Babhaniyav: satellite town and feeding center for Varanasi-Sarnath region

Babhaniyav:  satellite town and feeding center for Varanasi-Sarnath region

• A nearly 4,000­year­old urban settlement has been unearthed by a team of surveyors from the Banaras Hindu University, which experts say could be one of the craft villages mentioned in ancient texts.
• The university’s Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture, and Archaeology, which did the preliminary survey of the site in Babhaniyav village, 13 km from Varanasi, said it found remnants of one of the settlements mentioned in ancient literature about the holy city
• The survey found a temple dating back to the 5th century through 8th century, potteries which are 4,000­year­old and walls which are 2,000­ year­-old
• Based on the surface materials, we can say the structure is anywhere between 3,500 to 4,000 year old
• The site gains significance because of its proximity to Varanasi, which is said to be 5,000 years old, though modern scholars believe it to be around 3,000 years old
• The site at Babhaniyav could be a small sub­centre of Varanasi which grew as an urban town
• The findings are important as Babhaniyav could have been a satellite town and feeding center for Varanasi-Sarnath region
• The team unearthed a 5-­metre cultural deposit like the ones found in Sarnath.
• While such crafts villages have been earlier unearthed in Sarnath, Tilmapur, Ramnagar and other areas, Babhaniyav is an addition. They have also found a pillar with a two-­line text in Kushan-Brahmi script which makes the findings at least 3,500­ 4,000 years old. 

Kushan Empire

• The Kushan Empire was a syncretic empire, formed by the Yuezhi, in the Bactrian territories in the early 1st century. It spread to encompass much of Afghanistan, and then the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent at least as far as Saketa and Sarnath near Varanasi (Benares), where inscriptions have been found dating to the era of the Kushan Emperor Kanishka the Great. Emperor Kanishka was a great patron of Buddhism. He played an important role in the establishment of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent and its spread to Central Asia and China.
• The Kushans were most probably one of five branches of the Yuezhi confederation, an Indo-European nomadic people of possible Tocharian origin, who migrated from Gansu and settled in ancient Bactria.
• The Kushans possibly used the Greek language initially for administrative purposes, but soon began to use the Bactrian language. Kanishka sent his armies north of the Karakoram mountains. A direct road from Gandhara to China remained under Kushan control for more than a century, encouraging travel across the Karakoram and facilitating the spread of Mahayana Buddhism to China.
• The Kushan dynasty had diplomatic contacts with the Roman Empire, Sasanian Persia, the Aksumite Empire and the Han dynasty of China. The Kushan Empire was at the center of trade relations between the Roman Empire and China: according to Alain Daniélou, "for a time, the Kushana Empire was the CenterPoint of the major civilizations". While much philosophy, art, and science were created within its borders, the only textual record of the empire's history today comes from inscriptions and accounts in other languages, particularly Chinese.
• The Kushan empire fragmented into semi-independent kingdoms in the 3rd century AD, which fell to the Sasanians invading from the west, establishing the Kushano-Sasanian Kingdom in the areas of Sogdiana, Bactria, and Gandhara. In the 4th century, the Guptas, an Indian dynasty also pressed from the east. The last of the Kushan and Kushano-Sasanian kingdoms were eventually overwhelmed by invaders from the north, known as the Kidarites, and then the Hephthalites.

Brahmi script

• Brahmi is the modern name for a writing system of ancient India. The Brahmi writing system, or script, appeared as a fully developed universal one in South Asia in the third century BCE and is a forerunner of all writing systems that have found use in South Asia except the Indus script of the third millennium BCE, the Kharosthi script, which originated in what today is northwestern Pakistan in the fourth or possibly fifth century BCE, the Perso-Arabic Scripts of the medieval period, and the Latin scripts of the modern period. Its descendants, the Brahmic scripts, continue to be in use today not only in South Asia but also in Southeast Asia. Brahmi is an abugida that uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols.
• Several divergent accounts of the origin of the name "Brahmi" appear in history and legend. Several Sutras of Jainism such as the Vyakhya Pragyapti Sutra, the Samvayanga Sutra and the Pragyapna Sutra of the Jain Agamas include a list of 18 writing scripts known to teachers before the Mahavira was born, with the Brahmi script (bambhī in the original Prakrit) leading all these lists. The Brahmi script is missing from the 18 script list in the surviving versions of two later Jaina Sutras, namely the Vishesha Avashyaka and the Kalpa Sutra. Jain legend recounts that 18 writing scripts were taught by their first Tirthankara Rishabhanatha to his daughter Brahmi, she emphasized Brahmi as the main script as she taught others, and therefore the name Brahmi for the script comes after her name.
• The earliest (indisputably dated) and best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dating to 250–232 BCE. Brahmi only went through relatively minor evolutionary changes from the Mauryan period (3rd century BCE) down to the early Gupta period (4th century CE), and it is thought that as late as the 4th century CE, a literate person could still read and understand Mauryan inscriptions.
• Later the script underwent important changes, and the capability to read the original Brahmi script was lost. The first successful attempts at deciphering Brahmi were made in 1836 by Norwegian scholar Christian Lassen, who used the bilingual Greek-Brahmi coins of Indo-Greek kings, Agathocles and Pantaleon, to correctly identify several Brahmi letters. The script was then fully deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist, philologist, and official of the East India Company, with the help of Alexander Cunningham. The origin of the script is still much debated, with most scholars stating that Brahmi was derived from or at least influenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts, while others favor the idea of an indigenous origin or connection to the much older and as-yet undeciphered Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization.
• Brahmi was at one time referred to in English as the "pin-man" script, which is a "stick-figure" script. It was known by a variety of other names until the 1880s when Albert Étienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie, based on an observation by Gabriel Devéria, associated it with the Brahmi script, the first in a list of scripts mentioned in the Lalitavistara Sūtra. Thence the name was adopted in the influential work of Georg Bühler, albeit in the variant form "Brahma". The Gupta script of the fifth century is sometimes called "Late Brahmi". The Brahmi script diversified into numerous local variants classified together as the Brahmic scripts. Dozens of modern scripts used across South Asia have descended from Brahmi, making it one of the world's most influential writing traditions. One survey found 198 scripts that ultimately derive from it.
• Among the inscriptions of Ashoka ca. 3rd-century BCE written in the Brahmi script a few numerals were found, which have come to be called the Brahmi numerals. The numerals are additive and multiplicative and, therefore, not place value; it is not known if their underlying system of numeration has a connection to the Brahmi script. But in the second half of the first millennium CE, some inscriptions in India and Southeast Asia written in scripts derived from the Brahmi did include numerals that are decimal place value and constitute the earliest existing material examples of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, now in use throughout the world. The underlying system of numeration, however, was older, as the earliest attested orally transmitted example dates to the middle of the 3rd century CE in a Sanskrit prose adaptation of lost Greek work on astrology.
Source: The Hindu, Wikipedia