Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2022 i National Geographic History

Mad scientists are fun fictional characters—visionaries who hole up alone (sometimes in a garage? or maybe a remote castle?) to drive human progress. It’s a romantic notion, but one that doesn’t really hold up in real life. History’s innovators would be nowhere without their rivals. Rivalries are behind some of the world’s biggest achievements. In the 19th century Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla fought the current wars. Two hundred years earlier, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz battled over calculus. And two centuries before that, there was Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti, two men whose rivalry was part of the cauldron of competition known as the Renaissance. The two competed in 1418 to design the dome atop Florence’s Duomo, but their first encounter took place nearly two decades earlier in…

His American Life ca 1871-73 Wong Kim Ark is born in San Francisco, California to Chinese immigrants, Wong Si Ping and Wee Lee. 1882 The Chinese Exclusion Act passes, which limits Chinese immigration for 10 years and restricts naturalization. 1890 Wong returns to China with his parents. He marries and conceives a child before returning to the United States. 1895 U.S. officials challenge Wong’s citizenship while detaining him for months off the coast of California. He sues. 1898 Finding for Wong, the Supreme Court declares birthright citizenship the law of the land in the U.S. In 1897 the 14th Amendment was barely three decades old when it was put to the test, thanks to Wong Kim Ark. Ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, this addition to…

Five thousand years ago, there was no single nation of Egypt—at least not as it exists today. There were, and had been for thousands of years, two lands: Upper Egypt in the south and Lower Egypt in the north. There are millennia-old inscriptions on ceramics and depictions of leaders from each kingdom that show two distinct entities with different sets of traditions. Prior to unification, depictions of kings showed different regalia. Rulers of Upper Egypt wore a tall white crown called a hedjet, while in Lower Egypt kings donned a short red crown called a deshret. Around 3100 b.c., a king of Upper Egypt, known as Narmer, changed all that. By incorporating the lands west of the fertile, triangular Nile Delta region into his own kingdom—which spanned the lush Nile…

1 HUNTERS PALETTE Discovered in Armana, this mudstone palette, also known as the Lion Hunting Palette, dates to around 3200 b.c. The central circular compartment was for grinding cosmetics; the surrounding decoration depicts a vibrant hunting scene, complete with armed men in pursuit of many animals—including two lions, a gazelle, an ostrich, a jackal, and a hare. 2 BULL PALETTE Both sides of the Bull Palette are decorated, but only fragments of this graywacke palette survive. It dates to roughly 3200-3000 b.c., a Predynastic era known as the Naqada III period. A bull trampling a human figure has been interpreted by scholars as a symbol of royal victory. 3 TWO DOG PALETTE As in the Narmer Palette, one side of this siltstone piece shows two serpopards, long-necked feline creatures whose…

Through the ages, the engineering of one great dome has influenced that of the next. The Pantheon’s lightweight honeycomb dome and the Hagia Sophia dome, which is supported on pendentives, have influenced the architecture of very different places and styles. The dome of Florence’s cathedral mixes elements of both these designs and innovates with the double-shell and stone-chain solution, reaching dimensions never seen before. Not even the dome of St. Peter’s, which Michelangelo designed about a century later, was able to match it.…

First century b.c. The first agricultural community develops in Palenque; inhabitants combine farming with hunting and fishing. Fifth century a.d. Palenque’s dynasty of rulers (ajaws) is established in a.d. 431. The city is still a relatively small regional player. Sixth century Instability takes hold. Late in the century, incursions by forces from the Maya city of Calakmul devastate Palenque. Seventh century Under Pakal the Great, Palenque becomes a major regional power. The Great Palace and Temple of the Inscriptions are built. Eighth century Palenque’s power begins to wane. It will be abandoned, and the jungle will enshroud the city.…

ISRAEL’S Carmel coast is rich in sites from the time of the Crusades, including Atlit Fortress. The ancient city of Acre was the crusaders’ principal port during the kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted from 1099 until 1291. Shifting sands in the Mediterranean Sea unveiled a surprise for a recreational diver in October 2021. Shlomi Katzin spotted a sword on the seabed near his hometown of Atlit, on northern Israel’s Carmel coast. Despite being encrusted in shells and other marine detritus, the shape of the weapon told experts from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) enough so that they could draw some conclusions. About 10 similar swords have been recovered from Israel’s Carmel coast, but this most recent find appears to be the best preserved. To the excitement of IAA archaeologists, an…

THE SHIELD-SHAPED PALETTES that the late Predynastic kings of Upper Egypt had inscribed with images are a key source for scholars of the period, but so too are limestone maceheads. These also bore images symbolizing the ideology of power and elites from the earliest days of the united Egypt. While palettes were designed to serve practical purposes, maces were weapons. Narmer consecrated both the palette and mace that bear his name to the Temple of Horus in Hierakonpolis (Nekhen). The city was a center of worship of the falcon god. While the Narmer Palette expresses royal dominion and duality, the macehead represents the jubilee celebration Heb-Sed, a great renewal of power ceremony that took place after a pharaoh had reigned for 30 years. The rituals performed at the Heb-Sed appear…

