Read the complete article : http://www.indianscience.org/essays/15-%20E--Navigation%20&%20Math.pdf

Early Maritime Contacts with India : http://mitchtestone.blogspot.com/2008/09/early-maritime-contacts-with-india.html

Thanks to Mr.Sudhee for suggesting this article.

Columbus apparently was not the sailor to discover America it was the Dutch who lived there 200yrs before Columbus.

And it was discovered by Leif Ericsson, son of Erin The Red circa 1000 AD :-)

The article is certainly titillating but hardly illuminating. The author of the article is a mere compiler (as admitted by him) and the references cited at the end are scant. While there could be grains of truth splattered here and there, several of the claims appear to be indeed tall. If the claimants of Indian superiority over the Europeans in matters of science and mathematics are serious about their claims, they should do a better job of it. Otherwise they are frittering away the chance that there my indeed be some merit after all. There is difference between rules of thumb and mathematics. Mathematics can have only one language, which is the one that has evolved and become prevalent today. The claim that Fermat's last theorem was solved by Indians (even before it was formulated by Fermat) is a laughable claim. No such conjecture or proof is on record. Where are the writings of the Indians who anticipated all that is known to today's science? Show us the research. Cite the original work. Give corroborative evidence. Explain the meaning of the Sanskrit original quotes. Cite the records. At the least, give references to the claims in sufficient detail. A popular science enthusiast only can make claims as those cited in the article. A serious historian of science or a scientist would never do such a thing which will discredit his own proposition. My God, what a thing to say that Indians did not require maps or sextants to navigate the seas, and their primitive instruments was all that was required to cross the oceans and all the brilliant mathematicians of Europe like Euler, Fourier, Fermat, Descartes, Newton and others were struggling to rediscover what India already knew or they were plagiarists. It is ridiculous to say that their aim was to solve only the navigational problem. The refusal of the Christian Church in acknowledging pagan contribution should not surprise anyone. Why, they did not even recognize the contributions made by their own Galileo, Copernicus and Tycho Braha etc. They in fact hounded and persecuted their own men as heretics. The Church today perhaps still believes that the Earth is flat. The merits of the claims about India's contribution to modern science need to be seriously studied and documented. Whatever that contribution is, it needs to be protected from zealots such as the author of this "essay" from indianscience.org. I would really appreciate the effort to come from people who understand and have scoured the original texts and who are also aware of the History of Science as documented in the west. Lastly, discovery of America or discovery of the sea-route to India around the Southern tip of Africa should not be termed as scientific discoveries by any standard. They were indeed the advetures of powers seeking new wealth in new colonies. Exploration was the unwitting outcome.

And quite probably the Irish before the Vikings. While in no way wishing to downplay the undoubted superiority of Indian maths and the very important role that the Indian's had in inventing virtually all the equations, theories etc. that we in Europe have ascribed to the Greeks, the use of such maths was very limited when applied to most voyages made in European waters. This was brought home to me when I went in my teens on my uncle's Thames Sailing barge, a 250 tonne former sailing trading vessel. It had extremely sophisticated electronic navigation aids because he used it to travel over gravel beds in the Channel so that he could assess potential gravel beds before he bid for the rights to extract the gravel. When surveying he used the engine. The navigation worked because you could go in a straight line between two points regardless of wind weather or tide. By sail it is a different thing altogether. You can know to the nearest centimetre where you want to go, but unless you know the tide patterns, understand the currents, and have a suitable wind, you haven't a hope in hell of getting there, until you can work out a route that will allow you to use these currents and winds. Often we would sail out of Essex towards Calais or Dunkirk using hardly any wind at all. You basically waited until the tide was going out, and drifted surprisingly fast towards the Channel. When it changed, you dropped the anchor, so you didn't good back where you had started from. 12 hours later, you would pick up the outgoing tide, and for 6 hours you went further out, even without wind. Often the sail just pointed the boat in the right direction. You then hit the current that goes south down the North Sea, and angled you way across. It was far more important for a sailor to know your currents than to know maths. The highly skilled Indian pilot that got De Gama to Mt Dili and then Calicut was highly skilled because he knew about the weather, seasons and currents that at certain times of the year take you directly in a very short time from East Africa to India. In Warren Hastings correspondence there are absolutely fascinating accounts by practical sailors of attempts to find routes to the Red Sea from Bombay in the face of the Monsoon. This journey was to all intents and purposes impossible for several months of the year until steam ships arrived. Some of the very best and most experienced sailors were sent on expeditions to take letters to Suez in the face of the monsoon. It was very dangerous and often impossible to do. The sailors knew exactly where they were hoping to go, but that did them no good at all. The same was true of the Bay of Bengal. Whole fleets were severely damaged trying to beat the Monsoons, and currents. The real practical navigation success came from exercising patience and from knowledge gained over centuries of these currents. This was picked up by local pilots who each specialised in his sort section of coast or special crossing. Ships travelling over long distances picked up these pilots along the way, and swapped them for new ones as they went further along the coast. Over time the knowledge passed from the local pilots to the long distance sailors. This is why sailors from China and the Arab Countries frequented places like Calicut, Cochin, and Ponnani. These were natural switch over places from one Trade Wind pattern to another. The southern Monsoon ran out at that level, as the the Northern one, slightly further north. These sailors knew there was no point trying to round the Cape or Sri Lanka until the wind pattern changed. It just meant grief and damage. You might just as well have a few months in port enjoying the local ladies company before setting off again when the season was favourable. Nick Balmer

