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Who won the crusades? The causes, death toll, and number of medieval holy wars explained
Who won the crusades, how many were there, and what caused them? Medieval expert Rebecca Rist answers these major questions, exploring how centuries of religious conflict reshaped the medieval world
The crusades were a centuries-long sequence of era-defining medieval holy wars that transformed dynamics of power and religious ideas across Europe and the Middle East. But who won the crusades, and just how many crusades were there? Those are two of the questions answered by professor Rebecca Rist, an expert on the crusades and their broader medieval context. Speaking about the topic on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Rist steps into the dust of medieval roads and the heat of besieged cities to explain why these campaigns erupted, what the major expeditions set out to accomplish, how those ambitions played out on the ground, and how the long arc of conflict finally came to an end. Who won the crusades? Overall, the Muslim forces won the crusades, and the Christians lost. However, as Rist explains, while that was the final state of play, the granular details were far from that simple. "The final bastions of the crusader states were lost in 1291 (having been founded originally in 1099) to Muslim forces. In that sense, obviously the Muslims won the crusades and the Christians were defeated. "However, the crusades span a very long period of time, starting with the First Crusade in 1095 and ending with the loss of Acre in 1291. There were many individual crusades within that period, some of which were won by the Christians – by the Western Franks, like the First Crusade – and others by Muslims. For example, the Muslim forces were successful in the Fifth Crusade in capturing Damietta." In other instances, Rist says there were greater degrees of complexity. "In some crusades, we have partial victories. If we take the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart was partially successful, in the sense that he was able to take and maintain Acre. But, of course, he didn't win back Jerusalem with a military victory." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/06/GettyImages-1186332544-4f0a3d8-e1764009254971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This illustration depicts Richard the Lionheart paying homage to King Philip Augustus of France during the Third Crusade. Although allies in their campaign to the Holy Land, the two monarchs maintained a tense partnership" title="Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus" /> How many crusades were there? "There were eight crusades during the period from 1095 to 1291 in the Near East," says Rist. However, Rist is careful to caveat this: it's a number that's subject to debate, as what precisely counts as a full-scale crusade is difficult to define. Still, according to Rist, the eight major crusades were broadly as follows: "The First Crusade (1095–99), is where the crusaders take Jerusalem and set up the crusader states. The Second Crusade (1147–50), is a subsequent response to the fall of the first crusader kingdom of Edessa (the crusader kingdom in the north). The Third Crusade (1189–92) is launched to try to win back Jerusalem and is perhaps the most famous because it involved Richard the Lionheart. The Fourth Crusade (1202–04) doesn't end up in the Holy Land at all, but the crusaders instead sack the town of Zara and then Constantinople. The Fifth Crusade (1217–21) is an attack that the crusaders make on Egypt, on the town of Damietta in particular (and this ends in failure). The Sixth Crusade (1228–29) is very interesting because it's not authorised by the papacy, but it’s a crusade where emperor Frederick II, goes out under excommunication. He has a lot of success and makes a truce with the sultan and gets Jerusalem back for 10 years. Finally, I like to think of the Seventh (1248–54) and Eighth (1270) Crusades, which are the two crusades of Louis IX, launched respectively at Egypt and at Tunis." Read more | Is the world still living in the shadow of the crusades? In addition to these eight core crusades, there were other conflicts that need to be recognised. "There were also many more minor expeditions [with] small groups of fighters between these major crusades as well. So we can think of the Barons’ crusade of 1236, for example, or the crusade by Edward, prince of England, sometimes called the Ninth Crusade (1271–72). These little ventures are going on between these major responses [when] great papal calls are put out, and very large armies take up that call." How many people died in the crusades? The crusades' death toll likely came in at around 5-6 million, possibly reaching as high as 9 million, according to Rist. But, once again, there are serious caveats to consider. "It's very difficult to estimate [the crusades' death toll] because of the source material. We're dealing with very unreliable sources: medieval chroniclers are notoriously unreliable when they give figures of battles and losses." Despite the problems with the sources, it's still possible to come to a very broad conclusion. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Crusades "There are figures ranging from 1 million to 9 million over the whole period from 1095 to 1291. John Robertson famously, in his Short History of Christianity – a very old but seminal book first published in the early 20th century – had that really huge figure of 9 million. But I've seen other historians estimate much lower numbers. When I'm giving these figures, I'm including Christians, Muslims and all those who followed the armies, not just the combatants. "Historians generally prefer to try to give estimates for individual battles rather than for the crusades overall, and I think that gives us a better sense of the carnage and the losses. Regarding the overall estimates between 1 million and 9 million, certainly one million seems far too few to me." She concludes, "I would go for a much higher figure: 5 or 6 million." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/06/GettyImages-1435556881-76ecf57-e1764009379800.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This 14th-century illustration by the Maître de Fauvel depicts the Battle of Dorylaeum on 1 July 1097, one of the First Crusade’s major engagements. It shows crusader forces rallying after a surprise Turkish attack, capturing the drama and brutality of a battle that helped secure the crusaders’ advance into Anatolia." title="The Battle Of Dorylaeum On 1 July 1097" /> What caused the crusades between 1095­–1204? The motivations behind the crusades were a mixture of: "religious, political, social, and economic," says Rist. "To highlight a few definite motivating factors: I think the papacy granting a ‘remission of sins’ in the 12th century is a driving force. People want to be free from their sins, to try to wipe the slate clean, and they know that crusading will assure them that spiritual privilege. There is another religious motivation: to help fellow Christians. The pope had called for the First Crusade to help the Byzantines in the east. The Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus, had asked for help from the west because the Byzantines were struggling against the Seljuk Turks at this time." But it was far from just religion that motivated the conflicts, as Rist explains. Read more | Did the crusaders fight for God or gold? "There are many other non-religious motivations, such as the charismatic preaching that we see happening with these crusades. Take a figure like Bernard of Clairvaux on the Second Crusade. He preaches all over Europe drawing large crowds, and influences kings to ‘take the cross’. "I think crusaders were also spurred on by the idea of the glory that can pertain to their families if they take part in these great expeditions. Certainly, kings and emperors think it will do their ‘PR’ no harm. They take the cross often when they become kings. Often, it's a way of showing that there is a new reign and that they’re different from their fathers. "There's no doubt that there were also ideas of adventure. At the time of the First Crusade, there had been very bad harvests; there was famine in Europe, so people wanted something different and new. Of course, when they get out there, they didn't necessarily like it. But there were all kinds of romantic and adventurous ideas associated with the crusades." Ultimately however, Rist stresses that the motivation behind crusades was neither singular, nor homogenous. "An individual crusader doesn't just have to have one motivation. He can be conventionally very pious. He can also be hoping to be in favour with his lord. He can be hoping that there might be some land parcelled out to him. He can be inspired by charismatic preaching." How did the crusades end? The crusades ended in 1291 "when the Mamluks captured Acre," says Rist. She concludes, "For decades, Acre had been the centre of what remained of the kingdom of Jerusalem – and so it was the most important city that was still left of the crusader states. It fell to the Mamluk Sultan Khalil in 1291. In the days that followed, the rest of the remaining crusader towns – Beirut, Haifa, Tyre, Tortosa – all fell in a domino effect." The First Crusade Member exclusive | Walk in the footsteps of the first crusaders, witnessing the hardships they faced, meeting the people they came across and seeing the landscapes they traversed through their eyes. Listen to all episodes now
Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were daring and dazzling constructions that have burned bright in the human imagination right up to the modern day. Bettany Hughes follows in the footsteps of the ancients to tell their remarkable stories
Crawling underneath Egypt’s Great Pyramid, 70 metres down, is an unforgettable experience. On hands and knees in the sand, as the descending tunnel gets narrower and deeper, the bedrock of the Giza Plateau presses in so close you can actually taste it. The rock is salty, because 50 million years ago this was all sea. I am not the first to have had this visceral, time-travelling experience. As well as the Greek and Roman tourists who left graffiti here, this subterranean tunnel, and the chamber which it led to, was described by the ‘father of history’ Herodotus, and some 2,300 years later was explored by the Italian tomb-raider Giovanni Battista Caviglia. Other passages in the Great Pyramid – a huge burial place for Egypt’s King Khufu – were charted by medieval Arabic scientists and desecrated by off-duty Napoleonic soldiers. Built more than 45 centuries ago, this pyramid, the oldest of the famous Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, has always been a catalyst for awe. And it is not alone. Across time, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – the Pyramids at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria – have really mattered. They mattered so much that, in the epoch after Alexander the Great’s death, a bespoke catalogue, the Laterculi Alexandrini, was generated to group them together. Written in papyrus about 150 BC, it is our oldest extant evidence for a catalogue. We are not sure who created the list, but we do know that it was copied and shared, and that it has inspired poetry, prose and works of art for millennia. Don't miss... Bettany's new three-part docuseries Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is airing on Channel 5 from Saturday 2 August 2025 The precise entries vary a little: in some versions, the walls or an obelisk of Babylon are included; later, the Colosseum is mentioned; the Lighthouse has sometimes been left out. The Laterculi Alexandrini also lists the seven greatest rivers, the seven best mountains, the seven finest artists and the seven best lakes. The fact the Wonders deserved to be listed in a group of seven proved that not only were these exemplars of their age, projects of pioneering ambition that made extraordinary incursions into the landscape, but that they each encapsulated something special and important about the human experience. Marvellous news The word wonder (from the Old German wuntar) means ‘something marvellous’. Originally in the Greek, these attractions were described as thaumata – works that needed to be seen. Crucially, and this is a fact that is too often overlooked, all seven were connected. In some cases, the same artists worked on them. They also reference one another’s designs. Some of antiquity’s greatest names, including Alexander the Great, visited many of the sites. Ahead of writing my new book on the Seven Wonders, I set myself the task of travelling to the location where each once stood. This, I reasoned, was the best way to get a feel for what these creations meant to the women and men of antiquity who designed them, built them, worshipped in them, fought over them, wrote about them, maintained, cherished, loved and looted them, and made perilous journeys to visit and to tick them off their bucket lists. Following in their footsteps took me on a journey through both ancient and modern landscapes. 