I’m about 1,500 pages into the illustrious Mahabharata. It is an historical epic known in the history-loving Hindu tradition, daunting in size and sweeping in scale.
The story is very old, some of it clearly much older than the text itself. Some believe that parts of it date from an extremely early hominid migration into the Indian subcontinent. Much of the Mahabharata takes place so long ago that it seems (in some translations) perhaps to refer to women going into oestrus instead of having the ovulation and menstrual cycle that modern humans are currently understood to have.
The Mahabharata presents many excellent examples of how numbers in ancient texts and oral histories may not necessarily always translate directly into modern numbers. An extremely long time ago, a word like a hundred would’ve often been closer to the idea of “too many to keep track of easily” than ten groups of ten, and a word like a thousand would’ve been closer to the idea of “effectively uncountable, especially considering the fact that a comprehensive number system has not been invented yet” than ten groups of ten times ten. It was hard to conceive of numbers when we didn’t really have them.
What is still very important to understand is that a looser numerical system would not diminish the text’s portrayal of placing high value on extravagant generosity and prosperity, and the scale of riches it sometimes suggests does become staggering almost beyond imagination.
Our current standard system of numbers used throughout the world today was probably invented about 4,000 years ago or so in North Africa, according to Earth Logos. The Mahabharata in its current form was compiled and transcribed within the span of this time, but the following passage, which occurs near the beginning of the text, before Vaisampayana begins narrating, gives some idea of how numbers were a subject of specialization and how they seemed to fit into oral history.
“Sauti said, ‘One chariot, one elephant, five foot-soldiers, and three horses form one Patti; three pattis make one Sena-mukha; three sena-mukhas are called a Gulma; three gulmas, a Gana; three ganas, a Vahini; three vahinis together are called a Pritana; three pritanas form a Chamu; three chamus, one Anikini; and an anikini taken ten times forms, as it is styled by those who know, an Akshauhini. O ye best of Brahmanas, arithmeticians have calculated that the number of chariots in an Akshauhini is twenty-one thousand eight hundred and seventy. The measure of elephants must be fixed at the same number. O ye pure, you must know that the number of foot-soldiers is one hundred and nine thousand, three hundred and fifty, the number of horse is sixty-five thousand, six hundred and ten. These, O Brahmanas, as fully explained by me, are the numbers of an Akshauhini as said by those acquainted with the principles of numbers.’” – Mahabharata, section II (Vyasa, translation by Kisari Mohan Ganguli)
Keep in mind that at the time the text was codified thus, these sums probably represented the narrator’s mastery of arithmetic in front of his audience, which it’s easy to assume may have been very much in vogue at the time in terms of demonstrating intellectual prowess, almost like a magic trick.
In the Mahabharata, which depicts the lives and lineages of the Pandavas and the Kauravas as well as a war that ensued once between them, the text describes eighteen Akshauhinis meeting on a battlefield, while the fact remains, the kingdoms described were actually most likely city states. It is extremely unlikely that ancient kings fielded, for example, 393,660 elephants all in one place to do battle, and a fortunate unlikelihood it is at that. And indeed, earliest versions of the story may not have defined these things numerically at all. But the numbers thus being stylized seems rather to be an arcane reference to the scope of how epic these matters must’ve been and felt at the time.
Numbers are admirably objective, but their objectivity is actually subtly finite. Chaos theory is a theory that involves the fact that modern numbers and mathematics ultimately break down and get confusing because we made them up. It essentially deals with what happens when they do.
──── by Lync Dalton ────
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