General History Thread

[Azaad]

 

[ezsasa]

somewhere in the video, doval says alexander's invasion was such a insignificant event that nobody bothered to record it within India. he says western historians made it a mountain out of a mole hill ..
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Release of History of Ancient India by Shri Ajit Doval, KC, National Security Advisor, GOI

 

[notaname]

somewhere in the video, doval says alexander's invasion was such a insignificant event that nobody bothered to record it within India. he says western historians made it a mountain out of a mole hill ..
========
Release of History of Ancient India by Shri Ajit Doval, KC, National Security Advisor, GOI

#WATCH | Delhi: National Security Advisor Ajit Doval says "...When you think of this expanse of 6000-8000 years, of the continuous history in such a vast area, the narrative that has been brought is that probably the first chapter about Indian history starts with Alexander, that Alexander was the first who discovered India and it was the victory of the West over the East. Actually, he only came into the border of India into Jhelum and then probably was not able to proceed further and thereafter, that was the end of him...Justice William Jones of Calcutta High Court, from 1746 to 1792, had said that nowhere in any Sanskrit, Pali or Prakrit literature or the local dialects, I could find any mention of Alexander. There is no mention..."

 

[ezsasa]

#WATCH | Delhi: National Security Advisor Ajit Doval says "...When you think of this expanse of 6000-8000 years, of the continuous history in such a vast area, the narrative that has been brought is that probably the first chapter about Indian history starts with Alexander, that Alexander was the first who discovered India and it was the victory of the West over the East. Actually, he only came into the border of India into Jhelum and then probably was not able to proceed further and thereafter, that was the end of him...Justice William Jones of Calcutta High Court, from 1746 to 1792, had said that nowhere in any Sanskrit, Pali or Prakrit literature or the local dialects, I could find any mention of Alexander. There is no mention..."

they have cut out the punchline, mountain out of a molehill. print too has cut out the punch line

 

[Azaad]

This is Islam's greatest triumph & it has repeated this in place after place & time & again. This is also the reason they went after their own home grown religion with a vengeance eliminating all traces of it such that it is on the verge of extinction in Iran today.

This is precisely what was attempted on us. This is also the reason Paxtan finds us abhorrent , more of an abomination really for not only did we survive all the trials & tribulations but have begun the process of reclaiming our past glory & this feeling of abhorrence isn't merely restricted to just Paxtanis but the original Paxtanis in here.

 

[Azaad]

This is Islam's greatest triumph & it has repeated this in place after place & time & again. This is also the reason they went after their own home grown religion with a vengeance eliminating all traces of it such that it is on the verge of extinction in Iran today.

This is precisely what was attempted on us. This is also the reason Paxtan finds us abhorrent , more of an abomination really for not only did we survive all the trials & tribulations but have begun the process of reclaiming our past glory & this feeling of abhorrence isn't merely restricted to just Paxtanis but the original Paxtanis in here.

 

[Azaad]

Muslim attitudes across a millennium in more or less the same location. Some things never change nor ever will.

 

[Azaad]

The last of 3 instances in its history, when Persia inexplicably collapsed against a lesser foe & completely capitulated.

 

[Love Charger]

The last of 3 instances in its history, when Persia inexplicably collapsed against a lesser foe & completely capitulated.

You know sirji , actually it was safavids Turks whose ruler Shah Ismail outlawed sunni islam.

 

[Azaad]

You know sirji , actually it was safavids Turks whose ruler Shah Ismail outlawed sunni islam.

The Safavids weren't ottoman Turks if that's what you mean but a turkic group strongly suspected of having Kurdish roots.

 

[Love Charger]

The Safavids weren't ottoman Turks if that's what you mean but a turkic group strongly suspected of having Kurdish roots.

I know that sir, they weren't from the house of Osman ,if they were so then there would have been no safavid ottoman wars , like the famous battle of chaldiran and many more.
Heck safavis were always first to foment Shia uprisings in ottoman territory.
They reached a period of relative peace after
Treaty of amasya in 1566 between Shah tahmasp of safavids and kanuni sultan Suleiman of the ottomans.
It stablised their borders and even today border between iraq , turkiye and surriye follow that treaty borders.

