That photo, by the way, has nothing to do with this content. I put it up when this post was going to have a very different subject. I'll keep it there out of inertia. It does not harm. I have decided to use this post to preserve a fascinating brief passage from THE RULE OF LAWS by Fernanda Pirie. "Frustratingly for historians, in the climate of tropic India manuscripts written on cloth or palm leaves, or even on copper plates, deteriorate quickly. Only the most popular, those that were recopies and re-written over the centuries, survive. But from the eighth and ninth centuries, scholars began to produce commentaries on earlier texts and digests of what they considered the most important of these writings, which helped to preserve the tradition and its learning." So, although what contemporary scholars are trying to piece together is a very ancient tradition, one which was old when Alexander the Great showed up at its northwestern extreme, it is one we can understand now...