I gave to U.

Freely. And Unconditionally.

MY Sources. MY work. MY mentors.

And I credited all the above too.

Where has Common Courtesy gone? Has it been taken over by IT?

Not ONE Single Thank You. Not ONE Single Credit.

As Shakespeare said…NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING.

15. History of firearms: is our perception correct?

According to A. M. Petrov, “we are thoroughly confused about the history of firearms in Asia. For some reason, the prevailing absurd notion is that the Europeans introduced firearms to the Orient when their ships reached the Indian Ocean – after the epoch of the Great Discoveries, that is. The actual history was completely different.

In 1498 Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the Cape of Good Hope and sailed into the Indian Ocean. In 1511 the Portuguese started the siege of Malacca, one of the largest centres of sea trade in Asia. Much to their surprise, their cannon fire was answered by Malaccan artillery . . . After the capture of the city, the Portuguese found more than three thousand small cannons there” ([653], page 86).

“Timur managed to make some use of firearms in a number of battles (he died in 1405). Another known fact is the use of an enormous 19-tonne cannon by the Turks during the 1453 siege of Constantinople” ([653], page 87).

The founder of the Great Mogul Empire, Babur, “is meticulous to record every single detail that concerns firearms in his ‘Notes’. The first record was made in Central Asia, in 1495-1496 . . . It reports a successful shelling of a tower from cannons, which had made a hole in it . . . The records of 1526-1527 describe the whole process of casting a large weapon and its tests as carried out by the Turkic weapon armourers . . . Babur has made a multitude of such records about mortars, rifles, cannons and their manufacture by Turkic and other Oriental armourers without any assistance from Europe” ([653], page 87).

Therefore, the traditional opinion that firearms were manufactured in the West exclusively and then brought to the Orient by the Europeans is wrong. It appears to have been planted in the XVII-XVIII century as part of the disinformation campaign aimed at presenting the East as savage and the West as civilised.