To break up the walls of text I thought I’d start interspersing some posts with photos that I’ve taken – sometimes new, sometimes not (this one was taken in Paris in Sept 2011), sometimes singly, sometimes in batches.
Shabtis
Prehistoric Autopsy; Lost Kingdoms of South America
The last episode of Prehistoric Autopsy was about Lucy – one of the most famous fossils of our ancestors (and the only individual (as opposed to species) I’d actually heard about before this series). She was a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis and lived a little over 3 million years ago. She was discovered in the early 70s, and at 40% complete was one of the most complete specimens of a hominid from that era.
This programme felt like there was a bit more padding than the other two – not quite as much to tell us about, partly because there’re fewer fossils available to figure things out from. But there was still quite a lot 🙂 From the bones that do exist (both Lucy’s and others) they can tell that this species was bipedal & walked upright – even tho they don’t have the foot bones they can see the shape of the knee joints and the pelvis. This is corroborated by data from some preserved footprints, that are presumed to be Australopithecus afarensis because that was the only primate species that’s been found in that area at that time. Experts have analysed the shape of these footprints and compared it to both human and chimpanzee footprints in similar material. The Australopithecus afarensis footprints are much more like the human ones – they have a non-opposable big toe, and the pressure patterns (like deep heel prints) are similar to human ones.
They also showed us the pelvis bones of chimps, humans & Australopithecus afarensis – you can see the difference between the chimp one & the other two really clearly. But the differences between the Homo sapiens one & Australopithecus afarensis one are much subtler. The scientist Roberts was talking to also pointed out that you can see changes in the birth canal – Australopithecus afarensis would’ve found it harder to give birth than a chimpanzee because the canal is not as wide, due to the demands bipedalism puts on the shape. But not as hard as a modern human – the brain size of Australopithecus afarensis is still pretty small, only a little bigger than that of a chimp, so the fit would not be as tight nor would it require quite as much changing of position from the baby on the way out.
Australopithecus afarensis may’ve used tools. This was a pretty controversial piece of evidence – and Roberts & McGavin didn’t agree on how plausible they thought it was. And it was nice to see how that was presented – there wasn’t a feel of some fake monolithic “the opinion of the scientists”, it was presented in a much more true to reality way. Some scientists think this, others aren’t convinced, everyone’s interested in seeing more evidence. Actually the whole series has done well on this front, they took great care to tell you about the caveats and where the evidence was slim. Lots of “we think because of reasons” and less “we know”.
Anyway, back to the tools – there’s an animal bone, found in the same context as a juvenile Australopithecus afarensis, which has two parallel grooves on it. In the grooves are fragments of hard igneous rock (as opposed to the sandstone that was encasing all the bones). This may be evidence that Australopithecus afarensis used sharp rocks to butcher meat (in some crude sense). But it may also have been due to accidental trampling of a dead animal that drove a stone against the bone. Given chimps use tools like twigs, it wouldn’t be that surprising if Australopithecus afarensis did – but really there needs to be more evidence than a single bone.
They also had a segment on how Lucy might’ve communicated – which was probably via facial expressions as well as vocalisations, because pretty much all primates do that. To illustrate this they showed us a little bit about some new research starting on Japanese Macaques, which has the eventual goal of seeing how many different facial expressions they can tell apart (and I think they have hopes of figuring out what they mean, not sure how though).
The model they built looked really good, as all of them have. They said at the end of the programme that the models were going out touring museums round the country, but when I looked it up we’d missed all the dates (because we time-shifted the programme by 3 months). A shame 🙁 Although apparently the exhibition was aimed at kids, so maybe it’d’ve been a bit shallow. There also doesn’t seem to be a tie-in book for the series, another shame – I’d’ve bought it 🙂 I did find another Alice Roberts book on Human Evolution, so if I like the book of hers we have (when I get to it) then I’ll pick that up.
Having finished up Wartime Farm last week we started on a new series – this time something that we’re only time-shifting by a couple of weeks. The series is Lost Kingdoms of South America, which is clearly inspired by the previous BBC series called Lost Kingdoms of Africa. The primary difference between the two series (as well as which continent they’re on) is the presenter – the African one was presented by Gus Casely-Hayford, who is an art historian whose family come from Ghana. The presenter for this current series is Jago Cooper, who is an archaeologist who specialises in South American cultures but not (as far as wikipedia tells me) from South America. So that gives a slightly different tone to the programmes (not better or worse, just a different perspective).
This first episode was about the Chachapoya people of Peru. Who I must confess I’d never heard of before watching it (although it became clear I should’ve at least known the name). A good start – because I’d sort of assumed we were going to get first the Aztecs, then the Incas then perhaps the Mayans, you know all the peoples we’ve all heard of before. Instead we got an intriguing people whose society really wasn’t the same as our expectations for the place & time.
