Ancient World Review

Great Zimbabwe: African City Of Stone

"'Zimbabwe' is a Shona name that, while the translation varies, can mean houses of stone. The ruins contain numerous stone enclosures with soaring walls as tall as 11 meters (36 feet). They were made without the use of mortar." Source: Live Science.

"Much of Great Zimbabwe is unexcavated and what the different enclosures were used for is a source of debate among archaeologists. The earliest written records for the city date to the 16^th century, a time after it was largely abandoned. "

Great Zimbabwe is thought to have been built by the Gokomere culture (ancestors of the Shona) over several centuries between the 11th and 15th centuries AD. The central ruins may have been a royal palace and the city was probably an important trade center. According to Wikipedia, "[c]auses for the decline and ultimate abandonment of the site around 1450 A.D. have been suggested as due to a decline in trade compared to sites further north, the exhaustion of the gold mines, political instability and famine and water shortages induced by climatic change." In other words, no one really knows what happened.

The area around Great Zimbabwe was apparently well-developed at one time. According to Wonders of the Past (1943) (1), "when the Rhodesian pioneers burst into Mashonaland, and spread over the country in search of gold, they were vastly surprised to find that they had been anticipated. Over a great area of gold-bearing country, 600 by 700 miles in extent, they found open workings and closed mines reached by shafts which went down to a depth of from 70 to 150 feet, and worked-out reefs to lengths of from 300 to 7,500 feet. The bygone miners must have been industrious beyond belief..."

(1) Wonders of the Past is a rare two-volume collection of essays on a wide range of archaeological sites and ancient history subjects. Though out-of-date in many ways, it includes a lot of fantastic old photographs, line-drawings, color plates and exploration stories, and the essays were written before political correctness had infected academics. Highly recommended if you can find it. (I stumbled on my copy by accident at a local library sale).

Next video was produced by the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority. Yes, this failed state has a tourism industry. Besides the local wildlife (if there's any left), maybe foreign visitors get to see the sites where white farmers were murdered over the years in some of Mugabe's land grabs.

According to the academic consensus, the stone structures in Zimbabwe were built by the ancestors of the local Shona tribes who have traditionally been subsistence farmers. The Shona are known for their stone sculptures and "the precolonial Shona states received a great deal of their revenues form the export of mining products, especially gold and copper," (Wikipedia). The Great Zimbabwe State (12th - 16th centuries AD) was one of several kingdoms that rose and fell in the region over the years.

If the ancestors of the Shona built Great Zimbabwe, the obvious question is what what happened to their knowledge of stoneworking. According to Wonders of the Past, the original Rhodesian explorers found the natives living in "huts made of reeds and clay," so if the consensus is correct the picture that emerges is of a relatively advanced culture and trading center that collapsed long before the first colonialists arrived.

The Sun Temple At Konarak

"On the shores of the Bay of Bengal, bathed in the rays of the rising sun, the [13th cent. Hindu] temple at Konarak [aka Konark] is a monumental representation of the sun god Surya's chariot; its 24 wheels are decorated with symbolic designs and it is led by a team of six horses. Built in the 13th century, it is one of India's most famous Brahman sanctuaries." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.

According to Myoksha, a provider of pilgrimage tours and temple guides in India, "Konark Temple was referred to as 'Black Pagoda' by European travelers sailing the shores of the Arabian sea. It was so called maybe because of its dark colour due to continuous plastering and subsequent blackening of the surface over many centuries as mentioned by S.P Gupta in his book 'Temples in India'. It may also be that some European scholars believed that the exceptionally frank eroticism [next video] of many of the Konark sculptures has given it the name 'Black Pagoda'."

"The Sun Temple at Konarak was built in about 1250 AD by the East Ganga king Narasimhadeva, It is thought he built the temple to commemorate military successes against Muslim invaders." Source: Sacred Destinations.

"According to local legend, the temple has a great aura of power that comes from two very powerful magnets said to have been built into the tower - magnets that allowed the king's throne to hover in mid-air."

This magnetic aura could also be the reason for the name "Black Pagoda:"

"European mariners sailing off the coast used the temple's tower for navigation, but dubbed it the Black Pagoda for the frequent shipwrecks that occurred along the coast. They attributed the disasters to the legendary magnets' effect on the tidal pattern." (Sacred Destinations)

This is a magnificent temple, but King Narasimhadeva should be especially remembered for the fact that he "defeated the Muslim forces of Bengal who were constantly posing a threat to the Eastern Ganga dynasty's rule over Odisha [ancient Utkala], and because he was "one the few rulers in India who took the offensive against the Islamic expansion over India..." (Wikipedia)

Narasimhadeva should receive the same respect that we give to Charles Martel in the West.

