American Indians vs. Chinese

Factual Questions
21

“The Chinese knew gunpowder by the 11th c., and Europe got this from China somewhere around the late 13th or early 14th c. Furthermore, China had used cannon as early as the 13th c., and the gates and city walls of China had emplacements for cannon. But when the Europeans arrived there were no cannons in those emplacements and no one who possessed the skills as to how to fire a cannon. The Chinese had literally LOST a skill that they themselves had invented”

From the site… http://www.ukans.edu/~medieval/melcher/19981201.med/msg00425.html

This looks like a reply to a message board on this very subject. The entire message is worth a look and you can probably hit the links to find more discussion on this.

22

Seems that Europe benefited from a pre-existing war time mentality (from in fighting) and incented by lack of resources, was better prepared to conquer.

China, due to a stable government covering a huge easily defendible area, and the ability to grow enough food, lost out.

The ability to conquer may be the hallmark of a failed domestic government - gee sounds familiar… :slight_smile:

23

I’d like to know more about the possible connection between Arabic and Chinese writing mentioned by DF. I’ve never heard of such a thing, and in all my casual observations of the two scripts I’ve never noticed anything like that. Are there any good sources on it for the layman?

24

Although the points that {:-Df brings up are good, I for one think they lean far too heavily on China’s side, and some appear to be incorrect. There is no doubt that China is an ancient civilization responsible for many advancements in the sciences and the arts, although their decline in the last hundreds of years has been very severe.

APB9999 mentioned a few good points in response, but I’ll make a few comments myself.

I have never heard that Arabic derived from Chinese, and I would like to know of any respected scholar who believes this. I learned Arabic about 13 years ago (reading, writing, speaking), and I live in Hong Kong now, where I am confident there are zero similarities between the written forms of Arabic and Chinese. The structure is different, the script is radically different in appearance and usage, one language is phonetic cursive whereas the other is pictographic ideograms, etc.

The technology that allowed the Europeans to sail around the world was developed possibly in Egypt or in the eastern Mediterranean, and is called the Lateen fore and aft sail. It is at least 2,000 years old. The Northern Europeans caught on late to this design, because they favoured the square sail (which many people claim is the oldest form of sail) but in the Mediterranean and among the Arabs the lateen was very popular. Unfortunately the early Northern European sail technology (like many others) did not allow for tacking, and frequently seafarers had to resort to rowing. When they finally combined the two designs they were able to achieve good technology for ocean-cruising vessels that could tack against the wind.

Knowledge and language crossing the world from China directly to Arabia? I think this is extremely unlikely and undocumented. Massive Chinese ships capable of sailing all over the world? Unlikely, or we would have solid evidence of this. As APB9999 points out, it is likely that one expedition made it quite far by navigating coastal waters, but I don’t imagine much happened beyond that. This reminds me of that claim in recent years that the ancient Greeks sailed to and lived in South America thousands of years ago. These examples sound like massive Chinese propaganda, or the conclusions of a set of historians who want to receive their next research grant or newspaper article a little too badly.

I will agree with you that the Chinese were responsible for some dramatic inventions, such as the stirrup and the suspension bridge. But it says very much about them that they investigated so much technology and yet were unable to build on most of it. As I said earlier, technology for them was mostly a source of toys and amusements.

As for medicine, most cultures have developed a rudimentary system of medicine that is accurate to some basic extent. I find it difficult to believe that someone developed “hormone therapy for diabetes” without even knowing what a hormone is. That sounds similar to the ridiculous claim I read years ago that the ancient Egyptians were capable of brain surgery, a belief that still endures among some people I run into. And a very egregious example of Chinese medicine is their millennia-long preoccupation with increasing male sexuality. The Chinese above all other cultures developed thousands of methods over thousands of years to attempt to make men more virile (not necessarily to fight impotence). Needless to say, none of them have ever been proved to work.

