Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Some unique developments in the Saraswati-Sindhu culture

Governance and Standardization 

From the Sindhu to the Nile

The earliest people in the Saraswati-Sindhu cultural complex came from the emigrants from Africa in 60,000-70,000 BP who settled along the coast of the Arabian sea from the delta of the Sindhu (Indus) and the Saraswati.    We have discussed in an earlier posting, how they expanded along the foothills of the Kirthar range (a southern offshoot of the Himalayas) following a nomadic way of life that lived off the fauna of the Indus valley.  When they reached the Khyber Pass, this wave split into two and the western finger met the descendants of the second wave of African migration (described below).
A second wave of migration from Africa, probably around 40,000 BP, crossed the Arabian desert and headed northeast to Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates.  The common pattern was to live in the highlands or foothills and move to the river valleys during the spring and the summer to “harvest” the animals that came for the rivers and the plants that grew there.  As the highlands became colonized, the migration continued in three branches, possibly as early as 25000 BP.  One branch went north to Asia Minor, Turkey, and thence to Europe.  In Turkey they would become one of the earliest urban cultures in 10000 BP.  The second group headed northwest towards the Caspian Sea, still sticking to the highlands for year-round settlement and using low-lying plains for spring and summer harvesting. They would then slowly make their way round the Caspian sea – some would become fishing cultures, but the others would discover the grass-covered steppes to the north and east.  The expansion could only continue with a change in rhe way of life as there were no highlands.  The steppes themselves were populated by a wide variety of animals (including the wild horse) that could provide meat and vegetables and plants to supplement the diet.  The land was flat and grassy and finally a new form of nomadic culture developed, characterized by homes built partially underground, with thatched roofs, developed.  The wild horses roamed in large herds and were an easy source of meat. The underground homes, initially built for protection from the other predators, created semi-permanent settlements. This culture developed domesticated the horse.  This was not easy as the horse was feral and untamed – male stallions in particular were dangerous when provoked. But over many years and centuries, mares and foals became accustomed to humans and were kept as a source of meat and milk.  By 10000 BP these semi-domesticated animals were trained to pull carts as well, using a yoke.  Later, around 6000 BP, it became possible to ride the tamer horses. By 4000 BP, the bit had been invented and reins could be used to direct the horse.  The horse never became as easy as the cow or sheep to manage, but proved very effective in the hunt and later in war.
The third branch went east towards Persia and Afghanistan.  Initially, the Himalayas were a barrier to further migration, but then this branch met with the westernmost segment of the Sindhu-Saraswati culture, expanding northeast through the Khyber Pass.  The meeting was friendly. Neither side suffered from a scarcity of resources. The presence of lapis lazuli in Afghanistan, copper in many places, and the versatility of the cotton plant from South Asia provided a basis for barter.  The mingling of these two groups mingled created a haplotype that could be called the “Ancient North Indian” (see Reich et al,  in Nature, September 2011).  Trade between ANI and the SSC and the extraordinary scale and fertility of the Indus valley encouraged the wide dispersal of that haplotype into the SSC.  The merged ANI-SSC groups continued to spread eastward towards Kashmir and the foothills of northern Punjab.
The SSC spent early spring and summer months along the river plain, the rainy season in the hills, and returned in the early winter months to the plain.  This was a small change from the pattern elsewhere in the world, where the predictable cold of the winter drove game away and it was optimal to follow them rather than stay in one place. In South Asia, the rainy season is highly predictable and winters are better in the plains.  The snow-melt that begins in April causes floods in the lower half of the Sindhu and the Saraswati, but the northern segments all the way to the Kashmir foothills were relatively free of flooding. Trade across the Himalayan passes created trading centers that became the seeds of urban life. The first cities, built on the western trade, developed along the foothills close to the Khyber Pass and then spread north and northeast, creating a chain of urban settlements all along northern Punjab.  The risk of flooding could be partially addressed by building living quarters on mounds or hillocks.  Producing food was no longer the most important work to be done – settling down made it possible to specialize and produce goods that went beyond subsistence needs. The population in Afghanistan was in touch with the Mesopotamian culture to the west and this enabled a long chain of connections from the Saraswati to the Euphrates and on to Anatolia in the north and Egypt in the south.
Trade, by bartering with occasional visitors, created knowledge and new needs. From these small beginnings, by 4000 B.C.E., a great trade route had came into existence.

The Matriarchal republics  of the SSC

In most of the world, most matriarchies became patriarchies in the period 6000 BP to 3000 BP, sometimes with vestiges of matriarchal governance. The first step in locally-driven change (as opposed to a change enforced through conquest or imperialism) was conflict with neighbouring bands and the transition of the band to a war-footing. The Nagas and the Rakshasas, by avoiding war with each other, whether deliberately or because there were alternatives, did not were still  matriarchies in 4000 BP.  In the Sindhu-Saraswati culture, settlements in the north and northwest had to deal with the occasional invader, while the southern settlements remained peaceful.  As a result, a patchwork of systems existed across the Sindhu valley.
The shift to rule by males occurred at a time when the role of the father  and the sexual act in conception was being discovered.  This discovery occurs after a nomadic community settles down and begins a mix of farming and raising animals such as cows and goats.  By chance, the patriarchal shift in most of the world occurred at the same time. In the case of the SSC, their extensive contacts with other western cultures made them aware of the role of the father well after settling down into urban settlements.  A slow movement away from matriarchy began – not due to resource conflicts with neighbors, but from knowledge that recognized the crucial role of men without threatening the role of the matriarch.  Concurrently, most men became traders of one form or the other.  Since there was no need to create an army of men, the need to artificially boost the value of men by denigrating women did not arise.  The result was a mixed-gender governing system in the SSC culture – the matriarch ruled with the advice of a council of both men and women.  The councilors were often self-selected from powerful families. The councilor’s power and role in the council depended on their standing in the community, either because of their own acknowledged intelligence, or the perceived power or wealth of their families.  Am unqualified councilor would be laughed at and ridiculed and would leave.  Thus the settlements were functional republics with a reigning matriarch.
This difference in the political evolution of SSC settlements did not mean that pressure did not build up to convert to patriarchy. As the volume of trade increased, armed and trained men were needed as guards to protect the caravans from attack by gangs of robbers.  Many men became mercenaries who were paid for their services with goods that they could use in their own families, or trade on their own.  This was a source of income that men had and women did not, and that translated to greater influence in councils, so that over time, the councils tended to have more men than women.  Effectively, the settlements tended to be ruled by men, and specifically either male traders or male warriors/guards, even though the matriarch was still the head of the settlement.
All the SSC communities recognized the importance of trade in their economies. When and if neighboring settlements conflicted over some resource, the overwhelming pressure was to settle so that trade was not disrupted.  If, for some reason, a battle was deemed necessary, mercenaries (trader’s guards) were available for hire – that tended to favor the richer or larger cities, which made many conflicts easier to settle.  This did not mean that smaller settlements could be intimidated indefinitely – other settlements around them recognized the danger of the development of a dominant settlement and would act to restrain any incipient acquisitiveness.  Thus the culture developed into a large collection of more or less equal towns distributed more or less evenly. And more or less at peace.