That is the most exhaustive and clearly written piece I've read which even a" Dodo land lubber" like me has understood.Thank u Nick---and all I can say is Wow--its excellent--hope to read more your illuminating pieces in the future

Nick. I have three very basic clarifications to seek of you. As someone far more well versed in the classics than I ,these shouldn't be any problem for you . 1. Did the Ancient Egyptians , Greeks ,Carthaginians and Romans etc. use exotic spices like pepper and cardamom ? 2.If so, where did they get these from - in antiquity ? 3. How were these particular spices transported to the 'Ancient World' .?

Hello Shekhar, You make some interesting points, and I would agree with most of them. One part of what you say really fascinates me. It is how you untangle the maths from the original Indian texts. Two years ago by chance, I came across an early attempt by Brits in India who were trying to do precisely this, in a box held in library of the Royal Asiatic Society in London. An EIC official called CM Whish who was serving in Calicut in the 1820's and 30's, and who was a very good mathematician and linguistics had been studying the Aryabhateeyam. Somehow he had learnt that there was calendar information and mathematical calculations in these texts. He appears to have been in the habit of visiting Hindu temples in the Calicut and Ponnani area. While there he had transcripts made of these ancient texts in Malayalam on foolscap paper bound into books. I was research my 4 x great uncle Thomas Baber who was an older man and who was also spending a great deal of time studying in Hindu beliefs in the Tellicherry temple. He was fluent in about 5 local languages, and had had lots of copies of Granthams made, and about 27 of which are in the British Library. The librarian at RAS mentioned to me that they had recently found a box at the back of the library that wasn't fully catalogued, but which they thought might come from the area. Would I be interested in seeing it? Saying yes, I was shown the box which is about 6" deep full of perhaps 20 bound transcripts in Malayalam. This was initially a huge disappointment to me because I cannot read even a single character of Malayalam, but I decided anyway to look through one text. To my surprise several pages into the transcripts I discovered lots of pencil notes and diagrams, and workings out, often crossed out and re-done in an English hand. It was made up mainly of calculations, logarithms and angles and bearings. There was a drawing of a Comet and a date in 1819. It was as if somebody was trying to break the code or formula in the text. The figure 72 appeared very often in the workings. At that time I had no idea whats its significance was. I now know that this was a Yoni, and 72 year equivalent to the modern Century. I have done a great deal of research since into these papers, and now know that they were those of CM Whish, and that Whish frequently visited Tellicherry and TH Baber. The documents also include copies of texts from Tellicherry temple. Together they observed a comet that returned in July 1819. It had a cycle of 39 years. Sancara Varma had known this before 1819, and it might even have been in the text. Ironically that comet was "discovered" twice for the first time in 1819 in Paris and Moscow. Whish came to hold the view that much of the maths attributed to the Greeks had been available in India long before the Greeks knew it. I think this is why he was trying to understand how many 72 year Yoni appeared in the texts, as he tried to date events. This was at a time when conventional scholarship in Britain thought the World was 4400 years old. He and Baber gave quite a few presentations about this theory. Sadly Whish died young and TH Baber returned to Britain where he also raised the idea. It went down very badly with the Classical educated elite in Britain's Universities and was largely forgotten, although in the 1860's a couple of decades after both Whish and Baber raised the idea the theory was still being comprehensively trashed by Greek professors in Oxford. However we now know that they had discovered that the Indian's from the temples in Kerala and especially Ponnani were centuries ahead of the west in many types of maths. Somebody has written this up in Wikipedia. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Krishnachandranvn/Archives I would love to find a Malayalam speaking astronomer within range of London to come with me to the library and explain what Whish had found. Would it be possible to spot this in translation? Nick Balmer

Nick...wouldn't looking for a Malayalam speaking astronomer in and around London be a bit of a needle in a haystack thing ..? I speak Malayalam and Tamil ....but , to my eternal mortification , can't read so much as a single letter of either . Though I'm far better placed as far as Bengali and Hindi go ..

