roadrunner
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The origin of the numerical system would be shared by those who invented it only.
Motivations behind selecting the name 'India' in 1947
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The origin of the numerical system would be shared by those who invented it only.
Joe Shearer
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It is usually not advisable to enter a thread late, unaware of what has gone on before, ignorant of explanations that may have been offered, and sufficiently cover the ground, enough at least to need no further detailing and without knowing the positions that various contributors have taken. This is an unusually tempting thread, even if one detects suspect themes behind its choice and introduction.
I would like to comment on Sparten80 most recent comments, among other reasons for the irresistible coda to his main arguments, which runs as follows: By the way, this is an interesting topic, I hope no one is offended by it, as it has considerable academic merit and people need to discuss it and be more aware of this cultural hijack and sabotage (one of many) inflicted by the British on the local peoples of South Asia.
Since I disagree with a number of things that he has stated, but as he appears to have a sufficient degree of tolerance and broadmindedness to withstand a frontal attack on some of them, without losing his temper, firing nuclear missiles at his interlocutor or declaring jihad, this may be an interesting exercise. What's to lose?
I am not sure what the original reference was, that provoked this remark.
We can examine its validity depending on whether or not to accept the cited sources, Hindu epics (not scriptures), as authentic historical sources. These are not usually considered authoritative historical sources, although based on hints found within, there have been inspired guesses made about obscure parts of Indian history which have as often as not proven to be true. In sum, we can read it for suggestions of answers to questions whose answers are not to be found in recorded secular texts with a reasonably long written trail. We cannot assume that they are authentic; there is too much mixture of myth within.
It might be argued that Herodotus, the 'father of history', also had myths within his 'Istoria', single-legged men, men who slept in the shade of their own ears, legends of how gold was collected in the fabled east, and the like. However, Herodotus never spoke about his actual protagonists having been engaged with mythical beings, or having encountered mythical things or objects, unlike the epics, which are full of such incidents.
It is unwise and not historiographically correct to take Hindu epic sources as authentic. We shall deal with these at arms' length, therefore, and hope that this is clear to readers.
This particular reference was made in the Puranas, stating that the best practices were no longer to be found in the Punjab and its surroundings. The reference was made at a time when the language and culture of the incoming Aryans had gone deep into the Gangetic plain and was still moving east.
We can make sense of it only by postulating that the Indian branch of the Indo-Iranian speaking wanderers on the Central Asian steppes came to the Punjab earlier than to the Gangetic plains, that they were moving in an easterly, perhaps even a south-easterly direction. As the borders of this culture spread, its older habitations were increasingly considered inauspicious, its inhabitants came to be seen as outside the pale.
It is not right on your part to ignore the identical description of, specifically, the Uttara Madra and the Parama Kamboja. The Parama Kamboja may have been considered cousins from the steppes, a typical Iranian speaking dweller of the steppes, nearly certainly part of the great Scythian mass.
With the greatest respect to you personally, these views are extreme and completely untenable. Explaining why is a long procedure. Please bear with me. Another prior apology that needs to be rendered is that this exercise that follows is being done entirely from memory, so allowance may please be made for an elderly man to falter occasionally. It is hoped that there will not be a single major failure.
Instead of going at your arguments sentence and clause at a time, and fighting it out in the trenches, let us take a look at what we can postulate at a broad level.
The evidence today is largely linguistic. We have first the Indo-European language to handle. This seems to have branched out into Indo-European and Indo-Iranian variations during the wandering of the people speaking it on the steppes.
We know that there were five divisions (leaving aside the mysterious Boghaz Keui inscriptions for the moment) of the Indo-European variant: Greek, Latin, Celtic, Gothic or German and Tukharian. We know where each landed up, although it is a matter of speculation how the Tukharian landed up in the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang.
The Indo-Iranians themselves seem to have split somewhere on the steppes around the Syr-Daria/Amu-Daria river complexes, and the split in their languages was sharpened and deepened in this physical split.
As a result, and this gives us our first data point, some passages in the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta cannot be parsed without a reasonable knowledge of RgVedic Sanskrit; some passages in early hymns of the Rg Veda are comprehensible only given knowledge of Avestan. Again, linguistic analysis yields a figure of 1,700 to 1,100 BC for the Rg Veda, similar dates for the Avesta, leaving our fanatic Hindus and Zoroastrians and their dates in the 3rd and 4th millennium aside for the moment.
