Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

8

Alexandria, Occident and Orient in the Year 0

There was, of course, no year 0, and for several reasons. One is that the zero had not yet been invented: that happened in India, probably in the seventh century AD. Another is that many people around the world, then as now, were not Christians, and conceived time in completely different ways. A third reason is that the conventional chronology, used for dating events in the West over several centuries – AD, for Anno Domini, the year of Our Lord, and BC, before Christ – was not introduced until the sixth century. Jesus, as we have seen, never intended to start a new religion, and so people of his day, even if they had heard of him, never imagined that a new era was beginning. Use of the AD sequence did not in fact become widespread until the eighth century, when it was employed by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, and the BC system, though referred to by Bede, did not come into general use until the latter half of the seventeenth century.¹ However, considering a hypothetical ‘Year 0’ allows us to look at ancient notions of time, and to see what other ideas were current in the world in the era when Jesus is supposed to have lived.

The understanding of time in the ancient world varied with local conditions and, in particular, local religions. The first coins to be dated were minted in Syria around 312 BC and were stamped with the year of the Seleucid era in which they were coined (Seleucus Nicator founded the Seleucid empire in 321 BC, two years after the death of Alexander the Great.²) The basic astronomical factor in the understanding of time in antiquity was the division of the earth into the East, or Orient (from the Latin for ‘to be born, rise, grow’), and the West, the Occident (from ‘to fall down, die’). The Babylonians, among others, noticed the so-called ‘heliacal’ rising of the stars. This is the phenomenon whereby, just before dawn, it is possible to observe the rising of stars which are close to the position of the sun. The Babylonians also noticed that, as the year passed, the sun traversed the stars in what appeared to be a regular cycle. They divided these constellations into twelve, no doubt because there were, roughly, twelve lunations in a year, and gave them names. The origins of these names are obscure but many of them were animals (perhaps reflected in the arrangement of the stars) and the practice, inherited from the Babylonians by the Greeks, gave us the zodiac, derived from the Greek word zodion, meaning ‘little animal’. Just as the twelve months of the year are each divided into, roughly, thirty days, so the twelve regions of the zodiac were divided into thirty. This division of the sky eventually gave rise to our practice of dividing the complete circle around a point into 360 degrees.³

Babylonian astronomical knowledge spread far and wide – to Greece, to Egypt, to India and even to China (though its influence in China has recently been called into question). This is perhaps responsible for the similarities in time-keeping in different cultures, though the basic division of the day into twenty-four hours seems to have arisen in Egypt. There it was noticed that at regular intervals throughout the night bright stars arose, and this is how, at first, the hours of darkness were divided into twelve. Later, the day was divided in the same way, though until medieval times, and the invention of the mechanical clock, the length of hours varied with the seasons: the longer the night, the longer the evening hours and the shorter the daylight hours. This Egyptian practice spread, and in Babylon itself the day was divided into twelve beru, in China into twelve shichen, and in India into thirty muhala. In Babylon a beru was divided into thirty ges and one ges was equal to sixty gar. In India one muhala was divided into two ghati which in turn were each divided into sixty palas. In other words, there was in ancient times a tendency to divide time into subdivisions that are multiples of twelve or thirty and almost certainly this has to do with the division of the year into (roughly) twelve lunations and each lunation into (approximately) thirty days. This ‘sexagesimal’ system of the Babylonians, using sixty as a base, also accounts for why we divide hours into sixty minutes, and minutes into sixty seconds. Just as we are now familiar with a decimal system, in which numbers to the right have only one tenth of the power of numbers to the left (think of 22.2), so in the Babylonian system sixty was the base. Furthermore, the names given to this system of subdivisions live on. The first was known by the Latin phrase, pars minuta prima (the first small division), the next was partes minutae secondae (second small division), and so on. In time, the phrases were corrupted, until all that was left of the first division was ‘minute’ and all that was left of the other phrase was ‘second’. The first, second and further divisions were sometimes represented by ', ", and so on, which also survive today.⁴

The main problem in recording time was to reconcile the lunar cycle with the solar cycle. The sun governed the seasons – vital in agricultural societies – whereas the moon governed the tides and was an important deity, which appeared to change form in a regular rhythm. Most societies introduced extra months at certain times to overcome the discrepancy between the lunar and the solar year, but though such procedures often redressed the situation on a temporary basis, other intercalations, as they are called, were eventually needed. The most important amendment was introduced in Babylon, by 499 BC, though we know most about it from two Greeks, Meton and Euctemon, who introduced it to Greece in 432 BC. This ‘Metonic’ cycle, as it is called, lasts for nineteen years. Each of these years lasts for twelve months but seven extra months were added, one each in the third, fifth, eighth, eleventh, thirteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth years, while some months were ‘full’ (thirty days) and others ‘deficient’ (twenty-nine days). This might seem excessively complicated but the fact that the Indians and the Chinese took over the practice shows how important it was. (Endymion Wilkinson says that something very like the Metonic cycle was in use in China as early as the seventh century BC.) In medieval calendars the number which gave a year’s position in the Metonic cycle was written in gold and to this day they are known as ‘golden numbers’.⁵

Easter is also rooted in these practices. Both the Jewish and Christian calendars took over the nineteen-year lunar–solar cycle, since it solved the problem of fixing dates for the new moon, so important for religious ritual. Originally, the Babylonian priest-kings needed to fix the New Year Festival with absolute precision, since the celebrations were regarded as re-enactments of the divine manoeuvres which established the creation of the world, and only exact correspondence could propitiate the gods. From this sprang the Christian idea to celebrate Easter on the correct date ‘since this was the crucial time of combat between God (or Christ) and the Devil, and God required the support of his worshippers to defeat the Devil’.⁶ The Babylonians also appear to have been the first to divide the lunar months into seven-day periods (each day being dedicated to one of seven divine planets, or ‘wanderers’, heavenly bodies which were not ‘fixed’ in the sky as the stars were). Each period ended with an ‘evil day’, when taboos were enforced so that, once again, the gods would be propitiated. Cuneiform records also show that the Babylonian shabbatum (‘full-moon day’) fell on the fourteenth or fifteenth of the month, and this seems to be the basis of the Hebrew term shabbath. The Christians took over this practice also. The order of the days of the week is derived from an elaborate table of hours. Each of the hours of the day was named after one of the seven planets, arranged in descending order according to the length of their orbits, beginning with Saturn (29 years), Jupiter (12 years), Mars (687 days), Sun (365 days), Venus (224 days), Mercury (88 days) and ending with the Moon (29 days). When this cycle of seven is laid in this order alongside the twenty-four hours of the day, the first hour of each subsequent day then becomes: Saturn; Sun; Moon; Mars; Mercury; Jupiter; Venus.⁷

The ancient Egyptians divided the year into twelve lunar months, of thirty days each, with five additional days at the end, which were considered very unlucky. This calculation was achieved on purely practical grounds, being the average amount of time between successive arrivals of the Nile flood at Heliopolis (the most important event in Egyptian life). The Egyptians soon noticed that, in fact, the actual year is slightly longer, 3651/4 days, and made the adjustment. They also noticed that the rising of the Nile occurred just as the last star appeared on the horizon, the dog star Sothis (Sirius as we would say). This ‘heliacal rising’ became the fixed point of the so-called ‘Sothic’ calendar, and was more regular, and more accurate, than the flooding of the Nile. Astronomical calculations have shown that the first day of the two calendars – the pre-Sothic and the Sothic – agreed in 2773 BC, and scholars have concluded that this must have been when the Sothic calendar was introduced. So for the Egyptians, whether they knew it or not, the Year 0 was in fact 2773.⁸

The Greeks had two concepts of time – aion, sacred or eternal time, and chronos, ordinary time. There was in Greece a concept of time being the judge, and in the Athenian law courts water clocks, or clepsydras, were introduced, to limit speeches to half an hour.⁹ Before the introduction of the Metonic cycle, in Greece in 432 BC, an eight-year cycle, the octaeteris, had been in use. This was based on a year of twelve months containing alternately, thirty days and twenty-nine days, giving a total of 354 days. This was reconciled with the sun by introducing an intercalated month of thirty days every other year. This meant that the calendar was out of step with the moon by a whole day after eight years. In the late sixth century, the Greeks adopted a system whereby they dropped the intercalated month every eight years and this eight-year cycle came to be considered a fundamental time period. It survives today in the Olympic Games cycle, celebrated every four years, which is half an octaeteris.¹⁰ The Greeks sometimes dated events by referring to the current Archon – a new one being elected every year – and sometimes by reference to the Olympiads. The first Olympiad was reckoned to have been held in 776 BC and under this system, for example, the city of Alexandria was founded in the second year after the 112th Olympiad, written as 112.2 (our year 331 BC).¹¹

Only four months of the year are mentioned in the Bible, but the probability is that the ancient Israelites had a lunar calendar, tied to a seasonal year that began in the autumn. This is inferred from other documentary evidence which suggests that if the Jews could see that the barley would not be ripe by 16 Abib (‘the month of new fruits’) an extra month was intercalated, to ensure that a sheaf of barley could be offered to God on the day after Passover. At the time of Jesus, most Jews used the Seleucid calendar, which began in 321 BC (matching the first dated coins) and was known as the ‘era of contracts’ because the Seleucids required all legal documents to be dated by their era.¹² According to Jewish calculations the world began on 7 October 3761 BC but these calculations are uncertain and complex. These Anni Mundi (a twelfth-century idea) were derived from discrepancies between the Jewish, Samaritan, Hebrew and Greek texts, all of which were different. For example, from the Creation to the birth of Abraham there are 1,946 years according to the Jewish Hebrew text, 2,247 years according to the Samaritan Hebrew text, and 3,412 years according to the Septuagint. 3761 BC is now the date preferred for the Creation.