Hello Jaacob, I am not an expert on this, and I have an aversion (probably unfairly) to Egyptian history (probably because we did it for months on end at school), so I cannot really comment on them. Were they partial to peppered steak? I have no idea. However it is clear that the Greeks and Roman's were very partial to spices, and that this trade continued through what old fashioned scholars call the "Dark Ages." In the British Museum there is a late Roman period "pepper" pot. See http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_prb/e/hoxne_hoard_pepper_pot.aspx Hoxne in rural Suffolk is not the most obvious spot in England to find a cultivated taste in food. It is out in the countryside. If they had four pepper pots there, then there must have been many many more elsewhere. Apparently both Attila the Hun and the Visigoths demanded a tonne of pepper with menaces at different times from the Roman's. This is a subject that fascinates me. My own surname Balmer (think embalming) probably derives from Latin "balm" and may even denote somebody who sold spices. There were Balmer's in London by 1280 and presumably they got their stock from the Far East. They are very unlikely to have gone there, and yet it arrived in some amounts in London, even if it was very expensive by the time it arrved. We are inclined to think of the World as a much bigger place than it really is. In 1834 John Croft Hawkins rode from London to Tabriz in 34 days. He got to Bulshire in about ten more. Now, I recognise that it would take several times longer to travel loaded down with bags of pepper, but it is very likely that this trade involved many middle men. It might be 90 days door to door, including several layovers. It wouldn't matter if it took 180 days. The mark up was similar in scale to those that something like Heroin or Cocaine might command today. I have lived in Qatar and visited Bahrain and I have crossed Iran overland from Tabriz to Quetta. On all these routes there are traces of ancient trade and caravanserai's. It would have been relatively easy to move tonnes of pepper by camel to the Levant and then on to Europe by boat. It just takes time, and when you got a better profit the further west you went, what's another couple of hundred miles here and there? Trudging to behind a camel to Damascus was probably more fun than hand digging the fields or irrigation channels. You were away from the parents (wife?) etc. Along the coast of Qatar there are rock cut carvings of ancient ships, which were being dated by archaeologists when I was there to 2.000 or more years ago. Places like Bahrain, Ras Al Kaymah, Hormuz and Basra were all trading ports way back in time, and of course Roman artefacts turn up in India and even the Mekong Delta. The trade would have been tiny compared to today's trade. A 20 tonne cargo would have gone a very long way in England with say 2,000,000 people, 1,800,000 of whom probably couldn't have afforded to have paid for it anyway. To give you some idea just how profitable these trades were, I am by a 17th century step gt... granny descended from a man called Paul Bayning who was a grocer and who sold spices in Elizabethan England. In 1595 he was made Lord Mayor of the City of London. I have been collecting material on him and his business associates for years including Thomas Draper, another forebear who owned the wharf the Venetian galleys used just upstream of Tower Bridge in Henry VIII period. The rewards were enormous by the standards of the day. Bayning and his business partners provided at least six of the ships in the English fleet at the Armada. These 200 tonne armed merchantmen had been designed to outrun or to out gun galleys of the type encountered in the Mediterranean. These were the ships that could out turn and out sail Spanish galleons, and had guns that out ranged and could fire more effectively than the Spanish vessels. Just like the crews of 1840's opium runners in Clipper ships operating from Calcutta to China, you can bet those earlier crews were the very best and most adventurous the owners could get to sign on. They don't get mentioned in the books, because the aristocrats get the credit, but I bet these ships got in hard and fast as they took on the Spanish Crescent fleet in Lyme Bay. He had these ships because he had been sending fleets into the Mediterranean past the main Spanish naval base at Cadiz for at least two decades before 1588. He had previously cut out the Venetian Middlemen who had formerly controlled the pepper trade in Europe by going straight to the source of the spices in the Souks of the Levant. The Venetians hadn't reacted well to this, and he had had to fight his corner to get into ports and to get cargoes. His son Alexander Bayning provided several ships for John Lancaster's voyages to India, and became so rich in turn that he provided much of the Royalists fighting fund at the beginning of the Civil War. Hav

