Innholdsfortegnelse for The Ancient World i History Extra

What is it about the ancient world that inspires such passion? Pericles, Scipio Africanus and Cicero are, to many, still heroes for our times, their words and actions sources of inspiration and wisdom. Lessons are plucked from ancient Athens like pomegranates from a tree, and the Roman emperors are looked to as prototypes or parables for modern world leaders. If you are in need of an historical parallel, you can bet that the rules of Augustus, Caligula or Nero will provide one. There was a time when the study of the ancient world was deemed distinctly unfashionable. Between the 1960s and the mid 1990s, or thereabouts, the subject developed a reputation for fustiness. Latin and Greek fell by the wayside, exhausted by the horrors of school-day rote learning, and the…

Standing on the east bank of the Nile, the city of Akhet-aten (today known as Tell el-Amarna) was one of the jewels of Egypt's late 18th Dynasty. Built in the 14th century BC by the pharaoh Akhenaten as his great capital, where he could give full expression to his devotion to the solar disc, Aten, it was abandoned just a few years after his death in c1336 BC. We now know there was a darker side to this city of temples and palaces. That's because excavations of Akhet-aten's cemeteries have provided some of the most graphic evidence for the price Egypt's underclass paid for pharaonic indulgences. Malnutrition was rife, as was scurvy. Stunted growth was common, along with bone and muscle conditions including injury and degenerative joint disease – the…

Icelandic sagas Norse bards saluted Alexander's achievements in Alexanders Saga. Dating to as early as c1280, this translation of a Latin poem is considered one of Iceland's most important works of medieval literature. God of Egypt It was in Egypt that Alexander's journey to posthumous superstardom began, chiefly thanks to the rumours (fanned by Alexander himself) that he was not the son of King Philip of Macedon but of the deity Amun. English union The Alexander Romances featured prominently in the Talbot Shrewsbury Book, which was famously presented to Margaret of Anjou on her betrothal to English king Henry VI. Ethiopian battles Over time, the escapades attributed to Alexander became ever more fanciful. In an Ethiopian version of the Alexander Romances, the hero battles traps, hidden pits and a dancing…

In 480 BC Xerxes, the great king of Persia, headed west into Europe with a massive force – allegedly more than 2 million fighting men and 1,207 warships. He was, by all accounts, a formidable foe. “I am Xerxes, the great king, king of kings, king of countries containing all kinds of men, king in this great earth far and wide,” proclaimed the official documents of a monarch whose kingdom stretched from the Balkans to the fringes of the Indian subcontinent. And now, this powerful ruler had come to crush the Greeks, determined to avenge the embarrassing defeat that his father, Darius, had suffered at their hands at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Charged with stopping Xerxes’ forces was King Leonidas from the city-state of Sparta, leading 300…

1 Ritual killers Only the elite wielded these curved (or ‘Khepesh’) swords – due to the amount of bronze used in their manufacture. The majority may have been reserved for ritual executions and displays of wealth rather than combat. Only a small number survive today. 2 Mobile war The Egyptians did not invent chariots, but adapted the heavier near eastern examples, making them lighter and more manoeuvrable (like the one below, depicted in Tutankhamun's tomb). Each chariot had a driver and a shield-bearer. 3 Lethal combination By Thutmosis III's time, the Egyptians used composite bows (like the one wielded by Ramesses II, above), which had been invented in the near east. These were made from different materials laminated together, and were very powerful. 4 Body guard Most Late Bronze Age…

Crawling underneath Egypt's Great Pyramid, 70 metres down, is an unforgettable experience. On hands and knees in the sand, as the descending tunnel gets narrower and deeper, the bedrock of the Giza Plateau presses in so close you can actually taste it. The rock is salty, because 50 million years ago this was all sea. I am not the first to have had this visceral, time-travelling experience. As well as the Greek and Roman tourists who left graffiti here, this subterranean tunnel, and the chamber which it led to, was described by the ‘father of history’ Herodotus, and some2,300 years later was explored by the Italian tomb-raider Giovanni Battista Caviglia. Other passages in the Great Pyramid – a huge burial place for Egypt's King Khufu – were charted by medieval…

