Khitans and Mongols: A story of deep and persistent connections-1
While the Chingizid Mongols have long been the focus of students of medieval steppe history, studies over the past 50 years have been steadily contributing to the picture that they were heirs of a...
View ArticleLooking back at the goroga attacks and forward at geopolitical developments
An acquaintance recently asked us if we remembered the famous goroga attacks in the mahāmleccha lands. We had to confess that they were hardly the top thing on our mind, though we had repeatedly...
View ArticleTurks, Khitans and Mongols: the ethnographic journeys of P.T. 1283
An introduction to P.T. 1283 and its historical context This may be seen as an appendix to the previous exposition on early Mongolic and Para-Mongolic history. There we briefly alluded to the famous...
View ArticleThe gods in triples
It is clear that every civilization has its own unique manifest characteristics coming from the depths of its people. One such distinguishing characteristic of the Hindu civilization is the love for...
View ArticleOnes, twos, threes … hundreds and thousands in the Ṛgveda
In the previous note, we looked at some special numbers relating to the count of the gods in the Veda and the influence of the Proto-Indo-European tripartition on them. Here we more generally look at...
View ArticleA short note on an ancient Vedic poetic formula and an obscure word
A couple of ṛk-s, respectively from maṇḍala-s 6 and 7 of the Ṛgveda, are rather striking for their parallel structure: You are the bull of Heaven, the bull of Earth, the bull of the rivers, the bull of...
View ArticleGabhavāda in the dark age ushered by Piṇḍaka’s regime
As we have remarked before, the placing of Vṛddha-piṇḍaka on the rājāsandī was accompanied by the triumph of the navyonmatta-s. Watching the action of the navyonmatta-s gives one a ringside view of how...
View ArticleA meandering through Mongol epic-historic narratives: fraternal conflict and...
The Mongolic and Turkic peoples have a rather rich tradition of oral epics that have not yet been comprehensively analyzed from a comparative mythological perspective. Some of these extant epics...
View ArticleThe ghost of the man named Lilavinodan
This is the second of the Charuchitra series: Even if the story narrated were to resemble real-life incidents, all characters in it are fictitious. With the exam behind him, Somakhya relapsed into his...
View ArticleThe counting square and divisor functions
Leonhard Euler’s discovery of the zeta function in the course of solving the Basel problem was one of those momentous “unifications” in mathematics with deep philosophical implications that eventually...
View ArticleA Geopolitical meandering, October 2023
Sir Francis Drake, buccaneer bold and bloody, Sailed the seas in a gold-grabbing spree, With the Golden Hind, he circled the Earth wide – A murdering marauder on the swelling tide. Slaving in West...
View ArticleA prayoga of the Hiraṇyakeśin-s
To our knowledge, the Hiraṇyakeśin branch of the Taittirīyaka-s is today only found in pockets in Mahārāṣṭra and the Drāviḍa states. While they follow the Taittirīya-śruti like other Taittirīyaka-s,...
View ArticleTheology and AI
A key feature of most polytheistic religions, typically natural religions, is the importance of a multiplicity of visualizations of deities. This visualization might be solely mental/textual or...
View ArticleSome historico-linguistic considerations on Indo-Aryan
Over the past decade, the “Black” Kalasha people from the Chitral (<Skt. Kṣetra) region of the Islamic state in Northwestern India have been under increasing pressure from the Tehrik-e Taliban...
View ArticleNotes on the Vaiṣṇava retinue deities-1
The śaiva pattern of worship, which is especially emphasized in the Iśāna-srotas (siddhānta), features the Nirmālya-devatā, Caṇḍeśvara with roots in the older Pāśupata atimārga. This deity receives...
View ArticleSome snippets from early Indo-Sinitic probabilistic prognostication texts
The below is the barest sketch of a topic that has already been treated in multiple book-length works by learned scholars of the Orient. However, none of these works were entirely familiar with the...
View ArticleThe Dalāl who became a poltergeist
Lootika had returned from a scientific competition, which had been held in the dreadful city of Mahāvisphoṭaka, like the victorious Roman army after sacking the towns of West Asian...
View ArticleSome relationships involving the triangle incenter and circumcenter
While triangle centers (e.g., incenter, centroid circumcenter) are captivating to the amateur and mathematician alike, their serious investigation is a relatively modern pursuit. A major push in their...
View ArticleSome further notes on the Mongol religion-3
The core of the material discussed in this note is based on the publications of the Hungarian-Mongolian Joint Expedition studying folk traditions in Mongolia and the masterly work of Igor de Rachewiltz...
View ArticleThe crossover with Dabba Seṭṭhīputta
It was a Śivarātrī. Vidrum accompanied his friends Somakhya and Lootika to visit the small shrine of Rudra in the cemetery beside his house. It was one of the rare days when the normally deserted...
View Article