Ancient Rock Art in Tamil Nadu

It is not the oldest or longest, but more rock art dating back to 1500 BCE has been found in Tamil Nadu.

The paintings have been done on a rock surface that is 40 feet long and 20 feet tall. He and other experts put the date of the ancient rock paintings around 1500 B.C. These paintings include a tiger with its mouth wide open, a deer with straight horns, a porcupine, a wild boar, a peacock and elephants.

There are paintings of marching men in anthropomorphic form within a circle. Below are also men in marching form but not within a circle. There are scenes of an unidentified animal chasing another, an elephant seizing a man with its trunk with another man running after the elephant, etc.

Human figures are aplenty, showing men fighting and dancing. A rare painting has a man in profile, with a peculiar headgear. There is a glut of “mystic” designs and ancient graffiti. A leit motif is the figure of a ladder made out of bamboo poles. Such ladders are used even now to extract honey from beehives situated at heights near the tribal villages. [Ancient rock art dating back to 1500 B.C. found in Tamil Nadu]

Small things that matter

More than a decade back when  Yahoo! and Hotmail provided webmail services it was a great innovation, but over time those services became stagnant without any major break through. These services provided only a paltry 4 MB of storage, but were reliable. Then Google came and changed the game. Besides providing storage in the GB range, Gmail also provided a threaded view of the mails which is not a Google innovation, but was something new in the webmail world.

There was one small innovation which Gmail did, something which the other providers did not think about. In Gmail, when you start typing the first few characters of the receiver’s name, it auto completes the name. This not so hard to implement feature saves a few keystrokes in typing the address, a few mouse clicks in finding it from the address book and spares a few neurons from having to remember the email addresses.

No one takes the concept of distinguishing themselves from the crowd more seriously than Apple. If you go to an Apple Store to buy something, you will find that they don’t have the traditional cash counters. Instead, the staff will take a hand held device, scan your items, and  send the receipt to your email address. The staff can walk around with these devices and thus preventing any queues in the store. Sending the receipt to your email address keeps Al Gore, an Apple board member, happy too.

Costco did not get rid of the cash counters, but instead if the queues were getting too long, an employee would walk down the queue, scan your items and give you a bar coded receipt. At the counter you hand over the paper and pay  thus speeding up the queue.

The small things that make a difference can be found by studying your competitors. If you are an NRI account holder in HDFC Bank, you need to dial an Indian number to get help. When you call that number you are often asked to come to the bank and when you go to the branch you are asked for your ration card. All that is for another post. If you have a Citibank account, they provide a 1-800 number which also takes you to India, but at least it is toll free.

In a field where there are many competing players, it is small things like these which distinguish the great ones from the ordinary.

Public Radio Links (3)

National Public Radio  and local affiliates like KQED in San Francisco  bring some of the best interviews and discussions you can hear in American Media. Here are some interviews worth listening.

  • The war in Iraq was justified partly based on forged documents which came from Italy. Here is an interview with Carlo Bonini who broke the story.
  • What’s the big deal about twitter?
  • George Tenet on the war, intelligence and his role.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Randomness and Probability

(For all these links, click on the Listen button to hear the interview)

See Also: Public Radio Links (1), Public Radio Links(2)

 

Tags: NPR, KQED

Lost Years of Jesus

While the story of Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection is known by everyone,
no one knows what he did between the ages of 12 and 30. The Bible is silent
about this period in his life and after the mention of Jesus as a 12 year old,
discussing the Hebrew Bible with the rabbis, he surfaces at the age of 30,
full of divinity and wisdom.  The History Channel recently showed a
documentary titled,
The
Lost Years of Jesus which suggests that Jesus could have been in
India or England or Qumran or leading a revolution against the Romans in
the missing years.

The Jesus in India theory comes from author Holger Kersten who wrote a book
about the same. Though without proof the idea comes from the
observation that the teachings of Jesus are similar to Buddha who lived in
India, 500 years before Jesus. Since there was a trade route to India from the
Roman empire which passed through Palestine, it would have been possible for
Jesus to travel to India, learn Buddhism and go back to Palestine.

Glastonbury 
in England has a legend connected to Joseph of Arimathea and according to one
tradition, Joseph was Jesus’ uncle and established the first church in
England. Joseph, involved in tin trade lived in the tin mine areas of England
and it is believed that Jesus came along with him. According to the legends,
after the death of Jesus, the
Holy
Grail (the cup and not the Dan Brown version) was buried in
Glastonbury by Joseph.

Another theory is that simplicity of life and the concept of baptism all came
to Jesus while he and John the Baptist lived with
the Essenes. These Essenes
later moved to
Qumran due
to the fear of Romans, but they believed that they would be lead by a
leader called Messiha. While Jesus is portrayed as a peaceful man, there is
one instance in the Bible where
he
says, “I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword”. Also when Jesus
was arrested, one of his disciples took his sword and stuck down a slave of
the head priest. The theory suggested is that Jesus was a revolutionary
fighting the Romans and his revolutionary activities were left out from the
Bible since it would be difficult to circulate such a Bible in Roman Times.

The documentary, though telecast by the History Channel, is very speculative.
The Jesus in India theory is not taken seriously by most people and the Jesus
in England theory is also as the story says, “legend”. It is not even sure if
there was a person called Joseph of Arimathea for so far no one has been able
to find this place called Arimathea.

