Category History

The largest diamond that has ever been found is the Cullinan Diamond, and it weighed 3106.75 carats (621.35 g) at the time of its discovery. It was found in Cullinan of South Africa, in a mine called Premier No.2 on 26 January 1905. The diamond was named after the owner of the mine, Thomas Cullinan. But this gem was not sold for two years after it was put on sale in London on April 1905, and was later bought by the Transvaal Colony government in 1907. It was gifted to Edward VII, King of the United Kingdom, by the Prime Minister Louis Botha. The diamond was however cut by Joseph Asscher & Co. in Amsterdam based on the King’s liking.

Through the years, the Cullinan mine has produced stones of various cuts and sizes. Cullinanlor the Great Star of Africa, which is the largest clear cut diamond in the world, weighs 530.4 carats (106.08 g), and adorns the head of the British Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross, which is a part of the Crown Jewels of the British monarch.

The second-largest diamondalso comes from Cullinan and is named Cullinan II or the Second Star of Africa, weighing 317.4 carats (63.48 g). It is mounted in the Imperial State Crown. The two of the largest diamonds are thus part of the British Crown Jewels. Seven other major diamonds, that is, total of 208.29 carats (41.66 g), were owned by Elizabeth II privately. She inherited them from her grandmother, Queen Mary, in 1953. Apart from these, the Queen also owned minor stones and a set of unpolished fragments from Cullinan.

In Polynesia the construction of a house is accompanied by a ceremony that combines politics with religion. The building contract has to be drawn up with the tafugas, a guild of skilled craftmen regarded as the guardians of the art of the god Tangaroa.

Once the Contract has been agreed the whole village celebrates the erection of the main pole. This part of the house symbolizes the link between the world of mankind and that of the gods. The rafters of the house are fixed to the main pole and to the poles that form the outer sections of the house. The dome-shaped roof is then placed on this framework.

Polynesians use no precision instruments and do all the building by eye. Their accuracy is amazing. Every house has an individual design reflecting the tafugas who   built it. When the house is finished the tafugas put his own special mark on the timber and the end of the job is celebrated by feasting.

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The Pygmies who live in the dense forests of equatorial Africa are the smallest people on earth. A fully grown Pygmy man never grows to more than about 1.35 metres. The forests provide their basic needs of food, water, firewood and clothing. Their huts are made by covering a beehive shaped frame with leaves. They live in a camp for about a month and then abandon it and move on.

Pygmies are a very tough people and they are more than a match for even large animals. They make the best jungle explorers, beaters and hunters of Africa and their profound knowledge of the ways of all the animals they hunt enables them to make very clever traps to catch them.

Around their villages and in the forest the Pygmies dig deep pits in the ground. They cover the pits with twigs and branches and then with a layer of green leaves. They next place some dead leaves, moss, trufs and even termite hills to make the spot look like solid ground.

Only the Pygmy can recognise these almost invisible traps: even a cunning animal like the leopard fails to see them. The big animals of the forest are often the victims of these traps. These include elephants, buffaloes and hippopotamuses which the Pygmies could not hope to catch by any other method. As soon as an animal falls into the trap the Pygmies rush up and kill it with their spears. The meat of the animal is shared out and eaten immediately.

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When the great ice sheets that covered much of the land began to retreat northwards and the climate became warmer, man was able to come out of his cave dwellings and build huts above the ground. As the ice melted it gave rise to streams and rivers. There were also new lakes to be explored. All these waters were teeming with animal life such as fish and fowl which provided a ready supply of food.

Once the ice had gone, dense forests of willow and birch sprang up. Thousands of different kinds of birds lived in the branches and they were an easy target for man to shoot down with his bow and arrow. There was a whole new world to explore.

Man becomes a woodsman, a fisherman and a wildfowler. This new life had a great influence on social relationships between people. To get the best results possible from hunting and other forms of human activity, people came together in groups and formed the first tribes. These communities then became larger as life grew more complex. It became evident that people had to live and work together as a group to carry out all the operations necessary for living.

The basic nucleus of this community was the family. There was never a lack of work for the various members of the tribe. There were trees to be felled, huts to be built or repaired, fishing nets to be made from cords obtained from dried plant fibres. The work of women was more concerned with the home. They made rugs out of tree-bark to make their homes more comfortable; they made clothes of skin, sewn with bone needles; they cleaned and gutted the fish the men caught in abundance and dried it in the Sun; they cooked meals, gathered the fruits of the earth and prepared food stores for the winter.

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When man discovered fire he acquired a mighty new weapon for he could defend himself better against animals which were terrified of this strange light that gave off heat. Man was also able to fight against the cold, light up the darkness and cook his food.

Man had always known that animals were afraid of fire, much more afraid than he was. He deducted from this that he could defend himself from even the fiercest beasts with fire. So he began to put burning torches at the entrance to his cave dwelling. These torches were kept burning throughout the night.

Until that time man had fed on raw meat. He probably first tasted cooked meat when a forest fire had trapped animals and burned them to death. He then learned that meat cooked by fire was more tender and manageable to eat as well as being tastier and easier to digest. In this way cooking by fire gradually spread from tribe to tribe.

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When primitive man came to know grain he valued it greatly because it could be kept even during winter, when food was usually scarce. But those little hard grains were no good to young children or to old people without teeth. Some mother, perhaps, thought she would try and mash them up into softer form to give to her baby. In this way she produced a rough sort of flour and discovered how to grind flour from grain.

The woman used barley or wheat flour to make small pancakes which they dried in the sun. They then learned how to place which they dried in the sun. They then learned how to place pancakes on top of hot stones or in the embers of a fire. They discovered that the dough was much nicer to eat when it had been toasted and this was how bread was born. The men who went hunting by now were taking along these rough pieces of bread with them.

The first good pictures of primitive baking come from the tombs of the ancient Egyptians. They show all stages of bread-making, from the removal of grain from the granary, the grinding on stones and subsequent sifting, to the mixing and kneading of the dough and the baking of the bread in large pots.

Man also learned to till the soil better: he sowed wheat and cultivated it carefully. Later man learned to prepare the soil with a plough pulled by animals instead of scratching it with a stick, and so the grain grew even better.

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In the social and political life of ancient Rome no important action was taken unless the gods were first consulted. War was not declared, a building was not opened nor a magistrate appointed unless certain sacrifices had first been offered to the gods and the gods had found these acceptable.

Rome had numerous temples, many of them near the Forum, and the link between ordinary life and religion was very close. Temples sometimes acted as government offices to keep money in: in the temple of Satum the public treasury was stored together with documents and war regalia.

Other famous Roman temples included that of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, of Vesta, Juno, Castor and Pollux, Venus, Janus and the Pantheon, the temple dedicated to all the gods.

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The people of Mesopotamia, that is the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians, created a system of writing that was quite different from that used in Egypt. The difference was because the people of Mesopotamia used clay to write on instead of papyrus as in Egypt.

It is difficult to make curved lines on clay with a stylus so the Mesopotamians invented a handwriting based on straight lines that resembled nails or wedges. For this reason, their handwriting was known as ‘cuneiform’, a word meaning ‘wedge-shaped’. Cuneiform was later used on other materials, such as stone or metal. This writing was ideographic, as in Egypt and used pictures instead of words.

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We know exactly all the 282 laws in which King Hammurabi included the entire legal traditions of his day because they were found on a stele (stone slab) discovered at Susa in 1901 and now preserved in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The laws were written on the slab in a writing known as cuneiform. The slab also has a fine piece of sculpture depicting Samas, the god of justice, looking into the eyes of king Hammurabi as if to inspire him.

Babylonian society was divided into three distinct classes: the patricians, the plebeians, and the slaves. Justice depended on the class to which a person belonged. For example, an article in Hammurabi’s legal code said: ‘If a patrician, one of his eyes also shall be taken. If he breaks the bone of another patrician, one of his bones too shall be broken.’

If, however, the person hurt was a plebeian, matters were different. The law said: ‘If a patrician takes the eye or breaks a bone of a plebeian, he will pay a mine of silver.’ Of course, the penalty was smaller if a slave was involved. These laws seem very unfair to us today but the penalties inflicted are midway between the brutality of the Assyrian laws and the comparative lenience of the Hittites. We must remember that in the social conditions of Hammurabi’s day such laws were needed to curb the vices and passions of the Babylonians.

Hammurabi died but his dynasty, or family, continued to rule for another 150 years although it never reached the same peak of glory as it had in his day.

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The Etruscans were a very religious people. Their chief gods were Tinia, Uni, Minrva, the trio worshipped by the ancient Romans later under the names of Jove, Juno and Minerva. Only some of the Etruscan gods had the power to launch thunderbolts. Tinia was one of the more powerful of the divinities.

Religious ceremonies were conducted by priests who formed a very powerful class in Etruscan society. These priests were the only persons permitted to divine or guess the will of the gods and to tell the future. They did this in various ways: by bird watching; by observing lightening and other weather phenomena; and the ebbing and flowing of streams.

Of all the entrails the liver was studied with the greatest care. A bronze model of a liver found at the city of Piacenza is divided into forty-five areas, each with the name of a presiding deity written in it. The priests who studied birds traced the will of the gods from the way birds flew, cried and ate. The signs seen by these priests were known as auguries which could be either good or bad.

The Etruscan religion comprised a complicated set of beliefs and ceremonies for every act in public life. The laws relating to the foundation of a city were particularly strict.

The Etruscan believed, especially in their early days, that when they died they passed on to another life similar to the one in this world. They provided the dead with many objects of everyday life and the statues on their tombs depict people sitting at table with guests or playing music, singing or even hunting.

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The Middle Ages were a period of European history which occurred approximately between the fall of the western Roman Empire in A.D. 476 and the discovery of America in 1942.

During the first three centuries of the Middle Ages, the way people dressed underwent many changes. In the early stages they dressed in the Byzantine fashion: the emperor and the empress wore long tunics in brocade covered with a pallium, a sort of heavy square mantle that had a religious significance. Men let their beards grow and woman never out their hair.

When knights prepared for battle they put on a thick woollen tunic over which they donned their coat of armour or chain mail. They had a broad belt or buckler round their waist from which hung a broad sword. The bandolier went on the right shoulder. On the head was worn an iron helmet, usually with a nose guard, and at the end of the twelfth century the great cylindrical helmet was introduced.

The soldier’s dress was completed with a large convex shield on which the knight had his coat-of-arms painted or carved. These arms also decorated the linen surcoat which after about 1200 was worn over the mail shirt.

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Knighthood began as a military rank. After A.D. 1000 it become a more complicated institution and one of the glorious features of the middle Ages, the standards of which were both military and religious. One became a knight through birth into the nobility or through bravery in battle. Knights had the right to fight on horseback and this right was bestowed on them in a ceremony by the king. In this ceremony the recipient of the honour would kneel before his sovereign who would touch him on the shoulder with a sword.

The younger children of a feudal lord became knights but first they had to serve a period of service when they were known as squires. The training for knighthood began at twelve years of age. The young squire was taught to ride, to fence and to handle the bow; he also learned to hunt with falcons and dogs. In his teens, the squire had to act as an assistant to a knight, and this was his true apprenticeship. His duties included swerving his master at table, looking after his master’s horse and weapons, carrying his shield and helping him in battle.

At the age of about twenty the squire became a knight. He spent the whole night before the ceremony awake and in prayer, guarding his arms. This was known as the vigil. Today knighthood is bestowed on persons by the monarch for outstanding contributions in all spheres of life such as industry, science and the arts. The ceremony of touching the shoulder with the sword is still the same. Knights have the title ‘Sir’ before their Christian names.

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The word ‘mummy’ comes from an ancient Egyptian word meaning ‘tar’ or ‘bitumen’. Egyptian embalmers used many products in their craft such as bees-wax, cassia (a type of cinnamon), juniper oil, onions, palm wine, resin salt, sawdust, pitch, soda and bitumen to keep the corpses of the rich and the mighty from rotting.

The bodies were wrapped in linen bandages, clothed in funerary garments and adorned with necklaces and amulets. On the face of the deceased there was placed a mask made of rough canvas and chalk, but for dead pharaohs and high dignitaries this mask was made of gold. Poor people were mummified in any haphazard way and paupers were simply thrown without ceremony into a common grave.

The embalmed body of the deceased was buried together with objects which that person had used during his earthly life and which he might need in the next. Naturally, the graves of the dead reflected their social status during life. He tombs of the pharaohs were magnificent structures full of precious treasures and costly objects.

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Excavations have made it possible for us to know how the Vikings built their ships. The fighting ships or longships were shallow, narrow in the beam and pointed at both ends. They had a single large, square sail, although they used oars as well, a high prow and a projecting stern. The figurehead of the ship of about A.D.800, understand at Oseberg, was a coiled snake with its head upreared. Another Viking ship, found at Gokstad, dates from about A.D.900.

Longships had about ten oars a side and seem to have carried twice as many men for fighting as for rowing, that would be a total of some sixty men.

The most famous of the longships was the ‘big dragon’ of King Canute, Built in A.D. 1004. It looked like a huge sea serpent, with a dragon’s head at the prow and a high-coiled tail at the stern.

The Viking hafskip had fewer rowers than the longship and was sometimes more than 21 metres long and 6 metres wide. On voyages of colonization it would carry wives, children, livestock, stores and as many as thirty men.

The naval power of the Vikings was greatly helped by their levy system which allowed them to call up men to form one of the greatest war fleets of their day.

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In man’s first attempts to write every mark represented a word: to write ‘bird’ the writer drew a bird and for ‘man’ the figure of a man was drawn. Actions also had to be represented in writing: to describe the action of fighting in writing the figure of a man wielding a club was drawn; to express the idea of freshness, a jar of sparkling water was drawn. The ancient Egyptians made further progress in writing but they never created a true alphabet.

Nobody really knows who drew up the first alphabet. It could have been the Semites who first saw Egyptian hieroglyphics in about 1500 B.C. The Semites probably borrowed some of these signs to represent certain sounds made in their own language. These signs were later modified by the Phoenicians and spread throughout the ancient world. The alphabet was an invention which proved to have enormous practical value. With only about twenty simple signs man could write any sort of message. With hieroglyphics and cuneiform (the wedge-shaped writing used by the Babylonianns and Assyrians), which still used images and symbols, hundreds of signs were needed.

The function of the alphabet is to convert into signs the various sounds we utter in speech. These sounds are few. Before any alphabet came into existence written signs tried to express whole words, which were many.

The alphabet passed from the Phoenicians to the Greeks who added various letters. The Etruscans then took it over, then the Romans until it came down to us. The word ‘alphabet’ itself comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’.

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Ever since man first began to use the letters of the alphabet he has tried to make writing as rapid an act as possible, to keep up with human speech at its normal speed.

The first stenographer, or shorthand writer, was Tiro, the Greek secretary of the famous ancient Roman orator, Cicero, Modern shorthand, however, began in England when Dr. Timothy Bright published his book on the subject in 1588. Many systems using symbols instead of letters and words were later invented.

People normally say 180 words a minute, when they speak. Most shorthand writers can write down 120 words a minute, and the highest speeds are about 350 words but these can only be kept up for short periods. Pitman and Gregg, named after their inventors, are also machines that write shorthand: they resemble adding machines and are operated by keys.

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No ancient Greek or Roman book has ever come down to us. Many were lost among the papyruses and the parchments that perished in the fires and destruction in which the once mighty Roman Empire fell. Others were destroyed by the slower but still sure action of time. But before these books vanished from the world many were copied by ancient scribes and scholars.

Much of this work was done by monks during the Middle Ages, especially the Benedictines. During the fourth century St. Jerome had exhorted monks to perfect their art of writing. In the centuries that followed every monastery has its scriptorium or writing room. This room was usually next to the library and only the senior monks, the librarian and copyist monks were allowed into it.

Absolute silence reigned in the room as the monks copied out the manuscripts carefully. The silence was broken only when one monk would dictate the contents of a manuscript for the other monks to write down.

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Beer is an alcoholic drink which has been made since ancient times. Man probably learned how to make beer much earlier than he discovered that the juice of the grape could be made into wine.

Beer-making was once a simple household task and families brewed their own supply. Today brewing is a major industry catering for millions of people throughout the world. The industry uses the most up-to-date and complex equipment and must follow strict rules of hygiene. But the basis of brewing remains the same as it did 5,000 years ago: beer is obtained by fermenting the mash obtained by mixing water with barley which has malted or sprouted after being kept in dark, warm, moist atmosphere. It is from this thick cloudy mash that the clear, sparking and refreshing drink finally comes.

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The Pueblo Indians lived in a matriarchal society which meant that the woman was honoured and was the true ruler. The clans, or family groups, were based on descent through them other and not through the father. Property therefore belonged to the women and when they died they left it to their daughters. The farmland was also the undisputed property of the women.

When a man married he went to live in his wife’s house. If structure of society, however, did not mean that men were the victims of the whims of the woman and that they had rights of their own. They were respected for their working skills and also for their contribution to the wealth of the whole Pueblo community.

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The Yuma, Pima and Papago were tribes of American Indians who lived mainly by farming, growing maize, beans and a kind of gourd called squash. They were so skillful at their work that they had learned to irrigate their fields during the dry season and since A.D. I had used flood water for this purpose. Their society was based on the clan system.

One of their main feasts was the annual ceremony celebrating the ripening of the giant cactus (saguaro) and the coming of the summer rains. During this feast the people drank a beverage made from the fermented juice of cactus fruit. The beverage was very potent and those who drank it soon became intoxicated.

The saguaro ceremony had a magical significance, the beverage representing rain soaked in the soil.

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The Indians who lived in North America had been hunters since time immemorial. They were used to wandering across the vast prairies in pursuit of wild animals. But these Indians only became really nomadic after the coming of the Europeans.

We have often seen on western films how the Indians galloped along bareback on their horses, so it is quite surprising to learn that before the Europeans came in the fifteenth century, no horses had existed in the New World. The horse revolutionized the life of the Indians and changed their ways greatly.

Horses were brought to America by the Spanish conquerors and settlers. Some of these animals escaped and began to breed in the wild, multiplying into the numerous herds of the prairies and pampas. Soon there were tens of thousands of them throughout the continent. The Indians caught and tamed them and then learned to ride them. It was then that life changed for the Indians. This horse, known as the mustang, brought enormous advantages: the Indians tribes could now move more easily from place to place and hunting became more effective and profitable.

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The hardest blow against the civilized societies of black Africa was the slave trade. It is impossible to say just how many men, women and children were dragged away from their villages in chains to distant lands. According to one authoritative source at least 9 million people were uprooted from their homes before 1776 and taken mainly to America.

A recent American investigation considered this figures too low. At least one million slaves died during the ocean crossings which were carried out in dreadful conditions. A British doctor who served on board one of these slave ships gives some sort of idea of how terrible they must have been. This doctor said the slaves were stowed in the deepest hold of the ship and crammed together, without even enough room to stand up or stretch out. They were kept in chains which shackled their right hand and their left foot for the whole journey which sometimes lasted for months.

The doctor also remarked that it was impossible for a white man to spend more than a few minutes in these slave holds without fainting.

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Zimbabwe, meaning ‘stone house collection of ruins of extremely ancient stone buildings. These buildings were situated at the top of a granite hill that rose some 100 meters above the wild plain north of the river Limpopo which flows between Zimbabwe and South Africa. The ruins were discovered by chance by an American hunter who had heard missionaries talk about them. The German anthropologist Carl Mauch was the first man to write about the ruins after organizing an expedition in 1871. Mauch worked on the account given to him by an African chief in a German mission.

When Mauch was abandoned by his porters was helped by the Karanga tribe and as a guest of these people he was able to explore the region. He was convinced when he saw the colossal stone buildings and listened to all the old local legends that he had found the realm of the queen of Sheba, which provided the gold for the temple of Solomon. Rumors soon spread that a great treasure lay hidden at Zimbabwe and much clandestine digging damaged the site before the authorities could act to stop it.

 The majority of the objects excavated were locally made: pottery, iron tools and weapons, gold objects and carvings of human figures, birds and bowls in a local stone. A number of imported goods were also found including animals with germs to develop diseases. Sometimes various organs are removed from these laboratory animals for detailed study of their functions.

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The mayas were skilful astronomers and through their knowledge of the heavens were able to draw up a calendar. This was a great achievement at a time when there were practically no scientific instruments to help them.

The year (tun) was divided into eighteen periods (vinal). The names of these eighteen periods were of various animals and colours. When the vinal added up to only 360 days, a special short vinal of only five days, known as ‘ghosts’, was added to complete the year. These five days were considered unlucky and nothing was ever done while they lasted.

In addition to this calendar there was a 260-day sacred almanac which was of supreme importance as a guide to daily conduct and an instrument for diving lucky days.

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In prehistoric times man buried his dead near where he lived. The deceased’s possessions that he had used most frequently during his life, such as his axe and knife, were buried with him and enough to the next world. This suggests that man believed in a continued life after death.

Towards the end of the Stone Age it became the practice to bury the sealed off with boulders to assure the deceased undisturbed peace. Collective burial grounds date from this period. These were the first graveyards and they were treated with great respect. The appearance of these cemeteries was a sign of sign of an important social change and the development of religion.

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So far no one has been able to decipher the writing of ancient Crete of which there are many examples. Nearly 2,000 thin, clay tablets were found at the palace at Knossos. It was the first writing in which the characters run from left to right. Sometimes, however, when the writing reached the end of a line it continued in the next line from right to left.

Cretan writing is still but the remains so far found are eloquent witness of a flourishing civilization.

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The royal palace of Knossos in Crete was a true city within a city. The palace was built around an enormous courtyard and contained more than a thousand, perhaps used for ritual performances.

The palace had an ingenious system of plumbing for bringing drinking water and for flushing away waste materials. Light was supplied from above by ‘light wells’ and colonnaded porticoes provided ventilation. The palace was also the home of all the workers and craftsmen who produced all the tools and equipment needed at court.

The artisans of Crete were excellent ceramicists and potters and their vases were exported to all parts of the Mediterranean. The high level of civilization that developed on Crete had a major influence on neighbouring lands, especially on the Achaeans, the ancestors of the ancient Greeks.

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According to the stories of the time hanging gardens of Babylon began as gesture of love and affection. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 B. C., had married a Mede princess who was very homesick for her native land and its greenery. To please her, the king created the most beautiful gardens on the terraces of his royal palace.

The ancient peoples considered these gardens as one of the seven found wonders of the world. Archaeologists have never found any trace of them but some writes who saw the gardens have left behind detailed descriptions. They were not literally ‘hanging’ but were ‘up in the air’, that is roof gardens laid out on a series of terraces. These terraces were supported on strong vaults and were filled in with soil in which many kinds of trees grew.

The biggest danger to these gardens was rain which in that region occurs in downpours at certain times of the year. To protect the gardens from the torrential rain the caults were covered in bitumen or resign and clad in sheets of lead.

During the dry season the gardens were irrigated by pumps from the river Euphrates. The water was brought from ground level to a tank placed on the highest terrace.

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The word ‘automobile’, which is another way of saying motor car, means ‘moving by itself’. The motor car travels without being pulled by a horse or any other animal and with No visible force to make its wheels go round. For a long time inventors and engineers wondered how much such a machine could be produced. One of the first attempts to produce an automobile was made during the eighteenth century. It was a very ramshackle affair and can still be seen today in the National Museum in Paris. The machine was designed by the French engineer, Nicholas Joseph Cugnot.

Cugnot’s idea was to exploit the steam engine invented by watt and use it to power a vehicle. He drew up plans which he submitted to the War Ministry since the machine was meant to carry heavy artillery. Cugnot was authorized to make a prototype. The machine he produced was a large, heavy, steam-powered tricycle. His model of 1769 was said to have run for minutes at just over 5 Kilometers an hour while carrying four people. Cugnot then built large vehicle. During a test run at Vincennes the machine got out of control and crashed into a wall, demolishing it.

The accident gave ammunition to Cugnot’s opponents and the experiments stopped. It took many more years before attempts were resumed to make a motor car.

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Babar (1526-1530) is the great grandson of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, was the first Mughal emperor in India. He confronted and defeated Lodhi in 1526 at the first battle of Panipat, and so came to establish the Mughal Empire in India. Babar ruled until 1530, and was succeeded by his son Humayun.

He established himself in Kabul and then pushed steadily southward into India from Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass. Babur’s forces occupied much of northern India after his victory at Panipat in 1526. The preoccupation with wars and military campaigns, however, did not allow the new emperor to consolidate the gains he had made in India.

The instability of the empire became evident under his son, Humayun (reigned 1530–1556), who was forced into exile in Persia by rebels. The Sur Empire (1540–1555), founded by Sher Shah Suri (reigned 1540–1545), briefly interrupted Mughal rule. Humayun’s exile in Persia established diplomatic ties between the Safavid and Mughal Courts, and led to increasing Persian cultural influence in the Mughal Empire.[citation needed] Humayun’s triumphant return from Persia in 1555 restored Mughal rule, but he died in an accident the next year.

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Mongol leader Genghis Khan (1162-1227) rose from humble beginnings to establish the largest land empire in history. After uniting the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian plateau, he conquered huge chunks of central Asia and China. His descendants expanded the empire even further, advancing to such far-off places as Poland, Vietnam, Syria and Korea. At their peak, the Mongols controlled between 11 and 12 million contiguous square miles, an area about the size of Africa. Many people were slaughtered in the course of Genghis Khan’s invasions, but he also granted religious freedom to his subjects, abolished torture, encouraged trade and created the first international postal system. Genghis Khan died in 1227 during a military campaign against the Chinese kingdom of Xi Xia. His final resting place remains unknown.

Going against custom, Temujin put competent allies rather than relatives in key positions and executed the leaders of enemy tribes while incorporating the remaining members into his clan. He ordered that all looting wait until after a complete victory had been won, and he organized his warriors into units of 10 without regard to kin. Though Temujin was an animist, his followers included Christians, Muslims and Buddhists. By 1205 he had vanquished all rivals, including his former best friend Jamuka. The following year, he called a meeting of representatives from every part of the territory and established a nation similar in size to modern Mongolia. He was also proclaimed Chinggis Khan, which roughly translates to “Universal Ruler,” a name that became known in the West as Genghis Khan.

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Following his successful but bloody conquest of the Kalinga country on the east coast, Ashoka renounced armed conquest and adopted a policy that he called “conquest by dharma” (i.e., by principles of right life).

The empire he and his family built did not last even 50 years after his death. Although he was the greatest of the kings of one of the largest and most powerful empires in antiquity, his name was lost to history until he was identified by the British scholar and orientalist James Prinsep (l. 1799-1840 CE) in 1837 CE. Since then, Ashoka has come to be recognized as one of the most fascinating ancient monarchs for his decision to renounce war, his insistence on religious tolerance, and his peaceful efforts in establishing Buddhism as a major world religion. 

When Ashoka was around the age of 18, he was sent from the capital city of Pataliputra to Takshashila (Taxila) to put down a revolt. According to one legend, Bindusara provided his son with an army but no weapons; the weapons were provided later by supernatural means. This same legend claims that Ashoka was merciful to the people who lay down their arms upon his arrival. No historical account survives of Ashoka’s campaign at Taxila; it is accepted as historical fact based on suggestions from inscriptions and place names but the details are unknown.

The Kingdom of Kalinga was south of Pataliputra on the coast and enjoyed considerable wealth through trade. The Mauryan Empire surrounded Kalinga and the two polities evidently prospered commercially from interaction. What prompted the Kalinga campaign is unknown but, in c. 260 BCE, Ashoka invaded the kingdom, slaughtering 100,000 inhabitants, deporting 150,000 more, and leaving thousands of others to die of disease and famine.

Ashoka then renounced war and embraced Buddhism but this was not the sudden conversion it is usually given as but rather a gradual acceptance of Buddha’s teachings which he may, or may not, have already been acquainted with. It is entirely possible that Ashoka could have been aware of Buddha’s message before Kalinga and simply not taken it to heart, not allowed it to in any way alter his behavior. This same paradigm has been seen in plenty of people – famous kings and generals or those whose names will never be remembered – who claim to belong to a certain faith while regularly ignoring its most fundamental vision.

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This system of governance was instituted on 28 June 1858, when, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria (who, in 1876, was proclaimed Empress of India).

Queen Victoria took her duties as Empress very seriously and when her Golden Jubilee came around in 1887 she made every effort to showcase her ‘jewel in the crown of the British Empire’. She hosted lavish banquets and parties for Indian princes and European nobility and rode in elaborate processions accompanied by the Colonial Indian cavalry. Indian attendants were brought to the royal household to help with the festivities as well. Victoria took a liking to one of her new servants in particular: Abdul Karim. Soon the twenty-four-year-old’s role changed from patiently waiting at tables to teaching the Queen to read, write and speak in Urdu, or ‘Hindustani’. The Queen wanted to know everything about India, a place where she ruled but could never visit. Abul told her all about Agra, from the local fruits and spices to the sights and sounds of his homeland. It was not long before he became her ‘Munshi’, or teacher, and they began a friendship that would last over a decade.

India in Victoria’s time was rife with such unrest, in addition to sweeping famine and widespread change. The census of 1871 aimed to record the age, caste, religion, occupation and education level of the entire population in order to better govern. It found the total population to be 238,830,958. British-born subjects in India (excluding the army and navy) numbered just 59,000. India is now the second most populated country in the world with 1,326,801,576 residents as of July 2016. The population density in England in 1871 was 422 people per square mile on average, whereas in India it ranged from 468 in Oude to just 31 in British Burma. The census of 1871 failed to fully report on Indian subject’s level of education, but came to the conclusion that only around one in 30 men (women were not included in these reports) had received the ‘barest rudiments’ of education. In 2016 81% of Indian men over 15 years and 61% of women were literate. The census also found the population to be expanding at the rate of 3% annually, which the report writers thought to be ‘an improvement doubtless due to the better administration of the country since it came under the British rule.’

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Hammurabi, also spelled Hammurapi, (born, Babylon [now in Iraq]—died c. 1750 BCE), sixth and best-known ruler of the 1st (Amorite) dynasty of Babylon (reigning c. 1792–1750 BCE), noted for his surviving set of laws, once considered the oldest promulgation of laws in human history.

Hammurabi combined his military and political advances with irrigation projects and the construction of fortifications and temples celebrating Babylon’s patron deity, Marduk. The Babylon of Hammurabi’s era is now buried below the area’s groundwater table, and whatever archives he kept are long dissolved, but clay tablets discovered at other ancient sites reveal glimpses of the king’s personality and statecraft.

The Code of Hammurabi was one of the earliest and most complete written legal codes and was proclaimed by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, who reigned from 1792 to 1750 B.C. Hammurabi expanded the city-state of Babylon along the Euphrates River to unite all of southern Mesopotamia. The Hammurabi code of laws, a collection of 282 rules, established standards for commercial interactions and set fines and punishments to meet the requirements of justice. Hammurabi’s Code was carved onto a massive, finger-shaped black stone stele (pillar) that was looted by invaders and finally rediscovered in 1901.

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Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Egypt before it was annexed as a province of Rome. Although arguably the most famous Egyptian queen, Cleopatra was actually Greek and a member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty which ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. Cleopatra is probably best known for her love affair with the Roman general and statesman Mark Antony as well as her earlier affair with Julius Caesar (l. 100-44 BCE) but was a powerful queen before her interaction with either and a much stronger monarch than any of the later Ptolemaic Dynasty.

In June of 323 BCE, Alexander the Great died and his vast empire was divided among his generals. One of these generals was Ptolemy I Soter (r. 323-282 BCE), a fellow Macedonian, who would found the Ptolemaic Dynasty in ancient Egypt. The Ptolemaic line, of Macedonian-Greek ethnicity, would continue to rule Egypt until the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE when it was taken by Rome. Ptolemy I, Ptolemy II (r. 285-246 BCE), and Ptolemy III (r. 246-222 BCE) governed Egypt well, but after them, their successors ruled poorly until Cleopatra came to the throne. In fact, the difficulties she had to overcome were primarily the legacy of her predecessors.

Cleopatra VII Philopator was born in 69 BCE and ruled jointly with her father, Ptolemy XII Auletes. When she was 18 years old, her father died, leaving her the throne. Because Egyptian tradition held that a woman needed a male consort to reign, her twelve-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII, was ceremonially married to her. Cleopatra soon dropped his name from all official documents, however, and ruled alone.

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During his 13-year reign as the king of Macedonia, Alexander created one of the largest empires of the ancient world, stretching from Greece to northwestern India.  

Alexander was born in 356 B.C.E. in Pella, Macedonia, to King Philip II. As a young boy, Alexander was taught to read, write, and play the lyre. He developed a life-long love of reading and music. When Alexander was a teenager, his father hired Aristotle to be his private tutor. He studied with Aristotle for three years and from Aristotle’s teachings, Alexander developed a love of science, particularly of medicine and botany. Alexander included botanists and scientists in his army to study the lands he conquered.

Alexander built many new cities in the lands he conquered, including Alexandria in Egypt. He went on to conquer the lands of the Persian Empire, establishing more cities, and like Alexandria, often naming them after himself. His conquest continued through Asia until he reached the shores of the Ganga (Ganges) River in India. At this point, his army refused to continue further into India, exhausted and discouraged by heavy rains.

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In July of 64 A.D., a great fire ravaged Rome for six days, destroying 70 percent of the city and leaving half its population homeless. According to a well-known expression, Rome’s emperor at the time, the decadent and unpopular Nero, “fiddled while Rome burned.” The expression has a double meaning: Not only did Nero play music while his people suffered, but he was an ineffectual leader in a time of crisis. 

It’s been pretty easy to cast blame on Nero, who had many enemies and is remembered as one of history’s most sadistic and cruelest leaders—but there are a couple of problems with this story.

When the Great Fire broke out, Nero was at his villa at Antium, some 35 miles from Rome. Though he immediately returned and began relief measures, people still didn’t trust him. Some even believed he had ordered the fire started, especially after he used land cleared by the fire to build his Golden Palace and its surrounding pleasure gardens. 

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The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in Belgium, part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the time. A French army under the command of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition, a British-led coalition consisting of units from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick and Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, referred to by many authors as the Anglo-allied army or Wellington’s army, and a Prussian army under the command of Field Marshal von Blücher, referred also as Blücher’s army. The battle marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Waterloo was the decisive engagement of the Waterloo Campaign and Napoleon’s last. According to Wellington, the battle was “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life”. Napoleon abdicated four days later, and coalition forces entered Paris on 7 July. The defeat at Waterloo ended Napoleon’s rule as Emperor of the French and marked the end of his Hundred Days return from exile. This ended the First French Empire and set a chronological milestone between serial European wars and decades of relative peace, often referred to as the Pax Britannica. The battlefield is located in the Belgian municipalities of Braine-l’Alleud and Lasne, about 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) south of Brussels, and about 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the town of Waterloo. The site of the battlefield today is dominated by the monument of the Lion’s Mound, a large artificial hill constructed from earth taken from the battlefield itself; the topography of the battlefield near the mound has not been preserved.

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The Little Mermaid (Danish: Den lille Havfrue) is a bronze statue by Edvard Eriksen, depicting a mermaid becoming human. The sculpture is displayed on a rock by the waterside at the Langelinie promenade in Copenhagen, Denmark. It is 1.25 metres (4.1 ft) tall and weighs 175 kilograms (385 lb).