Iron Maiden At Moscow Museum Of Torture

The infamous Iron Maiden torture device is apparently a relatively recent invention. "Despite its reputation as a medieval instrument of torture, there is no evidence of the existence of iron maidens before the early 19th century," according to Wikipedia. "...The 19th-century iron maidens may have been constructed as probable misinterpretation of a medieval Schandmantel which was made of wood and metal but without spikes. Inspiration for the iron maiden may also have come from the Carthaginian execution of Marcus Atilius Regulus as recorded in Tertullian's 'To the Martyrs' (Chapter 4) and Augustine of Hippo's The City of God (I.15), in which the Carthaginians 'packed him into a tight wooden box, spiked with sharp nails on all sides so that he could not lean in any direction without being pierced,' or from Polybius' account of Nabis of Sparta's deadly statue of his wife, the Iron Apega (earliest form of the device)."

The Iron Apega was a lovely device which Nabis used to literally squeeze money out of his subjects:

"The mechanical Apega, according to Polybius, was a machine, a well-executed replica or duplicate of the real wife of Nabis, and was used by Nabis to collect money from unwilling Spartan citizens. Those who did not give money were sent to deal with his wife. This was the replica, dressed in expensive clothing, with arms outstretched. When the drunken visitors hugged her, this triggered the arms to close. The device's arms, hands, and breasts were covered with iron nails, and the arms were capable of crushing the body of its victim. Nabis would control the machine through hidden devices until the victim agreed to pay a tribute or to the point of death."

The Iron Apega would be an excellent device to use on Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, Inc., which paid zero taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profits in 2018.

Use Of Torture Increased Under Early Christianity

"In Athens and under the Roman Republic [torture] was normally thought inappropriate for citizens. It might be used on slaves and perhaps on foreigners, for example prisoners of war. Slaves might be tortured in order to extract confessions of their own guilt or evidence against other persons (the unreliability of this second kind of evidence seems to have been recognized in practice at Athens." Source: The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised).

The Romans knew that confessions obtained under torture weren't exactly reliable. According to the OCD, "in general we find emperors during the Principate urging that the use of torture be confined to serious cases and arguing that evidence taken under torture was fragile; the general line taken is that torture should not be resorted to unless there is other evidence of guilt."

The use of torture, even against citizens, apparently became more widespread in the later empire. In other words, the spread of Christianity also led to an increase in the use of torture as a legal instrument. This completely negates the common assumption that Christianity was a civilizing force which moderated the barbarity of the classical world.

Torture became a more common form of punishment during the medieval period and it would seem that the church didn't object. But why would the church object? After all, it preached the most extreme form of torture imaginable--an eternity of torment in Hell for sinners, heretics, free-thinkers of all types, and anyone who couldn't afford to buy indulgences.

Franz Schmidt, The Faithful Executioner

"One afternoon in May 1573, a 19-year-old man named Frantz Schmidt stood in the backyard of his father's house in the German state of Bavaria, preparing to behead a stray dog with a sword. He'd recently graduated from 'decapitating' inanimate pumpkins to practicing on live animals. If he passed this final stage, Schmidt would be considered ready to start his job, as an executioner of people." Source: Live Science.

"We know the details of this morbid scene because Schmidt meticulously chronicled his life as an executioner, writing a series of diaries that painted a rich picture of this profession during the sixteenth century. His words provided a rare glimpse of the humanity behind the violence, revealing a man who took his work seriously and often felt empathy for his victims. But what's more, Schmidt wasn't necessarily all that unusual; historical anecdotes reveal that the prevailing stereotype of the hooded, blood-spattered, brutish executioner falls far short of the truth."

Curiously, Schmidt also worked as a healer on the side. According to Slate (2013), he eventually became a "locally established and respected figure," but an executioner's social position back then was ambiguous, to put it mildly:

"Legally empowered to torture, maim, and kill suspected or convicted criminals, the professional executioner is one of the more evocative and charged symbols of pre-modern Europe's otherness [sic]. An ubiquitous and integral part of the European social fabric well into the modern era, these human 'weapons of justice' were simultaneously viewed with suspicion and disdain by the very communities they served, formally marginalized as members of the 'dishonourable trades', a delimited menagerie that included slaughterhouse workers and gravediggers. And yet 'Meister Franz', as he was popularly, endearingly known, remained a revered member of the local establishment, widely respected for his piety and steadfastness." (Wikipedia)

Schmidt was chopping heads off during the late medieval period. Next video briefly describes the executioner's job under the Tudors. I'm not sure how accurate this is.

Related: How long do you remain conscious if your head is chopped off?

