BARBARA STROZZI: BAROQUE COMPOSER AND FEMINIST

A remarkable woman of the Baroque period, the Italian, Barbara Strozzi (1619 – 1677), was one of the rare female composers who was recognized in her time as among the most important in the era of European classical music.  After that, like so many women composers, she vanished from the history books for many decades, until, at last, in the twenty-first century, she was restored to her rightful place among famous musicians.

The new genre of opera was developed in the Baroque era: as a singer she had a well- developed sense of drama and was able to express profound and passionate emotion.  A great champion of woman and challenger of conventional gender roles, she dedicated two of her compositions among others to the aristocratic Duchess of Tuscany and the Archduchess of Innsbruck, Anna de Medici.

Perhaps part of her independent spirit arose from the circumstances of her birth as the illegitimate daughter of Giulio Strozzi who came from a powerful Florentine family to live in Venice.  He became a patron of the arts as well as an artist himself who created poetry, plays and wrote texts for musical works.

There is little information about Barbara Strozzi’s personal life so many centuries ago, though it seems her father must have recognized her musical potential early on since he arranged for Francesco Cavelli, Venice’s most important opera composer and musical director of the famous St Mark’s Cathedral, to teach Barbara the elements of opera.

Her mother, Isabella Garzoni, worked as a servant in Giulio Strozzi’s household, though it was never officially confirmed that Barbara was Giulio’s daughter.  Nevertheless, in his will of 1628, he nominated her as potential heir to his fortune.  It was only in his final will of 1650 that he made her Strozzi surname official, stating that he had adopted her.  Still, she took the surname Strozzi in 1637 at the age of eighteen.

Already at fifteen or sixteen, she was mentioned as singing for a gathering at the family home where Giulio set up the new Accademia degli unisoni in 1637, which served as a showpiece for Barbara’s vocal performances.  The academy also acted as a kind of debating society or discussion group with Barbara as mistress of ceremonies.

In spite of her obvious talent as soprano, she was regarded as not entirely respectable since singing was associated with sexual promiscuity in women.  In any event, historians speculate that she may have been a courtesan or high-class prostitute who never married but had a long-term relationship with her father’s friend, Giovanni Paulo Vidman, a match not of choice but by her father’s arrangement.  She had four children, of whom two daughters entered the convent and a son who became a monk. The fourth child, a son, was possibly not Vidman’s.

Malicious gossip and slander aside, Barbara Strozzi became well known to all the members of the Accademia.  A book about the academy written at that time was dedicated to her.  Moreover, she inspired a composer associate of her father Giulio to write no less than two books of songs, well received, the first called Poetic Bizarre by composer Nikolò Fontei who named her the most virtuoso of singers – all at the tender age of fifteen.

In 1644 she was one of the few composers who published her own work without any support from the church or patronage from the nobility.  There were madrigals and eight volumes of music, Opus 1 – 8.  She also wrote cantatas, arias, ariettas and motets, making up a total of one hundred and twenty-five works, which were well received and the publications remained successful over a period of twenty years from 1644 to 1664.

Since she was a singer, the emphasis in her composition was on vocal pieces which were not religious, in the main, aside from one volume of motets called Sacri musicali affetti, Opus 5.  The madrigals were works for more than one voice.  Cantatas, arias and ariettas were expressive solo works in the new operatic style, while arias and ariettas repeated the same music for each verse unlike cantatas, which were more elaborate pieces.  They consisted of multiple sections and a variety of ways of setting the text, ranging from recitative, the closest to speech, to full-blown melodies.  The arioso was an intermediate stage between recitative and aria, more lyrical than recitative and less formally structured than the arias we know today.

Strozzi was an important musical creator in the genre of cantatas, with texts written by herself, her father and by writers in the Marinist tradition of the poet Giambattista Marini who wrote romantic lyrics using complex and elaborate concepts.

She composed prolifically and her hundred and twenty-five long works were unique in many ways.  The poetic texts to her songs even had directions for performance and expression, which were unusual for her time.  The melodies she composed were complex and spectacular, though within a singer’s natural range.  Her rich composition, her performing technique and her own rendering of her work all indicated that she was a true musician in her own right, independent of her father, which happened more and more as he got older.

In 1644 she published a set of madrigals for two to five voices with texts by Giulio but after that he gradually faded into the background, leaving her to shine as musical creator, actress and performer who accompanied herself on the lute or theorbo.

Most of her works were written for soprano voice and she used dissonance to great effect, which was characteristic of the seconda practica tradition.  As virtuosissima cantatrice, namely the composer’s voice, she was intensely emotional, singing texts about unrequited love, using the dissonance of the seconda practica to highlight the extreme   feelings.  In this way the drama of the work was conveyed within an atmosphere of unpredictability.

Her work was on a par with the best of her male contemporaries, the emphasis being on the cantatas.  After 1664 she became less well known, though her work lived on in its intensity and innovative use of form.

Taken from the chapter, Barbara Strozzi:  Women making Music from the book A Modern Reveal:  Songs and Stories of Women Composers is the following appropriate quotation, a dedication by Barbara Strozzi to the Italian noblewoman:

“ I most reverently consecrate this first work, which as a woman I publish all too boldly, to the most August Name of Your Highness so that, under of oak of gold it may rest secure against the lightning bolts of slander prepared for it.”        

/0 Comments/by

NADIA BOULANGER: TEACING MIDWIFE OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS

A remarkable woman of strength, perseverance, self-discipline, a musical genius when it came to creative composition, Nadia Boulanger was the doyen of music teachers, a first among women orchestral conductors, an organist and a composer.

Her celebrated musical family spanned generations:  grandfather, Frédéric Boulanger, won a prize, aged five, at the Paris Conservatoire; grandmother Marie-Julie was a famous singer at the Opéra Comique; father, Ernest Boulanger, who studied piano, violin and composition at the Paris Conservatoire from the age of sixteen, won the Prix de Rome, the top prize at the institution at the age of twenty.  A singing teacher at the Conservatoire at a later stage, he performed in various places and, while travelling in Russia, he met a young aristocratic Russian schoolteacher, Raissa Myschetsky, who subsequently came to Paris to study singing with him.

After Raissa divorced her Russian husband, she and Ernest married:  he was sixty-two and she was twenty.

Ernest was seventy-two when Nadia was born in Paris in 1887.  Aged six, she studied music with her mother and then, after her sister, Lili was born, she entered the Conservatoire, aged ten, to study harmony and composition and had private lessons in organ playing.

