Quirky History 2: Strange Stories From History

SECTION ONE

AMAZING INDIA

WHEN KASHMIR WAS A LAKE!

The Dal Lake is the most famous landmark in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir. Gliding across its water in colourful wooden boats called shikaras is a must-do for all tourists who visit the city. But did you know that millions of years ago, the entire area we know as Kashmir today was actually a gigantic lake!

It was only around 12,000 years ago that things began to change as the water from the lake began to drain. As this happened, the fertile bed of what was originally the lake became habitable, providing a great place for early humans to settle.

The area around the Dal Lake has many archaeological sites that go back thousands of years. In fact, there are as many as fifteen Neolithic sites strewn across the Kashmir Valley.

The story of how it all happened is amazing!

To understand this story, you have to go back a few million years. We know that the Himalayas are fold mountains that were created when the Indian subcontinent collided with the Eurasian plate fifty million years ago. But it didn’t end with that. There has been constant action along the ‘fault line’ where the two landmasses came together. It is this event that changed the geography of Kashmir.

The lake was formed when the Pir Panjal range in the inner Himalayas rose around five million years ago. This led to massive topographical changes in this region. Melting waters from the high mountain ranges were trapped in the Kashmir Valley, creating a massive lake.

Further tectonic movements around 200,000 years ago led to a breach in the Pir Panjal range. As a result, water from the lake began to flow out. This, in turn, formed the Jhelum River, which originates in Anantnag, fifty-three kilometres from Srinagar.

As the river cut through the higher ranges, it provided an outlet to the Himalayan waters. The lake shrank, exposing its old bed. The exposed sediments formed a rich and very fertile surface, locally called the Karewas, and this provided the perfect base for early man to cultivate the land, a practice followed to this day.

Of Myths and Legends

Interestingly, this story is hinted at even in old mythological tales. In India, the points from where rivers start – like Gangotri for the Ganga, Mansarovar for the Brahmaputra and Yamunotri for the Yamuna – are considered sacred. This is true of Verinag too, where you will find the spring and pond from which the Jhelum originates.

According to legend, Kashmir gets its name from ‘Rishi Kashyap’, a rishi or sage in Hindu mythology. According to the Nilamata Purana, an ancient text about the history, geography, religion and folklore of Kashmir written in the sixth to eighth century CE, all of Kashmir was a giant lake called Satisar (Lake of Sati). Legend says the lake was inhabited by a ferocious water demon named Jalodbhava, who was a menace to the local people. The lake was drained by Rishi Kashyap while Lord Vishnu killed the demon.

Rishi Kashyap then requested Lord Shiva to prevail upon Goddess Parvati to manifest herself in the form of a river to provide water to the valley. Lord Shiva obliged and struck the ground at Verinag with his trident. It is from this spot, the story goes, that the Goddess emerged in the form of the Vitasta or Jhelum.

Go there today and you will find the remains of a temple dedicated to the River Goddess Vitasta or Jhelum, which is considered a pilgrimage spot by local Hindus.

Early Life in the Valley

While all this is legend, archaeological excavations have revealed some fabulous finds. Close to Srinagar, in Burzahom, you will find one of the finest sites from the Neolithic period (around 3,000 BCE).

Burzahom is one of the oldest sites where we have evidence of dwellings beneath the ground in India.

Archaeologists believe that the Neolithic settlers in Burzahom used these pits as their winter homes, quite like the Eskimos and their igloos.

Dug out with stone tools, these dwelling pits have revealed many clues about the life of the communities that lived in Burzahom 5,000 years ago. One interesting find is the use of fine fishbone tools including harpoons and needles. We also know that the dwellers of these homes followed a rich diet, including meat, fish, lentils and barley, which they probably cultivated.

For archaeologists, another stand-out feature of the Burzahom site was that the burials here were unlike any other during this period in the Indian subcontinent.

Archaeologists believe that animals may have been killed and buried along with dead humans, and their meat may have been intended as grave goods. These burials were mostly found in the habitation area. Some of the finds at the Burzahom site also indicate how well connected the people here were with other communities. Close ties have been established with contemporary Harappan communities and settlements in Central Asia and China.

Burzahom was continuously occupied for 2,000 years and the evolution in architecture and lifestyles can be clearly seen. Evidence also suggests that around 2000 BCE, the inhabitants of Burzahom were in close contact with China. Perforated stone tools used as harvesters in early China have been found here. In fact, these tools were used only in Kashmir, Sikkim and the Yunnan province of China during that time.

By later periods, communities were erecting megaliths (large stones) like those seen at Stonehenge in England.

Over the years, as many as fourteen other Neolithic sites have been discovered along the Karewa deposits, on the bed of what was once the Kashmir lake. Most of them are near Srinagar, between Anantnag and Baramulla.

It is interesting to note that history, legend and geography come together to tell us of a time when Kashmir was a gigantic lake. Today, the Dal Lake and the rich orchards on the fertile Karewa remind us of a time long gone.

WORLD’S OLDEST ZERO

Shunya, null, cero, kore, sifar – so many words and they all mean nothing. But for those who love numbers, nothing can mean everything if ‘nothing’ is the number zero. Can you even imagine the world without the zero? Imagine your ten on ten without the zero! How did the world count at all when all they had was one to nine?

This simple circle may not look like much, but the world would be a very different place without it.

The zero as we know it took a long time to evolve, emerging in its most primitive form with the Sumerians from Mesopotamia.

This ancient civilization, in what is now Southwest Asia, was probably the first to develop a counting system around 5,000 years ago. When they did, they used an empty space to mark the absence of a number in a column or a row.

Later, in the third century BCE, the Babylonians filled in this ‘empty space’ with a wedge-shaped symbol, to indicate that there was ‘nothing’ or no number in that column or space. Other cultures, like the Mayans of Central America, used a similar symbol in 350 CE, as a ‘zero’ marker in their calendars.

We call these symbols ‘placeholder zeroes’ as they indicate a number’s position and value. It differentiates 10 from 100 or 1,000. At this point in time, the zero was not yet a ‘number’ in its own right, that is, the ‘numerical zero’ used in mathematical calculations.

These early placeholder zeroes looked nothing like the doughnut-like circle that we know today. Then, in September 2017, mathematicians and historians across the world were astonished when the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford announced that it had discovered the world’s oldest-known written representation of the symbol ‘zero’.

The world’s oldest-known written representation of the symbol ‘zero’ was found in a manuscript made of birch bark discovered in a small village called Bakhshali near Peshawar in what is now Pakistan. The manuscript was unearthed by a farmer from a mound in his field in 1881.

The Bakhshali manuscript was composed of seventy folios or pages, and after it was carefully studied by historians and scholars, it finally made its way to the Bodleian Library in 1902. It was a mathematical textbook-cum-workbook that was probably used to teach accounting to youngsters keen on careers in trade.

The manuscript was no dull manual. It was full of practical mathematical examples and equations that merchants needed to learn for daily trading activities. As a result, it was filled with hundreds of zeroes, each one represented by a dot. It is this dot, also a placeholder zero, that evolved into the circular zero that we use today.

But what was the world’s oldest known zero doing buried in a field near Peshawar?

This mathematical textbook meant for traders was found in Bakhshali probably