Iron pillars
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[edit] Definition
[edit] Provenance
The Emperor Ashoka was the third Mauryan Emperor, and reigned between about 265 – 240 BC. He erected a number of pillars listing his edicts and good deeds. Before the inscriptions were studied by archaeologists, Ashoka was suspected to be mythical, as the stories of him in Buddhist histories seemed simply too good to be true. Examination of his edicts showed that not only was he a very real person, but also that he was genuinely the ideal ruler that Buddhist historians portrayed. Historians today admit him to be, if anyone deserves that title, the ideal monarch, and the emblem that crowned his pillars is the symbol of modern India, and may be seen on the Indian flag. Most of Ashoka’s inscriptions are on natural rock formations or on stone pillars: there is only one iron pillar associated with him.
The other surviving iron pillar was erected by the Gupta dynasty Emperor Chandragupta II in the fourth century AD, near Delhi.
[edit] Discussion
The iron pillars of India first came to the attention of the pseudohistory community when Erich von Daniken attributed the Chandragupta pillar to alien technology:
- In the courtyard of a temple in New Delhi there exists ... a column made of welded iron parts that has been exposed to weathering for more than 4,000 years without showing a trace of rust. In addition it is unaffected by sulphur or phosphorus. Here we have an unknown alloy from antiquity staring us in the face. 1
What he means by “unaffected by sulphur or phosphorus”, we do not know, and nor, we suspect, did he. His reason for tripling the age of the pillar we may ascribe to ignorance. The pillar is not welded: it is one single piece. And his claim that the pillar is an “unknown alloy” is simply false: it is iron.
Metallurgists attribute the fact that it seems immune to rust to the presence of phosphorus as an impurity in the metal. 2
After publication, von Daniken retracted his claims about the pillar in an interview with that well-known journal of anthropology, Playboy magazine:
- When I wrote Chariots of the Gods? the information I had concerning this iron column was as I presented it. Since then, I have found that investigations were made and they came to quite different results, so we can forget about this iron thing.
Unfortunately, those following in the furrow that von Daniken plowed have not taken his advice to “forget about this iron thing”. Here is a more modern example:
- A testimony to ancient metallurgical skills in Delhi, India is called the Ashoka Pillar. Standing over 23 feet, it averages 16 inches in diameter and weighs about 6 tons. The solid wrought-iron shaft is made up of expertly welded discs. An inscription on the base is an epitaph to King Chandra Gupta II, who died in A.D. 413...
- Production of the iron and the techniques of preservation are far beyond 5th century abilities. It is probably far older, maybe several thousand years. 3
While recycling von Daniken’s misinformation, and identifying the pillar of Chandragupta as the “Ashoka pillar” to boot, this particular historical revisionist, as you can see, wished to attribute the triumphs of the Indian Iron Age to people living in the Late Stone Age, instead. A similar suggestion comes from Li Hongzhi, founder of the Falun Gong cult:
- At present, we have already discovered that there are many things on the earth that surpass our present civilization.... There is an iron pillar in India whose iron content is over ninety-nine percent. Even modern smelting technology cannot produce iron with such high purity; it had already surpassed the level of modern technology. Who created those civilizations? How could human beings--who would have been microorganisms in those times--have created these things? These discoveries have caught the attention of scientists worldwide. They are considered to be from prehistoric culture since they prove inexplicable. 4
However, a look on the internet (an expedient which the Chinese sage seems to have overlooked) reveals firms advertising iron available at a purity of 99.995% --- and all done without alien assistance. Using less impressive technology, the book Metals for Engineering Craftsmen, which is a manual for blacksmiths, defines wrought iron as being better than 99% pure.
We see in the quotation, as in the previous one, the inexplicable notion that if the pillar couldn’t have been made in the third century BC, when human beings “would have been microorganisms”, it must have been made even earlier. We confess that we are unable to follow this line of reasoning.
It is not difficult to fix the actual dates of the pillars, because they are, of course, inscribed with the names of the relevant monarchs: to push them back into the Stone Age would introduce a gap of thousands of years in history unnoticed by the chroniclers. Moreover, the inscriptions on the pillars are in languages descended from Sanskrit: to put them before the oldest Sanskrit texts would turn linguistics on its head as well as archaeology. Then again, at least one of the inscriptions of Ashoka, in Afghanistan, is multilingual, giving versions of the same text in Greek and Aramaic, which fixes it in classical times. Also, Ashoka’s inscriptions are explicitly Buddhist. To put Ashoka back thousands of years, we must also move the Buddha back thousands of years, doing massive violence to the history of Buddhism. Chandragupta II is even harder to shift in time, being as well-documented a figure as Julius Caesar.
The sad thing about this whole story is that the pillars of Ashoka should provide seekers after lost ancient cultures exactly what they say they’re looking for. Here we have a lost Empire, ruled by a wise, beneficent and just Emperor, which disappeared almost without a trace, to be replaced by lesser dynasties governed by lesser men: it was remembered only in a few old books, dismissed by scholars as a myth, and then proved real by painstaking archeological research. Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing that Graham Hancock and his fans would love to discover? But the Empire of Ashoka really existed, so for the pseudohistorian there is nothing to be done but to attribute its achievements to some other still more ancient culture as yet unknown, to aliens, or to refugees from Atlantis.