1. The Great Pyramid at Giza Egypt’s giant resurrection machine Built at least 4,500 years ago, the Great Pyramid is the oldest of all the Wonders, and yet still stands today almost intact. And it could be even older than previously thought: the 2013 discovery of 1,000 fragmented papyri documents on the Red Sea coast potentially pushes its date back a further 100 years. The pyramid was built over a span of 20–23 years as a giant resurrection machine for Khufu, the king of a united Egypt, helping to transport him to the afterlife. As such, it was conceived as a means for the ancient Egyptians to try to understand the place of humans in the cosmos and the possibilities of both mortality and immortality. Read more | Were the pyramids built by aliens? The real history that debunks the conspiracy The pyramid’s mathematical precision is astonishing (it is close to geometrically perfect – just 2cm out in some places). Constructed of 2.3 million limestone blocks, rising 146.6 metres high, it was originally cased in gleaming, polished, white Tura stone. A few slabs still remain on the Giza plateau, surveyed by bored camels waiting for their tourist burdens. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/02/BAL611268web-203f90e.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 20th-century drawing of the construction of the pyramid. The enormous tomb took more than 20 years to build. (Image from Bridgeman)" title="A 20th-century drawing of the construction of the pyramid. The enormous tomb took more than 20 years to build. (Image from Bridgeman)" /> As the site of the pyramid was originally lapped by the Nile for 6–8 weeks of the year during the time of inundation, we now think that ancient Egyptian builders may have used the river’s rise and fall to move the pyramid’s stone building blocks into place. Listen | Ancient Egyptian pyramids: everything you wanted to know 2. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon Botanical booty takes centre stage Created sometime between 691 and 550 BC, the Hanging Gardens are the most elusive of all the Wonders. No indisputable archaeological evidence for them exists, and we have filled this gap with our imaginations. Therefore, while the Hanging Gardens have left behind the least hard evidence in the ground, they are, ironically, the most famous, and the most commonly cited of all the ancient seven. Built either by King Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon or by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in Nineveh, they almost certainly employed ingenious watering schemes (including palm tree trunks lined with waterproof bitumen) running up a series of staggered planting ledges, all kept hydrated by machines that were an early version of Archimedes’s screw. Exotic plants and trees were showcased here – many seized as botanical booty on campaigns of expansion by either Assyrian or Babylonian monarchs. Read more | A guide to ancient gardening A venue for hosting visiting dignitaries, for displaying wealth, and possibly a location to sit and be healed by the night-time power of the stars, the gardens seem to be the ancient world’s attempt to replicate (and control) nature itself. Exploring the story of the Hanging Gardens is important because it reminds us to privilege eastern as well as western sources for the Wonder monuments. Crucially, we learn from Babylonian and Assyrian records that both the concept of ‘wonders’ and the symbolic power of seven stretches right back to the beginnings of history itself. Seven was a potent number because it connected the four elements of the Earth (earth, air, fire and water) with the three of the heavens (the sun, the moon and the stars). So we hear of seven heavens, seven hells and seven ages of man in Middle Eastern cultures. Grouping objects or ideas into lists of seven gives us meaning because they suggest human culture has a predictable pattern. Whereas the Great Pyramid was a gargantuan imposition on the landscape by a king and his people seeking to understand their connection to the chemistry of space and the cycle of life and death, the Hanging Gardens celebrated both the beauty of nature and the possibilities of humankind’s dominion over it. 3. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus A place of refuge... and murder This Wonder was subsidised in the sixth century BC by the famously rich King Croesus of Lydia. Yet the temple, sited near the western coast of modern-day Turkey, was accessible not just to kings but to commoners. And as well as honouring an eastern deity, Artemis – who protected animals and virgins alike – it was renowned as a place of sanctuary. Many sought refuge here, including Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe (who was double-crossed and murdered on the temple’s steps). Recent archaeological excavations have shown the stalls where refuge-seekers slept. The temple was destroyed in the mid-fourth century BC (21 July 356BC) – before being rebuilt, in even grander form, in c340 BC (this later version would itself succumb to fire, earthquake and plunder). Gargantuan in scale, the temple’s double row of columns would become the model for Greek temples across three continents. In fact, a number of the artists employed on the later building would go on to work on other Wonders, such as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. And a building inspired by the Temple of Artemis would house another of the Wonders: the Statue of Zeus... 4. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia Where man met the divine The imposing ivory and gold Statue of Zeus, seated in his temple home, overlooked the stadium of the sanctuary of Olympia in southern Greece. The statue was an incarnation not just of divine, but of human potential. Built around 430 BC, at a time in the classical world when pioneers like Socrates were declaring the power of philosophy, human agency and the human mind, this bearded, muscle-bound male god was built to celebrate the potency of agnostic competition, of striving and of winning. The ancients would have experienced this ferocious artwork, whose forehead was said to glower like a thunderstorm, after arriving at the site as religious pilgrims. I travelled to Olympia along the sacred route that connected it to the city of Elis, during lockdown. Without the mechanical sounds of the modern world around, Zeus’s sanctuary was thick with birdsong and with the rustle of sacred olive trees. The statue itself is now, however, long gone – it’s believed that it was taken to Constantinople in the early centuries AD, where it was probably lost in a fire. At the time Zeus’s sanctuary was built, it would also have resounded with the hum of 50,000–100,000 visitors – Greeks summoned from everywhere from the Black Sea to Byzantium to praise the king of the Olympian Gods with displays of athletic prowess. 5. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus A site of death and glory Standing at more than 45 metres high, this gigantic building gave its name to mausoleums all over the world and has been mimicked in the cenotaphs and tombs of everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Vladimir Lenin. The mausoleum (which was ultimately destroyed by war and earthquake) reveals much about the cosmopolitan nature of life around the Mediterranean 2,300 years ago. Built by the Karian ruler Mausolos with his wife (and sister), Artemisia, in c351 BC, its wonderful hybrid of styles included Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek and Karian. It would have exploded like a firework on the coast of what is now Bodrum. While researching the building techniques of the mausoleum, I was fortunate enough to be allowed 5 metres below ground into a grave commissioned by Mausolos for his father, Hekatomnos, in nearby Mylas. Hekatomnos’s sarcophagus demonstrates the exquisite nature of the stone-carving that would have decorated Mausolos’s own burial place. It was covered with scenes of Hekatomnos’s family, including portraits of Mausolos and Artemisia, and a lion hunt. Artemisia has become infamous through history thanks to an anecdote handed down from Roman times. According to the author Aulus Gellius, Artemisia missed her brother-husband so much that after his death she ground down his bones to drink them, together with the ash from his funeral, and then pined away. But there is a strong chance, given we know gladiators drank bone-meal for strength, that Artemisia actually sought to steal Mausolos’s power. Whatever her intentions, Artemisia completed this vast, richly painted grave after her husband’s death, and was buried in her own chamber in the mausoleum. Five centuries later, the essayist Lucian of Samosta imagined a dialogue between Diogenes the Cynic and Mausolos in the underworld. The king boasted that because he was tall, handsome and a superb warrior, he needed to be commemorated with the most splendid tomb in the world. Diogenes quietly pointed out that the ruler’s hairless, skinless, eyeless skull would now look the same as his own. In fact, Diogenes added, Mausolos would look worse, as Halicarnassus’s mausoleum was a dead weight bearing down on the king’s corpse. 6. The Colossus of Rhodes Greece’s second sun The colossus was a gargantuan celebration of a moment in history when conflict sharpened into diplomacy. Wipe from your minds the popular image of a massive, kitsch statue, legs akimbo, straddling two of Rhodes’s harbours. That would have been structurally impossible. In reality, Rhodes’s towering representation of the sun-god Helios (with a face reminiscent of Alexander the Great) was probably erected high on the island overlooking the sanctuary of Helios where the Helian games were held in the god’s honour. The colossus was built (in c302/292 BC) after a pitiless siege of Rhodes by the son of one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Demetrius the Besieger. Legend has it that much of the raw material to make the figure derived from the melted down weapons and siege engines used to break through heavy walls and gates, which were surrendered following a truce. Yet those raw materials also, it seems, came from below the ground. The author Philo of Byzantium wrote: “The artist used so much bronze for the work there was almost a shortage of metals, for all the Earth’s mines were exploited in carrying out the project... for in the world a second sun stood to face the first.” Indeed, ice cores from Greenland show pollution levels soaring in the Hellenistic and Roman ages, caused by the process of larger-than- life-size metal statues being produced to prove man’s dominion over cities and far-flung territories. All of the Seven Wonders prove the fevered possibilities of the human imagination – and the harsh demands of making our dreams flesh. By building a statue more than 30 metres tall honouring the sun, the Colossus of Rhodes’s creators set in train a history of humans plundering the Earth’s resources, and a heating of the planet, which now threatens us all. 7. The Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria History’s greatest warning beacon? The Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria guided sailors to safety along one of the most perilous coastlines of northern Egypt. Built in c297 BC, it also acted as a warning beacon in times of distress – and, with an articulated decoration on its summit, may have been the world’s first weathervane. It was also, clearly, beautiful. Standing at 120 metres tall (until its collapse, as a result of earthquakes, in the Middle Ages), the lighthouse played with a sequence of geometrical shapes: oblong, circular and square. It was decorated with the same pink granite that lined Khufu’s burial chamber in the Great Pyramid. Some of these blocks are still in situ, re-used as door frames and as thresholds in the fort of Qaitbey, which now swamps the lighthouse’s footprint. Lucian (one of my favourite authors of antiquity) was inspired by a hidden inscription on the Pharos Lighthouse, left by its architect, Sostratus of Knidos, as an allegory for the writing of history itself. The visible inscription praised the pharaohs who had commissioned the Pharos. But when the gypsum covering was washed away, we are told that underneath was a dedication commemorating Sostratus’s hope for the safety of sailors. As Lucian wrote: “History should be written in that spirit, with truthfulness and an eye to future expectations rather than with adulation and a view to the pleasure of present praise.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/02/GettyImages-89164073web-93219a5.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="This block from the lighthouse would originally have been decorated in a glowing pink colour. (Photo by DEA / C. SAPPA/De Agostini via Getty Images)" title="This block from the lighthouse would originally have been decorated in a glowing pink colour. (Photo by DEA / C. SAPPA/De Agostini via Getty Images)" /> In an 1,800-year-old work of science fiction (also written by Lucian), an ancient astronaut staring down from the Moon recognises Earth, thanks to a sighting of the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Colossus of Rhodes. Today, courtesy of satellite imagery, we really can look down on Earth from space. But even though we’d only be able to see one of the Seven Ancient Wonders standing in situ, their power to fire our intellect and capture our imaginations still burns disproportionately bright. This article was first published in the February 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine. You can listen to Bettany Hughes explore the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in a this podcast episode. Bettany is the presenter of a new three-part docuseries Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The first episode airs on Channel 5 at 6.30pm on 1 August 2025. The series will explore the history and significance of the ancient wonders, combining archaeological access, new research, and digital reconstructions.