 

[Azaad]

I know that sir, they weren't from the house of Osman ,if they were so then there would have been no safavid ottoman wars , like the famous battle of chaldiran and many more.
Heck safavis were always first to foment Shia uprisings in ottoman territory.
They reached a period of relative peace after
Treaty of amasya in 1566 between Shah tahmasp of safavids and kanuni sultan Suleiman of the ottomans.
It stablised their borders and even today border between iraq , turkiye and surriye follow that treaty borders.

The land occupied by the Turks & Persians today has seen wars between people occupying that land since ancient times beginning with the Achaemenid Empire & the Greeks followed by the Parthians & the Romans followed by the Byzantines & the Sassanids & finally the Ottoman Turks & the Safavids - the last golden age of Islam where three great empires the world had known then , with contiguous borders , in the late mediaeval period , were all ruled by Turkics - the aforementioned 2 & the Turco Mongol Gurkhani dynasty better known as the Mughals

 

[Love Charger]

The land occupied by the Turks & Persians today has seen wars between people occupying that land since ancient times beginning with the Achaemenid Empire & the Greeks followed by the Parthians & the Romans followed by the Byzantines & the Sassanids & finally the Ottoman Turks & the Safavids - the last golden age of Islam where three great empires the world had known then , with contiguous borders , in the late mediaeval period , were all ruled by Turkics - the aforementioned 2 & the Turco Mongol Gurkhani dynasty better known as the Mughals

Hehe not beginning with Greeks and achaemenid ,
Rather they have seen wars between , sumerians and hittites, post Sumerian kingdoms and hittites, between chaldeans and sumerians , between amorites and sumerians . Between assyrians and babylonians, Between egypt and Levant kingdoms , Between Judah and ashur
Between the assyrians and elamites , 1000 years of wars , finally defeated in detail by sennecherib probably)between the
Between medes and ashur ,
Actually a combined mede and babylonians army sacked ashur , the medes were in turn overtaken by kourush or cyrus the great , a Persian who was the originator of achememid Empire. Although they themselves said that some man named achemenis was the originator of their Dynasty but the first ruler was cyrus nontheless.
Sirji the fertile crescent is not fertile due to water rather due to blood flowing through it .
So when I see war there today, I sigh and think it's that regions destiny to be at war always.
The combination of rivalries I mentioned earlier encompasses , a struggle of 2000 years before Greeks and achememid were even a thing .
But as far as Persians and Romans are concerned like later parthians which came after achaemenids or sassanids , which succeeded parthians they fought with Romans over Armenia.
The safavids also fought with Ottomans over Armenia along with Mesopotamia.

 

[Azaad]

Hehe not beginning with Greeks and achaemenid ,
Rather they have seen wars between , sumerians and hittites, post Sumerian kingdoms and hittites, between chaldeans and sumerians , between amorites and sumerians . Between assyrians and babylonians, Between egypt and Levant kingdoms , Between Judah and ashur
Between the assyrians and elamites , 1000 years of wars , finally defeated in detail by sennecherib probably)between the
Between medes and ashur ,
Actually a combined mede and babylonians army sacked ashur , the medes were in turn overtaken by kourush or cyrus the great , a Persian who was the originator of achememid Empire. Although they themselves said that some man named achemenis was the originator of their Dynasty but the first ruler was cyrus nontheless.
Sirji the fertile crescent is not fertile due to water rather due to blood flowing through it .
So when I see war there today, I sigh and think it's that regions destiny to be at war always.
The combination of rivalries I mentioned earlier encompasses , a struggle of 2000 years before Greeks and achememid were even a thing .
But as far as Persians and Romans are concerned like later parthians which came after achaemenids or sassanids , which succeeded parthians they fought with Romans over Armenia.
The safavids also fought with Ottomans over Armenia along with Mesopotamia.