The world in which Christianity emerged and developed was partly Hellenistic, partly Jewish, but also Roman. In Rome there were many religions, and many superstitions. On several days of the year, the religious calendars forbade business of any kind and ships would not leave harbour, for example, on 24 August, 5 October or 8 November.¹³ Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, was supposed to have invented the original calendar, which began in March and had ten months. This was revised by the second king of Rome, Numa, who set up the pontifices, a college of officials headed by the Pontifex Maximus. Their responsibilities included giving religious advice, looking after the bridges of Rome (which had great theological significance) and overseeing the calendar. Later on, the Christian leader in Rome became the Pontifex Maximus, which is why the pope is still referred to as the pontiff. According to legend, it was Numa who added the months of February and January (in that order), producing a year of 355 days that kept in step with the moon. He also introduced an intercalated month, known as Mercedonius, deriving from the word merces or ‘wages’ (from which the English word ‘mercenary’ derives), because that was the season when people were paid.¹⁴ In the fifth century there were further reforms, when January became the first month. This was because Janus was the god of gateways and it was felt appropriate for the beginning of a new year, when office-holders took up their positions in the Roman government.

A public clepsydra was set up in Rome in 158 BC, but rich Romans had their own water clocks and would employ slaves to announce the time aloud to them, on the hour.¹⁵ The calendar we use today is actually a modified version of the one introduced in Rome by Julius Caesar on 1 January 45 BC. The previous year, 46 BC, was 445 days long, to bring it into line, and was known as ‘the last year of confusion’.¹⁶ The change was made because, under the previous system, intercalary months, of no determinate length, had been abused by unscrupulous politicians for their own ends – for example, either to lengthen a term of office, or to bring forward an election.¹⁷ Caesar abolished both the lunar year and intercalary months and settled on the solar year of 3651/4 days, introducing the idea of a leap year every four years to account for this extra quarter day. To begin with, January, March, May, July, September and November all had thirty-one days, the rest thirty, save for February, which had twenty-nine. The changes to the system we have now were introduced in 7 BC by Augustus, who wanted a month (Sextilis) named after him.¹⁸ Officially, the Roman calendar began in the spring, on 1 March (which is reflected in the names for the months September to December) but this too was changed because Roman officials, elected for a year, took up office on 1 January. Early Christians disliked this arrangement because they felt it reflected a pagan habit and for a time used instead the Annunciation as the first day of the year (25 March, nine months before Christmas). The names Quintilis to December derive from the Latin names for the numbers five to ten and are probably very ancient. March is named after Mars, the god of war, May after Maia, a goddess of spring, June for Iuno, the wife of Jupiter. April may be derived from aprire, ‘to open’, or from Aphrodite. February may derive from a Sabine word, februare, meaning ‘to purify’. July was named after Julius Caesar who had done so much to remove confusion from the calendar.

It was Varro, in the first century BC, who introduced the Roman system of dating ab urbae condita (from the foundation of Rome), which by tradition was placed in 753 BC. The Romans also took over the Babylonian idea of the seven-day week (the Greeks had not followed this practice), though originally their months had been divided into three: the Calends (from which our word ‘calendar’ is derived), which began on the first of the month, the Ides, which began on the thirteenth or fifteenth of the month, and Nones, beginning eight days before the Ides. Calends fell on the new moon, Ides on the full moon.¹⁹ Originally, the days were numbered, not named, working backwards from the Calends, Nones and Ides but in imperial times, thanks to the widespread popularity of astrology, the days were named after the planets.

For the early Christians, who felt that the kingdom of God was ‘at hand’, time held little interest, not long-term time anyway (Paul, for one, didn’t date his letters). At first the Christians followed the Jewish practice of numbering days rather than naming them, except for the Sabbath. But as more and more converts from paganism entered the fold, bringing with them astrological influences, Christians adopted the planetary week, but chose Sunday as the first day, because this was when Christ rose from the dead and because it distinguished them from the Jews. Easter was introduced in Rome in about the year 160. The first mention of Christmas Day, according to G. J. Whitrow, occurred in the Roman calendar for 354. Previously, 6 January had been celebrated, as the anniversary of Jesus’ baptism, which was believed to have occurred on his thirtieth birthday. The change occurred because infant baptism was replacing adult baptism, as Christianity spread, and this led to a change in belief also. It was now held that Christ’s divinity began at birth, rather than at his baptism.²⁰

By the time of Jesus, Alexandria in Egypt – situated between the Occident and the Orient – had been a centre of learning, ‘a centre of calculation’, ‘a paradigmatic place’, for several centuries. Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, because he wanted to bring Egypt closer to the Greek world, and because he wanted a port that would not be affected by the Nile floods, Alexandria was from the first intended as a ‘megalopolis’, built in the shape of a chlamys, a Macedonian military cloak, with walls that would stretch ‘endlessly’ into the distance, with streets wider than any yet seen, based on Aristotle’s design for the ideal city – a grid laid out in such a way as to benefit from sea breezes yet providing shelter from the wind.²¹ A third of the city was ‘royal territory’ and it was conveniently located as a trading centre, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, near where the Nile and the Red Sea formed an international crossroads, and where many caravan routes from inner Africa and Asia converged on the coast. It boasted two harbours, one with the famous lighthouse, the Pharos, 144 feet high, and a wonder of the ancient world that could be seen thirty-five miles away.²² After the death of Alexander, his generals had quarrelled, leading to a split, in which Seleucus had gained control of the northern parts of the former empire, including Israel and Syria, while the Egyptian part was controlled by Ptolemy I, at least from 306 BC.

But it was for its learning that Alexandria was chiefly known. According to tradition, Alexander himself, when he had decided that the site was ideal for a new city, had also commanded that a library be built there, dedicated to the muses. The idea was not new: as we have seen, several libraries had been compiled in Babylon and others arose elsewhere on the edge of the Mediterranean, in particular at Pergamum and Ephesus. From the start, however, the ambition at Alexandria was bigger than elsewhere – in the words of one scholar ‘an industry of learning’ was launched there.²³ As early as 283 BC a synodos, or community of thirty to fifty learned men (only men), was associated with the library and given special status – the scholars were exempted from paying taxes and given free board and lodging in the royal quarter of the city. The library was directed by a scholar-librarian, appointed by the king, who also held the post of royal tutor.²⁴ This library had several wings, with lines of shelves, or thaike, arranged along covered walkways, with niches where different categories of learning were kept. There were lecture theatres and a botanical garden.

The first librarian was Demetrius and by the time of the poet Callimachus, one of his better known successors, in the third century BC, the library comprised more than 400,000 mixed scrolls plus 90,000 single scrolls. Later, a daughter library, the Serapeion, housed in the temple of Serapis, a new Graeco-Egyptian cult, which may have been based on Hades, the Greek god of the dead, held another 40,000 scrolls. Callimachus installed the first subject catalogue in the world, the Pinakes, one effect of which was that by the fourth century AD, as many as one hundred scholars at a time came to the library to consult the books and discuss the texts with others. This distinguished community existed in all for some seven hundred years. The scholars wrote on papyrus, over which Alexandria had a monopoly for some time, and then on parchment when the king stopped exporting papyrus in an attempt to stifle rival libraries being built up elsewhere, notably at Pergamum.²⁵ The papyrus and parchment books were written as scrolls (in length they were what we would mean by a chapter) and were stored in linen or leather jackets and kept in racks. By Roman times, not all the books were scrolls any more: the codex had been introduced, stored in wooden crates.²⁶

The library also boasted many charakitai, ‘scribblers’ as they were called, in effect translators. The kings of Alexandria – the Ptolemies – were very keen to acquire copies of all the books they did not possess, in their attempt to attain all the wisdom of Greece, Babylon, India and elsewhere. In particular, the agents for Ptolemy III Euergetes scoured the Mediterranean and he himself wrote to all the sovereigns of the known world, asking to borrow their books for copying. When he was lent works written by Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles from Athens, he held on to the originals, forfeiting his deposit, and returned the copies. In the same way all ships passing through the harbours of Alexandria were forced to deposit any books they were carrying at the library, where they were copied and catalogued as ‘from the ships’. For the most part the ships also had returned to them copies of the books that had been confiscated. This assiduous ‘collecting’ gave the Alexandrian library a pivotal role in the civilised world of antiquity.²⁷

Among the famous scholars who made their name at Alexandria were Euclid, who may have written his Elements during the reign of Ptolemy I (323–285 BC), Aristarchus, who proposed a heliocentric basis for the solar system, and Apollonius of Perga, ‘the great geometer’, who wrote his influential book on conic sections in the city. Apollonius of Rhodes was the author of the epic Argonautica (about 270 BC) and he introduced Archimedes of Syracuse, who spent time observing the rise and fall of the Nile, and inventing the screw for which he became famous. Archimedes also initiated hydrostatics and began his method of calculating area and volume that, 1,800 years later, would form the basis of the calculus.

A later librarian, Eratosthenes (c. 276–196), was a geographer as well as a mathematician. A great friend of Archimedes, he believed that all the earth’s oceans were connected, that Africa might one day be circumnavigated and that India ‘could be reached by sailing westward from Spain’. It was Eratosthenes who calculated the correct duration of a year, who put forward the idea that the earth is round, and calculated its diameter to within an error of fifty miles. He did this by selecting two sites which were a known distance apart, Alexandria in the north and Syene (modern Aswan) in the south, which was assumed at that time to be exactly under the Tropic of Cancer, which meant that at the summer solstice the sun would be directly overhead and cast no shadow. At Alexandria on the same day, he used a skaph or bowl, a concave hemisphere, with a vertical rod or gnomon fixed at its centre. This cast a shadow which covered one-fiftieth of the surface of the bowl and so Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth as 50 × 5,000 (= 250,000) stades (later amended to 252,000 stades, since it was more conveniently divisible by sixty). 250,000 stades was equal to 25,000 miles, not so far from the modern calculation of just under 26,000 miles.²⁸ Eratosthenes also began the science of chronology, carefully establishing when the fall of Troy occurred (1184 BC), the first Olympiad (776 BC) and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war (432 BC). He also initiated the calendar that Julius Caesar eventually installed and devised a method for identifying prime numbers. He was known among fellow scholars as ‘Beta’ (Plato was ‘Alpha’).²⁹