Give away your worries, like an ancient Mesopotamian
What can we learn about managing worrying from the people of ancient Assyria and Babylonia? Dr Selena Wisnom offers some Near Eastern wisdom to Dave Musgrove
Do you worry about things? Do you wake up in the middle of the night, sweating about what might happen to you, to your family, to the world in general? I do. If you do too, rest assured you’re not alone. It’s a natural human trait, and it’s something people have been doing for millennia. In evolutionary terms, I imagine it’s something to do with forcing our minds to think about the things we ought to be doing next to keep ourselves alive, and keep us out of dangerous situations. It’s counterproductive, of course, to worry yourself into a state of paralysis – that’s when worrying goes wrong. Are there any lessons we can take from history that can help us worry productively? I went to the Assyria Galleries in the British Museum late one Friday afternoon to reflect on this. They are well worth a visit, whether you’re a worrier or not. Turn left at the main entrance and you’re straight into them. I wanted to go there because Dr Selena Wisnom, an expert on the history and heritage of ancient Mesopotamia and author of the excellent new book The Library of Ancient Wisdom (Penguin, 2025), had told me these people were worriers of renown: “They worry so much that they invent an entire branch of scholarship devoted to it. This is worrying on a kind of national cosmic scale.” This organised worrying was called ‘lamentation’. It wasn’t just a private matter – it was ritualised, institutionalised and shared across the whole society. We know they worried and lamented because they wrote about it. I wanted to get up close and personal with some ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform script. There is a lot of cuneiform script on display in the British Museum. I can’t read it – and there aren’t many people who can – but I figured it would be instructive just to look at it, and think a bit about the people who carved it. Hands and minds of the Mesopotamians Cuneiform is the writing system that they used in Mesopotamia. It was invented in the mid-fourth millennium BC and used for millennia afterwards, although it evolved on the way. It was basically a system of signs inscribed on clay tablets, produced by pressing a wedge into a piece of clay to make a three-dimensional impression. So when you’re looking at a cuneiform inscription, you’re looking at the hands and minds of the people who made them. By studying those cuneiform writings, Assyriologists like Wisnom have been able to understand a great deal about life in ancient Mesopotamia, and research how these people saw their world. It was a world, as Wisnom explained to me, that was full of worry and worriers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Alamy-2F61XHP-Astronomical-calendar--5c0dfc4.jpg" width="761" height="558" alt="A photograph of a beige-coloured stone tablet. On the left of the scene are three small figures with their hands aloft; on the right is a large seated figure on a throne. There are several lines of cuneiform writing towards the top of the scene" title="Ancient Astronomical Calendar" /> Let’s take a moment for a quick recap on where and when we’re talking about. Mesopotamia is a geographical term – it means between the rivers, and the rivers in question are the Tigris and Euphrates, so broadly where modern Iraq, north-east Syria and part of south-east Turkey are today. Mesopotamia was a focus for ancient civilisations from the fourth millennium BC onwards and Assyria and Babylonia were two of those civilisations, Assyria to the north and Babylonia to the south. Relations between these two kingdoms in the first millennium BC were, in Wisnom’s words, “tense”. Her book focuses on the time of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, who reigned in the mid-seventh century BC from his splendid capital at Nineveh. His brother was king of Babylon, and as is so often the way, the siblings fell out and went to war. The upshot was an Assyrian victory over Babylon. However, a few decades after Ashurbanipal’s death, revenge was served when the Babylonians and their allies descended on Nineveh and reduced this mighty city to rubble in 612 BC. Its remains are now to be found on the outskirts of Mosul. Read more | Your guide to the ancient city of Babylon Why burning a library was good news for historians The destruction of Nineveh included the burning of the great library of Ashurbanipal – the library of ancient wisdom in Wisnom’s book title. You might imagine that a raging fire in a great library would be a Very Bad Thing for later historians. However, because the ancient Mesopotamians used clay tablets, the conflagration acted like a giant kiln and fired the tablets, making them more likely to survive for posterity. Crushed and forgotten though these tablets were, their subsequent rediscovery in the 19th century provides a huge source of material for us to understand how these people saw the world around them. Quite a lot of the writings in Ashurbanipal’s library have found their way to the British Museum, along with reliefs, sculptures and statues as well. And that’s how we know what the Babylonians and the Assyrians worried about, and how they coped with these worries. To understand the central role of worry in ancient Mesopotamia, you’ve got to appreciate the scale and sophistication of these civilisations. Assyria was one of the great powers of the ancient world, known for its military strength, monumental architecture and extensive bureaucracy. The Babylonians were renowned for their scholarship and cosmopolitan culture. Babylon became a centre of religious ritual, law and intellectual life. Assyrian and Babylonian fortunes rose and fell turn-by-turn over the centuries. As Wisnom notes in her book, “Assyrian culture owes so much to the Babylonians that the two can be difficult to disentangle.” She likes to use the term Mesopotamian to refer to aspects of their culture that are shared, as well as relating to earlier Sumerian texts. “They were guardians of knowledge stretching back a thousand years before them,” she says, inheriting and preserving earlier Sumerian and Akkadian traditions. Flood, fire, famine and fear This long historical memory brought with it an equally enduring awareness of the risk of natural disaster. Flood, fire and famine were things they knew and feared. They also knew that the way to avoid catastrophe was to keep their gods happy. They had a pantheon of gods who were active in daily life. Mesopotamian gods, says Wisnom, “behave much like human beings do… they have strong personalities, they can be persuaded, they can be tricked. They do things, they care, they intervene, and people are really trying to get their attention and call them over to their side.” “They had ways to address it,” says Wisnom. “They had prayers. They had rituals. They might go to the exorcist to help them go through a very elaborate procedure where they give voice to all of that and express it.” In a society where fear of the gods was interwoven with daily life, ritualised expressions of worry were not eccentric – they were essential. I don’t want to give you the impression that these people were superstitious bumpkins though. These were advanced societies – pioneers of writing, architecture, mathematics, and astronomy – but their cultural sophistication did not free them from fear. Quite the opposite. WATCH | Dr Selena Wisnom on ancient anxiety View Green Video on the source website Lament, and let the Gods know you’re there They believed the world was sustained by divine order, and that disorder – famine, floods, illness, invasion – meant that something had gone wrong in the human relationship with the gods. Misfortune wasn’t random: it was a message. And so they acted, regularly and ritually, to express their anxieties and try to restore divine favour. “They lament to the gods in the temples every single day,” says Wisnom. “They have people whose job it is to sing in front of the gods four times a day, these very, very long litanies, bewailing all of the potential things that could go wrong to the city.” These professional lamenters were essentially state-appointed national worriers. Their job was to imagine worst-case scenarios in elaborate poetic form, and recite them in public ceremonies, even when no immediate crisis was at hand. “If you make it clear to the gods that you know they could do all these terrible things to you,” says Wisnom, “then they won’t feel the need to do it.” It was an act of pre-emptive humility – ritualised worrying in the hope of divine mercy. In order to know what you need the gods to do on your behalf in the future, you need to know what’s coming your way. One of the ways the Assyrians and Babylonians dealt with their worries about the future was by attempting to predict it. They developed highly sophisticated systems of divination, which were treated not as superstition but as a vital form of scholarship. Their premise was simple but profound: if misfortune is a message from the gods, it must be possible to read the signs in advance. This approach took many forms. Celestial omens were especially important. The movement of stars and planets, eclipses, and unusual celestial events were meticulously recorded and interpreted. The Assyrians and Babylonians were very proficient at studying the stars. Wisnom notes that Mesopotamian astronomers could “predict the movements of any star or planet to an accuracy of four minutes on any day, past or future,” using only naked-eye observations and mathematical ingenuity. The wisdom of sheep entrails But divination didn’t stop at the sky. The Assyrians also practised extispicy – the reading of entrails – as a means of answering specific questions posed to the gods. “It was one of the most important ways for kings to receive divine guidance,” says Wisnom. Priests would sacrifice a sheep, examine its liver and other organs, and interpret the shape, texture, and marks according to detailed manuals. The process was collaborative, peer-reviewed and surprisingly scientific in its approach. Other forms of divination included dream interpretation, reading smoke patterns, and interpreting odd occurrences in the natural world – like a pig dancing in a town square or a goat giving birth to a two-headed kid. Any anomaly might hold a message. I’m reading this as a response to uncertainty. I’ve locked in my mortgage rate because I didn’t know if the interest rate was going to spiral upwards, so I’ve listened to the predictions of financial experts and acted accordingly. That means I don’t need to worry about it because I actually can’t do anything about it. If you believe that you can get divine guidance from the stars or a sheep’s liver, then you too can get certainty about the future, and I guess, reduce anxiety. Managed risk it’s called, I think. Read more | Ashurbanipal 'the Great', the Lion of Assyria The people in Nineveh and other cities across the Mesopotamian world had a lot to worry about. Their world was full of unseen dangers. They had demons, witches and ghosts to contend with. Malevolent forces could afflict individuals or communities, and their symptoms – physical, mental or social – had to be interpreted and treated. Demons were blamed for sleeplessness and depression. Others, like Lamashtu, threatened pregnant women and infants. Even King Ashurbanipal’s grandfather Sennacherib was said to have been afflicted by a demon that left him “so miserable his advisors were afraid to speak to him”. Witchcraft, too, was taken seriously. If someone suffered from unexplained weight loss, dizziness, or persistent anxiety, a diagnosis of witchcraft might follow. “Witchcraft is actually a diagnosable disease like anything else,” says Dr Wisnom. Treatment came through rituals. Figurines were made and destroyed; incantations were recited; offerings were made to the gods. Exorcists – far from being theatrical performers – were highly trained specialists who used a combination of ritual, medical knowledge and divine petition to help patients. “The exorcist is more like a lawyer than a magician,” Wisnom explains. “He pleads with the gods to change their verdict.” Putting worries in a pot I suppose the point is that these people didn’t worry in silence. They worried very publicly, loudly and regularly. Anxiety was given a voice, a schedule and, often, a proxy. “They assigned worrying to professionals and fixed times of day,” Wisnom notes. “It’s not actually that different from what the NHS suggests that we do.” The NHS’s Every Mind Matters platform offers guidance on how to manage persistent worry using self-help CBT techniques. These include identifying whether a worry is hypothetical or practical, writing worries down to gain distance from them, and allocating a set time each day to process them – techniques that echo the Assyrian practice of ritualising anxiety through structured lamentation. As the NHS explains, “If you find that you’re constantly worrying, it can help to give yourself a set time to do it – and then let those worries go the rest of the day.” I’m thinking that the ancient Mesopotamians would likely have approved. There was also no shame in acknowledging emotional distress. Letters from royal scholars, priests and even kings include candid confessions of despair, hopelessness and guilt. Ashurbanipal himself once wrote: “I did absolutely everything right… and yet still I’m constantly depressed.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Alamy-RK4BW4-King-1d84e3c.jpg" width="866" height="1190" alt="An Assyrian statue of Ashurbanipal from his royal palace in Nineveh. He once wrote: “I did absolutely everything right… and yet still I’m constantly depressed.” (Image by Alamy)" title="London, England / United Kingdom - 2019/01/28: Ancient Assyria statue of king Ashurbanipal from his royal palace in Nineveh at the archeologic exposit" /> Not so distant, not so weird If the scale and solemnity of Mesopotamian lamentation sounds distant and weird, hang on for a second to consider how we’ve reacted to disaster and threat in Britain in recent times. I’m reminded of an article that Professor Natalie Mears, a historian of early modern Britain, wrote for BBC History Magazine a few years ago about national days of prayer in Britain (if you’re a HistoryExtra member, you can read it in full here now). She notes that since 1535, there have been more than 500 such occasions in England and Wales alone. These were not mere religious observances – they were formal, state-sanctioned rituals in response to national anxiety. “There seem to have been two principal motivations for the country to come together in prayer: to seek God’s help in secular affairs, and to offer thanks for his intervention,” says Mears. So Charles II, in 1666, ordered a “day of solemn fasting and humiliation” after the Great Fire devastated the capital. But there were also days of thanksgiving when the nation had been delivered from disaster, such as after Trafalgar and Waterloo in the early 19th century. More recently, in May 1940, just days after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill approved a national day of prayer in response to the crisis unfolding in France. “People throughout Britain flocked to their local churches and chapels,” Mears writes. When news broke of the Dunkirk evacuation’s success five days later, many saw it as divine deliverance. How different is this national prayer for deliverance, and humiliation before God, from ancient Mesopotamian lamentation? Seems pretty similar to me. Would it even be going too far to suggest that the banging of pots and pans outside during Covid was the latest iteration of lamentation and thanksgiving in a more secular Britain? Were we trying to hammer away our worries about the pandemic, as much as say thanks to the NHS and first responders? Gods, demons and algorithms The Assyrian and Babylonian response to anxiety was, in many ways, deeply pragmatic. It acknowledged fear as part of life, and sought to engage with it openly and communally. There were specialists to diagnose it, rituals to manage it, and no expectation that individuals should bear it alone. Read more | A history of happiness: 5 life lessons from the past Their world may have been filled with gods and demons rather than algorithms and economic graphs, but the emotional terrain is familiar. They show us that naming our fears, expressing them in structured ways, and seeking support from others are timeless strategies for resilience. As Wisnom reflects: “Even the king of Assyria was admitting to feeling rubbish. Something we can all relate to.” The problem with this is in the practical application today. I’m not the king of Assyria, and nor are you, so we can’t instruct a temple of professional lamenters to take our worries off our shoulders. But maybe there is something basic here, in terms of personal delegation of worrying. “I do like the concept of delegating your worrying to somebody else or something else,” says Wisnom. “that’s something that I have in fact inadvertently tried myself. One night I was very worried about something. It was late at night. Nobody was awake so I called a friend in America because they are awake in America. He said to me ‘Don’t worry. I will hold your worries until morning,’ and it actually worked. I got back to sleep.” So if perhaps the method of delegation is a little alien when we compare ourselves to the ancient Mesopotamians, the underlying concept works. Delegate your worries to someone else, or something else, and you might find the demon within more manageable. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. 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A history of the Bible: who wrote it and when?
The origins of the Bible are still cloaked in mystery. When was it written? Who wrote it? And how reliable is it as an historical record? Spencer Mizen charts the evolution of arguably the most influential book of all time
In 2007, Time magazine asserted that the Bible “has done more to shape literature, history, entertainment, and culture than any book ever written.” With phrases like “an eye for an eye” and “thou shalt not kill” embedded in our language and over five billion copies sold worldwide (swollen by a further 100 million every year given away for free), its impact is undeniable. Though, while its cultural influence is clear, the history of the Bible is much less so. Questions about who wrote the Bible, when, and why have fascinated and perplexed scholars for centuries. These are the thorniest of questions, made all the more tangled by the Bible’s great age, and the fact that some, or all of it, has become a sacred text for members of two of the world’s great religions – Judaism and Christianity – numbering more than two billion people. Where does the Bible originate? Archaeological discoveries and the study of written sources, such as Merneptah's Stele, have shed light on the history of both halves of the Bible: the Old Testament, the story of the Jews’ highs and lows in the millennium or so before the birth of Jesus; and the New Testament, which documents the life and teachings of Jesus. These findings may be incomplete and they may be highly contested, but they have helped historians paint a picture of how the Bible came to life. For centuries, the Old Testament has been widely interpreted as a story of disaster and rescue – of the Israelites falling from grace before picking themselves up, dusting themselves down and finding redemption. Nowhere is this theme more evident than in Exodus, the dramatic second book of the Old Testament, which chronicles the Israelites’ escape from captivity in Egypt to the promised land. Read more | On ancient battlefields, the world's oldest civilisations turned beloved pets into weapons of war The Bible tells us that Moses led the Israelites out of their captivity in Egypt (whose population had been laid low by ten plagues inflicted on them by God) before Joshua spearheaded a brilliant invasion of Canaan, the promised land. The historical sources, however, are far less forthcoming. As John Barton, former professor of the interpretation of holy scriptures at the University of Oxford, puts it: “There is no evidence of a great invasion by the Israelites under Joshua; the population doesn’t seem to have changed much in that period as far as we can tell by archaeological surveys.” In fact, the best corroborating evidence for the Bible’s claim that the Israelites surged into Canaan is Merneptah’s Stele, a carved granite monument created by the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah at the end of the 13th century BC. This stele, discovered in Thebes in 1896, mostly details the Egyptians’ victory over the Libyans and their allies. But it is the final three lines of the inscription that has arguably excited most interest among historians. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/04/GettyImages-1134266816-17c5bea-scaled-e1737028949459.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="A replica of Merneptah’s Stele" title="A replica of Merneptah’s Stele, now housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The last 3 of the 28 lines deal with a separate campaign in Canaan, then part of Egypt's imperial possessions. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> “Israel has been shorn,” it declares. “Its seed no longer exists.” It’s an inauspicious start, one that boasts of this people’s near destruction at the hands of one of the ancient world’s superpowers in their homeland of Canaan. But the Israelites would survive. And the story they would go on to tell about themselves and their relationship with their God would arguably eclipse any of Merneptah’s achievements. It would spawn what is surely the most influential book of all time: the Bible. Merneptah’s Stele may describe more Jewish pain at the hands of their perennial Egyptian persecutors, but it at least suggests that they may have been in Canaan during Merneptah’s reign (1213–1203 BC). If the early history of the Israelites is uncertain, so is the evolution of the book that would tell their story. Who wrote the Bible? Scholars now believe that the stories that would become the Bible were disseminated by word of mouth across the centuries, in the form of oral tales and poetry – perhaps as a means of forging a collective identity among the tribes of Israel. Eventually, these stories were collated and written down. The question is by whom, and when? Until the 17th century, received opinion had it that the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – were the work of one author: Moses. However, more recent evidence suggests otherwise. Read more | The murderous history of Bible translations A limestone boulder was discovered embedded in a stone wall in the town of Tel Zayit, 35 miles southwest of Jerusalem, in 2005. The boulder, now known as the Zayit Stone, contains what many historians believe to be the earliest full Hebrew alphabet ever discovered, dating to around 1000 BC. “What was found was not a random scratching of two or three letters, it was the full alphabet,” Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland has said of the stone. “Everything about it says this is the ancestor of the Hebrew script.” The Zayit Stone does not in itself tell us when the Bible was written and collated, but it gives us our first glimpse of the language that produced it. And, by tracking the stylistic development of that language down the centuries, and cross-referencing it with biblical text, historians have been able to rule out the single-author hypotheses, concluding instead that it was written by waves of scribes during the first millennium BC. Ask the expert: John Barton John Barton is a former professor of holy scriptures at the University of Oxford and the author of A History of the Bible: The Books and Its Faiths. Q: Just how reliable is the Old Testament as an historical document? A: Some parts, such as the early chapters of Genesis, are myth or legend, rather than history. But parts of Samuel, Kings, Ezra and Nehemiah describe events broadly known also from Assyrian or Persian sources. For example, Jehu, king of Israel in the ninth century BC, appears on an Assyrian monument, the Black Obelisk, doing obeisance to the Assyrian king. From about the eighth century BC onwards, the Old Testament contains some real historiography, even though it may not all be accurate. Q: Does it matter if it’s not historically accurate? Are we guilty of placing too much emphasis on this question? A: I think we are. Much of the Old Testament is about seeing God at work in human history rather than in accurately recording the detail, and sometimes we exaggerate the importance of historical accuracy. The Old Testament is not a work of fiction, but nor is it a modern piece of history-writing. Q: How much does archaeology support the historicity of the Old Testament? A To a limited extent. It gives us a context within which the Old Testament makes sense, but it doesn’t confirm a lot of the details. It mustn’t be forgotten that archaeology has also yielded vast numbers of documents from the ancient near-east, such as Assyrian and Babylonian annals, which illuminate the Old Testament world. Q: How much do we know about the scribes who wrote the Old Testament? A: The scribes are never described in detail in the Old Testament itself, but analogies with Egypt and Mesopotamia make it clear that there must have been a scribal class, probably attached as civil servants to the temple in Jerusalem or the royal court. After the exile of the Jewish people in Bablylon in the sixth century BC, scribes gradually turned into religious teachers, as we find them in the New Testament. Q: When was the Old Testament assembled into the book it is today? A: Probably during the first century BC, though parts of it were certainly regarded as holy scripture much earlier than that. But the collection is a work of early Judaism. It should be remembered that for a long time it was a collection of individual scrolls, not a single book between two covers. Q: Did the Old Testament anticipate the figure of Jesus Christ? A: There are prophecies of a coming Messiah – which means ‘anointed one’ – occasionally in the Old Testament, and Christians claimed them as foretelling Jesus. But messianic hopes were not widespread or massively important in first-century