As I think everyone agrees, the state of medicine in past centuries was deplorable almost all over the world. In China, much “traditional” medicine is still extremely popular, and in many cities you can’t walk more than 20 steps without having your nostrils assaulted by a shop selling dried deer penis, tiger testicles, shark fins, pickled snake, etc., as legitimate medical remedies. The problem is so bad that Jackie Chan made a TV commercial inviting people to stop buying tiger penis, because the tigers are rapidly dissappearing.

I will also argue that China has always been very isolationist. China has usually been a nation very ready to take recourse in war, but nowhere as successful at it as their vast numbers, resources, and supposed technological advantages would suggest. The main purpose of the Great Wall was to keep barbarians (read: everyone else) out of unified China. That sounds very isolationist to me.

I do not find it necessary to alter the conclusions made in my earlier message. The size and power of China seem to have been handicaps rather than advantages.

Abe

IDIOT, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
–Ambrose Bierce

25

What? The Arabic script is derived from Nabatean Aramaic, which is a Semitic script. All Semitic scripts derive from the North Semitic Script (as does Brahmi, the precursor to modern Indic alphabets).

From Funk and Wagnalls’ website:

Further, Arabic absolutely does not look like it’s derived from Chinese. You may be thinking of the Japanese scripts, Katakana (which does in fact derive from bits of Chinese logographs), and Hiragana which is a cursive form.

It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…

26

Such a small brain-o (similar to a typo), such a huge mistake…

What I meant was that the Arabic number writing system - Arabic numerals - are what is visibly derived from the Chinese. (As has been pointed out, no reasonable person would think that the literary writing system termed “Arabic” is related to Chinese ideograms.) And when I wrote “Arabic” in quotes, I was merely hinting at the difference between knowledge from other lands transmitted (often during Crusades) to Europe through Arabic culture and lands versus that knowledge which was homegrown in those lands and was demonstrably Arabic. Arabic numerals are a prime example - we got them from those peoples and named them Arabic without inquiry as to where they really came from. (Later historians decided “from India” was the answer, which IF TRUE would make the numeral system more “Indian” than Arabic.) No slight was intended.

I just wanted to get that in to forestall further firestorms of contempt and disbelief; now I’m off to find an example of Chinese numbers on the web to demonstrate what I mean. I’ll get to the other points later, but in the meantime APB9999’s point “in the rush to redistribute mistaken credit given to Europeans, let’s make sure it goes where it’s supposed to” is well-taken.

27
  1. Nope. According to threads available elsewhere on this site and in this very forum (see Search function), neither the Classical Greeks, Hebrews, or Romans used Base 10 (or Base anything, as far as I can tell).
  2. Yes, apparently. The Hebrew numbering system seems very similar to the Greek system, and not too far from the Roman numeral system.
  3. One would think so - seen from the vantage point of today. Nonetheless, the Classical Mediterranean cultures apparently did not come up with it (IIRC, the Babylonians used Base 60, which sounds too absurd to be true), and (northern) European scribes used Roman numerals (and the Roman counting system) until the advent of “Arabic” numerals and Base 10. (Do you remember learning “Roman numerals” in grade school? Imagine doing everything in it - the bookkeeping for the monastary, calculating pi, your astronomical studies… Arggh!)
  4. True, it may have. In fact, that applies to many of the things alluded to in this thread, such as keels, cannon, etc. But whenever something has been in common use in some area for decades, centuries, or even millennia, and that thing finally appears in some other place where transmission is conceivable, one should keep in mind the possibility of transmission as well as discovery. Definite proof is another issue, involving questions such as “did the background for this discovery clearly exist, or did it seem to spring full-formed from the mind of the inventor?” (Thus, Gutenberg lived where he had access to Far East traders, IIRC. Did he hear tales of such a process? Clearer still, the American patent-holder for “Bessemer” steel hired Chinese engineers to help him build his factory - but nevertheless gets the credit for the discovery.)

Uh uh. At least not in the case of stirrups, which were invented by central Asians, possibly the Mongols themselves (which means it was also not the Chinese - oops). As for the zero as a mathematically important concept, it is conceivable (likely?) that it came to India at the same time as the stirrup: with the Mongols, whose descendents made the later the Mughul Empire. I would be interested if anyone can point us to a site that tries to separate Indian culture from that of their central Asian concquerors. In the absence of that, I do feel that our common “authoritative sources” have been remarkably lazy on points like this, tracing sources back to “India” and leaving things at that.