By that time her father was already eighty-two and died when Nadia was thirteen years old.  Unbelievably, she then had to support the family.  At that tender age, she shouldered the onerous responsibility, taking up performances as a pianist and teaching private pupils at home, for at this stage, the family had moved to an apartment in rue Ballu, where Nadia lived and taught in the same place until she died seventy-five years later.

She also taught her younger sister, Lili, another Boulanger musical prodigy, who unfortunately after an early bout of bronchial pneumonia, was left with a weakened constitution.  When she was a mere two years old, the composer and director of the Conservatoire, Gabriel Faure, discovered that she had perfect pitch.  As a result, aged five, she accompanied the ten-year-old Nadia to classes at the Conservatoire in organ-playing and composition and, aside from singing, learned to play the violin, piano, cello and harp.  Like her father before her, Lili won the Prix de Rome at the age of nineteen for a cantata based on Goethe’s Faust called Faust et Hélène.  She died at the young age of twenty-four in 1918, after which Nadia stopped composing.

She herself failed in two attempts at the Conservatoire to win the important Prix, both in 1908 and 1909.  Having revered her sister, she believed Lili had the superior talent and genius, as her unsuccessful attempts at the Prix indicated.  These failures left her with the unwarranted view, according to Gabriel Faure, that her own music was “worthless”.  (Refer Nadia Boulanger:  Bach Cantatas website)

Nevertheless, her compositions were published between 1901 and 1922:  they consisted of two orchestral works, twenty-nine songs for solo singers; nine more ambitious vocal works some of which were orchestrated; five pieces for instrumental solo, namely organ, piano and cello; the opera, La ville morte; a song cycle Les heures claires, of which the opera and the song cycle were composed together with Raoul Pugno.  A French composer, teacher, organist and pianist of Italian origin, he became Director of the Opéra in Paris.  Nadia also composed Fantaisie variée for piano and orchestra, which he was to   stage as an opera in 1914 but as unrest was leading to the World War and Pugno himself died suddenly in the same year, the opera was never performed.

A harsh critic of her own work, she concentrated instead on teaching, conducting and directing orchestral and other pieces, some of which she arranged to have recorded in 1937 by His Masters Voice.  Among the recordings was her performance of Johannes Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes for two pianists with a vocal ensemble, her conducting of Piano Concerto in D by Jean Françaix, and directing the first performance of Monteverdi’s compositions, in this case, a selection of his madrigals.

In 1912 as the first woman conductor, she worked in the United States with, among others, The New York Symphony Orchestra, The Boston Orchestra and The Philadelphia Orchestra.  In 1937 she became the first woman to conduct an entire concert for the Royal Philharmonic Society in London.   The following year she directed the debut performance of Stravinsky’s Concerto Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC.

Meanwhile, she had already started teaching at the Conservatoire in 1907 and in 1920 joined the first staff members of the new Ecole Normal de Musique de Paris started by Alfred Cortot where she taught a range of musical subjects.  The following year, she was given a teaching post at the new Conservatoire Américain at Fontainebleu, a summer school sponsored by Americans.  Here she taught composition, harmony and counterpoint.  In the United States itself, she taught at the Longy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1915.

As a result of her ties with America, she influenced what were to become some of the country’s famous composers, like Aaron Copland, Michel Legrand, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass, Elliott Carter and many, many more.  Hundreds of composers and musicians went through the hands of Mademoiselle, her preferred title, one of whom remarked that there was a dime store as well as a Boulanger student at every town in the United States.  In the 1920’s a group of these students opened a school of composition based on Nadia Boulanger’s teaching.

During her first tour of the United States in 1912, she conducted the premier of Aron Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra:  he became a pupil of hers in the 1920’s when she taught at the Conservatoire Américain.

As for her extensive range of Continental students, there were, among others, John-Eliot Gardiner, Lennox Berkeley and Igor Markevitch.  Indefatigable, she served on various juries of international competitions, one of which was the International Tchaikovsky Competition held in Moscow in1966.  She made her teaching mark in England at the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, of which the lectures on a variety of musical subjects were broadcast by the BBC.

It seems as though over time, the negative in her psychology, namely the destructive self-criticism of her musical compositions was over-ruled by an increasingly well-developed understanding of the musical language and creative process of her students, past and present.  Although disciplined and traditional in approach, she had an unusual intuitive grasp of the work by individual composers who studied with her.  She was able to guide them towards a peak of creative self-fulfillment, which, ironically, she could not do for herself.  She inspired musical creators to realize their own individual fingerprint, that she regarded as the mark of genius.

This exceptional pedagogue continued to work, perform and teach for almost the full span of her seventy-nine years of active music life, starting from the age of thirteen and ending at the mature age of ninety-two.

/0 Comments/by

CECILE CHAMINADE: THE UNRIVALLED PERFORMING PIANIST

Unlike many women composers of earlier centuries, Cecile Chaminade, born in Paris in 1857, was fortunate enough to be recognized and fêted in her time, even though, sadly, she faded into obscurity.  Her songs, ballet music and piano pieces lost the popularity they had at her performances in England and the United States.  One of the few pieces played occasionally later on was the Flute Concertino in D major, Opus 107.

Coming from an upper middle-class family, Cecile was prevented by her father from attending the Paris Conservatoire, in spite of the fact that she was a child prodigy who played the piano early on and composed by the age of seven or eight:  her work greatly impressed Georges Bizet.  Her mother cleverly managed to contact various well-known French musical instructors in piano, violin and musical composition and Cecile was not deterred by her father’s restriction, giving her first public concert at the age of eighteen.  After that, she became more and more well known for her performances of her own piano pieces and songs for salon, most of which were published.

She toured France, giving concerts countrywide and by the age of thirty-five was enthusiastically received in England, promoted by the head of the Paris Conservatoire, Isidor Philipp.  During one of her tours, she was a guest of Queen Victoria.  Her frequent visits to England continued throughout the 1890’s when she also arranged premieres involving various woman singers, until her popularity started to wane after 1899 as a result of poor reviews.

Eventually at the age of forty-four, she married an older man, Louis-Mathieu Carbonel, a music publisher from Marseilles.  He died six years later and Cecile did not remarry.  Years earlier, her younger sister, Henriette, had married the well-known composer and pianist, Morris Moskowski.

After her husband’s death, she decided to remain free to pursue her career as performer.  It was at this point in 1908 that she visited the United States where she was received with open arms:  in fact, a number of Chaminade clubs were established in America.  She also had the honour of an invitation from President Teddy Roosevelt to play at the White House and she performed at the famous Carnegie Hall in New York and Symphony Hall, Boston.

