1971 SNAPSHOTS TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE
It must have been an unusual sight for those strolling beside the River Thames in central London: renowned English film director Alfred Hitchcock, holding a model of his own head. To promote his penultimate film Frenzy, a teaser trailer was made with a model of Hitchcock shown floating through the river. The real Hitchcock then breaks the fourth wall and introduces the plot to viewers – a thriller about a serial killer who is terrorising London. During the filming, Hitchcock could be seen walking along the riverbank to reassure worried onlookers that it was not, in fact, him floating in the water.
YEAR IN FOCUS....
SNAPSHOTS OF THE WORLD FROM ONE YEAR IN THE PAST
1913
1 December 1913 FULL SPEED AHEAD Henry Ford – inventor of the widely affordable Model T car – introduces the first moving assembly line (using rope-and-pulley conveyor belts) to his factory. This revolutionary method reduced the manufacturing time of a Model T from 12 hours down to less than three; the process was soon replicated across the world, spurring on mass production.
DIED: 31 MARCH JP Morgan John Pierpont Morgan was one of the most powerful US financiers before World War I and founded JP Morgan and Company. In 1902 he helped merge a number of steel firms to forge United States Steel Corporation – the first billion-dollar corporation.
BORN: 4 FEBRUARY Rosa Parks In 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat for a white citizen, sparking a boycott that influenced the US civil rights movement. Rosa was arrested and lost her job for opposing the Jim Crow laws, which championed racial segregation.
14 October 1913 BRITAIN ROCKED BY DISASTER Residents of the mining town of Senghenydd in South Wales are woken by a fearsome bang – which turned out to be what remains Britain’s worst mining disaster to date. It’s believed a spark caught in the bowels of the mine, igniting underground gas and causing a massive explosion. Of the more than 900 miners below ground at the time, 439 lost their lives, as did one rescuer.
Summer 1913 TROUBLE IN THE BALKANS
20 August 1913 CUTLERY RULES
56.7°
The highest surface air temperature ever recorded on Earth – in Death Valley, California, on 10 July 1913
4 June 1913 SYMBOL OF SUFFRAGE In front of a crowd of thousands, including King George V, militant suffragette Emily Davison runs out in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby. She was seriously injured and died four days later. It is still unclear if Davison intended to take her own life or merely hoped to interrupt the race. Whatever her intentions, she was immortalised as a martyr for the suffragette cause.
A Sheffield metallurgist Harry Brearley adds chromium to molten iron and invents ‘rustless steel’ – which today we call stainless steel. His discovery brought steel cutlery to the masses (Sheffield was traditionally the centre of tableware production outside London) and also provided new, durable materials for the construction industry.
The Treaty of London officially ends the First Balkan War – fought between the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro) since October 1912. By June 1913, divisions had erupted within the Balkan League over Macedonia, and the Second Balkan War broke out before being settled in August. Tensions in the Balkans continued to simmer and came to a head in 1914, with the assassination of the AustroHungarian heir, Franz Ferdinand.
THIS MONTH... 1944 ANNIVERSARIES THAT HAVE MADE HISTORY
ANNE FRANK WRITES HER LAST DIARY ENTRY
H
idden in a secret annexe, Anne Frank hunches over her diary, the slight scratching of her pen barely breaking the room’s oppressive stillness. It’s the first day of August in 1944, and as Anne adds another entry to her diary – a battered school exercise jotter, the third notebook that she’s filled with her innermost thoughts – she cannot know these written words will be her last. Three days later, the eight inhabitants of the annexe – Anne, her parents Otto and Edith, her sister Margot, and the van Pels family and family friend Fritz Pfeffer – were arrested by members of the Gestapo. They had been given up by an anonymous source. Anne was sent to various concentration camps, ultimately finding herself at Bergen-Belsen, where she and her sister succumbed to typhus. Anne was just 15 when she died. The Frank family went into hiding in July 1942, but had already upturned their lives once before to escape persecution, when they relocated from the increasingly anti-Semitic Germany to Amsterdam in the early 1930s. Anne was only four at the time. Their new home did not stay safe for long, though: in 1940, Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands. Anne (along with Amsterdam’s other Jewish children) was barred from the city’s public schools and forced to wear a yellow star on her clothes. However, there was one small comfort in the face of the encroaching darkness: on her 13th birthday, Anne received a diary. Covered with white and red checked cloth, it fastened with a small lock. This birthday, on 12 June 1942, was the last before she and her family went into hiding. Edith baked biscuits for Anne to share with her friends at school, and a party was also thrown in Anne’s honour, complete with a strawberry pie and a room decorated with flowers.
ABOVE: The cloth-covered diary that Anne Frank received for her 13th birthday MAIN: Anne was still a schoolgirl when she went into hiding with her family
“Anne devoted pages of her diary to describing the tension that crackled between the annex’s inhabitants” The teenager soon set about filling the pages of her treasured birthday gift, and her first entries reflected her family’s precarious circumstances, describing the segregation and discrimination they were experiencing. Daily life grew increasingly fraught for Jews, with the imposition of ever more restrictions. When Margot received a callup for a German work camp, it was the final straw: the family went into hiding on 6 July 1942. Their refuge was a secret
room in the house behind Otto’s office on Prinsengracht 263, with its entrance hidden behind a moveable bookcase. The Franks were joined by four other Jews: Hermann van Pels, one of Otto’s business associates; Hermann’s wife, Auguste; his son, Peter; and later by a German dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. Anne devoted pages of her diary to describing the tension that existed between the annexe’s inhabitants, forced to stay indoors at all times in near silence so that the staff working in the warehouse below would not become suspicious. This secretive, fearful existence, punctuated by the blare of air raid sirens and the bellow of exploding bombs, was to be Anne’s life for two years and 35 days. During this time, she was unable to see the sky or feel the sun on her skin. To fill the hours, Anne studied
Otto Frank with his daught ers, Margot and Anne. Otto was the only Frank to survive
and read books on European history and literature, curled her hair and painted her nails, received short visits from the family’s outside helpers – and, of course, wrote in her diary. With no friends in which to confide, Anne turned to writing to articulate her fears, boredom, and the struggles she faced. On 16 March 1944, she wrote: “The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings; otherwise I’d absolutely suffocate.” She addressed many of the entries to ‘Kitty’, an imaginary friend.
THE MIGHTY PEN
Anne harboured hopes of one day returning to school, as well as spending a year in Paris and another in London. She dreamed of studying the history of art and learning multiple languages, while seeing “beautiful dresses” and “doing all kind of exciting things”. And she confided in her diary on 11 May 1944 that she ultimately wanted to become “a journalist, and later on a famous writer”. In addition to keeping her diary, Anne wrote short stories and collated her favourite sentences by other writers in a special notebook. But it was in her diary
The Franks’ hiding place is now a museum. This is the entrance to the annexe
G SECRETS
SIBLIN only writer Anne wasn’t the r older sister, in the family: he pt a diary while Margot, also ke annexe. Anne the in she lived veral times se it ed referenc diary. n ow r he in ot’s However, Marg t account did no survive
Radio Oranje’s monitoring department in London. Its broadcasts inspired Anne’s fervour for writing that she saw a real opportunity for getting published. On 28 March 1944, Anne and her family listened to a BBC programme broadcast illegally by Radio Oranje – the voice of the Dutch government-in-exile. The Dutch Minister of Education, Art and Science, Gerrit Bolkestein (who was exiled in London), urged listeners to preserve their accounts of the war, as he wanted to collate a record of the Dutch experience of Nazi occupation. With
ARCANGEL X1, GETTY X3
THE ROMANS
8
HISTORYEXTRA.COM
FEATURE NAME HERE
YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE
I
t’s hard to imagine Rome as it began – a small town on the banks of the Tiber, at a best guess founded in 753 BC – such is the lasting shadow it has cast across the world. At its height, the empire that bloomed from the Eternal City boasted some 50 million people and stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to Northern Africa and Mesopotamia, making it one of the greatest powers in world history. Today, the Romans and the world they lived in are a source of endless fascination – from the intricacies of daily life (why were they so obsessed with bathing?) and the pantheon of
gods and goddesses they worshipped, to the visceral delights of gladiatorial games and a colourful cast of political leaders – not to mention the panoply of despots, murderers and tyrants. Over the next 26 pages, we’ll be exploring some of the biggest questions surrounding the culture and workings of the Roman Republic and the Empire that followed. What was so good about being a Roman citizen, for instance? What was a Vestal Virgin? And how many Roman emperors actually died of natural causes? Turn the page to begin a story that spans almost a thousand years....