Before I get to boats, let’s look at the numbers. One link for Chinese numbers is http://www.ocrat.com/ocrat/chargif/numbers.html . (This reference, unfortunately, is of a boring computer script, which fact might interfere a bit with the “obviousness” of the similarities. I also wish we had some examples of REAL Arabic numerals - especially thousand year old examples - rather than just European “Arabic” numerals. And while we’re at it, can anyone produce some Indian (Sanskrit?) numerals?)

So. Looking at those numbers, try to imagine their transmission to the Arabs, who (assuming they adopted them) would “regularize” them a bit, perhaps purposely, perhaps just naturally over time. (The same might apply when Europeans adopted them from the Arabs.) Both the Arabic scholars and the Chinese used brush pens, I believe, but one culture wrote vertically on the page, the other horizontally. More importantly, perhaps, the Chinese lift their pens repeatedly as they write, while the Arabic scholars seem to do so as little as possible, sometimes running entire sentences together into one long line.

1 - okay, the problem is, how do we make it clear that this is a number, not just a link between two words? (A: Change its angle.)
2 - write that without lifting your pen and you have either a 2 or an S.
3 - write that without lifting your pen and you have either a 3 or an E.
4 - too complex…but, if we write just the right-hand half, without the box portion, we get an open-topped 4.
5 - a top bar and a nice easy looping stroke underneath makes a 5.
6 - we can do that with only symbol - a 6.
But now it get’s less obvious.
7 - rotate that symbol counterclockwise 180 degrees, and it is a European barred 7. Why? I dunno.
8 - maybe that Chinese character already looks a bit like an Arabic letter? Or maybe there are numerological/astrological reasons to “close” it?
9 - not obvious at all. If you really, REALLY simplify it, you might have gotten a 9, but you could go a number of other directions also. Again: Arabic literary historians? Anyone?

I’m going to post this now so I don’t lose it and so I can come back later.

28

What I meant was that the Arabic number writing system - Arabic numerals - are what is visibly derived from the Chinese.

Uhh, no. Arabic numerals are derived from Indian Numerals. In fact, mathematical information was traded between India and the Islamic Nations.

“The system of numeration employed throughout the greater part of the world today was probably developed in India, but because it was the Arabs who transmitted this system to the West the numerals it uses have come to be called Arabic.”

Further, the site where I got that says that the Arabs probably invented their own glyphs for the numbers, but used the Indian system, and style of writing them.

go here: http://www.islamicity.org/mosque/ihame/Ref6.htm

It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…

29

First, if you have a cite that says the Mongols conquered India, please post it, because that’s news to me.

Second, the Indians invented the stirrup. It was a little thing, called a “toe stirrup”, and hard to use unless you were barefoot. This predates every other known stirrup in the world. In time it moved north into central asia, where it was cold enough that going barefoot to use your stirrups was problematic, and the people there enlarged it so you could use it with boots. From here it moved east into China (the central Asians are NOT Chinese) and west into Europe, around the eighth century IIRC. This invention was pivotal to the development of European feudalism, with its emphasis on mounted knights (try staying on a horse in armor without stirrups!)

Unfortunately, I’m going by memory here, from a history book I read a few months ago. I will try to remember to write down the full reference tonight if I can find the book.

30

I meant you’re in armor, not the horse. And the horse has the stirrups. Well, you both do. You know what I mean.

The book was “Medieval Technology and Social Change” by Lynn White, Oxford University Press. It was first published in 1962, but the edition I read was the 1964 version, and that was the 23d printing. It’s actually quite a well-known little book; something of a classic. I asked my roommate, who’s a historian, if the consensus was still India on the stirrup, and he said yes.

By the way, the Mongols were kept out of India by the Himalayas (though they may have adventured a little in the northernmost part, I’m not sure). You were probably thinking of the Moghuls, who were Moslems and also from central Asia. They did indeed conquer most of India and rule it for a long time. The Moghuls, were not Chinese, either, but I can see how it would be an easy confusion.