Around 1943, Robert Graves penned a poem. In it he took his customary sideways glance at the world of antiquity and chose as his theme the subject of war and propaganda. He focused on the battle of Marathon, fought in 499 BC between the forces of Athens and Persia. Hailed as a magnificent triumph for the Athenians, Marathon had quickly become mythologised in the Greek-speaking world. When the Persians were repelled from Greek soil, the legend of the heroic fight for freedom over despotism was born. And that's not all. For Europe, in this reading of history, was also born at Marathon. So was the British empire. This is why, writing in 1846, John Stuart Mill could claim that, “even as an event in English history”, the battle of Marathon…

On 26 November 1922, when Howard Carter reported what he could make out in the gloom of a dusty chamber in the Valley of the Kings, a new phase of Egyptomania began. For more than 100 years, since Napoleon's Egyptian campaign at the turn of the 19th century, Europeans and North Americans had been enthralled by the architecture, art, design and dress of this ancient civilisation. Carter's discovery was different, though. “Everywhere the glint of gold!” he famously recalled of the moment he first saw the wonders of Tutankhamun's tomb. The scene was set for an international fixation with this gilded young pharaoh who presided over a glittering court of fabulous wealth. Tutankhamun seduced the world, further sensationalising the popular image of Egypt at its height during the 18th Dynasty…

In the late 19th century, the French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote a seven-volume history of Christianity. It was a vast, wide-ranging publication, spanning centuries and continents. Yet one of these volumes was dedicated entirely to the reign of one man: the Roman emperor Nero. Nero ascended to power in AD 54 following the death of his step-father, Claudius. Fourteen chaotic, blood-spattered years later it was all over, Nero dying – perhaps by his own hand – at the climax of a rebellion against his rule. But this, Renan said, wasn't the last the world would see of him. Nero would return to Earth again, and his second coming would signal the time of the apocalypse. “The name for Nero has been found,” the philosopher declared. “Nero shall be the Antichrist.”…

✗ FALSE (sort of) Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that ancient Egyptians treated the remains of high-status individuals to preserve them for the afterlife. Yet this idea is shaped by modern – which is to say modern western – cultural expectations of what the dead should look like, linked to the fact that the first Europeans to investigate ancient Egyptian mummies in the 18th century were themselves interested in embalming techniques. These researchers were keen to preserve their own dead just as they had been in life – so they looked as if they had simply fallen asleep. Even today, people take comfort from this approach. The ancient Egyptians, however, did not intend their dead to be seen by the living, and were apparently less concerned with preserving the…

✗ FALSE Ancient Egyptian ideas about the afterlife seem to offer an exception to the rule that ‘you can't take it with you’. Tutankhamun's relatively small – but hugely famous – tomb in the Valley of the Kings was found stuffed full of objects, many of them covered with gold. But this was not stockpiling bullion just for the sake of it. Every item found in the tomb was there for a very specific reason: to help transform the king into, and maintain his status as, a god in the afterlife. Tutankhamun was provided with more than 140 linen loincloths – essentially, ancient underwear – not because this set was expected to last him for eternity but because these items had likely touched his skin. Considered a semi-divine being while…

✗ FALSE Egyptian tombs were intended to stand for eternity. The houses of the living were made from mud-bricks and, many of them standing on or near the Nile floodplain, frequently needed to be repaired or rebuilt. Elite tombs, however, were mostly cut from rock or built from stone, set back into or towards the cliffs. Such a tomb was commonly referred to as a ‘house of eternity’. A small number of examples featured actively defensive architecture. Blind passages were constructed inside some pyramids to confuse would-be robbers. From the earliest tomb structures, built around 3000 BC, portcullis slabs were lowered after the burial, part of the mechanics of sealing the tomb. Deep shafts in many tombs in the Valley of the Kings served both a magical purpose – to…

