What makes a work of history trustworthy?

 

Albertinelli, The Creation of Adam (Courtauld Galleries, London)

Much of the debate about the crisis in scholarly publishing has centred around trust and authority. Research integrity looks at these issues, but they are crucial for the assessment of any text. In their specialist subject, a researcher may be able to make an expert judgement on an article, and decide for themselves about the truth or otherwise of the article. But, of course, scholars don’t only read in their specialist area; I would guess (and hope) that a large proportion of scholarly reading will be in areas where the researcher has only limited expertise. Understanding, after all, requires context, and most of our reading, however many PhDs we may have will be outside our area of expertise. How then do we make a judgement that we are to trust the author, and to trust their claims, when we are not a subject-matter expert?

A case study

Robin Lane Fox, in his The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (1991), gives us the tempting prospect of a scholar revealing his working, as it were. Lane Fox is a classical historian, and so (I imagine) familiar with the challenge of dealing with an ancient writer such as Herodotus, the historian, and trying to ascertain how much of what Herodotus writes is history, and how much is simply a folk tale (Herodotus includes a lot of both). Using this knowledge, Lane Fox then applies similar standards to the books of the Bible, to see if we can apply a historical evaluation to a book that is usually judged on very different terms. After all, the opening words of his book are: “The Unauthorized Version is a historian’s view of the Bible … I write … as an ancient historian who is accustomed to reading the Bible narratives like other narratives which survive from the ancient past.” And later, he writes: “It is as a historian that I will explain it [the Bible], accustomed to putting Pilate’s question to written evidence from the distant past.” [p14]. Pilate’s question, of course, is “What then is truth?”

Of course, the Bible is a particularly challenging example, because, unlike other ancient texts, it is frequently read by believers, who will all have some adherence to the text for reasons of faith.  Lane Fox’s first chapter reveals pretty much his entire position; he then uses the same method to examine both the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible, in considerable detail. and considers the claims any of the authors might have to be a historian. I will concentrate, therefore, on an example early in his book.

Incidentally, I ask myself who the intended reader is, if not Lane Fox himself. To read The Unauthorized Version, I found I needed to have a working knowledge of early Jewish history, plus a good knowledge of the main Bible narratives. I found I had to refer to a list of all the books of the Bible and Apocrypha, ordered by date of narration, as well as by order of composition, to be able to keep up with the author. Including these tables would have been helpful to this reader, at least.

For me, the key question is to know what Lane Fox means by “history” and “historian”. He first distinguishes “faith” from facts:

The Bible is not always a text of [faith]. It does also refer to events and persons … it narrates, refers, and prophesies. It therefore invites the question of truth.” [p14]

With such statements, Lane Fox uses terms such as primary and secondary, but there is more to it than that. Nowadays, authority derives from a historical writer writing from personal experience, which makes him or her a primary source. This also is Lane Fox’s view. But with most of the Biblical books is that we have little or no choice to validate what has been written – we have few, if any, comparable sources. We have therefore to try to work within the limitations of the source we have.

As we know, The Bible contains many well-known inconsistencies and contradictions. There are two separate tales of the Creation in Genesis, for example. Many Enlightenment writers, such as Voltaire, made long lists of such discrepancies, and used them as ammunition to attack established religions. After all, if God’s instructions are so unclear, by transmitting them to poor mortals in such a confusing and ambiguous way, such that they require an army of textual scholars to decide what is meant, it is difficult to state “all you have to believe is the Bible”. A further complication is that there is a substantial gap between the orthodoxy of the established churches, and the scholars.

What is a historian?

Lane Fox uses the term “historical” in several senses, it would appear. For example, he describes the author of Kings as “a historian whom we can understand without ever needing to believe” [[195]

In contrast, he has no respect for the accuracy of the author of Chronicles: “When was this splendid liar write and who was he?” [p196] I dutifully assumed that this author would be struck off the list of accepted history, only to be stunned when I subsequently read:

His work is patently secondary, with a strong historical bias, a pleasant gift for fictitious monologues and little value as historical truth. The enterprise, however, was the work of a historian, even if we can rarely trust him further than we can throw him. [chapter 13, p197]

This leaves me thoroughly confused. Is the author of Chronicles a historian like Herodotus? Or just a liar?

