Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2022 i National Geographic History

Pizza is one of the most popular dishes in the whole world. This simple combination of baked flatbread, tomatoes, and cheese flowered in Italy and then spread to the United States in the early 2oth century with Italian immigrants. Pizza’s popularity exploded in America, becoming ubiquitous across the nation. There are many different styles of pizza, but only one has a royal pedigree. The origin story began when the queen of Italy visited Naples in 1889. Strolling through the streets of the city center, Queen Margherita and her husband smelled a delicious aroma wafting from a pizzeria. Intrigued, the couple invited the chef of the establishment, Raffaele Esposito, to the city’s Capodimonte Palace to cook the dish for them there. Esposito prepared three different kinds of pizza. One option emulated…

Appearing like a fever dream amid a thick, humid jungle is Angkor Wat—a soaring, sumptuous city of stone with elegant spires and elevated towers, covered galleries and airy courtyards, ornate walkways and intricate bas-relief carvings. Situated on the shores of Tonle Sap, a lake in northwest Cambodia, this temple complex is a nearly 900-year-old ruin from the ancient Khmer Empire. Among the hundreds of surviving temples in the region, the vast complex is easily Cambodia’s most famous sacred site—it appears on the nation’s current flag—and is revered for good reason. Comprising over a thousand buildings and covering some 400 acres, it is the world’s largest religious structure—and one of humanity’s cultural wonders. Construction of Angkor Wat began in the first half of the 12th century by the Khmer king Suryavarman…

The Knights of the Round Table were heroes of the realm in Britain’s Arthurian legend. Dedicated to ensuring peace in the mythical kingdom of Camelot (hard won by Arthur after early wars), the knights represented chivalry in its purest form. These nobles pledged to follow a code of honor in service to God, king, and country. According to various origin stories, the Round Table was created by the magician Merlin, in imitation of the table at Christ’s Last Supper, for Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s father. A seat at the table was the highest honor to which an Arthurian knight could aspire. The table’s circular shape precluded hierarchy and was a potent symbol of fraternity and esprit de corps.…

Howard Carter’s sensational 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s treasure-filled tomb sparked a fascination with all things ancient Egyptian across Europe and the United States. Hopes were high that more exciting discoveries were coming, not least among the archaeologists working in sites across Egypt. A spirit of intense rivalry marked relations among this group of largely Western scholars, who all jockeyed for the most promising sites while jealously monitoring their competitors’ progress. From the early 1900s, the Giza plateau, site of Egypt’s three iconic pyramids, was being systematically excavated by an international group of scholars. A part of this vast terrain fell to the American archaeologist George Reisner. On February 2, 1925, Reisner’s photographer, Mohammedani Ibrahim, was working near the Great Pyramid, erected by Pharaoh Khufu in the mid-third millennium b.c.…

Between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, a group of people walked along a lakeshore in what is now White Sands National Park, New Mexico. The body of water dried up about 10,000 years ago, but their footprints remained. A recent study of the footprints has revealed something astounding: They could be the oldest evidence of human settlement in North America. Seeds of Proof Analysis of the footprints reveals that many belonged to teenagers and young children. Researchers led by geoscientist Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University, England, who published their study in the journal Science, believe the discovery could recalibrate when humans first began living in North America, one of the biggest questions in paleo-anthropology. The researchers identified 61 sets of human tracks formed in soft mud and preserved in seven…

When Alfred Dreyfus was summoned to the French Ministry of War on October 15, 1894, he had no inkling that his life, and French society as a whole, was about to be turned upside down. Dreyfus was a promising officer who believed he had a bright career ahead of him. Gen. Armand du Paty de Clam greeted him and, due to a bandaged right hand, asked Dreyfus to write a note on his behalf—a ploy to obtain a sample of Dreyfus’s handwriting without arousing any suspicion. After examining the note, du Paty, an amateur graphologist, concluded that Dreyfus’s handwriting matched that on a bordereau, or memo, that had recently been recovered from the wastebasket of the German Embassy in Paris. In 1894 the French military believed a spy was in…