31

So the issue of the stirrup seems resolved. If the earliest example of a stirrup we have is a toe stirrup, and this type of stirrup must be used barefoot, then we can be fairly certain the Mongols and the Chinese did not develop it first, but probably modified it later to wear it with boots.

As for the language, my apologies. I thought that {:-Df was referring to the entire script, and not just the Arabic numerals. On this point though, I have something to put forward. Take a look at the link provided by Doobieous:
http://www.islamicity.org/mosque/ihame/Ref6.htm

To see what Arabic numerals looked like before the West repackaged them, you need to look at the 5th line from the top, the early Eastern Arabic. There seem to be little similarities between these Arabic numerals and Chinese numerals. The obvious exception is of course the number one, which I would wager is a cross-cultural diagram of a single digit (fore-finger?) being displayed. The number 8 is also remarkably similar, but this could be coincidence, since it is an extremely simple sign.

Also, I think that Arabic mathematics was able to use zeros in clean sequence so that numbers could be calculated more easily. In Chinese you use a sort of multiplication instead: 100 thousand is not written 100,000 but instead it is written 10 multiplied by ten thousand.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the value for “nothing” was actually invented by the Arabs or the Indians to fill a mathematical need. No doubt Chinese mathematicians could have invented a similar concept to suit their needs as well, and it appears from this discussion that they did.

Abe

32

Exactly! The OP who says that the Arabic Numerals come from Chinese is trying to make a silk purse from a sows ear. If the Arabs used chinese numerals they would have used the same system, which is not that efficient at displaying large numbers. Also that link I posted clearly shows how Arabic numerals evolved into the numbers we have. You cannot look at the modern numbers and try to say that they are descended from Chinese. That’s like looking at Japanese and saying it’s a Chinese dialect because of a lot of cognates, and the used of similar scripts.

It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…

33

From an article published in the New York Times back in November, re-printed in the Los Angeles Daily News on November 14, 1999, by John Noble Wilford: (I don’t throw away stuff like this!)

Dr. John Coleman Darnell, an Egyptologist from Yale, and his wife Deborah, a Ph.D student in Egyptology, along with Dr. Bruce Zuckerman of USC have examined carvings recently uncovered in Egypt. These carvings were alongside an ancient road used by travelers going between Thebes and Abydos.

Later, the story has this to say:

I wish I could find a picture of the inscriptions. I dimly recall seeing a photo, but I can’t find it right now. Dr. and Mrs. Darnell were scheduled to report on their finding at a November 22 meeting in Boston of the Society of Biblical Literature.M aybe there’s a website?

>< DARWIN >
__L___L

34

Abe, don’t apologize. I wrote “Arabic writing” - I only thought “Arabic NUMERAL writing” as I did so. But thanks for being polite.

  1. Maybe. But don’t dismiss it that easily. The Chinese were using Base 10, and IIRC zero, in the far-BCE era (about 1000 BCE for Base 10, IIRC), and had contact with India both directly (recorded) and indirectly (traders) before the time period given in your source for the transmission from India to the Arab world. IF it was transmitted to India, that still makes it Chinese, ultimately.

  2. Cultural transmission is not that straightforward. Often, unburdened by tradition and libraries full of ‘old-style’ works, and possessing their own discoveries and transmitted knowledge from yet other lands, ‘recipient’ cultures improve on the knowledge they acquire. In fact, your source suggests that it was the Arab scholars who introduced the zero as a place keeper and that they didn’t get that from the Indians. (Note that a place-keeper function, while important of itself, is a different use for zero than the mathematical concept of zero as a number. That is, they are separate discoveries.) If the Indians did not use zero as a placekeeper, that is quite interesting, and in any case the question of how much of their system was also transmitted to them, rather than discovered on themselves, is still open.