The role of the SSC in developing a standards-based culture

In any extended network of trade and exchange, the points in the network that are the farthest apart (in travel time) can be considered as terminal points.  Often, there is a bottleneck that constrains the route to these points. The SSC was the eastern terminus of a great trade route.   Being the end of the line requires careful practices, especially when trade is conducted via barter.  One of these is that buyers must ensure the quality of products imported there – the loss due to damages and fraud must often be swallowed.  These include adulteration, poor quality, under-weight deliveries of bartered items, and a host of others. The buyer who gets cheated has few options with respect to the seller as the seller can cut the buyer out of the network, while the seller can find other buyers somewhere else.
As a result of being the end-point of the trade route, the SSC developed weight standards at an early stage of development.  A highly accurate and standard system of weights – by 4000 BP, the weights in use bye SSC (many discovered in archaeological sites in Mesopotamia as well as in many locations in South Asia) are more accurate and better maintained than the weights developed locally elsewhere, including Sumer. 
The SSC became the first culture to appreciate the benefits of standardization. This “discovery”,  of the utility of standardization, spread like wildfire throughout the SSC.  In the absence of absolute rulers and chiefs who dictated who should win or who should lose, the urge to standardize, to make everything the ?same”, was the ultimate law in democracy.  A rich or powerful person could not simply force a poorer person to accept an unequal exchange – the inequity becomes obvious when publicly revealed and that would bring opprobrium on the winner of such an exchange.
Standardization spread to many many aspects of life in the SSC – bricks were standardized so that it was easy to build and to compensate the brick-maker uniformly; weights were standardized so that the market was more easily monitored and fraud controlled; the layout of houses and city-planning led to the construction of many standardized cities. Time and space were standardized – the day was broken up into 60 ghatis and a ghati was 60 vighatis; a yojana was defined in terms of the sun’s transition during a vighati – in the latitude of the northern Punjab this is about 6 miles – for they knew that the world was round and that the rotation of the earth caused a night and a day.

The History of History in the SSC – the Oral Archive

The SSC developed a sophisticated system for archiving history that may have been unequalled anywhere else in the civilized world at that time. I say “may” because the rest of the world developed systems of writing that led to the loss of any system like those of the SSC.  The SSC became an oral recording culture.
Like the cultures to the west, the SSC used tokens[1] to represent tradable objects and and “token boxes” as manifests – these were versatile tools that worked for trade, for business, for taxation, for commodity storage, and other commercial transactions.  Tokens could be used effectively for the size, range, and complexity of commercial relationships in 4000 B.C.E..  But as the centers grew and the scale of business increased, tokens were not sufficient.  Token boxes grew in complexity, but within a few centuries they did not suffice either.  The problem within a community or city was the number of different tokens that were needed and the range of meanings that needed to be assigned to token boxes (began as indicating ownership, but then went on to record loans, debts, inventory held for others, trading manifests, and so on).  The problem between trading partners was that the tokens were not secure.  Tokens could be lost or stolen or destroyed and this could cheat the owner of goods sent for trading.   By design, the tokens had to be simple, but that meant they could be easily counterfeited.  When a trade happened, the token boxes had to be broken if the objects were separated, but if they were sold together the box could be kept intact.  A system of drawing tokens on the outside of a token box to indicate the actual tokens present inside developed – this was a promise of the contents of a box and the promise was validated by the imprint of a signature seal.  This allowed a token box to be passed around as an exchangeable surrogate for its contents.  This development led to the demise of the token box and its contained tokens – the promise of the right to transfer a piece of property could be represented by the drawings of the tokens.
Writing began with these humble origins from simple tokens representing owned objects to drawings of these simple tokens.  A newly-made clay tablet, still wet, could be written on and the signature seal validated the tablet’s promise.  A signature seal would, by its very nature, have idiosyncratic and unique elements that could not be copied even by an expert.  The dried tablet was a contract that promised delivery of its indicated contents – since the tablet could not be modified once it was dry, the contract could not be unilaterally rewritten.
The cities of Mesopotamia and the kingdom of Egypt went down this path and developed writing and subsequently coinage.  But the cities of the SSC followed a different path – contracts were verbal agreements that were memorized by the trading parties and one or more guarantors. The role of guarantor became highly respected, for without one or more guarantors, a contract would be one trader’s words against another’s.  Of necessity, the guarantor(s) had to be most expert and efficient at memorizing many contracts, while the counter-parties could be less expert.  Thus all three of the parties developed some skill at memorizing the assertions of a contract.  The SSC became a culture in which everyone had some level of skill at memorizing and a few were highly expert. 
An expert guarantor did not strive to remember everything that was heard – there would always be many things that were peripheral to the contract.  There were guarantors who focused on remembering only the text of the contract; there were guarantors, considered much more expert, who remembered everything that was heard in the course of a meeting.
The word for “that which is heard” was shruti; the word for a remembered limited contract was smriti; the expert who could memorize “all that was heard” was rishi.  These three words would develop a potent meaning in Hinduism centuries later. Shruti would come to mean “that which is revealed” and refer to the Vedas and their extensions called the Upanishads. The reliance of the SSC culture on the memorized word would cast a long shadow – centuries later, it can explicate an observation credited to Megasthenes, Greek ambassador of Seleucus Nikator to the court of the Maurya Emperor.  He expressed amazement at the honesty of Indian traders and businessman who made verbal contracts supported merely by their memories.[2]
The SSC developed a framework of memorizing speech and honored the ones best at it. The people who gravitated to the profession of guarantor formed the Kavi Sangha (“The Society of Poets”).  Here they studied and extended their skills in memorization and as they rose up the organization, they gained respect in the eyes of the culture.  The head of the Kavi Sangha, called the Vyaasa, was revered almost as though he were the head of a religious cult.[3]
A member of the Kavi Sangha was required to perform some duties.  The Kavi Sangha organized story-telling events around festival days.  Some of these festivals were culture-wide, others were specific to a city or town.  At the culture-wide festivals, the stories that were told were the story of how the culture came to be, its successes in past years, and how they had reached perfection on the Saraswati.  At the city-wide festivals, the stories were local – how the city came to be, who founded it, the obstacles they had to overcome, and how wonderful that city was.  It was a matter of pride for a Kavi Sangha member to be asked to perform at these events.  Memorizing the history of the SSC and of each city was an essential part of the member’s training.  In this way, the Kavi Sangha became the oral archive of the history of the SSC.

