Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2020 i National Geographic History

There is something of the Cinderella story to Lakshmi Bai, a commoner who rose to become rani (queen) of Jhansi, a princely state in mid-19th century India. Most fairy tales would end there, but in Lakshmi Bai’s case it was just the beginning of a remarkable life as a warrior queen. After becoming regent at the age of 25 in 1853, she would find herself at the heart of the Indian Rebellion that broke out in 1857, now known by many historians as India’s First War of Independence. Ultimately, she would lead thousands of infantry and cavalry troops into battle against the British, reportedly fighting with a sword in each hand and her horse’s reins between her teeth. History and myth are inseparable in her story. In the end, Lakshmi…

ca 1400 B.C. Prince Amenhotep is born to Pharaoh Thutmose IV and his minor wife Mutemwiya. ca 1389 B.C. Thutmose IV dies, and his heir Amenhotep becomes the ninth ruler of Egypt’s 18th dynasty. ca 1393 B.C. By year two of his reign, Amenhotep marries Tiye, who will become his great royal wife. The two will have at least six children. ca 1361 B.C. The pharaoh and queen celebrate the first of three jubilees. Amenhotep symbolically marries his daughter Sitamun as part of the ritual. ca 1353 B.C. Amenhotep III dies, and his son Amenhotep becomes pharaoh. Queen Tiye will outlive her husband by at least a decade.…

Today little is visible of the funerary temple built by Amenhotep III on the west bank of the Nile. Inscriptions say it was designed by the architect Amenhotep, son of Hapu, and constructed as a monument for the god Amun. To greet the sun god, the temple entrance faced east and was flanked by two colossal statues of Amenhotep III. Carved from single blocks of quartzite sandstone, these two giants are the most visible remnants of the complex’s vast size and grandeur. Archaeologists began new excavations at the site in 1998, led by Armenian Egyptologist Hourig Sourouzian. Her work has shown the rich detail still buried in the ground, including 72 statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet and two more colossal statues of Amenhotep III. More detailed reconstructions can now…

TREES APPEAR IN CRUCIAL MOMENTS in the central stories of Buddhism, from the birth of Siddhartha, to his achieving nirvana, to his death at age 80. When Siddhartha’s mother, Maya, went into labor in Lumbini, the branch of a sal tree (Shorea robusta) supported her while she gave birth to her son. A fig tree (Ficus religiosa) shaded the seated Siddhartha as he achieved nirvana at Bodh Gaya in Bihar, northeastern India. At the end of his life, religious texts say the Buddha lay down between two sal trees in Kushinagar, India, before passing from this world. Because of their importance in Buddhist texts, trees are often implemented in Buddhist art and architecture as well. Some early examples were first built by the emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C.,…

47 B.C. Ptolemy Philopator Philometor Caesar is born to Cleopatra of Egypt, who claims that Roman Julius Caesar is the father. 46 B.C. Queen Cleopatra, accompanied by her son Caesarion, are welcomed by Julius Caesar for their first visit to Rome. MARCH, 44 B.C. On her second trip to Rome, Caesar is assassinated. Caesarion is not named his heir. Cleopatra and son quickly return to Egypt. JULY, 44 B.C. Cleopatra plots the murder of her brother Ptolemy XIV so she may crown her son Caesarion Ptolemy XV and rule as co-regent. 34 B.C. Infuriating Octavian, Mark Antony officially recognizes Caesarion as the son and heir of Julius Caesar and co-regent of Egypt. 30 B.C. Fleeing to Alexandria after a crushing defeat, Cleopatra tries to send Caesarion to safety in the…

AFTER THE CHILDREN arrived in Rome, sources say Octavian presented them in chains to the Roman people and paraded them through the streets in triumphal procession. Some sources say Octavian wished to execute them after the triumph, but that Octavia the Younger, his elder sister and the late Mark Antony’s ex-wife, convinced him to let her raise them alongside her own children. THE FATE OF the two boys is unknown. None of the popular historians of the time mention either Alexander Helios or Ptolemy Philadelphus again, which leads many to believe they died in childhood. Cleopatra Selene did survive; she married Juba II, king of Numidia and then Mauritania, and had several children with him. Her body supposedly lies next to that of her husband in the mausoleum that the…

