Category: History
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Pleistocene rock art in Maharashtra
Ancient Rock Art in the Plains of India-Two amateur sleuths have uncovered a collection of mysterious rock carvings on the Indian coastal plain south of Mumbai: In the evening breeze on a stony hilltop a day’s drive south of Mumbai, Sudhir Risbud tramped from one rock carving to another, pointing out the hull of a…
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Rumbles in religion and cultural evolution
A few months ago I posted Society Creates God, God Does Not Create Society, which was a write-up of a paper in Nature, Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. The study was of interest to me because it seemed to test the hypothesis and argument presented in Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation…
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An Islamic view of the Crusades
I should say a thing or two about The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades. It turns out that the Islamic perspective on the Crusades and Muslim-Christian conflict is pretty much exactly what you might infer from the Christian perspective. That is, the narrative in The Race for Paradise is surprisingly unsurprising.…
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The shadow of the Hun
Short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey; and he had a flat nose and tanned skin, showing evidence of his origin. – Jordanes, describing Atilla the Hun When I was younger (think age 10) I had a period when I…
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The shadow of the Hun
Short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey; and he had a flat nose and tanned skin, showing evidence of his origin. – Jordanes, describing Atilla the Hun When I was younger (think age 10) I had a period when I…
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The arrow of evolution
5,000 years of changeMost evolutionary biologists would agree with the contention that evolution has no long-term direction. In other words, evolutionary change is shaped by the contingencies and exigencies of the present set of circumstances, searchin…
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Irish memories faded into myth
Newgrange Neolithic mound site in IrelandLocated on the northwestern fringe of Europe, on the “edge of the world,” Ireland has occupied a special place in the imagination of the West. It was a mild green land beyond the Roman frontier. But it was also …
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Religion change, genocide, and culture in the Indian subcontinent and Eurasia
Since many readers of this website refer to “genocides,” and all of them were born in the 20th or 21st centuries, I want to put a note here which I think will illustrate why it is important to be careful of the use of particular words and what their connotations are as a function of…
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Against being an intellectual subaltern
Over at my other weblog, The blood on brown hands is a legacy of all of history. Basically, a long essay where I fire broadsides at reductive postcolonialism in the context of Indian history and communal divisions. The motivation was straightforward: twitter is not really good to outline more subtle or detailed perspectives. But, it…
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The blood on brown hands is a legacy of all of history
Yesterday I put up a tweet which went a bit viral (I won’t embed since it has a vulgarity). It was the result of my frustration with a very liberal Indian American who was using unfortunate tensions in the Indian subcontinent to attack “white supremacy.” My frustration was due to the reality that a major…
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The Vedic People: Their History and Geography
My boss leant me is copy of Rajesh Kochhar’s The Vedic People: Their History and Geography. It’s a short and dense book that covers many fields. I highly recommend it. As usual, don’t take it as gospel, but as a starting point. The a…
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What to read if you don’t want to read Guha
In the podcast with Kushal Mehra he made an offhand comment that it was strange that conservative American intellectual Ben Shapiro was reading India After Gandhi to understand his country. Mehra’s confusion is simply that Shapiro is on the Right, but he is reading from the perspective of Indian Left to understand India. Though probably hyperbolic, perhaps…
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We are all Aryans now
Last year I contributed a chapter to a book soon to be published in India, Which of Us are Aryans? In answer to the question, the straightforward answer is that almost all of us are Aryans. That is, the thin but persistent layer of Indo-Aryan (“steppe”) ancestry is present across the subcontinent. In higher fractions…
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Forgetting the past
How could the Indo-Aryans have been from somewhere else if it is not recorded in their traditions? This is a common question that comes form many Indians. It is an entirely Indo-centric perspective. This is a description, not a critique. After all, the Indo-European Greeks have no lore of migration in the Hesiod. Many, such…
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Why Indian forms dominated Chinese forms in mainland Southeast Asia
On Twitter Peter Turchin had a question in response to me tweeting a new preprint on bioRxiv: I am particularly interested in what the data say about Indian genetic contributions — I thought that SE Asia just got Indian culture, without any subst…
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How the English abolished their British (Celtic) ancestors
Reading both Bryan Ward-Perkins’ 2000 paper Why did the Anglo-Saxons not become more British? and The fine scale genetic structure of the British population, published in 2015, is interesting. To date, this second paper is probably the “bes…
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Hinduism before India
Azar Gat is one of my favorite scholars. He does not seem to be one who bows before fashion. If you haven’t, I recommend War Before Civilization a great deal. With that being said, perhaps an overlooked work is his more recent Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. It…
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Donald Knuth in the Galactic Library!
If you are a nerd you have been waiting for George R. R. Martin to complete his A Song of Ice and Fire series. But if you are a next level nerd, what you’ve been waiting for is for Donald Knuth to finish The Art of Computer Programming. If you’ve never heard of Knuth, The…
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Notes the emergence of “Indic civilization”
Note: This post is a supplement to the podcast below. People get hung up on particular words a lot. This post is to clarify some terminology from my own perspective. It needs to make clear here that I am a semantic instrumentalist. Words don’t have power or meaning in and of themselves but point to…
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When myth becomes reality
Netflix now has Arjun: The Warrior Prince on its stream. I watched most of it to get a feel for some of the details of the story. I know the general outline of the Mahabharata, but I know the Bible or the Iliad far better (in case you can’t be bothered to follow the link,…