̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Persia

A world of science

lw355 — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 09:20:44 +0000

̽��ֱ��year was 1789; the place Bengal. Isaac Newton’s masterpiece Principia Mathematica was being translated for only the third time in its already 100-year-old history; this time, into Arabic.

̽��ֱ��author of this remarkable feat of scholarship was Tafazzul Husain Khan. According to a member of the ruling East India Company: “Khan… by translating the works of the immortal Newton, has conducted those imbued with Arabick literature to the fountain of all physical and astronomical knowledge.”

For Professor Simon Schaffer, who has researched the story of Tafazzul’s achievements, the complex work of translation is deeply significant. Tafazzul worked with scholars in English, Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit language communities in his efforts to connect Newtonian theories with the Indo-Persian intellectual tradition. For Tafazzul was, as Schaffer describes, “a go-between”.

“ ̽��ֱ��‘go-betweens’ are the individuals who, across the centuries, have been the cogs that have kept science moving,” he explains. “They are the knowledge brokers and translators, networkers and messengers – the original ‘knowledge transfer facilitators’. Their role may have disappeared from mainstream histories of science, but their tradecraft has been indispensable to the globalisation of science.”

Schaffer and Dr Sujit Sivasundaram are historians of science with an interest in understanding how the seeds of scientific knowledge have spread and grown. They believe that the global history of science is really the history of shifts and reinventions of a variety of ways of doing science across the world.

They, and others, have called for a retelling of science’s past, not only to be more “culturally symmetric” but also because the issue has enormous contemporary relevance.

“A standard tale is that modern science spread around the world from Western Europe, starting about 500 years ago based on the work of those such as Newton, Copernicus and Galileo, and then Darwin, Einstein, and so on,” explains Schaffer. “But this narrative about the globalisation of science just doesn’t work at all. It ignores a remarkable process of knowledge exchange that happened between the East and West for centuries.”

“Successful science is seen to be universal in its applicability,” adds Sivasundaram. “Yet, accounts of scientific discovery, heroism and priority have been part and parcel of a political narrative of competitive ownership by empires, nations and civilisations. To tease this story apart, we focus on the exchanges and ‘silencings’ across political configurations that are central to the rise of science on the global stage.”

Over the past two years, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, he and Schaffer have undertaken a programme of debates to ask whether a transregional rather than a Eurocentric history of science could now be told.

To do so, they teamed up with researchers in India and Africa, including Professor Irfan Habib from Delhi’s National ̽��ֱ�� of Educational Planning and Administration and Professor Dhruv Raina of Jawarhalal Nehru ̽��ֱ��, and in December 2014 held an international workshop at the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi. “And now our debate is also being carried forward by a new generation of early-career researchers who came to the workshop,” adds Sivasundaram.

One conundrum the researchers debated was how global narratives of science could have been missed by scholars for so long. It largely stems from the use of source materials says Schaffer: “It’s an archival problem: as far as the production and preservation of sources is concerned, those connected with Europe far outweigh those from other parts of the world.”

“If we are to de-centre from Europe, we need to use radically new kinds of sources – monuments, sailing charts, courtly narratives, and so on,” explains Sivasundaram. He gives an example of Sri Lankan palm-leaf manuscripts: “ ̽��ֱ��Mahavamsais a Buddhist chronicle of the history of Sri Lanka spanning 25 centuries. Among the deeds of the last kings of Kandy, I noticed seemingly inconsequential references to temple gardens. This led me back to the colonial archive documenting the creation of a botanic garden in 1821, and I realised that the British had ‘recycled’ a Kandyan tradition of gardening, by building their colonial garden on the site of a temple garden.”

Moreover, says Sivasundaram, the mechanisms of knowledge assimilation are often overlooked. Europeans often accumulated knowledge in India by engaging with pandits, or learned men. “ ̽��ֱ��Europeans did not have a monopoly over the combination of science and empire – the pioneering work of Chris Bayly [see panel] shows how they fought to take over information networks and scientific patronage systems that were already in place. For Europeans to practice astronomy in India, for instance, it meant translating Sanskrit texts and engaging with pandits.”

“Very often, scientific achievement is used as a standard to measure a country’s progress because science and technology can intervene in problems of hunger, disease and development,” adds Sivasundaram. “If a biased history of science is told, then the past can become what Irfan Habib has called a ‘battlefield’, instead of a ‘springboard’ for future research or indeed for conversation across cultures.”

This is why, says Schaffer, it becomes so important to provide a better account of the worldly interaction between the kinds of knowledge communicated, the agents of communication – like Tafazzul Husain Khan – and the paths they travelled.

