arjun uvaach

mathura

^{Pencil Art: Madan Maholvi}

prompt …

Mathura was the anchor city in human edification. Through a vibrant tradition of inquiry and logic, it made itself central to Vaidik culture - the oldest of human race known thus far.

Vaidik way of life spanned across the Ganges, Yamuna and Indus - vast plains spread over many kingdoms, and spoken languages. This culture of abundance reached far ends of South Asia with Mathura at physical and spiritual center - and probably the origin. Interestingly, unlike the later periods (Egyptians or Greeks), this advancement isn't remembered as an empire, nor a country; or even a religion. It is seen as the primal society of seekers. Those who figured out written language and arithmetic. And more importantly a foundational value exchange system - gold.

Visiting travelers, aggressors as well as historians named the region Sone ki Chidhiya (a Golden Sparrow), for people here loved to hold gold - as an imperishable store of value. Unafraid and theft free, not only did they display their treasures in styles of jewelry, they decorated their deities with golden ornaments. Gold was seen as the celebration of life. Be it a childbirth or a marriage - exchange of gold gifts was deemed auspicious. No wonder, even today, Indian families privately custody thirty thousand tons of gold- most in the world ~ at par with China

It was here that gold evolved as the basis of monetary and measurement systems - a divine store of value. Humans learned to move beyond barter - to a value exchange protocol that would last them for next ten thousand years. This protocol- in physical or digital forms - would be the basis of a permission-less and censor-resistant exchange that defined humans -- free yet interdependent.

As early scribes discovered the written word; Mathura had witnessed the wisdom flow from one generation to next - through distortion free recital (of mantras). The method, however, was losing its utility in handling growing body of information. In all probability, the transcription techniques were developed to safeguard the neolithic¹ insights - mining, agriculture, botany, medicine, metallurgy, and astrology among others - but the written word was limited to a chosen few. Mahabharta was the first fully scribed historical narrative that captured public imagination. It was primary catalyst in mass-adoption of written word. It was unveiled here at Mathura - in a series of eighteen Parvas (events) each marking release of a book.

The legend says the epic was too big to scribe for humans! Thus, the poet - Krishna Dwaipayana sought Ganesa - the elephant god. As in cover photo, Ganesa has an elephant head. In Hindu mythology, he is the embodiment of supreme intelligence². Like Egyptian god Thoth, Ganesa is Hindu deity of wisdom, knowledge, magic, art, and science. Incidentally, both of them are depicted to have non-human heads !

An elephant head on a human torso was a right-sizing intervention. Elephants, lose evolutionary advantage despite bigger brains - burly physique being harder to feed and multiply. Bringing similar neural capacity to humans was not natural evolution - it was a divine intervention. There is a popular mythical narrative to etch this idea in public discourse :

It says - Ma Parvati, wife of Siva, created a humanoid from her body scrub. It worked but it wasn't context aware. It was programmed to do only one task - protect his mother !

When Siva returned home the humanoid wouldn't let him in. Siva - the epitome of conscious experience - had to engineer context awareness in him. Metaphorically, he planted an Elephant head on young humanoid. Being the mind child of Siva, he imbibed divine intelligence and soon became leader of Siva's followers (Ganas). Thus, the name Ganesa.

Superior intelligence presented itself in the ability to write long text. Both Thoth and Ganesa are known as deities of hieroglyphs - sacred carvings. Like large language models of our time, their words reflect universal information base.

‘Text’ was the new medium...

To the speech-only world, it was a new way to store and send information - somewhat similar to addition of digital to our analog communication. Not only did it demand new scribing skills, it also meant the populations must learn to read - beyond a select class of intellectuals. New tools such as reed pens, ink and palm leaves became common place - just as we mass adopted general purpose computers. Superior neural network (Ganesa) was invoked to usher humanity into this new era, just the way we are setting up chatGPT, Gemini, Llama and Grok LLMs³. It isn't hard to imagine "AI assisted humans" would scale new highs of conscious experience in the same manner as "text" enabled we did - versus our speech-only ancestors - a quantum jump⁴ ! The way we improved our publishing tools (from palm leaves to printing press to internet), in the same fashion our future is all about improving the ways to interact and express with AI.

Back then, written word commanded as much attention as the code in our times. Which meant iterative rigor to precipitate the words into rule based immaculate verses - such that the message stayed in our carbon based memory. On similar lines, primary objective of a computer program is to have data persist in silicon memory. No wonder good code rhymes like a poem !

The upfront effort to organize scribing paraphernalia (quills and ink etc.) was quite a chore. And then you could write only one copy at a time! It mandated the text must be accurate, succinct and comprehensible. Scaling compute, storage and network are barriers that force similar constraints on our code.