Yes well except for the Assyrians & Elamites followed by the Assyrians on one side & the Chaldeans & Medes on the other side, the rest of the conflicts in old antiquity you've described are essentially between powers straddling what was then Mesopotamia / Akkad / Ashur or the northern central & eastern part of modern day Iraq , northern Syria apart from Eastern & Southern Anatolia vs the rest of Anatolia .

Thought we were discussing the land of what now comprises Iran or any rate Persian Empires & what's now Turkey or empires based in Anatolia.

But point taken. No dispute with the rest of your post save to say that most bloody wars usually occur in places which are usually great population centes which those Middle & Near East Empires never could hold a candle to when it came to India & China. More blood has been spilt in these two lands by people from within & without these two centers of population.

For example we've still no idea of the toll wars against the Huns between the mid 4th century & early to mid 7th century in India waged by Indic kings took. All we have are scrappy bits of information we've to piece together.

Like Buddhism for example never really recovered & went into terminal decline lasting centuries for other reasons as well of which this was one of the primary reasons in North India NW India which is modern day Paxtan & Afghanistan shortly after Harsha's death when Persia fell to the Arabs who rapidly took western Afghanistan & went further north into what was then Bactria & Scythia or C Asia followed by Sind & Southern Paxtani Punjab falling in mid 8th century to Bin Qasim..

The Kabul Zabul Ghazni Kandahar axes or Indic Afghanistan held out for a few more centuries though one by one they fell too & with them were gone the Indic religions culture & philosophies in Afghanistan & now Paxtan .

You may be interested to know all those regions where Buddhism had a strong presence or were in a majority got converted to Islam be in Bangladesh in the East or Paxtan & Afghanistan in the West / NW within a few centuries whereas the Sindi Hindu or Paxtani Punjabi or even isolated examples of Hindus among the Baloch or Hindus among the various Pashtun tribes are still to be found though the latter are a microscopic minority or even the Bengali Hindu for that matter, but not a single Buddhst in those areas.

Don't go about counting the Chakmaa in the CHT for they come under a different category.

 

[Azaad]

 

[GaudaNaresh]

Yes well except for the Assyrians & Elamites followed by the Assyrians on one side & the Chaldeans & Medes on the other side, the rest of the conflicts in old antiquity you've described are essentially between powers straddling what was then Mesopotamia / Akkad / Ashur or the northern central & eastern part of modern day Iraq , northern Syria apart from Eastern & Southern Anatolia vs the rest of Anatolia .

Thought we were discussing the land of what now comprises Iran or any rate Persian Empires & what's now Turkey or empires based in Anatolia.

But point taken. No dispute with the rest of your post save to say that most bloody wars usually occur in places which are usually great population centes which those Middle & Near East Empires never could hold a candle to when it came to India & China. More blood has been spilt in these two lands by people from within & without these two centers of population.

For example we've still no idea of the toll wars against the Huns between the mid 4th century & early to mid 7th century in India waged by Indic kings took. All we have are scrappy bits of information we've to piece together.

Like Buddhism for example never really recovered & went into terminal decline lasting centuries for other reasons as well of which this was one of the primary reasons in North India NW India which is modern day Paxtan & Afghanistan shortly after Harsha's death when Persia fell to the Arabs who rapidly took western Afghanistan & went further north into what was then Bactria & Scythia or C Asia followed by Sind & Southern Paxtani Punjab falling in mid 8th century to Bin Qasim..

The Kabul Zabul Ghazni Kandahar axes or Indic Afghanistan held out for a few more centuries though one by one they fell too & with them were gone the Indic religions culture & philosophies in Afghanistan & now Paxtan .

You may be interested to know all those regions where Buddhism had a strong presence or were in a majority got converted to Islam be in Bangladesh in the East or Paxtan & Afghanistan in the West / NW within a few centuries whereas the Sindi Hindu or Paxtani Punjabi or even isolated examples of Hindus among the Baloch or Hindus among the various Pashtun tribes are still to be found though the latter are a microscopic minority or even the Bengali Hindu for that matter, but not a single Buddhst in those areas.

Don't go about counting the Chakmaa in the CHT for they come under a different category.

