Looking for Punt

Some time in the 15th century BCE, the female Pharoah Hatshepsut sent ships to a place called Punt. But we don’t know where that place is, even now.

So elusive is the answer that, since the mid-19th century, a procession of scholars have, like erudite dart-throwers, stippled the map of the Red Sea area with their often strongly argued proposals for where Punt lay. (Refer to map at right throughout this article.) Syria. Sinai. Southern Arabia. Eastern Sudan. Northern Ethiopia. Somalia. Kenya. Each was Punt, insists this or that Egyptologist. New papers continue to appear regularly that try to put this question to bed once and for all. So far, all have failed.[NOVA | Building Pharaoh’s Ship | Where Is Punt? | PBS]

To resolve this issue, scientists are turning to two people who may know the answer: two mummified baboons in the British Museum

The team is conducting oxygen isotope tests on the preserved hairs of the baboons. Oxygen isotopes act as a ‘signal’ that can tell scientists where an animal is from.
To aid in narrowing down the location of Punt the team is also performing oxygen isotope tests on samples of modern day baboons from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, Uganda and Mozambique. If the oxygen isotope signatures of these baboons match their ancient counterparts the team will know where Punt was.[Mummified Baboons in British Museum May Reveal Location of the Land of Punt | Heritage Key]

Update (April 26): The Baboons have spoken. They say Punt was the land between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Takshashila: 2 Kings & a King Maker

(The glorious battle of Alexander, King of Macedon, and Porus, King of India. Russian lubok via Wikipedia)
In early 327 BCE, half of Alexander’s army marched through the Khyber Pass and reached the shores of Indus. After subduing the hill tribes, Alexander and rest of the army joined them in 326 BCE at Ohind at the border of Takshashila — a large and prosperous city between Indus and Jhelum. Alexander’s activities, mostly invasion, produced different reactions from three people — two kings (Ambhi & Porus) and a king maker (Chanakya).
After a 30 day rest, Alexander crossed the Indus into “the country of Indians” and on the other side he was met by an army in battle formation. This was highly unexpected. The king of Takshashila, Ambhi or Oomphis, had sent word that he would not oppose Alexander and would fight on his side. When it looked as if Ambhi had reneged on his promise, Alexander ordered his army to get ready.
Ambhi rode up alone towards the Greeks and he was met by Alexander who too rode up alone. Realizing that what came from Alexander’s mouth was all Greek, interpreters were summoned. Ambhi explained that he had come to put both his army and the kingdom at Alexander’s disposal. He also gifted elephants, large sheep and 3000 bulls to Alexander prompting the Greek to ask Ambhi if he as into husbandry. A satrap — Philip of Machatas — was appointed to govern.
Enjoying Ambhi’s hospitality, Alexander sent word to the neighboring kings to meet him and pay tribute. While few did, one king stayed away: Porus, who was not going to follow Ambhi’s foot steps. When Alexander’s envoy met Porus and asked him to meet the emperor and pay tribute, Porus replied that he would definitely come to meet the emperor, but with an army. Thus in the spring of 326 BCE the two armies met on the banks of Jhelum.
We only have the Greek account of the battle and hence the exaggeration has to be discounted. 20,000 infantry and 3000 cavalry of Porus was killed. All his chariots were destroyed, his generals were killed, so were two of his sons. According to the Greek historians — Diodorus, Arrian, Plutarch — the Greek losses were not so high. But still Porus was praised: “his courage matched his body vigor”, “he exhibited great talent in battle performing deeds not only of a general but also of a valiant soldier.” This battle, Battle of the Hydaspes, was immortalized by Western painters like André Castaigne ,Charles Le Brun and artists in Russia.
Finally the two met. In the meeting Alexander asked Porus how he wished to be treated and Porus replied, “As befits a king”. This reply under adverse conditions impressed Alexander and he returned Porus back to the throne and turned him into an ally.
So was Ambhi a traitor for aligning with a foreigner? In his book India: A History John Keay mentions that though Porus surrendered only after giving Alexander a good fight, calling Ambhi who surrendered without a fight a traitor is harsh judgement. An argument is that there was no concept of India as a nation and if a king like Ambhi took help from Alexander to be safe against attacks by Porus, can he be blamed?
That argument would have held, if not for the efforts of Chanakya, who saw the cultural unity among the various kingdoms. As a teacher in Takshashila, he saw students — brahmin youth, princes, sons of rich merchants — come from far away places along the uttarapatha to learn the Vedas, arts (archery, hunting, elephant lore, political economy) law, medicine, and military science. This tradition went back to Buddha’s time. Jotipala, the son of a Brahmin priest in the court of the King of Benares returned after graduating in archery and military science and was appointed the commander-in-chief. Jivika, Bimbisara’s physician who cured Buddha, learned medicine in Takshashila. Prasenajit, the king of Kosala, who too was associated with Buddha was educated in Takshashila.
Chanakya wanted to convert this cultural unity into political unity against the invader. For him, kingdoms of Ambhi and Porus, had to unite against the foreigner. He condemned foreign rule as exploitation; for the foreigner the conquered country was not his own, but a place to tax and extract wealth. He also realized that the reason Alexander was able to advance was because there was no united front: there was no leadership or pooling of resources. Alexander was able to exploit this division and was stopped only by a mutiny in his camp.
One of the first activities of Chanakya and his protegé Chandragupta was to organize resistance against the Greeks satrapies. We know this because of the writings of Justin, who was describing the return of Seleucus Nicator, an officer of Alexander to India to expand the Greek kingdom.