Judaism and are even less central to the Old Testament itself. Christians discovered texts they saw as messianic prophecies – for example, in Isaiah 7 – though other Jews did not read them that way. Q: Why did the New Testament gain so much traction in the first centuries AD? A: The New Testament was accepted because it was part of the package of the Christian message, which was massively successful in the early centuries. The message, which was that all humankind was accepted through Jesus by the God worshipped by the Jews, proved a winner. Who was Jesus? Did he really exist? Most scholars agree that Jesus, a first-century religious leader and preacher, existed historically. He was born in c4 BC and died – reportedly crucified on the orders of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate – in cAD 30–33. Then, for around 40 years, news of his teachings was spread by word of mouth until, from around AD 70, four written accounts of his life emerged that changed everything. The gospels, or ‘good news’, of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are critically important to the Christian faith. It is their descriptions of the life of Jesus Christ that have made him arguably the most influential figure in human history. Read more | How much is known about the birth of Jesus? “We can’t be sure when the gospels were written,” says Barton, “and we know little about the authors. But the guess is that Mark came first, in the 70s, followed by Matthew and Luke in the 80s and 90s, and John in the 90s or early in the second century. “In general, Matthew, Mark and Luke tell the same story with variations, and hence are called the ‘synoptic’ gospels, whereas John has a very different style, as well as telling a markedly different version of the story of Jesus. Matthew and Luke seem to be attempts to improve on Mark, by adding more stories and sayings from sources now lost. John is a different conceptualisation of the story of Jesus, portraying a more obviously divine figure.” Though the variations in the four gospels may have proved a source of frustration to those trying to paint a definitive picture of Jesus’s life and teachings, they offer a fascinating insight into the challenges facing the early Christian church as it spread around the Mediterranean world in the first and second centuries AD. Mark, it’s been argued, wrote for a community deeply affected by the failure of a Jewish revolt against the Roman empire in the AD 60s, while Luke wrote for a predominately Gentile (non-Jewish) audience eager to demonstrate that Christian beliefs could flourish within the Roman empire. Both John and Matthew hint at the growing tensions between Jewish Christians and the Jewish religious authorities. As a Jew, Jesus would have been well-versed in the Hebrew Bible and, according to the gospels, saw himself as the realisation of ancient Jewish prophecies. “Don’t think that I came to destroy the law, or the prophets,” Matthew reports him saying. “I didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfil.” But for all that, by the time the gospels were written, schisms between Judaism and nascent Christianity were clearly emerging. Versions of the Bible Different editions of the Bible have appeared over the centuries, aiming to further popularise the stories and teachings within. Here are three of the most notable versions... King James Bible On 24 March 1603, King James VI of Scotland was also crowned King James I of England and Ireland. His reign would usher in a new royal dynasty (the Stuarts) and a new era of colonialism (most especially in North America). But arguably every bit as significant was his decision, in 1611, to introduce a new Bible. The ‘King James Version’ (KJV) wasn’t the first to be printed in English – Henry VIII had authorised the ‘Great Bible’ in 1539 and the Bishops’ Bible had been printed during the reign of Elizabeth I in 1568 – but, in terms of impact, the KJV would dwarf its successors. Shortly after his coronation, James was told that existing translations of the Bible were “corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original”. What his scholars produced was a book designed to be read out aloud in church – fast-paced, easy to understand, a masterclass in storytelling. No other version would challenge its dominance in the English-speaking world until the mid-20th century. According tob historian Adam Nicolson, the King James' Bible’s “particular combination of majesty and freedom, of clarity and richness, was for centuries held, particularly by the Victorians, to be the defining terms of our national identity”. The Gutenberg Bible In 1454, in the Rhineland town of Mainz, three friends – inventor Johannes Gutenberg, printer Peter Schöffer and financier Johann Furst – pooled resources and brainpower to come up with what the British Library describes as “probably the most famous Bible in the world”. The Gutenberg Bible, as the three friends’ creation would come to be known, signalled a step-change in printing techniques. Whereas earlier Bibles were produced by printing presses that employed woodblock technology, the press that churned out the Gutenberg Bible used moveable metal type, allowing more flexible, efficient and cheap printing. Gutenberg’s Bible also had massive cultural and theological ramifications. Faster, cheaper printing meant more books and more readers – and that brought with it greater criticism, interpretation, debate and, ultimately, revolution. In short, the Gutenberg Bible was a significant step on the road to the Protestant Reformation and ultimately the Enlightenment. In the words of Professor Justin Champion of Royal Holloway, University of London: “The printed Bible in the hands of the public posed a fundamental challenge to papal dominion. Once released from Latin into the vernacular, the word of God became a weapon.” Dead Sea Scrolls Sometime between November 1946 and February 1947, a Bedouin shepherd threw a stone into a cave at Wadi Qumran, near the Dead Sea. When he heard something crack he headed inside to investigate. What he found has been described by the Smithsonian Institute as “the most important religious texts in the Western world”. What the shepherd had chanced upon were the Dead Sea Scrolls, more than 800 documents of animal skin and papyrus, stored in clay jars for safe keeping. Among the texts are fragments of every book of the Old Testament, except the Book of Esher, along with a collection of previously unknown hymns and a copy of the Ten Commandments. But what really makes the scrolls special is their age. They were written between around 200 BC and the middle decades of the first century AD, which means they predate by at least eight centuries the oldest previously known Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Were the scrolls left in the caves by a Jewish community living near the Dead Sea or, perhaps, by Jews fleeing Roman troops in the first century AD? We may never know for sure.
“I don’t underestimate how difficult it is to satisfy everybody” | Simon Sebag Montefiore on writing the history of Jerusalem
More than a decade since its original publication, historian and broadcaster Simon Sebag Montefiore’s updated biography of Jerusalem charts events right up to the present day. Why did he choose to examine such a contentious past? And is it possible to remain entirely impartial? Matt Elton caught up with him to find out
You’ve just published a new edition of your history of Jerusalem. What were your aims in updating it? The book is a history of the Middle East, the Holy City and Holy Land across 3,000 years – from the Canaanites to the 2020s, encompassing all faiths, all religions, all conquerors, all empires and all states. Where possible, it’s mainly told through the stories of individuals. The previous version of the book came out in 2011, and largely ended in 1948 – though it did include a brief section on the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967. So its coverage of the 20th century was incomplete, which seemed okay when I wrote it – but so much has happened since then that I began to think I should update it. I was in the process of doing that when the attack by Hamas in southern Israel happened on 7 October last year. Since then there’s been such a deluge of misinformation and, frankly, ignorance and bias from all directions that it seemed even more urgent – particularly because, in the year after that attack, the book sold out many times in Britain and the US. Read more | Israel and the Palestinians: a history of conflict in 8 key episodes For better or worse, the book is one of the few balanced accounts that attempts to tell the story of the creation of the Israeli nation and the Palestinian nation. Nothing is perfect, of course, and it would be hubristic and arrogant to think that anyone could write a perfectly balanced history. But I think this is as close as it gets. This is among the most contested areas of world history, so how did you navigate the process of writing this book in a balanced way, fending off potential accusations of bias – from all sides? First, you have the manuscript read by experts on both sides, who will hopefully advise you if you’ve got something wrong. But it’s also a matter of respect. When writing any book, if I recognise a preconception I have, I try to wipe it out and start looking at the evidence both ways. The tragedy of the Holy City and the Holy Land is that, historically, this was always an incredibly cosmopolitan area – a multi-ethnic, multi-faith patchwork that developed across thousands of years. So it’s deeply depressing to chronicle the increasingly binary nature of what’s happening today: the way in which the other ethnic groups have been forgotten in this story, which has been reduced to this terrible battle between Israelis and Palestinians, each with their own version of history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1483142338-97e7eab-e1732102463186.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The arched entrance into Jerusalem's Old City. Benjamin Disraeli claimed that the history of the city is the history of the world (Photo by Kirk Fisher/Getty Images)" title="The arched entrance into Jerusalem's Old City. Benjamin Disraeli claimed that the history of the city is the history of the world (Photo by Kirk Fisher/Getty Images)" /> So I’ve read everything I can on all dimensions of these subjects. I’ve aimed to ensure that all narratives are respected and, wherever possible, I’ve set out to get as close as possible to what really happened – even if it offends both sides. And hopefully this book will offend both sides. As I say, I don’t underestimate how difficult it is to satisfy everybody. The increasing ferocity of the conflict in our times also makes it harder and harder to tell this history – but this is a very serious effort to do so. While writing this book, I had a piece of paper next to me on the desk – a story about the first British governor of Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs. When he arrived in Jerusalem [as military governor] in 1917, he was initially quite popular – with Arabs, Christians, Jews, Muslims, everyone – but within a few months he was hated by all sides. Read more | How Britain stirred the cauldron of conflict in Palestine So he went back to London to see the prime minister, David Lloyd George, and said: “I just have to resign.” And the PM replied: “Well, you’ve got to carry on with your job – but as soon as any one side stops hating you, I’ll sack you.” That story, I think, sums up the challenge of writing a history of Jerusalem. In the new section, you write: “If this book has any mission, I passionately hope that it might encourage each side to recognise the ancient heritage of the other.” Can you expand on what you mean by this? If you look at a social-media site such as X [formerly Twitter], you’re constantly reading posts written from ultra-nationalist Israeli or ultra-nationalist Palestinian viewpoints, denying the history of the other in Jerusalem and in the wider Holy Land. There are also many pro-Israeli histories that minimise the real story of the Islamic presence, and many pro-Palestinian histories that make all sorts of bizarre claims about ancient history and the very existence of the first and second Jewish Temples. Amid all this, I’m trying to get as close as possible to what really happened. And at the very heart of the story is the Temple Mount, also known as Haram al-Sharif, around which the competition of different faiths, cultures and civilisations is incredibly complex and intense. This site has been home to such a range of different places of worship – and provides just one example of the need to get a very complex story absolutely correct. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/JX6Y84-2-a7fa55f-e1732102531485.