Based on the 1837 fairy tale of the same name by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, the small and unimposing statue is a Copenhagen icon and has been a major tourist attraction since its unveiling in 1913. In recent decades it has become a popular target for defacement by vandals and political activists.

The statue was commissioned in 1909 by Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of Carlsberg, who had been fascinated by a ballet about the fairytale in Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre and asked the ballerina, Ellen Price, to model for the statue. The sculptor Edvard Eriksen created the bronze statue, which was unveiled on August 23, 1913. The statue’s head was modelled after Price, but as the ballerina did not agree to model in the nude, the sculptor’s wife, Eline Eriksen, was used for the body.

The Copenhagen City Council arranged to move the statue to Shanghai at the Danish Pavilion for the duration of the Expo 2010 (May to October), the first time it had been moved officially from its perch since it was installed almost a century earlier. While the statue was away in Shanghai an authorised copy was displayed on a rock in the lake in Copenhagen’s nearby Tivoli Gardens. Copenhagen officials have considered moving the statue several meters out into the harbour to discourage vandalism and to prevent tourists from climbing onto it, but as of May 2014 the statue remains on dry land at the water side at Langelinie.

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The Thiruvalluvar Statue, or the Valluvar Statue, is a 41-metre-tall (133 ft) stone sculpture of the Tamil poet and philosopher Valluvar, author of the Tirukkural, an ancient Tamil work on Dharmic and morality. It is located atop a small island near the town of Kanyakumari on the southernmost point of the Indian peninsula on the Coromandel Coast, where two seas (the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea) and an ocean (the Indian Ocean) meet. The statue was sculpted by the Indian sculptor V. Ganapati Sthapati, who also created the Iraivan Temple, and was unveiled on the millennium day of 1 January 2000 by the then Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi. It is currently the 25th tallest statue in India.

The combined height of the statue and pedestal is 133 feet (41 metres), denoting the 133 chapters of the Tirukkural. This includes 95 feet (29 metres) sculpture of Valluvar standing upon a 38 feet (12 metres) pedestal that represents the 38 chapters of Virtue, the first of the three books of the Kural text. The statue itself represents the second and third books of the Kural text, namely, Wealth and Love. The whole design signifies that wealth and love be earned and enjoyed on the foundation of solid virtue. The right hand of the statue with three fingers pointing skywards signifies the three cantos of the Kural text, namely, Aram, Porul, and Inbam (Virtue, Wealth, and Love, respectively), combined. The head of the statue stands at a height of 61 metres (200 ft) above the sea level.

To prevent the statue from corrosion due to sea breeze, the statue is chemically treated once in four years. The salty deposits in every joint are removed and replaced with new cement mixture. Paper pulp is then applied on the whole of the statue. As the paper pulp coating dries, it absorbs the salty deposits completely, after which it is removed.

The statue has been thus treated three times since its unveiling. The fourth treatment began on 17 April 2017 and is completed by 15 October 2017.

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The Thinker, French Le Penseur, sculpture of a pensive nude male by French artist Auguste Rodin, one of his most well-known works. Many marble and bronze editions in several sizes were executed in Rodin’s lifetime and after, but the most famous version is the 6-foot (1.8-metre) bronze statue (commonly called a monumental) cast in 1904 that sits in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in Paris. The large muscular figure has captivated audiences for decades in his moment of concentrated introspection.

The Thinker has been cast in multiple versions and is found around the world, but the history of the progression from models to castings is still not entirely clear. About 28 monumental-sized bronze casts are in museums and public places. In addition, there are sculptures of different study-sized scales and plaster versions (often painted bronze) in both monumental and study sizes. Some newer castings have been produced posthumously and are not considered part of the original production.

Rodin made the first small plaster version around 1881. The first full-scale model was presented at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1904. A public subscription financed a bronze casting in 1906, which became the property of the City of Paris, and was put in front of the Panthéon. In 1922, it was moved to the Hôtel Biron, which had been transformed into the Rodin Museum.

A bronze cast of the sculpture can be found in front of Grawemeyer Hall on the University of Louisville Belknap Campus in Louisville, Kentucky. It was made in Paris and was first displayed at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, then given to the city. This sculpture was the only cast created by the lost-wax casting method.

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Easter Island is famous for its stone statues of human figures, known as moai (meaning “statue”). The island is known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui. The moai were probably carved to commemorate important ancestors and were made from around 1000 C.E. until the second half of the seventeenth century. Over a few hundred years the inhabitants of this remote island quarried, carved and erected around 887 moai. The size and complexity of the moai increased over time, and it is believed that Hoa Hakananai’a (below) dates to around 1200 C.E. It is one of only fourteen moai made from basalt, the rest are carved from the island’s softer volcanic tuff. With the adoption of Christianity in the 1860s, the remaining standing moai were toppled.

The production and transportation of the more than 900 statues is considered a remarkable creative and physical feat. The tallest mo?ai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tonnes (80.7 tons). The heaviest mo?ai erected was a shorter but squatter mo?ai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tonnes (84.6 tons). One unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately 21 m (69 ft) tall, with a weight of about 145–165 tons. The mo?ai were toppled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, possibly as a result of European contact or internecine tribal wars.

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One of the most mysterious and powerful women in ancient Egypt, Nefertiti was queen alongside Pharaoh Akhenaten from 1353 to 1336 B.C. and may have ruled the New Kingdom outright after her husband’s death. Her reign was a time of tremendous cultural upheaval, as Akhenaten reoriented Egypt’s religious and political structure around the worship of the sun god Aten. Nefertiti is best known for her painted sandstone bust, which was rediscovered in 1913 and became a global icon of feminine beauty and power.

Nefertiti may have been the daughter of Ay, a top adviser who would go on to become pharaoh after King Tut’s death in 1323 B.C. On the walls of tombs and temples built during Akhenaten’s reign Nefertiti is depicted alongside her husband with a frequency seen for no other Egyptian queen. In many cases she is shown in positions of power and authority—leading worship of Aten, driving a chariot or smiting an enemy.

After Nefertiti had given birth to six daughters, her husband began taking other wives, including his own sister, with whom he fathered the future King Tut (Tutankhamen). Nefertiti’s third daughter Ankhesenpaaten would eventually become her half-brother Tutankhamen’s queen.

On December 6, 1913, a team led by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt discovered a sculpture buried upside-down in the sandy rubble on the floor of the excavated workshop of the royal sculptor Thutmose in Amarna. The painted figure featured a slender neck, gracefully proportioned face and a curious blue cylindrical headpiece of a style only seen in images of Nefertiti. Borchardt’s team had an agreement to split its artifacts with the Egyptian government, so the bust was shipped as part of Germany’s portion. A single, poor photograph was published in an archaeological journal and the bust was given to the expedition’s funder, Jacques Simon, who displayed it for the next 11 years in his private residence.

In 1922 British Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb. A flurry of international attention followed, and the image of Tut’s solid gold funerary mask was soon a global symbol of beauty, wealth and power.

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The Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French people commemorating the alliance of France and the United States during the American Revolution. Yet, it represented much more to those individuals who proposed the gift.

Apart from being the most famous monument in the world and not just in the United States, the statue also represents the friendship between France and the United States, who were allies when the Americans were fighting for freedom against the British. The statue is said to be America’s most prized gift even today because of the message that it echoes across the world and helps portray the US as a beacon of freedom and liberty. The 134-year-old statue was a gift from the people of France to the United States and was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and engineer Gustave Eiffel, the maker of the Eiffel tower in Paris.

The project was announced by French political thinker Laboulaye following the war with Prussia in order to cement deeper ties with the US. At the start, the statue was given the name Liberty Enlightening the World, and a fundraising arm was set up in order to raise funds for the completion of the statue. The project faced a lot of setbacks but after several fundraising efforts, including one by Joseph Pulitzer, whose name is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes, the statue was completed and was installed at Liberty Island Manhattan, where it stands tall even today.  

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Venus of Willendorf, also called Woman of Willendorf or Nude Woman, Upper Paleolithic female figurine found in 1908 at Willendorf, Austria, that is perhaps the most familiar of some 40 small portable human figures (mostly female) that had been found intact or nearly so by the early 21st century. 

Very little is known about the Venus’ origin, method of creation, or cultural significance; however, it is one of numerous “Venus figurines” surviving from Paleolithic Europe. The purpose of the carving is the subject of much speculation. Like other similar sculptures, it probably never had feet, and would not have stood on its own, although it might have been pegged into soft ground. Parts of the body associated with fertility and childbearing have been emphasized, leading some researchers to believe that the Venus of Willendorf and similar figurines may have been used as fertility fetishes. The figure has no visible face, her head being covered with circular horizontal bands of what might be rows of plaited hair, or perhaps a type of headdress.

Catherine McCoid and LeRoy McDermott hypothesize that the figurines may have been created as self-portraits by women. This theory stems from the correlation of the proportions of the statues to how the proportions of women’s bodies would seem if they were looking down at themselves, which would have been the only way to view their bodies during this period. They speculate that the complete lack of facial features could be accounted for by the fact that sculptors did not own mirrors. This reasoning has been criticized by Michael S. Bisson, who notes that water pools and puddles would have been readily available natural mirrors for Paleolithic humans.

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Great Buddha Dordenma is a gigantic Shakyamuni Buddha statue in the mountains of Bhutan celebrating the 60th anniversary of fourth king Jigme Singye Wangchuck. The statue houses over one hundred thousand smaller Buddha statues, each of which, like the Great Buddha Dordenma itself, are made of bronze and gilded in gold. The Great Buddha Dordenma is sited amidst the ruins of Kuensel Phodrang, the palace of Sherab Wangchuk, the thirteenth Druk Desi, overlooking the southern approach to Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. Construction began in 2006 and was planned to finish in October 2010, however construction did not conclude until 25 September 2015. The completed work is one of the largest Buddha rupas in the world, at 169 feet (52 m) and contains 100,000 8-inch-tall and 25,000 12-inch-tall gilded bronze Buddhas

Like the large Buddha, these thousands of miniature Buddhas are also gilded and made of bronze, a major reason that the statue cost almost $100 million to build when it was constructed in 2015 to honor the 60th birthday of Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the fourth king of Bhutan.

The statue also fulfils two prophecies. The first, foreseen by yogi Sonam Sangpo, is that a Buddhist statue would be built in the region to “bestow blessings, peace, and happiness to the whole world.” In addition, the statue is said to have been mentioned by Guru Padmasambhava, widely referred to as the “second Buddha,” in the eighth century. This statue kills two birds with one stone by fulfilling both prophecies in glimmering fashion.

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The 2001 destruction of the two giant Buddhas in Bamiyan is, by far, the most spectacular attack against the historical and cultural heritage of Afghanistan committed during the country’s recent period of turmoil.

The statues represented a later evolution of the classic blended style of Gandhara art. The statues consisted of the male Salsal (“light shines through the universe”) and the (smaller) female Shamama (“Queen Mother”), as they were called by the locals. The main bodies were hewn directly from the sandstone cliffs, but details were modeled in mud mixed with straw, coated with stucco. This coating, practically all of which wore away long ago, was painted to enhance the expressions of the faces, hands, and folds of the robes; the larger one was painted carmine red and the smaller one was painted multiple colors. The lower parts of the statues’ arms were constructed from the same mud-straw mix supported on wooden armatures. It is believed that the upper parts of their faces were made from great wooden masks or casts. The rows of holes that can be seen in photographs held wooden pegs that stabilized the outer stucco.

The Buddhas are surrounded by numerous caves and surfaces decorated with paintings. It is thought that the period of florescence was from the 6th to 8th century CE, until the onset of Islamic invasions. These works of art are considered as an artistic synthesis of Buddhist art and Gupta art from India, with influences from the Sasanian Empire and the Byzantine Empire, as well as the country of Tokharistan.

The statues were blown up and destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban, on orders from leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, after the Taliban government declared that they were idols. International and local opinion strongly condemned the destruction of the Buddhas.

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The Lion Man is a masterpiece. Sculpted with great originality, virtuosity and technical skill from mammoth ivory, this 40,000-year-old image is 31 centimetres tall. It has the head of a cave lion with a partly human body. He stands upright, perhaps on tiptoes, legs apart and arms to the sides of a slender, cat-like body with strong shoulders like the hips and thighs of a lion. His gaze, like his stance, is powerful and directed at the viewer. The details of his face show he is attentive, he is watching and he is listening. He is powerful, mysterious and from a world beyond ordinary nature. He is the oldest known representation of a being that does not exist in physical form but symbolises ideas about the supernatural.

Stadel Cave, where the Lion Man was found, is different. It faces north and does not get the sun. It is cold and the density of debris accumulated by human activities is much less than at other sites. This was not a good place to live. Lion Man was found in a dark inner chamber, carefully put away in the darkness with only a few perforated arctic fox teeth and a cache of reindeer antlers nearby. These characteristics suggest that Stadel Cave was only used occasionally as a place where people would come together around a fire to share a particular understanding of the world articulated through beliefs, symbolised in sculpture and acted out in rituals.

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Excavations at Keezhadi an archaeological site in Sivaganga district near Madurai. Tamil Nadu, have brought to light significant details about the Sangam era. The sixth phase of the excavation came to an end late September. However, only one report that of the fourth phase) has been published so far. The first three phases were conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the latest three were under the ambit of the The Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department (TNAD). While avaiting the reports of the fifth and sixth phases, political parties in Tamil Nadu have urged the ASI to publish the findings of the first three phases of excavation without delay Meanwhile, scientists have discovered the oldest known human-made nanomaterials in the “unique black coatings” of potsherds – dated to 600 BC – unearthed from Keezhadi. (Nanomaterials are materials with at least one dimension measuring 100 nm or less. A nanometre (nm) is one millionth of a millimetre. Nanomaterials can occur naturally, created as the byproducts of combustion reactions, or be produced purposefully through engineering. Nanomaterials may be added to materials such as cement or cloth to make them stronger and yet lighter.)

Let’s take a look at how Keezhadi has helped us understand the cultural history of the Sangam era.

How were the excavations carried out?

In 2013-2014, the ASI began exploration in Tamil Nadu, along the banks of the river Vaigai. More than 290 sites were identified in Theni, Dindigul, Madurai, Sivaganga and Ramanathapuram districts for excavation. Keezhadi, a village 12 km southeast of Madurai in Sivaganga district, was one of them. In Keezhadi, the first phase of excavation began in 2015. The site began yielding rich artefacts such as potsherds with Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions, deep terracotta ring wells, big storage pots, pots with spouts, decorated pots, and beads made of semiprecious stones. Further excavations at the Pallichanthai Thidal in Keezhadi pointed to an ancient civilisation that thrived on the banks of the Vaigai.

What are some of the major findings from the site?

• The Sangam era could be 300 years older than thought. Cultural deposits unearthed date back to a period between the 6th Century BCE and the 1st Century CE.

• The Keezhadi site provides overwhelming evidence of the presence of an urban settlement. The artefacts suggest that urbanisation took place on the Vaigai plains in Tamil Nadu around the 6th century BCE, making it contemporary to the Gangetic plain civilisation The discovery of brick structures with classical features such as platforms, ring wells, rectangular tanks, square tanks with extended structures, and channels vouches for the presence of an urban culture there.

• Sangam people may have participated in recreational activities – as many dice made of ivory have been unearthed.

• The Keezhadi findings push back the date of the Tamil-Brahmi script to another century, i.e.. 6th century BCE. • Many Tamil-Brahmi inscribed potsherds have been recovered, suggesting that the residents of the Sangam era attained literacy or learned the art of writing as early as the 6th century BCE.

• There are also other markings alongside the Tamil-Brahmi symbols which apparently suggest a connection with the Indus Valley civilisation. Artefacts with ‘graffiti’ or markings establish a possible link between the scripts of the Indus Valley Civilisation and Tamil Brahmi which is the precursor to modem Tamil.

• Skeletal fragments of animals suggest that animals were used predominantly for agricultural purposes.

• Pottery specimens confirm that water containers and cooking vessels were shaped out of locally available materials.

What is the Sangam era?

The Sangam period refers to a period in the history of ancient Tamil Nadu. Kerala the souther parts of Kanataka and Andhra Pradesh, and northern Sri Lanka. The TNAD has stated that the cultural deposits unearthed indicate that the era could be safely dated to a period between the 6th century BCE and the 1st century CE. It is known for scholarly congregations in and around the city of Madurai. The period is considered the golden age of Tamil literature and culture as many of its epics were composed during this time.

Why are the Sangam era people believed to have been well-versed in city planning?

The fourth phase report highlighted the supposedly high standard of living in the Sangam era. It talked about the excavation having unearthed well-laid floors made of fine clay along with roof tiles. The finger groove impressions on roof indicate they may have been used to drain water. Other excavations include terracotta pipes that could have been used for carrying protected water. Another brick structure, which looked like a tank/trough, haul an inlet and an outlet A covered drain was found below this. A small structure with a stone slab on top, perhaps meant for washing dothes, was also one of the artefacts Excavated.

Different types of water channels brick construction evidence of trade relations with other domestic and foreign places sign and letter usages revealed that the civilisation along the Vaigai river was advanced.

What is the possible connection between the Indus script and the Tamil-Brahmi script?

The Indus Valley Civilisation existed between 5000 BCE and 1500 BCE in the northwestern part of India. When it declined, its people started moving towards east and south. The script that was used by the people of this civilisation has been termed the Indus script.

Now, the ‘graffiti marks on the artefacts obtained from the Keezhadi excavation site point to a link between the scripts of the Indus Valley Civilisation and Tamil Brahmi which is the precursor to modem Tamil. According to the report: One kind of script that survived in the time period between the disappearance of the Indus script and the emergence of the Brahmi script has been referred to as graffti by the scholars. These marks they believe have evolved or transformed from the Indus script and served as the precursor to the Brahmi script.

Therefore, these graffiti cannot be dismissed as mere scratches. Besides, like the Indus script this also could not be deciphered till date. Among the scripts of India, the Indus script is considered to be the earliest. After the decline of the script and before the emergence of the Brahmi script there seemed to be a gap. Researchers note that this graffti could fill that gap.

What do we know about the discovery of nanomaterials?

Scientists have discovered the oldest known human made nanomaterials in the unique black coatings of potsherds from Keezhadi. Research revealed that these coatings are made of carbon nanotubes (CNTS) which have enabled the layer to last more than 2,600 years, raising questions on the tools used during those periods to achieve high temperatures for making earthenwares.

Scientists say that the people of this time may not have intentionally added CNTS. instead, during the processing at high temperatures these would have just formed accidentally. They may have added or coated something similar to plant-sap to the inside of the pots, and subject it to the nearly 1100-1400 degree Celsius high-temperature fire treatment as seen in kilns. This fire treatment may have led to the formation of CNTS during high-temperature processing, which has likely strengthened the pot and made the coating durable.

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Worlds War II, also known as the Second World War, was fought I many countries between 1939 and 1945. The global war involved two opposing groups: the Allies and the Axis powers, France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China constituted the Allies. The Allied powers were led by Winston Churchill (the U.K), Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union), Charles de Gaulle (France), and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (the U.S). The Axis powers were led by Adolf Hitler (Germany), Benito Mussolini (Italy), and Hideki Tojo (Japan).

What triggered the war?

The Second World War began in Europe on September 1, 1939, when German troops invaded Poland. Was it a continuation of the First World War? In a way, yes. The instability created in Europe and the economic depression worldwide as a result of WWI were major factors leading to WWI. Besides, Hitler had been waiting to regain territory lost after WWI, to unite all German- speaking people into one Teach in Europe. Hitler’s invasion of Poland forced Great Britain and France, which had promised support to Poland, to declare war on Germany.

Then Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, but soon found itself crippled by the Russian Winter. The war in the Pacific broke out in December 1941, when Japan, annoyed by the U.S. trade bans, attacked Pearl harbor, the American naval base in Hawaii, and other Dutch and British military installations throughout Asia.

When the war ended…

The war came to a close on September 2, 1945, when Japan formally surrendered. With Hitler’s death in April, Germany signed an unconditional surrender document. Mussolini was captured and hanged by Italian partisans.

With millions of soldiers and civilians losing their lives on account of the war, it was considered the largest and bloodiest war in history. The war saw the use of blitzkrieg tactics (a method of offensive warfare blending land and air action to achieve quick victory over adversaries), initially by Germany and later by the Allies, and devastating weaponry such as U-boat subs and atom bombs as a result of technological advancements.

The Holocaust

The deadliest conflict witnessed the Holocaust, the killing of almost six million Jews by the Nazis, and the Allied atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The U.S, the Soviet Union, France and China emerged victors of the war, while Germany, Italy and Japan embraced defeat.

The war brought about a major shift of power in the world, with the United States and the Soviet Union emerging as superpowers. It also resulted in the end of colonialism in Asia and Africa. One of the significant developments in the port-war worlds was the formation of the United Nations to maintain international peace and security.

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In armies throughout the ages, the marching boot has been a prized possession. Weapons will only be needed in times of war, but the boot is needed every single day. Command sends the soldier into awful terrain on a regular basis, for long periods of time, often to cover very large distances.

And as has been stated in other answers, earlier legionaries wore the caligae, open sandal-like boots that had thick soles held together with hobnails. From the late 1st century onwards the army began to equip itself with calcei, an enclosed boot more often used by civilian workers. This transition may reflect the fact that more recruits were coming from the northern frontiers, where enclosed boots are of great benefit, or it might reflect changes in the supply system, with legions turning to civilian sources for their footwear. Whatever the reason, calcei were ubiquitous in the British provinces. At Vindolanda a Roman fort on Hadrian’s wall, the wet conditions have preserved many examples of Roman footwear, civilian and military, adult and child. A great proportion (of all types) have hobnails hammered into the soles, a technique which binds the thick soles strongly together, which reduces wear and tear, and which gives an excellent grip akin to wearing modern football boots!

These are a pair of reproductions worn by a reenactment legionnary, who had them for three years.

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 Dr. Balasubramaniam from Indian Institute of Technology did a material sciences analysis of the iron, and here’s what he found (in easy words):

If you melt pig iron and add phosphorous in it, it will start breaking up. The iron would never come together and make bond with each other. So, what the manufacturers do is that they take out phosphorous out of the molten iron. (Just like you filter out tea leaves out from your tea, where tea leaves are your phosphorous molecules in an analogy.)

What ancient Indians did was they never took out the phosphorous out of the pillar. They welded the cylindrical pieces of wrought iron. To remove the phosphorous from it, they started hitting it from all sides with a hammer. Phosphorous got pushed towards the surface of the cylinder from inside. So inside had no more phosphorous while outer surface had a protective layer of phosphorous. It was a win-win.

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Firstly Hinduism is not a religion, it is way of life

Hinduism-oldest religion in world

The Vedas were written in 1700–1100 BC and Upanishads were written in 700 to 500 BC

Concept of cyclical time

Hindus believe in cyclical time

There is no beginning and endings

There are 4 yugas-1) kritayuga 2) Treta yuga 3)Dvapara yuga 4)kaliyuga

4 yugas are about 4.32 million years

At end of 4 yugas decline in human morality lead to total destruction of world

We are in 4th and final yuga kali

In kaliyuga shiva will perform a dance which will destroy the world.

Concept of Trimurti

Brahma-creator of world

Vishnu-preserver of world which means he protects the universe from being destroyed and keeps it going, according to this religion.

Shiva is known as “The Destroyer”. At end of every yuga shiva destroys world by opening 3rd eye.

108 have long been considered a sacred number in Hinduism. This number also connects the Sun, Moon, and Earth: The average distance of the Sun and the Moon to Earth is 108 times their respective diameters.

Classification of Hindus

We all know Muslims are classified into Sunni and Shiva. Christians into catholic and Protestants.

Similarly Hindus are classified into

1) shaivism

2) vaishnavism

3) shaktism

4) smartism

Worship of five shrines with five deities, all treated as equal – Shiva, Vishnu, Surya, Ganesha, and Shakti

Science behind Hindu traditions

1. Tulasi

Tulasi is sacred in hinduism.we regard it as earthly manifestation of godess tulsi(avatar of laxmi)

Science-According to Ayurveda Tulasi enhances your immunity

2. Upavas/fasting

Science-fasting diet showed health benefits including weight loss, lower blood pressure and a drop in levels of the hormone IGF-1, which primarily stimulates growth but also plays a role in regulating blood glucose levels.

3. Throwing coins into river

Hindus believe throwing coins into river can make them lucky

Science-Ancient Indian Science was very superior and there are many mentions in Ayurvedic texts about use of copper for water purification, or using copper or silver pots to store water. Silver, Copper and their alloys have many antimicrobial properties. And in ancient times the currency was forged with copper and silver.

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But the Romans, lacking machine tools and industrialized manufacturing, produced surprisingly standardized and precise in line valves to finely control the water supply to public baths, fountains and quite often, individual homes.

The design was simple, a bronze or bronze alloy junction piece with a tightly fitting plug cylinder sleeved within it. This had holes in. Turn the spindle at the top and the holes align with the pipe allowing water to pass through and vice versa.

Some modern valves you get from the hardware shop work the same way and look surprisingly similar.

Simple, but to make it work it must be robust and precisely measured. The plug insert has to be a precise fit or it will leak or Caesar up. Ahem sorry, seize up.

You see, a valve isn’t just a valve.

If you work back through the reverse butterfly effect of what is required to make a simple device standard across a whole empire that everyone uses, you see it takes a huge amount of collective effort.

We have the benefit of fine machine tools, synthetic polymers, stainless steel, a literate population that can read and count, standardized factories. Decades of craftsmen and engineers talking with each other, comparing designs, sharing best practice.

You need people to travel to demonstrate to craftsmen what is required. To travel you need efficient transport, or at least roads, and therefor a robust government administration to put that in place.

You have to have literacy and numeracy to a degree, otherwise you will have simply a hundred differing artistic interpretations of “valve”, not an empirical design.

You need enough of the workforce producing enough of a food surplus that a segment of the population can specialize in making stuff that isn’t food. Like valves.

All this has to be in place first.

Rome, at its heart, was a slave owning economy based on simple agriculture. Human and animal muscle power drove it, and the wind helped blow its ships. In that respect it was little different from the Minoans, Egyptians, Assyrians or any other nameless, ancient culture.

And yet the pre-industrial Romans managed to coordinate themselves to such a degree that small groups of craftsmen, as far apart as northern England and Egypt, with hand tools in simple workshops, could produce a standard device that could, literally, plug into a standard plumbing system in different corners of the empire.

We picture the great aqueducts sweeping into the cities dumping water into troughs while the eager plebs gather around with their buckets.

In actual fact it was a lot more elegant, and indeed modern, than that.

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Extremely effective, because although they restricted visibility, they gave the occupier almost unlimited time to survey and take aim at their target, with almost no risk of being shot back at.

You actually stand inside the structure of an arrow slit. The floor slopes down, toward the opening, to afford the best view of the terrain below, and the chamfered walls mean you have a wide field of fire, even with a weapon like a crossbow (that most unskilled defenders would be using). A bow-shooter would gain as much as 20–30 degrees wider field of shot in the same opening, over a crossbow user, for instance.

The exterior view of the same sorts of arrow loops show that it would be near impossible to shoot back through them at the defender.

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The Blood-eagle

Basically, person would be tied, then his back would be cut open, skin removed, exposing the ribs, then each rib would be broken in form of the wings, and some left it there, but Vikings went a step further. They would take out victim’s lungs and hang them on the broken ribs.

Victim would be alive through most of the punishment, dying when their lungs were removed.

That would be so painful to the victim, that arguably it’s the most painful punishment in the history of the human race.

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1. In 1995, a guy named Sonny Graham had a heart problem and had to have a heart transplant. He was lucky enough to find a suitable donor. The former owner of the donor just shot himself, leaving a 28 year old widow. After the operation, as soon as Graham saw the widow, he fell in love with her. ?Later, they got married. Three years after getting married, Graham was found dead at home and police investigation revealed that he also committed suicide by swallowing a gun.

2. Confucius in China and Sakyamuni in Nepal.?Confucius and Sakyamuni were almost born at the same time.?Confucius created Confucianism, a traditional oriental culture, which is the most famous traditional culture in China; Sakyamuni created one of the largest religions in the world, Buddhism.

They both had a great impact on the world.

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The Bajau People of Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines). Real life “Aquamen”.

The Bajau are able to hold their breath much longer than the average people, up to 13 minutes and dive deep down to 60 meters underwater. They are semi-nomadic people that lived and relied on the seas, with mostly fishes and seafood for their diet.

No, they don’t have gills…

But they have adapted/evolved much larger spleen compared to other people.

Even as toddlers they were able to swim naturally. The nomadic Bajau babies were born next by the sea, and get introduced to it right after birth.

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The difference between tracked and wheeled is huge.

The biggest difference is ground pressure.

Tracks greatly increase the surface area under force.

A 70 ton M1 Abram tank has a ground pressure of about 15 PSI. A standard passenger car at maybe 2 tons, has a ground pressure of 30 psi. A stilleto heel has a ground pressure of about 471 psi.

The area used to support a M1 Abrams tank is measured in meters, the area used to support a passenger car is measured in centimetres, and the area used to support a stilleto heel is measured in millimeters.

Ground pressure

The bigger the area used to hold it up the weight of a object from the ground, the lower the ground pressure. The lower the ground pressure, the softer the ground could be and still allow a heavy object to be supported.

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Few ancient civilizations were as developed and prosperous as that of the Indus Valley. It had remarkably organized cities, a thriving economy, a better quality of life than that of many other civilizations.

A still mysterious civilization

The civilization of the Indus Valley is not as well known as those of Mesopotamia and Egypt which existed at the same time, presumably because its writing has not yet been deciphered.

So we still do not know much about the functioning of this society. Even its origins remain mysterious, it is not known when it appeared precisely.

This civilization had its golden age between 2600 and 1900 BC, with the two largest cities, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, in particular, but it certainly appeared long before, perhaps even before the Mesopotamian civilizations. It could therefore be the first civilization of humanity.

An ideal geographical location

As the name suggests, this civilization was established along the Indus River which today flows mainly in Pakistan.

The Indus Valley is located at the eastern end of the rains that washed down the Mediterranean and the Middle East and at the western end of the Indian monsoon. The population therefore lived precisely where these two climatic systems meet.

The valley thus experiences two wet seasons, winter and summer, which allowed farmers to harvest two annual harvests. In Antiquity, the Indus Valley was therefore a particularly fertile region.

Thanks to these enormous agricultural yields, the economy was surplus, even flourishing, which allowed the populations to export the surplus food. Indeed, this civilization was very oriented towards trade.

Flourishing trade

At its peak, between 2600 and 1900 BC, the Indus Valley civilization extended over approximately 800,000 km², but its trade network extended far beyond. Harappan merchants did business in China, Southeast Asia, and Mesopotamia.

They exported all kinds of goods, agricultural products like cotton, a crop very greedy in water, which was relatively easy to cultivate in an area so watered by the rains.

The Harappans also took objects, pottery, ceramic or terracotta dishes, often of good quality.

Innovative technologies

They also sold ornaments (statuettes, figurines, etc) in copper and bronze thanks to a process ahead of its time and even still used today : Lost-wax casting

It is a process in which molten metal replaces, by melting it, a wax model placed in a mold. This technique allows complex parts to be cast in one piece (without welding) with great precision in details.

To guarantee trade, trust is essential. Sellers and buyers must trust each other. Nowadays, trademarks, like logos or labels.

But thousands of years ago the people of the Indus Valley had already invented this. In particular, they used terracotta seals which had the same function as modern brands. They attested to the quality of the product and to the merchant’s membership of a particular community.

Planned cities

The Harappan cities were organized according to a very rational, resolutely modern plan. The streets, the buildings were all tailor-made.

The cities obeyed mathematical principles. The length of the buildings was greater than their width at a fixed ratio and accurate to less than 1 %, which made the architecture complex. These proportions may have obeyed cosmic forces, very present in Hindu mythology.

Running water is often associated with ancient Rome. Yet the cities of the Indus were also equipped with a remarkable water supply system, thousands of years before the Romans.

The houses had bathrooms and toilets. The waste water was evacuated, thanks to terracotta pipes, in gutters then in the river.

A peaceful society?

Once again, for lack of torn writing, little is known about Harappan society. However, archaeological excavations would indicate that these societies were relatively peaceful and egalitarian.

The towns were surrounded by ramparts but nothing indicates that they had a defensive function, they were rather used to control the influx of people and goods. In addition, few weapons were found.

The rarity, even the absence of wars can be explained by the trade which had a particular important place in the valley of Indus. Indeed, trading partners rarely go to war.

An egalitarian society?

Archaeologists have not found any royal palaces or religious temples. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any, but then they were modest in size.

This would therefore indicate that the Harappan societies were more egalitarian than the Mesopotamian and Egyptian societies which had, for their part, monumental palaces and temples for the elites and priests.

Mysterious disappearance

After a golden age of 7 centuries, the civilization of the Indus Valley ended up disappearing around 1900 BC for reasons still unknown.

However, it is likely that at the time the region was ravaged by epidemics due to the long distance trade which brought diseases from far away lands, such as leprosy and tuberculosis, which surely contributed to the decline of this civilization.

In addition, at this time, the region’s climate probably dried up, reducing agricultural yields. Societies were ravaged by malnutrition and even famine.

Finally, the decline of this civilization has undoubtedly destabilized the social order, which would have created violent conflicts as evidenced by many damaged skeletons dating from this period.

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Technology and advancement have brought us so far that there were some jobs which are now obsolete or entirely changed.

Following are some which are old forgotten jobs.

Pre-radar Listener

These were used to detect enemy aircraft.

Pre-Radar listener is one of them. During war times these pre-radar listeners were used to detect the enemy approaches. They had built in a way that could capture sound from some good distances and were used for reporting and surveillance.

Bowling Alley Pinsetter

Workers usually young boys used to work at bowling alleys. Their job was to set up the pins for customers. Really used to be a very busy job.

Lamplighter

Workers were required to refuel and extinguish the lamplights. These lamplighters used long sticks to light the lamp and refuel before the bulbs and electric lamps were introduced

Switchboard Operators.

Not long ago, these workers were an essential part of the telephone networks. They used to connect long distance calls by switching pins.

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The Prison System in the 18th, 19th and beginning of the 20th century was solely based on punishing

So, you might think the prison system today is harsh. Think again. In the 19th century the US and Britain prison systems were based on punishing prisoners to the point that they wouldn’t commit a crime again in fear of landing in prison.

How bad was it?

First let me tell you about this one

The Eastern State Prison

The eastern state prison was a 40,000 square meter prison, and was for a long time the largest building in the US.

The Eastern State Prison’s system was basically based on completely isolating the prisoner, so for his whole sentence he would not see nor communicate with another inmate ever.

* When the prisoner was first shoved to his cell, a mask was put over his head to prevent him from seeing another prisoner.

* The walls were extra thick to prevent communication by knocking on the wall

* When the prisoners arrived they were all given a number, which was the only name they were allowed to go by

* The prisoners received food through a hole in the wall to prevent catching an eye contact with the guard

And you think just that is bad? Because there’s more.

* In many prisons the prisoner had to pay just to sleep on a bed and sometimes also to be released.

So if you didn’t have any money, you could be just left inside the prison for a couple more years after your sentence.

* The prison food was truly awful.

Often the prisoners just received nothing more than a little bit of porridge, gruel or soup for every meal.

