Those peaceful Minoans

Fresco of an acrobat on a bull with two female acrobats on either side.
Minoan fresco of an acrobat on a bull with two female acrobats on either side.

Minoans, who lived on the island of Crete, were contemporaries of the Harappans. But unlike the Harappans, they were known more for their monumental palaces and mansions. The civilization came to an end by fire, ash or flooding when the volcano on the Greek island of Santorini blew up. Till recently, it was believed that this civilization was devoid of war and now new evidence suggests it was not so.

“The study shows that the activities of warriors included such diverse things as public displays of bull-leaping, boxing contests, wrestling, hunting, sparring and duelling. Ideologies of war are shown to have permeated religion, art, industry, politics and trade, and the social practices surrounding martial traditions were demonstrably a structural part of how this society evolved and how they saw themselves.”
Molloy found a “staggering” amount of violence in the symbolic grammar and material remains from prehistoric Crete. Weapons and warrior culture were materialised variously in sanctuaries, graves, domestic units and hoards. It could also be found in portable media intended for use during social interactions, for example, administration, feasting, or personal adornment. “There were few spheres of interaction in Crete that did not have a martial component, right down to the symbols used in their written scripts.” said Dr Molloy.

This is interesting because the Harappan civilization is also considered to be a peaceful one; you do not find glorified rulers, or depiction of conquest or warfare. There are no jars or seals depicting battle and no trace of armed conflict. It remains a mystery as to how such a vast domain was governed. One theory is that trade and religion were the instruments of authority and not warfare. But then as Michel Danino writes in The Lost River, only less than 10 per cent of the 1140 Mature Harappan sites have been excavated. The buried ones may have a different story to tell.

Decoding Neanderthals (NOVA)


As humans left Africa and reached Europe, they found another hominid species which had left Africa much earlier — 800,000 years back — and had colonized specific parts of Europe. For about 10,000 years, humans and the Neanderthals co-existed; the magnificent Chauvet caves were built during this period. Then they just disappeared from the face of earth. Thus a species, which had survived for so long battling against an unforgiving nature, simply vanished and the reason behind that remains a mystery. Was it because they were now battling for the same resources as humans and could not win? Or was it because Neanderthals, who lacked art, language and technology, were wiped out by a superior species?
The new NOVA documentary, based on evidence from archaeology and genetic studies, does an image makeover of Neanderthals based on evidence from archaeology and genetics.

  1. It turns out that they had skills to use a set of carefully designed strikes to convert a flint stone into a flake with sharp edges. This flake could then be used to cut meat or as a weapon when attached to a pole.
  2. For attaching the flake to a pole, they brewed their own glue from birch bark using a dry distillation process which involved controlled heating.
  3. They had some language skills which was used to convey the above technologies to their peers.
  4. They also interbred with humans; everyone except Africans has a percentage of Neanderthal gene in them. Italians have the most.
  5. They had ritual, art and symbolism. They may have attempted body painting and also used grave goods as part of a burial ritual.

Since the program covered a lot of aspects of Neanderthal life, it fast-forwarded through one of the interesting questions about why they perished. One theory was offered: they were bred out by humans through interaction and absorption. Though it led to their extinction, this interbreeding might have helped us by providing with immunity to pathogens.
The entire program is available online

Watch Decoding Neanderthals on PBS. See more from NOVA.

History of Historians

The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes has some interesting musings on history in the first part where Tony Webster and his trio of book-crazy friends analyze the meaning of everything, sometimes in subtle mockery or high seriousness. In one scene, the teacher asks one of them to offer his thoughts as the Serbian gunman who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in 1914.  The boy, Finn, explains one of the central problems of history in his answer, “The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”

Later, there is a more detailed discussion of exactly what history is. “History is the lies of the victors,” one replies to which the teacher retorts, “It is also the self-delusions of the defeated.” Another one has a simpler explanation, ““History is a raw onion sandwich, sir” and he explains further, “It just repeats, sir. It burps. We’ve seen it again and again this year. Same old story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.” Another one has a more precise definition, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

Some of these observations come to reality in Benjamin Schwarz’s piece which is a review of Sheldon M. Stern’s The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory in The Atlantic. For years, through books and movies, we have been fed a story about the incident and how a tough Kennedy averted a global nuclear war and forced the Soviet Union to do a U-turn without offering anything in return. It turns out that this version of history was one scripted by the Kennedy administration. It was repeated by historians and has now been proved to be the lies of the victors. According to the book, the Kennedy administration was not innocent and  bore “substantial responsibility” for the crisis.

