Material culture and philology: semantics of mining in ancient India.

• Author: Olivelle, Patrick
• Position: Essay

For readers of JAOS the bold claim made in an otherwise sympathetic article by Michelle R. Warren may come as a surprise: "Philology has been more often irrelevant than controversial within mainstream critical debates. With the expansion of electric technologies and the fragmentation of the nationalist disciplines that first nurtured philology, its demise may seem more certain than ever. Roberta Frank has pointed out that some dictionaries boldly declare that the word is no longer in use." (1) It did come as a surprise to learn that what I have been doing for four decades is not only dead but the very word has been rendered obsolete! But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of philology has been greatly exaggerated. There is no better way to show this, and to demonstrate not just the vitality but also the indispensability of philology for studying the cultural history of the past and in a special way the material culture of the past from which critics say it is divorced, than to do a bit of philology. That is the aim of this paper.

Philology, as we know--and here I may be preaching to the choir--actually deals with the real world of the past, where words and texts are the windows into the social, religious, economic, and political histories for which we often have little other evidence. Words are often the only artifacts these societies have left. Philology, philologically, is, of course, the "love of words." And the word, actually two words, for our attention relate to a central area of ancient Indian society and economy and of its material culture, and that is mining. The importance of mining to the ancient Indian economy and material culture is well known and need not be rehearsed here. Mining produced all the metals, including iron, that anchored activities as diverse as clearing forests, agriculture, warfare, and construction. Mines also produced the raw material for luxury goods, including gold, silver, and precious stones, that anchored cultural expressions of beauty in ornaments and jewelry.

The earliest literary evidence for metals and metallurgy has been collected by Wilhelm Rau (1974) in his important study of metals and metal objects in Vedic India. Unfortunately, although it provides a wealth of information about metal objects and weapons, it tells us little about how metal was extracted from the ground, about the technologies of mining. The sole reference to a mine is in the rather late text, the Maitraymiya Upantyad 6.28 (Rau 1974: 26), which uses the term avata for a mine. (2) In describing the passage of a person along the path to Brahman, the text gives the example "as a miner in search of minerals enters a mine" (avataivavatakrd dhatukamah samvi[section]aty evam). However, I have not encountered this word with the meaning of 'mine' in other literature.

A little-noticed fact regarding ancient Indian metal culture is that there are two common and strikingly different words in Sanskrit for mine: khani and akara. I think that a close examination of these two terms and their semantic histories will shed light on the mining technologies of ancient India, on Sanskrit imagery and metaphors based on mining, and, importantly, on the dating of ancient Indian texts.

If mining requires digging into the ground, as it generally does, then khani, derived from the verbal root \'khan to 'dig', would seem to be the obvious choice. That, however, is not the case. This term is absent in an impressive list of classical Sanskrit texts: Ramayana, Mahabharata, and all the dhannagastras. Indeed, the Petersburg Dictionary, because it did not have access to Kautilya's ArthaRistra, could only refer to late sources and lexicons for this term, the earliest being KAlidasa's Raghuvarpfa (17.66; 18.22). The most common term for mine in the classical texts is akara (from the verb a -silo, meaning something like a place of scattering, or a place where things are scattered or lying around. As I have shown elsewhere (Olivelle 1997: 174 n. 1), the a prefix often indicates the place of an activity, as in aroma, aslrama, and ananda. Perhaps the word had the meaning of deposit, as in "gold deposit," that is, a place where a concentrated amount of a metal or gems is located. The use of these two terms in ancient texts may give us valuable insights into both the changes in the technology of mining in ancient India and the compositional histories of texts using these two terms.

My principal focus here is on Kautilya's Arthafastra, clearly one of the--if not the--most important source for ancient Indian society, economy, and material culture. This text is unique in that it uses both terms a substantial number of time, certainly more than any other ancient Indian text: khani 24 times and akara 12 times. The term khani is found both in the first half of the Arthatastra devoted to domestic affairs and known as Tantra (Books 1-5) and in the second half dealing with foreign affairs and known as Avapa (Books 6-14), while akara is found only in the first half.

khani Tantra: 1.10.15; 2.6.1, 4; 2.11.38; 2.12.27, 36; 2.22.10; 2.28.6; 2.35.11; 4.1.51; 4.9.2; 5.1.39; 5.2.3. Avapa: 6.1.8; 7.1.20; 7.11.10 (twice); 7.11.12; 7.12.13 (twice); 7.12.25; 7.14.25; 7.16.10; 9.4.8. Akara Tantra: 1.13.21; 1.18.8; 2.1.19; 2.1.39; 2.12.1 (twice), 20, 22, 37; 2.13.3, 9; 4.8.29. While khani is spread throughout the entire text, the situation is quite different in the case of akara. First, the term is conspicuous by its absence in the second half of the Arthafastra. Even in the first half, it is mostly confined to Chapter 12 of Book 2, a chapter devoted to the tikaradhyaksa, the superintendent of mines. The three occurrences of the term in the first book of the Arthatastra and in 2.1.19 are all in the compound akarakarmanta, factories attached to Czkaras. At 2.13.3 and 9 we have the reference to a kind of gold that is akarodgatam, originating from auras. Two of the other occurrences of akara (2.12.37 and 4.8.29) are in verses that conclude chapters, verses that were later introductions by a redactor (Trautmann 1971: 75; McClish 2009: 104; Olivelle, forthcoming b).

Looking at the work of the Czkarodhyak.sa, we get a clear picture of what an...