India: ancient

Sandalwood Oil, East Indian. The use of sandalwood oil for its perfumery value is ancient, probably extending back some 4000 years. Oil from the powdered wood and roots of the tree Santalum album L. is produced primarily in India, under government control. Good quaUty oil is a pale yellow to yellow viscous Hquid characterized by an extremely soft, sweet—woody, almost ariimal—balsarnic odor. The extreme tenacity of the aroma makes it an ideal blender—fixative for woody-Oriental—floral fragrance bases. It also finds extensive use for the codistillation of other essential oils, such as rose, especially in India. There the so-called attars are made with sandalwood oil distilled over the flowers or by distillation of these flowers into sandalwood oil. The principal constituents of sandalwood oil are shown in Table 11 (37) and Figure 2. 

Potassium nitrate, essential in the manufacture of black gun powder, was produced by the Chinese, who had developed gun powder by the tenth century AD. The process involved the leaching of soil in which nitrogen from urine had combined with mineral potassium. By the early 1800s, potassium nitrate had become a strategic military chemical and was stiU produced, primarily in India, by using the ancient Chinese method. The caUche deposits in Chile are the only natural source of potassium nitrate (2). These deposits are not a rich source of potassium nitrate, purifying only to about 14% as K O. 

In ancient India, a steel called wootz was made by placing very pure kon ore and wood or other carbonaceous material in a tightly sealed pot or cmcible heated to high temperature for a considerable time. Some of the carbon in the cmcible reduced the kon ore to metallic kon, which absorbed any excess carbon. The resulting kon—carbon alloy was an excellent grade of steel. In a similar way, pieces of low carbon wrought kon were placed in a pot along with a form of carbon and melted to make a fine steel. A variation of this method, in which bars that had been carburized by the cementation process were melted in a sealed pot to make steel of the best quaUty, became known as the cmcible process. 

Diamonds were first discovered in ancient times in India and Borneo and later in Brazil in 1670 in alluvial deposits where water had sorted minerals on the basis of density and toughness. This type of tumbling often concentrates the better quality crystals such as those found in the ocean off the west coast of Africa. Exploration can be done by stream panning or drilling in conjunction with a search for the heavy mineral assemblages that accompany diamond. Alluvial deposits account for about 40% of the diamond found in primary sources. 

Because of the long overland route used to bring indigotin from India to Europe, and because of the small amount of indigotin that was present in the leaves, about 2—4%, indigotin ranked among the most expensive of the ancient dyes (105). 

The use of hydraulics is not new. The Egyptians and people of ancient Persia, India and China conveyed water along channels for irrigation and other domestic purposes. They used dams and sluice gates to control the flow and waterways to direct the water to where it was needed. The ancient Cretins had elaborate plumbing systems. Archimedes studied the laws of floating and submerged bodies. The Romans constructed aqueducts to carry water to their cities. 

The earliest recorded attempts at organ transplant date back thousands of years.1 More than a few apocryphal descriptions exist from ancient Egypt, China, India, and Rome documenting experimentation with transplantation. For example, an Indian text from the second century bc describes a procedure for nasal reconstruction surgery with the use of autografted skin. Also, Roman Catholic lore has saints Damian and Cosmas replacing the gangrenous leg of a man with the leg of a recently deceased man in the third century ad.1... 

Patvardhan, R.V. "Rasavidya or alchemy in ancient India." In Proc Trans 1st Oriental Conf (1919), i, civ.. ... 

Rajan, Raj G. "Religion and the development of an alchemical philosophy of transmutation in ancient India." In Alchemy revisited, ed. Z.R.W.M. von Martels, 101-106. Leiden Brill, 1990. 

Jaggi, O.P. Scientists of ancient India and their achievements. Delhi Atma Ram, 1966. 266p. 

Ray, PraphuIIa Chandra. Progress of chemistry in ancient India. Sci Cult 2, no. 

Ray, Priyadaranjan. History of chemistry in ancient and medieval India, incorporating the History of Hindu chemistry by Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray. Calcutta Amsterdam Indian Chemical Soc Swets Zeitlinger, 1956. 494p. 

Lead (chemical symbol Pb, from the Latin name for the metal, plumbum) is a gray, soft, ductile, and very poisonous metal, although its poisonous properties were probably unknown to the ancients. The metal has been used, particularly in China and India, since very ancient times. Lead is not found in nature in the native, metallic form, although tiny particles of the metal are occasionally encrusted in rocks. It is unlikely, therefore, that the metal would... 

Hegde, K.T.M. (1989). Zinc and brass production in Ancient India. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 14 86-96. 

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