The Zheng He Coin

China’s role in Africa — the infrastructure projects in East Africa, investments in Sudan’s oil industry, mining contracts with various nations — is getting lot of attention these days. Now China is being accused of colonization and all the evils associated with Western powers.
The Chinese presence in Africa is not new; it is at least six centuries old. Zhu Di, the third Ming emperor sent a fleet of ships under the command of Zheng He in 1405 CE.There were 317 ships of which 60 were the large junks. These treasure ships which held lacquers, porcelain, and silks 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 Zheng He’s 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.

Now, besides doctors, diplomats and businessmen, China has also sent archaeologists to Africa and they have found a brass coin with a square hole near Malindi in Kenya (see video). This coin was minted between 1403 and 1424 and could have reached Africa through Zheng He’s fleet.

First, ancient texts told of Zheng He’s visit to the Sultan of Malindi – the most powerful coastal ruler of the time. But they also mentioned that Malindi was by a river mouth; something that the present town of Malindi doesn’t have, but that Mambrui does.
The old cemetery in Mambrui also has a famous circular tomb-stone embedded with 400-year-old Chinese porcelain bowls hinting at the region’s long-standing relationship with the East.
In the broad L-shaped trench that the team dug on the edge of the cemetery, they began finding what they were looking for.
First, they uncovered the remains of an iron smelter and iron slag.
Then, Mohamed Mchuria, a coastal archaeologist from the National Museums of Kenya, unearthed a stunning fragment of porcelain that Prof Qin believes came from a famous kiln called Long Quan that made porcelain exclusively for the royal family in the early Ming Dynasty.[Could a rusty coin re-write Chinese-African history]

Also read: Chinese Power in Indian Ocean

Lost Language Decipherment using Computers

The headline reads Software that automatically deciphers ancient language developed. The language thus deciphered was Ugaritic – used in Syria from the 14th through the 12th century BCE. To find out if such a technique can be used to decipher the Indus script, we need to understand how Ugaritic was deciphered.
The language itself was deciphered manually decades earlier. What helped the manual decipherment was the fact that Ugaritic is similar to Hebrew and Aramaic. The first two Ugaritic letters were decoded by mapping them to Hebrew letters and then based on this information few other words were also deciphered. Then one word inscribed on an axe was guessed to be “axe”, which turned out to be a lucky guess.
There were two inputs to the computer program: corpus of the lost language and the lexicon of the related language. The output was the mapping between the alphabets of the known language and Ugaritic and also the traslation between Ugaritic and cognates in the known language. The program was able to map 29 of the 30 letters accurately. It also deduced the cognates in Hebrew for about 60% of the words.
But when it comes to the Indus script, both the script and language are unknown; there is no second input to the program. Still that has not prevented researchers from applying various techniques to gain insight into what the script represents. In the 60s the Soviets and Finns used mathematical models find order in the symbols. Taking this further, Subhash Kak did a mathematical analysis of the Indus script and the oldest Indian script – Brahmi. When a table containing the ten most commonly occurring Sanskrit phonemes (from ten thousand words), was compared to the ten most commonly occurring Indus symbols and there was a convincing similarity, even though Brahmi was a millennium after the Indus script. Surprisingly some of the characters, like the fish, looked similar too.
But that’s it. The current research is not in comparing Indus script with a known language, but in finding if the Indus script even encodes a language or not.
References:

Benjamin Snyder, Regina Barzilay, and Kevin Knight, A statistical model for lost language decipherment, in Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics(Uppsala, Sweden: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010), 1048-1057
Subhash C. Kak, A FREQUENCY – ANALYSIS – OF – THE – INDUS – SCRIPT – PB – Taylor & Francis, Cryptologia12, no. 3 (1988): 129.
Subhash C. Kak, INDUS – AND – BRAHMI – FURTHER – CONNECTIONS – PB – Taylor & Francis, Cryptologia 14, no. 2 (1990): 169.

Indian History Carnival – 34: Ayodhya, Alberuni, French in Calicut

In one of his articles, Harsha of Kashmir, a Hindu Iconoclast? Koenraad Elst writes that whenever the destruction of Hindu temples by Muslims is mentioned, the opponents argue that Hindus have done similar things to Buddhists and Jains – a largely untrue allegation. So when Mr. Salil Tripathi made the same allegation, B Shantanu decided to investigate.

So there we are. I am still missing “three names” (let alone “many” examples) but as I had promised in my comment #17, I did spend several hours reading online materials, archives and asking my readers/acquaintances to find out more. I have drawn a blank.

An important event this month was the Rama Janmabhumi verdict. Commenting on this Koenraad Elst explains how the lies of some eminent historians have been exposed.