The Chachapoya lived in the north of Peru, in the Andes, from about 400AD until around the time the Europeans arrived on the scene. The name we use is the Incan name for them & it translates as the Cloud People because of their high altitude villages & towns. Cooper interviewed an archaeologist in Lima who said she thought only about 5% of their sites have been properly excavated, if that. So there’s a lot still to find out.
One of the themes of the programme was that when thinking about these people we really need to take our Western preconceptions and throw them away before we can understand them. For instance the first thing we think is “but why did they live so high?” – because that’s the altitude that was best for cultivation of maize & potatoes. They lived where they could grow their food, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do. And why did they live somewhere so remote? It wasn’t remote for them – both because the people were more willing to travel further between settlements, and because the rivers and the geography of the Andes at that point combined to funnel trade from the Amazon Basin to the Pacific Coast through the lands of the Chachapoya. So not remote, but on a busy trade route. Cooper showed us some artifacts found in Chachapoya sites that included things like feathers from birds only found in the rain forest in Brazil.
Early in their culture they buried their dead up in caves on mountain cliff-faces. These were astonishing – Cooper needed the help of modern equipment and experienced mountaineers to get to these caves where the bones lay. But the floors of the caves were worn through repeated visits, so this didn’t seem to be a case of burying your dead somewhere out of the way. Later they mummified their dead – and this is why I feel I should’ve heard of them, because I knew there were Peruvian mummies, I just didn’t know which culture made them. Which is poor, really – but now I do 🙂 These mummies weren’t like the Egyptian ones which were buried & left to last out eternity in their tomb. These mummies were carried around from place to place in bags, and sometimes taken out & displayed in some fashion. A very different relationship with the dead.
Another difference in their society from what we might expect is that they don’t appear to have had a hierarchy – the Spanish had referred to this in writing from the time they arrived in South America, but there’s also evidence for it in the archaeology. The villages that’ve been investigated don’t seem to have elite housing – all the housing is the same sort of shape & size. I wasn’t entirely clear how they can tell that the one larger building most villages have is a ceremonial site & not an elite site, but they were clear that this was the case. There are also no signs of elite burials – all the dead that have been found are treated in the same. This is pretty unusual for a human society.
They also don’t seem to’ve been bloodthirsty in the way that the Aztecs & the Incas are – no human sacrifice was mentioned, nor ritual bloodletting. And in another difference from the “canonical” South American civilisation story they were conquered & dispersed by the Inca before the Spanish arrived. The Spanish actually allied with the Chachapoya to fight against the Inca. Although the Europeans did deal the final blows to the Chachapoya way of life – both through converting them to Christianity, and via the diseases they brought with them.
“China: The World’s Oldest Civilisation Revealed” John Makeham (Part 4)
Partition and Conflict: The Period of Division
This is a short chapter, just 18 pages, and probably I should’ve read it right after the last one & done a post about the two together. But then again, it covers another 400 years from about 200AD through to about 600AD. And about half a thousand different names and kingdoms (some exaggeration for effect here 😉 ). So it was a bit confusing.
Orientation dates: Diocletian became Emperor of Rome in 284AD. Constantine became Emperor in 306AD, and called the Council of Nicea in 325AD. The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410AD. The Anglo-Saxons migrate into (or invade) Britain over the period between 400AD and 600AD. The Merovingians ruled Francia from 481AD through to 687AD. Muhammed was born around 570AD and Islam was founded in 610AD.
So this 400 year period is actually the equivalent of one of the Ancient Egyptian Intermediate Periods – the country is divided, and ruled over by different kings or emperors in different bits. But there is still a high degree of cultural continuity within the area as a whole and across the time period. I admit I was a bit surprised by the length of this period between unified Chinas – I’d somehow assumed that once it was unified back in 221BC the core pretty much stayed that way except for brief periods thereafter.
I found the writing for this section quite confusing, and even as I’m flicking back over it to write this post I’m sometimes struggling to figure out quite who did what when & what the country afterwards (or before) was called.
The Three Kingdoms
The beginning of the end for the Han was in 189AD when a civil war broke out that would eventually lead to the division of the Empire into three parts (the “Three Kingdoms”). A general called Dong Zhuo entered the capital city, Luoyang, and took charge of the two sons of the recently deceased Emperor. Instead of supporting the new Emperor (the elder son) he replaced him with the younger son who “ruled” for 30 years under the thumb of Dong Zhou and later Cao Cao & his offspring. This line eventually took the title Emperor around 220AD. The kingdom they ruled over was in the north of China and called Wei.
In the south of China there ended up two kingdoms – which I think derive from the “loyal rebels” who originally supported the new Emperor of the Han Dynasty back in 189AD. But I’m not quite sure. In the south east was the kingdom of Wu, ruled over by Shu Quan & descendants (who didn’t claim to be Emperors until 229AD). And in the south west (including modern Sichuan) was the kingdom of Shu Han ruled over by Liu Bei and descendants (Emperors shortly after 220AD) – these guys claimed descent from the Former Han so I think were trying to set themselves up as more legitimate than the others.
