The Grand Egyptian Museum and Other Adventures in Egypt ~ by Lesley Downer

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.’

Ramses II at Luxor -
Ozymandias, King of Kings

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

The Grand Egyptian Museum opened to huge fanfare on November 1st 2025. So when I planned a visit to Egypt in January, the first thing I did was book a ticket.

The museum is a long way from the centre of Cairo, on the edge of the Sahara, near the Pyramids and the Sphinx. It’s mammoth, designed to echo the pyramids, with sloping triangular walls and hieroglyphic decorations. Just getting from the gate to the entrance of the building is a long walk.

Once inside, the sheer size is breathtaking. The building soars above you. It’s the largest collection in the world of archaeological treasures devoted to a single civilisation.

Ramses dominates the atrium
of the Grand Egyptian Museum

Ramses II
The ground floor is dominated by an 11 metre (36 feet) tall statue of Ramses II (1303 - 1213 BCE), which is 3200 years old. The greatest and most powerful of all the pharaohs, Ramses fought wars, expanded his kingdom and commissioned colossal awe-inspiring statues of himself right across Egypt, including four vast statues at Abu Simbel - though even he might not have imagined that people would still pay homage to him three millennia later or that he would be immortalised by Percy Bysshe Shelley under the Greek form of his name, Ozymandias.

Having paid my respects to Ramses, I set off to explore the museum. Broad steps lead up to the exhibition halls on the third floor, on which sit or stand monumental, exquisitely-carved statues. The mammoth images of pharaohs and gods dwarf us mere humans who climb up. From the top you can see the pyramids shimmering in the desert.

Sneferu - battered but
amazingly ancient

There are twenty galleries on the third floor, arranged by era. They trace the history of ancient Egypt beginning with hunter gatherers and the earliest dynasties, around the 27th century BCE, right through to the advent of Greek and Roman influences in the early centuries CE.

One of the earliest artefacts is a battered but marvellous statue of Sneferu (2700 - 2200 BCE), which dates from 2600 BCE. A pioneer of pyramid building, he commissioned four pyramids including the Bent pyramid, whose bulging walls make it look a bit like a yurt.

Gallery after gallery is filled with amazing sculptures of gods and pharaohs, priests and scribes, many adorned with hieroglyphs. There are perfectly crafted models of boats and houses along with models of servants that would have been placed in tombs so that the dead could continue to enjoy the pleasures of this world, and which create a feeling for what the life of those ancient times was like. There’s also an absorbing section recreating the interior of some of the key tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.

On the way down one can take in the Tutankhamen Galleries and the Khufu Boat Galleries.

Shimmering in the desert - 
Pyramids and sphinx

It’s wonderful that these artefacts, this precious heritage of mankind, have been gathered together and carefully conserved and preserved. Most are perfect, intact and largely undamaged. It’s amazing that despite grave robbers and looters and British and French armies carting stuff away by the shipload there’s still so much right here in Egypt. It’s reason to celebrate and a good reason to visit Egypt. The Egyptian authorities are trying to reclaim treasures from Britain and France - such as the Rosetta Stone.

The museum is a marvellous showcase for these astonishing creations - the size of them, the beauty. It’s also a taster. After all, this was a living culture. These are objects that living people admired or worshipped or stood in awe before. And here in Egypt we can see artefacts like these in the actual temples in which they were intended to be seen, where they belong.

Pyramids and Sphinx
So you step out of the cool architect-designed museum into the blazing sun and the mad chaos of the Egyptian streets and take an Uber (the best method) through the honking surging Giza traffic to the pyramids.

I first visited in 1997. In those days you just went. Now you need a ticket. There’s a shuttle bus to take you from one to the next, and a lot of people.

 

The temple at Luxor

But no matter how many crowds there are, nothing can detract from their majesty and mystery, the sheer age and solidity and symmetry and size of them and the vastness of the desert that stretches behind. The Great Pyramid is 4600 years old. It’s of a physical scale that defies human comprehension and a time scale beyond imagination.

The Sphinx is if anything even more alluring and mysterious. It was probably commissioned by Khufu between 2590 and 2566 BCE, around the same time as the Great Pyramid, and the face is his. There is a stele between the paws, placed there by Pharaoh Tuthmose IV 1200 years later, in 1401 BCE. On it he records his dream, in which the sphinx asked him to clear away the sand that half concealed it after all those centuries and promised that if he did, he would become pharaoh. The gap of time between the sphinx and Thutmose is longer than between us and 1066.

The Temple at Luxor: Apotheosis of Ramses II
To set these ancient images more in their context you need to take a felucca down the Nile to the small palm-fringed town of Luxor. The temple at Luxor is breath-takingly beautiful. It was founded and laid out by Amenophis III (1417 - 1379 BCE) on the edge of the Nile. It’s a perfect, quite compact structure, with courts lined with towering pillars inscribed with hieroglyphs.