1469 Niccolò Machiavelli is born in Florence the same year that Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de’ Medici assumes power. 1494 The Medici are expelled from Florence when the Dominican friar Savonarola imposes his rule over the city. 1498 Savonarola is executed. At age 29, Machiavelli is appointed a senior diplomat under the city’s chief minister, Piero Soderini. 1512 Machiavelli’s allies are ousted when the Medici return to power after the Holy League defeats France, a Florentine ally. 1513 After being imprisoned by the Medici, Machiavelli is released and retires to the country, where he writes The Prince. 1516 Machiavelli dedicates The Prince to Lorenzo de’ Medici, ruler of Florence and grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent. 1527 After spending years working to restore favor with the Medici, Machiavelli dies on June 21,…

In 1517 Machiavelli wrote the Discourses on Livy, which drew parallels between classical Rome and the politics of his own day. This work revisits themes from The Prince, including a reflection that certain leaders do not necessarily fall into the conventional moral categories of good and bad. In chapter 24 he cited the example of Pope Julius II’s conquest of Perugia, whose aftermath Machiavelli had witnessed firsthand: Julius II desired to remove Giovanpagolo Baglioni, tyrant of Perugia. And so coming to Perugia [Julius] entered it unattended by troops, although Giovanpagolo was there with a great company of soldiers. And thus, urged on by that impetuosity which stamped all his actions, Julius committed himself into the hands of his enemy—whom he forthwith removed from power. All who saw it remarked on…

Curses are often associated with fairy tales and witches, but archaeologists have discovered evidence of them in ancient Greece. Scratched onto pieces of lead, entreaties to the gods of the underworld were buried in tombs, but archaeologists have discovered 35 tablets from the fourth century B.C. at the bottom of a well, a rare example of an already unusual practice. Researchers at the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens have unearthed 6,500 burials, finding only 60 curse tablets, said Jutta Stroszeck, head of the Kerameikos excavation for the German Archaeological Institute. Although uncommon, curse tablets dating between the sixth century B.C. and sixth century A.D. have been found throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. To make a curse effective, such objects had to be buried in a tomb, which was risky business: The…

circa 1827 Manikarnika is born to a Brahman family in a city on the banks of the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh. 1842 She marries the maharaja of Jhansi and changes her name to Lakshmi Bai. The two will have a son, who survives only a few months. 1853 The maharaja dies, and Lakshmi Bai becomes regent for her adopted son. The East India Company rejects their claim to the throne of Jhansi. 1857 The Indian Rebellion breaks out against British rule and begins to spread across the nation. 1858 Lakshmi Bai joins the fight and leads troops against the British. She dies in combat on June 17.…

ON LEAVING Waterloo Station, the trains of the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company traveled 23 miles to Brookwood almost entirely on existing railroad and were then diverted to the cemetery by a specially built branch line. The Brookwood Cemetery’s two stations—the South Station serving members of the Church of England, and the North Station serving “nonconformists” who were non-Anglicans—reflected conventional railway architecture of the period. Initially, these were temporary structures to be replaced by more elaborate buildings later. Since the venture was never as profitable as planned, the new buildings never materialized. Both stations have since been demolished.…

IN ORDER TO accustom the public to the new meter, the French government distributed leaflets, posters, and conversion tables. After 1796, engraved marble meter bars were installed in public places around Paris. Two are still in place today, but only one in its original location: 36 rue de Vaugirard, in front of the Palace of Luxembourg. In 1799 France’s premier instrument maker, Étienne Lenoir, made the definitive meter in platinum, replacing a provisional standard made from copper. It remained in use as the definitive metric standard until replaced in 1878.…

The daughters of Amenhotep and Tiye played an important role during the pharaoh’s jubilee celebrations. The first was held around year 30 of his reign; his eldest daughter, Sitamun, married Amenhotep to become a daughter-wife and queen; her younger sister Isis seems to have done the same in the second jubilee around year 34. Many Egyptologists think that these unions were purely symbolic, with no sexual relationship between parent and child. Almost all the evidence of these unions is related to the jubilees. It seems these marriages were part of the festival’s complicated regenerative rituals. The two daughters disappear from the historical record after their father’s death, but their mother does not. Tiye took on the role of royal mother when her son Amenhotep IV became Pharaoh. She remains in…

A VICTORIOUS QUEEN THE SHARED POWER BETWEEN Tiye and her husband is depicted in a relief on the grave of Tiye’s steward Kheruef in El Assasif, part of the Theban necropolis. 1 Tiye appears next to 2 the seated pharaoh on a raised platform; below are bound peoples of Egypt’s conquered states. The image is intended to depict the supreme power of the pharaoh as monarch of the universe. On the lateral reliefs of 3 the queen’s throne, two female prisoners are handcuffed to emphasize the queen’s equality with her husband and their shared rule. Tiye even appears in the form of 4 a sphinx crushing the enemies of Egypt, a classic motif used to represent male rulers as triumphant.…