William Tyndale & The War For The English Bible

The execution of the Protestant scholar, William Tyndale, who was condemned for heresy, then strangled to death and burned at the stake in 1536 AD, tells me everything I need to know about the nature of the early Catholic church. It was a sadistic, totalitarian organization that maintained its grip on its flock through terror and mystification.

Tyndale, a leader in the Protestant Reformation, was condemned partly because he was the first to translate the Bible into English from the Greek and Hebrew texts. The King James Bible drew heavily on Tyndale's [partial?] translation. "One estimate suggests that the New Testament in the King James Version is 83% Tyndale's and the Old Testament 76%," according to Wikipedia.

Translating the Bible into English was something the Catholic church couldn't permit. If ordinary people could read the Bible for themselves Rome would lose its monopoly on the faith, not to mention a lot of its secular power, so the church had to make sure it controlled the message.

Translations of the Bible had to be carefully restricted and regulated. Latin versions were OK because only the churchmen and elites could read Latin, but the last thing the church wanted was an English version that the plebs might actually be able to understand and interpret for themselves. The first English translations of the New Testament had to be printed overseas and were apparently smuggled into England in bales of cotton. At the time, these were probably the most dangerous books in the world to possess. Note: Even possessing a Bible is still dangerous in some places.

The Daring Mission of William Tyndale, Steven J. Lawson (2014)

During Tyndale's lifetime, Rome didn't want people being able to think for themselves. As far as the church was concerned, the best way to fleece the sheep was to keep them in a state of illiteracy, ignorance and passive obedience. It was a particularly insidious form of social control reinforced with bloody punishments for "heresy." Imagine living under a regime where you have to obey laws written in a language you can't understand. That's what the situation was like, but in the case of the medieval church, if you broke the law you not only faced burning at the stake but eternal damnation.

The church's policy was a form of mushroom management. It's no wonder that the peasants eventually revolted. The war for the English Bible was similar in some ways to Prohibition in America where high-quality booze -- the "real stuff" -- had to be smuggled into the country from Canada and the Caribbean. The church didn't have any more chance of containing the thirst for knowledge during the Reformation than the US government had of containing the thirst for liquor during Prohibition, and the democratization of knowledge exploded with the invention of the printing press:

"In the early days of the Reformation, the revolutionary potential of bulk printing took princes and papacy alike by surprise. In the period from 1518 to 1524, the publication of books in Germany alone skyrocketed sevenfold; between 1518 and 1520, Luther's tracts were distributed in 300,000 printed copies." (Wikipedia)

William Tyndale was a key figure in the war for the English Bible. The eventual publication of the King James Bible, based partly on Tyndale's work and authorized by the Church of England, itself a reaction against Catholic corruption, was a victory for free thought.

Earliest Known Draft Of The King James Bible

Report from 2015.

"In 2015, Jeffrey Alan Miller, an English professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, stunned the academic world with his announcement, in the Times Literary Supplement, that he had discovered 'the earliest known draft of any part of the King James Bible, unmistakably in the hand of one of the King James translators.' This year [2019] Miller was awarded an NEH research fellowship to bring out a critical edition of the draft, and, as we went to press, it was announced that he had won a MacArthur 'genius' grant." Source: National Endowment for the Humanities (2015).

The King James Bible is an English translation carried out "by 6 panels of translators (47 men in all, most of whom were leading biblical scholars in England) who had the work divided up between them: the Old Testament was entrusted to three panels, the New Testament to two, and the Apocrypha to one." (Wikipedia) The work was started in 1604 AD and completed/published in 1611. The drafts or notebooks that Jeffrey Miller discovered were written by one of these translators, a Puritan theologian named Steven Ward (1572–1643).

Note: The KJ version wasn't the first English translation of the Bible. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he followers of John Wycliffe undertook the first complete English translations of the Christian scriptures in the 14th century. These translations were banned in 1409 due to their association with the Lollards," a pre-Protestant reform movement within the Roman Catholic church which was eventually condemned as a heresy.

These early English translations of the Bible were illegal. According to Wikipedia,"the spread of Wycliffe's Bible in the late 14th century led to the death penalty for anyone found in unlicensed possession of Scripture in English, although translations were available in all other major European languages." The books themselves were burned by the orders of the Pope and at least one of Wycliffe's followers, Jan Hus, was burned at the stake for criticizing the extremely corrupt church and promoting the radical idea that people should be able to read the Bible in their own language.

Frankenstein Castle In Germany

"Frankenstein Castle certainly isn’t the biggest or most interesting castle in Germany, but it’s possible that Mary Shelley found the inspiration for her gothic novel, Frankenstein, from these ruins." Source: Exploring Castles.