The Nile at Luxor

The temple reached its pinnacle of perfection under the great conqueror Ramses II - Ozymandias himself - a hundred years after Thutmose. The statue of Ramses II here is colossal yet delicate at the same time, and epic in scale. It conveys awesome power and divinity.

Of course all that power - and all that divinity - has long since vanished, leaving behind only magnificent monuments for us lesser mortals to contemplate:

‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

PS You can also see Ramses at Battersea Power Station! What would he have thought of that!

Photo of colossal statue of Ramses at Grand Egyptian Museum by Richard Mortel, originally posted on Flickr at https://flickr.com/photos/43714545@N06/54298959040 via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Sneferu at Cairo Museum by Richard Mortel, originally posted on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/prof_richard/54297653082/ via Wikimedia Commons. 

The other photos are mine. 

Lesley Downer is a lover of ancient times and foreign places. She had two books out in 2024: The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications) - 16,500 years of Japanese history in 50,000 words, full of stories and colourful characters - and her first ‘real’ book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, reissued by Eland under her new pen name to acknowledge her Chinese roots - Lesley Chan Downer. Since then she has been enjoying seeing places that are not Japan. Back to Japan soon! 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com

Queens and Empresses: When Women Ruled Japan ~ by Lesley Downer

‘Thank you very much for bestowing the crown today at the coming of age ceremony.’
Prince Hisahito, September 6th 2025

Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako of Japan

On Prince Hisahito’s 19th birthday, September 6th 2025, there was an elaborate coming of age ceremony at the imperial palace in Tokyo. The prince wore the Kakan-no-Gi, the traditional golden yellow garment with a long train to mark him as a youth, and was presented with a black silk and lacquer crown by deferential courtiers in rustling black robes, recognising him as second in line to the throne after his father, the Crown Prince.

He then changed into the black robes of adulthood and set off to the next ceremonial event in a horse-drawn carriage.

Princess Aiko, December 23 2022 

Prince Hisahito is the nephew of the Emperor of Japan; his father is the emperor’s younger brother. His cousin Princess Aiko is the only child of the Emperor and Empress and, at 23, is older than him. So how does Prince Hisahito come to be second in line to the throne?  

Princess Aiko can’t accede to the chrysanthemum throne for one simple reason: she is a woman.

This is not ancient tradition. Until the passing of Japan’s first constitution in 1889 there was no such rule. The aim of the constitution was to make Japan appear similar to western nations, on the surface at least, so as to end the unequal treaties which forced Japan to kowtow to the west - though ironically at the time Queen Victoria was firmly on the throne in Britain.

After the war the American occupying forces drew up a new constitution which set in stone the law that only men could accede to the throne. Empress Masako, the present Empress, was under great pressure to produce a son and didn’t succeed, though she did have a daughter, Princess Aiko.

But before that first constitution things were different. Female emperors were not common but there were some who played major roles in the development of Japan. And in ancient times there were plenty.

The Sun Goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami
by Utagawa Kunisada 1856

In fact the claim to legitimacy of the imperial family is - again, ironically - that they are descended in an unbroken line from the female Sun Goddess, Amaterasu.

Queens and Empresses part I

Shaman Queen

The very first named person in Japanese history is a woman - Queen Himiko, who ruled from about 190 to 248 AD, just over a hundred years after Boudicca. At the time the kings who ruled the various kingdoms that made up Japan were always fighting and in order to maintain the peace decided to set a woman on the throne.

Himiko, who came from a line of queens, maintained peace for 60 years. She was not only a temporal ruler but a shaman who could intervene with the gods to ensure the food supply and protect her people from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. After her death a king took the throne and fighting started again. Peace was only restored when Himiko’s 13 year old niece Iyo, who was also a shaman, became queen.

In the years that followed there was a succession of empresses, six in all.

Suiko: Long reigning empress who established Buddhism

Empress Suiko: imaginary picture
by Tosa Mitsuyoshi (1700 - 1772)

Empress Suiko (554 - 628) came to the throne in 593, succeeding her husband, Emperor Bidatsu, and ruled for 35 years. Like Himiko she was installed on the throne in order to establish peace among warring factions, the Soga and the Mononobe clans. Her father, Emperor Kinmei, had been given a statue of the Buddha by the King of Baekje, now part of Korea, who urged him to adopt this ‘most excellent’ religion.

Under Suiko’s rule Buddhism was recognised as the official religion of the country and the country absorbed a great deal of Chinese culture - politics, poetry, laws, religion, food, clothing, architecture and music. Chinese and Korean craftsmen came to Japan. Her government sent its first official embassy to the glorious Chinese court, introduced the Chinese calendar, replaced the Japanese system of hereditary ranks with the Chinese bureaucratic system and established the supremacy of the emperor, laying the foundations for Japan as a unified country rather than a collection of warring states.

Empress Kōgyoku witnesses a spectacular coup d’état.

Empress Kōgyoku

Empress Kōgyoku (594 - 661) had a rather dramatic story. She was the widow of the previous emperor, Suiko’s great-nephew. She came to the throne in 642 and had a new palace built, the Itabuki no Miya. In those days people founded a new capital every time a new emperor came to the throne so as to avoid being jinxed by the ghost of the previous incumbent. She then brought an end to a drought by praying.

But she’d barely settled into her new palace when there was an upheaval. Her son Prince Naka was tired of the Soga clan controlling power. He started meeting with a nobleman called Nakatomi no Kamatari in a wisteria grove where they claimed to be studying Chinese texts but in fact were plotting a coup d’état.

On July 13 645 there was a grand meeting at the new palace. Prince Naka ordered all the gates to be locked, smuggled in a sword and in full view of everyone lopped off the head of the young leader of the Soga clan, Soga no Iruka, thus ejecting the Soga from power. Empress Kōgyoku abdicated immediately because she was polluted by being in the presence of death.

Prince Naka killing Soga no Iruka
from the Tōnomine Engi scroll, Edo period

Empress Kōgyoku’s brother took over but everyone understood that the real power in the land was now Prince Naka and that power was now in the hands of the imperial family again.

After her brother died Kōgyoku came back to the throne with a new, unpolluted name - Empress Saimei. She then set off to lead an armada to attack the Chinese and Sillan (Korean) ships that were threatening Japan but on the way she died. Prince Naka finally took power as the great Emperor Tenji.

The empresses who were to follow played a major part and varied roles in shaping the country Japan was to become. For their stories, watch out for my next riveting instalment!


All images are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and in particular all things Japanese. She had two books out last year: The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications) - 16,500 years of Japanese history in 50,000 words, full of stories and colourful characters - and her first ‘real’ book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, reissued by Eland under her new pen name to acknowledge her Chinese roots - Lesley Chan Downer. For more see www.lesleydowner.com

Japan’s Jazz Age: Flappers and Feminists ~ by Lesley Downer

‘In the beginning, woman was the sun.’

Hiratsuka Raichō

Moga, pictured in 
Mainichi shimbun 

‘Modern gals’

If you had visited Tokyo in the 1910s and 1920s, you would have met Japanese women stepping out confidently with short flapper skirts and scandalously short hair, a million miles from the stereotypical ‘submissive Japanese woman.’ They were moga - ‘modern gals’ - a term coined by the great Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in his novel A Fool’s Love. Not all women were moga, but there were enough to flavour the era.

While Europe was engulfed in World War I, Japan, which was allied to Britain, was enjoying an economic boom. In the Meiji period, Japan’s Victorian era, the country had burst spectacularly into the modern age and onto the world stage. And by now westernisation, prosperity and mass culture had spread to nearly everyone in Japan. Now everyone was enjoying the benefits.

1929 ad for Shirokiya department store

Speed, sport and sex
After the hard work and discipline of the Victorian era, when the government was determined to build up the nation to protect it against colonisation, the new era (named Taishō, after a new emperor came to the throne) was like a fresh breeze blowing through.

The Meiji constitution had been all about keeping women in their place, slotting them into the template of ‘good wives, wise mothers’. But by the 1910s and 1920s the rebuilding was done. Suddenly people were free to let their hair down and be themselves. 

At last the younger generation had a voice. They didn’t have to follow in the drab footsteps of their elders. Those of us who remember the Sixties - Flower Power, Women’s Lib - will recognise the thrill, the exhilaration. 

Moga 1928 in 'beach pyjama' style

Youth power
This was Japan’s Jazz Age - the age of speed, sport and sex, of anything goes. There was universal education. With one of the world’s largest student populations, Tokyo was enjoying a boom in the publishing of books, journals and newspapers. People were free to think and talk and argue and throw around words and ideas like socialism, Marxism, anarchism, democracy and freedom. They also had money which they could spend any way they liked.

Forget ‘good wife, wise mother’. These women had jobs. They could be typists, elevator girls, shop clerks, nurses, writers, journalists or beauticians, and be financially independent. Some moga worked as waitresses in cafes, dispensing sexual favours where they saw fit, like Naomi in Tanizaki’s ground-breaking A Fool’s Love, a sort of Japanese Lolita, the story of a man hopelessly besotted with one of these cool aloof creatures.

Tipsy by Kobayakawa Kiyoshi

The moga were the trendsetters along with mobo - ‘modern boys’. Moga cut their hair short, like boys, and flaunted short flapper skirts, while dapper mobo wore their hair long and swept back in the all-back style and sported bell bottoms, bowler hats and horn-rimmed Harold Lloyd glasses.

They hung out in cafes and bars, they smoked, talked and argued, they practised free love and they strolled along the Ginza, Tokyo’s most fashionable street. They listened to jazz, danced the Charleston, watched American movies and ate ice cream. Until the authorities clamped down, Marxism was all the rage and everyone read the latest revolutionary Russian novels, such as Aleksandra Kollontai’s A Great Love.