The second data point is the geographical references within the Vedas, which map on to features in the geography from the Syr Daria/Amu Daria river complexes, some on the mountains, and some on the foothills coming down from the high mountains;
The third data point is the tribes list from the Mahabharata, and the locations of the tribes, including, intriguingly, references to individual tribes and their peculiarities. A case in point is the Parama Kamboja tribe; horsemen, tall, fair, ferocious in battle, loyal to a fault, available as mercenaries to the feuding kings, source of wonderfully warm blankets, speakers of a language hauntingly familiar to the tribesmen in the Punjab, the Kauravas, but subtly different, and cautioned against by the high priests.
Our best guess is that these Parama Kambojas were dwellers in the Ferghana Valley, part of the Scythian congeries, speakers of an Eastern Iranian dialect. After being pushed around in the time of troubles when the Yueh-chi, the Moon-borne, were expelled by the Hiung-nu, and in turn pushed out the Scythians from their Ferghana homeland, one branch landing up in Scythian-stan, or Sakasthan north of the Makran coast, known in contemporary times as Seistan; another branch lives on to this day in the Punjab as the Kamboh.
At this point, it is necessary to address your misgivings regarding the lack of an associated material culture. In brief, the position is this. The early Indo-Aryan speakers had no identifiable material culture. In their earlier, steppe-land avatar as the Scythians, there is a speculative link to the BMAC culture; at that stage, if we are to go by our best-established links, this was a horse-riding, gold-ornament wearing pastoral people, who travelled the steppes like mastermariners and were the people who taunted Darius by staying just over the horizon from his expedition to hunt them down. The material culture that is associated with them appears in the form of tumuli and graves.
There was no corresponding material culture for the tribesmen who crossed the mountains and colonised the country beyond the foothills in the Punjab. They were in transition, and it is difficult to detect their traces until we come to Painted Grey Ware. There is, in fact, in South Asia, a long gap in material culture between the Mohenjo Daro remains, and the cult figures of the Buddha. Two major reasons define this phenomenon.
First, this was a society in transition from pastoral life on the steppes to initially just such a pastoral life on the pasture lands of the Indus river flats and then the Ganges river flats, followed, as their influence spread among autochthonous and peoples in the hinterland. As it happens, there has been no identification of any material culture with them. Taking the Ganges plain, for example, there is no trace of material culture to mark the passage of these people other than Painted Grey Ware in the period 1100 BC to 600 BC, that is, from after the time that the Vedas were thought to have been composed to the approximate time of the Buddha.
Mention has been made of the failure to find temples and other public buildings. This mention could only have been made in complete ignorance of the culture and civilisation and the religious practices that were characteristic of the period before the Buddha. Those early Vedic Hindus, for lack of better terminology, had no temples for the same reason that the Scythians had no temples; they were not idol worshippers. Idol worship became a feature of religious life only during the counter-reformation initiated by the gradual decay of Buddhism and the desire of the Hindu priestly class to preach their religion once again, that is, during the period 400 AD onwards. How idols came into the religious life of South Asia is not certain, although the Indus Valley Civilisation certainly had no lack of suggestive iconography. For the Buddhists, the first depictions of the Buddha were prompted by the converted among the Greeks who set up the Bactrian kingdoms. It may be recalled that this was during the period of the supremacy of the Buddhist religion, and the earlier forms of Hinduism were dormant, a minority in society and unable, perhaps even unwilling, to seek prominence.
From 600 BC to 400 AD, Buddhism slowly prevailed, with increasing momentum, against the earliest, Vedic Hinduism, which had no idols, hence no temples, and left neither the evidence of temples nor of tumuli, thanks to the adoption of cremation with the availability of wood in plenty, from the surrounding forests and arborage of both the Indus plain and the Gangetic. While the Indus plain was no longer the haunt of rhinoceros and elephant, the desiccation of some of the river systems having accelerated during the aftermath of the Harappan civilisation, it was still green and plentifully supplied with trees. It is Buddhism, therefore, that left the first traces of archaeological remains for posterity to examine.