The Elements of Euclid is widely acknowledged as the most influential textbook of all time. Composed about 300 BC, some one thousand editions have been produced, making it perhaps the most republished book after the Bible (its contents are still taught in secondary schools today). Euclid (eu means ‘good’ and kleis – conveniently – means ‘key’) may well have studied at Plato’s Academy, if not with the great man in person (he was born in Athens around 330 BC), and although he produced no new ideas himself, Elements (Stoichia) is regarded as a history of Greek mathematics to that point.³⁰ The book begins with a series of definitions: of a point (‘that which has no part’), a line (‘a length without breadth’), various angles and planes, followed by five postulates (‘a line can be drawn from any point to any other point’), and five axioms, such as ‘all things equal to the same thing are equal to one another’.³¹ The thirteen books, or chapters, that follow explore plane geometry, solid geometry, the theory of numbers, proportions, and his famous method of ‘exhaustion’.³² In this Euclid showed how to ‘exhaust’ the area of a circle by means of an inscribed polygon: ‘If we successfully double the number of sides in the polygon, we will eventually reduce the difference between the area of the polygon (known) and the area of the circle (unknown) to the point where it is smaller than any magnitude we choose’ (see Figure 8). One effect of Euclid’s work was that the Alexandrians, unlike the Athenians, treated mathematics as a subject wholly distinct from philosophy.³³

Figure 8: Euclid’s method of ‘exhaustion’ of a circle

Apollonius of Perga was both a mathematician and an astronomer. Born at Perga in Pamphylia (southern Asia Minor), he studied at Pergamum, but flourished at Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes, dying in 200 BC. Several of his works have been lost but the Conics was the equal of Euclid’s Elements in that it survived throughout antiquity without being improved upon. A jealous man, he was known as ‘Epsilon’, because in the Mouseion he always used the room numbered 5 in the Greek alphabet. In the Conics Apollonius studied the ellipse, parabola and hyperbola – the plane figures generated when a circular cone is cut at acute, right and obtuse angles – and set out a new approach to their definition and description. Cones would become important in both optics and astronomy.³⁴ In his astronomical works (which he sent to colleagues to critique before he released them generally), Apollonius built on the epicycles of Eudoxus of Cnidus to explain planetary motion. This system envisaged planets moving in small circles around a point, as the point moved in a larger circle around the earth. At this stage, before elliptical orbits were conceived, this was the only way mathematical theory could be made to fit observation.³⁵

The most interesting, as well as the most versatile of the Hellenistic mathematicians was Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287–212 BC). He appears to have studied at Alexandria for quite a while, with the students of Euclid, and he was constantly in touch with the scholars there, though he lived mainly at Syracuse, where he died. During the second Punic war, Syracuse was caught up in the struggle between Rome and Carthage and, having sided with the latter power, the city was besieged by the Romans in 214–212 BC. During this war, we are told by Plutarch, in his life of the Roman general Marcellus, Archimedes invented a number of ingenious weapons to use against the enemy, including catapults and burning-mirrors to set fire to Roman ships. All to no avail, for the city eventually fell and, despite an order from Marcellus to spare Archimedes’ life, he was killed when a Roman soldier ran a sword through him while he was drawing a mathematical figure in the sand.

He himself set little store by his innovations. He was more interested in ideas, and his range was remarkable. He wrote on levers, in On the Equilibrium of Planes, and on hydrostatics, in On Floating Bodies. This latter gave rise to his famous lines: ‘Any solid lighter than a fluid will, if placed in a fluid, be so far immersed that the weight of the solid will be equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.’ And: ‘A solid heavier than a fluid will, if placed in it, descend to the bottom of the fluid, and the solid will, when weighed in the fluid, be lighter than its true weight by the weight of the fluid displaced.’³⁶ He explored large numbers, a preoccupation that would lead centuries later to the invention of logarithms, and he achieved the most accurate rendering of pi.³⁷

The last of the great Hellenistic mathematicians at Alexandria was Claudius Ptolemy, who was active from AD 127 to 151. (The name Ptolemy here refers to the area of the city he came from; he was not related to the royal Ptolemies of Alexandria.) His great work was originally called Mathematical Syntaxis (System), thirteen books or chapters, but since this was often compared with other (lesser) collections by various authors, it became known as megiste, ‘the greatest’. Later, in the Muslim world, there was a custom of calling this book by the Arabic equivalent, Almagest, and it is by this name that Ptolemy’s work is usually known.³⁸ The Almagest is primarily a work of trigonometry, that branch of mathematics associated with triangles, how the angles and lengths of the sides are related, and how they are all related to the circles which encompass them. In turn, these are related to the orbits of the heavenly bodies and the angles the planets present to the observer here on earth. Books 7 and 8 of the Almagest listed over one thousand stars, arranged according to forty-eight constellations.

Towards the middle of the third century BC, Aristarchus of Samos had proposed putting the earth in motion about the sun. Most other astronomers, Ptolemy included, discounted this because they thought that if the earth moved by so much, the ‘fixed’ stars in the heavens should change their positions relative to one another. But they didn’t. Ptolemy, armed with his calculations of trigonometry – of chords and arcs (similar to sines) – went on to develop his system of planetary cycles and epicycles, known as the Ptolemaic system. This system envisaged a geocentric universe, with other bodies moving in a grand circle around a central point (the deferent), and in a smaller epicycle, as Eudoxus had imagined, all the while spinning on their axes.

Ptolemy’s other great work was his Geography, in eight chapters. In Alexandria, geography had been put on the map, so to speak, by Strabo, who had written a history of the subject and of his travels, which showed for example that ‘Egypt’ had originally referred only to that strip of land or ‘bandage’ running along the Nile, but then extended further and further east and west, eventually taking in Cyprus. Strabo also noted the convexity of the sea.³⁹ But Ptolemy was a more theoretical and innovative geographer. His Geography introduced the system of latitudes and longitudes as used today, and catalogued around eight thousand cities, rivers and other features of the earth. At the time there was in fact no satisfactory way to determine longitude and, as a result, Ptolemy seriously underestimated the size of the earth, opting for a circumference of 180,000 stadia given by Posidonius, a Stoic teacher of Pompey and Cicero, rather than the 252,000 stadia calculated by Eratosthenes and amended by Hipparchus. One of the major consequences of this error was that subsequent navigators and explorers assumed that a voyage westward to India would not be nearly so far as it was. Had Columbus not been misled in this way, he might never have risked the journey he did make. Ptolemy also developed the first projection of the earth – i.e., a representation of the globe on a flat surface.⁴⁰

Alexandria continued as the focus of Hellenistic mathematics: Menelaus of Alexandria, Heron of Alexandria, Diophantus of Alexandria, Pappus of Alexandria and Proclus of Alexandria all built on Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius and Ptolemy. We should not forget that the great age of Greek maths and science lasted from the sixth century BC to the beginning of the sixth century AD, representing more than a millennium of great productivity. No other civilisation has produced so much over such a long period of time.⁴¹

There was another – very important and very different – aspect to mathematics, or at least to numbers, in Alexandria. These were the so-called ‘Orphic mysteries’ with the emphasis on mysteries and mysticism. According to Marsilio Ficino, writing in the fifteenth century, there was a line of succession of the six great theologians in antiquity. Zoroaster was ‘the chief of the Magi’; the second was Hermes Trismegistus, the head of the Egyptian priesthood; Orpheus succeeded Trismegistus and was followed by Aglaophamus, who initiated Pythagoras into the secrets, who in turn confided in Plato. In Alexandria, Plato was built on by Clement and by Philo, to create what became known as Neoplatonism.

Three ideas underlie the Orphic mysteries. One is the mystic power of number. The existence of numbers, their abstract quality and their behaviour, relating to so much in the universe, had an enduring fascination for the ancients, accounting as they did (so it was felt) for celestial harmony.⁴² The abstract nature of number also reinforced the idea of an abstract soul, which brought with it the further – all-important – idea of salvation, the belief that there was a future state of bliss, achieved by transmigration, or reincarnation. Finally, there was the principle of emanation – that there is an eternally existent ‘good’, a unity or ‘monad’, from which all creation springs. Like number, this was felt to be an essentially abstract entity. The soul occupied a central position between the monad and the material world, between the totally abstract mind and the senses. According to the Orphics, the monad sent out (‘emanated’) projections of itself into the material world and it was the task of the soul, using the senses, to learn. In this way, via repeated reincarnations, the soul evolved to the point where further reincarnations were no longer needed. A series of ecstatic moments of deep insight resulted in a form of knowledge known as gnôsis, ‘in which the mind comes into a state of oneness with the thing perceived’. It can be seen that this idea, stemming originally from Zoroaster/Zarathustra, underlies many of the world’s major religions. It is another core belief, to add to the others considered in earlier chapters.

Pythagoras believed in particular that the study of number and harmony could lead to gnosis. For Pythagoreans, one, 1, is not a true number but the ‘essence’ of number, out of which the number system emerges. Its division into two creates a triangle, a trinity, the most basic harmonic form, which would find echoes in so many religions. Plato, at his most mystical, believed that there was a ‘world soul’, also based on number and harmony, and out of which all creation arose. But he added the important refinement that the method to approach gnosis was by dialectic, the critical examination of opinions.⁴³

Traditionally, Christianity reached Alexandria in the middle of the first century AD when the evangelist St Mark arrived, to preach the new religion. The spiritual similarities between Platonism and Christianity had been most fully perceived by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215) but it was Philo Judaeus who first worked out the new amalgamation. Pythagorean and Platonic schools of thought had existed in Alexandria for some time, with educated Jews well aware of the parallels between Jewish and Hellenistic ideas, so much so that many of them thought that Orphism was no more than ‘an unrecorded emanation of the Torah’. Philo was a typical Alexandrian who ‘never relied on the literal meaning of things, and looked for mystical and allegorical interpretation’. He thought that we can ‘connect’ with God through the divine ideas, that ideas were ‘the thoughts of God’ because they brought ‘unformed matter’ into order. Like Plato he had a dualistic notion of humanity: ‘Of the pure souls that inhabit ethereal space, those nearest earth are attracted by sensible beings and descend into their bodies.’ Souls are ‘the Godward side of man’. Salvation is achieved when the soul returns to God.⁴⁴

Philo’s ideas were built on by Ammonius Saccas (d. 242), who taught in Alexandria for more than fifty years. His pupils were both pagans and Christians and included some major thinkers, such as Plotinus, Longinus and Origen. For Ammonius, God was threefold: essence, intellect and power, the latter two being emanations of the essence (and in this way mirroring the behaviour of number). For Ammonius and other Neoplatonists the essence of God could not be known by intellect alone – this produced ‘only opinion and belief’. This was a major difference between the early Christians and the Greeks: for the Christians all that was needed, they said, was faith, belief. But this cut across the Greek tradition of reason. The Neoplatonists, like the Orphics before them, posited what was in effect a third form of knowledge, gnosis, which was experiential, and not wholly within the power of the intellect. Philosophy and theology helped one towards gnosis and the Christian idea – that only belief was needed – appeared to the Neoplatonists to be an undermining of spiritual evolution. Under Plotinus, who moved from Alexandria to Rome, gnosis – appreciation of the divine – could be achieved only by doing good, by experiencing good, and by use of the intellect in self-contemplation, self-awareness leading to the monad, or the One, or unity. This is not Christianity; but its mystical elements, its ideas about the Trinity, and the reasons for the Trinity (more difficult to grasp even than the Christian Trinity), and its use of the intellect and dialectic, did help to shape early Christian thought. The notion of biblical exegesis, the practice of asceticism, hermitism and monasticism are all founded in the Orphic mysteries, gnosis, and Neoplatonism.⁴⁵ It is difficult for us to grasp (even to write about) and shows how different early Christianity was from the modern version.