How to determine quality historical writing

Lane Fox’s views are nowhere stated explicitly; they have to be pieced together from his use of the term throughout the book. For Lane Fox, a  historian adheres for the most part to the current consensus of scholars’ interpretation of the text. Thus, for example, the two accounts of Genesis are explained very clearly:

The first story, we now know, was the second in time. It was written by a Jewish priestly writer who took the sabbatical view of Creation. [p21]

“We now know” means that the scholarly community have broadly (although never entirely) agreed on this interpretation of the text. Using the first person plural (“we”), as in academic articles, emphasises this collective understanding.  The text alone does not reveal enough to clarify which of the two narratives comes first. Both of the two creation myths are contradicted by science, but we can establish some facts about the statements.

A good historian, emphasises Lane Fox, looks at the context of a statement or object, which equates to the text scholars trying to know about the period and place where the text was composed. But a historian is also described simply as an author who is “trying to record the past” [p162]. This is a very broad description!

Poetic truth

Even if untrue, the creation myths in Genesis are fascinating to read. The creation myth continues to reverberate today, because the story is so haunting. Let’s call this “poetic truth”. Lane Fox always has room for poetic truth, if it is well enough written.

Many of the Bible stories we are familiar with from our childhood are stories of this kind, or “Just So” stories, as Lane Fox aptly puts it. Unsurprisingly, these tend to be the stories that are depicted in medieval and Renaissance church paintings.

Factual truth

When The Bible states facts, it can potentially be proved to be wrong. For example, in the Gospel of Luke, there is a mention of a “decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed”. According to Lane Fox (or to the scholars whose work has been endorsed by him) in the time of Augustus, Jews were not part of the Roman world, so this statement cannot be correct. Errors like this are explained by the author writing much later than the events related taking place. Lane Fox also states that one of these errors “has not grown up from history” [p35] which suggests an external reality which is only partly captured in any textual account. Lane Fox, as a historian, can detect what has or has not “grown up from history”.

The Lane Fox synthesis

Historical study “has to assess the use which fundamentalists make of its own evidence Historians and on a wider, more challenging front it has to try to appreciate scripture for what it is.” This would appear to be responding to the text as a literary object – just as the plays of Shakespeare might be at odds with history but great literature for all that. For my part, I find it easier not to reconcile the two at all; if this composite text is so full of errors and inconsistencies (and Lane Fox takes 417 pages to show this), I find it difficult to “appreciate scripture for what it is”. When I read social media, I find that factual inaccuracies and false statements tend to incline me against the argument of the writer. Is this so unusual? Why, then, do we give religious texts so much leeway? 

Is the Bible true? Measuring religious texts against criteria of truth and accuracy

 

A page from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the sources discussed in The Unauthorized Version [Public Domain]

I used to recommend that all theology departments in universities should be closed down, since their very title “department of theology” suggested to me at the time that they were at odds with the disinterested search for the truth that is the essence of the enlightenment institution. This was the result of reading a lot of Voltaire, I must admit. He used to sit at home of an evening, with his partner Madame du Chatelet, having great anti-clerical fun in discovering inconsistencies and impossibilities in Bible texts

Reading Robin Lane Fox’s The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (1991) has changed my view somewhat. It makes me realise that much of the output of theological departments is valuable, in that it demonstrates the impossibility of any kind of belief in the “truth” of scripture. Within a few pages, Fox reveals a very different view held as a consensus by biblical scholars about the Bible: for example, that the Gospels were mainly not written by the person whose name is attached to them. In the Old Testament, anonymous (and often multiple) authors are the norm. So not  only is there a “Q”, a supposed source for the New Testament narratives, there are also sources J, E, P and D for some of the most familiar Old Testament books such as Genesis.

So this I can understand. University departments of Literary Studies are used to trying to establish an accurate text, and in some cases, this is simply not possible. Lane Fox has tried to apply the skills he has learned from working in a classics department to determine the truth or otherwise of Biblical books, regarded simply as another classical-period text.

The result is fascinating, even if more difficult to read than it should have been (see below). Basically, Lane Fox tries to determine if Biblical books make use of primary sources (they do not), and if they can be regarded as proper history (they cannot, for the most part). This is where his argument becomes interesting, because he applies, I think, rather simplistic criteria to assess his texts. Here, the index fails completely: it is only an index of proper names, so there is no index term “primary”. So I have to hunt for myself, using the digital version in The Internet Archive, to find Lane Fox’s discussion about what constitutes history. There is a very relevant passage in Chapter 11, “Ideas of History”. Lane Fox describes the distinction between primary and secondary sources, that we are all familiar with from school, and claims to use this as one criterion for evaluating Bible texts:

