CQ2

Have you ever had the experience of reading something for the first time and then realizing that you had actually read it before and just forgotten?  There should be a name for that; there probably is, in German at least.

Last night I was reading George van Driem’s absolutely amazing two volume Languages of the Himalayas, a book I love for its eccentric encyclopedic breadth of knowledge.  (Eccentric because, for example, chapters are entitled “Kings of the Forest,” “Men of the Jungle”, and “Flotsam and Jetsam along the Southern Slopes.”  And because he has an idiosyncratic ’symbolic theory of language.’  But encyclopedic because he somehow knows about all — and I mean all — Himalayan languages.)

Anyway, it’s not a book that you read from cover-to-cover but I was looking at the Burushaski section last night and wandered over to the Turkic section, getting more and more lost the whole time.  Eventually I got to this:

Also in [China's] Gansu province live the ‘Yellow Uighur’, quite distinct from the Uighur proper, who speak a language closely related to Uzbek.  Yellow Uighur is now usually called Yugur, which actually does little to alleviate potential confusion, because the Yugur are a linguistically heterogeneous group.  The Western Yugur speak an Eastern Turkic language, and the Eastern Yugur speak a Mongolian language.  Some ‘Yellow Uighur’ even speak an Amdo dialect of Tibetan.  (pp. 1210-1211)

If you had asked me yesterday about it, I would have said that this — especially the fact that there are Tibetan-speaking Yellow Uighurs — was mindbendingly complicated and utterly new to me, but at some point in the past I had apparently had the exact same epiphany and scrawled “This finally and conclusively puts it over the top for me” in the margins.

There’s a common misperception that Greek settlement in Afghanistan was simply the remnants of Alexander’s garrisons in the east. For example, writing in a recent New York Review of Books, the estimable William Dalrymple says, “After [Alexander] died, the Greek garrisons he had established in what is present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan found themselves cut off from their Mediterranean homeland and had no choice but to stay on, intermingling with the local peoples, and leavening Sanskrit learning with classical Greek philosophy.”

If this were true, it would have to be a pretty impressive garrison of troops to have such an impact. But the reality is that there was an active program of settlement even in the easternmost satrapies, with Greek colonists moving to Bactria, and other regions, over the course of many — hundreds? — years. At least at first these were not isolated communities, and they were designed to anchor the successor kingdoms. John Grainger writes in his Alexander the Great Failure:

[Alexander's successor] Seleukos found groups of Greeks and Macedonians scattered throughout his lands, usually former soldiers settled in old Persian centers or new Macedonian garrisons. He organized several of these places as new cities, each with a defined territory, a set of public buildings, including city walls. Each city also had a garrison established in an adjoining citadel; he established cities, but also ensured that he retained control. Some of these places were organized while he was in the east campaigning in Baktria and India, and he inherited Alexander’s foundations as well: at Alexandria at Kandahar, Alexandria-Eschate and Merv, in Margiane.

And their impact was huge; in art (veristic portraiture, for one arrived in South Asia with the Greeks), medicine, language and scripts, warfare, governance, and philosophy. But despite this acknowledged influence, until fairly recently, there was a paradox about the Greeks in Afghanistan: there was the textual record and the evidence of their impact — Buddha statues in togas, lots of numismatic evidence, the edicts of Asoka in Bactrian written in Greek letters, and so on — but we didn’t know where their fabled cities were. Balkh today, outside of Mazar-e-Sharif, Ali’s tomb, in northern Afghanistan, is a dusty little village: Colin Thubrow reports in Shadow of the Silk Road that “almost nothing in Balkh remained.” This paradox — lots of evidence, no cities — was often referred to as ‘the Bactrian mirage,’ and it was resolved only with the modern discovery, by French archeologists before the Soviet invasion, of the classical Greek city of Ai Khanoum in northern Afghanistan.