This isnt accurate.
Firstly, if we go by Xuanzong's records, Gandhara, Magadh & Gour were buddhist strongholds of his time.
Of this, Magadh transitioned into hindu.
Gandhara and Gour became muslim. Gandhara since the days of mid Gupta empire period ( After Vikramaditya) has been inhabited by Indianised huns ( Nezak huns, then Alchon huns) who have similar kinship and tribal structure as the turks ( indeed the turks are an emergent group from the Huns partly) and as such, with the conversion of their fellow turks to islam, were islamised easily in the post Kabul-shahi period.
Bengal is significantly more complex story and part of the reason is, due to geography. Historical bengal didn't have the present day bengal geography, which is a result of 17th century floods changing the riverine structure of Bengal.
The traditional boundary of bengal was Ganges-Karatoya system. There is a near-dead river that traverses India-Bangladesh border, called Karatoya, into which teesta and mahananda drained, with Brahmaputra following its 'buri brahmaputra' course near brahmanbaria. The current arm of Brahmaputra (Jomuna in beedieland) was the combined arm of the teesta-karatoya-mahananda and the area east of it was traditionally Assam, then known as Kamrup. We see in Pala records that the lord of kamrup and pal emperors battled near this riverine boundary often.
In the very south, where Chittagong is, was again bengali, under the harikela kingdom. The area of Dhaka & Sylhet have been mostly colonised by Bengalis in the muslim era, with significant influx of Persian sunnis after persia became Safavid shia. Indeed, a significant reason for bengal sultanate's success against the Delhi Sultanate has been this immigrant persian sunni community holding high posts in the bengal administration, most of whom, ended up colonising the lands abovementioned.

 

[Azaad]

This isnt accurate.
Firstly, if we go by Xuanzong's records, Gandhara, Magadh & Gour were buddhist strongholds of his time.
Of this, Magadh transitioned into hindu.
Gandhara and Gour became muslim. Gandhara since the days of mid Gupta empire period ( After Vikramaditya) has been inhabited by Indianised huns ( Nezak huns, then Alchon huns) who have similar kinship and tribal structure as the turks ( indeed the turks are an emergent group from the Huns partly) and as such, with the conversion of their fellow turks to islam, were islamised easily in the post Kabul-shahi period.
Bengal is significantly more complex story and part of the reason is, due to geography. Historical bengal didn't have the present day bengal geography, which is a result of 17th century floods changing the riverine structure of Bengal.
The traditional boundary of bengal was Ganges-Karatoya system. There is a near-dead river that traverses India-Bangladesh border, called Karatoya, into which teesta and mahananda drained, with Brahmaputra following its 'buri brahmaputra' course near brahmanbaria. The current arm of Brahmaputra (Jomuna in beedieland) was the combined arm of the teesta-karatoya-mahananda and the area east of it was traditionally Assam, then known as Kamrup. We see in Pala records that the lord of kamrup and pal emperors battled near this riverine boundary often.
In the very south, where Chittagong is, was again bengali, under the harikela kingdom. The area of Dhaka & Sylhet have been mostly colonised by Bengalis in the muslim era, with significant influx of Persian sunnis after persia became Safavid shia. Indeed, a significant reason for bengal sultanate's success against the Delhi Sultanate has been this immigrant persian sunni community holding high posts in the bengal administration, most of whom, ended up colonising the lands abovementioned.

So what about what I posted wasn't accurate ? You just added fine detailing to the broad strokes I painted.

 

[GaudaNaresh]

So what about what I posted wasn't accurate ? You just added fine detailing to the broad strokes I painted.

that all buddhist regions of india converted to islam. magadh didn't. Gandhara isnt also direct buddhist to islam conversion route, they went hindu first, under the hindushahi & karakota dynasty, something that lasted about 200 years- 8+ generations back then.

 

[Azaad]

that all buddhist regions of india converted to islam. magadh didn't. Gandhara isnt also direct buddhist to islam conversion route, they went hindu first, under the hindushahi & karakota dynasty, something that lasted about 200 years- 8+ generations back then.

