Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2017 i National Geographic History

Samurai were a caste of warriors prevalent in Japanese society from the 12th to the 19th century. Respected for their military prowess, swordsmanship, and discipline, they valued honor, courage, and loyalty above all. Political change brought about the end of their era, but the samurai did not go down without a fight. They were led by Saigo Takamori, who both embraced and fought the forces of modernism and became one of Japan’s great national heroes in the process. Foreign Influences In 1852 Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy embarked on a mission to open Japan to the United States and the rest of the world. In an effort to keep out foreign influences and protect its culture, Japan had been under self-imposed isolation. Faced with Perry’s warships, the Japanese…

a The Via Salaria connected Rome with the Adriatic; it is named after the salt once transported along its route. b The Via Labicana was the road to Labicum and central Italy. At its third mile from Rome lay the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter. c The Via Ostensis connected Rome to Ostia, the city’s principal Mediterranean port, 16 miles away. d The Via Appia was considered “the queen of roads” and ran south of Italy to Brundisium, where two pillars marked its terminus. 2 Nile River The desert through which Moses wandered for 40 years is drawn in great detail to the east of the Nile. 3 Constantinople The empire’s eastern capital is marked by an armed woman beside a statue of the emperor Constantine. 4 Antioch This ancient…

Semiramis of myth was a ruler who not only governed with strength but also made legendary use of her beauty to govern. Echoing a first-century A.D. work by the Roman author Valerius Maximus, 14th-century Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio relates how the queen faced very serious civil unrest in Babylon. Having received news of a revolt while getting dressed, she “threw aside her comb and instantly rose in anger from her womanly pursuits, took up arms, and led her troops to a siege of the powerful city. She did not finish arranging her hair until she had forced the surrender of that powerful place.” To Boccaccio, her decisiveness in crisis exemplifies the queen’s fitness to rule. He ascribes traditional masculine qualities to her and even describes how she handles weapons with…

Once an obelisk had been excavated, there came the dangerous task of transporting it. When the barge reached its destination along the flooded Nile, it would be moored until the water level dropped enough for the obelisk to be unloaded. Another large ramp would be built at the site where the obelisk was to be erected. The workmen dragged the monolith up the ramp using ropes, rollers, and levers, to where it would be placed on a pedestal. There is disagreement as to whether it was then that the inscriptions were engraved on the obelisk or whether that was done in the quarry. The final placement of the obelisk required hundreds of people to raise the stone into place. 1 PREPARATION Two pedestals a are placed in front of the…

Circa 3000 B.C. The Bronze Age Minoan civilization emerges on the island of Crete. It becomes a great maritime trading power, forging commercial ties with Anatolia, Greece, Egypt, and even Sicily. Circa 2000 B.C. The first palaces are built and maritime commerce with the islands of the Aegean increases as the Cretan upper class start to trade high-quality goods for luxury items. 1700 B.C. Earthquake damage causes the Cretans to rebuild and create highly decorated complexes at the beginning of the Neopalatial period. The first frescoes appear, and trade flourishes. Circa 1600 B.C. The palace of Knossos in Crete is built. The pinnacle of Minoan architecture, it boasts vast numbers of rooms and splendid frescoes, whose style and motifs are found at other sites around the Aegean. Circa 1450 B.C.…

BY THE 15TH century B.C. the Minoan civilization was in decline, and the role of regional power in the eastern Mediterranean was passing to the Mycenaean Greeks. Located on the Peloponnesian peninsula in the south of modern Greece, the fortified city of Mycenae was—according to tradition—the court of the legendary King Agamemnon, commander of the Greek armies at Troy. Mycenae owed a great deaI to the Cretan culture that preceded it. Many of the goods found in Mycenae’s grave shafts are decorated with Minoan motifs: griffins, sphinxes, butterflies, and bull’s heads. These objects were not plundered from Minoan sites but made by Mycenaean craftsmen, sometimes with local variations. They reflect the deep influence that the earlier Cretan culture left on the forerunner of classical Greece.…

46 B.C. Julius Caesar organizes a naval battle on an artificial lake in the Campus Martius, the first recorded naumachia in Roman history. 2 B.C. Emperor Augustus holds a large-scale naumachia on the right bank of the Tiber to celebrate the inauguration of the Temple of Mars Ultor. A.D. 52 Emperor Claudius stages a naumachia on Fucine Lake in central Italy, shortly before it is drained. Some 19,000 combatants perform in the battle. A.D. 57 Nero holds the first of two naumachiae in his reign in an stone and wood amphitheater he had built. The second battle is staged there in 64. A.D. 80 Roman sources mention two naumachiae held to celebrate Rome’s new amphitheater, the Colosseum. A.D. 109 To celebrate Rome’s triumph in the Dacian wars, Emperor Trajan stages…