This period of Chinese history is apparently often represented in art and storytelling – particularly famous is “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” which is a novel by Luo Guanzhong, written around the 14th Century. The book also makes the point that the period in question was culturally rich and splendid, including a poet (Cao Zhi, son of Cao Cao) who is still recognised as one of China’s greatest poets.
The Two Jin Dynasties
Next there was a brief period of unity before it all dissolved into chaos again. Sima Yi murdered Cao Shuang in 249AD and took over the kingdom of Wei. His grandson succeeded in conquering Shu Han in 266AD and set himself up as the Emperor of a new Dynasty – the Jin. He conquered the Wu in 280AD and all looked set for a newly unified China to continue in serenity.
Unfortunately his son & heir was mentally incompetant (that’s exactly what the book said – no details as to what they meant though) and when he came to the throne in 290AD the whole thing started to collapse. Infighting between consort families eventually lead to the War of the Eight Princes and the Jin Dynasty lost control of the north of China in 316AD. That’s the end of the Western Jin.
The Eastern Jin keep control of the south of China for another hundred years. It didn’t sound like it was a particularly peaceful or settled period – lots of refugees from the north causing friction with local warlords. And eventually the Jin ruler actually hands over power to the start of the Liu Song Dynasty out of a feeling that the Mandate of Heaven has passed from the Jin.
As an aside – I’m wondering if the naming of Dynasties as Western then Eastern is linked in Chinese somehow to Former/Later or Early/Late. Linguistically I mean. This particular pair seem to have no connection to a west->east movement of power (unlike, say, the Zhou much earlier whose capital did shift over time).
This is the time of the chicken headed ewers!
The Sixteen Kingdoms
While the Eastern Jin were ruling the south the north was split into several different kingdoms which rose & fell during the 4th & 5th Centuries. To add to any confusion one might have about this period of Chinese history they have also mostly taken names from earlier Chinese kingdoms of the Warring States period – like Zhao or Qin. A way of legitimising themselves, perhaps? Which might be particularly important for these kingdoms because they were mostly ruled by members of the Five Barbarian Peoples – who were descended from the peoples to the north of China.
These peoples were not actually barbarians, the word is just the epithet used by the Chinese to describe the non-Chinese (and therefore perceived as uncivilised) that neighboured them. And despite this period sometimes being called “The Barbarian Invasions” they mostly didn’t invade either. They’d often been co-inhabiting the northern region of the empire alongside the “native” Chinese, and becoming assimilated into their culture. The exception is one of the last of the groups to appear on the scene – these are the Särbi, and they were nomadic herders who are the ancestors of the Mongols. A branch of these (the Tagbatch) would eventually re-unite northern China around the end of the 4th Century.
The Southern and Northern Dynasties
We’re now entering the last hundred years of this period between unified Chinas. In the south between 420AD & 581AD there are a series of short-lived dynasties starting with the Liu Song who were handed power by the last of the Jin. Each seems to come to power in a military coup then not long out-last their founder. In the north the Tagbatch rule the whole area for quite some time first from a northern city called Pingcheng, then moving south. Then a civil war breaks out around 525AD – this war destroys the capital city Luoyang. Eventually the Sui dynasty rise up from the Wei valley area and re-unite northern China before setting their sights on the conquest of the south.
Again the book makes the point that despite the political turmoil this is a time of growth and cultural achievement. New maritime traderoutes between the Eastern Jin in the south of China & Japan, South-East Asia and India lead to great economic growth and the rise of what might be called the middle class (my phrasing, not the book’s) – wealthy merchants and tradespeople, who didn’t have the political power or social status of the aristocrats but certainly were a large part of keeping the country solvent. Poetry became cemented as one of the central parts of Chinese culture during this time – this is when it became expected that an upper class gentleman would be able to write poetry as a matter of course. Mentioned in passing a couple of times was that Buddhism and Daoism started to spread to a degree to rival Confucianism, I’d’ve liked more discussion of this but perhaps it will be revisited later in the book.
Tangents to follow up on: The various peoples to the north of China who form the Sixteen Kingdoms, what their history is before & after this time.
Whew. I’ve ended up writing quite a lot about what was covered so briskly in the book. But on the plus side, I think I’ve got it put into some order in my head now, which is after all the purpose of writing an essay about it 🙂
In Our Time: The Borgias
The Borgias have a bit of a reputation – poisoning, murder, incest & all sorts of bad behaviour. And particularly shocking in a family that includes two Popes! The experts who discussed this on In Our Time were Evelyn Welch (Queen Mary, University of London), Catherine Fletcher (University of Sheffield) and Christine Shaw (Swansea University).
The programme started with a brief run-down of the salacious details of the “Black Legend” (much as I did just now, but they did it with a quote). Then they moved on to set the Borgia family in context with a description of Italy in the fifteenth century – unlike today it wasn’t a single unified state, instead there were several different states on the peninsula. Some were city states ruled by aristocracy, some were republican city states, other areas were kingdoms (like the Kingdom of Naples), and there were also the papacy. The political interactions of all these various states, and of the families that ruled them were complex and sometimes the rivalries were so bitter that states would rather invite in foreigners than be ruled by a neighbouring state. The papacy had only relatively recently returned to Italy & to Rome, and so was in the process of establishing itself (in temporal terms) in the network of relationships. The Pope held a lot of lands within Italy, including the Kingdom of Naples.
