History Mystery: The Pagan City Of Temples! part-1

On the plain in the central Myanmar (Burma), Stone shrines mark the site of Pagan. They are dedicated to Buddhism- a creed that abhors violence. Many were built by slaves on the orders of a king who condoned the sacrificial murder of his own wife. Early one morning in the year 1044 AD, villagers and courtiersgather in front of a wooden palace in Myinkaba, northern Myanmar. Their ruler, Sokka-te, still new to the throne has been challenged to a duel by his half brother Anawrahata. Sokka-te, confident of victory, accepts the challenge. Of the younger Anawrahata he says scornfully; ‘his mother’s milk is yet wet upon his lips.’ Each of the brothers, armed with a lance, mounts a horse. They charge, thrusting and stabbing. Sokka-te shrieks and falls, transfixed by his brother’s lance. Anawrahata is carried in triumph to the palace of his father.

So, according to a Burmese chronicle, began the reign of one of history’s most unusual converts to Buddhism: a ferocious warlord who enslaved a nearby civilization in order to build a city that was devoted to Buddha, the prophet of gentleness. When Anawrahta came to the throne he believed, like his people, in spirits; entities know as Nats who determined human destiny by controlling the land and the forces of nature. Burmese chronicles record that a Nat appeared to Anawrahta in a dream and commanded him to build monasteries and shrines, to dig wells and ponds, and to construct an irrigation system and grow rice for his people, all in penance for the death of his brother.

In obedience to the spirit’s orders, Anawrahata chose a plain bordered by two rivers, at Kyaukse, about 30 Km south of the present day city of Mandalay, and set to work. He collected forced labour from the nearby villages and hired irrigation experts from the Shan hill tribes of eastern Burma. For three years, tens of thousands of peasants toiled unceasingly in the steam bath heat of the plain. They built dams, dug canals, and changed the course of the rivers as Anawrahta ruthlessly pursued his vision. In the course of the projects, thousands died of tropical fevers and exhaustion.

Finally, the mammoth undertaking was ready. As decreed by his people’s grisly custom, Anawrahta would mark the occasion by offering human sacrifices, one for each dam. The victims, it was believed, would then become nats, the guardian spirits. Chronicle record that a wife of Anawrahta, sister of a Shan chief, offered herself as a single substitute sacrifice for all the dams. Her offer was accepted. She was ritually killed- possibly by having her throat cut and her body was burnt on a huge pyre.

The flooded paddy fields at Kyaukse became the economic powerhouse of Anawrahta’s realm, producing food for the people and a torrent of wealth to swell the royal coffers. Gradually more neighboring chieftains came under Anawrahta’s sway, and his territory spread north towards what are now the Indian and Chinese borders, east in to Thailand, and west to the Bay of Bengal. At the same time, he expanded the town he had chosen as his capital: Pagan, on the banks of the Irrawaddy River. The town needed work to turn it into a city. The native Burmese were poor architects and worse artists, but to the south lay a civilization, the Mons, living in a patch work of city states that had been a centre of culture for more than 1000 years. From this centre, in 1056 AD, came a remarkable refugee: a Buddhist mon called Shin Arahan. Shin Arahan was a mon who believed fervently in the traditional creed of his people: an ascetic variety of Buddhism called Theravada. His faith, however, had come under pressure in his homeland, both from other Buddhist sects and from the Hindu influence of India. The final insult came when the Monk leaders agreed to a number of compromises with Hindu Beliefs. Shin Arahan, outraged by the changes, deserted his home and began his journey to Pagan.

Anawrahta was impressed by the power and passion of the monk. Within a year, the king was publicly converted to Buddhism, and ad agreed to invade the Mon territories to help to re establish the supremacy of Theravada Buddhism. With Shin Arahan at his side, the king marched south on one of the most important Mon cities- Thaton, on the coast of the Gulf of Martaban, east of Myanmar’s present day capital, Rangoon. When Thaton fell in 1057 after a three month siege, the other Mon city states submitted without a flight.

History Mystery: Mari The Lost City Of Mesopotamia! -2

After a short reception ceremony, the envoy followed the king through several halls to courtyard with a decorated alter and walls inset with rectangular columns. From the courtyard two doors opened into a long chamber, the sanctuary, at the back of which was another room containing the sepulcher of the dynasty’s ancestor. Above his tomb was an altar where the reigning king officiated as high priest and god. On the walls, mosaics illustrated New year festivals in which the king stood in for his god and the queen played the god’s consort, acting out a divine marriage ceremony. If their union proved fruitful, it portended a fertile year. The mosaic figures were carved from mother of pearl imported from the Persian Gulf, and were mounted in bitumen on wooden panels. The content of the mosaics would have been familiar to those practiced at Ur- but the artistry would have seemed unusually refined.