Shekar Sathe : I agree with your objective observations and your regularly pertinent questions on these issues most of the time....reflects of someone who retains a healthy distance from hype and hoopla....and keeps his head firmly on his shoulders.. But I tend to disagree with yor earlier comment on this post demanding written / scriptural proof of these ancient Indian discoveries and acheivements. I feel this is patently unfair.....since its almost akin to asking a member of an erstwhile royal family 5 generations later when his palaces, properties and title deeds have been confiscated or robbed.....to prove that he is a rightful descendant...when he actually wouldnt have any proof of his ownership or his ancestry, probably since there was no practice of recording births or deaths in some kind of a Registry. If such situations can exist in a short span of 250 years......how can we expect written proofs in a country with a history of 2500 years. Recording in the manner which we find as scientific by western standards is essentially a cultural issue. How else can we explain the ability of the ancients in India who could : measure the distances between earth and the heavenly bodies and many such astronomical calculations etc. with such uncanny accuracy, a thousand years before Copernicus or Galileo. For e.g : Some of the Vedic postulates are really outstanding and unbelievable to the modern man. To cite one example, the number of Vedic verses in praise of each of the 5 planets corresponds exactly to the number of days the planet takes to orbit once around the sun in an elliptical path, for example, Mercury (87), Venus (225), Mars (687), Jupiter (4350) and Saturn (10816).

RBSI: I take your point and accept it albeit with a pinch of salt (or I should say pepper!). As a person trained in modern and Western Science, I will look for some independent and reliable source in confirmation and reproduction of text where available to determine the acceptability of a statement. In one of the claims about finding the square root of a number, Aryabhatt was quoted as having given an algorithm. Frankly, I could not make head or tail of the paraphrase that was offered. The original verse was also not quoted for me to seek professional help. Regarding vedic postulates about the 5 planets: Please tell me the source from where I can verify that information. Why couldn't the authors of the vedas (apaurusheya as they may be, which veda, you have not stated) simply state that Venus takes 225 days to go around the Sun? Why go to the extent of composing 225 verses for what can be stated in one sentence? Or was it such a State Secret that it had to be told in such a manner. Why spread such myths? Please tell me where to find the vedic verse which states that the planetary orbits are indeed elliptical. Please show me a definition of an elipse in the vedas. Recording or lack of it cannot be a cultural issue. It is an issue which relates to how your knowledge is derived and if someone else can also independently come to the same answer or proposition. In the modern world, your claim will come to a naught if you cannot back it up. If a source is not available, the presenter should say that this is my opinion based on such and such information or hypothesis and should not talk about it as a given truth. Look at the effort the CSIR has had to under- take to prevent some usurpers from claiming IPR on the medicinal properties of Haldi. I too am inclined to think that our knowledge about astronomy preceded the West in many areas (but not all). Unfortunately, that is all hearsay. People active in that field should try to systematize such knowledge and should give it credibility that it deserves. These things cannot be done by edicts or diktats. Why do we lack the passion to do it in a way that it satisfies the basic empirical tests of scientific thinking? The topic at hand however was the ancient trading routes and a discussion about terms of trade. In that context that piece from indianscience.org was out of way out by several nautical miles!

Thank you Nick for all that. Between your first , second and third paragraphs you've given me an answer to my question 1. I do look forward to your enlightening me with regard to my questions 2 and 3 .

Shekar Sathe: Points well taken.

@Nick Balmer Piperatorium! Fantastic! House of Pepper! What would be the Latin name for the House of Commons? In 1992 a German professor (from Augsburg) by the name Dr. Knabe had come to Bombay. With him he brought a (motorized yacht) ship called Mercator which he had built himself. He wanted to retrace the routes taken by some German traders in their schooners in the 15/16th century along India's west coast. He sailed from Bombay and went up to Cochin. Shrikant Lagu, a friend of mine, had accompanied him part of the way. Dr. Knabe may have some information you are looking for. He later published a book in German. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Knabe

@Nick Balmer: Why don't you put out a notice on the RS board or the British Library Board (websites) for a Malayalam expert? You may actually find a good student in your back yard! Or you can request a few FB friends to put up a notice in Cambridge. If you have some relevant material, let it not go unnoticed. I remember having read that Ramanujan's lost note books were found in a dusty box and remained unnoticed because there was nobody to read them!