According to the new version Kennedy himself admitted that Soviet missiles in Cuba were the same as the American Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy. For him, it was not a military issue but a political one. Since he had made Cuba one of his campaign issues, he could not be seen acting soft on it. For this political reason, he had to create an image of toughness and show that he enforced a unilateral Soviet withdrawal.

Even though the crisis was averted by a mutual withdrawal of missiles, it was a different story that came out. The article explains how this story was minted

Only a handful of administration officials knew about the trade; most members of the ExComm, including Vice President Lyndon Johnson, did not. And in their effort to maintain the cover-up, a number of those who did, including McNamara and Rusk, lied to Congress. JFK and others tacitly encouraged the character assassination of Stevenson, allowing him to be portrayed as an appeaser who “wanted a Munich” for suggesting the trade—a deal that they vociferously maintained the administration would never have permitted.

He justifiably excoriates the sycophantic courtier Schlesinger, whose histories “repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts” and whose accounts—“profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive”—were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys.[The Real Cuban Missile Crisis]

The truth finally came out because Kennedy had secret recordings of all the deliberations and thanks to that we now have the history of the historians.

Indian History Carnival–61: Linguistics, Sernigi, Babur, Ramanujam, Thirumalapuram

Ramanujan (centre) with other scientists at Trinity College

Ramanujan (centre) with other scientists at Trinity College
  1. Is English a Scandinavian or a West Germanic language? There is a debate going on this topic and it boils down to the question: do languages which are in close contact with each other borrow just words or do they borrow grammar as well.? Sally Thomason mentions an example from India

    Probably the most famous case of all is Kupwar, a village in India in the border area between Indic languages in the north and Dravidian languages in the south. Morphosyntactic diffusion has been multidirectional in Kupwar, but the most extensive changes have affected the Kupwar variety of the Indic language Urdu, which has borrowed from the Dravidian language Kannada and from Marathi, the other Indic language spoken in the village. The changes include adoption of an inclusive/exclusive `we’ distinction, subject-verb agreement rules in four different constructions, word order features, and about a dozen other features (details can be found in the 1971 Gumperz & Wilson article). Another striking case was reported by Andrei Malchukov in 2002: the Tungusic language Evenki has borrowed a volitional mood suffix and an entire set of personal endings from the Turkic language Yakut. It’s worth noting that word order is the most frequently borrowed type of syntactic feature — a relevant point because two of Faarlund’s examples of Scandinavian structure in English are word order features.

  2. Girolamo Sernigi was responsible for financing many Portuguese voyages to India and also for making Calicut popular in Europe. Maddy has a post about what Sernigi wrote about Calicut

    So much for Sernigi’s letters. The full texts of those can be found online, in the first reference. What became of Sernigi? If you recall, the entry of the Florentine associations with the Portuguese broke the Venetian control of the spice trade. In fact most ships had their representatives in the ships that travelled to the Indies. Their notes of the trade and the locales as we saw from the example above provided much insight to the benign culture and conditions in Malabar, to the people of Europe and encouraged their forced entry into Malabar. According to Moacyr Scares Pereira, the first nau to return to Lisbon, Nossa Senhora Anunciada, belonged to D. Alvaro de Braganca and his associates, Italian merchants Bartolomeo Marchioni, Girolamo Sernigi and possibly Antonio Salvago. So had it not been for people like Sernigi, Gama might never have landed in Calicut.