̽��ֱ��history of science has been centred for too long on the West, say Simon Schaffer and Sujit Sivasundaram. It’s time to think global.

̽��ֱ��‘go-betweens’ have been the cogs that have kept science moving ... their tradecraft has been indispensable to the globalisation of science

Simon Schaffer

Private collection/Bridgeman Images

̽��ֱ��European in India, 1813 by Charles D'Oyly (1781-1845)

̽��ֱ��art of listening in

Knowledge networks were as important to the building of British political intelligence in north India in the 18th and 19th centuries as they were to the diffusion of science.

No discussion of Indian history, or of the communication and the movement of knowledge, would be complete without reference to the work of the late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly (1945–2015).

Bayly saw the role of Indian spies, runners and knowledgeable secretaries as crucial to the British in helping to keep information and gossip flowing in the 1780s and 1860s. His ground-breaking research uncovered the social and intellectual origins of these informants, and showed how networks of ‘go-betweens’ helped the British understand India’s politics, economic activities and culture.

“One overriding reason why the East India Company was able to conquer India… was that the British had learnt the art of listening in on the internal communications of Indian polity and society,” he explained in his seminal work Empire and Information (1996).

Ultimately, however, India’s complex systems of debate and communication challenged the political and intellectual dominance of the British; it was their misunderstanding of the subtleties of Indian politics and values, he argues, that contributed to the British failure to anticipate the 1857 Mutiny–Rebellion.

World-renowned for his enormous contributions to his subject, Bayly was the Director of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies until his retirement in 2014, as well as President of St Catharine’s College, and the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History in the Faculty of History.

He completely transformed people’s understanding of India in the 18th and 19th centuries, explains Professor Joya Chatterji, the Centre’s current Director: “Chris has been one of the most influential figures in the field of modern Indian history. Every one of his monographs broke new ground, whether in political, social and economic, or latterly intellectual history.”

His work was increasingly drawn towards ‘world historical’ comparisons and connections; his ̽��ֱ��Birth of the Modern World (2004) transformed the understanding of the history of modernity itself, drawing attention to its richly complex, overlapping global roots.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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̽��ֱ��Book of Kings: the epic continues

bjb42 — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:30:43 +0000

̽��ֱ��Shahnama Centre at Pembroke College has opened its doors for the study of Persian culture and arts, marking a new phase for a project that has amassed the largest digital collection of one of the world’s greatest literary epics: the 1,000-year-old Persian ‘Book of Kings’, or Shahnama.

Firdausi’s stirring poem, which was completed in the year 1010, explores the Persian Empire’s history, beliefs, myths and chivalrous code. For the next 800 years, successive court scribes copied and recopied the text, often using the richest of pigments to create exquisite illustrations (almost 100 of which have been brought together in the spectacular Epic of the Persian Kings exhibition currently at ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum).

Professor Charles Melville, Director of the new Centre and an expert on Persian history in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, has led a decade-long study of the Shahnama masterpiece, which is regarded as one of Iran’s national treasures. Over the millennium, many of the manuscripts had become scattered worldwide, some as isolated pages. ̽��ֱ��aim of the Shahnama Project, initially funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, was to bring together the Book of Kings in an online environment.

First estimates indicated that there could be a few thousand illustrated pages in existence. But, as Professor Melville explains, the true number has surpassed all expectations. ‘What began as a task that involved physically searching out, photographing and documenting each manuscript has taken on a life of its own. Curators and museums are beginning to send us new data, dispersed manuscripts are being reunited, and the corpus now contains over 12,000 images, and counting.’

With the opening of the Shahnama Centre, supported by the Aga Khan Development Network, the Iran Heritage Foundation and the Isaac Newton Trust, the Project can now enter a new phase. ‘Just as this iconic text has nurtured many different fields of study,’ says Professor Melville, ‘the Centre will now nurture research and teaching in the fascinating and exotic world of Persian culture and the arts of the book.’

For more information, please contact Professor Charles Melville (cpm1000@cam.ac.uk).

A millennium after its completion, an epic Persian poem is providing the springboard for a new centre of Persian studies in Cambridge.

Just as this iconic text has nurtured many different fields of study, the Centre will now nurture research and teaching in the fascinating and exotic world of Persian culture and the arts of the book.

Professor Charles Melville

Shahnama (c.1435)

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̽��ֱ��Athenians: Another warning from history?

bjb42 — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In a new history of the 4th century BC, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Classicist Dr. Michael Scott reveals how the implosion of Ancient Athens occurred amid a crippling economic downturn, while politicians committed financial misdemeanours, sent its army to fight unpopular foreign wars and struggled to cope with a surge in immigration.