Telling Time: the Human Chronometers of the SSC

The application of memorization techniques and standardization as an approach spread to their music and poetry.  This occasioned a most remarkable invention. The Kavi Sangha realized that it was possible to use music to mark time.  An entire genre of memorized music developed that was used exclusively for keeping time.  A trained singer who started at sunrise would be able to accurately announce each vighati and ghati, and identify when noon occurred.  Singing through the night, a star-gazer would be able to note the time at which certain stars and collections of stars were at their zenith, and, less precisely when they rose or set.  They discovered exactly how the day varied through the year, that the time period from one dawn to the next (daytime) decreased every day during Uttarayana, when the sun was moving north every day and that the same period increased every day during Dakshinayana, the other half of the year. They could predict the course of the planets through the nakshatras (asterisms).  The singer was a human chronometer, far superior to any of the mechanical or water-based ones that other cultures devised in those days.  Of all the ancient civilizations of the world, the SSC were the only one that considered the earth to be a sphere (whose circumference was 3600 yojanas, a yojana being the angular distance traversed by the sun in one vighati), and they were the only ones who could determine longitude.
The SSC standardized on a diurnal clock that started at sunrise in Takshashila. One curious side-effect of this standard and the knowledge of longitude with respect to Takshashila was that SSC traders in Mesopotamia knew when sunrise occurred in Takshashila and used that as the standard for the start of their day.  Their technology for tracking time was a mystery to the Sumerians (for the human chronometer could be silent) and they adopted the SSC standard – sunrise in Takshashila became accepted as the start of a new day in Sumer.  This standard spread to Egypt and later even to the Persians and the Greeks. It is not clear that it ever lost its influence – one should note the curious fact that midnight in Greenwich, England, the defined start of a new day in the modern Greenwich Meridian Time or Universal Time, still corresponds approximately to sunrise in Takshashila.
An accurate clock makes it easy to determine longitude.  Two clocks can be synchronized with each other. One of them stays put while the other moves to the location whose longitude (relative to the initial position) is desired.  The difference in the diurnal time indicated by the two clocks at high noon is a measure of longitude – each vighati difference being 1/10th of a degree.  A small correction is needed if the latitudes are different, but small differences in latitude can be ignored.  Under the mostly cloudless conditions of South Asia, a large number of measurements can be made and easily repeated.  The accuracy can be improved by synchronizing on the starting time of eclipses of the sun, less susceptible to errors of judgment.  To the human chronometer, one vighati is approximately 96 syllables (but can be as much as 108, which would explain why 108 is considered an auspicious number in Indian numerology).
The musicians who specialized as chronometers (and it became a specialty as all standards-based endeavors are) came to be called Sama-Vedins in a later age, well after the original purpose of that music had been forgotten.

Summary: Key characteristics of the SSC cities

By 4400 BP, the SSC was uniquely characterized by:
1.     The cities were republics (janapadas) under a matriarch who was the ritual head of the city.
2.     Extensive use of standardization for guaranteeing contracts and the consequences – no writing, no coinage
3.     Memorization as a core skill in the SSC
4.     Historical Archives maintained by an institution of highly skilled memorizers
5.     Skilled standardized recitation techniques used to keep track of time – the invention of the human chronometer
6.     Application of the human chronometer for determining longitude
One other characteristic to be discussed later was:
7.     The Zebu cow (the Indian humped cow, the male is also called the “Brahmin bull”) domesticated as a source of meat.





