Ideas

by Peter Watson

  60. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 777. See: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, page 278 for optics and the beginnings of scientific chemistry.

  61. Philip K. Hitti, Makers of Arab History, London: Macmillan, 1969, page 197.

  62. Ibid., page 205.

  63. Ibid., page 218. And see: Hourani, Op. cit., page 173, for further discussion of Ibn Sina’s idea of the soul. For other Islamic ideas about the soul, and its relation to the body, see: Smith and Haddad, Op. cit., pages 40ff.

  64. Hitti, Op. cit., pages 393–394. The current phrase ‘suicide bomber’, as applied to the many outrages perpetrated in particular in the Middle East, is strictly speaking inaccurate. Suicide is a mortal sin in Islam, as it is in Catholic Christianity. But a martyr’s death guarantees the faithful a place in paradise. See Smith and Haddad, Op. cit., page ix.

  65. Hitti, Op. cit., page 408.

  66. Ibid., page 410.

  67. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, page 98.

  68. Hitti, Op. cit., page 414.

  69. Hourani, Op. cit., pages 63–64.

  70. Hitti, Op. cit., page 429.

  71. Hourani, Op. cit., page 65.

  72. Hitti, Op. cit., page 434. See also: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, page 275.

  73. Hourani, Op. cit., pages 167–171.

  74. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 527. See also: Ivan van Sertina, The Golden Age of the Moor (a special issue of the Journal of African Civilisations, volume 11, Fall 1991), New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Transaction Publishers 1992.

  75. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 531. And see Hourani, Op. cit., page 193 for new forms of poetry developed in Cordova.

  76. Hitti, Op. cit., page 252, quoting Franz Rosenthal, Ibn Khaldun, The Maqaddimah: An Introduction to History, volume 1, New York: Pantheon Books, 1958, page 6.

  77. Cordova was the biggest university but it wasn’t the only one. Similar institutions were set up at Seville, Malaga and Granada. The core departments were astronomy, mathematics, medicine, theology and law, though at Granada philosophy and chemistry were offered as well. Books were plentiful owing to the spread of papermaking, imported into Spain from Morocco in the middle of the twelfth century. (The English word ‘ream’ derives from the Arabic rizmah, meaning ‘bundle’.)

  78. Boyer, Op. cit., pages 254–271.

  79. Ibid., page 254.

  80. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 579.

  81. Ibid., page 583.

  82. Philip K. Hitti, Islam: A Way of Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, page 134.

  83. Hourani, Op. cit., page 175. See also: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, page 275 on ‘the two truths’. For Islamic ideas on paradise see: Smith and Haddad, Op. cit., pages 87–89.

  84. Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, Op. cit., pages 110 and 120.

  85. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 854.

  86. Ibid., page 855.

  87. Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, pages 303f. It was this translation which produced the English word ‘sine’. The Hindus had originally given the name jiva to the half-chord in trigonometry. The Arabs had taken this over, as jiba. However, in Arabic there is also a word jaib, meaning ‘bay’ or ‘inlet’. When Robert of Chester came to translate the technical term, jiba, he seems to have confused it with jaib, possibly because in Arabic vowels were omitted. He therefore used the Latin word for bay or inlet–sinus. Adelard of Bath was also one of those who introduced Latin readers to Arab-Hindu numerals. These caught on surprisingly slowly, with many people still using the nine Greek alphabetical letters, plus a special zero symbol. One reason for the slow adoption of the Hindu system was that its advantages were not so apparent while people still used the abacus. There was in fact keen competition between the ‘abacists’ and the ‘al-gorists’ for several centuries. It was only with the wider spread of literacy that the advantages of Arabic-Hindu numerals became clear (in pen-and-paper calculations, rather than with an abacus). The algorists didn’t finally triumph until the sixteenth century. Boyer, Op. cit., pages 252–253.

  CHAPTER 13: HINDU NUMERALS, SANSKRIT, VEDANTA

  1. Basham (editor), A Cultural History of India, Op. cit., page 48.

  2. John Keay, India: A History, London: HarperCollins, 2001, page 138. Romila Thapar, A History of India, London: Penguin Books, 1966, volume 1, pages 136ff.

  3. Keay, Op. cit., pages 156–157. See Thapar, Op. cit., page 146, who says that Chinese Buddhist pilgrims mentioned them.

  4. Keay, Op. cit., page 157.

  5. Ibid., page 136.

  6. T. Burrow, The Sanskrit Language, London: Faber & Faber, 1955, page 64. See also: Thapar, Op. cit., page 58.

  7. Burrow, Op. cit., page 65.

  8. Keay, Op. cit., page 139.

  9. Ibid., page 145. See also: Thapar, Op. cit., page 140.

  10. Keay, Op. cit., page 145.

  11. Guilds even acted as bankers, lending money on occasion to the royal court.

  12. Keay, Op. cit., page 145.

  13. Ibid., page 146.

  14. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 162.

  15. Burrow, Op. cit., page 43.

  16. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 162; see also Keay, Op. cit., page 61 and Thapar, Op. cit., page 123.

  17. Burrow, Op. cit., page 58.

  18. Ibid., page 2.

  19. Ibid., page 50.

  20. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 170.

