An excerpt from the book ‘Discovering India Anew: Out of Africa to Its Early History’, by Alan Machado.

Alan Machado

Where does one begin to tell a story that spans many thousands of years, a story whose origins are obscured by stubborn mists that will not lift and enduring myths that will not shift under the weight of ages of telling? Where does one begin unravelling the history of India and its peoples?

There have been many beginnings in the telling of the story depending on who told it, when and why. Different yardsticks have been used: myth, bias, selective readings and interpretations. Stripped of all this, there is and can be only one beginning. Today, a host of disciplines and technologies, many of them recent developments, are being applied to uncover and write the history of India and Indians. The story they tell begins in Africa. Indian history, or to be more precise, the history of Indians begins in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

Stone tools tell remarkable stories of the evolutionary history of our hominid and hominin1 ancestors and of the world they inhabited. Buried in the earth of India’s Deep South, in Tamil Nadu, is one such story sculpted in hard stone many millennia ago.

What has climate change got to do with Indian history? A lot, if not everything.

We humans are all of African origin. Africa has the highest diversity of human genetic material. Genetic diversity is evidence of the place of origin of a species or group.

South Asia harbors a genetic diversity second only to Africa’s, strong evidence that it was settled soon after humans left Africa and became a secondary center for early human dispersal. Archaeological evidence supports genetic findings that by 50 KA much of South Asia had been colonized.

About one-fifth of the world’s population, around 1.5 billion people, live in South Asia, a region comprising less than 3 per cent of the global land mass. It is a land of vast cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity. “The truth,” writes Reich, “is that India is composed of a large number of small populations.”

A five-stage process best fits South Asia’s colonization history. The archaeological record takes us back to perhaps c130 ka; the genetic record begins only at c65 KA when Y-chromosome Hgs C and D appeared. The third stage, between 47-30 ka, records the arrival of Y-chromosome Hgs H, L, and R2. These three stages of colonization were all made by hunter-gatherer populations. The fourth represents the movements of pastoral and farming cultures during the Neolithic from the east (Hgs O2 and O3) and west (Hgs J2, L, and R1a). It is associated with the arrival and spread of Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages. The final stage brought small groups in recent times from different regions.

Read more: The Sarasvati River and Why the Vedas Can’t Be a Lesson in Geography

The oft-repeated phrase “unity in diversity” most aptly describes South Asia’s modern population, the unity coming from its maternal heritage, the diversity from its paternal. An estimated 88 per cent of South Asian DNA derives from the out-of-Africa dispersal.

In contrast to the maternal heritage, roughly two-thirds of South Asia’s Y-chromosome genotypes derive from male-dominated migrations of farming and pastoral cultures from east, west and Central Asia during the Neolithic. While South Asia’s women preserved and spread the initial gene pool in a hunter-gatherer economy, male immigrants brought new genetic material from farming and herding cultures originating beyond its borders. The admixture, therefore, involved a considerable degree of cultural, linguistic and lifestyle adoptions and adaptations. It has had a deep and lasting impact on many aspects of South Asian history.

Languages tell tales.

Languages have words and grammatical structures that provide information on their origins, speakers and their movements and interactions with others.

The earliest evidence for Indo-Aryan languages in South Asia appears only around 3.5 KA, after that of the other language families. Unlike the other families, however, they have a considerable body of texts dating to this early period. The texts, however, being mainly related to priestly functions, are preserved in the language of an elite section of society and provide only a limited view of the larger world…It is from this small window that we have to infer much of the rest.

Five major regional centers were located on what appears to be a grid with calculated distances separating them: Mohenjodaro (250 ha, Sindh) on the Indus in the south; Harappa (150 ha, Punjab) on the Ravi in the north; Ganweriwala (80 ha, Cholistan) on the Ghaggar-Hakra; Rakhigarhi (+80 ha, Haryana) on the Chautang in the northeast; Dholavira (100 ha, Kutch/Gujarat) in the southwest.

Until about 10 KA, for over 95 per cent of their history, humans lived exclusively as foragers, a way of life inherited from their hominid ancestors. Some of the most important behavioral changes in social evolution occurred during this phase of human history.

The South Asian archaeological record identifies four macro-regions where primary domestication occurred: the greater Indus valley in the northwest; the Gangetic plains; east India; and south Deccan (Karnataka).

