Recently, I presented my talk on “Pre-colonial appropriations of Indian ganita: epistemic issues”. This was at a round table at IIAS Shimla which replaced the now-postponed conference on Indology. My talk was primarily about the inferior math we teach in school today based on the European misunderstanding of the Indian ganita which Europe imported.
But as a sidelight, I took up a novel aspect of the Aryan race conjecture. Indologists have so far talked about the Aryan conjecture solely in the Indian context. However, I pointed out the need to link this discussion also to the Aryan race model as it applies to the African context. In particular, to the issue of the Aryan model vs Ancient model as in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, vol. 1: The fabrication of ancient Greece 1785-1985. (The date of 1785 alludes to William Jones whose philological researches started these wild speculations on race.)
The fabrication of ancient Greece has a direct bearing on the history of Indian math. But first let us understand how racists did it.
Racist history
Bernal’s key point was that after 1785 racist historians systematically rewrote history to appropriate all achievements of Black Egyptians to White Greeks. This aligned with George James’ Stolen Legacy: Greek philosophy is stolen Egyptian philosophy. But instead of philosophy, Bernal applied it, for example, to architecture where the evidence of Greeks copying Egyptians is not easily contested: the so-called Greek architecture of columns is manifestly copied from Egypt and Iran (Persepolis).
Bernal made only scattered remarks on math and science, perhaps out of deference to his father J. D. Bernal, who wrote his famous (but now hopelessly dated) volumes on the history of science. However, after going through my PHISPC volume Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, Bernal (Jr) strongly encouraged me to look at the related issues of concern to the history of math where undue credit has been given to Greeks (as explained in an earlier blog “Greediots and Pythagoras”, which also provides the relevant background to this post).
One point in my above book relates closely to Afrocentrist concerns about undue credit to Greeks in the history of math.
Thus, my point (later summarised e.g. in Is Science Western in Origin?) was that the church falsified history even before racist historians. This process of falsifying history went virulent during the Crusades against Muslims. (Bernal agreed with me here.) The Toledo mass translations of Arabic texts into Latin, beginning 1125, involved learning from the books of the religious enemy. The church, which had earlier consistently burnt heretical books, needed to justify learning from the books of the religious enemy. It provided this justification through the coarse falsehood that all scientific knowledge in Arabic books came from the sole “friends of Christians”, the early Greeks. As such, it claimed that knowledge in Arabic books as a Christian inheritance: and that Arabs contributed nothing to it. Later racist historians modified the church thesis by insisting that the authors of Greek books, even in Africa, were white-skinned, hence claimed it as part of White achievements. The racist historian Florian Cajori is an example of how religious chauvinism was absorbed into racist chauvinism. No evidence exists, and none was needed!
Egyptian and Persian texts were translated into Greek, by Alexander and the Ptolemy dynasty, but any material coming from these texts was all attributed by racist historians to Greeks. Western historians against Afrocentrism, such as Lefkowitz, falsely state that there is no evidence for such translation. As I pointed out in my UNISA lectures, Zoroastrians have been complaining about the burning and Greek translation of their texts for over 2000 years. Western historians rightly assume that their parochial readers would be unfamiliar with those texts. Obviously, also, for the Greediotic brain it is equally easy to imagine (when required) that skin color relates to the language of the text: thus, any Indian author writing in English, such as this one, must be white-skinned! There are no early original Greek sources available, but even if they were a claim of any Greek originality (e.g. on Sphere and Cylinder, attributed to Archimedes), would need proof, since this is also found in the Ahmes papyrus from a thousand years earlier, as pointed out by Diop. Lefkowitz has only some utterly foolish comments to offer claiming that Archimedes compared the area of a cylinder to the volume of a sphere. That is the typical standard of racist historians.
Relevance to Indology
Anyway, the fact is (1) that the Abbasid khilafat in Baghdad made huge investments in knowledge (e.g. Bayt al Hikma), so that, following the knowledge gradient, numerous Arabic texts were translated FROM Arabic into Byzantine Greek (then Constantinople was a tributary of Baghdad). The fact also is that (2) much Indian knowledge travelled to Baghdad, as is well known and as repeated and explained during my talk (e.g. al Khwarizmi’s Hisab al Hind). As stated in the abstract, a striking example of both (1) and (2) is the case of the Panchatantra which was translated from Sanskrit to Farsi to Arabic and then to Byzantine Greek to other European languages as Aesop’s fables. Knowledge of Indian math could similarly have got into late Arabic and Byzantine Greek texts.
So, the question that arises, and was raised in Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, was this: could Indian knowledge have been mis-attributed to Greeks in the process of appropriating Arabic texts to Greeks? Specifically, on the strength of this appropriation, people like Pingree and his students have been clamouring that trigonometry was transmitted from Greeks (“Ptolemy”) to Indians. My question challenged this claim (and Pingree ducked the challenge in 2004 when, on a trip to the US, I directly challenged him to publicly debate the claim).
My counter-points to that claim are the following. (more…)