(To respond to APB9999, the Mughuls/Moghuls were the direct descendants of the Mongols, IIRC (it’s been over 15 years since my class in Indian history). I strongly believe that the Mongols themselves made it through the Khyber and concquered a swath of northern India; if not, their descendants definitely did, bringing Mongol culture and administrative history with them (the higher culture of the Mongol Empire was Chinese-derived, though Uigher-influenced). BUT: that’s not to say that the Indians weren’t on the ball before the central Asians arrived, and the cite given by Doobieous offers a time frame for transmission from India to the Arab world predating the Mughul Empire. On the other hand, as I said, records exist for contacts between China and India also predating the transmission to the Arab world, so that transmission is still a possibility.

Also note that there is a difference between writing and calculating - but I haven’t found examples of ancient Chinese higher math to show. Just as Abe at one point wrote “100 thousand” (instead of 100,000) the Chinese write “10 [ten-thousands]” in documents…but so what? An important question still to be answered is: what did their arithmetic and math look like?

  1. Doobieous, your own posted link says, “If the origin of this new method was Indian, it is not at all certain that the original shapes of the Arabic numerals also were Indian. In fact, it seems quite possible that the Arab scholars used their own numerals…” I not only CAN say they look remarkably similar to what one would expect from an adoption of the Chinese, I DO say that the similarity is so great as to constitute reasonable evidence. Again, it is obvious to the eye…I guess we just have different eyes (or world views).

The Early Arabic (western) script from your post looks closer to the Chinese than it does to the Early Devanagari, period. (Even the four - just compress the “box” in the Chinese to a “dotted” line.) For the Eastern Arabic, both the seven and the eight look suspiciously like simplified versions of the Chinese - but the other differences are great enough to leave the question wide open. It is imaginable that every line in your script is a child of the Chinese, and it’s imaginable that some of them are not. (Try drawing the strokes yourself, in proper order, and then simplify them. EVEN the Early Devanagari sample could be a child of the Chinese, especially the 6 through 9. But of course, that isn’t proof of anything - it just leaves the question open.)

But also - and IF IIRC - consider that the Arabs themselves had some direct contacts with the Chinese around the time in question (transmission to Europe). My understanding is that it was the Arabs who recovered the secret of paper (it had remained a profitable and well-guarded secret for some time, apparently) when some of them sacked a city containing a Chinese-run paper-making operation. (I can’t remember if that was in Persia or NE Africa; probably the former.) Even prior to that event, while paper was still a secret, the Arab traders were the most likely transmission route of paper to (Crusader) Europe, which makes it probable that they were dealing with Chinese businessmen living in the area. It doesn’t require too great a stretch of imagination to think that the Chinese continued to do things (record-keeping, contracts, whatever) in their own way, and if the Indian learning hadn’t fully taken among all Arabs the system could have been influenced or replaced by the more immediate contact.

This doesn’t answer the question of whether the Chinese way contaminated the homegrown Indian discovery, or whether it was a case of dual transmission (China->India->Arab world, and China->Arab world) but at least it is still an open issue.

So: how ancient can we definitely go in establishing Base 10 in India? Anyone?

35

Who would win, American Indians or Chinese? Are they playing ping-pong or lacrosse?

>< DARWIN >
__L___L

36

At http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/mathhist/china.html we find, among other things:

= Traditional decimal notation … Goes back to origins of Chinese writing. Not very helpful, as this is still a very broad range, going back prior to 1000 BCE. (The number 1000 BCE sticks in my head, but may be conflated with the implementation of “modern” agriculture.)
= Calculations performed using small bamboo counting rods… 0 digit was a space… Back to 400 B.C.E. or earlier. This is the earliest date given on this site. (Okay, but I wish Joseph Needham’s work was available online. Or even just nearby!)
= Chinese work on pi seems definitely to lag behind Greeks.
= Translations of Indian mathematical works. By 600 C.E. … Levensita, Indian astronomer working at [Chinese] State Observatory … Hindu decimal numerals also introduced, but not adopted.

This information, while historically interesting, does not address the question of Chinese influence on the shape of European “Arabic” numerals.