Justin identified the leader of the rebellion as Sandrocottus or Chandragupta Maurya.
There were six satrapies: three on the West of Indus and three on the East. Following Alexander’s departure, the satrapies he established started collapsing. At the same time, under the leadership of Chandragupta, a war was declared. The satraps Philip and Nicanor were assassinated and by 323 BCE, India was free of Greeks.
References:

Abraham Eraly, Gem in the Lotus: The Seeding of Indian Civilisation, 2005.
A. Dani, Historic City of Taxila (Bernan Press(PA), 1986).
Radhakumud Mookerji, Chandragupta Maurya and his times, 3rd ed. (Motilal Banarsidass, 1960).
John Keay, India: A History (Grove Press, 2001).

Indian History Carnival – 28

The Indian History Carnival, published on the 15th of every month, is a collection of posts related to Indian history and archaeology.

Why are there no Chinese fishing nets in Calicut — the place where Zheng He visited — while Cochin has them? CHF has a theory. Please read the comments for this post as well.

A more plausible explanation has been offered by Deepa Leslie in her article at http://enchantingkerala.org/kerala-articles/chinese-nets.php According to her, it is the Portuguese Casado settlers from Macau who brought this form of fishing into Cochin. She explains further that the names of the various parts of the net currently in use are Portuguese in origin

Fëanor writes about 16th century Manipur when texts in Meitei Mayek script were burned to make way for new Sanskrit texts.

After Charai Rongba, his son Gareeb Niwaz fell under the influence of the Chaitanya school of Vaishnavism. He decided to no longer support the Meitei Mayek script, and – fearing that the old texts would undermine his efforts to establish Hinduism among the Manipuris, and quite probably encouraged by his Brahmin adviser Shantidas Adhikari – ordered the burning of documents written in it. Large numbers of histories and texts of the old faith were publicly set aflame. In view of the supposed prestige of the languages of the incoming new faith, Manipuri began to be written in the Bengali script, which along with Sanskrit, assumed greater importance in ritual matters.

Inorite has the tale of the kingdom of Vadakkamkur in Kerala

The fate of the dispossessed Rajahs of the Travancore region had always interested me and I could, at best, only find scattered sources that mentioned them in passing. I am still highly intrigued as to what happened to the Kayamkulam Rajah who was perhaps the fiercest and most difficult enemy of Travancore so much so that Marthanda Varma on his death bed instructed his successor that the enmity of the Kayamkulam Rajah was “never to be forgotten”.

Between 1840 and 1870, a commodity that was imported to the Presidencies of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay was American Ice. This trade made one man — Frederic Tudor of Boston — a millionaire. Maddy writes about A Frozen Journey and varnam has a post on the The Forgotten American Ice Trade.
The Oxford University Blog has an excerpt from the 1888 book The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook which gives practical advice to memsahibs in India.

In regard to other supplies, the difficulty in procuring them depends entirely on your position. The district officials have none, while a mere globe-trotter may starve. It is merely a matter of coercion, for the peasant does not wish to sell, and will not sell, if he thinks it polite to refuse. This fact should never be forgotten by the mistress, for it is easy to understand how fearful a weapon for oppression that appalling necessity of camp life, the tâhseel chuprassi, or tâhseel office orderly, may become…

Uber Desi has some photographs of coins used in pre-colonial and colonial India

If you find any posts related to Indian history published in the past one month, please send it to jk AT varnam DOT org or send a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up on May 15th.

