scholarly journals Art. VIII.—Notes on the Early History of Northern India

1888 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-363
Author(s):  
J. F. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Religious History ◽  
Early History ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Written Materials

The most noteworthy part of the history of India must always be that which tells how the people known as Hindoos, speaking languages derived from the Sanskrit, and living in the country between the Himalayas and the Vindhyan Mountains, and in the Valley of the Indus, were formed from originally heterogeneous elements into a nation, and which dfurther describes the origin and development of their system of government and their early religious history. The written materials available for these purposes are unusually abundant, but vary greatly in value.

scholarly journals Art. VII.—The Land of the Four Rivers. A Supplement forming Part III. of the Series of Notes on the Early History of Northern India

1889 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-582
Author(s):  
J. F. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Early History ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Similar Position ◽  
Northern India ◽  
History Of

In two previous papers written in the Journal of this Society I have adduced reasons for believing that the earliest Indian civilization was originated by the Dravidian immigrant races who formed stable governments in the countries previously ruled under the more loosely organized system of the Kolarian tribes, and who founded and maintained a flourishing internal and foreign trade. In my latest paper I brought forward arguments, based chiefly on the early religious history of India, to prove that there were at least two Dravidian immigrations into Northern India before the Aryans entered the country, or at least before the arrival of that section of the Aryan race who founded the Brahmanical religion. The first Dravidian immigrants were the Accadian moon and snake worshippers, called in India Haihayas, or Sombunsi, the sons of the moon or Lunar Rajputs, and the second were the Semite-Accad trading and warrior tribes, called Sukas Sans, sons of Ikshvaku, or Solar Rajputs. These latter immigrants worshipped the snake as their predecessors had done, but regarded the snake sun-god Vasuki, or Vishnu, as their parent and as the true symbol of the creative energy of nature, instead of the moon, which had occupied a similar position in the theology of their Accadian predecessors.

scholarly journals Art. III.—Notes on the Early History of Northern India. Part II

1889 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-359
Author(s):  
J. F. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Public Lands ◽  
Early History ◽  
The Public ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The People ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
Village Communities ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Village

In a paper printed in the Journal of this Society in July, 1888, I adduced reasons for believing that there existed adequate evidence to prove the truth of the following statements with regard to the early history of Northern India, (1) That Northern India was peopled by Kolarian and Dravidian tribes long before the Aryans came into the country. (2) Of the two races who preceded the Aryans, the Kolarians were the first immigrants. (3) The Dravidians, when they assumed the government of countries originally peopled by Kolarian tribes, retained the village communities established by their predecessors, but reformed the village system. They made each separate village, and each province formed by a union of villages, more dependent on the central authority than they were under the Kolarian form of government. (4) Under the Dravidian rule, all public offices, beginning with the headships of villages, were filled by nominees appointed by the State instead of being elective as among the Kolarians. (5) The Dravidians set apart lands appropriated to the public service in every village, required the tenants to cultivate these public lands, and store their produce in the royal and provincial granaries; this being the form in which the earliest taxes were paid. (6) They also in the Dravidian villages made every man and woman bear his or her share in contributing to the efficiency of the government, but this process was not followed out in the same completeness in Kolarian villages, where the people were not so ready as the Dravidian races to submit to the same strict discipline, to which the Dravidians had been accustomed long before they entered India.

scholarly journals Introduction

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 1-2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamon Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Early History ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Normative Value

Since the Enlightenment, historians and theorists of religion have often worked with a two-tiered model of Christianity, in which the pure belief and practice of the enlightened few was perceived as constantly under pressure and in danger of corruption or distortion from the grosser religion of the multitude. This imagined polarity between the sophisticated religion of the elite and the crude religion of the people at large underlay much Enlightenment historiography, most notably Gibbon’s account of the early history of Christianity, and has remained potent in such influential twentieth century works as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. Even the future Cardinal Newman could contrast ‘what has power to stir holy and refined souls’ with the ‘religion of the multitude’ which he once described as ‘ever vulgar and abnormal’. Newman, as more than one contributor to this volume shows, had in fact an acute sense of the value, even the normative value, of popular religious perceptions, but those implicit polarities and the historical condescension they encode have been recurrent and assertive ghosts, haunting the writing of religious history, in contrasts between official and unofficial religion, or those between clerical and lay, literate and illiterate, rich and poor, hierarchical and charismatic.