While in the United States, she played her own compositions such as The Scarf Dance,  The Flatterer and Ballet No 1 for piano and orchestra (performed at the Academy of Music with the Philadelphia Orchestra), various orchestral works and the ballet, Callirhoë.  Among her most popular songs were The Silver Ring and Ritournelle.  Most of the four hundred works she composed were published and included about a hundred and twenty-five songs, ballet music, a comic opera called La Sevillane, a dramatic symphony, Les Amazones, for chorus and orchestra, orchestral suites and chamber works.  She was acknowledged as being a great composer, regardless of being a woman.

Early in 1901, she made her first gramophone recording of seven works, under the label of The Gramaphone and Typewriter Company, subsequently recording many piano pieces before and after World War 1, in the current vogue of chamber music.  In 1913, as the highlight to her musical career, she became the first woman composer to become a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur as bestowed by the French government.

From early on, she had the disadvantage of not being allowed to attend the Paris Conservatoire and become part of the professional Parisian musical circle because of her father’s prejudice against careers for women.  It was not the same to have had private instructors and tutors from the Conservatoire.

Circumstances dictated that she support herself and her family after her father’s death.  Because of this constraint, she needed to perform and gain a public following in the then vogue of chamber music, songs and small ensembles played at home.

Because she had not had the traditional Paris Conservatoire teaching, she was regarded as an outsider, in spite of the official accolades for her work in performance and composition.  Her energy was focused on performance in various countries and she probably had little time for involvement in the latest trends in musical composition as time moved from the mid to late Romantic Period and innovators such as Wagner and Richard Strauss emerged.

In my view, she suffered unfairly from discrimination for various reasons:  she was an outsider, her piano pieces were difficult to play and she became the target for unwarranted criticism of her work based on gender prejudice.  Her salon music was ‘too feminine’ and her orchestral pieces ‘too virile.’  The critics (male) had a field day of sexism, forgetting, for instance, the censure levelled at Liszt for his complicated piano works, which were nevertheless accepted as worthwhile.

Gradually, however, she recorded less, becoming less and less known until she died in obscurity in Monte Carlo at the age of eighty-six.

 

/0 Comments/by

FANNY MENDELSSOHN: BRILLIANT BUT UNRECOGNISED COMPOSER-GENIUS OF THE ROMANTIC ERA

Born in Hamburg in 1805 to an affluent Jewish banking family, Fanny and the Mendelssohn household moved to Berlin six years later, when Napoleon’s army occupied the city.

In Berlin, they converted to the Lutheran faith:  Fanny and her brother, Felix, who was four years her junior, were baptized in 1816.  Both were talented as musicians.  Fanny learned to play the piano when she was a child and remained a brilliant performer and composer, although diffident and lacking in self-confidence since she was repeatedly reminded of her inferior position as a woman in the discriminatory Victorian society. Her Father, Abraham, believed that musical composition was not a career for women.  He told her, “… music will perhaps become [Felix’s] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.” (Note 1)

Nevertheless, as children, she and Felix were sent to Paris for several months to study music and Fanny continued to compose, regardless of her father’s prejudice.  Both brother and sister had a close relationship.  Felix recommended not to publish her work:  instead, he published some of her pieces under his name.  Among others, there was a song called Italien, which he played for Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.  On another occasion, when he asked the queen if he could play one of her favourite songs and she replied “Italien,” he was forced to admit it was composed by Fanny.

There was no apparent animosity between the two of them.  They inspired, depended on and interacted with each other in their creative works.  But there was always the danger that Felix received credit for compositions which she had written.  Fanny’s approximately four-hundred and sixty pieces of music included Song without Words, for

which Felix became famous.  She only published her own work, Opus 1, at the age of forty-one in 1846.  She also published a piano trio and several books of solo piano pieces.

Having been tutored by a student of J.S. Bach, Fanny’s mother taught her the piano in turn.  At the age of thirteen, Fanny could play all twenty-four preludes from Bach’s Well-tempered Klavier from memory, a significant contribution to musical presentation since it was uncommon for performed pieces to be memorized, although Clara Schumann also played from memory.  She and Fanny spent time together in March 1847, when the two women both had new Piano Trios in common:  Fanny was working on her Piano Trio Opus 11 and Clara had recently written Piano Trio Opus 17.

As for J.S. Bach, Fanny probably influenced and prompted Felix to promote Bach’s work, which he reintroduced to the public during the Romantic period after long years of neglect.

 In 1820 when she and Felix joined the Sing-Akademie in Berlin, a music society directed by composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, Zelter wrote of Fanny in a letter to his friend Goethe:  “This child really is something special.”

Because of various accolades, Fanny’s father was tolerant of her talent but not supportive.  When it came to a suitor, he disapproved of her attachment to the poor and unknown artist, Wilhelm Hensel, on the grounds that she was a mere seventeen years old.

Eventually, at the age of twenty-four, she married Wilhelm in spite of his financial shortcomings.  Encouraged by her husband to develop her musical life, she performed her own compositions on Sundays at their home.  Her only child, Sebastian Ludwig Felix Hensel, born in 1830, was named appropriately after her favourite composers, Bach, Beethoven and her brother, Felix.

She also thrived musically in the year which she, together with Wilhelm and Sebastian, spent in Italy.  Here she met a circle of admiring young French musicians who inspired an outpouring of piano music, oratorios and chamber music and, in particular, her finest work, a song cycle called Das Jahr (The Year) with a piece written for each month of the year.

She made her second public performance (her first was at the age of thirteen) in 1838 at the age of thirty-three when she played brother Felix’s Piano Concerto No 1.  Seventeen years later while rehearsing for a performance of an oratorio by Felix, she had a stroke and died immediately.  Soon after her death when Felix began to arrange publication of Fanny’s work with his own publishers, tragedy struck:  he, too, had a stroke and died six months after her.  It appeared that a heart problem ran in the Mendelssohn family.

In 2010, music experts discovered that The Easter Sonata, a work attributed to Felix since its discovery in the 1970’s was by Fanny.  As a tribute to her, it was performed under her name on International Women’s Day, 8 March, 2017.

In 2018 with the opening of the Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn Museum in Hamburg, the city of their birth, new interest was created in the work of this talented musically twinned sister and brother.

