An ancient Indian Buddhist monk buried in Athens

That has zero relevance to the statement about Al Biruni unless he magically travelled back in time and was stuck in some x-00 BC and couldn't see newer developments in India.

Also strange is the fact that around Al Biruni's time Hindu numerals were adopted by Arabs (and that we all use now). Maybe he did go back in time!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu–Arabic_numeral_system

> Its clear from ancient texts and stories like the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Bhagavata Purana that the Aryans were a nomadic, tribal cow-herding people who didn't tend to live in fixed structures

What? No, the Mahabharata has elaborate descriptions of palaces, cities. Even Ramayana mentions palace. And nomads, usually, don't have palaces or cities lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshagriha

https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/history-of-architecture...

Lets leave all that aside and come back to this question:

Was there any objective metric by which ancient Indian engineering was behind others?

Do you have examples of stories to support this point? I ask because the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, at least, are deeply concerned with cities, city life, and the politics of cities, and nomadic life within them is a salient point only insofar as its main characters are in exile from the cities they wish to return to.

The comment is almost entirely wrong but this is especially deranged.

What are you talking about? Almost the entirety of the Mahābhārata deals with politics, intrigue, war- and state-craft, amongst others. The Rāmāyaṇa discusses an equally complex civilisation. By around ~500 BCE, Northern India had coalesced into large, hierarchical, and complex civilisations and city-states, which conducted war, trade, and diplomacy both within and outside the Indian subcontinent. The Kalinga war was conducted in ~260 BCE, and Alexander the Great halted his advance in India about half a century prior.

There's something about Indian history that is deeply, deeply divisive like almost no other civilisation's history is. On one side, there's the full-on jingoistic and ultranationalistic stuff like the out-of-India theory, that ancient Indian mathematicians and scientists built a civilisation rivalling the 21st century, that Sanskrit is the 'mother of all languages', and that it is a 'programming language' (yes, it has a highly regular, formal, and almost context-free grammar that allows it to be easily parsed like few other natural languages can, but that's it).

On the other hand, there's dismissive, 'Orientalist', and sometimes outright racist views. Yours is a good example of the dismissiveness and Christo-centric/Western-exceptionalism thought process that was the zeitgeist amongst many Western scholars until well into the 20th century. I daresay it is precisely in reaction to this sort of paternalistic dismissiveness that the above-mentioned jingoism sprouted in the first place.

As others have pointed out they really don't. The Rig Veda does seem to describe a society somewhat closer to what you're talking about, but that's from a much earlier date

That the siddhantas are influenced by Greek is obvious to anyone who has examined them. E.g. one is called Romaka Siddhanta. Another, Paulisha Siddhanta is a literal translation of Paulus of Alexandrias’ commentary on the Syntaxis of Ptolemy.

The considerable advances Indians made in mathematics in e.g. Ganesh Daivajna or Nilakantha Somayaji etc. are comparatively later say 13th to 16th century.

There’s an unfortunate tendency amongst some people to get all defensive about the idea that things may not have been invented in India but why? Yes we borrowed from the Greeks but we took their system and made it better. That’s reason enough for pride.

Nowadays I read Sanskrit original sources only so I’m not entirely up to date with the academic literature I’m afraid.

> The first evidence we have of zero is from the Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia, some 5,000 years ago.

> The symbol changed over time as positional notation (for which zero was crucial), made its way to the Babylonian empire and from there to India, via the Greeks.

> Arab merchants brought the zero they found in India to the West.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-origi...

So the real inventor is Sumerian. Greek spread that to India, and later Arabs take that back to Europe from India.

Although Indian isn't it's inventor, they did their job spreading it.

As for fantastic descriptions, what would future archaeologists think of scifi novels? Should they accept them as factual?

When I browse used bookstores, I often find novels stuffed into the history section. They aren't there maliciously, it's just that the titles on the books sound like plausible history books. Sometimes it's even harder to distinguish a novel from an actual account, though modern fiction seems to put "a novel" somewhere on the cover in small print.

See this, for example: Last 5 years, 79% of new HC judges upper caste, SC and minority 2% each [0] https://indianexpress.com/article/india/last-5-years-79-of-n...

Indians will defend this by pointing out how Modi belongs to an "other backward castes" (OBC) category, conveniently skipping over the fact that this category was created as a political tool to gather votes and most OBCs face none of the discrimination the truly backward, lowest castes face (I also belong to OBC category fyi).

India's minorities, lower castes, and tribes - more than a third of the population - is heavily underrepresented in any position of power. In rural areas, caste discrimination is prevalent enough that lower caste people regularly get lynched for marrying someone from the upper caste.