28 The Roman Republic Democracy, politics and power games explored
34 The Roman Empire Its rise and fall, notable emperors and the adoption of Christianity
40 What the Romans did for us Five things we have to thank Roman ingenuity for in the 21st century
42 Slavery in Ancient Rome They weren’t always in chains, but much of Roman society was powered by enslaved people
44 Food and drink Five dining table staples – but what about fast food?
45 Housing and hygiene Explore the Roman fascination with baths, plus take a tour of a country villa
48 Religion and worship Who were the gods and goddesses of Roman culture – and how important were they to daily life?
50 The might of the Roman Army Much of Rome’s expansion was powered by its fearsome army – but what made the Roman military machine so successful?
52 Leisure and relaxation What did Romans do to unwind? Turns out they weren’t all that different to us when it came to having fun...
ANCIENT EGYPT
GUIDE TO MAKING A MUMMY Mummification was an expensive process carried out by skilled embalmers over 70 days. Although it changed gradually over time, it always featured the same basic steps...
The body was washed, then a metal probe inserted up the nose to liquify the brain – which drained away.
A small cut was made in the left side to remove the digestive organs responsible for decomposition.
The intestines, stomach, liver and lungs were treated and buried separately in four Canopic jars (but the heart was left in place since it was believed to contain intelligence and emotion).
The body was dried out for 40 days using a natural salt called natron.
PREPARING FOR DEATH When packing for the Afterlife, there were some essential items needed for the journey
BOOK OF THE DEAD
H Since the dead had to find their way through the Underworld to reach eternity, collections of spells and prayers known as the Book of the Dead were written on papyrus rolls, acting as guide books to the Underworld.
The skin was rubbed with oils and resins to provide a protective coating against ‘harmful forces’, including insects, mould and bacteria. The body was wrapped in many layers of linen wrappings and put in its coffin for burial.
MUMMY WRAPPINGS
TIME IN A LONG AKING M E my TH ing mum
s analys ere able to Scientist w s in 2014 n wrapping at mummificatio th und o ar prove in t Egyp began in so 1,700 years – 4300 BC an believed’ earlier th
H In terms of the correct ‘outfit’ for the journey, the Book of the Dead states that those wishing to reach the Afterlife must be “pure, clean, clothed in fresh linen and anointed with the finest myrrh oil”, referring to the many layers of mummy wrappings protecting the body from damage.
FOOD & DRINK
G Supplies for the long journey to the Underworld and for the Afterlife beyond were accompanied by the prayer “may there be given offerings of bread, beer, beef and fowl and every good and pure thing for your ka”.
THE MOST TERRIFYING CREATURES FROM THE BOOK OF THE DEAD Reaching the Afterlife meant getting past these fearsome guardians
AMMUT AMULETS
G ‘Devourer of the Dead’ was a terrifying goddess with a crocodile’s head, lion’s body and the back legs of a hippopotamus. She waited by the scales of Judgement to eat the hearts of sinners.
F Worn in both life and death, amulets were not only decorative but were thought to protect against harm. Placed over different parts of the body, a whole series of protective amulets included the Eye of Horus, worn to keep the body healthy and complete, and large scarabs (beetle-shaped amulets) placed over the heart.
SHABTIS
H No one wants to work for eternity, so many ancient Egyptians were buried with small servant figurines, or ‘shabtis’, and the ‘Spell for making a shabti do work for the owner in the land of the dead’. The wealthiest tombs contained a shabti for every day of the year, with extra ‘overseer shabtis’ to keep the rest in order.
APEP
G The ‘Eater of Souls’ was the great roaring serpent who tried to swallow the Sun god Ra each night to prevent him rising again, plunging the world into darkness and chaos unless constantly fought against.
SHEZMU
E The ‘Lord of Blood’ hunted sinners for slaughter. He was also a butcher known as ‘the One who dismembers bodies’ and used a wine press to crush human heads instead of grapes.
WWII BATTLES
STALINGRAD NOVEMBER 1942 TO
A Soviet mortar crew runs to take up a new firing position during the Battle of Stalingrad
JANUARY 1943
The three-month battle is often seen to be the war’s turning point: after Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht would make no further advances into the USSR. The mid-November 1942 mobile operation to cut off the city demonstrated for the first time the skill of the rebuilt Red Army. The capitulation of the Sixth Army in the Stalingrad pocket on 31 January was the first major German surrender. Both the German leadership and the population of occupied Europe realised the significance of what had happened: the Third Reich was now on the defensive.
ixth Army S e th f o n o ti la u it p a “ The c s the first a w t e k c o p d ra g lin in the Sta nder” major German surre
& BRIANSK-OREL BELGOROD-KHARKOV JULY-AUGUST 1943 The Battle of Kursk (July 1943) is commonly regarded as one of the three great Soviet victories of WWII, and the first achieved in the summer – unlike Moscow and Stalingrad. Hitler’s offensive against the Kursk salient (Operation Citadel) was indeed halted, but it had only had limited objectives, and the Soviets suffered higher losses. More significant were the counter-offensives that followed Citadel: north of Kursk (Briansk/Orel, Operation Kutuzov) and south of it (Belgorod/Kharkov, Operation Polkovodets Rumiantsev). The Red Army took and held the initiative along the whole southern front. Its advance to the Dnepr River and across western Ukraine to the pre-war border would then continue without significant pause until February 1944.
Soviet soldiers advance past a burning T-34 medium tank during the Battle of Kursk
German soldiers retreat across the last bridge over the Dnepr River – the other routes across having been blown up by their own engineers
NORMANDY JUNE–JULY 1944
To many people in Britain, D-Day (6 June 1944) and the following six weeks of fighting in Normandy is the most obvious ‘significant battle’, since it allowed the rapid liberation of western Europe. The technical complexities of putting thousands of largely untested Allied troops across the Channel and supplying them there were huge; the Germans thought they had a good chance to repel any invasion. After D-Day, Hitler chose to mount a stubborn defence of the Normandy region, and when the main American breakout came, in late July, the burned-out defending forces had no option but to beat a rapid retreat to the German border.
MAIN: US soldiers wade ashore after reaching Omaha Beach RIGHT: British soldiers move inland after landing at Normandy
OPERATION BAGRATION JUNE–JULY 1944
The Soviet offensive in Belorussia (now Belarus), three weeks after D-Day, was bigger than the battle of Normandy. Surprised by the location of the attack, the Germans were overwhelmed by the pace and uninterrupted nature of the advance – within six weeks an entire army group had been destroyed, most of Soviet territory had been liberated, and spearhead units had advanced as far as central Poland. The pressure of Bagration aided the British-American advance from Normandy. The greater significance of the offensive (coupled with the defection of Romania in August) was that the Red Army would end the war in control of all Eastern Europe. d
EVAN MAWDSLEY is Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. His publications include The War for the Seas: A Maritime History of World War II (Yale University Press, 2019) and World War II: A New History (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2020).
WHAT O YOU THID NK? Which WW II you think w battle do a significant? s the most Email thoughts to your haveyours ay@ historyrev ealed.com
A Soviet officer explains the movements of the Red Army against German forces during Operation Bagration
VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT
‘Ace of Spies’. But it was in a Jesuit seminary outside Rome in 1912 – during a book-buying expedition – that Voynich apparently discovered the manuscript to which he would give his name. Voynich, it appears, instantly realised that he had chanced upon something very special. Appended to the manuscript, and no doubt firing Voynich’s imagination further still, was a letter that appeared to shed some light on the document’s history. The correspondence, written in 1665 by imperial physician Johannes Marcus Marci, claimed that the manuscript had once belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who reigned from 1576 to 1612. Its next owner was apparently a Praguebased alchemist called Georg Baresch who, Marci tells us, “devoted unflagging toil” to the quest of deciphering the text and “relinquished hope only with his life”. The book then came into the possession of Marci himself, who sent it on to a Jesuit scholar called Athanasius Kircher in the hope that he could succeed where Baresch had failed.