For the question of historical truth, the line between primary witness and secondary source or tradition is more fundamental than the line between oral and written. In the Hebrew Old Testament it is clear that no book is primary in this strong sense. [p173, Penguin edition]

While I am fascinated by Lane Fox’s careful survey of a mountain of over a hundred years of Biblical scholarship, I think his idea of what constitutes history is somewhat simplistic. Probably 99 per cent of all historical writing is not based on primary sources, and this book is a typical example. I don’t expect Lane Fox to have read all, or even any, of the primary sources he is discussing; it would take a lifetime. Instead, I am grateful that he has summarised what many scholars, no doubt based in university departments of theology, have done: to review, line by line, the original texts, and to determine their authenticity, the theological equivalent of the Arden edition of Shakespeare. We read the Arden edition because it is the considered thought of a scholar much more knowledgeable than us, and with more time than we have, to reach a conclusion. When we read, we use a variety of means to assess how far we can trust the scholars, and then we make our own judgement -- and at various points in the narrative Lane Fox is very emphatic to state his own view of the evidence, for example, on page 85, “The mission of Ezra … involves the law more historically; in my view, it is historical and belongs to 398 BC (others opt for 458).” In writing this, Lane Fox is telling the reader, trust me, I’ve read this stuff, and I have weighed the evidence for myself.

In departments of literature, scholars may spend several years preparing a critical edition of one text. For the most part, all of us, academics, students, or general readers, we assume the decisions taken by the textual scholar are trustworthy, and we move on to assessments of interpretation of the text. Something of this kind must happen in science, also; a narrative is used as the explanation for what is happening, and for most purposes, we work within the limitations of each model.

So I’m very grateful to Lane Fox for the work he has put in to assemble this view, even though his is a secondary work. Most of my historical reading (and, I guess that of most people) has been of this kind of level. After all, it’s how we operate. We read or listen to the news and we don’t have time to investigate primary sources. If we hear a news clip, we know it has been heavily edited and selected and may not reveal the truth of the story, but we have no choice but to accept it, for the most part, until we find some reason to doubt.

Incidentally, my only complaint about Lane Fox is, paradoxically, his slapdash referencing system. He does not use footnotes, but links to references by using references to the main text. But his use of references is partial (he doesn’t cite all his sources) and uncertain: many direct quotations in the text at not cited properly in the endnotes (e.g. p81 “exemplified by completeness” – which book is this extracted from?), plus, equally annoying, the assumption that the readers know more than they do. For example, the reference to “Samson’s unfortunate foxes” on the same page (p81) made no sense to me, until I looked up the reference and found out what the episode was about. Lane Fox has a rather cavalier attitude to his readers: they don’t know scholarship about the Bible, but they do know (a) the outline of Jewish history, including all the major exiles, and (b) the books of the Bible and everything they contain, even if they don’t know the latest scholarship. Finally, there should be a full list of all books cited or referred to, in alphabetical order. As often happens in books for a wide audience that have scholarly pretensions, Lane Fox assumes in his bibliography you may want a review of the latest year’s articles, when most of his readers are struggling to follow his basic text. Still, I'm grateful that this book exists; it's made me think much more deeply about topics that are taken for granted for so much of our lives. 

With Ruskin in Florence

 

Guide books, let’s face it, are dull. They are all too frequently reduced to lists of things to see, and all too often they repeat each other. Many of them give the impression they were written by AI, repeating the same anecdotes. Certainly that’s what I felt on my most recent visits to Florence.

Of course, the problem with Florence, perhaps the biggest challenge, is that it is a heavyweight cultural destination. I don’t know anyone who has seen every room in the Uffizi. As for churches, they are numberless. Florence is not for the faint-hearted, especially if they don’t know their Gothic from their Renaissance (Florence is mainly restricted to these two, but that doesn’t make things easier for the average tourist).  

That’s why reading Ruskin seemed so inviting. Ruskin never minces his words; of all the guides, Ruskin is the one who makes a direct appeal to your emotions, and the only one who is prepared to say some of the prized cultural objects are dreadful. I like a guide with opinions – at least I can disagree with them!

It seemed, therefore, a good way to see Florence to have Ruskin’s volume Mornings in Florence (1874) in hand. After all, who could resist such a direct openinng line?