First of all I added Buddhist dominated to Buddhist majority regions. Do we have census records to state that Magadha was Buddhist dominated & Sind wasn't ? How do we go about deciding this issue ?

Were all Buddhist sects exclusivist or were some of them composite ones with Hinduism ? The Pashupata sect was pretty strong in Sind & the NW during the 6th century & later. Are you mistaking Mihirkula's conversion to Shaivism to the introduction of Shaivism in Kashmir ?

Besides your statement that Gandhara became Hindu first presupposes the fact that there weren't any Hindus there to begin with whereas frescoes of Shiva painted onto the indoor walls of residences were found all the way up in Panjikent during Kushan rule.

We know that the Prahladpuri & Aditya Sun Temple were present since great antiquity in Multan during Bin Qasim's conquest of Sind & Seraiki Punjab which is practically next door to Gandhara.

 

[GaudaNaresh]

First of all I added Buddhist dominated to Buddhist majority regions. Do we have census records to state that Magadha was Buddhist dominated & Sind wasn't ? How do we go about deciding this issue ?

Its pretty hard to go for each and every region and by time-frame, as there are gaps in records. Magadh most likely remained buddhist till near the end of the Pala period - this is because:
a) Xuanzong mentions it
b) The pal held magadh for 200 years and did significant buddhist constructions & grants there. The land grants to buddhists is pretty indicative of a buddhist majority population, given that pal were known to be major sponsors of buddhism but not anti-hindu in their activities either.
c) Sindh is mostly mentioned as hindu and Sindhi coinage all show hindu-zoroastrian influence rather than buddhist.

Were all Buddhist sects exclusivist or were some of them composite ones with Hinduism ? The Pashupata sect was pretty strong in Sind & the NW during the 6th century & later. Are you mistaking Mihirkula's conversion to Shaivism to the introduction of Shaivism in Kashmir ?

No i am not mistaking Mihirkul's conversion to Shaivism with introduction of shaivism in kashmir, i am talking of the karkota dynasty records, some of the most extensive ( rajatarangini for eg) that show them to be predominantly sun-worshipping hindus ( may have ties with the zunbil afghans, who were a particular sun worshipping region of afghanisan in pre-islamic period). The period of aprox 800 CE-1000 CE is when we see the Kabul-shais become hindushahis and the region of Kabul to Lahore being shared by Kabulshahis and Karkotas- the latter was definitely hindu for longer than the kabulshahis.

Besides your statement that Gandhara became Hindu first presupposes the fact that there weren't any Hindus there to begin with whereas frescoes of Shiva painted onto the indoor walls of residences were found all the way up in Panjikent during Kushan rule.

Well its pretty safe to say that from the Indo-Greek period (170s BCE) to the end of the Gupta period ( 500s CE), Gandhara was mostly buddhist - xuanzong coming 2 centuries after the hunnic devastations still notes more buddhist monasteries than hindu ones in the region.

So when i said they became hindu first, i meant the progression of gandhara went as hindu(pre 170s BCE)-->Buddhist (170s BCE-early700s CE)-->Hindu ( 700s CE-1000 CE)-->muslim ( 1000 CE-present).

We know that the Prahladpuri & Aditya Sun Temple were present since great antiquity in Multan during Bin Qasim's conquest of Sind & Seraiki Punjab which is practically next door to Gandhara.

Yes, there isnt much evidence of Buddhism being present south of Sialkot ( Sagala) in ancient times and Sindh being hindu is most likely, as even the arabs note that the Sindhis had 'bamman shahs', meaning brahmin kings at the eve of their conquest.
The period of Sindh between Gupta rule of the region ( ends around 470s CE) to its conquest by arabs ( roughly 750s CE) doesnt see any buddhist iconography coinage, which most likely means the region at this point wasn't buddhist.
In the period prior, Sindh went from Sassanid control ( 250s CE-350s CE) and shows fire altars in the form of zoroastrianism iconography and the style of Persian shah's potrait-coinage, indicating that the region may have had zoroastrian influences at this point.