Clement thought that all knowledge – gnosis, philosophy, reason – was preparation for Christianity. Worship of the heavenly bodies, for example, was given to man at an early stage, ‘that he might rise from these sublime objects to worship of the creator’.⁴⁶ The Father, he said, was the Absolute of the philosophers, whereas the Son was the reason (the Word) of God. It followed for him that a Christian life involved an inevitable conflict between the downward pull of the passions and the discipline of the disciple. Man is made for the contemplation of God, all knowledge was a preparation for this, all behaviour directed to this end.

This early world of Neoplatonic Christianity in Alexandria was engulfed at least twice by vicious quarrels. The first time arose in the second century as a result of a treatise, The True Word, by the pagan philosopher Celsus, who could not understand why so many Jews had left the Law of their fathers and converted to the new religion. Celsus turned his wrath on the Messiah, pointing out that he was born in a small village, to a poor woman whose husband had divorced her after she committed adultery with a soldier. This, he remarked sarcastically, was an unlikely beginning for a god. He then went on to compare Jesus’ so-called healing powers with the ‘wizards of Egypt’, who performed similar tricks to the Messiah ‘every day in the market place for a few obols’. ‘We do not call them the Sons of God. They are rogues and vagabonds.’⁴⁷ Celsus insisted that the universe was no more made for man than it was made for lions or dolphins, that the view among Christians that they alone had possession of divine knowledge was ludicrous, and that the ‘promise’ of salvation and bliss was a delusion. But Celsus was not only a clever polemicist – he was an able researcher too: he showed where the idea of Satan had originated, he showed that the story of Babel was a plagiarism of early Greek ideas, and he showed that heaven itself was derived from a Platonic notion. Christianity was a collection of ‘borrowed’ and intellectually bankrupt ideas.

His charges went unanswered for more than a century until one of Clement’s followers, Origenes Adamantius, better known as Origen, took it upon himself to do so. He was careful not to try to refute the irrefutable, arguing instead that religion, faith, will always be more rewarding, more emotionally satisfying, more morally uplifting than philosophy, and that insofar as Christians led moral and productive lives the religion justified itself.

But even Origen did not think that the Father and the Son were the same essence, part of the same Trinity. In fact, he thought there was an immense difference between them, that the Son was so far beneath the Father that he should not be worshipped. This view found echoes – more than echoes – in the second great controversy to shake the early Church, the so-called Arian heresy. It is not certain whether Arius was born in Libya or in Alexandria but he certainly lived his adult life in the city. He appears to have been a quarrelsome man, who was twice excommunicated by the bishop of Alexandria, but his most famous and troublesome assertion was to question the divinity of Christ, arguing that Jesus was ‘a created being’ and therefore thoroughly dissimilar – and inferior – to God the Father. This became the subject of passionate debate on the streets and in the shops of Alexandria – blood was shed. For Arius, Jesus was a middle being between God and the World, who pre-existed before time, before all creatures, and was the executor of His thoughts. But he was made, said Arius – not in the essence of the Father – but out of nothing.⁴⁸ Jesus was therefore not eternal and not unchangeable. In his own defence, Arius noted that in the scriptures Christ had said: ‘The Father is greater than I.’

The first ecumenical council of the Church was called at Nicaea in 325 AD to decide this very question. The council decided against Arius, affirming that the Son was the same substance (homoousios) as the Father. Arius refused to accept this decision but even so was allowed back into Alexandria. On his return, however, on his way to the church, for the ceremony of readmission, he was seized with stomach cramps, his bowels were voided and extruded, he suffered a ‘copious’ haemorrhage, and expired almost immediately. For years afterwards, Alexandrians avoided the spot where Arius died.

There is a final Alexandrian idea to consider: empiricism. Ancient Egypt, we know, ‘teemed’ with doctors, though at the time being a doctor was mainly a job for theorists (iatrosophist was the technical term). That is to say, doctors had many theories about what caused illness, and what treatments might be effective, but they did no experimentation to test their theories. Such an idea had yet to occur to anyone. But it seems that in Alexandria, at the turn of the third century BC, at least two doctors, Herophilus and Erasistratus, were allowed to perform autopsies on the bodies of criminals, supplied ‘out of prison by the king’. The experiments shocked many of the citizens but the vivisections led to so many discoveries that ‘the Greek language was simply unable to name them all’.⁴⁹ Both owed a considerable debt to Aristotle, the man who – with the Stoics – had in effect achieved the secularisation of the corpse, the idea that ‘things’ are ‘morally indifferent’.⁵⁰

Herophilus made two advances. One was to establish, in a medical context, the culture of smallness, an appreciation of the small structures of the body. He discovered the existence of nerves, accurately distinguishing motor and sensory nerves, the ventricles of the brain, the cornea and the retina of the eye, he made the first accurate description of the liver, the first investigation of the pancreas, the ovaries, the Fallopian tubes, and the uterus, in the process demystifying the womb and the idea that, in some way, in hysterics, it had moved.⁵¹ His second achievement was the mathematisation of the body, noting that there were stages in the development of the embryo, periodicity in ailments (such as fevers) and providing a quantitative theory of the pulse. This, he maintained, varied at different stages of life, each phase having a characteristic ‘music’ or rhythm. There was first the pyrrhic pulse in infancy (∪∪), a trochaic pulse in adolescence (–∪), a spondaic in the prime of life (––) and finally an iambic rhythm in old age (∪–). He devised a portable clepsydra to calibrate the pulse of his patients.⁵² He also noted the geometry of wounds – round wounds heal more slowly than others.

In a sense, and to our modern way of thinking, Erasistratus went further down the mathematical route than Herophilus, maintaining that the body was a form of machine – that all physiological processes are explicable in terms of their material properties and structures.⁵³ Blood and air, he said, were distributed mechanically from the heart and the liver through the arteries and psychic pneumata are radiated from the brain through the nerves. The heart, he thought, was a form of bellows, with valves to prevent backward flow. At this time, Ctesibious had devised a water pump with two chambers in it, though whether Erasistratus borrowed from Ctesibious or Ctesibious from Erasistratus isn’t known. Erasistratus did, however, feel that the body had a purpose: he wasn’t a complete mechanist as were, for example, the French physiologists in the Enlightenment.⁵⁴

Despite its shocking nature and its astounding results, experimental medicine – experimental anything – does not seem to have caught on. It would be another 1,400 years before the experiment was taken seriously as a method.⁵⁵

On the other hand, although experimentation didn’t catch on, another form of empiricism did. This was founded by Philinus of Cos, who broke away from Herophilus. We don’t know much about Philinus and what we do know comes from Galen, the famous Greek doctor of the second century AD. Philinus wrote several books about medical empiricism in Alexandria and tells us that they abandoned theory (which was then understood as what one could see with ‘the mind’s eye’), and argued instead that true insight could only be achieved as a result of observation and seeing what circumstances were attached to any given condition (such a cluster of observations was known as a ‘syndrome’). Moreover, for Philinus there were three ways this experience could be gathered: teresis, or careful vigilance; metabasis tou homoiou, or analogical inference, which enabled a doctor to say, tentatively, that what applied to one part of the body might well apply to another part; and historia, research among earlier scrolls and codices. In this way, the writings of the Hippocratic tradition came to be regarded more or less as a research tool (as we would say) which added to, rather than detracted from, their authority. It was left to Galen, in the second century AD, to rediscover the importance of practical investigation. But he too was a literary type, often resorting to libraries, or haunting booksellers who specialised in medical books. It would be many centuries before medicine opened up to the empiricist tradition that has brought so much benefit in our own day.⁵⁶

By the time of the Year 0 Alexandria had changed in two important ways. In 48 BC there had been a terrible fire which had destroyed at least part of the great library. Some accounts say that most of the books were lost, others that it was mainly the Serapeion that suffered, still others that the bulk of the library was destroyed much later by the Arabs in the sixth century of the common era. Since, as we shall see, the Arabs went to great lengths to preserve Greek and Near Eastern materials wherever they found them, it seems unlikely that the Muslims deliberately destroyed the library. But certainly, the destruction of the library in Alexandria was one of the ways by which the ideas of antiquity were lost, and not recovered for many centuries.

However, the main change that occurred in Alexandria during the second and first centuries BC was that the dominant form of scholarship evolved. It became less concerned with natural knowledge (natural science, as we would say) and more concerned with literature, literary criticism and ‘custodial scholarship’.⁵⁷ ‘By the beginning of the common era, Alexandria was a place where what could be known of Babylonian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek thought was strenuously collected, codified, systematised, and contained. Alexandria became the foundation of the text-centred culture of the western tradition.’⁵⁸ It was the notes, or scholia, written chiefly in the margins of Alexandrian books, that gave rise to our words scholar and scholarship.