Today, I feel sorry for the eminent historians. They have identified very publicly with the denial of the Ayodhya evidence. While politically expedient, and while going unchallenged in the academically most consequential forums for twenty years, that position has now been officially declared false. It suddenly dawns on them that they have tied their names to an entreprise unlikely to earn them glory in the long run.

Continuing with Ayodhya, at varnam, we had a post which explained why eminent historians are angry with the verdict.

Finally, dismissing the argument by some historians that the structure beneath the mosque could not be a temple because of the discovery of animal bones, “HC was also surprised to note the “zeal” in some of the archaeologists and historians appearing as witnesses on behalf of the Sunni Waqf Board who made statements much beyond reliefs demanded by the Waqf.”

In a post about Alberuni, Arundhati writes about his visit to India

Alberuni tries his best to understand other civilizations on their own terms and looks for common ground between his own religion and the religions of India. He is still unable to completely avoid his own frame of reference – for example, the assumption of the concept of One God as being inherently superior (remind me again, exactly why is the worship of one invisible being superior to the worship of more than one invisible being)?

Based on the writings of the Huguenot traveller and scribe Jean Chardin, Fëanor writes about the Indian economy of the 17th century.

Gold and silver from the Americas and Europe simply poured into India. Being an agricultural and industrial powerhouse, and to all intents and purposes self-sufficient in food, India was able to export away most of its surpluses. And, with a large population base that was able to work for cheap (and with inflation being next to zero for well-nigh on a couple of centuries), India was able to produce goods so competitively priced that even factoring in the risks of international trade, they still were cheaper than local products in Iran and the Ottoman domains.

In 1774, the French flag was hoisted in the Zamorin’s palace. But why didn’t Calicut become a French colony? Maddy has a very interesting story

Just imagine, if all had gone in the directions that Monsieur Duprat had wished, Calicut would have been a French Colony and instead of eating chicken biriyani at Sagar we would have been ordering Bouillabaisse or Coq au vin or some such strange stuff like frogs legs sautéed in wine in some French restaurant

The next edition of Indian History Carnival will be up on Nov 15th. Send your nominations to varnam dot blog @gmail or as a tweet to varnam_blog

Koro – A "hidden" language of India

In February a person by the name of Boa Sr died in the Andamans and with her death, the language named Bo was gone; she was the last known speaker of that ancient language. While Bo was a known language, Koro was not. It was only in 2008 that researchers found that such a language — spoken by 800 to 1200 people— even existed in Arunachal Pradesh.

The speakers of Koro had remained invisible to outside observers because their bright red garments, the rice beer they made and other details of their lives seemed no different from that of the speakers of Aka, the socially dominant language in the region, Harrison said.
“There’s a sort of a cultural invisibility; they’re culturally identical in what they wear, what they eat, the houses they live in…. They just happen to have a different word for everything,” Harrison said.
Koro also blends in because its speakers frequently marry Aka speakers (who number 4,000 to 6,000) and people who use another tongue, Miji (who number 6,000 to 8,000). And because the villages had been largely cut off from the outside world for so long, the languages in the region remain poorly studied.[Linguists uncover ‘hidden’ language in north India]

If you want to hear this language, National Geographic has the video.

Ayodhya: Article 25

Shocked by the verdict of the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court, Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu wrote, “Collectives in India have faith in all sorts of things but “faith” cannot become the arbiter of what is right and wrong in law.” Romila Thapar, writing in the same newspaper wrote that the verdict was based on Hindu faith and belief and that the verdict had set a legal precedent “by declaring it to be the birthplace of a divine or semi-divine being worshipped by a group that defines itself as a community.”
It turns out that Hindu belief is protected by the constitution.

Justice Agarwal, in his over 5,000-page judgment, said: “We are of the view that once such belief gets concentrated to a particular point, and in totality of the facts, we also find no reason otherwise, it partakes the nature of an essential part of religion, particularly when it relates to a matter which is of peculiar significance to a religion. It, therefore, stands on a different footing. Such an essential part of religion is constitutionally protected under Article 25.”[“Hindus’ belief about Lord Rama’s birthplace protected under Article 25”]

Also

The court said: “Various religious literature, which have been placed before us, show that Ayodhya is believed to be the place of birth of Lord Rama. It did not specify any particular area or a particular place in Ayodhya. It is quite possible that the entire city may be held to be very pious and sacred on account of some occurrence of divinity or religious spirituality. It may happen that a small place may attain such a status. For example, the tree under which Gautam Buddha attained divine knowledge is considered to be extremely sacred and pious place by Buddhists. In a country like ours, where unity in diversity is its characteristic, the existence of people or other faith, existence of their place of religion at a place, in wider sense as its known, cannot be ruled out and by necessity they will have to exist, live and survive together.”[“Hindus’ belief about Lord Rama’s birthplace protected under Article 25”]

If only Siddhath Varadarajan and Romila Thapar read The Hindu.

