There was a historical debate in the Kerala State Assembly last week. CPI (M) MLA Babu M Palissery pontificated that a Caliph had ordered the burning of books in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt about 1500 years ago. When it appeared in the papers the next day, it said that Caliph Umar had ordered the burning of the books. This obviously upset various secular parties like Congress (I) and Muslim League and they demanded an explanation.

Founded in third century B.C.E by Ptolemy, the library was destroyed by Roman emperors and a Pope. The final destruction happened during the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 642 C.E. According to A Short Account of the History of Mathematics By Walter William Rouse Ball, the following happened:

The same story, with minor variations, is repeated across many books, but historian Bernard Lewis thinks it is a myth.

To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic an event was unmentioned and unnoticed not only in the rich historical literature of medieval Islam, but even in the literatures of the Coptic and other Christian churches, of the Byzantines, of the Jews, or anyone else who might have thought the destruction of a great library worthy of comment. That the story still survives, and is repeated, despite all these objections, is testimony to the enduring power of a myth.[The Vanished Library]

Back in the Kerala Assembly, the MLA apologized and reaffirmed that he intended the word Caliph to mean “a Caliph” and not Caliph Umar. He also stated that Caliph Umar was a book lover and would have never ordered the destruction of the library. Thus peace was restored to the galaxy.

People in other states might be wondering if Kerala is free of all problems that the Assembly debates historical events just to spend time. The answer is: yes, we have no other issues to debate. Kerala is God’s own country and the honourable Amartya Sen wants this model, where a literate society would spend time reading Herodotus and Josephus, to spread all over the world.

Now that the Caliph’s name has been cleared, next item on the agenda would be to make it official that St. Thomas actually arrived in Kerala in 52 C.E.

A stone tablet pre-dating Jesus with inscriptions suggesting resurrection is making news. Written using ink on stone, and dating to some time between late first century B.C.E. and early first century C.E, the tablet is written like a scroll in two columns. Though it was discovered a decade ago, the news worthiness came from the research of Hebrew University scholar Israel Knohl who claimed that the tablet mentions a messiah who will arise after three days. Does this shake the foundation of Christianity and as Time Magazine asks, was Jesus’ resurrection, a sequel?

Some letters in the tablet are not clear and hence the translation is vague, but it seems to be written by someone named Gabriel in the style of prophecies. The first column is about the destruction of evil within three days, followed by a promise that God will soon appear. The tablet also mentions a war that led to bloodshed in Jerusalem.

This was the time when Jewish rebels were trying to overthrow the Roman monarchy following the death of Herod and there was an expectation that a messianic figure would restore the Davidic monarchy. One such messianic leader was Simon, who the first century historian Josephus wrote, burned the royal palace at Jericho and destroyed many other royal residences, till he was beheaded by Gratus, an officer of the royal troops.

Prof. Knohl reads line 80 of the tablet as, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you” and believes this to be a reference to Simon written by his followers.

The tablet is proof that Jewish people were familiar with the concept of a messiah who would be resurrected. This revelation is not new because there are such predictions by the Hebrew prophet Hosea and in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This tablet emphasizes two concepts. First, the traditional Jewish view was of a triumphant messiah who would be a descendent of David and not one who suffers. But the one mentioned in the tablet is that of a suffering messiah who resurrects after three days and this exact motif was chosen by later Christian writers. Second, the messiah mentioned in the tablet died for Israel and not for people’s sins.

Several scholars have believed that this suffering messiah motif was not an original creation of the Christian communities.

Several scholars, myself included, along with Michael Wise, Michael Fishbane, and Israel Knohl, have argued for some years now that the“Suffering Messiah” ideas, reflected in our Synoptic Gospels, were not creations of the Christian communities after Jesus’ death, nor even unique to Jesus himself, but in fact were ideas current within messianic varieties of Judaism reaching back into the 2nd century BCE or earlier.[Knohl’s Gabriel Text Interpretation Makes the NYTimes]

These two concepts, Prof. Knohl says, change our view of Christianity.

“This should shake our basic view of Christianity,” he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”“

His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer sohis blood will be the sign for redemption to come,” Mr. Knohl said.“This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view ofJesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.[Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection]

Almost ten year after the ten year Trojan war the Greek hero Odysseus, who was the leader of the group inside the Trojan horse, reached home to find that his wife Penelope was being harassed by 108 unruly suitors. Disguised as a beggar, he experienced the suitors’ intentions, tested Penelope and decided to act. In Book 20, the seer Theoclymenus warned the suitors.

Plutarch and Heraclitus thought this was a reference a solar eclipse and some scholars dated it to the eclipse on April 16, 1178 B.C.E.

