to Khufu’s ship (2500 B.C.E), but then Khufu’s ship probably never sailed.

The ship that was found at Wadi Gawasis was sent to Punt by the female Pharoah Hatshepsut (1508 B.C.E – 1458 B.C.E). But even now no one knows where Punt it. We know that it was south of Egypt, was accessible through the Red Sea and from there Egyptians obtained an alloy of gold and silver, wood, slaves and animals like giraffe and rhino.

The most important export of Punt was a tree resin used to make incense. Then incense, during those times, could be obtained from Arabia, Sindh, Baluchistan, Gujarat, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan. In fact among all these places, the Arabian one was considered the best. But looking at various other factors, Punt is believed to be in the Saudi/Yemen border or Eastern Sudan/Eritrea area.

The importance of incense during that period can be seen in the story of Queen Sheba who visited King Solomon. She came either from Ethopia or Yemen and bought bales of incense as gift. This is the same queen who had a Duryodhana effect and converted and whose son stole the Ark of the Covenant

Egyptians were known for their land trade, but when the King of Kush became powerful and hostile, Queen Hatshepsut had no option other than navigating the choppy waters of the Red Sea. The design of her ship can be seen in the frescoes of her tomb and based on that archaeologists and ship builders made an exact replica which was the subject of the new PBS documentary Building the Pharoah’s ship. This ship, made of wood, tied with rope and sealed with beeswax, performed well. It was able to survive a small storm as well.

But then sailing across the open ocean was quite common by that period. A millennia before Hatshepsut, Sargon of Akkad boasted about the ships of Magan, Dilmun and Meluhha lying in his harbor. To prove that ancient ships could do such long distance travel Thor Heyerdahl made a 60 foot reed ship called the Tigris and sailed from the Tigris delta to the Indus delta and returned back to Djibouti. It was in such ships that Queen Puabi got her carnelian beads, Gudea got his wood and the Meluhhans arived to settle in Guabba.

Noah's Raft

Few years back there was a PBS documentary titled Walking the Bible, which was based on Bruce Feiler’s book. In the documentary Feiler climbs Mt. Ararat in Turkey in search of Noah’s Ark: Bible literalists believe that an actual Ark came to rest on top of this mountain.

The Noah’s Ark story is of course an adaptation of the Sumerian epic – the 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. [Noisy Epics]

If you want to see how Noah’s Ark looked like, here is a replica built by some folks in Netherlands. Here is a cartoon version and here is another. The Ark is imagined to be a large ship since as per Genesis 6:13-16, it 300 cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high.

A new translation of a 3700 year old tablet tells a different story about the Ark – the one in Atra-Hasis: It was not a boat, but a circular raft.

“In all the images ever made people assumed the ark was, in effect, an ocean-going boat, with a pointed stem and stern for riding the waves – so that is how they portrayed it,” said Finkel. “But the ark didn’t have to go anywhere, it just had to float, and the instructions are for a type of craft which they knew very well. It’s still sometimes used in Iran and Iraq today, a type of round coracle which they would have known exactly how to use to transport animals across a river or floods.” [Relic reveals Noah’s ark was circular]