Adi Parva, the first book, describes Mahabharata as the history of advancement. Every dynasty, every invention, and every war must find its place in the epic - in a fashion that was both - readable to text-enabled; and sonorous to those still catching up. It created a physiological pathway from listening to reading. It was like an embedding run to train a new mode of communication to human mind. It also means the next obvious frontier is to enable our brain with capabilities of large language models. Just as anyone may read and write today albeit a limited vocabulary of say thirty thousand words, the future generations would be at ease with millions of tokens. They will know all human and computing languages. They will learn from entire knowledge base on demand - and internalize their biases without blinking an eye. AI will be a voice of reason with in us - holding our hands in conflicts - guiding us through every step of the way !

Wait - don't we already have an internal voice ? A gut feeling ! Where does it come from ?

Any major paradigm shift, mandates an order of magnitude improvement - even more so a once in a ten thousand years event⁵. There was an all around effort to reduce the cost while increasing the utility of written words. It wasn't that no one knew scribing before, but the inscriptions were pegged to the cave walls. Like murals or wall carvings, text was written on human size scales. Large paintings and books were of the same measure, and medium. An artist could afford to spend a year on a painting, but investing that kind of time on a single page was a test of patience. Even if someone was willing , the typography wasn't mature enough.

In an estimate, a hundred-page scripture, painted on human size frames, used to cost a Tola⁶ of gold - weight of a minted gold coin around eleven grams- commonly called a Śatamāna⁷ in Sanskrit. The goal was to bring the cost down to a Ratti (around 100th part of a Tola). A 10x reduction in size plus a 10x improvement in transcription tools led to a 100x reduction in cost - in a matter of less than a century.

Does it sound like our journey from mainframes to smartphones? First slow - then very fast.

narrative …

How did the monetary system perpetuate scribing and vice-versa? What motivations led to preservation of information? Why would someone take the pains to poetically scribe entire history? How was wisdom drawn off the history and more importantly, how was this wisdom tested for truth - before putting into text?

Following pages are a filtered version of theming the early days of text and gold. And surprisingly, they make a fascinating story! They also answered a question that stayed longer on my mind — why should one care for the pen and the paper? What value in spending cycles on the tools of a bygone era! Turns out, our challenges and moral dilemmas are not very different! We are right at the center point of a 10k cycle turning our physical information to digital form. We are warming up to the idea of storing value in cyberspace - just as we did with gold in the "real" space - five thousand years back!

History is a window into the future -- because universe is a continuum , like a Mobius Strip ! The question is of the topology - if it is spherical one or circular? Or the one shaped like a Torus?

notes and stuff …

Neolithic revolution:- Around 11,000 BC, after the last long winter ended, our ancestors discovered agriculture, pottery, mining and other skills that lay in the foundations of modern society. This revolution with tools and technology and a zeal to do better faster is called the Neolithic (new Stone Age) revolution. There is a debate among historians on duration - the consensus is anywhere between 10000 BC to 5000 BC - right before the times of Mahabharata. -> Ref

Artificial intelligence that we use in models such as GPT are designed to serve millions of clients on a narrowband of skills. For example chatGPT is good at reading the internet and answering questions in that context. It is however not good at swimming or simply walking. An artificial general intelligence (AGI) is one that is trained on millions of skills, but it serves only one user - forever. For example our brain is AGI because it helps only one user navigate through a multitude of skills. Isn't it amazing use of words? - general annotates faith in one while artificial annotates one who serves many gods!

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Lazarus Long

Large Language Models (LLMs) -

The earliest public model of chatGPT (version 3.0) used around 12000 mathematical dimensions to internalize the context of around 50,000 words of text.
It did so by crawling through the data from internet, digital books in public domain and code repositories.
This in itself is a breakthrough but consider the later versions that learnt music and art.
It begs the question of how many dimensions must a human mind have - it may be trained in text, music, art and thousands of other skills - agriculture, metallurgy, transportation to state the obvious.
And what does it take to create a consistent three-dimensional visual experience.

⁴

A quantum jump in the awareness paradigm is defined as a state change such that one form of awareness becomes the representative identity of the group. For example white color is the cumulative identity of the group of seven rainbow colors. From a particle physics standpoint, an electron draws energy from all others in the same orbit to jump to the next higher orbit. When it does, it imbibes all those in lower energy state (classical orbits). This electron that gains the higher energy is now a representative electron to other atoms for interactions. In general human organizations, a quantum jump creates a leader of the group. The leader is also one of the participants in the organization, but her primary role is to represent the group.

⁵

Once in a ten thousand events, also called 10 K events, are the ones that need a large time frame to occur because they depend on many streams of technologies. Not only technologies, the purpose to work for such changes isn't clear in the beginning. It is still not clear why people work in such endeavors that have no end goal in sight. In absence of an explanation, such efforts are said to be a "divine inspiration". In Hindu traditions such events are tied to the incarnation of Vishnu to help progression of consciousness to the next level.