At this point, I will seek a break to go about my normal work. If, Sparten80, you find this useful and interesting, I should like to continue the commentary with your following observations. Please feel free to indicate frankly if this is too heavy for a defence site. When you decide, please be aware that what follows is likely to be rather more comprehensive and fundamental an examination than has been done up to this point.
I would like to comment on Sparten80 most recent comments, among other reasons for the irresistible coda to his main arguments, which runs as follows: By the way, this is an interesting topic, I hope no one is offended by it, as it has considerable academic merit and people need to discuss it and be more aware of this cultural hijack and sabotage (one of many) inflicted by the British on the local peoples of South Asia.
Since I disagree with a number of things that he has stated, but as he appears to have a sufficient degree of tolerance and broadmindedness to withstand a frontal attack on some of them, without losing his temper, firing nuclear missiles at his interlocutor or declaring jihad, this may be an interesting exercise. What's to lose?
I am not sure what the original reference was, that provoked this remark.
We can examine its validity depending on whether or not to accept the cited sources, Hindu epics (not scriptures), as authentic historical sources. These are not usually considered authoritative historical sources, although based on hints found within, there have been inspired guesses made about obscure parts of Indian history which have as often as not proven to be true. In sum, we can read it for suggestions of answers to questions whose answers are not to be found in recorded secular texts with a reasonably long written trail. We cannot assume that they are authentic; there is too much mixture of myth within.
It might be argued that Herodotus, the 'father of history', also had myths within his 'Istoria', single-legged men, men who slept in the shade of their own ears, legends of how gold was collected in the fabled east, and the like. However, Herodotus never spoke about his actual protagonists having been engaged with mythical beings, or having encountered mythical things or objects, unlike the epics, which are full of such incidents.
It is unwise and not historiographically correct to take Hindu epic sources as authentic. We shall deal with these at arms' length, therefore, and hope that this is clear to readers.
This particular reference was made in the Puranas, stating that the best practices were no longer to be found in the Punjab and its surroundings. The reference was made at a time when the language and culture of the incoming Aryans had gone deep into the Gangetic plain and was still moving east.
We can make sense of it only by postulating that the Indian branch of the Indo-Iranian speaking wanderers on the Central Asian steppes came to the Punjab earlier than to the Gangetic plains, that they were moving in an easterly, perhaps even a south-easterly direction. As the borders of this culture spread, its older habitations were increasingly considered inauspicious, its inhabitants came to be seen as outside the pale.
It is not right on your part to ignore the identical description of, specifically, the Uttara Madra and the Parama Kamboja. The Parama Kamboja may have been considered cousins from the steppes, a typical Iranian speaking dweller of the steppes, nearly certainly part of the great Scythian mass.
With the greatest respect to you personally, these views are extreme and completely untenable. Explaining why is a long procedure. Please bear with me. Another prior apology that needs to be rendered is that this exercise that follows is being done entirely from memory, so allowance may please be made for an elderly man to falter occasionally. It is hoped that there will not be a single major failure.
Instead of going at your arguments sentence and clause at a time, and fighting it out in the trenches, let us take a look at what we can postulate at a broad level.
The evidence today is largely linguistic. We have first the Indo-European language to handle. This seems to have branched out into Indo-European and Indo-Iranian variations during the wandering of the people speaking it on the steppes.
We know that there were five divisions (leaving aside the mysterious Boghaz Keui inscriptions for the moment) of the Indo-European variant: Greek, Latin, Celtic, Gothic or German and Tukharian. We know where each landed up, although it is a matter of speculation how the Tukharian landed up in the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang.
The Indo-Iranians themselves seem to have split somewhere on the steppes around the Syr-Daria/Amu-Daria river complexes, and the split in their languages was sharpened and deepened in this physical split.
As a result, and this gives us our first data point, some passages in the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta cannot be parsed without a reasonable knowledge of RgVedic Sanskrit; some passages in early hymns of the Rg Veda are comprehensible only given knowledge of Avestan. Again, linguistic analysis yields a figure of 1,700 to 1,100 BC for the Rg Veda, similar dates for the Avesta, leaving our fanatic Hindus and Zoroastrians and their dates in the 3rd and 4th millennium aside for the moment.