In India, as elsewhere, dating depended on the religion followed. Pandit Nehru, writing in 1953, claimed there were over thirty calendars in use even then.⁵⁹ The Vedas refer to a calendar of twelve months of thirty days each. The year was divided into two parts, the uttarayana, when the sun moves north, and the dakshinayana, when the sun moves south, and into six seasons: Vasanta (spring), Grishma (hot), Varsha (rainy), Sarad (autumn), Hemanta (cold), and Sisira (dewy). Several astronomical works (the Siddhantas) were composed in the first century AD, and they show the influence of Babylon and Greece, notably in the division of time into ever smaller components of sixty, and in the names for signs of the zodiac.⁶⁰

Before the first century BC, many Indians calculated time by regnal years though Buddhists took their dates from the attainment of nirvana (as opposed to the birth) of the Buddha: traditionally, 544 BC. The Jains did likewise, marking the death of Mahavira in 528 BC. After the first century BC, the Hindus used one of two systems. The Vikrama era began in 58 BC, and is said in the Jain text Kalakakaryakathanka to have been founded after the victory of King Vikramaditya over the Shakas. When this chronology is employed, Hindus use the word vikramasamvat, or simply samvat. But the most widespread chronology of all, still in use in India, is that which dates from the Shaka era itself, which began in AD 78. Kanishka, with whose accession the era began, was a great Kushan king/emperor, who ruled over vast distances and had his capital at Purushpar, or Peshawar, where there still exist the remains of a colossal monument, nearly a hundred metres in diameter and reported to have been 200 metres high. The Shakas are thought to have been incomers from Scythia, that area of the Caucasus that was west of the Volga and north of the Black Sea.⁶¹

By the time of Jesus Christ there were many links between the Mediterranean world and northern and western India. By Kushan times – the middle of the first century AD – Indian coins were minted with a mixture of Greek, Persian and Indian gods.⁶² In the late first century BC there was an upsurge in the number of Indians travelling to Egypt and beyond, with several references in literature, including an ode by Horace in 17 BC, which mentions Indians and Scythians in Rome.⁶³ The anonymous Alexandrian sea captain who produced the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written some time between AD 50 and 120, gave an account of various ports of the Red Sea and round the Indian coast, including many details of western Indian harbours.⁶⁴ Several texts of ancient Indian literature mention the Greeks, using the word Yavanas, a term said to be derived from ‘Ionian’.⁶⁵ Masses of red-glazed Arretine pottery were discovered in India, together with Roman coins which, because of their precious metal content, were much sought after. Other travel information was a weird amalgam of fact and romance. Megasthenes, who visited India as ambassador of the Seleucid king c. 300 BC, reported that some Indian tribes had dog’s heads and barked instead of speaking; he said others had feet that turned backwards, or had no mouths, and that gold was sometimes to be found in the rivers.⁶⁶ But he also reported, accurately enough, on their special commissioners whose job it was to maintain the rivers, or to protect foreigners, and that there were pillars placed along the roads at regular intervals to indicate distances.⁶⁷

But it is the affinities between Buddhism and Christianity that are, perhaps, the most intriguing ideas of the time. Given that Buddhism pre-dated Christianity by several hundred years, we may take it that if anyone borrowed from anyone else, it was the Christians. The Tripitaka (‘The Three Baskets’), as the Buddhist scriptures are known, were in existence, at least in some form (possibly oral), by the time of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka, who lived in the third century BC.⁶⁸ Apart from any specific parallels between the Buddha and Jesus, the most striking similarity is the overall resemblance of their life stories. Jean Sedlar, who has studied both narratives, notes that both figures were born to a woman who was ‘sexually untouched’. At the moment when both came into the world, celestial beings announced the event to an aged saint who prophesied the infant’s future glory. Both were fulfilling an ancient prophecy and when they were grown, both lived as ‘wandering ascetics and preachers’. Both could control the elements and cure the sick and, shortly before dying, each was transfigured. At the end, in both cases, a great earthquake shook the world. Both sent out disciples.⁶⁹ Some of the specific parallels are striking too. In the Buddhist story, the holy man Asita learned from the gods in heaven that a future Buddha had been born and hurried to see the infant to foretell his destiny. In the gospel of Luke we are told how the Holy Spirit revealed to Simeon that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. Proceeding to the Temple, where – as stipulated by Jewish tradition – Mary and Joseph had taken the baby, to present him to the Lord, Simeon prophesied ‘that Jesus would cause the fall and rising again of many in Israel’. Likewise, as with Peter in the Bible, the Buddhist scriptures describe a certain monk who crosses the river Ashiravati by walking on the water, until his faith deserts him, and he sinks.⁷⁰ Jean Sedlar, who also notes that both systems share an ethic of love and non-resistance to violence, self-denial, the renunciation of earthly satisfactions and an approval of celibacy, concludes that ‘many of the general resemblances between Buddhism . . . and Christian ethics must be attributed to the similar other-worldly attitudes of these religions’. In both, for example, the goal of salvation after death was all-important. Though Sedlar believes that both religions borrowed from each other, she says there was more borrowing in the Apocrypha where, in most cases, ‘the Buddhist versions are probably the originals’.⁷¹ The similarities may mean less than they appear to at first sight.

The most famous instance of a link between Christianity and India concerns Thomas, one of Jesus’ original twelve disciples. According to a Syriac source, the Acts of Judas Thomas, probably composed at Edessa, in north-west Mesopotamia in the third century AD, Jesus’ disciples divided up the known world for evangelisation after the Crucifixion, and India fell to Judas Thomas.⁷² Today, on the Malabar coast of south-west India, there exists a community of some 2 million Indian Christians who believe their church was founded by Thomas. According to local tradition, he landed there around AD 50 and built seven churches.⁷³ No one outside the Malabar community itself believes any longer that the Thomas who initiated the Indian church was the biblical disciple of that name, but the very presence of Christianity in the subcontinent does have some interesting ramifications. In particular, there is Vishnuism, one of the two main divisions of Hinduism, which arose in the second and third centuries. The god who is believed to be Vishnu’s principal incarnation is called Krishna and, as European missionaries discovered in the eighteenth century, in some Indian dialects Krishna is pronounced Krishta, much the same pronunciation as that given to Christ. As Jean Sedlar puts it, ‘the theoretical possibility exists that Krishnaism might be a corrupt form of Christianity’.⁷⁴ There are parallels between the religions, but the fact remains that the name Krishna goes back to the sixth century BC. Again, we are unlikely ever to find a complete answer.⁷⁵

In India, in the year we are calling 0, the subcontinent was politically divided. The Mauryan empire had ended around 180 BC and the Guptas would not emerge until AD 320.

The Mauryan era is, in the words of one historian, that ‘to which the word “classical” is as readily applied as to those of Greece and Rome – and with good reason, in that it has since served India as an exemplar of political integration and moral regeneration’.⁷⁶ With their capital at Pataliputra, in the north, the Mauryas produced two – very different – leaders, and one classic text. The first of these two was known to history for many years as Sandrokottos. It was Sandrokottos’ empire that was described in such fantastic terms by Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador to his court. And it was Sandrokottos who Sir William Jones, a British judge in India in the eighteenth century, realised in a flash of inspiration was the same person as Chandragupta, ‘the Indian Julius Caesar’ who left the greatest empire, stretching from Bengal to Afghanistan.⁷⁷

Sir William Jones’ association of Sandrokottos with Chandragupta was one flash of insight. Another was the brainchild of James Prinsep, the assay-master at the British mint in Calcutta, who in 1837 made what John Keay calls ‘the single most important discovery in the unravelling of India’s ancient history’.⁷⁸ Prinsep was familiar with a massive Buddhist stupa (or monument) at Sanchi, near Bhopal, in central India, which was covered with writing in an unknown script. This script was also reported from other parts of India. It was found on rocky outcrops, on cliffs, and on massive pillars, and many of the inscriptions seemed to say the same thing. Prinsep eventually identified the language as Pali, one of the derivatives of Sanskrit which, significantly, was popular in the Buddha’s time. In fact, as Prinsep guessed (because so many of the inscriptions were similar), it was the sacred language of Buddhist scripture. In a sense Prinsep was only half right. Pali was the sacred script of Buddhism but the inscriptions were not only religious tracts; they included also ‘hard statements of policy . . . the directives of a single sovereign.’⁷⁹ They became known in India as the Edicts after being attributed to a certain Devanampiya Piyadassi. The first term means ‘Beloved of the Gods’ and though Prinsep had at first no idea who this figure was, it soon became clear that he was Ashoka, the third Maurya, the grandson of Chandragupta, and the greatest of Indian emperors, who was elevated c. 268 BC and ruled for forty years. Ashoka championed Buddhism in India and sent his son to introduce the system in Sri Lanka, where there were many records of his achievements among the Buddhist literature there.⁸⁰

The Edicts – divided now into the fourteen Major Rock Edicts, the eight Minor Rock Edicts and Inscriptions, and the seven Major Pillar Edicts – describe Ashoka’s accomplishments. The ‘big idea’ in the Edicts is Ashoka’s concept of dhamma, equated with ‘mercy, charity, truthfulness and purity’, the renunciation of violence, piety, duty, decency and ‘right conduct’.⁸¹ The innovations of Ashoka cannot be fully understood other than against the background of the main classic text of the time, the Arthasastra, written by the ‘steely Brahmin’, Kautilya.⁸² Chief minister to Chandragupta, Kautilya’s treatise was a comprehensive compendium of statecraft – how the state should be administered, how taxes should be levied and collected, how foreign relations, and war, should be conducted. It has been described as an almost paranoiac document, with sections on how to detect dissent, how the state should intervene in almost all activities and with bloodthirsty suggestions for ruthless law enforcement. On the other hand, it has also been described as laying the ground for the world’s first secular welfare state.⁸³ Recent textual analysis by computer has shown that it was in fact written by several hands but it still remains ‘a guide not only for the acquisition of this world but of the next’.⁸⁴ In the Arthasastra, the author(s) say(s) that it is the sacred duty of a king to conquer neighbouring states. The ideology of dhamma, in contrast, was an attempt by Ashoka to go beyond this. He had conquered many states and his empire was enormous. Dhamma, therefore, was an attempt to unify his empire: common laws were introduced, common taxes and, where possible, standardisation – of measurements, punishments, and so on. It was an admirable aim, well justified by the comment of John Keay that this could be regarded as India’s ‘classical’ age, with Chandragupta as Julius Caesar and Ashoka as Augustus.