Note 1:  The Mendelssohn family (1729-1847) from letters & journals by Sebastian Hensel.  With eight portraits & drawings by Wilhelm Hensel. Published by Harper & Brothers, New York, 1882

/1 Comment/by

CLARA SCHUMANN: COMPOSER AND PERFORMING PIANIST PAR EXCELLENCE

Clara Josephine Schumann (née Wieck)

Clara was born in 1819 in Leipzig, at that time a major centre in Europe of learning and culture in music and publishing.  A child musical genius, she had as role models her father Friedrich, a gifted pianist if disciplinarian, as well as her mother, a pianist and soprano at the famous Leipzig Gewandhaus, housing one of the oldest symphony orchestras in the world today.  Clara’s mother, Mariane, had been a pupil of Friedrich, that exacting and difficult individual whom she divorced about five years after Clara was born, although the child remained with her father.

Fortunately, he nurtured Clara’s talent:  she studied music theory and composition with some of the main teachers in Germany at that time.  Regarding performance, she made her musical debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus at the age of eleven and toured Europe with her father when in her  teens.  Her talent as pianist was much admired and recognized by Paganini, Felix Mendelssohn, Liszt, Louis Spohr and Chopin.

When Clara was young, Robert Schumann came to live with the Wiecks as Friedrich’s pupil and in her teens, Clara and Robert fell in love, though her father was against the marriage and refused his consent.  Eventually, just before Clara turned twenty-one, she and Robert married.  Clara then had eight children over a period of thirteen years, of whom seven survived.  During this time, she continued to teach, perform and compose, following a harsh schedule.

All the while, her composition was given second place to Robert’s creative output:  he insisted the house be quiet while he composed.  Coming as she did from a predominantly male household within a conservative 19th Century German society, she convinced herself, eventually, that women were unable to create musically and that the task best be left to the men.  It was in this respect that she became restricted and regrettably composed very little.

As for Robert, he firmly believed she should dedicate herself to him, both as spouse and in music, having convinced himself that performance in which Clara excelled was secondary to composition.  And yet, he included in his work phrases of Clara’s as a sort of secret code they shared.  In the main, however, Clara as woman was sidelined and discounted in her composing.

As for Friedrich, it was ironic that Clara’s exacting father fostered in her an ability to deal with the demands of her many children, the rigours of performing for which she was highly accomplished but needed to earn income for the large household.  She also had to address Robert’s depression and insanity:  eventually he was committed to an asylum where he died in 1856.  After this landmark event, Clara stopped composing altogether.

She may have felt, mistakenly, that she needed Robert’s support and input for her creativity.  After his death, she continued to teach and to follow a busy schedule of performing in order to support her large family and to promote Robert’s work.

More than twenty years after his death, she was appointed as piano teacher at Frankfurt Conservatory, a post she held for fourteen years, during which time she contributed to and improved modern piano-playing techniques.  She continued to perform right up to the age of seventy-two and died five years later of a stroke.

In her lifetime, she was recognized internationally for her performances, which she pursued for sixty-one years.  In effect, she was lauded as a superb performer, albeit a woman and acknowledged by Liszt and Anton Rubinstein and by Brahms who befriended her from when he was twenty years old until her death in 1896.

Her creative output, though small, was neglected during her lifetime, namely the Romantic era of the 19th Century when twenty-three of her works were published.  She only came to the fore in the 20th Century, partly through the modern-day teenage and virtuoso performer, Laura Downes.  British pianist, Isata Kannah-Mason devoted an entire album to Clara’s music on the Decca label.

As a further mark of acknowledgment and recognition in the 20th Century, Clara Schumann’s face appeared on the one hundred Deutschemark bill introduced in 1989.

/1 Comment/by

WOMEN COMPOSERS – UNIQUE, ECCENTRIC, UNACKNOWLEDGED

Largely sidelined, their musical compositions ignored in favour of male musicians. women composers were rarely acknowledged in their time.  They were expected to follow the traditional feminine and marital role of looking after their husbands and producing and bringing up children.

Sometimes women like Clara Schumann, an accomplished pianist and child prodigy, were recognized and launched according to their talent in performance, but with Clara, for instance, it was only in the l970’s that her work was brought to public and world attention.  Husband Robert believed her place was in the home and, perhaps, felt threatened to an extent by her musical talent as competing with his own.

Fanny Mendelssohn’s father insisted that, unlike her brother, Felix, music for her “can and must be only an ornament.” (refer Letter of 16 July by Hensel 1884, 1, p. 82) And the French musician, Cecile Chaminade, prevented by her father from entering the Paris Conservatoire, had to have private music lessons.  As a result, she remained an outsider in the accepted musical world of those who had graduated from the conservatory.

In Nadia Boulanger’s case, she came from a family in which men and women were celebrated over generations of musical geniuses.  Ironically, as a result of her father’s death, she had to take on a male role and provide for the family at the tender age of thirteen by teaching and performing.

In the Italian Baroque period, the remarkable singer and composer, Barbara Strozzi, was, surprisingly, recognized as a rare female composer of her time.  Subsequently, she was forgotten for many decades and only restored to her rightful place in the 21st Century when her music was performed on instruments built in imitation of those of the era:  the baroque harp and the theorbo.

The following cameos of various musicians dramatize the bumpy road of some musically talented women.

/0 Comments/by

JOSĒ DALE LACE OF JOHANNESBURG’S RANDLORD ERA: A BELLE EPOQUE BOMBSHELL

Hi Pam…

Your novel is excellent; it makes sense to revert to a more conventional and conversational prose style so as not to hamper the narrative impetus and the vast sweep of history encompassed in the whole-life portrait of José Dale Lace…

The novel’s chapter headings as per your previous novels serve as signposts/leitmotifs for the unfolding narrative; as always catchy and appropriate and reflecting the carefully mapped architecture.  The structure of the book is intricately mapped and planned and bears evidence of the two-year gestation period in the writing and voluminous research.

As anticipated the novel reads like the wind, short chapters keep the attention from flagging; your novel is meticulously researched and annotated as expected, fascinating, and does full justice to its subject.  The well-considered layering and accretion of details are especially enjoyable to read, almost serving as cameos which embellish and burnish the character development and narrative; a skilful picture of the manners and social mores and class distinctions of late 19th Century Britain and dawning era of the new emancipated woman… and equally a most authentic depiction of Johannesburg as an upstart mining town growing at a feverish pace from the late 19th Century onwards and the affluent lifestyles of the Parktown Randlords.

Your novel gives a convincing sense of a distant time and place and the privileged life of its refined but maverick leading lady as well as the numerous people in her social and family ambit.  I particularly liked the intricate descriptions pertaining to fashion, apparel, hair styling, corsetry, interior décor, equestrian activities, fine dining, modes of transport and most especially the account of the commissioning and construction of Northwards and also the various dwellings and gardens José Dale Lace inhabited/visited viz. hotels, spas and stately homes.