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 14th-century illustration of Frederick II meeting Ayyubid Sultan al-Kāmil. Though the encounter never occurred, the two sides did peacefully agree to divide Jerusalem between the religions in 1229 (Photo by Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A 14th-century illustration of Frederick II meeting Ayyubid Sultan al-Kāmil. Though the encounter never occurred, the two sides did peacefully agree to divide Jerusalem between the religions in 1229 (Photo by Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> You asked at the start of our conversation about what I set out to do with this new version. Well, of course, missing from the 2011 edition were all of the characters from the past 50 years that we now think of as being massively important: [Palestinian leader] Yasser Arafat, [Israeli general and prime minister] Ariel Sharon, [Syrian president] Bashar Assad, [current Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and Saddam Hussein, right up to Joe Biden. As well as bringing the story up to date, I also wanted to set the Holy City and the Holy Land into the context of the wider region – because it’s impossible to understand the creation of the modern Middle East without understanding the region. All of its modern states were created at the same time, essentially by the colonial powers, and most had never existed before. Does setting this recent history into a longer narrative sweep reveal any continuities or echoes? An episode that I recount in the earlier section of the book is the peace deal between Ayyubid Sultan al-Kāmil and Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Jerusalem, who in 1229 agreed to divide the city between the religions. It’s one of several examples from across the centuries that I think can provide inspiration to us today – showing that these kinds of things have been attempted in different eras. Your recent conversation on X with fellow historian William Dalrymple, in which you disagreed on an aspect of Middle Eastern history, was praised for remaining cordial. How unusual is that kind of civil online discourse when discussing complex historical subjects? It’s very unusual – but, of course, the internet is the worst forum on which to discuss the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Social media is the very last place where peace will ever be negotiated, because social media – and its algorithms specifically – are created to enrage and provoke, and to funnel people into echo chambers and concrete, fortified positions. So it’s almost impossible to understand a complex historical subject such as the Middle East and its nuances on that kind of digital platform. William and I have known each other for almost 40 years, and decided there was no point in falling out now – because so many people have fallen out over this subject. The only way it’s going to work is if people learn about each other and respect their narratives. That’s the entire mission of the book. We’re trying to set a small example of how being civil to one another, criticising each other in a polite way, can be done. Do you think this increased division and intensification means historians increasingly find themselves on the front line? I do think many of us feel like we’re involved in some kind of battle. I also write about Russian history, and my history of the world [2022’s The World: A Family History] touched on empire and slavery – subjects that have become very fraught in recent years. Indeed, I think the two books are complementary. Benjamin Disraeli famously said that the history of Jerusalem is the history of the world, and while that’s not quite true – eastern and southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa don’t play any role in the history of Jerusalem, for instance – they overlap. Read more | Historians debate: how do intractable conflicts come to an end? Of course, when you look to the past, you realise history has always mattered. That’s why figures such as Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong took history so seriously, and wrote books attempting to supervise which stories are told. One of the great influences on my writing is the [14th and 15th-century] north African Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun. His brother, also a historian, was assassinated by a fellow historian. And if you look to China, its great [second and first-century BC] historian Sima Qian was arrested by the emperor for criticising his rule. Offered the choice of execution or castration, Sima Qian chose the latter – so he could finish his book. These stories show us that the writing of history has always been fraught. We think today’s battles over history are unique, but it has been always thus. Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian, author and broadcaster. His latest books is an updated edition of Jerusalem: The Biography – A History of the Middle East (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024) This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Leper Crusaders: how disease-stricken knights forged an army in the Holy Land
During the Crusades, one Christian order transformed from caring for those suffering from leprosy in Jerusalem to fielding an army of leper knights. Matthew Doherty explores the story of the the Lazarites
In the history of the Crusades, a number of military orders made their names with their exploits in the Holy Land. The likes of the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, and the Teutonic Order all formed in the 12th century, in the decades after the First Crusade (1095-99) had captured the holy city of Jerusalem from Islamic control. Alongside the more prominent orders, however, was a small group called the Order of Saint Lazarus. Although formed with the sole purpose of caring for the sick, by the 13th century the Lazarites, adorned in white with a green cross, were among the ranks of crusader knights. But they were no ordinary fighters: the majority of them suffered from the dreaded scourge of leprosy. Read more | Crusader criminals: why medieval knights went rogue in the Holy Land Rise of the order The beginnings of the Order of Saint Lazarus can be found in a leper hospital in 12th-century Jerusalem, with the purpose of helping and caring for sickly pilgrims to the Holy Land. Leprosy appears to have been particularly prevalent in the Near East in the 12th and 13th centuries, at the same time as waves of Christian invaders descended on the region. In 1142, Fulk, the Christian king of Jerusalem, conceded to “the church of Saint Lazarus and the convent of the sick who are called miselli, an estate… which is between the Mount of Olives and the Red Cistern on the road which leads to the River Jordan.” Miselli can be roughly translated to “little wretched ones” and referred to leprous beggars. The land granted to this church was well situated, for it was on a key crossroads close to the Jordan, where those suffering from leprosy could bathe in its supposedly curative waters. Styling themselves ‘Lazarites’, the monks who cared for the afflicted were successful enough to buy more land two years later and expand their ministrations. Read more | Melisende of Jerusalem: the queen of a crusader kingdom A living death In the 21st century, it’s known that leprosy (also known as Hansen’s disease) is spread in humans by Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis (leprosy bacteria). Symptoms include thickened and deeply furrowed skin, discoloured sores on the body, and numbness in the arms and legs. If untreated, it can lead to severe facial disfigurement, paralysis, and blindness. The hands and fingers tend to wither and shorten. Non-healing ulcers can also develop on the soles of the feet, forcing many sufferers to shamble painfully as they walk. Though the disease itself is not fatal, complications arising from infection can often lead to septicaemia and death. During the medieval age, it was often called a “living death”, for the sufferer would have looked – to the unscientific and unsympathetic eye – like a moving corpse. Those suffering from leprosy were often viewed with horror and suspicion by a fearful population, especially in the wake of the Black Death. The classic image of the hooded leper, shunned by a society who assumed the disease was divine punishment from God, does hold much truth. However, more recent scholarship is redefining the longtime perception of the medieval leper as an eternal outcast. At the time of the Crusades, many regarded the leper as suffering a type of purgatory on Earth, and so believed that they would ascend straight to heaven upon death. Accepting donations from the nobility of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Lazarites continued to grow and gained more ‘lazar houses’ across the Crusader states, or Outremer. Pilgrims and penitents would come to pray and care for the lepers at these houses. Read more: Crusader queens: the formidable female rulers of Jerusalem The most spectacular case of penance was that of a nobleman called Alberic, who “ate those things which the lepers had left, kissed each one daily after Mass, washed and wiped their feet, made their beds, and carried the weak on top of his shoulders.” Alberic must have felt himself to have led a particularly violent and impious life prior to serving at the lazar house, considering that he whipped himself relentlessly and wore a goat-hair shirt (worn so the coarse hair would scratch the wearer). He even took the bowl used to wash the lepers and, though the blood and discharge within moved him to nausea, immerse his face in it. For the first 50 years of its existence, the monks of the Lazarite Order only concerned themselves with tending to the sick. But this would all change after the great sultan Saladin recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslim world in 1187. Men who are not afraid to die One of the greatest problems faced by Crusader forces was manpower: they were almost always outnumbered by opposing Muslim armies. To combat this shortcoming, several orders took an active role in defending Outremer, including the aforementioned Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller and Teutonic Order. These military orders contained some of the most highly trained and motivated fighting men in the Christian world. But when a knight contracted the dreaded disease of leprosy, he would usually be ordered to live separately, or encouraged to report to a lazar house. Since leprosy in its early stages rarely renders the sufferer infirm, the Lazarites began to add to their ranks men who were the fighting elite of the Crusader states, and could still wield a blade. In 1191, the Lazarites relocated their headquarters to the coastal city of Acre and built a fortress-hospice called l’Eglise des chevaliers de Saint Lazare, or House of the Knights of St Lazarus. Popes gave them similar dispensations and tax breaks to the ones bestowed upon other key military orders, while their knights began to combine military and medical duties. At the beginning, the knights were likely all made up of lepers. It is definitely known that Walter de Novo Castro and Reynald de Fleury, two master generals after the order’s militarisation, suffered from the disease. In battle, Lazarite knights wore a green cross on a white background. It is likely that brothers with facial deformities or scarring would have wrapped up in white bandages. Though the group was small in number, they must have been a terrifying sight, especially given that their opponents may have believed that close combat ran the risk of contracting leprosy. The ‘Leper King’? The most famous sufferer of leprosy in the Crusader states was one of its greatest kings: Baldwin IV. King of Jerusalem from 1174 to 1185, it is likely he had an association with the Lazarites. His father Almaric gave an annual rent of 50 bezants to the lazar house in Jerusalem, specifically for the support of one leper. This was in 1171, around the time he became aware of his son’s condition. By the time he ascended the throne at the age of 13, Baldwin’s leprosy had already caused one hand to wither. He was therefore taught to ride a horse using his knees. He became known as the ‘Leper King’. In 1177, Saladin led a huge army of his Ayyubids against the Crusaders, and Baldwin elected to head up his forces in person. As one chronicler put it: “Everyone despaired of the life of the sick king, already half dead, but he drew upon his courage and rode to meet Saladin.” In the subsequent battle of Montgisard, Baldwin achieved a spectacular against-the-odds victory, completely routing Saladin’s army. This was in large part down to Baldwin's daring leadership, not to mention horsemanship. Yet by 1183, Baldwin was blind, had lost the use of both hands, and could not walk without help. Until his death in 1185, he forced himself to perform administrative duties. Though never an official member of the Lazarite Order, Baldwin was in every respect a leper knight. How successful were the Lazarites? Despite occasional battlefield successes, the tide opposing Christian forces in the Holy Land was unstoppable, and the position of the Crusader states grew ever more precarious as the 13th century ground on. At the battle of La Forbie in 1244, an allied army – made up of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the military orders and breakaway Ayyubids – took on the Muslim forces of Egypt. While the Egyptians swept up much of the enemy, the knights – including the Lazarites – made a ferocious mounted charge, which nearly restored the