Monday Cup Of Links #76 - Lost Amazon City, Royal Spy Rooms, 1930s Weight Loss
Monday Cup Of Links Is Back! Happy Pongal!
Happy Pongal!
It’s been a while since I did a Monday Cup Of Links, so many of you might not have seen one from me until now. It’s a set of interesting links, usually related to history or culture, that I’d come across in the previous week. I used to add interesting clips or GIFs, but I liked it better to add a museum artifact every week. I quit doing it because it stopped feeling authentic at the point I was, but now I feel like it’s the funnest part.
It’s been a cold, wet Makara Sankranti day, which isn’t ideal for flying kites. Let’s hope the sun shows up for Surya Pongal; last year was so rainy with the atmospheric river that we couldn’t offer prayers outside. Though, I’m looking forward to hot pongal and vadai in the morning. I did try to make molded sugar candy (sakkre acchu), but I just can’t seem to get it right, and I just made do with ellu-bella (sesame seeds, jaggery, and bits of jeera candy). Oh, and does anyone else end up with a sore throat if you drink water after eating sugarcane? I don’t know why that always seems like a good idea and I always end up regretting it.
Onto our links!
A huge ancient city has been found in the Amazon, hidden for thousands of years by lush vegetation. Apparently the Amazon has always been known to be a rather young forest, and the area previously used to be more like a a savanna/grassland. People kept finding remnants of old villages that were closely connected, but they weren’t considered true urban centers. Now with aerial Lidar/remote sensing from helicopters, they’ve found remnants of big urban centers. The people who occupied this area were apparently called the Casarabe, and they likely ceased to occupy this area in around 1400 CE. Why did they leave? It seems like the reason might have been drought. This sort of reminds me of how it is generally assumed that forest tribes in India have always lived in the forest, but in many cases, they turn out to be groups who went into the forest to escape invasions.
They mounted the golden rooster atop the spire of the Notre Dame cathedral recently. It will be reopened to the public on 8 December 2024. They’ve rebuilt it in the five years since the 2019 fire for $750 million. There’s been some controversy about the stained glass windows being recreated in artistic styles of the 21st century, but it’s a good idea IMO because that keeps it a living monument instead of a museum stuck in the past.
In the light of Indian students in Ukraine sheltering in Poland when war broke out, the history writer Bhuvan Lall writes about how the Maharaja of Nawanagar housed orphaned children from Poland during the worst of WW2. I’ve come across this incident before, but this piece goes into the history of how these children came to be in India in the first place. When Poland was being invaded by Nazi Germany, millions of Polish civilians were deported to Arctic Russia and Siberia, where they languished in gulags, and among them were many orphaned children of soldiers. When Stalin joined the Allied efforts, the children became free to go to any country. They were brought to Bombay where the Polish consulate tried to take care of them. The consul there spread awareness of the plight of the children among various Indian princes, and the Jam Sahib (ruler) of Nawanagar, a small principality in Gujarat, rose to the task. He housed them all in his palace, made sure they lacked for nothing, and kept their morale up until it was safe for them to return to Poland. In Warsaw today, there is a “Skwer Dobrego Maharadzy” - the Square of the Good Maharaja commemorating his actions.
In the ruins of the palace of Hampi, there’s a secret underground chamber. Kings used that room to hold secret meetings with spies. Isn’t that amazing?
Artifact of the week: I was researching some family history in an old Pennsylvania newspaper, and came across this apparent “news article” in the Lebanon Daily News edition dated Jan 7, 1933. It seems like some sort of an advertorial for Kruschen Salts, but it seems intriguing that losing 20 pounds was newspaper-worthy in 1933. Would people from back then lose their minds if they came across weight loss shows like The Biggest Loser or shows like My 600 lb Life?