  3. Is this the oldest surviving Mughal document? The Mughal Indian blog at the British Library has a farman of Babur dating to 1527 CE

    Very few original documents survive from Babur’s reign; S.A.I. Tirmizi (see below) lists only four. This one is particularly interesting. The early date suggests that under Mughal rule a new grant was required to confirm Jalāl al-Dīn in a post which he had probably already held under the Lodhi Sultans of Delhi. The use of the administrative unit parganah, a term fora collection of villages which had been in official use in India from the 14th century, demonstrates the Mughals’ continued use of an existing administrative structure. However, the grant itself is called a suyurghāl, a Mongol term for a hereditary grant. Other new terms used are mutavajjihāt and māl u jihāt, both names of taxes found in documents of the Turkman and Timurid dynasties which ruled much of Iran during the 15th century.

  4. The 125th birthday of Srinivasa Ramanujam was on Dec 22, 2012. drisyadrisya writes about the media coverage

    And what about the visual and the print media ? I haven’t yet come across anything significant from them either. In fact, perhaps today, this piece got an extensive space in daily mail UK and so far I haven’t seen the Indian media pick it up except for a much shortened version in “Hindu Business Line” Go through the two, and tell me, what major difference do you notice in the treatment of the subject ? True to its ‘tradition’ which is has ever made its name a misnomer the “Hindu” Business Line has completed ignored the Hindu aspect. One might say that the UK mirror was meant for an audience not-so-familiar with Ramanujam, and the HBL being an Indian publication, did not want to repeat the well known ? .. well well well … well known ? Quoting from the mirror “Ramanujan, a devout Hindu, thought these patterns were revealed to him by the goddess Namagiri” . I just wanted to pause at that statement and give it some thought … Could there have been any motive for Ramanujam to lie ? Not one that I can think off .. after all why would one give credit to someone else , even if it be a Goddess.. One potential argument that could stand logic (though not necessarily true unless proven to be so) is from Hardy – “Ramanujan’s religiousness had been romanticised by Westerners and overstated by Indian biographers”

  5. A famous legend in Kerala is that of Peumthachan, a master sculptor who kills his talented and capable son due to jealousy. Vijay finds a similar story in Thirumalapuram

    The master sculptor who was excavating the north cave had a talented son who would bring his ‘coffee’ from home every day. He would then observe his father work the stone and would go around the hill and replicate the same moves on the stone there. He took care to match the strokes with those of his father’s hammer, so that his father’s hammer strikes would mask his own. He continued in this fashion when one day, the father suddenly stopped mid stroke and heard the sound of the hammer on chisel. He immediately set off to find the source and came across a boy stooped over a stone. But since he was turned away from him, he couldn’t recognize him but seeing the work he realized that someone was copying his design. Enraged he stuck the lad on his head with his hammer and slew him on the spot. Only then he realized that it was his own son but it was too late!

If you have any links for the History Carnival, please leave a comment or send an e-mail to varnam.blog @gmail. The next carnival will be up on Feb 15th.

Jan 2013: Reference Books on my Desk


These are some of the books that I referred a lot in the past year.

  1. Hiriyanna, M. Outlines of Indian Philosophy. Motilal Banarsidass Pub, 2009. Another excellent book is A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy  by Chandradhar Sharma
  2. Danino, Michel. Lost River: On The Trail of the Sarasvati. 2010th ed. Penguin Books India, 2010. (my review)
  3. Tope,Parag. Tatya Tope’s Operation Red Lotus. Rupa & Co., 2010. (my review)
  4. Bryant, Edwin. The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford University Press, USA, 2004. If you want to understand all angles of the Indo-Aryan issue, this is an excellent introduction.
  5. Singh, Upinder. A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century. 1st ed. Pearson Education, 2009. This has become my standard reference for Indian history.
  6. Tignor, Robert, Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, and Michael Tsin, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World: From 1000 CE to the Present (Third Edition) by  This was my textbook for a course I did at Princeton via Coursera and is my reference for Western History.