situation. Even when they pressed too far into the Egyptian ranks and became surrounded, they fought bravely until eventually be overwhelmed. Some Hospitallers and Templars cut their way out, but Robert of Nantes, Patriarch of Jerusalem, reported that “all the leper knights of the [Lazarite Order] have been miserably killed by the enemies of the faith.” Further losses were to come in 1252, when the reformed Lazarites decided, on their own initiative, to launch a chevauchée near Ramla. This was a fast-moving raid aimed at civilian targets, during which cattle would be seized and crops burned, in an effort to spread terror. In the end, things did not go so well for the Lazarites, as one French knight called De Joinville remembered: “After [the master of St Lazarus] had collected his spoils the Saracens attacked him, and so thoroughly defeated him that of all the men he had in his company no more than four escaped.” The defeats at La Forbie and the Ramla raid crippled the already small Lazarite order. To replace their losses, it became necessary to accept healthy knights into the ranks. For those men, this was seen as an act of extreme piety and faith in God, for they risked contracting leprosy. By 1255, Pope Alexander IV described the order as a convent “of active knights and others, both healthy and leprous, for the purpose of driving out the enemies of the Christian name.” And in 1260, it became official policy for a leprous Templar brother to transfer to the Lazarites. Yet despite their (often-suicidal) courage, the tiny band of Lazarite knights could not hope to hold the Crusader states. Matters came to a head at the Siege of Acre. The Siege of Acre In April 1291, a large Muslim army from the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt surrounded Acre. To many, the fall of the city was inevitable, leading women and children to evacuate by sea, but most of the fighting men stayed – including the knights of Saint Lazarus. By now the order had been so whittled away that it could only muster around 25 knights for the defence, with some backing from lighter armed retainers. Tightening the ring, the Mamluks brought up siege engines to batter the walls. The night of 15/16 April saw a foray led by the Templars, which probably included Lazarite brethren. Though unsuccessful in burning the siege engines, they engaged over a thousand Mamluks and brought home valuable trophies. Yet nothing could stop the fall of the city. On 18 May, the Mamluks attacked the entire length of the wall. Templars and remaining Lazarites had been given responsibility for defending the Montmusard wall. This constituted the short straw: a lengthy section with a small number of defence towers, built straight which meant that it lacked opportunities for crossbowmen and archers to provide covering fire. When the ‘Accursed Tower’ fell on the other side of the city, the Templars scrambled to retake it, leaving the Lazarites to guard the wall. The Mamluks pressed Montmusard again with the Lazarites spread too thin. All the “military brethren” of the order fought to the death. The fall of Acre represented the end of the Crusader presence in the Near East. What happened to the Lazarites? While the Lazarite cause in the Holy Land collapsed, the order was growing in Europe. During the Crusader period, they had built a network of lazar houses centred on the Castle of Boigny near Orléans in France, and Lazarite monks continued to care for the afflicted. The next centuries would see the order survive papal disfavour, political revolutions, and two world wars. Today, the modern Order of Saint Lazarus boasts 4,500 members across five continents. And it still maintains its original mission of caring for the sick, with a special focus on the one to two million people still suffering with leprosy. Matthew Doherty is a military historian, writer and teacher
Michael Wood on Gaza's astonishing cultural heritage
"The current destruction in Gaza is more thorough than any ancient siege," says historian Michael Wood
Back in the mid-nineties, I went on a journey following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, travelling down through Lebanon to Egypt, and I stayed in Gaza. Alexander had waged a brutal siege of the city, which ended with the vindictive killing of the heroic governor, Batis, who was dragged around the walls behind Alexander’s chariot, as Achilles had done with Hector. War is a horrible business. And Gaza has known more than most. My photos show the old Great Mosque, with its huge circular window; originally a temple to Marnas, the chief Gazan deity, then a Byzantine church, it’s now destroyed. The Greek church of St Porphyrius, perhaps the third-oldest in the world, has been wrecked. The souk, squares, gardens and orchards – all obliterated, along with mosques, churches, universities, libraries, hospitals, schools, museums, cemeteries, even the zoo. Alternate history: What if Alexander the Great had lived longer? Back then I stayed in the Marna Guest House. Opened in 1946, it was run by Alia al-Shawa, a warm hostess from an old Gazan family. There was a sunlit terrace, a garden with a huge plane tree, and an old well of good water for which Gaza was once famous. That first evening I had a dinner with Gazan scholars including Dr Moain Sadek, who had studied in Germany and had just become head of Gazan Antiquities; he has since written distinguished studies on Gazan archaeology and architecture. We talked about the city’s long history: first settled in the fifth millennium BC, Gaza has always been a crossroads between Egypt, the Near East and Anatolia. It was sacked and ruined many times – including bombing by the British in 1917 – but always rose again. After dinner we walked in the garden. “In the west, when you think of Gaza, you think of violence and war, poverty and despair,” observed Dr Sadek. “But there’s another Gaza – rich in ancient heritage, openness to the world and a determination to preserve the culture of the past amid all the destruction.” After all, he smiled, “the cradle of civilisation – the Fertile Crescent – runs through the orchards of Gaza”. That night, I curled up with a book on the history of Gaza from the house library. Published in 1963, it was part of a series called The Centers of Civilisation, which was “devoted to the cities that from earliest times to the present have exercised a radiating influence upon the eras in which they flourish”: Bukhara, Constantinople, Athens, Fez, Florence, Kyoto – and a volume on Gaza. In the fifth and sixth centuries AD, a group of writers and thinkers worked at the famous School of Gaza that attracted students from all over the classical world, their links reaching as far as Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria. Indeed, the writer Aeneas of Gaza claimed that, when the Academy in Athens was shut down by Justinian in AD 529, some teachers migrated to Gaza. There, the classical tradition was transformed in the new world of Late Antique Eastern Christianity. Members of the Gazan schools mixed with the local cultures of philosophers, rhetoricians, hermits and monks from nearby monasteries. Classical theatre was still popular in sixth-century Gaza. The public baths were adorned with paintings of the Theseus myth and scenes from the Iliad. The Christian philosopher Procopius of Gaza (from whom 169 letters survive) had a remarkable library comprising not only Christian literature but also an unbelievable range of works by the ancients, from Homer to Euripides, in the belief that culture also depended on the pagan classics. When the Syrian Theodore of Tarsus became archbishop of Canterbury in the seventh century, he arrived with Procopius’s biblical commentaries in his baggage. That’s just a snapshot of just one chapter of Gaza’s rich story. Travelling the world making films over the past 40 years, I have seen the devastation of war in old Mosul, Kabul, Aleppo before the fall – the barbaric work of the modern sackers of cities. The current destruction in Gaza is more thorough than any ancient siege sung about in the city laments of Iraq or the Book of Lamentations. The loss of life now is horrendous. But also important over the past 70 years has been Gaza’s continued enforced isolation from the world, and the world from Gaza. Its role as a vibrant, historic Levantine city has been shut down. Only when that isolation comes to an end will it be able to reconnect with the Mediterranean world to which it belongs, and to which it has contributed so much. Let’s hope that Gaza, now in the nadir of its fortunes, will rise again. This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
North, south, east and west: how ancient civilisations found their bearings before the compass
Why did the ancient Chinese associate north with power? What led early Muslims to pray to the south? And what role did winds have to play in our understanding of directions? Jerry Brotton takes us on a journey through the history of the four points of the compass
Writing in his philosophical work the New Organon in 1620, the English scientist and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon famously identified China’s three great inventions, “which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely printing, gunpowder and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.” Much has been written about the historical impact of printing and gunpowder. But there’s been far less emphasis on the magnet, and how (using lodestones to magnetise iron needles) it enabled the ‘obscure’ invention of the magnetic compass during the Han dynasty in the third century BC. This technology enabled China and, subsequently, other societies to navigate and orientate themselves according to the four points of the compass: north, east, south and west. We tend to think about these directions and the art of navigation as a consequence of the invention of the compass, but this is not in fact the case. The ancient history of direction and its relationship to the magnetic compass is altogether more surprising. How ancient civilisations understood east and west Thousands of years before the discovery of the compass, early human societies observed the sun rising in the direction we now call ‘east’ and watched it setting in the direction now known as ‘west’. East to west was probably the earliest prime axis that people understood by simply watching the sun’s path across the sky. The worship of the sun, or heliolatry, characterised ancient Egyptian worship of solar gods: Horus (the rising sun), Ra (the noon sun) and Osiris (the dying or setting sun). Read more | Sun gods and goddesses: 16 solar deities from world history This initial east-west solar axis was gradually followed by the understanding of another axis. This one ran vertically from north to south, and could be identified by observing the sun and stars. At noon the sun is always due south in the northern hemisphere and due north in the southern hemisphere. Living in the northern hemisphere, you can also look up at the stars and find north according to Polaris, the North or Pole Star. If you live in the southern hemisphere, that direction is identified by Polaris Australis, the South Star. The four cardinal directions By combining the two axes – east-west horizontally and north-south vertically – ancient societies created the basic framework for what we now call the four cardinal directions. The word ‘cardinal’ comes from the Latin cardinalis, which can mean something (or someone) of fundamental importance. That’s why, in the Roman Catholic church, it refers to a priest ranking beneath only the pope. The names for these four directions were inspired by the human body: our front and back, left and right, even top and bottom. In many ancient languages, ‘front’ and ‘back’ are synonymous with east and west. In Hebrew, east – qedem or mizrach – also means ‘forward’ or ‘front’, while ‘west’ – achor – is a synonym for ‘behind’. In ancient Chinese, the pictograph for north, bĕi, represents two people back to back. The dark and cold north is synonymous with the ‘back’ of the body, while the ‘front’ looks southwards (nán), in the direction of light and warmth. The earliest surviving record that we know of that names the four cardinal directions was inscribed on a clay tablet during the first great Mesopotamian empire, the Akkadian dynasty (c2350–2150 BC). It is a rudimentary topographical map known as the ‘Gasur map’, showing an agricultural estate. At the top left is IM-kur, ‘east’; at the bottom left is IM-mar-tu, ‘west’; and to the centre left IM-mir, ‘north’. The prefix ‘IM’ refers to winds, not astronomical observations. Other Mesopotamian texts describe four principal winds forming a diagonal cross, equivalent to the modern directions of north-west, north-east, south-east and south-west. When the cuneiform text on the map is read from top to bottom, IM-mir, the direction from which the regular north-western winds blow, is the prime orientation. What this shows is that the farmers cultivating the land more than 4,000 years ago understood the four cardinal directions in terms of wind direction and changeable climatic conditions. Why? Because they were crucial for the cultivation of crops and could mean the difference between