̽��ֱ��book, entitled From Democrats To Kings, aims to overhaul Athens' traditional image as the ancient world's "golden city", arguing that its early successes have obscured a darker history of blood-lust and mob rule.

Other reputations are also taken to task: ̽��ֱ��"heroic" Spartans of Thermopylae, immortalised in the film 300, are unmasked as warmongering bullies of the ancient world. Alexander the Great, for all his achievements, is described as a "mummy's boy" whose success rested in many ways on the more pragmatic foundations laid by his father, Philip II.

Perhaps more significantly, however, the study suggests that the collapse of Greek democracy and of Athens in particular offer a stark warning from history which is often overlooked.

It argues that it was not the loss of its empire and defeat in war against Sparta at the end of the 5th century that heralded the death knell of Athenian democracy - as it is traditionally perceived. Athens' democracy in fact recovered from these injuries within years. Instead, Dr. Scott argues that the strains and stresses of the 4th century BC, which our own times seem to echo, proved too much for the Athenian democratic system and ultimately caused it to destroy itself.

"If history can provide a map of where we have been, a mirror to where we are right now and perhaps even a guide to what we should do next, the story of this period is perfectly suited to do that in our times," Dr. Scott said.

"It shows how an earlier generation of people responded to similar challenges and which strategies succeeded. It is a period of history that we would do well to think about a little more right now - and we ignore it at our peril."

Although the 4th century was one of critical transition, the era has been overlooked by many ancient historians in favour of those which bookend it - the glory days of Athenian democracy in the 5th century and the supremacy of Alexander the Great from 336 to 323 BC.

This, the study says, has led to a two-dimensional view of the intervening decades as a period of unimportant decline. Instead, Dr. Scott argues that this period is fundamental to understanding what really happened to Athenian democracy.

Athens was already a waning star on the international stage resting on past imperial glories, and the book argues that it struggled to keep pace with a world in a state of fast-paced globalisation and political transition.

In an effort to remain a major player in world affairs, it abandoned its ideology and values to ditch past allies while maintaining special relationships with emerging powers like Macedonia and supporting old enemies like the Persian King. This "slippery-fish diplomacy" helped it survive military defeats and widespread political turbulence, but at the expense of its political system. At the start of the century Athens, contrary to traditional reports, was a flourishing democracy. By the end, it was hailing its latest ruler, Demetrius, as both a king and a living God.

Dr. Scott argues that this was caused by a range of circumstances which in many cases were the ancient world's equivalent of those faced by Britain today. Athens, for example, committed itself to unpopular wars which ultimately brought it into direct conflict with the vastly more powerful Macedonia. Its economy, heavily dependent on trade and resources from overseas, crashed when in the 4th century instability in the region began to affect the arterial routes through which those supplies flowed.

̽��ֱ��result was a series of domestic problems, including an inability to fund the traditional police force. In an effort to cope, Athens began to create a system of self-regulation, described as a "giant Neighbourhood Watch", asking citizens not to trouble its overstretched bureaucracy with non-urgent, petty crimes.

Ultimately, the city was to respond positively to some of these challenges. Many of its economic problems were gradually solved by attracting wealthy immigrants to Athens - which as a name still carried considerable prestige.

Democracy itself, however, buckled under the strain. Persuasive speakers who seemed to offer solutions - such as Demosthenes - came to the fore but ultimately took it closer to military defeat and submission to Macedonia. Critically, the emphasis on "people power" saw a revolving door of political leaders impeached, exiled and even executed as the inconstant international climate forced a tetchy political assembly into multiple changes in policy direction.

̽��ֱ��name of "democracy" became an excuse to turn on anyone regarded as an enemy of the state, even good politicians who have, as a result, almost been forgotten. Dr Scott's study also marks an attempt to recognise figures such as Isocrates and Phocion - sage political advisers who tried to steer it away from crippling confrontations with other Greek states and Macedonia.

"In many ways this was a period of total uncertainty just like our own time," Dr. Scott added. "There are grounds to consider whether we want to go down the same route that Athens did. It survived the period through slippery-fish diplomacy, at the cost of a clear democratic conscience, a policy which, in the end, led it to accept a dictator King and make him a God."

From Democrats To Kings is published by Icon Books.

̽��ֱ��collapse of Greek democracy 2,400 years ago occurred in circumstances so similar to our own it could be read as a dark and often ignored lesson from the past, a new study suggests.

It shows how an earlier generation of people responded to similar challenges and which strategies succeeded.