Source: ESRF, Grenoble

[updated; links broken]

I highly recommend reading a great, thickly detailed, optimistic article on Pakistan, “A New Deal in Pakistan,” by William Dalrymple in The New York Review of Books. The thrust of his nuanced article is that the stereotype of fundamentalist Pakistan doesn’t hold water and that the recent elections are a cause for hope:

To widespread surprise, the elections in Pakistan were free and fair; and Pakistanis voted heavily in favor of liberal centrist parties opposed to both the mullahs and the army. Here, in a country normally held up in the more Islamophobic right-wing press of Western countries as the epitome of “what went wrong” in the Islamic world, a popular election resulted in an unequivocal vote for moderate, secular democracy.

I certainly missed that; I knew there were elections and that they had gone badly for Musharraf, but I didn’t understand the full import of those elections. And Pakistan, over the last five years, has been changing. Among the changes that Dalrymple notes are the booming economy, especially in the cities (”full of gay designers and beautiful models”) and the growth of a newly prosperous middle class:

It was this newly enriched and empowered urban middle class that showed its political muscle for the first time with the organization of a lawyers’ movement, whose protests against the dismissal of the chief justice soon swelled into a full-scale pro-democracy campaign, despite Musharraf’s harassment and arrest of many lawyers. The movement represented a huge shift in Pakistani civil society’s participation in politics. The middle class were at last moving from their living rooms onto the streets, from dinner parties into political parties.

But these changes go beyond the secular city; even in traditionalist strongholds such as the Northwest Frontier Province (ancient Udyana, homeplace of none other than Padmasambhava but I digress), the pro-Taliban party in power lost, decisively, to the Awami National Party (ANP).

[The ANP] is a remnant of what was once a mighty force: the nonviolent and secular Red Shirts movement, which, before the creation of Pakistan, was originally led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, an important ally of Mahatma Gandhi from the North-West Frontier Province. Ghaffar Khan was locked up by one Pakistani general after another for much of the time between Partition and his death in 1988, but his political movement has survived both the generals and a succession of bomb blasts aimed at its party, and has now—after nearly fifty years in opposition—made a dramatic comeback under the leadership of Ghaffar Khan’s grandson, Asfandyar Wali Khan.

That’s a little dizzying to think about, Gandhi’s allies in charge — again! — of the NWFP.

Dalrymple’s article was so good that I went looking for more by him and I’m now, ecstatically, reading his From the Holy Mountain, about old Christian communities in the Middle East.

James Miles of The Economist was, coincidentally, on an officially sanctioned visit to Lhasa when the riots broke out there last week. He spoke with CNN, giving the first good account that I’ve seen of the violence. Several points stand out for me, including the extent of the destruction, the lack of an immediate crackdown by the authorities in response, the surprise on the part of the Han Chinese targets of the violence, and the curent martial law effectively — although not explictly — in place now.

(His excellent article, “Trashing the Beijing Road” is available now at the Economist website, but no promises how long that link will work without a subscription.)

(more…)

A year ago now, I wrote:

For the Indology nerds: there are a set of clay tablets at the Guimet, I think on the second floor, which have as their provenance a Buddhist monastery in Kashmir. The panels have raised images on them which are clearly not Buddhist. I suspect they’re Ajivika and I seem to remember an article, which of course I can’t track down now, describing how the Buddhists reused the materials from an Ajivika complex as the flooring in their monastery, as an insult. But I can’t pinpoint the source and it’s driving me nuts.

Since then, I figured out that they were from Harwan, a site outside of Srinigar, next to the Shalimar Gardens. But I still couldn’t find the article I was thinking of or, really, any good information on the deeply enigmatic tablets.

This past fall, the Asia Society in New York sponsored an exhibit entitled The Arts of Kashmir, which — despite my best intentions — I never got to visit. (Here’s a review by the great New York Times Asian art critic Holland Cotter.) Consoled with the catalog to the exhibit by Pratapaditya Pal, I found some helpful references.

The beautiful catalog itself is much more substantial than a typical exhibit catalog — it’s really a collection of art historical survey articles about Kashmir, including architecture, sculpture, painting, calligraphy, and crafts.

