Stuff Jos van der Woude cares about :: History
Why History
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When asked: "If you could travel in time, where would you choose to go to?" I used to always answer: "100, 200, or 500 years in the future!". Because by then, I image, we will have figured out a way to travel to distant planets. Man, that would be cool. This preoccupation with the future started way back in the 1960s when I watched Star Trek as a little kid. Some twenty odd years later and wiser (that moment is now some twenty years ago) it dawned on me that under the pretext of Science Fiction, a lot of sensitive social and historic issues were being raised in these shows. In my own defence I have to say that even the US TV censors were fooled. By now, it is very much common knowledge that the creators of Star Trek knew full well what they were doing. But I like to think I discovered this all on my own. I discovered that great and sophisticated civilizations in fact existed in our past and were being used as a model for future imaginary civilizations. I watched the foolishness of a war-torn planet where one half of the population was bent on killing the other half. Why, you ask? The skin of people on this particular distant planet is half black and half white, with the color divided by a line through the exact center of their faces. However, in half of the population the sides of black and white skin are reversed, a difference which seems inconsequential to the Enterprise crew but is of great importance to the people from this planet. In fact important enough to hate and kill each other over it. Makes you think, |
| I do not remember when my fascination with ancient Egypt really started. I do remember some key moments. One of those key moments was a visit to the Egypt museum in Berlin in 1994. Back then the museum was located in Charlottenburg West Berlin, now it is part of the Neues Museum on museum island in the center of Berlin. Here I stood less than half a meter away from the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti. I remember being totally overwhelmed. This was a statue of a beautiful utterly modern looking woman which for all intents and purposes could have been a bust of a model or movie star made last year, but was in fact made around 1350 BC, almost 3400 years ago. You see, in my simple mind the past was dark and horrible and the future bright and enlightened. The fact that there was a civilization some 3400 years ago which could produce a woman looking like that and on top of that produce a work of art depicting such a woman, totally blew this naive idea out of the window. The man who discovered the bust in 1912 was Ludwig Borchardt. His diary provides the main written account of the find; he remarks, "Suddenly we had in our hands the most alive Egyptian artwork. You cannot describe it with words. You must see it". I totally agree. From then on I remember wanting to know more about this amazing civilization. And so I did, I visited the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Egypt Museum in Turin, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum for Art and History in Brussels and the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. All this culminated in a trip to Egypt in 2005. There I saw most of the ancient temples and a lot of the art; it was totally awesome. Oh, and I did actually read some books on the subject as well. I shot the picture on the right on a second visit to this museum in Berlin in 2008. Obviously I maintain a photo gallery of all Egyptian art I came across (link opens in a new window). |  |
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The temple in Abydos dedicated to Seti I, Osiris and Isis along with Ptah, Ptah-Sokar, Nefertem, Re-Horakhty, Amun, and Horus was begun by Seti I and finished by his son, the great Ramesses II. This structure built of fine white limestone is actually one of the most impressive religious structures in Egypt. I shot the photograph on the left of a wall sculpture inside this temple in extremely low and yellow light on July 10th, 2005. And just in case you are wondering about Stargate now. Yes, I am also a big fan of Stargate, obviously. :-) |
| Another influence of an entirely different order is the game Civilization. This is a so called strategic game. In this game you start as a tribal leader in the year 4000 BC. The game ends in 2050 by which time you should have achieved a thriving civilization capable of sending a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. On the way, you have to make decisions relating to scientific discovery, forms of government, economic principles, cultural spending and foreign relations. You can choose to conquer the world, or dominate through economic, scientific or cultural might. You can trade with others or disallow all foreign contact. You can be a dictator or an elected president. In all cases it is wise to avoid a global nuclear war. This game taught me a lot about the larger forces at work behind the rise and fall of great empires. Admittedly this game suffers from an American bias. Because the bottom line of doing well in this game is running an efficient economy. This rings with a famous one liner from a former US president: "It's the economy, stupid!". Access to strategic resources like iron, coal, oil, rubber, aluminum and uranium as a precondition for surviving as an independent civilization was an other big time gotcha. It is not fun having to defend your country with horses against an attacker with tanks, not because you don't know how to build tanks, but because you do not have access to the oil needed to operate them. On top of that you find out that your friendly neighbor who does have oil, has just made a deal with your attacker not to supply oil to you in exchange for some gold and coal. Fun aye? Playing this game is a powerful lesson in realpolitik. Never mind what the politicians of the day are saying, there are always the same underlying principles: access to scientific knowledge, availability of resources, ownership of land and money. Please note the order, this is not a random list. |  |
right? Would it have been possible to address this very issue in 1969 on the level? I don't think so. Reviews of this episode "Let That Be You Last Battlefield" were never very positive. Critics thought this episode to be "too heavy-handed and obvious". That may be so, but in my view this very issue is still very relevant today, although the color black is now possibly substituted with the color olive-brown.