⁶

Monetary and measurement system :- It appears both the systems evolved hand in hand. Gold was the basis of both the monetary and the measurement systems. No one knows for sure when gold mining began. Our current estimates are around 4000 BC. That puts it around the same time as Mahabharata. The frequent mentions of gold ornaments among kings and deities and as jewelry among women during the times of the epic, indicate usage of gold as a scarce but in-fashion store of value. -> Ref

In Mahabharata, there is a clear mention of gold coins being abundantly used. In the fourth book (Viarata Parva), the prince Uttara offered Arjuna (disguised as a transgender named Vrihnnala) a hundred gold coins for saving him (and his bovine wealth) from Kaurvas -> Ref .
There is evidence of countable units of precious metal being used for exchange from the Vedic period onwards. A term Nishka appears in this sense in the Rigveda. A unit called Śatamāna, literally a " hundred standard ", representing 100 krishnalas is mentioned in Satapatha Brahmana. A later commentary on Katyayana Srautasutra explains that a Śatamāna could also be 100 Rattis . A Ratti is the weight equal to seeds of Abrus Precatorius. A hundred of them are almost equal to a Tola that is used for gold trade to date in India. All these units referred to gold currency in some form, though they were later adapted to silver currency. -> Ref
Barter system was widespread for the smaller transactions. Commoners used fruits and grains to get what they needed. Rich people used copper as a store of value. A one time adult meal was normally considered one copper coin. So was the ride fare. You could hop on and hop off any boat or cart at any place along its route for one copper coin. Super rich used copper for utensils at their home. For them the valuable thing was silver. A silver coin was considered the same as a hundred copper coins. Ultra rich ate their food in Silver utensils. For them the store of value was a gold coin.
A gold coin was equal to a hundred Silver's. The valuation was based on rough order of rigor in mining these metals. Silver was considered hundred times harder to purify than copper, and gold being similar orders of magnitude harder than Silver because of very low yield. In a way "proof of work" was baked in universally acceptable currency.
All states, no matter what their political equations, honoured this simple "proof of work" based storage of value. Privacy , self custody and universality were to underpin trade. Value exchange protocol was owned by people NOT kingdoms though kingdoms could issue coins (currency) aligned to universally accepted methods. It is a well established fact that after the great war of Mahabharta, sixteen main kingdoms (mahapadas) got formed over a couple of centuries. Each one of them issued their own coins, though they were all different shapes or stamps on gold coins. Quarter gold coins (Svarna) are excavated from Gandhara -> Ref
Currency was pegged to people's trust in "proof of work". Important point to note here, currency was not pegged to commodities such as iron or wheat. Gold and silver were NOT treated as commodities. Gold's only purpose was value storage and silver was used purely for minting. Copper was primarily used for making utensils for the rich. Copper was supposedly the best metal to store food and water. Eating in silver, though common for the rich, was considered a show-off.
This simple to understand and time tested system of powers of ten, was later exploited by Aryabhatta to conceptualize zero and decimal system - the very basis of modern arithmetic. The seeds of Abrus precatorius (Ratti) being very consistent were used to weigh gold using a measure where 8 Ratti = 1 Masha; 12 Masha = 1 Tola (12 X 8 = 96 Ratti), or roughly equal to 100 Ratti ( 96 Ratti pure gold and 4 Ratti impurities to solidify the gold). In other words, a Tola's "weight unit" was 100 Ratti while its "price unit" was 96 Ratti. In simple calculations 10 grams (one Tola) of solid gold was worth one kilo of solid silver or hundred kilos of solid copper. Or one Ratti (tiny seed) of gold was equal to one kilo of copper.
The common word used for one Kilo was Ser or Seer- roughly equal to 1.07 kilos in weight units or volume wise roughly equal to one liter. Volume was a preferred way to exchange at a larger scale to weed out as many impurities as possible from molten metals. One Seer is around 80 Tola in weight.

⁷

Śatamāna the precursor to Ashrafi : The same weight specifications - one Tola of gold - were adopted as Ashrafi - around fourteenth century in Prussia. The weight of an Ashrafi gold coin varies depending on the coin's origin and history:

Nizam-era gold Ashrafi: A gold Ashrafi coin issued by Nizam VI Mir Mahbub Ali Khan in 1893 CE weighed about 11 grams.
India-Princely States HYDERABAD Ashrafi : This coin weighed 11.1780 grams and had a fineness of 0.9100.
Awadh Gold Ashrafi: This coin weighed 10.73 grams and was made of 22-carat gold.