Dr. Michael Scott

eguidetravel from Flickr

Athens acropolis

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Bringing together the Book of Kings

ns480 — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:43:03 +0000

Almost 1000 years ago, the Persian poet Firdausi created an epic poem of such unparalleled sweep and power that, after his death in 1020, it continued to live on as a seminal expression of Iranian art, literature and history. ̽��ֱ��Shahnama (Book of Kings) is the longest poem ever written by a single author and narrates the history of Iran from the first King until the Arab invasions in the early 7th century AD.

̽��ֱ��story goes that the sum of money Firdausi was paid by the Sultan for his work of 35 years was so pitiful that he gave it to an attendant at the baths and left the country. Little did he know that, for the next 800 years, his epic tale would be fêted by successive Persian rulers and aristocracy, whose scribes would fashion precious copies and illustrate them using the finest materials – lapis lazuli, gold, ultramarine. Many of these manuscripts survived, became scattered throughout the world and have now been brought together in an online environment by the Shahnama Project at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Dr Charles Melville, from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, was awarded a five-year grant from the AHRB in 1999 to photograph, catalogue and produce an electronic corpus of the thousands of paintings in the versions of the Shahnama still existing worldwide. A second stage commenced in 2006, with the award of a three-year grant from the AHRC’s Resource Enhancement Scheme to Dr Melville and John Norman of the Cambridge Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) to develop the Shahnama Project website.

Thanks to the technological expertise and digital know-how provided by CARET, international researchers are able to use this uniquely interactive online resource to gather together a global record of extant Shahnama manuscripts. Visitors are already building their own workspaces for teaching and research, and will be able to use the site to engage in research dialogue with other users. With the addition of a sophisticated behind-the-scenes approvals process, the website will ultimately even allow visitors to correct the database directly. ‘Although it has been vitally important to collate and preserve these images digitally, the result is much more than a catalogue,’ said John Norman, Director of CARET. ‘It is a new type of research tool.’

One of the many fascinating aspects of the research is tracing the ‘transmission history’ of the texts and their illustrations. ̽��ֱ��oldest surviving copy of the poem dates from 200 years after Firdausi’s death. ‘Thereafter, seeing sections of the manuscripts side by side and comparing them over time, one can explore the context in which they were made and why they were commissioned,’ said Dr Melville.

By the end of the project, it is hoped that the corpus will include 10,000 images, representing about 70% of the surviving manuscripts. ‘My main aim was to stimulate and promote research in Persian history and culture. With this funding, we have had a fantastic opportunity to encapsulate a key element of this and to make it accessible for all to use,’ said Dr Melville.

For more information, please contact Dr Charles Melville (cpm1000@cam.ac.uk) or John Norman (john@caret.cam.ac.uk).

̽��ֱ��Shahnama Project is building a powerful online resource that will stimulate research and interest in Persian cultural history.

Thereafter, seeing sections of the manuscripts side by side and comparing them over time, one can explore the context in which they were made and why they were commissioned.

Dr Charles Melville

Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

A version of Shahnama: a battle between Iran and Turan

Arts and Humanities Research Council

̽��ֱ��Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) supports research within a wide subject domain, from traditional subjects such as history, modern languages and English literature, through to the creative and performing arts.
Established in April 2005 from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), the AHRC has an annual budget of around £90 million to fund research and postgraduate study, as well as museums and galleries associated with higher education establishments. In 2006–2007, the value of awarded grants to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge was £4 million.

̽��ֱ��AHRC recognises not only the importance of sustaining the arts and humanities research base, but also of ensuring that the knowledge and understanding it generates is widely disseminated. ̽��ֱ��two Cambridge projects highlighted here – the Shahnama Project and Accessing Virtual Egypt – address this strategic priority in different ways. Indeed, the Council has established itself as a leading authority on research-based knowledge transfer (KT), with several new initiatives (including the KT Fellowship) launched specifically for the AHRC research community. Because the AHRC’s definition of KT is broad and flexible in implementation, its impact has extended to key societal and economic challenges.

Several new strategic initiatives have been planned for 2007–2008. In 2007, the AHRC launched a joint £5m programme on Religion and Society with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and a £5.5 million programme entitled Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects. In 2008, work will begin with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on a Science and Heritage programme.

Alongside research grant activities, strategic programmes and KT, the AHRC is keen to highlight another priority: the support of postgraduate and early career researchers to protect the long-term sustainability and health of the UK’s arts and humanities research. A recent survey showed that 74% of AHRC award holders go on to pursue academic and research careers, with the majority of others pursuing careers in creative and cultural sectors, non-profit organisations and public services.

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