[1] The Sanskrit word is Rupaka – coin or form – a signed token representing an object. Initially made of clay in a form similar to the represented object. As the form became simpler, it was validated by the seal of a validating authority, who guaranteed the existence of the represented object.  Later this same seal would be used on token boxes to validate that the external markings matched the internal content.  Initially, Rupaka referred to the token, but over time Rupaka was used to refer to the seal on the token; then it referred to the seal on the token box; and, finally it referred to a flat clay medallion with two markings that guaranteed the value represented by this medallion – one side of the medallion is embossed with the seal of the guarantor and the other side with a icon of the object.  Clay is fragile, and the next step in the evolution of the name Rupaka would be when metal medallions replaced the clay. The metal in the coin had an intrinsic value and its quality, purity, weight, etc., was guaranteed by the seal of the minting authority embossed on one side.   This coin was the rupaka, which became rupya in common Indian languages.  The final step in the evolution of money would be the divorce from a commodity by eliminating the object icon on onr side – the intrinsic value could represented all that was needed.  The consequent ability to create wealth by fiat led to the arrogation of sole minting authority to a king or other ruler.  The value of such a coin was dependent entirely on belief in the staying power and reputation for honesty of the king and/or his dynasty.
[2] This honesty in contracting and the absence of a coin led to the persistent Western belief in the “non-materialism” of Indians and Indian culture.
[3] A side effect of the development of a memorizing guarantor was that the rupaka, i.e., the token sealed by a guarantor, never became as critical in the SSC as it was further west (Egypt and Mesopotamia).  Thus coinage did not develop in the SSC and in the rest of India until international trade expanded greatly and foreign coins began circulating alongside tokens (probably around 600 B.C.E. after the Persian empire expanded to its “Indian” provinces of Gandhara and XXX and the introduction of talents with the Emperor’s seal to the west of the Indus).  The superiority of coins quickly ended the last stronghold of orally guaranteed agreements.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Three Matriarchal cultures


The three cultures occupying South Asian were organized as matriarchal bands as was the rule in all human cultures at that point.  Each matriarchy developed in different ways in response to the rich environments that the cultures occupied.  These environments were very different from each other, and the differences in development could probably be traced to environmental and historical differences.  In the period long before the events of the third millennium BC, from the first arrival of these peoples to the South Asian coast to about 4000 B.C.E., all the bands were ruled by matriarchs.

Please refer to the essay "Matriarchy -- evolution to Patriarchy" for the background argument.

There were differences:
a) The Saraswati-Sindhu culture developed when nomadic bands settled down and cultivated crops. In the absence of conflict over resources between bands, the men became just another member of the band and a competent man could aspire to membership in the council advising the matriarch.  When fatherhood was discovered and recognized, it highlighted the men’s claim to equality.  In the absence of war there was no need to put down women in order to glorify the men (that would be the hallmark of patriarchy).

The SSC villages evolved into republican city-states, governed largely by a mixed-sex council advising a matriarch.  Formally, the matriarch had great powers, but none of which were exercised.

In the fourth millennium BCE, the SSC would find itself at one end of a trade route the crossed the Hindukush and went over Afghanistan into Persia and from there into Mesopotamia and further into Turkey.  All the cultures along this trade route slowly developed into patriarchies under the stress of competition for resources such as water and cultivable land.  By the end of the fourth millennium BCE, all were patriarchies except for the SSC.  The hill country between the SSC and Afghanistan containing the Khyber pass was called Him-alaya by the SSC and Mele-ch-a by the Persians (already, they had become unable to pronounce “s” and “h” properly).  The Mesopotamians called the land Meluhha.

b) The Nagas found themselves in a land that was difficult to till.  As a result they became slash-and-burn agriculturists. Slash-and-burn meant that at least once or twice a generation a band would move to new areas and the old plot would be left to go back to forest.  When a band moved, it would often split into two or more smaller bands that would go further into the hinterland.  The old plot would often have recovered in a generation and might be re-settled by the parent band, but the daughter bands would go find new pastures.  Bands maintained close and friendly relations and the custom of moving every generation prevented inter-band conflicts from getting out of control.

The Naga domesticated the chicken but no other animal.  As a result they did not know of fatherhood (until they encountered the SSC).  The matriarch reigned supreme within each band and decided which men could visit, how long, and how they were treated. The biggest problem was the existence of gangs of unaffiliated men. The men in a band were available to deal with this and other disputes that sometimes led to battles.  Dealing with these gangs required cooperation with other nearby bands. These bands were usually related to each other, and a group of bands might form a clan (a confederacy of sorts) headed by a “Great Mother” selected from the matriarchs of each band.  Mobilizing a clan to address some problem was not easy, but once mobilized, the Great Mother had supreme power over the clan akin to the matriarch and the clan could mount an overwhelming response to the problem.  Loyalty to the clan and the Great Mother was a problem addressed by requiring the Great Mother to take a new lover every year from a different band – this harked back to an ancient custom of sacrificing the matriarch’s lover every year at the start of the spring festival.

c) A Rakshasa band was a small collection of families, usually related to each other, that came together for protection and social interaction.  Fatherhood was believed to be the influence of the father on the unborn child during the mother’s pregnancy.  Men attached themselves to particular women so that they were fathers to children. Accepting these males was completely at the discretion of the band’s women.

Rakshasa families relied on plants in their section of forest for their primary diet. They knew that many trees grew from seeds, but this was not universally true. Some plants grew in the same place every year and the only way to start a new patch was to transplant one – if you were lucky, a new patch was created.  Root plants grew from edible roots.  Everyone in the family worked to plant and collect food from the plants.  Meat was obtained by hunting – this became the male specialization.  Men had also domesticated dogs and a Rakshasa man and his dog formed a formidable hunting team.

Rakshasa families did not move until forced by circumstance such as a drought, or a flood, or disease, etc.. But as the family grew in size, the area of forest needed to maintain the family increased and at some point it would become reasonable to split – often a group of young women along with the men who had attached themselves to those women would leave to establish a new village in adjacent unoccupied forest.  The forest would get crowded and conflicts would arise between the men sharing overlapping territories.  Battles between the men was a sign that somebody had to move – often more than one family would elect to move out to virgin forest – across the river, beyond the next ridge, and so on. It was easier to come to such a decision as the families were related – the decision was not left to the men, for they were considered easily angered.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Cultures in South Asia, 4000 B.C.E.

South Asian bands: 60,000 B.C.E. to 4000 B.C.E.

