Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2019 i National Geographic History

Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered. Pithy, precise, parallel: The phrase was first found in the works of second-century A.D. historians Suetonius and Plutarch when they wrote about Julius Caesar’s military successes. “Veni, vidi, vici” appears in their accounts of Caesar’s lightning-fast, absolute victory over the kingdom of Pontus in 47 B.C. Rome rewarded Caesar with a triumph for that victory, and history rewarded him with something far more enduring: a catchphrase. When you start to look, “Veni, vidi, vici” (or its English equivalent) turns up everywhere. A 1724 Handel opera and the 1984 movie “Ghostbusters” both reference it. Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole have all crooned “You came, you saw, you conquered me,” in “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You).” Spaghetti Westerns…

THE ANCESTRAL PUEBLOANS who fashioned the tattoo tool were part of the Basketmaker II culture. Their artifacts, dwellings, and artworks have been found across the American Southwest in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. Lasting about a millennium, from 500 B.C. to A.D. 500, the Basketmaker II period coincides with the transition to agriculture. The period gets its name from the abundance of baskets found at archaeological sites. These skillfully woven baskets were often sealed with pine pitch, making them watertight. The baskets could be used in food preparation by placing fire-warmed stones inside to heat food. Later, Ancestral Puebloan peoples began living in cliff dwellings, which still dot the landscape throughout the Southwest.…

IN 1864, Russian artist Konstantin Flavitsky created what would become his most notorious painting, “The Princess Tarakanova, in the Peter and Paul Fortress, at the Time of the Flood.” According to a romanticized legend, Catherine the Great ordered the false princess imprisoned in a cell that was known to flood when the icy waters of the Neva River rose. Flavitsky’s painting allegedly caused a furor among the Russian royal family, who preferred that the story of this particular pretender to the throne remain a closely guarded one. Flavitsky was then forced to claim that his inspiration for the painting had instead been drawn from a novel rather than history.…

1960 As construction of the Aswan High Dam proceeds, UNESCO appeals to the international community to help preserve the monuments of Nubia. 1964 In parallel with the dismantling of other sites, the salvage of Abu Simbel begins. A team begins to cut the structures into more than a thousand blocks. 1966 The temples are successfully dismantled months before their old site floods. Reassembly, which will be completed in 1968, begins on higher ground. 1980 One year after the successful re-grouping of the Philae temple complex on an island, UNESCO formally concludes its Nubia campaign.…

8th century B.C. The Iliad and the Odyssey are composed. These epics will form the basis of classical Greek education. 7th-6th century B.C. Based on works of Homer and Hesiod, education extols moral and physical courage, known as arete. 5th century B.C. The term paideia is first used. The Sophists widen its intellectual scope. Higher education becomes available. Circa 387 B.C. Plato founds his Academy in an olive grove in Athens for the advanced study of philosophy. Circa 380 B.C. Plato writes his Republic. At its heart is a complex vision of educational models, which is still debated today. Circa 335 B.C Aristotle founds his philosophical school at the Lyceum in Athens, dedicated to theoretical and scientific inquiry.…

Despite the informal nature of education for girls, there are references in classical sources to women philosophers. One of the most famous is mentioned in Plato’s Symposium: Diotima, who was lauded by Socrates. She teaches them the philosophical underpinnings of love, in which the wise seek to exchange physical love for more spiritual forms of desire, culminating in the divine. This concept of love greatly influenced medieval and Renaissance thought. Diotima’s words, however, are known only through the reports of male philosophers. Another female philosopher was Axiothea, who, according to the third-century A.D. author Diogenes Laërtius, was so inspired by Plato’s Republic that she went to study under him at the Academy, where she had to dress as a man. However, as with other female philosophers in the classical period,…

NOT ALL VICTORIES resulted in triumphs. If a general won a battle but fell short of the minimum requirements, he could be honored with an ovation, a celebration on a smaller scale. Ovations were still grand parades, but they were missing some of the more elaborate effects of a triumph. Rather than ride in a chariot, the victor would march. Instead of the toga picta that was solid purple and decorated with gold stars, he would wear the toga praetexta, which was white with a broad purple border. On his head he would wear a wreath of myrtle rather than laurel, and instead of sacrificing oxen he’d have to make do with sheep. Marcus Licinius Crassus, who completed the triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey, received an ovation in 71 B.C.…

