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Tamil Bell
- andrewvijay 10y agoI was just arguing with my friend about a Tamil ruler called 'Raja Raja Chola' and reading this now blows my mind!!
- neduma 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language
- sathishmanohar 10y agoAm I missing some context here? How is this related to HN?
- cyberferret 10y agoScience. Exploration. Discovery. Stretching the limits. Challenging common belief patterns... - all things that intelligent people, and those with a creative bent enjoy discussing among like minded colleagues.
- kornish 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. If it's #1 on the front page, people most likely find it interesting (or voting ring; but the mods have some practice spotting those).
- cyberferret 10y agoInteresting. There has to be more evidence of other nations discovering Australia and New Zealand before the ones mentioned in our history books. Nearer to me, the Tiwi islands just off the coast of North Australia have unearthed jade figurines and artifacts that seem to originate from China or another Asian country, which date back to before the time of Captain Cook. Update: Article on early Chinese explorers reaching Australia a long time before Dutch or English explorers - http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/24/1037697982893.html http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/24/1037697982893.h...
- thewhitetulip 10y agoEdited. Was Australia a part of Indian subcontinent back then?
- cyberferret 10y agoWe are talking artifacts that are maybe 500 years old, not millions of years, which was when Australia was part of Gondwanaland.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dguest 10y agoActually continental drift explains a variety of phenomena that have been falsely attributed to human exploration: English is spoken in New York, for example, because the british isles used to be connected to New England. Even the names reflect this: when the landmasses separated Queen Victoria proudly viewed them as a geological projection of the British sphere of influence and christened her new islands "New England" "New York", "New Hampshire" etc.
- fuck_google 10y agoDo you work at Apple?
- elvinyung 10y agoOut-of-place artifacts[1] are cool. A really interesting one is the Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head[2], a part of a terracotta figurine that was found in a pre-Columbian site in Mexico that is speculated to have Roman origin. Learning more about this is actually kind of hard. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of pseudoarchaeology concerning pre-Columbian transoceanic contact. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact [2] http://www.unm.edu/~rhristov/calixtlahuaca.html http://www.unm.edu/~rhristov/calixtlahuaca.html
- noobermin 10y agoI'm a physicist, and I imagine this sort of thing are like studies looking for magnetic monopoles, really out there stuff that capture the imagination of the public and non-experts, but are fringe and/or really difficult to get funding for vs. the usual, safe path.
- ianai 10y agoI doubt it's necessarily that crazy. There's a lot more to the world and human history than documented. Plus, for some reason, 'the west' tends to have an insular viewpoint. Oddball physics has fewer avenues of 'being true but unobserved'. I need sleep.
- simonh 10y agoWe have enough provable, documented examples of very long range contact and trade that it seems highly implausible that there was no such contact that we aren't aware of. If a Christian monk can be born near Beijing in 1220, walk all the way to Europe and meet the pope then it' beggars belief that similar journeys were never done in more ancient times. After all Marco Polo wasn't the first European to go to China either, his father and uncle had been there before him. I do accept that we have to distinguish between mythology and history, but lets analyse this according to scientific principles for a moment. If you have a theory and it accurately predicts what happens, we call that science. If the Aztec believed there were bearded white people living beyond the eastern sea that would one day come and conquer them, then it actually goes and happens, then I think it’s reasonable to take the origins of that belief seriously.
- palerdot 10y agoFascinating. I'm from Tamilnadu (where Tamil is spoken in southern most part of India) and so far we have only heard of early day explorations so far as current singapore, malaysia, cambodia etc. This news is really interesting.
- searchfaster 10y agoSame here.. and even the script is easily readable too.. compared to some of the old works of Tamil, found in old temples. Tamil is over 2000 years old and it is fascinating to see how the script has changed from back then to now.
- mataug 10y agoTheres ambiguous separation between the words on the picture. It reads phonetically as "MugayatheenPak Udaya Kappal Mani". The translation is spot on. Source: I'm a native speaker from Tamil Nadu.
- scriptdevil 10y agoSo am I. I was surprised when it said some of the characters were in Old/Archaic Tamil but I could read the characters fairly clearly.