But learning too was encouraged by Ashoka and other Maurya rulers. Originally, the main debates had been between the Brahmans and the monastic sects – Buddhists and Jains. Not much written material has survived from that time but it is known that when the Buddha was alive there were two centres of learning or, as we would say, universities. These were at Kasi and Taxila but they were overshadowed later, in the early part of the fourth century BC, by the institution at Nalanda, in Bihar, which has been called the Oxford of Buddhist India.⁸⁵ It consisted of a cluster of courtyards and buildings and many large-scale sculptures of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas. Brahmanical universities did not appear until much later, around the time of Christ, at Kasi (as Varanasi was then known). The foundation of the curriculum was grammar, politics and caste law, with medicine, fine arts, logic and philosophy introduced later.⁸⁶ It was the custom for the students to nail their theses to the doors of the lecture halls. The public would gather, read the theses, and then hear the students defend their arguments in the hall.

The rise of the universities encouraged the spread of literacy and of learning, including (1) the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, (2) the Upanishads, short religious poems for memorising, (3) sutras, brief philosophical guides, in prose, for learning, (4) sastras, didactic verses presenting philosophical and legal principles, (5) dramas, (6) animal tales, and (7) the Puranas, the scriptures of later Hinduism.⁸⁷

The Mahabharata, which means the Great Bharata, had its origin in Vedic times. Legend has it that this epic work existed in several forms in antiquity, variously of 24,000 and 100,000 verses. The version we have, however, was produced probably as late as c. 100 BC. Its theme is a fratricidal war of succession.⁸⁸ The story opens with Pandu being consecrated as emperor in the Bharata dynasty. He becomes emperor because his elder brother, Dhrtarastra, who should be emperor by rights, is blind and therefore legally disqualified. However, Pandu dies before his brother, who seizes power while claiming to act as regent for Pandu’s son, Yudhisthira. Yudhisthira had been named as crown prince, given part of the kingdom to rule, and formed a marital alliance with Krsna (Khrishna), leader of another dynasty. This provokes jealousy in Duryodhana, Dhrtarastra’s son, who challenges Yudhisthira to a gambling duel, where he knows the odds have been fixed. In the duel, Yudhisthira loses everything, and is consigned to exile. After twelve years, Yudhisthira sends Krsna as envoy to negotiate the restoration of his kingdom. But Duryodhana will not give up even the smallest part and a great battle becomes inevitable. This takes eighteen days but, with the aid of Krsna, who engages in various acts of deceit, the Pandavas regain their kingdom and destroy their enemies. In the main the Mahabharata is seen as criticising the effects on man’s nature of too much worldly ambition. In a sense this is both Buddhist and Greek.⁸⁹ Even today in India, TV adaptations of the story bring the country to a standstill.

The Ramayana, traditionally held to have been composed by Valmiki (fl. c. 200 BC), was the first narrative poem in Sanskrit. Metrically, it is later than the Mahabharata, lacking the archaic rhythms of the earlier epic and it has less material added in later ages. Here too we have a story of palace intrigue. Rama is excluded from the succession to his father’s throne, and sentenced to twelve years’ exile, in the south. There, he finds the land constantly raided by demons from Lanka (Ceylon) and even his own wife is abducted. In retaliation, he raises an army, invades Lanka, rescues his wife, and kills Ravana, the demon king. When he returns home the period of exile has lapsed and his brother magnanimously surrenders the kingdom. The Ramayana is a more generous story than the Mahabharata. Later translated out of Sanskrit into the vernacular languages of India, it became the nation’s favourite poem and Rama its most popular hero. Episodes from the narrative were widely used in sculpture and the other arts.⁹⁰

The five hundred years between the displacement of the Mauryas and the emergence of the Guptas (in AD 320), straddling the year 0, were once regarded as India’s ‘dark age’.⁹¹ This view can no longer be justified. It was a time of great cities, of Pataliputra and Kasi, of Mathura and Ujjain, often built to a common plan, four-square, with a gate at the centre of each wall, surrounded by a moat. It was, above all, a great era of sculpture and rock-cut temples, for which India would become justly famous. The great sculptural reliefs of Bharhut, Sanchi and Amaravati all date from this period, commissioned not by emperors but by the newly-successful merchant class. Principally found in western India, in the hinterland behind Mumbai (Bombay), where the folds in the edges of the Deccan plateau create hundreds of natural caves, many of these monuments are more than temples – there are entire monasteries, with meditation cells, pillared halls, and elaborate connecting staircases, all carved out of the natural rock. Besides the rock-temples, two forms of sculpture emerged at this time. One, in the north, in the Punjab and Afghanistan, was very much influenced by Greek ideas, showing Buddhas and other figures with the attributes of Apollo and other Greek gods (this is now known as the Gandharan school). The second developed around the city of Mathura, using the distinctive pink sandstone of the area, showing mainly voluptuous female figures that may have been associated with various cults.⁹² Indian sculpture – Indian carving – is much less well known than classical Greek carving of the same period, but it deserves similar acclamation.

The time straddling the year 0 in India was equally notable for its literature. In the second century BC, Patanjali, a Sanskrit grammarian, compiled the standard text on yoga. Yoga is defined as a cessation of mental states.⁹³ The yogin learns to position him- or herself in a particular position (asana) and to steadily arrest the processes of breathing. At the same time he or she increasingly focuses on his or her own mental state, the aim being to ‘deconstruct the fabric of the mind’, learning a ‘transcendental loneliness’ (kaivahya), which brings with it ethical purity or a new wisdom. The greatest religious work was the Bhagavad Gita, a work of post-Maurya India. The Bhagavad builds on the Upanishads in a mixture of social administration and philosophy. It accepts the four castes and the four types of duties attached to them. For the brahmana, the duties are sacrifice and study; for the kshatriya, it is fighting and protection of the subjects; for the vaisya it is economic welfare, trade and agriculture; and for the sudra it is service and the menial jobs. Philosophically, the aim is to free oneself from all of the ‘impurities of passion’ – greed, antipathy, self-love. But even the seer or sage, the wise man, must pursue his public duties, as an example to others who may not possess his advantages.⁹⁴ However high a man may soar, in a philosophical sense, he is still bound by his social ties here on earth. The highest wisdom cannot be divorced from the world in which we live: it has to co-exist alongside. The Bhagavad Gita is scarcely less conservative than the Analects of Confucius.

The Buddhist equivalent of the Gita is The Lotus of the Good Law, Saddharmapundarika (see here). In some ways this was even more influential because, as we shall see, Buddhism was much more of a missionary religion than Hinduism. The Lotus provided China and Japan with new ideas about God and man and is found today on every Buddhist altar in Japan. In the second century AD, the Kamasutra of Vatsyana, the Manusmriti (‘Manu’s code’ of law) and Kautilya’s Arthasastra all found their final form.⁹⁵

Probably the most significant long-term intellectual trend at this time in the East was the move of Buddhism out of the subcontinent, to China, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and so on, and of Hindu-Buddhist diffusion into Java, Malaysia and elsewhere. According to tradition, Buddhism entered China during the reign of Ming-ti (AD 58–75), but actually it was the main religion in the various states of Tokharestan long before this and it was from there, in 2 BC, that the Chinese ambassador, Tsing Kiang, received Buddhist texts as gifts to take back to the Chinese court.⁹⁶

An official Chinese history, The Record of the Later Han, tells us that, by the first century AD, Buddhism had reached the Chinese capital. Liu Yang, a half-brother of the emperor, had received permission to practise Buddhism, which he did alongside worship of Laotzu. After the emperor had had a vision ‘of a golden man with sunlight passing from the back of his neck, who flew about in time and space’, envoys were sent to India to inquire after Buddhism and returned with monks, a number of sacred texts and many works of art. There are several accounts of journeys made into India, with drawings, written by Chinese pilgrims in the first century AD. For example, Wang Huan-ce travelled to India several times and made a copy of the Buddha image at Bodhgaya, the location where he achieved supreme enlightenment, which was then brought back to the Imperial Palace and served as the prototype for the Kongai-see temple. This early Buddhist art, imported from India, served only to stimulate a Chinese art of even greater beauty. By the middle of the first century, Buddhism was established north of the river Huai (halfway between modern Canton and Beijing), in eastern Honan and southern Shantung.⁹⁷

The reasons why Buddhism caught on so quickly in China have to do with the nature of life and thought among the Han Chinese, who ruled from 206 BC to AD 222, neatly straddling the year 0. The earliest settlements in China appeared around 3500 BC, with writing dating from the Shang period (c. 1600 BC). The origin of the Chinese script is a matter of lively debate. One theory, about the birth of numbers, is that – as in the Americas – characters began with knots in string, large knots for important memories, small knots for more trivial things. Figure 9, for example, shows the way string knots may have given birth to the Chinese characters for number.

Figure 9: Chinese ‘knot’ numerals

[Source: Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000, page 374]

Another theory is that rock art gave rise to some of the characters (for men, women, snakes, feet, mountains), and a third is that pottery marks, pictographs, which were used to indicate superstitious rites regarding the production and protection of pottery, also developed into Chinese characters. Finally, there are the oracle-bone inscriptions which also seem to prefigure the characters for, among others, the sun, the eye, and so on. It may well be, then, that Chinese characters had several origins. Their general shape, long and narrow from top to bottom, with the characters for animals having their heads at the top and their tails at the bottom, suggest they were originally written on bamboo stems, which have perished. The fact that the first known users were the diviners and scribes of the Shang kings suggests that writing proper in China did not emerge before 1600 BC and that its origin was religious/political rather than economic as in Mesopotamia.