1 THE DREAM Maya, soon to be the Buddha’s mother, dreams that a white elephant has entered her right side. Attending her are the four heavenly kings, the dikpalas, entrusted with guarding the four cardinal points of the compass. 2 THE INTERPRETATION Sages and wise men interpret Maya’s dream for her husband, Suddhodana. They explain that it is a foretelling that Maya will give birth to a son who will become a great man and change the world. 3 THE BIRTH Grasping the branch of a tree in the garden of Lumbini, Maya stands as she gives birth. According to tradition, her child emerges from the same spot on her body where the elephant entered in her prophetic dream. 4 THE PRESENTATION Maya (right) presents a cloth, which symbolizes her…

IN ARMANT near Luxor, within a large temple complex, Cleopatra built a small sanctuary known as a mammisi, or birth house. Artworks there depict Cleopatra as the mother goddess Hathor, goddess of the sky, while her son Caesarion was shown as the god Horus in various forms. The sanctuary was destroyed in the 19th century, but fortunately detailed copies had been made of its reliefs. IN ONE RELIEF (LEFT), two cow-headed goddesses sit on a divan, each one nursing a male child. Scholars have identified them as Har-pe-khrad (“Horus the child”) and Caesarion, but their nearly identical depictions are meant to strengthen Caesarion’s association with the divine as well as his claim to the throne of Egypt.…

For four years after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494, Florence was effectively governed by the ascetic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who railed against the corruption of the papacy and the vices of the Florentines. Long before he wielded direct power, the friar’s fiery edicts would have loomed over Machiavelli’s earlier years. Records show that Savonarola started preaching in Florence in 1482, when Machiavelli was 13, but the impact of these early sermons on the young man is unknown. The first mention of the friar in Machiavelli’s papers dates to March 1498, when he was nearly 30 years old. In a letter Machiavelli recalled how Savonarola could captivate an audience and noted how the friar “acts in accordance with the times and colors his lies accordingly.” The friar lost…

ON FEBRUARY 18, 1513, NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI WAS ARRESTED, ACCUSED OF PARTICIPATING IN A PLOT AGAINST THE MEDICI LORDS OF FLORENCE. HIS GRISLY EXPERIENCE WAS THE VIOLENT REALITY OF POWER IN RENAISSANCE ITALY. 1. ARREST In February 1513 Florence was ruled by brothers Giuliano and Giovanni de’ Medici, who learned of a plot against their family’s newly restored rule. According to an account written by Machiavelli’s friend and correspondent, the diplomat Francesco Vettori, a document drawn up by Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi outlined an anti-Medici plot and supposedly listed 18 to 20 men whom “they supposed would help them after the assassination [of the Medici], even though they had not conferred with them before.” Venetian diarist Marino Sanuto claimed that Machiavelli’s name was seventh on the list. An order…

CURSES sometimes spilled into public life in classical Greece. In his play The Wasps, Aristophanes alluded to the real-life feud between an aristocrat, Thucydides, and Pericles, leader of the democratic party. An incident in the Athenian Assembly in 444 B.C. led to the belief a judicial curse was at work. Thucydides decried Pericles’ building plans in Athens, calling him a spendthrift. When Pericles said he would pay for the construction himself, Thucydides, a veteran orator, froze in mid-retort. His paralysis may have been caused by a stroke, but in the ancient world, suspicions could quickly turn to the supernatural. “Everyone must have thought, I want a sorcerer like that,” said the German Archaeological Institute’s Jutta Stroszeck. The number of curses found in Kerameikos that involve court battles increased in the…

JOHN LANG, an Australian lawyer, represented Lakshmi Bai in her legal battle against the East India Company to stop the annexation of Jhansi. In his memoir, Wanderings in India, he describes seeing the rani for the first time: “She was a woman of about the middle size—rather stout, but not too stout. Her face must have been very handsome when she was younger, and even now it had many charms … The expression was also very good, and very intelligent. The eyes were particularly fine, and the nose very delicately shaped. She was not very fair, though she was far from black … Her dress was a plain white muslin, so fine in texture … that the outline of her figure was plainly discernible—and a remarkably fine figure she had.”…