THE NAUMACHIA organized for Claudius on Fucine Lake in A.D. 52 was modeled after Augustus’ extravaganza half a century earlier, but it did not go off as smoothly. A silver Triton emerged from the center of the lake through some ingenious mechanical means. To the wonder of the crowds watching from hillsides all around, he sounded a trumpet to begin the battle. Before it started, the combatants cried, “Hail Caesar! We who are about to die salute you!” According to historian Suetonius, writing about 70 years later, the emperor replied, “Or not.” The convicts interpreted his words as a pardon and would not fight. Enraged at their reaction, Claudius leapt out of his seat and paced from one side of the lake to the other with his “ridiculous tottering gait.”…

The Christian religion faced one of its most significant controversies thanks to a thunderstorm. In 1505 a promising law student at the University of Erfurt in Germany changed the course of his life after surviving a terrible ordeal. The young scholar’s name was Martin Luther. The weather set him on a collision course with Rome and would trigger a crisis of faith in Western Christianity. Luther came from a well-heeled family in the central region of Saxony. Luther was born in Eisleben in November 1483. Shortly after his birth, the family moved about 10 miles away to the town of Mansfeld.A successful businessman in copper mining and refining, his father, Hans, had young Martin educated at a local Latin school and later at schools in Magdeburg and Eisenach. In 1501,…

Viktor Chernov, a member of the Provisional Government toppled by the October Revolution, wrote: “Lenin’s devotion to the revolutionary cause permeates his entire being.” His diagnosis was shared by friend and foe alike. BORN Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, Lenin grew up in a well-to-do family in a city some 550 miles east of Moscow. Vladimir’s elder brother, Aleksandr, proved that revolution was in the family’s DNA. A participant in a clumsy attempt to assassinate Tsar Alexander III in 1887, Aleksandr Ulyanov was executed at age 21. It seems probable that this incident inf luenced both Lenin’s worldview and his (later) distaste for individual acts of terrorism as a political tool. LENIN was also politically rebellious; he was arrested in St. Petersburg for sedition and exiled to Siberia in 1897. The next…

In late spring 1968 archaeologist Mario Napoli and his team made a discovery that would overturn scholarly understanding of Greek art. Napoli’s team was digging in Italy at a necropolis near the Greek site of Poseidonia, later renamed Paestum during Roman times. “The lid of tomb number four was lifted,” Napoli recalled, “and after two and a half millennia of darkness, sunshine lit up the marvelous frescoes on its internal walls.” These paintings were remarkable enough—vivid and cheerful scenes of a symposium, or Greek banquet. But what made the scholars catch their breath was the work of art on the lid: Against a white background with decorative palm fronds at each corner, an extended male figure—his body a vibrant streak of color—dives from a tower headfirst into a river. The…

1828 Saigo Takamori is born in Satsuma (modern-day Kagoshima) to a modest, but proud, samurai family. 1858 Following the death of his feudal lord, he is twice exiled to remote islands where he devotes himself to poetry, calligraphy, and meditation. 1868 Saigo leads the defeat of the shogunal forces in Edo (today’s Tokyo), bringing about the Meiji Revolution. 1873 Disillusioned by state reforms, Saigo retires from politics. His military academy in Satsuma will become a focus of dissent. 1877 Saigo’s rebellion is crushed. Legends suggest he carries out seppuku.…

Novel. Dumas’s tale presents the mysterious masked man as Louis XIV’s twin brother, cruelly hidden from sight. Theater. A poster advertising an adaptation of Dumas’s book in a London theater in 1899. It was performed 69 times in three months. Cinema. The 1929 movie directed by Allan Dwan is a forerunner to the swashbuckling 1998 film The Man in the Iron Mask.…

There is a dark side to the legend of Semiramis. Some authors presented her as a dangerous sexual temptress, including the fifth-century theologian Orosius, who declared her so corrupt that she legalized incest. In his great 14th-century poem The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri draws on these traditions, including the cosmopolitan nature of Semiramis’s realms (“Empress . . . of many languages”). Dante places the queen in the second circle of hell, reserved for those who had committed the sin of lust, whom he likens to flocks of birds. With Semiramis are other temptresses: Helen of Troy and Cleopatra. Dante’s guide, the poet Virgil, describes the Assyrian queen with these words: The empress was of many languages. To sensual vices she was so abandoned, That lustful she made licit in her…

