Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2019 i National Geographic History

Wearing gold slippers and a lavender silk robe, physician Franz Anton Mesmer moved slowly around the silent, dimly lit room while waving a metal wand. A baquet, a large oak tub of magnetized water, sat in the middle of the richly appointed salon. Mesmer’s patients surrounded the baquet and pressed its protruding metal rods to the afflicted areas of their bodies. Ethereal notes of a glass harmonica, its sound resembling that of clinking glasses, tinkled in the incense-filled air. After a flick of his wand or a touch of his hand, some of Mesmer’s patients fell into trances, cathartic and curative “crises” that could resemble violent convulsions, fits of laughter, or piercing shrieks. Theory Becomes Practice Mesmer’s patients fell into trances, curative “crises” that resembled fits of laughter, convulsions, or…

CIRCA 7400 B.C. People begin settling at Çatalhöyük (in present-day Turkey). The land is abundant with natural resources and well suited for agriculture. CIRCA 6700 B.C. Çatalhöyük rapidly grows in size and population. During the 2,000 years the site is occupied, the settlement will expand to 34 acres and peak at roughly 8,000 people. CIRCA 6500 B.C. Over the centuries Çatalhöyük residents establish a community of mud-brick homes, tightly clustered together. A vibrant religious and artistic tradition develops. CIRCA 5900 B.C. New settlement patterns emerge at Çatalhöyük on a neighboring mound to the west and the surrounding plain. Its egalitarian society continues to grow and thrive. CIRCA 5500-5100 B.C. Technological changes come to Çatalhöyük in the form of decorated pottery, an advance associated with the Copper Age. CIRCA 5100-5000 B.C.…

One of the most striking ancient wall paintings found in Çatalhöyük shows headless human figures alongside a giant bird, believed to be a vulture (left). Depictions of birds like this one have been found on other objects from Çatalhöyük. This scene may show a funerary ritual, in which the dead were placed on the rooftops, out of reach of other carnivores. There, their bodies would be picked clean by the scavenging vultures. This process, known as excarnation, could have taken a matter of hours and would have left behind only bones. People would then retrieve these remains, wrap or bind them, and bury them beneath the floors of their homes. Researchers theorize this placement was believed to keep a dead person’s soul nearby and has been documented elsewhere in Anatolia…

THIS SCULPTURE is one of the ones that seem to have been buried beneath the Sacred Way in antiquity, where it was found in a votive deposit along with other offerings. It is a chryselephantine (ivory and gold) statue that many believe represents the god Apollo. The face is charred from a fire that seems to have led to the Sanctuary of Delphi being rebuilt in the sixth or fifth century b.c. It is believed that the Apollo figure is a creation from a workshop in Ionia (in present-day Turkey), and some scholars consider it to be part of the magnificent offerings made by Croesus, the wealthy king of Lydia in the sixth century b.c. The survival and burial of Apollo and the other pieces is due to their sacred…

CIRCA A.D. 68 St. Mark, founder of the Egyptian church, is martyred in Alexandria, according to Coptic and wider Christian tradition. 303 Emperor Diocletian orders the persecution of Christians. Large numbers of Egyptian Christians die in the Coptic “age of martyrs.” CIRCA 356 The Desert Father St. Anthony the Great dies. His monastic model is adopted across the Christian world. 380 Although Nicene Christianity has become the state religion of the empire, church leaders clash over doctrine. 451 Following the Council of Chalcedon, the Copts split with much of the Christian world in a bitter dispute about the divine nature of Christ. 642 Alexandria is conquered by an Arab army. Christians are initially tolerated by their new Muslim masters, but Egypt steadily Islamizes.…

1473 Nicolaus Copernicus is born in Torun, Poland. After his father’s death, his uncle, Lucas Watzenrode, a senior cleric, cares for Nicolaus. 1491 Copernicus begins his education in Krakow. Later, he will study law and medicine at Italian universities while also learning astronomy. 1503 Copernicus returns to his homeland and works for his uncle, who has become the Bishop of Warmia, a region near the Baltic Sea. 1512 His uncle dies. Soon after, handwritten copies of Copernicus’s Commentariolus, are circulated to a select group of scholars. 1533 German humanist J. A. Widmannstetter lectures on the Copernican theory at the Vatican during an audience with Pope Clement VII. 1540 G. J. Rheticus, a follower of the elderly Copernicus, persuades him to publish a one-volume summary of his working theories. 1543 One…