The purpose of Mesannepadda’s diplomatic mission was to tighten the bonds between Ur and Mari. Clouds were gathering to the west where the king of Ebla (present day Tell Mardikh) posed a serious threat. This fearsome monarch had made vassals of his neighbors, and had conquered many more distant areas. The king of Mari was clearly anxious to show the importance he attached to the visit of the Sumerian envoy. Offerings from his own treasury had been prepared for burial beneath the new palace’s foundations: copper, gold, silver bracelets, silver pendants, and a series of cylinder seals from the city’s workshops. There were also two statuettes of goddesses sent by a king of Syria, one of ivory, the other silver. Both were naked- shocking to a Sumerian. To this hoard of treasures were added to the cylinder seals and pendants of lapis lazuli from Ur. All were placed in a large jug which was buried beneath the courtyard. The act symbolized for the benefits of the gods, the splendor of the king of Mari, and the scope of his international relations.

 Over the centuries, Mari underwent developments like another city. But even in 2400 BC, a century after the visit of Mesannepadda’s envoy, a Sumerian traveler would have found much to remind him of home. Mari’s narrow, carefully laid out streets resembled those of Ur. Near the palace stood the temple of NInni Zaza a goddess also known at Ur. Through the temple’s entrance hall was something rather less familiar to a Sumerian: a tapering stone set in the middle of the temple courtyard. In Mari, the gods not only took human shape- their presence also dwelt in stone. This belief, shared by Mari’s western neighbors, was alien to the Sumerians. The stone would be regularly anointed with oil, and offerings of sacred cakes would be placed nearby. Two doors led from the courtyard into the shrine of Ninni Zaza, a long, rectangular chamber which was lit with oil lamps. At the end stood a wooden statue of the goddess wearing a horned tiara. Below it vases sunk into the floor received water poured by the priests. Offerings of food were placed on nearby table. On a brick bench facing the entrance stood a host of statuettes carved from white alabaster or limestone. They depicted the notables of Mari, in postures of reverence and prayer. One bore the inscription Iku shamagan, ‘king of Mari’. Others represented Salim, the “king’s Eldest Brother”, Mashigirru, the ‘Country’s Grandee” and lastly the ‘Royal Cup bearer”, Steward of the King’s Household’, and ‘Great Scribe’ (the prime minister, Ipumsaar). The inscriptions were in Semitic language, but the script was Sumerian and easy enough to decipher since the symbols represented concepts as much as sounds.

Religion at Mari differed in some important ways from that practiced at Ur. Images at the cylinder seals found at the site depict the Sun god, patron deity of Mari, at the prow of a serpent shaped vessel brandishing a leafy branch. The god is sailing the celestial ocean which was believed to span the world and feed the Earth’s rivers. He reined the Universe as the master of all life, in particular of plants. In this capacity he was also the patron of ploughmen, and plough was depicted at his side. U’s patron deity, the moon god Nanna, was represented in amore down to earth fashion. Nanna was the highest in a hierarchy of gods; each deity had a particular sphere of influence and wielded his or her power through spirits who fulfilled specific roles.

 But for all the power of the gods, and the alliance with Ur, Mari was soon to fall. Some times between 2350 and 2300BC, the city was destroyed. Historians are unsure of the invader; perhaps the ruler of neighboring Ebla, or perhaps the mighty Sargon of Akkad who, from his capital near Babylon, conquered lands between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean to establish the first Mesopotamian Empire, when Mari became part of this empire, the rebuilding of the ruins began. But Sargon’s supremacy crumbled with in a century, and was eventually replaced by a Sumerian empire based at Ur. Mari’s rulers were vassals to Ur from about 2111 to 2003 BC.

                                                                                                                     Continued......

