Sachin Gupta @sach_gupta - Twitter Profile

@nickcollins1953

about 1 month ago

India was the cradle of civilisation. Not one of several. Several people have replied to my recent essay by saying there is no single cradle of civilisation. Civilisation developed independently in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and South America. Why make it a competition? This sounds like humility, but it is the same evasive move that propped up the Aryan invasion theory for a century: when the evidence becomes inconvenient, redraw the question so no evidence can ever settle it. Consider what would have to be true for independent emergence to hold. Indus-Sarasvati merchant seals would not appear across Sumerian cities. An Akkadian cylinder seal would not name its owner as an interpreter of the Meluhhan language. Bead necklaces manufactured at Lothal would not turn up in Queen Puabi's tomb at Ur around 2450 BC. Pre-dynastic Egyptian graves at Nakada would not contain mud brick-lined pits in Sumerian and Indus-Sarasvati style, alongside cylinder seals and lapis lazuli from the northernmost Indus-Sarasvati settlement. The Sumerian scribes would not record ships arriving from Meluhha carrying timber, copper, carnelian and cotton. All of those things happened, and they are in the archaeological record. They have been for decades. The "independent emergence" position has a convenient feature. No evidence can ever dislodge it. Merchant seals from one civilisation found inside another become "evidence of trade, not dependency." Identical brick ratios become "convergent development." A professional interpreter role for a foreign language becomes "contact, but not influence." At every point the conclusion is decided in advance, and the evidence is arranged around it. Others have argued that even if the civilisations were connected, Mesopotamia was still earlier. Earliest attested writing. Earliest cities. Earliest legal codes. The crucial word is "attested," which means found and recorded by archaeologists. Mesopotamia was excavated intensively from the 1840s. Mohenjo-daro was not discovered until 1922. The site at Bhirrana, dated to 7570-6200 BC, with planned streets, drainage, standardised weights and bronze metallurgy millennia before it appears elsewhere, was identified only recently. Mehrgarh, around 7000 BC, supported 20,000 people growing wheat, barley and cotton, and trading lapis lazuli and copper beads. "Earliest attested" tells you where archaeologists chose to dig, but it does not tell you what existed first. So at what point does evidence of connection actually count? When one civilisation's merchants are living in another's cities, boring beads with their own technology and maintaining a permanent enclave at Lagash? When the Sumerian texts record ships from Meluhha bringing wealth but never once mention Sumerian ships sailing east? When Indus-Sarasvati seals are found throughout Mesopotamia but no Mesopotamian seal has ever been found in Indus-Sarasvati lands? And that is before the underwater evidence from the Gulf of Cambay and the Tamil coast, where sonar readings suggest ports thousands of years older than anything in Mesopotamia. If those dates hold, the question of independent emergence becomes redundant. Treating every civilisation as equally primary, whichever direction the evidence actually points, is a kind of participation trophy for entire fields of study, not open-mindedness. Independent emergence is where one lands once you’ve already decided not to look at what moved between the geographical boxes, or in which direction. It kept the Aryan invasion theory standing for a hundred years, and it's propping up the same evasion today.

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sach_gupta retweeted

Nick Collins

@nickcollins1953

about 1 month ago

Every land-based, continental empire that tried imposing one language, one faith, one bloodline on its people eventually collapsed under the weight of enforcing it; Rome, the Ottomans, the Soviet Union. Maritime trading powers did the opposite. Venice, Gujarat, the Malabar coast and Britain got rich by tolerating diversity if all were involved in mutual prosperity. A merchant who refuses to deal with a Muslim, a Jew, or a Tamil trader goes broke. Maritime trade imposes pluralism. India sat at the centre of Indian Ocean trade for over four thousand years. Its coast made it impossible to bypass. Long before Britain arrived, Gujarati and Tamil merchants were running its trade until Song and Yuan China began dominating from roughly 1100 to 1372, when the Ming forcibly stopped private foreign trade to enforce its own repressive Confucian version of a continental empire. Continental empires try to conquer. Maritime civilisations built actual wealth. History forgot to credit their merchants.

nickcollins1953's tweet photo. Every land-based, continental empire that tried imposing one language, one faith, one bloodline on its people eventually collapsed under the weight of enforcing it; Rome, the Ottomans, the Soviet Union.

Maritime trading powers did the opposite. Venice, Gujarat, the Malabar coast and Britain got rich by tolerating diversity if all were involved in mutual prosperity. A merchant who refuses to deal with a Muslim, a Jew, or a Tamil trader goes broke. Maritime trade imposes pluralism.