As Copernicus wrestled with his scientific ideas, his duties as a church administrator led him to develop an important theory of economics. In the 1520s, war between the Teutonic knightly order and Poland affected Frombork and Warmia. Political instability had led to gold and silver being reduced in the coinage, which in turn led to dramatic inflation. In 1528 Copernicus published an influential treatise warning on how debasing coins would lead to the disappearance of high-value, “good” coins from circulation, with baleful economic effects. The phenomenon was also described by the English banker Thomas Gresham, and the Gresham-Copernicus law (as it is now known) is often summarized as “Bad money drives out good.”…

Beethoven spent the summer of 1802 in the village of Heiligenstädt. In an unsent letter to his brothers, he expressed in harrowing detail the impact of his growing deafness as a composer: “Ah, how could I admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others.” The Heiligenstädt Testament, as it is now known, is written in a tone of acceptance: “With joy I hasten towards death—If it comes before I have had the chance to develop all my artistic capacities, it will still be coming too soon despite my harsh fate. “ On other occasions, however, Beethoven took a more positive attitude. A year before, broaching the topic of his deafness in a letter to a friend, he wrote: “I will seize…

William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer created publishing empires through sensationalism, but neither one invented this style of storytelling. Instead, Hearst, who built the nation’s largest news conglomerate out of the San Francisco newspaper his father gave him in 1887, and Pulitzer, a poor Hungarian immigrant with an eye for a good story, followed the legacy of James Gordon Bennett. Fifty years earlier, Bennett won readers for the New York Herald with his gruesome and fact-challenged crime coverage. AFTER A GRISLY ax murder at a brothel, Bennett ran an interview with the madam that is widely believed to have been concocted by the brash editor. While others may have invented sensationalism, Hearst and Pulitzer perfected it; their craft became known as yellow journalism, which got its name from a comic…

Opulence of Opet One of the most vibrant of all ancient Egyptian festivals, the feast of Opet occurred every spring in Thebes. Joyful crowds watched ostentatious processionals as boats dedicated to Amun were carried to the temple on the shoulders of priests in gratitude for the life-giving Nile. Richest Man in Rome Marcus Licinius Crassus purchased his power and governed with Julius Caesar and Pompey as part of the First Triumvirate. A hunger for glory and thirst for gold led to his downfall, and pushed the Roman Republic into civil war. The Unhappy Empress Elizabeth of Austria, also known as Sisi, was famous for her beauty throughout 19th-century Europe. But her good looks masked deep dissatisfaction with her husband’s overbearing family, the rigid protocols of life at court, and the…

MORE THAN 5,000 YEARS AGO an arrow struck and killed a man as he tramped through the Alps. Preserved where he fell, his mummified body lay in the ice until its discovery by two hikers in 1991. Nicknamed for the Ötztal Alpine range where he was found, Ötzi gave scholars rich insights into daily life of people in the Copper Age. Analysis of Ötzi’s remains revealed the kinds of weapons they carried, the food they ate, and the clothing they wore. Forensic scientists have joined the team to explore Ötzi’s death—from the cause of his demise to the Copper Age conflicts that could end in murder.…

1734 Franz Mesmer, the son of a humble forest warden, is born in Iznang, a small town next to Lake Constance, Germany. 1768 Two years after receiving his doctorate, Mesmer marries Anna Maria von Posch, a wealthy widow. Their Vienna home serves as his consulting room. 1778 After his controversial treatment of a blind pianist is deemed a failure, Mesmer leaves Vienna and moves to Paris. 1784 A scientific commission concludes that Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism lacks scientific basis. 1815 Mesmer dies in anonymity in the German town of Meersburg.…