The Chronology of the Sena Kings of Bengal

1930 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
P. C. Barat
Keyword(s):  
Great Powers ◽  
Early History ◽  
Late Professor ◽  
Indian History ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of

Since the beginning of the present century students of Indian history have been making strenuous efforts to collect such materials as would help them to reconstruct the early history of Bengal. But so far they have not succeeded in ascertaining definitely even the dates of those kings of the Sena Dynasty who governed dominions of large extent and took rank among the great powers. The discovery of the era with which is associated the name of Laksmana Sena Deva induced several well-known archaeologists to bring its initial date to bear on the history of Bengal. From the scanty data which were then available the late Professor Kielhorn after much laborious calculation definitely settled that the Lakṣmaṇa Samvat or La-Sam began in A.D. 1119–20. According to him the La-Sam was an ordinary Southern (Kārttikādi) year with Amānta scheme of lunar fortnights; and the first date of the era was October 7, A.D. 1119. As this date has not been made use of in reconstructing the chronology of the Sena kings, it may be accepted for the present; and time will show whether the conclusion of the learned doctor is right or wrong. But the assertion of the historians that the initial date of the Lakṣmaṇa Sena era synchronizes with the commencement of Lakṣmaṇa Sena's reign is quite untenable and can never be accepted as true. In Indian history there is no era which does not commemorate some epoch-making event which affected the people of the country in general. And ordinary succession to the throne in its normal course, as was the case with Lakṣmaṇa Sena Deva, does not justify the inauguration of an era in place of the usual regnal years to which the people in those days were accustomed.

scholarly journals Art. XIV.—Notes on the Early History of Northern India. Part VI On the Historical Value, Origin, and Growth of Early Methods of Record anterior to Alphabets, including Ideographic Signs, Sacred Numbers, and Myths

1890 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 697-758
Author(s):  
J. F. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Early History ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Benefit ◽  
Northern India ◽  
History Of ◽  
Combined Work

As botanists and zoologists trace the successive stages of existence traversed by living plants and animals through species and genera to families, so the historian of human progress finds himself obliged to extend his generalizations through tribes and nations to races. Research proves that it is these larger units who, through the combined work of the several component parts of the race, are the authors of the underlying ideas which are acted out in its achievements. It also seems to show that there are two races who have most materially aided in the development of civilization— one, quiet, silent, hard-working and practical, whose members have always looked on the public benefit of the tribe or nation to which they belonged as their best incentive to action: the other, impulsive, sensitive, generous, and eloquent, who have looked on personal glory and the aggrandizement of their families and personal adherents as the object of their ambition.

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done”: Southern Religious History in Retrospect and Prospect

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. Mathews
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious History ◽  
The South ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many

One of the most distinguishing marks of the American South is that religion is more important for the people who live there than for their fellow citizens in the restof the country. When this trait began to identify the region is surprisingly unclear, but it has begun to attract attention from scholars of religion and society who have hitherto been esteemed as students primarily of areas outside the South. The study of religion in Dixie cannot but benefit from this change. After centuries of obsession with thickly settled, college-proud, and printexpressive New England—an area not noted for excessive modesty in thinking about its place in the New World—students of American religion are turning to a region whose history has sustained a selfconsciousness that makes its place in American religious history unique. For studying the American South begins with a dilemma born of ambiguity: whether to treat it as a place or an idea. Sometimes, to be sure, the South appears to be both; but sometimes it is “place” presented as an idea; and sometimes it is a place whose historical experience should have, according to reflective writers, taught Americans historical and moral lessons they have failed to learn. Confusion results in part from the South's contested history not only between the region and the rest of the United States but also among various competing groups within its permeable and frequently indistinct borders. Differences between region and nation will, however, continue to dominate conversation even though the myth of southern distinctiveness may mislead students as much as the myth of its evangelical homogeneity. If inquiry about religion in the South should be sensitive to the many faith communities there, the history of the South will still by contrast provide insight into the broader “American” society.

