Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2024 i National Geographic History

HOUDINI publicly premiered his water torture cell in Berlin on September 21, 1912. He referred to this act as the Upside Down. A tank with a capacity of more than 250 gallons was placed at center stage and filled with pressurized hoses by assistants. Houdini, in a bathing suit, had his ankles padlocked before being lowered headfirst into the tank. A curtain hid the set and then, after a suspenseful period ranging from 30 seconds to two minutes, the magician would reappear, dripping, onstage. Houdini said of the act, “I believe it is the climax of all my studies and labors. Never will I be able to construct anything that will be more dangerous or difficult for me to do.”…

TAKING ADVANTAGE of the furor over the Loch Ness monster, the film The Secret of the Loch, in which an archetypal mad scientist searches for a living dinosaur, was released in 1934. As the myth gathered pace from the 1960s onward, Nessie returned to cinema screens. In Billy Wilder’s 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective discovers that the beast is nothing more than a spy submarine. And with the 2021 documentary Legend’s End: The Loch Ness Monster Story, Nessie remains a permanent fixture in popular culture. More than 200,000 visitors a year make the pilgrimage to the Loch Ness Centre at Drumnadrochit.…

Despite its name, this deck was not actually created by the painter Andrea Mantegna, and historians are still debating the true artist. At the bottom of each card is written the suit to which it belongs (A, B, C, D, or E), the name, and the number.…

ALMOST ALL EGYPTIAN obelisks were made of red granite, extracted from the quarries of Aswan, near the first cataract of the Nile. The stone had to be completely intact. If it broke or cracked, the extraction was stopped immediately, and the obelisk abandoned. In Aswan, an obelisk dating to the reign of Hatshepsut or her successor Thutmose III was left unfinished for this very reason. Still anchored to the bedrock, this obelisk in the making sheds light on the extraction techniques that were used. Along its sides, the ditches where workers stood are still visible. To break and carve the rock, they used handheld pounders made of dolerite found on site, copper tools including saws and drills, and an abrasive mixture of water and silica sand.…

8th-6th century b.c. Sparta establishes its dominion over Laconia and Messenia, forcing their people to become serfs, known as helots. 480 b.c. Three hundred Spartans led by King Leonidas fight to the death in a vain attempt to stop the Persians from advancing at Thermopylae. 431-404 b.c. The Peloponnesian War pits Athens against Sparta. The two cities follow distinct and antagonistic political models. Early 300s b.c. After the Spartan victory, admiration for all things Spartan—“Laconomania”—intensifies in Athens. 371 b.c. Defeat by Thebes at the Battle of Leuctra marks the beginning of the end of Sparta’s hegemony in Greece. 146 b.c. After defeating the Achaean league, the Romans allow the Spartans to return to their way of life.…

The dragon is one of the most emblematic images of medieval culture. Far from being a fantastical invention or a modern product of J. R. R. Tolkien’s sagas, the dragon emerged from symbolic worlds created in ancient times and has survived to the present day. In medieval societies, the dragon was classified within the same framework as regular animal species. Legends, stories, and images turned it into a symbol of the Middle Ages that would transcend time. Even earlier than the Middle Ages, in the civilizations of antiquity, a whole menagerie of mythological beings with dragon-or snakelike features already existed. In ancient Mesopotamia, Marduk, the supreme deity of Babylon, clashed with the demonic dragon Tiamat, the symbol of primordial chaos and seawater, to establish order in the cosmos and create…

Many single Spanish men in the Americas started relationships and families with Indigenous women, a practice frowned upon by the Spanish authorities. In the 1520s a new law sought to force married men who went to America to reunite with their Spanish wives after a set period, either by returning to Spain or by bringing their wives across the Atlantic. Married men could be separated from their spouses for no more than two years, or three if they were merchants. If they did not renew the permit before the deadline, the Spanish authorities in America could return them to their conjugal duties in Spain. In distributing colonized land, the best plots were granted to married men, but if their wives did not come to the Americas to join them, they…

