Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2021 i National Geographic History

No matter the time or place, sports fans love to debate. When the question popped up recently about who is the greatest athlete of all time, people’s arguments came fast and furious as they scanned the past for their favorites. Some said Serena Williams, the American tennis champ with a record-setting 23 Grand Slam titles. Others put forth American swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated modern Olympian with 28 Olympic medals (23 of them gold). There’s just one problem. They and many other popular candidates (like Michael Jordan, Simone Biles, Usain Bolt, and Pelé to name a few) all come from the very recent past. What about the athletes from the very distant past? If the question is sincere about “of all time,” then taking a longer view is necessary.…

MUCH OF THE BIBLICAL Book of Kings celebrates the ways in which Solomon serves the god of Israel. Perhaps the best known is his construction of the First Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. In the Bible, Solomon says: “[B]ecause of the wars waged against my father David…he could not build a temple for the name of the Lord his God until the Lord put his enemies under his feet” (1 Kings 5:3). Solomon begins work on the temple in the fourth year of his reign. Passages in the Book of Kings go into great detail about the structure’s design and dimensions, as well as its building materials: cedar and cypress timber from Lebanon, quarried stone from the hills surrounding Jerusalem, and gold to adorn the inner sanctuary where the…

IT IS OFTEN SAID of Qin Shi Huangdi’s terra-cotta army that no two figures are exactly the same. While it is perhaps difficult to believe that the thousands of warriors are all portraits of individuals, it is clear that great effort was expended in giving the figures unique features. Some investigators believe that the producers worked with a set range of different appearances, which, when mixed together, combined to give an impression of individuality. Although millions of tourists who visit annually see these thousands of faces ranged before them as an unforgettable spectacle, these figures were not created for the eyes of the living. They are warriors for the afterlife. The modern visitor’s visual experience, overlooking endless rows of soldiers, is a privilege that even the emperor himself might not…

Santo Domingo, 1586 llustrated maps were a key feature of the 1589 publication of A Summarie and True Discourse of Sir Frances [sic] Drake’s West Indian Voyage. This work is a chronicle of Drake’s great expedition of 1585-86 and was written by Walter Bigges, one of the expeditioners. The illustrated maps were created by Italian cartographer Giovanni Battista Boazio, who filled the maps with intricate detail. One map shows Drake’s fleet in front of Santo Domingo (today in the Dominican Republic); ships scuttled by the Spanish to block entry to the harbor are visible. Boazio incorporated distinctive creatures from the Americas, including a sea turtle and a caiman, which may have been based on the sketches of John White, a colonist at Roanoke (modern North Carolina), the first English settlement…

BOOK OF KINGS The earliest source for the meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is the Book of Kings, which took its final form in the sixth century B.c. BOOK OF CHRONICLES Biblical scholars date Chronicles to the fourth century B.C. Many details of the reign of Solomon, including his meeting with the queen, are copied from Kings. THE ANTIQUITIES The Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus was written in A.D. 93. It refers to the queen as a ruler with African origins. QURAN Composed in the seventh century, Islam’s sacred scripture incorporates new elements into the meeting of Solomon and the queen. TARGUM SHENI The seventh- to eighth-century Jewish account of the meeting is similar to the Quran. Scholars are unsure which influenced which. KEBRA NAGAST…

ARCHAEOLOGY has been searching for evidence to complement the descriptions of King Solomon’s building campaigns as described in the Book of Kings. One place scholars have looked is in northern Israel. Tel Megiddo’s age makes it a good candidate. It is an ancient site whose earliest levels date to the the Bronze Age (ca 3300–1200 B.C.) when Megiddo was an important city-state well positioned on trade routes between Egypt and Mesopotamia. A passage in the Book of Kings refers to Solomon accumulating "fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousand horses, which he kept in the chariot cities and also with him in Jerusalem” (1 Kings 10:26). In 1924 British archaeologist P.L.O. Guy found evidence of stables at Tel Megiddo and telegrammed: “Believe have found Solomon’s stables.” More recent analysis puts the…

431 B.C. The Peloponnesian War breaks out between the powerful city-states of Athens and Sparta, and their allies. 430 B.C. In the second year of war, a mysterious sickness begins to spread among the Athenians. It quickly reaches epidemic proportions. 429 B.C. The plague continues to rage, and the Athenian leader Pericles and members of his family are infected. He dies that fall. 426 B.C. The epidemic’s final wave breaks out in Athens. After nearly five years, up to a third of Athens’s population has died because of the plague. ca 421 B.C. Athens and Sparta strike a truce. Neither side is satisfied by the agreement, and hostilities will break out again in 418. 404 B.C. The Peloponnesian War ends. Thucydides’ account of the conflict contains the most detailed historical…