  21. Keay, Op. cit., page 151.

  22. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 172.

  23. Keay, Op. cit., page 152.

  24. Ibid. Inside India itself, the development (or nondevelopment) of Sanskritled to certain anomalies. In Kalidasa’s plays, for example, there was a theatrical convention that servants, people belonging to the lower castes, and all female and child characters, spoke and understood only Prakrit, showing that it was everybody’s first language. Burrow, Op. cit., page 60. Sanskrit is preserved in the drama only for the ‘twice-born’ principals–kings, ministers, learned Brahmans. Keay, Op. cit., page 153. Because Sanskrit was frozen, writers who lived a full millennium after Panini were forced to replace innovation with ingenuity. One consequences was that, eventually, sentences sometimes ran to several pages, and words might have more than fifty syllables. (In early Sanskrit, in contrast, the use of compounds is no different from, say, Homer.) Burrow, Op. cit., page 55. But although Sanskrit was understood by just a tiny minority of the population, that minority was all-important and, as we shall see, this did not inhibit the development or the spread of new ideas. Sanskrit acted as a cultural bond in India, as the vernacular languages fragmented and proliferated.

  25. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 197.

  26. Ibid., page 203.

  27. Ibid., 204. See Thapar, Op. cit., page 158, for the plan of the Vishnu temple at Deogarh.

  28. Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols of Indian Art and Civilisation, Princeton, New Jersey, and London: The Bollingen Series of Princeton University Press, 1972/1992, page 48.

  29. Ibid., page 49.

  30. Ibid., page 53.

  31. Unlike in so many areas of the world, the sun was not worshipped in India. On the contrary, it was seen as a deadly power. The moon, however, was understood as life-giving. The dew followed its appearance and the moon also controlled the waters through the tides. Water was the earthly equivalent of amrita, the drink of the gods (and a word related to the Greek ambrosia). Water, sap, milk and blood were all different forms of amrita and its most conspicuous manifestations on earth were the three holy rivers–the Ganges, Sarasvati and Jumna. Sinners who expire near these rivers are released from all their sins. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 110.

  32. Ibid., page 81.

  33. Keay, Op. cit., page 152.

  34. Ibid., page 174.

  35. Thapar, Op. cit., page 190, for a detailed description.

  36. Keay, Op. cit., page 206.

  37. Ibid., page 214.

/>   38. Ibid., page 208. See also: Thapar, Op. cit., page 195.

  39. Keay, Op. cit., page 217, while Thapar, Op. cit., page 210 gives details of the income of the temple.

  40. Keay, Op. cit., page 209.

  41. Gernet, Op. cit., page 92.

  42. Thapar, Op. cit., pages 143–146. Gernet, Op. cit., page 96.

  43. Mukerjee, The Culture and Art of India, Op. cit., pages 269–271.

  44. Ibid., pages 267ff.

  45. Thapar, Op. cit., pages 161ff.

  46. S. N. Das Gupta, ‘Philosophy’, in Basham (editor), Op. cit., pages 114ff.

  47. Das Gupta, Op. cit., page 118.

  48. Mukerjee, Op. cit., pages 255ff.

  49. Thapar, Op. cit., page 162.

  50. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 119. Thapar, Op. cit., page 185.

  51. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, Op. cit., page 207.

  52. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 147.

  53. Tamil poems of the first four centuries AD make frequent references to Yavanas, Westerners familiar with Hellenic science and Roman technology. As was mentioned earlier, this word is seen by some as derived from ‘Ionian’. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 151 and W. W. Tam, The Greeks in Bactria and India, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1951.

  54. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 154.

  55. As discussed earlier (Chapter 12, note 87), the actual word ‘sine’ emerged through a mistranslation of the Hindu name, jiva.

  56. Boyer, Op. cit., page 210. See also: Thapar, Op. cit., page 155.

  57. Boyer, Op. cit., page 198.

  58. Ibid., page 212.

  59. D. E. Smith, History of Mathematics, New York: Dover, 1958, volume 1, page 167.

  60. Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in China, volume 3, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1954, page 11n.

  61. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 157.

  62. Boyer, Op. cit., page 215.

  63. Ibid., page 216. The mathematics of India have influenced the whole world. But Westerners should never forget that, historically, India’s international influence has been primarily on the countries to the east of her. In particular, Sanskrit literature, Buddhism and Hinduism, in their various guises, have helped shape south-east Asia. In terms of sheer numbers of people affected, certainly up to the medieval period, India’s influence on the world is second to none. Hindu doctors believed that life began in the ‘primal waters’, that the appearance of people (their physiognomy) recalled the appearance of different gods, and that fever was due to demons, as was indigestion, the commonest cause of illness. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 148. Health was maintained by the proper balance of the three humours–phlegm, gall and wind (or breath), which depended on diet (blood was added later, as a fourth humour). The lungs were believed to transport water through the body and the navel was the ultimate source of the blood vessels. Hindus had a vast pharmacopoeia based on a theory that certain essences of herbs and foods corresponded to the humours in differing proportions. Honey was believed to have healing powers and was associated with amrita, the ‘elixir of immortality’. Ibid., page 149. There was, interestingly, no conception of brain disease–consciousness was centred on the heart. Dropsy, consumption, leprosy, abscess, certain congenital diseases and a number of skin complaints were recognised and described. The name of the Hindu god of medicine was Asvin and the best-known physician was Charaka, who described many real and not-so-real conditions. For example, he gave the name Ayurveda to the science of longevity. Ibid., page 150. All illnesses were seen as having an ethical element, resulting in some way from a moral lapse. There was a specialist tradition of elephant medicine.