The spread of chivalric ideals led to notable historical figures being framed as great knights in the medieval tradition. In western Europe, this popular idea was forged into the canon of the Nine Worthies (Neuf Preux) in Jacques de Longuyon’s Vows of the Peacock in 1312. These Worthies exemplified chivalric values and virtues. Pagan, Jewish, and Christian, they represented three distinct chapters in chivalric history. The first trio were Trojan hero Hector, Greek conqueror Alexander the Great, and Roman general Julius Caesar. The second were from the Old Testament: Joshua, King David, and Judas Maccabeus. The last trio were King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon, the most recent addition.…

The archaeological site of Nunalleq on the southwest coast of Alaska preserves a fateful moment, frozen in time. The muddy square of earth is full of everyday things that the Indigenous Yup’ik people used to survive and to celebrate life here, all left just as they lay when a deadly attack came almost four centuries ago. As is often the case in archaeology, a tragedy of long ago is a boon to modern science. Archaeologists have recovered 100,000 artifacts at Nunalleq, from typical eating utensils to extraordinary things such as wooden ritual masks, ivory tattoo needles, pieces of finely calibrated sea kayaks, and a belt of caribou teeth. Beyond the sheer quantity and variety, the objects are astonishingly well preserved, having been frozen in the ground since about 1660. The…

The first blow fell at noon on March 15, 44 b.c. The conspirators “suddenly bared their daggers and rushed upon him,” writes Nicholas of Damascus, a first-century b.c. historian. “First [Publius] Servilius Casca stabbed him on the left shoulder a little above the collarbone, at which he had aimed but missed through nervousness.” After Casca’s glancing blow, Julius Caesar “snatched his toga from [Tillius] Cimber, seized Casca’s hand, sprang from his chair, turned around, and hurled Casca with great violence,” according to the Greek historian Appian of Alexandria. Suetonius, a Roman biographer and antiquarian, offers a slightly different account: “Caesar caught Casca’s arm and ran it through with his stylus,” a sharp tool used for writing on wax tablets that could rip through flesh. “At almost the same instant both…

Knights are among the most iconic characters from the Middle Ages. Their origins harken back to the fall of the Roman Empire in western Europe whose last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was toppled by a Germanic warlord in a.d. 476. The vacuum left by Rome’s destruction was partially filled by the Roman Catholic Church, and also by relationships between the church and the dominant local lords. The church supported the lords, in part by anointing kings and lords as God’s chosen rulers, but also controlled them through fear of cutting off God’s approval through interdict and excommunication. The alliances between the papacy and the king of the Franks lasted 500 years. Over time, this was replicated across Europe and both led to and supported the rise of feudalism, a system dependent…

German composer Richard Wagner’s 19th-century opera Lohengrin was inspired by the Swan Knight myth, first told in a late 12th-century text, the Dolopathos, in which an anonymous knight appears in a swan-drawn boat and rescues a maiden. A few years later, the same figure cropped up in a chanson de geste (song of heroic deeds), “Le chevalier au cygne” (“Knight of the Swan”). In this iteration he has become the grandfather of Godfrey of Bouillon. This chanson is part of the so-called Crusade Cycle, set during and just after the First Crusade. In the 13th century, German authors like Wolfram von Eschenbach and Konrad von Würzburg further developed the Swan Knight’s story, and their work would form the basis of Wagner’s opera.…

Immortalized in 1599 by William Shakespeare in Henry V, the Battle of Agincourt proved to be the undoing of the French hero Boucicaut. On October 25, 1415 (St. Crispin’s Day), the French suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the English. Together with army commander Charles d’Albret, Boucicaut was one of the leaders of the French side, but he could do little to prevent the loss: There was dissonance in the French chain of command caused by conflict between the Dukes of Orleans and Burgundy. Boucicaut suffered the ravages of defeat firsthand: He was captured by the enemy and taken to England where he was imprisoned in Yorkshire. The French knight died there six years later.…

THE EFFECTS of global climate change are threatening hundreds of sites that hold clues to Alaska’s past and its people’s heritage. The permafrost that once preserved centuries-old artifacts is thawing—quickly. As artifacts are exposed, they are susceptible to decay and rot. Scientists estimate that the nine million square miles that make up the Arctic are warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. In southern regions of Alaska, rising sea levels and the Bering Sea’s winter storms are putting coastal heritage sites in even greater danger. Reductions of sea ice, which had protected coastal areas from battering storms, mean that a single severe weather event can cause erosion as far as 100 feet inland. Flooding has not only caused coastlines to recede; it has also swept…