- mataug 10y agoHey scriptdevil ! We've met before remember ? We both share a common name right ? Don't worry I won't dox you on HN
- palerdot 10y agoAlso, I noticed the actual inscription on top is pronouncing something else that i cannot understand. Only the bottom inscription (translation) is comprehensible for me. I think the bell has only the top section sentence inscribed in it. Can you comprehend the top one?
- aangjie 10y agoI thought the top one simply has a slightly different writing style.(For ex: the thi in muhaiyatheen).. Apart from that there does seem some grammar/or other rule/mistake.. I can see 'udaiya' (or something lke it) twice. once joined with 'buks' and once before bell... Which is unusual, and makes me wonder if it was written by someone not familiar with the language..
- aangjie 10y agoCheck that.. .After going through that grantha script(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantha_alphabet#/media/File:Grantha_Vowels.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantha_alphabet#/media/File:G...) someone posted here.. I think the 'thi' difference can be from grantha script influence... But that 'udaiya' repeated for both name and ship is very interesting...almost like trying to be very explicit...
- LAMike 10y agoTrincomalee would be a good base, second biggest harbor in the world. Cool to see something Sri Lanka related on HN
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- LAMike 10y agoTrincomalee would be a good base, second biggest harbor in the world. Cool to see something Sri Lanka related on HN
- puranjay 10y agoYou might find this interesting: "Australia experienced a wave of migration from India about 4,000 years ago, a genetic study suggests." http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21016700 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21016700
- jv22222 10y agoWhile we're on the topic of interesting artifacts on Wikipedia, this is pretty cool: Voynich manuscript – Undeciphered book from the 15th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
- phobius 10y agoSorry - but I genuinely thought this was going to be an entry about a South Indian fast food franchise. Please don't ban me.
- manojlds 10y agoAs a Tamil, I am surprised by so many such things that I come across about our ancestors. No wonder we take a lot of pride in our culture, sometimes to the extreme.
- RajuVarghese 10y agoYou may be interested to know that the word 'Coromandel' is a anglicized corruption of the 'Chola mandalam'. The Cholas had a sea empire that stretched all the way up to Vietnam. You probably know that there are Hindu temples in Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. Wherever the Cholas landed they set up a temple with a local caretaker who later grew in power.
- vram22 10y ago>You may be interested to know that the word 'Coromandel' is a anglicized corruption of the 'Chola mandalam'. Interesting. I've heard a different version when I studied in South India, that Coromandel [1] is the anglicized version of karu manal (mannal?) meaning black sand - because there are beaches in the Coromandel Coast that have black (and also red and other color) sand. E.g. At Kanyakumari a.k.a Cape Comorin, the southernmost tip of India, you could buy small plastic bags with multi-colored sand as a souvenir. I remember at least black, normal light brown, red and purple colors. [[1] Update: The Wikipedia article says what you say about the name Coromandel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coromandel_Coast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coromandel_Coast ] Similarly, catamaran, I've heard, is from kattu maram - tied tree (trunks). Very stable boats, and that principle is now adopted in modern high-tech catamarans too. [2] Once when on a school picnic on that coast, I asked for and got a ride on a catamaran of the local fishermen. We went out quite a way to sea, for maybe half an hour or more. I was sitting on one of the logs in the front, with my legs nearly up to the waist, in the sea. Could feel the water rushing past my legs. Good fun. [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catamaran#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catamaran#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catamaran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catamaran
- adrianratnapala 10y agoIndeed when I started reading the article I assumed this would be something from the big days of the Chola empire. But the bell seems to be more recent than that.
- skrebbel 10y ago> Translated, it says "Muhayideen Baksh’s ship’s bell". I like language, and this inscription makes me wonder. Why write on a bell that it's a bell? I'd be less surprised if the bell had said "Muhayideen Baksh’s ship". I mean, I get that school buildings say "School" because otherwise it's really just a building. But a bell? Isn't that a bit like writing "Headmaster's Office Door" on the headmaster's office door? I wonder whether maybe it was just an artsy kind of joke. A bit like how in import stores you can buys forks that say "FORK" on the handle. I now imagine the crew on that ship looking up to the bell every once in a while, grinning, thinking "that Baksh fella is a tough one but at least he has some sense of humor".
- noufalibrahim 10y agoI'm guessing that the construction and workmanship of the bell made it an item of adornment for the ship. Inscribing a name on it would make sense if it were so valuable.