The Borgias enter the story with Alphonso Borgia who came with the King of Aragon when he conquered Naples, as a secretary & lawyer. He was then made a Cardinal, and became Pope as a compromise candidate when there was stalemate between the two leading candidates. Once he became Pope he did the traditional papal thing of making a nephew or two into Cardinals. They were saying on the programme that this nepotism (the word is derived from the Italian for nephew) was fairly standard – that there were really two sorts of Cardinals, those that were respected theologians or churchmen, and those that were there to be part of the government for the Pope’s temporal domains. And promoting your own family to these positions would give you some men on whose loyalty you could count.
So Rodrigo Borgia is one of these new Cardinals and he stayed a Cardinal under several popes for thirty-something years, gaining experience and power as he did so. The experts were saying that he was a very politically savvy man. He was elected as Pope in 1492 and took the name Pope Alexander VI – he’s the (in)famous Borgia Pope. Here’s where in the programme we had the first debunking of a popular legend – he is generally said to have bribed his way to the papacy, but the experts were keen to point out that bribery isn’t quite the right way to describe it. Yes, his various bishoprics were handed out to various Cardinals etc after he became Pope but this was the standard way that things were done. And obviously people who were on good terms with him would be more likely to get given these, but it wasn’t that he systematically went out to gain votes by promising people rewards. Any of the candidates for the papacy would’ve given out their bishoprics to allies after they got the office.
Rodrigo had several children, eight I think they said, and particularly doted on the eldest four (who all had the same mother). These included Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia who are the other main subjects of the salacious legends. They said on the programme that it wasn’t particularly shocking that a Pope had children – but he did raise eyebrows by actually having children whilst he was Pope and by legitimising his children.
They talked about how the generally politically astute Rodrigo had a blindspot when it came to his children. He was trying to ensure the survival of his dynasty after his death and granted Cesare a lot of lands that had belonged to the Pope, which unsurprisingly didn’t particularly go down well. Rodrigo was effectively trying to sweep aside all of the delicate alliances & networks of relationships that existed in Italy and to install his son in a fiefdom of his own. He also once left Lucrezia to handle the papal correspondence whilst he was away from Rome – shocking because women weren’t even supposed to be in the Vatican, let alone be in a position of responsibility. This helped fuel rumours of indecent relations between father & daughter.
When they came to discuss the rumours and legends they were fairly unanimous that most of it was made up by enemies of the Borgias either at the time or after one of Rodrigo’s main rivals had succeeded him as Pope. There probably was one orgy, but there is no evidence of poisoning or of incest. The incest rumours in particular are probably due to someone who would have a distinct bias against the Borgias – Lucrezia’s first husband. At the time the rumours start Rodrigo is trying engineer his daughter’s divorce (because he wants an alliance with someone more useful), and is trying to get the chap to sign off on an annulment on the grounds that he was incapable of consumating the marriage. Which the soon-to-be-ex-husband isn’t particularly happy about, so he’s spreading rumours about how rather than him being impotent it’s more that Rodrigo wants Lucrezia for himself.
However it is likely that the talk of murders was true – some of them at least. But this is not confined to the Borgia family, and it’s worth remembering that not only were the politics of the time fairly cut-throat in general but also the whole period is a time of war. The King of France is marching his armies through Italy (at, I think, the request of some states that are hoping he’ll back them against other states – that whole thing where the internal rivalries are stronger than the external). There’s definitely evidence that Lucrezia’s second husband was murdered on the orders of the Borgia. And perhaps one of the Borgia sons was murdered by Cesare – but there are several other candidates for his murderer. However, Shaw made the point that the Borgias seem to’ve been particularly feared as a family that you shouldn’t cross, and even Rodrigo seems to’ve thought that Cesare overreacted when he felt he’d been insulted. So they certainly weren’t a nice family.
They talked a bit about the later lives of Cesare & Lucrezia – Cesare basically declined from power & ended up dying in some minor conflict in Navarre. Lucrezia died in childbirth at the age of 39, and at that point had a reputation for piety & good business sense – not what you’d think if you believed the stories told about her now.
So the take home message was that the Black Legend of all the evil doings of the Borgias was pretty much propaganda. They weren’t nice people by any means, but they weren’t unusual for a ruling family of the time.
Migration
Welcome to the new home of the posts I’ve been putting on livejournal! 🙂 I’ve copied across the last few months worth of posts (but not the comments), so it should look a little familiar.
