XPost: soc.culture.indian, alt.fan.jai-maharaj, alt.education   
   XPost: soc.culture.usa, soc.culture.british, alt.politics   
   XPost: talk.politics.misc, soc.culture.india   
   From: alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com   
      
   DEBUNKING MYTHS ABOUT HISTORY   
      
   By C. K. Raju, Op-Ed, The Pioneer, dailypioneer.com   
   Wednesday, October 4, 2017   
      
   Western history was written exclusively by Christian   
   priests, who wanted to convert the entire world to   
   Christianity. A sustained debate is needed to expose the   
   lack of evidence for churchified history   
      
   One often hears about the saffronisataion of history but   
   never about its churchification. However, for some 1,500   
   years, Western history was written exclusively by   
   Christian priests. Their stated goal was to convert the   
   whole world to Christianity. Did they speak about the   
   unbiased truth of history? Hardly.   
      
   The first church historian, Eusebius, extravagantly   
   glorified the Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, who   
   enabled the church to marry the state --  a marriage   
   which swelled the coffers of the church. To enforce a   
   profitable monopoly, the Christians waged a war against   
   the surviving 'pagans'; they burnt down the Great Library   
   of Alexandria.  The next church historian, Orosius, wrote   
   during this religious war. The very title of his book,   
   History Against the Pagans, shows it was a war   
   propaganda. He constantly belittled and denigrated   
   'pagans'.   
      
   This became the model of future church history,   
   glorifying itself and denigrating all 'others'. With the   
   rise of the Abbasid Caliphate, Constantinople (Istanbul)   
   became a tributary of Baghdad, which invested heavily in   
   knowledge, gathering it from all parts of the world,   
   especially India and China. The Baghdad Bayt-al-Hikma   
   seeded a culture of books, and huge libraries sprouted   
   across the Islamic world from Timbuctoo to Tashkent.   
      
   Many of these Arabic books were translated into Byzantine   
   Greek, in Istanbul. The translators (all priests of the   
   Greek church) injected their chauvinism into the   
   translated texts, planting stray remarks, attributing   
   authorship to Greek names, real or imaginary. Few people   
   are aware that unlike the Rhind papyrus, or Iraqi clay   
   tablets, there are no original Greek sources for the   
   purported achievements of Euclid, Archimedes, Claudius   
   Ptolemy, etc.   
      
   Unlike also the Indian case, there is no continuous chain   
   of intermediate commentaries which reproduce the original   
   in full. The 'evidence' for claims of Greek scientific   
   achievements comes from stray remarks in discontinuous   
   and late Byzantine Greek texts from over a thousand years   
   after the purported event. In fact, we do not actually   
   have even those 'early' Byzantine Greek sources (which   
   are only a thousand years late) but only purported copies   
   and translations of them from several centuries later.   
      
   This method of falsifying history by attributing all   
   early knowledge to Greeks turned virulent during the   
   Crusades. Militarily the Crusades (after the first) were   
   failures. A key reason for this failure, as reported by   
   Christian spies like Adelard of Bath, was that the   
   Christians were deficient in knowledge compared to   
   Muslims. Hence, the church now sought knowledge from   
   Muslims. An opportunity arose when Toledo fell, and its   
   huge library of Arabic books came under Christian   
   control. But the church dithered. Why?   
      
   The earlier church policy was to burn non-Christian books   
   as heretical. But now it wanted to learn from the books   
   of the religious enemy. That too during a religious war!   
   Therefore, an excuse had to be invented to make the   
   translations of Arabic books seem theologically correct.   
      
   It was claimed that all secular knowledge in Arabic books   
   was an exact replica of what the early Greeks did. Since   
   there were no early Greek sources, this claim was faith-   
   based. It is contrary to commonsense that a scientific   
   text would stay unchanged for a thousand years. But   
   evidence or commonsense did not matter to the church,   
   what mattered was that Eusebius had declared the early   
   Greeks as the (sole) "friends of Christians".  Hence,   
   attributing the source of knowledge to early Greeks made   
   it a Christian inheritance! This flimsy excuse of Greek   
   origins enabled the mass translations of books in the   
   Toledo library, though many of these books were   
   nevertheless initially placed on the index.   
      
   Such acts of faith are not history. As David Fowler, a   
   leading expert on Greek mathematics, explained, the   
   earliest source for Archimedes is a Byzantine Greek text   
   supposedly from the ninth century. Alas, even that was   
   lost! What we actually have is a 16th century Latin text   
   asserted to be a translation of it, whereas it probably   
   reflects 16th century. knowledge.  That is, all the   
   evidence for Archimedes comes from a 16th century text in   
   another language from another place, 1,800 years after   
   the purported date of Archimedes!   
      
   To call this 'evidence' is as fanciful as claiming that a   
   modern text on aerodynamics in English, from London, is   
   an exact replica of an unknown Sanskrit source from the   
   third century CE! The fanciful 'Archimedes palimpsest' is   
   hardly worth discussing.   
      
   The Greeks could not have done science because they   
   lacked sophistication in mathematics.  Thus, the   
   Greek/Roman system of numeration was so primitive they   
   had no systematic way to represent fractions. Hence,   
   there was no way Archimedes could have done anything on   
   the sphere and cylinder (as Egyptians did). This   
   inability to work with precise fractions is seen also in   
   the calendar. Though the Romans laughed at the Greek   
   calends, and Julius Caesar reformed the calendar with   
   great fanfare, the Julian calendar remained defective   
   just because the Romans had no way to write the precise   
   fraction (not 365 ¼ days) for the duration of the   
   (tropical) year.   
      
   This churchified history of Greek origins was later   
   systematically promoted by racist historians who   
   portrayed the Greeks (even from Alexandria in Africa) as   
   white. Colonial historians further advanced it, linking   
   the  'Hellenic' civilisation to the West. This claim   
   facilitated colonial education: The filtered history   
   written by losers in an earlier war, helped to   
   consolidate colonial power. Those who wrote a biased   
   version of history became victors.   
      
   We received this slanted history through colonial   
   education, failing to see it was church education. It was   
   intended to create a sense of inferiority among the   
   colonised, whether Indians or blacks in Africa.   
   Nevertheless, even 70 years after independence, we   
   continue to glorify those mythical Greeks and their   
   imagined achievements in our present-day school math   
   texts from NCERT and various States. This false history   
   is harmful in other subtle ways: Our entire teaching of   
   math is premised on the false history of 'Euclid', and   
   masks the demand to imitate church practices related to   
   its theology of reason.   
      
   The colonised mind is comfortable with churchified   
   history, even without evidence, but objects vociferously   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)