Poisoning his brother Nero's earliest alleged crime was the poisoning of his step-brother, Britannicus. As the natural son of Claudius, the previous emperor, Britannicus may have been expected to assume power. Unfortunately for him, however, he was only 13 when his father died in AD 54. And so it was Nero, whom Claudius had adopted as his son in AD 50, who became emperor. Nero, we are told, was wary of his step-brother, fearing that he might go on to threaten his position. And so, at a dinner in early AD 55, Nero took matters into his own hands, apparently poisoning Britannicus's drink. When the boy was taken ill, the emperor assured everyone that he had suffered an epileptic fit and would recover. Britannicus died later that night. Causing the…

The King of Kadesh knew that he had gambled both his position and his life. Not only had he instigated a revolt against the Egyptian pharaoh, Thutmosis III, but he had also allied with Egypt's enemy, the kingdom of Mitanni. More perilous still, he had left the safety of his own stronghold in Syria. In the spring of 1457 BC, the king had led an army south to the fortress city of Megiddo on the outskirts of the Jezreel Valley in what is now northern Israel. And there he formed an alliance with the prince of Megiddo, another disgruntled vassal of the Egyptian empire. Their combined Canaanite army numbered perhaps 20,000 soldiers. The rebel commanders were confident in victory. Their scouts had informed them that Thutmosis had left Egypt at…

It was the campaign season of AD 172, and one of Emperor Marcus Aurelius's legions found itself staring into the face of disaster. After a series of hard-fought battles along the Roman empire's north-eastern borders, the Roman soldiers found themselves holed up in enemy territory surrounded by a hostile group known as the Quadi. The legion put up a good fight but it had a problem: a chronic lack of water. The Quadi were confident that, if they kept the enemy enclosed, thirst would soon overcome them. And the Quadi's confidence appeared to be justified. The sun beat down unrelentingly. Water began to run out. “The Romans,” Cassius Dio tells us, “were in a terrible plight from fatigue, wounds, the heat of the sun, and thirst, and so could neither…

✗ FALSE The ancient Egyptian concept of post-mortem judgment is illustrated by a scene in the funerary composition known as the Book of the Dead, first written on papyrus during the 16th century BC. This depicts the heart of the deceased being weighed on a set of scales against a feather representing maat – the concepts of truth, order and justice. It is often assumed that, for this reason, the heart had to be kept in place in the body during mummification, while the other internal organs might be removed and placed in containers that became known to early Egyptologists as canopic jars. But what of the brain? According to popular perception, this wasn't even afforded the respect of being placed in a jar. Instead, so we've been led to…

✓ TRUE ✓ ALSO TRUE The Egyptian dead have been used for purposes they could never have imagined – and would probably have feared. Indeed, many modern treatments of mummified remains make tomb robbery seem the preferred option. For a mummy left untouched for thousands of years, a museum was in some ways a stable destination – if not one where it could be guaranteed to stay intact. Scientific examination of mummies has included dissection, in some cases resulting in various parts of one body being placed into hundreds of sample jars across several institutions. Other desecrations have been rather more commercial. Pulverised Egyptian mummified bodies and bandages were used to produce a deep earthy brown pigment favoured by artists of the 19th century. ‘Mummy brown’ paint was commonly found…

Rising out of the sands of the Marv Dasht in south-west Iran, the citadel of Persepolis is one of the great sites of antiquity, and one of the best-preserved royal palaces of the ancient near east. Darius the Great began the construction of the palace around 515 BC, and it was greatly added to by Xerxes and each of the successive Achaemenid monarchs. It was still in the process of being built when, in 330 BC, Alexander of Macedon (the Great) burned it to the ground. The buildings were built of locally quarried stone, although the craftsmen and enslaved people who worked on the site were drawn from all over Persia's vast empire – some 30,000 cuneiform tablets (the so-called Persepolis Fortification and Treasury texts) attest to the presence of…

STEP 1 Select your site The mighty Acropolis provided the firmest of foundations for Athenian people-power “Democracy,” as Winston Churchill famously observed, “is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” And if any city can lay claim to being the cradle of this ‘least imperfect’ method of ordering society, then it is surely Athens. The Greek capital is, after all, where a form of democracy worthy of the name was first invented, where it was taken furthest, and where it lasted longest in the ancient world. And that democracy was very much the product of Athens’ location. Two-and-a-half millennia ago, Athens was the largest town in a region known as Attica, a pocket of south-east Greece that was roughly the size of…