Out of quarantine and out into the wild volcanic Highlands of Central Java. The 7thC temples of Gedong Songo are strung up the ridge of an eerie volcano, where plumes of sulphurous steam belch out of the ground and mingle with thick cloudbanks scudding up bamboo slopes.
The temples themselves look sometimes Gupta, sometimes Pallava, with a hint of Kashmir- all topped with curving Chinese-style flying eves- a mixture you'd see nowhere in India and yet are contemporary with the earliest Indian stone mandirs in MP and coastal Tamil Nadu.
The guards, all Muslims, all reported regular night time sightings of Hindu queens and their spirit courts.
One told me how a princess had appeared in a dream and directed him to a place where he found a 7thC Sanjaya gold necklace, which he handed in "because stealing treasure brings bad luck on a family." It is now on display in the National Museum in Jakarta.
Candi Gedong Songo on Mount Ugaran. “It is at Gedog Songo rather than Dieng that the model for the Javanese temple was established.”
Gedong Songo means ‘nine buildings’ in Javanese, though many more have been found. These are considered to be the 2nd-oldest extant Javanese temples, contemporary with later Dieng constructions, though dating is more a matter of interpretation than reference to any inscription.
"Each of the Gedong Songo temples is square in plan, with a tiered superstructure of three false storeys which varies from temple to temple in proportion of height to width rather than compositionally"
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Today we launch at new @EmpirePodUK series-
WRITERS ON EMPIRE
We kick off with a four-part look at George Orwell
Part One-
Orwell: The Anti-Imperialist in India & Burma
Eric Arthur Blair- Orwell's real name- was born on 25 June 1903 in a modest house in Motihari, Bengal Presidency (now Bihar), British India. His father worked as a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production and storage of opium for sale to China.
Part One-
Orwell: The Anti-Imperialist in India & Burma
Eric Arthur Blair- Orwell's real name- was born on 25 June 1903 in a modest house in Motihari, Bengal Presidency (now Bihar), British India. His father worked as a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production and storage of opium for sale to China.
New from @EmpirePodUK
The Final, Tragic Episode in our History of Gaza:
GAZA & THE NAKBA
How did neighbouring Arab nations respond to the displacement of Palestinians in 1948? Why was the future Egyptian prime minister, General Nasser, stationed in Gaza in 1948? Did Jordanian Arab Legion collude with Ben Gurion? linktr.ee/empirepoduk
How did the population of Gaza double almost overnight with the influx of Palestinian refugees who had lost everything, and what conditions did they face? linktr.ee/empirepoduk
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…