I'm generally baffled and frustrated by the Indian unwillingness to acknowledge their privilege. It's turned into a meme at this point where everyone calls themselves middle class, from the finance minister, to Satya Nadella (whose father was the most powerful bureaucrat in his state of birth).

Anyhow, my ranting won't change things.

It reminds me a lot of Greek drama, except there even if the grammar is funky, you can usually deduce how the language is being stretched and why, even if its very difficult and technical. In Sanskrit that isn't always an option, you just have to know from context why and how certain words are being used after having already studied the language for decades.

Ofcourse, Sanskrit can be used like English too. That is like using a super computer as a calculator.

Academics do more than just "question" this, they consider it racist junk, unworthy of any consideration whatsoever.

An EU official talking about a "jungle", while reprehensible, is not representative of the thinking of most people, and, to keep you from wandering off-topic, is not claiming the West invented civilization.

> The surviving writings are four treatises and ten letters. The four treatises are: 1) On the divine names (DN) (Peri theion onomaton, in Greek; De Divinis Nominibus, in Latin), the longest work of thirteen chapters that deals with affirmative or kataphatic theology, namely, the names attributed to God the creator in scripture and also in pagan texts, but also exploring the limits of language and therefore also involving negative or apophatic theology. 2) On the celestial hierarchy (CH) (Peri tes ouranias hierarchias, in Greek; De coelesti hierarchia, in Latin), a work that examines how the nine choirs of angels (in scripture) are to be understood in lifting us up to God. 3) On the ecclesiastical hierarchy (EH) (Peri tes ekklestiastikes hierarchias, in Greek; De ecclesiastica hierarchia, in Latin) that examines the various orders and liturgy of the church as relating us to God through a divinely appointed but human hierarchy. And 4) On Mystical theology (MT) (Peri mustikes theologias, in Greek; De mystica theologia, in Latin), a brief but powerful work that deals with negative or apophatic theology and in which theology becomes explicitly “mystical” for the first time in history (By mystical here we do not mean an extraordinary or private experience of transcending one’s self in the modern sense of the term, but simply “hidden”. On this see Bouyer, 1949; Vanneste, 1959; McGinn 1994). There follow ten letters that provide helpful comments upon topics in the above four treatises, especially letter 9 on what Dionysius calls symbolic theology of which works 2) and 3) above (CH; EH) form a substantial part. The ten letters appear to be arranged in a roughly hierarchical order, letters 1–4 being addressed to a monk (a certain Gaius, also the name of one or more of St. Paul’s companions), letter 5 to a deacon, letter 6 to a priest, and letters 7 and 9 to hierarchs or bishops. Letter 8 disrupts this order since it is addressed to a monk charged with disrupting the hierarchical order itself!

I'd expect the Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast(SHWEP) to cover him at some point in the near future, but the host hasn't quiet reached that point in the timeline yet. When he does, expect a much more digestible source of information.

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-dionysius-areopagi...

>> Modern views on the decline Since the 1970s historians have taken multiple approaches to the decline, with little consensus on which factor was dominant. The psychological interpretations emphasise depravity in high places, excessive luxury, and increasingly narrow views that left the rulers unprepared for an external challenge. A Marxist school (led by Irfan Habib and based at Aligarh Muslim University) emphasises excessive exploitation of the peasantry by the rich, which stripped away the will and the means to support the regime.[75] Karen Leonard has focused on the failure of the regime to work with Hindu bankers, whose financial support was increasingly needed; the bankers then helped the Maratha and the British.[76] In a religious interpretation, some scholars argue that the Hindu powers revolted against the rule of a Muslim dynasty.[77] Finally, other scholars argue that the very prosperity of the Empire inspired the provinces to achieve a high degree of independence, thus weakening the imperial court.[78]

Jeffrey G. Williamson has argued that the Indian economy went through deindustrialization in the latter half of the 18th century as an indirect outcome of the collapse of the Mughal Empire, with British rule later causing further deindustrialization.[79] According to Williamson, the decline of the Mughal Empire led to a decline in agricultural productivity, which drove up food prices, then nominal wages, and then textile prices, which led to India losing a share of the world textile market to Britain even before it had superior factory technology.[80] Indian textiles, however, still maintained a competitive advantage over British textiles up until the 19th century.[81]

That skips over the rape, murder and utter destruction quite tidily. The British were not there to help and I don’t think that could be a valid argument at any stretch.

Same with Buddhism, near as anyone can tell. None of the scripture is contemporary with Buddha.

It happens today, in an era where information is/appears much more precise, people and attribution is common. e.g. quotes being attributed to Einstein or some rock-star, or actors "cancelled" for stuff some other person did or said.

The annoyed religious leadership referred him to the local Roman in charge of such things who had him executed.