I particularly liked the use of a prologue and epilogue as a framing device for the novel, bookends to the narrative; the observations of the semi-autobiographical narrator-journalist “Grace Kilmartin” pertaining to the Villa Cimbrone on the Amalfi coast as a mirror and counterpoint to Northwards in Parktown, the contrasting fortunes of Ernest Beckett and John Dale Lace being especially clever and the oblique reference to José in the prologue piques the reader’s interest (as does) the seminal role of  Ernest Beckett in José’s life, the roué seducer who compromises her reputation and whose ignoble renunciation of his marriage proposal propels her rebound marriage to John Dale Lace.  The Prologue and Epilogue work effectively as a zooming out and zooming in, and jump cut into the present from a 100-year-old narrative.  The elemental link between José and John Dale Lace, as with many long-time partners, expiring within a few months of each other is quite touching. The chamber music recital at the close of the novel brings the reader up to date with the present-day Northwards restored by George Albu and the lingering charm and atmospherics of the mansion, especially the Great Hall, the focus of Herbert Baker’s architectural plan….

I enjoyed the restrained use of dialogue which is plausible and sounds authentic and in-character; the skilful imagination of correspondence between José and Nellie, her sister, and her various benefactors – the compendious detail of entertainments, lavish dinner menus, suppers and social activities and intrigues befitting the moneyed classes.

The closing of the novel is enigmatic and delivers a witty tiny frisson with the idea of a ghostly José sweeping down the grand stairway towards the Great Hall where she must have made many dramatic appearances….

It was judicious of you to request the use of the portrait (of José Dale Lace) for your cover and a stroke of luck to be granted permission to reproduce the iconic portrait on your cover; José was celebrated for her beauty, glamour, flair for fashion and vivacious personality.  She is the epitome of the Belle Epoque bombshell.  Her appeal was primarily to men….The portrait is larger than life (quite literally) and exquisite and so was she….The novel is dense with historicity and (contains) details relating to inter alia the Anglo Boer War, Jameson Raid, conflicted allegiances and politics of the Randlords, the course of the First World War, sinking of the Galway, eclectic Arts and Crafts architecture in Johannesburg in the early 20th Century, the humble trade/origins of many of the Randlords, the vagaries of personal fortunes and politics in the lives of the Randlords and the intrusion of bad luck in the lives of John and José Dale Lace.  For a slim novel, it is quite encyclopaedic in scope; not much is speculative or sketchy. The chapter detailing a grand banquet/dinner at Northwards has the full crowd of Randlords and captains of industry in attendance- Lionel Phillips, George Farrar, Solly Joel, Sammy Marks etc.

As always a highly visual and compelling narrative which would translate especially well as a bio-pic or NETFLIX series.  I particularly liked the chapter detailing the temporary exile/relocation of the Dale Laces to East London during the Anglo Boer War and the elaborate preparations for bathing, and the chapter depicting the young José’s maiden voyage to the UK with her chaperone, snappily dressed and hectoring to visit the blue dining room on the cruise ship.

In summary very well done…consider this one (this novel) an unqualified success.

Regards

Carl

/0 Comments/by

MORE ABOUT THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA AND THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES OF EGYPT

WRITTEN BY PAMELA HELLER-STERN

To read the first essay on the pyramid of Giza, click here.

Much has happened in the world of archaeology in the last few years.  The development of technology, advanced and ground-breaking penetrating radar and ultra-sonic testing have given access to new worlds, undreamed of up till now.

In Egypt, scientists have discovered a hidden tunnel running underneath the Great Pyramid of Giza, built as the tomb of Pharaoh Khufu, which is the largest stone structure ever found.  It is also the oldest of the Seven Great Wonders of the Ancient World. This corridor measures 9 metres in length, is 2.10 metres wide and 2 metres high.  Located near the main entrance on the northern side of the Great Pyramid, its function has not as yet been established.  Nevertheless, it is regarded by archaeologists as the most important find of the 21st century.

In 2015 a cross-continental investigation spearheaded by Scan Pyramids started to investigate the Pyramid of Giza, using the safe non-invasive technique of ground-penetrating radar and ultrasonic testing.  This was approved by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities.  About two years later in 2017, the Scan Pyramid team, using cosmic ray muon radiology picked up a huge empty space or void above the Grand Gallery.

They then inserted a telescope at the opening of one of the entrances to the Grand Pyramid and picked up a rectangular cuboid structure: this was no random empty space but a remarkable architectural structure, a tunnel in stone, consisting of a gabled roof following the slope of the pyramid’s chevrons.  The tunnel or corridor was hidden inside large blocks of stone, arranged in the shape of an inverted “V” on the north face of the pyramid.

They estimated the corridor was constructed round 2560BCE, during which time two to three million huge blocks of stone were used to build it.  They were quarried at the time of Pharaoh Khufu.  He was a powerful and noteworthy ruler whose family, wives and court members were buried in smaller pyramids and mortuary temples in the area.

The Khufu pyramid was the tallest man-made structure on earth, measuring nearly 146 metres until the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889 to a height of 330 metres.

In modern times the three known chambers are the King’s Chamber, Queen’s Chamber and an unfinished room cut into the structure’s bedrock.

In looking for an explanation to the use of the extraordinary tunnel, Mostafa Waziri, head of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Archaeology, has put forward the theory that the tunnel was dug to redistribute the weight of the pyramid, namely to relieve the pressure of the load, based on the theory that the five rooms in Khufu’s burial chamber served the same purpose.  The tunnel could also have led to other still unknown chambers.  And so the scans continue in order to discover what lies beneath the corridor or just at the end of it.

World interest in modern times as regards Egyptology and the Pharaohs really began about a hundred years ago when Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922.  A rural young English photographer with a keen eye for artefacts, he arrived in Egypt in 1899 and came to be appointed as one of the two chief inspectors of antiquities in the Egyptian Antiquities Service.

The young Pharaoh’s crypt had been sealed for three thousand years and was packed with about five thousand treasures, which included ancient chariots, gold coffins and in particular Tutankhamun’s solid gold death mask, weighing 10.89kg.

A few months later in February 1923, Carter found Tutankhamun’s burial chamber with three mummy-shaped coffins, which fitted together, one nestled within the other.  He realised it was essential to photograph the crypt together with the artefacts found, for which task he used another young country-bred Englishman, Harry Burton.  Burton was trained as an art photographer who had already successfully photographed various ancient tombs and discoveries in Egypt.