- skrebbel 10y agoI think you misunderstood my point - I don't wonder about the entire inscription, but the word "bell". Edited my comment to clarify.
- palerdot 10y agoMaybe, the bell was taken as a trophy and the inscription was done to identify from whom it was taken.
- clort 10y agoSometimes in other languages, the way that you say something is different. I mean, in the english language and culture I agree your point has some sense but in old Tamil it may need to be described that way because of the language structure. The translation may not be perfect either as sometimes a concept that is expressed in one language just has no equivalent in another. edit: native Tamil speaker also contributing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13947061
- giis 10y agoHere's the picture: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/1135/the-tamil-bell http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/1135/the-tamil-bell
- _yvjs 10y agohere's some interesting speculation on this topic: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-three-hour-tour/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-three-hour-tour/ Basically there's genetic (Y chromosome) and linguistic evidence suggesting an infusion of Indian immigration (~5000 years ago so maybe a distinct event from this). One plausible explanation is that some Dravidian seafarers crash-landed in Australia and got absorbed by the local population. From their perspective it probably would have felt like sinking into savagery.
- linuxkerneldev 10y ago> From their perspective it probably would have felt like sinking into savagery. This sentence is incongruous with the rest of your post. Why would you think such a thing?
- _yvjs 10y agoThe sentiment is lifted directly from the linked post. It's hard to argue with given the subcontinent had agricultural, seafaring populations while Australian populations never made it past Paleolithic hunter-gathering.
- mclightning 10y agoA lot of people express their surprise about "other nations discovering AU, NZ, US" etc. You do understand homo sapiens did not evolve separately on these different continents/lands right? The actual discovery was when the first homo sapien settled in US, AU, NZ etc.... Of course some cultures managed to travel to these lands long before our history records tells us. Native Americans are not a separate species of homo sapiens, they did not evolve there separately.
- netzone 10y agoYes, but we're not talking about that here. We're talking about the interconnectivity of the ancient world. That's something completely different.
- msound 10y agoThe Tamils originally wrote on dried palm leaves with a sharp scribe. So, if you didn't want to tear the leaf, you had to avoid straight lines and dots. That's why there are so many curves in the script. Also, one of the meanings of my first name "Mani" is literally "Bell". Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_script Also: I'm Tamil.
- dewaka 10y agoPalm leaves were commonly used to write in Sinhalese as well, and the alphabet, similarly, is very curvy[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhalese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhalese_alphabet
- ergothus 10y agoIt's fascinating (to me) to think that the medium influences the script - something I had never considered. I wonder if we can find medium-based influences on other scripts, say, Roman and Arabic. My Archaeological/anthropological knowledge doesn't even extend to spelling those words correctly (thank you Chrome spell-checker), so I can't do more than wonder unless someone here... (nudge, nudge)
- SAI_Peregrinus 10y agoRoman block lettering avoids curves because it was often curved. That's why the U and V sounds were represented by the same letter, and only later diverged. Norse runes are similar, and lack curves entirely.
- sriram_iyengar 10y agoProud moment for a Tamizhan on HN !
- shanth 10y ago_/\_
- pvg 10y agowith a sharp scribe That sounds incredibly unwieldy.
- palerdot 10y agoMore details on this context - the sharp scribe is wielded deftly so that they can write freely in the dried palm leaves. The sharp scribe is called "ezhuthaani" (where zhu is a special L sound) which literally means writing nail. The dried palm leaves are commonly referred as "olai suvadi" which literally means dry leaf book. PS: The word Tamil itself should be pronounced "Tamizh" where zh is a special "La" sound, unique to Tamil language.
- pvg 10y agoI think you mean something like 'stylus'. A scribe is a person.
- devnonymous 10y agoA word can have more than one meanings. From https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Ascribe&oq=define%3Ascribe https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Ascribe&oq=define%3A... 3. a pointed instrument used for making marks on wood, bricks, etc., to guide a saw or in signwriting.
- pvg 10y agoA word can have more than one meanings Lies spread by Satanist band. 3. a pointed instrument used for making [...] Communist dictionary.
- devnonymous 10y ago- You make a snide comment - Someone misinterprets it as an honest mistake and tries to explain things - You take on a condescending tone attempting to ^educate^ this obviously clueless person who doesn't know what word they ought to be using - Someone patiently points out that it is you who is wrong - You now use humour and pretend to be dismissive (instead of either not saying anything or acknowledging that yes, you did learn something new). Bravo! Now everyone knows just how witty and smart you can be!
- danans 10y agoThe name of the ship's owner (mohayideen) is Arabic, transliterated into Tamil script. There is a well known history of the Arab trade network throughout Southeast Asia but it's fascinating that this artifact represents a fusion of Arab and Tamil culture. It makes me ponder whether the owner of the ship was himself cross cultural. The Arab presence in Southern India actually predates the advent of Islam, so even it's possible (though not likely) that this artifact hails from before that time. EDIT: TFA notes that the script is datable to 500 years old so it is probably not pre-Islamic.
- BeetleB 10y ago>The name of the ship's owner (mohayideen) is Arabic, transliterated into Tamil script. I think you'll find that today most people with that name are South Asian.
- danans 10y agoEDIT2: In retrospect, the surname Baksh actually suggests a Persian/Central-Asian ancestry[1], so the cultural picture of the owner is actually even more complex. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buksh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buksh
- gumby 10y agoVery good point. There was also significant foreign trade between Egypt, Arabia, and India/Pakistan going back at least 4000 years, so your conjecture makes a lot of sense. Edit: I followed the footnote to vol 1 of the NZ Journal of Science where the suggest a Portuguese origin, presumably because of Portuguese saying prowess. In fact of course Tamil Nadu was an initial colonization point of many European invaders, all of whom by definition were sailing nations. In fact who's to say that the bell didn't arrive within the century preceding Colenso's seeing it?
- danans 10y agoI would just add that Tamils were a sailing nation with trade links in Southeast Asia well before European colonization - as is clearly evident in their cultural influence on and from Southeast Asia [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_inscriptions_in_the_Malay_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_inscriptions_in_the_Mala...
- shas3 10y agoThis is not implausible. Maritime Southeast Asia had trading relationships [1] with aboriginal Australians in the northern coast of Australia. It is not too surprising (still very interesting) if a ship every now and then made it to New Zealand or further. The main difference between them and the European Colonial Age is that most ships did not return. Note that there was a long Indian 'colonial age' in Southeast Asia, though it was more cultural and trade exchange with naval influence rather than remote hegemony. Likewise the Western Coast of India had maritime activity with the civilizations of Middle East, Europe, and Africa, from as long ago as the Indus Civilization. The point is that coastal Indians were reasonably adept sailors and maritime trade played a major role in South Indian and Western Indian civilization(s) and culture(s). Over several thousand years, it is not too unlikely that a few ships made their way to Australia, etc. [1] http://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2012/05/australian-aborigines-and-makassan-trepangers.html http://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2012/05/australian-aborigines...
- mmjaa 10y agoI think this discussion is sadly lacking a fair bit of Szukalski. If you don't know him, he's a total weirdo. But, like so many totalitarian weirdoes, he was also a bit of a genius. Of the mad variety. Mad, but nevertheless interesting. So, one of his mad genius ideas is that the world has endured a number of cyclic catastrophic events, every 65k years or so, which completely obliterates civilisation and culture and replaces it with naught but refugees and a relatively clean slate. On account of The Deluge. If you imagine that the Earth, 65k years (or so) ago might've had an Advanced Civilisation, Szukalski is gonna be right alongside, albeit way ahead of you. One of the things he proposes is that the survivors of The Deluge have inter-mixed, around the globe, and you can see it in ancient art - common themes, originally expressed from a root culture (the 'mother tongue' of the prior civilisation), which eventually degrades over time as entropy - and the shifting oceans of The Deluge - separate us all. Anyway, Szukalski had some things to say about sea-faring survivors whose language echoes through the ages. If you want a bit of a "Weird Art" kick, because the Tamil Bell is indeed weird art, then take a look at Szukalski. The Protong Lives!
- ripdog 10y agoHere is the bell in the Te Papa Tongarewa collection: http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/Object/213397 http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/Object/213397
- gumby 10y agoWhat I would like to know is how Colenso got the bell. Did he purchase it, simply take it, or offer a better replacement? Neither the Wikipedia nor a broader web search addresses this. And Colenso's own wikipedia page doesn't even mention the bell!