From c. 9500 BCE, forager numbers have declined from roughly 99 per cent of the world’s population to about 1 per cent by 1800 CE.

Also Read: “Early Indians: The Story Of Our Ancestors And Where We Came From” by Tony Joseph

Agni, the god of fire, burned the forests, deprived foragers of sustenance, and forced them to migrate. Forests were replaced by farms and pastures. The Mahabharata tells one such story.

Mesopotamian texts refer to the supply of a range of essential, luxury and exotic goods including timber, carnelian beads, agate, lapis lazuli, ivory, gold, figurines of monkeys, shell bangles made of marine species found only in Indus waters and animals from Meluhha.

On 20 September 1924, was able to announce to the world the excavation of two sites on the Indus plains, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. It reported: “At both these places there is a vast expanse of artificial mounds evidently covering the remains of once flourishing cities, which . . . must have been in existence for many hundreds of years.”

The term “Harappan Civilization” is generally used for the period of integration and urbanism… The coming together of multi-ethnic and multi-language groups that inhabited this geographically diverse region created a network of urban homogeneity supported by extensive agricultural hinterlands in a complex and unique material culture…It eventually covered an area roughly 1,210,000 sq. km in extent, 1,100 km north to south and east to west, nearly twenty times the area of Egypt, and over twelve times the settled area of Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. The distance between the two major Indus cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, is greater than Mesopotamia’s north-south extent of about 440 km.

The Harappan gene pool came from its diverse hunter-gatherer populations mixed to a smaller extent with Iranian hunter-gatherers/farmers.

The Transition (2600-2500 BC) was a veritable revolution within the Harappan urbanization process. By the time it ended, a complex and highly organized society, the Mature Harappan (2500–1900 bce), had emerged. It was significantly different in scale, organizational and social complexity, cultural uniformity and ideology and ethos from that of the Early Harappan.

The Transition took place with the abandonment of more than three-fifths of Early Harappan settlements.

The most notable feature of the Transition was the abruptness of the change.

The stimulus for the Transition may have come from a spurt in overseas trade with Mesopotamia.

Harappan cities were surrounded by massive walls, sometimes with bastions and towers, constructed of baked or mud bricks, rubble or stone. Imposing gateways monitored the flow of people and goods into and out of the city.

Also Read: “Aryans: The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth” by Charles Allen

Five major regional centers were located on what appears to be a grid with calculated distances separating them: Mohenjodaro (250 ha, Sindh) on the Indus in the south; Harappa (150 ha, Punjab) on the Ravi in the north; Ganweriwala (80 ha, Cholistan) on the Ghaggar-Hakra; Rakhigarhi (+80 ha, Haryana) on the Chautang in the northeast; Dholavira (100 ha, Kutch/Gujarat) in the southwest.

Also Read: Did Climate Change Cause The Decline Of Indus Civilization?

The remarkable feature of the Mature Harappan is the overall acceptance for 700 years, despite regional differences, of a unifying culture by over a million people inhabiting a diverse geographical environment spread over a million sq. km.

Throughout history, four sources of power – economic, military, political, ideological – have been used in various combinations to enforce authority and retain control by elite groups (Butters 1996)… In Harappa, economic and ideological factors seem to have been the primary means of elite dominance.

Also read: Indus Civilization had no Ruling Class!

__________________

Alan Machado (Prabhu) graduated from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and worked in the engineering industry in various capacities and countries, including Australia and Europe. His previously published books include Sarasvati’s Children (1999), Shades within Shadows (2012), Slaves of Sultans (2015) and Goa’s Inquisition (2022).

Courtesy: Scroll (Posted on Aug 09, 2024)

The post A new book reconstructs the history of South Asian peoples with Africa first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Josephine Quinn

In the eighth-century CE the Abbasids undertook to collect the wisdom of the world in their new capital at Baghdad. This project started with the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur (“the Conqueror,” r. 754–74), who commissioned Arabic translations of important scientific texts from Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, and Syriac (a late form of Aramaic), and came into its own under al-Ma’mun (“the Trusted One,” r. 813–33).

The operation was lavishly funded by the caliph himself, as well as by members of his household, courtiers, merchants, bankers, and military leaders. It reflects the prosperity of the era, as the Abbasids created a powerful centralized government based on a land tax, which as conversion became more common they pragmatically extended to Muslims as well as non-Muslims.