221 B.C. Qin Shi Huangdi becomes the first emperor of China after defeating rival kingdoms. 215 B.C. A wall is begun, linking northern defensive fortresses, the origin of the Great Wall of China. 213 B.C. The emperor orders the burning of classical books and has Confucian scholars executed. 210 B.C. Qin Shi Huangdi dies and is buried in the Xi’an mausoleum near the underground terra-cotta army. 206 B.C. Beset with internal crises, the Qin dynasty collapses. The new Han dynasty desecrates the Xi’an monument.…

Every British schoolchild knows that Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe on the Golden Hind. Fewer are aware that when he set out on the voyage in 1577, the ship was called the Pelican, and that Drake changed the name mid-voyage to manage the consequences of having beheaded one of his own officers following a rushed—and some would say, unsafe—trial. Four centuries of mythmaking have created different versions of Drake. To the English, he was a plucky hero of the Elizabethan golden age who outsmarted the mighty Spanish. To the Spanish, he was a pirate, feared and hated as el Draque (the dragon). Historians have peeled away these layers to reveal a more nuanced portrait. Drake lived just as England was beginning to carve out a new, naval role for itself…

TWO BOOKS IN THE BIBLE (Kings and Chronicles) feature a story about the Queen of Sheba traveling to Jerusalem to meet King Solomon. Archaeologists agree on where ancient Jerusalem was, but the location of Sheba has yet to be determined. Efforts have focused on the ancient kingdoms of Saba in southern Arabia (modern Yemen) and Aksum (modern Ethiopia) in the Horn of Africa. Lying at the crossroads of trading routes between Egypt, Arabia, and Persia, the Sabaean culture flourished until the fourth century b.c., when the Ma'in, Qataban, and Nabataean peoples emerged as competing powers. The Aksum theory is supported by the Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’ reference to the Queen of Sheba as the “Queen of Egypt and Ethiopia.” The problem that both theories pose to historians, however, is…

In 1950 explorer Wendell Phillips led one of the first American expeditions to the lands of ancient Saba, that were then called the Aden Protectorate and are now Yemen. Searching for signs of the Queen of Sheba, Phillips’s team first excavated sites around the ancient city of Timna. They found exquisite alabaster objects and stelae but no sign of Sheba. Next Phillips negotiated access to the site of Marib, the capital of ancient Saba and its glorious Awwam Temple, a complex dedicated to the Sabaean moon god, Almaqah, but found no evidence of the elusive queen.…

DURING CONSTRUCTION work at Kerameikos metro station in Athens in 1994, archaeologists discovered a mass grave. Analysis revealed that the occupants were victims of the plague that devastated Athens between 430 and 425 B.C. Among the remains was the skull of an 11-year-old girl. Manolis J. Papagrigorakis, an orthodontic specialist, worked with a team of Swedish experts on sculpting a forensic reconstruction of her appearance. They named the girl Myrtis and gave her a hairstyle and clothing typical of that period in Greek history. Myrtis appeared as part of an exhibition held in 2010 at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.…

HOW WAS IT POSSIBLE to bring together the raw materials, the technical knowhow, and the labor to build thousands of life-size soldiers in the third century B.C.? Producing the terra-cotta army required a standardized mass-production system, along with highly efficient project management. Reverse engineering studies carried out by a team of archaeologists (including the author of this article) have attempted to re-create how these artifacts were made, based on their scientific analysis. They have proposed that the labor force was organized in relatively small teams, working in parallel to produce separate pieces. The warriors were not produced and assembled in one workshop; instead, separate groups of artisans, each headed by a master, assembled the warriors one by one, which, once painted, would be taken down to the pits. Likewise, the…

1560s Young Francis Drake begins sailing with his older cousin John Hawkins on ships engaged in the transatlantic slave trade between Africa and colonies in the Americas. 1568 A deadly battle with Spanish forces at San Juan de Ulúa, Mexico, kindles a hatred for Spain in Drake. He vows to take revenge and conducts ever more deadly attacks on Spanish holdings in Central America. 1578 Drake passes through the Strait of Magellan in 16 days and enters the Pacific Ocean. He heads west and will become the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, returning to England in 1580. 1581 Elizabeth I orders the knighting of Francis Drake. The ceremony takes place aboard his flagship, the Golden Hind. Drake becomes mayor of Plymouth and makes Buckland Abbey as his personal estate.…

40-20 B.c. Historians consider this the most likely period in which three Rhodian sculptors created the “Laocoön” grouping. 1506 After being unearthed in Rome, a sculpture is inspected by scholars and identified as Pliny’s “Laocoön.” 1520 The “Laocoön” is restored. Artists attach a replacement arm to the adult male figure, whose original limb is missing. 1957 The arm attached in 1520 is replaced with a marble limb found in 1905, which will later be deemed the original missing piece.…