The first group: The Sindhu-Saraswati Culture

There is some evidence that around 70,000 to 60,000 B.C.E, a large number of humans migrated out of Africa.  Moving along the coast of the Arabian Sea they established settlements in Somalia, Yemen, the Makran coast, the Indus delta, all along the western coast of India, then up the eastern coast to the delta of the Ganges and onwards to point east, possibly all the way to Australia.  The settlements in Yemen and the Makran coast faced formidable challenges and grew very slowly, but all along the South Asian coastline, the living was easy.  The settlers in Sind, on the Indus delta, and the settlers in Bengal, on the Ganges delta, were hit with floods caused by the summer monsoons and melting snow from the Himalayas, and in both areas, a nomadic way of life developed. In the summer the bands moved to the foothills of the nearby mountains (Baluchistan in the west and Chhota Nagpur in the east). After the rainy season and as the weather cooled, the river receded exposing land made fertile with fresh silt.  Other animals also came migrated down to the fresh water and the abundance of food and so did the human bands from the hills.  As the number of bands in the west grew, they moved along the foothills of the Kirthar range, maintaining the practice of wintering on the Indus and summering in the hills.  They continued expanding north and then followed the Helmand tributary up through the Khyber Pass into the plateau of Afghanistan.  Here in Afghanistan, between 15,000 B.C.E. and 8,000 B.C.E., they would encounter migrants from the north and west, and the Ancient North Indian haplotype came into existence. Along the way, they encountered the zebu, the humped Indian cow, and domesticated it. [1]

Having encountered a group migrating towards them, the Indus valley population imported the Ancient North Indian haplotype back to the Indus valley.  The migration along the foothills also continued to the  north and east until they hit the foothills of Swat and Kashmir.  They continued to the east in the shadow of the Himalayas, crossing the Indus and its tributaries and at the eastern end they encountered the Sutudri.  They called it the Sutudri because every summer when the waters rose, the river split into a hundred streams.  Crossing the Sutudri was impractical, so they moved south along its westernmost branches and discovered the northern end of the Saraswati, a wide but manageable river.  They continued south along both banks of the Saraswati and found themselves back where they had started, twenty thousand years earlier.  Thus a unified culture came into existence that encircled the Punjab, the “land of five waters”, and Sind, where the Indus (the Sindhu) and the Saraswati deltas emptied into the Arabian Sea.

Until they encountered the Saraswati, they had never seen a river that did not flood every year. The Saraswati was fed by snow melt from the Sutudri and the Yamuna (another river further to the east) and monsoon rains that fell on the western side of the Aravalli range, that extended a ridge from the Vindhya range in the south.  The Indus and its tributaries constantly changed course and the culture that had developed was a nomadic one that went to the hills during the monsoon and the fall snow melt, and came down to the river plains only for the winter and spring. But with the discovery of the Saraswati, they were on a river-bank that would support a permanent settlement. During the extended nomadic period, they had domesticated cattle and they knew much about edible fruits and seeds.  The first permanent settlements emerged around 8000 B.C.E. along the banks of the upper Saraswati.

In the meantime, bands on the eastern bank of the Indus delta, had moved east and reached the Saraswati.  Faced with a wide stable river they created settlements.  They, too, built up herds of cattle and began to settle down and expand to the north.  This was a slower process as each new village would form only when the old one was deemed to be crowded and in 8000 B.C.E. they had only reached the upper sections of the Saraswati when they encountered their own ANI-hybridized cousins.

Over the next 5000 years, a civilization came into being.  It has been called the Indus Valley Civilization.  More recently, there has been a drive by some Indian groups to rename it the Sindhu-Saraswati Culture. The basis for this claim is that the largest number of settlements of this people can be found along the banks of the disappeared Saraswati.

The second group: the Rakshasa

The settlers along the eastern and western coasts of peninsular India found a very different environment. Numerous streams and rivers exited the hills of the Deccan plateau and there were a wide variety of animals and edible plants. There was no need to lead a nomadic life, moving from oasis to oasis in search of food and water.  Life was integrated with the surrounding forest and wilderness.  Bands remained small for it was easy to form a new band when the old band grew too big – the new band typically moved upstream until they reached the hills or arrived at non-forested semi-desert and scrubland.  When the riverbank was completely populated, the next band would move north or to the south in search of another river and forest to exploit.

A band established a home base in the forest, usually in an open grove close to the river, where a cluster of homes could be built.  Built of logs, daubed with mud, and thatched, they were simple homes that provided shelter from rain during the monsoon and some privacy but little else.  Cane baskets with lids provided storage for fruits, tubers, nuts, 24and other plant foods that the group collected.  Coir was used to make rope and nets of coir-rope or cane were used to trap small animals.  Bows and arrows tipped with flint arrowheads (in the beginning) and copper or bronze (later) were used to kill larger prey. They did not need to lead a nomadic life, but they did have to protect their turf.  They called themselves Rakshasa, meaning “protector”.

This group, originating from the coasts, slowly migrated north up the coasts.  In the east, as they approached the delta of the Ganga-Brahmaputra rivers, they encountered an unfamiliar group of people – this group spent the monsoon and fall flood season in the north and eastern end of the Chhota Nagpur plateau and went down to the delta in the winter and spring to harvest fish, fruits, and other plants.  The Rakshasas generally avoided conflict, so they turned west through the valley of the Mahanadi (“The Great River”) going deeper into the Chhota Nagpur plateau. As the Rakshasas went deeper into the plateau, they discovered the Sone river that flowed north out of the plateau.  Following the Sone, they exited the plateau in the northwest and entered the great North Indian plain through which the Ganga flowed.  Their initial settlements were in a forested area south of the Ganges at the confluence with the Sone.

By 4000 B.C.E., the Rakshasas had settled in the forest on both banks of the Ganga.  Having reached the Ganga, they had expanded to the east.  The river turned north and then went further east to merge with the Brahmaputra coming from further east – this was a flood-prone plain and the forest disappeared.  The river here was settled by a people who called themselves Meena-Nagas, who relied on fish as their primary food.  As usual, the Rakshasas stopped well short of  conflict.  Their expansion continued to the west of the Son-Ganga merge, but they encountered another people who also called themselves Naga, but not Meena.  These Nagas made common cause with the Meena-Nagas of the Ganges delta.  As a result, the Rakshasas could not expand along the river bank.  They pushed north towards the Himalayas, but had to stop when they reached the foot-hills of the Himalayas and were overwhelmed by the scale of the mountains.