Hello Jaacob, I thought I had answered 2 and 3 as well. But in more detail 2.If so, where did they get these from - in antiquity ? Exactly the same place they got pepper in 1800, Malabar. Most of the time it came through ports on the west coast like Calicut, Ponnani or Cochin. In the 16th Century some pepper went overland to the east coast and I expect that happened earlier as well. 3. How were these particular spices transported to the 'Ancient World.'? By ship and by camel trains. Nick Balmer

Thanks Nick ...Do your researches shed any light on the details of how these were transported ..? If by ship ...then any 'gen' on the sea routes those 'ancient mariners' took i.e. to which ports in the Ancient World ; transit times ..and other pertinent information ? From the very little I know of it ..it seems to me that camel train transport ..would have taken significantly longer than the sea routes . And would probably have been fraught with as much ..if not far greater risk . However correct me if I've got this all wrong..

Hello Shekhar, I have actually already done that via SOAS, and I found an Kerala guy who was working for NASA in the States who understood the astronomy. Unfortunately we are both busy people, and so far the opportunity to get together has not arisen. You point about why the Indian "scientists" working in Vedic hadn't just written down a chart of the calendar is a fascinating one. The following is not in the least bit to be trusted and is not necessarily true, but is why I believe they resorted to verse. The curator (a European) at the Asiatic Society had spent time in Tamil Nadu in temples learning the local languages. She explained to me that these stories had existed for thousands of years as verbal stories before they were written down. She told me that there were families of Brahmins who specialised in learning these texts in much the same way as Muslims learn the Koran, and that they placed great emphasis on accuracy. Each generation teaching the next to words in the same way they had themselves learnt them. She said that in order to do this mental feat the students learned these stories word perfect, and also played games like learning them backwards or every other word. I have never met a Brahmin to ask if this is true. But it sounds plausible. There is an interesting book by Graeme Hughes about these stories and their links to the flooded areas of India that went under in the period 8,000 years or so ago when the sea level rose sinking many former settlements. He believes that some of these tales might even represent folk memories of these events. So if there was a very well developed tradition of recording stories in verse with great accuracy in India (and similar ones survived in places like Iceland with sagas) before writing was widespread, why should this not extend from religious stories, beliefs etc. into science. This would also provide a reason for the hiding of information in verses. Information is power. Power is the ability to get others to conform to your wishes. If you wish to force people to provide you with food and shelter and fine buildings, without you yourself having to go out and work in a paddy field everyday, what more powerful way that to become a holy man or sage? If you happen to know that the sun gets to a particular point on a set day, or better still that every 39 years a comet will return to blaze its trail across the sky, what better way to "demonstrate" to those you wish to dominate and live off, that you have mystic or supra-natural powers that being able to predict a year in advance that the comet will come, and that in order to appease the god that rides upon it we need a great big ceremony. The ability to conjure up a fiery ball flying across the sky is very potent magic. Wouldn't it be a good thing if each of you gave me 10% of your harvest, so that I can work full time on interceding to stop it falling on your crops? Now if everybody knew it was coming back, your supra-natural power conversely would be greatly diminished. You then have every reason to want to protect your knowledge in codes or verse to prevent others from getting access to what is hopefully your meal ticket for life. Just as society became specialised with smiths, farmers, warriors, so we had a group that became religious leaders. Some of them discovered the value in observing natural events, and some must have become very good at it indeed. I personally believe that science grew out of religion. I am very interested in the early years of the Royal Society and in the experiments undertaken at that time by men like Robert Boyle and John Locke. Like Newton, those men were all highly interested in religion as well as science. They often wrestled to reconcile what they were discovering by observation and experiment with what their beliefs told them was supposed to be the origin or cause of what they now saw to be manifestly untrue. Nick Balmer

Thank you Nick for your excellent exposition of all those thoughts which were reeling in my head and just did not have the right words and rationale to express them. I agree with you that the Brahmins zealously protected their discoveries and secrets in coded verses and slipped them unobtrusivesly in daily rituals to ensure their preservation in perpetuity. I have heard that there are certain scientific truths in verses chanted quite ritually even in the daily Sandhya by Hindus...which incidentally have no great religious significance at all. Its a fact that....the Brahmins have proved to be the only successful race to have survived with their knowledge intact from many millenia unlike any other ancient communities which have either been transformed or uprooted because of geography or theology. The methods of perfection in Vedic Chanting is called 'Ghana paatha'. More at : http://www.svbf.org/journal/vol1no2/chanting.pdf Will post a 1950s Indian Films Division video soon called the 'Marvel of Memory'....which explains this fantastic method of consistently perfect intonation of words passed on from generation to generation from many thousand years. More at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chanting