Isabel Barreto’s 1595-96 voyage to the far side of the Pacific is a story of reckless courage against a backdrop of violence and plunder. Barreto took command when her husband, Álvaro de Mendaña, died in September 1595 just to the east of the Solomon Islands, the goal of the expedition. A few years before, on his first expedition, Mendaña had been the first European to sight the Solomon Islands, named after King Solomon in the Bible who coveted the wealth of the port of Ophir. Following her husband’s death, Barreto did not reach the islands, but she skillfully commanded the hungry, mutinous, and sick crew to the Philippines. Despite her hero status for this feat, such expeditions had a dark side. In their voyages across the Pacific, the violence unleashed…

1879 Emiliano Zapata is born into a family of campesinos (farm workers) in Anenecuilco. In 1909 he is elected president of the local village council. 1911 Zapata, who has joined Francisco I. Madero’s rebellion against Porfirio Díaz, breaks with Madero over differing views on agrarian reform. 1913 Zapata refuses to join Victoriano Huerta, who has assassinated Madero. Zapata’s objective, embodied in the Plan of Ayala, is still radical reform. 1914 In Aguascalientes, Venustiano Carranza breaks with Zapata and fellow agrarian leader Pancho Villa, who enter Mexico City in November. 1915 Villa, leader of the revolution in the north, is defeated by Álvaro Obregón, Carranza’s military chief. Zapata continues to fight in the south. 1917 The U.S. recognizes Carranza as Mexico’s president. His troops besiege Morelos, where Zapata is undertaking root…

INSCRIPTIONS from the Minoan period found in Crete correspond to various forms of Aegean syllabary. The oldest is a figurative Cretan script, sometimes called Cretan hieroglyphs because of the resemblance to Egyptian hieroglyphs. (In reality, the script may not have anything to do with Egypt and likely has a local origin.) It is unclear whether the script on the Phaistos disk derives from this Cretan script in the same way that the Linear A writing system probably does. Neither Cretan hieroglyphs nor Linear A have been deciphered yet. Linear A disappeared with the collapse of the Minoan civilization, but it left two offshoots: the Cypriot syllabary and Linear B, both of which have been deciphered. Linear B is the oldest known dialect of Greek. ORIGINAL SCRIPT It has not been…

Unprecedented archaeological evidence that the Maya used tobacco infusions for rituals related to sacrifice, bathing, and childbirth has been uncovered in the Pacific lowlands of Guatemala. Scientists working on the pre-Columbian archaeological site of El Baúl at Cotzumalhuapa were looking for traces of cocoa in a sample of large ceramic vessels recovered from ritual deposits. The vessels, which date from the Maya Late Classic period (a.d. 600 to 900), were also tested for other residues, including tobacco. When the results came back from analysis, the team was surprised. “We didn’t expect to find traces of nicotine in cylindrical vases suited for drinking,” lead researcher Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos told History. Risky Ritual The roots of Maya culture can be traced to around 2600 b.c. Maya states later extended across Central America…

1874 Ehrich Weiss is born in Budapest. At age four he immigrates with his family to Wisconsin, where they struggle to earn enough. 1894 Now known as Harry Houdini, he marries Bess Rahner, who works as his assistant in the precarious world of traveling circuses. 1899 Impresario Martin Beck hires Houdini, kick-starting years of fame and wealth. Houdini tours Europe in 1900 and Russia in 1903. 1908 Houdini first performs his escape, while manacled, in a water-filled milk can. The act will later evolve into the water torture stunt. 1926 Following a punch to the stomach delivered by a hapless student, Houdini dies in Detroit from peritonitis.…

SPARTA AND ATHENS have traditionally been seen as polar opposites. Athens left a major artistic legacy, including a body of literature that gives historians rich insights into its society, history, and customs. By contrast, beginning in the sixth century b.c., Sparta privileged its military culture over all else. Although Spartans did create fine pottery and some sculpture, they produced almost no literature. No native account of ancient Spartan society has survived. All the classical sources on Sparta were written by non-Spartans, such as Herodotus and Thucydides in the fifth century b.c. and the Greco-Roman author Plutarch in the first to second centuries a.d. Another barrier to diffusion of knowledge about Sparta was its isolationist policy, known in Greek as xenelasia. Devised by Sparta’s legendary lawgiver, Lycurgus, xenelasia stipulated that foreigners…

ILLUMINATED BESTIARIES, or books of beasts, became particularly popular in Christian Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Bestiaries featured animals not for their natural history but as Christian allegories. A bird’s seductive song, for example, symbolized the dangers of desire, while the medieval belief that a beaver castrated itself symbolized chastity. Juxtaposed with real fauna in the bestiaries were fantastical animals, notably dragons, around which a rich set of bestiary conventions grew. Dragons’ tails were more deadly than their teeth and were used to asphyxiate large animals such as elephants. Despite their ferocity, and their association with the devil, dragons feared the shadow of the peridexion tree of India. Doves, representing pure souls, were safe from dragons in the branches of the tree, a scene that symbolized Christian salvation.…

During the siege of the Buenos Aires fort by the Querandí people in 1536, a woman from Granada, Spain, Catalina Vadillo, nicknamed “La Maldonada,” fled to avoid famine and her crazed compatriots. According to one story with more than a touch of legend to it, La Maldonada lived in a cave for three months with a female puma that she helped give birth to her young. One morning, when La Maldonada was bathing in the river near the cave, she was abducted by some Querandí people who took her to their village, and one of them took her for a wife. A year later, some Spanish soldiers saw her in the village and took her back to the fort. They decided to punish her for having escaped, tying her to…

In March 1919, Gen. Pablo González, in command of the government forces stationed in Morelos, arrested Col. Jesús Guajardo, head of the 15th Regiment, for going to a cantina while under orders to attack the Zapatistas. Zapata found out, and on March 21 he sent a letter to Guajardo in which he invited Guajardo to join him. Zapata believed that with the help of Guajardo’s men he could retake the key cities in Morelos. However, González intercepted the letter and decided to use the now compromised Guajardo to set a trap for Zapata. After obtaining President Carranza’s authorization for his plan, González released Guajardo, showed him Zapata’s letter, and accused him of being a traitor. He humiliated Guajardo and then offered him a deal: Guajardo was to write back to…

THE MAYA consumed various types of psychoactive substances to achieve a state of trance during ceremonies conducted by the priestly elite. As floating plants that mark the boundary between water and air, and the living and the dead, water lilies were prized for their symbolism. They also contained powerful psychoactive ingredients that induced trances when consumed. Maya mushroom stones testify to the hallucinogenic effects of another substance, magic mushrooms (Psilocybe cubensis), known to the Maya as k’aizalaj okox. These were consumed before battle or during religious rituals.…

HOUDINI HAD FIRSTHAND experience when he set out to expose spiritualism as a fraud, since he himself had practiced as a medium. Early in his career, he pretended to contact the dead as a lucrative component of his performances. Later, feeling remorse at monetizing grief, Houdini aimed to debunk the practice. He sabotaged séances across the country and, shortly before he died, testified in Congress in support of legislation that would have prohibited the practice. But the First Amendment protected spiritualists. His 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits detailed the many tricks that mediums used to hoodwink their paying clients.…

PLAYING CARDS first appeared in China in the ninth century. Various theories have emerged to explain their original use, either as an early form of dominoes or as play money in gambling games. Medieval Europe generally encountered goods and customs from China and other eastern regions when they spread through the Arab and Islamic world. The first decks of cards imported into Europe, therefore, came from the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt via ports such as Venice. Regarded as an Islamic custom, the cards were sometimes referred to as the Saracen’s pack. Mamluk decks were usually organized into four suits, such as swords, polo sticks, cups, and coins. Europeans went on to invent a dizzying variety of suits and trumps in a storm of improvisation from which tarocchi, later known as…

