If the Arabs had possessed an explosive in the thirteenth century, the fact must have been known to their alchemists, and they show no such knowledge. There is not an allusion to saltpetre in the Leyden Arabic MS. of 1225.[229] Hassan er-Rammah, who died in 1295, knew nothing of explosives. In speaking of saltpetre in the year 1311, Yusuf ibn Ismaël al-Juni says: “The people of Irak use it to make a fire which tends to rise and move. Saltpetre increases the ease and rapidity of ignition.”[230] This sentence contains the sum total of Yusuf’s knowledge of saltpetre mixtures. He was aware of the effects of their progressive combustion, but he knew nothing about their explosive combustion.
By whomsoever gunpowder was invented, it was not by the Arabs.
CHAPTER VI
THE HINDUS
In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, by order of Warren Hastings, a committee of Brahmins collected a body of Gentoo (or Hindu) laws from a number of ancient Sanskrit books. These laws were translated into Persian under the superintendence of one of the Brahmins, and the Persian version was translated into English in 1776 by Mr. N. B. Halhed, Bengal Civil Service. In his preface he states that gunpowder had been known in India “far beyond all periods of investigation,” a conclusion arrived at by a method now familiar to the reader: “the word ‘firearms’ is literally in Sanskrit agni astra ... Cannon in the Sanskrit idiom is shataghni.”
Agni is found in the Latin ignis = fire; astra, Romocki explains, is connected with the Slav ostr = point (of an arrow, &c.); and the compound agniastra is simply a fire-arrow or rocket. In the shataghni, or “hundred killer,” we have some weapon described in the exaggerated style usual in early times and by no means confined to India. When Sigurd struck an anvil with his sword Gram, “he cleft it down to the stock thereof;”[231] and “if one smote a mountain” with al-Mahik (the annihilator) the sword of Gharib, “‘twould overthrow it.”[232] There is nothing to connect the shataghni> with fire: indeed it seems to have been a mace, for in the “Raghuvansa” the demon is said to have laid his iron-headed shataghni upon Rama, just as Kuvera laid his club on Jamraj.[233] No mention of any projectile discharged by an explosive is to be found in Manu’s “Code of Laws,” and to Manu belongs a passage in the “Code of Gentoo Laws” (p. 53) which either Halhed has mistranslated from the Persian, or the Persian translators have mistranslated from the Sanskrit. Professor Rāy has unearthed the original text of Manu (vii. 90), and gives the correct translation: “The king shall not slay his enemies in battle with deceitful or barbed or poisoned weapons, nor with any having a blade made red hot by fire,[234] or tipped with burning materials.”[235] Halhed’s translation is: “The magistrate shall not make war with any deceitful machine, or with poisoned weapons, or with cannon and guns, or with any other kind of firearms.” Mephistopheles was right:—
“Mit Worten lässt sich trefflich streiten,
Mit Worten ein System bereiten.”
Halhed’s mistakes might have been forgotten had they not been revived and elaborated by Professor G. Oppert in an essay “On the Weapons, &c., of the Ancient Hindus,” London, 1880. His argument is briefly this: firearms are clearly mentioned in the “Laws of Manu” and two very ancient Sanskrit poems; therefore at some very remote period the Hindus possessed an explosive which, for whatever reason, fell into disuse eventually.