Monday Cup Of Links #63 - Queen’s homecoming, 16-yr-old Ptolemaic Landlady, Hopelessly Ornate Ancient Earrings
Yes, I know it's Tuesday now.
Happy Tuesday!
It’s been one of those Mondays. I started writing this post at 4am, and somehow I’ve only completed it at 11:30 PM. No, I wasn’t staring at this all day, I don’t have the luxury of this kind of procrastination right now.
Onto our links!
Queen Ketevan goes home, from Goa to Georgia! This is such an interesting saga. Queen Ketevan was a queen of the Georgian kingdom of Kakheti in the 17th century. After her husband, the King died, she was the regent of her son. The Safavid emperor in Persia was eyeing the kingdom, so her son was forced to send Ketevan and his two sons as hostages to Shiraz in Persia. The two princes were tortured and killed. The Queen (queen-mother at this point, I guess) was ordered to convert to Islam and join the emperor’s harem. What kind of a monster asks that of a sixty year old woman, I don’t know. She valiantly refused to abandon her Christianity through all the torture she was subjected to. She was publicly executed.
Two Augustinian monks who had just moved to Shiraz witnessed her execution, and dug up her remains. They split up her remains into many parts and spread them around the place.
The Augustinians built a grand church in Goa. Her hand bones were kept in St. Augustine’s Church in Goa. But in the 19th century, the Portuguese Inquisition expelled the Augustinians from Goa and ordered the church demolished. It was stripped for parts and abandoned. Why? The Portuguese wanted to go back to some pure form of Catholicism, and I suppose the Augustinians weren’t pure enough. Heck, they tortured and executed the Nasrani christians who came to India in the 1st century and are so ancient that they still have old testament names.
Anyway. It was a right old treasure hunt to find the remains of Queen Ketevan. In 2013, they did a DNA analysis and found the remains to be of a Georgian woman. And now, they are repatriating those remains to Georgia, where they belong.They found Harappan style pottery in Maharashtra! This site was right by the Nimbalkar Fortress, so it’s a new site to be considered part of the Indus-Saraswati Civilization. Two things are cool about this find - It’s a continuously inhabited site that has Indus Valley pottery, and some 16th century pottery has also been found alongside the Indus Valley pottery.
We really need to get whatever cool tech allows us to look under our current cities and towns to find how old our cities really are, and how we used to live.I enjoyed reading this piece about the Tatas and philanthropy. The biggest philanthropist in the world is not Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, it is JRD Tata. They are such an important part of the idea of India. The piece goes into how they feel a strong sense of duty to India, and how their giving benefits them in the long term.
There’s this papyrus found in Egypt, dated to July 17, 161 BC, which is the statement of a 16-year-old girl named Herais, registering her property in her own name. She lives with her mother, father, and 9-year-old sister, and she owns the house they live in. Her mother owns another property close by <Insert Bay Area home prices joke>. You can read the whole English translation here.
Her mom is 39 and her dad is 44. This whole scene seems so contemporary other than the kid owning the home. Makes me wonder if childhood and adolescence has only grown longer. And this book about Gen Z, which I read earlier this week, seems to agree with me.
The other thing that I found interesting was this was the Ptolemaic Kingdom. I don’t know much about Egyptian history and haven’t really put in the effort to learn, but apparently this was part of the Roman empire, and this part was mainly settled by Greek mercenaries under Augustus Octavian to exploit the fertile land.Artefact of the week: Satavahana Queen’s golden earrings from 100 BC. This is one of the only pieces of gold jewelry that has survived from ancient India. Archaeologists found the earrings in sculptures very ornate and elaborate and wondered if they were even real, and then they found these earrings which are every bit as elaborate as a pair of earrings can be. They aren’t symmetrical. One has an elephant on it, another a winged lion. They are so impossibly ornate, I want them so bad!