* The work was most often completely meaningless

This was a very common tactic in prisons, to rob the prisoner of the joy that comes from a job well done, because, well, he hadn’t really achieved anything at all.

Some of the work prisoners did included:

The Crank

Prisoners had to turn a crank up to 10,000 times per day, with absolutely no purpose

The Penal Treadmill

Basically stairs that whenever you stepped up, it turned, so to avoid falling of you just had to keep stepping

Breaking rocks with a sledgehammer

Now, you might think they needed smaller rocks for making roads or building something but that was not the case. It on purpose had no meaning.

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Evariste Galois

He was killed in 1832 at age 20 in a duel over “une femme”.

On the night before the duel he wrote a letter containing 60 pages of his math findings. In 1846 Liouville published his results on group theory, but it was only around 1870 that Camille Jordan finally understood it and its implications… Unlike Gauss, whose math works were mostly questions that other persons later discovered on their own, all of Galois’s findings were original and revolutionary.

So we make Galois survive the duel and live five years longer. I assume the near death experience would motivated him to properly expose his ideas. This would accelerate math development of groups theory a whole four decades, but most important, the great math minds that were alive and productive during this time interval will have the chance to work upon it. Imagine Gauss and Riemann having access to Galois’s ideas and tools- it is like giving the minds behind the Manhattan project access to a modern PC to design and calculate his A-Bombs.

One can safely assume that magnetism theory and relativity would be formulated earlier as well- Cantor would achieve his own results earlier and likely expand upon them. Galois’s death delayed math development at least 40 years, in the time frame exactly before math gave birth to relativity and quantum mechanics.

Then we enter the speculation scenario: if between 17y and 20y Galois produced such revolutionary results, what would he do living five years longer? Would he solve Fermat’s last theorem?! Galois’s mind worked in ways alien to most humans minds, the kind of genius we are blessed with once a century, if that much.

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Anne Frank.

Now, you’re probably thinking “Why Anne? I thought we knew a lot about her!” And you’re correct, we know a lot about Anne Frank, but there’s something people don’t get.

Two diaries came from Anne. One was A Diary of a Young Girl and the other was The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition.

The first edition (A Diary of a Young Girl) is the edited version. Such edits were made by Anne’s father, Otto Frank, and some came from Anne herself.

So, what was left out of The Diary of a Young Girl? Lots of stuff, actually.

For one, Anne’s mother is painted in a very different light, a more positive light. Secondly, Anne made her writing better when she edited her diary. She added things she’d forgotten, reworked some parts, and sometimes cut out whole sections.

Lastly, Anne was much more explicit in her sexuality. In her unedited version, we come to learn Anne likes girls. (Among other things, but that’s what I want to talk about today).

It is speculated that Anne Frank was bisexual. Now, that is a great piece of representation, however, Anne Frank is not a bisexual icon.

She died because she was Jewish. Not because of her sexuality.

When someone says “Anne Frank is a bicon,” they are forgetting why she died. Yes, people who weren’t Jewish died in the holocaust, but you should never say that in replying to Jewish people talking about it.

To be clear: it is okay to talk about the LGBT community (and many other minorities) who were killed in the holocaust. But, you should talk about that separate from talking about the Jews who were killed.

For example, it would be wrong if someone were to say “Jews were killed in the holocaust, but so were other people, so it’s not even that big of a deal.”

Anne Frank should be remembered for being Jewish, not being bisexual.

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Many castles were designed as homes for rulers rather than as fortresses. Many of the world’s most famous and fancy palaces were built hundreds of years ago.

The royal family of the United Kingdom lives at Windsor Castle when they are not in nearby London. William the Conqueror built a castle in that place about 1070 A.D. Since then, many kings and queens have added to the castle, which now covers 3.6 hectares. It has 15 majestic towers and a beautiful chapel.

Another famous castle lies on a hill in the city of Osaka, Japan. The elegant Osaka Castle was built during the 1500’s. Visitors can still see three of the original towers as well as the castle’s main gate.

A famous palace is in Versailles, France. The Palace of Versailles, France. The Palace of Versailles is more than 0.4 kilometre long and has about 1,300 rooms. It was built by the French King Louis XIV in the 1600’s.

To see a real fairy-tale castle, go to Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. It has a walled courtyard, spires on its roof, and a blue arched ceiling decorated with stars. Built for King Ludwig II in the 1860’s, the castle is now a popular place to visit.

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Some of the world’s most amazing buildings were built for protection, not beauty. Hundreds of years ago, people in different parts of the world had many rulers. The rulers often fought each other. Powerful rulers built castles to live in with their family, helpers, priests, soldiers – and farm animals!

Many of the castles were made of stone. Often they were built around an open courtyard. They had high walls that could be built 10 metres thick to protect against enemies. Some castles had towers at each corner.

Sometimes the walls were surrounded with deep, wide ditches that were usually filled with water. These were called moats. To protect the castle, guards looked out from the towers and walked along the tops of the walls. They hid behind stone fences called battlements and shot arrows at attackers. When visitors came, the guards would lower a drawbridge so that people could walk or ride across the moat. Then they would have to pass a gatehouse.

Inside, there was a large room where people met and ate meals. A huge fire in the fireplace too away the chill. So did tapestries, or hanging cloths, placed around the castle walls. People spread sweet-smelling plants on the floors and changed them every month.

Castles had a kitchen, a chapel in which to pray, and rooms for the family. They also had a barracks, or sleeping room, for soldiers. Many had dungeons in which to keep prisoners.

In many places around the world, ancient castles still stand. One is the Tower of London on the River Thames in London, England. This group of stone buildings has a wall and moat surrounding it. The Tower of London was first built as a castle in the 1000’s. In later times, it was a palace and a prison. Today it is a museum.

The Loire River Valley in France is famous for its many castles, called chateaux in French. One of the oldest French chateaux is in Angers. Visitors can still see the remains of the 17 towers and the moat. This chateau as built in the early 1200’s.

In Syria, near the northern border of present-day Lebanon, is a castle called Krak des Chevaliers. This fortress was built by crusaders during the 1100’s.

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People have always had to work. Ancient people hunted animals and gathered plants. Some people fished. Later, they learned to farm. They made their own clothes, tools, and furniture. They swapped some of the things they made, grew, or caught for other things they needed. This is called bartering. Then people began to use money. Some people paid others to work for them. Workers used that money to buy what they needed, instead of making those necessities for themselves.

In some places in the world today, people still live as the ancient peoples did. They hunt, fish, or farm in small groups near their homes, and they make everything they need for everyday life.

In other places, people who farm or fish sell much of what they grow or catch. Some people make things for other people to buy. They are craftworkers and factory workers. Some people work as teachers, scientists, nurses, and doctors.

Year after year, people learn, discover, and invent things. As they do this, they find different kinds of work to do.

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No one knows exactly why – or when – people first wore clothes. But ancient peoples probably began to wear clothes for the same reasons that we wear clothes today. Clothes keep us warm and dry. Some people – nurses, police officers, priests, and many others – wear clothes that show who they are or what they do. And sometimes we wear clothes that make us look like part of a group or clothes that make u stand out in a crowd.

They no longer had much body hair, which had helped more archaic hominins keep warm at night and offered some protection from the heat of the Sun.

It is possible we started wearing clothes to compensate for the loss of fur, says Ian Gilligan of the University of Sydney in Australia.

Historical accounts suggest that other hunter-gatherer societies, such as the Fuegians from South America, wore simple clothes some of the time, but also walked around naked. Perhaps early humans only covered up when it was cold.

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The United Nations marked its 75th anniversary on September 21, 2020 with a high-level global meeting. The world leaders came together virtually amidst growing tensions of several nations with China and the deadly coronavirus pandemic.

The theme for this year’s discussion was “The future we want, the United Nations we need: reaffirming our collective commitment to multilateralism”. During the event, the UN General Assembly adopted a forward-looking declaration that called for strengthening the mechanism to combat terrorism, reformed multilateralism, inclusive development and better preparedness to deal with challenge like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked for comprehensive reforms in the United Nations. In this video address, the Indian Prime Minister started “We cannot fight today’s challenges with outdated structures. Without comprehensive reforms, the UN faces a crisis of confidence.” Modi vouched for reformed multilateralism, giving a voice to all stakeholders. He also called for changes that would address contemporary challenges and focus on human welfare.

Modi’s call comes at a time when India is ready to take up an elected non-permanent seat at the UN Security Council India’s two-year term will commerce on January 1, 2021.

Did you know?

The United Nations Day is celebrated on October 24 every year as on this day in 1945, the UN Charter came into force after being ratified by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – China, Russia, the U.S., the U.K., and France – and a majority of other signatories.

The UN Charter is the foundational treaty of the United Nations, drafted with the aim of maintaining world peace and upholding human rights.

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The Mudejar architecture of Aragon is centred in the autonomous community of Aragon in Spain. It consists of three provinces, namely Huesca, Teruel and Zaragoza. Known for its Mudejar art, a type of ornamentation and decoration used in the Iberian Christian kingdoms, the buildings in Aragon started following this style in the 12th century. Most of these buildings can be found in the valleys of the Ebero, Jalon and Jiloca. Some of the buildings in the city together represent the architectural form in the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Mudejar art

The Mudejar art emerged as an architectural style in the 12 the Century in the Liberian peninsula. The style evolved as a result of Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures living side by side in medieval Spain. The art form is influenced by Islamic tradition but also reflects contemporary European styles, particularly the Gothic.

The materials used to construct the buildings in Aragon were typical of Islamic art. These include brick, ceramics, plaster, and wood. The ten buildings which are part of the UNESCO Heritage site, have decorative motifs from a variety of traditions including Byzantine, Greco-Roman, Sassanid, Berber, Seljuq and Visigoth.

Most of these monuments have rhombus-shaped mouldings called seqba, stars, interlaced and angled brick freezes, and multi-grooved arches, with elements of construction characteristic of Islamic art such as alfiz panels, decorative eaves and lattice work.

What made it to the list?

A total of ten buildings constitute the Mudejar Architecture of Aragon. Each of these buildings is unique in terms of design, though they are all based on one architectural style. The first manifestations of the Aragonese Mudejar have two origins – one maintained Islamic ornamental tradition in the Aljaferia Palace, and the other is the tradition of developing Romanesque architecture using brickwork instead of masonry. Examples of this kind of Mudejar architecture can be found in the churches of Daroca whose construction began in stone in the 12th Century but finished in the 13th Century with Mudejar brick panels.

The buildings

1. Tower, roof and dome of the Cathedral of Saint Mary of Mediavilla, also known as the Teruel Cathedral. This is a Roman Catholic Church dedicated to St. Mary.
2. Tower and church of San Pedro, also known as San Pedro Church. This is a 14th Century church and a 13th Century bell tower in Teruel.
3. Tower and church of San Martin, built in 1316, and renovated in the 16th Century.
4. Tower and church of The Savior, also known as the Tower of the church of San Salvador, a Mudejar bell tower and a church.
5. Apse, cloister and tower of Colegiata de Santa Maria, or the Collegiate church of St Mary Major, a Mudejar-gothic style, Roman Catholic church.
6. Parish church of Santa Tecla, a church-fortress in the Aragonese Mudejar style.
7. Church of Saint Mary in Tobed, a church-fortress in the Aragonese Mudejar style.
8. Mudejar remains of the Palace of Aljaferia, a fortified medieval palace, and the only conserved testimony of a large building of Spanish Islamic architecture.
9. Tower and Parish church of San Pablo, a Gothic-Mudejar church.
10. Apse, parish and dome of La Seo, also known as the Cathedral of the Savior of Zaragoza, is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Zaragoza.

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The Phonetic Phoenicians

When early forms of writing first developed in different parts of the works humans drew picture symbols to show what they observed in real life. So each symbol represented one object. The Egyptian Hieroglyphs, the Mesopotamian Cuneiform, and the Indus Valley script were all ‘pictorial’ scripts. This meant that to read or write, people had to learn lots and lots of symbols, which was very difficult and took a lot of time.

Around 1500 BC, the ancient Phoenicians, an ancient sea-faring, trading civilization based around what is now Lebanon, came up with a system of writing that would change the world! Symbols were now used for sounds rather than actual words. These sounds became alphabets, which didn’t mean anything by themselves, but could be used as building blocks to form an unlimited number of words. Even unknown words could be spelled out as people now knew how to pronounce them. All cultures which came in contact with this immediately adopted this revolutionary concept, and created their own ‘phonetic’ alphabets.

However, the Chinese alphabet remains pictorial. So while writers of most languages of the world have to learn, and focus only on building their vocabulary, the average Chinese person today has to learn, by heart, between 3,000 and 50,000 characters just to be able to read her language!

The Greeks and Roman scripts became the base for the European language scripts used today. The Hebrews* and Arabs modified Phoenician differently and created their own scripts, including the Aramaic script, which was adopted as the official script of the Persian Empire. With the Persian conquests of the Indus area in the 6th century BC, the Aramaic script came to India.

Origin of Indian scripts

In India, the Harappan script was by then a long forgotten mystery. After a gap of thousands of years, the earliest inscriptions are from the Mauryan period, in the Hathigumpha in Orissa, and the Ashokan edicts in the 3rd century in a script called Brahmi. Interestingly, Emperor Ashoka’s very first edict, carved into a rock near Kandahar around 260 BC, was written exclusively in Aramaic and Greek!

However, Brahmi and other scripts had probably been gradually evolving for a long time in India and it is just that the oldest ones we have found are from the Maurayan period, as they started carving things into durable stone, rather than writing on wood or paper.

Brahmi would become the mother of all South Asian and most South-East Asian scripts – around 15 of them – from Hindi to Punjabi to Bengali to Tamil to Burmese, Thai and Tibetan!

Variations in Brahmi

Like languages, scripts also change across different regions. Brahmi quickly started getting regional variations. Around the 1st century, there was a distinct split between Northern Brahmi and Southern Brahmi , which diverged more and more over time. Northern Brahmi evolved into all the north Indian scripts we have today, like Gurmukhi, Devanagari, Marathi, Bengali and so on. Southern Brahmi gradually morphed into the Old Kannada, Pallava grantha and Vattelutu scripts, which gave rise to modern Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

The South-East Asian Connection

The Pallava dynasty ruled a large swathe of southern India around the 3rd-9th centuries AD. In their time, a script called Pallava Grantha was used. The Pallavas developed strong trading ties with many countries in South-East Asia, and not just goods, but Indian culture, religion, mythology and even the script spread to countries like modern Burma, Indonesia, Thailand Cambodia and Vietnam. All of their scripts come from Pallava Grantha!

Vowels and Consonants

Have you ever wondered why, in English, vowels are written as separate letters, but in Indian scripts, the vowels are added to the top, bottom or side of the consonants> this is special feature of all Brahmic scripts. While it makes learning to write a bit more complicated, it is at least less complicated than Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew…which simply don’t have vowel sounds! Readers of those languages have to guess what the word is while reading the paragraph!

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Several artefacts and relics were unearthed during the excavation of Mohenjo Daro by archaeologists. Most of these are preserved and on display at the National Museum, New Delhi. Some of the notable artefacts discovered are:

The Dancing Girl

Dating back to 2,500 BC, this is one of the rarest artefacts found the world-over. The artifact depicts a woman who looks like she is dancing. Hence, the name ‘Dancing Girl’. The bronze statue suggests two important facts about the Indus Valley Civilisation – the artists knew metal blending and casting, and the civilisation had dance and other performing arts as modes of entertainment.

Mother Goddess idol

Discovered in 1931 by Hohn Marshall, this terracotta idol was made between 2700 and 2100 BC. According to archaeologists, the figurine suggests the Mother Goddess cult was wide-spread during the days of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

The Priest King

Discovered in 1927, and sculpted around 2,500 BC, this is a statue of a seated male with a neat beard, pierced ears, and a fillet around his head. He also wears a clock and an armband. The statue, which is 17.5 cm tall, is made of soapstone.

Though there is no evidence of a king or a priest having ruled Mohenjo Daro, archeologists dubbed this figure the ‘Priest King’.

Pashupati Seal

Engraved between 2500-2400 BC, this artefacts is considered one of the most significant Indus finds. It is a seal which bears the image of Shiva, suggesting the existence of a Shiva-cult during the Indus civilization. The seal is engraved on a chip of steatite, a soft stone which is decay-resistant.

Present state

Many archaeologists believe that not must is being done to protect the ruins. The faces challenges from rising temperatures, which sometimes soar over 46 degrees Celsius. Salt from the underground water table is also said to be damaging the ruins.

More than the weather and time, archaeologists believe that it is fight against militancy and neglect by people that will lead to the eventual disappearance of the ruins.

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The ancient city

Situated in the modern-day Larkana district of Sindh province in Pakistan, Mohenjo Daro was ince a thriving city of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Built around 2,500 BC Mohenjo Daro meaning mound of the dead, is considered one of the world’s earliest well-planned cities. It was abandoned in the 19th Century BC with the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation. It was rediscovered in the 1920s by an officer at the Archaeological Survey of India.

Following its discovery, several excavations have been carried out at the site, with only-third of the city’s area of 240 hectares excavated so far. The excavations have revealed evidence of art, religion, customs and administrative abilities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, along with the city’s excellent drainage system.

The site was added to the World Heritage Site list in 1980 by UNESCO for being the most ancient and best-preserved urban ruin in the Indus Valley and bearing testimony to the Indus civilization.

Architecture and layout

The city of Mohenjo Daro had been carefully planned. Spread across 240 acres, it is believed that the city once housed nearly 40,000 people. Its layout has rectilinear buildings on a grid plan and an elaborate drainage system. Most of the buildings in Mohenjo Daro were build of fired and mortared brick, with some incorporating sun-dried mud-brick and wooden superstructures.

The site consists of several mounds, which archaeologists believe grew organically over the centuries as platforms and walls were constantly built for the houses. The Great Bath, water light pool, and one of the major constructions in Mohenjo Daro, sites on the tallest mound in the city. Many believe that the Great Bath is the closest structure that Mohenjo Daro has to a temple. Next to the Great bath is the Great Hall or Great Granary, with wall divisions and air ducts.

The city had a central marketplace with a large central well. Most of the houses contained a bathing area with a drainage system. They also had inner courtyards and some were two-storeyed.

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A serial property on the Pacific Coast of the central part of Mexico Baja California Peninsula, the Whale Sanctuary of EL Vizcaino comprises two coastal lagoons – Laguna Ojo de Liebre and Laguna San Ignacio. The site includes the wetlands, marshes, dunes, halophytes, mangroves and desert habitats surrounding the lagoons. Spanning nearly 400,000 hectares, the World Heritage Site is part of the much larger El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, Mexico’s largest protected area. The lagoons of El Vizcaino are recognised as the world’s moat important place for the breeding and reproduction of the once endangered Eastern subpopulation of the North Pacific Grey Whale.

The ideal spot

Every year between December and March, many Grey whales come to the sanctuary from the oceans of Alaska to breed. Nearly half the population of gray whales found in the world today is believed to have been born in this sanctuary.

One of the major reasons for the whales making their way here is the high temperature and saline concentration of the lagoon waters, which make it ideal for newborn calves to learn how to float and swim. The shallow waters of the lagoon also help the calves learn how to feed themselves. This is why the sanctuary is known as “The Whales’ Cradle”.

The return of the grey whales

While the current population of the grey whale is estimated to be about 20,000, there was a time when the species was on the verge of extinction. The population had come down to just 200 in the beginning of the 20th Century due to overhunting, including in this very sanctuary. However, due to the local government’s strict protection policy as well as the accreditation of El Vizcaino as a biosphere reserve and later as a World Heritage Site, the grey whales have returned and improved in numbers.

A sanctuary to many others

The lagoons of the sanctuary are home to numerous other marine mammals such as the bottlenose dolphin, California sea lion, blue whale and the harbor seal. Four species of endangered marine turtles can also be found in the lagoon. These are the leatherback, green, hawksbill, and olive ridley turtles. The shallow waters of the lagoon serve as an important habitat and nursery for a large number of fish, crustaceans, and other forms of life. Many breeding as well as migratory bird species such as the brant goose depend on the lagoons and their surrounding habitats.

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Princess Enheduanna, daughter of the great king Sargon of Akkad in Mesopotamia, paced about impatient for the latest shipment from Meluha. She wanted a new dress made of ultra-fine cotton, printed with a striking pattern of blue, red and yellow, or maybe a slightly thicker cotton, striped blue and cream. She had heard they even had this really fine soft wool that you could actually draw through a ring. But their jewellery was simply the best! She had her heart set on a long necklace of carved carnelian and gold.

Chic clothes

Meluha was what the Mespotamians called the ancient Harappan civilization. So how did ancient Harappans dress?

The most common fabric was, of course cotton, which was native to India. It was woven thick, or fine and gauze-like. It was used in its natural colour, or dyed in many shades – a rich blue with indigo, red with the madder plant, or yellow with turmeric. Patterns were often created by weaving – fabric woven in coloured solid stripes, or with different colours in warp and weft, creating a shimmery look like the still used Khes material in Punjab. The fabrics were also printed in patterns using many colours, similar to Ajrakh printing in Gujarat today. The shawl in the famous statue of the Priest King is an example of fabric printed in such a pattern. Clothes could be embroidered or studded with buttons made of terracotta, ivory, and if you were rich, gold sequins!

They also used wool, both coarser varieties from sheep, and finer varieties similar to Pashmina and Shatoosh. Native Indian varieties of silk like Tussar have been found, as have hemp and jute fibres. Most garments seem to have been unstitched and draped in various patterns, similar to those worn in much of India today.

Woman wore short knee-length skirts, or longer ones that reached their calves. Men wore something which looked sort of like a dhoti. Some would also drape a fabric over their upper halves. Men wore turbans or conical caps.

Even animals were dressed well – often covered with blankets to protect them from the cold or insects. Painted deigns on some terracotta figurines suggest that some of these blankets may have been embroidered or woven with patterns. Think of the brightly festooned camels and elephants you see in India today!

Seem like a lot of what we do today harks back to the Harappans!

Hip Hairdos

Woman had very elaborate hair styles – with braids, buns, ringlets or left loose. They also used really small beads (1 man) to bead up their hair (like an afro possibly!) They would use kajal made from antimony, face powders and other cosmetics and used burnished copper mirrors to view themselves. Mehendi was also grown.

Jazzy jewellery

The Indian passion for jewellery is a long standing one it seems, as both Harappan men and women wore a lot of it! Men wore head bands, bead necklaces and bangles, while women draped themselves with bangles, earrings, rings, anklets, belts, pendants, chokers and necklaces of all lengths…phew!

The jewellery was made of gold, silver, ivory, gemstones, or if you were not so rich, shell, bones or even mud (terracotta)! Hundreds of clay bangles have been found – painted in different colours. They would often be worn to cover the entire arm, like the famous dancing girl statue, and still worn by some tribal people in Rajasthan.

One of the crafts that the Indus people had really mastered was that of bead-making. The beads were made from semiprecious stones such as steatite, agate, camelian, lapis lazuli, other materials such as shell and terracotta, and even some from gold, silver and copper.

Bead-making was time consuming as the drilling and polishing had to be done carefully by hand (no electricity!) and people who were able to afford these beads would have been well-off. In fact, a belt was found with thirty six very long camelian bedas, each of which would have taken a skilled craftsman about two weeks to make. So thirty six beads represent the full time work of more than a year, and we can be sure that the owner of the belt would have been very rich indeed. Imitation goods is by no means a modern business, and for the not so well off, the Indus Valley bead-makers also produced imitation beads out of baked terracotta and painted them red to resemble camelian beads.

The Harappas acquired gold by trade from Mesopotamia, by panning it from the banks of the Indus River, or from the mines in Kolar in South India, by bartering with the local Neolithic tribal people. In fact, the tribal people may have been slightly short-changed in these transactions as cheao steatite paste beads, which were made from the waste stone powder generated while seal making, have been found near this region. Of course all these fabulous Indian products were exported as far as Mesopotamia!

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The Wall and attempts to cross it

Willi Seifert, commander of the GDR’s interior troops was tasked with erecting the barrier. Constructed in August 1961, the Berlin Wall was actually two walls separated by a heavily guarded, mined corridor of land known as the “death strip”. There was also around 50km of heavy wire mesh, existing cemetery walls and house facades that made up part of the Wall. The entire length of the Wall was 163 km.

Lined with nearly 300 watchtowers, the Wall was under the constant surveillance of the East German border guards. They were authorized to shoot at anyone attempting to cross the Wall.

Several attempts were made by people to cross over the Berlin Wall. It claimed the lives of at least 140 people. The most public incident of the attempt to cross over was that of Peter Fetcher. Peter and his friend, both teenagers, sprinted across no-man’s land near a border crossing-point nicknamed Checkpoint Charlie on August 17, 1962. While his friend made it over, 18-year-old Peter was shot in the back and collapsed. As western photographers pleaded with the guards to rescue the teen, the guards refused to help.

Amidst the lull, there were several East Germans who managed to cross the Wall using different ways. While some used sports cars and armoured trucks, some dug tunnels and built a hot air balloon.

The fall of the Wall

Things started to deteriorate for the Eastern bloc in the 1980s with the start of an energy crisis and political struggle within the bloc. Rising civil unrest also put pressure on the East Germany government. However, what started the downfall of the GDR was the fall of the Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria. The opening of that border led to several East Germans migrating to West Germany through Hungary. However, this attempt was quickly blocked, but East Germans began to camp at West German embassies across the Eastern bloc and refused to return. Meanwhile, demonstrations began within East Germany in full swing.

East Germany was pressured to relax some of its regulations on travel to West Germany. On November 9, 1989, at a pressconference to announce the same, East German spokesman Gunter Schabowski announced that East Germans would be free to travel into West Germany, starting immediately. However, he failed to clarify that some regulations would still apply. This led to the western media reporting that the border had been opened, leading to large crowds gathering at either side of the checkpoints. Eventually, passport checks were abandoned and people crossed the border unrestricted.

The Berlin Wall had fallen, and this fall marked the beginning of the unification of Germany, which took place on October 3, 1990.

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A guarded concrete wall that physically and ideologically divided Germany’s capital, the Berlin Wall stood tall between 1961 and 1989.

Construction of the Wall commenced on August 13, 1961 by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to ensure people from East Germany did not emigrate to West Germany. The Wall finally fell on November 9, 1989 after East Germany declared all the crossing points along the wall open.

Backdrop to the building of the Wall

In 1949, a war-torn Germany formally split into two independent nations – the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic – with the FDR allied to the western democracies led by the U.S. and the GDR allied to the Soviet Union led by Russia. These superpowers had growing geopolitical tension between them, in what is today known as the Cold War. The city of Berlin, was at the centre of this heated split, with one part under the Eastern bloc and the remaining three with the West under the U.S, Britain and France.

Why was the Wall built?

Free flow of people between the two parts was allowed through Berlin as East Germany had sealed its mainland border from the West along the Elbe river and the mountains of Harz with barbed wire and fire zones.

As time passed, many people from East Germany migrated to the West in search of better jobs and infrastructure.

One in six people fled from the East to the West. This irked the GDR as its economy was deeply affected due to this ‘brain drain’. Thus, in a bid to halt this migration, East German communists were given the permission by Moscow to close the border and build a physical barrier along it.

With information from their informers in the western part that the West will not react, East German Police, in a top-secret operation, established a human cordon along the border with West Berlin. The border forces then went on to build a solid breeze-block wall trapped with barbed wire, from what was earlier just provisional wire-mesh fences.

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The scrolls are believed to contain mostly Greek philosophy. They may also provide insights into the lives of ancient Romans.

The hot ash and gases from the volcanic eruptions have charred and carbonized the scrolls, turning many into impenetrable log-like cylinders. The scrolls are also too fragile to unfurl and various attempts at unrolling the scrolls and deciphering the texts over the last 270 years, have mostly failed. Many scrolls have been damaged in the process.

Further, in the Herculaneum scrolls, the script has been written with carbon ink, unlike many ancient texts that were written with metal-based inks. The use of carbon ink is one of the main reasons these scrolls have evaded deciphering. Unlike metal-based inks, its density is similar to that of the carbonized papyrus on which its sits, and therefore appears invisible in X-rays.

Other challenges: Even if a scroll is successfully opened, the original ink – exposed to air – would begin to fade. In addition, this form of unrolling often leads to pages getting stuck together or damaged.

Scientists use the X-ray beam at Diamond Light Source and a virtual unwrapping software to detect the carbon ink on the scrolls. The technology is similar to a CT scanner where one would take a three-dimensional image of a person and then examine different organs.

Scientists will shine very intense light through the scroll, which will deliver three-dimensional images on the other side. From that, a three-dimensional image of the text will be constructed. The idea is to read the text in a non-destructive manner. But the digital scan is only the first step in the decoding process.

The research team is building a machine-learning algorithm that will go through the digital scan of the scrolls to detect evidence of ink. The text will have to be later deciphered.

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Scroll is a roll of paper or papyrus usually with official writing on it. The scroll is usually unrolled so that one page is exposed at a time. The remaining pages are usually rolled up to the left and right. In Roman usage, the scrolls were written latitudinally.

Between 1752 and 1754, about 1,800 blackened unreadable papyrus scrolls were recovered from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. The Villa of the Papyri belonged to the family of Julius Caesar, but the ownership of the scrolls per se is unknown.

These scrolls became known as the Herculaneum papyri or scrolls, the majority of which are today stored at the National Library, Naples. But a handful of them ended up in England and France, as gifts from Ferdinand, son of Charles III and King of Naples and Sicily. The Institut de France has six scrolls in its possession. Two of those scrolls, in hundreds of pieces after past attempts to open them, have been taken for the current study.

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Between 1752 and 1754, an excavation was carried out at the Herculaneum site in Italy. They recovered an astonishing collection of 1,800 scrolls from a house believed to have belonged to the family of Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator who was assassinated in 44BC.

A pair of unopened scrolls from the collection belonging to the Institut de France will be virtually unwrapped using sophisticated technology in the Diamond Light Force, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, which houses a particle accelerator in which beams travel around a closed-loop path to produce light many times brighter than the sun.

But the digital scan is only the first step in the decoding process. There is a long way to go before a complete recreation of the text is ready.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Pompeii and Herculaneum were busy wealthy Roman cities located in Campania region in southern Italy. But in 79 AD, the nearby Mount Vesuvius volcano erupted. The ensuing smoke and gas spread 32 km into the air. While the molten lava ravaged the city of Pompeii, a thick blanket of ash entombed the town of Herculaneum.

Herculaneum and Pompeii were basically lost and forgotten until they were rediscovered in 1709 and 1748, respectively.

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 The Sao Francisco De Assis Church

The Sao Francisco De Assis Church remains in use as a church and is considered to be the greatest masterpiece amongst all the buildings in the ensemble. It was designed in the form of a parabolic wave with reinforced concrete. The church is popular for its bold, unusual and striking forms, which also prevented it from being consecrated as the then Archbishop declared the church unfit for religious purposes. After many struggles, the church finally got its status in 1959.

The Pampulha Art Museum

Now an art museum, this building was functioned as a casino till April 1946. The casino ceased to exist as Gaspar Dutra, the former president of Brazil, prohibited gambling across the territory, it was converted into an art museum in 1957. The museum now boasts a collection of over 1,600 works including a collection of pieces by plastic artists and modernists.

The Ballroom

The Casa de Baile, known as the ballroom house, was inaugurated with the other buildings in 1943. However, in 1948, it ceased to function due to lack of visitors. Today, it houses the Centre of Reference in Urbanism, Architecture and Design. Situated on an artificial islet, it can be reached by crossing a bridge.

The Golf Yacht Club

The Golf Yacht Club has been turned into the Yacht Tennis Club today. Used as a place for entertainment and sports until the 1960s, it changed hands due to lack of funds. The original building was in the shape of a boat overlooking the lake. But over the years several modifications have been made.

The Kubitschek House

This was also designed in the 1940s along with the other buildings. It was intended to be the weekend residence of Juscelino Kubitschek. Today, it is a cultural space and a museum where objects from the time of the construction of the Pampulha Modern Ensemble have been collected.

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Juscelino Kubitschek, the former mayor of Belo Horizonte and former president of Brazil, wanted to develop an area around the artificial lake Pampulha in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais state. Therefore, around 1940, he commissioned the design of a set of buildings from renowned architect Oscar Niemeyer. Oscar was also responsible for the construction project of the current capital city of Brazil, Brasilia.

Oscar worked in collaboration with renowned engineer Joaquim Cardozo, and artists including Candido Portinari, to build a casino, a ballroom, a church, a golf yacht club and a hotel around the artificial lake. Except for the hotel, the cultural and leisure complex was inaugurated on May 16, 1943.

The team exploited the plastic potential (the moulding capability) of concrete, and integrated plastic arts (any art form which involves modelling or moulding in three dimensions) such as sculpture and ceramics in the buildings. Landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx reinforced the links between the buildings through designed gardens and a circuit of walkable spaces.

The Pampulha ensemble reflects the way principles of modern architecture evolved in the early 20th century from rigid constructivism and adapted organically to reflect local traditions, the Brazilian climate and natural surroundings.

The ensemble was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.

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The Jesuit Missions of the Guaranis consist of the ruins of Sao Miguel das Missoes, San Ignacio Mini, Santa Ana, Nuestra Senora de Loreto and Santa Maria la Mayor. Only Sao Miguel is in Brazil, while the others are in Argentina.

Lying at the heart of a tropical rainforest in the land of the Guarani indigenous communities, these Jesuit missions were built in the 17th and 18th centuries. Each of the five-ruins has a specific layout.

These ruins are part of the 30 missions founded by the Jesuit Order in the rainforest stretching across Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. The missions combine Spanish baroque architecture, and indigenous building technology with the religious symbolism of both local traditions and European Catholic liturgy.

During their time here, the Jesuits brought many changes to the lives of the native population by harnessing their natural resources and transforming their landscape.

This led to the Guaranitica War of 1756 and the later expulsion of the Jesuit order in 1767. Post this, these sanctuaries were abandoned.

Sao Miguel das Missoes

Also known as Sao Miguel Arcanjo, this church was built between 1735 and 1745. Among all the structures, this church is in a better state of conservation. Considered one of the beautiful representations of the Jesuit missions in Brazil and a very important historical record of humanity, visitors can see the ruins in the day, and watch a show in the evening which tells the story of the place in different languages.

San Ignacio Mini

The mission in Argentina was constructed in 1666 in Spanish baroque style, heavily influenced by indigenous motifs. The mission had a central square with buildings clustered around it. After the war, it was abandoned like the other missions and churches. However, its ruins were opened to the public many years later after conservation efforts stabilized the remaining structure. This is the best preserved among the ruins on the Argentine side.

Santa Ana

Not far from San Ignacio Mini, Santa Ana is another mission in ruins. It was founded in 1633 during the Spanish colonial period. It was added to the UNESCO heritage list with the three other missions in Argentina in 1984.

Nuestra Senora de Loreto

This was one of the first missions to be founded by the Jesuits in the early 1600s. located near the San Ignacio Mini mission, the Loreto is not as well-preserved as the San Ignacio Mini or Santa Ana. It is mostly covered in vegetation, but one can still see the ruins.

