My beautiful Anglo-Bengali great great grandmother, Sophia Pattle. She had quite a life: born in Chandernagar, educated in Versailles and married in Calcutta, she brought up her children in Little Holland House in Kensington, then a village outside London.
In Little Holland House she lived with her sister, Sarah, Sarah's husband Henry Prinsep, a Sanskritist who opposed Macaulay's Anglicising reforms & wrote the first English-language history of the Sikhs.
Also living in Little Holland House was the painter GM Watts, then known as 'England's Michelangelo' who came to lunch and stayed for 35 years.
Another of her sisters was the pioneering photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, who used Little Holland House as an open air studio
In Little Holland House Julia would dress up Alfred Lord Tennyson and Cardinal Vaughan as King Arthur and Lancelot, and make them sit still for her 15 minute exposures.
Sophia was a muse not just to Watts, who painted her often, but also to Burne-Jones, who fell in apparently unrequited love with her, and also Rossetti.
She moved briefly to Scotland with her husband, but found it too cold and on his early death moved to Monte Carlo
1,2,3, 6&7 by Watts
In her old age in Monte Carlo she played Spanish guitar and entertained her great niece, Virginia Woolf.
The story of Gaza during the Ottoman period is one of the most controversial eras of its history. The early Zionists maintained that Palestine was an almost empty desert, a lost paradise ripe to be saved from the nomads & 'savages' who had wrecked it, "a land without a people for a people without a land."
But what was the reality? What does history tell us about the religiously & ethnically diverse population of hundreds of thousands who had aways lived there?
Friend of @EmpirePodUK and the greatest living writer on the Late Ottoman period, Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford, returns to the show to separate fact from fiction.
In today's @EmpirePodUK we tell the little known story of how the Imperial Camel Corps- including units from both Bikaner and Australia- helped win the epic 1916-17 Battles of Gaza
This largely forgotten World War One campaign that did far more than Lawrence of Arabia to defeat the Ottoman army on Palestine... but the promise of freedom for the Arabs was shortlived...
On 9 November, only two days after Allenby's forces entered Gaza, in London the Jewish Chronicle published a new British policy on Palestine. In a brief letter to Walter Rothschild dated 2 February, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the declaration that would come to bear his name linktr.ee/empirepoduk
Gaza is one of the oldest urban centres on Earth, and in this series we are exploring its long history. It was first referred to by Pharaoh Thutmose III in the 15th century BC when it was known as Ghazzati....
Palestine is also one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself.
On the temple of Medinet Habu near Thebes there is inscribed in hieroglyphs the name of the people who had invaded from the North who the Egyptians knew as the ‘Peleset’. The inscription dates from the time of Pharaoh Ramses III, and was carved in 1186 BC. The cuneiform inscriptions of the Assyrians mention the ‘Palashtu’ who lived on the southeastern Mediterranean coast from about 800BCE. The Book of Genesis in 21:34 says clearly that after migrating from the city of Ur, that the Patriarch Abraham lived “in the land of the Philistines.” Herodotus, the Father of History, describes the same area as “Syria Palestina” (Παλαιστίνη) around 480BCE.
Don't miss this week's @EmpirePodUK Partition double bill:
The Creation of Pakistan... and
Why India was Split in Two
Part One: Jinnah, Ruttie & the Idea of Pakistan
How come Jinnah was originally know as the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity? Why did he initially accept that Pakistan could be part of an Indian Federation? When did Jinnah start to push for Pakistan to be independent from India? What was Direct Action Day in 1946, and how did it start the violence of Partition? share.google/rpyzvoT4QBpSIP…
Dividing India:
Why was the Partition of India and Pakistan so rushed in 1947? How did Partition divide everything from stationery to army boots in a matter of weeks? And how do South Asians today grapple with the memory of the largest forced migration in history? share.google/EnKs7GPSdhElv6…
When the Macedonian soldiers of Alexander the Great first broke into Gaza after the siege of 332BCE, they recorded what they saw and left the first eyewitness account of Gaza that survives....
They recorded the vast stores of incense and spices which the merchants of Gaza had brought overland by camel caravan from southern Arabia.
When he was a boy, Alexander had been ticked off by his tutor Leonidas for scooping up handfuls of precious frankincense to burn on the altar as offerings to the Gods. Leonidas had clucked reprovingly, “Alexander when you have conquered the lands which produce these aromatics, then you can scatter incense in this extravagant manner. Until then, don't waste it.” Now Alexander sent to the elderly Leonidas a gift of 500 talents (13.7 tonnes) of frankincense and 100 talents of myrrh, with the message, “I have sent you frankincense and myrrh in abundance , to stop you being stingy to the Gods.”
Not Gaza 2025, but Jaffa 1948, after the Nakba
#ThisDidntBeginonOct7 #HistoryRepeating
The Manshiya quarter of Jaffa was destroyed in a series of bombardments led by the Irgun during the 1948 Nakba in order to drive out its Palestinians inhabitants