Many scholars think that the lines refers to an allegorical eclipse, not a historical one. Since the above passage was suspect, Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina decided to ignore it. Instead they picked on non-allegorical astronomical references in Odyssey such as

1. Reference to Pleiades, Boötes and Ursa Major given by Calypso, a nymph.

2. Seeing Venus before arriving in Phorcy’s Bay.

3. New Moon on the night before the massacre of the suitors.

Using these three references, they searched for a date between 1250 – 1115 B.C.E. where the astronomical references cohered. With off-the-shelf astronomical software like Starry Night Pro, they applied the constraints and only one date matched perfectly – April 16, 1178 B.C.E.

Now, wouldn’t it be nice if someone analysed the astronomical references in Mahābhārata and used software to find the date?In fact it has already been done by B. N. Narahari Achar of the University of Memphis. Like the Odyssey analysis it was done solely on the basis of astronomical references listed in the epic. Unlike the Odyssey which has just three astronomical references, the MB has about 150 references with the major ones being mentioned in Udyogaparvan and Bhishmaparvan.

Mr. Achar took one important reference – the appearance of Saturn and Aldebaran near one another – and found 137 possible dates between 3500 B.C.E and 500 C.E. The next constraint that Mars executed a retrograde motion before reaching Antares was added and choices reduced to 17 dates. He applied two more astronomical references – a lunar eclipse near Pleiades and a solar eclipse near Antares – and intersecting the constraints, the unique year for the war was found to be 3067 B.C.E. and this was found to cohere with other references given in the epic.

Since astronomy has offered dates for Odyssey and Mahābhārata, the question to ponder is on how the authors of the two epics knew about the celestial events. This become interesting in the case of Homer^[1] because Vyasa^[2] was the author and a character in Mahabharata but Homer lived five centuries after the Trojan war. How did Homer know about it.?

(To be continued)

Notes:

[1] Modern scholars believe that Homer was not a historical poet and his poems were the collective work of generations of poets. They believe that Homer was the name given to anonymous poets the way the Gospel writers were named Mark, Matthew etc.

[2] Mahābhārata, by tradition, acknowledges that it evolved over a period of time and had contributions from various authors.

References:

1. Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo O. Magnasco, “Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey?,” June 24, 2008.

2. B. N. Narahari Achar, Reclaiming the Chronology of Bharatam

Using images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian programmer stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Images taken by Landsat and IKONOS helped archaeologists find several building sites near Tikal in the Guatemalan rainforest. In India, satellite images have shown evidence of paleo channels in Haryana believed to be the mythical Saraswati.

Archaeologists are now using radar and satellite imagery to explore regions affected by violence and sites which are inaccessible.

Here in Cambodia, the new archaeology has changed the history of a civilization. The low-key Evans, a director of the University of Sydney’s Greater Angkor Project at just 32 years old, has already mapped northern Angkor, another heavily landmined area, from a computer screen in Australia. He has used radar and satellite images to chart its vast network of canals and reservoirs, proving that Angkor was once the largest city in the world, a metropolis consuming an area about the size of present-day Los Angeles. His work also underpins a radical new explanation of why, in the 15th century, the Angkor civilization died out, a finding that holds grave undertones for the megacities of the 21st century.[The Space Archaeologists | Popular Science]

Early this year, film makers Simcha Jacobovici and James Cameron made the case in their documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, that a tomb found in Jerusalem belonged to Jesus. This claim was made based on the fact that the tomb contained ossuaries with inscriptions reading “”Jesus son of Joseph”, “Miriam”, and “Judah son of Jesus”, among others. When the tomb was discovered in 1980, it had ten ossuaries; currently it has only nine.

The tenth ossuary, the documentary claimed, was the James ossuary which surfaced in Israel in 2002. This limestone box carried an inscription “James son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus” and if it was proved to be true, could be historical evidence for a man named Yeshua.

The American TV program 60 Minutes found the Israeli who possessed the ossuary. They also tracked down an Egyptian who had fabricated various artifacts for the Israeli. A committee of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) declared it a forgery. Most scholars believe it to be fake.

Now Hershel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeological Review, who first published news of the ossuary has come out with a letter in which he alleges that most scholars claim the ossuary is a fake, based on a hunch and they have not been able to reason it properly. Some expert paleographers still believe the inscription to be authentic and it turns out no committee of the IAA has found it to be fake. Even the Egyptian shown on 60 minutes admitted that he had not seen the ossuary before.

Shanks letter which is similar in tone to B. B. Lal’s lecture on the 19th century paradigms, finally says

Either I’m way off the mark or there has been a successful effort to “hustle” this inscription. Maybe it’s just a better story if the inscription is a forgery than if it’s authentic. Maybe the IAA hates the antiquities market enough to lump the ossuary inscription with other alleged forgeries where it has a better case. Or perhaps the strong suspicion that Oded Golan is a forger is enough. Perhaps he’s forged other stuff.[Help Me! I’m Desperate!]

This brings the ossuary back into news and if the inscriptions are found to be true, it could profoundly affect the historicity of the Jesus.