Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2021 i National Geographic History

Carved from an elephant tusk, an intricate ivory saltcellar stands only 10 inches high, but its myriad details make a massive impact. Four European males—two richly attired men and their servants—support a receptacle for salt, which is in turn crowned by a ship. Housed today in Paris, France’s Quai Branly Museum, the saltcellar was fashioned around the 16th century by the highly trained artisans in Africa’s ancient kingdom of Benin (in what is modern Nigeria). According to Kathy Curnow, associate professor of African art history at Cleveland State University, saltcellars like this one were made by a small group of artists (six or seven men) who belonged to a hereditary, male-only guild of ivory carvers. Their highly sought skills were passed down through the generations through demanding apprenticeships: “Growing up…

Ancient Rome was famous for many things, many of them big and flashy. Gladiators, triumphs, and emperors often spring to mind, but perhaps Rome’s most enduring contribution to history is more humble: their roads (which all led back to Rome), a vast, interconnected network spanning as many as 200,000 miles at its maximum. Across Europe, parts of North Africa, and the Middle East, the remnants of these roads can be found crisscrossing the landscape, from Scotland to Mesopotamia, from Romania to the Sahara. Rome’s earliest roads were built to connect the city on the Tiber with other cities on the Italian Peninsula. As Rome’s influence grew, their system of roads expanded too. They became arteries connecting new territories and their peoples to Roman civilization and eventually the Roman Empire. Some…

Opium destined for China was cultivated in Bengal in northeast India. The hub for the Bengali opium trade was Patna, a city on the Ganges River some 350 miles northwest of the port of Kolkata (Calcutta). The factory in Patna was run by the British East India Company, which had taken over an opium factory formerly run by the Dutch. It was surrounded by fields of poppies, which were planted in November, intensively irrigated during the three months of growth, and then harvested. The seedpods were opened to collect their milky sap, which was then dried and sent to the factory for processing. Large numbers of farmers in the area participated in poppy cultivation. Recent research suggests that many peasant farmers were coerced to give their land over to poppy…

MAGELLAN’S GLOBAL JOURNEY FIVE CENTURIES ago, Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Philippines, but his crew would continue their journey and complete the first known circumnavigation of the globe in 1522. A Portuguese explorer who sailed under the Spanish flag, Magellan was seeking a western route to the Spice Islands (today’s Maluku Islands of Indonesia). Before his death, he overcame attempted mutinies and navigated his flotilla through a perilous strait (that now bears his name) to reach the Pacific. IN SEARCH OF CELTIC CULTURE THE QUESTION OF WHO the Celts were and where they came from remains a controversial issue in European prehistory. During the late Bronze Age, the Celts are believed to have emerged from central Europe and settled at sites in modern France, Italy, Spain, and the British…

Archaeologists have long speculated about human settlement on Australia’s northern continental shelf, a stretch of now submerged land that extends 100 miles from the current coastline. Forty years ago, a search for evidence was unsuccessful, leaving the question open. A new effort, drawing on the expertise of Australian universities and Britain’s University of York, in partnership with the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, recently set out to try again. The project centered on the Dampier Archipelago in Western Australia. Even knowing that this area abounds with Indigenous rock engravings, doctoral students John McCarthy and Chelsea Wiseman were surprised by what they found in the aquamarine waters of Cape Bruguieres in July 2019. “I was stunned when I saw the tools in a little pothole on the seabed,” said McCarthy. When he surfaced…

The series of roller-skating crazes in recent memory make it seem a quintessentially 20th-century phenomenon, but wheeled shoes first rolled out as early as the 1700s. As models changed and improved over the years, skating fads bloomed in Europe and the United States throughout the 19th century. The precursor to roller-skating—ice-skating—is vastly older and can be dated as far back as 1800 B.C. Archaeologists found evidence that people in Scandinavia fashioned ice skates from animal bones, pioneering the oldest human powered means of transport. In-line Adventures One of the first recorded attempts to put wheels on shoes took place in the 1700s. An unnamed Dutchman strapped to his shoes strips of wood with wooden spools on the bottom, known as “skeelers.” They quickly broke. Another famous early attempt to skate…