The Harwan tiles appear in John Siudmak’s piece on religious architecture, which seems to summarize what we know about the site:

The earliest surviving Buddhist site is at Harwan, near the Mughal Shalimar Gardens, probably dating from the fifth century and of Hephthalite patronage, and mostly known for its terra-cotta tiles impressed with figural and floral designs used to decorate a large circular terrace on the hillside, which was destroyed by an earthquake. [...] Similar terraces have been found elsewhere in the valley; the most extensive at the site of Hutamura, in the Lidder valley. Their religious affiliation still remains a mystery. However, excavations of a rectangular courtyard in a lower terrace uncovered the triple basement of a stupa, a number of cells, and several terra-cotta figural fragments and three plaques impressed with stupa images (fig. 37.) [...] The stupas on the Harwan plaques compare closely with three Gandhara bronze examples, one also with columns at the corners, and confirm a Gandhara influence. (pp. 55-56)

So there are more of these sites, besides Harwan, although “their religious affiliation remains a mystery.” And nothing about the Ājīvikas. The second half of this redacted excerpt is on firmer ground, unraveling the Buddhist elements of the site; the complex symbolism of the stupa is a favorite topic of study and Siudmak’s comments helpfully locate early Kashmiri, presumably wooden, examples in the timeline between Greco-Bactrian Gandhara and later versions, especially Tibetan. (Tibetan and Central Asian religion and art is deeply indebted to Kashmir.) Note, by the way, that the tiles or plaques with clearly Buddhist stupa images are different — made differently and different in appearance and style — than the rest of the Harwan tiles.

But most interestingly to me is a footnote at the end of this excerpt, to a 1989 article by Fisher. Unfortunately, the scholarly apparatus of the catalog is shoddy and there’s no further reference to Fisher in the bibliography.

The curator of the exhibit, Pal, has a long useful essay (the metal sculpture section alone is fantastic) entitled “Faith and Form” in the catalog which also refers several times to the Harwan tiles:

The earliest sites that have yielded terra-cotta objects, which, according to tradition, go back to the Kushan period, are Semthan, Harwan, Hutmora, Ushkur, and recently Kutbal. These sites are particularly noteworthy because of the large, stamped tiles with figural and symbolic forms that represent an independent local artistic tradition. Although tiles for paving floors and walls of monasteries were used in Gandhara, they are not as richly and diversely decorated as those from Kashmir. The figures in the Harwan tiles further show both Indian and foreign ethnic types, strange crouching ascetics unique in the Indian plastic tradition and convincingly rendered flora and fauna. Both the Harwan and the Kutbal finds reflext a mature and confident state of artistic skill but, strangely, the tradition did not continue. There is no certainty about the exact dates of these sites, although the consensus is between the third and the fifth century. (p. 66)

So now we have a whole set of sites related to Harwan, including Siudmak’s afore-mentioned Hutamura — presumably the same as Pal’s “Hutmora” — plus Semthan, Ushkur, and Kutbal! Again, though, the scholarly apparatus of the catalog fails us, since the endnotes in this passage aren’t correctly referenced; #9 appears twice in the excerpt above and only once in the notes; the only usable reference (a pers. comm.) is to the recent Kutbal find. And still no Ājīvikas.

Even though I couldn’t get an exact citation, some heavy duty googling yielded reference to a 1982 article by a Robert E. Fisher in Art International, a now-defunct (I think) journal. For the record, it’s:

Fisher, Robert E. The enigma of Harwan, Art International, 1982, XXV(9)33-4

There may be a later, 1989, Harwan article by Fisher, too, as Siudmak suggests, but I haven’t been able to find it. (Fisher’s early 1980’s Ph.D. dissertation at USC was on the Buddhist architecture of Kashmir.)

I think that Fisher’s article, the one that I was looking for and finally tracked down, thanks to my wife and the wonders of inter-library loan, more or less definitively addresses the enigma of Harwan. Fisher proves — at least to my satisfaction — that the tiles are part of an Ājīvika religious site, later reused in a nearby Buddhist monastery. (Thus Siudmak’s reference to [monastic] cells adjoining the stupa.)