AFTER DEFEATING the sons of Pompey and their supporters at the Battle of Munda in 45 B.C., Caesar was granted a fifth triumph in October, but this one was more politically complicated than the others. His previous four triumphs celebrated wins over outsiders in Gaul, Egypt, Pontus, and Africa. According to first-century A.D. historian Plutarch, the fifth triumph “vexed the Romans as nothing else had done. For it commemorated no victory over foreign commanders or barbarian kings, but the utter annihilation of the sons and the family of the mightiest of the Romans.” Celebrating the downfall of one of Rome’s most celebrated generals and his family felt disrespectful to many. Caesar’s inability to see how poorly this triumph reflected on him helped hasten his own downfall. Although he was made…

IN 1619 THE ENGLISH were beginning to see success in their early colonization attempts in North America. Thirteen years earlier, in December 1606, the London-based Virginia Company had sent three ships, captained by Christopher Newport, to colonize the eastern coast of North America. On May 14, 1607, he and his all-male passengers arrived on the shores of the James River, in an area ruled by the Powhatan. They were later joined by more settlers, including women, and were able to establish Jamestown as the first successful English settlement in the Americas. By 1619, Virginia had become an established colony; in July it held the first gathering of the General Assembly, marking the formality of law in the young colony, and English settlements began to expand inland.…

BY THE TIME THE ANGOLANS arrived in Virginia, the transatlantic slave trade had been in existance for more than 100 years. As early as 1501, both Portugal and Spain began building up their young colonies in Brazil and Uruguay through slave labor. Other European colonizers soon followed; Great Britain in the 1550s, France in the 1570s, the Netherlands in the 1590s, and Denmark in the 1640s. In the 1500s, the Spanish were the first to bring enslaved Africans to North America as part of their colonization efforts in Florida and the Carolinas. By 1620, close to 520,000 captured and enslaved African men, women, and children had already been sold into chattel slavery by several European nations. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies alone accounted for approximately 475,000 enslaved people.…

THE JOURNEY FROM the west coast of Africa to the European colonies in the Americas, known as the “Middle Passage,” was a hellish experience for African captives. Slave traders packed as many people on their ships as possible, leading to horrific living conditions. Roughly 30 percent died along the way, due to shortages of food and water, disease, abuse, and revolts. The exact number of people who died from each cause is unknown, but scholars estimate that more than one million Africans did not survive the Atlantic crossing.…

IN 1875, MORE THAN A CENTURY AFTER Bruce’s visit to Thamugadi, British diplomat Robert Lambert Playfair (right) described a visit there in his book Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis. He set out under a hospitable Berber guide, appropriately named “Bou Dhiaf, father of guests … who, not without reason, boasts of Roman descent.” The road to the ancient site lay through “country covered with Roman remains. We found our camp pitched in the very centre of the ruined city, which allowed us to devote every hour of our stay to its examination.”…

Empress Catherine II of Russia was no stranger to conspiracies and cabals orchestrated by her enemies, but in the early 1770s, one mysterious woman’s claim to the throne would expose deep insecurities underlying Catherine’s reign. The empress ordered that “Princess Vladimir” (later known as “Princess Tarakanova”) be imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. Although Catherine II is better now known as Catherine the Great, her reign had a rocky start. Empress Elizabeth, before she died in 1762, had named Peter, her nephew and Catherine’s husband, heir to the throne. Six months after her death, a coup, led by Catherine, forced Peter III to abdicate. About a week later, imprisoned in a palace in Ropsha outside of St. Petersburg, Peter died while in the care of Catherine’s…

SINCE 1989, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has launched 12 expeditions on Nikumaroro Island, a remote atoll in the Pacific. They have uncovered various objects dating to the 1930s that they believe could have belonged to Earhart and Noonan.…

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to save all of the historic monuments and archaeological sites from the floodwaters created by construction of the Aswan High Dam in 1960. Despite the remarkable campaign that saved more than 20 structures, including Ramses II’s massive temples at Abu Simbel, many other monuments (those shown in blue), could not be salvaged. They are now submerged in Lake Nasser. Four of the rescued structures had very different fates. They did not stay in the region, but were relocated far away. In gratitude for their help, Egypt gave a temple to each of four countries—Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States—that played a significant role in saving them.…

