istoryworld
Dutch and English houses
Dutch prosperity in the 17th century results in a very satisfying design of town house. Merchants are eager to have their homes and premises in the limited space fronting the canals of Dutch towns. With numerous middle-class competitors for the available land (as opposed to the small number of noblemen holding power and wealth in other areas of Europe), the typical Dutch town house, several stories high, has a narrow brick façade and generous areas of glass - made possible by the new design of ...
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The Book
The Bible (from biblos, Greek for 'book') is the basis of two great religions, Judaism in the Old Testament and Christianity in the New Testament. In each case it brings together a group of documents to tell the story of the founders and early followers of the religion. In doing so it also explains their beliefs. The conventional sources of historical evidence (archaeological remains, written documents) provide few traces of the Old Testament story and none at all of the events described in the New ...
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Moghul domes
Throughout his early career, much of it spent in rebellion against his father, Shah Jahan's greatest support has been his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. But four years after he succeeds to the throne this much loved companion dies, in 1631, giving birth to their fourteenth child. The Taj Mahal, her tomb in Agra, is the expression of Shah Jahan's grief. Such romantic gestures are rare among monarchs (the Eleanor Crosses come to mind as another), and certainly none has ever achieved its commemorative purpose so brilliantly. ...
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Factories and slums
In any peasant community children work in the fields. As families move in from the countryside to work in Britain's developing industrial cities, there is nothing intrinsically strange about children joining their parents in the factories. And the entrepreneurs who own the factories welcome a supply of labour trapped by economic circumstances into accepting long hours and low pay.The living conditions of the poor in any rapidly growing city, without sanitation, are invariably worse than the condition of peasants in the countryside. But in Britain ...
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Cyrus the Great
Cyrus dies in 530, campaigning against nomadic tribesmen in the northeast, near the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers. He is buried in the place which he has made his capital, Pasagardae. His tomb, massive but superbly simple, stands today as an impressive monument to the emperor - though now in parched surroundings where once everything was well watered, in an early version of a Persian garden. Its interior, in which the body lies in a gold sarcophagus on a gold couch, is broken into and stripped ...
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The First Fleet
On January 21 Phillip sails a few miles north and finds the great natural harbour of Port Jackson. Here he selects an inlet with a good water supply as the site for the new colony. He names the place Sydney Cove in honour of the home secretary, Viscount Sydney.A prefabricated house of wood and canvas, designed in London for the governor, is erected at the centre of the settlement. Tents are put up for the marines and the convicts, with a separate encampment a little ...
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Machu Picchu
Ever since the arrival of the Spaniards in Peru there have been rumours of a lost city of the Incas. Many have searched for it before the challenge inspires Hiram Bingham, an American historian. In 1911 he arrives in Cuzco with a party from the university of Yale. After several disappointments, following up rumours of ruins, the group stops for the night by a canyon of the Urubamba river. An old Indian, named Arteaga, walks into the camp. He says that he knows a ruined ...
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Longships
A swift design of boat powered by oars is developed in northwest Europe, from the 5th century onwards, when the Germanic tribes begin raiding by sea. It is best known, in a later form, as the Viking longship. This type of boat features already in the 7th century in the Sutton Hoo ship burial. The shape of the Sutton Hoo ship is known only from the traces left by its timbers in the earth, but a smaller boat of similar kind was found at Nydam ...
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St Denis and Chartres
Fifty years later this pious effort at Chartres seems to be divinely rewarded. When the rest of the old cathedral is destroyed in a fire of 1194, the west façade - with its two great towers, and the triple entrance flanked by superb sculptures - miraculously survives (as does the Virgin's tunic). The cathedral authorities, gathering in the funds of the faithful, are inspired to build behind this façade an entire new cathedral in the Gothic style. The soaring interior, with its vertical lines unbroken ...
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Nineveh
After nearly two centuries of Assyrian rule from Nimrud another spectacular capital city is created by Sennacherib, in about 700 BC, at Nineveh. His grandson, Ashburbanipal, builds a palace in the new city ornamented with superb carvings in relief. He also stocks his palace with the world's first great library (see Ashurbanipal's library). But Ashurbanipal's death, in 626, is close to Assyria's end. His grandfather's city lasts less than a century. Sennacherib has ruled Mespotamia with the customary Assyrian brutality. His treatment of his neighbours ...