"Whether this is true or not, the castle was certainly home to an eccentric scientist, Konrad Dippel – responsible for hair-raising experiments with animals – and human body-parts."

"The Odenwald, the mountain range on which Frankenstein Castle is located, is a landscape with dark forests and narrow valleys shrouded in mystery and enshrined in legend. Many folktales and myths exist about Frankenstein Castle. None of them have been verified as fact, but all of them have influenced the culture and traditions of the region." (Wikipedia)

Built sometime before 1250, the castle was the birthplace (in 1673) of a professional theologian, physician and alchemist named Johan Conrad Dippel, who may have been the model for Mary Shelly's Victor Frankenstein.

Closed captions helpful.

According to one famous legend, a dragon lived in the castle's garden. It would steal out at night and attack the peasants in a nearby village, eating them and their children. A knight named Lord George eventually killed the dragon after a long battle, but died as a result of the wounds he suffered in the fight.

The castle is also said to have a fountain of youth:

"Hidden behind the herb garden of the castle, there is a fountain of youth. Legend is that in the first full-moon night after Walpurgis Night, old women from the nearby villages had to undergo tests of courage. The one who succeeded became rejuvenated to the age she had been on the night of her wedding. It is not known if this tradition is still being practiced these days." (Wikipedia)

Castle Frankenstein segment starts at around 13:50.

Related: Halloween at Frankenstein Castle.

What Lies Beneath The Castle Where Dracula Was Imprisoned?

Castelul Corvinilor, aka Corvin Castle in Romania, once central Transylvania. English subtitles available.

"A historic Transylvanian castle that may have once imprisoned Vlad the Impaler — likely inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula [1] — still stands today. But what lies beneath it?" Source: Live Science (2018).

"Because of centuries of rebuilding and additions, archaeologists weren't sure where the castle's original foundation lay ... However, new research using radar scans of the ground beneath the structure is revealing what's going on below the building's imposing facade."

[1] It's probably incorrect to say that Bram Stoker was inspired by stories about the real Dracula. According to Wikipedia, "[s]ome historians are convinced that a historic figure, Vlad III Dracula, often called Vlad the Impaler, was the model for Stoker's Count although there is no supporting evidence. Stoker borrowed only 'scraps of miscellaneous information', according to one expert, about this bloodthirsty tyrant of Wallachia and there are no comments about him in Stoker's working notes. Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller has remarked that aside from the name and some mention of Romanian history, the background of Stoker's Count bears no resemblance to that of Vlad III Dracula."

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Torture instruments on display at the castle. English subtitles available.

Comment: From what I can tell, the connection between Vlad and Castelul Corvinilor is tenuous as best. The story that he was imprisoned in this impressive castle may be purely legendary. The radar scans should reveal the history of the castle's development, though. If the Dracula stuff attracts public interest and, hopefully, more funding for the project, so much the better. As for Vlad himself most sources describe him as some kind of sadistic, blood-crazed monster, but the truth is far more complex and interesting. Modern Romanians consider him, with good reason, to be one of their country's greatest heroes.

The Medieval Manor Of Stokesay

Stokesay in Shropshire is "the finest and best-preserved fortified manor house in England," according to English Heritage. "Stokesay Castle was constructed at the end of the 13th century by Laurence of Ludlow, who at the time was one of the richest men in England. It remains a treasure by-passed by time, one of the best places to visit in England to experience what medieval life was like."

"Stokesay Castle was built in the 1280s and 1290s in the village of Stokesay by Laurence of Ludlow, a very wealthy wool merchant." (Wikipedia) According to English Heritage, "[t]he life and times of Laurence of Ludlow offer an early example of one of the oldest tales of English aspiration: the rich tradesman redefining himself as a country squire."

"But his story, and that of Stokesay Castle, Shropshire, built with the fortune he made from wool, is above all about the medieval wool trade: its unique status; the extraordinary prizes it created for its savviest merchants; and the perils of late 13th-century international travel."

Some believe that Stokesay Castle is haunted and the area is surrounded with old legends. For instance, the "fortified manor house is supposedly the hiding place of a treasure chest full of gold, which was hidden by two giants," according to Mysterious Britain.

"Many many years ago, when the world was a more enchanted place, and the thresholds between fact and fantasy were much thinner, two giants owned much of the countryside around Stokesay in Shropshire. One giant lived on View Edge and the other at Norton Camp. Although no one knows for sure, it is said that they were brothers, for they shared the rich land between them, and also a vast amount of money they had collected. This money was kept in a huge strong oak chest, deep within the dark vaults of Stokesay Castle." -- "The Giants of Stokesay Castle," Mysterious Britain.