SEARCH FOR THE SCRIBE
Marci’s missive tells us the manuscript could have been the handiwork of the 13th-century philosopher and alchemist Roger Bacon. Voynich himself called his discovery the “Roger Bacon cypher manuscript”. Case closed? Certainly not.
A whole host of candidates have been put forward as potential authors. “My favourite is that it is the illustrated diary of a teenage space alien who left it behind on Earth,” Ray Clemens, curator at the Beinecke Library, told BBC News in 2014. Voynichologists have argued that the text’s roots lie in tongues ranging from Old Cornish and Old Turkish to the Aztec language of Nahuatl. Others have thrown their weight behind the theory that John Dee – who Roger Bacon, English philosopher and Franciscan friar, was once mooted as the manuscript’s author
was astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I – and the alchemist Edward Kelley conceived the text as an elaborate Tudor hoax. But then, as the centenary of Voynich’s discovery of the book approached, science threw a big bucket of cold water on the theories. In 2009, radiocarbon dating revealed that the vellum on which the text and images were rendered dated to the 15th century – probably somewhere between 1404 and 1438 – a hundred years or so before the Elizabethan bigwigs were in their pomp. The manuscript is
“It’s claimed the ma nuscript once belonged to H oly Roman Emperor Ru dolf II”
Elizabeth I’s astrologer John Dee – seen here performing a chemical reaction in front of the court– was said to have created the manuscript as a jape
LEFT: The strange plants that adorn the pages of the manuscript bear no semblance to any known to science BELOW: Depictions of bathing women led one researcher to label it a women’s ‘health guide’
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THREE MORE INDECIPHERABLE TEXTS The Voynich Manuscript is not the only historical text to have perplexed would-be codebreakers THE ROHONC CODEX
E Sometime in the early 19th century, a book was discovered in Hungary written by an unknown author, for an unknown reason, at an unknown date, in a language that no one can understand. That book is the Rohonc Codex, and though it’s not as celebrated as the Voynich Manuscript, its origins are every bit as murky. Here’s what we know: across its 448 pages, the codex contains hundreds of distinctive characters (perhaps as many as 792), symbols similar to those painted onto cave walls occupied by Scythian monks, and drawings that contain what could be Christian, Muslim and Hindu symbols. It’s been theorised that the text is written in a form of Hungarian, early Romanian, or even Hindi. The rest is mystery.
THE BOOK OF SOYGA
While it’s now widely accepted that John Dee didn’t write the Voynich Manuscript, the Elizabethan astrologer’s connection to the Book of Soyga – a treatise on magic, astrology and demonology – is undeniable. Dee acquired the book in the early 1580s and was enchanted by its combination of protection spells and magical formulas. He was even more fascinated by its final 36 pages, which were written in code, and that’s where things got really weird. In a bid to crack the meaning of the text, Dee and his friend, alchemist and occultist Edward Kelley, apparently summoned the archangel Uriel in order to question him. We can’t be sure what advice Uriel offered, but we do know that versions of the manuscript now reside in the Bodleian and British libraries.
then, it seems, a medieval mystery, not a Tudor one. If Voynichologists believed that the radiocarbon dating would somehow becalm the arguments raging over the provenance of the book, they were to be mistaken. In 2017, historical researcher Nicholas Gibbs provoked something of a backlash when he declared that the manuscript was a women’s health guide – or, as he put it, “A reference book of selected remedies lifted from the standard treatises of the medieval period, an instruction manual for the health and wellbeing of the more well to do women in society.” Gibbs based his argument on the images of bathing women and the repeated use of signs of the Zodiac, both of which were regularly employed in medical treatises in medieval Europe. While he expounded his theory in the much-respected Times Literary
THE LIBER LINTEUS
E Not all mysterious texts are found in books – the Liber Linteus is an Egyptian mummy literally wrapped in an enigma. In 1867, German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch was examining a mummy, purchased in Alexandria a few years earlier, when he discovered writing on the linen in which the body was wrapped. That text would be sent to Vienna, Austria, in 1891 for examination, where it was discovered that it was written in the little-understood language of the Etruscans, an ancient civilisation on the Italian peninsula. Based on the dates and names contained in the writing, it’s now thought that the text was some kind of religious calendar. Though what that calendar was doing wrapped around a dead woman far from the Etruscans’ homeland has thus far defied explanation.