The second data point is the geographical references within the Vedas, which map on to features in the geography from the Syr Daria/Amu Daria river complexes, some on the mountains, and some on the foothills coming down from the high mountains;
The third data point is the tribes list from the Mahabharata, and the locations of the tribes, including, intriguingly, references to individual tribes and their peculiarities. A case in point is the Parama Kamboja tribe; horsemen, tall, fair, ferocious in battle, loyal to a fault, available as mercenaries to the feuding kings, source of wonderfully warm blankets, speakers of a language hauntingly familiar to the tribesmen in the Punjab, the Kauravas, but subtly different, and cautioned against by the high priests.
Our best guess is that these Parama Kambojas were dwellers in the Ferghana Valley, part of the Scythian congeries, speakers of an Eastern Iranian dialect. After being pushed around in the time of troubles when the Yueh-chi, the Moon-borne, were expelled by the Hiung-nu, and in turn pushed out the Scythians from their Ferghana homeland, one branch landing up in Scythian-stan, or Sakasthan north of the Makran coast, known in contemporary times as Seistan; another branch lives on to this day in the Punjab as the Kamboh.
At this point, it is necessary to address your misgivings regarding the lack of an associated material culture. In brief, the position is this. The early Indo-Aryan speakers had no identifiable material culture. In their earlier, steppe-land avatar as the Scythians, there is a speculative link to the BMAC culture; at that stage, if we are to go by our best-established links, this was a horse-riding, gold-ornament wearing pastoral people, who travelled the steppes like mastermariners and were the people who taunted Darius by staying just over the horizon from his expedition to hunt them down. The material culture that is associated with them appears in the form of tumuli and graves.
There was no corresponding material culture for the tribesmen who crossed the mountains and colonised the country beyond the foothills in the Punjab. They were in transition, and it is difficult to detect their traces until we come to Painted Grey Ware. There is, in fact, in South Asia, a long gap in material culture between the Mohenjo Daro remains, and the cult figures of the Buddha. Two major reasons define this phenomenon.
First, this was a society in transition from pastoral life on the steppes to initially just such a pastoral life on the pasture lands of the Indus river flats and then the Ganges river flats, followed, as their influence spread among autochthonous and peoples in the hinterland. As it happens, there has been no identification of any material culture with them. Taking the Ganges plain, for example, there is no trace of material culture to mark the passage of these people other than Painted Grey Ware in the period 1100 BC to 600 BC, that is, from after the time that the Vedas were thought to have been composed to the approximate time of the Buddha.
Mention has been made of the failure to find temples and other public buildings. This mention could only have been made in complete ignorance of the culture and civilisation and the religious practices that were characteristic of the period before the Buddha. Those early Vedic Hindus, for lack of better terminology, had no temples for the same reason that the Scythians had no temples; they were not idol worshippers. Idol worship became a feature of religious life only during the counter-reformation initiated by the gradual decay of Buddhism and the desire of the Hindu priestly class to preach their religion once again, that is, during the period 400 AD onwards. How idols came into the religious life of South Asia is not certain, although the Indus Valley Civilisation certainly had no lack of suggestive iconography. For the Buddhists, the first depictions of the Buddha were prompted by the converted among the Greeks who set up the Bactrian kingdoms. It may be recalled that this was during the period of the supremacy of the Buddhist religion, and the earlier forms of Hinduism were dormant, a minority in society and unable, perhaps even unwilling, to seek prominence.
From 600 BC to 400 AD, Buddhism slowly prevailed, with increasing momentum, against the earliest, Vedic Hinduism, which had no idols, hence no temples, and left neither the evidence of temples nor of tumuli, thanks to the adoption of cremation with the availability of wood in plenty, from the surrounding forests and arborage of both the Indus plain and the Gangetic. While the Indus plain was no longer the haunt of rhinoceros and elephant, the desiccation of some of the river systems having accelerated during the aftermath of the Harappan civilisation, it was still green and plentifully supplied with trees. It is Buddhism, therefore, that left the first traces of archaeological remains for posterity to examine.
At this point, I will seek a break to go about my normal work. If, Sparten80, you find this useful and interesting, I should like to continue the commentary with your following observations. Please feel free to indicate frankly if this is too heavy for a defence site. When you decide, please be aware that what follows is likely to be rather more comprehensive and fundamental an examination than has been done up to this point.