History Mystery: Mari The Lost City Of Mesopotamia! -1

      When a large, headless statue was unearthed in Syria early in the 20th century, it turned out to be the first of startling series of archaeological discoveries. A palace and temples followed and soon an entire city was brought to light. TELL HARIRI lies on the west bank of the river Euphrates in Syria, 12 Km from the border with Iraq. In the early 20th century, the ruins at the site were considered to be to little interest there were scores of similar sites, or tells, throughout the lands of the Middle East. But in the 1930s, while Syria was a French mandate, a Bedouin foraging among the ruins for a suitable gravestone discovered a headless statue. The statue bore an inscription in cuneiform ancient, wedge shaped writing. Casual digging at the site was hurriedly stopped by the local authorities, and the French archaeologist Andre Parrot was sent to explore the tell. Parrot unearthed a large number of alabaster statues of the period known as early Dynastic III, most of them priests. One bearing a dedication to the goddess Ishtar was inscribed with the name of the king of Mari- a find that unlocked the secrets of the site. Tell Hariri stood on the ruins of the lost city of Mari. The name Mari had already cropped up in the records of the great Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer, discovered by earlier archaeologists. Sumer was centered on the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where great cities such as Uruk, Nippur, Eridu, and Ur flourished some 3000 years before the birth of Christ.

      Its people invented writing, and in early texts now known as the king list, they named Mari as one of the dozen or so city states struggling for supremacy between about 3000 and 2300 BC. But Tell Hariri was a long way from the known centers of Sumerian civilization and its discovery revolutionized thinking about ancient Mesopotamia. Clearly its culture had been shared by other peoples living much farther up the Euphrates than had been imagined. While working on the site in 1934, Parrot was visited by Henri Frankfort, a Duch archaeologist then exploring Tell Asmar and Khafajeh, some 400 Km to the east. His findings were strikingly similar to Parrot’s, suggesting that a single civilization spanned the entire breadth of Mesopotamia. Parrot went on to reveal the true grandeur of the ancient Mari. He discovered two royal palaces, one on which fated back to 2500 BC – the time of the Early Dynastic Period- and a haul of inscribed tablets, which helped to build up a vivid picture of the city’s history.

     Mari’s importance stemmed from its key position on the trade route linking Mesopotamia with Syria to the North West. The Sumerian settlements of the delta were rich in agricultural produce, but they needed crucial raw materials from Syria to sustain their city culture. Sumer exported corn, leather, and wool in exchange for scarce building materials such as tone and timber. Silver and lead were brought down fromm the Syrian hills to supply Sumerian metal workers. Copper came from as far away as the Taurus Mountains in Asia Minor, and from Magan in the Persian Gulf. As trade expanded, military and diplomatic missions were sent to Mari to maintain links with its supply lines. During excavations of the Early Dynastic places, Andre Parrot discovered a cache of objects, including several cylindrical seals, presented to the local ruler by Mesannepadda, king of the Sumerian city of Ur. The evidence indicated that an important diplomatic mission was sent to Mari in around 2500 BC.

       Mesannepadda’s envoy was a scribe, with him, the king sent a message of friendship to Mari’s ruler, an offer of alliance, and rich gifts, including a magnificent blue Anzu bird pendant of lapis lazli imported from beyond the Iranian plateau and inscribed with the royal sender’s name. The Journey was not difficult, for Ur at that time dominated many of the other Sumerian cities and nobody would have obstructed the Caravan’s progress. As it made its way up the valley of the Euphrates, the envoy would have noticed linguistic changes. But understanding the Semitic tongue was not a problem to Sumerian scholar: Bedouin herdsmen often drove their cattle up and down the valley, and mixed freely with the city dwellers in south. Their language was understood in Ur.

     In the dry uplands of the Euphrates, Mari loomed like an oasis, irrigated by networks of canals leading off the great river. A dyke protected the city from flooding, and ramparts of unbaked brick fortified its walls. The envoy was greeted at the gates by royal officials and conducted to the newly erected palace. In the great visitors’ courtyard, the envoy awaited an audience. At the appointed time, a grouped of dignitaries arrived scribes, army officers, and relatives of the king- followed by the king himself. The king’s costume was no different from that of his entourage, consisting mainly of goatskin from waist to ankle, but he was distinguished by the arrangement of his long hair, plaited in a diadem around his head with a double bun above the nape of the neck.


                                                                                                                         Continue....

History Mystery: The Extraordinary Creatures of Myth and Legend

The Sphinx and the Minotaur, Centaurs and Gorgons, dragons and unicorns- ancient mythology and medieval fables are teeming with strange creatures. Who created the often terrifying and repellent beings that haunt our dreams, and why? Where does the Sphinx come from? How did the Sirens and centaurs come into being, and how was the Hydra created? How are the Gorgons and the Minotaur related? And why did our distant ancestors invent such bizarre creatures?


The origins of many of these mythological creatures lie with the wealth of stories told by the Sumerians, Babylonians and Egyptians. We owe their survival largely to the Greeks, who included these fabulous tales in the mythological structure of their world and passed them on to Western civilization. The creatures that feature in these stories all have one thing in common: each is a hybrid, or a creature born out of the union of two different beings. What is unthinkable in nature is made possible through the divine origin of their creators.