Santa Maria la Mayor

This mission was founded by the Jesuits in 1626. This mission is the least preserved compared to the others. It had a sizable plaza, printing press and a prison. A church, which is in a total shambles, was also a part of this settlement. The chapel found in the settlement today is a recent 20th century addition.

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In the southern Indian state of Karnataka, about two hours away from the city of Bangalore is a region called Kolar Gold Fields.

A hub of activity for over a century, the mines here shut in 2001 when gold prices fell to unprofitable levels.

Bharat Gold Mines Limited used to own the lease to mine an area that was about 16km long by 3km wide.

It was shut down nearly a decade ago as it became too expensive to continue operations.

With the growth of the gold mines requiring more labour, people from the Dharmapuri, Krishnagiri, Salem and North and South Arcot districts of Tamil Nadu and the Chittoor and Ananthapur districts of Andhra Pradesh settled nearby; the settlements began to form the outskirts of K.G.F. The well-to-do families of British and Indian engineers, geologists, and mine supervisors lived in the centre of town. Two townships, Robertsonpet and Andersonpet, are named after two British mine officials.

The establishment of BEML Limited expanded the city, providing employment and attracting new residents.

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Kaurava is a Sanskrit term for the descendants of King Kuru (or simply Kurava in Tamil), a legendary king who is the ancestor of many of the characters of the Mah?bh?rata. The well-known Kauravas are Duryodhana, Dushasana, Vikarna, Yuyutsu and Dussala. Yuyutsu is not the son of Gandhari. But he is the same age of Duryodhana and Bhima.

The name Kaurava comes from the lineage of Dhritarashtra’s ancestor Kuru, a dynamic king and ruler of the earth to all its corners, hence the heirs of the Kuru lineage termed as Kauravas, which for instance, also includes the five Pandavas and the later discovered sixth Pandava, Karna. Since Pandu could not continue to remain the king of Hastinapur due to a curse, Dhritarashtra, his cousin-brother was made the king. Pandu’s five sons chose to be called Pandava and not Kaurava. Dhritarashtra was blind from birth while Gandhari being a women of strong conviction and wanting to suffer her husband’s share of blindness, covered her eyes by tying a silk robe when she married him which she would only open at her death. In addition to the 100 Kauravas, Dhritarashtra and Gandhari were also blessed with a single daughter called Dussala. 

After Yudhishthira lost his kingdom, his brothers and his wife Draupadi, in a game of dice with Shakuni, Duhshasana dragged Draupadi by the hair into the assembly, at the behest of his brother Duryodhana, and tried to disrobe her. Draupadi prayed to Krishna and he made her sari to be of infinite length, so that Duhshasana could not take it off. Dussasana was very exhausted and he nearly fainted. The assembled men were amazed at this miracle. They condemned Duhshasana and praised Draupadi. However,Draupadi was humiliated by being dragged into court by her hair. After this humiliation Draupadi swore that she will not tie her hair until it is bathed with blood of Duhshasana. Bhima, who could no longer watch Draupadi’s insult in silence, rose up. He vowed to tear open Dussasana’s chest in battle and drink his blood. Bhima also exclaimed that if he could not fulfill his oath, then he would not meet his ancestors in heaven.

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Surdas was a 16th-century blind Hindu devotional poet and singer, who was known for his lyrics written in praise of Krishna. The book Sur Sagar (Sur’s Ocean) is traditionally attributed to Surdas. However, many of the poems in the book seem to be written by later poets in Sur’s name. The Sur Sagar in its present form focuses on descriptions of Krishna as a lovable child, written from the gopis’ perspective. Surdas was a great religious singer.

In its 16th-century form, however, the S?rs?gar gravitates much more to descriptions of Krishna and R?dh? as beautiful, youthful lovers; the pining (viraha) of R?dh? and the gop?s for Krishna when he is absent—and sometimes vice versa; and a set of poems in which the gop?s lambast Krishna’s messenger ?dho (Sanskrit: Uddhava) for trying to satisfy them with his spiritual presence once he has finally left their midst. They will have nothing less than the real, physical thing. In addition, poems of S?r’s own personal bhakti are prominent, whether as celebration or longing, and episodes from the R?m?ya?a and Mah?bh?rata also appear.

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Once upon a time, Afghanistan was not how we see it today, that is what studies say. It was once known as Gandhara and the fact that it still has a city known by the name of Kandahar confirms the truth. As per the experts, the Gandhara kingdom covered portions of today’s northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. It was spread over Pothohar Plateau, Peshawar Valley and Kabul River Valley.

The word Gandh?ra finds a mention in the Rig Veda, Uttara-Ramayana and Mahabharata. The word means gandha (fragrance), i.e. the land of fragrances. 

Mahabharata, the scripture authored by sage Veda Vyasa also mentions the Kingdom of Gandhara. As the story goes, King Subala ruled Gandhara some 5500 years ago. He had a daughter named Gandhari, who was married to the prince of Hastinapur kingdom, Dhritrashtra. Gandhari also had a brother, Shakuni, who later took over the kingship of Gandhara after his father’s death. Gandhari gave birth to a hundred sons, who became famous as the Kauravas.
It is believed that after failing miserably at the hands of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata war, several Kaurava descendants settled in the Gandhara kingdom. Later, they slowly migrated to today’s Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

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In early March 2020, Egypt reopened the Pyramid of Djoser to the public after extensive restoration costing close to USD 6.6 million. A part of the larger UNESCO World Heritage Site of Memphis and its Necropolis, the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur, the Pyramid of Djoser is the oldest pyramid in the world.

Situated in Saqqara, Egypt, the pyramid was built over 4,700 years ago. It takes its name after Pharaoh Djoser and serves as his burial place.

Djoser and his grand wish

Djoser, also known as Zoser, was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh of the third dynasty of the Old Kingdom who ruled for 19 years between 2630 and 2611 BC.

During his rule, Djoser tasked his vizier Imhotep with the construction of his burial chamber. A man of many talents, Imhotep is widely considered to have been the architect of the pyramid.

He initially designed the structure as a traditional, flat-roofed tomb with sloping sides called a mastaba. However, Djoser wanted something grander. And this grand wish culminated in the construction of a six-step pyramid, which was the largest of its time and inspired those that were built later.

The majestic pyramid

The Pyramid of Djoser was assembled during the 19 years of Djoser’s rule. The mighty six-step pyramid contains close to 11.6 million cubic feet of stone and clay. Part of a larger 40-acre complex, the pyramid stands at a height of 197 feet.

The burial chamber of Djoser and his 11 daughters is located deep within the pyramid. It is part of the pyramid’s maze-like series of tunnels which are roughly 5.5 km in length. Researchers believe the tunnels were designed to prevent theft. However, it is felt that these tunnels might have been a reason for the pyramid’s deterioration.

Deterioration and conservation

By the beginning of the 21st Century, experts believed that the pyramid was on the verge of collapse. It had suffered severe damage due to winds and natural disasters, including a massive earthquake in 1992.

Without conservation, the tunnels could collapse, bringing down the pyramid with it.

In 2006, restoration of the pyramid began. However, work had to be halted for two years from 2011 to 2013 due to the uprising that saw the expulsion of the then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

Conservation work within the structure proved to be difficult. To prevent the stone walls from crumbling inwards, engineers inflated airbags to prop up the roofs of the pyramid’s six-stacked terraces.

Conservation was also plagued by controversy, with experts claiming that it was only worsening the condition of the pyramid.

All’s well that ends well

Though not completely restored to its former glory, the pyramid was opened to the public in March 2020.

The structure is now fitted with a new lighting system and an accessible entry for people with disabilities.

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Home Rule League, either of two short-lived organizations of the same name in India established in April and September 1916, respectively, by Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak and British social reformer and Indian independence leader Annie Besant. The term, borrowed from a similar movement in Ireland, referred to the efforts of Indian nationalists to achieve self-rule from the British Indian government.

Indian home rule movement began in India in the background of World War I. The Government of India Act (1909) failed to satisfy the demands of the national leaders. However, the split in the congress and the absence of leaders like Tilak, who was imprisoned in Mandalay meant that nationalistic response was tepid.

By 1915, many factors set the stage for a new phase of nationalist movement. The rise in stature of Annie Besant (who was of part Irish origin and a firm supporter of Irish Home Rule Movement), the return of Tilak from exile and the growing calls for solving the split in congress began to stir the political scene in India. The Ghadar Mutiny and its suppression led to an atmosphere of resentment against British rule.

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The first Partition of Bengal was a territorial reorganization of the Bengal Presidency implemented by the authorities of the British Raj in 1905. The partition separated the largely Muslim eastern areas from the largely Hindu western areas on 16 October 1905 after being announced on 20 July 1905 by Lord Curzon, the then Viceroy of India.

The middle class of Bengal saw this as the rupture of their dear motherland as well as a tactic to diminish their authority. In the six-month period before the partition was to be effected the Congress arranged meetings where petitions against the partition were collected and given to impassive authorities. Surendranath Banerjee admitted that the petitions were ineffective and as the date for the partition drew closer began advocating tougher approaches such as boycotting British goods. He preferred to label this move as “swadeshi” instead of boycott. The boycott was led by the moderates but minor rebel groups also sprouted under its cause.

The uproar that had greeted Curzon’s contentious move of splitting Bengal, as well as the emergence of the ‘Extremist’ faction in the Congress, became the final motive for separatist Muslim politics. In 1909, separate elections were established for Muslims and Hindus. Before this, many members of both communities had advocated national solidarity of all Bengalis. With separate electorates, distinctive political communities developed, with their own political agendas. Muslims, too, dominated the Legislature, due to their overall numerical strength of roughly twenty two to twenty eight million. Nationally, Hindus and Muslims began to demand the creation of two independent states, one to be formed in majority Hindu and one in majority Muslim areas.

In 1947, Bengal was partitioned for the second time, solely on religious grounds, as part of the Partition of India following the formation of the nations India and Pakistan. In 1955, East Bengal became East Pakistan, and in 1971 became the independent state of Bangladesh.

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The Cripps Mission had failed, and on 8 August 1942, Gandhi made a call to Do or Die in his Quit India speech delivered in Bombay at the Gowalia Tank Maidan.  The All-India Congress Committee launched a mass protest demanding what Gandhi called “An Orderly British Withdrawal” from India. 

The speech decreed that the British must leave India immediately or else mass agitations would take place.

The call mobilised the citizens to be involved in a widespread Civil Disobedience movement since the British refused to grant independence to India till the War was over.

The ‘Quit India’ movement then escalated into large-scale violence directed at railway stations, telegraph offices, government buildings, and other emblems and institutions of colonial rule.

There were widespread acts of sabotage, and the government held Gandhi responsible for these acts of violence, suggesting that they were a deliberate act of Congress policy. This led to the incarceration of the Congress leadership.

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The Battle of Plassey was fought in north-eastern India on 23 June 1757. Troops of the British East India Company, led by Robert Clive, came up against the forces of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the last Nawab of Bengal, and his French allies. Clive’s victory eventually led to the British becoming the greatest economic and military power in India.

The East India Company was one of these competing powers. While battling the French for trading supremacy, it simultaneously began to involve itself in local politics, especially in Bengal, India’s richest province.

The Bengali ruler Siraj-ud-Daulah had been in dispute with the Company for some time. A year before the Battle of Plassey, when the Company refused to halt military preparations against the French following the outbreak of the Seven Years War (1756-63), he had attacked and captured its stronghold of Fort William in Calcutta (Kolkata).

For a later generation of Britons, the victory at Plassey marked the birth of their Indian Empire. Until Indian independence in 1947 almost every schoolchild would have heard of the battle and known of ‘Clive of India’.

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Mangal Pandey, (born July 19, 1827, Akbarpur, India—died April 8, 1857, Barrackpore), Indian soldier whose attack on British officers on March 29, 1857, was the first major incident of what came to be known as the Indian, or Sepoy, Mutiny (in India the uprising is often called the First War of Independence or other similar names).

Pandey was born in a town near Faizabad in what is now eastern Uttar Pradesh state in northern India, although some give his birth place as a small village near Lalitpur (in present-day southwestern Uttar Pradesh). He was from a high-caste Brahman landowning family that professed strong Hindu beliefs. 

In India, Pandey has been remembered as a freedom fighter against British rule. A commemorative postage stamp with his image on it was issued by the Indian government in 1984. In addition, a movie and stage play that depicted his life both appeared in 2005.

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“Tryst with Destiny” was a speech delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, to the Indian Constituent Assembly in The Parliament, on the eve of India’s Independence, towards midnight on 14 August 1947. It spoke on the aspects that transcend India’s history.

At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her successes and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us.

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 In Amritsar the news that prominent Indian leaders had been arrested and banished from that city sparked violent protests on April 10, in which soldiers fired upon civilians, buildings were looted and burned, and angry mobs killed several foreign nationals and severely beat a Christian missionary. A force of several dozen troops commanded by Brig. Gen. Reginald Edward Harry Dyer was given the task of restoring order. Among the measures taken was a ban on public gatherings.

On the afternoon of April 13, a crowd of at least 10,000 men, women, and children gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh, which was nearly completely enclosed by walls and had only one exit. It is not clear how many people there were protesters who were defying the ban on public meetings and how many had come to the city from the surrounding region to celebrate Baisakhi, a spring festival. Dyer and his soldiers arrived and sealed off the exit. Without warning, the troops opened fire on the crowd, reportedly shooting hundreds of rounds until they ran out of ammunition. It is not certain how many died in the bloodbath, but, according to one official report, an estimated 379 people were killed, and about 1,200 more were wounded. 

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Sultana Chand Bibi (1550–1599 CE), was an Indian Muslim regent and warrior. She acted as the Regent of Bijapur (1580–90) and Regent of Ahmednagar (in current day Maharashtra) (1596–99). Chand Bibi is best known for defending Ahmednagar against the Mughal forces of Emperor Akbar in 1595.

Chand Bibi was the daughter of Hussain Nizam Shah I of Ahmednagar, and the sister of Burhan Nizam Shah II, the Sultan of Ahmednagar. She knew many languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Marathi and Kannada. She played sitar, and painting flowers was her hobby.

Chand Bibi took the leadership in Ahmednagar and defended the Ahmednagar fort successfully. Later, Shah Murad sent an envoy to Chand Bibi, offering to raise the siege in return for the cession of Berar. Chand Bibi’s troops were suffering from famine. In 1596, she decided to make peace by ceding Berar to Murad, who retreated.

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We all love the story of Anarkali, that beautiful dancing girl in the court of Akbar the Great, who was allegedly buried alive by the emperor for having the audacity of falling in love with his son Saleem, later to be named Jahangir, the heir to the Mughal throne of India.

 The story of Anarkali and her alleged lover Saleem is now part of a subcontinental legend, and to try to change the story of the ‘eternal lovers’ would be an uphill task. 

 Everyone scoffed at the idea of her being buried alive, and that is where the ‘original’ story has to be told. The real name of Anarkali was Nadira Begum, a girl of Turkmen origin, she was a ‘kaneez’ in the harem of the emperor. Of the hundreds of women in the great Mughal harem in Lahore, she stood out for her beauty. Her complexion was red like a “pomegranate” in full bloom, and it was because of her flushing red complexion that the emperor himself named her Anarkali and announced it in court.

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Mumtaz Mahal was born as Arjumand Banu on 27 April 1593 in Agra to Abu’l-Hasan Asaf Khan and his wife Diwanji Begum, the daughter of a Persian noble, Khwaja Ghias-ud-din of Qazvin. Asaf Khan was a wealthy Persian noble who held high office in the Mughal Empire. His family had come to India impoverished in 1577, when his father Mirza Ghias Beg (popularly known by his title of I’timad-ud-Daulah), was taken into the service of Emperor Akbar in Agra.

Mumtaz was Nur Jahan’s niece and was married to Shah Jahan when she was 19.  They were, however, married five years after the year of their betrothal on 30 April 1612 in Agra. The marriage was a love-match. After their wedding celebrations, Shah Jahan, “finding her in appearance and character elect among all the women of the time”, gave her the title “Mumtaz Mahal” Begum (“the Exalted One of the Palace”). During the intervening years between their betrothal and marriage, Shah Jahan had married his first wife, Princess Kandahari Begum in 1609 and in 1617, after marrying Mumtaz, took a third wife, Izz-un-Nissa Begum (titled Akbarabadi Mahal), the daughter of a prominent Mughal courtier. According to the official court historians, both the marriages were political alliances.

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Mariam-uz-Zamani was a wife of the Mughal emperor Akbar. She has also been referred to by several other names, including Hira Kunwari, Harkha Bai and Jodha Bai.

Born a Hindu-Rajput princess, in 1562, Mariam-uz-Zamani was offered in marriage to Akbar by her father, Raja Bharmal of Amber. The wedding, held in Sambhar, was a political one and was a sign of complete submission of her father to his imperial overlord. Her marriage to Akbar led to a gradual shift in his religious and social policy. She is widely regarded in modern Indian historiography as exemplifying Akbar’s and the Mughal’s tolerance of religious differences and their inclusive policies within an expanding multi-ethnic and multi-denominational empire.

Mariam-uz-Zamani was born in 1542, the daughter of Raja Bharmal of Amber by his wife Rani Champavati, daughter of Rao Ganga Solanki. Her paternal grandparents were Raja Prithviraj Singh I and Apurva Devi, a daughter of Rao Lunkaran of Bikaner.

Her birth name is unknown. ‘Mariam-uz-Zamani’ was in fact a title bestowed on her by Akbar on the occasion of their son Jahangir’s birth.

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Nur Jahan (1575-1645) whose original name was Mihr-un-Nisa, was the daughter of Mirza Ghiyas Beg who belonged to a noble family of Persia. Evil days fell upon him and he had to leave his native place and in search of fortune he moved towards India. When he reached Qandhar, his wife gave birth to a daughter who later on became the most beloved queen of emperor Jahangir. With the help of a friend, he was able to get some job during Akbar’s time. On account of his talents, he gained importance in the court.

Nur Jahan was a cultured educated, intelligent and dominating lady. She was fond of music, painting and poetry. She composed verses in Persian. She designed new varieties of cotton and silk fabrics. She suggested models of jewellery. Thus she set the fashions of the age. About Nur Jahans’ influence over Jahangir, Dr. Beni Prasad has observed “Nur Jahan ruled him (Jahangir) for fourteen years and during the last five years of his reign, Nur Jahan alone controlled him.”

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The origin

When Babur, the first Mughal emperor came thundering into India, he brought his ‘haraman’, his household with him, including wives, children, mothers, grandmothers, elderly widowed aunts, unmarried relatives and so on. These Turki women were hardy – they lived in tents, rode on horseback accompanying the army and mingled with everyone, and indeed, matriarchs were greatly respected and looked to for advice.

However, during Akbar’s long, stable reign, the concept of a physically separate, private place for Mughal royal ladies started. As Akbar made a great many marriage alliances with the Rajput princesses in his endeavour to get the support of their fathers, his household exploded in size, since each princess would come to him with a large number of attendants to keep her company.

A Glided Cage

An enclosed area of the royal compound called the harem, mahal or zenana became the world of Mughal women. Over time, the separation became complete. Mughal royal ladies started observing full purdah (meaning ‘curtain’ in Persian) – it became utterly shameful for them to see or be seen by any unrelated man who wasn’t the emperor himself. The zenana was soon heavily-guarded – not by men, but by eunuchs. On the rare occasion that the royal ladies had to venture outside, it was under heavy veils and in closely covered palanquins. If an unrelated man was found trying to enter this sacrosanct space, he could (and often would) be put to death straight away!

Inside this royal bubble and the mahal, life was totally different, where the women could walk around freely, unveiled. Thousands of women lived their entire lives in this luxurious, opulent, gilded cage. In addition to the many official wives of the emperor, were hundreds of ‘semi-official’ ones, as well as grandmothers, step-mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, nieces and so on. Children were brought up in the harem, until the boys had to move out in their teenage years.

It was an entire world of its own, where the Mughal Emperor was the sun around which the women revolved. He could enter his harem whenever he pleased. The harem is where the Emperor went for privacy and relaxation. It is where he would take his meals, and where he would read his private documents.

Zenana Shenanigans

Life in the zenana was a bustling hive of activity and intrigue. Each lady had a personal allowance, and female slaves and servants hovered around to tend to every need. Royal karkhanas were set up just to make the finest muslin dresses for them, and royal jewelers did the rounds to fashion the most exquisite jewellery.

The ladies were educated, and many became patrons of culture – music, art and literature. They influenced fashions at the court. Some were writers and poets like Salima Sultana, Jahanara, and Aurangzeb’s daughter Zebunissa. Chess, a Mughal obsession, was as fiercely played inside the harem as at court.

Eager Europeans

European visitors to the Mughal court were both shocked and very curious about this setup which seemed very exotic to them.

European visitors were most curious to see the zenana for themselves but were not allowed anywhere close to it due to the heavy shroud of secrecy surrounding it.

Bernier, a French doctor, speaks of his attempts to get into the harem. “I have sometimes gone into it when the King was absent from Delhi, for the purpose of giving my professional advice when a great lady was so ill she could not be moved. A cashmere shawl covered my head, hanging like a scarf down to my feet, and a eunuch led me by hand as if I had been a blind man.”

Mostly they had to rely on hearsay from the eunuchs who served in the harem. “The apartments of the queens are magnificent; and whatever can contribute either to conscience or pleasure has been consulted in their arrangement. It may be said, that the ardour of a burning climate is never experienced in these abodes. Here are to be seen running streams, shadowy groves, fountains, and subterraneous grottos for securing the enjoyment of a delicious coolness.”

Meena Bazaar

Akbar started an annual event in the mahal that was carried on by all future emperors. The Meena Bazaar was a yearly fair held during the lavishly celebrated Parsi Navroz festivities, where instead of regular shopkeepers, the royal ladies and the wives of Mughal nobles would set up stalls to set luxuries and exotic items. The only made customer allowed in was the Emperor himself!

A French account says, “A whimsical kind of fair is held in the Mehale, conducted by the handsomest wives of the Omrahs…these bewitching females act the part of traders, while the purchases are the King, the Begums or the Princesses of the harem”. But to give an idea of how some nobility really felt about it: when Akbar was negotiating with a Rajput king, one of the conditions for the Rana’s surrender was that his women would be exempt from attending the Meena Bazaar!

Powerful Princesses

Royal Mughal Princesses would usually remain unmarried and spend their whole lives in the zenana. However, they could have enormous influence, and would ofen watch what was happening at court from behind intricate latticed screens and give their opinions to the emperors. Some also issued farmans (edicts). For instance, Jahanara was the great favourite of her father Shah Jahan and her brother Dara Shikoh. Her sister Roshanara on the other hand, was on Aurangzeb’s side and would spy on the harem and send him letters about what was happening. Jahangir’s wife Noorjahan practically ran the massive Mughal empire in his name for 15 years.

The mahal was a thriving hotbed of politics all around. Each royal lady would intrigue to become more powerful and influential than the next, and everyone competed to get the Emperor’s ear.’ There were quite as many plots and spies and treachery as in the Mughal court.

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The Inklings were an informal literary group in Oxford that started in the early 1930s. They continued meeting till the 1950s.

Most of the Inklings were academics at the University of Oxford and many of them were creative writers. The Inklings valued creative imagination and encouraged one another to write fantasy literature.

The most important members of the group were C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams. Three were writers of fantasy fiction. C.S. Lewis authored the much loved classic children’s book series The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56). Tolkien is the author of The Hobbit (1938) and the famous trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1955-56). Charles Williams was an editor at Oxford University Press while Barfield was a poet.

The main activity of the Inklings at their meetings was the reading and discussion of their unfinished writings. Tolkien first read The Lord of the Rings to the Inklings. He described the spirit of the meetings as ‘a feast of reason and flow of soul’

Christian values are reflected in the fantasy works of many of the Inklings authors. Both The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings have Christian themes. However, the Inklings included some non-Christians too.

The term ‘Inklings’ was a pun on these who dabble in ink i.e. writers. It also refers to those who may be having only an inkling of what they are going to write about when they start a story.

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Gandhara art, style of Buddhist visual art that developed in what is now northwestern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan between the 1st century BCE and the 7th century CE. The style, of Greco-Roman origin, seems to have flourished largely during the Kushan dynasty and was contemporaneous with an important but dissimilar school of Kushan art at Mathura (Uttar Pradesh, India).

The materials used for Gandhara sculpture were green phyllite and gray-blue mica schist which in general, belong to an earlier phase, and stucco, which was used increasingly after the 3rd century CE. The sculptures were originally painted and gilded.

Gandhara’s role in the evolution of the Buddha image has been a point of considerable disagreement among scholars. It now seems clear that the schools of Gandhara and Mathura each independently evolved its own characteristic depiction of the Buddha about the 1st century CE. The Gandhara School drew upon the anthropomorphic traditions of Roman religion and represented the Buddha with a youthful Apollo-like face, dressed in garments resembling those seen on Roman imperial statues. 

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The Kharosthi script (also known as ‘Indo-Bactrian’ script) was a writing system originally developed in present-day northern Pakistan, sometime between the 4th and 3rd century BCE. Kharosthi was employed to represent a form of Prakrit (Middle Indic), an Indo-Aryan language. It had a wide but irregular distribution along northern Pakistan, eastern Afghanistan, northwest India, and Central Asia. 

As the Brahmi script dominated most of India outside the northwest, Kharosthi remained dominant in this region: most inscriptions between c. 200 BCE and CE 200 in this area were written in Kharosthi.

Kharosthi arrived into several areas in central Asia, aided by the flourishing commerce of the Silk Road. It was Employed in the kingdom of Shanshan (founded in the 1st century BCE) located in the southern and eastern area of the Tarim basin. Most texts found in Shanshan are written in the Chinese script, but some Kharosthi examples were retrieved from the ancient cities of Niya and Endere, in the western section of Shanshan.

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The Shunga art style differed somewhat from imperial Mauryan art, which was influenced by Persian art. In both, continuing elements of folk art and cults of the Mother goddess appear in popular art, but are now produced with more skill in more monumental forms. The Shunga style was thus seen as ‘more Indian’ and is often described as the more indigenous.

Art, education, philosophy, and other learning flowered during this period. Most notably, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and Mahabhashya were composed in this period. It is also noted for its subsequent mention in the Malavikaagnimitra. This work was composed by Kalidasa in the later Gupta period, and romanticised the love of Malavika and King Agnimitra, with a background of court intrigue.

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The dynasty was established by Pushyamitra Shunga, after the fall of the Maurya Empire. Its capital was Pataliputra, but later emperors such as Bhagabhadra also held court at Besnagar (modern Vidisha) in eastern Malwa. Pushyamitra Shunga ruled for 36 years and was succeeded by his son Agnimitra.

Buddhist records such as the Ashokavadana write that the assassination of Brihadratha and the rise of the Shunga empire led to a wave of religious persecution for Buddhists, and a resurgence of Hinduism. According to Sir John Marshall, Pushyamitra may have been the main author of the persecutions, although later Shunga kings seem to have been more supportive of Buddhism. Other historians, such as Etienne Lamotte and Romila Thapar, among others, have argued that archaeological evidence in favour of the allegations of persecution of Buddhists are lacking, and that the extent and magnitude of the atrocities have been exaggerated.

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Seleucus Nicator, a Greek general of Alexander, held some of the land in the extreme north. Therefore, Chandragupta fought a long battle against him and at last defeated him around 305 B.C. and a treaty was signed. According to this treaty, Seleucus Nicator ceded the trans-Indus territories – namely Aria (Heart), Arachosia (Kandahar), Gedrosia (Baluchistan) and Paropanishae (Kabul) – to the Mauryan Empire and in exchange Chandragupta made a gift of 500 elephants to Seleucus. He (Seleucus) also gave his daughter in marriage to the Mauryan prince or it is supposed that Chandragupta married Seleucus’s daughter (a Greek Macedonian princess) as a gift from Seleucus to formalize an alliance. In this way he took his control over Indus region, some part of which is now in modern Afghanistan. Later he moved towards Central India and occupied the region, north of Narmada River.

In addition to this treaty, Megasthenese was sent by Seleucus to the court of Chandragupta and Deimakos to Bindusar’s court as Greek ambassadors. Chandragupta embraced Jainism towards the end of his life and stepped down from the throne in favour of his son Bindusara. Later he (Chandragupta) along with Jain monks led by Bhadrabahu went to Sravana Belgola, nearby Mysore and starved himself to death in typical Jaina fashion.

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“King Milinda by name, learned, eloquent, wise, and able; and a devoted and faithful observer. Many were the arts and sciences he knew- holy tradition and secular law; philosophy; arithmetic; music; medicine; the four Vedas, the Puranas, and the Itihasas; astronomy, magic, causation, and magic spells; the art of war; poetry. And as in wisdom so in strength of body, swiftness, and valor there was found none equal to Milinda in all India. He was rich too, mighty in wealth and prosperity, and the number of his armed hosts knew no end.” – On the Indo Greek King Menander, from the Milindpanho

After Alexander’s death, his vast empire (stretching from Greece to north-west India) was carved up amongst his generals. One of them, Seleucus, ruled over much of the Near East. By the 250s BCE, Bactria (Balkh in Afghanistan) had broken away, forming the Greco-Bactrian kingdom.

By 180 BCE, with the collapse of the Mauryan Empire, the Bactrian Greeks moved south of the Hindukush into India, under the ruler Demetrius. Various Greek dynasties ruled over parts of India till the 1st century BCE and are known as the Indo-Greeks. They were then defeated by the Scythian and Parthian invaders. We know about them mostly through the many different coins they had issued with their names.

Raid upto Pataliputra

One of the most important Indo-Greek rulers was Menander (155- 130 BC). Menander was born not in India, but up north in Greco-Bactria. He started out as a king there, but extended into the Indian subcontinent, ruling over the northern parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Punjab. His capital was a Sagla, a bustling city in northern Punjab, near modern-day Sialkot.

He raided upto Pataliputra. The scholar Patanjali and the Yuga Purana mention that ‘after having conquered Saketa, the Yavanas (Greeks), wicked and valiant,’ reached ‘The thick mud-fortifications at Pataliputra’. A great battle followed with ‘tree-like engines (siege engines).’

The Greek geographer Strabo wrote that he “conquered more tribes than Alexander the Great”, though this may just have been flattering exaggeration! He was also a great patron of Buddhism, and is referred to as King Milinda in Buddhist texts. He seems to have been not only a great soldier, but a keen thinker and avid debater.

FAMOUS DEBATE AND CONVERSION

The story of his conversion to Buddhism is interesting. Amusingly, according to the Milindapanha (“Questions of Milinda”), it is said that there were no scholars left in his capital as he would roam about engaging them in debate and defeating them, afterwards sighing, “No one speaking for any religion can defeat me in argument; alas for the world!” A Buddhist monk Nagasena showed up to debate with him. This debate recorded in Milindpanha which consists of questions supposedly asked by King Menander, employing Greek logic, to which Nagasena replies on the basis of Buddhist doctrine, with Indian reasoning. At the end of the book, King Menander is impressed, and adopts is impressed, and adopts Buddhism. The book is quite an intriguing and unexpected glimpse of the clash between Eastern and Western thinking.

KING ON ONE SIDE, GOD ON THE OTHER

Many coins have been found from Menander’s reign, and they are fascinating. You see classically Greek-looking coins, with the king in a variety of warrior poses on one side of the coin, and various Greek gods and Goddesses such as Athena, the goddess of wisdom, on the other. These coins could be straight from Greece! But, there is a difference. The inscriptions are bilingual, in both Greek and the native Kharoshti scripts. Later coins substitute the goddess Athena for various animal motifs, especially those important to the Buddhists, such as the elephant, bull and boar. There is even a coin with the eight-spoked Buddhist Wheel of Dharma. Imagine, a native Greek king, called Menander I Soter “The Saviour”, who most king Milinda for his Buddhist values!

Plutarch, a Greek biographer, relates that he died in camp while on a military campaign, and that his remains were divided equally between the cities to be enshrined in monuments, probably stupas, across his realm. After his death in 130 BC, he was probably succeeded by his wife Agathokleia who ruled as regent for his son Strato I. The last Indo-Greek kings were ultimately defeated by the Shakes by 50 BCE.

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Born in St. Louis, Missouri, the U.S., on August 8, 1884, Sara Teasdale was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. In 1918, Love Songs,her poetry collection, won the Columbia Poetry Prize (now, the Pulitzer) and the Poetry Society of America Prize. Though the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was officially inaugurated in 1922, Sara’s win is listed today as the earliest Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Teasdale paved the way for women in poetry and writing, inspiring several of them to write and aim for the top prize – the Pulitzer Prize.

“I have no riches but my thoughts. Yet these are wealth enough for me.”

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Born as Ishibashi Junko on September 22, 1939, in Miharu, Japan, Junko Tabei was the first woman to reach the summit of the world’s tallest mountain – Mount Everest. Tabei reached the summit of Mount Everest on May 16, 1975, as the leader of an all-female Japanese climbing party. In 1992, she went on to become the first woman to ascend all the Seven Summits which involves climbing the tallest peak on each of the seven continents. Tabei continued climbing even after she was diagnosed with cancer in 2012.

Tabei led the way for the women who climbed Everest after her and those who aspire to do so. Bachendri Pal is the first woman from India to summit Everest in 1984.

“Everest for me, and I believe for the world, is the physical and symbolic manifestation of overcoming odds to achieve a dream.”

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Born on January 3, 1831 in Naigon, Maharashtra, Savitribai Phule is regarded as the first female teacher of India. Along with her husband, Jyotirao Phule, Savitribai played an important role in improving women’s rights in India and founded the first girls’ school at Bhide Wada, Pune in 1848.

She helped put education on the priority list for women in India and inspired several educationists in the country.

“The lack of learning is nothing but gross bestiality. It is through the acquisition of knowledge that (he) loses his lower status and achieves the higher one.”

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Born on May 12, 1977, in Tehran, Iran, Maryam Mirzakhani was the first and the only woman to win the Fields Medal, the prestigious award in the field of mathematics. She won the award on August 13, 2014, for her work on the dynamics and geometery of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces. Mirzakhani was also the first Iranian to be honoured with the Medal. She was a professor of Mathematics at Stanford University before her untimely death due to breast cancer.

Women can achieve feats in the field of mathematics as well. Her achievement continues to inspire several young women to pursue a career in mathematics.

“I find it fascinating that you can look at the same problem from different perspectives and approach it using different methods.”

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Born on March 31, 1865, in Kalyan, India, Anandi Gopal Joshi was the first Indian female physician. She was the first woman from the then Bombay presidency to study and graduate with a degree in western medicine in the U.S.. She graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1886. Joshi was inspired to become a physician following the death of her child just ten days after birth due to lack of medical care.

At a time when women’s role was confined to the kitchen, Joshi, supported by her husband, stood up to pursue higher education and inspired several women in the country to do so.

“Be grateful for challenges because… Had there been no difficulties and no thorns in the way, then (each woman and) man would have been in his primitive state and no progress made in civilisation and mental culture.”

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Born on March 6, 1937, in Bolshoye Maslennikovo, a village on the Volga River in western Russia, Tereshkova was the first and youngest woman to have flown into space. She achieved this feat on June 16, 1963, when she made the first solo mission to space aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft. Tereshkova spent almost three days in space and orbited the Earth 48 times in her 70.8 hour-long flight. Till date, Tereshkova remains the only woman in the world to have flown on a solo mission.

