Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2023 i National Geographic History

There are some facts that for inexplicable reasons feel untrue to me. For example, I recently heard that Cape May, New Jersey, is farther south than Baltimore, Maryland, but I didn’t believe it. One look at an atlas proved me wrong. I looked at the map—lo and behold—there was the Victorian beach town sitting to the south of Charm City. (It’s a fun experiment. I also learned that Cairo, Egypt, lies roughly on the same latitude as New Orleans!) Another truth it’s taken me a while to absorb is this one: Cleopatra’s lifetime is closer to the present day than it is to the building of the Great Sphinx. The math checks out: About 2,100 years ago, Egypt’s last female pharaoh was born. About 2,400 years before that, the Great…

1678 On March 4, Antonio Vivaldi, the son of a violinist in the orchestra of St. Mark’s Basilica, is born in Venice. 1703 After less than a year as a priest, Vivaldi is hired as a violin teacher at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà orphanage. 1713 Vivaldi’s first opera, Ottone in Villa, premieres in Vicenza, Italy. He is now a composer and violinist known throughout Europe. 1725 The Four Seasons, today Vivaldi’s best known work, and one of the favorites of Louis XV of France, premieres. 1741 Having fallen on hard times, Vivaldi dies in Vienna at the age of 63. He is buried in an unmarked grave.…

1647 The plug bayonet is first used in Europe, according to written accounts of the Thirty Years’ War. 1688 Development of the socket bayonet enables guns to be fired while the blade is mounted. 1693 A bayonet charge at the Battle of Marsaglia in the Nine Years’ War proves key to France’s triumph. 1746 Defeating Scottish forces, the British army employs bayonets to win the Battle of Culloden. 1781 At the Battle of Yorktown, George Washington tells his troops that bayonets are crucial for victory.…

Ur’s Sumerian rulers accrued great wealth in the mid-third millennium b.c. thanks to robust trading relationships with other cities. In 1927, archaeologist Leonard Woolley led an expedition (sponsored by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania) that uncovered a lavish necropolis in the ancient city, revealing glittering evidence of the city’s great wealth. The tombs were full of objects made from silver and gold and adorned with precious stones like lapis lazuli, carnelian, agate, and chalcedony. Woolley’s team recovered jewelry, weapons, and even a golden lyre adorned with a bull’s head. One of the most iconic pieces was an ornate box now known as the Standard of Ur, which was decorated on all sides with intricate mosaics made from shell, red limestone, and lapis lazuli.…

The death of Servius Tullius is one of the most dramatic episodes in Livy’s History of Rome. According to Livy’s account, Tullius’s own daughter Tullia Minor plotted with her husband against the king. Tarquin the Proud summoned the senators to the curia, sat on the throne, and delivered a violent speech against Tullius. When the aged king appeared, Tarquin “seized Servius round the waist, and being a much younger and stronger man, carried him out of the senate-house and flung him down the steps into the Forum below.” Servius tried to escape to his home, but Tarquin’s emissaries caught and killed him. Livy mentions the rumor that Tullia sent these hit men. But what really stained Tullia’s reputation was the “horrible and inhuman” crime that ensued. Returning home in her…

JOSHUA L. CHAMBERLAIN Although he opted to go by his middle name Joshua, Chamberlain was named after the war hero Capt. James Lawrence, who uttered the cry, “Don’t give up the ship!” during the War of 1812. In June 1863 Chamberlain commanded the 20th Maine Infantry as its colonel. He recalled the horrors of Little Round Top: “The crush of musketry gave way to cuts and thrusts, grapplings and wrestlings. The edge of conflict swayed to and fro… At times I saw around me more of the enemy than of my own men; gaps opening, swallowing, closing again with sharp convulsive energy; squads of stalwart men who had cut their way through us, disappearing as if translated. All around, strange, mingled roar—shouts of defiance, rally, and desperation; and underneath, murmured…

Like a monstrous storm, the Battle of Gettys-burg left carnage in its wake. More than 50,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing in this tempest—a toll that bore harder on Lee’s smaller army and forced him to retreat into Virginia, leaving the dead behind. “Some with faces bloated and blackened beyond recognition, lay with glassy eyes staring up at the summer sun,” recalled Cpl. Thomas Marbaker of the 11th New Jersey Infantry. “Hugging the earth like a fog, poisoning every breath,” he added, was “the pestilential stench of decaying humanity.” Burial parties digging in the hard, rocky soil did not linger over their grim task. “The dead are many, the time is short, so they got but very shallow graves,” wrote one soldier, “in fact most of them were buried…