From the earliest times the calendar was taken very seriously, with the Almanac Maker being a prestigious post in the imperial court. Excavations made between the two World Wars at Anyang, near the Yellow river, have uncovered many of the so-called oracle bones, usually the shoulder blades of oxen, or the under-shells of turtles. These produced cracks when heated, which were interpreted as part of the diviner’s art. Some of them also concern payment of tribute and so contain information on the calendar. They show that originally the Chinese divided the day and night into one hundred equal units (baike) and that they were aware of the 3651/4 year and a lunation of 291/2 days (there were originally four words for ‘year’ in Chinese). There were no eras, as such, in China, but time was understood to consist of a series of cycles. There was a ten-day cycle, with the days known as ‘ten heavenly stems’, and a twelve-day cycle, of the ‘twelve earthly branches’. Together, these produced a sixty-day ganzhi cycle (the lowest common multiple), which by tradition was begun in a year corresponding to 2637 BC. But other cycles were known: the chi, of 31,920 years, the ‘grand conjunctions’, when all the planets came together after a cycle of 138,240 years, and a ‘world cycle’ of 23,639,040 years, the beginning of which was referred to as the ‘supreme ultimate grand origin’.⁹⁸ Already, then, the Chinese had a very different idea of ‘deep’ time from anyone else. The Chinese also had a concept of approximate numbers (yueshu), so that, for example, wulu wushi means ‘about 50’. The numbers 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 were used to indicate orders of magnitude and were known as xushu, hyperbolic numbers, similar to the English ‘dozens’ or ‘hundreds’. The numbers 3, 9 and 12 were used respectively to mean ‘several’, ‘many’, and ‘a lot’, and some numbers were auspicious, associated with authority, power and longevity – thus all the doors in the Forbidden City have nine rows of nine nails. Alteration-proof characters were given to numbers to prevent falsification.

In 163 BC a new system, nianhao (reign-year title), was introduced and thereafter every emperor proclaimed a new nianhao at the beginning of the year following his accession. In 104 BC a new calendar was introduced, with twelve lunations and a thirteenth intercalated month, very similar to the Indian system and, indeed, to the zodiac. The seven-day week, however, was not adopted in China until the thirteenth century AD; before then the year was divided into twenty-four fortnightly periods beginning with Li Zhun (‘spring begins’) in February and ending with Da Han (‘severe cold’) in January. In China until Song times a ‘meal drum’ was sounded five times a day, signalling the three main meal times, the evening curfew and the morning lifting of the curfew. (This curfew was strictly enforced in every kingdom and especially in towns, where its aim was to prevent fire as much as crime.)⁹⁹

By the time Buddhism arrived in China the Han dynasty was in decline and with it the philosophical system that had dominated there for so long. The underlying principle of traditional Chinese thought was to imagine a cosmological order to the universe, which was mirrored on earth by the ordered centralisation around the emperor. This idea of order governed everything from commerce to government to philosophy to religion. Trade in the great cities could be carried out only in government markets, where officials set the prices and the level of taxes. The government built and maintained the main roads, and charged for their use. The government also operated a monopoly over iron, metal money and salt (a daily requirement for a grain diet). In this way order was centrally generated and maintained.

Above all, the Han emperor had a special role in worship and he collected around him large numbers of scholars whose job it was to advise him and help him run the state. These educated men became a new aristocracy under the Han; they were powerful officials in the provinces and were an (intended) threat to the older, more independent aristocracy. In this fashion, the Han gradually evolved a number of dominant ideas that amalgamated Confucianism into a state philosophy. This is referred to now either as legal-Confucianism, or Imperial Confucianism, to distinguish it from the original doctrines. As John Fairbank, the great Harvard scholar of China, put it, ‘The essential point about the Legalist-Confucian amalgam was that legalism was liked by rulers and Confucianism by bureaucrats.’¹⁰⁰ Confucians believed that the emperor’s observance of ceremonial ritual and his own exemplary conduct gave him a certain virtue (de) that encouraged others to respect his position. The threat of force always hovered in the background but the elaborate college of Confucian experts ensured that the emperor always behaved in the ‘right’ way. It was the Confucian understanding of ‘right conduct’ that governed everything, always in the context of Chinese cosmology. This cosmology was very different from Western ideas and was itself a sort of astronomical Confucianism, in that the Chinese imagined the universe as an ordered whole. The Chinese differed from other peoples further west in that they had no creation myth and no creator-lawgiver who was supernatural. They assumed that there was an ordered harmony in the universe but did not assume a supernatural deity who ordained this order. ‘For the Chinese the supreme cosmic power was immanent in nature, not transcendent.’¹⁰¹ Mankind was part of this ordered whole, his place defined and nurtured by the ruler and his ancestors.

As a result of this approach, the Han Chinese saw ‘correspondences’ and ‘resonance’ everywhere. The macrocosm was reflected in the microcosm of man which ordained his ‘proper’ place in the scheme of things. Thus, in the Huainanzi, written around 139 BC, ‘the head’s roundness resembles heaven’s and the feet’s squareness resembles earth. Heaven has four seasons, five phases, nine sections and 366 days. Man likewise has four limbs, five viscera, nine orifices and 366 joints. Heaven has wind and rain, cold and heat. Man likewise has taking and giving, joy and anger . . .’¹⁰² This approach was most marked in the doctrine of the five phases, or elements: water, fire, wood, metal, earth. The ‘fiveness’ of the elements was reflected everywhere: the five planets (all that were then visible), the five colours, five directions, five musical tones, five punishments, and many more ‘fives’. Where it suited them, or seemed wise, the Chinese invented devices for connecting correspondences that might otherwise prove difficult. We have already mentioned the ten celestial stems and the twelve earthly branches. To these were added the devices of yin (female) and yang (male), which allowed the correspondences of four, five, ten or twelve to be doubled. The most complicated, but popular, set of correspondences grew up around the Yijing, or ‘Classic of Changes’ (better known as the I Ching). This was primarily a hexagram of sixty-four squares, produced by six sets of parallel lines, either broken or unbroken. This produced sixty-four resulting figures, each with specific connotations, to be used in prophecy.¹⁰³ The most famous theorist of this system was Zou Yan of Qi (305–240) who extended his interpretation, or divination, to astronomy, geography, history and politics. According to him, political change was governed by the five elements, in the order: earth·wood·metal·fire·water.

This notion of correspondence led in turn to the idea of resonance (ganying), which also infiltrated all areas of life, from music to government. The strings on a lute, for example, resonated with one another but so did the ruler and the ruled: one good act should be balanced by a response. When the ruler set a good example, his people should and would follow.¹⁰⁴ Acupuncture was the perfect science of correspondences: certain puncture points in the body were found to control nervous sensitivity in other parts of the body. Although acupuncture anaesthesia was not introduced until the twentieth century, the very existence of acupuncture was held to be vivid evidence of correspondence and ganying.

As mentioned above, the central element in this elaborate system was the ruler and his ritual observances which reflected the cycle of the seasons and other celestial events.¹⁰⁵ Beginning with the oracle bones, Chinese records of the heavens were very detailed over many centuries, though they are most comprehensive for the early Han period. Natural events – eclipses, meteors, floods or earthquakes – could be interpreted as nature’s verdict on a ruler’s performance. It followed that the clever ruler, if he wanted to stay in power, appointed specialist advisors. If he followed their advice, and the advice was wrong, it was they who suffered, not him. By Han times it was understood that the great classics of China contained secret knowledge, available only to erudite scholars. (The word jing, which means ‘classic’, originally referred to the warp, or vertical threads, in a loom, which were long-lasting.) In this way there grew up at court a whole raft of powerful Confucian philosopher/interpreters, people such as Dong Zhongshu (c. 175–105 BC). They advised the emperor how to relate to the cosmos, and then anxiously watched the results. It was the emperor’s special privilege to worship heaven, and his ancestors, but he also controlled the police, the army and other institutions of social control. He therefore formed an ideological alliance with the Confucian literati who concerned themselves with precedents set by former emperors as recorded in the classics. These two elements – the emperor with his worship of heaven and the ancestors, and the trappings of force on the one hand, and the Confucian advisors around him – formed the governing/intellectual elite in China, the pinnacle of a two-class system in which the remainder were peasants.¹⁰⁶

This approach reached its greatest influence in 124 BC with the formation of the imperial academy, or Taixue. Here there were specialists in the five classics: the Yijing, or ‘Classic of Changes’ (for divination), the Shujing, or ‘Classic of History’, the Shijing, or ‘Classic of Songs’ (ancient folk poems), the Chunqiu, or ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’ (chronicles of Confucius’ own state of Lu in Shandong, plus commentaries), and the Liji, or ‘Record of Ceremonies and Proper Conduct’. Alternative versions of some of the classics were found, allegedly in a wall of Confucius’ house, sometime between 156 BC and AD 93. While this gave scope for different interpretations of the texts, and argument as to whether they were coded prophecies or not, they also stimulated an interest in textual criticism long before such a discipline existed elsewhere.¹⁰⁷ It was under the Han, too, that history was first written down in China in a systematic way, with many oral traditions finally being captured. The most important of these were The Historical Records, by Sima Qian (135?–93? BC) and The History of the Han (Han-shu), completed about AD 82 by Ban Gu and his sister Ban Zhao. Both these works were organised along similar lines: annals of the sovereign, treatises (on music, astronomy, canals, law etc) and biographies.¹⁰⁸ Already by this time examinations were in place for appointment to the ranks of imperial advisor, but now the emperor required an education in the classics before potential recruits could even sit the exam, though in the Confucian manner filial piety was also one of the criteria for selection.¹⁰⁹

The classics, whose secret meaning was passed from one generation of scholars to the next, and the Confucian approach in general, governed thinking in the majority of areas. ‘Most fundamental was the stress on hierarchy so evident in pre-historic times, which assumed that order can be achieved only when people are organised in gradations of inferiority and superiority.’ Similarly, there was an emphasis on duties rather than rights: it was assumed that if everyone did his duty everyone would get what he deserved. ‘With all duties performed, society would be in order, to everyone’s benefit.’¹¹⁰ The son obeyed the father, as the people obeyed the ‘parental’ government, with loyalty as the paramount value. It was the ruler’s job, with a mixture of auspicious things (chi), such as bounties and amnesties, and inauspicious things (hsiung), such as penalties and punishments, to maintain cosmic harmony, to prevent excess.¹¹¹

