History questions not worth their own thread V

[Phrossack]

Montesquieu's Persian Letters, I'm guessing.

I think that's it. Disappointing, since I thought it contained the actual words of real Persian visitors rather than a novel written by a Frenchmen. Oh, well.

 

[Traitorfish]

There were actually a few documents like that floating around in the 17th and 18th centuries, purporting to describe the opinions of various Moorish, Persian, American Indian, etc. visitors to Europe, it's just that they didn't tend to be more than pamphlet-length and were generally not all that well-composed, while Montesquieu's work is considered a classic of the satirical genre, so they're not really remembered by anyone but historians.

 

[Lord Baal]

The Persian ambassadors to Europe had a rather nasty tendency to convert to Christianity and stay behind for some reason. I've never understood why; it's not like Persia was bad for a high-status male. I assume it was the heat.

 

[caketastydelish]

They tend to do it even now in modern times, coming to western countries, converting to Christianity, and staying.

It's not the heat. Iran is not particularly hot anyway as far as the middle east. It's the bad drivers. That's the problem with a country called 'Iran'. All of the drivers are Iranian.

I mean, you're looking at a country that has literally got persian cats on persian rugs eating persian kebab. It's pretty terrible.

 

[caketastydelish]

Was Judaism or Zoroastrianism the world's first monotheistic religion?

 

[Plotinus]

No-one knows, and it rather depends on what one means by "monotheistic" anyway.

 

[sydhe]

Atenism would be older than Zoroastrianism.

 

[Arakhor]

Assuming it wasn't inspired by Judaism, as enthusiastic readers of the Bible might suggest.

 

[Gucumatz]

What religious effects/carryovers do you all believe ancient sites like Jericho, Catalhoyuk, Gobekli Tepe etc. had on the formations of monotheistic religions like Zoroastrianism in the Middle East?

 

[TheLastOne36]

How did the Indo-Greek kingdom influence Indian society/culture/history?

 

[Dachs]

How did the Indo-Greek kingdom influence Indian society/culture/history?

The short answer is "Gandhara statuary and the Milindapanha".

Art historians claim that there is a very definite change in the sorts of poses and details emphasized by sculptors in classical subcontinental art following the Indo-Greeks, with definite connections to Greek types already in evidence further west. For instance, it is argued that the first depiction of the Buddha as a human figure as opposed to a symbol - leading to the extremely famous types of seated Buddhas known from all over the Far East - is due to Greco-Buddhist artwork. This claim is generally dismissed by Indian nationalists in an effort to prevent anything important in 'Indian' history from being the work of 'foreigners', and since it's art history it's kind of hard to prove them wrong.

The Milindapanha, or Questions of Menandros, is a work in which the Indohellenic king Menandros (I Soter) engages a Buddhist sage named Nagasena in philosophical discourse. As part of the Pali canon, it's one of the most highly regarded works of classical Indian prose. This one's hard for Indian nationalists to argue, because Milinda is universally identified as Menandros and more or less everybody agrees that it's a pretty good work of philosophy. So they claim that, at that point, the Indohellenic kings were, in fact, "Indian" and not "Greek" at all, which is more than a little ridiculous.

That's for culture, and it's the short version. Society is a bit tougher, because we know virtually nothing about the societies of the Indohellenic kingdoms. Pretty much everything is extrapolation or out-and-out guesswork with very shaky foundations. W. W. Tarn once tried to come up with a fairly comprehensive description of Indohellenic society, but people have been chipping away at it for the last eighty years, so.

 

[Ajidica]

Why do we know so little about the Indo-Greeks compared to the western Greek states?

 

[Dachs]

Because written histories about them do not survive, except in extremely small fragments. We know with a reasonable degree of certainty, for instance, that an Indohellenic ruler besieged and sacked Pataliputra during the collapse of the Mauryan state. We know a little about the Indohellenic interaction with Greek Baktria, through bits and pieces of Pompeius Trogus' description of Eukratides I. Everything else is based on archaeology and coin finds.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Because written histories about them do not survive, except in extremely small fragments. We know with a reasonable degree of certainty, for instance, that an Indohellenic ruler besieged and sacked Pataliputra during the collapse of the Mauryan state. We know a little about the Indohellenic interaction with Greek Baktria, through bits and pieces of Pompeius Trogus' description of Eukratides I. Everything else is based on archaeology and coin finds.

I thought the Indo-hellenes were the Bactrian breakaway state...

 

[Dachs]

It depends on how you read Trogus's infuriatingly sparse and confusing narrative of the war between Eukratides (I?) and Demetrios (I? II???).

Tarn construed it as a rebellion within Baktria against the 'legitimate' Euthydemid rulers that had moved their capital to Gandhara. Sidky did the exact opposite.

And the sense that I get from the writings of other, more modern (and/or better) historians like Holt is that trying to form a coherent political narrative of Baktrian and Indohellenic history from coins and a few paragraphs of written history is a fool's errand, and that it's better to focus on using the archaeology of places like Ai Khanoum to reconstruct social history.

 

[Ajidica]

Because written histories about them do not survive, except in extremely small fragments. We know with a reasonable degree of certainty, for instance, that an Indohellenic ruler besieged and sacked Pataliputra during the collapse of the Mauryan state. We know a little about the Indohellenic interaction with Greek Baktria, through bits and pieces of Pompeius Trogus' description of Eukratides I. Everything else is based on archaeology and coin finds.

Sorry if this question is particularly dense, but why did the written histories not survive? My (essentially nonexistent) knowledge about that area of the world doesn't suggest to me it was bloodier than the area of the Western Greeks, of whom we have a fair amount of written history.

 

[ParkCungHee]

How about this question: Do we know less about the Indo-Greeks then comparable states in the same region?

 

[Dachs]

Not really. Information on the Saka, the Satavahana, and the Yuezhi/Kushan state is pretty sparse. Of those, the Satavahana have a fair amount of written stuff about them, but it's mostly quasi-mythical and of dubious use.

 

[Cutlass]

How and when did the women's suffrage movements get their start in Britain and France?

 

[Wrymouth3]

How and when did the women's suffrage movements get their start in Britain and France?

I dunno about France, but I can tell you that women's suffrage in Britain really started to climax in the 1880's to 1900's with Lydia Becker and Emmeline Pankhurst as leaders of a growing coalesced movement. Although I've seen some authors argue that it actually started around the time of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect The issue sort of stems from a growing number of places from my understanding, which is really not limited to influence from the earlier Chartist Movement and some pretty deep interpretation of the Reform Acts. You probably know already of the force feeding that happened a lot in the HMS prisons all over Great Britain in the 1900's. That also contributed towards growing calls for suffrage for all social classes of British women.