India sat at the centre of Indian Ocean trade for over four thousand years. Its coast made it impossible to bypass. Long before Britain arrived, Gujarati and Tamil merchants were running its trade until Song and Yuan China began dominating from roughly 1100 to 1372, when the Ming forcibly stopped private foreign trade to enforce its own repressive Confucian version of a continental empire.

Continental empires try to conquer. Maritime civilisations built actual wealth. History forgot to credit their merchants.

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sach_gupta retweeted

Nick Collins

@nickcollins1953

about 1 month ago

Mesopotamia was never the cradle of civilisation. India was. I spent forty years in international shipping, not academia. When I began researching the history of maritime trade, I had no orthodoxy to defend. I followed the evidence, and it kept arriving in the same place: the Indian subcontinent. Nineteenth century archaeologists dug in Mesopotamia because the climate preserved artefacts, the biblical sources pointed them there, and the Ottomans allowed the excavations. That is the entire basis for the myth of Mesopotamia as "the cradle of civilisation." Nobody applied the same rigour to India. Mohenjo-daro was not discovered until 1922. By then the narrative had already hardened. What was actually there was the largest civilisation of the ancient world. Three hundred cities. Fifty thousand people in each, by 2600 BC. Two thirds of them stood on the banks of the Sarasvati, the central and greatest of the seven rivers described in the Rig Veda, flowing down from the Himalayas before the river vanished entirely by 1900 BC. The Vedic kings claimed territory stretching "sea to sea," from Afghanistan to Maharashtra, some 1.5 million square miles, against Egypt's 13,000. A dock at Lothal built to handle thirty ships of sixty tons, unmatched in Europe for four thousand years. When it was first excavated, it was recorded as a bathing pool. When the scale became impossible to dismiss, the theory was not corrected. It was replaced with a story of pale-skinned nomads from the steppe who supposedly arrived around 1500 BC and brought civilisation with them. There is no evidence. The chronology doesn't work. The Vedas describe no invasion. In 2019 a Harvard-led genetic study revived the claim, and the press reported it as confirmation. It was not. The same study found the builders of these cities were indigenous. The Sarasvati river that the Rig Veda described had already dried up before these newcomers arrived. What the study also found is that a small group of men, arriving after the Sarasvati had already dried up, interbred with the existing population and left a genetic signature. That is all. So, where they chose to dig was mostly an accident of climate and access. The Aryan invasion theory was constructed because an Indian civilisation that owed nothing to Caucasians was a fact the late nineteenth century could not accommodate. Link to full Substack essay with sources in the comments below.

nickcollins1953's tweet photo. Mesopotamia was never the cradle of civilisation. India was.

I spent forty years in international shipping, not academia. When I began researching the history of maritime trade, I had no orthodoxy to defend. I followed the evidence, and it kept arriving in the same place: the Indian subcontinent.

Nineteenth century archaeologists dug in Mesopotamia because the climate preserved artefacts, the biblical sources pointed them there, and the Ottomans allowed the excavations. That is the entire basis for the myth of Mesopotamia as "the cradle of civilisation."

Nobody applied the same rigour to India. Mohenjo-daro was not discovered until 1922. By then the narrative had already hardened.

What was actually there was the largest civilisation of the ancient world. Three hundred cities. Fifty thousand people in each, by 2600 BC. Two thirds of them stood on the banks of the Sarasvati, the central and greatest of the seven rivers described in the Rig Veda, flowing down from the Himalayas before the river vanished entirely by 1900 BC. The Vedic kings claimed territory stretching "sea to sea," from Afghanistan to Maharashtra, some 1.5 million square miles, against Egypt's 13,000. A dock at Lothal built to handle thirty ships of sixty tons, unmatched in Europe for four thousand years. When it was first excavated, it was recorded as a bathing pool.

When the scale became impossible to dismiss, the theory was not corrected. It was replaced with a story of pale-skinned nomads from the steppe who supposedly arrived around 1500 BC and brought civilisation with them. There is no evidence. The chronology doesn't work. The Vedas describe no invasion.

In 2019 a Harvard-led genetic study revived the claim, and the press reported it as confirmation. It was not. The same study found the builders of these cities were indigenous. The Sarasvati river that the Rig Veda described had already dried up before these newcomers arrived. What the study also found is that a small group of men, arriving after the Sarasvati had already dried up, interbred with the existing population and left a genetic signature. That is all.

So, where they chose to dig was mostly an accident of climate and access. The Aryan invasion theory was constructed because an Indian civilisation that owed nothing to Caucasians was a fact the late nineteenth century could not accommodate.

Link to full Substack essay with sources in the comments below.

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