As for Sanskrit it was never the language of masses. Pali or Prakrit would have been the language of masses during time of Al biruni. Sanskrit is an elegant language but was again limited in access to few by the caste system.
Was there any objective metric by which ancient Indian engineering was behind others?
There are other Indian achievements that have no parallels elsewhere in a similar time. But you can't overgeneralize from them in the other direction either:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170110-indias-ancient-e...
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
1. Indian advances in Mathematics are several centuries in the future from the period under discussion. And they owe quite a bit to interaction with the Greeks though patriots might not want to admit it.
2. Pali wasn’t a “language of masses” either. It was a trade language of Western India that became the literary language of the sthaviravadi Buddhists. Other sects used Sanskrit or other Prakrits. Shakyamunis mother tongue was Magadhi yet another Prakrit.
3. Sanskrit was the most prestigious language though at this point it didn’t have the monopoly it would later have. No it wasn’t a mass language either but more people had access to it than you might think.
2. > And they owe quite a bit to interaction with the Greeks though patriots might not want to admit it.
Yes, it is hand wavy statement without specifying the period of interaction. This is as bad as the "patriots" (who are non existent except as bogeymen in this thread, lol. Maybe this makes sense if you are a Greek patriot. )
I always assumed it is not rude to ask for academic references. (I am even scared to ask for references here lol.)
Eurocentrism is a real thing but I did try to search for any refs.
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.
As for rest of your comment, I don’t know enough to comment on it. On cursory reading it seems you are right and thank you for this information.
Modern day Pakistan was then-day Indian civilization. And he had established several cities there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism
>India is not Delhi and adjacent areas of Delhi which speak Hindi.
Don't have to be the whole of India. Just to be part of it. That's like saying someone who went to a tour of New England didn't visited the United States, because "New England is not the US".
The Taylor series comes from Madhava around 13th century. This was rediscovered in the 1970s. There is no feasible mechanism for Greek influence here.
The Indian numeric system (often called Arabic in Europe) and the consept of zero (invented in India) enabled both the science revolution and the establishment of modern banks and corporations first in Italy and then in the rest of Europe.
> 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 a point of conjecture few/nobody would have thought the Greeks made something as complex as the Antikytheria mechanism unless it was discovered and studied extensively for a century. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if something of similar quality from Asia would be discovered or is in the study process already.
Well.. nobody except those who were willing to believe Cicero wasn't spinning a science fiction yarn when he described a very similar device and attributed it to Archimedes. But to your point, it seems like people didn't take it seriously until one was found. It makes you wonder what other things have been written of but not taken seriously because they sound too fantastic.
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.
We need a source
https://web.archive.org/web/20100214195826/http://www.new.dl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuktibhāṣā with digital open access at https://books.sayahna.org/ml/pdf/yukthibhasha.pdf (I'm afraid I cannot read it)
From Dharampal "Beautiful Tree"
> It is, however, the Madras Presidency and Bengal-Bihar data which presents a kind of revelation. The data reveals the background of the teachers and the taught. It presents a picture which is in sharp contrast to the various scholarly pronounce- ments of the past 100 years or more, in which it had been assumed that education of any sort in India, till very recent decades, was mostly limited to the twice-born amongst the Hindoos, and amongst the Muslims to those from the ruling elite. The actual situation which is revealed was different, if not quite contrary, for at least amongst the Hindoos, in the districts of the Madras Presidency (and dramatically so in the Tamil- speaking areas) as well as the two districts of Bihar. It was the groups termed Soodras, and the castes considered below them who predominated in the thousands of the then still-existing schools in practically each of these areas.
