Geoffrey Parker - Power in Stone: Cities as Symbols of Empire

POWER IN STONE

POWER IN STONE

Cities as Symbols of Empire

GEOFFREY PARKER

REAKTION BOOKS

For Julie and Martin

Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2014
Copyright Geoffrey Parker 2014

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9781780233260

Contents

Note on Spelling

H istorically the spellings of non-English names accord with the way in which these names have normally been pronounced in English. Thus Roma has become Rome, Lisboa has become Lisbon and Bruxelles has become Brussels. This convention has remained largely unchanged over the years.

However, in those parts of the world with entirely different systems of writing and spelling there have been some problems. Very often the form of name used in English has borne little relationship to the actual name and the way it may be written. Thus the names of such Chinese capital cities historically known as Peking, Nanking and Chungking do not correspond with the Chinese pronunciation and the way in which they are written in the Chinese script. In the late twentieth century the adoption of a new transliteration by the Chinese has come to be accepted as being the standard form. As a result the names of these three Chinese capitals are now transliterated as Beijing, Nanjing and Chongqing using the spellings specified by the Chinese themselves. Sometimes this can cause confusion as the new spelling may not correspond at all with the usual western pronunciation. Many new and unfamiliar spellings, such as Qin for Chin and Qing for Ching, have had to be accepted but they can cause confusion among those who find the new transliteration difficult to cope with.

In the case of India, many of the place names, such as Bombay and Calcutta, were originally given by European colonialists and these spellings were in use until quite recently. Major changes did not come about until the early twenty-first century and these have not always come to be widely used. While Bombay is now generally written as Mumbai, names such as Chenai (Madras) and Bharuch (Baroda) have proved less easy for Europeans to accept.

In the case of the spelling of Mongolian names, the fashion for Chinese transliteration has spread to what was for many centuries a Chinese province but which has since the Second World War been an independent country. However, the Chinese transliteration has not been followed here because the older spelling has continued to be widely used both in Mongolia and elsewhere. Thus the spelling Karakorum has been used in preference to Qaraqorum. However, the Mongolians themselves have transliterated names such as Ulan Bator as Ulaan Baatar and this has been followed here.

Some names have a historical use which may have literary and other associations. After the play by Christopher Marlowe the name of the fourteenth-century central Asian conqueror came to be known as Tamburlaine. This was an Elizabethan Anglicization of Timur or Temur Lenk, meaning Timur the Lame. Today the most usual English spelling is Tamerlane, although other transliterations may still be found.

In a similar manner the thirteenth-century Mongol khan and emperor became known as Kubla Khan after the poem by Coleridge. Qubilai Khan, the Chinese transliteration of his name, is accepted here since, although a Mongolian, he was the founder of the Chinese Yuan dynasty.

Overall, the author has aimed to use what is judged to be the most generally accepted and acceptable spellings. In the case of European spellings using the Latin script, the usual English conventions have been followed. Elsewhere while note has been taken of new spellings, and in many cases these have been adopted, in other cases those judged to be most easily understood and accepted by an English-speaking reader have continued to be used.

Prologue: Symbols of Power

Look on my Works: Ozymandias, King of Kings

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

O zymandias was written in 1818 and it was seemingly inspired by a visit which Percy Bysshe Shelley made to the British Museum to see the colossal statue of Ramesses II which had been brought there from Egypt a few years previously. This statue certainly astounded all who saw it with the sense of power which emanated from it. It told early nineteenth-century Britons of a great kingdom which had flourished when Britain had still been in the Stone Age.

Ramesses reigned from 1279 to 1213 BC, ruling over a powerful and prosperous kingdom. He was not backward in claiming his share of the credit for this and he left a legacy in which he was the central character and largely the instigator of all that was achieved during thisGolden Age of ancient Egypt. He clearly intended that the knowledge of his achievements should be widely known both to his own people and to future generations. An important feature of this self-aggrandizement was his new capital, Pi-Ramesses Aa-nakhtu meaning the House of Ramesses II but his most monumental display of power lay elsewhere. He had huge statues of himself placed widely throughout his domains, most significant among which was the vast complex at Thebes knowntoday as the Ramesseum. This complex included a temple, a palace, a treasury and other buildings as well as large numbers of statues. Everything was designed to demonstrate the greatness of the pharaoh and it was here that the statue was found in the early nineteenth century. Originally discovered by Napoleons Egyptian expedition of 17981801, it was the British, one of the principal victors in the Napoleonic wars, who eventually had it removed to their own capital city.

The statue of Pharaoh Ramesses II in the British Museum.

With the Ramesseum the pharaoh sought to display himself as the supreme ruler, but it had another function and this was to present in stone the essentials of successful kingship. Paramount among these was that the king should be at all times visible to his subjects and this Ramesses sought to do through the multiplication of statues of himself throughout his kingdom. There was also the necessity for the king to have divine blessing for his endeavours, and this was ensured by the fact that in ancient Egypt the pharaoh was himself divine. A pronouncement in stone by Ramesses was, Listen for I am R, lord of heaven, come to earth. Braudel points out that this divinity was translated into the size and dignity of the monarch as he would have appeared in his statues.