If there is one artist, more than another, whose work it is desirable you should examine in Florence, supposing that you care for old art at all, it is Giotto. [Mornings in Florence, First Morning]

Notice the throwaway remark “supposing that you care for old art at all”, as if to say, you are already part of an elite group of art appreciators. Ruskin, in other words, is the flattering, knowledgeable tour guide, who promises to show you the best sites, without you having to worry about the dross. There is far too much to see in Florence, anyway, so you need someone to say which things to focus on. Even the legendary Guida Rossa, the definitive Italian art guide, does not include detals of all the altarpieces, chapel statues, and incidental bulidings, despite its 847 pages devoted to the city of Florence (in my edition, from 2016).

So we strode purposefully, with Ruskin in hand, into Santa Croce, one of the three largest churches in Florence, and headed for Giotto. As instructed by Ruskin, we ignored the roof of the church (it “has no vaultings at all, but the roof of a farm-house barn”). We don’t look at the famous Renaissance tomb of Marsuppini by Desiderio di Settignano, as “very fine of its kind; but there the drapery is chiefly done to cheat you … It is wholly vulgar and mean in cast of fold.” No, we press on to see the Giotto chapels. Similarly, we are told we shouldn’t even think about Ghirlandaio’s astonishing frescoes in Santa Maria Novella (“it is all simply – good for nothing … Ghirlandaio was to the end of his life a mere goldsmith”).

Having dismissed in this way both the early Renaissance of Ghirlandaio, and the full 16th-century Renaissance, what does Ruskin see in Giotto (and Cimabue, his contemporary?) What matters for Ruskin is that their work expresses religious belief! Such a view would be unthinkable in art criticism today. The art historian might praise an artist for their grasp of perspective, for their use of colour, even, at times, for their social criticism, but never for conveying a sense of the divine. According to Ruskin, Giotto taught three things: “You shall see things as they are … And the least with the greatest, because God made them … but also the golden gate of Heaven itself, open and the angels of God coming down from it.” [Second Morning]. Well, I saw the Giottos, and I didn’t see the gate of Heaven open.  

If to be a tourist is to imagine yourself, for a brief moment, as the original audience saw a work, then Ruskin is your ideal guide. The word “cheat” is very significant: for all his immersion in art history, Ruskin was never beyond being a tourist, despite more than 15 lengthy visits to the continent, over a period of more than 50 years. Nonetheless, he reveals in his letters and diaries how he was constantly concerned at all times of the presumed danger of being cheated. For Ruskin, most Italians he encountered had no concept of art, and could only be influenced by money.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on Mornings in Florence. It originated as a series of lectures, and was never intended for publication at all, but, it would appear, was faithfully transcribed by Ruskin’s student Alexander Wedderburn, who attended each lecture. The transcript was subsequently published, with, it would appear, minimal involvement from the author; this explains why Ruskin frequently admits he cannot be bothered to find a reference, for example:

And in one place (I have not my books here, and cannot refer to it) I have even defined sculpture as light-and-shade drawing with the chisel [Val d’Arno]

When I read this kind of thing, I start to think that Ruskin’s references to paintings or sculptures that I cannot locate might not be my error, but perhaps indications of his poor memory. For example, he spends a long time talking about works by Giotto that I can see are located in Padua rather than Florence.

I’m somewhat reassured to find I am not alone in finding Mornings in Florence distasteful. Henry James, for example, was shocked by it:

 I had really been enjoying the good old city of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir of that very church [Sta Maria Novella]; but it appeared from one of the little books [Mornings in Florence] that these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, not the stupid Brunelleschi, not the vulgar Ghirlandaio [Henry James, Italian Hours]

Had Ruskin lost his critical faculties by this stage (Italian Hours dates from 1874, while his major works, such as Modern Painters, date from 1843)? Perhaps, as Kenneth Clark states, Ruskin’s strength and weakness was lack of self-awareness. He is insightful and objectionable in successive sentences. It was “sheer self-indulgence of him to give his opinion on every single topic” [Ruskin Today, 1964]. Certainly, from my experience in Florence, Ruskin is to be enjoyed at arm’s length, with the reader’s critical faculties fully intact, questioning every sentence. There may be gems there, but they perhaps reveal more about Ruskin and 19th-century taste than eternal truths about art. 

Anna Ancher

 

Brondum's Dining room, Skagen, 1891

Anna Ancher gets a solo exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery - apparently, her first solo exhibition in the UK. When you visit Skagen, where she was born and lived, you immediately get the impression of a group of artists, living and working together; Anna as one of several contemporaries. Consequently, it was strange to see Anna Ancher in a solo show here, detached from the Skagen artists. Seeing work by the other group members would make it easier to form ideas of how Ancher was (or was not) unique. Her profile portraits, for example, are very much in the group style, as can be seen from the photograph above.