Religious Art, Perception and Practice in Islam

Last week a French satirical magazine was firebombed for printing a ‘Sharia’ edition. Before that, there was the YouTube video controversy and before that  there were the Swedish cartoons.  There are numerous such cases where there was violence because the image of Prophet Mohammed was depicted. So film makers like Moustapha Akkad, who made the The Message (1976) on the life of Prophet Mohammed,  worked around the issue by not showing him at all. At the beginning of the film, they displayed the statement, “”The makers of this film honour the Islamic tradition which holds that the impersonation of the Prophet offends against the spirituality of his message. Therefore, the person of Mohammad will not be shown.”

In his review of Aisha’s Cushion by Jamal J Elias, David Shariatmadari writes

Anyone who has a more than superficial knowledge of Muslim cultures will be aware of what can seem like a contradictory approach to the issue. There are strong theological precepts against the creation of likenesses of living things, and above all of religious figures, especially Muhammad. And yet lush vegetation in mosaic form garlands the façade of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, devotional pictures of members of the prophet’s family are common among Shias, and merchants in the Tehran bazaar sell pendants with Muhammad’s portrait on them. Animals prance across carpets, and manuscripts and miniature paintings bustle with human activity. So what’s going on – does Islam prohibit such images or not? How come the bazaaris can carry on plying their trade, while Danish newspapers get picketed?[Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception and Practice in Islam by Jamal J Elias – review]

The review page even has a Turkish miniature from the 16th century showing Muhammad and Abu Bakr. The reviewer does not have a good opinion of the book and so need to search for another one to get more clarity on this issue.

Indians in Socotra

Socotra is an island which lies to the east of the Horn of Africa and it was an important stop on the maritime trading route from India to the Middle East. A few years back Belgian speleologists found inscriptions, drawings and archaeological objects inside a huge cave and they were left by sailors  who visited the island between 1st century BCE and 6th century CE.

The 1st century author of Periplus of the Erythraean Sea mentions Socotra few times. From that book we know that India exported rice to Socotra. There is also a mention of a handful of staples being imported into Socrata and they were bought by traders from the southern region of Yemen. There is also a mention of the island being leased out to Arab shippers and that Indians lived there since the 1st century CE. Now, thanks to the Belgian Socotra Karst Project, we know what those Indians wrote in both Brahmi and Kharosthi script.

Most of them wrote down their names and sometimes even their original home towns while taking their way through the almost three kilometres long cave. Sometimes we find a name written several times marking thus the whole procession from the entrance of the back part to the deepest point of the cave accessible only through a narrow passage not more than 60 cm wide.

Altogether the estimated number of Indian inscriptions amounts to more than 100 epigraphs written by charcoal, chalk or mud or scratched with a sharp instrument on the surfaces of rocks, stalactites or stalagmites. Most of them are written in a variety of early Indian scripts known as Brahmi. The Brahmi type used in Hoq cave can be compared to that attested in India herself during the 2nd to 4th centuries AD in West India. These data can now be confirmed by some newly discovered inscriptions which mention the city of Bharukaccha, one of the most important West Indian harbour towns of that period. It is also mentioned by the Periplus under the name Barygaza.

But there were also traders from other parts of India. Thus we found in January 2006 an inscription in Kharosthi, another Indian script which was used only in the North-West of ancient India, i.e. the modern Pakistan, and in Central Asia. The whole corpus of Indian inscriptions found in Hoq cave is not only an impressive witness of Socotra´s cultural past. It is as well the most western evidence of Indian writing yet known. From the texts written in several handwritings we get a unique picture of the art of writing as practiced not by specialists like in the case of many Indian religious inscriptions but by ordinary people.[OLD INDIANS ON SOCOTRA]