Nick ....excuse my interloping like this ..but if what your curator friend had said is even partially true ..then in my 'umble opinion , that would be good for quite a few London U. D.Phils and many a learned SOAS research paper .. Which begs the question : how come she has not pursued the matter any further ..? Quite frankly though , it is a new one for me ! In all my years of being in and around Madras , the rest of Tamil Nadu ..traveling the length and breadth of Kerala ..and being very close friends with dozens of ' Tam- Bhrams ' ( Tamilian Brahmins ) ..this is the first I've heard of it ! The closest one has come to something like this is the 'Naadi Jyothishis' of " Vaitheeshwaran Kovil ' near Chidambaram .

Jaacob You would need both. Many ancient ships have been found in the Mediterranean carrying cargoes going right back to Iron Age times. Generally the cargo containers remain, when the wood has gone. There are also many ships being found in Britain and Holland with ancient cargoes. The Mediterranean was where many of the early underwater discoveries were made because that sea is very pleasant to swim in, and the waters are clear. Diving there is fun. I can't dive, but I have been able to swim in an ancient sunken port in Crete picking up bits old cargo pots from 1800 years just six feet under water. It is only as diving develops and spreads that ships have been found in Northern waters, as dry suits get invented and deeper diving becomes possible. I expect as people become richer in India and as a Middle Class develops with more leisure time and improving transport links more people will start to dive along the coast of India. As development starts in many of the former coastal ports in estuaries along the coast boats will turn up. There is an article here about marine archaeology in India http://drs.nio.org/drs/bitstream/2264/30/3/Man_Environ_29_28.pdf A lot of discoveries here are made by amateur expeditions. I expect that it is only a matter of time before sunken ships start turning up off India in similar numbers to those found in the Meditterrean. Ships tended to follow currents & winds. These follow fairly set patterns. If a mapping exercise was carried out for routes of EI Company and VOC ships from the thousands of highly detailed logs that survive (and this is already being done to map climate change) it would soon be obvious where ancient ships would have also travelled. By then looking for where they went when slightly off course and where hazards are you would soon locate where wrecks are. http://www.unescobkk.org/fileadmin/user_upload/culture/Underwater/HK_presentations/Day%20One%20-%20Alok%20Tripathi.pdf The other fascinating thing to do would be to look at how rivers have changed course in major alluvial estuaries. Ports in India did not have wharves in ancient times. Ships often waited for months in ports, and old descriptions speak of there being hauled onto mud banks until the season changed. In places like Surat or Kochi and possibly Bombay or Vasai or Tannah there must be former silted up river channels that quite probably contain ancient wrecks. Here's an example from Greece of what could turn up off places like Ponnani. http://www.oceantreasures.org/categorie,archaeological-pages,1055383.html The Gulf and Indian Ocean coasts in places like Muscat, the UAE and Qatar must also have examples of these ships lost in them. http://www.adventurecorps.com/archaeo/uaeproj.html I myself have field walked places around Fujerah and in Qatar where there are the obvious remains of structures along the coast. There are carvings on rocks of all sorts of animals, and some look like insects with huge numbers of legs. I think they are probably rowing vessels. It is very difficult to put a date on these things with only amateur resources, but it is quite likely that some of these carvings go back a long time. Just how long is anybodies guess. Nobody in their right mind at present would dive off Basra or Bulshire, but in the months of the Tigris and Euphrates there are probably also sites that will one day be found. I don't have huge knowledge of camel trains, but if you read, as I have done in the past the accounts of men like Anthony Jenkinson (1530–1609) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Jenkinson it is obvious that significant amounts of high value goods could be taken huge distances along routes that were already well established long before Englishmen ventured down them. There is an interesting page on the European Asian routes here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_European_exploration_of_Asia That shipping was going from China to places like Northern Australia, India and East Africa routinely in medieval period as is explained by Gavin Menzies, see http://www.gavinmenzies.net/pages/evidence-1421/content.asp?EvidenceID=472 I am unsure about his claims for trips to Boston in the USA and even Italy, but fundamentally I see little reason to doubt his research in the Indian Ocean. The other thing we should not overlook, and which has never been considered as far as I am aware. How far west were Indian's going. For instance Romany people who turned up in Europe in Medieval times. DNA research suggests that they may be descended from Jats's. Could they have been travelling with trade, in much the same way Jews and Armenian's did? I think movements for peoples were far more fluid that we currently are aware. Trade and people move in company. Nick Balmer