Another branch of Rakshasas went west from the Chhota Nagpur following tributaries of the Mahanadi into the interior forests of the Deccan plateau.  But this land was only watered by the monsoons and years of drought alternated with flash floods. The hillsides were heavily forested with trees that could survive the lack of rain.  For the Rakshasas, expansion was limited by the ability to cultivate the hillside with a minimum of labor.

The Rakshasas were the source of the Ancient South Indian haplogroup.

The third group: the Nagas

The third group, who called themselves the Nagas, had initially settled in the Ganga-Brahmaputra Delta. In the beginning, they followed the model common to the Sindhu-Saraswati culture and the Rakshasas – they spent the monsoon and fall in the north-eastern stretches of Chhota Nagpur.  Naga bands came down to the river plains only in the winter and spring.  The waters would have receded and left a layer of sediment on the banks.  The heavier clay sediments had been laid down in the upper reaches of the Ganga and the sediment here was sandier and easier to cultivate, so it was possible to plant a winter crop of fruits and vegetables.  River fishes as well as forest wildlife supplemented this largely vegetarian diet.  The Nagas expanded north and when they reached the confluence of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra they continued to the Himalayan foothills.  Here they encountered a group that had entered the subcontinent from Tibet via Nepal.  That group was moving in front of the advancing glaciers of 20,000 B.C.E.

The initial encounters with the northern group created confusion. The newcomers did not understand that when the Nagas left during the monsoon, they were not abandoning their lands.  In the beginning, the Nagas adjusted – land was plentiful, but as the newcomers occupied more and more of the best land, customs changed.  The Naga bands began to protect “their” land by abandoning the annual migration to the foothills.  The northerners also learned new practices – how to store food so that it would not spoil in the hot, wet monsoon season.  Houses had to be built on pilings by the river banks that would survive floods – the northerners were used to building permanent homes on the Terai hillsides and the rugged Nepali plateau, but they had to learn to build homes that were less permanent as nothing was storm resistant. Floods and rainstorms destroyed houses every few years, so houses had to be rebuilt or repaired often – a pattern emerged of moving in response to deterioration of a settlement and rebuilding in a different location.

Over the next ten thousand years the two groups merged.  The resulting culture called itself Naga.  The older Nagas, still dominant in the mangrove forests of the delta called themselves Meena-Naga, the Fish(-ing) Nagas. Over the next 10,000 years the groups merged.  The Tibetans contributed the Ancient East Indian haplotype to the population.  As Naga settlements increased and moved away for the flood-plain and upstream, they developed agricultural practices that were consistent with frequent moves.  Sometime around 8000 B.C.E., wild rice was discovered and became a staple grain.  We do not know where rice was first discovered and cultivated, but it is possible that it was a Naga discovery.  Rice grew best in flooded fields and that brought about another innovation in Naga practice – when a Naga village moved it prepared new farmland for growing rice by a controlled burn to create an open grove in the forest for planting.

Thus when the Rakshasas first encountered them, the Nagas had already settled along the Ganges all the way up to the confluence of the Chambal and the Ganga (the Yamuna at that time flowed west into the Saraswati and the Chambal with the Ganga and not the Yamuna as it does now).  The Rakshasa expansion exerted pressure to the east as well as to the west.  Since the Naga groups to the east could not move, they resisted, but to the west the Nagas simply abandoned their farms and went further west in response to Rakshasa expansion.  As a result, by 4000 B.C.E., Nagas had settled all the way up the Ganges to the foothills of the Himalayas as well as much of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta and points further east – the Naga range was divided in two by a Rakshasa-dominated area on both sides of the Ganga east of the confluence with the Sone.

Conclusion: South Asia in 4000 B.C.E.

The period from 70,000 B.C.E. to 4000 B.C.E. covers a lot of history. It includes a global ice age that reached its maximum around 20,000 B.C.E.  South Asia stayed largely free of glaciers, ice, and extreme cold, especially near the coasts.  The population of South Asia grew at a time that other areas of the world were shrinking.  Issues of farming and domestication could be addressed in South Asia between 15,000 B.C.E. and 8000 B.C.E. at a time when the Middle East, Europe, the Russian steppes were snow-bound and struggling for survival.  By 8000 B.C.E. the South Asian populations had established settlements, started farming or cultivation, while the rest of the world was just beginning the process.

By 4000 B.C.E., a fully urban Saraswati-Sindhu culture existed in the west, while the vast Gangetic plain supported partly nomadic populations that employed simple cultivation techniques.


1 The domestication of the zebu led the SSC down a path significantly different from the Shakas of the steppes who domesticated the horse.  Both animals can be used as draft animals, but the horse is larger, eats more, prefers foods that must be grown in competition with food for humans, is less compliant when milked, and must be individually tamed. Horsemeat is also leaner, i.e., delivering less energy, making it more expensive.  However, the horse can be a weapon of war, and that would make a big difference in a later era.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Overview of Blog Contents

Outline of Posts

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The posts in this blog begin with a description of the initial populations of South Asia resulting from the 60,000 year-old migration out of Africa. It will progress to the description of the demographic distribution of three variant haplotypes ("Ancient North Indian", "Ancient South Indian", and "Ancient East Indian") in the northern plains. Then, we will provide the frame story of the Re-imagined Mahabharata, i.e., How the orally transmitted Mahabharata came to be written down and the political reason it was distributed all over India (like the Re-imagined Mahabharata these frame stories are speculative.

[I am leaving this collection of posts unchanged, even though many changes in the grand story have been made since March 2013. The first book The Last Kaurava was published by Leadstart Inc., of Mumbai India in November 2015, a revised version will be released this year as the first in a series of 5 books. The population distribution described here is used as a driver of conflict in these books.]

These frame stories will introduce the third Kindle book Bhishma Remembers (to be published), which will cover the story of Santanu's attempt to deal with a refugee crisis; then the story of his son Bhishma/Devavrat from childhood to  his  first handover of power to his half-brothers Chitrangada and Vichitravirya; then, a second handover of power to his nephews Dhritarashtra and Pandu; and then a third handover of power to his grand-nephew Suyodhana that results in the disastrous war.  The last episode will be the one that results in Bhishma's death and the end of the Kuru family.