At her best, Ancher captured some lovely effects of light, notably in the best painting in the show, Sunlight in the Blue Room, 1891. 

But it’s difficult to make much of a judgement on the basis of the works exhibited. For me, one of the most impressive works by Ancher was actually a joint painting with her partner Michael: Appraising the Day’s Work, 1883. This painting is in the catalogue, and is held at the Skagen Museum, so why wasn’t it in the show? It seems to demonstrate very clearly the relationship between the two, sharing ideas. This painting surely, answers the question posed by the catalogue, how Anna Ancher was able to be a full-time female artist around 1900? As the catalogue states, “One wonders whether her success would have been possible without the help and support of the male painters in the artist colony, including her husband” [catalogue, p18]. But for this show, you would hardly know her husband, or the other artists in the Skagen group, existed. It seemed very strange to pull just one artist out of this group  - not all of them male – as they painted and exhibited together. Instead, we get four works by women contemporaries – hardly enough to get much of an idea. What about Nordic contemporaries, such as Hanna Hirsch Pauli, who currently has a solo exhibition at the Hirschsprung Gallery in Copenhagen? Did Ancher not see any contemporaries?

As a result, we are left with a small collection, which doesn’t give us enough evidence to make a decision about Ancher. Apart from her ability to capture light, what else is there? A girl in the Garden in summertime 1914 could be a work from any number of provincial collections from the early years of the 20th century. The exhibition raises our hopes about a large number of rough sketches recently discovered, with only two on display, it’s difficult to get any idea of how talented Ancher was in this area. It’s not easy, either, to see much of a progression in the work. There are two paintings of removing feathers from fowl from 1902 and 1904, but the progression between the two seems to have been from a more impressionistic style, with rough brushwork, to a more precise, representational manner; I would have expected the other way round.

The captions were not very helpful. There was a picture of a couple with their rabbits, and the caption stating “perhaps he is waiting to eat the rabbit”. Perhaps he is, but there is nothing in the painting to suggest it. And the quotes highlighted, both in the exhibition and in the catalogue, were not very inspiring: ”Anna Ancher had the courage to stand out … Her many repetitions of similar motifs and her many sketches reveal her persistence and dedication”. The suggestion that in her day landscapes were seen as masculine did not strike me as very convincing. I would have liked more quotes by her, and more context. There may be a story here, but we have to work it out for ourselves, on the basis of rather partial evidence. 

Reading Groups: a new idea

 

photo by Paréj Richárd on Unsplash

I became interested in reading groups when I was having dinner with three librarians at a conference recently. They were all members of the same (long-distance) reading group. When asked what they were currently reading, none of them could remember! I’ve heard of books having an influence, but never of a book having so little effect that three members couldn’t recollect the title, or even the plot. It suggested that the real motivation for many reading groups is just to get people together; which perhaps is no bad thing. Reading may be for many reasons; I remember my mother borrowing armfuls of romantic fiction titles from the local public library, giving me the impression that filling the time was the key function of these books.

Following my discovery of the forgetful reading group, as an exercise, whenever I meet people for social chat, I asked them if they are involved with a reading group. All the women are present or recent members of a reading group; none of the men. Then I asked them how they got on with the group.

Organisation

A common gripe among members is having to read something they don’t like. However, the mechanism for choosing books seems to invite this kind of criticism – in one case, one person chooses all the books, but in several instances it seemed to be not quite a democratic process, meaning that each member had an equal opportunity to suggest new titles entirely of their choice. Of course, looking for consensus is its own form of censorship. Something very innovative is unlikely to be chosen if suggested by only one member.

Which books?

Strangely (in my opinion) reading groups seem to concentrate on fiction, and recent fiction at that, “recent” meaning from the last 25 years or so. Suggestions that something older could be considered are usually not received with any warmth. Perhaps I’m unusual, but I feel that this kind of selection process is likely to focus on subject matter rather than quality, I would imagine.

A reading group that never meets

One local reading group enthusiast talked about a very different formula. The group never meets in person; the group leader simply assembles every few months extracts or comments from the members, which she then distributes as a print booklet for the others to enjoy. I was given an example of this output, and initially I was very excited. My enthusiasm waned somewhat when I realised that many of the extracts were just that, included without any comment, leaving me none the wiser if the reader approved or disapproved of the extract, or of any other opinion. The reprinting of an entire Tim Dowling column from The Guardian suggested an uncritical enthusiasm.