Hello Jaacob, I don't mind your interloping in the slightest. It is interesting that what I was told has some support from the post Subbiah made an hour ago. Hindu and Vedic scriptures are areas that I have very little knowledge of. I have tried to read some in translation, but I am afraid that they leave me cold. I think that you have to be brought up with the language and cultural background to understand them. I have been challenged by several friends to learn Malayalam but I fear I haven't the ability or free time to do this. I am put to shame in this by my wife who has learnt Ptolemaic Greek in recent years to be able to read the bible in its earlier forms. I enjoyed being in Hindu Temples and I have observed many hundreds of Indian's obviously gaining enormously from their observances of Hindu scriptures. Mrs Prema Menon who looked after me in Kerala see http://malabardays.blogspot.com/2007/01/day-three-14th-december-2006-interview.html was fascinating on the subject, as she was a walking encyclopaedia on the subject as I believe her forebear had been to Thomas Baber. My son is fascinated by science fiction, Greek classical legends and he really enjoyed comparing these stories with Prema who can reel off Hindu equivalents. It was sad we only had a sort while together in which to talk about these things. I expect that if I had been able to stay a few years in India I would become knowledgeable enough to understand these cultures and ideas more. I believe that a number of Brits had tried to understand Hindu scriptures before Sir William Jones, but had failed largely because they could not gain the trust of Brahmins sufficiently for Brahmins to want to open up to them. Here Jones was somehow successful, and he was also willing to put himself through many years of concentrated study. He must have been more temperamental prepared for doing this than the others. My 4 x gt uncle Thomas Hervey Baber seems to have been similarly interested at a later date. In the Sree Ram Temple at Thalassary see http://sreeramtemple.com/history.htm there is a belief that T Baber attended the temple daily to study the scriptures and that he eventually became a Hindu. He was certainly very interested in the temple and paid to have it repaired. I don't know if he became a Hindu, and they might be right. He was certainly in possession of fundamental texts that would have enabled him to have done so, because he presented 27 to the British Library where his brother, Henry Baber my 3 x gt grandfather (a Vicar) was Keeper of the Printed Books. Sadly so far I have not been able to find anything in writing by either of them about these documents. Which is a pity because Henry was an expert on early Christian beliefs as well as a highly knowledgeable Classicist who knew Greek and Latin. Did they discuss comparative religion? It would have been fascinating to have be a listener in on those discussions. A friend from Kerala went with me to identify some of these Granthams and was able to tell me what they were. Nick Balmer

Hello Subbiah, That's a fascinating article and supports what the curator at the Royal Asiatic Society told me about the chanting of these verses backwards and forwards to ensure accuracy. I found it hard enough to learn bits of Shakespear at school, let alone chanting it backwards and forwards. I fear that I would have made a very poor Brahmin. It is great that we can explore these things in ways today that we could never have done just ten years ago. Is there a Brahmin on your list who could find some of these maths texts to give us an example of how they work. Is there some of this chanting on You Tube for instance? Regards Nick Balmer

Subbiah and Nck...I don't know if it will help , but there are 3 Hindus i can think of ..off the top of my head here on fb . They are Ramesh Chivikula, Venkateswara Swamy Swarna , and Swaminathan Murthy . None of them is a member on RBSI though. However Nick , if you're interested , you'll have to message them directly I'm afraid ..

Hello Nick, Subbiah et al I shall not even pretend that I follow the esoteric intricacies of this particular learned thread - however - I was very interested in some comments that were made (somewhere above) indicating the possible presence of Englishmen in Portugese service sailing to India in the period prior to the late 16th century. If anyone has further information on such individuals I would be very grateful to recieve it. It is established in most of the conventional reference texts that one Thomas Stevens ( http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14292a.htm), Jesuit missionary and native of Wiltshire, was, unofficially at least, 'the first Englishman in India' - having first arrived in 1579. In 1584 a small group of five English tradesmen arrived overland via Aleppo - having survived 'defrauding Turks, blackmailing Arabs and stealithly obstructing Venitians' - whereupon they were promplty arrested by the Portugese. During their period of incarceration they met and befriended Stevens - a generous act, considering that he would have been considered a traitor in England. Eventually, with the intervention of the Dutch, the five were released and three, perhaps surprisingly, chose to remain in India in the service of the Moguls while the other two - John Eldred and Ralph Fitch - returned to England in 1591 and were to be present, eight years later, at the meeting in Founders Hall, in the City of London when the East India Company was established. Here is a 'google books' link to a text - 'Early English Travellers' by Ram Chandra Prasad - for those who might wish to learn more. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4nUx8ZzIHBsC&pg=PA369&dq=rc+locke+the+first+englishman+in+india&hl=en&ei=KSxoTLKTI9ygOKDh1LgF&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