She paved the way for women to become astronauts, with 64 women having flown successfully to space after her.

“Once you’ve been in space, you appreciate how small and fragile the Earth is.”

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Born in Warsaw, Poland on November 7, 1867 as Maria Sklodowska, Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, and the only woman in history to win it twice. Curie was also the first person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for her contribution to the research on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel. She along with her husband Pierre Curie shared the award with Becquerel. In 1911, she won the Nobel Prize in won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium.

Marie’s work paved the way for future research into radiation, which today plays a big role in treating cancer patients around the world.

“I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.”

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Born on December 10, 1815, in London, England, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, is widely regarded as the first computer programmer. Lovelace worked closely with Charles Babbage, (credited with inventing the first mechanical computer), on his mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. She recognised the potential of the machine to have applications beyond just calculations and published an algorithm intended to be carried out by it. As a result, she is considered the first computer programmer.

Lovelace paved the way for computer programmers of the future, who are now programming the computer to learn by itself, a process known as machine learning.

“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show.”

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Durga Puja might be over but celebrations aren’t over in the the city of joy – Kolkata. The city celebrated its sixth Nobel Laureate with Abhijit Banerjee being awarded the prestigious award for his contribution to economics.
In fact, one of the most prestigious universities of the city – Presidency College has in itself brought out two Nobel Laureates including Banerjee.
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and fellow economist Michael Kremer, won the Nobel Prize for Economics. A native of Kolkata, Banerjee, who happens to be married to Duflo, did his schooling and college here in the city.

The son of two economics professors, Nirmala Banerjee and Dipak Banerjee, he studied at South Point school and then attended Presidency College (now Presidency University). He completed his Masters from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

The students of South Point and Presidency University are understandably ecstatic and have been celebrating the achievement of their alumnus. Meanwhile, congratulatory messages continue to flood the Banerjee household in Kolkata.

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On February 2, 1835, British politician Thomas Babington Macaulay circulated Minute on Education, a treatise that offered definitive reasons for why the East India Company and the British government should spend money on the provision of English language education, as well as the promotion of European learning, especially the sciences, in India.

While The Minute acknowledged the historic role of Sanskrit and Arabic literature in the Subcontinent, it also contended that they had limitations. “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,” Macaulay wrote in the Minute.

A month after its circulation, the Minute became policy, when William Bentinck, the governor general of India, signed the resolution. For Macaulay, this was a victory. He had won against his detractors, especially the Orientalists – East India Company officials, scholars, translators and collectors – who supported study and instruction in India in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian languages.

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On 50 BCE, Julius Caesar conquered Gaul (ancient France) and Britain was also conquered about a century later by the emperor Claudius. As a result, this large Celtic-speaking area was absorbed by Rome, Latin became the dominant language, and the Continental Celtic languages eventually died out. The chief Continental language was Gaulish.

The modern Romance languages developed from the spoken Latin of various parts of the Roman Empire. During the Middle Ages and until comparatively recent times, Latin was the language most widely used in the West for scholarly and literary purposes. Until the latter part of the 20th century its use was required in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church.

The oldest example of Latin extant, perhaps dating to the 7th century BCE, consists of a four-word inscription in Greek characters on a fibula, or cloak pin. It shows the preservation of full vowels in unstressed syllables—in contrast to the language in later times, which has reduced vowels. Early Latin had a stress accent on the first syllable of a word, in contrast to the Latin of the republican and imperial periods, in which the accent fell on either the next or second to the last syllable of a word.

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The translations of One Thousand and One Nights have been made into virtually every major language of the world. They began with the French translation by Antoine Galland (titled Les mille et une nuits, finished in 1717). Galland’s translation was essentially based on a medieval Arabic manuscript of Syrian origins, supplemented by oral tales recorded by him in Paris from a Maronite Arab from Aleppo named Hanna Diyab.

The first English translation appeared in 1706 and was made from Galland’s version; being anonymous, it is known as the Grub Street edition. It exists in two known copies kept in the Bodleian Library and in the Princeton University Library. Since then several English reissues appeared simultaneously in 1708. As early as the end of the 18th century the English translation based on Galland was brought to Halifax, Montreal, Philadelphia, New York and Sydney. Galland-based English translations were superseded by that made by Edward William Lane in 1839–41. In the 1880s an unexpurgated and complete English translation, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, was made by Richard Francis Burton.

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James Prinsep, (born August 20, 1799, County of Essex, England—died April 22, 1840, London), antiquary and colonial administrator in India, the first European scholar to decipher the edicts of the ancient Indian emperor Ashoka.

Prinsep was appointed to the Calcutta (Kolkata) mint in 1819 but left to become assay master (1820–30) at the Benares (Varanasi) mint. He returned to the Calcutta mint as assay master in 1832, leaving in 1838 for England because of ill health. As secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (from 1832), he had access to and developed the study of the largest collection of Indian coins then existing.

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Born into the aristocratic Dutt family in Calcutta, Torulata Dutta was the youngest of three siblings. Toru’s father Govin Chunder Dutt was a noted linguist and a poet, and her cousins and uncles were also accomplished in the literary field. “the Dutt Family Album”, published by Govin in 1870 in London, bears evidence of the family’s literacy prowess.

The family converted to Christianity shortly after Toru’s birth and moved to Europe three years later, when Toru’s brother died. Govin made sure both his daughters were well-educated. They studied at a school in Nice, France, spent time in Paris and Boulogne, Italy, and then moved to England in 1870. Here, they studied music and history.

The girls began to translate French poems into English from an early age and created a companionship through writing. The family moved back to Calcutta in 1873 due to the girls’ poor health. Here, the girls began to write more, finding ways to cope with the stifling atmosphere in Calcutta. Unfortunately, their partnership came to an end in 1874, when Toru’s sister Aru died at the age of 23.

Toru spent the next three years writing a lot of poetry and prose for “The Bengal Magazine” and “The Calcutta Review”. In 1877, at the age of 21, Toru died due to tuberculosis.

Toru’s only work to be published during her lifetime was “A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields”, a collection of English translations of French poetry. Toru left her first novel “Bianca” unfinished.

Excerpt

Toru was often called the Keats of Indo-English literature for the quality of her writing and meteoric rise to fame.

Sonnet

A sea of foliage girds our garden round,

But not a sea of dull unvaried green,

Sharp contrasts of all colors here are seen;

The light-green graceful tamarinds abound

Amid the mango clumps of green profound,

And palms arise, like pillars gray, between;

And o’er the quiet pools the seemuls lean,

Red – red, and startling like a trumpet’s sound.

But nothing can be lovelier than the ranges

Of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon

Looks through their gaps, and the white lotus changes

Into a cup of silver. One night swoon

Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze

On a primeval Eden, in amaze.

Did you know?

Toru loved the Indian epics “The Ramayana” and “The Mahabharatha”, and often read old Sanskrit classics to gain first-hand knowledge of those stories.

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Apart from the main mausoleum, which houses the tombs of Humayun and his wife Haji Behum, there are several tombs that can be found within the Humayun’s Tomb complex. One of the most prominent of these is the tomb and mosque of Isa Khan Niazi, an Afghan noble in Sher Shah Suri’s court of the Suri dynasty. This tomb predates the main one by nearly 20 years. Built during the reign of Islam Shah Suri, son of Sher Shah Suri, this octagonal tomb is placed within an octagonal garden. While it was built for Isa Khan, it later served as a burial place for his entire family.

Barber’s Tomb, also known as Nai-ka-Gumbad, is another popular tomb which lies close to the main mausoleum. The tomb, which dates to 1590-91 CE according to an inscription, is said to belong to Humayun’s royal barber. It stands on a raised platform and can be reached by climbing seven steps.

The Afsarwala tomb complex is another tomb found in the vicinity. The complex comprises a tomb and a mosque. The tomb is believed to belong to a military officer, thereby the name ‘Afsarwala’. The mosque, built between 1560 and 1567, stands on the same raised platform as the tomb.

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Built in the 1560s by Persian and Indian craftsmen, Humayun’s garden tomb is an example of the charbhag style. The main tomb is located at the centre of the charbagh – a four-quadrant garden with the four rivers of Quranic paradise represented by waterways. The four quadrants are further divided into smaller squares by pathways, leaving us with 36 squares in all. This 36-square design is typical of later Mughal gardens.

There are two gateways to the Tomb – one on the southern wall and the other on the western wall – each connected to the main walkways in the garden. Today, only the small western gate is operational. At the centre of the eastern and northern walls, one can find a pavilion with 12 doors, and a bathing chamber called Hammam.

The main mausoleum stands on an eight-metre-high, wide terraced platform. The terrace is square in design but chamfered on the edges to appear octagonal. The plinth made with rubble core has 56 cells, housing over 100 gravestones.

The tomb is built of rubble masonry and red sandstone. Marble has been used as a cladding material to provide a degree of thermal insulation and weather resistance. It has also been used for the flooring, door frames, lattice screens/jaalis (a screen made of perforated stone usually in an ornamental pattern), eaves and the main dome. While the mausoleum’s exterior dome is made up of marble, the remaining structure uses red sanstone with white and black marble and yellow sandstone detailing.

Humayun’s Tomb is the first to use the unique combination of red sandstone and white marble. Though heavily inspired by Persian architecture, it also incorporates elements of Indian architecture such as small canopies or chhatris surrounding the central dome.

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Nasir-ud-Din Muhammad, popularly known as Humayun, was the second emperor of the Mughal Empire. He succeeded his father Babur to the throne in 1530. Between 1530 and 1540, and 1555-1556, Humayun ruled over what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, Northern India and Bangladesh.

He lost his kingdom in 1540, and regained it in 1555 with the help of the Safavid dynasty of Persia. This also marked the beginning of the influence of Persian art, architecture, literature and language on the Mughals.

Humayun passed away in January 1556, when he fell down the stairs of hid library and hit his temple on rugged stone edge. He was laid to rest initially at the Purana Qila, also in Delhi, but his Kalanaur in Punjab following in the attack and capture of the Purana Qila by the Hindu emperor Hemu. Humayun was finally buried in a grand way at his tomb, following its completion.

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Humayun’s Tomb, situated in Delhi, is the grand mausoleum of the Mughal emperor Humayun. Built in 1570, it is the first garden tomb in the Indian subcontinent. Humayun’s Tomb was commissioned by his wife Haji Begum, and was designed by Mirak Mirza Ghiyath, a Persian architect, and Humayun’s son, Akbar.

Spanning 27 hectares, Humayun’s Tomb is situated in a complex that also houses other monuments such as Nila Gumbad, Isa Khan’s tomb, Bu Halima, Afsarwala tomb complex, Barber’s Tomb, and the Arab Serai, the complex where the craftsmen employed in the construction of Humanyun’s Tomb stayed.

The tomb is called the ‘dormitory of the Mughals’, as over 150 members of the Mughal family have been buried in the cells of the gardens.

Humanyun’s Tomb is known to be the first structure to be built with red sandstone on such a scale.

The monument has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1993.

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The most featured Tibetan food is buttered tea, tsampa and meat. The local food and cuisine in Tibet reflect its climate and customs. Due to the extremely high altitudes, and harsh climate, few crops grow at the high altitudes that characterize Tibet, although a few areas in Tibet are low enough to grow such crops as rice, oranges, bananas, and lemon. The most important crop is barley. Vegetables are scarce in the high altitude.

To create Tsampa, Tibetans put some ghee (yak butter) in a bowl, pour some boiled water or tea into the bowl, add some roasted barley flour into the water or tea, mix and then knead the mixture into dough balls and eat them.

Buttered tea is the favorite drink of Tibetan people and usually drank while eating Tsampa. It is made of boiled brick tea and ghee. Ghee, which looks like butter, is a kind of dairy product of fat abstracted from cow milk or sheep milk. Tibetan people like the ghee made of yak milk. When they make buttered tea, they mix boiled brick tea and ghee in a special can, add some salt, pour the mixed liquid into a pottery or metal teapot and finally heat up it (but not boil it). 

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Over the years, tea in Russia has grown into something bigger than a simple beverage, and an invitation to tea is considered a sign of fondness and hospitality.

In Russia, the samovar is seen as a symbol of a warm home and family ties as well as something that is truly Russian and owned by the nation.

A notable feature of Russian tea culture is the two-step brewing process. First, tea concentrate called zavarka is prepared: a quantity of dry tea sufficient for several persons is brewed in a small teapot. Then, each person pours some quantity of this concentrate into the cup and mixes it with hot water; thus, one can make one’s tea as strong as one wants, according to one’s taste. Sugar, lemon, honey or jam can then be added freely.

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Darjeeling tea is a tea grown in the Darjeeling district, Kalimpong District in West Bengal, India, and widely exported and known. It is processed as black, green, white and oolong tea. When properly brewed, it yields a thin-bodied, light-coloured infusion with a floral aroma. The flavour can include a tinge of astringent tannic characteristics and a musky spiciness sometimes described as “muscatel”.

Tea planting in the Indian district of Darjeeling began in 1841 by Archibald Campbell, a civil surgeon of the Indian Medical Service. Campbell was transferred as superintendent of Darjeeling in 1839 from Kathmandu, Nepal. In 1841, he brought seeds of the Chinese tea plant (Camellia sinensis) from Kumaun and began to experiment with tea planting in Darjeeling.

The British government also established tea nurseries during that period (1847). Commercial development began during the 1850s. In 1856, the Alubari tea garden was opened by the Kurseong and Darjeeling Tea Company, followed by others.

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The history of coffee dates back to the 15th century, and possibly earlier with a number of reports and legends surrounding its first use. The earliest substantiated evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree is from the early 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen, spreading soon to Mecca and Cairo. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, South India (Karnataka), Persia, Turkey, the Horn of Africa, and northern Africa. Coffee then spread to the Balkans, Italy, and to the rest of Europe, as well as Southeast Asia and then to America, despite bans imposed during the 15th century by religious leaders in Mecca and Cairo, and later by the Catholic Church.

The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the late 15th century, by Sufi Imam Muhammad Ibn Said Al Dhabhani who is known to have imported goods from Ethiopia to Yemen. Coffee was first exported out of Ethiopia to Yemen by Somali merchants from Berbera and Zeila, which was procured from Harar and the Abyssinian interior.

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A rainy day always calls for steaming chai and freshly fried pakoras.

How about some fresh hot tea at the chaiwala around the corner? Travel on the Indian railway and the tea- hawker cries out at every station, offering delicious kulhad chai for a few rupees. The fragrant smell of tea brewing with ginger and cardamom soon percolates the air. Indians seem inseparable from their tea. Surely this obsession is an ancient one?

In fact, tea was practically unknown to Indians until the British came, saw and conquered! Though there was a native Indian variety of tea in Assam, the local Assames people would cook the leaves with garlic and oil and eat it as a vegetable!

BELOVED IN BRITAIN

By the tail-end of the 17th century, the British East India Company had started trading with Cinha, besides expanding their trading operations in India. The Chinese were happy to export gorgeous silk, porcelain china for delicate crockery…and a new type of drink called tea. Tea actually started becoming popular as a medicinal drink – advertised as curing all illnesses under the sun from cold to headache to stomach problems to conjunctivitis (!) – and helping its drinkers reach “an extreme old age”. It soon became the rage all over upper-class Europe and the American colonies, as a way to display wealth and status, as it was very expensive. People had it the Chinese way – lightly brewed in hot water, with nothing added to it. Over time, the British started adding sugar, another luxury imported from the booming sugar plantations of the Americas. Soon, a splash of milk was often added as well.

Throughout the 18th century, tea became the preferred drink of the British people…and still hardly anyone in India had even heard of it!

However, the British East India Company was in trouble. Like the Indians, the Chinese too were only interested in gold and silver was leaving its shores regularly. Something had to be done to convince the Chinese to accept goods rather than money in exchange for their tea. But what?

THE TEA TRIBES OF ASSAM

The British now started offering cheap land in Assam to European planters to grow tea. The first tea plantation was set up in Assam in the 1830s using indentured labour. The European planters preferred Indian “jungly tribes” as workers as they were believe to be the only people hardly enough to put up with the awful working conditions.

There was soon a large influx of tribal adivasis from Jharkhand to Assam. They make up a larger part of the population even today and are sometimes called the tea tribes of Assam. On paper, these people were not slaves, but taken to Assam for three to five years, after which they were meant to be free to return to their homes. In reality, many workers were brought in under false promises, and they would often have to keep working under conditions of near-slavery long after their contracts were over.

CHAI FROM CHINA

Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the Chinese, an idea was waiting to be born. The opium drug, which was grown in India, had started to become popular with the Chinese public. Alarmed at this growing drug menance, the Chinese emperor banned all opium imports. However, the Europeans simply switched to smuggling opium illegally into China, in return for their precious tea cargo. They even fought and defeated the Chinese emperor for the right to selling this harmful drug to the Chinese people. This led to the worst drug addiction problem ever seen in the world where one of every four Chinese men became a hopeless opium addict.

In the 1830s, once the British were masters of large parts of India, they decided to start tea cultivation in India. In fact, they even sent a British spy into the interiors of China to steal the secrets of tea cultivation from them. The spy disguised himself as a Chinese wise-man!

CHAI CONQUERS INDIA

In the early 20th century, the Indian Tea Association wanted to get Indians hooked to tea along with the rest of the world. A massive marketing campaign was launched across the Indian Railways. Giant hoardings were put up to advertise tea, along with recipes. People were hired to make and serve tea at all major stations. British companies like Brooke Bond tried to sell tea by giving away free samples. However, Indians didn’t seem to take to this pale bitter brew…until the Indian tea vendors ignored the recipes of their English instructors and brewed it strongly with lots of milk, sugar and spices like cardamom, to imitate the hot flavoured milk that Indians were used to!

This new hybrid tea, known as “masala chai”, soon became a runaway hit in India. Today, India is one of the largest producers of tea in the world, but more than 70% of it is consumed within the country, and we can confidently call tea the national drink of India. But this has only happened in the last 100 years!

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The cowrie — or cowry — shell was one of the most successful and universal forms of currency in the world. In West Africa though, the humble shell worked its way into the cultural fiber, taking on a deeper symbolic and ritualistic meaning that has never been entirely lost.

The attractive white shell has all the characteristics required of money: easy to handle and carry around due to its light weight, non-perishable, good for small and large purchases. Its shape makes it instantly recognizable and difficult to forge. The cowries also have very little variation in size and form, which makes them easy to count.

They were often threaded into bracelets or long strings of forty, or packed into pouches to form greater quantities. For large payments, the shells could be tossed into baskets and weighed to determine their value.

• 40 cowries made 1 string,
• 50 strings made 1 head (2,000 cowries total),
• 10 heads made 1 bag (20,000 cowries total).

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Taekwondo is popular Korean martial arts that is focused primarily on kicks and punches & strikes. This martial arts is best known for its spectacular kicks (i.e. tornado kick and spinning hook kick). Taekwondo is one of the few martial arts that competes at the Olympics. Taekwondo schools generally provide instruction for basic self-defense, sparring, breaking, joint locks, Korean terminology and some grappling techniques. At most Taekwondo schools, students will also learn either WTF Taekwondo forms or ITF Taekwondo patterns.

Taekwondo consists of the following Korean words; Tae “to strike with the foot”, Kwon “to strike with the hand” and Do “the way”. Therefore, in Korean, Taekwondo means “the way to strike with foot and hand”.

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Daulat Khana refers to the imperial complex at Fatehpur Sikri meant for political, economic, financial and administrative affairs of the Mughal Court. The arrangement of the offices in the entire Daulat Khana complex is surprisingly similar to the office of a prime minister in modern times. The term Daulat Khana means ‘Abode of Fortune’. The complex consists of The Pachisi Courtyard, Ankh Micholi or the Royal Treasury (along with the astrologers’ seat), Diwan-i-Khas, Turkish Sultana Palace, Anup Talab, the Diwan Khana-i-Khas and the Khwabgah or the emperor’s royal sleeping chamber.

Pachisi Courtyard is a large paved courtyard resembling the designs in a gigantic chess board. The Pachisi game is played on a black and white chequered board with mohras or chess pieces. Akbar innovated a unique way to enjoy this game with his royal ladies, ministers and other Mughal nobles. He designed the centre of the courtyard in front of the Diwan-i-Am in the form of giant chequered board using black and white marbles. Instead of chess pieces or mohras he used attendants attired in bright dresses to pose as the chess pieces.

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The story begins when the blindness of Dhritarashtra, the elder of two princes, causes him to be passed over in favour of his brother Pandu as king on their father’s death. A curse prevents Pandu from fathering children, however, and his wife Kunti asks the gods to father children in Pandu’s name. As a result, the god Dharma fathers Yudhishtira, the Wind fathers Bhima, Indra fathers Arjuna, and the Ashvins (twins) father Nakula and Sahadeva (also twins; born to Pandu’s second wife, Madri). The enmity and jealousy that develops between the cousins forces the Pandavas to leave the kingdom when their father dies. During their exile the five jointly marry Draupadi (who is born out of a sacrificial fire and whom Arjuna wins by shooting an arrow through a row of targets) and meet their cousin Krishna, who remains their friend and companion thereafter. Although the Pandavas return to the kingdom, they are again exiled to the forest, this time for 12 years, when Yudhishthira loses everything in a game of dice with Duryodhana, the eldest of the Kauravas.

The feud culminates in a series of great battles on the field of Kurukshetra (north of Delhi, in Haryana state). All the Kauravas are annihilated, and, on the victorious side, only the five Pandava brothers and Krishna survive. Krishna dies when a hunter, who mistakes him for a deer, shoots him in his one vulnerable spot—his foot—and the five brothers, along with Draupadi and a dog who joins them (Dharma, Yudhisththira’s father, in disguise), set out for Indra’s heaven. One by one they fall on the way, and Yudhisthira alone reaches the gate of heaven. After further tests of his faithfulness and constancy, he is finally reunited with his brothers and Draupadi, as well as with his enemies, the Kauravas, to enjoy perpetual bliss.

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HH Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II of Jaipur (1912-1970) and his third Maharani Gayatri Devi were two of the most glamorous international figures in 20th century society. A nine-goal hero on the polo field, the Maharaja was the last and one of the greatest rulers of Jaipur State. The Maharani’s legendary beauty was matched by a mind that saw her successfully stand for the Indian parliament post-Independence.

The Maharaja’s life was high risk with his derring-do on the polo field and his relentless flying. Weeks before his wedding to Gayatri Devi, a vulture flew into the propeller of Jai’s plane over Bombay. The crash killed the pilot instantly and the Maharaja narrowly escaped with his life. Gayatri Devi married the Maharaja in 1940 and lived something of a double life. Behind the Rambagh Palace walls and travelling internationally, she lived and dressed like a Western socialite. In the City Palace she was carried around, veiled, in a palanquin.

Maharani Gayatri Devi describes Jaipur’s adoration for the Maharaja in her memoir: ‘everyone in the city recognised his Bentley and knew that they could stop him on the street or the polo grounds, or at the gates of the palace – anywhere – if they had a complaint or wanted to bring some problem to his attention, or simply wished to ask after the welfare of his family and tell him about their life’.

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Another trick used to teach you handwriting was this: You joined the small dots forming a block letter and then wrote the block letter on your own. Remember? After you mastered writing in block letter, you were taught cursive writing. This, most probably, was due to the Zaner-Bloser company.

Charles Paxton Zaner, a professional penman, developed a method of handwriting in the late 1800s. Zaner-Bloser is basic and clean, with a print (straight up and down) and cursive (slightly slanted) form. The method is simple to learn, easy to read, quick to write, and has no swirls. It’s designed for young children. It was published as The Zaner Method of Arm Movement Writing in 1904 and became widely used in schools. Most American schools still use the Zaner-Bloser method in some form.

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By the 1800s, the ornate round hand scripts were simplified into the Spencerian script in the U.S. Platt Rogers Spencer, an educator wanted children to develop legible handwriting. His handwriting guides became bestsellers in the 1800s, when business schools bought them. The Spencerian script (named after him) is the first truly American handwriting. It does have flourishes, particularly in the loops of capital letters, but it is mostly a simple cursive handwriting with the letters less rounded and more lean. Check out the Coca-Cola and the Ford logo! They are written in Spencerian script.

In the late 1800s, one Austin Palmer developed a handwriting system, even while the typewriters were being used extensively to record messages. His script, called the Palmer method, had fewer flourishes than Spencerian script, even on the capital letters. The little swirls you see in the Coca-Cola/Ford logos were removed. But Palmer eventually lost out, and the cursive handwriting stayed.

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By the 1600s, italics were swamping the writing space. French officials said, “enough is enough!” and helped develop the “round hand” style of handwriting. In round hand, the letters were full and rounded. It spread to England and the American colonies. The Declaration of Independence was written in a form of round hand by a professional penman, Timothy Matlack.! Ah, but round hand too is difficult to the 21st century eye. It is beautiful, but ornate, like a drawing.

The Universal Penman illustrates more than just English round hand, but that is by far the dominant style. Its pages demonstrate how this kind of writing can be used in the most ordinary of business documents (though none of them looks the least bit ordinary in these tour-de-force examples). The book includes Bickham’s own invitation to his contributors, and in some cases their replies to him. It also features blackletter and a remarkable kind of blocky but elegant roman caps — John Baskerville’s roman capital letters come closest in contemporary type design — along with a somewhat slimmer style of cursive script, with more elegant blobs on the ends of many of the extending strokes, that harks back to the look of 17th-century handwriting.

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The years of 1400 – 1500 were called the period of Italian Renaissance. At this time, there was a revival of interest in all kinds of antique stuff, including ancient manuscripts. And many felt handwriting should be simple to read. Taking elements of Carolingian minuscule, a scribe from Florence, Niccolo Niccoli shaped the italic script. (Italic refers to ancient Italy.) The italic script was more cursive, with letters connected within a word and written slanting to the right. There are no loops, serifs, or flourishes in the handwriting.

As in modern italic fonts, the form of a is distinctive, and f, g, k, and a long thin s are more or less reminiscent of black-letter cursive. For his headings Niccoli preferred Roman capitals “italicized” by a slight inclination to the right.

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By the 1100s, more people were reading. So, scribes had to find faster ways to write books. The blackletter style was formed with fewer loops and flourishes. Its lines are big, bold, compact and sharp. The curves are seen only at the end of the word. We cannot read them, but blackletter handwriting had several variations. They lasted for hundreds of years. They were named blackletter in the 1600s, to distinguish them from the lighter typefaces that began to be used.

Blackletter is also known as Gothic script because it resembled the script left by ancient Geramanic tribes. The blackletter style was popular for a long time in Germany. It was adopted as the official typeface of the Nazi party, until it was banned in 1941, during World War II. Examples of the typeface can be seen in Germany, England (Ye Olde Shoppe) and Austria.

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The Holy Roman Empire standardised handwriting in the Latin alphabet. Emperor Charlemagne of the empire did not read or write but standardised handwriting across his empire so that people in different regions could all read the Bible. The name of this script, Carolingian, comes from Carolus, Latin form of the name of Charlemagne (also called Charles the Great). Minuscule in Latin means “smallish,” what we would today refer to as lowercase. It was used from AD 800-1200.

Uppercase and lowercase letters in our Latin alphabet copy elements from Carolingian minuscule. Carolingian minuscule also had rounded, connected letters, like insular script – but the serifs were shorter, and the letters simpler. Manuscripts written in Carolingian minuscule were easier to read because (a) the letters were joined well (b) words looked neat and lean and (c) there was space between the words.

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Before everyone began to read and write, most writing was done by the monks in monasteries who copied down texts by hand. The earliest forms of handwriting can be seen in these manuscripts. One such early form of handwriting is known as insular script, which originated in Ireland. Insular comes from the Latin insularis, “relating to an island,”Ireland, in this case. Insular script spread from Ireland throughout western Europe around AD 600-850.

In the insular script, letters in a word are generally rounded and connected by serifs (the little lines at the ends of letters). This script has been used in illuminated manuscripts such as The Book of Kells.

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When we write, we use the same alphabet. We make our letters stand straight, lean forward or backward, but the shape of the letter is the same. But each one has his/her won distinct handwriting. Handwriting experts tell us that our handwriting is like our signature, it is unique to us. Like the fingerprint, it marks us as special. Even when we type them out on a computer, we have a list of handwriting styles we can choose from. Mine is Liberation Serif. What is yours?

However, historically, there have been some common handwriting trends. After all, humans have been since the Bronze Age (C. 3300 – 300 BC). The Latin alphabet we use has been around since 700 BC. The trends were formed by the writing tools used, the words in the language and the shape of the alphabets.

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Did you know that merry-go-rounds, also called “gallopers”, or “flying horses” or, more commonly, “carousels,” have been around since 500 A.D.? At first they were used for war games and for training horsemen who practised swiping at each other with swords while sitting on the moving platforms. The round and round as well as the up and down movement made hitting each other difficult and prepared the cavalrymen for actual combat.

Carousels were at first kept secret by the European Kings who hid them inside their castles, so that their enemies did not get to preparation exercises.

It was much later that this top secret cavalry training equipment began to be used for entertainment!

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About the site

Antigua Naval Dockyard and Related Archaeological Sites consists of a group of buildings and structures in Gregorian-style, set within a walled enclosure. The dockyard and the related structures were built by the British as a strategic naval base in the battle for supremacy of the seas of the Caribbean between the European countries.

The dockyard offered shelter from the infamous hurricanes that the islands would often witness, making it ideal for repairing ships.

The British would not have been able to construct the dockyard and the related sites if not for the labour of generations of African slaves since the end of the 18th Century.

While many of the buildings and fortifications in the area are in ruins, the dockyard continues to function.

Nelson’s Dockyard

The Antigua Naval Dockyard is popularly known as Nelson’s Dockyard. The largest of Antigua’s National Parks, Nelson’s Dockyard is still used as a working dockyard for yachts and ships.

Nelson’s Dockyard was built by the British in the early 18th Century with the main aim of maintaining the British Royal Navy warships which were protecting Britain’s sugar-producing islands in the region.

The dockyard is named after Horatio Nelson, the British Hero of Trafalgar, who served as the captain of the H.M.S. Boreas. He was sent to Antigua by the British to enforce British laws, especially the Navigation Act, which barred foreign ships from trading with British colonies. This made him hugely unpopular with the local merchants, who were trading with the U.S. Nelson, who hated the place, spent most of his time there in the cramped quarters of his ship.

The British closed down the dockyard in 1889, after the sugar industry waned. In the years following its abandonment, Nelson’s Dockyard was battered by earthquakes and hurricanes. In the 1950s, the dockyard underwent major restoration and was officially named after Nelson.

The strategic advantage

 While the construction of the dockyard began as early as the 1720, its strategic importance increased when Britain lost the American War of Independence.

After its loss, the British had two enemies to protect its sugar-producing islands from – the U.S. and France. The British had to protect these islands as the sugar from the Caribbean was finding the Industrial Revolution and the development of Britain.

The deep narrow bays of the south coast of Antigua were the perfect spot for the British to build its dockyard. Surrounded by highlands that create a natural harbour, the location offered shelter from the hurricanes that often struck the Caribbean islands. Known as the English harbour, this gave Britain the advantage of retaining its fleet and repairing its ships while other countries had to send their fleet back during the hurricane season.

Antigua’s location also offered the British control over major sailing routes to and from the rich island countries.

Related sites

Apart from the dockyard itself, there are several fortifications and other buildings inside the dockyard that are part of the UNESCO heritage site.

Among these are the Clarence house, the Officer’s Quarters and the Senior Officer’s House built in the English Gregorian style but adapted to suit the climatic conditions of the Caribbean.

Shirley Heights Lookout, a military complex is a famous tourist spot offering panoramic views of the harbour. The complex is named after Sir Thomas Shirley, Governor of the Leeward Islands, who strengthened the island’s defences in 1781 by building this lookout.

Another site that was discovered only in 2010, after a hurricane uncovered well-preserved human remains, prompting for an extensive excavation project, is Galleon Beach. This former burial site for British sailors who fell victim to the yellow fever outbreaks, also falls within the boundaries of the Dockyard.

The Dockyard today

Offering many sites and activities for visitors to explore, Nelson’s Dockyard is today a popular tourist place.

The Dockyard Museum exhibits the Dockyard’s history and presents the current archaeological research on the island. There are several shops, hotels and marina businesses housed in the buildings in the dockyard, while outside the dockyard, one can hike to some of the historic forts such as Fort Charlotte and Fort George that dot the landscape.

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ANZAC stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, formed during the First World War. The first major military action spearheaded by the ANZAC was the submarine landing on the Gallipoli peninsula (Turkey) on April25,1915.

Popular legend has it that, as a treat, the soldiers fighting in the war were sent a consignment of sweet biscuits made of oats, flour, soda bicarbonate, desiccated coconut, golden syrup, sugar and butter. The biscuits continued to be made and sold at charity events. These events were held to raise money for the war effort and for the war effort and for the soldiers. Today, they are commercially manufactured following the same basic recipe.

Anzac Day is observed every year on April 25 and is a public holiday in Australia and New Zealand and the biscuits are eaten as part of the ceremony.

Anzac tiles and Anzac wafers are two other kinds of hardtack or ship biscuits – they are extremely tough on the teeth ( they have to be softened before eating), but remain unspoiled for a very long time.

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Maheshwar is an old hub of textile weaving on Hand looms since 5th century. It has been producing India’s finest muslin and silk fabrics since then. But the credit for making Maheswar Sarees world known goes to Maharani Ahilya Bai Holkar, which dates back to 18th century. Maharani Ahilya Bai Holkar wanted a Saree to be woven in her own town Maheshwar that shall be suitable for all weather use with the elegance of traditional Maheshwar fabric. Weavers across the country and various type of Zari from Surat were called and one master piece was designed by Maharani herself. The carvings on Maheshwar Fort inspired designs on Saree. Later on same technique to weave were adopted across the Maheshwar and modern Maheshwar Sarees came to in existence. In 1979, to create women employment and promoting the Maheshwar fabric, Holkars family founded an NGO Rehwa Society. Since then this NGO has been proficiently working towards their goals.

Today’s Maheshwari Saree is at par with modern fashion, where you will find comfort, colors, designs, fabric as per the latest trends along with the same legacy, richness and heritage which is attached to Maheshwari Sarees since centuries. These Sarees are woven in various compositions of yarns that can be only pure silk or only pure cotton or pure silk woven with pure cotton. Borders and Pallu on Saree are woven in Zari and colorful Resham. Still the designs on Sarees are inspired with Maheshwar fort.

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The Scindia family ruled Gwalior until India’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1947, when the Maharaja Jivajirao Scindia acceded to the Government of India. Gwalior was merged with a number of other princely states to become the new Indian state of Madhya Bharat. George Jivajirao served as the state’s rajpramukh, or appointed governor, from 28 May 1948 to 31 October 1956, when Madhya Bharat was merged into Madhya Pradesh.

Mahadaji was instrumental in resurrecting Maratha power in North India after the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, and rose to become a trusted lieutenant of the Peshwa, leader of the Maratha Empire. Along with Madhavrao I and Nana Fadnavis, he was one of the three pillars of Maratha Resurrection. During his reign, Gwalior became the leading state in the Maratha Empire and one of the foremost military powers in India. After accompanying Shah Alam II in 1771 to Delhi, he restored the Mughals in Delhi and became the Vakil-ul-Mutlaq (Regent of the Empire)’. Mahadji Shinde’s principal Advisors were all Shenvis.