The most important thing to understand about what is often now called the “Translation Movement” is that it wasn’t primarily about translation. It was part of a wider commitment by Islamic scholars and political leaders to scientific investigation that also saw Caliphs commission new works of science, geography, poetry, history, and medicine.

It is well-known that classic works of Greek science and philosophy were translated into Arabic before they were translated into other European languages—including Latin. What is less well-known is that the point of translating foreign works was not to preserve them but to build on them. As links around the Mediterranean continued to increase, that Arabic scholarship began to reach Western Europe, and to change the way people there thought.

*

Back in Baghdad, as so often happened, cultural change began from the outside—and in this case with the collection and comparison of foreign knowledge. The fundamental model and first material for the Abbasid translation project came from Iran, where sixth-century Sasanian shahs had commissioned Persian translations of important Indian and Greek works.

What is less well-known is that the point of translating foreign works was not to preserve them but to build on them.

Living Iranians were an inspiration too. Sasanian intellectual traditions had weathered the Arab conquest, and Persian remained a major Iranian language, but Persian scholars had already started to translate classic works of their own literature into Arabic.

This ensured their preservation, and advertised the history and high culture of Iranian lands. Sasanian intellectuals also maintained useful links with scientific traditions farther east, above all with Indian mathematicians, the most advanced in the ancient world, and they had already translated important works from Sanskrit into their own language.

The Abbasid Caliphate, c. 850 CE

The benefits for the Abbasid caliphs of engaging with Iranian traditions were not purely intellectual. It helped them establish roots for themselves in the old Sasanian territory of Mesopotamia that they now occupied; in a similar spirit they built Baghdad itself in 762 in the circular form characteristic of Sasanian cities.

Incorporating the work of Greek thinkers into the Arabic canon was by contrast a declaration of cultural hegemony over the rump Roman Empire at Constantinople, where older learning had been set aside in favor of Christian genres from sermons to saints’ lives, and where ancient science and philosophy now moldered in archives and monasteries.

More immediately, the project took inspiration from the contemporary intellectual culture of western Asia, revitalized by the unification under Islam of regions once subject to either Persia or Rome. Intellectual centers from Christian Edessa and Mosul to Zoroastrian Merv and resolutely pagan Carrhae were now not only in touch with one another but freed from the religious orthodoxy imposed by their old masters: theological disputes among foreigners were of little interest to the caliphs.

This world produced well-traveled intellectuals expert in topics from military strategy to astrology, and comfortable in Greek, Syriac, Middle Persian (Pahlavi), and now Arabic as well.

The final key component came from farther east. Paper had been invented in China in the second century bce and by the second century CE it is found in the trading oases of the Tarim Basin. It was first used as wrapping, but people soon realized that like leather and wood it made a useful surface for inked text.

The craft of papermaking reached the Abbasid world in the eighth century, and the first paper mill was built in Baghdad in the 790s. As paper was much cheaper to produce than papyrus, it finally made writing in great quantity a practical prospect.

In the early ninth century scientific scholarship in Baghdad coalesced around a library called the “House of Wisdom” (Bayt al-Hikma), and the translation efforts were put on a more organized footing. The translators were paid a monthly salary, and the translations themselves often passed through several stages.

Persian scholars translated into Arabic works that had already been translated from other languages into their own, and since there was comparatively little direct Greco-Arabic bilingualism, Arabic translations of Greek works were often made from Syriac versions. Translation from Greek was therefore largely in the hands of Levantine Christians, already used to working across different languages including Greek and Syriac as well as Arabic.

We have a useful guide to the foreign works considered worthy of investigation in the form of an encyclopedia entitled Keys of the Sciences written by Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–850), a Persian-speaking mathematician and astronomer from the central Asian oasis of Khwarazm, south of the Aral Sea, who worked at the House of Wisdom.

He divided the work into two books: one describes “Islamic religious law and Arabic sciences,” defined as law, theology, grammar, secretaryship, poetry, and history; the other is devoted to “the sciences of foreigners such as the Greeks and other nations”: philosophy, logic, law, medicine, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy/astrology, music, mechanics, and alchemy.

