Scientists are baffled by medieval link between Scotland and India.
RESEARCHERS in Scotland and India have made the remarkable discovery that mediaeval property records written in Latin and Sanskrit have striking similarities.
Teams from Glasgow University and the University of Calcutta have proved that their two countries, some 6000 miles apart, developed very similar ways of recording property transactions, even though there was no known cultural link between Indian and European societies at that time.
With their knowledge of Latin and Sanskrit, the two teams combined to show that records in mediaeval Bengal and Scotland were devised in ways that used directly related vocabulary and philosophical concepts, and that even featured similar words, though no one knows how this happened.
The project was started in 2013 by John Reuben Davies and his team of Dauvit Broun, Katherine Forsyth, Sim Innes and Joanna Tucker from Glasgow’s Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies and Calcutta University historians Suchandra Ghosh, Swapna Bhattacharya, Sayantini Paul and Rajat Sanyal.
The British Academy has now agreed to back the continuation of the project which it approved in late 2013.
At the time, the Academy said: “The concept of gift is central to property-transfer in medieval Europe and India. Indeed, striking parallels exist between Sanskrit records of property-transfer from early medieval Bengal and contemporaneous Latin charters from Europe.
Source: https://goo.gl/2Q68Th