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History

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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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