I decided to migrate it across to my own site partly because I’m beginning to think I’ve got posts I might miss if LJ were to vanish. And partly because it was an excuse to play around with a new website design & some new software 🙂
Hopefully I have most of the wrinkles ironed out – if you spot a broken link or visual infelicity please do let me know! I’ve got it set up so you don’t have to register an account to comment, but if you don’t then your comment gets stuck in moderation till I deal with it so don’t be surprised if it takes a little while.
Prehistoric Autopsy; Wartime Farm
The second episode of Prehistoric Autopsy was all about Homo erectus, and they were building a model of Nariokotome Boy. This is a 1.5 million year old near complete Homo erectus skeleton & the most complete one ever found. They started off with context, again – Homo erectus only died out relatively recently, but was around for 2 million years, which is the longest of any human species. It’s also one of the first hominids that can be thought of as human, and we and all the other ones that were around in the recent (geologically speaking) past are descended from them. They also lived outside Africa, and were the first hominids to do so.
Homo erectus co-existed with several different hominid species over time – they talked in detail about one, Paranthropus boisei. The skull they showed had a massive jaw, a skull ridge and very flared cheekbones to fit the chewing muscles behind. A diet of particularly solid things seems plausible, like nuts and seeds. As well as that sort of food there’s evidence of wear from grasses on their teeth.
They showed us research into the climate over the time period – I loved this bit, there’s just something so neat about being able to find out what the world was like so long ago with such a simple concept. They do it using samples taken of the sediment on the ocean floor. It’s laid down layer upon layer over time, and you can look at things like the sort of mud it is and the sorts of plant seeds/pollen you find in it to build up an idea of what the weather and landscape was like on nearby continents. We got shown a particular example of a core where you could see a colour change in the mud from top (~5000 years ago) to bottom (~10,000 years ago), and told us that the changes correspond to a change in the nearby climate (East Africa, if I remember right) from wetter to more dry. Over the 2 million years that Homo erectus existed the climate seems to’ve undergone lots of swings between hotter & colder or wetter & dryer conditions and they speculate that why Homo erectus survived and the other hominids didn’t is that Homo erectus was more adaptable.
And that they were more adaptable because of their bigger brains and because of the different way they interacted with the environment around them. There’s evidence that Homo erectus used fire, and they cooked their food (at least at the end of the time period, I wasn’t clear if there was no evidence from earlier on or if they hadn’t done the analysis (yet)). Their tools are more sophisticated than earlier hominid tools – instead of just breaking rocks for a sharp edge their tools are carefully shaped and show evidence of being planned and involving skill to make. So Homo erectus seems to’ve had the cognitive ability to shape the environment to suit themselves, rather than put up with the environment they find themselves in. There’s also evidence that they took care of older members of their groups – a skull has been found where the individual lost their teeth a few years before death, and quite clearly wouldn’t’ve survived without help.
Because of the model building the programme also spent some time discussing the probable physique of Nariokotome Boy. Homo erectus show many adaptions for running, and were probably lean and hairless (to the extent that modern humans are hairless, I mean). Because of the lack of hair they’d’ve had dark skins to protect themselves from the UV of the African sun – and this limited their spread north, they don’t seem to’ve got the low melanin mutation that permitted us to live in more northern climates. Also in this section they showed us evidence that Homo erectus may’ve suffered from tuberculosis, which is astonishing – it is a disease that we get from cattle originally, and was assumed to’ve become a human disease only more recently when modern humans started living in close proximity to cattle because they’d become herders. The marks and signs on the Homo erectus skull they were looking at (not Nariokotome Boy, another one) were very similar to the ones on a modern human who’d died of TB, so seemed convincing evidence. Which raises all sorts of interesting questions.
We also watched the last episode of Wartime Farm, which unsurprisingly covered 1945 and the immediate aftermath of the war, as well as wrapping up with a “what we’ve learnt” segment. So they were mostly concentrating on the fact that once the war was won, that didn’t mean life returned to how it had been pre-war – not only did people still need fed, but in some ways the situation was even more precarious because Britain was close to bankrupt and couldn’t afford to import food yet the fields were becoming less fertile due to a lack of manure and from being over-farmed. They also talked about the celebrations that people had (and the thing they dramatised was a firework elephant, which was awesome 😀 ). And they harvested the wheat crop they’d spent the year growing, using a brand new combine harvester (well, 70 year old one …).
This was a good series, although I’ve struggled to write more than a paragraph per episode. I’m not quite sure why, but I guess partly because there was a lot of “look at how we did things” which isn’t easy to transform into text. I did feel that they spread it all too thin, perhaps they couldn’t do it half the number of episodes, but I do think they could’ve cut it down a bit. The format of half-dramatising, half-telling still feels like it shouldn’t’ve worked, but they pulled it off very well.
“The Desert of Souls” Howard Andrew Jones
I read an excerpt from the sequel to “The Desert of Souls” on tor.com & was intrigued enough to reserve this one at the library. And then a bit startled when it came in coz it had been long enough that I forgot I’d reserved it 🙂
It’s set primarily in the Baghdad of the 8th Century, during the time of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, and our protagonists are part of the household of Jaffar, son of the Vizier. Jafar & Haroun are historical figures (as are some of the others), and they are also protagonists in some of the stories in the Arabian Nights. This story is a kind of modern story of that type, with ancient magic & djinn. There’s also some of the feel of Sherlock Holmes & Watson to the main two characters.