> In most areas, the Brahmin scholars formed a very small proportion of those studying in schools. Higher learning, however, being more in the nature of professional specialisation, seems in the main to have been limited to the Brahmins. This was especially true regarding the disciplines of Theology, Metaphysics, Ethics, and to a large extent of the study of Law. But the disciplines of Astronomy and Medical Science seem to have been studied by scholars from a variety of backgrounds and castes. This is very evident from the Malabar data: out of 808 studying Astronomy, only 78 were Brahmins; and of the 194 studying Medicine, only 31 were Brahmins. Incidentally, in Rajahmundry, five of the scholars in the institution of higher learning were Soodras. According to other Madras Presidency surveys, of those practising Medicine and Surgery, it was found that such persons belonged to a variety of castes. Amongst them, the barbers, according to British medical men, were the best in Surgery.
The worst part is that instead of dying out, it seems to be coming back.
I’ll always be bearish on India as long as we still have this awful institution around.
Curious about that - do the founders of big indian IT companies, like Infosys or Zoho, belong to a specific cast?
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.
Some occupations like Law employ such a tiny percentage of the population, that Caste becomes too coarse grained to be the only dimension of analysis for the basis of privilege.
You probably will have a better chance of breaking into the top echelons of this industry by living in the right gated society in Delhi that puts you into contact with these entrenched folks rather than being the right caste in some remote Indian Village.
To look at a broader scale of occupational distribution, SC/ST folks have 23% affirmative action Quotas in Govt/State universities like IITs, IIMs and Medical Colleges. Is the issue that they are unable to compete in the Industry post college?
Caste based affirmative action quota is 52% with overall affirmative action quota at 63%.
Do you think more affirmative action is necessary to fix the problem?
At this point it just looks like " The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves".
You could also say no matter how large a portion you cut out of a pizza, you will never feed a hundred people if one pizza is all you have.
That should tell you where the problem is: most don't even make it all the way to higher education.
You have to first fix primary and secondary education. But to fix that, you have to first fix rural society where caste hierarchies are still dominant.
Do you think incidents like these are conducive to pushing scheduled castes to higher education? https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/16-year-...
This is an interesting point. A huge focus of Indian politics is lobbying groups from various lower caste communities asking for _more_ reservation. The fact that this point never reaches discussion, that the Indian schooling system is failing its students never makes airwaves gives me the feeling that Lower caste community leaders and politicians are _not_ interested in fixing the problem if it loses them their captive vote banks.
> https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/16-year-...
Rural India has serious problem in class and caste. Depressing state of things overall.
But I would note that you could have chosen a better example. This incident does not have any caste slur or anything to indicate that this was rooted in caste. Government teachers and employees power-tripping in their little fiefdoms is a common story across caste boundaries. I personally know of examples of upper caste folks facing violence in schools. One had their front teeth smashed by their teacher by "accident", but you can guess the type of environment where these accidents happen. This will also never make headlines since there is no caste angle to push.
Caste is a problem in Rural and to a smaller extent in Urban India. But you will also have to admit that our media and related political interests are hell bent on fanning the flames. The caste angle is brought into every petty bit of violence. So much that it becomes hard to believe even what may be genuine cases.
The American version of this would be race being highlighted if the victim is Black/Indigenous/Hispanic. A common reddit trope is if the victim's race isn't mentioned then they're white. If the perpetrator's race isn't mentioned then they aren't White/White-adjacent.
Scholarships spanning the whole length of education rather than reservations may be a better mechanism for improving opportunity in my opinion. It would also let you know if your scheme is working since with reservation, you just let potentially unprepared students through without fixing other prior systemic issues.
This is absolutely true.
You will find a bunch of modern keyboard warriors who have not studied Sanskrit literature vehemently disagreeing with this based on some misplaced sense of pride.
Sanskrit is --syntactically-- a very exact language with no room for debate. The flip side of this is that every dialect got labelled as an aberration (literally!) with no hope of mainstream adoption.
Now moving on from syntax, Sanskrit semantics is intentionally loosely defined. So much that you are discouraged from interpreting it yourself. The usual argument for that is that you would have a teacher who will teach you the correct interpretation. Obviously this did not scale, and caused knowledge to get lost wholesale over time.