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The Third Battle of Panipat took place on 14 January 1761, at Panipat, about 60 miles (95.5 km) north of Delhi between a northern expeditionary force of the Maratha Empire and a coalition of the King of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Durrani with two Indian Muslim allies—the Rohilla Afghans of the Doab, and Shuja-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Oudh. Militarily, the battle pitted the French-supplied artillery[4] and cavalry of the Marathas against the heavy cavalry and mounted artillery(zamburak and jizail) of the Afghans and Rohillas led by Ahmad Shah Durrani and Najib-ud-Daulah, both ethnic Pashtuns (the former is also known as Ahmad Shah Abdali). The battle is considered one of the largest fought in the 18th century,[5] and has perhaps the largest number of fatalities in a single day reported in a classic formation battle between two armies.

The Marathas had gained control of a considerable part of India in the intervening period (1712–1757). In 1758 they nominally occupied Delhi, captured Lahore and drove out Timur Shah Durrani, the son and viceroy of the Afghan ruler, Ahmad Shah Abdali. This was the high-water mark of Maratha expansion, where the boundaries of their empire extended north of the Sindhu River all the way down south to northern Kerala. This territory was ruled through the Peshwa, who talked of placing his son Vishwasrao on the Mughal throne. However, Delhi still remained under the control of Mughals, key Muslim intellectuals including Shah Waliullah and other Muslim clergies in India were frightened at these developments. In desperation they appealed to Ahmad Shah Abdali, the ruler of Afghanistan, to halt the threat.

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The Holkars came to prominence during the time of Maratha Peshwa Bajirao I (or Baji Rao). His able military commander, Malharrao Holkar, was the patriarch of this Holkar family. A dhangar (shepherd) peasant by caste, Malharba, as he was popularly known, rose through the Maratha ranks by stint of his valour and attained the rank of general in Peshwa Bajirao’s army. He helped Bajirao in establishing Maratha supremacy in central and northern India along with the likes of his equally competent contemporaries such as Ranoji Scindia and Udaji Pawar.

Malharrao Holkar (born 1693-died 1766) was born in the village of Hol, near Jejuri, Pune, to one Khanduji Holkar of Vir.

Malharrao joined the Maratha cavalry at a young age and this brave youth soon impressed his peers. He was noticed by Peshwa Balaji Vishwanath and was gradually elevated to the rank of a commander.

He assisted the next peshwa, Bajirao I (son of Balaji Vishwanath), in his early years and soon became a part of the team that progressed north to establish Maratha hegemony. Malharrao was instrumental in Bajirao’s successes in Malwa and was soon given the task of collecting revenue from that region.

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Maheshwar for me is the city of Rani Ahilya Bai Holkar. She moved the capital of Holkar’s from Indore to this place on the banks of Narmada River. This is where she ruled from, driving her strength from her faith in Shiva and Narmada. At this place, you are never far away from the Narmada.

It is an ancient town on the banks of Narmada River. In ancient Indian scriptures, it is mentioned as Mahishmati. Yes, the same name you might have heard in the blockbuster Bahubali. This is supposed to be a place where Ravan was held the prisoner for 6 months by the king Sahastrarjun. His temple can be seen at the RajRajeshwar temple complex. Both, our epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata mention Maheshwar. It was also a part of Avanti that we better known as Ujjain.

It is a small town, you can potentially do it in a day or two. The city revolves around the Maheshwar Fort with the Narmada flowing gently on its one side and the city emanating from its gates on the other. So, let us start our journey from the heart of this place.

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A twist of fate

The story of Ahilya begins thus. On his way back to his capital Indore in 1733, Malhar Rao, the Maratha ruler of Indore, spent the night in a small village. There he saw Ahilya, eight-year-old daughter of the village chief. Struck by her intelligence and her regal bearing, Malhar Rao decided to get her married to his only son, ten-year-old Khande Rao.

Malhar Rao gave Ahilya the education of a prince – not only in religious and secular texts, but also in the practice of arms, accounting, statecraft, strategy and administration. He was seldom in Indore as he ranged far and wide, raiding and conquering territories for the Marathas. He relied heavily on Ahilya for local administration. Ahilya was a workaholic, and soon gained a reputation for being extremely competent and fair.

When her husband died, Ahilya was held back from committing Sati by her father-in-law. After Malhar Rao’s death, Ahilya’s son Male Rao became the ruler but died within a year.

Checkmating raghoba

After Male Rao’s death, Ahilya, who had been the real ruler for years, decided to make it official. Horrified at the idea of a woman ruler, Raghoba, the uncle of the teenaged Peshwa and the de facto regent, decided to take back Indore directly under the rule of the Peshwa and moved towards it with 50,000 troops. He camped near Ujjain on the banks of the Shipra River. (A Peshwa is Prime Minister of the Maratha Empire.)

Ahilya decided to fight back on many fronts. She wrote to all the major Maratha Sardars like the Scindias and Gaikwads, reminding them of the favours they owed Malhar Rao. She wrote to Peshwa Madhav Rao. She readied her own troops.

Then she played a masterstroke. To paint Raghoba as an oppressor of widows, she got together about 500 women and formed a small army contigent, giving them some elementary battle training. She herself had her favourite elephant publicly readied for battle, with quivers of arrows placed on all four corners of the howdah.

Ahilya then wrote a letter to Raghoba, announcing her intention of fighting him with her contingent of women, and saying that he could only gain infamy battling with women; to win would be a dishonor, and to lose a still greater one.

Raghoba realized that he had bitten off more than he could chew. Instead of the cowed woman he had expected, he was facing armed women, Holkar troops, and a bombardment of letters from the Peshwa and Maratha Sardars asking him to desist! In an attempt to save face, he sent a message to Ahilya that he had only come to Indore to offer his condolences on the death of Male Rao. Ahilya then graciously invited him to Indore (sans his troops, of course) and he was royally entertained for a month.

Rebuilding India

An extreamly unusual aspect of Ahilya’s rule was her pan-India perspective. Ahilya took the crores of personal wealth accumulated by Malhar Rao, and formally dedicated it with a sankalp to the welfare of people across the country. She funded renovations, temples, ghats, dharamshalas and education centres at all the major Hindu pilgrimage sites across India, including in other kingdoms!

A fairy tale princess

Ahilya often solved problems in novel ways. For instance, the areas surrounding Indore were beset with dacoits who made travel unsafe. In a quixotic gesture straight out of a folk tale, Ahilya declared that she would give the hand in marriage of her daughter, the princess Muktabai, to the brave young man who would rid her kingdom of the menace of dacoits. As in all folk tales, a poor but brave young man, Yashwantrao Phanse, took up the challenge, and with troops and funds offered by her, made the kingdom safe and duly won the hand of the princess. With her characteristic magnanimity, Ahilya made the dacoits guardians of the highway, instead of executing them, and gave them the right to collect a highway toll!

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On a river bank

In 300 BC, a group of seven islands on the banks of the mighty river Seine was inhabited by tribal fisherfolk of the Celtic sub-tribe Parisii. They loved the place and its climate enough to settle there permanently and set up their capital. The region was known as Gaul until conquered by the Roman dictator Julius Caesar, who gave it the name Lutetia. The place was subsequently called Civitas Parisorium – The name ‘Paris’ came about only around 500 BC.

Over time, Lutetia became the commercial hub for the Romans. The original inhabitants adopted Roman manner and customs. The prosperous and strategically located city, was prone to invasions. Invading monarchs from multiple dynasties contributed to making the city what it currently is-Paris.

During the 11th and 12th Centuries, Paris was becoming an important cultural and commercial urban centre. The Seine facilitated trade and the city began to grow on both its banks. By the end of the 12th Century, Emperor Philippe Auguste had built paved streets, fountains and the huge commercial market at Les Halles on the right bank of the river. Universities, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the royal Sainte-Chapelle and a much expanded royal palace came up on the left bank. The fortress ‘Louvre’ was built to protect the city from invaders. For more than 700 years (until 1919), Paris remained a fortified city, with concentric boulevards, where buildings left very little space for gardens and other recreational facilities.

Fame and fall

By the end of the 13th Century, Paris had 80,000 inhabitants and was the biggest city in Europe. However, during the 14th Century, famine and plague decimated its population and the 100-year war between France and England added to the unrest. Paris lost its standing as the capital unit 1530, when Francois I ascended the throne and made Paris his capital, triggering its reconstruction and growth while bringing intellectual and cultural changes.

The old Louvre was rebuilt as a modern, Renaissance palace. The Saint-Eustache Church and the College de France were constructed. The printing press came up. Numerous poets, thinkers and humanists took centre-stage-many of them teaching at the College de France-but, strangely, massacres too occurred in the name of religion.

The Bourbon King Henry IV, brought further changes: tax regulations, agriculture, public works, forest conservation, etc. He added a massive gallery to the Louvre, built the Pont-Neuf, the oldest of the 35 bridges across the Seine, promoted art and architecture. Successive rulers contributed to building the city until 1680, when Louis XIV made Versailles his capital.

A happening city

Although no longer the capital, and damaged by three major wars during Louis XIV’s 72-year reign, Paris, with a population of 5,00,000, remained the hub of intellectual life, eventually progressing to become the intellectual capital of the world by the 1800s. The ideas of justice, liberty, equality, independence, statehood and individuality were being shaped through discussion and debate, triggering the French Revolution, which started with the storming of the Bastille prison. By the end of the revolution, the monarchy became a just and liberal republic, and Paris became the capital again.

In 1804, with Napoleon Bonaparte becoming emperor, the borders of France expanded into central and western Europe. Merit gained value over lineage, and religious tolerance increased. People migrated from rural areas, and Paris’ population grew from 6,00,000 in 1800 to 10,00,000 in 1846. Ill-equipped to cope, Paris became an unpleasant city wrought with poverty and disease. Sick of the poor governance, economic hardships and poor harvests, the elite classes and the working classes united to overthrow the monarchy in 1848.

Napoleon III then began the transformation of Paris into the modern city of today. He charged an official named Georges Haussmann with restoring Paris to its past glory and turning it into a great modern capital – with potable water networks, a modern sewage system, 2,000 hectares of greenery, hospitals, the opera and the residential areas for the working classes, and more. In 1870, the empire ended, followed by a year of unrest and bloodshed.

Fast-paced growth

By the end of the century, there was a sudden shift towards scientific and technological advances: the timeless, unmatched wrought-icon Eiffel Tower became an icon of Paris. In 1900, Paris inaugurated its first metro line. In 1910, the Sacred Heart Basilica was added to the city’s list of treasures. Impressionist painters of the time made their marks worldwide, making Paris the epicenter of revolution in art and culture. By 1911, the population was up to 2.9 million.

Between 1945 and 1974, Paris witnessed unprecedented economic growth, and its social and economic fabric underwent restructuring. Industries moved out of Paris, taking worker populations along. By 1974, the Charles de Gaulle International Airport was operational. Modern buildings came up and ‘old’ districts were rebuilt or renovated while heritage structures received protection and UNESCO recognition as a World Heritage Site.

Paris today

Today, Paris is a bustling business centre. Its two million inhabitants and 20 million annual tourists are supported by a strong services industry and the metro, trams and railways. Transportation, finance, healthcare, agriculture and engineering sectors are based in Paris. Haute couture – made-to-order clothing- was a trend that started in Paris. So was the case with haute cuisine. The art of preparing and presenting food, luxury dinning experiences and experiments with exotic ingredients and recipes is Paris’ gift to the world.

Indeed, Paris remains a crucial financial centre and one of the world’s oldest cultural and intellectual centres.

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The Amer Fort

The fort is located in Amer, which was the capital of the kingdom before Jaipur. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, this majestic fort houses gardens, palaces, halls and temples. Situated atop a hill, one needs to undertake a steep climb to visit the fort.

The Diwan-e-Aam and the Ganesh Pole, both pillared halls, are popular in the fort. The Sukh Niwas and Jas Mandir gardens are also a sight to behold.

The Hawa Mahal

Also known as the Palace of Winds, this was designed by Ustad Lal Chand and built by Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh in 1799 A.D. Designed in the form of Krishna’s crown, resembling a honeycomb, there are 953 small windows (Jharokhas) in the palace. It was built to let the royal ladies view the streets without being seen by outsiders.

Jaigarh Fort

Constructed by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II in 1726 A.D, the Jaigarh Fort is located on a cape called ‘Cheel ka Teela’ in the Aravali mountain range. It was built with the vision of securing the Amer Fort from enemy attacks. The fort houses royal residences, gardens, water reservoirs, and an arsenal among others. The Jai Ban, a mounted cannon on wheels, is the largest in the country.

Jantar Mantar

A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur is the biggest among Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II’s five observatories. Built with stone and marble, the instruments at the site stand testimony to the advancement of Indian astronomy in the late medieval era.

The Jal Mahal

Also known as the Water Palace, the Jal Mahal is situated in the middle of Man Sagar Lake in Jaipur. The palace was renovated in the 18th Century by Maharaja Jai Singh II and used as a hunting lodge.

One can hire a boat from the shore to reach the palace. Inside the palace are decorated hallways and a garden called Chameli Bagh.

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The capital and the largest city of the state of Rajasthan, India, Jaipur was founded by Maharaja Swami Jai Singh II on November 18, 1727. Believed to be the first planned city in India, Jaipur was designed by the king himself who was assisted by Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, a scholar in Mathematics and Science from Bengal. To design the city, Vidyadhar referred to ancient Indian literature on astronomy and books by Ptolemy and Euclid, both Greek mathematicians.

The principles of Vastu Shastra, a traditional Indian system of architecture, were also followed during the design of the city.

Construction of the major palaces and roads in the city took nearly four years.

Since it was meant to be the kingdom’s capital, huge walls were constructed around the city with seven gates. This earned Jaipur the name ‘the walled city’.

The city itself was divided into nine blocks. Two of these blocks consisted of the state buildings and palaces while the remaining seven were allotted to the general public.

When the Prince of Wales visited the city in 1878, the whole city was painted pink to welcome him. Thus the name ‘the pink city’ came into being. To retain the charm of the historic era, even today all the palaces and the state buildings of the city are painted in pink.

The Creative City

Apart from its architecture, Jaipur is known for its arts and crafts. In 2015, the city was added to UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network as a City of Crafts and Folk Art. In the 18th Century, Jaipur was called the House of the 36 Industries (Chattis Karkhanas) for being an important trade centre that was largely supported by crafts and folk art. In honour of this period, today, specific streets and markets in the city are dedicated to each of these industries.

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The Indus Valley Civilisation existed between 5000 BCE and 1500 BCE in the northwestern part of India. When it declined, its people started moving towards east and south. The script that was used by the people of this civilization has been termed the Indus script. Experts have speculated that it could be that of a Dravidian language.

Now, the ‘graffiti marks’ on the artefacts obtained from the Keezhadi excavation site point to a link between the scripts of the Indus Valley Civilization and Tamil-Brahmi. According to the report: One kind of script that survived in the time period between the disappearance of the Indus script and the emergence of the Brahmi script has been referred to as graffiti by the scholars. These marks, they believe, have evolved or transformed from the Indus script and served as the precursor to the Brahmi script. Therefore, these graffiti cannot be dismissed as mere scratches. Besides, like the Indus script, this also could not be deciphered till date. Among the scripts available with India, the Indus script is considered to be the earliest. After the decline of the script and before the emergence of the Brahmi script, there seemed to be a gap. Researchers note that this graffiti could fill that gap.

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The Sangam period refers to a period in the history of ancient Tamil NADU, Kerala, the southern parts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, and northern Sri Lanka, spanning from 6th century BCE to 1st century CE. It is known for scholarly congregations in and around the city of Madurai. The period is considered the golden age of Tamil literature and culture as many of its epics were composed during this time.

Well-versed in city planning

The report highlights the supposedly high standard of living in the Sangam era. It talks about the excavation having unearthed well-laid floors made of fine clay, along with roof tiles. The fine groove impressions on the roof may have been used to drain water, the report says. Other excavations include a terracotta pipe that might have run through several quadrants over a stretch of many metres before ending in a soak jar. The pipe and the soak jar attest to the advanced system of the people who lived here. Another brick structure, which looked like a tank/through, had an inlet and an outlet. A covered drain was found below this. A small structure with a stone slab on top, perhaps meant for washing clothes, was also one of the artefacts excavated.

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• The Sangam era could be 300 years older than thought. Cultural deposits unearthed date back to a period between 6th Century BCE and 1st Century CE. This is the first time the date has been officially announced by the TNAD.
• The Keezhadi site provides overwhelming evidence of the presence of an urban settlement. The artefacts suggest that urbanization took place on the Vaigai plains in Tamil Nadu around 6th century BCE, making it contemporary to the Gangetic plain civilization. The discovery of brick structures with classical features such as platforms, ring wells, rectangular tanks, square tanks with extended structures, and channels vouches for the presence of an urban culture there.
• Sangam people may have participated in recreational activities – as many as 110 dice made of ivory have been unearthed.
• The Keezhadi findings push back the date of the Tamil-Brahmi script to another century, i.e., 6th century BCE.
• Fifty six Tamil-Brahmi inscribed potsherds have been recovered from the site of excavation undertaken by the TNAD alone. These suggest that the residents of the Sangam era attained literacy or learned the art of writing as early as 6th century BCE.
• There are also other markings alongside the Tamil-Brahmi symbols which apparently suggest a connection with the Indus Valley civilization. Artefacts with ‘graffiti’ or ‘markings’ establish a possible link between the scripts of the Indus Valley Civilisation and Tamil Brahmi, which is the precursor to modern Tamil.
• Skeletal fragments of animals suggest that animals were used predominantly for agricultural purposes.
• Pottery specimens confirm that water containers and cooking vessels were shaped out of locally available materials.

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Excavations at Keezhadi, an archaeological site in Sivaganga district, near Madurai, Tamil Nadu, have brought to light significant details about the Sangam era. The report on the fourth phase of the archaeological survey, undertaken at the site in 2018, was released by the Tamil Nadu Archaeological Department (TNAD) recently. It described the findings a turning point in the cultural historiography of the ancient Sangam era.

In various phases

As many as five phases of excavations have been carried out in Keezhadi and the sixth one will begin soon. The first three phases were conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the fourth and the fifth phases are under the ambit of the TNAD.

In 2013-2014, the ASI began exploration in Tamil Nadu, along the bands of the river Vaigai. More than 290 sites were identified in Theni, Dindigul, Madurai, Sivaganga and Ramanathapuram districts for excavation began in 2015. The site began yielding rich artefacts such as potsherds with Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions, deep terracotta pots, white-painted black ware, black and red pottery and beads made of semiprecious stones. Further excavations at the Pallichanthai Thidal in Keezhadi pointed to an ancient civilization that thrived on the banks of the Vaigai, Political parties in Tamil Nadu urged the ASI to publish the findings of the first three phases of excavation.

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Takshashila had great influence on the Hindu culture and Sanskrit language. It is perhaps best known because of its association with Chanakya, also known as Kautilya, the strategist who guided Chandragupta Maurya and assisted in the founding of the Mauryan empire. The Arthashastra (Sanskrit for The knowledge of Economics) of Chanakya, is said to have been composed in Takshashila itself.

According to the Buddhist text Mahavamsa Tika, Chandragupta and Chanakya raised an army by recruiting soldiers from many places after the former completed his education at Taxila. Chanakya made Chandragupta the leader of the army.The Digambara Jain text Parishishtaparvan states that this army was raised by Chanakya with coins he minted and an alliance formed with Parvataka. According to Justin, Chandragupta organized an army. Early translators interpreted Justin’s original expression as “body of robbers”, but states Raychaudhuri, the original expression used by Justin may mean mercenary soldier, hunter, or robber.

The Buddhist Mahavamsa Tika and Jain Parishishtaparvan records Chandragupta’s army unsuccessfully attacking the Nanda capital. Chandragupta and Chanakya then began a campaign at the frontier of the Nanda empire, gradually conquering various territories on their way to the Nanda capital. He then refined his strategy by establishing garrisons in the conquered territories, and finally besieged the Nanda capital Pataliputra. There Dhana Nanda accepted defeat, and was killed by Buddhist accounts, or deposed and exiled by Hindu accounts.

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Taxila and Peshawar, ancient Gandhara’s chief cities, were important cultural centres. From the 1st century BCE to the 6th–7th century CE, Gandhara was the home of a distinctive art style that was a mixture of Indian Buddhist and Greco-Roman influences.

Taxila, Sanskrit Takshashila, ancient city of northwestern Pakistan, the ruins of which are about 22 miles (35 km) northwest of Rawalpindi. Its prosperity in ancient times resulted from its position at the junction of three great trade routes: one from eastern India, described by the Greek writer Megasthenes as the “Royal Highway”; the second from western Asia; and the third from Kashmir and Central Asia. When these routes ceased to be important, the city sank into insignificance and was finally destroyed by the Huns in the 5th century CE. Taxila was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1980.

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The world’s most widely consumed beverage, all tea comes from the tropical plant known as Camellia Senensis. The tea plant grows best in a warm climate with long sunlit days, cool nights and an abundance of rainfall. Tea plants grow at altitudes ranging from sea level to 7,000 feet and on latitudes as far north as Turkey and as far south as Argentina. 

The tea story started in China around 2750 BC. During this time, the tea plant was found to have a number of medicinal properties. Legend says that an Emperor by the name of Shen Nung was sitting in the shade of a wild tea tree, boiling some drinking water, when a breeze blew a few leaves from the tree into the pot and gave the water a flavor that he found delicious. He experimented further and found it to have medicinal properties, as well as a pleasing flavor. He urged the Chinese people to cultivate the plant for the benefit of the entire nation. Over time, he has become the Legendary Father of Tea.

Although the first tea was discovered in China, several other areas of the world now contribute to the overall tea harvest. The first tea used in England originated in China, and it wasn’t until the 19th century that tea growing spread to Formosa and that indigenous tea was discovered in Assam. In 1839, the first Indian tea was sold in London. Around 1191, Japanese Zen priests brought tea seed back from studying abroad in China and began cultivating them in the southernmost part of Japan. The first tea in Africa was planted in the Cape in 1687, but did not progress until the latter part of the 19th century. The 20th century has seen the spread of tea in Africa, notably in Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania.

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Built between roughly A.D. 1113 and 1150, and encompassing an area of about 500 acres (200 hectares), Angkor Wat is one of the largest religious monuments ever constructed. Its name means “temple city.”

Originally built as a Hindu temple dedicated to the god Vishnu, it was converted into a Buddhist temple in the 14th century, and statues of Buddha were added to its already rich artwork

The city where the temple was built, Angkor, is located in modern-day Cambodia and was once the capital of the Khmer Empire. This city contains hundreds of temples. The population may have been over 1 million people. It was easily the largest city in the world until the Industrial Revolution. 

Although Angkor Wat is dedicated to Vishnu, the full purpose of the temple is still debated. One question is whether the ashes of Suryavarman II were interred in the monument, perhaps in the same chamber where the deposits were found. If that were the case it would give the temple a funerary meaning.

Eleanor Mannikka has noted that Angkor Wat is located at 13.41 degrees north in latitude and that the north-south axis of the central tower’s chamber is 13.43 cubits long. This, Mannikka believes, is not an accident. “In the central sanctuary, Vishnu is not only placed at the latitude of Angkor Wat, he is also placed along the axis of the earth,” she writes, pointing out that the Khmer knew the Earth was round.

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Cambodia has a rich and fascinating history. The first humans in Cambodia were Stone Age hunters and gatherers. However farming was introduced into Cambodia about 2,300 BC. The first farmers in Cambodia used stone tools but from about 1,500 BC the Cambodians used tools and weapons made from bronze. By about 500 BC they had learned to use iron.

The first civilization in the area arose about 150 AD in the Mekong River delta in South Vietnam. This civilization was known to the Chinese who called it Fu-nan.

While Fu-nan was trading with the Chinese Cambodian society grew more sophisticated. Settlements grew larger. So did kingdoms. By the beginning of the 7th century AD all of Cambodia was highly civilized.

At first Cambodia was divided into rival states. However at the beginning of the 9th century a king named Jayavarman II founded the Khmer Empire in Cambodia.

During the 16th century Cambodian power continued to decline. At the end of the century Cambodia fell under Thai suzerainty (loose control). In 1594 the Thais captured the capital. After that they dominated the region.

From the middle of the 17th century the power of Vietnam grew. In the early 17th century the Cambodians controlled parts of what is now South Vietnam. They held a port called Prey Nokor. (Later it was renamed Saigon). In the late 17th century Prey Nokor fell under Vietnamese rule.

During the 18th century Cambodia found itself squeezed between two powerful neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam. The Thais invaded Cambodia several times in the 18th century and in 1772 they destroyed Phnom Phen. In the last years of the 18th century the Vietnamese also invaded Cambodia. The Cambodian king was forced to look to the Thais for protection. In return Thailand took north-west Cambodia.

Today Cambodia is still a poor country but there is every reason to be optimistic about its future. In the early years of the 21st Century the Cambodian economy grew rapidly. Today the economy of Cambodia is growing strongly. The textiles industry in Cambodia is booming so is tourism. Cambodia is growing more and more prosperous.

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It was the 10th century AD, in the Kingdom of Dali. Lying in the south-eastern foothills of the Himalayas, in what is now known as China’s Yunnan province this independent kingdom was established by the Bai people – ethnic cousins of the Tai people (after which Thailand was named), the Shan people in Burma, and even the Ahoms of Assam!

The Dali kings believed they were descendants of the Buddhist Mauryan king Ashoka, and saw themselves as part of a brotherhood of Buddhist kingdoms that spanned from India, to Burma, Thailand and Vietnam. The Dali kings were very Indianised indeed, and apparently called their kingdom ‘Gandhara’ – that ancient renowned centre for Buddhist learning that lay thousands of kilometres west in the Swat region of Pakistan! Even the olden Burmese name for Yunnan is Gandhara.

Mad about Magadha

The Dali kings seemed to want to recreate the holy land of the Buddha’s homeland in their kingdom, thousands of kilometres away, and started naming many places after those in Magadha, modern Bihar. One of their cities was named Mithila, where the Buddha had once lived…in modern Bihar. A cave on the side of Lake Dali was called Kukkutapada Cave, after a famous Buddhist pilgrimage site in India. They did not stop there, and built a stupa next to this cave, which claimed to hold the relics of the Buddha’s favourite disciple, Ananda, though how they would have gotten hold of this 1500 years after his death later will forever remain a mystery.

As the early Americans would go on to name cities after their original counterparts in Europe, it seems that the Dali kings tried to recreate a Buddhist homeland in Yunnan by naming sites and cities after those in India. The mind boggles! The Persian historian Rashid of Din writes that these kings of Gandhara would actually refer to themselves as maharaja.

The Mongols Arrive

By 1253 AD, the ferocious Mongol armies of Kublai Khan armies had conquered this powerful independent kingdom, and its former capital, Dali, became a tributary to the Mongol Yuan dynasty. However, when the Mings topped the Yuans over a century later, they crushed Dali in 1381 AD after a fierce battle, as the kingdom had helped the Yuans. Dali now became just a remote outpost of the Ming empire. Over the centuries its people and nobility assimilated with Chinese culture and started becoming officials at the Ming court.

Happy Holi!

Though Yunnan is very much a part of China today, the Bai people still lives there and celebrates many Buddhist festivals. They, along with other neighbouring areas like Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia celebrate a unique festival every April. It is called the Water Festival. It falls on the traditional New Years celebrations of these regions, and people celebrate by gently and delicately splashing scented water on one another. It bears a startling resemblance to the Hindu festival of Holi, held around the same time every year, where Indians not-so-gently hurl coloured water (and other substances) at each other! In fact, in Thailand, this festival is known as Songkran, which directly comes from the Sanskrit word ‘Sankranti’, meaning ‘astrological passage’.

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Here are some important buildings one can find inside the Galle Fort

Dutch Reformed Church

Also known as Groote Kerk, this church is located within the Galle Fort. Originally built by the Portuguese in 1640, the church was renovated by the Dutch around 1755.

The floor of the church is made of gravestones dedicated to the memories of parishioners who passed away centuries earlier. The lawn of the church is open and has a pebble pathway to enable visitors to look at the crumbling tombstones erected around the lawn.

A church organ from 1760 still sits in the building.

Old Dutch Hospital, Galle

Built by the Dutch as a hospital, this is one of the oldest buildings in the Galle Fort area. The building was used as the Galle Town Hall by the Sri Lankan government but due to restriction of space over time, the offices moved elsewhere. Today, after extensive renovation, the building is being used as a shopping and dining precinct.

Galle Lighthouse

This onshore lighthouse is Sri Lanka’s oldest light station dating back to 1848. The original lighthouse, built by the British, was located 100 metres from the current site. However, it was destroyed by fire in 1934 and the existing lighthouse was erected in 1939. It is located within the walls of the Galle fort and is a popular tourist attraction.

Galle Clock Tower

Also known as the Anthonisz Memorial Clock Tower, this clock tower was constructed in 1831. It was paid for through public subscriptions by the people of Galle in recognition of Dr. P. D. Anthonisz, a well-known doctor. Roughly four-storeys high, the clock tower is situated immediately inside the fort ramparts.

National Maritime Museum

First opened to the public in 1992, the museum is located in a Dutch Warehouse that dates back to 1671. Originally specialising in the flora and fauna of the sea, the display at the museum expanded over time to include underwater artefacts, sea-faring, maritime trade and relics retrieved from the 20-odd maritime archaeological sites around Galle.

While the building housing the museum survived the 2004 tsunami, the adjoining UNESCO Maritime Archaeology Unit was completely destroyed. Three years after the tsunami, the maritime museum reopened to the public.

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Situated nearly 100 km away from the Sri Lanka capital city Colombo, Galle is a seaside town known for its fortifications and colonial buildings.

Galle came into prominence following its capture by the Portuguese in the 15th Century from the Sinhala kings. Soon after, the Portuguese erected the first fortification in the city which was a single wall fronted by a moat which extended from the sea to the harbour.

While the Portuguese were the first colonial power to capture Galle, they were soon defeated by the Dutch, who captured the fort after a four-day siege.

It was under the Dutch rule that Galle witnessed the height of its development. The Dutch heavily fortified the city in their architectural style. They built a rampart around the city with a double wall. The Dutch added close to ten bastions all over the fort which went on till about the early 18th Century.

The Dutch established public administration buildings, warehouses and residential quarters among others inside the fort.

The British took over the fort from the Dutch in 1796, after they captured Colombo. And Sri Lanka remained a British colony till it received its independence in 1948. Galle lost its prominence during this period, as the British developed Colombo as their capital and main port.

Today, Galle is one of the best examples of a fortified city built by European in South and Southeast Asia.

The fort has withstood the test of time and survived the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that destroyed most of the town, including the famous Galle International Cricket Stadium.

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Aurangzeb’s death marked the beginning of end for the Mughal Empire. Since the kings who ascended the throne after him were inefficient, the Sayyid Brothers saw an opportunity in the ensuring chaos.

“Shah banaye, Shah giraye, Abdulla, Hussain Ali.” (They make kings and then make them fall- Abdullah and Hussain Ali) Street song about the Sayyid Brothers

It was 1713, just six years after Aurangzeb’s death. After his son Bahadur Shah’s brief reign, throne, totally controlled by his wife Lal Kunwar, who had been a courtsan. Jahandar Shah spent all his time partying and spending exorbitant amounts of money, and was such a bad ruler, that some historians dubbed him the ‘Lord of Misrule’! in this situation of near anarchy, Prince Farrukhsiyar, Jahandar Shah’s nephew, began roaming around the country trying to get support to become emperor instead.

Farrukhsiyar seeks support

In came the Sayyid Brothers, Abdulla Khan and Hussain Ali Khan Barha – men in their forties, from an old aristocratic military family. When Frrukhsiyar landed up in Patna, the Sayyids weren’t initially sympathetic towards him, but eventually agreed to support him after an imploring meeting between their mothers and Farrukhsiyar’s mother!

The Sayyids rustled up a group of malcontents, men who felt sighted or overlooked by the current emperor and built up support for their cause. Money for their mission came from raiding royal caravans as well as the usual taxes, and forced loans.

No money to pay the troops

Even as news of this rival army reached Jahandar Shah, he couldn’t be bothered to mount out a defence. As the Sayyid’s army was about to reach Dealhi, Jahandar Shah finally bestirred himself; but there was a slight problem. During the revelries of the past year, Mughal imperial troops hadn’t been paid even once. There was little money as much had been frittered away on frivolities like massive weekly ‘illuminations” of Delhi fort and river banks – like Diwali every week, for a full year!

Anyway, gold vessels from Akbar’s time were melted, then jeweled objects, then fine clothes and hangings taken. Still the cash fell short. Finally, the gold-roofed of the palace were broken and distributed to royal soldiers.

Jahandar Shah loses

Nothing worked, and Jahandar Shah lost, was captured, and duly strangled. He was the first Mughal emperor to be so unceremoniously deposed by Mughal nobles, but an awful tradition was set.

The new emperor Farrukhsiyar’s reign started with such a flurry of strangulations and executions of the defeated groups that terror started spreading amongst these nobles. Every time they were summoned for an audience with the Emperor, they took formal farewells of their families, just in case they didn’t manage to return home!

The Sayyid brothers grasped all power and high positions for themselves and their family and friends. Farrukhsiyar gradually became influenced by other factions at court, and turned against the Sayyids, and started planning on to get rid of them.

Here comes the twist

A tense see-saw state of affairs remained for the next few years. Hussain Ali Khan was sent off to “retake the Deccan” from the growing might of the Marathas, and Farrukhsiyar secretly encouraged the Marathas to kill him off! Hussain Ali Khan struck a deal with them instead and started marching towards Delhi as the head of a large army, theoretically to “attend to the emperor.” He was escorted by a large troop of Marathas!

Time to get rid of Farrukhsiyar

Farrukhsiyar was in a state of terror and briefly reconciled with the Sayyids, but once again tried to betray them the second he had a chance. Finally the Sayyids decided to get rid of him. When the palace was taken by the Sayyid’s soldiers, Farrukhsiyar took refuge in the women’s quarters of the palace and refused to step out, swearing to take revenge, while being guarded by a contingent of female Turki bodyguards!

The Sayyid brothers picked at random from the harem another prince, Rafi-ud-Darjat, a first cousin of Farrukhsiyar. They marched him off in his ordinary clothes without jewellery or ornaments, packed him unceremoniously on the magnificent Peacock throne and declared him Emperor. This sorry state is what the magnificent ‘Grand Moguls’ had been reduced to!

Farrukhsiyar was roughly recovered from the harem and dragged, bareheaded and barefooted to be presented to the Sayyids, where he was blinded publicly with a hot needle. The maimed ex-Emperor was thrown into a dark and dark prison cell, where he was strangled after some days.

Puppet kings

The king makers’ new puppet emperor, Rafi-ud-Darjat was kept under firm guard. Even his meals were not served without the order of his tutor who was a distant Sayyid relative. The young Emperor however had a wasting disease and was hopelessly addicted to opium; he died in three months.