Everything is told to us by Captain Asim, the man in charge of Jaffar’s household guards. He organises a diversion for Jaffar after his pet bird has died – they go out into the market place in disguise, accompanied by the scholar Dabir. While Jaffar enjoys pretending to be a common person they go and have their fortunes told, and shortly afterwards a man being chased through the streets trying to reach Jaffar dies in front of them carrying an elaborate door pull. The two main plot lines of the book are thus launched – Dabir are tasked to find out what is so important about the door pull, and Asim is to guard him particularly when this requires travelling to a far away ruined city. Jaffar is also keen to separate Dabir from his erstwhile pupil, Jaffar’s niece Sabirah, out of fear that they have fallen in love – said fear being encouraged by the prophecy of the fortune teller. Sabirah is destined for an arranged marriage with someone politically suitable, and far above the station of a scholar/tutor no matter how learned he is.
One thing I really liked about this book is how rooted in the real world it is – even the bits that are fantastical. There’s a tale within the tale about a previous adventure of Jaffar, Asim & Dabir and described as an incidental detail in the ancient ruins they visit is what is what seems quite clearly an ancient Assyrian relief of a king in a chariot. The afterword at the end says that Haroun & Jaffar are real, but I was quite pleased I’d figured that out already & I’d looked them up (and the answer to what Jaffar’s prophecy means was mentioned in wikipedia too!). Also helping it to feel real was that the characters don’t feel like 21st Century Westerners dumped in an exotic setting.
“China: The World’s Oldest Civilisation Revealed” John Makeham (Part 3)
Unification and Expansion: The First Chinese Empires
This chapter of the book covers the Qin Dynasty & the two halves of the Han Dynasty, who ruled China between 221BC and 220AD. The Qin Emperor was the first ruler to unite China under the rule of a central authority rather than the feudal states of previous dynasties. The Han emerged initially as the result of a peasant uprising against the second Qin Emperor, and subsequently ruled over China for about 400 years.
Orientation dates: We’re moving out of the time where I try to cross-reference with Egypt, and more into the Roman Empire. The last Egyptian date is the famous Cleopatra, who ruled 69BC to 30BC. For the Romans – the Second Punic War (Hannibal, elephants, etc) happened between 218BC & 202BC, roughly speaking matching the start of the earlier Han Dynasty. Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44BC. Britain (well, bits of) became part of the Roman Empire in 43AD. Hadrian ruled the Roman Empire from 117AD to 138AD, starting to build Hadrian’s Wall in 122AD. The Emperor Diocletian ruled from 284AD, so just outside the Han period.
The Qin Dynasty
Before the Qin Emperor was the Warring States period – China divided into 7 different kingdoms who fought amongst themselves, but still had a fair degree of continuity of culture. The Qin state was one of these kingdoms, and it had been a latish addition to the Zhou dynasty’s territory. Being on the edge of the country it had expansion prospects that central states didn’t, so ended up with a higher population and thus a bigger army than the other states. They’d also lucked out in having a series of rulers that were both long-lived and competent. So over the period of 256BC to 221BC they conquered the other six kingdoms. And the First Emperor ruled the whole of China for the next 11 years until his death.
The way the Qin empire was different from the previous unified states was that it was centralised and not feudal. The pre-existing kingdoms were dismantled and the land divided up into commandaries ruled by centrally appointed bureaucrats. Culture, laws, currency & weights were all standardised across the Empire – by dictat rather than by natural change. There was also a lot of forced labour, doing public works projects like roads & irrigation. And the first incarnation of the Great Wall of China was built during this period using conscript labour. The book had a whole section on the Great Wall which was interesting – I hadn’t realised that until modern times the Great Wall was a symbol of oppression and ultimate uselessness (because it didn’t actually keep the nomads out for long). I was aware (though only found out recently, via listening to an In Our Time programme) that the Great Wall that we can see today isn’t the original, the first incarnation would’ve been earth ramparts rather than stone walls.
The overall impression I got from the book was that lots of good and useful stuff happened during this decade, that would shape the future of united China. But it was achieved via a lot of oppression & cruelty, so it’s not a surprise that the First Emperor’s dynasty didn’t long outlast him. He died in 210BC, probably from taking mercury pills that were supposed to make him live forever (which is the sort of detail that feels like it should be in a fairytale as The Moral). His tomb was described in the ancient texts & is supposed to be spectacular & to include a scale model of the world complete with rivers of mercury. The only bit that’s been excavated is the Terracotta Army, the rest is waiting until the archaeologists are sure they won’t damage anything. But the tales of mercury rivers might well be accurate – apparently the soil in the region contains higher levels of mercury than other places nearby.
