Essays on Indic History Quotes

“The advent of Islamic armies at the gates of India was not a surprise to the frontier kingdoms. They have in the past centuries seen armies of Alexander, the Indo-Greeks, the Kushans, the Scythians, and the Huns, invade the north-western borders of India. What was different this time were the post-war events; the enslavement of wives and children of fighting men[107]; and The desecration of places of worship and religious taxation.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“Skardu was a predominantly Buddhist region in fifth century India. Faxian mentions a magnificent Stupa that held the relics of Buddha. He mentions a tooth relic and a spittoon which were kept in the Stupa. The Stupa had an order of more than a thousand monks and their disciples, practiced Hinayana Buddhism. Sadly, today there are no Stupas standing in Skardu, which would remind us of its Buddhist heritage. Most of them being lost to iconoclasm. As recently as June 2020, Buddhist rock carvings were vandalised in Chilas region of Gilgit-Baltistan.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at Oxford University, was involved in the study of Bakhshali Manuscript. He realises the importance of the text and says[86], ‘Today we take it for granted that the concept of zero is used across the globe and is a key building block of the digital world. But the creation of zero as a number in its own right, which evolved from the placeholder dot symbol found in the Bakhshali manuscript, was one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mathematics.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“His work, the Aryabhatiya, deals in planetary motions and the concept of time, nakshatra and sine-differences. He was the first person to suggest the spherical nature of earth and that it spins on its own axis, leading to westward movement of stars and sun. According to him, the period of one rotation of earth on its axis equals to 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds, which is very close to the modern estimate of 23h:56m:4.091s.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“The Western Satraps together with the Satavahanas, probably controlled a large share of international trade. The Port city of Bharuch, known as Barygaza in the Erythraean Scrolls, was under the Satraps, and Machilipatnam, known as Maisolos in the Erythraean Scrolls, was under the Satavahanas. The two also provided political stability to the region as the Mauryan Empire declined.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“An ivory statuette was excavated from the ruins of Pompeii in 1930s. Made in typical Indian style with ornaments and bangles, it was identified as Pompeii Lakshmi. Later research however identified it with a Yakshi. The statuette dates back to early years of the Common Era and must have reached Pompeii with either the Roman seafaring traders or over land via the Kushan territories.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“identified”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“What has been missed out here is that the Indian traders of eastern India have discovered the Monsoon patterns many centuries before Hippalus. It was their knowledge of the wind patterns in the Eastern Sea that helped them navigate to Southeast Asia with the retreating Monsoon in late October and sail back to India with the advancing Monsoon in May. The event of starting off the sea voyage is still symbolically celebrated in Odisha as the festival of Bali Jatra (voyage to Bali). The festival is celebrated on the full moon of the Hindu month of Kartik (fifteen days after Diwali).”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“Ptolemy, the Graeco-Roman polymath (100 CE – 170 CE), mentions a third century BCE, port town Maisolos on the eastern coast of India in his accounts. This port has been identified with modern-day Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh. Later in the Erythraean Scrolls, it is mentioned as Masalia.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“in the Nadistuti Sukta of Rig Veda, Jhelum is identified as Vitasta. The river is also known as Bedasta in Kashmir, a modified version of Sanskrit Vitasta. Ptolemy identified Bedasta as Bidaspes, which eventually was known as Hydaspes to the Greeks.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“By 500 BCE, we start getting clear evidence of established states or political units. These were referred to as the Mahajanapadas. We find their reference in Panini’s Ashtadhyayi and in many Jain and Buddhist scriptures. There were sixteen such Mahajanapadas, mostly in north, north-west and eastern parts of the Indian subcontinent.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“The first season of excavation at Keezhadi in Madurai district has yielded significant findings. Subsequent seasons brought out the existence of an urban settlement. This is for the first time that signs of an ancient urban settlement have been excavated in Tamil Nadu. Brick walls and brick platforms and ring wells point towards an evolved urban settlement.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“We do not have evidence of a royal dwelling place, i.e. a palace in any of the cities. We have not, yet, excavated a city that would classify as the capital of the Harappan civilisation. Yet there is concrete evidence of the Harappans following a highly standardised way of living and had elaborate public works that require an administrative machinery for their smooth running.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“With all the grand town planning, standardised sanitation works, a thriving export city, obsessive standardisation of weights, a uniformity in seals across a vast area, were the Harappans living in a centrally controlled empire of a sort?”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“But we see standardisation as a common feature in the Harappan cities. It ranges from standardisation of the brick sizes to standardising the city layout, drainage planning, location of cemeteries and kilns and ultimately to weights and measures.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“The thing worth noting here is that India remained an export-oriented country from the Harappan times until the Europeans took control of the shipping lanes and harbours in the colonial times.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“The oldest extant manuscript in the ancient Indian region was discovered in Bakhshali, Pakistan and dates back to early 3rd century CE.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“The oldest extant manuscript (the Bower manuscript) in Sanskrit was found in Chinese Turkestan, the troubled Xinjiang Province in modern China. Written on birch bark the script is dated to the Gupta Era (5th – 6th century CE). The manuscript contains treatises on medicine, future telling (by casting a die) and spells to counter snakebite.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“In the past, the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the Cuneiform scripts were deciphered because bilingual and multilingual texts were discovered. The Egyptian Hieroglyphs were understood once the Rosetta stone was found in Egypt by soldier in the army of Napoleon in 1799. The cuneiform too was deciphered once the Behistun trilingual inscriptions were found in western Iran. There have been no corresponding inscriptions found for the Harappan script, yet. Since the seals have also been discovered in Mesopotamia and we know that there were trade relations between the two civilisations, it is likely that there might, one day, turn up a Rosetta stone for the Harappan script.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“Though the Neolithic people were smelting copper, serendipity played its role when they discovered that adding tin to copper, makes it harder, thus began the Bronze Age.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History

“The excavation of graves has also provided evidence of early dentistry in the region. At least eleven drilled molar crowns have been recorded on nine individuals[8]. The drilled crowns were found on both men and women. One individual had three drilled crowns while another had the same crown drilled twice. When archaeologists tried to re-enact the antique procedure, they found that a bow drill tipped with flint head can drill such holes in the enamel in less than one minute. Dentists today use the same procedure, better known as the root canal procedure, to relieve pain in a rotten tooth. Of course, now we don’t have to go through the excruciating pain, thanks to anaesthesia and mechanised drills.”
― Vijender Sharma, Essays on Indic History