The documentary also mentions that what we know about Jesus  is pure
speculation and comes not from historical documents, but from the Gospels.
Though there were many historians who were alive at that time who wrote
about events in Palestine, it is surprising that the no one mentioned about
this person. 

Considering that the Gospels, both the canonical and the heretic like the
Gospel
of Judas were written with the aim of glorifying Jesus, the bias in it
would not be, let us say, minuscule. The Gospels were not first hand accounts,
but oral tradition written down much later. From the Gospels it cannot be
decided what is historical and what is not, for the authors of Gospels were
evangelists, not historians. The documentary which establishes the lack
of historical evidence for Jesus then goes on suggesting the
above theories based on  legends and gospels, which was kind of
ironic. 

Book Review: The Lost Gospel

The Lost Gospel by Herbert Krosney, National Geographic (April 6, 2006), 352 pages

The Lost Gospel

The Gospel of Judas, which disappeared before the 4th century and was discovered sometime in the 1970s  in Al Minya in Egypt takes the story of Judas as the betrayer and turns it upside down, similar to what Malayalam novelist  M T Vasudevan Nair has done many times. According to  this Gospel, Judas did not betray Jesus for money, but because Jesus asked him to.

Also in this Gospel, written in Greek by someone who revered Jesus, Judas is the favorite disciple to whom Jesus imparts secret teachings. Contrary to the teachings of other Christian texts, Jesus came to save the world, predicted his own death and used Judas as an instrument in that process.

This book, published by National Geographic, is written by Herb Krosney, who first alerted the National Geographic Society about the existence of the document and convinced them to publish it. Besides narrating the history of early Christianity and the significance of this new Gospel, the book also explains the 30 year journey of the fragile papyrus from Egypt to the offices of National Geographic.

This Gospel written in the century that followed Jesus’  life gives fresh insight into the evolution of early Christianity like what the Nag Hammadi codices revealed. The thirteen Nag Hammadi codices, again translated from Greek to Copt, contained texts that inspired the Gnostic movement. Gnostics — religious mystics who proclaimed knowledge and not belief in death and resurrection of Jesus as the way to salvation — expanded beyond the teachings of Jesus, were highly intelligent and used symbolism which were difficult to understand.

Continue reading “Book Review: The Lost Gospel” →

King Herod's Tomb

According to the Gospels, Herod was the king when Jesus was born. Though there is no historical evidence for Jesus, a tomb belonging to Herod has been found in West Bank. It contains a sacrophagus believed to contain Herod’s remains. The tomb was found in Herodium, the only site which carries Herod’s name.

An ancient staircase used in a royal funeral procession led an Israeli archaeologist to solve a 2,000-year-old mystery, the location of the tomb of the Roman-anointed “King of the Jews,” Herod the Great.

The pieces of the “large unique” sarcophagus, made of Jerusalem reddish limestone and decorated with rosettes, was discovered on the northeast slope of the mesa, where archaeological excavation began in August 2006.

“Only very few similar sarcophagi are known in the country and can be found only in elaborate tombs,” he said.

It “was broken into hundreds of pieces, no doubt deliberately,” Netzer said, adding that it appeared to have been destroyed between 66 and 72 AD during the first Jewish revolt against the Romans.[Israeli
archaeologists unearth King Herod’s tomb]

According to the legends, Moses was born at a time when the Pharaoh
had ordered all male children to be killed by drowning in the Nile. King Herod
of Jerusalem, who lived in the first century BC, in a similar fashion ordered
all male children to be killed to prevent a threat to his rule. There was a
prophecy that he would lose this throne to the newly born King of Jews and like
Kamsa, he wanted
to preempt it. Historians believe that this incident was copied from the Exodus
to show Jesus as the new Moses and it never happened.

Herod died a natural death, unlike Kamsa and  was buried in Herodium as per
the documents of historian
Josephus
Flavius.  They were not able to find his grave, till this week.

See Also:
Herod’s
Tomb: The Hebrew University Press Conference

Dwaraka Update (4): Two pieces of wood

The last time a piece of wood was discovered during under water archaeology in Dwaraka, tall claims were made about the antiquity of the civilization which could not be substantiated. Sceptics suggested that the piece of wood could have come from anywhere due to tidal action and ocean currents.

Now a circular wooden structure has been discovered in a near shore excavation near the Samudranarayan Temple. The underwater structure was made of stones but its lowermost portion was made of wood with wood joined with dowels and nails.  Though many stone structures have been obtained in previous expeditions, they were not helpful in determining the date since stone cannot be dated easily. This particular wooden structure can reveal new information and whether it was part of the ancient city of Dwaraka which was destroyed by tsunami will be found after more analysis.

See Also: Dwaraka Update (1), Dwaraka Update (2), Dwaraka Update (3): The City submerged by Tsunami

Mammotty's dream

Speaking at the DYFI meet alongside N. Ram, Malayalam cinema actor Mammotty said

He added that the Gujarat carnage in 2002 would not have happened, if the Communist Party of India-Marxist’s (CPI-M) youth wing had been stronger in that state. [Mammootty captures the hearts of DYFI activists]

Who better to trust our lives with than the peddlers of the imported murderous ideology called Communism. The ideology which gave us Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and that psycho cum t-shirt revolutionary Che also gave us Indians, Maoists, Naxalites and the latest, Nandigram. Then when you are the chairman of the Communist television channel  you have to the sing the official bhajan.