Ayodhya: Why are some historians angry?

The Allahabad High Court verdict in the “The Sunni Central Board of Waqfs UP Lucknow & Others Versus Gopal Singh Visharad and Others” lawsuit has upset some historians and they have started questioning the credibility of the Archaeological Survey of India report. According to Romila Thapar, few archaeologists and historians had quesioned the ASI report and hence it was not fair to accept it in a simplistic manner. She then lamented about the mention of destruction of the “supposed temple” without balancing it with the mention of the destruction of the not-so-supposed mosque. Dr. Omar Khaladi went one step furthur and accused the ASI — an institution controlled by a non-Hindutva party — of being a handmaiden of Hindutva.
This anger against the ASI can be understood if we examine the narrative perpetuated by these historians. In 1989 many historians issued a statement that there was no temple.But a decade back, under a project titled, “Archaeology of Ramayana Sites”, the ASI had conducted surveys around Babri Masjid. The goal was to determine the antiquity of the site; settlements existed in Ayodhya as far back as the second millennium BCE. Archaeologists also found twelve stone pillars with Hindu motifs and deities, but the report published in 1976 did not mention these.
Some eminent historians tried to explain these pillar bases away by suggesting that these were part of a wall or a cowshed. But the court ordered excavations conducted by the ASI from March 12 to August 7, 2003 found pillar bases all over the area. Based on this, the ASI summarized the following for the court.

“Subsequently, during the early medieval period (11th–12th century AD) a huge structure was constructed, which seems to have been short-lived. On the remains of the above structure was constructed a massive structure with at least three structural phases and three successive floors attached to it. It is over the top of this construction during the early sixteenth century, the disputed structure was constructed directly resting over it.[Massive shrine was under disputed site]

Second, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, a large stone block with a Sanskrit inscription was found. This inscription clearly indicated that a temple dating to 11-12th century existed at that location. Some historians argued that the inscription was forged but many epigraphists who examined the slab disagreed. Finally, as B.B.Lal (Director General of ASI) wrote in Rama: His Historicity, Mandir and Setu, Evidence of Literature, Archaeology and other Sciences

Anyway, to allay misgivings, I append here a note from the highest authority on epigraphical matters in the country, namely the Director of Epigraphy, ASI, Dr KV Ramesh (Appendix II). In it he first gives a summary of the inscription, then an actual reading of the text and finally an English translation thereof. While many scholars may like to go through the Note, it maybe straightaway here that according to it this temple was built by Meghasuta who obtained the lordship of Saketamandala (i.e. Ayodhya) through the grace of the senior Lord of the earth viz Govinda Chandra, of the Gahadavala dynasty who ruled over a vast empire, from 1114 to 1155 CE.

What ASI proved was that Romila Thapar’s “supposed temple” did exist. Taking note of the criticism against the ASI, the judges have mentioned the ASI excavations were transparent and it proved beyond doubt, the existence of the temple and “even Muslim members have also signed the report of ASI.” Finally, dismissing the argument by some historians that the structure beneath the mosque could not be a temple because of the discovery of animal bones, “HC was also surprised to note the “zeal” in some of the archaeologists and historians appearing as witnesses on behalf of the Sunni Waqf Board who made statements much beyond reliefs demanded by the Waqf.”

Offered Without Comment (1)

This gem comes from a lecture given by Max F. Muller to the civil servants who were going to India to govern.

What do we owe to the Persians It does not seem to be much for they were not a veiy inventive race and what they knew they had chiefly learnt from their neighbours the Babylonians and Assyrians. Still we owe them something First of all we owe them a large debt of gratitude for having allowed themselves to be beaten by the Greeks for think what the world would have been if the Persians had beaten the Greeks at Marathon and had enslaved that means annihilated the genius of ancient Greece However this may be called rather an involuntary contribution to the progress of humanity and I mention it only in order to show how narrowly not only Greeks and Romans but Saxons and Anglo Saxons too escaped becoming Parsis or Fire worshippers [India: what can it teach us?]

Briefly Noted: Creation (2009)