If Greek education centered on refining the baser elements of human nature, babyhood was a process of becoming human in the first place: “They are born in a more imperfected condition than any other animal, “Aristotle wrote of newborns, noting that babies cannot even nurse with their heads unsupported. As well as weakness, Greek infants were associated with an animal wildness that needed to be tamed: Aristotle likened a crawling baby to a four-footed animal. Infanticide was not uncommon in Athens. Babies (especially girls) were left to die if they were seen as an unwanted financial burden. “To rear children is a hazardous undertaking and success is won through struggle,” wrote the fifth-century B.C. thinker Democritus. Other sources take a more joyful view. In Euripides’ play Ion, for example, children…

1483 Portugal connects with the Kingdom of Kongo. The two nations establish diplomatic, religious, and commercial ties that will form the basis of the transatlantic slave trade. 1490s Spain founds its first “New World” colonies. Many European settlements will follow in the coming decades, and the demand for labor will increase. 1501-1505 The Spanish and Portuguese bring enslaved Africans to work in the Americas. Santo Domingo becomes the New World’s first international slave port. 1584-1612 The English begin establishing colonies in the Americas. After an attempt in Roanoke, North Carolina, fails, successful colonies are founded at Jamestown, Virginia, and St. George’s, Bermuda. 1619 The San Juan Bautista leaves for New Spain with a cargo of about 350 Africans. English pirates attack the ship and seize approximately 50 people, who are…

It isn’t often that entire cities vanish, but the Roman outpost of Thamugadi did. Founded by the emperor Trajan around A.D. 100, the city, also known as Timgad or Tamugas, was located in the North African province of Numidia. Home to veterans of the Third Augustan Legion, Thamugadi flourished for hundreds of years, becoming prosperous and thus an attractive target for raiders. After a Vandal invasion in 430, repeated attacks weakened the city, which never fully recovered and was abandoned during the 700s. The desert sands swept in and buried Thamugadi. One thousand years would pass before the city received a visit from a team of explorers led by a maverick Scotsman in the 1700s. Statesman and Scholar Best known now for his contested discovery of the source of the…

JANUARY 1762 Elizabeth of Russia dies, and is succeeded by her nephew, Peter III. Peter’s wife, Sophie, is a German princess. JULY 1762 Following a coup in which Sophie forces her husband to abdicate, Sophie becomes Catherine II. Peter dies in prison. 1772 A young woman in Paris claims to be the daughter of the late Empress Elizabeth and attracts the support of wealthy men. 1774 Catherine II orders Count Alexei Orlov to lure the mystery woman into a trap. She is arrested and sent to Russia. 1775 The false princess dies while imprisoned in St. Petersburg. Her true identity is never discovered.…

Greek schoolchildren were required to memorize sections of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These epic poems, attributed to Homer, were about 300 years old by the fifth century B.C. and well established as literary classics of the day, much like Shakespeare’s plays would be today. The keystone of Greek education, Homeric epics imparted not only literacy, but also virtues of bravery, loyalty, piety, perseverance, and humanism. The thinker Isocrates believed Homer’s works stimulated patriotism among the youth during Athens’s war against Persia. In his Republic, Plato described how Greeks regarded Homer as “the teacher of Greece … [who] on questions of human conduct and culture deserves to be constantly studied as a guide by whom to regulate your whole life.”…

QUEEN ANA NZINGA was born in 1583, and in 1624, at the age of 42, she became the Queen of Ndongo, just five years after the Angolans arrived in Virginia. Her reign came amidst the ongoing war between the Portuguese, and her people of Ndongo. She attempted to shift the political partnership between the states, offering herself as a convert to Catholicism in return for the termination of slave raids that were devastating her people. Portugal’s colonial Governor agreed, and acted as her godfather for the conversion. Queen Nzinga maintained a strong political relationship with the Portuguese for two years, but in 1626 they betrayed her and began taking Ndongo captives again. As a result, she established a nearby state, Matamba, which acted as a refuge for victims of the…

ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES throughout the African diaspora yield rich data that can reveal heritage and ancestry. Handmade pipes, like the ones excavated at the Cliffs Plantation at Stratford Hall (left), dating to the 1650s, are valuable because of the insight they give scholars. The ones from Stratford Hall were handmade by the enslaved Africans who lived there, and the designs etched in the clay are specific to their cultures. Similar designs are found carved into objects throughout the Atlantic world. These clues help render a fuller interpretation of the early colonies and of the people who built the nation. These pipes may also hold the DNA of the people who used them. In 2019, scholars were able to collect DNA from a 19th-century clay pipe found in Maryland and trace it…