The industrial age gave Britain a massive military advantage over China in the 19th century. A product of the British industrial powerhouse, and a symbol of the new, pitiless tactics of global imperialism, the H.M.S. Nemesis was the world’s first oceangoing iron warship. Launched in Liverpool in late 1839, the ship had been commissioned by the East India Company with the express purpose of wreaking havoc on the Chinese fleet. Nemesis fulfilled the goal spectacularly: Compared with the large, cumbersome Chinese junks, Nemesis proved remarkably agile. Although the engines driving the two paddles were not especially powerful, the flat-bottomed design enabled it to sail in areas inaccessible to other ships. It could easily penetrate narrow waterways—an ideal feature in a war that would be played out in river deltas. Nemesis…

In many engravings in the Description of Egypt, the French scholars literally inserted themselves in their work. They depict how they sketched monuments, took notes, excavated ancient sculptures, and explored temples. Their presence helps show the scale of these objects as well as saves personal memories of a great archaeological adventure.…

In 2001 a flood of archaeological objects began appearing in the antiquities market seemingly out of nowhere. For sale were distinctive pieces of jewelry, weapons, finely crafted ceramics, drinking vessels, and game boards—featuring unusual artistry and magnificent inlays of carnelian and lapis lazuli. These extraordinary pieces featured a complex symbology of animals, both wild and domesticated, depicted fighting among themselves or with human figures, the humans always triumphant. There were beautifully realized bucolic scenes of animals grazing in vast palm groves and architectural reproductions of temples or palaces. Data provided by the internet sites and auction houses selling these mysterious pieces was sparse and, at best, vague. Their origins were often listed as “from Central Asia.” At first, it was assumed that the pieces were the work of expert forgers,…

Book XVIII of The Iliad tells how the god Hephaestus made a magnificent shield for Achilles at the request of his mother, Thetis. It was decorated with numerous scenes that the poem describes in great detail. This passage of the poem served as a basis for later artistic attempts to re-create the shield. In the early 19th century, in homage to the great poem, English sculptor and draftsman John Flaxman designed a gilded silver disk adorned with the dramatic scenes described. 1 THE FIRMAMENT “On [the shield] he formed the earth, and the heaven, and the sea and the weariless sun and waxing moon, / and on it were all the wonders with which heaven is ringed” 2 CITY OF JOY “he made two cities of mortal men, / both…

On October 1, 1949, Chairman Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, ending the so-called century of humiliation in which European powers dominated Chinese trade policy. In 1842 the country, then under the rule of the Qing dynasty, was defeated by Great Britain in the First Opium War, which marked the beginning of the end for the Qing, the last imperial dynasty to rule China. The defeat was not only humiliating to China, it was devastating to its people. Forced to open up to trade on Britain’s terms, as well as ceding the island of Hong Kong, China was defeated by a nation more than 15,000 miles away. The Chinese imperial navy had collapsed before the Royal Navy’s superior firepower. The conservatism of Qing rule under…

China ceded Hong Kong to Britain under the terms of the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. The mountainous island has little in the way of water or resources, but its position at the mouth of the Pearl River grants it enormous strategic importance. Like the nearby Portuguese colony of Macau, its deep, well-protected port was on the main trade routes from the Far East. At the end of the Second Opium War in 1860, China ceded the Kowloon Peninsula on the mainland, facing Hong Kong. British rule over the area was extended under a convention signed in 1898, which leased the enclave to Britain for 99 years. In 1984 a Sino-British joint declaration arranged for Hong Kong to become part of China again in 1997.…

Fifth-century B.C. Greek author Herodotus wrote about an unusual royal burial he observed while visiting the Scythians, the nomadic warriors of the Eurasian steppes. He observed a king’s corpse being eviscerated, its cavities filled with herbs, and the body borne on a cart to be buried in a great square pit. Horses, and even servants, were sacrificed and their bodies laid nearby, along with golden cups, “after which they raised a vast mound above the grave.” Many classical scholars regarded Herodotus as more of a fabulist than a historian. Archaeology, however, is revealing that he got a lot right about the Scythians. In 1865 Russian scholar Vasily Radlov excavated a large burial mound (known as a kurgan in Russian) in the Altay Mountains, near Berel in Kazakhstan. Opening the mound,…