Fisher, although not cited in the 2007 Kashmir catalog, acknowledges Pal in his endnotes: “It was his belief that there is more to Harwan than has been published as well as his careful screening of my evidence that inspired this essay.”  And, although I haven’t yet had a chance to read it, Pal discusses (pp. 223-224) a tile in the LACMA collection, described as “Tile with Ajivaka (?) Ascetics” in vol. 1 of his Indian Sculpture (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, University of California Press, 1986) book.

Alright, if you’re still with me, some quick background on our suspects:

We really don’t know much about the Ājīvikas, except from what we read about them from their successful rivals, including Buddhists and Jains. It’s a similar situation to, say, gnosticism in late antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean: most of what we knew, up until the Nag Hammadi finds, about gnosticism was hearsay, and the hearsay treated the tradition as heretical.

The founder of the Ājīvika tradition, Gosala, supposedly was a contemporary of Mahavira, the founder of Jainism and thus a near-contemporary of the Buddha and possibly from the same north-central region of India. (Fisher points to a 1951 book by A.L. Basham, History and Doctrine of the Ājīvikas, which I haven’t read yet. There’s also a workmanlike Wikipedia article.) They were famously ascetic, and one story that really left an impression in my mind was that they supposedly meditated (or committed slow suicide) inside of clay pots. This is such a disturbingly powerful idea that just thinking about it makes me start to physically panic. Whether or not this has any basis in reality, of course, is another matter, but Ājīvikas are closely associated with pots, pottery, and the like. Thus, as you might have guessed, all the clay tiles. And look again at the ascetic figures in the tiles; don’t they seem like they could be crouching in pots?

Fisher, citing Basham, notes that caves in Bihar, with Ājīvika inscriptions from the 3rd century BC, had three foot deep deposits of clay fragments in them when excavated by Alexander Cunningham in the 19th century. These caves, it’s important to note, had what Fisher calls “an unusual shape”:

apsidal in plan with a circular construction at the far end. If Buddhist, this arrangement would indicate the presence of a circular stupa. According to Basham, these caves may originally have been stone replicas of the earliest Ājīvika meeting-place, a circular thatched hut at the end of a courtyard. (p. 43)

If, like me, your vocabulary doesn’t include “apsidal,” Wikipedia comes to the rescue. It’s a form of “apse“:

In architecture, the apse (Latin absis “arch, vault”; sometimes written apsis; plural apses) is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault. In Romanesque, Byzantine and Gothic Christian abbey, cathedral and church architecture, the term is applied to the semi-circular or polygonal section of the sanctuary at the liturgical east end beyond the altar. Geometrically speaking, an apse is either a half-cone or half-dome.

And, you may have guessed correctly already, that is the same plan as the Harwan site.

Furthermore, other images — especially flowers, elephants, and swans –common in the tiles have Ājīvika associations, based on our very limited knowledge of their beliefs.

In his article, Fisher goes to great lengths to disprove other associations: that Harwan is not exclusively Buddhist, that the images have connections to but are different than other traditions, and so on. So he surveys Hindu and Buddhist images for ascetics, and crouching figures, and floor tiles, and looks at Parthian evidence for the horse rider images and the potential architectural connections between Parthain fire temples and the Harwan site. But he concludes this section with the following comment (p. 39):

Amidst all these images, be they foreign or Indian, one stands apart with compelling force. The repeated portrayal of a crouching ascetic forms a dramatic border to the variety of lively forms of the floor and provides the most enigmatic problem for the entire site.

And this, to me, is the central issue; a really enigmatic problem. These figures look like nothing else: in Pal’s words, the “strange crouching ascetics [are] unique in the Indian plastic tradition.” I can still remember the surprise I felt seeing the tiles at the Guimet, how odd and otherworldly they seemed.

I think that Fisher’s solution, the Ājīvika attribution, is a brilliant contribution, one that’s unfortunately not been widely accepted. (This, I suspect, is due to issues of distribution not disagreement.) If we add in the comments from the Kashmir catalog that Harwan is one in a set of similar finds, including Hutamura/Hutmora, Semthan, Ushkur, and the supposedly spectacular Kutbal site, we have suggestive evidence for a large Kashmiri Ājīvika movement in the early centuries of our era, ca. 300 - 500 C.E..