As a result of Carter’s intervention, Burton remained for almost ten years, photographing  Tutankhamun’s tomb and its artefacts by means of over three thousand four hundred photographs still preserved with  detailed images.  Over time, he also used the early colour and autochrome plates and even learned how to operate a motion picture camera, loaned to him by Samuel Goldwyn Productions. He used this camera to record the opening of Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus in February 1922 and showed the objects being removed from the tomb.  He supported Carter right through to 1932 when the Pharaoh’s tomb was completely cleared and he remained on good terms with him.  In fact, he was appointed as Carter’s executor when Carter died in 1939.

Regrettably Carter’s sponsor, Lord Carnarvon died not long after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but Carter continued with the excavation until the Egyptian authorities intervened and indicated that they wanted to take a more active role in the explorations.  Up till then they had been content with, even welcomed the intervention of French and British archaeologists or interested parties, which together had established a brokered system of partage, whereby the foreign excavators were allowed to retain a share of the new discoveries after they had been evaluated by the Antiquities Service.

However, following the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922, the Egyptian government, supported by Pierre Lacau, the then Director-General of Excavations and Antiquities of Egypt, revoked the partage practice:  they wanted the entire collection of findings to remain in Egypt.

Carter stopped work for a year in protest of the Egyptian government ruling.  At this point, he was banned from the site but allowed to return after he and his new patroness, the Dowager Countess Almina Carnarvon gave up any claim to Tutankhamun’s burial items.

Delving into the history of the young Tutankhaten, Carter established that the young pharaoh took the throne at the age of nine and ruled for ten years before he died mysteriously of an unknown cause at the age of nineteen.  He was physically deformed in some way, probably with a club foot since many walking sticks were found in his tomb.  Born during the reign of his father Pharaoh Akhenaten, he did not share his father’s unpopular religious beliefs, namely his worship of one god only, being the god Ahten.

As Pharaoh, Tutankhaten reverted to the old polytheistic religion:  as a result, he changed his name to Pharaoh Tutankhamun.  His mummy was provided according to his religious beliefs with clothing, jewels, games, weapons, furniture, food, wine and cosmetics among the five thousand items tightly packed into the fore-room of his burial crypt.  And at this point, it was already becoming impossible to display all the treasures discovered so far.

With considerable foresight, the current President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el Sisi spearheaded a move away from Cairo when he came to power in 2015.  Born himself in the city of Cairo, he recognized that it was already overpopulated and could no longer accommodate its twenty-million inhabitants.  He began to relocate the seat of government including embassies as well as the financial district and the Nile Valey, about forty-eight km east of Cairo into desert territory.  And then also relocating agricultural land to the Nile Delta and as far as the Mediterranean Coast, more than 241 km involving the Mediterranean Sea and involving a population of 106 million people.  (The move was no novelty since it had occurred eighteen times in Egyptian history.)

After that, in a masterly show of national pride, he arranged in 2021 for a unique display of mummies, which included eighteen kings and four queens brought from the National Museum in central Cairo through the street of the city in a grand procession, known as the Pharoah’s Golden Parade.  The event evoked in every Egyptian a strong sense of national pride.

It was the climax to a whole string of isolated discoveries made at various times.  These included temples, pyramids, artefacts and curiosities, among which were the Luxor Temple built by the Pharaoh Amenhotep 111 and Ramesses 11, the ancient Temple of Horus built between 237 and 57BC.  The Bent Pyramid discovered in Dahshur outside Cairo was supposedly 4600 years old, built for the pharaoh known as King Sneferu and containing mummies dating back to the period between 664 and 332 BC.  Sometimes called the Red Pyramid, it was built from rust-coloured limestone bricks.

A significant discovery made in 1799 by soldiers from Napoleon’s army was the Rosetta Stone.  After Napoleon was defeated by the British, the stone became British property and is on display in modern times in the British Museum.  It has been the key to deciphering hieroglyphics, which are regarded as the earliest form of writing.  Another milestone in man’s history was the Egyptian calendar, based on the journey of the sun and resulting in our division of the year into 365 days, the time taken by the earth to revolve round the sun.

The list of archaeological discoveries was seemingly endless and included ancient tools such as battle-axes and bronze-tipped spears to stone polishers and chisels.  These are also displayed in the British Museum.  The experts also found mummified cats, crocodiles, leopards and beetles, canopic jars, amulets and jewellery as well as the Book of the Dead, drawn up on papyrus in hieroglyphics.

As a result of these ongoing discoveries, the old National Museum of Egyptian Civilization became hopelessly inadequate.  A new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) was planned and has taken more than twenty years to complete.  It will only open towards the end of 2023 and will present the many thousands upon thousands, estimated currently at 100,000 unique Egyptian archaeological finds, including antiquities of Pharaonic and Graeco-Roman times.

Built in the desert outside Cairo on the plateau of the pyramids of Giza, the GEM will be connected by means of an extremely long pedestrian walkway with the pyramids.  The size of the museum itself is gigantic, totalling about 45,000sq metres, consisting of twelve exhibition halls as well as the ground floor, dedicated to colossal statues and massive, heavy objets d’art, including a statue of Ramesses the Great, which is 3.35 metres high.  Most important, too are the state-of-the art conservation laboratories where the treasures are first cleaned and restored by various Egyptian experts.  Many are women who seem to be particularly adept in this field.  But, regardless of gender, young and old experts feel honoured to be involved in their heritage.

Imbued with national pride, Egyptian archaeologists, too, continue to explore and excavate, even in the sweltering summers of Upper Egypt where the temperature soars in the morning from 38C (100F).  Paradoxically, projects have increased through the negative of the covid pandemic, when populations were grounded in their home country, unable to travel and when foreign archaeologists, in turn, were unable to access airflights to Egypt.

Local excavations have already made finds in Luxor, near Minya, at Tuna el Gebel, with mummies examined by a team of geneticists, which reveal links with ancestors, including genetic malformations.   Remarkable discoveries have been made in Saqqara, much to the delight of Zahi Hawass, former minister of antiquities.  He has been working since 2002 on the diggings at the 5000-year-old Pyramid of Djoser, almost destroyed and badly needing restoration and conservation.  Excavation leaders have recently uncovered hundreds of bronze statuettes, painted wooden sarcophagi, mummies and statues of various animals including ibises, cats, crocodiles and mongooses.

Egyptian citizens, still fired up by the thousands after the Pharaoh’s Golden Parade through the streets of Cairo in 2021, will be able to access their ancestors and learn more about their history once the GEM opens.  The project is in the capable hands of the museum director, Major-General Atef Moftah, trained engineer, dedicated to the task of completing this massive task by the end of 2023.