So about the boats, APB9999 (may I call you All-Points?):

Yes, it is true; what’s not true is that it was ONLY discovered in China. Keels, rudders, compasses, uh…turnable sails on boom-things (help), etc. IIRC, the ships that went to Africa were some 300 feet long. European ships were what - average 90 feet? If Mike Xu (above) can be believed - and THAT looks like a can o’ worms! - the Chinese made it to America a bit before Agamemnon made it all the way to Troy.

So okay: China as an empire was always focussed on land power, and never really got all hot and bothered about circumventing their large natural barriers (mountain range, desert, ocean, jungles), using them instead to protect the frontiers. We all have our blind spots, and the Chinese had good reasons for this one. They built their big cities far from their rivers on purpose.

But that is not to say they had no naval capability; it’s just that it was rarely an official government capability. When the Mongols needed ships to expand to Indonesia and Japan, there were apparently lots at hand. (For Japan, 40,000 men (plus ‘an army?’ - Britannica is not clear if that is a second force or not) in the 1274 invasion, 140,000 in the 1281 invasion. Military historians please chip in, but I think that compares with 19th century European warfare.)

Also, All-Points: when you say the Arabs developed celestial navigation, does that mean the Indians didn’t? I guess that would mean that for them and the Chinese astronomy was more theoretical, more cosmological than practical…?

37

APB9999:

If the Mongols made it through the Khyber, it was just before they turned back for the post-Genghis succession struggle, because Tamerlane had to do it again. Also, by the time of the (yet later) Mughuls it would have been impossible to tell what was Chinese in the mix of culture they brought, but once they got started on the sub-continent their Empire purely Indian in its expression, according to Britannica.

(Note to self: Trust nothing over 30, including your own memory.)

38

Ok, since people HAVE reserched the origin of Arabic numerals and have concluded that the system is most likely and probably from India, can YOU provide any resources to back up your claim that Arabic numerals are from Chinese numerals? Or, are you just going off surface observations? If you are going to claim something like you are, please back it up with evidence. As far as I know, no scholars who have studied Arabic numerals and their history believes they are descended from Chinese numerals.

Also, why is it easy for you to give credit to the Chinese (for everything it seems), but you don’t think the Arabs could have come up with their own numerals? You believe what you want, and i’ll believe what I have seen written evidence for.
wondering why people prefer to go the complicated route instead of keeping things simple

It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…

39

<a name=“Shin1”>{:-Df:</a>

You misapprehend horribly the meaning of base ten. The Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians–I don’t know about the Hebrews–most certainly employed a base ten system. What they did not employ is a positional system, in which a number wxyz (or zyxw) represents [(zb,[sup]0[/sup])+(yb[sup]1[/sup])+(xb[sup]2[/sup])+(wb[sup]3[/sup])], where b is the base of the number system. Such a positional system requires encipherment, i.e., assignment of a unique symbol–we call them numerals–to each number between zero and (b-1), inclusive.

The Romans employed incomplete encipherment, assigning symbols to five, fifty, and five-hundred as well as one, ten, one-hundred, and one-thousand; this allowed the Romans to reduce symbolic repetition, but did not allow them to employ a positional system.

While it is true that the Chinese employed all the aspects of our current number system (base ten, encipherment, a positional scheme including zero as a place-holder) before the Western world, any argument which treats these aspects as interchangeable is specious; any argument founded on the idea that a base ten system could not arise independently of the Chinese is bound to collapse.

<a href="#Shin1">Lather, read, repeat</a>

40

I know this is a moot point in this great discussion but the Babylonians used base 60 only in their formal mathematics, like astronomy but used base 10 for every day calculations.

They were familiar with the facts of the Pythagorian Theorm 1200 years before that guy was born.

In 1800 BCE they could solve the problems for which we use algebra, do square and cube roots, too.

And you and I still use base 60 for telling time and degrees of arc.

In the earliest stages (about 3000 BCE) they used only 2 basic numeral strokes, made by pressing a reed into clay.

And not every user had to be bright as a light, they had tables to aid in calculations.

Civilization Before Greece and Rome by H. W. F. Saggs.