Reference

  1. Casson, Lionel. The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Princeton University Press, 2012.

A debate over the PIE homeland

In 1668, Andreas Jager of Wittenberg proposed that there was an ancient language spoken in the Caucasus mountains which then spread throughout Europe and Asia through waves of migration. Mr. Jager did not know about Sanskrit or the similarities between Sanskrit and European languages when he wrote that. A century later,  Sir William Jones discovered that similarity, thus creating the field of historical linguistics. The mother language was postulated to be proto-Indo-European and now there are differing theories on the location of that homeland. One of those theories claims that proto-Indo-European speakers were chariot driving pastoralists from above the Black Sea, who left their homeland around 4000 years back. Another theory claims that, they were from the land below the Black Sea (Anatolia) and were farmers. Along with the spread of agriculture from 9000 years back, the language also spread.
Recently a paper claimed that they had solved the homeland mystery forever.

We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses. We found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000 to 9500 years ago. These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory.[Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family]

Based on this paper, The New York Times had a graphic which showed the timeline for the evolution of each language tree. If you note the time for Vedic Sanskrit, it falls to around 4000 BCE, which is much earlier than the Mature Harappan Period. This violates many sacred academic lakshmana rekhas. But if you note the time frame for Romani, it is around 1500 BCE, which actually does not agree with the known history of the Romani people, who left North India much later.
Here is a video (via GeoCurrents) where a two Stanford historical linguists   syntactician and historical geographer take the authors of the paper, who are computational linguists, among whom one is a computational linguist, to task calling them “creationists” but thinks this does not rise to the level of Creationism.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ?rel=0]
 
Another point they make is that PIE cannot be older than 3500 BCE because that was the time the wheel was invented and PIE contains words for the wheel.  Obviously the language cannot contain words for things which did not exist. Now if PIE cannot be older than 3500 BCE, then Vedic Sanskrit cannot be older than that. This is an important point for dating the presence of Vedic speakers in India based on historical linguistics (and not computational linguistics)
References:

  1. Bouckaert, Remco, Philippe Lemey, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Alexander V. Alekseyenko, Alexei J. Drummond, Russell D. Gray, Marc A. Suchard, and Quentin D. Atkinson. “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family.” Science 337, no. 6097 (August 24, 2012): 957–960. doi:10.1126/science.1219669.
  2. Bryant, Edwin. The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford University Press, USA, 2004.

The Malice of Fortune by Michael Ennis


During the Renaissance period, there was no unified Italy, but it was divided into a number of warring city-states, kingdoms and duchies (see above map). These places were ruled by powerful families like the Medici and Orsini who used both money and matrimonial alliances to their advantage. The Pope, during that time, was Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) and one of his sons, Cesare Borgia, was governing the region of Romagna.  During that period, Leonardo da Vinci worked for Cesare Borgia as his military engineer. Also present in the same place was Niccolò Machiavelli, who was the Florentine secretary.
The Borgias were one of the most notorious families in European history and there is no shameful act that has not happened under their watch. When Rodrigo was around 25, his maternal uncle Pope Callixtus III, made him a bishop. The word nepotism (nepotis – Latin for  nephew) comes from this system which was common during that period. Rodrigo became Pope in the year Christopher Columbus set off to on his voyage to paradise.
During this period, alum, which was an important dye for the cloth industry, was discovered in the Roman hills. Previously it had to be imported from Turkey and following the fall of Constantinople in 1452, it was no longer an option. The revenue brought by the sale of alum was augmented by the sale of indulgences, a practice against which Martin Luther would revolt. This wealth was quite useful for Rodrigo to secure the future of his illegitimate children. He also ruled by terror; it was not considered a good idea to come in the path of the Borgias as murders and poisoning were common.
Among his illegitimate children, Rodrigo, who fathered when he was the Pope and also kept a mistress, had great ambitions for Cesare who was given command of the papal army. The novel is set in motion with the murder of his elder brother Juan and Cesare along with several Roman barons are suspect. This was followed by a series of grotesque murders of women who are considered as prostitutes and witches and their body parts are dispersed in carefully arranged patterns along the countryside.
To find the killer, the Pope sends Madonna Damiata, a courtesan who was the lover of the murdered Juan. At Imola, she meets Machiavelli and da Vinci, who work with her in solving the mystery. The first one-third of the book is written as a first person account by Damiata as she meets the various players in Cesare’s court and gets familiar with the vastly different techniques of the scientist and the man who studies people.
While The Secret Supper focused on Leonardo as an artist, this book is about the scientific methods he uses. In Imola, he is all about dissecting corpses, quantifying everything, creating maps and finding patterns based on that data and not guesswork. One of the fascinating parts of the book is when he disagrees with  Machiavelli on his techniques; his technique is based on analyzing historical events and the men who shaped them. Even though the times have changed, the nature of men remain the same, he argues and Leonardo cannot agree to that since it is of subjective nature.
During a ceremony at the place of a Romagnole witch, Damiata disappears and the remaining two-thirds of the book is a first person narrative by  Machiavelli. There is urgent need to find the killer because Cesare is about to make a pact with the Roman barons and it is possible that they might advance to  Machiavelli’s homeland of Florence.
All the characters in the book are real historical characters and all of them did what the historical record tells us. The missing part is why they did those things and Ennis fills those gaps. In an essay, Michael Ennis wrote