ROCK BOTTOM Women pick out rocks and dirt from a conveyer belt transporting coal at Bickershaw Colliery
Is Caesar salad named after Julius Caesar? SHORT ANSWER
The only thing remotely Roman about this salad is romaine lettuce The Caesar salad did get its name from an Italian, just not that one. Cesare Cardini emigrated to the United States and opened restaurants in California, before moving on to Mexico in order to get away from the no-booze laws of Prohibition. According to his daughter, Rosa, he invented the salad on 4 July 1924. On a busy American Independence Day, his Tijuana restaurant ran low on ingredients, so he had to improvise a new dish with leftover lettuce, eggs, Parmesan and other bits. Simple as that. Or f ber o The num raham maybe not, as there are other claims over who b A in words tossed the first Caesar salad, with Cardini’s mous fa ’s ln Linco ss, rg Addre brother, Alex, and a young employee named Gettysbu e paid his h Livio Santini also in the mix. What is certain is in which the fallen to respects rs. that it had nothing to do with Julius Caesar. ion soldie
LONG ANSWER
272
Who were the Pit Brow Lasses?
Un
SHORT ANSWER
Soot-covered men who risked their lives underground were not the only workers at Britain’s collieries It wasn’t only men who manned Britain’s coal mines. Women initially went underground, too, until the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, which also prohibited all boys under the age of ten from going down the pit. Instead of losing their jobs, women just shifted their occupations above ground. The so-called ‘Pit Brow Lasses’ (also known as ‘Tip Girls’) were stationed at the pit head, or brow, where they loaded the wagons, hauled the coal tubs, and sorted
through the coal. There were plenty in 19th-century society who viewed this as wholly unsuitable employment for women – not least because they wore trousers. In 1887, a group of women from Wigan travelled to London in their working clothes to petition the Home Secretary to let them keep working. They were dubbed an “invasion of colliery Amazons”, but the protest worked, and the Pit Brow Lasses remained in the country’s collieries.
Has the ‘Mona Lisa’ ever been stolen? SHORT ANSWER
Yes – Leonardo da Vinci’s mesmerising beauty went missing for two years It took 24 hours before anyone realised that the ‘Mona Lisa’, missing from her spot at the Louvre, hadn’t simply been taken for cleaning. The thief, an Italian named Vincenzo Peruggia (a former employee) had hidden in a cupboard on 21 August 1911 before removing the famous painting from its frame, shoving it under his white smock and walking out with it the next morning.
LONG ANSWER
MOANIN’ ABOUT LISA The world was obsessed by the missing ‘Mona Lisa’, and many theories swirled
Despite the simplicity of the crime, the police investigation failed to get anywhere for two years. Theories and the list of suspects grew ever more wild – even Pablo Picasso was questioned – and the ‘Mona Lisa’ became the most famous painting in the world. All the while, it was in Peruggia’s apartment. Peruggia’s capture came in 1913, when he tried to sell the painting under the not-so-subtle name of Leonardo. He actually became something of a national hero, serving less than a year in prison, as he claimed his intention had been to return the ‘Mona Lisa’ back to its Italian homeland.
D
ID
YOU KNOW DIE SMILING
?
NOT JUST A PIPE DREAM The lavish ceremony to open the Suez Canal on 17 November 1869. People had wanted to build such a waterway for centuries, but it only became possible in the 19th century. Ferdinand de Lesseps (inset left) secured permission for the project
The Greek philosopher Chrysippus is said to have died of laughter. After watching a donkey eat some figs, he collapsed to the floor in hysterics at his own joke. The punchline? He’d offered the animal wine to wash them down with.