Later Kindle books will cover other primary characters, from Pandu to Ashwatthama.

Outline of Posts

First, before we get to the frame story, we will cover:

   The demographic lay of the land in the Indo-Gangetic plain and how it came about.

Posts #1 and #2 have described the evidence that the population of South Asia derived from three haplotypes, all of which originated at least 10,000 years ago.

This Overview is Post #3.

The next post (#4) will describe how two of these ancient haplotypes ("Naga" and "Rakshasa") came to occupy different regions of the Gangetic Plain in the east, while one haplotype ("Western") occupied the Sindhu/Saraswati plain.

I will then digress (post #5) to a discussion of how matriarchy, the traditional band organization of all three branches, evolved as bands settled down into cities and towns.  In conditions of resource competition, the changes led to patriarchy. Otherwise, formal matriarchy continued and developed frameworks of mystery around the matriarch while the underlying polity became (or could become) gender-neutral and either democratic or led by a council of families.

Coming back to the main line, Post #6 will describe how the three haplotypes expanded from a small beginning and occupied the regions they did.

Post #7 will describe how the Western or Saraswati-Sindhu culture (SSC) culture developed into a system of cities and towns that were at peace with each other and formed the eastern end of a great trade route to Mesopotamia and Egypt; how, internally, they were ruled by a council under a matriarch in which the leading families of the city had representation; how men and women shared power equally in that council, and the pressures that were pushing them to become a male-dominated polity; some key technologies developed by the Western culture -- extensive use of "human archives" for memorizing contracts; extensive use of standardization; the use of "human chronometers" for time-telling; the domestication of the zebu (the humped cow common in India); and, finally, some key technologies that they did NOT develop (writing and coinage) which I will attribute to the use of "human archives" as guarantors of contracts. (This is also speculation though I would welcome discussion on why or whether this provides a reasonable explanation for the three historical mysteries of the undeciphered (and possibly undecipherable) Indus script, the apparent non-use of writing for monuments in India before 500 B.C.E., and the late development of coinage despite extensive trade ties with other coin-using cultures).

Post #8 will describe how the political structure of Naga bands evolved into one confederacy (Panchala) that claimed dominance over all other Naga bands.

Post #9 will describe how the Rakshasa bands evolved into two very loosely coupled confederations on either side of the Ganga.  Naga-Rakshasa rivalry was avoided by the two sides initially by maintaining a buffer between the two.

Post #10 will describe how one SSC family (the Kurus) attempted to extend the trade route further east into Naga territory by establishing the city of Hastinapur on the banks of the Ganga. The resulting conflict with the local Nagas and, later, the conflict with Panchala, and the consequences of Hastinapur victory, put increased pressure on the Nagas to conflict with Rakshasas further east over land.

Post #11 will describe the tectonic events leading to the crisis and how Hastinapur was overwhelmed by refugees.  This will also describe the Yadava migration through Saurashtra (in Western India) and their ultimate settlement on the banks of the new river Yamuna.  This increases pressures on the Nagas to go east and increases conflict with Rakshasas.

These posts will have established the cultural and political landscape that Bhishma and his successors had to deal with.


With these posts we are headed towards the following two frame stories for the Mahabharata:

1) Post #12: The Emperor Pushyamitra Sunga's (circa 150 B.C.E.) project to rewrite and distribute a master written text of the Mahabharata as a way of countering the influence of Buddhist monks;

2) Post #12 & #13: The Bharata project (circa 800 B.C.E.) of Hastinapur to transcribe its orally maintained history to a written form in order to preserve it.

Post #14 will be a digression -- it will be a summary of the ORIGINAL Mahabharata and an introduction to the rest of the Re-imagined Mahabharata.



Monday, March 11, 2013

A mix of three ancient haplogroups

Background to the Reimagined Mahabharata

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Genetics and Jaati

South Asia contains one of the most diverse populations in the world (possibly even more diverse than Africa).  Any discussion of the history of South Asia must address the reasons for this diversity and that makes it important to understand the genetics of the populations.  It is generally accepted that the diversity now is the similar to the diversity in 2000 B.C.E. -- the few anthropocentric measurements that have been made in the Indus valley show a range similar to what exists.  My contention is that this was true for the preceding 10,000 years and forms the background for the Reimagined Mahabharata.  This is a controversial position -- the controversy arises from claims about the origins of "Aryans" and "Dravidians", a racial/ethnic distinction that has driven expert opinion since the mid 1850s.  Aryans are supposed to have come in around 1500 B.C.E., destroying an existing urban Dravidian culture. The evidence for an Aryan invasion is scanty and requires that one discount local history and traditions as recorded in ancient Indian texts. Dravidians are supposed to have come in around 4000 B.C.E. -- this was based on physiological similarities between Dravidians and some pre-historic Mediterranean peoples (i.e., with even less cultural or local data than for the Aryan hypothesis).  Both these invasions supposedly occurred through the northwestern passes (the Khyber for one) through the Himalayas from Afghanistan..

Recent work by geneticists based on SNP correlation suggests something entirely different.  A better solution to the origins question is to push the most recent "invasion" back by another 10000 years or so.  The following excerpt builds to that.

Caste-based exclusivity in South Asia

I grew up as a child in Bombay (now Mumbai).  One of the things I remember vividly is my strong belief that I could determine the ethnicity of another Indian by their appearance.  I do not think that I came to this belief by myself – I think it was the general assumption, not only in my family, but in the surrounding community. I believed that I could identify the state that an individual was from and for some people in some states, the caste of the person. This was never tested with any rigor, and I no longer believe the strong version of this thesis, that I could do it for every state or ethnic group in India.  I certainly cannot do it now.  Coupled with a changing South Asian demographic, my own absence from India, and the creation of new states in India by carving up old states, it is simply no longer tenable. The weakest version is that I can recognize a South Asian; the next stronger belief is that I can identify broad “regions” (West, East, North, and South).