Greek mythology is full of such hybrids, who were conceived by the various deities or by their descendants. Thus the old sea god Phorcys and his sister, the sea monster Ceto, produced Echidna, a creature half nymph and half serpent. Echidna herself gave birth to other monsters: the three headed dog Cerberus, who guarded the gats of the underworld; the Hydra, a nine headed water snake with the body of a hound, who lived in the swamps of Lerna; the Chimaera, a fire spitting monster, part lion, part goat and part snake; and the Sphinx, who, unlike the celebrated stone Sphinx of Egypt, was a female creature with the face of a woman, the body of a lion and bird’s wing. Certainly no less horrible were Echidna’s three sisters, the Gorgons the most famous of who was Medusa. The Gorgons had golden wings and hands of bronze; each had a long red tongue handing from her mouth and their canine teeth resembled those of a wild boar. Instead of hair, a repulsive nest of living snakes writhed around their heads and anyone who gazed upon their grotesque faces was instantly turned to stone.

The ancient Greeks regarded the Sirens maidens with the bodies of birds, who are enticing singing lured seamen to their doom, as the three daughters of the river god Achelous and one of the three Muses. The centaurs, which combine the upper body of a man with a horses’ torso and legs, were fathered by Apollo’s son, Centauros, with the obliging co operation of a herd of mares. According to myth, human beings have played an important role in the procreation of hybrid creatures. Thus, the famous and feared Minotaur, a human with the head of a bull, was born out of the union of Pasiphae, the wife of the Cretan King Minos, and a white bull sent by the sea god, Poseidon.

The End Of The World

During the Middle ages, great anxiety surrounded the approach of the year 1000. Many people feared that the new millennium would mark the end of the world – just as it had been described in the Book of Revelation in the Bible. How did the people of the time deal with this fear? And what was it about the year 1000 that made them think it would bring the end of human kind?

In 1890s, a number of historians observed that the approach of the year 1000 in Europe had been accompanied by fears about the end of the world. These fears were fed by the Church, which apparently wanted Christians to believe that they could secure their places in paradise by transferring their property to the clergy. Many Christians did so, there by securing the church’s power base for years to come. It is not difficult to imagine that this caused a sensation, and that the Church angrily denied that anything of the kind ever took place.

 We know that the level of anxiety among the medieval population rose as the year 1000 drew nearer. Naturally, they looked to their priests and to the Bible for guidance. The bible gives a detailed description of number of catastrophes and plagues that would lead to the end of the world. This would fulfill god’s will, and the New Jerusalem would descend from heaven. The problem was that the Holy Scriptures did not give an exact date, but some scholars estimated that the period around the new millennium would be the likeliest time. This leads to proclamations such as that of Parisian cleric, who announced around 975; ‘the Antichrist will come at the end of the year 1000 and the Last Judgment will follow shortly thereafter’. Many people believed such statements in part because a string of natural disasters that took place towards the end of the 10th century led them to fear for the future. In the year 987, parts of western and central Europe were stricken by torrential rains; a severe drought followed in 990; and shortly afterwards storms again devasted these regions. France in particular was badly hit by natural disasters; in 997, a terrible epidemic claimed countless lives, while in Burgundy, a severe famine even produced out breaks of cannibalism.

 Faced with the sign of imminent chaos, it was easy for people to believe in the legends that ‘the end of mankind is at hand’. The appearance of a comet in 1014, and a solar eclipse in 1033, were both interpreted as harbingers of further horrors.

 All these events were meticulously recorded by the monks, who were the chroniclers of history during the Middle Ages. The various disasters and strange celestial occurrences certainly seemed to confirm the apocalyptic predictions of the Church. Raoul Glaber, a monk from the abbey of Cluny in central France, wrote around 1050; ‘ After all the signs and wonders which occurred before or after the year 1000 of our Lord, there was no shortage of innovative people who predicted no less important events for the thousandth return of the passion of the Lord. And indeed there is no doubt that signs were manifest… they fulfilled the prophecy of John, which states that Satan shall be let loose after a thousand years’


The expectation of the thousand year reign of Christ on earth before the end of the world is known as Chilism and was a wide spread belief in the first centuries of Christianity. According to this doctrine,, the souls of the just will be resurrected and will rule with the Messiah, then, Satan will be freed for a short time, and the end of the world will follow.

 (Cont.)