Post # 135
The original Prime Meridian...
In October 1884, 41 delegates from 25 countries met in Washington DC, at the request of the then president of USA, Chester A Arthur, for a conference called the International Meridian Conference, and selected the meridian passing through the Royal Observatory, Greenwich village, in London, as the official Prime Meridian of the world.
Prime meridian, of course, is an imaginary reference line on the earth, from North pole to South pole, denoted as zero degrees longitude.
So, for the past 136 years, the entire world has been broken down into time zones, with reference to Greenwich Mean Time. The Indian Standard Time (IST) is 5:30 hours ahead of the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+5:30), as represented by 82.5 degrees longitude, passing through Mirzapur in Prayagraj district of U.P.
But why was such a conference necessary?
When medieval Europe woke up from the dark ages - they called this Renaissance - it wanted to explore the world. So it put ships on seas and set out to navigate the world. And navigation needed maps. Maps, in turn, needed grids and coordinates. And coordinates needed markers - North, South, East and West.
Marking north-south was easy. The North pole and South Pole were fixed. The midpoint between them was the equator - the zero degree latitide.
But where should zero degrees longitude be? East- West are arbitrary concepts. So, every culture that ever drew maps chose its own “prime meridian” to represent a zero-baseline for longitude. For the Spanish it was Madrid. The Norwegians used Oslo, the Japanese used Kyoto. In total, cartographers have found maps using more than 30 different longitude systems, with prime meridians at cities ranging from Philadelphia to Rio de Janeiro to Warsaw to Giza, Egypt. International maritime travel became messy and confusing.
Also, with the advent of industrial revolution, railways had developed into a prominent mode of land transport. And railways had problems unifying local times for preparing their time tables. For example, in the United States, because of its large land mass, timetables showed 100 different local times, with a span of 3 hours.
So, the International Meridian Conference was called and Greenwich was officially selected as the prime meridian of the world. But why Greenwich? For two reasons.
First, in the 19th century, Great Britain, and hence London, was the power center of the world. They wielded significant influence.
Second, on the other side of the earth, 180 degrees from the prime meridian, falls the International Date Line - a line which represents midnight, when Greenwich is midday - and hence it represents a line where the date changes. So, if it was Monday on one side of the line, on the other side, it will be Tuesday.
If such a date change were to occur in the middle of a country, then it would have led to utter confusion with people not knowing as to which day of their lives they were living. Bang 180 degrees opposite to Greenwich is a vast patch of Pacific Ocean, having just a smattering of islands, with very little population. Hence Greenwich was ideal and suitable.
But the resolution to select Greenwich as the prime meridian was not unanimous. The vote was 22-1 in favor of Greenwich. Dominican Republic voted against. Two countries abstained - Brazil and France. France did not adopt the Greenwich meridian until 1911. Even then it refused to use the name Greenwich, instead using the term Paris Mean Time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds. France finally replaced this phrase with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in 1978.
But why did France do all this drama? Therein lies a mini-tale.
During the 17th-19th centuries, the Anglo-French rivalry was like USA-USSR rivalry during the Cold war or the USA-China rivalry today.
In 1666, Louis XIV, the king of France authorized the building of the Paris Observatory, which is today the oldest observatory in the world.
In 1667, members of the French Academy of Sciences traced the under-construction building's outline and bisected it from north to south. This became the Paris Meridian. French cartographers would use it as their prime meridian for more than 200 years.
So, the Paris Meridian was the prime meridian of the world from 1667 to 1884, around 217 years. Interestingly, Paris has a set of 135 odd bronze medallions, embedded on its pavements, dotting the Paris meridian. These medallions were inscribed with the word ARAGO and North and South labels, in honour of the French astronomer Francois Arago, who defined its exact trajectory in the 19 th century.
Though the Paris meridian ceased to be the prime meridian of the world later, it continued to be in the cultural ethos of the country. The international hospitality and hotel chain Le Meridien was born in Paris. There is a plot point in 2011’s Secret of the Unicorn, a movie based on Herge's Tintin, where Tintin and his friends are looking in vain for pirate treasure at a certain longitude, unaware that the sea-captain who hid it was using Paris-based coordinates, not London-based ones. The Paris meridian was also fictitiously represented as Rose Line by Dan Brown in his novel and movie - Da Vinci Code. There are scores of articles on the internet on Paris meridian, which almost became a prime meridian.
But do you know, which was the prime meridian of the world before that? Ujjain, in India! Therein lies a mega-tale, much beyond the scope of a blog. But here are a few snippets.
According to Indologists D K Hari and Mrs. D K Hemahari, from 1600 CE to a couple of millenia backwards, Ujjain was the prime meridian of the ancient world.
Back then, India was the centre of the world, pretty much how England was a hundred years ago and how US is today. The world was India centric then, on aspects of knowledge, wealth, textiles, metallurgy, spices, indigo, culture, medicine, navigation, trade and many other fields. Due to this dominance, the world’s prime meridian was considered to be passing through Avantika, also called Ujjain.
This has been repeatedly mentioned by many ancient geographers/mathematicians of India and the world. Notable among them are Aryabhata, Varahamihira, Bhaskaracharya among the Indians and Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer, who lived between 87 and 150 CE.
Ptolemy shows the ancient Indian city of Ujjain, in the Greek language as Ozene, in his map and mentions that it is the cardinal city of the then known world.
In the 12th century CE, Bhaskaracharya mentions in his treatise - Laghubhaskareeyam:
Ujjain is a significant location for time keeping as it is situated on the Tropic of Cancer. The Indian name for this Tropic of Cancer is Kataka Rekha. Kataka means Crab, the symbol for the zodiac Cancer, and Rekha meaning line.
Ujjain is also home to the Jyotirlinga - Mahakaaleshwara Temple. Maha = Great. Kaala = Time. Eshwara = Lord of. It is significant that such a temple was constructed there millenia back.
I picked this narrative up from D K Hari and Smt. D K Hemahari's Bharat Gyan book - The Autobiography of India: Brand Bharat: Roots in India. This narrative is lost to us Indians because of the massive brain washing we received from the Britishers and the education system established by them. But I think it is time we know ourselves better.
This post is dedicated to Ujjain - the original Prime Meridian of the world.