Processes of Ethnic Interaction and Integration in Ethiopian History: the Case of the Agaw

1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taddesse Tamrat
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Northern Ethiopia ◽  
General Picture ◽  
The People ◽  
State And Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Ethiopian Region ◽  
Written Materials ◽  
North Western

The earliest documents available on the Ethiopian region, in the form of Greek and Ge'ez inscriptions, give a general picture of considerable ethnic and linguistic diversity in a relatively small area of northern Ethiopia. One of the ethnic groups referred to then and subsequently, with remarkable continuity from pre-Aksumite times until the present day, is the Agaw. Different sections of the Agaw seem to have constituted an important part of the population occupying the highland interior of northern Ethiopia from ancient times. In the early days of the gradual formation and consolidation of the Aksumite state, they seem at first to have been peripheral to the process, which was clearly dominated by the Semitic-speaking inhabitants of the area. Later, however, they assumed an increasing importance, so much so that they eventually took over political leadership, establishing the great Zagwe dynasty. The dynasty lasted for about two hundred years, and transmitted the institutions as well as the cultural and historical traditions of Aksum, almost intact, to later generations.The exact processes of this development cannot be reconstructed for those early days. Instead, this article is a preliminary attempt to understand the integration of the Agaw into the state and society of the Ethiopian empire over hundreds, even thousands of years, by considering a relatively recent period in the history of the Agaw in the northern and north-western parts of Gojjam. The considerable sense of history which the people of this area possess, going back to the time of its conquest and conversion in the seventeenth century, together with the existence of written materials for the period, provide an opportunity to study a particular example of the entry of the Agaw into the civilization of Christian Ethiopia which may throw light upon the more distant past of their ancestors.

scholarly journals Art. XXII.—Notes on the History of the Banu ‘Oḳayl

1886 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-526
Author(s):  
Henry C. Kay
Keyword(s):  
Early History ◽  
Ibn Khaldun ◽  
The Real ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of

The following particulars on the origin and early history of the Banu ‘Oḳayl are from Ibn Khaldūn, vol. ii. p. 312, vol. vi. p. 11, etc. (Bulak Edition).I may perhaps allow myself to begin by reminding the reader that Eastern writers invariably represent the Ismailian Arabs as the posterity of ‘Adnan, descendant of Ismail, and the people of each tribe as the actual children of one or other of the Arab Patriarch's posterity, after each of whom the tribe is usually named. But it is obviously unnecessary, to say the least of it, to regard the genealogies attributed to the tribes as anything more than the real or reputed pedigrees of their chiefs.

Americanization of Karl August Rauschenbusch, 1816–1899

1955 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Carl E. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Early History ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

An interest in August Rauschenbusch may be motivated by the hope that perchance in the life of the father we could discover factors which would illuminate the social-gospel interests of his more famous son. The importance of Rauschenbusch in the early history of German Baptists in North America, particularly as founder and virtual head of the “German Department” of Rochester Theological Seminary for thirty-two years (1858–90), should alone, it could be urged, establish his significance for the religious history of that day. However, it is the primary and less ambitious purpose of this paper to place Rauschenbusch within the framework of the German and American religious situation of the mid-19th century on the basis, largely, of twenty-two of his unpublished letters and a smaller number addressed to him, running from April 12, 1845 to September 27, 1854. These were recently discovered in the archives of the Rhenish Missionary Institute, Wuppertal-Barmen, Germany.

scholarly journals The house that Syd built: an early history of the Department of Microbiology

2010 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. x
Author(s):  
Christina Cheers
Keyword(s):  
Early History ◽  
Professional Life ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of

The Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne, where Prof. Nancy Millis spent most of her professional life, has been influenced by many key figures, not least Prof. Millis herself and the long-serving chair of the Department, Prof. Sydney Rubbo. This is the story of some of the people who have inhabited that Department.

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