The world's earliest dated inscription of the circular symbol "O", to represent zero, though the Bakhshali manuscript, whose date is disputed, could be earlier. The Brahmi numerals, 2, 3, 4, 7 & 9 are already instantly recognisable.
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The Chaturbhuj [The Four-armed God ie Vishnu] Temple just below Gwalior Fort, was excavated out of a rock face in c875 AD, by Alla, the son of Vaillabhatta, and the grandson of Nagarabhatta of the Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty, in present-day Madhya Pradesh.
The inscription states, among other things, that the community planted a garden of 187 hastas by 270 hastas (1 hasta = 1.5 feet) and that the garden yielded 50 garlands for the temple every day. The last digits of 270 and 50 are "O" shaped.
While Indian texts mention zero earlier & there is an earlier "dot zero" in an Indic stele in Cambodia, K-127, this has the earliest dated epigraphical evidence inscribed in stone that uses the concept of zero within India & is the oldest in the world to use the 0 to signify zero
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Some favourite masterpieces of early Buddhist art. Over the last week I have been researching the diffusion of early Buddhism. Here are some favourites I dug out from my travels.
1.The King of Varanasi hunting- illustration from Shyama Jataka.
Cave Ten, Ajanta 1stC BC
Detail of Standing Buddha in Abhaya mudra
Gupta, 5thC
Jamalpur Tila
Now in the Mathura Museum
The Fasting Buddha
Gandhara, 3rdC
Now in the Lahore Museum
The Diwani- the document that handed over the three richest provinces in India to the East India Company, 1765. Later, the British dignified the document by calling it the Treaty of Allahabad, though Clive had dictated the terms & a terrified Shah Alam simply waved them through.
As Ghulam Hussain Khan put it ‘A business of such magnitude & which at any other time would have required the sending of wise ambassadors & able negotiators, was done and finished in less time than would usually have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass, or a beast of burden’
Before long the EIC was straddling the globe. Almost single-handedly it reversed the balance of trade, which from Roman times on had led to a continual drain of Western bullion eastwards.
My next book, The Golden Road, will be focusing on the diffusion of Indic culture in the early centuries AD, and this short video gives an idea of the richness of the archaeological material from the period. livehistoryindia.com/tales-and-trai…
Here is an idea of some of the material I'll be covering, from a piece I wrote for the New York Review @nybooks in 2015
The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist civilisations of Southeast Asia, Fifth to Eighth century CE
There will also be a lot about the diffusion of Indic art forms and how the iconography of Ajanta diffused through Gandhara, Afghanistan and Central Asia
Tragic news from Old Delhi: the dome of the Masjid Mubarak Begum (aka the Rundi ki Masjid) just collapsed....
Mubarak Begum was wife of Sir David Ochterlony. She started off a Brahmin girl in Pune; found her way to Delhi where she converted to Islam & married Ochterlony, who built her the last great Mughal tomb, Mubarak Bagh. She then remarried a noble who fought vs the British in 1857.
In middle age Mubarak Begum became very grand and demanded to be referred to as Lady Ochterlony. Sadly her social mountaineering gave her a bad name in Shahjahanabad where her mosque was commonly known as the Rundi ke Masjid.
"In reviewing the vast literature on the subject, one gains the impression that the whole story of Rome−China trade has been vastly exaggerated by the myth of the Silk Route," Warwick Ball.
Far more important, it seems was the Rome-India sea trade & the India-China sea route.
"Of the few bits of both archaeological and literary evidence that we have, by far the bulk supports a sea route to north-western India, thence through the Kushan Empire. Other overland routes were almost negligible in terms of Roman trade links with Central Asia."
Warwick Ball
"The existence of the ‘Silk Road’ is not based on a shred of historical or material evidence. There was never any such ‘road’ or even a route in the organisational sense, there was no free movement of goods between China and the West until the Mongol Empire in the Middle Ages 1/2