The Forgotten American Ice Trade

In the winter of 1846 – 47, Henry David Thoreau looked out of his small self-built house in Walden and saw a hundred Irishmen with their American bosses cutting ice slabs from the pond. On a good day, he noted, a thousand tonnes were carted away. These ice slabs went not just to New Orleans and Charleston, but also to Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. Thoreau was amused: here he was sitting in America reading the Bhagavad Gita and the water from his well was being taken to the land of the Ganges.
A Business Opportunity
In 1831, a Boston businessman named Frederic Tudor, who wanted to make money without physical effort, came up with an idea. He would speculate on coffee prices; coffee consumption in United States was increasing and prices were going up at the rate of 20 to 30 percent. What could go wrong?
Within three years, this speculation would put him deep in debt of more than $210,000. He did not know that in 1833 when he met Samuel Austin, a Boston merchant. Austin’s ships regularly went from Boston to Calcutta, but on the trip to Calcutta it did not carry cargo, but empty ballast. Austin wanted to know if Tudor wanted to ship American Ice at a low freight rate.
If there was one person in United States who had the expertise to export ice to the opposite side of the globe, it was Tudor. He had invented the ice trade in 1806 by exporting ice, cut from frozen lakes in Massachusetts, to the French colony of Martinique. At that time he had faced ridicule — from his father, relatives, and other Boston merchants — but ignoring them he proceeded. No merchant was willing to carry his cargo, but he overcame that by buying a brig for $4000. Inventing various techniques required for the safe transportation of ice, he delivered ice not just to Martinique, but also to Havana, New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah.
Continue reading “The Forgotten American Ice Trade” →

Two Books on the Crusades

After 9/11, when President Bush used the word “crusade” in one of his speeches, it raised red flags in Europe. Why do those battles — ones which Christians eventually lost — still important? There were two books on this topic and both WSJ and The New York Times had reviews.

What comes through clearly is that the “remembered” history of the Crusades might better be called an imagined or invented history. Mr. Asbridge, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, puts it this way: The Crusades “have come to have a profound bearing upon our modern world, but almost entirely through the agency of illusion.” Mr. Phillips, a professor of history at Royal Holloway University of London, says that we have seen only “shadows of the crusades, not true shapes.”[Book Review: Holy Warriors and The Crusades – WSJ.com]

Also it was not just Christians against Muslims

Phillips concentrates on the seven “official” crusades, from 1095 to the final disastrous campaigns of Louis IX (St. Louis) of France in 1248-54 and 1270, but he also describes the fiasco of the so-called Children’s Crusade as well as the horrifying Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southwest France. As he notes, “holy war” was as often as not waged against coreligionists: Catholics against Cathars, Sunnis against Shiites. In the rigid, polarized mentality of the holy warrior, any deviation can signify a dangerous otherness. This is the best recent history of the Crusades; it is also an astute depiction of a frightening cast of mind.[Book Review – ‘Holy Warriors – A Modern History of the Crusades,’ by Jonathan Phillips – Review – NYTimes.com]

Why read Historical Fiction?

Author, historian and chair of the award’s judges Alistair Moffat said that writers like Robert Harris on ancient Rome or Hilary Mantel on 1520s England were “far better at conveying what life was like than some university history lecturers”.
“They are giving history back its stories,” he said. “The best way to understand the past is often to read a novelist rather than an historian. We need to know where we came from, what kind of people our ancestors were … What people in the past believed – such as the absolute certainty about heaven and hell in the Middle Ages – is every bit as important in telling us what they were like as what they left behind in the historical record.”[Booker rivals clash again on Walter Scott prize shortlist | Books | guardian.co.uk]

Among the recent historical fiction I read, The Bellini Card did not impress as much as as The Snake Stone or The Janissary Tree. The Martyr was well written and was a good introduction to Elizabethan England. After reading 50 pages of The Sheen on the Silk, realized that this book is not for me.
Any recommendations?
Update: One book I can recommend is Gore Vidal’s Creation. The main character travels to India and meets Mahavira and Buddha and goes to China and learns from Confucius. Fascinating read.

Pictish writing?