Despite the strength of Confucianism, Taoist beliefs had not disappeared and several Han emperors, or their wives, embraced Taoist principles and employed Taoist magicians. Yang Xiong (53 BC–AD 18) wrote a famous Taoist work called The Supreme Mystery. By now the fundamental Taoist concern was with longevity and/or immortality. They believed that immortals existed, manifesting themselves in different forms down the ages, and Taoists sought to extend their lives by various alchemical, dietetic, gymnastic and even sexual rituals.¹¹²

The particular form of Buddhism that was translated to China was known as Mahayana Buddhism. This distinguished it from the Hinayana school. The schism had developed within the sangha, the order of monks, following the Fourth Buddhist Council, traditionally held under the auspices of Kanishka II, the Kushan emperor, who began his reign c. AD 120. In Hinayana Buddhists held that their beliefs were essentially an ethical system, while the Mahayanas elevated the Buddha and other ‘enlightened ones’ to the status of deities, who were to be worshipped. In other words, whereas Hinayana Buddhism remained a broad philosophical system, Mahayana Buddhism, which was exported to China, was much more a conventional religion. The Hinayana Buddhists, for example, did not to begin with represent the Buddha in human form: he was indicated by a footprint, a throne or a tree. The Mahayanists, on the other hand, adapted Greek ideas, clothing the seated Buddha in elegant folds of drapery, and giving him a placid, serene, classical expression (all the while keeping him ethnically distinctive). The leading figure in the Mahayana movement was the philosopher/poet Asvaghosa (fl. c. 150), whose Buddhacarita, or ‘Life of Buddha’, was for a long time the main document in Mahayana Buddhism.¹¹³ Asanga, a monk who flourished between 300 and 350, introduced yoga and turned Mahayana Buddhism into a proper religion of salvation, being as much concerned with a ‘future state’ as with life here on earth.

After the second century AD, the chief Mahayana doctrinal work was the Saddharmapundarika or The Lotus of the Good Law, a statement of faith ‘comparable with the Hindu Bhagavad-gita and the Christian Fourth Gospel’.¹¹⁴ Addressed to the simple layman, it portrayed the ‘coming Buddha’, Maitreya, who taught the way of salvation:

Buddhas ye shall all become;

Rejoice and be no longer uncertain.

I am the Father of you all.

This poem, longer than the New Testament, described the one true way to salvation, and affirmed that there was one eternal Lord. Maitreya overlapped in many ways with the Iranian Mithra. Mahayana Buddhists believed that the Buddha, sitting alone on a mountain peak, gave reality to everything. When evil built up in the world, he descended from his mountain-top in a new form, casting light and bringing mercy, and teaching the path of salvation. In other words, in addition to the original Buddha there was a series of Buddhas, each playing an important role in the evolution of the universe and the moral growth of mankind. More important still, future Buddhas, the Maitreya, would come to earth to rescue the world from evil.

Also integral to Mahayana Buddhism was the concept of the bodhisattva. Having achieved Buddhahood by a righteous life, the bodhisattva postponed nirvana in order to remain on earth, serve and teach men. As part of this tradition, ten virtues were encouraged by the bodhisattvas, self-mastery being the cardinal individual virtue, and compassion – the love of others – the supreme social virtue.¹¹⁵ This implied a further change in Mahayana Buddhism in that the teacher was more a priest than a monk. ‘There was a single road to salvation but it had three gates: one for arhats [‘accomplished ones’, who had achieved nirvana], another for those who excelled in meditation, and still another for the altruistic and sociable.’ Yoga was clearly important in self-mastery but so was the chanting of sacred words. ‘Right conduct’ was encouraged by the belief that one’s last thought at the moment of death determined the fate of the soul. At death the soul was removed to purgatory where it ‘suffered many torments’. There were sixteen kinds of hell, with different punishments for different types of sin.¹¹⁶ For those who weren’t sinners, the ultimate destination was the ‘western paradise’ of Amitabha (A-mi-tʾo-fo). ‘There seven fountains flowed with the waters of the right virtues. For six hours each morning and evening there was a rain of celestial flowers . . . Each morning the blessed offered the celestial flowers to the countless Buddhas who returned to their land at mealtimes. The continuous repetition of Amitabha’s name was a sure way to reach this heaven.’¹¹⁷ It was a long way from the vision of Gautama.¹¹⁸

A final factor in the spread of Buddhism in Han China was the emerging dichotomy between wen and wu. Wen refers to writing, literary culture and the values associated with it: reflective thought, rational morality, persuasion, civilisation. Wu, on the other hand, stands for violence, force, military order. The Confucian advisors disparaged wu and favoured wen. But this had two unfortunate knock-on effects. It drove a wedge between the ruling elite and the peasants in the provinces, thus weakening Han unity, making the country susceptible to attacks from the periphery and even outside China. And, second, it meant that Confucianism as a framework of thought and belief was less and less suited to the common people: it became an intellectual system for the elite.¹¹⁹

Beginning around AD 220, the aristocratic families in the north revolted and amid the resulting chaos the Toba Turks, steppe people from the north, invaded and set up the Wei dynasty. They too were Buddhists.

Not all Chinese thought of the Han period concerned itself with abstract ‘big ideas’. The Chinese then, as ever, were a fiercely practical people. They were producing steel as early as the second century AD, by mixing together iron with different carbon content.¹²⁰ There was already a thriving international trade in Chinese technological inventions, particularly in luxury items such as silk, lacquer and bronze mirrors. The Han Chinese practised a highly original policy of ‘ostentatious generosity’ with their neighbours, ‘which surprises us by its extremely high cost and systematic character. Probably no other country in the world has ever made such an effort to supply its neighbours with presents, thus elevating the gift into a political tool.’ According to official records, in 1 BC, the Han gave away some 30,000 rolls of silk and by AD 91, the value of silk gifts had reached 100,900,000 pieces of currency.¹²¹ Jacques Gernet, the great French orientalist, calculates that the annual revenue of the empire at that time was of the order of ten billion coins and that three or four billion were taken up with gifts, a substantial levy on the country’s wealth which at the same time stimulated production and weakened the economy. But these gifts were part of a conscious, long-term policy by the Han Chinese to seduce their barbarian neighbours and to corrupt them by accustoming them to luxury. It seems to have worked, insofar as it helped the Han achieve political stability on the borders of the empire for several centuries.¹²²

The watermill was invented in the reign of Wang Mang (9–23). At first it seems to have been a vertical wheel, turned by water, activating a horizontal axle which turned a battery of pestles. But by AD 31 one text records the use of hydraulic power to work piston bellows in forges. The breast-strap harness had been introduced very early, perhaps as early as the fifth century BC, but just as important was the wheelbarrow, invented in the first century AD. This allowed much greater loads to be carried by one person, and for them to be transported along paths that were too narrow or winding for horse-drawn vehicles.¹²³ Chinese ships had the rudder from AD 1 and the compass was introduced in AD 80. The systematic recording of spots on the sun began in 28 BC and in AD 132 the first seismograph was invented by Zhang Heng. This was a good example of the Chinese approach, for Zhang Heng’s aim was to pinpoint earthquakes which, as we have seen, were regarded as a sign of disorder in nature. In AD 124, Zhang Heng (a poet as well as an astronomer) also produced a celestial globe, with an equatorial circle.¹²⁴ This had important consequences, not least in the development of logical/scientific thought. A key figure here was Wang Chong (27–97), who wrote Lun-heng, a ranging criticism of the superstitions of the time. He had a deep interest in physics, biology and genetics, ridiculed the idea that man had a special place in the cosmos, did not believe in life after death, individual destiny, or that the mind can exist independently of the body, preferring logical explanations for phenomena, based on experience.¹²⁵

Arguably the most important Chinese innovation of this time was paper. Traditionally, this invention was commemorated in the story of Cai Lun, a eunuch who served at the court of the emperor Hedi as director of the imperial workshops (see here). He made zhi (Chinese for paper) from the bark of trees, remnants of hemp, old fishing nets and used it for writing. He was promoted for his discovery, to Shangfangling, or chief-commandant of skills and production, but this too is now the subject of revisionist history and, according to Jonathan Bloom, zhi was defined in a Chinese dictionary produced at the time Cai Lun lived as xu yi shan ye, in which xu refers to ‘fibrous remnants obtained from rags or from boiling silkworm cocoons’ and the word shan ‘refers to a mat made from interwoven rushes used for covering something’.¹²⁶ These processes date back to the sixth century BC and so paper-making may be as old as that. Most Chinese authorities now think that paper as we know it had been invented by the second century BC, though it was coarse and not suitable for writing until, perhaps, the first century AD. A Chinese story, set in 93 BC, records the first use of facial tissue – an imperial guard advises a prince to cover his nose with a piece of zhi.¹²⁷ Paper required treating, with gypsum, gum, glue or starch, before it would take writing, and this seems to have occurred around the first century, or a little before. Already by AD 76, a scholar was instructing students by using copies of the classics written on zhi, so paper must have been reasonably common, and cheap, by then. The earliest examples show that Chinese papermakers formed sheets by pouring a pulp made of rags and textile waste on to cloth moulds floating in a pool of water. Later they dipped the mould into a vat of pulp, which was peeled off as it began to dry, allowing the mould to be used again. As the appetite for paper grew, they turned from waste materials and made their pulp direct from the fibres of hemp, jute, rattan, bamboo or mulberry.¹²⁸ Lavatory paper was introduced by the sixth century.¹²⁹

There were many innovations in the arts during the Han dynasty. Prominent among them were the fu, flamboyant and hyperbolic rhythmic poems of court life – the hunts, the parks, the parties – and an Office of Music (Yue fu), which collected popular songs, dances and musical instruments. This office was partly responsible for the ku-shih, a new poetic form with verses of five or seven characters. These would evolve into the regular poetry (lu shi) of the Tang age in the seventh century.¹³⁰

In AD 190, following a period of revolt by peasants and army leaders against the central authority, the imperial library and the Han archives were destroyed in a fire caused by the fighting. The disruption and anarchy continued for a quarter of a century; urban societies disintegrated and the fine civilisation of the Han age trickled away into the Chinese Middle Ages.