To a significant extent, the strong hypothesis confounds nature (i.e. genetic inheritance of traits) and culture (practices of dress, eating, behavior, and so on).  In Bombay (i.e., Mumbai of the 1960s), one could always identify a Sikh, for they were tall, wore a particular style of turban, had beards, were intimidating and scared most of the kids, but were considered extraordinarily honest, and drove taxis; I could recognize UP “bhayyas” for they wore white dhotis, a cap, had had round faces; a Sindhi home always smelled awful to my Tamizh nose (probably garlic, but I did not know that); and you could identify two Bengalis because as soon as they saw each other, they would start spouting Bengali rudely ignoring everybody else; the “Anglo-Indian” from Goa spoke “kasha-masha” English that was impossible to understand.  The list goes on. These cultural stereotypes probably overwhelmed any sharp distinctions that nature could have produced, but there were weaker distinctions to be made.

The reason of these distinctions in India can be credited to the millennia-old “caste” system. Jaati, as it is more correctly termed, divides the polity into endogamous units, supposedly based on the “purity” of their labor (inevitably, perhaps, the plush tasks score high on purity and the hard jobs that keep the system clean and healthy score low on purity).  People rarely married outside caste boundaries.  This is not to say that inter-caste sexual relationships, including marriage, did not occur – they were punished by a mix of religious and economic sanctions, which militated against expressions of interest  not leading to anything.  But the result is that  most Indian jaatis, (of which there are over four thousand) show, when analyzed with DNA-SNP analysis, a distinct founder effect dating from 100 to 200 generations ago. That is to say, Indian jaati endogamy began over 2000 years ago and maybe as late as 4000 years ago.

A hundred generations, and for that matter, two hundred generations are not enough for speciation – Indian jaatis are still fertile with each other (!) – but they are enough for some significant changes.  If the founder group was small enough and had some unusual genetic mutation, that would be more prevalent in that jaati than in the general population.  Some of these changes may be covert changes that are hard to detect in a deliberate manner, but recognizable unconsciously as a pattern.

The point is that by adopting the jaati system at some pre-historical point in the past, Indian civilization cast into stone the diversity of that era. The diversity of traits displayed by the various castes represent the diversity of traits that existed over two thousand years ago! Unlike Europe and China, where significant chunks of the population share a genetic heritage that can be traced to specific migratory events, the Indian population was already diverse at the beginning of recorded Indian history. If we are to find an explanation for the diversity of traits in South Asia, we have to begin with an explanation for these diverse traits being in place 2000-4000 years ago.

Sources of Diversity in South Asia

The analysis of correlation between SNPs between various ethnic and family groups has been used to build inheritance trees.  These attempt to explain how two groups split from a parent group and approximately when that might have happened (in terms of generations). When two populations meet and become one, it is possible to propose how these populations contributed to the pattern of SNPS in the current population – crudely, what proportion of traits were contributed by each of the parent populations.

Such analysis has been applied in a limited way to South Asian populations, across jaatis and within jaatis.  Much more work needs to be done and the work has to be extended to all jaatis if possible.  But based on current studies, the family tree for a subset of jaatis is best explained by positing an “Ancient North Indian” population and an “Ancient South Indian” population that merged.  Jaatis in the northwest tended to be as much as 90-95% ANI.  As one moves south and east towards the Deccan peninsula the percentage of ANI decreases and the percentage of ASI increases.  This continues south through the Deccan – unfortunately, this information is particularly scanty – and ends with the lowest ANI of 40% and ASI of about 60% in the deep south.

The source of the ASI and the ANI is not the proposed Dravidian invasion of 4000 B.C.E and the Aryan invasion of 1500 B.C.E.  If the Dravidian invasion was the source of the ASI, and it was followed by the Aryan source of the ANI, there would have been significant pockets of higher ASI percentage all over the north rather than in just one or two places. The ANI proportion being 95% in Afghanistan suggests that ALL north-western invasions of India came from groups that were ANI themselves (otherwise a 95% ANI would not happen). A recent invasion of ANI would have created a much more stepped transition from ANI to ASI, not the observed smooth transition from 95% ANI to 40% ANI.  Some of the oldest tribal populations in the south have substantial  ANI percentage.  

When the same comparisons are made with populations from East India (W. Bengal, Bangladesh, Assam, and the other Naga states), the split between ANI and ASI is harder to discern as one goes east – however, one finds a greater and greater admixture of variants similar to East Asian populations from Tiibet in the north and Burma in the east and other points further east.  I have not yet seen a report analyzing the east-west spread, though research has been in progress for some time.  This can be viewed as the source for an Ancient East Indian (AEI) which is not addressed by the  Dravidian-Aryan invasion theory.

I begin with the hypothesis that South Asian diversity derives from three ancient sources. (I've called them "haplotypes", though, technically they are not because we don't have a definite collection of SNPs to identify one, but have a derived factor in a multi-factor analysis of all SNPs -- but it makes the point that a certain pattern in the DNA continues to exist.) It is important to understand that the word “ancient” does not refer to 2000 BCE or even 4000 BCE.  All the genetic evidence indicates that the ANI is over 10,000 years old, the ASI is even older, probably as much as 50,000 years, and we do not have an estimate for an Ancient East Indian, if there is one.  The east-west change is sharper than the north-south change and therefore hints at a later time for the mingling of populations.  I hypothesize that migrations from Tibet started around 8000 B.C.E.

By 8000 BCE, the Indo-Gangetic plain and Deccan peninsula was already populated with descendants of these three lines – an ANI, an ASI, and an AEI.  The history of South Asia begins with the cultural evolution of these three populations.

Caveat emptor, for the thesis that three independent ancestral strands occupied the Indo-Gangetic plain is speculation. What follows is further speculation on how those three groups evolved, and their relations with each other before the crisis.

To be continued ... South Asia from 60,000 B.C.E, to 4000 B.C.E.