Pagla Dashu
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Joe, your ability to compress hundreds of years of history in just few paragraphs, without even losing the nuances, just blows my mind away. That was an exceptionally well written synopsis of history of 'ancient Pakistan' (I hope you are aware that here, on this forum, we have finally discovered this South Asian Atlantis).
I seem to be vaguely remembering from one of Michael Witzel's (or was it someone else?) essays that the temples are also conspicuous by their absence in Mahabharata. There are of course mentions of temples in Mahabharata, but only in texts that were added much later.
I seem to be vaguely remembering from one of Michael Witzel's (or was it someone else?) essays that the temples are also conspicuous by their absence in Mahabharata. There are of course mentions of temples in Mahabharata, but only in texts that were added much later.
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Agnostic_Indian
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how can pakistan claim exclusively when 1/3 of land and more likely half of the original population is in modern india (considering the theory that they were pushed down south by aryans, large number of pak population today is outsiders or mixed breed because of constant attacks it faced, large population shift in partition days large number of hindus and muslims shifted to india while muslims from india shifted to pak )..
pubweb.cc.u-tokai.ac.jp/indus/english/map.html
roadrunner
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1/3 of Pakistan is in India? I don't think so. Pakistan is in Pakistan. Look on a map for the borders.
Half the original population of Pakistan is not in India. You've based this on zero evidence, only a figure that will fit your hypothesis.
There's no theory that says anyone was pushed south out of Pakistan in its entire history.
Pakistan has had numerous invasions. So? Does that change the fact that someone inside of Pakistan's borders at some point in history came up with all the mathematics? No, that still remains the history of Pakistan, not of India.
Partition wasn't that big a change. Probably 1 in 20 is a Muhajir in Pakistan and 1 in 100 a Muhajir in India.
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Question
If only Pakistan is the original India and..... u bravely asked us tht Why wud u named ur nation a India.... and u wer proposing tht modern India is not a part of Ancient India in ancient times, then tell me... today Why Indonesians Named their nation Indonesia which literally means a Indian Nation(land) in theirs own language "Bahasha"? ? ?
If only Pakistan is the original India and..... u bravely asked us tht Why wud u named ur nation a India.... and u wer proposing tht modern India is not a part of Ancient India in ancient times, then tell me... today Why Indonesians Named their nation Indonesia which literally means a Indian Nation(land) in theirs own language "Bahasha"? ? ?
roadrunner
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It was JR Logan a British Anthropologist that named it Indonesia.
Pagla Dashu
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Joe, I am using this thread to reply to your message on my wall as I am unable to leave any message on your wall or send you any PM. Hopefully mods will allow this personal message. I just wanted to thank you for your kind words. I am going to treasure those words of inspiration for a long time to come. I would also like to inform you that I'm a not so old e-acquaintance of yours.
Joe Shearer
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Thank you for your message. I really look forward to your interventions, as to those of Abir, Captain Popeye and other sensible, non-jingoistic Indians (there are many more, all of an intelligent and reasonable point of view). Having said that, I admit that when a particularly cheap crack is taken apart and its utterer smacked down by a Kartic Sri, it is difficult not to cheer loudly.
On this thread, incidentally, I am hoping hard that Sparten80 will support a continuation of the commentary on his scintillating post. It astonished me. It is not usual to see such a thoughtful and intelligent post. I just hope that he is open to alternative ideas and allows a further discussion. Without such support, the discussion is liable to degenerate into an exchange of abuse and personalities; not my cup of tea, thank you very much. The discussion that was going on with some Chinese members has gone that way, with the intervention of gpit; there are some members whose presence is a sure sign of beastlliness about to happen, and who seem to be tolerated only because they specialise in insulting Indians, and he seems prominent among them. All in all, this is the only worthwhile thread left alive, and is an enthralling one, regardless of its great age!
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Am I being praised or reproached ?
roadrunner
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I got about as far as here, and it looks to be mostly incorrect. I think the reference Sparte80 is referring to are the ones from the Mahabarata (whether they're a historically inaccurate story or not is irrelevant, it is a sacred text)
Mahabharata, Book 8, Chapter 44
Karna rebukes Shalya, who belong to a non-Vedic tribe named Madra, belonging to the category of Aratta-Vahikas
How can one go to heaven, having drunk milk in the town called Yugandhara, and resided in the place called Acyutasthala, and bathed in the spot called Bhutilaya? There (Punjab) where the five rivers flow just after issuing from the mountains, there among the Aratta-Vahikas, no respectable person should dwell even for two days. There are two Pishacas named Vahi and Hika in the river Vipasa. The Vahikas are the offspring of those two Pishacas.