TO CONVINCE Roman leader Mark Antony that Egypt possessed an affluence that placed it above conquest, Cleopatra wagered that she could give the most expensive banquet ever known. As Pliny the Elder detailed in his first-century A.D. work Natural History, Cleopatra removed one of her pearl earrings, dropped it in a goblet of vinegar placed before her, and drank it. The astonished Antony declined his dinner—the matching pearl—and admitted defeat. Pliny’s anecdote was considered credible in antiquity but is deemed legendary by many modern scholars. Whether the fate of Cleopatra’s pearl is fact or fable, Antony’s “meal” was reportedly given to Rome where it was cut in half and made into earrings for a statue ofVenusin the Pantheon.…

AS WELL AS adapting symbols such as the ankh, Coptic Christianity may also have been influenced by ancient pharaonic liturgies. The revered fourth- and fifth-century monastic reformer St. Shenute decreed that novice monks should recite the following covenant: I will not defile my body in any way, I will not steal, I will not bear false witness, I will not lie, I will not do anything deceitful secretly . . . THERE IS A STRIKING parallel with the ancient mortuary texts known as the Book of the Dead, which took form around the 16th century B.C. In the long Negative Confession, the deceased must swear to Osiris the following lines: “I have not committed sin . . . I have not uttered lies . . . I have not polluted…

Beethoven was not the only composer deeply affected by Napoleon. Following the general’s march on Vienna in 1797, Joseph Haydn wrote his Missa in Angustiis (Mass for Troubled Times). At its 1798 premiere, news of the victory of British admiral Horatio Nelson over Napoleon at the Battle of the Nile was filtering back to Europe. Haydn admired Nelson, and in time the piece became known as the Nelson Mass. By 1813, when Napoleon’s star had waned, Beethoven also decided to honor a British hero. Declaring his allegiance to Napoleon’s nemesis, he wrote his 15-minute Battle Symphony commemorating the victory of Arthur Wellesley (the future first Duke of Wellington) over the French at the Battle of Vitoria in 1813. The Battle Symphony was popular in its time but is now regarded…

LESS THAN 50 years later, the Spanish claimed portions of the Earth many times the size of their homeland thanks to conquistadores like Hernán Cortés in Central America and Francisco Pizarro in South America. Vasco Núñez de Balboa thought so grandly he claimed all of the Pacific Ocean for Spain. In 1511 Spain started the permanent settlement of Cuba. Within a century, enslavement, disease, and starvation had decimated the local Taino culture. Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer sailing for the Spanish, arrived in the Philippine Islands in 1521. The islands would be named for Spanish king Philip II and settled in 1565 by a mere 500 Spaniards who imposed their language and customs on the inhabitants. But by the end of the 19th century, having lagged behind in the industrial…

Known by ancient writers as the “land of a thousand cities,” the Persian province of Bactria lies in what is now part of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. In the fourth century B.C. Alexander the Great conquered the region as he pushed his empire eastward. He married a Bactrian princess and founded many cities there where a blended Hellenistic and Asiatic culture would blossom over the centuries that followed. In the 19th century European explorers yearned to find one of these cities. They ventured deep into Bactrian territory, following the Amu Darya, the river the Greeks historically identified as the Oxus. A British army captain, John Wood, visited a promising village, Ay Khanom, at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains (near the border with modern-day Tajikistan). Locals informed him that…

THE DISCOVERY in northern Israel of beer production some 13,000 years ago falls into the same timescale as the oldest known traces of bread yet found—between 14,600 and 11,600 years ago. The traces of flatbread, found in Jordan in 2018 and made from wild cereals, were the product of the same Natufian culture that brewed the Raqefet beer. Before the find, the earliest evidence of breadmaking had been dated to about 9,000 years ago in Turkey. Taken together, these finds are leading scholars to consider that crude methods of bread- and beermaking brought such nutritional and social enhancements to communities that they spurred efforts toward ever more refined cultivation of plants and farming.…

FRANZ MESMER was unable to obtain praise or recognition from the medical and scientific communities for his cures, but his patients gave him glowing testimonials. They described how Mesmer, confident and charismatic, radiated a comforting serenity. His theory that a universal magnetic fluid governed the human body was wildly inaccurate. But Mesmer believed his powerful magnetism could restore health, and in many cases, his confidence and the trust of his patients resulted in relief. Rather than revealing the powers of animal magnetism, Mesmer’s experiments were some of the earliest documentations of the placebo effect, when treatments work because patients expect them to.…