This evidence brought my sleuthing-geniuses premise squarely back into the domain of documented history: I had discovered a true crime story – involving, as it turns out, a brilliant serial killer–interlaced with one of history’s pivotal political events. Although this was a story Machiavelli, for very good reasons, decided to keep to himself, The Prince contains artifacts of it, once you know what you are looking for. As Machiavelli confesses to us at the beginning of his narrative, there is a “terrifying secret I deliberately buried between the lines of The Prince.” The words are my creation, but they are based on admissions that Machiavelli made later in his life. The truth that can be found between the lines of The Prince – a revelation of man’s capacity for evil far more ghastly than anything Machiavelli wrote explicitly in the text–is no mere fictional invention. With consequences that have resounded throughout the subsequent course of Western culture and history, the dreadful secret of The Prince is all too real.

It is also a great character study of Machiavelli  and shows how he came up with the concepts he later wrote in Prince. Even though the book looks a bit disconnected at some points, it is a great read and gives you a good account of the Borgias and politics of 16th century Italy. Also thanks to this book, I came across two television series (1, 2) based on this period.
References

  1. BBC. In Our Time. The Borgias

150 years of ASI: A Rare Exhibition in Delhi

To commemorate 150 years of its existence, the ASI had  year long celebrations. If you are in Delhi or are going to Delhi before the end of Jan 2013, then it is worth going to the National Museum near India Gate as ASI is exhibiting  some of the greatest finds since 1961.

There will be 307 objects on display including some retrieved antiquities and four fibre glass replicas. The antiquities have been selected from all the major periodic divisions of Indian history (prehistory to modern history) and from different regions of the country. In addition there will be some photographs, map, illustrations and explanatory charts and write-ups. The earliest artifacts in the exhibition are the prehistoric stone tools used by primitive man when he was a hunter/food gatherer. The pottery which first appeared during Neolithic period is also on display.

A major attraction is the objects belonging to the Harappan culture which include the inscribed seals, beads, pottery, terracotta figurines, etc. The furrow marks which are the first evidence of agriculture at Kalibangan and the oldest signboard at Dholavira, both discovered through excavations and belonging to Harappan period are photographically displayed. The objects from Megalithic culture are interesting as they were put in the burials under life after death concept. The bronzes from Sirpur (M.P.) belonging to 7th-8th century with Brahmanical and Buddhist affiliation are landmark finds of early medieval period witnessing remarkable metallurgical skills of contemporary artist.

The antiquities from early, medieval and modern periods of history are represented by a variety of objects made in terracotta, stone, metal and household utility items, ornaments, weapons, beads, coins, inscriptions, pottery, etc. An outstanding exhibit is the fibre glass replica of a relief panel from Kanaganahalli near Sannati in Karnataka depicting King Asoka with his consort which is the first sculpture of the legendary Mauryan emperor. [Rediscovering India: 1961-2011]