25TH CENTURY B.C. The 5th-dynasty pharaohs USERKAF AND NEUSERRE each build a sun temple in Abusir dedicated to the god Ra. An obelisk-style structure is erected in the courtyard. 20TH CENTURY B.C. In the Middle Kingdom the 12th-dynasty pharaoh SESOSTRIS I orders the construction of obelisks at the Temple of Ra in Heliopolis, one of which still stands. Another, 42 feet high, is built near Al Fayyum. 15TH CENTURY B.C. During the NEW KINGDOM, Thutmose I erects two obelisks at Karnak. His successor, Hatshepsut, builds another two. Thutmose III constructs several obelisks that will be moved to other cities around the world centuries later. 13TH CENTURY B.C. RAMSES II builds more obelisks during his reign than any other pharaoh. One of his twin obelisks at the temple of Luxor will…

FOUR TIMES more powerful than the devastating Krakatoa volcanic eruption of 1883, the volcano on Thera (modern-day Santorini) exploded around the 16th century B.C. It buried cities, killing thousands, and—some say—led to the collapse of Crete. Scientists point out that Crete was spared from the immediate consequences of the ash cloud, which moved away from the island, but the eruption’s long-term effects may have weakened Crete, leading to its swift downfall a few generations later. Passed down through time, stories of the Minoan collapse are believed to be the genesis of the lost city of Atlantis as described by the Greek philosopher Plato circa 360 B.C. Plato described a prosperous island that the gods swiftly destroyed in a night of fire and earthquakes, sending the civilization to the bottom of…

1483 Martin Luther is born in the small town of Eisleben in Saxony, Germany. 1505 Luther leaves law school and enters the Augustinian order in the city of Erfurt. He stands out for his intellect and uncompromising piety. 1510 Luther travels to Rome, where he is scandalized by the corruption and profanity that he sees at the religious sites. 1517 On October 31 Luther ignites a firestorm, publishing his Disputation on the Power of Indulgences—better known as the Ninety-Five Theses. 1520 In June Pope Leo X issues a papal bull calling Luther’s writings “heretical, scandalous, offensive to pious ears.” Luther publicly burns a copy in December. 1521 The pope excommunicates Luther. In April, at the Diet of Worms, Luther refuses to recant his ideas. He subsequently takes refuge in Wartburg…

THIS ALTARPIECE by Lucas Cranach the Younger was made for the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul in Weimar in 1555. It illustrates the central tenet of Martin Luther’s ideology: that salvation is attained only through personal faith and the reading of the Holy Scriptures. 1 Luther appears, bottom right, holding a Bible and pointing to a passage from the First Letter of St. John: “The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” 2 A stream of blood from Christ Crucified reaches the artist’s father, 3 Lucas Cranach the Elder, who represents those “true” believers who receive salvation without any kind of mediation from a priest or the Catholic hierarchy. Beside him, 4 John the Baptist points to Christ and his representation as the 5 Lamb of…

Tsar Nicholas II Romanov—born Nikolay Aleksandrovich in 1868—had grown up in the shadow of his father, Alexander III. A staunch opponent of democracy, the bearded, burly Alexander was known for his habit of crashing through locked doors and being able to bend silver coins with his powerful thumb. His son worshipped his father, even though Alexander openly regarded his heir as a weakling and nicknamed him “girlie.” WHENNicholas ascended to the imperial throne in 1894, he understood little of modern Russia, whose ever more educated, urban, and restless society was on a collision course with his autocratic instincts. Russia’s 1904-05 war with Japan ended in humiliation and revolution in the streets of St. Petersburg. The cocktail of war and revolt would prove his undoing a decade later, even though Russia…

AS LENIN OBSERVED WORLD WAR I FROM EXILE, the Germans observed the deteriorating domestic situation of its enemy Russia. They proposed to allow Lenin to return to Russia in late March in the hopes that his presence would lead to more chaos and further weaken the country. Fellow Russian exiles viewed Lenin as a traitor for making a deal with Russia’s enemy, but Lenin, his wife, and a group of fellow émigrés made the voyage anyway. They boarded a “sealed train” that would travel through Switzerland to Sweden. On arrival at Petrograd’s Finland Station on April 3, Lenin undermined the Provisional Government by declaring, “All power to the soviets.” Germany’s gamble that Lenin would increase destabilization in Russia paid off. Later, British prime minister Winston Churchill assessed the move: “They…