The regions are called by the name of Arattas. The people residing there are called the Vahikas. The lowest of brahmanas also are residing there from very remote times. They are without the Veda and without knowledge, without sacrifice and without the power to assist at other’s sacrifices. The Prasthalas, the Madras, the Gandharas, the Arattas, those called Khasas, the Vasatis, the Sindhus and the Sauviras are almost as blamable in their practices
Mahisha Kingdom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
That is basically all of Pakistan.
yeah and why they named it if tht wasnt an Indian land/nation.
and why wud they named modern India a "British India" at the time of colonial period when ther wer Indian Empires wer like marathas and mughals wer calling India a Hindustan or maratha empire or mughal sultanate ???
Why Ancient Greeks historians called Patna"pataliputra" as an "Indian Town" ???
Because Modern India is a mainland of Ancient India and hence This Nation has a right to have a name INDIA in all sense.
What is Pakistan ???
Pakistan is not an ancient Indus's nation, hence it got nothing to do with claims of the inventions of people of Indus valley civilization ,the word "Ancient Pakistan" i donno frm whom did u get this hilarious idea ,cuz...
if u say the word "Ancient Pakistan" then u need to understand the history tht wud be very difficult to digest tht the ancestors of modern Pakistan are the childrens of the foreign Invaders who destroyed and killed almost all ancient Pakistanis, u know what i mean
the word pakistan is created in 1940s ,creation of pakistan is itself is the proof tht they dont belong to this Ancient Civilization of India hence they want separation frm "hindus" ( descendents of Ancient India so ur "people of region of ancient pakistan also comes to tht") and like Jinnah rightly said Muslims and hindus belongs to two different civilizations, hence it also gives a hint tht the separation was not only between Hindus and muslims ,it was also between people of two different civilization and hence separation between people of invaders and people of defenders of Ancient India "Bharat Varsh" .
u know there was no such criteria like region/location based nation "based on specific Land/region " for creation of pakistan, so pakistan can be created in any part of British India but whereever there wer muslim domination so tht cud be a pakistan, so wer proposed and created a muslim nation as pakistan, the region of Sindh,punjab,baloch,afghan, & bengal wer places where we found muslim dominations it also coincides with the cruel history tht people of these regions wer the first victims of Islamic Invasion and Islamisation by muslim invaders and massacres of locals and the settlement of turks there, i hav read tht the sacred river indus flown red with the blood of millions of sindhis who wer massacred in process of islamisation of Sindh in 7th cent.
Ancient India was named after a river indus .
im glad tht our Sacred River Indus has no influence(spiritual bliss) on pakistan but still has a great influence(spiritual bliss) for its childrens "hindus" and the name India still belongs to modern india .
roadrunner
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You could ask why native Americans were called Injuns. Just call everything India that looks non-European and it's a lot simpler. Will you be claiming America next in your Pan-India theories?
The term Indonesia came from the Indian Archipelago. They recognized the people, culture, and history as different from Indians and wanted to come up with a name that wouldn't be confused with India. It was either Melayunesia or Indonesia. So the point was they named it Indonesia in order to say "this land is not India".
It is much easier to rule a country when it is one unit, than when it is splintered into various tribes. Surely this is very obvious?
The Greeks would have called it Palibothra. You should note that Patalibothra of the Greeks could very easily be a town in the Northwest of the subcontinent.
http://indiafirsthand.com/2010/05/15/alexander-the-great-and-chandragupta-maurya/
You're not understanding this at all. Modern day India up until about 2,000 years ago was undiscovered. The Greeks believed the world ended at the Indus River.
So how can modern India with a 2,000 year history be Ancient India with a 5,000 year history. The answer is it cannot.
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Spring Onion
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where you had been RR. One of the best debaters on history.
man we need you here.and we missed you. hope all is ok
man we need you here.and we missed you. hope all is ok
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