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February 17 - February 20, 2022
Megasthenes, 27 the Macedonian ambassador to Chandragupta,
Megasthenes tells us that he had seen all the great cities of the east, including Susa and Ecbatana, but that Pataliputra was the greatest city in the world.
Patna has now covered the site.
The Macedonian ambassador Megasthenes very likely used it to visit the imperial capital of Pataliputra.
this highway survives as NH1 between Amritsar and Delhi and as NH2 between Delhi and Kolkata. During Mauryan times, the section through Bihar would have taken a somewhat northerly route through Patna in order to accommodate the imperial capital.
One of the best places to experience this is Girnar hill in Junagarh, Gujarat. At the foot of the sacred hill, there is a rock outcrop with an Ashokan edict. More than three centuries later, a Saka (i.e. Scythian) king called Rudradaman added his own inscription next to it. The second inscription records the restoration of the Sudarshana reservoir. We are told that the reservoir was originally constructed by Pushyagupta, Chandragupta Maurya’s provincial governor, and that it was completed during Ashoka’s time by Tushaspa, an official of possibly Greek origin.
stone pillar raised by Heliodorus, the Greek ambassador in Vidisha, a major pit-stop on the Dakshina Path.
the "great southern highway" in India, traveling from Magadha to Pratishthana,
the Harappans traded actively with Mesopotamia. In the Iron Age, centres like Dwarka may have maintained these links. We know that by the time of the Mauryans, Tamralipti was a thriving port with links as far as Sri Lanka.
it was from the second century BC that we see trade with both the Graeco–Roman world and South East Asia jump an order of magnitude.
the Sangam anthologies. These collections of early Tamil poetry appear to have been put together in a series of ancient conferences. Exact dates are not available, but they probably took place between the third century BC and the sixth century AD.
much of the scholarship around Sangam literature is focused on trying to use the corpus to discern the roots of pristine Dravidian culture, unsullied by ‘Aryan’ influences from the north. This is ridiculous at many levels. First, the society described in the poems is full of trade and exchange with the rest of India as well as foreign lands. It is a world that is busily absorbing all kinds of influences and clearly revelling in it. Looking for signs of a pristine past misses the point about the people who composed the anthologies. Secondly, the composers of the Sangam poems clearly show strong
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Well, to put it straight, no one who wants to promote monoculturism is going to publish an anthology of multi cultural authors.
The point is that by the late Iron Age, the people in southern India were not just aware of the rest of Indian civilization but were comfortably a part of it.
For some odd reason, Indian historians see cultural influences flow only from the North to the rest of the country. The reality was of back-and-forth exchange. We see this in how the ‘northern’ Sanskrit language evolved ...
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Contrary to popular perception, Sanskrit was never a ‘pure’ language and its success was largely due to its ability from the earliest times to absorb ideas a...
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Many of the words that are generally considered as Sanskrit words used in modern Tamil are actually ancient Tamil words t...
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There is a story that Cleopatra, when defeated by the Romans, had hoped to escape with her family to India. When Octavian attacked Egypt in 30 BC, she sent Caesarion, her seventeen-year-old son by Julius Caesar, to Berenike with a great deal of treasure. Before she could escape, however, she was captured in Alexandria and famously committed suicide by snake-bite. Meanwhile, Caesarion had reached Berenike and could easily have escaped to India. Unfortunately, he was convinced by his tutors, almost certainly bribed, to return to Alexandria for negotiations. Octavian promptly had his cousin
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The Periplus tells us that ships sailing from Berenike to India went down the Red Sea to Yemen and then, dodging pirates, to the island of Socotra. The island had a mixed population of Arab, Greek and Indian traders. Even the island’s name is derived from Sanskrit—Dwipa Sukhadara (Island of Bliss).
Isle of Bliss, the Sirens’ isle?
From here, there were two major routes to India. The first made its way north to Oman and then across the Arabian Sea to Gujarat. Ships were advised to make this journey in July to take advantage of the monsoon wind.
The second route to India was a more southerly one that went across from Socotra to the Kerala coast. The most important port in this area was Muzaris (or Muchheri Pattanam) that is mentioned frequently in both Graeco–Roman and Indian texts.
Roman writer Pliny (23–79 AD) wrote: ‘Not a year passed in which India did not take fifty million sesterces away from Rome.’ This is corroborated by the fact that many hoards of Roman coins have been found in India. In a world where money was based on precious metals, this one-way flow of gold and silver would have been equivalent to severe monetary tightening. At one point, the drainage of gold became so serious that Roman Emperor Vespasian was forced to discourage the import of Indian luxury goods and ban the export of gold to India.
It is estimated that even today 25–30 per cent of all the gold ever mined is held privately by Indians even though the country itself has very few gold mines of its own.
thousands of miles from the Indian mainland, that we see the rise of the first Indianized kingom in South East Asia. Chinese texts tell us of the Hindu kingdom of Funan that flourished in the Mekong delta in the second century AD.8 According to a legend told both by Chinese sources as well as by local inscriptions, the kingdom was founded by the Indian Brahmin, Kaundinya, who married a local princess of the Naga (Snake) clan.
