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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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
The history of Gaza is full of surprises: I had no idea it was home to a Christian Byzantine school of rhetoric, "an important library that could compete with Athens, Alexandria, Beirut and Constantinople" and also an Festival of Roses that celebrated "the arrival of Spring and the workings of Eros" at which poetry was read- in other words a sort of erotic Gaza Litfest.
The Church of St. Porphyrius, which was first built in 425 AD, is the last survivor from this world. It still, just, survives though the Israelis shelled its outbuildings last year. 450 Palestinians, mainly Palestinian Christians, were sheltering there. Eighteen were killed.
And as @GhassanDahhan has just pointed out to me, Polybius in about 120BCE commends the people of Gaza for their bravery in the face of external aggression: penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman…