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9 million books and 10k students - Unrealistic.
by nothrowaways 4y ago
9 million books and 10k students - Unrealistic.
- 22SAS 4y ago[flagged]
- sbmthakur 4y agoIs BBC following Hindu nationalist propaganda?
- Bang2Bay 4y agothat is what most want us to believe or argue about. :)
- 22SAS 4y ago[flagged]
- Bang2Bay 4y ago'could be' many things. :) But what centrists should do is research and allow research to happen. Not silence. rewriting history is not shameful.
- SeanLuke 4y agoActually a fair bit of the BBC article appears to have been derived from Wikipedia.
- lazyninja987 4y ago[dead]
- Bang2Bay 4y agoeverything is propaganda. Including painting nationalists as those behind these articles. :) Unfortunately no one wants to research because many tame any research as rightwing propaganda. No research has been done as to how an 80ton stone was moved 100s of km and lifted 20 stories up to build temples for example.
- steponlego 4y agoWhy wouldn’t Hindus have a country? Muslims got two in the partition.
- 22SAS 4y agoWhat does my post have to do with Hindus having/not having a land of their own?
- steponlego 4y agoIt seems extremely obvious if you just think for a second. Are you aware that British India was partitioned along ethno-religious lines? I’m a little shocked that you’re so confused…
- selimthegrim 4y agoI guess Nepal is chopped liver then?
- shaan7 4y ago[flagged]
- steponlego 4y agoAre you aware that there are many dozens of such countries?
- shaan7 4y agoYes, hence the "should". Just because something exists doesn't mean it is always justified or sensible.
- steponlego 4y agoWho are you to judge them though? Seems like a colonizer’s attitude.
- seatac76 4y agoDid you even read the article? It seems well researched, if anything it alludes to the uncertainty inherent in determining with accuracy what happened centuries ago.
- MPlus88 4y ago[dead]
- kshacker 4y agoWhy? Books need not be unique books. There could be variations of the same book. For example, many books / scriptures were still being reconciled as recently as 100 years back and there are so many versions of ramayana available from one corner of Asia to another corner, that I would expect a respectable university to try to look at the variations and do some kind of lineage analysis. And also book may not imply a 1000 page book, it could also mean an 8 page manuscript. Does 9 million sound big, sure? But in the absence of other information, maybe we can debate the quantum of overstatement rather than just assuming that since we can't explain it, everything related to it may be fake. And last point, maybe there were 9 million books. What's a university if it does not have more than one book per student especially if they built that library over 700 years. Maybe each student had an annual journal which is classified as a book.
- stonogo 4y agoYale has 15k students and its library has a collection of 15 million. Cornell has 25k students and 10 million books.
- Symbiote 4y agoMost of Cornell's books cost between $5 and, say, $200. They represent between less than an hour and a day's labour. Copying a book in mediaeval times took months, so 9 million is an incredible amount of work. Other sources put the number of books in the low hundreds of thousands.
- CydeWeys 4y agoHow many of the books that Yale and Cornell have are hand-written on hand-produced paper and manually bound codexes? The printing press is kind of a big deal.
- brigandish 4y agoThe printing press allows magnitudes greater than that but it doesn't limit the number that can be written by hand, especially over hundreds of years, at an institute dedicated to study.
- Symbiote 4y agoCopy out a short novel, by hand, using a quill pen, and then decide what the limit is for handwritten books. By the way, you also need to make the quills, ink and paper by hand, and work with natural light and no eyeglasses.
- brigandish 4y agoWhy is the chosen length a short novel? Books range from a few pages to hundreds of pages. If we make some unlikely assumptions - that there were 10,000 students attending Nalanda every year from its foundation to its destruction, and that each student wrote for only 1 hour a day, 5 days a week for 40 weeks of the year, that gives us 2,000,000 hours of writing. Over 763 years that is 1,526,000,000 hours. There were 2000 teachers at Nalanda, that's 400,000 more hours per year, 305,200,000 hours over the course of Nalanda's existence. The population of India in 1000 AD is estimated at anywhere from 75 million to 200 million. Not all the students would have to write all the books as there was another university nearby that was also destroyed by Muslim invaders called Takshashila[2] which would've also housed and produced books, some of which no doubt made their way to Nalanda, and show that books weren't only produced in one part of ancient India, and that there was a large enough population to support a book "industry" with things like quills and ink (they actually used a knife with palm leaves that could last hundreds of years[3]), let alone writers. Add to that, what are some of the students going to be doing once they graduate? Writing books. As that last link says: > Hindu temples often served as centers where ancient manuscripts were routinely used for learning and where the texts were copied when they wore out. In South India, temples and associated mutts served custodial functions, and a large number of manuscripts on Hindu philosophy, poetry, grammar and other subjects were written, multiplied and preserved inside the temples. Archaeological and epigraphical evidence indicates existence of libraries called Sarasvati-bhandara, dated possibly to early 12th-century and employing librarians, attached to Hindu temples. Palm leaf manuscripts were also preserved inside Jain temples and in Buddhist monasteries. That is all to ignore that movable type printing was invented in China[4] before Nalanda was sacked, and that scholars from all over Asia went back and forth from Nalanda sharing texts. You might have heard of the Journey to the West, which was inspired by an actual journey that was written down in a book called Great Tang Records on the Western Regions[5]. In it, Nalanda is mentioned because Xuanzang, the author, visited there. That book took 2 people to produce, and is described as: > The book contains more than 120,000 Chinese characters and is divided into twelve volumes That's in 646 AD. I think you underestimate the abilities of the people of that time to produce books. [1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/33640/what-was-the-population-of-indian-subcontinent-in-1000-ad https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/33640/what-was-t... [2] https://www.britannica.com/place/Taxila https://www.britannica.com/place/Taxila [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm-leaf_manuscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm-leaf_manuscript [4] https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/printing-press https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/printing-press [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tang_Records_on_the_Western_Regions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tang_Records_on_the_West...
- flextheruler 4y agoOftentimes the ancient world did not distinguish between manuscripts of a couple pages and books. If that number is not made up then that must be what’s happening here.
- blackoil 4y agoExaggeration is an integral part of such stories. It definitely didn't take 3 months to burn. But even if it was 9 million pages, still impressive and important.
- rg111 4y agoI think they are considering even 5 written pages as a "book"?