References made to National Geographic 11.2022 Articles as follows:

The Boy King p. 34, The Explorer p. 54, The Mummy p. 68, The Museum p.96.

 

/0 Comments/by

THE INCAS OF PERU: A UNIQUE CIVILIZATION

Through their excavations, archaeologists of the 21st century have allowed scholars and historians to piece together a detailed account of the Incas, their society and achievements, though the mystery still remains as to where and how they derived certain unique aspects of their customs and lifestyle.

Among their findings was the fact that the history of the Incas went far further back than the 1600 and 1700’s to between 1150 and 1300.  At that time, the Inca empire was ruled by powerful Wari warlords from their capital near modern day of Ayacucho, until they were driven away by severe cold and drought to the valley near Cusco.  Here it was fertile and warm, with a plentiful supply of water, which allowed the Inca farmers to irrigate their fields. They also built terraces up the slopes and learned how to supply water by means of canals or aqueducts.

The royal dynasty established in Cusco produced military leaders so powerful that the Incas established through conquest the largest empire in the New World before Columbus ventured there.  It was the 8th emperor, Pachacutec, who was chiefly responsible for the expansion of the Inca empire by persuading rival tribes to surrender peacefully or, if that was unacceptable, he subdued them by military conquest.  Pachacutec ruled from 1438 to 1471 and, as a result, by the 1600’s the Quechua people who formed the Inca civilization had spread from Cusco in Peru to modern-day Ecuador in the north, Chile in the south, Bolivia in the east, and bound by the Pacific Ocean in the west.  This phenomenal expansion took place, not only as a result of conquest, but also by alliances through marriage whereby they took the daughters of nearby lords as wives.

Pachacutec singled out for conquest the southern lords of the Colla people in the region of Titicaca, with its large population living round the lake, the land rich in gold and silver, the fertile meadows supporting enormous herds of llama and alpacas.  Under his rule, Cusco was rebuilt in the shape of a puma, with lavish temples and dwellings for royalty, leaving the common people to live in the outlying areas.  Since the Inca believed they were created by the sun god, Inti, they built among other temples the Coricancha Sun Temple or Home of Gold, its walls, ceilings and altars lined with gold.  These were later plundered by the Spanish invaders.

After Pachacutec’s death, his descendants continued to conquer the southern rulers by their remarkable organizational ability.  They moved populations from obscure villages to towns controlled by the Inca and built roads to connect the towns and facilitate the movement of troops.  Additionally, they built storehouses along the routes for military provisions.

In short, they brought civilization, order and growth.  Their technical skills were unsurpassed at the time:  not only did they build about 22,530km (14,000 miles) of paved roads through rough terrain but they also built suspension bridges from natural fibre.  This was made possible by the hierarchy of the civil organization from royalty to workers and it was a successful structure whereby royalty governed and workers benefitted by trading work for food, shelter, education and health care without the pressure of a monetary system.  This did not exist in Inca society.

Inca farmers played a crucial role in the survival and expansion of the empire by mastering agriculture at high altitudes and very steep terrain, producing some seventy different crops, from corn to cotton, hot peppers to peanuts, potatoes and quinoa.  The water canals were mostly carved from rocks and the joints sealed with clay.  They were masters of hydraulic engineering, angling the canals to accommodate the steep slopes of the mountains.

Significantly, they could store food for between three to seven years in huge storehouses, the contents of which were monitored by imperial officials who took inventories by means of a quipu, with its coloured and knotted cords.  These were used like a computer or calculator to record accounting particulars, whereby the knots represented numerical values within a decimal system.  Keeping records by means of a quipu allowed the Incas to keep stock of any numerical information, including debts and production.  The cords of this useful device were made from cotton, alpaca or llama threads and the system had existed from 2600BC in earlier civilizations.  Hence the quipu demonstrated once again the Inca’s ability to find and use ancient methods to further their progress.

They were also masterly at building and engineering as shown by the structures which have remained standing for 500 years, in spite of earthquakes, wind and weather.  Excelling at stonemasonry in graphite and limestone in which the stones fitted together perfectly without mortar and without a razor blade play, they built various buildings, temples and fortifications such as the fort of Ollantaytambo and the sacred site of Machu Picchu.  This citadel of about 200 structures was situated between the Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu mountains:  it was only discovered in 1911.

When it came to craftsmanship, they also excelled in creating objects made of gold and silver as well as eye-catching textile designs, since they had great regard for cloth and its artistry.  To this end, they grew cotton, sheared wool from the alpaca and the vicuna, which belonged to the llama family and used looms to create complex textile designs for cloth, mostly worn by royalty.

After Pachacutec’s death in 1471, the Inca’s power was further expanded and consolidated.  By 1493 under the King Huayna Capac, the empire appeared to reach its zenith.  He established a new royal estate in Ecuador, namely the country palace of Quispiguanca, which was both the king’s palace and his country home and represented one of the many royal estates built over the years by various Inca kings.

The estate was sumptuous and impressive as an example of a highly developed culture and civilization.  Workers were instructed to divert the Urubamba River to the south of the valley, to drain marshes and level hills in order to plant crops, including corn, cotton and peanuts.  It was essentially the king’s place of relaxation containing banqueting halls for feasting, entertainment and gambling, a game lodge and a forest for hunting deer and other game.  The palace was surrounded by fertile fields, parks and gardens.

When the king died, his body was mummified as was the tradition and taken to Cusco where, over the years, members of his family came to consult him.  His advice was conveyed through an oracle next to him.  Inca tradition included a month of “carrying the dead,” when people fed the mummies of their ancestors.  At this time, they took them from their storehouses, dressed them in rich clothing and gave them food and drink, after which they would sing and dance and walk with them from house to house.

The Incas paid tribute to the gods through human sacrifice by offering up children and teenagers who were well fed for a year and drugged with alcohol and cocoa leaves before being slaughtered and mummified.

Before Huayna Capac died in about 1527, the Spanish had already invaded and conquered the Inca empire, which was subsequently almost wiped out by smallpox, brought by the Spanish to their shores.  When Capac’s son, Atahualpa eventually came to the throne, he was killed by the Spanish who replaced him with a token ruler.  By 1572, the Inca empire, which had reached about 10 million people, was no more.