Dionysus was so much more than just the master of the vine; he was also charged with fertility, fruitfulness, theater, ecstasy, and abandon. Whether called Dionysus (his Greek name) or Bacchus (his Roman one), he is perhaps the strangest of the gods in the vast classical pantheons. Though his pagan-like cults and mysteries may seem to have existed outside the usual Greco-Roman religious and philosophical spheres, archaeological evidence in the 20th century proved that he was a fully realized god. The son of an immortal god and a mortal princess, Dionysus’ role forged a crucial link between humanity and the divine, serving as a force of cyclical, unbridled nature who drew men and women out of themselves through intoxication. In that sense, Dionysus, a genial but wild and dangerously ravishing…

This magnificent composition depicts a well-known episode from classical mythology. After helping the Athenian prince Theseus kill the monstrous Minotaur, Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete, flees with him. Theseus cruelly abandons her on the island of Naxos, and she is devastated by his abandonment. 1 Ariadne falls asleep and is discovered by 2 Dionysus, who arrives on Naxos accompanied by his retinue. He immediately falls in love with her, and they marry. The decoration of the sarcophagus shows a 3 band of satyrs playing instruments and 4 maenads dancing wildly. 5 Centaurs appear as well, including 6 a mother holding her little son in her arms. The episode is a fitting scene for a sarcophagus like this one, from the third century a.d.: There is a parallel between…

THE TEMPLES of Palenque’s so-called Cross Group each represent a different tier of the Maya cosmos and one of the city’s three major deities. The Temple of the Cross (above) is sacred to the triad member known as GI and to the realm of ocean. The Temple of the Foliated Cross was dedicated to GII, known as Unen K’awiil, associated with the earthly realm of rain, crops, and the rulers of Palenque. As its name suggests, the Temple of the Sun was linked with the heavens, and its GIII god is associated with the Sun Jaguar deity, and war.…

ATLIT, near where the medieval sword was found in 2021, is one of very few natural coves along Israel’s Carmel coast. According to Ezra Marcus, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa, Atlit likely offered a safe haven for ships during winter storms. It would have been used as a harbor by ancient Egyptian boats as they headed north along trade routes in the Bronze Age. During the Fifth Crusade in the early 1200s, the Knights Templar recognized Atlit’s strategic importance and built a fortress (below) facing Atlit harbor. Muslim forces eventually expelled the Crusaders from the Holy Land, but the Atlit Fortress, also known as Pilgrims’ Castle, was never breached. Instead, its Christian defenders abandoned the site in 1291, and the Mamluks took it over.…

The Florence Cathedral is, without doubt, one of the great feats of Renaissance engineering. The cathedral is dedicated to Santa Maria del Fiore (St. Mary of the Flower), a reference to the lily, Florence’s emblem. Its iconic and ingenious dome, which architect Filippo Brunelleschi completed in 1436, brought to fruition a project that had begun 140 years earlier. It was sculptor and architect Arnolfo di Cambio who came up with the initial plans for a new cathedral in Florence in 1296, to be built over the existing Cathedral of Santa Reparata, alongside the ancient octagonal baptistery. He worked in the Italian Gothic style, incorporating elements of late Gothic and emerging Renaissance design. But when he died in 1310, work on the cathedral came to a halt. Then, in the 1330s,…

Deep in the jungle in Mexico’s state of Chiapas stands the ruins of a Maya city known today as Palenque. Surrounded by a thick canopy of cedar and mahogany, some 1,500 individual structures make up the ancient complex, whose center is dominated by a palace and ringed by temples. Although Palenque is relatively small compared with other Maya sites such as Chichén Itzá or Tikal, the fine detail and elegance of its architecture has stunned visitors since its seventh-century heyday. The slender walls of its monuments were once coated with a layer of stucco and painted with brilliant reds and blues. Although these colors have long faded, Palenque’s ornate friezes and stonework endured. So too has its rich repository of inscriptions, most notably on the panels in the city’s largest…

THE 1952 DISCOVERY by Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz of Pakal’s burial chamber below the Temple of the Inscriptions revolutionized historians’ understanding of Palenque and the Maya. Pakal’s sarcophagus lid (above) is made from a single piece of limestone that weighs about seven tons. Decorated with an intricate relief, the lid is now considered one of the great treasures of universal art. There are several interpretations of the scene on the lid, but most scholars agree that the central figure depicts 1 Pakal transformed into the god of maize, fertility, and abundance. Behind him is the 2 Maya World Tree; some scholars believe Pakal is falling down the tree into the underworld, while others have posited that he is preparing to ascend it. Beneath Pakal is the 3 Earth Monster, from…

Along a horseshoe-shaped cliff above the Waghora River in central India, a cadre of British soldiers set out in 1819 hoping to bag a tiger. Their hunting party stumbled upon something surprising: a network of manmade caves ingeniously and dramatically cut into the rock. The beauty of the stonework was just a hint to what awaited inside those stone halls. The interiors of the caves, home to bats and familiar to local tribes but otherwise unknown to the rest of the world for roughly 14 centuries, revealed a singularly astonishing collection of religious art. The immense murals, rock-cut sculptures, shrines (stupas), monasteries, prayer halls, and inscriptions created over centuries exemplify masterpieces of early Buddhist art and the creative achievements of classical India under the influential Gupta dynasty. And yet, surprisingly,…