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Inhabited bridges
The most famous bridge with houses is also one of the earliest and the longest lasting. London Bridge is built between 1176 and 1209, with the work apparently entrusted to Peter, chaplain of St Mary Colechurch. His task is formidable. This is the world's first stone bridge to be constructed in a tidal waterway, with a large rise and fall of level every twelve hours. The stone foundations of the nineteen pointed arches are placed within timber cofferdams, in the technique pioneered by the Romans. ...
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Cranach and Holbein
On this first occasion Holbein stays only two years in England, but he paints a great many portraits during his visit - including the large series of coloured drawings now in Windsor castle. In 1528 he returns to Basel, but he is back in England by 1532. On this second visit, lasting till his death in 1543, he is frequently employed by Henry VIII.The most familiar image of the self-indulgent tyrant is Holbein's sturdy portrait of him. The future Edward VI is familiar too, as ...
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Trial and execution of Charles I
Charles refuses to recognize the court and merely reiterates the doctrine of the divine right of kings. His accusers respond with arguments based upon the sovereignty of parliament. Thus the entire issue of the civil war is restated, with unflinching intransigence on each side, within the narrow confines of this historic hall.On January 27 the tribunal finds the king guilty of treason. A high scaffold is constructed in Whitehall. Three days later the king steps on to it from one of the large windows of ...
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France against Britain
Indignation at this British policy, heightened by diplomatic pressure from Napoleon, prompts Russia, Sweden and Denmark to form in December 1800 a League of Armed Neutrality. They declare the Baltic ports out of bounds to British ships. The embargo is strengthened when the Danes seize Hamburg, the main harbour for British trade with the German states.Britain responds by sending a naval fleet into the Baltic. The second-in-command is Nelson, who sails into shallow and well-defended waters in Copenhagen harbour. There is heavy fighting, during which ...
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Amphibious war against Japan
A significant step in the slow move north towards Japan is the US assault, in February 1944, of a strong naval base in the volcanic cluster of the Truk Islands. Eleven Japanese warships and more than 300 planes are destroyed here, in the first radar-guided night attack. After this it is clear that the next target must be the Marianas, a group of islands which the Japanese rightly regard as a crucial line of defence. From here US planes will be within bombing range of ...
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Fortification and siege
The towns which Sargon marches to attack are well fortified - a precaution which has been considered necessary in this part of the world for many centuries. The tower at Jericho dates from not long after 8000 BC. Uruk, a neighbouring city of Ur, provides itself in about 2700 BC with more than 5 miles (8 km) of protective walls. The tools of siege warfare - ladders to scale the walls, shovels and picks to undermine them - are not invented for this purpose. Only ...
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Buddhism in east Asia
Mahayana Buddhism travels by a land route. In the 2nd century AD northern India and Afghanistan are ruled by the Kushan dynasty, one of whose kings, Kanishka, is a devotee of this form of Buddhism. His encouragement of it has special significance, since his kingdom occupies a central position on the Silk Road - at one of its busiest times, when its caravans effectively link China with Rome. The western influence on the Kushan region (also known as Gandhara) is seen in the famous style ...
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Romanesque
Vézelay is a pilgrimage church (the monks here have on show the bones of Mary Magdalene), and many of the Romanesque churches of France are on the great pilgrimage routes which develop at this period - particularly those leading to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. An innovation of architectural significance in French Romanesque relates to the pilgrims. The ambulatory, a passage behind the altar following the curve of the apse, makes possible the addition of several small chapels to contain relics. The pilgrims can ...
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Easter Island
The famous statues on Easter Island are first described in 1722, the year in which the Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen visits and names the island on Easter Day. They must have been carved over a long period, for there are about 600 of them, between 10 and 20 feet high, with the largest weighing some 50 tons. They may have been created at any time between the first arrival of people on the island, probably in about500, and the visit of the Dutch in the ...
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Ajanta
A group of British officers, posted to India in the service of the East India Company, are in the hills to the northeast of Bombay. They are hoping to shoot a tiger. The hunt brings them into a steep ravine near the village of Ajanta, formed by the Wagura river after it has tumbled down a series of waterfalls. In this dramatic spot an Indian boy indicates that he has something to show them. The soldiers follow him up the steep wooded cliff edge. Pulling ...
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