There’s a good post by Andrew Leonard at Salon in his column “How the World Works,” in part about the Tocharians, a group of people who lived in Central Asia long ago. If you’re a historical linguist with an specialization in Indo-European languages, the Tocharians are an interesting outlier, since their language shares characteristics with distant languages and not so much with their immediate neighbors.

Although it would, as always, be nice to know more about them, I would say that we know a fair bit about the Tocharians, from archeological and textual references and remains, including Buddhist manuscripts written in their languages. (Like hepatitis, there’s Tocharian A, B, and C.)

But they are supposed to be mysterious:

Why mysterious? Because hard evidence on who the Tocharians were or where they came from is scarce. Ethnically speaking, they are believed to be a Caucasian race that flourished for thousands of years in Central Asia before being swallowed up almost without a trace by their Turkic neighbors, sometime around the end of the first millennium (Recently discovered well-preserved corpses of European-looking bodies have even been cited by present-day Uighur Turk separatists as proof that China has no claim to Xinjiang.)

I’m not sure what counts as ‘hard evidence’ here but it doesn’t seem to me that we know more about, say, the Mayans and “who they were or where they came from.” Or any other ethnic group, for that matter. And by ‘ethnicity’ I mean those components of language and culture, not physical characteristics embedded in the idea of a ‘Caucasian race’ which is anyway a discredited physical anthropological term.

It’s certainly not clear that the Tocharians were “swallowed up … by their Turkic neighbors,” unless that means that they started speaking a Turkic language at some point in much the same way ethnic minorities all over the world get ’swallowed up’ by their larger and stronger neighbors. That process doesn’t seem especially mysterious, does it? But we really don’t know what happened, why there aren’t Tocharian-speakers today — it could have been climate change or innovations in technology or population growth. Or, as I suspect, maybe they didn’t go anywhere — there’s lots of green-eyed Uighurs, especially on the southern rim of the Taklamakan.

Now, I don’t want to dump too much on Andrew Leonard because he has much else of interest to say in his article and he claims no Tocharian expertise. On the contrary, it’s cool that he mentioned them at all.

But Central Asia, as in his essay, often seems to be a blank slate onto which mysteries are projected. Mostly not in jest I think that the Indiana Jones movies are to blame; they’re retro homages to exactly the kind of swashbuckling archeologists who explored Central Asia around the turn of the century (Sven Hedin, Albert von le Coq, and Aurel Stein, for example). The homage has generated, or preserved, an archetype that seems to have become a dominant lens for understanding the region’s history.

The discovery of ‘European-looking’ corpses, the so-called Tarim Mummies, has inspired a lot of this kind of silly Indiana Jones-ing. Case in point: a PBS documentary entitled, “Mysterious Mummies of China.” Presumably these mummies and their associated artifacts, preserved via dessication in the desert, are ‘Tocharian,’ of some sort. What, pray tell, is so mysterious? We’ve known about the Tocharians for a hundred years and the discovery of new archeological material merely confirms and extends what we already knew. It’s cool, and important, but it’s not surprising or mysterious.

The transcript from the PBS documentary is really precious, presumably in an effort to make it more appealing to a broad audience. Victor Mair, a noted Sinologist, translates for Mr. He, a Chinese archeologist:

When I brought her out of the grave and held her in my arms, I realized —I realized that she was the most beautiful woman on earth. I was startled. I was holding the most beautiful woman on earth. (laughter) If she were alive today, or if I were alive 3,000 years ago, I would certainly make her my wife.

That’s a bit creepy, no? But that’s a main thrust of the program — these good-looking Europeans and their tartans and horse-bits in western China. Later on, to ominous music, we are asked:

NARRATOR: …Who were these enigmatic people? If Victor can corroborate his hunch that they descended from the ancient mummy people, a startling conclusion would be inescapable. This region, on the very doorstep of ancient China, was continuously populated by people of European origin from as early as 1800 B.C., through the boom days of the Silk Road.

