Edit: Just throwing in the whole crockpot: here's the link to the argument that a Bactrian king,
Diodotus I,is the historical Ashoka. Pretty interesting from a linguistic point of view, since it raises the question of whether Sanskrit predates, or postdates the Hellenistic Prakrits.
Not exactly long on time this week, so I'm going to pull some old reading out of my --pants. It is, however, a bit of a response to various provocations. (Lameen sends me here, if you're
interested.)
The joke here is that back in the late Nineteenth Century, a supposed "frontier of settlement" that delineated populated America from the "Old West" was passed by wheat farmers headed west. Supposedly, the improvements changes made by settlers would cause the micro-climate to become wetter. Rain would follow the plough, they said. Incorrectly, though there are other reasons for the abandonment of Kansas's numerous ghost towns. I could also make some strained point about the Middle East being dry, and the home of "Islamic extremists," and Kansas being dry, and the home of. . . But who would that be helping? The issue here is that we keep talking about culture (and language), where it wouldn't be unreasonable to start with rainfall.
A week ago, Brad Delong took us on a dive into the
superb research of Islamic medievalist Eduardo Manzano, who asks just how medieval Islamic institutions became so different from "Western." The implication is that this is going to matter for the divergence between "Western" and "Islamic" economies. Why are we European-descended, give or take, people so rich, while Middle Eastern-descended (look, let's just go with it, okay?) so poor? It's because of Roman law something Benedictine monasticism something feudalism something private property. Or so I imagine the argument. The fun thing about this is that we have someone with a fingertip feel for Islamic history sketching an overly broad and schematic history of
medieval Europe, with the ultimate outcome teleologically explaining the outcome of the assorted crisies, reformations, renaissances and revolutions of European history. Well, fine. Once we've excluded other possible factors, surely institutional history is a thing to look at, and Manzano is exquisitely sensitive to precisely the objections I've suggested here, and does his best to guard against it.
The question is whether we have, actually, excluded other factors. Like rain. The Middle East is dry, or so I've heard. Not that this is going to be about the Middle East, Islam, and the Clash of Civilisations, because it is actually about something I've researched in the past, which is not that. It is Bench Grassish, though. Notice the new label!
East of the "Middle East," where Islam failed to thrive, lies the the Indian subcontinent, long since split from its Antarctic motherland, collides in slow motion with the Eurasian plate, producing the Himalayas, lies the Punjab, Land of the Five Rivers. (
Maahi Ve, by Josh.) Much of the Punjab has been incorporated in the Muslim League's national home for Indian Muslims, Pakistan.
Before that, we are told, between about 2000BC and 1500BC, it was the home of something which we agree to call the
Harappan Civilisation, after the archetype, an archaeological site fifteen kilometers west of Sahiwal, on the Lahore-Karachi Railway, on an abandoned bed of the
Ravi River. Well-known to locals, who pointed it out to antiquarian Charles Masson, who described it in an 1842 book, Harappa was first excavated in 1925 by a team led by D. R. Sahni, commissioned by the Director-General of the Indian Archaeological Survey,
Sir John Marshal. Subsequent digs, especially that led by British '50s television archaeologist,
Mortimer Wheeler, have consolidated Harappa's reputation as one of the great Lost Civilisations of antiquity.
Qualifying the adjectives, the Harappan Civilisation is great because, apparently, it had a lost language, written in an undeciphered script. (Whether there's anything in it about the the Hiss case, we may never know.) It is lost, because, Mortimer Wheeler says, because Indo-Aryan, Veda-reciting, chariot-riding, bronze-axe wielding warriors of the north descended on them and destroyed the mud-brick citadels.
Later intepretations favour climate change or systems collapse or what-have-you, and absolve the Aryans on grounds of chronology, because the collapse actually happened about 1900, and everyone knows that the Aryans arrived at the stroke of 1500BC.
Just count the generations back from the Trojan War. Uhm, science. Specifically,
historical linguistics. If you are not moved to follow links, pioneering German Indologist, Max Mueller, argued that since the Buddha lived c. 550BC,* and the Vedanga and and Sutra Vedas are in dialogue with him, they must be the latest of the Vedic writings. The chain of listed Brahmanic teachers of these Vedas takes us back to 800BC. The Samhitas, which are before these, must have been composed over, oh, say, 200 years (1000BC). The Vedic hymns were composed over about 200 years. (1200BC), a date confirmed by
the date of the Trojan War archaeology's first good date for chariots down in these parts.
Fine, fine, whatever. I'm not going to be the iconoclast here. As
Terence D'Altroy points out, we probably would not infer the existence of Tawatinsuyu from the archaeology of Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, either. Having already used that excuse to suggest that the
Uruk Expansion really might have been an empire, I am not going to exclude the idea of a vast, Indus Valley Civilisation/Empire, just because its existence would make modern Hindu nationalists very happy. As for kicking Veda-chanting, Indo-Aryan warriors out of the picture, at least since we realised that Conan the Barbarian isn't real, we haven't been big on the idea that barbarians burn down cities without replacing them, if at all possible. (In other words, our barbarian invaders have to be subordinated to a "systems collapse" model.)
So, uhm, about that "lost" part.
Harappa (1):
Harappa (2):
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By Sam Panthakya. Getty Images, scraped from Slate. |