I was busy writing biographical study of a certain personality, and I needed to check on some data. This seems to be easy these days: one simply does it on the Internet. It came to me though, and probably not only to me I suspect, that this might be a great illusion. What if the information that one obtains there is not quite correct? What if someone, out of ignorance maybe, or perhaps even out of malice, uploads something there, perhaps saying that so and so lived in such and such year over there, in a little cottage made of marzipan? Idiots, like myself, will swallow it, hook and line! When I use such information that is, expressed in polite terms, excrementum tauri, and even pass it on, will I bear the responsibility? Who knows, such a thing might even become a family curse to be passed on up to the seventh generation! Or at least, until the truth prevails. Veritas vincit. Truth conquers. These words have stood as a motto on the Presidential standard of the Czech Republic for almost a hundred years. Jan Huss had once written them in his letter to Jan of Renstein, and a couple of years he did so again in his letter to the professors of the Prague University, shortly before being put to burn at the stake by the Council of Constance. (This information may have come from the Internet, but I believe it to be safe.) The idea is much older, however, at least two millennia older. This can’t be found in the Bible, but it is in the Apocryphal 3rd Book of Esdras, which the mediaeval scholars often cited. Flavius Josephus also mentions it in his book Antiquities of the Jews. Zerubabel, who was supposed to be one of the ancestors of Jesus, had stated in front of the king Darius that the king is not most powerful of all, that most powerful is the Truth! The Truth that is undying, inviolable, unperishable and honest, to which only one way leads that is worth a human effort. This was a brave statement, in front of the king by one of the leaders of the conquered nation. The words had been meant to remind the king of the promise made by his predecessor on the throne, Cyrus, that he will allow rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem that was burnt down by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar. The Truth had prevailed, Darius had complied with the promise given by Cyrus, and the Temple was rebuilt, to stand for another five centuries. But is there anything older that would express the same or similar idea, I wondered. In Sanskrit we find the words Satyan nasti paro dharmah. Nothing is greater than truth. This is a somewhat lose translation, mainly because it is so difficult, almost impossible, to translate the Sanskrit word dharma. It has so many meanings, one of them being similar to the Greek word nemesis, which means fate, something that cannot be avoided. Dharma too is something that has been firmly established, a law, but also a duty (moral), justice (of a higher order), religious belief and philosophy, etc. During the time Darius the Great occupied the throne in Babylon, the Indian upper classes had been speaking Sanskrit. But the same language was already spoken two thousand years earlier, as the scholars would confirm. Some of them even state that it was used even as early as the 5th Millennium BC! Myself, I believe the truth to be even older than that. Much older.