His brother Rafi-ud-Daulah was crowned the new Mughal emperor on the Peacock Throne as Shah Jahan II, in what was becoming a fine farce. Rafi-ud-Daulah was also a puppet, and every action was dictated by the Sayyid brothers. Now this new king turned out to be as sickly as the last, and equally addicted to opium. He gave up the habit after he took the throne (or was made shock of withdrawal. He died in four months as well.

Fall of the brothers

Well, the Sayyid brothers had many options to choose from, and next installed a 17-year old Muhammad Shah on the throne. This would prove very costly for them. The other court factions, the Turanis (Central Asians) and Iranis (Persians) finally united to get rid of them. The younger Sayyid was killed in battle, and the elder assassinated. The age of the Sayyid brothers was abruptly over by 1720.

To recap, it had been only 12 years since Aurangzeb’s death. Six Mughal emperors had already come and gone. After taking the throne in 1719, Muhammad Shah went on to rule for thirty years, during which he was known more for his pastimes than for his strong work ethic. He was bestowed the moniker of Muhammad Shah Rangeela, the colourful one. The Mughal empire was already in a shambles.

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On August 26, 1768, 250 years ago, Captain James Cook British explorer, surveyor, navigator and cartographer, embarked on his first Pacific voyage, aboard the HMB Endeavour, with instructions to chart the transit of Venus across the sun at the equator. Cook went on to chart New Zealand, before continuing onward to first sight the east coast of Australia at Point Hicks on 20 April 1770. As the Endeavour sailed north, he charted the coast making first landfall at Bay on April 29, 1770.

Cook’s voyage had three aims; to establish an observatory at Tahiti in order to record the transit of Venus (when the planet passed between the earth and the sun), on 3 June 1769. The second aim was to record natural history, led by 25-year-old Joseph Banks. The final secret goal was to continue the search for the Great South Land. 

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A bit of France on Arab sands? Yes, topped by an enormous signature dome of overlapping geometric lattices that weight more than 7,500 tonnes, the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, opened to the public on November 11, 2017. The new museum showcases hundreds of works of art from around the world, ancient as well as contemporary. It is approximately 24,000 square metres (260,000 sq ft) in size, with 8,000 square metres (86,000 sq ft) of galleries, making it the largest art museum in the Arabian peninsula.

55 heterogeneous buildings are sheltered under one gargantuan dome at the Louvre. Described as ‘Arabic-Galactic’ by the New York Times, the dome is a reinterpretation of the traditional Arab dome. 180metres in span, the dome purportedly weighs as much as the Eiffel Tower, despite its seeming ‘floating’ appearance. Nouvel’s architecture seems to converse with nature. 

Under the dome, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect’s “museum city” is formed like a cluster of man-made islands. Spread out across the sea, its marble-clad walls sparkle as sunlight is reflected off the water. Not wanting to merely mimic traditional Arabic architecture, Nouvel reinterpreted the traditional settlements of the region through his “modern proposal”. Meandering streets, covered piazzas and inlets for water, echo the mysterious feeling of an Arabic village, where the atmosphere brims with the possibility of chance encounters at every turn.

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The bongs of the iconic Great Bell, popularly called Big Ben, inside the clock tower above the House of Parliament in London, fell silent on August 21, 2017, and will resume four years later in 2021. The reason? The Elizabeth Tower, home to the bells that make up the great clock has been undergoing a programme of restoration work.

Big Ben is the name of the bell inside the tower (St. Stephen’s Tower, renamed Elizabeth Tower in 2012), and not the building or the clock (simply known as the Great Clock) itself.

The chimes were last silent in 2007 during maintenance, and before that from 1983-1985 during a period of refurbishment.

Londoners needn’t worry though; Big Ben will continue to chime for “important national events” such as New Year’s Eve and Remembrance Sunday.

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On 6 February, 2017, the Sapphire Jubilee of Elizabeth II, marking sixty-five years of her reign, took place. The longest-reigning monarch in British history, Queen Elizabeth II is the first British monarch to have a Sapphire Jubilees, there were no widespread public celebrations of the Sapphire Jubilee. Large-scale celebrations took place in June 2016, to mark the Queen’s 90th birthday.

A traditional gun salute and a performance by the Band of the Royal Artillery is planned to underline the record-breaking anniversary. However, celebrations should remain limited this year. The Queen is said to want to quietly devote the day to her father’s memory.

Larger celebrations could, however, be planned for the Queen’s next big anniversary, her Platinum Jubilee in 2022.

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In 2017 the world marked the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, an event that tradition tells us began on October 31, 1517 when the priest Martin Luther posted his ninety-five these on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. His radical views sparked the Protestant Reformation, a watershed event in Western history that has bequeathed to the world a variety of concepts that are relevant even today.

The 95 Theses, which would later become the foundation of the Protestant Reformation, were written in a remarkably humble and academic tone, questioning rather than accusing. The overall thrust of the document was nonetheless quite provocative. The first two of the theses contained Luther’s central idea, that God intended believers to seek repentance and that faith alone, and not deeds, would lead to salvation. The other 93 theses, a number of them directly criticizing the practice of indulgences, supported these first two.

Luther is remembered as a controversial figure, not only because his writings led to significant religious reform and division, but also because in later life he took on radical positions on other questions, including his pronouncements against Jews, which some have said may have portended German anti-Semitism; others dismiss them as just one man’s vitriol that did not gain a following. Some of Luther’s most significant contributions to theological history, however, such as his insistence that as the sole source of religious authority the Bible be translated and made available to everyone, were truly revolutionary in his day.

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Situated in Birjand, the Akbariyeh Garden consists of two ancient mansions belonging to high-ranking officials from the Qajar period in Persia. The garden was created in steep, straight lines, with the buildings situated at the top-most part of the garden. Today, the mansions have been converted into museums.

This building benefits from nice view and excellent decorations including wooden decorations, lattice and sash with colored glass, plaster decorations with arabesques and geometric designs.

Due to a lot of reasons Akbariyeh Garden has been put on the World Heritage List. Among all it should be named, the garden has been created in the steep, straight lines have been used in garden design, the building has been constructed on the highest part of the garden, many pomegranate, berry and palm trees and etcetera.

Today, different parts of the complex are used as library, archaeology and anthropology museum, traditional teahouse and also college of art in Birjand.

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Located near Mahan, Iran, this garden was built for Mohammad Hassan Khan Sardari Iravani in 1850. Rectangular in shape with a wall around, the garden has a lower end, while a two-storeyed residential structure adorns the upper end. Between these are ornamented water fountains engineered according to the natural incline.

Garden also consists of a two-storied building for which the second floor was used as living quarters and for receiving guests. Other smaller utility rooms are situated along the sides of the Garden. Amongst them a few side entrances also connect the Garden to the outside.

Water fountains can be seen over the land flowing from the upper ends toward lower ends on a water cascade style at Shazdeh Garden. These fountains look very beautiful and have been provided impetus by the natural incline of the place. The garden itself consists of a variety of pine, cedar, elm, buttonwood and fruit trees which benefit from the appropriate soil, light breezes and qanat water enable such an environment in contrast to its dry surroundings. The water enters the Garden at the upper end and while irrigating the trees and plants along its way, flows down through a series of steps and falls.

The vital resource of Shahzadeh garden is streams originating from adjacent mountains. Tigran qanat, originating from Joupar altitudes, is the water supply of this garden. This stream flows into the garden from the highest level and constitutes the garden’s designed irrigation system.

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Situated in Kashan, this historical Persian garden was completed in 1590. It is the oldest surviving garden in Iran. It contains a main yard surrounded by four circular towers, and, like other Persian gardens, has several water features.

The garden expresses a series of accentuared contrasts between the arid, inhospitable landscape outside the walls and the lush foliage within. Outside, water is scarce and precious; here it flows with superabundance to produce a dense jubgle of growth. The monotone of the landscape is replaced by the colors of foliage, of flowers, of blue tiles, of fountains, and of painted plaster and woodwork, Axial symmetry contrasts with areas of almost impenetrable growth. The plan of Fin calls sharply to mind the Persian garden carpet, for all elements of multiple channels, orchards, flowers, and pavilions are present in similar relationship. At Fin, all the channels are lined, sides and bottom, with blue faience tiles so that the very water seems bright and gay until it flows into one of the larger pools, lined with great trees. The largest pool mirrors the remains of the central pavilion, ascribed to Fath Ali Shah’ The garden was repaired in 1935 and Wilber called for restoration of the central pavilion, which has seen been effected.

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Built under the order of Shah Abbas I of Persia in the middle of a jungle, this garden is Iran’s most prominent non-desert garden. The Abbas Abad Garden comprises a palace, towers and a lake with a mansion at its centre, making it a big tourist draw.

Several years ago, archaeologists discovered the wonderful waterworks of the park which had been connected to the water supply system of the city as well as bathhouses, and recreational centers. Built on the top of a slope beside the Abbasabad Dam, the excellent water system had three terraced floors, each used by a specific social class.

The garden has a number of spectacular waterfalls and a stream flowing into the western side of the lake, which gives visitors the opportunity to enjoy walking and even swimming.

The art of garden design in Iran dates back to at least 500 B.C. and was developed in the Safavid era (1501-1722). Iranian gardens were built in desert regions before the Safavid era, but the Abbasabad Garden is one of the rare examples of a garden constructed in a forested region.

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Located in Mehriz, the Pahlavanpour Garden is one of Iran’s historical orchads. The orchard consists of a summerhouse, a winter quarter, a kitchen, a janitor’s unit and a public bathroom. The waters of the orchard are fed by the Hassan-Abad aqueduct. Next to the summerhouse, the kitchen, the bathroom, and the warehouse were situated, which have been recently unearthed throughout excavations which were carried out in this orchard.

The most valuable section of the orchard is the three-storey summerhouse, which covers an area of 1500 square meters. The interior section of the summerhouse includes a hall and a pond. The Kolah Farangi building within the summerhouse has been beautifully decorated and is considered as one of the most valuable sections of the summerhouse.

The other important building is the winter quarter. It is a one-storey building which includes the common room, and kitchen. The janitor’s unit which has been the place of residence and the workshop of the related workers is located in the northern corner of the orchard.

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Built in 1647, Chehel Sotoun is a pavilion in the middle of a garden covering 67,000 Sq. meters at the far end of a long rectangle shaped pool, in Isfahan, Iran, built by Shah Abbas II to be used for the Shah’s entertainment and receptions. It was used by Shah Abbas II and his successors to host receptions and entertain dignitaries. Literally meaning Forty Columns, Chehel Sotoun gets its name from the 20 wooden columns supporting the entrance to the pavilion, which when reflected in the waters of the pool in front look like 40 columns.

 Each column is made of a plain tree with a thin layer of colored board fitted on the skin. The layer was formerly covered with colored pieces of glass and mirror. The wooden pillars support an elegant terrace with a light wooden ceiling of wide fretwork louvers. The terrace is only a few steps high and opens the pavilion onto the gardens and an elegant pool. The ceiling still keeps its beams, covering, painted wood louvers, and carefully lay-work-rosettes and suns, stars, stylized fruit and foliage.

The palace is now a museum of Safavid paintings and ceramics, which attracts millions of domestic and foreign visitors. In 2005 safe guarding plans were to be implemented to include the installation of early fire prevention systems.

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Located in Shiraz, Iran, this historic Persian garden was built during the mid-13th Century by the paramount chief of the Qashqai tribes of Pars. Following the Chahar Bagh style, the original layout of the garden was most likely laid in the 11th Century by another tribe. The garden and the building belonged to the leaders of the Qashqai tribe before being confiscated by the government. Today, the Eram Garden and the building are within the Shiraz Botanical Garden of the Shiraz University.

Mohammad Qoli Khan ordered the construction of the original mansion that stood on the grounds in the early 18th century, and planted various trees and plants in the garden including pine, orange, cypress and persimmon trees. Later on, during the rule of King Nasser ed-din of the Qajar Dynasty (1785-1925) Mirza Hassan Ali Khan Nasir-al Mulk bought the gardens from the Qashgai tribes and began construction on the present pavilion that now stands in the gardens.

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Built around 1750, this garden, situated in Yazd, Iran, was meant to be a residence of Persian regent Karim Khan Zand. The pavilion is set amidst the Persian garden lined with evergreen trees. The pavilion boasts Iran’s tallest badger (wind tower) standing at 33 metres.

The tallest wind tower of the pavilion inside the garden is conceivable from miles away. This traditional air-conditioning system of local houses around the desert in Iran is the essential elements at the residential structures. However, the exaggerated grand size of this wind catcher functioned perfectly well. Actually the Dolat Abad garden is also renowned for having Iran’s tallest badgir (the wind tower), that is standing over 33 meters; though this one was rebuilt after it collapsed in the 1960s.

The most significant characteristics of the design of Dolat Abad Garden is believed to be the attempt of the architect in selecting tactful angles for providing the best views and landscape internally.

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Established in the 6th Century BC, along with the city of Pasargadae by Cyrus the Great, the garden of Pasargadae are the oldest among the nine gardens and the earliest-known example of the Chahar Bagh design. They consisted of several palaces in the four quadrants and were divided by pathways and waterways.

Pasargadae has in fact one really superb piece of architecture: it is the tomb of Cyrus, situated right on the edge of the main palace complex. According to Arrian, it was restored by Alexander the Great and has a quiet simplicity that ensures its place in every book on world architecture. Indeed, today it holds a special place at the heart of modern Iran, and it is splendidly displayed at the end of a flower-lined avenue.

Cyrus deserves his special place in the history of modern Persia. He began as a ruler of a petty kingdom in the southwestern corner of the habitable part of modern Iran. He started by conquering the Medes who were then top dogs in that area. He then went west and conquered Croesus, king of the Lydians, and the young Greek city states in what is now the western coast of Turkey. And he then went on to conquer Babylon, thereby establishing the Persians as the main power in the Near East.

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The Persian garden design evolved around the 6th Century BC during the time of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Archaemenid Empire. It finds its roots in the idea of an earthly paradise made popular by Persian literature and is conceived to symbolize Eden and the four Zoroastrian elements of sky, earth, water and plants. Gardens following the Persian design reflect the flexibility of the Chahar Bagh, which is the originating principle of the Persian garden. Meaning ‘four gardens’, the Chahar Bagh follows a quadrilateral garden layout based on four gardens of paradise mentioned in the Qur’an. Hence, the Persian garden is always divided into four sectors with water playing an important part in the design, especially for irrigation and ornamentation.

The Persian garden design combines manmade components with nature and incorporates concepts of art, philosophy, symbolism and religion. Designed with the ability to withstand drastic climatic conditions, the Persian garden is inspired by the application of different fields of knowledge such as technology, water management and engineering, agriculture, botany and architecture.

Apart from plant or flower beds, one can find architectural elements such as buildings, walls and pavilions in the Persian garden.

Having found references in poetry, literature, music, calligraphy and carpet design, the Persian garden design has influenced the art of garden design in places as far as India and Spain.

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The glory of Awadh can be seen in the present day cities of Uttar Pradesh such as Lucknow, Kanpur, and Faizabad. Lucknow, in particular, owes a lot of its present day charm and infrastructure which includes fine arts and cuisine to the former rulers of Awadh, who later made Lucknow their capital.

Awadh was earlier called by the name Lakshmanpur Awadh and is termed as an ancient Hindu state that has roots dating back to the popular mythological legend of Lord Rama of Ayodhya who had gifted Awadh to his brother Lakshman. Therefore, the original name of Awadh was Lakshmanpur which was located in the outskirts of Ayodhya. Hence, the name Awadh comes from the name Ayodhya which was the capital of the Hindu Kosal province.

The Nawabs of Awadh were very lavish and opulent. They were connoisseurs of fine fabrics and jewellery which can be seen in their portraits. From the usage of finest makhmal or velvet, to mulmul or cotton- the royal robes of the royalty exuded grandeur. There attire had a very dexterous embellishment of zardozi or chikankari work. The Nawabs of Awadh were very lavish and opulent. They were connoisseurs of fine fabrics and jewellery which can be seen in their portraits. From the usage of finest makhmal or velvet, to mulmul or cotton- the royal robes of the royalty exuded grandeur. There attire had a very dexterous embellishment of zardozi or chikankari work. 

The turban of the Nawab was white in colour, having an embellished sarpech adorning it. However, the Nawabs were extremely influenced by the regal finery of the British and even indulged in wearing the Imperial Crown themselves. The crown of Oudh was a huge piece of headgear that had 12 pointed diadems all covered with diamonds with a huge centerpiece ruby.

The Nawabs of Awadh were great patrons of music, poetry, dance and drama. From the popular ‘thumri’ to the revival of kathak, Lucknow had become a flourishing cultural center under the patronage of the Awadh rulers.

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Nizam-ul-Mulk’s greatest achievement was the foundation of the princely state of Hyderabad. As the Viceroy of the Deccan, the Nizam was the head of the executive and judicial departments and the source of all civil and military authority of the Mughal Empire in the Deccan. All officials were appointed by him directly or in his name. He drafted his own laws, raised his own armies, flew his own flag and formed his own government.

He divided his kingdom into three parts – one part became his own private estate known as the Sarf-i-Khas; another was allotted for the expenses of the government and was known as the Diwan’s territory; and the remainder was distributed amongst Muslim nobles (jagirdars, zamindars and deshmukhs), who in return paid nazars (gifts) to the Nizam for the privilege of collecting revenue from the villages under them. The most important of these nobles were the Paigahs (see p128). The properties were usually split into numerous pieces in order to prevent the most powerful of the nobles from entertaining any thought of carving out an empire for themselves. The system, which continued relatively unchanged until 1950, ensured a steady source of income for the state treasury and the Nizam.

The Nizam is remembered for having laid the foundation for what would become one of the most important Muslim states outside the Middle East by the first half of the 20th century. The kingdom he ruled over was said to have been close to the size of France.

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The great poet-composers and creative musicians or Vaggeyakar’s Sadarang and Adarang are credited with the emergence and popularity of the ‘khayal’ style of Hindustani classical music. The story goes back to the court of Mohammed Shah ‘Rangila’ in the mid eighteenth century. There, a Dhrupad singer and a been (flute) player Niyamat Khan –“Been Nawaz” as he was called was apparently asked to accompany a Dhrupad singer. He took affront at this insult and left in a huff. But he could not resist the temptations of courtly life and returned adopting the nick-name Sadarang. The musical wars between the been-players and the dhrupad singers led to the evolution of the khayal which broke away from the abstract patterns of the Dhrupad. Sadarang’s disciple, nephew and son-in-law Adarang added his own compositions to further popularize and enrich this style of music.
Although this musical tradition is more than 300 years old and many new composers have added to the field, Sadarang and Adarang’s compositions in praise of nature, god, love etc. continue to resonate even for contemporary audiences. Their vocal and instrumental compositions are not bound either by language or gharanas; both of them composed in various languages – Punjabi, Braj, Arbi , Farsi and Rajasthani and vocalists from all gharanas sing their compositions, some of which were transmitted in written form while others have been passed down through the vocal tradition.

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Baji Rao I (18 August 1700 – 28 April 1740) was a general of the Maratha Empire in India. He served as the Peshwa to the 4th Maratha Chhatrapati (Emperor) Shahu from 1720 until his death. Bajirao was Peshwa in the Ashta Pradhan (8-minister council) of Shahu. He is also known by the name Bajirao Ballal.

Bajirao I is credited with expanding the Maratha Empire in India. Maratha Empire reached its zenith later on under reign of Chhatrapati Shahu and Bajirao. He was one of the major contributors in expansion over the Indian subcontinent. In his military career spanning 20 years, Bajirao I never lost a single battle.

By the time of Baji Rao’s appointment, Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah had in 1719 recognized Marathas’ rights over the territories possessed by Shivaji at his death. The treaty also included the Maratha rights to collect taxes (chauth or chauthai and sardeshmukhi) in the six provinces of Deccan. Bajirao succeeded in convincing Chatrapati Shahu that if we want to defend the Maratha Empire then we have to be offensive on our enemy. Bajirao believed that the Mughal Empire was in decline and wanted to take advantage of this situation with aggressive expansion in North India. 

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It was in the year 1739, Nadir Shar, the Shah of Iran and the founder of the Afsharid dynasty, invaded India and brought about a boisterous and damaging mark on the history of Mughal India. The invasion of India by Nadir Shah—one of the most mammoth calamities that had taken place during that period—brought about a complete destruction of the already weakened Mughal Empire.

He captured the western frontiers of Mughal Empire such as Kabul, Ghazni, Lahore in 1739. When Nadir Shah crossed Khyber Pass, the Governor of Punjab requested for the strengthening of the army force in Punjab to the Mughal emperor. But, Muhammad Shah, the Mughal emperor of Delhi, did not pay heed to his request. Soon Nadir Shah entered Punjab with great force and then Muhammad Shah sent the Mughal forces, led by Khan Dauran and Nizam-ul-Mulk, to fight against Nadir Shah. However, the two declined, and so Muhammad Shah led the forces himself. The two forces of Nadir Shah and Muhammad Shah met at Karnal. At the battle of Karnal on 13 February 1739, Nadir Shah easily outnumbered the Mughal forces. The battle lasted for less than three hours and the Mughal emperor, Muhammad Shah surrendered. Both the rulers now entered Delhi on 12 March 1739 and Delhi was handed over to Nadir Shah, along with all its treasures. He occupied Shah Jahan’s royal suite in the Red Fort and held a great durbar in the capital the next day.

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Thailand mourned the death of its King Bhumibol Adulyadej who ruled for 70 long years. Conferred with the title King Bhumibol the Great in 1987 (officially conferred by Vajiralongkorn in 2019), he was the ninth monarch of Thailand from the Chakri dynasty, titled Rama IX. Reigning since June 9, 1946, he was, at the time of his death, the world’s longest-reigning head of state, the longest-reigning monarch in Thai history and the longest-reigning monarch having reigned only as an adult, reining for 70 years and 126 days. Following his death, Queen Elizabeth II is today the world’s longest-reigning living monarch.

The king’s body lay in state in the Dusit Maha Prasat Throne Hall of the Grand Palace for a period of one year, with daily rites for a period of 100 days. As in the funerals of the king’s mother and sister, the king’s body was not physically placed in the royal funerary urn (kot) as was customary; instead, the coffin which housed the body was placed behind the pedestal displaying the royal urn. Special rites attended by King Vajiralongkorn were held to mark the 7th, 15th, 50th and 100th days since the king’s death. After the 15th day, the public were allowed to pay their respects and attend the lying-in-state in the Grand Palace. By the end of the allowed public attendance on 30 September 2017 (later pushed forward to 5 October the same year), over 12 million people had paid their respects in person, a historic record crowd that, including foreign tourists and expats living in Thailand, broke all-time attendance records and left an estimated 890 million Thai baht in donations for the royal charity activities.

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Mother Teresa, reversed for her work for the poor in India, was proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis in a ceremony at the Vatican on September 4, 2016. The Pope said Saint Teresa had defended the unborn, sick and abandoned, and had shamed world leaders for the “crimes of poverty they themselves created”. Tens of thousands of pilgrims attended the canonization in St Peter’s Square. In India, a special Mass was celebrated at the Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded in Kolkata (Calcutta).

Many of the proposed miracles associated with Mother Teresa didn’t meet church guidelines. Among the cases that were considered but not deemed miraculous were:

A French girl who said touching a medallion from Mother Teresa healed ribs she’d broken in a car accident — but this healing did not happen quickly enough to be seen as miraculous.

A Palestinian girl recovered from bone cancer after seeing Mother Teresa in a dream — but the church waits for several years to ensure there is no recurrence in cancer cases, as a miraculous recovery will be permanent.

In addition, an improvement in someone’s condition, even if there’s no medical cause for the amelioration, wouldn’t fit the parameters for a miracle, as the healing should be complete. And a cure must be due to the intercession of Mother Teresa — so any recovery that involved prayers sent to other saints would not work.

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The Magna Carta, a historic document that made the king subject to the laws of the land and limited his powers, was signed in June 1215 by King John in England. Magna Carta, which means ‘Great Charter’, laid the basis for much of the legal system as we know it today. To mark its 800th anniversary, the original remaining copies of the Charter were put on display at the British Library.

The Magna Carta Trust is also campaigning for a public holiday on 15 June 2015 – the exact anniversary – and are asking the Royal Mint to issue a commemorative coin in the same year.

Talks are also under way for a commemorative stamp.

An exhibition is expected to be held at the British Library in London, with smaller events planned for schools and libraries across the UK.

Some 160 British Council offices around the world are also considering producing displays.

The trust is aiming to make people more aware of the legal, political and constitutional importance of the document, which has World Heritage status.

It was time to celebrate the 200th anniversary of a historic battle too – the Battle of Waterloo, marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars, fought on June 18, 1815, near Waterloo in Belgium.

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A stepwell situated in the town of Patan in the state of Gujarat, Rani ki vav, literally the Queen’s well, was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Located on the banks of Saraswati river, its construction is attributed to Udayamati, queen of the 11th-century Chaulukya dynasty and spouse of Bhima I. Silted over, it was rediscovered in the 1940s and restored in the 1980s by the Archaeological Survey of India.

Rani-ki-Vav impresses not only with its architectural structure and technological achievements in water sourcing and structural stability, but also in particular with its sculptural decoration, of true artistic mastery. The figurative motifs and sculptures, and the proportion of filled and empty spaces, provide the stepwell’s interior with its unique aesthetic character. The setting enhances these attributes in the way in which the well descends suddenly from a plain plateau, which strengthens the perception of this space.

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The Silk Road of China, Kyrgyzstan: the Routes Network of Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor was included in the UNESCO list of Heritage Sites. Stretching from Luoyang, the central capital of China in the Han and Tang dynasties, to the Zhetysu region of Central Asia, it is a 5,000 km section of the extensive Silk Roads network, built between the 2nd century BC and 1st century AD.

The thirty-three components included in the routes network include capital cities and palace complexes of various empires and Khan kingdoms, trading settlements, Buddhist cave temples, ancient paths, posthouses, passes, beacon towers, sections of The Great Wall, fortifications, tombs and religious buildings.

The routes served principally to transfer raw materials, foodstuffs, and luxury goods. Some areas had a monopoly on certain materials or goods: notably China, who supplied Central Asia, the Subcontinent, West Asia and the Mediterranean world with silk. Many of the high value trade goods were transported over vast distances – by pack animals and river craft – and probably by a string of different merchants.

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The 2014 centennial of the beginning of World War I was commemorated with events-symposia, exhibits, theatrical presentations, re-enactments, and concerts-the world over. The Flanders region of Belgium, especially Ypres (where three battles took place), was a particular focus of such efforts.

On a more joyful note, on August 15, 2014, the citizens of Panama celebrated the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Panama Canal. The gala event was attended by descendants of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French engineer who oversaw the first attempt to construct the canal, and of Theodore Roosevelt, the U.S. president under whose watch work began on the project.

The world had experienced significant changes in transportation technology during the previous century, yet on the day marking its opening 100 years earlier, the operation of the Panama Canal was fundamentally the same as it had been when the first ship had passed through it. The canal remained, however, one of the most important and vital strategic links for world nautical transportation.

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India sent its last telegram on July 14, after using the once revolutionary technology for fast communication for 163 years. Thousands crammed into the country’s telegram offices as the service shut down for good.

The service began in 1850, as an experiment to connect Kolkata and Diamond Harbour. In 1854, it was made available to the public. Since then, the Service had sent million of telegrams across India.

The Telegraph was invented by Samuel Morse. Morse Code, the code used to send telegram messages, is named after him.

The messages were conveyed using electrical signals which were transmitted by interlinking wires.

During its final years, the service was able to garner a revenue of 75 lakhs annually, but the running cost was an extravagant, Rs 100 Cr.

On July 14, 2013 the last telegram message was sent to Rahul Gandhi by Ashwani Mishra.

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On 5 December 2013, Nelson Mandela, the first President of South Africa to be elected in a fully representative democratic election, as well as the country’s first black head of state, died at the age of 95 after suffering from a prolonged respiratory infection. He led South Africa’s transition from white-minority rule in the 1990s, after being incarcerated for 27 years for his political activities, and focussed on wiping out the legacy of apartheid by ending racism, poverty, inequality, and promoting national reconciliation.

South Africa observed a national mourning period of 10 days. During this time numerous memorial services were conducted across the country. The official memorial service was held at FNB Stadium, Johannesburg, on 10 December where the 95,000 seat stadium was two-thirds full because of the cold, rain, and transport challenges.[4] His body lay in state at the Union Buildings in Pretoria from 11 to 13 December 2013. A state funeral was held on 15 December 2013 in Qunu in the Eastern Cape province, where his body was buried.

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The Western Ghats, a 1,600-km-long mountain chain with forests said to be older than those in the Himalayan range, was recognized as one of the world’s eight “hottest hotspots” of biological diversity by UNESCO. The forests of the site include some of the best representatives of non-equatorial tropical evergreen forests anywhere and are home to at least 325 globally threatened flora, fauna, bird, amphibian, reptile and fish species.

Older than the great Himalayan mountain chain, the Western Ghats of India are a geomorphic feature of immense global importance. The Outstanding Universal Value of the Western Ghats is manifested in the region’s unique and fascinating influence on large-scale biophysical and ecological processes over the entire Indian peninsula. The mountains of the Western Ghats and their characteristic montane forest ecosystems influence the Indian monsoon weather patterns that mediate the warm tropical climate of the region, presenting one of the best examples of the tropical monsoon system on the planet. The Ghats act as a key barrier, intercepting the rain-laden monsoon winds that sweep in from the south-west during late summer.

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The year 2012 marked the 100th anniversary of the sinking on April 14-15, 1912, of the British luxury passenger liner the RMS Titanic. The vessel sank during its maiden voyage, en route to New York City from Southampton, England, when it hit an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 passengers and ship personnel.

On the 15th at the site of the Titanic’s sinking, the ships plan to hold “a memorial service at 2:20 a.m. to commemorate the 100th year anniversary and to pay tribute to all the brave passengers and crew on board that fateful night.”

The Balmoral is scheduled to then finish the Titanic’s never-completed trip, docking in Halifax on April 16 and New York City on the 19th.

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On February 6, 2012, Queen Elizabeth II reached the 60th anniversary of her accession to the British throne, a milestone that was followed in June (to coincide with her June 2, 1953, coronation) by four days of national celebration, including a two-days public holiday, to commemorate her Diamond Jubilee.

Her coronation took place in Westminster Abbey on 2nd June 1953.

She celebrated her Silver Jubilee (25 years) in 1977, Golden Jubilee (50 years) in 2002, and 2012 marked the Diamond 60th Jubilee of her reign.

The only other British monarch to celebrate a Diamond Jubilee was her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria who celebrated the 60th year of her reign in 1897. 

To mark this historic occasion special events took place during 2012 throughout the UK and the Commonwealth Realms (countries in which she is Head of State), and in many Commonwealth Nations.

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The success of conservation efforts at Manas National Park, Assam were recognized as it was removed from UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger. The park had been put on the danger list with its flora and fauna depleting due to poaching and civil unrest in the region.  On 21 June 2011, it was removed from the List of World Heritage in Danger and was commended for its efforts in preservation.

It had decided to include this site in the danger when the park became a safe haven for militants and there was rampant poaching inside it, with damages estimated over USD two million.

“India scores a winning goal for Manas,” said Jagdish Kishwan, Additional Director General (Wildlife), who led the Indian delegation at the session.

“Inscription of a site in the List of World Heritage in Danger has two sides to it. One, it draws global attention to the problems faced by the site, which is beneficial; the second, it indicates a pending threat that the site could be deleted as a World Heritage completely if appropriate measures are not taken to restore it,” said Vivek Menon, executive director of Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), and another member of the delegation.

The decision on the World Heritage status of Manas was an outcome of voting by 22 member countries to the World Heritage Committee.

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Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s great achievement of reaching the Geographic South Pole 100 years ago was celebrated in style with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg visiting the Pole and unveiling a specially commissioned ice bust of Amundsen. It took Amundsen’s team 99 days to cover a distance of 1,800 miles and it was a victorious moment when he planted the Norwegian flag at the Pole on December 14, 1911. What’s more, he had reached five weeks ahead of a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott!

Amundsen and his team spent almost two months skiing across the frozen Ross Sea, climbing steep hills to the Antarctic plateau at about 9,800 feet (3,000 meters) and crossing vast ice fields to reach the pole.

During the preparations they placed several depots of food and supplies along parts of the route before the final assault toward the pole. Once there, they spent three days doing scientific measurements before starting the return trip.

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The Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, Rajasthan, comprising a collection of 19 architectural astronomical instruments, which the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh II completed work on in 1734, and featuring the world’s largest stone sundial, was inscribed as a UNESCO Heritage Site.

It includes a set of some 20 main fixed instruments. They are monumental examples in masonry of known instruments but which in many cases have specific characteristics of their own. Designed for the observation of astronomical positions with the naked eye, they embody several architectural and instrumental innovations. This is the most significant, most comprehensive, and the best preserved of India’s historic observatories. It is an expression of the astronomical skills and cosmological concepts of the court of a scholarly prince at the end of the Mughal period.

On the culture front, three performing arts-Kerala’s Mudiyettu, West Bengal’s Chhau dance and Rajasthan’s Kalbelia (Rajasthan) made it to the UNESCO Intangible Heritage list.

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The 2010 year saw the inclusion of Amsterdam’s canal ring area, built during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th Century-the Prinsengracht, Keizersgracht, Herengracht and Jordaan-on the UNESCO World Heritage Site list.

Herengracht is the first of the three major canals. This is best known for the Golden Bend wherein you will find many of the double-wide mansions, coach houses, and inner gardens. The other notable canal in Amsterdam is the Keizersgracht. It is the second widest of the three major canals that comprise the Seventeenth-century canal ring area of Amsterdam inside the Singelgracht. The canal is named after the Holy Roman Emperor – Maximilian I. Finally, the longest of the main canals is the Prinsengracht. The canal is named after Prince of Orange.

 It comprises a network of canals to the west and south of the historic old town and the medieval port that encircled the old town and was accompanied by the repositioning inland of the city’s fortified boundaries, the Singelgracht. This was a long-term programme that involved extending the city by draining the swampland, using a system of canals in concentric arcs and filling in the intermediate spaces. These spaces allowed the development of a homogeneous urban ensemble including gabled houses and numerous monuments. This urban extension was the largest and most homogeneous of its time. It was a model of large-scale town planning, and served as a reference throughout the world until the 19th century.

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History was made with the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in UAE’s Dubai, opening its doors to the public on January 4, 2010. All of 828m in height, the cloud-piercing structure towers majestically over Dubai city.

The world’s tallest building will celebrate its 10th anniversary on Saturday, January 4, with three specially-curated light shows, set to dazzle visitors. The event comes soon after the Burj Khalifa’s New Year’s Eve celebrations where guests can expect fireworks, animation on Burj Khalifa’s LED facade and sound effects. Meanwhile, the Dubai Fountain will showcase the world’s longest choreographed fountain show for the occasion.

Since then, Burj Khalifa has evolved, serving as a prestigious residential address, corporate offices for multinational entities, a must-visit tourist attraction famed for At the Top, Burj Khalifa SKY as well as Atmosphere, the world’s highest fine dining restaurant and The Lounge, Burj Khalifa at a height of 585.36 metres.

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Qutubuddin Aibak, a ruler of medieval India, was the first ruler of the Delhi Sultanate and also the founder of the Slave dynasty.

