Mesopotamia & North Syria

[Vanbakkam Vijayaraghavan]

On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 00:13:25 +0100, Bjarte Kaldhol <bjartekal at AH.TELIA.NO>
wrote:

>Dear listmembers,
>
>Those of you who are interested in the early culture of North Syria, where
>the Hurrians were a dominating people around the middle of the second
>millennium BC, might like to look at this website, with a lot of
>interesting photos:
>
>http://ugarit.uni-muenster.de/esetbmai.htm
>
>Read also the fascinating article "The Secret of Nabada", by Joachim
>Bretschneider.
>
>Best wishes,
>Bjarte Kaldhol

Early this year I went on a trip to Syria and went to Ugarit, Mari and
other archeologically interesting sites. Two musuems woth mentioning:
Damascus and Die ez Zor on the Euphrates. Syria is a grave yard of
civilizations going back to 6000 years.

While I was going through the 3rd millennnium restorations of Mari, I was
stuck by the wealth of archeological remains in other parts of the world
and the near complete absense of it in India. To be more precise, India
without it's religious buildings.

While other civilizations had or seem to have much energy for civic
ventures like palaces, gyms, baths, city centres, etc, why there is a near
absense of it - the remains of them anyway- in India.

Has anyone tried to connect sanskrit or Tamil literary writings with an
inhibition against taking pride and taking part in civic life? Apart from
civic monuments, there is also a absense of (remains of) military
architecture in classical India. Only from the Muslim perdiod we find
expressions of military architecture in India? any connection of these with
attitudes expressed in classical India?