Carved more than 3,000 years ago, an inscription on the tomb of an Egyptian priest shows a harpist singing. His song says that while one can live forever in the afterlife, on Earth “life is but a dream.” Known as the “Harper’s Song,” this hymn contains the first known use of that famous phrase. But dreams meant much more to the ancient Egyptians than a turn of phrase. Egyptians put great value on dreaming as a way to access a world normally hidden from view. They devised history’s first manual of dream interpretation and first recorded humanity’s dreams and nightmares. The most common word for“dream” in ancient Egypt was the noun resut, which means “awakening.” There was no verb for dreaming; it was not active but passive, something to be…

Following the decline of the old kingdom, the Sphinx and the structures around it were abandoned and fell into ruin. They lay dormant for centuries as the desert sands piled up around them. The Sphinx would be reborn during the New Kingdom (circa 1539-1075 b.c.), when a young pharaoh used the Sphinx to tie his reign to the kings of old. Standing between the paws of the Sphinx is the Dream Stela of Thutmose IV. Discovered in 1817, the stela was a late addition to the Sphinx complex, installed sometime during the 18th dynasty. The Dream Stela is a massive piece of solid granite, weighing some 15 tons and standing about 12 feet tall. Its ornately carved inscriptions relate an episode from the life of Pharaoh Thutmose IV, the eighth…

Before it was an empire, before it was a republic—Rome was a kingdom. Its legendary founder Romulus, was the first rex, or king. According to tradition, his reign began in 753 b.c. Rome is believed to have had seven kings in all, and the monarchy lasted for more than 240 years. Unlike the other rexes, the last three kings—Tarquin the Elder, Servius Tullius, and Tarquin the Proud—all shared Etruscan ancestry, tracing it back to a civilization that flourished in central Italy between the eighth and third centuries b.c. Of all Rome’s royalty, they perhaps made the biggest impact on the Eternal City. Their notable deeds, questionable reputations, and bloody deaths would end Rome’s time as a monarchy and drive it into the dawn of the Republic. Divine Connections Accurate records…

The Cumaean Sibyl loomed large in Roman mythology and was a favorite subject of Italian Renaissance artists including Michelangelo and Raphael. The sibyl lived in the ancient city of Cumae, near Naples, and served as a priestess of Apollo. She may have been the only person who Tarquin the Proud feared. According to tradition, the king visited her, and she offered to sell him nine books, assuring him that they contained oracles to secure the gods’ favor. He felt her price was too high and refused to pay. The sibyl burned three of the nine books and then demanded the same exact price for the remaining six (although some tellings say she doubled the cost). Tarquin again refused the offer and the priestess set fire to three more. The king…

KNOWN AS STELA 12, a monolith from the Classic Maya period depicts the humiliation of captives after a battle fought between the city of Piedras Negras (in northeastern Mexico) and the city of Pomoná in spring 792. 1 The victorious ruler of Piedras Negras, K’inich Yat Ahk II, sits high above his defeated prisoners. His nobles wear headdresses and are richly adorned with jewelry. At the ajaw’s feet kneels 2 a captured sajal (noble or governor). 3 Other prisoners appear bound and stripped of their clothes and adornments. The figures are identified; their names are written in glyphs behind them. Some are secondary sajals from Pomoná and are shown in a position of respect toward the captor, with their right hand on the left shoulder. The style of the stela…

Gen. Robert E. Lee’s victory at Chancellorsville came at a steep price and left him determined to abandon his defenses at 1 Fredericksburg and carry the fight north. “Our loss was severe,” he concluded, “and again we had gained not an inch of ground.” Following the death of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson on May 10, Lee welcomed the return of his“old warhorse,” Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who had been sent to southeastern Virginia with 20,000 men to shield Richmond and ease the burden of feeding Lee’s army. Conferring with Lee, Longstreet agreed that “fruitless victories” like Chancellorsville“were consuming us, and would eventually destroy us.” Lee decided to launch another invasion of the North—an advance into Pennsylvania that would allow his hungry, ragged troops to forage at the Union’s expense and…