The First Emperor was succeeded by one of his sons – not the one he might’ve preferred, but the one that was there when he died. He sounds incompetent, and was persuaded to start off his reign by striking fear into the hearts of the people. Which didn’t work out all that well for him as they promptly rebelled!
The Former Han Dynasty
(I don’t much like this nomenclature for this bit of the Han Dynasty, but it’s what the book uses – except in the Chronology appendix which calls them the Western Han Dynasty like I’d seen other places. “Former Han” just sounds to me like this is people who once were Han but now are not, rather than the first half of the Han.)
The very beginning of the rebellion against the Second Emperor was a group of men who were on their way to the northern frontier for garrison duty, but were unavoidably delayed by poor weather making the roads impassable. Given that the punishment for being late was death one of them, Chen She started a rebellion instead of going quietly to his death. He died after only 6 months, but the rebellion gathered force, and eventually there were two men in charge of it, Xiang Yu (a former general) and Liu Bang (a peasant). They were successful in over-throwing the Qin dynasty and re-uniting China, but fell out over who would rule what. Liu Bang won in the end, and came to the throne as the first emperor of the Han Dynasty in 202BC.
The book talks a bit about the reign of Liu Bang (as Emperor Gaozu), and I think it turns into hagiography at this point. But it does explain that a lot of the actual apparatus of the state was the same as under the Qin Emperor, there’s even been law books found from both the early Han period and the Qin period, which have been compared and are much the same in terms of what there are laws about. The differences are more about tone – the Han did away with a lot of the crueller punishments, and forced labour. They also were more respectful of Confucian scholars, and in fact set up the education system for both bureaucrats and the general population along Confucian principles. Which would get them better press from later historians (who tended to be Confucian educated scholars …). They even went back to the system of bureaucrat run commandaries for dividing up the country – having originally given out kingships to allies during the revolution over time these were taken back again (as they got more rebellious against the Han). In general, if the Shang was the era that set up a lot of the traditional material culture of China, the Qin & early Han Dynasty was where the state apparatus and culture was formed.
It wasn’t all sunshine & roses, though – after the death of the first Han Emperor his wife ruled as regent for his son, and after her death her relatives rose up to seize power. This appears to’ve been aristocratic infighting rather than popular revolt (and resolved in favour of the Emperor’s descendants rather than his wife’s relatives). Wives for Emperors were often chosen from families with few male relatives to avoid this sort of thing, and from more humble families (after all it’s not like the Emperor had any peers, everyone was more lowly). The end of the Western Han came in 9AD when a regent (and relative of the late Empress) took the throne himself, establishing the Xin dynasty. And if it had stayed aristocratic infighting then this might’ve been the next Dynasty to rule China. However environmental disaster, caused by the Yellow River changing course, lead to thousands of refugees and chaos in the country. This popular uprising eventually lead to the downfall of the Emperor, and relatives of the earlier Han Dynasty took over again in 25AD forming the Later Han (or Eastern Han) Dynasty.
The Later Han Dynasty
The book is laid out partly in chronological order & partly in themes, and while there’s a place for both I’m not sure the balance is always right. I mention this here because there’s not actually much about the chronology of the 200 years of the later Han Dynasty. What there is is part of the section on the power of eunuchs, rather than separated out into its own section.
One of the themes they cover is the status & role of women in the Han dynasty period – which is interestingly sometimes more progressive than you might expect but in other ways is just as depressingly sexist as expected. It was during this period that the traditional role of women in China as inferior to men was articulated & laid down – they were supposed to be tranquil, submissive, do all the proper women’s work about the house without complaint, to subordinate all their interests to their husband (or father). This was the Confucian ideal of womanhood, and it fits with the general hierarchical nature of Confucian ordering of the world. But high-born women were also frequently well educated – perhaps it was just to enable them to better help their husbands, but even so they got the education. And in the Emperor’s harem in particular they had status & influence on the issues of the state. Particularly during the later Han Dynasty when the Emperors spent more time in the harem where there were no men, only eunuchs & women. And there was equal pay for equally ranked women & men – the concubines apparently got ranked on the same scale as the male officials, with the most senior ones being at the same rank as the most senior men and receiving the same pay.
Another of the themes is technology and medicine. There were several advances in both agricultural & military technology over the period, primarily driven by better iron working technology and the abundance of iron ore in China. But in terms of military advances they also had good map making abilities, and some of the maps from the early Han Dynasty correspond well to modern maps. Which is pretty impressive if you think about the things that medieval European mapmakers drew and called “accurate” 😉 The biggest thing to happen during this period from a technological point of view was the development of better paper. Paper had possibly been made before (and used by lower class people because silk would be too expensive for them), but in 105AD one of the eunuchs in the service of the later Han Dynasty is credited with making high quality paper, fit for the court and bureaucracy to use.