Militant feminists
Out of this fizzing free love milieu sprang pioneering feminists.

Hiratsuka Raichō (1886 - 1971),
 from her autobiography

Hiratsuka Raichō lived the life. She famously said that marriage was ‘slavery during the daytime and prostitution at night.’ In 1908 at the age of 22 she eloped with an older married man, Morita Sohei, and the two tried - and failed - to commit suicide together in time-honoured Japanese fashion. She then had two children by a much younger lover whom she only married when her children were adults, taking her husband’s surname so that her son would not be negatively impacted when he was drafted.

She was also more than prepared to speak up for women’s rights. In 1911 she founded Seitō - Bluestocking - Japan’s first all-women literary magazine. The first words were ‘In the beginning woman was the sun’ - a reminder that in Japanese mythology the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, is the creator of all life.

The first issue of Seitō, 

September 1911,

cover illustration by 

Naganuma Chieko

Seitō was packed with stories and articles expressing women’s sexuality with no holds barred. One story detailed the break up of an arranged marriage, another was a graphic description of casual sex with a man the author picked up in a bar. The upholders of traditional values, particularly in the government, were outraged and both issues were banned.

Then Hiratsuka started publishing articles daring to attack the capitalist system and the established order and demanding women’s rights. For the powers that be this was the last straw. In 1916 the Home Ministry forbade distributors to supply the magazine. Sales instantaneously dried up and the magazine had to close down.

But that didn’t stop Hiratsuka. At the time women were banned from attending political meetings on the basis that they should be at home looking after their families. In 1922 Hiratsuka and her fellow activists managed to get this law overturned though female suffrage was still a long way off. Women were not included when universal male suffrage was introduced in 1925. She and her fellow activists were condemned as ‘New Women’, a term which they enthusiastically embraced.

Yosano Akiko (1878 - 1942)

Seitō’s most famous contributor was the poet Yosano Akiko. She too had an affair with a married man whom she later married; the couple had eleven children. Her first volume of poems, Midaregami - Tangled Hair - was a passionate expression of her love for him. Critics attacked the book as immoral and obscene but it was loved and widely read and became a beacon for supporters of women’s rights. At the height of the Russo-Japanese War she published a poem entitled ‘Thou shalt not die’, exhorting her younger brother who was a soldier not to sacrifice himself for this senseless war. It became the anthem of the anti-war movement and was picked up again after World War II.

Midaregami (Tangled Hair)
by Yosano Akiko

These were women who took their lives in their own hands. Their power was their independence. Perhaps some of them even thought that the times they were a-changing, that a new age was dawning, as we did in the Sixties as we looked forward to the coming of the Age of Aquarius. But those that did discovered all too soon - as we did - that they were wrong. The era of speed, sport and sex turned out to be just a flash of brightness before the darkness of World War II closed in.

For more on Japan’s pioneering feminists, you could read

In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist by Hiratsuka Raichō, translated with an introduction and notes by Teruko Craig (Columbia University Press 2006)
and
A Girl with Tangled Hair: the 399 poems in the Midaregami by Akiko Yosano, translated by Jane Reichhold and Machiko Kobayashi

All images are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and in particular all things Japanese. For more about these amazing women and much else, please see my new book, The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications). My travel book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, was also reissued last year, by Eland. For more see www.lesleydowner.com
    

The Men who Ate Gold ~ by Lesley Downer

Like a great cloud
The Wiraqochas [Whites]
Demanding gold
Have invaded us.         The Death of Atau Wallpa, Runasimi [Quechua] epic lament

                                           put into writing in the 18th century

Inca Emperor, Museo Inkaryi, Valle Sagrado

I was recently lucky enough to go to the enchanting country of Peru and was captivated by its extraordinary landscape and tragic history ...

The all-conquering Atahualpa
In November 1532 the emperor of all the Incas, Atahualpa, was marching south to his capital, Cusco, accompanied by an army of 80,000 men in a vast triumphal cavalcade. After a long civil war he had captured his half brother, the then Inca, and made himself emperor - Inca - of the whole vast land of Tawantinsuyu.

Deep in the mountains he ordered his men to pitch camp in a lush fertile valley outside the small city of Cajamarca. There were so many tents pitched across the hillside that it was like a city. Atahualpa and his women stayed in a beautifully-appointed residence a few kilometres away, at a hot spring where mineral waters hissed and bubbled out of the ground. There was a bathhouse, hot and cold running water and a garden. There he engaged in a ceremonial fast, took the waters and recuperated from a war wound.

Inca emperor and courtiers in a palace 
of Inca stonework, Museo Inkaryi

 Atahualpa was an incredibly impressive presence. His crown was a multi-coloured braid like a coronet from which hung the imperial fringe ‘of fine scarlet wool’ spreading across his forehead. When he travelled he was borne aloft in a gold litter with such majesty that people left the roads on which he passed and ascended the hills to worship and adore him. He was far too grand for his feet ever to touch the ground.

The Four Quarters of the World
His grandfather, the great emperor Thupa Inka, who died in 1493, had been an Alexander the Great, who expanded his territory across not just modern-day Peru but much of modern-day Ecuador and Chile, creating the empire of Tawantinsuyu, ‘The Four Quarters of the World’, which ran along most of the east coast of South America. 

This was an incredibly sophisticated empire with a network of roads built for llamas to walk on, carefully irrigated agricultural terraces, great monuments and

Performer depicting an Inca woman

public buildings of masonry, great blocks of perfectly smooth stonework that slotted together like pieces of jigsaw puzzle and were never toppled even by the most violent earthquake. The Incas were the last of a long line of peoples all of whom left their mark on Peru; the Inca themselves were only here for a hundred years.

After his grandfather’s and his father’s deaths, civil war broke out between various half brothers; the old man had had some sixty sons. Eventually Atahualpa proved victorious. Now the time had come to consolidate his empire and establish his rule.

He’d already had news of the extraordinary strangers who had landed on the coast.

The gold eaters
There are coming men who never sleep and who eat silver and gold, as do their beasts who wear sandals of silver. And every night each of these speaks with certain symbols; and they are all enshrouded from head to foot, with their faces completely covered in wool so that all that can be seen are their eyes.

Waman Puma, 16th century native chronicler 

Performer depicting an Inca 

The newcomers were pale and hairy. People soon realised that they were not half man and half beast, like centaurs, but sitting on enormous animals, the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Atahualpa also heard that they were pillaging the countryside and abusing the local people.

But there were not that many - 168. Atahualpa had bigger things to worry about. He was still tidying up pockets of resistance, issuing orders to his army, arranging the occupation of the newly-won empire, awaiting reports from his commanders in the south and planning his journey to Cusco. In fact one of his nobles on his way south had already met the newcomers and spent a couple of days with them. He had even given them stuffed ducks to eat and gifts of pottery.

 

Atahualpa, 14th Inca, 18th century portrait,
courtesy Brooklyn Museum/wiki commons

The Spanish sent representatives to Atahualpa, who agreed to meet their leader, the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, the following day in the central square of the town of Cajamarca. The town had been largely evacuated for the war. The barrack-like buildings that surrounded the square on three sides were empty. There Pizarro hid his men, horses and cannons. The 168 Spanish crouched in the shadows, awaiting the Inca, trembling with fear.

  
Showdown at Cajamarca

It was November 16th 1532.

Atahualpa arrived in a ceremonial parade. First came liveried men in chequered coats who sang as they cleared and swept the ground before him. Then came a troop of five or six thousand, almost all bearing only ornamental weapons. He left his main troops outside the town. He was not expecting an attack.

Gold and blue chequered cape
of feathers, Museo Larco, Lima

 
All the retainers wore large gold and silver discs like crowns. Eighty lords in rich blue livery carried Atahualpa’s litter on their shoulders. The timber ends were covered in silver and the litter was lined with multi-clouded parrot feathers and gleamed with plates of gold and silver. Atahualpa himself wore his imperial crown and a collar of large emeralds around his neck. A staff bearer carried Atahualpa’s royal standard with his personal coat-of-arms.

Perhaps Atahualpa was expecting this tiny contingent of men to be awestruck by the grandeur of his procession. He demanded that they return everything they had stolen since they had arrived in his kingdom.

Pizarro meets Atahualpa, by Waman Puma,
courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 But things did not go as expected. A Spanish friar stepped forward and started talking what must have sounded like nonsense to Atahualpa’s ears. He thrust a breviary - a service book - into the Inca’s hands. It must have been closed in some way. Atahualpa tried to open it and at first he couldn’t. He finally succeeded and stared at the pages, turning them over, not seeing the purpose of them. The Incas had no writing at this point. Then he tossed it impatiently onto the ground, looking furious.

 
‘By the grace of God’
It was the moment the Spanish had been waiting for. The Spanish Royal Council had issued a Requirement proclaiming that the newly discovered peoples should submit to God and the king of Spain and had declared that this Requirement had to be delivered before any bloodshed could take place. The friar screamed that Atahualpa had desecrated Holy Writ, giving the Spanish the excuse they needed to rush out and start killing.

What followed was a massacre. The Spanish, firing cannons, wearing armour and mounted on horses - none of which the Incas had ever seen - burst out of the barracks and into the square. The Inca troops were utterly panicked by the smoke and fire and steel and charging animals. Hundreds, trying to flee, trampled each other to death. The Spanish killed almost all the rest.

Portrait of Atahualpa, Museo Inka, Cusco

Atahualpa’s retainers gathered around him, protecting him and holding his litter high. When the Spanish sliced off their hands with their swords they heaved the litter up on their shoulders and when some were killed others rushed in to take their place. But eventually they were all slaughtered.

A Spanish soldier tried to kill Atahualpa but Pizarro parried the blow, shouting, ‘Do not kill him.’ Then he personally dragged the Inca emperor out of his litter by his hair.

As the Spanish records recount triumphantly, ‘And since the Indians were unarmed they were routed without any danger to any Christian.’ They later added, ‘It was by the grace of God, which is great.’

Gold, gold, gold!
Atahualpa was dragged off and imprisoned in a small room in Cajamarca. The Spanish were impressed with how very intelligent he was and what an able and resourceful man he was - obviously so if he’d won all these battles to make himself emperor. He was very curious about the Christian way of communicating by writing and spent his captivity learning Spanish, chess and cards.

Pizarro, Lima Cathedral

He quickly became aware of the Spanish obsession with gold. In fact he wondered whether they ate gold or were suffering from a disease for which gold was the only cure. To the Incas and the preceding peoples of Peru, gold and silver were beautiful materials from which to make marvellous objects. They were not interested in money, they had no money. They saw gold and silver as beautiful and even with religious significance.

 

Pachacuti, the great 9th Inca, Atahualpa's
great grandfather, in Cusco

Atahualpa offered to fill a large room, 22 feet long by 17 feet wide (6.7 by 5.17 metres), with gold objects and two equivalent rooms with silver in exchange for his freedom.

Even though he was imprisoned he was still emperor of his country. He ordered his general to strip Cusco of its gold and silver. He had never lived there - he’d grown up in the equatorial north - and had no attachment to it. Also it was the headquarters of one of his brothers who was of course his rival.

Between December 1532 and May 1553 caravans of precious objects crossed the mountains on llama-back to Cajamarca. When Atahualpa had fulfilled his part of the bargain and the rooms were full, Pizarro had it all melted down into ingots and shipped to Spain. Then he had Atahualpa garrotted and the Spanish marched on Cusco.

Cusco, Plaza de Armas

My sources are three wonderful books: The Conquest of the Incas by John Hemming; Cut Stones and Crossroads by Ronald Wright; and 1491: The Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Plus my own experiences of Peru.

All pictures except the Brooklyn Museum portrait of Atahualpa and Waman Puma's depiction of Atahualpa meeting Pizarro are mine.

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books on Japan, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death, out now in paperback. And watch out for The Shortest History of Japan, out soon! For more see www.lesleydowner.com

Octopus dreams: Japan, Stonehenge, Knossos ~ by Lesley Downer

takotsubo ya                 Octopus pot
hakanaki yume o          Fleeting dreams
natsu no tsuki               Beneath the summer moon
                                                    Matsuo Bashō (1644 - 1694)

Minoan octopus vase,
around 1500 BC

Husband (in octopus tee
shirt) meets dogū at the
Heraklion Archaeological
Museum

Cultural echoes spring up tentacle-like in the most unexpected of places. Japan and Stonehenge, Japan and Knossos - who would have thought it?

This summer there have been exhibitions at Stonehenge and the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete, celebrating the parallels between the marvellous Jōmon culture of Japan and these two very distant yet in surprising ways not dissimilar island cultures. I was lucky enough to visit both.

Jōmon flame pot at 
Heraklion Archaeological
Museum (3000 - 2000 BC) 

Jōmon - prosperous hunter-gatherers and the world's first potters
Fifteen thousand years ago the world was engulfed in an ice age. Much of the earth’s water had solidified into ice and sea levels had fallen by several hundred feet. What are now the islands of Japan were part of mainland Asia, connected to present day Siberia and Korea by vast tracts of countryside, plains and hills. It was cold and stormy. Huge long-tusked long-haired ‘Naumann’s’ elephants lumbered around, along with giant deer, horses, tigers, brown bears and wolves, trailed by hardy nomadic people looking for animals to hunt and fruit and vegetables to forage.

Around 14,500 BC, long before anyone else thought of doing so (except possibly the Chinese), some of these people took to moulding the clayey soil and making it into small pots, useful for carrying grain. This was a quite extraordinary development; pots are heavy to lug around when you’re on the move. Millennia later these nomads came to be called Jōmon - ‘rope design’ - after the patterns they impressed on their pots.

 

Jōmon flame pot at
Circles of Stone
exhibition at Stonehenge

Then temperatures began to rise. The ice melted and the sea levels rose, turning what had been the extreme edge of the Asian continent into a string of islands. The weather turned balmy. The descendents of those hardy nomads found themselves in a Garden of Eden, enjoying a lush temperate climate. Most lived not far from the sea where fish and seafood could be snatched straight from the water, collected or speared. 

There were mountains where animals roamed and forests overflowing with roots, fruits, leaves and berries. The Jōmon knew about farming; their neighbours across the water in Korea were farmers. But they themselves didn’t need to break their backs hoeing the soil day and night, for they had abundant food all around them. Most peoples didn’t settle down until the advent of farming; but these hunter-gatherers were so prosperous that many stopped wandering and formed communities.

dogū at Heraklion
Archaeological
Museum

Life was so easy that they didn’t need to send everyone out hunting and foraging. Specialist trades developed. Artisans stayed home and built houses or made pots. By now they were using the pots for cooking and serving large communal feasts. And the pots they made became bigger and bigger and more and more gloriously elaborate.

One settlement, at Sannai Maruyama in the far north of the main island, present day Honshu, made up of 700 large thatched houses built around fire pits, was occupied for 1500 years, from 3500 to 2000 BC. The inhabitants dined on mackerel, yellowtail, tuna, salmon, shark and shellfish from the sea, rivers and lagoons, and deer and boar which they hunted with dogs and with stone arrowheads glued to wooden shafts. They ate chestnuts, acorns, walnuts, wild grapes, kiwi fruit, gourds and beans and hunted rabbits and flying squirrels for their warm fur.

Ōyu stone circles

And from 2500 BC to 300 BC they also made amazing figurines - dogū. These were mostly female and may have represented an earth goddess or were used in fertility or healing rituals.

Some 2000 years down the line, these communities began to break up. Some of these smaller communities built stone circles. Around 2200 to 1700 BC, at Ōyu and Isedotai, not too far from Sannai Maruyama, people carried stones from nearby river beds and laid them out with great precision in concentric circles. 

Ōyu stone circles

Most were laid flat with standing stones in the centre that aligned with pillars at the outer edges to mark the sunrise at the summer solstice and made it possible to calculate the winter solstice and the spring equinox and the movements of the sun. Here people gathered to carry out seasonal ceremonies, conduct rituals and bury their dead.

Stone circles: the Stonehenge builders and the Jōmon
Around the same time, 3000 to 2500 BC, on another small island, Neolithic farmers were dragging massively heavy bluestones 180 miles, 290 kilometres, from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain. 

Stonehenge

These two cultures on opposite sides of the globe had no contact between them yet had striking similarities. Both made stone circles, used flaked stone tools, had huge feasts and made beautiful pots. Circles of Stone, a wonderful exhibition at Stonehenge which closed on September 3rd, spotlit these cultures.

While the Jōmon were fishermen, hunters and gatherers, in Britain the weather was far less clement and life as a huntergatherer was rough. Around 4000 BC people started farming. The Stonehenge builders cultivated wheat and barley and had cattle, pigs and sheep. They ate beef and roasted pigs over open fires including piglets, which they ate at midwinter. They also gathered wild foods like their Japanese contemporaries.

They used far bigger stones for their stone circles and stood them upright with lintels resting on the top, akin to the torii gate at a Shinto shrine. Like the Jōmon stone circles they were laid out with great care. 

Minoan and Jōmon figures

Both the Stonehenge builders and the Jōmon, it seems, followed and celebrated the passage of the sun, particularly during the summer solstice, and gathered at these stone circles at key times in the annual calendar for festival and rituals. But the Stonehenge builders did not make human figures like the Jōmon dogū.

島国 shima guni, island countries: the Minoans and the Jōmon
The Minoans developed their civilisation a few millennia later, between about 2000 and 1000 BC. They didn’t build stone circles but huge and splendid palaces painted with frescoes. But as an island nation they had much in common with the Jōmon, who were still thriving across the world in Japan. Legacies of Beauty: Archaeological Treasures from Japan, a wonderful exhibition at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum which closed on September 24th, celebrates the parallels.

Minoan and Japanese haniwa 
horses (6th century AD)

The Stonehenge builders, the Jōmon and the Minoans were all island dwellers. The Japanese call it shima guni, 島国. Wherever you are the sea is never far away. You are well aware of the rest of the world out there and of cultural developments outside your own small community. Both the Minoans and the Jōmon traded extensively. The Jōmon traded with Hokkaido, Korea and China while the Minoans were the centre of an extensive trade network crisscrossing the Eastern Mediterranean.

Both cultures celebrated the sea. Octopuses coil their tentacles across Minoan pots while the triton shell became an essential religious implement in Japan. And both created images of life-nurturing women, probably used in prayers for safe childbirth and fertility.

Minoan goddess

For all their creativity all these cultures died out, leaving ruins large and small, as will no doubt happen to us too.

For more on the Jōmon there’s a wonderful British Museum catalogue, The Power of Dogu, Ceramic Figures from Ancient Japan, edited by Simon Kaner. You can also see Jōmon pots at the British Museum.

The Jōmon also feature all too briefly in my The Shortest History of Japan, to be published next June.