Again, I’m not sure what’s startling or enigmatic here, unless we take the narrator at face value and believe that ancient China was influenced by these honorary Scotsmen of the desert.

The team requests permission to visit a remote site, never before filmed by foreigners. There, they may be able to glimpse the real faces of the Tocharians. This temple complex, carved out of sandstone cliffs, is riddled with caves where Buddhist monks made their homes….

JEANNINE DAVIS-KIMBALL: Oh, look! Look up there. You see the guy with the horse and the pointed hat?

VICTOR MAIR: Oh.

JEANNINE DAVIS-KIMBALL: There’s three of them on that horse. There’s three Saka there, with the pointed hats? Three Saka nomads.

I especially like that Victor Mair — who certainly knows better — and the other explorers are depicted as the discovers of a new archeological site, even though they climb up ladders and hold onto handrails that someone recently put there. It may be the first time foreigners have filmed the site, but I sort of doubt that the unnamed cave is new to our body of knowledge about the region. Likewise, any casual reader of Herodotus will be familiar with the pointed-hat Scythian (Saka) nomads. That might have been a find a century ago.

After an arduous climb up a flight of concrete stairs, the team makes an astonishing discovery:

NARRATOR: In a small passage at the back of the cave, Victor hits pay dirt.

VICTOR MAIR: I see the red beard and the red hair parted in the middle. It’s a distinctive style of Tocharians. He’s wearing a coat with wide lapels on both sides, and then folded over. It’s a shame that these figures have all been defaced by people of other faiths at some time in the past. But still, it’s very easy to see what they looked like, and we can tell who they were.

NARRATOR: The Tocharian figures are strikingly similar to the mummies that lived in these parts 1,000 years earlier. Victor’s quest has come full circle.

The fact that I can do something similar by walking to my bookcase (”an arduous climb” upstairs) is not as cinematically appealing I suppose.

So: why does it have to be mysterious? This is mysterious to me.

Next: Harwan.

“Kashgar lies where the maps in people’s minds dissolve.” –Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

IBM’s research labs have a new data visualization service running, called “Many Eyes.” The idea is to put data sets into the public domain and then have many eyes look at them and to create insights through the group’s analysis. I think it’s a great idea and the tools are excellent — simple, powerful, and effective.

Sangha Population

To test Many Eyes out, I used a ‘data set’ I had lying around, a spreadsheet that I had put together of the population of Buddhist monks and nuns around the world. This monastic community, the sangha, is organized in the sense of having clear hierarchies and monastic rules, but it is not organized in any overall sense, so there isn’t a single source for this data. There is excellent, precise data on the number of Catholic monastics (which would be interesting to represent in Many Eyes), but Buddhist monastic population information is hard to come by.

So, years ago, I put together a plain spreadsheet with a row for each Buddhist region (I had Tibet as a separate region, for example, although Many Eyes didn’t acknowledge this) and columns for total country population, Buddhist population, monastic population, % Buddhist, % monastic, and a rating for my confidence in the data (low/medium/high). Now, overall, I’m not at all confident in the numbers that I put together, but it’s a start. There are definitional issues, for one thing, especially in Japan. Japan, which has very accurate (or precise?) data, counts Pure Land priests as monastics, although it could be argued that they are not recognizably monks. Other countries, e.g., Laos, just don’t have good information at all and I had to guess. China, because of its size, is in a league of its own; Buddhism, and religions in general, are seeing a renaissance, but it’s very hard to say how many Chinese Buddhist monks and nuns there are.

Moving this spreadsheet to Many Eyes was simple. I copied the table I wanted to move, pasted it into a textarea and then agreed to the tool’s guesses at the data types. It’s much like DabbleDB and others in that category.

Where the service really excels (pardon the pun) is in the visualization tools; I especially like the Treemap view. For me, the primary insight from the visualizations is the existence of a “Buddhist Big Three”: Thailand, Japan, and Burma (Myanmar).