A concrete example is the grammar rules of the language itself, which is supposed to be exact and well defined. Well, it turns out that these rules were only written down in terms of mnemonics (similar to remembering the first letter of trigonometric identities to recall it), and people have interpreted these mnemonics in different ways.
I have studied Sanskrit literature extensively and do not know what this means.
> people have interpreted these mnemonics in different ways
Your implication is that people interpreted these mnemonics differently due to misunderstanding these rules. The mainstream scholarly response is rather some version of प्रयोगशरणा वैयाकरणाः ("grammarians take refuge in usage"), i.e. that different grammarians working in different eras and time periods were forced to reconcile the Ashtadhyayi as a fixed document with the slight divergence in contemporary usage -- that is, that they followed usage and intentionally reinterpreted rules to fit usage.
For an example of how this accounts for Patanjali's readings in particular, see [1].
This means a sentence can often have many different meaning, not just the literal one suggested by the words.
The idea is you either accept multiple meanings or settle it through debate.
I am not criticizing this, this is fundamentally what makes literature and poetry interesting.
But this makes it really difficult to draw a line between philosophy and science.
The claim from the Greek historian is that this is what caused eastern science and engineering to stagnate compared to Greek/Roman efforts.
I am inclined to agree, of course it is not really possible to prove any causality here.
Being from the western world, with a deep curiosity in eastern thought and practice, these types of thought experiments are very interesting to me, but also depressing when you look closely at the reality of how things played out.
I'm not sure this ever happened on a worldwide scale.
I am not an historian, but is this really true? Scientists/mathematicians then were philosophers or "natural philosophers" and it seems like most of the famous ones also worked on things like metaphysics.
If I had to put a timestamp on it, it would be the fall of the Maurya empire around 200BC when the Roman War Machine was getting more and more organized and industrialized.
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.
Now the problem is that these descriptions are colored by the philosophy and opinion of the person writing it, often heavily because of the lack of cross pollination of ideas.
For example, the ISKCON descriptions of the verses of Gita are often completely orthogonal to the main philosophy of Gita, but the interpretation is technically as valid as the literal interpretation.
Yes but you can always read multiple commentaries, and its usually good to be critical of whichever one you are looking at.
>For example, the ISKCON descriptions of the verses of Gita are often completely orthogonal to the main philosophy of Gita, but the interpretation is technically as valid as the literal interpretation.
Yea, my first Sanskrit teacher was not ISKCON but ISKCON-adjacent, a very well-meaning guy, but I think recently we're beginning to break because I'm rejecting his interpretations of the Gita and the Sankhya philosophy. I've never read the ISKCON materials directly but I get the feeling that they emphasize a kind of personal monasticism and asceticism, which seems not exactly antithetical to what the Gita propounds, but is certainly a very restricted reading.
Their interpretation is heavily filtered through the 15th century devotional movement of Chaitanya, himself a member of the devotional/dualist lineage started by Madhvacharya. Their beliefs stem from the medieval sectarian Puranic literature, and have the goals of moralization and idealization of Indian rural, pastoral, doctrinally vegetarian lifestyles, which is a perspective very far removed from the martial culture that produced the Mahabharata. Hence the strained interpretation they use.
I'd also argue that there is nothing particularly monastic or ascetic about the Gita, which propounds that conquest and the fruits thereof are not only acceptable, but are expected as a matter of the prince's duty.
But a good commentary does help and more importantly it is the accepted academic style just as footnotes, APA formatting etc. are Western academic conventions.
You always have to know context because language can always be stretched. People write poetry in Perl for goodness sake!
Perhaps because it’s written in more flowery, loose Sanskrit with words and idioms made up when the situation called for it.
Compared to that everything newer is a bit weird to interpret because some random phrase would be taken from some other contemporary text, the reader is assumed to understand and appreciate the cryptic reference.
Funnily enough this reminds me of Rick and Morty/South Park kind of media nowadays, where the inner joke is usually a pop culture reference.
The last one feels like it was tacked on later and contains contemporary creation myths and practical philosophy.