What are reading groups for?

So often, a discussion about a book involves people talking past each other. X likes the book, because she enjoys horse riding. Well, it might be a justification, but not for Y, who likes historical dramas. You sense we aren’t really talking about the book, here: the act of reading is reduced to individual taste, rather than engaging with the text in a meaningful way. But perhaps I’m over-thinking it – maybe the dinner is the most important criterion, not the book.

A new idea for reading groups

Having to read a whole book is a slog; life’s too short for me to devote several days, if not weeks, to struggling with a book I didn’t choose. My preference would be to select short stories, or something so short that everyone can read it even the same day if necessary. Perhaps even better might be to have a reading group where nobody has to read anything new at all! Each member simply has to talk about something interesting they have read since the last meeting. There is no obligation for others to read it; but the person reading it will feel the need to justify their choice to the others. I will promote it as “the reading group where nobody has to read anything new”, an idea so novel that it will probably be suspected as some kind of plot. Not, of course, a fictional plot. 

William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How India transformed the world

 

Ashoka Pillar at Vaishali, Bihar, India (c250 BCE) [Wikipedia]

After the excellence of Dalrymple’s The Anarchy (2019), it proved a real challenge to get through The Golden Road (2024). It might have sold more copies than the earlier book, but it is a much less entertaining read; it’s not so easy to follow the vast canvas. In this book, Dalrymple has taken on subjects well outside his core territory. His thesis is that India exported religion, culture, and science, during the period from the Buddha (C5 BCE) to around 1250, not that he tells you explicitly these parameters. Dalrymple is a great narrative historian, but not all histories make for good narratives, and this book is an example. Within a few days of finishing it, I could remember only a few key individuals, such as the monk Xuangzang. History of science is not his forte, and I feel there as an element of uncertainty about his arguments that is revealed by the vast number of footnotes (there are around 98 pages of footnotes for 289 pages of text). Referencing your sources is a good principle, but here the subject is too vast, both by location and by subject, for Dalrymple to keep in manageable proportions, and the endless footnotes suggest he hasn’t quite mastered the (largely secondary) sources. He draws on a few primary sources, but many of the references are to other secondary works (inevitable, given that he is covering India, the Middle East, China, and Southeast Asia over a period of 1,000 years).

The book describes well the transmission of Buddhism via traders and wealthy donors (who paid for the large number of sculptures and buildings across SE Asia) – not the way I imagined early Buddhism at all.

perhaps counter-intuitively for a faith that embraced poverty and renunciation as an ideal, it was spread around the globe most effectively by wealthy merchants engaged in trade.[p42]

To give an example of the strength and weakness of the book, here is a quote that had me scratching my head:

But just as it was the conquest of northern India by the Kushans that opened the way for the Buddhist conquest of China, so it was the Umayyad Arab conquest of Central Asia, and its absorption into the wider Islamic world, that opened the way for Indian learning to seduce the western mind with its brilliance and sophistication. [p246]

Even if you are familiar with the Kushans and the Umayyad conquest, which I am not, you will find this proposition contrary to your expectations. Dalrymple is stating that in both cases, India was conquered, and yet its ideas were exported. That may have been the case (take the Roman conquest of Greece), but it requires some explanation.

The big questions I have from the text are around these cultural spreads. Why was Buddhism so popular outside India, when it did not spread even across the whole of India? Why did Jainism never gain significant followers outside India? And then, why did Buddhism start to be replaced after around 1200 in China and SE Asia? As a historian, Dalrymple is of course dependent on his sources, but these questions I think deserve answering.  

A few notes on the e-book (Kindle) edition

• Uses CE/BCE in the text, but AD/BC on the paperback cover
• I am reading the e-book and there don’t appear to be any illustrations. As often happens with e-book editions, there are credits for photographs, but not a photo to be seen. Nor does this edition have any maps.
• The index has a very strange layout, not helpful at all. Here are the first few entries:

• Readers use page numbers to get some idea of the type of reference, but if all the references are to “here”, the reader has no clues whatever – are these references found close together, in one chapter, or widely separated?
• The book has ten chapters, and as often found in pop history books, the chapter titles tell you little or nothing about what the chapter is about; the main coverage of the monk Xuangzang, who travelled from China to India in search of Buddhist learning, is covered in the chapter “The Sea of Jewels”.

All in all, Dalrymple is a fine historian, and all credit to him for using art and architecture as a way in to periods of history about which I for one know very little. It could have been better organised, but I am grateful for the insights and analysis provided.