The later Han Dynasty Emperors would spend most of their time in the harem, and so eunuchs gained more power because of their greater access to the Emperor. But being castrated was a disgrace, and so they weren’t held in high regard by the other officials & aristocrats. Which clearly leads to infighting and political manoeuvring between the eunuchs and the rest of the court. Towards the end of the Han Dynasty this got pretty nasty, with mass demonstrations or riots & murder. Eventually it led to the dis-unification of China & the start of the next period of Chinese history (and the end of this chapter!).
Tangents to follow up on: Mostly I’d like to know a bit more about the Qin and the very beginning of the Han Dynasty, some of the stuff in this book felt a little bit too much like repeating the stories that the traditional histories tell.
In Our Time: The Upanishads
The Upanishads are some of the sacred texts of Hinduism, originally transmitted orally from father to son in the priest families they were written down in the 6th Century AD. They consist of a series of dialogues about the nature of the universe and the nature of knowledge. And I’d not even heard of them before listening to the In Our Time episode about them. The experts on the programme were Jessica Frazier (University of Kent and University of Oxford), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Lancaster University) and Simon Brodbeck (University of Cardiff).
They started by putting the texts in context – the oral versions date from about 700BC and are the last part of the Vedas, which are the rituals performed by Hindu priests. The Vedas are part of the ancient concept of religion as control of the world – these rituals are spoken in the right way at the right time, with the right ceremonies, and then the gods and world will become ordered in the way you desire. The Upanishads were developed during a time when the tribal societies of the Indian subcontinent were starting to coalesce into kingdoms, with larger urban centres, and are concerned with the meanings and knowledge behind the rituals. They’re presented mostly as a series of dialogues between pupil and teacher (with the roles of teacher & pupil being taken by various different people – sometimes father & son, sometimes husband & wife, sometimes King and sage (in either role)). I’m not quite clear on why they started to be written down, perhaps it was just a more general transition from oral to written culture? But even after they were first written down they were still for the priestly class, not for general consumption. Over time commentaries on them were written by religious leaders, and closer to modern times they were translated first into Persian and then into Western languages & became more widely known.
There was an interesting division between the experts. Brodbeck seemed to concentrate on how the texts were about knowledge and about how to transmit and to learn that knowledge. And the other two were more interested in what the texts had to say about the Hindu beliefs about the nature of the universe. Interestingly they were saying that the Hindus were not interested so much in “who created the world” like many other religions, but more in what came before there was a world and before there was a creator – this is the concept of Brahman (I think) which is the universal cosmic power & is described using many different analogies in the Upanishads. They also discussed the desire for immortality reflected in what the Upanishads said, and how this is different from the Western concepts of immortality. In our culture immortality is about the continuation of the personality – either living forever or dying and going to an eternal afterlife as yourself. But in the Hindu religion it can be about the immortality of one’s lineage – one’s children are one’s immortality, they carry on the line. Or it can be about the immortality of the Atman (which again is described with many analogies in the Upanishads but roughly translates as the self). And this isn’t your personality, if the Atman is reincarnated the new life isn’t related to the old one & doesn’t remember it or anything, even tho it’s the same immortal Atman. And a goal is to die finally and become part of the Brahman, in an immortal existence that has no more personality or suffering like there is in the world.
Threads of Silk and Gold (Exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum)
While we were in Oxford after Christmas we went to the Ashmolean Museum – J looked at the Egyptian stuff and I took the opportunity to visit one of the exhibitions they had on, as well as having a look at the early Chinese gallery to look at the sorts of things mentioned in the book I am reading.
Threads of Silk and Gold
This is an exhibition of embroidery & other textile crafts from Meiji era Japan, which is 1868-1912. During this period there was a lot of European influence on the designs made by Japanese craftspeople, and also a big European market for Japanese textiles. The exhibition had several very fine objects, made with a variety of techniques – embroidery, weaving, appliqué, dying etc. I don’t really have much to say about the exhibition, as it was very much a “look at the pretty stuff” sort of thing. And no photography coz it would damage the items.
I would’ve bought a postcard, but there wasn’t one of my favourite object – this was a four-paneled screen with a golden peacock and peahen embroidered on it (link goes to the museum’s page for the screen). I like it both for the design (which is very striking) and for the quality of the work. From a distance it looks like gold on lacquer, and it’s only when you get up close you can see that it’s embroidered. And if you look closely you can see that each feather in the peacock’s tail has been stitched in full, no short cuts. So a feather in the back had all its frondy bits coming off the main spine, and then a feather in front stitched over it etc.
The exhibition as a whole made me want to take up stitching again, but I think I’ve too many projects going on at the moment, perhaps I’ll come back to that some time though 🙂 And I should learn something about Japanese history, I had never heard the term “the Meiji period” before.
Other Stuff
I had a look around the earlyish Chinese stuff that they have in the museum – the galleries are split into two, Neolithic to 800AD and 800AD to the present. As I’d been reading about Chinese pre-history & the pre-unification dynasties I looked mostly at that stuff but I did also look at the Tang Dynasty pottery because I like that. And took pictures 🙂 They’re up on flickr, as always.