That is things which someone presumably got tired of answering again and again and just added as an appendix.
Also the language is provable to have been a later iteration of Sanskrit.
I've found this to be the case also, despite the free-wheeling and less regular grammatical style - because the Rigvedic hymns usually have pretty concrete subject matter - like getting motivated to steal (or perhaps "free") some cows held by an adversary.
Of course any number of other more abstract or esoteric interpretations can be read into the hymns, but I prefer the simpler and more earthly interpretation.
Ofcourse, Sanskrit can be used like English too. That is like using a super computer as a calculator.
Even if you try to describe precise and scientific facts in Sanskrit, the nature of the language would enable multiple interpretations of it.
That is amazing if you want to have intellectual debates, but useless if you are trying to follow directions to build ..say.. a bridge.
Sanskrit's high polysemy is restricted to a rather bounded set of words (see the नानार्थवर्गः in the अमरकोशः).
Stepping back, this claim and the others you have made in this thread are strange and at odds with my experience reading and speaking and teaching the language, specfically the claims that:
- "Sanskrit semantics is intentionally loosely defined"
- the Rigveda contains "words and idioms made up when the situation called for it" in some way that is different from the ordinary suffixation that is a standard part of Sanskrit grammar;
- the ISKCON interpretation of the Gita is "technically as valid as the literal interpretation" in some manner that is unique to Sanskrit.
I consider these claims extraordinary and request evidence that any of these problems are (a) real and (b) unique to Sanskrit.
> That is amazing if you want to have intellectual debates, but useless if you are trying to follow directions to build ..say.. a bridge.
We have the various Shilpa Shastras [1] as a clear example of this kind of instruction, so I eagerly await a concrete example of what you mean.
I'm not sure what evidence for this would satisfy you but here is an article with examples. https://yogainternational.com/article/view/the-subtleties-of...
> in some way that is different from the ordinary suffixation
This is fairly well studied, rigvedic sanskrit differs from modern sanskrit in the sense that vedic sanskrit is similar to all other languages.
https://www.remembersanskrit.com/articles/vedic-vs-classical
Panini codified Sanskrit because he felt the language was evolving too rapidly and knowledge and wisdom might be getting lost in translation.
> the ISKCON interpretation [...] unique to Sanskrit.
I concede that this problem is not unique to Sanskrit. It is unique to classical (and not vedic) Sanskrit literature though. My hypothesis is that it is a natural side effect of codifying a language strictly and trying to prevent change. Other languages can (and has been) used to produce literature where interpretation is the key to understanding, but for Sanskrit it is the vast majority of the available literature, not a few oddballs here and there.
> We have the various Shilpa Shastras
Do you notice that these are heavily focused on art and crafts? And the number of these is astonishingly low for a ~7000 year old civilization.
It's not surprising that a spiritual community highly invested in a fixed text can find new interpretations for it, see all of Christiany for illustration or [1] for a specific Christian example. The "kshetre kshetre dharma kuru" example, though, is especially naive -- sure, I guess you can make a new meaning if you totally ignore Sanskrit grammar. The author is clearly quite early on in their study.
> rigvedic sanskrit differs from modern sanskrit in the sense that vedic sanskrit is similar to all other languages
Sure, I agree that Vedic and Classical Sanskrit differ, largely in the same way that Homeric and Attic Greek differ. But this isn't the claim you made -- you said that the Rigveda contains "words and idioms made up when the situation called for it," which I reject.
> Panini codified Sanskrit because he felt the language was evolving too rapidly
Panini's intent is an open question, though your view is a reasonable one. The Ashtadhyayi is more descriptive than people give it credit for: it generally focuses on the भाषा, i.e. the contemporaneous usage of experts (शिष्ट), with a lesser emphasis on Vedic usage, and it further takes extensive notice of regional variation and different preferences among other grammarians of the time. Another possible interpretation is that just as the other parts of the ritual had been fully worked over and polished, it was thought that the language itself should be perfected (संस्कृत).
> for Sanskrit it is the vast majority of the available literature, not a few oddballs here and there.
This is an interesting observation that has other explanations -- see below.
> It is unique to classical (and not vedic) Sanskrit literature though
Again, I see no support for this.
> And the number of these is astonishingly low
Sure, I agree with this. But this isn't the claim you made -- you said that the nature of Sanskrit makes it useless for tasks like describing how to build a bridge, which I reject.
~~~
I'd like to conclude with two thoughts.
First, you are raising interesting questions. Why is it the case that so much of Sanskrit literature is commentary? Why does the number of Shilpa Shastras seem relatively low? Why does Sanskrit literature tend to have a culture of reinterpretation?
Assuming these observations are true, I believe that the answer is some combination of: India's oral memory culture and a concomitant deference to authority and preference for the spoken over the written; consequently, a preference for text forms that can be easily memorized (sutra and verse), which can be harder to parse and change; material constraints on manuscript preservation in the hot and humid Indian climate; strong deference to realized spiritual teachers, and by extension to all teachers; and extensive competition with local languages for intellectual territory.
But that's an armchair answer that needs further investigation. Note that none of these points have anything to do with Sanskrit as a language.
Second, Sanskrit and the tradition are far more exacting and precise than you give them credit for, and I encourage you to look into the matter more deeply before making extremely strong statements about it that have little basis in fact.
I have been reading and teaching Sanskrit for a long time, and in that time I have learned that while Sanskrit is special in many ways, it is still a language that can be used and learned like any other. Even so, I have seen extraordinary claims, both positive and negative, from people confidently asserting what Sanskrit is like without looking deeply into the matter. And while they are well-intentioned, they are -- to use your phrase -- "modern keyboard warriors who have not studied Sanskrit literature."
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Reinterpreting-New-Testament-Dont-Mea...
I have studied Sanskrit literature much more (15+ years with two mentors and on my own) than I have studied Sanskrit formally (3 years in high school). I love Sanskrit literature but not the modern culture of putting Sanskrit on a pedestal.
There is a reason the language has vanished from use and to a large extent not been used for passing on practical knowledge. These are potentially fixable issues, but to fix an issue a community should be able to admit that there exist issues.
Makes sense.
What I was touching upon was the culture of leaving things up to interpretation though, not just this particular issue.
India had wide trade and cultural interchange between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and even the eastern Mediterranean at least as far back back as Harrapan times.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrS...
Well, at the (later, circa 330 B.C) time of Alexander the Great, some areas of India and modern-day Pakistan had established Greek cities, living behind them some considerable influence. That's a well known historical meeting between the two:
Regarding your point specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art
The article itself mentions about the debate on whether the monk was sent from Tamil kingdom or Punjabi kingdom.
Greeks were at the fringes of the ancient civilization. The Romans and the Germans were considered barbarians in contrast.
India on the other hand was the center of the ancient world, both by sea trade as well as its huge population.
The Chinese as well as the SE Asians sent their best scholars as well as royalty to study in India.
It is very much more likely that the Greeks themselves benefited from their contact with India, as did many other ancient civilizations of that time.
You are merely replaying this template.
The West has destroyed all its own traditions, and continues to want to not only appropriate and reform it in the mold of 'western rationality', but also to destroy the original tradition. We see this with Buddhism, Yoga, Ayurveda, Indology and what not, where the authority has been usurped by the West, not out of merit, but by politicking and economic cunning.
The sad part is that nothing changes in the occident either. Greco-Egyptian philosophy was appropriated by Europeans for the simple reason that it was bat to beat the papacy with, but then when it posed a real threat, it was again derailed by the continental philosophers and excreted out.
The role of continental philosophy on the study of India is an amazing one that is yet to be told.
Here's a great presentation from a recent conference,
This was very much questioned even when it was somewhat mainstream, which was many many decades ago. Since the second world war it is unquestionably considered racist garbage by all reputable mainstream historians, archeologists and linguists.
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.