Since, unlike the Maya, they had no system of hieroglyphic writing, their achievements and culture vanished from history and historical records.  It was only in the 1990’s that archaeologists visited the territory once more to make extraordinary discoveries and piece together the rise and fall of the Inca people.  Among other findings was the major sacred shrine of Maukallacta, south of Cusco, where pilgrims worshipped in the belief that this was the birthplace of their empire.

Although the history of the Inca was only explored in depth in the 20th century, their influence and legacy has existed in South America for hundreds of years.  Enduring Inca traditions include textile making, ethnic food, the use of the ancient Inca language, Quechua, a lingua franca spoken by between six and ten million people living near the Andes, from southern Columbia to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, New Argentina and northern Chile.

A further unexpected legacy is the sacred valley of Peru where the sacred River Urubamba flows.  This is a hummingbird paradise with more than two hundred species of birds, of which there are thirty different types of hummingbirds, strikingly diverse and richly coloured.  It is an idyllic environment for the birds, marked by good weather and an abundance of  flowers as a result of the plentiful water supply.

Although they have always been regarded as indigenous people, anthropologists propose that the Inca ancestors came from Asia as hunters who crossed the Bering Strait, which in ancient times connected Siberia and Alaska.  Over thousands of years, they moved west, more than half-way across the earth, eventually settling in the Americas and reaching the Andes somewhere between 13000BC and 10000BC.  The unique features of their civilization nevertheless remain a mystery, intriguing and often baffling.

 

/2 Comments/by

STONEHENGE: THE SACRED PLACE OF SUN-WORSHIP?

Like the Great Pyramid of Giza, Stonehenge is also a prehistoric monument, its huge sandstone or sarsen standing stones weighing about twenty-five tons each.  Situated on the Salisbury Plan in Wiltshire, England, it is probably the most famous landmark in the UK and forms part of an entire larger landscape containing many sacred monuments, both in stone and wood, which are believed to date back to over ten thousand years ago in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

As with The Great Pyramid, Stonehenge is linked to sun worship.  The circle of stones  consisting of the large sarsens on the outside, the ring of smaller bluestones inside and within these, the five freestanding trilithons are all orientated towards the sunrise on midsummer’s day, the summer solstice and longest day of the year as well as midwinter’s day, the winter solstice and shortest day of the year.  Sun worship rituals were undertaken at these times.

The word Stonehenge derives from the Saxon meaning the hanging stone or from Old English stan meaning stone and hencg meaning hinge to signify the stone lintels, which hinge on the standing rocks in a horizontal position.

Stonehenge could have been a burial ground in early eras since human bone dating from as early as 3000BC has been unearthed.  There are also many burial mounds outside the stone circle.

Approximately 3.2 km from Stonehenge, the large Neolithic settlement of Durrington Walls contains houses, perhaps originally as many as a thousand, which means it may have been settled by four thousand people.  Circles were constructed to form an enclosure, built mostly with wooden posts from massive old trees.  These circles, like those at Stonehenge, were aligned with the solar solstices.  Signs of feasts and social activity have been found at this monument.  Researcher Mike Parker Pearson believes that the wooden circle at Durrington Walls represented the land of the living whereas Stonehenge, with its stone circles surrounded by burial mounds, symbolized the land of the dead.

The two places were connected by the Avon River, representing water and purification.  Leading from Durrington Walls were avenues, which were used for ceremonial processions from the life of the living to death, cremation and burial at Stonehenge.  And yet, his theory has not been well received by many archaelogists and experts.

Parker Pearson went on to head a project of excavation at Durrington Walls in 2016 using ground-penetrating radar, which led to the discovery that there were no buried standing stones in the area’s circle but, instead, a ring of enormous post-holes underneath the henge bank.  These had been filled with chalk rubble.

He also took charge of excavations in Wales, in the belief that the smaller stones in the inner Stonehenge circle made up of bluestones had come from several sites in western Wales and transported for up to 140 miles or 225 km as far as Stonehenge itself.  He set out with an expedition to find the exact place where these bluestones came from and by sheer physical labour in poor weather conditions managed to find the precise location, testing the stones on site for similarity.

17 miles or 27 km north of Stonehenge is the town of Avebury, which is part of the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site and unique for its enormous stone circle, the largest in the world as well as the village, which is partly built within the circle itself.  The large outer ring contains two smaller inner circles as well as a recently discovered large square stone monument within a smaller circle.  This was found by means of ground penetrating radar and exists mainly underground.  Like Stonehenge, the stones of

Avebury also consist of the local sarsen or sandstone.

The identity of these amorphous sun worshippers remains hidden.  We know in a very general way that they belonged to the Neolithic and/or Bronze Ages.  According to various archaelogists, Wales and the Gower Peninsula in particular was inhabited by humans from the time of the late Stone Age or Upper Paleolithic Period, namely somewhere between 50,000 to 12,000 years ago.  As early as 1823, the Paviland Cave on the Gower Peninsula revealed a human skeleton, fairly much complete, wrapped in cloth dyed with red ochre or rubbed with red ochre.  It represented the earliest burial in the entire Western Europe.  The skeleton was the first human fossil to be discovered anywhere in the world and dated at approximately 33,000 Before Present (BP) years ago.  The red ochre was thought to be the work of a shaman or pagan religious person.

Working in the Gower Peninsula in the 1950’s, members of the University of Cambridge found between three hundred and four hundred flint stones used in toolmaking.  In 2010, while exploring the Cathole Cave, also on the peninsula, an instructor from Bristol University came across a rock drawing of a red deer, which was dated to between 14,000 and 12,000BC.  The cave has been described by archaelogists as a shelter for bands of Mesolithic hunters and as a Neolithic ossuary.

Perhaps the best examples of early human artistic activities are in the Lascaux network of caves in SW France near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne region.  About six thousand painted figures of animals, local fauna and abstracts found there have been dated from Upper Neolithic occupation between 28,000 to 10,000BC.  The materials used for the artworks comprise iron oxide, charcoal and ochre.

Researchers have speculated as to whether these early peoples were forerunners of the Celts or the Druids.  The learned class of Druids has been put forward.  As scholars, they were believed to have studied for about twenty years in order to undergo their training which involved law, counselling, medical knowledge, diplomacy and priesthood.  Theirs was a polytheistic religion practised at the sacred sites of nature on hills and along rivers, involving rituals using oak, mistletoe and hazel.  They supposedly used fire in their rituals and sacrificed animals and possibly humans in gory tales of blood-letting.

Although Stonehenge is far older than the Druidic religion, it is possible that a form of Neo-Druidism existed in those early times, bringing with it polytheistic sun worship rituals, shamans, burial rites and sacrificial ceremonies.

 

 

 

/100 Comments/by