The long reign of Amenhotep III and his great royal wife, Tiye, was a golden age for Egypt. Ruling together for as many as 38 years, the pair oversaw a vast and prosperous empire from circa 1391 to 1353 B.C. during Egypt’s 18th dynasty. Wealth poured in from Nubia and the Levant, financing a new era of monument building and artistic expression. Amenhotep III’s reign is one of the best documented in ancient Egypt. His father, Thutmose IV, passed on to him a wealthy and expansive kingdom at the height of its power and influence. Amenhotep’s empire would stretch 1,200 miles from the Euphrates in current-day Syria to the Fourth Cataract of the Nile in present-day Sudan. Early in his reign, Amenhotep waged successful military campaigns against Nubia, a land…

KV46, the resting place of Queen Tiye’s parents, was the best preserved tomb found prior to the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Found by James Quibell in 1905, Tuya and Yuya’s tomb had been looted as many as three times in the distant past. Grave robbers stole portable objects, such as oils and jewelry, but left behind larger items: gilded furniture, golden coffins, and the mummies inside. Tuya and Yuya were probably in their 50s or 60s when they died and were buried in the Valley of the Kings. Scholars first used inscriptions on their funereal goods to identify them. Hieroglyphs spell out their names and trumpet their titles. Yuya’s titles included Divine Father, Priest of Min, Commander of Chariots, and Chief of Horses. Tuya also held important…

Ptolemy Caesar “Theos Philopator Philometor”—“Ptolemy Caesar, The God Who Loves His Father and Mother”—became king of Egypt at the tender age of three. His alleged father, Julius Caesar, had been assassinated several months earlier, and his mother, Queen Cleopatra VII, placed him on the throne to solidify her power as queen of Egypt. Better known to history by his Greek nickname “Caesarion,” or “little Caesar,” Cleopatra’s son reigned only a short time; his rule ended with his murder, shortly after the suicide of Cleopatra in 30 B.C. The deaths of mother and son brought an end to the Ptolemaic line of rulers who had controlled Egypt since the time of Alexander the Great. Family Quarrels Caesarion’s story began when his grandfather, Ptolemy XII, named his two oldest children, 18-year-old Cleopatra…

THE EARLIEST EXISTING depictions of Caesarion appear on coins minted in Cyprus in 44 B.C. Even though the boy was then a toddler, he was still shown as a baby in his mother’s arms. There are later works of art in which Caesarion appears as a young man, wearing the typical Egyptian headdress (nemes) and kilt (shandyt), as in traditional images of the pharaohs. MANY REPRESENTATIONS of Caesarion associate him with the Egyptian god Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris. After Osiris is violently murdered by his rival Set, Isis must protect her son and restore the rightful king to the throne. Cleopatra smartly used this imagery to win support for Caesarion and cast herself in the role of divine maternal protector.…

Life must have seemed good for Niccolò Machiavelli in late 1513. The former Florentine diplomat, who had built his reputation as a shrewd political analyst in his missions to popes and kings, was now at leisure on his farm near Florence. From there, Machiavelli wrote a letter to a friend on December 10 that year, describing his daily routine: He spent his mornings wandering his woods, his afternoons gambling in a local tavern. His evenings he spent in his study, where he composed “a little work”: De principatibus (On Principalities), on which he said, “I go as deeply as I can into considerations on this subject, debating what principalities are, how they are gained, how they are kept, why they are lost.” Best known today as The Prince, this “little…

In what would be one of the most significant meetings of his life, Machiavelli, in his role as Florentine ambassador, first met Cesare Borgia at Urbino in 1502. By then, Borgia had taken control of much of central Italy. The powerful Borgia family originated not in Italy but Aragon (in modern-day Spain); Cesare’s great-uncle Alfonso had been appointed Pope Calixtus III in 1455 largely because his outsider status made him more palatable to feuding Italian families. To expand the clan’s power in Italy, Calixtus III subsequently promoted his nephew Rodrigo. In 1492 Rodrigo became the new pope, took the name Alexander VI, and made his 18-year-old bastard son Cesare a cardinal. Cesare spent six years in the service of the church before renouncing his title to focus on his military…

The grassland steppes stretch away to the horizon in the far south of Kazakhstan. In a landscape blasted with summer heat and winter cold, the shelter and shade of the Tamgaly gorge, about 100 miles northwest of the former Kazakh capital, Almaty, has been a special place for people for millennia. They have left their mark in the form of 5,000 vivid rock carvings, the earliest of which date from the middle of the Bronze Age, 3,500 years ago. Some of these carvings are hidden, while others’ placement ensures maximum visibility. The petroglyphs stand out in pale contrast to the dark rock revealing myriad drawings: sun deities with rays shining from their heads, warriors on horses, dancing shamans, and herds of animals. All tell of the different peoples that lived…