The World

* The rise of Aryan culture occurs between 1500 and 500 BC, though there may be more continuity between the Aryan and Indus Valley cultures than was previously supposed. Three millennia later, in Europe, Nazi ideologues commandeered the word Aryan for their racist ideology. At the same time, Reza Shah, whom we will meet later, changed the name of Persia to Iran (Aryan). In today’s India, Hindu nationalists reject the idea that Indian, especially Hindu, faith or race can possibly have European origins. But in central Asia, long known as the Aryavarta – Abode of the Aryans – this concerns not race but language and culture: Old Persian (Avestan) and Sanskrit are still closely linked; the stories and rituals of the Persian Avesta are similar to those of the Indian Rigveda and other Vedic stories, and to the Ramayana with its tales of ideal kings and families. The latest DNA research in India reveals that most Indians are descended from a mixture of the original southern Indians, the Harappans, and steppe peoples related to Iranians.

* Though nineteenth-century historians named it after a mythic king, Minos, there is no evidence of a monarchy and its ‘throne room’ may have been a council chamber or a temple for rituals. Cretans may have worshipped goddesses portrayed on their frescoes. Some suggest these were female rulers, but there’s no evidence either way. Their language has still not been deciphered.

* If the Egyptians did not grasp the dangers of incestuous marriage, they did produce guides to medicine and gynaecology, written on papyrus, which together with other papyri reveal how much they knew – and how little. Illness was caused by demons and bad spirits that were cured by both magic and treatment. Doctors, often also priests, were specialized, ranging from ‘Physician of the Eyes’ to ‘Shepherd of the Anus’; Djoser had Hesy-Ra, a ‘Chief of Dentists and Doctors’, in 2700 BC, and there was a chief female doctor Peseshet in 2400. Babies were delivered with the mothers in a kneeling position, supervised by female midwives. Their physicians believed channels led from the heart to the rest of the body. Pain was treated with opium, burns with aloe, epilepsy with camphor; wounds were bound with bandages. Tests for pregnancy used female urine on barley and emmer seeds; if they grew the woman was pregnant; if it was barley, it would be a boy, if emmer a girl. Fertility was tested with an onion in the vagina; if the woman’s breath smelled in the morning, she was fertile. Other measures are more sensible: if the perineum was ‘very swollen due to childbirth you should prepare for her: oil to be soaked into vagina’. Contraceptives for females included pessaries of sour milk, honey, natron or acacia gum, the latter a known spermicide. Crocodile dung would have acted as an indirect contraceptive. After rape: ‘Instructions for a woman suffering in her vagina and limbs having been beaten … You should prepare for her: oil to be eaten until she is well.’

* The titles reveal the complexity of the court – Royal Seal Bearer, Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Fan Bearer of the Lord of Two Lands – but security was vital: Master of the Secrets was ‘Eyes of the King’. The royal bodyguards were made up of Nubian but also Mycenaeans from the Aegean. The police were often Nubian.

* The definition of life after death had changed since the days of Sneferu. Then, only kings had been worthy of afterlife; now high officials too inscribed their tombs with the sacred texts to achieve divinity and resurrection. The new royal family promoted the cult of Osiris, god of earth and the lord of the underworld, who oversaw the rebirth after death assisted by Ra and Horus, the two gods of the sky. The Egyptians embraced different concepts of the soul of the dead: the ba existed in parallel to the individual, but in death by day travelled with the sun and by night rejoined the mummified body with Osiris. The ka was a deathless spirit that needed food to survive and allowed the dead to travel to the underworld for judgement by Osiris, a terrifying voyage that, according to the so-called Coffin Texts, led them to the Field of Offering. There they faced fearsome alternatives between eternal life and damnation to hell where they had to eat excrement and drink urine. But if chosen, they entered a paradisiacal world. All of this depended on the survival of the mummy in the grave: just in case, Egyptians were now buried with a shabti, a burial figurine, to serve as a substitute in case the mummy was destroyed, so the ba could return every night.