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Looking East...
Official history in Belgium seems to start in
Mesopotamia and to move from there to the West only,
never to the East. It's also a quasi exclusive
Christian history. Like in classic cowboy films,
where the Indians are always the bad guys, the
muslims are the villains, invading Spain, occupying
the Holy Land, taking Constantinople, even menacing
Vienna...
What happened in the meantime in Asia is for the
most part terra incognita. The rich cultures of
India, China, Japan, Persia are all but unknown to
us. We ignore that the ancient Greeks were in
contact with Buddhism and Hinduism, that the Arabs
crossed the Indian Ocean to Africa and the Far East.
Asia only comes into view with the spice trade and
colonisation. Likewise, the Americas were
'discovered' in the 15th century, as if no
civilisation, Incas, Mayas, Aztecs, or Inuit,
existed there before.
On my travels to India, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos,
I got the impression that in these countries their
proper history also remains quite obscure. In
Thailand I got invited to meetings in Surat by a few
amateur khmerologists, simply because I could
identify some of the Hindu deities on lentil
sculptings at Khmer sites in NW Thailand.
The National History Museums in Mumbai, Vientiane or
Bangkok seem rather amateuristic, often a haphazard
collection with more emphasis on patriotism than on
science.
I was interested to learn more about the prehistoric
culture of Mohenjo-daro✶, the Indus
valley civilisation✶
(3300-1700 BC), with its well developed city
structure, or about another little known
civilisation, that of Oc Eo✶ (1st-7th century)
in southern Vietnam, that under the name Kattigara
may have been the place Columbus and Vasco da Gama
were looking for...
Cham (Vietnam), Khmer (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia),
Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu temples were always a hot
item on my travel itinerary. Likewise, I visited
prehistoric sites on Malta (Ġgantija✶ on Gozo, Hagar
Qim✶ and Mnajdra✶ on Malta itself),
or excavations of old Greek and Roman settlements,
on Rhodos, in Ostia, etc.
Always looking for the beginning, for the origins of
civilisation, how people with very primitive means
succeeded in building a society, in creating art,
like those marvellous paintings on the Lascaux✶ cave walls (I saw
them as a small boy, since then the site has been
closed down because the paint was fading away...).
But civilisations evolve and succeed one another,
history is always on the move, and where does it go?
History doesn't move from East to West exclusively,
but until now, I took little or no opportunity to
see and learn more about the rich cultures of the
Americas, or of those little known civilisations
that existed in Africa before the European
colonisation, and that left so few traces. Now that
my steps go more often in the direction of South
America, a closer look into different 'Indian'
cultures is likely.
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