Creation (2009) In his new book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking states that God is not part of the grand design of the universe. In The Brief History of Time, he tried to grok the mind of God and left it at that. Now with the No-boundary proposal, top-down cosmology and the latest discoveries in M-theory, he argues that gravity and quantum theory are sufficient to explain how multiple universes are spontaneously created from nothing. If there is God maybe he could have chosen the initial state; he then goes on to say that even that would not be possible for there are laws for the initial state too.
More than 150 years back another Englishman too killed God. In this movie, Darwin is still working on his manuscript on the theory of evolution. In one of the earliest scenes Charles Darwin is visited by Joseph Dalton Hooker (botanist and explorer, who was once held prisoner by the King of Sikkim) and Thomas Henry Huxley (biologist). Encouraged by the abstracts he had seen and with the desire to see archbishops and their threats of eternal punishment removed from society, Huxley encourages Darwin to publish his book. But Darwin is not in the mood, “There is no book”, he dismisses. Huxley still does not give up. “You have killed God, sir”, he says, “And I, for once, say good riddance to the vindictive old bugger.” For Darwin, the church, however imperfect, is the one which holds society together.
But Darwin had become a different man following the death of his daughter;he had prayed to God to save her. Following Annie’s death, Darwin’s wife sought refuge in religion, while he turned away from it like Mark Twain, who wrote novels like The Mysterious Stranger after the death of his daughter Susy.
He was convinced about his theory but had not published it due to his wife. He was worried that if he wrote about a world in which God, love, trust etc were not required and that the world just depended on survival, it would break her heart. His wife was worried that he would never enter heaven and they both would be separated for eternity.
The important thread in this slow movie is not Darwin’s relation with his wife, but with his daughter Annie to whom he narrated tales of his journeys. Annie appears to Darwin as hallucinations and in flashbacks as the script moves back and forth in time; she had died of sickness.The script finds patterns: in Annie’s death and the death of Jenny the Orangutan who too fell sick; in the water treatment Darwin and Annie took; in the suggestion of a pigeon breeder that relatives should not get married and a similar conversation between Darwin and his wife.
In the final scene, Darwin walks with the manuscript, with his wife’s approval, and hands it over to the postman who rides off in his carriage. The book was sold out in a day. His idea changed the world, except for few like US Senate candidate Christine O’ Donnell, who in 1998 wondered why monkeys are not evolving in front of her eyes.

varnam

The name of this blog is varnam, which means color in Sanskrit. It has many other meanings as well.

The word for color in Sanskrit is ‘varNa’ (वर्ण) and it actually signifies quality, one of them being color. It is also used for the letter of the alphabet (quality of sound), the alphabet being called varNa-mAlA (वर्ण-माला, letter-garland). Gold is called su-varNa (सुवर्ण, सु=good, beautiful; वर्ण=color, quality ). The four personality types are called वर्ण as well – ब्राह्मण, क्षत्रिय, वैश्य, शूद्र (brAhmaNa, kShatrIya, vaishya, shUdra) which are the thinkers, administrators, business and working class of a society by professions, but they are based originally on personality types, qualities of a person.[how colorful is your life? – colors in sanskrit]

New Paper: Entropy, the Indus Script, and Language: A Reply to R. Sproat

Recently Rajesh Rao et al applied statistical tests to Indus scripts and concluded that the script has the same entropy as a linguistic system; this contradicted the “illiterate Harappan theory” which has been in circulation since 2004. Previously too scholars disagreed with the “illiterate Harappan theory” and have published point-by-point rebuttals, but this new statistical analysis added fuel to the fire. This research, which got extensive coverage, was called “useless”, “trivial” and proponents of the illiterate theory lamented about the reviewing practices of science journals.
Now Rajesh Rao et al. takes on their critics with a new paper to be published in Computational Linguistics (H/T Rajesh P N Rao). They make it clear that without a full decipherment, the linguistic hypothesis or non-linguistic hypothesis cannot be proved. What they claim is increasing evidence for the linguistic hypothesis.

If the Indus script does encode language, what might the content of the inscriptions be? A majority of the Indus texts are found on stamp seals (Figure 1(a)), which were typically used in Bronze Age cultures for regulating trade. Seals were pressed onto clay used to seal packages of goods. Indeed, a number of such clay tags have been found at various sites in the Indus civilization, bearing seal impressions on one side and impressions of woven cloth, reed matting or other packing material on the other. These archaeological observations suggest that the short Indus texts on seals (Figure 1(a)), like their other Bronze age counterparts, probably represent the contents, the origin or destination, the type or amount of goods being traded, name and title of the owner, or some combination of the above. Similar linguistic explanations can be found for the inscriptions on other media.
If, on the other hand, as Sproat and colleagues propose, the script merely represents religious or political symbols, one is hard pressed to explain: (1) how and why were sequences of such symbols, with syntactic rules entropically similar to linguistic scripts (Figure 1(b)), used in trade in a manner strikingly similar to other literate Bronze age cultures? and (2) why did the Indus people use these symbols in consistent sequences in their native region and alter their ordering when in a foreign land (Figure 1(c))? As pointed out by other authors [ Mahadevan2009, Parpola2008, Vidale2007], such incongruities are more the norm than the exception if one accepts the nonlinguistic thesis espoused by Sproat and colleagues. The principle of Occam’s razor then suggests that we reject the nonlinguistic hypothesis in favor of the simpler linguistic one.[Entropy, the Indus Script, and Language: A Reply to R. Sproat]