GREEDY PIG
The US Navy recruited a pig as a war bond fundraiser during World War II. Dressed in a crown, silver earrings and a robe, the swine, dubbed King Neptune, was taken around Illinois to be ‘auctioned’, raising $19 million.
SCHOOLBOY REVENGE?
When did the Suez Canal open?
The headmaster of the school where Vladimir Lenin went as a boy was the father of the man who led Russia’s Provisional Government – which was overthrown when Lenin led the 1917 October Revolution.
SHORT ANSWER
An ancient idea needed 19th-century industrialisation for the shipping highway to come into being... By connecting the Mediterranean and Red Seas, the Suez Canal substantially cut maritime routes, so was destined to become a major shipping lane. The 120-mile waterway across the stretch of land linking Africa and Asia opened on 17 November 1869. Canals had been carved out of that part of land since ancient times, as early as 1850 BC, and hopes of one that cut all the way across had been floated for centuries. But construction hadn’t actually got underway until 1859. The former French consul in Cairo, Ferdinand de Lesseps, secured approval for the
LONG ANSWER
project from the Egyptian viceroy, Said Pasha, and the newly formed Suez Canal Company was given the right to operate for 99 years once the waterway was completed. Construction took four years longer than estimated due to the climate, terrain, a cholera epidemic, and a ban on the use of forced labour. Although the French operated the Suez Canal, it was a British ship that had the honour of being first to sail through. The night before the grand opening, the captain of HMS Newport sneakily navigated the craft to the front of the queue of vessels under cover of near-total darkness.
Who was Shaka Zulu? SHORT ANSWER
A warrior ruler who ruthlessly transformed Southern Africa as he built a powerful kingdom The British Army learned just how ferocious the Zulu warriors could be in the 1870s, and that was thanks to the man who turned the Southern African people from a small tribe into a powerful kingdom. The tall, strong warrior Shaka kaSenzangakhona became chief of the Zulu in 1816, and he set about conquering neighbouring lands and peoples. The chief created a fighting force the likes of which the region had never seen before, and he dealt ruthlessly with his enemies. His rule led to a period known as Mfecane, or the Crushing, which saw widespread chaos, warfare and the deaths of perhaps millions of people. Yet for someone with such a fearsome reputation, the name Shaka – meaning intestinal beetle – seems ill-fitting. Shaka was an illegitimate child, so his father tried to claim his lover’s swollen belly had been caused by such a beetle.
LONG ANSWER
PRUDE OR PRUNES
There have been some strange measures to treat sexually transmitted infections throughout history. In 16th-century England, many believed that prunes had special healing powers, and so they were served in many brothels.
What did toshers do? SHORT ANSWER
Decked out in canvas trousers and aprons, they searched the sewers for anything of value Of history’s worst jobs, being a tosher was probably one of the hardest to stomach. Toshers scavenged the sewers of 19th-century London for items to sell – from coins and nails to rope. Dangers included getting lost, being buried by crumbling brickwork, trapped by high tides of water, suffocated by noxious air, and attacked by rats. After 1840, it became illegal to enter the sewers without permission, so they faced arrest, too. A BUM DEAL Toshers searched the sewers for treasur e
LONG ANSWER
BRITAIN’S TREASURES YOUR GUIDE TO EXPLORING THE HERITAGE SITES OF BRITAIN
The remains of the wooden buildings at West Stow suggest that the houses were held up with wooden posts
10 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT...
WEST STOW ANGLO-SAXON VILLAGE SUFFOLK It was built on the banks of the River Lark in Suffolk in the early 5th century, but abandoned by the mid 7th century. It has since been reconstructed with huts, workshops and halls made using traditional building methods.
The Lark Valley has East Anglia’s greatest concentration of prehistoric settlements. There is also evidence of a Romano-British settlement here, an Iron Age farmstead as well as Neolithic burial mounds.
The land here may have been used for farming in the medieval period but by the 14th century, a sand blow had covered the site and it remained hidden until the 20th century.