The battle raged in the 1 Wheat Field, where Sickles’s beleaguered Third Corps buckled under pressure from brigades led by 2 Col. George “Tige” Anderson of Hood’s division and Brig. Gens. 3 Paul Semmes and 4 Joseph Kershaw of McLaws’s division. To hold the line, Meade reinforced the Third Corps with men led by Brig. Gens. 5 James Barnes and 6 John Caldwell. Barnes went in first but found Kershaw on his flank and pulled his forces back, obstructing 7 Brig. Gen. Samuel Zookof Caldwell’s advancing division. “If you can’t get out of the way,” Zook shouted, “lie down, and we will march over you!” Passing through, Zook’s troops entered the Wheat Field alongside the Irish Brigade of 8 Col. Patrick Kelly. A third brigade under 9 Col. Edward Cross…

The Four Seasons is about as popular as a piece of classical music can be. The timeless collection of four concertos—each representing a different season—sounds as dynamic and exciting today as when Italian Antonio Vivaldi published it in 1725. The work is among the best-loved pieces of classical music ever composed, but before World War II, only a few music specialists had heard of it. Even Vivaldi’s name was an obscure footnote in musical history at the time. It wasn’t always this way. Vivaldi was famous, lionized across Italy, Germany, France, and England as a virtuoso violinist and composer. His restless genius produced more than 40 operas and hundreds of concertos performed throughout Europe. Like his contemporaries Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, Vivaldi was a shining light of…

3200-2900 b.c. Humanity’s first known examples of writing and urban planning develop in the city of Uruk, the first of Sumer’s great city-states. 2900-2330 b.c. The Sumerian invention of cuneiform writing, imprinted on clay tablets, spreads throughout Mesopotamia to Syria. 2330-2150 b.c. The neighboring Akkadians conquer Sumer, forging the first empire in history. When it collapses, Sumer is invaded by the Gutians. 2150-2112 b.c. Although the Gutians occupy Sumer, Lagash rises under its powerful Sumerian king, Gudea. Lagash is later eclipsed by the new dynasty in Ur. 2112-2004 b.c. Under Ur’s mighty new king, Ur-Nammu, the city’s ziggurat is dedicated to the moon god Nanna. The world’s first legal code is compiled. 2004-1595 b.c. Elamites conquer Ur and capture its last king. Regional power later shifts to Babylon, and spoken…

At the time of the Roman monarchy, although the Etruscans didn’t form a united political entity, they were the most powerful group of people in Italy. The Greeks called them Tyrrhenians and said that they came from Asia Minor. The Etruscans called themselves Rasena, and everything indicates that their culture had developed independently in Italy. One feature that distinguished them from other Italic peoples was their language, which has not yet been fully deciphered. Etruscan influences are apparent in much of Roman culture. Rome’s monumental architecture, both public and sacred, bears hallmarks of Etruscan style. Rome’s first temple to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the Capitoline Triad, was built during the Etruscan period, as was the Auguracle, also on the Capitoline Hill, from where the augurs observed the sky to predict…

At dawn on July 1, Confederates of Maj. Gen. Henry Heth’s division, leading the way for Hill’s corps, approached Gettysburg along the 1 Chambersburg Pike. They expected to find the town lightly defended by militia. Instead, they confronted 3,000 dismounted Federal troopers, led by Buford, that would be bolstered at midmorning by the arrival of the First Corps under Maj. Gen. John Reynolds, who would later be shot dead as he hurried men into line along 2 McPherson’s Ridge. Heth’s troops fell back toward Herr Ridge, where they were reinforced by another of 3 Hill’s divisions, led by Maj. Gen. William Pender. Lee arrived from Chambersburg at midday, ahead of Longstreet’s corps, to find Ewell’s divisions approaching from the north and east. “I do not wish to bring on a…

LEE’S FINAL BID The general made one last desperate try at Gettysburg on July 3, sending some 13,000 men against the center of the Federal line. Pickett’s three brigades under Kemper, Armistead, and Garnett formed the strongest component of this advance, known to posterity as Pickett’s Charge. Armistead and the small contingent who followed him over the stone wall at the Angle were the only attackers to breach the Union line there. After two days of fighting, Lee did not give up. He ruled out another attack on Meade’s left, which had been heavily reinforced. Prospects for success looked little better on Meade’s right, where Confederates in Ewell’s division had advanced late on July 2, breaking through at 1 Cemetery Hill before being repulsed there, as they were at Culp’s Hill.…