Hello Julian, Read this book for more on Stevens, and the other early travellers to India. http://www.archive.org/details/earlytravelsinin00fostuoft Nick Balmer

Hello Julian, Even as early as the second Portuguese voyage to India you are getting Flemish and Italian's on board. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_Portuguese_India_Armada_%28Gama,_1502%29 "Two ships went out under Italian captains - Thomas de Carmona (Tommasio da Cremona) and João da Bonagracia(Giovanni Buonagrazia) - and may have been privately outfitted by Italian consortiums. Lopo Dias is identified by Barros as an employee of D. Álvaro of Braganza, who had privately outfitted ships in earlier armadas in conjunction with the Marchionni consortium. So there is reason to presume Dias's ship was outfitted the same way. The Leitoa Nova is said to have been privately outfitted by the powerful nobleman Tristão da Cunha in conjuction with the mysterious Lisbon merchant-woman Catarina Dias de Aguiar [3] Aboard the ships, as passengers, were Gaspar da Gama (the Goese Jew brought by Gama's first journey, who had also served as translator in the Cabral armada), an ambassador from the Kolathiri Raja of Cannanore and one of two noble Cochinese hostages taken inadvertently by Cabral's Second India Armada back to Lisbon. The other hostage elected to stay in Lisbon, dispatching a letter to Raja Trimumpara, prince of Cochin relating what he has seen and explaining the useful role he might serve Cochin by remaining behind in the Portuguese court." Italian chronicler Matteo da Bergamo was aboard Buonagrazia's ship, an anonymous Flemish chronicler was aboard the Leitoa Nova. while Portuguese chronicler Tomé Lopes sailed out with the third squadron of Estevão da Gama. There were two Italian passengers on the armada - both military engineers, and probably secret Venetian agents - that would play a sinister role in India. They were known by their Portuguese names as João Maria (Gianmaria) and Pêro António (Pierantonio).[4] Nick

Julian, Here's a bit about Magellan's voyages illustrating the multinational crews on these ships. "The crew of about 234 included men from several nations: including Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, Germans, Flemish, Greeks, English and French.[13] Spanish authorities were wary of Magellan, so that they almost prevented him from sailing, switching his mostly Portuguese crew to mostly men of Spain. Nevertheless, it included about 40 Portuguese, among them Magellan's brother in law Duarte Barbosa, João Serrão, a relative of Francisco Serrão, Estêvão Gomes and also Magellan's indentured servant Enrique of Malacca. Faleiro, who had planned to accompany the voyage, withdrew prior to boarding. Juan Sebastián Elcano, a Spanish merchant ship captain settled at Seville, embarked seeking the king's pardon for previous misdeeds and Antonio Pigafetta, a Venetian scholar and traveller, had asked to be on the voyage accepting the title of "supernumerary" and a modest salary, becoming a strict assistant of Magellan and keeping an accurate journal. The only other sailor to report the voyage would be Francisco Albo, who kept a formal logbook" From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan Nick.

Hello Jaacob, By chance today in a newsagents I looked in History Today and magazine and there is a really comprehensive article on Greek & Roman Voyages to India and beyond. A copy without the some of the illustrations is available online here http://www.historytoday.com/raoul-mclaughlin/rome-lure-orient Nick Balmer

Here's an article by a friend of mine, with a picture of an indian Ivory statue that turned up in Pompei. http://maddy06.blogspot.com/2009/05/goddess-at-pompeii.html

Thank you very much Nick.

@Nick" If you refer to the book "Vedic Chronology" by BG Tilak you will find a whole chapter devoted to the verses in the texts on vedic astronomy which calculate days and time etc (the kind you have mentioned you found in the box at the RAS). The book is posted by RBSI some time today. The algorithms discussed contain a lot of references to 72 among other numbers and fractions.