Like the ancestors of Indians, the ancestors of Scots also left a sequence of symbols. For example, “One symbol looks like a dog’s head, for example, while others look like horses, trumpets, mirrors, combs, stags, weapons and crosses.” Like the Harappan symbols these ancient Scottish symbols — known as Pictish — has not be deciphered. The questions are the same? Do they even encode a language? If they don’t encode a language what were they trying to convey?
To analyze the script, the researchers applied Shannon entropy “to study the order, direction, randomness and other characteristics of each engraving.”

The resulting data was compared with that for numerous written languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish Stone engravings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.
Although Lee and his team have not yet deciphered the Pictish language, some of the symbols provide intriguing clues. [New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered]

Now does having order, direction and non-randomness indicate that it is a language? Last year there was a paper which calculated the conditional entropy of the Indus script

The new study compared a well-known compilation of Indus texts with linguistic and nonlinguistic samples. The researchers performed calculations on present-day texts of English; texts of the Sumerian language spoken in Mesopotamia during the time of the Indus civilization; texts in Old Tamil, a Dravidian language originating in southern India that some scholars have hypothesized is related to the Indus script; and ancient Sanskrit, one of the earliest members of the Indo-European language family. In each case the authors calculated the conditional entropy, or randomness, of the symbols’ order.
They then repeated the calculations for samples of symbols that are not spoken languages: one in which the placement of symbols was completely random; another in which the placement of symbols followed a strict hierarchy; DNA sequences from the human genome; bacterial protein sequences; and an artificially created linguistic system, the computer programming language Fortran.
Results showed that the Indus inscriptions fell in the middle of the spoken languages and differed from any of the nonlinguistic systems[Indus Script Encodes Language, Reveals New Study Of Ancient Symbols]

Statistical analysis can only show that the symbols had an order. But can this be assumed to be a spoken language? This methodology has been questioned.

The trouble with this form of argument is that it’s heavily dependent on the particular combination of statistical measure and comparison sets that we choose. And the argument becomes especially unconvincing when there’s an obvious alternative choice of comparison set — generated by a simple random process — that would fall squarely on the side of the line that allegedly identifies “written language”. [Pictish writing?]

It could represent a language or a set of ordered symbols to represent a personal seal or something to mark the goods. Since it was created by humans it probably meant something to the person who created it and the person who saw it. While we know the Indus seals were used in an economic context in some cases, it is not clear what the Pictish seals convey.

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

Gama's Eastern Christians

An iconic scene during the Portuguese arrival in Malabar in 1498 is when the ex-convict Joao Nunes stepped into land and met two Moors from Tunis. The Moors greeted the ex-convict, “The Devil take you! What bought you here.” He replied, “We came to seek Christians and spices”.

While the Portuguese search for a direct trade route to India bypassing the Muslims is well known, less mentioned is this search for Christians. They searched for the Eastern Christians in Africa and India and interestingly found them everywhere they looked. They also encountered Muslims; encounters which did not go well. The joyous news of the discovery of Eastern Christians was duly reported to Dom Manuel.

Vasco da Gama’s king, Dom Manuel, over a period had developed a messianic streak, due to the death of a large number of people who had preceded him. He believed that he was chosen by the Holy Spirit to confront the powerful. He wanted to take over the Holy Land and destroy Mecca to claim the title — the Emperor of the East. But he could not do it alone: to attack the Egyptian Mamluks, for instance, he needed help and for this the lost Christian kingdoms of Asia could become useful.

To understand this Portuguese obsession with finding Eastern Christians, we need to go along with Vasco da Gama on his first Voyage to Malabar and experience his encounters with people of other faiths.

In Search of Christians

(Prester John)

After navigating the Cape, the fleet reached Mozambique Island in March 1498 where men belonging to the “sect of Mohammed” told them that Eastern Christians lived on a nearby island. The other half of the island where the Christians lived was populated by Moors and there were constant battles among them. Then they were told that Prester John — the mythical Christian king — lived nearby in the interior and he could be reached by a camel trip. Though they were happy to hear about Prester John, they did not attempt to visit him.

During a conversation, the Sultan of Mozambique asked Nicolau Coelho, one of the captains in Gama’s fleet, about Turkey and their religious books. Then Coelho realized that the Sultan had assumed them to be Turks and not Christians. The Portuguese wanted to conceal their identity since they did not know how the reaction would be. Hence for celebrating mass, they would go off to an island.
Continue reading “Gama's Eastern Christians” →

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]