The Greek philosophers translated into Arabic ranged from Plato and Euclid writing in the fourth century B.C.E. to the third-century C.E. Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus. Arabic scholars took a particular interest in the work of Aristotle, as well as in Greek commentaries on it.

More practical Greek texts also found their way into the collection, on topics from engineering to military tactics to falconry. Popular literature included books of fables, “wisdom sayings,” and letters supposedly exchanged between famous historical figures. Classical poetry, drama, and history were of less interest: even Homer only appears in quotations found in scientific authors.

This was in part because the scholars involved knew how difficult it was to translate poetry well. Even translating scientific vocabulary relies on a shared way of seeing the world that was hard for intellectuals working centuries later to capture.

They managed it with varying degrees of success, especially when it came to the more abstract, philosophical texts. Some translations incorporate a great deal of interpretation: the “gods” become “the god” and one rendering of Plotinus’ work equates his idea of a “first principle” with Allah himself. But new manuscripts were acquired whenever possible to check against existing texts and new translations were issued where clear improvements could be made.

Scholars also thought hard about the methodology and challenges of translation: a Nestorian Christian doctor from Basra who worked in Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Arabic called Hunayn ibn Ishaq argued strongly for the principle that translations should be fluent and relatively free, rather than rigorous but unreadable word-for-word renditions.

Read: Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science

Some of the Greek texts were acquired through personal request, even from the caliph himself. Other manuscripts were found on investigative missions, or indeed rescued: a tenth-century compendium of literature written in Baghdad reports that camel-loads of old works were discovered in a pagan Greek temple that had been locked since the arrival of Christianity, getting worn and gnawed at by pests.

As western European monks and nuns laboriously copied Latin manuscripts in candlelit monasteries, the manipulation, criticism, and sometimes outright rejection of foreign works by intellectuals working in the Islamic world catalyzed a scientific revolution.

Some works still proved elusive: Hunayn ibn Ishaq reports a quest for a work by the Roman doctor Galen (129–216 C.E. ) who mapped the four “humors” (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) onto personality types. After searching in vain through northern Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, he eventually finds “about half of it, in disorder and incomplete, in Damascus.”

*

The legacy of the Translation Movement is not in the translations themselves. The notion that the Arabs “preserved” ancient Greek learning that would otherwise have been lost is largely a myth.

Most ancient science was indeed lost to Western Europe for almost a millennium: such works were usually written in Greek, even by Romans, and they disappeared with the knowledge of that language. Only a few Latin translations of Greek works had ever been made: Plato’s Timaeus and various works of Aristotle, as well as practical works like Ptolemy of Alexandria’s Handy Tables, containing the basic information needed to calculate the positions of the sun, moon, and planets, as well as the times at which they rise and set, and to predict eclipses.

Read – Book Review: How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs

For the most part however the original texts survived as well, kept and copied in the libraries, archives, and monasteries of the eastern Roman Empire. Modern versions of ancient Greek texts are naturally based on those.

The Arabic translations are still useful, as they were often made from earlier and more accurate Greek manuscripts. And there are a few Greek works that survive only in Arabic translation, but they are curiosities rather than canonical texts: examples include a guide to estate management written in the first-century CE by a Roman author now known as Bryson, and a second-century CE treatise on physiognomy by the sophist Polemon.

The real legacy of the Arabic translations is the impetus they gave to further thought. As the Syriac patriarch Barhebraeus summed it up in the thirteenth-century CE:

There arose among [the Arabs] philosophers, mathematicians, and physicians, who surpassed all the ancients in subtlety of understanding. While they built on no foundations other than those of the Greeks, they constructed greater scientific edifices by means of a more elegant style and more studious researches, with the result that, although they had received the wisdom from us through translators now we find it necessary to seek wisdom from them.

His story is too neat: Greek texts were far from the only inspiration for Arabic science. But as western European monks and nuns laboriously copied Latin manuscripts in candlelit monasteries, the manipulation, criticism, and sometimes outright rejection of foreign works by intellectuals working in the Islamic world catalyzed a scientific revolution.

[Excerpted from How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn Copyright]

______________

Courtesy: Literary Hub (Posted on September 4, 2024) 

The post How Arabic Translations of Ancient Greek Texts Started a New Scientific Revolution first appeared on Sindh Courier.