He was very well treated by the Qazi and imparted good education, including training in archery and horsemanship in his childhood. However when the master died, his jealous sons, sold Qutubuddin Aibak to a slave merchant.

Qutubuddin Aibak, crowned himself the Sultan of Delhi in 1206, when Muhammad Ghori was killed in the battlefield. After his death when Aibak came to throne he ruled over those places where he was appointed as the local receiver-general of Sultan Ghori. Despite the rebellions by nobles like Taj-ud-din Ildiz and Nasir-ud-din Qubachah, he strengthened the administrative system, which was established by Ghori.

In 1210, Qutb-ud-din Aibak died in an accident while he was playing polo. He fell from the horseback and was severely injured. He was buried in Lahore near the Anarkali bazaar. He was succeeded by Iltutmish, another slave who rose to the level of a Sultan, thus extending the Slave Dynasty.

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The construction of the Qutub Minar was started by Qitub-ud-Din Aibak, but he only constructed the basement. The construction of the tower was later taken over by his successor Iltutmish who constructed three more stories. The last two storeys were completed Firoz Shah Tuglak. The different architectural styles from the time of Aibak to Tuglak are clearly visible in the Qutub Minar.

Iltutmish’s eldest son died before he did, and his other sons were incompetent. He gave an excellent education to his daughter Raziyya (Raziyyat al-D?n) and desired that she should succeed him. His wishes were offensive to the administrative Council of Forty, Iltutmish’s personal slaves who served as his advisers. Raziyya did succeed briefly to the throne, but her appointment of an African to an important position was considered insulting to the council, which shortly brought about her downfall. This marked the beginning of the decline of the line of Iltutmish.

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The Roman aqueduct was a channel used to transport fresh water to highly populated areas. Aqueducts were amazing feats of engineering given the time period. Though earlier civilizations in Egypt and India also built aqueducts, the Romans improved on the structure and built an extensive and complex network across their territories. Evidence of aqueducts remain in parts of modern-day France, Spain, Greece, North Africa, and Turkey.

Aqueducts required a great deal of planning. They were made from a series of pipes, tunnels, canals, and bridges. Gravity and the natural slope of the land allowed aqueducts to channel water from a freshwater source, such as a lake or spring, to a city. As water flowed into the cities, it was used for drinking, irrigation, and to supply hundreds of public fountains and baths.

The most recognizable feature of Roman aqueducts may be the bridges constructed using rounded stone arches. Some of these can still be seen today traversing European valleys. However, these bridged structures made up only a small portion of the hundreds of kilometers of aqueducts throughout the empire. The capital in Rome alone had around 11 aqueduct systems supplying freshwater from sources as far as 92 km away (57 miles). Despite their age, some aqueducts still function and provide modern-day Rome with water. The Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct constructed by Agrippa in 19 B.C. during Augustus’ reign, still supplies water to Rome’s famous Trevi Fountain in the heart of the city.

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Gol Gumbaz, situated in Bijapur district of Karnataka, is the largest dome in India. Gol Gumbaz has a diameter of 124 feet and is the second largest dome in the world, next only to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The dome was built by Muhammad Adil Shah in the year 1656. It has a floor area of 1700 m2 and a height of 51 m. The walls of the structure are 3 m. thick. The dome contains tombs of Muhammad Adil Shah, his two wives, his mistress, his daughter and grandson. Gol Gumbaz is an architectural wonder as it stands unsupported by pillars. The most remarkable feature of Gol Gumbaz is its acoustical system. Even the faintest whisper around the dome echoes several times.

The tomb is a giant cube that is topped with a hemispherical dome. Each storey of the structure has seven arched windows that are crowned by smaller domes. Surrounded by beautiful lush green gardens, the monument is not only Vijayapura’s most important tourist spot but also invites visitors from all corners of the world.

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The Hagia Sophia, whose name means “holy wisdom,” is a domed monument originally built as a cathedral in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) in the sixth century A.D.

It contains two floors centered on a giant nave that has a great dome ceiling, along with smaller domes, towering above.

The story of the construction of the Hagia Sophia began in A.D. 532 when the Nika Riots, a great revolt, hit Constantinople. At the time Emperor Justinian I had been ruler of the empire for five years and had become unpopular. It started in the hippodrome among two chariot racing factions called the blue and green with the riot spreading throughout the city the rioters chanting “Nika,” which means “victory,” and attempting to throw out Justinian by besieging him in his palace.

In 1934, the government of Turkey secularized the Hagia Sophia and turned it into a museum. The Turkish Council of Ministers stated that due “to its historical significance, the conversion of the (Hagia Sophia) mosque, a unique architectural monument of art located in Istanbul, into a museum will please the entire Eastern world and its conversion to a museum will cause humanity to gain a new institution of knowledge.”

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A true arch allows the building of very high and wide doorways. To form a true arch, stones are laid against each other in a semicircular pattern in such a way that load or weight of the entire structure is shifted to the ‘keystone’, a specially shaped stone at the apex (highest point) of the arch. Because of this offsetting pressure, the overall structure does not collapse due to its own excessive weight, as it would otherwise do. So, true arches allow much larger and more majestic-looking doorways than straight doors, which would need many, many pillars around the room to hold up the structure.

The first use of the True Arch in India is perhaps in the mausoleum of the last slave king Ghiyas-ud-din Balban in 1287. The Turks were familiar with the True Arch for much longer, in fact Emperor Septimius Severus rebuilt the provincial city of Byzantium in 203 CE and endowed it with a Hippodrome — a course for horse racing, I have seen a fully preserved True Arch in one of the walls of the Hippodrome and there will be more. The True Arch existed in Ephesus from at least the 1st century of the Common Era and at the capital city from 200 years earlier and the Turks could not have been unaware of the form.

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Ancient Indian architecture was lush and ornate, with sculptures small and big, adorning the gates, the walls and the tall conical roofs of sprawling temple complexes. However, with the Turkic invasions and Sultanate rule in North India from the 12th century, there was suddenly a totally new style in vogue.

Calligraphy replaced statues, and single roomy buildings replaced many smaller ones, topped by the larger curved arches and domes we associate with Islamic architecture in India, and indeed, across the world. Well, this is the story of how the arch and dome first came to India!

Part of Islamic culture

The arch was extensively used across their empire by the Romans, and could be seen everywhere, from their gigantic aqueducts to triumphal arches and the Colosseum. Its popularity spread to pre-Islamic Persia. Like other aspects of Persian culture – calligraphy, geometric designs and so on – arches eventually became an essential part of Islamic culture.

When Qutb-ud-din Aibak became the governor of Delhi in 1192 AD many centuries later, he ordered a brand new mosque to be built to mark his victory. He naturally wanted to have it look like the mosques of his homeland…except, Indian stonemasons, talented and skilled as they were, did not know how to construct ‘true’ arches and domes at all!

Many attempts

What they did know was a common technique used in Hindu architecture called ‘corbelling’, in which successively overhanging layers of bricks rose up to cover the span of the doorway. However, this method did not have the load-bearing capacity to support very large openings. Thus Indian temple gates were very tall, but narrow. Aikbak’s Indian stone-masons decided to improvise – they continued to build arch-like openings using the stacked corbelling (i.e. the ‘fake’ arch). However, they simply chiselled away the inner surfaces of the protruding brick corbels into curved shapes, so it would look a true arch!

Now because they were not ‘true’ load-bearing arches, the gates were still much narrower than the ones found in Central Asia, but happily enough, the Sultans were happy with it! Early tombs like those of Sultan Ghari and Iltutmish are good examples of this fake-but-true arch style.

Now, it’s perfected

It was only with the tomb of Balban in 1287 CR, nearly fifty years later, that the first true arch was employed in India, after the Indian stone-masons had learned the technique from their foreign counterparts! Other early examples were the Alai Darwaza in the Qutb complex, and the Jamat Khana Masjid in Nizamuddin, built during Khilji times.

The arch technique was soon honed and expanded, and by Mughal times, we see large exquisite arches, such as in Humayun’s  tomb and of course, the Taj Mahal.

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Sigiriya, sometimes, called Sinhagiri, is an ancient rock fortress located in the northern Matale District near the town of Dambulla in Sri Lanka. A site of historical and archaeological significance, Sigiriya is dominated by a massive 200 metre-high column of rock surrounded by dense jungle. It gets its name from the giant lion statue between whose paws lies a staircase which gives access to the site.

Built in the 5th Century, Sigiriya is home to an ancient palace, beautiful gardens and fabulous frescos. It remained covered by the jungle until British archaeologists discovered it in the 1800s.

Today, Sigirita is a UNESCO World Heritage Site visited by thousands of tourists every year.

History of the city

Sigiriya was built by King Kashyapa I, who ruled the Moriya, the native Sinhalese dynasty. According to legends, Kashyapa orchestrated the assassination of his own father King Dhatusena, and expelled his half-brother to usurp the throne. Fearing attack by his half-brother, Kashyapa moved his capital from Anuradhapura to Sigiriya and built a giant fortress and palace on top of the cliff there.

Sigiriya remained the capital of the Moriya until Kashyapa’s half-brother returned and defeated Kashyapa. Unwilling to concede defeat, Kashyapa killed himself. Following his death, Sigiriya is said to have been used as a Buddhist Monastery until the 14th Century.

After the 14th Century, Sigiriya remained hidden from the outside world and was known only to the world and was known only to the locals. Once the British took over Sri Lanka, civil servant George Turnour worked with a Buddhist monk to translate an ancient 5th Century chronicle, the Mahavamsa, from the Sri Lankan Pali language into English. He also studied the Culavamsa, which narrated the story of Kashyapa. In 1827, Jonathan Forbes, a Scottish officer, befriended Turnour and decided to look for Sigiriya upon hearing Kashyapa’s story.

In 1831, he set off to find Sigiriya, based on information given by the locals. Eventually, he found the large rock and noticed platforms and galleries cut into the rock face. Forbes, however, was unsure if it was the Sigiriya he had read about in texts and decided to abandon the expedition. A few years later, when he returned, he traced the moat around the gardens at the foot of the rock. However, he did not climb it.

Finally, British mountaineers reached the top in 1851, and the task of surveying the site fell in the hands of the Archaeological Commissioner of Ceylon, Harry C.P. Bell. Bell’s study at the end of the 19th Century has since served as the basis for all the studies conducted on the site.

Mirror Wall

This wall was once so highly polished than the king could see his reflection as he walked alongside it. Today, however, the polish has faded, and what’s left are scribbles by visitors on a range of subjects – some dating back to the 8th Century.

The wall is currently barricaded to protect the scribbles and whatever little polish remaining on the wall.

Lion’s Paws

The lion’s paws are located at the northern end of the rock. Sigiriya derives its name from this. The paws were discovered by Bell in 1898. At the time, a gigantic lion stood here. The final ascent to the top began here on a staircase that would pass between the lion’s paws and end at its mouth. Today, however, the 5th Century lion’s head has disappeared and only its paws and a few flights of stairs remain.

Frescoes and paintings

When it was found, Sigiriya’s rock face had extensive galleries decorated with wall paintings. These wall paintings are some of Sri Lanka’s most prized possessions. There are a total of 21 surviving frescoes in Sigiriya. These mostly represent apsaras, celestial singers and dancers.

The walls of the rock face have over 1,000 graffiti done by monks and pilgrims who visited the site between the eighth and 13th Centuries.

Gardens

Found at the foot of the rock, the gardens of Sigiriya are among the oldest landscaped gardens in the world. They are divided into three distinct forms – water gardens, boulder gardens and terraced gardens.

The water gardens include bathing pools, little islands with pavilions, and landscaped borders among others. The boulder gardens features boulders that once served as the base for monastery buildings, while the terraced gardens are formed from a natural hill at the base of the rock.

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Stories within

What can a single image tell you about a place, its culture or the time? Apparently, a lot. In 2018, a family in London showcased the postcard correspondence between two of its members: Annie Reynolds and her niece May. The postcards, dated between 1912 and 1919, have beautiful artwork that captures the essence of places in India they lived in – Madras, Nilgiris, Mahabalipuram and so on – through local landmarks, monuments and family photographs. The handwritten messages on them are relatively insignificant, but the postcards encapsulate the culture of that time.

The origins

Postcards probably originated in 1777 with the start of the postal services, when French engraver Demaison printed a sheet engraved with multiple cards and greetings. The messages could be cut out and posted to recipients. The idea didn’t really take off: people wanted their messages to be private, not open for everyone to see. Besides, the postage cost, which was quite high, was payable by the receiver. Often, people simply refused to receive postal messages. This changed when British postal reforms brought down the cost of domestic post while ensuring profits for the postal system by making the sender pay the postage in advance. Around 1840, when the Penny Black postage stamp made its debut, writer Theodore Hook mailed the first hand-painted picture postcard to himself as a practical joke. The card sold for 31, 750 pounds at a 2002 auction.

Born again

In February 1861, when the U.S. government allowed privately printed cards to be posted, printer John P. Charlton patented the design of the postal card. He sold the rights to stationer Hymen Lipman who went on to invent lead pencils and erasers and set up the first envelope company in the U.S. The Lipman Cards, however, were forgotten in the wake of the Civil War and remained buried for almost a decade. It was in 1869, in distant Austria, that the postcard was reborn. Emmanuel Hermann, an Economics professor, proposed the postcard as a cheaper and easier alternative to handwritten letters, Austrian Post, in response, designed a light-brown, rectangular card with space for the address on one side and the message on the other. A postage stamp was imprinted on the top right corner, and the postcard’s cost was half that of a normal letter.

By the 1880s, sketched images started appearing on postcards. Called “Vignettes”, these postcards depicted ordinary scenes and had space for a handwritten message. Soon, Germany became the hub of chromolithography – a technique to reproduce multi-colour photographs. Bulk of the postcards during this period was produced in Germany. In 1889, when the Eifel Tower was thrown open to public, French engraver Charles Libonis designed postcards featuring the monument. The novelty postcards, known as Libonis, became popular souvenirs.

Picture postcards

With the growing popularity of photographs on postcards in the 1890s, Kodak, a producer of cameras and related products, launched a negative that was the same size as a postcard, and with that picture postcards became easier to produce. In 1893, they were commercially produced, packed and sold as a set in the U.S. for the first time. The beautifully detailed and coloured pictures became an instant success as souvenirs and gifts.

The 1900s can be considered the ‘golden era’ of postcards. The postcard design underwent change with the front fully dedicated to artwork and the back divided between the address and the message. The Divided Back Postcard – artistic, convenient and inexpensive – could be mailed internationally and became a hugely popular mode of communication. Landscapes, local sights, portraits, humour and even current events made up the artwork. During World War I, soldiers used postcards to exchange poignant messages with friends and family, recording compelling stories of their times, some of which have survived to the present.

And today…

Postcards continued to evolve with technological advances in the printing and publishing industry. Curt Teich, one of the offset printing’s pioneers, added postcards to his existing portfolio of newspaper and magazines. His printing technique gave the postcard a slightly embossed look and showed the artwork in sharper, brighter colours. Became the texture of the finished postcard resembled linen, they came to be known as linen postcards. As time passed, a white border was added to the postcard to make the high-precision task of cropping and trimming the borders easier.

The current postcard era, which began around 1939, is the chrome era. These contemporary postcards have a glossy finish and have more of a souvenir value. Communication has been taken over by text messages, voice messages and email. Photographs are shared over social media. Postcards, while not dead yet, play second fiddle to digital media.

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One of the 15 municipalities forming Havana in Club, Old Havana is at the heart of the city. Touted as one of the most impressive historical cities in the Caribbean, Old Havana is known for its narrow streets and architectural structures mainly built by the Spanish.

Havana was founded in 1519 by the Spanish conqueror Panfilo de Narvaez. A few years later, the city was attacked and burnt down by French pirates. Once they left, the Spanish realised the importance of defending the city and started building fortresses (some of the oldest in the Americas) and walls. By the 17th Century, Havana had become one of Caribbean’s main centres for ship-building.

Old Havana’s original layout is still intact, except the walls that were broken down to expand the city. Divided into five plazas – Plaza de Armas, Plaza Vieja, Plaza de San Francisco, Plaza del Cristo, and Plaza de la Catedral – there are over 900 historical buildings in Old Havana. The city’s neoclassical, baroque and art deco architectural styles stand testimony to Havana’s Caribbean, French, British, and Spanish roots.

Due to conservation efforts in the 19th and 20th Centuries, the architecture of Old Havana has stood the test of time. Today, tourists from all over the world throng to Old Havana to capture a glimpse of the historical city and its many architectural buildings.

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The Castle of the Royal Force/Army is a bastion fort located in the Plaza des Armas Square. It was the first big fortification to have been constructed in Havana. The oldest preserved fort in the Americas, it was built in 1577 serve as a replacement for an earlier fort which was badly damaged by French pirates.

The historic monument is most famous for its watchtower (added in 1634 and now a symbol of Havana city), adorned with a bronze statuette in the shape of a woman (replica of La Giraldilla of the Seville Cathedral, Spain) that is used as a weather vane.

The fortress’s exterior consists of a square segregated into nine equal sections with four regular bastions reminiscent of Italian and French Renaissance architecture and a pit with a perimetral wall.

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 Located in Plaza de la Catedral, the Havana Cathedral is one of 11 Catholic cathedrals on the island. Designed by Italian architect Francesco Borromini, the cathedral was built between 1748 and 1777. It is one of the oldest cathedrals in the Americas. The cathedral was home to the remains of Italian explorer and coloniser Christopher Columbus between 1796 and 1898, after which it was moved to the Seville Cathedral in Spain.

The building is simply stunning in every way possible. The famous façade is simply gorgeous. It has been designed and constructed in the Baroque style of architecture. The most interesting thing about it are the two towers which are of different heights but still seem to fit.

The interiors are equally lovely and the church has inspired many a great artist. The old charm of this building cannot be denied and it is a Havana essential on your trip.

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Built on a rock overlooking the sea, the Morro Castle was designed by Italian engineer Juan Baustista Antonelli to guard the entrance to the Havana bay. The fort’s most distinctive feature was a huge chain running from EI Morro to another castle nearby. This chain was raised when hostile ships were spotted. It was so thick that ships could not go past it, in 1762, the British lay siege to the fort. It was later recovered by the Spanish under a treaty.

 Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro is one the symbols of Havana and one of the most visited places by both tourist and locals. It has been photographed and painted by many and has also appeared in several movies. Inside are several exhibitions, but the construction itself is worth a visit.

Along with a deep moat and two batteries, additional defence was originally provided by an ocean-side tower, replaced in 1844 by a lighthouse called the Faro del Morro. Now a symbol of Havana, it offers one of the finest views of the city, especially at sunset. 

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Home to the Cuban National Ballet, the Great Theatre of Havana was designed by the Belgian architect Paul Belau. It served as a community-social centre for the Galician immigrants of Havana. Located in Paseo del Prado, a promenade in Havana, the Great Theatre hosts the international Ballet Festival of Havana (Festival de Ballet de La Habana) once every two years.

Years later, in 1914, the theater itself and the buildings around it were purchased to build in that location the Centro Gallego, which took up the entire block.. The construction of this center, one of the most important of its kind in the city, was commissioned to the US Company Purdy & Henderson. Inside, the old Tacón Theater was remodeled, integrating it with the new elements.

The façades of this building can only be described as magnificent. Decorated with sculptures and other stone adornments, as well as marble and bronze works. The frontage features four groups of sculptures in white marble by Giuseppe Moretti representing charity, education, music and theater.

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Colloquially called La Cabana, the Fort of Saint Charles was built in the 18th Century on the eastern side of Havana Bay, following the attack on the Morro Castle by the British. Like the Morro Castle, La Cabana also stands on a large rock overlooking the sea. By the time it was completed, it was the second largest colonial military installation in the New World.

Over the next couple of centuries, the fort served as a base for Spain and later Cuba. Today, it houses several museums and is a popular tourist spot.

It cost so much that King Carlos III requested a spyglass to see it, claiming that such an expensive project–approximately 14 million gold pesos–could surely be seen from Madrid.

During the wars of independence, this fortress was used as a prison and prisoners faced firing squads in its pits. In the 20th century, it was used as a prison and storage facility, and shortly after the triumph of the 1959 Revolution, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara established his command headquarters here.

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The Peacock Throne was a famous jewelled throne that was the seat of the Mughal emperors of India. It was commissioned in the early 17th century by emperor Shah Jahan and was located in the Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of Private Audiences, or Ministers’ Room) in the Red Fort of Delhi.

Built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666), the Peacock Throne was said to have cost him twice as much as the Taj Mahal. According to historical accounts, the throne is believed to have been wrought out of 1150 kg of gold and 230 kg of precious stones, with two open peacock tails made of gold at the back, and was modelled on the Throne of Solomon.[i] The famous Koh-i-Noor diamond was one of the many historical stones to adorn it, along with the world’s second largest spinel ruby (the Timur ruby). A poem by the Mughal poet-laureate Qudsi, in praise of the emperor, was embedded in it in emerald letters.

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Pietra dura in the Indian Subcontinent, is a term for the inlay technique of using cut and fitted, highly polished colored stones to create images. It is considered a decorative art. The stonework, after the work is assembled loosely, is glued stone-by-stone to a substrate after having previously been “sliced and cut in different shape sections; and then assembled together so precisely that the contact between each section was practically invisible”.

Pietre dure is an Italian plural meaning “hard rocks” or hardstones; the singular pietra dura is also encountered in Italian. In Italian, but not in English, the term embraces all gem engraving and hardstone carving, which is the artistic carving of three-dimensional objects in semi-precious stone, normally from a single piece, for example in Chinese jade. The traditional convention in English has been to use the singular pietra dura just to denote multi-colored inlay work. However, in recent years there has been a trend to use pietre dure as a term for the same thing, but not for all of the techniques it covers, in Italian.

By the early part of the 17th century, smaller objects produced by the Opificio were widely diffused throughout Europe, and as far East to the court of the Mughals in India, where the form was imitated and reinterpreted in a native style; its most sumptuous expression is found in the Taj Mahal. In Mughal India, pietra dura was known as Parchin kari, literally ‘inlay’ or ‘driven-in’ work.

Due to the Taj Mahal being one of the major tourist attractions, there is a flourishing industry of Pietra Dura artifacts in Agra ranging from tabletops, medallions, elephants and other animal forms, jewellery boxes and other decorative items. This art form is fully alive and thriving in Agra, India though the patterns in the designs are more Persian than Roman or Medician.

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Red Fort or Lal Quila is one of the most-famous monuments in Delhi. It is situated in the Old Delhi which was called as Shahjahanabad during the reign of Mughal Empire. Red Fort is one of the architectures built by Shah Jahan. It served as a royal residence of Mughal Emperors for many years. Today, Red Fort is one of the top tourist places to visit in Delhi.
Shah Jahan was widely considered the most competent of Emperor Jahangir’s four sons and after Jahangir’s death in late 1627, when a war of succession ensued, Shah Jahan emerged victorious. He put to death all of his rivals for the throne and crowned himself emperor in January 1628 in Agra under the regnal title “Shah Jahan” (which was originally given to him as a princely title). Although an able military commander, Shah Jahan is perhaps best remembered for his architectural achievements. The period of his reign is widely considered the golden age of Mughal architecture. Shah Jahan commissioned many monuments, the best known of which is the Taj Mahal in Agra, which entombs his wife Mumtaz Mahal.

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The beginning

Archaeological evidence shows that the Japanese archipelago was inhabited at the end of the last glacial period. Composed of five major islands (Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku and Okinawa) and roughly 7,000 smaller ones, the country is about 1,45,000 square miles of land, with 75% comprising steep slopes that rest on four tectonic plates. The shifting plates have resulted in volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, creating Japan’s lush forests, valleys and mountains.

Historians divide Japan’s early history into three eras: The Jomon era, which lasted until 400 B.C., had a hunter-gatherer culture. The Yayoi era (300 B.C to 300 A.D.) saw the beginning of settlements. The Kofun era (300 A.D. to 710 A.D.) saw territorial expansion and dominance of the Yamato clan, followed by the emergence of new political and administrative patterns, with Nara becoming the first permanent capital of Japan. After 1185, the shoguns, or military leaders, who are technically appointed by the Emperor, started gaining power. In 1192, shogun Minamoto Yorimoto established the military government, with its capital in Kyoto. The shogun rule lasted an uninterrupted 700 years. Its final era was led by the Tokugawa dynasty, founded by Tokugawa leyasu, who moved the capital from Kyoto to Edo, originally a fishing village. Soon, Edo became the centre of economic, political and cultural power. In the 1720s, with a population of over a million people, Edo was one of the largest cities in the world.

Gets its name

In 1868, with the shogunate period ending, Emperor Mutsuhito officially renamed Edo Tokyo, meaning ‘Eastern Capital’. The Emperor’s Meiji, or “enlightened rule”, era spanned the years 1868 to 1912 – a period of rapid modernization that commenced with the first telecommunications line established between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1869. The construction of roads, modern buildings and the introduction of steam locomotives followed, accelerating Japan’s (and Tokyo’s) progress, until the Great Kanto earthquake stuck Tokyo in 1923. Measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, it demolished nearly half of the city, killing almost 1,40,000 citizens. The quake not only sparked off a fire but also caused a tsunami. Forty-ft high waves destroyed hundreds of houses and killed several hundred people.

It was a mammoth undertaking to pull Tokyo back on its feet. But amidst the rubble and ruin, some people saw the opportunity to build a city of the future. Within six years, Tokyo was rebuilt. A subway like was inaugurated in 1927. Tokyo Airport opened its gates in 1931, and Tokyo Port, in 1941. By 1935, with a population of six million, Tokyo had entered the league of London and New York.

Within a decade, the city was back to rubble. On 10 March 1945, 15 square miles of Tokyo was demolished and half the population killed in the World War II bombing raid by the U.S. On that single night, the population went down by half. The heat generated by the explosives melted buildings, metal and caused canals to boil over. The devastation caused by the raid far exceeded any other during the War.

Falling and getting up. Again

During the 1950s, rose again from the ashes: television broadcasting began in 1953, and in 1956, Japan joined the United Nations. The 1960s saw rapid economic growth, technological innovation and manufacturing industry expansion, with Tokyo producing everything from household appliances to transport equipment, automobiles, cameras, furniture, textiles, publishing and printing equipment. By 1962, Tokyo was a megacity, with a population over 10 million. By 1964, the bullet train was operational.

Through the 1970s and 80s, Tokyo was unstoppable. It became a global presence and one of the world’s most attractive cities with common citizens’ lives enhanced by cutting-edge, innovative technology. Despite its vast population, Tokyo has the best infrastructure and is one of the safest cities in the world. School children with backpacks larger than themselves take public transport – buses, monorail, railroad – by themselves and 10 million people go to work and back using the subway ferries every day.

One of the best, today!

For nearly, 50 years now, Tokyo has been the top economic city (New York is second). In 2018, it ranked third in the Global Power City Index, a measure of its attractiveness as the preferred location for businesses. While environmental pollution is a problem that Tokyo shares with other megacities, its citizens do their bit to keep it in check – preferring bicycles for transport, guarding their packs and nature spots and ensuring that corporate pay heavy penalties for pollution. With regular earthquake drills, Tokyo is ready to respond to and overcome natural disasters while constantly reinventing itself to improve its place in the world. No wonder this global city has come so far from its origins as a fishing village!

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Located on the slopes of Mount Esphino, in Braga, Portugal, the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte was developed over a period of 600 years. Combining different architectural styles, this property has inspired the architecture of several churches around the world. Some of the outstanding features of the Sanctuary are a stairway, several fountains, statues and paintings.

The Bom Jesus ensemble is centred on a Via Crucis that leads up the western slope of the mount. It includes a series of chapels that house sculptures evoking the Passion of Christ, as well as fountains, allegorical sculptures and formal gardens. The Via Crucis culminates at the church, which was built between 1784 and 1811.

The granite buildings have whitewashed plaster façades, framed by exposed stonework. The celebrated Stairway of the Five Senses, with its walls, steps, fountains, statues and other ornamental elements, is the most emblematic Baroque work within the property.

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The French Austral Lands and Seas is a group of isolated volcanic islands in the sub-Antarctic region. Comprising the Crozet Archipelago, Kerguelen Islands and Amsterdam and St Paul Islands, the property is known for its rich diversity of marine birds, especially the world’s largest colony of King Penguins and yellow-nosed albatrosses. The islands are also home to mammals such as seals and dolphins.

Because of its huge size – more than 672 000 km2 –, this site contains a high representation of the biodiversity of the Southern Ocean and protects the ecological processes that are essential for these species to thrive. For this reason, the territory plays a key role in the health of oceans worldwide, particularly in the regulation of the carbon cycle.

As a result of their great distance from centres of human activities, the French Austral Lands and Seas are very well preserved showcases of biological evolution and therefore unique areas for scientific research, particularly for long-term monitoring of populations of marine birds and mammals and for the study of the effects of global change. Aware of this exceptional heritage, the authority of the French Austral Lands and Seas, through the nature reserve and with the commitment of the scientific community, has adopted a proven and recognized management system to ensure its preservation for future generations.

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Dating back nearly 50 million years, the Hyrcanian Forests of Iran run some 850 km along the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. The ancient forests are known for their floristic biodiversity and rich ecosystems due to the ideal climatic conditions in the area. Apart from their flora, the forests are home to nearly 60 mammal and 180 bird species, including the endangered Persian leopard.

The forests, which were on UNESCO’s tentative World Heritage List since 2007, now become Iran’s second natural site and the 24th site inscribed in UNESCO’s world heritage list. Its biological diversity is of economic and social value. In fact, 44% of the vascular plants known in Iran are found in the Hyrcanian region, which only covers 7% of the country. Ali Asghar Mounesan, head of Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization, welcomed the measure calling it a supportive move towards saving Iran’s natural resources. 

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Situated in Cheshire, United Kingdom, the Jodrell Bank Observatory is owned by the University of Manchester, the Observatory opened in 1945 and has been at the forefront of astronomical research for decades. It is the home of the Lovell Telescope, which is the third largest steerable radio telescope in the world. The telescope weighs 3.200 tonnes!

The observatory tracked United States and Russian crafts during the space race and pioneered radio astronomy, using radio waves instead of visible light to understand the universe.

The observatory becomes the 32nd UNESCO World Heritage Site in the UK and joins the prestigious list alongside international sites such as Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal.

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Consisting of an aqueduct, water towers, canals, ornate fountains and hundreds of bridges, the 800-year old water management system of the city of Augsburg Germany, was listed as a World Heritage Site 2019. The 2000-year old city’s water system has evolved in successive phases since the 14th Century and has provided clean drinking water and sanitation to the area since the Middle Ages. The city’s engineers were forerunners in damming and redirecting river water from the Lech, Wertach and Singold streams.

The water flowed through hollowed pine logs connected with metal casts to ornamental fountains in the city, including the Mercury and Hercules fountains.

It also entered the city’s butchers house, the Stadtmetzg, where the flowing water helped to cool the meat and dispose of the waste.

Later water power was used for industry, with water wheels driving mills and pumping stations as Augsburg became an early centre of textile and paper production.

With the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the city saw the creation of the first large hydroelectric power plant, at nearby Wolfzahnau.

One of the waterways, the Ice Canal, was designed to keep free floating ice from entering the city, and in 1970 became the world’s first artificially created whitewater canoe course, used for the 1972 Olympics.

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This World Heritage Site is located near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Dating back to the 18th Century, Paraty is one of Brazil’s best-preserved colonial coastal towns. It is lined with cobblestone streets and calm beaches. Ilha Grande, once the home of a maximum-security prison housing Brazil’s most-wanted, is today home to some of the world’s most threatened species that find shelter in the four protected areas of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. With Paraty’s rich culture, and Ilha Grande’s vast forests, this property is listed as a mixed world heritage site.

“The most interesting thing about this title is not to attract tourists to a specific event. All cultural and environmental beauties are in the municipality for 365 days a year, so the visitor will be able to enjoy it all on any day. This is very important because it unlocks the flow of tourism on specific dates of events. It is very good because it is another action against the seasonality of tourism,” argued Paraty Culture Secretary Cristina Masela.

“In Paraty and Ilha Grande, we see in an exceptional and unique way a combination of natural beauty, unique biodiversity, cultural manifestations, a preserved historical complex, and archaeological testimonies important for understanding the evolution of humanity on planet Earth”, said the president of Institute of National Historical and Artistic Heritage.

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Located in the Yellow Sea eco region in China, this natural heritage site is the central node of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF). The flyway boasts the largest number of endangered and critically endangered species of birds in the world due to its rich biodiversity. Nearly 280 species of fishes and over 500 species of invertebrates are also found here.

The two components of the property are both along the coast of the Yellow Sea: 1) YS1- the Jiangsu Dafeng National Nature Reserve, the southern section and Dongsha Experimental Zone of Jiangsu Yancheng National Nature Reserve and the Tiaozini area (totaling 173,110 ha including a buffer zone of 28,271); and 2) YS-2 the middle section of Jiangsu Yancheng National Nature Reserve (95,589 ha including a buffer zone of 51,785). The total area of the two components is 188,643 ha plus a buffer zone of 80,056 ha.

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Located near Sawahluntro, West Sumatra, Indonesia, the Ombilin coal mine was built in the 19th Century for the extraction, processing and transport of high-quality coal when Indonesia was under the control of the Dutch government. Its workforce was drawn from the local population and supplemented by convict labourers from Dutch-controlled areas. It is considered the oldest coal mining site in Southeast Asia.

 It comprises the mining site and company town, coal storage facilities at the port of Emmahaven and the railway network linking the mines to the coastal facilities. The Ombilin Coal Mining Heritage was built as an integrated system that enabled the efficient deep-bore extraction, processing, transport and shipment of coal. It is also an outstanding testimony of exchange and fusion between local knowledge and practices and European technology.

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One of the three national parks in Iceland, the Vatnajokull National Park was founded in 20087 when authorities combined the 8300-sq-km Vatnajokull ice cap with the already existing Skaftafell and Jokulsargljufur national parks. The park is known for its rich diversity in landscape, biosphere and cultural remains. Its landscape features are created by the combined forces of glacial ice, rivers, volcanic and geothermal activities.

The second-largest national park in Europe is now Iceland’s third UNESCO World Heritage Site, joining Thingvellir National Park and the volcanic island of Surtsey. Vatnajökull National Park is a natural marvel where active volcanoes meet arctic ice in a constant battle for survival. A land of shifting glaciers, lava fields, sudden glacial floods, ice caves, unique wildlife, fresh glacial rivers, and deep canyons — all of which showcase the dynamic nature of fire and ice in real-time.

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Located across provinces of South Korea, the Seowon academies were educational facilities built during the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910). They served as publishing houses, libraries and venues for discussing social and political matters. Renowned Confucian scholars were honoured at the Seowon. Over the centuries, the Seawon have survived the turbulence of the country and maintained their original form. Nine of the Seowon sites have been inscribed on the World Heritage List. With the addition of Seowon, Korea now have a total of 14 world heritages. Diverse tour programs and events are planned to attract both domestic and international travelers to Seowon.

Among the many Seowon in Korea, nine were chosen and added to the list of Korea’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites as follows: Sosuseowon, Namgyeseowon, Oksanseowon, Dosanseowon, Piramseowon, Dodongseowon, Byeongsanseowon, Museongseowon, and Donamseowon.

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