  64. S. A. A. Rizvi, ‘The Muslim ruling dynasties’, in Basham (editor), Op. cit., pages 245ff.

  65. Ibid., pages 281ff.

  66. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 284.

  67. Mukerjee, Op. cit., pages 311–327. Thapar, Op. cit., pages 306–307, explores Sufism’s links to mainstream Islam and its role in non-conformism and rationalism.

  68. Mukerjee, Op. cit., pages 298–299.

  CHAPTER 14: CHINA’S SCHOLAR-ELITE, LIXUE AND THE CULTURE OF THE BRUSH

  1. Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire, New York: Norton, 2000, pages 171–174. Our word ‘China’ is derived from transliteration of Qin, the Chinese empire of the third century BC.

  2. Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in China, Op. cit., page 134. Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, Op. cit., page 844.

  3. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, page 316.

  4. Yong Yap and Arthur Cotterell, The Early Civilisation of China, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975, page 199.

  5. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, London: Verso, 1976, page 71.

  6. The oldest samples of paper were discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in central Asia, in the stonework of an abandoned tower on the Great Wall which had been evacuated by the Chinese army in the mid-second century AD. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 72. Microscopic analysis revealed that the pages–letters written in Sogdian–were made solely from hemp. (Sogdiana was a central Asian kingdom near Samarkand, now modern Uzbekistan.) Paper thus spread rapidly. See Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Central Asia: From Antiquity to the Turkish Expansion, Princeton, New Jersey, and London: Markus Wiener/Princeton University Press, 1998, pages 151ff, for the Silk Road; pages 183ff, for the world of the Sogdians.

  7. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., pages 72–73.

  8. Gernet, Op. cit., page 332. For the intellectual effects of printing, see: Hucker, China’s Imperial Past, Op. cit., page 272. Wang Tao, personal communication, 28 June 2004.

  9. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 75.

  10. Gernet, Op. cit., page 335.

  11. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 76.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Hucker, Op. cit., page 317. Curiously, the Europeans seemed singularly uninterested in what the East had to offer in this area. For example, the Mongols sent a number of xylographs with bright red seals printed on some messages to the kings of France and England, and to the pope, in 1289 and again in 1305, but no one in the West picked up on the new technique. Even Marco Polo, inveterate traveller and a man of normally extraordinary curiosity, marvelled at the banknotes he saw in China but seems not to have grasped that they had been printed from engraved woodblocks. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 76.

  14. Yu-Kuang Chu, ‘The Chinese language’, in: John Meskill et al. (editors), An Introduction to Chinese Civilisation, New York: Columbia University Press, 1973, pages 588–590.

  15. Ibid., page 592.

  16. Ibid., page 593.

  17. Ibid., page 595 and 612.

  18. Ibid., pages 597–598.

  19. Ibid., page 603. See Hucker, Op. cit., page 197, for a discussion of the difference between ‘new text’ and ‘old text’ Chinese writing, and the scholarship attached to old words.

  20. Gernet, Op. cit., page 325.

  21. Hansen, Op. cit., page 271. Among other things, paper money aided the development of the Chinese merchant navy which, at the time, was by far the largest in the world (see pages 304–305).

  22. Raymond Dawson, The Chinese Experience, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978, pages 181–182. Gernet, Op. cit., page 324.

  23. A completely different set of innovations was introduced in China as a result of advances in ‘wet rice’ growing. From the sixth century on, the Chinese began the systematic selection of seeds so that, by the eleventh century, five hundred years later, yields had been dramatically improved and there were two harvests a year. Traditional keng (rice) had needed 120–150 days to ripen. But, by the turn of the eleventh century, an early-ripening and drought-resistant form had been evolved at Champa on the south coast of Vietnam. Although its yield was less, the fact that it ripened in sixty days solved many problems (fifty-day rice was developed in the sixteenth century and a fort
y-day variety in the eighteenth century). Early-ripening rice had a major impact on the population of China and meant that the country was able to meet its food needs more adequately than was possible in Europe during the same period. ‘It was precisely because of her more abundant food supply that China’s population began to increase relatively rapidly since the opening of the eleventh century, while the rapid growth of Europe had to wait till the late eighteenth century.’ Ho Ping-Ti, ‘Early-ripening rice,’ in James Liu and Peter Golas (editors), Change in Sung China, Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath and Co., 1969, pages 30–34. In association with the new form of rice, the crank gear, the harrow and the rice-field plough were all developed at this time. Probably the most effective piece of new technology was the chain with paddles (long guzhe), which allowed water to be lifted from one level to another by means of a crank gear. Hansen, Op. cit., page 265.