feast and famine. The importance of the winds Ancient Greek philosophy and science inherited the Mesopotamian preoccupation with winds. Mythical personifications of the four directions as gods first appear in the ancient works of Homer (c800 BC). His celebrated epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, both mention four deities representing cardinal winds. Boreas, the north wind, is possibly an archaic variant of ‘mountains’ or ‘roaring’. Notos, the south wind, derives from ‘moist’. Eurus, the east wind, comes from the ‘brightness’ of sunrise. The western wind of Zephyrus stems from the ‘gloom’ of sunset. Later Greek philosophers offered a more naturalistic account of direction. Aristotle’s Meteorology (c350 BC) includes the earliest known geometrical diagram of cardinal directions according to wind systems, depicting eight principal winds in his conception of the Earth. Listen | Roderick Beaton picks out the key moments in 4,000 years to explore how the Greeks changed the world The Romans adopted many of the Greek terms for directions based on winds, and introduced some new Latin words. North came first, named borealis or septentriones, a reference to the ‘seven stars’ of Ursa Major (which appears to rotate around the northern star, Polaris). South was given several new terms, including australis (‘harsh’ or ‘sharp’ – thanks to the harsh heat and hot, sharp winds) or meridionalis (from ‘midday’). West was occidentalis (‘falling’ or ‘passing away’) and east was orientalis (‘rising’ or ‘originating’, as in the sun). So, when we speak of being ‘disoriented’, we are literally saying we are unable to find the east. The role of Judaism and Christianity These ideas and terms were accepted until the ninth century, when a radical change took place that changed the names of the cardinal directions. This happened under Charlemagne (748–814), emperor of much of the northern part of Europe. In attempting to unify the continent, Charlemagne initiated many political, economic and educational reforms. This included abandoning winds as a means of classifying directions and renaming the four directions using proto-Germanic words, derived from Indo-European roots. Nord (north) came from the proto-Indo-European term, nórto-s – ‘lower’, or to the ‘left’ (of the rising sun looking east). Est (east) drew on the Indo-European austo-s – ‘light’ or ‘shine’ (as in the morning). Sund (south) derived from an archaic term for the sun, sú-n-to-s, referring to the south as the direction of the midday sun. Oëst (west) took its name from the proto-Indo-European uestos with its many meanings of the evening, including red (as in the setting sun). Versions of these words are now recognisable in most modern European vernacular languages. The impact of these evolving ideas of the cardinal directions underpinned early theological belief across various cultures. Jewish and Christian theology revered the east as the prime cardinal direction of worship and celebration. The story begins in Genesis: God “planted a garden eastward in Eden” (Genesis 2:8). The messiah’s second coming is predicted as arriving from the east, “For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be” (Matthew 24:27). Mizrach, or east, thus became the Jewish direction of prayer. Early Christianity expanded the Jewish mizrach by developing the Latin term Ad orientem – ‘to the east’ – to understand east as its sacred direction. The idea can be seen on medieval Christian maps, such as the mappa mundi housed in Hereford Cathedral. Here the cardinal directions are represented on its outer ring from the top, moving clockwise, from oriens (east), meridiens (south), occidens (west) to septentrio (north). The Garden of Eden is shown at the top, then time flows downwards through images of Old Testament empires, the birth of Christ and the rise of Rome, with Jerusalem at the centre. It ends at the westernmost point of Gibraltar at the bottom of the map. The differences of early Islamic maps Where east sat at the top of early Christian maps for theological reasons, on many early Islamic maps south was the prime direction. This was because most of the societies that first converted to Islam lived directly north of Mecca. As a result, believers prayed due south, a practice that oriented their world maps accordingly. On a map dated 1297 (copied from the 10th-century geographer Muhammad al-Istakhri), the world is oriented with south at the top. Africa is a claw extending deep into the Indian Ocean, and the vertical bar running from top right downwards is the Nile, flowing into the Mediterranean with three islands: Cyprus, Crete and Sicily. Europe is shown below, including Muslim Spain (al-Andalus). The map’s finest detail lies at the heart of the Muslim empire, whose various administrative districts are demarcated in red. Arabia sits in the centre of the map with the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. Why China put north at the top While east and south defined the theological directions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in China north sat at the top of their world maps, hundreds of years before Europe adopted such a convention. In Chinese belief, the emperor was the ‘Son of Heaven’, the earthly manifestation of the supreme deity inhabiting the Pole Star. The emperor looked ‘down’ south on his subjects from an elevated position on high in the north, while they looked ‘up’ northwards to him. ‘South’ (nan) was expressed in its pictograph as a liana plant, evoking the luxuriant vegetation of the south as viewed from the drier, colder northern latitudes. But north remained the direction from which imperial power and authority emanated. Read more | Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower? For centuries, China was a global leader in the technology of navigation – and it was only in the 12th century that the magnetic compass started to appear in the Mediterranean for use in navigation. How these compasses moved west is still unclear. But they were decisive in enabling Christian navigators to develop sailing charts known as ‘portolans’ to navigate across, first, the Mediterranean, and then the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Maps of European exploration Yet though their explorations were facilitated by a Chinese technology, Europe an explorers didn’t initially follow the Chinese convention of placing north at the top of their maps. Eight years after Christopher Columbus’s momentous voyage to the Americas in 1492–93, Juan de la Cosa, owner of Columbus’s flagship, La Santa María, drew a map showing the new ‘discoveries’ in the west. The writing on the map suggests that it should be oriented with west at the top – one of the few world maps to ever privilege ‘west’ as its cardinal direction. The west briefly became the cardinal direction – until European scholars, who tended to revere the classics, chose to mimic the ancient Greek practice of placing north at the top. Juan de la Cosa’s map also features a ‘compass rose’ in the middle of the Atlantic, a symbol of the key role that the instrument was to play in the coming centuries. Soon, with the European age of discovery gathering momentum, the magnetic compass would well and truly triumph. Many of us may have naturally assumed that the compass gave us the words we use for the cardinal directions – north and south, east and west. Yet, as the long and colourful history of our relationship with orientation and navigation proves, it was the other way round. This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Iranian embassy siege: an SAS hostage drama in London
Ben Macintyre tells the dramatic tale of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege and the dramatic SAS operation that brought it to an end
In May 1980, TV coverage of the world snooker final was interrupted by live footage of men in black balaclavas abseiling down the walls of the Iranian Embassy in London. This was Operation Nimrod, a daring SAS plan to free dozens of hostages who'd been held captive in the building for almost a week by a group of gunmen. In his new book, bestselling author Ben Macintyre tells the story of the Iranian Embassy siege, from its roots in the Middle East to its incredibly dramatic conclusion. He spoke to Rob Attar about this defining event of Margaret Thatcher's premiership. View Green Video on the source website
Michael Wood on the Bangladesh Liberation War
“From Africa to the Indian subcontinent, imperialism has left a trail of damage,” writes historian Michael Wood
Over the past four months I have watched the Israel-Gaza war with horror. And I have been struck by the growing international reaction to it all: the stark division between the Western world and the rising ‘Global South’, which increasingly no longer accepts the ‘rules-based order’ that it sees as being imposed by the West to support its hegemony. It feels like a big moment in history. Is a new world order emerging? It has left me reflecting on the legacy of the age of colonialism. Some influential modern historians have argued that colonial powers were, on balance, a force for good, improving the lot of humanity. I disagree – and that is even before we mention the climate catastrophe, largely caused by the ravages of international capitalism. On the podcast | Cricket as a colonial weapon In my job, I have travelled the world and seen for myself the aftermath of empire. From apartheid South Africa and the Congo through to Afghanistan, the Americas and the Indian subcontinent, colonialism and imperialism have left a trail of damage. And that damage is both psychological and material. The development of traditional societies has been disrupted and arrested, ancient cultural identities have been erased in a few generations. And, as current events show, we are still living with the divisions we bequeathed. Those divisions are laid bare in a powerful documentary by Krishnendu and Madhurima Bose, Bay of Blood, about the liberation war in Bangladesh in 1971. This story is largely forgotten today outside that country, but it is part of one of the most significant events in the history of the modern world, one in which the aftermath of empire had a catastrophic impact on millions of lives: the partition of India. Read more | 10 historical turning points for modern India Or perhaps we should say the partitions of India, because they took place over the course of a century. In fact, the tensions currently besetting Kashmir suggest that they are not over yet. The viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, initiated this process with the short-lived partition of Bengal in 1905. (The British divided East and West Bengal on religious grounds to constrain voices for independence in Bengal, which was the intellectual powerhouse of 19th-century India.) Then, in 1947, came the great partition, which was driven, too, by religion. Read more | Enduring trauma: the legacy of partition With huge loss of life, and the forced transfers of entire populations, British India was divided into three: India, and East and West Pakistan. It beggars belief that this arrangement could ever have been contemplated, let alone put into practice: a single country, Pakistan, whose two halves were separated by a thousand miles – one Urdu speaking, the other Bengali, with nothing in common but religion. The cognitive dissonance of this whole disastrous idea was summed up in the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s, infamous speech declaring that “Urdu and only Urdu” would be the national language, and that those who thought otherwise were “enemies of Pakistan”. In the new country, all power rested with West Pakistan. East Pakistan was denied money, resources and influence. Inevitably, an independence movement grew, and in an election in December 1970, the East Pakistan Awami League won the right to rule the entire country. Needless to say, the West Pakistan establishment didn’t accept that, and the Pakistan army plunged the East into a nightmare that saw massacres, mass rape and the systematic murder of intellectuals, driven by racism towards the darker-skinned Bengalis. All this is harrowingly told in Bay of Blood. The crisis was only resolved by the heroic determination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, who intervened on behalf of East Bengal. The Pakistani army was swiftly routed and a new country was born: Bangladesh. One of the striking factors of this terrible episode was how much Cold War politics determined the mindsets of the West. Even when the Americans were shown clear evidence of genocide they still supported their client West Pakistan, sending a battle group to the Indian Ocean to threaten India. It’s half a century since these tragic events, and nearly 80 years since the partition of 1947. We are still living with the consequences, with increasingly intolerant religious nationalisms emerging across the subcontinent. Jawaharlal Nehru – who would become the first prime minister of an independent India – set out his hopes for a secular state celebrating India’s “unity in diversity”. For now, at least, that noble aspiration seems to be receding. This column first appeared in the March 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine