Robert E. Lee’s Army surrendered to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865 and after six days President Lincoln was assassinated. Ten days later, the assassin John Wilkes Booth was killed by Union soldiers in Virginia. But on the day Lincoln was shot, he went into a coma and the War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton wanted answers. Very soon one of Booth’s colleague, a John Surratt was identified. John had left town, so his mother Mary Surratt was taken into custody. Robert Redford’s gripping period movie follows the trial of Mary Surratt
Mary was the owner of a boarding house in which the conspirators stayed and that was a fact she never denied. To defend her before a military tribunal a reluctant lawyer — a 27 year old civil war hero by the name of Fredrick Aiken is appointed. Mr. Aiken believes that his client is guilty and he reluctantly defends her because he was forced to by his mentor who believes that the constitution is applicable during war time as well.
But as the trial proceeds he changes; from being certain that Mary was guilty, he becomes unsure of her role. Despite the fact that the military tribunal worked against him, never giving him the freedom to work the case, he manages to convince everyone that Mary was not guilty. But Mary becomes the first woman to be executed by United States because Edwin M. Stanton believes that, “They assassinated the President and someone must be held accountable.”
After the preachy and boring Lions for Lambs, this is an excellent movie which goes into deeper questions about nation, laws, war and the people who have to make tough decisions in the midst of all these.
Category: History: General
Crowdsourcing the Search for Genghis Khan's Tomb
In my Pragati article Secrets of the cellars, I wrote, “If the government cannot find a specialist to translate the royal records, it should have them carefully digitised and published online, so that the job can be crowdsourced.” While writing this I did not have any particular precedence in mind and so it was interesting to hear that this crowdsourcing idea is actually being used to find the tomb of Genghis Khan.
This may be a fool’s errand as we have no idea if there is actually a tomb or not, but Albert Lin of UC San Diego is in Mongolia with funding from National Geographic searching for the tomb. To narrow down the spots they have taken aerial photos of possible sites and are now asking the public to help them. Here is the video which explains how you can help. Also listen to Albert Lin explain this in an interview with Boston Public Radio
The Columbian Exchange
In 1492 Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage to the Americas which bought him fame and wealth, but death and disease to the natives. It also changed the Americas forever: they bought new plants and animals which created an ecological convulsion. In his new book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C. Mann writes about the destruction caused by the Columbian exchange. Listen to the interview on Public Radio in which he explains how it led to slavery (bringing in Africans who had immunity to malaria), ecological damage (by earth worms from ship’s ballast) and how Chinese slaves ended in Peru (due to bird droppings).
“All of the great diseases from smallpox to measles to influenza … [did not] exist in the Americas because they didn’t have any domesticated animals,” says Mann. “When the Europeans came over, it was as if all the deaths over the millennium caused by these diseases were compressed into 150 years in the Americas. The result was to wipe out between two-thirds and 90 percent of the people in the Americas. It was the worst demographic disaster in history.”
Early accounts and diaries mentioned the epidemics in their accounts of life in the 1500s and 1600s. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that modern historians realized the scale of the human death toll in the years following Columbus’ landing, says Mann.
“When you start adding up everything that we know, it becomes apparent that there was just an enormous catastrophe that took place,” says Mann. “These diseases exploded like chains of firecrackers across the landscape.”[In ‘1493,’ Columbus Shaped A World To Be]
The Destruction of the Buddhist site of Mes Aynak
Last December, the Hosni Mubarak’s government gave 2.8 square kilometers of land around lake Qarun to developers to build a tourist resort. If the resort was built, a Neolithic site would have been lost. Now, due to the revolution, that land deal has been revoked.
Archaeologists say the remains of rain-based Neolithic farming in the reserve may hold vital clues to a technological leap that led to irrigation-based farming along the Nile.
Around 4,000 BC, humans occupying a strip along the northern shore of the lake seized a window of only a few centuries of rainfall to grow grain in previously inhospitable desert, archaeologists say.
“We have the evidence of the earliest agriculture activity in Egypt. So it’s before the Pharaohs, it’s before the early dynastic period when Egypt becomes a state,” said Willeke Wendrich, an archaeology professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.[Egypt’s revolution may save Neolithic treasure]
But the Buddhist monasteries of Mes Aynak in Aghanistan are not so lucky.
Mes Aynak (Little Copper Well) lies 25 miles south-east of Kabul, in a barren region. The Buddhist monasteries date from the third to the seventh centuries, and are located near the remains of ancient copper mines. It is unclear whether the monastery was originally established to serve the miners or if the monks set up there to work the mines themselves.Here, 7,000 ft up the mountains, Bin Laden set up a training camp in 1999 to prepare terrorists for the 11 September attack. All traces of the camp have gone, but the region still remains a Taliban stronghold.
During the early 2000s, widespread looting occurred at the Buddhist sites after the Kabul government found it difficult to impose control. Archaeologists are now uncovering dozens of statues with missing heads that were broken off to sell.
Mes Aynak’s fate changed again in 2007, when the government negotiated a 30-year mining concession with the state-owned China Metallurgical Group. The archaeological remains sit on the world’s second largest copper deposit. The $3bn deal represents the largest business venture in Afghanistan’s history.[Race to save Buddhist relics in former Bin Laden camp]
Now that mining the place is lucrative, you can say bye bye to the monastery next year. After all who wants that in Afghanistan now? Definitely not the Chinese and definitely not the folks who run the country. In 2001, the Taliban used mortars, dynamite, tanks and anti-aircraft weapons to destroy Bamiyan. Now the Chinese are going to use dynamite and heavy machinery to destroy the remains of an Indic religion.
There is not much in the news about this Bamiyan type destruction. There are no screaming voices in the Guardian from international award winners who usually get upset when they hear the word mining.
If you want to know more about Mes Aynak and what the world is losing, please take a look at the ebook created by The Association for the Protection of Afghan Archaeology. (blog)
Who owns the Heritage Sites?
As new nations form, an important issue is that of the heritage sites. This is especially important in Israel-Palestine area where everyone except people of Indic religions seem to have a stake.
“In any political arrangement, one side will have control of equities of the other,” Seidemann emphasised. “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not only a conflict of territory but of identity and narratives, with archaeology and cultural heritage the physical embodiments of the narratives. Addressing these issues is critical for the stability of Israelis and Palestinians.” [Israel and Palestine: who owns what?]
As the vote for Palestinian statehood is coming up in September, there is lot of activity in the ground in West Bank.
Israeli officials have argued that heritage sites with Jewish historical connection must remain under Israeli sovereignty. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that position last year, after Unesco ruled that, despite being venerated by Jews, Christians and Muslims, heritage sites in Bethlehem and Hebron are Palestinian (The Art Newspaper, December 2010, p25). He denounced the decision as “absurd”, calling it “an attempt to disconnect the nation of Israel from its heritage.”
Palestinians counter that location, not religious identification, determines sovereignty of a site. “Palestinians are proud to host a diversity of cultural heritage which is also important to the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths. It is Palestinian policy to respect and apply international laws concerning cultural property and heritage using a professional approach to preserve and protect the sites based on geographic location,” said Gabriel Fahel, the legal adviser on archaeology to the PLO’s Negotiations Support Unit (which closed last month). He also charged Israel with violating international treaties it has signed by excavating in the West Bank and removing Palestinian cultural property.[Israel and Palestine: who owns what?]
Since none of these groups give up easily, this is going to be an interesting debate.
A 17th Century Tibetan Deception
In 1679, China under the powerful Qing dynasty was trying to claim power over Tibet. The Fifth Dalai Lama was in his final years and the future looked bleak. To ensure that the spiritual and political leadership continued he came up with a brilliant plan: he announced that he was retiring and appointing an official named Sangye Gyatso as the leader of the Tibetans. To see how this innocent looking plan, which is being repeated once again by the 14th Dalai Lama, fooled the Chinese, read on.
When the Fifth died in 1682 at the age of sixty-five, Sangye Gyatso duly informed the public that the Dalai Lama was in retreat. On the rare occasions when important visitors were allowed an audience, he enlisted an elderly monk of similar age and appearance to pretend to be the Fifth; the monk wore a large eye-shade, much like the current Dalai Lama, albeit for different reasons.
The deception was so effective that it was fourteen years before the Chinese Emperor realized he had been duped, and then only because some Mongolian prisoners of war mentioned reports they had heard in Lhasa that the Dalai Lama had died more than a decade earlier. By then the next Dalai Lama had been identified, educated, and established: a succession crisis had largely been avoided. The Qing had been denied any say over the selection of the Sixth Dalai Lama, thus taking away a fundamental part of their claim to overlordship. “You, Regent!” thundered the Emperor Kangxi in a 1696 edict to Sangye Gyatso, “You are nothing except an administrator working for the Dalai Lama, you were elevated to be the ‘King of Tibet’ by us! …This news should have been communicated to us directly!”
Hence the concern in some quarters of Beijing that the current Dalai Lama might be similarly using his retirement to prevent China from selecting his spiritual successor and thus reinforcing its claim to sovereignty over Tibet. [The Dalai Lama’s ‘Deception’]
Revolutionary Ideas from Göbekli Tepe
National Geographic has an article (HT Vipul) on Göbekli Tepe in Southern Turkey where people constructed a huge temple complex much before the invention of agriculture. This site is now prompting historians to rethink the theories on the origins of complex societies. How were foragers, who usually follow the resources like the Nanook, able to stay at one place and move 16 ton stones without wheels or animals? Why did they even bother constructing such a massive structure? Did pilgrimage pre-date the Neolithic revolution?
Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife. “I, my colleagues, we all thought, What? How?” Schmidt said. Paradoxically, Göbekli Tepe appeared to be both a harbinger of the civilized world that was to come and the last, greatest emblem of a nomadic past that was already disappearing. The accomplishment was astonishing, but it was hard to understand how it had been done or what it meant. “In 10 or 15 years,” Schmidt predicts, “Göbekli Tepe will be more famous than Stonehenge. And for good reason.”[Göbekli Tepe]
There is a new explanation for the origin of agriculture
If these archaeologists were correct, these protovillages provided a new explanation of how complex society began. Childe thought that agriculture came first, that it was the innovation that allowed humans to seize the opportunity of a rich new environment to extend their dominion over the natural world. The Natufian sites in the Levant suggested instead that settlement came first and that farming arose later, as a product of crisis. Confronted with a drying, cooling environment and growing populations, humans in the remaining fecund areas thought, as Bar-Yosef puts it, “If we move, these other folks will exploit our resources. The best way for us to survive is to settle down and exploit our own area.” Agriculture followed.[Göbekli Tepe]
and it is connected to religion
Schmidt speculates that foragers living within a hundred-mile radius of Göbekli Tepe created the temple as a holy place to gather and meet, perhaps bringing gifts and tributes to its priests and craftspeople. Some kind of social organization would have been necessary not only to build it but also to deal with the crowds it attracted. One imagines chanting and drumming, the animals on the great pillars seeming to move in flickering torchlight. Surely there were feasts; Schmidt has uncovered stone basins that could have been used for beer. The temple was a spiritual locus, but it may also have been the Neolithic version of Disneyland.
Over time, Schmidt believes, the need to acquire sufficient food for those who worked and gathered for ceremonies at Göbekli Tepe may have led to the intensive cultivation of wild cereals and the creation of some of the first domestic strains. Indeed, scientists now believe that one center of agriculture arose in southern Turkey—well within trekking distance of Göbekli Tepe—at exactly the time the temple was at its height. Today the closest known wild ancestors of modern einkorn wheat are found on the slopes of Karaca Dağ, a mountain just 60 miles northeast of Göbekli Tepe. In other words, the turn to agriculture celebrated by V. Gordon Childe may have been the result of a need that runs deep in the human psyche, a hunger that still moves people today to travel the globe in search of awe-inspiring sights.[Göbekli Tepe]
See Also: Photos from Göbekli Tepe | Video of a clay model
60 Minutes Feature on Mt. Athos
Mt. Athos in Greece is a unique place where Orthodox monks live a monastic life. Though Greece protects the peninsula, it is self governed by the monks of the 20 monasteries of the Eastern Orthodoxy. Special permission is needed to visit Mt. Athos and only a few visitors are allowed each month. Mt. Athos does not permit women to enter and this ban has been in place since 1045 CE, since the time of the Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomachos. Mt. Athos does not even permit female animals (female cats are allowed since they catch rats).
Most of us will never set foot in this autonomous monastic state where orthodoxy has been preserved for a millenia. So the next best option is to watch the CBS 60 Minutes feature on this. (Part 1, Part 2). Ironically, the CBS clips are sponsored by viagra.
16th Century Europe
In 1492 Christopher Columbus set of to Asia and reached the Americas. Six years later Vasco da Gama reached Calicut. Following these, Europeans made many such voyages, started trading companies and eventually colonized the world. But what was Europe like in those days? Movies like 1492: Conquest of Paradise and The Sea Hawk give us some images, but they do not present the complete picture.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has posted lectures given by Prof. George L. Mosse in the Fall of 1969. One of the lectures (mp3) deals with this question and the image of Europe of that period is not pretty.
By 1500, economic conditions were severe: a price revolution was starting, but it was also a time of bad harvests. 1500 saw a total crop failure in all of Germany that resulted in peasant uprisings, looting and pillaging, to such a proportion that in 1501 Europe for the firsts time saw a paid police force to maintain order. Additional scourges were diseases and epidemics. First and foremost, the Black Death: To the populations of Europe, this seemed like a willful and arbitrary punishment. Between 1499 and 1502, whole populations were decimated. A new disease, syphilis, joined the plague. This prompted preachers to call for repentance, penance and pilgrimages. The Plague was more frightening than the syphilis, because it occurred suddenly and greatly disfigured its victims. All of this leads to a heightened religious sensibility and a search for answers by all parts of the population.
To find answers, people turned to a kind of literature that had come down from the Middle Ages and was most popular: books of prophecies. Their content was simple, promising hope for the future: darkness would be followed by light, and after the Anti-Christ would come Christ. The roots of these books lay partly in the bible (which, Mosse tells the students, he is sure they have never read), especially in the Books of the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse is written in symbolic terms. Before the book of the seven seals can be opened, “the wine must be pressed and the harvest reaped” that means, before Christ’s return there will be bloody wars and mass the conversion of the heathens, especially of the Jews, to Christianity. Man lived in the expectation that the world was coming to an end; Luther believed it, and so did all protestant reformers and many of the intellectuals. With it came astrology. The stars were now in an evil conjunction. Saturn was “the evil planet”. The Anti-Christ would come up from the darkness; for a short while the Jews would rule the world before their conversion. Then the book of seven seals would be opened. (For example, Shakespeare firmly believed in astrology).[European Cultural History 1500-1815 – Summary]
Read the whole thing: European Cultural History 1500-1815 – Summary
Two New Fakes
It is Easter time and it is time for two new hoaxes.
Two ancient nails discovered in a Jerusalem archaeological excavation 20 years ago may have been those used to crucify Jesus, filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici says.The nails, discovered in an excavation of a first century Jewish tomb in 1990, have divided historical opinion. Jacobovici’s view is set out in a documentary that will be aired on television in both the U.S. and Israel[Nails Used to Crucify Jesus May Have Been Found, Filmmaker Says]
The nails were found in the tomb of a Caiaphas family. Caiphas was also the name of the High Priest during the time of the crucifixion. So the assumption is that this Caiphas is that Caiphas and for some reason one of the nails used to crucify a man called Yeshua — whom Caiphas hated — was put in his tomb.
Prof. Robert Cargill of UCLA writes, “no, simcha, you didn’t find the ‘nails of the cross’ of christ (a week before easter)”
- Simcha claims to have found the tomb of the High Priest Caiaphas, a claim which is uncertain becausearchaeologists aren’t even sure that the tomb is Caiaphas’ tomb.
- The excavation found two nails in the tomb, one in an ossuary, and one on the ground.
- The nails disappeared (i.e., someone took or misplaced them).
- The nails “magically reappear” in a lab in Tel Aviv 20 years later.
- Because Caiaphas is mentioned in the story of Jesus, and the nails “disappeared” for a time, they must be the nails of Jesus’ crucifixion?????
Dr. James McGrath has a roundup from various scholars on this topic.
The next hoax is a collection of 70 metal books from Jordan
Christian Today reports: If the finding is found to be authentic, it would constitute the earliest known Christian writings. Discovered about five years ago, after a flash flood that exposed two niches inside a cave in remote northern Jordan, these codices have divided Biblical Scholars as to how significant these books maybe. The indication that they are Christian in nature is based on preliminary translation of images and symbols. These symbols contained on the books refer to the Messiah and the crucifixion. [Metal books discovery may have ties to First Century Christianity]
Many media houses went to town with the story, but now these books have been provied to be fake.
Caruso’s new analysis of the text corroborates the recent findings of a Greek archaeologist at Oxford, who said the images appearing in the codices, including one of Christ on the cross, are anachronistic. “The image they are saying is Christ is the sun god Helios from a coin that came from the island of Rhodes. There are also some nonsense inscriptions in Hebrew and Greek,” Peter Thonemann told the press. He believes the codices were forged within the past 50 years.[Exclusive: Early Christian Lead Codices Now Called Fakes]