In the mid-19th century, a nearby Anglo-Saxon cemetery was excavated:
more than 100 skeletons were found with burial goods, but the village was not discovered. Archaeologist Basil Brown (best known for excavating the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship-burial) found Romano-British pottery kilns at West Stow in 1940. Excavations in 1947 uncovered an Anglo-Saxon settlement, and further excavations between 1957 and 1972 unearthed several artefacts of note.
The original buildings would have been made from timber, straw and reeds. Families lived around a central hall – a communal structure without a pit. Excavators found 69 houses and seven halls among the buildings.
It was originally believed that the Anglo-Saxon people lived in a pit with the
house over it. Later finds support the idea that a wooden floor was built over the pit, the latter keeping the floor above dry and warm. Evidence suggests that the people who lived here were farmers who raised cattle, sheep, pigs and goats, and grew wheat and barley.
Pottery found at the site suggests that the villagers traded across East Anglia, and people of a higher status were marked out with gilded brooches and amber beads.
Many of the finds at West Stow emphasise the importance of zoomorphic design (representing animals) in Anglo-Saxon art. Creatures real and mythical were symbolic and could be found on jewellery, weapons and pots.
WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR... GLASS CONE BEAKER
INFORMATION
This glass beaker was probably imported from a Frankish workshop – in modern-day France, Belgium or Germany – and would have been expensive, suggesting that its owner was of high status.
GETTING THERE
West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village is outside Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, just off the A134.
OPENING TIMES AND PRICES PAID ENTRY Open daily* between 10am and 5pm. Adults £6, children £3. The country park that surrounds the village is free to enjoy, with a charge for parking. *Currently closed due to Covid-19; please check website before visiting
FIND OUT MORE
HUT RECONSTRUCTIONS
The majority of the reconstructions at West Stow have been built where the originals once stood, and been made using traditional materials and methods such as thatching. Pits were built underneath the hut floors to keep the room above warm.
weststow.org
FLORID CRUCIFORM BROOCH
KEY DATES
This cross-shaped brooch is one of 49 discovered at West Stow during the cemetery excavation in 1849. Unusual eagle-headed beasts are used for decoration but their meaning is unclear.
cAD 420
Earliest date of Anglo-Saxon occupation of the village
cAD 650
The village enters a decline, and is almost completely abandoned by the middle of the 7th century
c14th century
The village is used for farming and ploughing
1849
An Anglo-Saxon cemetery is excavated at West Stow – skeletons are unearthed alongside blades and jewellery
EQUAL-ARMED BROOCH
This brooch – possibly inspired by Roman designs – was found in the nearby Westgarth Gardens Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Bury St Edmunds. Normally worn by women, such clothing fasteners could also express cultural identity.
1940
Basil Brown, discoverer of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, finds Romano-British pottery kilns at West Stow
1947
Brown finds evidence of an Anglo-Saxon settlement
1957-72
Excavations are undertaken and hundreds of artefacts are unearthed
1976
West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village Trust is established, but which time three buildings had already been reconstructed
1999
The current visitor centre opens
ICKLINGHAM DIE PLATE
Made of copper alloy, this die plate may have been used to stamp an impression of its surface on sheets of gold or silver foil to decorate objects such as drinking horns. It features six dragon-like creatures whose bodies are interwoven in a repeating pattern.
PYRAMID MOUNT
This mount, made of gold, was used for a sword scabbard or belt. With a garnet and snake-like creatures as decoration, it’s believed that it belonged to someone important and may have even been a royal gift.
PHOTO FINISH
ARRESTING IMAGES FROM THE ANNALS OF THE PAST
THE ‘GIANT OF ILLINOIS’ c1931 Thirteen-year-old Robert Wadlow – often known as the Giant of Illinois – towers over his father at their home in Alton, Illinois. Despite weighing an unremarkable 8.7lb (3.85kg) at birth, Robert soon began to shoot up and by the age of five he measured an incredible 5ft 4in (1.63m). Robert’s exceptional height was caused by hyperplasia of his pituitary gland, which causes an abnormally high level of the human growth hormone. His condition caused him mobility issues and he died at the age of just 22, as a result of a septic blister on his right ankle caused by a leg brace. At his last measuring, a month before his death, in June 1940, Robert’s height was 8ft 11.1 in (2.72m) - a world record that still stands today.