1891 AFTER A DECADE of negotiations, Greece grants France exclusive access to excavate at Delphi. The village of Kastri must be relocated before excavation can begin. 1892-94 THE “BIG DIG” begins under the direction of Théophile Homolle. The Altar of the Chians, the Athenian Treasury, and the statues of Kleobis and Biton are some notable early finds. 1896-98 A BRONZE statue of a charioteer is found in the sanctuary of Apollo. In 1897 the theater and the stadium are excavated, and in 1898, work begins on the Tholos of Delphi. 1903 A MUSEUM opens adjacent to the dig site in Delphi to protect, house, and exhibit artifacts from the site, which span more than a thousand years of occupation at Delphi.…

ON MAY 30, 1893, Théophile Homolle documented an exciting discovery in his excavation journal: “We found the early statue of Apollo (?), which lacks only its feet. The legs have been preserved down to the knee. The statue was found to the NW of the Athenian Treasury, very nearby, set into a modern wall and resting on the polygonal wall that heads off from the Sacred Way to the SE of the Treasury (covered in inscriptions at this point) and continues westward.” Next to the entry, in the margin, the name Kleobis is written in pencil, correcting the initial identification of the statue. The statue’s base, identifying the sculptor, appeared on November 30, and the next year, on May 28, 1894, the statue of Biton was found. In Greek myth…

Rumors were circulating in the 1530s that Nicolaus Copernicus, a cathedral cleric in a small Polish city, had written a revolutionary theory on the cosmos. To the frustration of many, however, the secretive clergyman was refusing to publish it. Curiosity came from many quarters. One letter, written in 1536, begged for more information. It praised Copernicus’s “new theory of the Universe according to which the Earth moves and the Sun occupies the basic, and hence, central, position.”Its author was Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg, a prince of the Catholic Church. By placing the sun at the center, Copernicus’s idea overturned the ideas devised by the second-century astronomer Ptolemy. In Ptolemy’s theory the sun and planets orbited the Earth, which was regarded as the orthodox model across the Christian world. Through decades…

THE FIRST TELESCOPES were developed in the early 1600s. Copernicus was limited to three instruments that the mathematician Ptolemy had described in the second century A.D. Two of these, the triquetrum (upper right) and the quadrant (lower right), were used to measure the height and position of the sun and other heavenly bodies. The third, the armillary sphere (left), shows the apparent movement of the heavens around the Earth. After the Copernican theory gained ground, armillary spheres were made to reflect the sun-centered model.…

As a young performer in Bonn, Beethoven was steeped in the music of Joseph Haydn. The Bonn elector library held more than 100 scores by the Austrian. When Beethoven met Haydn in 1790, it must have felt like a brush with greatness. As Beethoven prepared to move to Vienna, his patron, Count Waldstein, assured him that “[there] you will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.” After his arrival in Vienna, the young German composer took lessons with the maestro. According to some accounts, Beethoven chafed at Haydn’s rigorous tasks, and secretly took classes from other teachers. Even so, his influence was considerable. The elder composer taught him the expressive possibilities of the string quartet, a genre that Beethoven later took in a direction that baffled his…

1814 Spanish king Ferdinand VII is restored following Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain. He attempts to reassert control in the South American colonies, where trust in Spain has eroded. 1819 Led by Simón Bolívar, the short-lived Gran Colombia begins to break away from Spain. By 1830 Gran Colombia will split into what is now Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador. 1822 The United States recognizes Mexico, Chile, Peru, and the United Provinces of the River Plate (this later split to form parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay). 1833-1876 Three civil wars further weaken Spain. Distracted by its domestic woes, Spain struggles to contain an independence movement in Cuba. 1898 Following a short war, Cuba is free of Spain; the United States takes possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.…

A PLAQUE outside Afghanistan’s National Museum in Kabul reads: “A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.” The words are of particular relevance to the museum, which was founded in 1919 and reflects Afghanistan’s rich, complex history that stretches back through centuries. Bombed and looted in the 1990s, the museum was targeted by the Taliban regime, whose agents destroyed many of the pre-Islamic artifacts in its collections. A few pieces from Ay Khanom (shown here) escaped this fate.…