Over the next thousand years, Funan’s legacy would evolve into the great Hindu–Buddhist kingdoms of Angkor in Cambodia and Champa in Vietnam. Strongly Indianized kingdoms and cultures evolved in other parts of South East Asia as well.
Contrast this with successive Chinese emperors who repeatedly tried to impose a tributary relationship with these kingdoms. Although they sometimes succeeded in gaining temporary submission, often backed by military threats, they failed to match India in making civilizational inroads till the voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the fifteenth century.
So there.
The national languages of both Malaysia and Indonesia are called ‘Bahasa’, and both are full of Sanskrit words. Indeed, the name itself is derived from the Sanskrit word bhasha meaning language.
According to the Samguk Yusa,9 Princess Huh Hwang-ok of Ayodhya sailed all the way to Korea to marry King Suro in the fourth century AD. They had ten sons and together founded Korea’s earliest dynasty. The Gimhae Kim clan claims to be direct descendants of this union and remains influential (former President Kim Dae Jung was from this clan).
Uttar Pradesh
Yet again, folk memory has been proved to have been based on historical fact even if one cannot exactly confirm if there indeed were another six temples in Mahabalipuram.
According to Angus Maddison, the country accounted for 33 per cent of world GDP in the first century AD. India’s share was three times that of western Europe and was much larger than that of the Roman empire as a whole (21 per cent). China’s share of 26 per cent of world GDP was significantly smaller than India’s12. He also estimates India’s population at 75 million (compared to today’s 1.2 billion).
shown in the panels of Borobodur, the Indonesians preferred a design with outriggers. However, they all seem to have shared a peculiar design trait: they were not held together by nails; they were stitched together with rope! Throughout the ages, travellers from outside the Indian Ocean world have repeatedly commented on this odd design preference. The technique persisted into modern times—locally built vessels were being stitched together well into the twentieth century.
A survey of the Orissa coast by Eric Kentley in the 1980s found that boats called ‘padua’ were still being made by sewing together planks with coir ropes.
the Indonesians independently conducted their own maritime expeditions. From the third to the sixth century AD, they crossed the Indian Ocean in their outriggered ships and settled in Madagascar in large numbers. Thus, the first humans in Madagascar came from distant Indonesia rather than nearby Africa. The descendants of the Indonesian settlers still form a significant proportion of the population of the island country and the Malagasy language retains the strong influence of dialects from Borneo!
Unused to the extreme cold of the Afghan mountains, they died in such large number that the range would come to be known as the Hindukush meaning ‘Killer of Hindus’.
Or, was the tiger simply not considered a worthy symbol of royal power?
Or was the tiger too dangerous to invoke?
In 1235, Sultan Iltutmish laid waste Ujjain—once the secondary capital of the Gupta empire and a major centre for mathematics, literature, astronomy and Hindu philosophy. It is worth noting that at exactly the same time as these universities were being destroyed, the University of Oxford was being established on the other side of the planet.
It was a very bloody period in Indian history—ancient cities, universities and temples were laid waste and hundreds of thousands, probably millions, were massacred. Anyone who doubts this should read the Tarikh-i-Farishtah 14
many of the events of the Mahabharata relate to the area around Delhi. Indraprastha, the capital of the Pandavas, is said to have been situated in Delhi along the banks of the Yamuna.
The first Delhi of which we have definite historical knowledge was built by the Tomar Rajputs, who made it their headquarters in the eighth century.
He also rebuilt the ancient Uttara Path highway from Punjab to Bengal. Known as ‘Sadak-e-Azam’ (or Great Road), it would be a major artery of the Mughal period; the British would know it as the Grand Trunk Road and it is now part of the Golden Quadrilateral highway network.
Humayun
By the time Akbar appeared on the scene, however, centuries of conflict had left both sides exhausted. Thinkers like Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh tradition, had already put forward arguments for civilizational accommodation.
Ibn Batuta may have been the one to write about his travels but the routes he took were well known to the world of Arab merchants.
Zheng He was an unlikely admiral for the Chinese fleet. He was a Muslim eunuch from land-locked Yunnan who had been brought as a boy prisoner to the Ming court and castrated. Yet, he led seven major naval expeditions between 1405 and 1433 that visited South-East Asia, India, Sri Lanka, Arabia and East Africa. The ‘treasure fleets’ were of an astonishing scale, with over hundred ships and tens of thousands of men.
In recent years, some authors have argued that Zheng He may even have visited the Americas. He certainly had the technology, but I am not convinced that he actually made the journey across the Pacific.
The Chinese domination of the seas, however, came to an abrupt end. The mandarins decided that the voyages were not worth the expense. The treasure fleets were allowed to rot and their records suppressed.
Columbus planned his 1492 expedition after reading The Travels, and explorers like Raleigh read the book very carefully. Thus, one of the greatest discoveries of history was based on an elaborate lie!
Columbus discovered nothing, idiot. Land back.
The fleet set sail on 8 July 1497 and rounded the Cape of Good Hope by November. After this point Vasco was in uncharted waters.
False. Uncharted by whose reckoning?
Le Corbusier, a French fascist,
Wrong, he was a collaborator with the Vichy gov, but was not a fascist