2305-2279 b.c. Found in Heliopolis in the 1970s, a fragment from a pillar built in the time of Pharaoh Teti of the 6th dynasty is the oldest remnant of an obelisk. 1493-1425 b.c. Eighteenth dynasty rulers Thutmose I, Hatshepsut, and Thutmose III commission obelisks for the Karnak Temple Complex. The pillars are carved from granite. 1279-1213 b.c. Ramses II erects a pair of obelisks at the Temple of Luxor, one of which remains there. The other is taken to Paris, where it stands on the Place de la Concorde. 116-107 b.c. At the temple dedicated to Isis, on the Nile River’s Philae Island, Ptolemy IX Soter II builds the last two obelisks created during pharaonic Egypt. 10 b.c. Augustus brings two obelisks to Rome as souvenirs of conquest. Today they…

LED BY PLUTARCH, the philosophical disciples of Plato in the second century a.d. became known as the Middle Platonists. Living many centuries after the Spartan heyday, they felt nostalgia for Sparta. Their admiration for acts of courage, such as those undertaken at Thermopylae, is exemplified by the Greco-Roman author Maximus of Tyre: “The pure Spartans were educated without restraint, with an erect soul, nourished in liberty, whipped and scourged, and exercised in hunting, in wandering on mountains, and other labors, and when they were sufficiently accustomed to endurance, then, being furnished with spear and shield, and marching: under law as their leader, they fought for liberty and the safety of Sparta.” He also lauded Sparta’s founder, Lycurgus, for having established “a city without walls, without fear, which was not a…

MANUSCRIPTS overflowed with dragons by the 12th and 13th centuries. Scribes excelled in working the fabulous beasts into the lavishly stylized capital letters at the beginning of each section of work. Dragons are often depicted holding on to capital letters, walking around inside them, or hanging from them by their tails or long necks. Their tongues are frequently used to highlight particular words in the beginning of paragraphs. Margins also are populated with dragons, often depicted fighting against knights or against other strange creatures. These design strategies captured the attention of the audience, making the process of reading more dynamic and attractive.…

1492 Christopher Columbus’s first voyage is partly financed by Queen Isabella I of Castile. Women will participate in his second and third voyages. 1520s Laws limit the time married men in America can be apart from their wives. Women are encouraged to cross the Atlantic to join their husbands. 1536 The siege of Buenos Aires prompts Isabel de Guevara and other women to settle in the burgeoning colonial center of Asunción, today in Paraguay. 1542 Beatriz Hernández rallies her fellow colonialists against Indigenous attacks and cofounds the city of Guadalajara, in western Mexico. 1595 On her husband’s death, Isabel Barreto takes command of the expedition to the Solomon Islands, captaining her crew to safety in the Philippines. 1606 Passing as a man, 21-year-old Catalina de Erauso enlists to fight the…

Born in Llerena, Spain, Catalina Bustamante set sail from Sanlúcar for America in 1514 with her husband, her children, and her in-laws’ family. She probably belonged to a noble family and was well educated, having knowledge of Greek and Latin. When she reached her destination, the island of Hispaniola in the West Indies, she worked as a governess to the daughters of the Spanish conquistadors. Later she moved to Mexico, where she continued her vocation, eventually being appointed head teacher of the school for Indigenous girls in Texcoco, New Spain. She taught reading, writing, Spanish customs and language, and religion. In 1529 a group of Spanish soldiers arrived at the school and kidnapped one of the pupils, a chieftainess named Inesica, and her maid, on the orders of a local…

“I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees,” said Emiliano Zapata, a peasant leader who played a remarkable role in the Mexican Revolution. Zapata was born into an unequal society that became more unjust during his lifetime as the ruling party increased their power and control over the land. As the leader of a powerful agrarian movement in his home state of Morelos, Zapata became a key player and symbol for demolishing the dictatorship and elitist governing practices of the time. Emiliano Zapata Salazar was born in the village of Anenecuilco in 1879, near the beginning of the Porfiriato, the dictatorial regime President Porfirio Díaz imposed on Mexico for more than a generation. Anenecuilco, with its 400 inhabitants, was a peasant community dating back before Spanish colonization.…