most favored among European left-wing revolutionary thinkers. It was defined by “historical materialism,” an idea that argued that society and its political structures are shaped by the economic reality of the time. Analyzing the economic—and therefore, social—evolution of humanity, Marx considered that he could scientifically predict the later stages of capitalism. First, a revolution would be led by the bourgeoisie. Then, a revolution led by the workers would establish a dictatorship that would eventually lead to communism and freedom for all. Even though Lenin would become an ardent follower of Marxist doctrine, he would be an impatient one. Marx’s prophecy contemplated the eventual downfall of ripe, capitalist societies—not budding, semifeudal ones like Russia in the early 20th century. In 1917 Lenin quickly realized that the revolution could not wait to…

WHO WOULD SERVE a rich Egyptian after his or her death? Egyptians believed that body and soul remained united, so they took care to bury the dead with ushabtis: an army of figurines who would come to life to provide the tomb’s occupant with all he or she might need in the afterlife. The cache of 1,000 ushabti figurines found in Userhat’s tomb—a selection of which appears in the image below—are carved in a variety of materials, including faience, terra-cotta, and wood. Once the soul of the deceased had been deemed pure, they reached Aaru, or paradise. Here, the ushabti fulfilled very specific functions, such as providing food, drink, and care. Aaru was envisaged as a land as rich and fertile as the Nile Valley itself, so these figurines would…

STANDING SIX FEET TALL, Saigo Takamori would not be considered an especially tall man now. But he was a giant compared with the Japanese average at that time, an effect heightened by his broad neck, square shoulders, and large, penetrating eyes with bristly eyebrows. He was known for outbursts of misanthropy—“that herd of wild beasts who call themselves human beings”—yet he could also be modest and self-effacing. His ideal was to be “a man who is utterly unconcerned with his life, fame, rank or money.” A complex man for complex times.…

Obelisks were hewn directly out of rock—an extremely arduous task that involved considerable labor. It is thought that at least 140 workmen worked 12-hour days for seven months on the “Unfinished Obelisk” at the Aswan quarry. The process of carving a monolith began by selecting the best quality stone for the project. The outline of the future obelisk was sketched out. And then the cutting began . . . 1 CUTTING OUT The workmen dig a trench some two feet wide in the rock, which gives them enough room to squat and work. The tools they use to carve out and polish the monolith are balls made out of diorite, a volcanic stone that is much harder than other rock types; wooden mallets; and copper (later, bronze) tools. 2 DIGGING…

MINOAN CULTURE left its mark across the Aegean. The map (above) shows the Minoan trading routes of the Bronze Age, and their exports. At Philacopi on the island of Melos there are architectural remnants, pottery, and frescoes in Cretan style, similar to those found at Akrotiri on Thera. Obsidian is abundant on Melos and one of the minerals used to produce the sharp tools widely used by the Cretans. Farther north, there is evidence of Minoan influence in the settlement of Agia Irini on the island of Kea. The island lies close to the silver mines of Laurium on the Attic coast, an important site on the western Minoan trading route. In the eastern Aegean, Minoan pottery has been found on various islands of the Dodecanese, especially in Rhodes where…

In January 1905 revolution erupted in Russia when the tsar’s forces fired on and killed hundreds of protesters in St. Petersburg; similar strikes and protests followed throughout Russia. The Revolution of 1905 came to an end when Nicholas II placated the people with reform, including a parliament and a national constitution. For the next decade, several political factions continued to clash with each other as the monarchy clung to power. Bolsheviks like Trotsky and Lenin honed their ideas and waited in prison and exile for the next phase. In 1917 another revolution would arrive. 1 LIBERALS: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY, LED BY PAVEL MILYUKOV Founded during the Revolution of 1905, the CDP was dominated by liberal aristocrats and middle-class professionals who aimed to replace the autocracy of the tsars with a…

ESTABLISHED in early December 1917, the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage—Cheka, for short, in Russian—would be, according to Lenin, “the Party’s sword and shield,” dispensing “revolutionary justice” wherever needed. It answered only to Lenin and it soon became one of the most feared organizations in Russia. Lenin wanted a “staunch, proletarian Jacobin” at its helm, and he found it in Feliks Dzerzhinski (above). The first director of the Cheka had few doubts about his job: “I do not seek forms of justice. We are not in need of justice. It is war now—face to face, a fight to the finish. Life or Death.” And it was usually the latter. This body would survive in many forms and eventually evolve into one of the Soviet Union’s most infamous agencies:…