Circles of Stone ran from September 30 2022 to September 3rd 2023 at the Stonehenge Visitors’ Centre

Legacies of Beauty: Archaeological Treasures from Japan was at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum from June 2nd 2023 to Sunday September 24th 2023

The pictures of the Ōyu stone circles are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. All other pictures are by me, taken at the two exhibitions, at Stonehenge and Heraklion.

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books on Japan, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death, out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

A Brief Encounter ~ by Lesley Downer

Which is more beautiful, spring or autumn? That was a question bound to stir the interest of any sensitive young woman at the eleventh century Japanese court ...

A Heian lady's day ...

Our story begins with some monks reciting Buddhist sutras all through a long, very dark night. Two young women had crept out of their quarters and lay down on the veranda outside the prayer hall to listen to their beautiful voices. Women were not supposed to be seen but it was dark enough that no one would see them.

It was October 1042. Across the world Edward the Confessor had just come to the throne and commissioned the building of a royal burial church, later to become Westminster Abbey. Beowulf’s epic battle with Grendel had been set down in writing, as had The Song of Roland.

In Japan courtly gentlemen were studying and writing poems in Chinese, which was to Japan as Latin was to the west, the language of educated people. Women learnt kana, a simple alphabetical form of writing, just enough to read and recite the sutras, which was all that women needed, or so men thought. The ladies of the court, however, were smart, sophisticated and very witty and they used the flowing kana script to record their lives, feelings and the often amusing events that occurred, in glorious detail.

One shy young woman was whiling away her years in the provinces, reading, dreaming and writing poems. She wrote an introspective, astonishingly modern account of her thoughts, feelings, regrets and sadnesses, so vivid that we can almost step into her silken shoes and imagine ourselves back in Heian Japan. The diary she wrote - in modern terms, a memoir - is called The Sarashina Diary. She is known only as the daughter of Takasue or Lady Sarashina, though that certainly wasn’t her name.

After many years in the provinces, when she was twenty six, our heroine was invited to the court of Princess Yūshi. On that momentous occasion she wore eight layers of gowns of alternating dark and pale chrysanthemum shades topped with a flowing robe of crimson silk. Eventually she was offered a position as a lady-in-waiting there.

On such a night as this ...

Court ladies and gentlemen spoke separated by screens 
so that the gentleman couldn't see the lady. 

On that dark night, as Lady Sarashina and her friend were reclining on the veranda, a gentleman strolled by and stopped to engage the ladies in conversation. In the ordinary course of events our heroine would never have met a courtier of such high rank. She was far too humble to attend on high court nobles or senior courtiers, so lowly that such people would never even have known she existed.

The proper thing to do would have been to slip away or summon ladies of the proper status but that would have been awkward. There was nothing for but to respond to his remarks.

Lady Sarashina listened while her friend chatted with the man. She noticed that he was quiet and thoughtful, not flirtatious or forward like other men. He spoke poetically of the brevity of life, mono no aware, the sadness of things. He was a perfect gentleman, in fact.

Then he asked, ‘And who is your companion?’

Lady Sarashina spoke up modestly and the gentleman responded, ‘So there is still a young lady in this palace whom I do not know?’ He showed no sign of wanting to leave, she writes.

It was a starless night and a slight drizzle pattered on the leaves with a charming sound.

‘How beautiful the darkness is,’ the gentleman said. ‘If there’d been a full moon it would have been too dazzling.’ It would also have meant that that they wouldn’t have been able to talk. They could only talk because they couldn’t see each other.

It was then that he turned to the very topic that struck a chord with her, comparing spring and autumn. He spoke of the beauties of spring, when the sky is overcast and the moonlight seems almost to float on the mist. ‘That’s the time when it’s lovely to hear the soft notes of a lute, set in the key of the Fragrant Breeze,’ he said. Then he spoke of autumn, then winter, then asked them which season they most loved.

Her friend spoke up in favour of autumn so Lady Sarashina decided to champion spring. She answered with a poem:
asa midori hana mo hitotsu ni kasumitsutsu oboro ni miyuru haru no yo no tsuki
‘Glimmering green,
Seen through mist,
Merging with the cherry blossom too,
Dimly seen -
The moon on a spring night.’

In those days educated people readily composed poems; it was an essential accomplishment. But our heroine was no ordinary poet but an exceptional one.

A Heian lady's room complete with kicho screen

The gentleman savoured her lines, repeating them again and again. He replied with a poem of his own: ‘From this night on, so long as I have life, such a spring night will hold the memory of you and of our meeting.’

Then he spoke of how he had once gone to the great shrine at Ise to attend the coming-of-age ceremony of the virgin priestess. Awe-inspiring though that experience had been, he said, this dark rainy night that they had spent together was every bit as unforgettable.

With that he left. They still hadn’t seen each other. She had no idea what he looked like, neither did she care. What drew her to him and demanded a place in her heart was his sensitivity, his manner, his poetry, his voice.

Such a fine gentleman could have no idea who she was, which was only proper, or so she thought.

‘Why should you remember it so well?’

Behind the screen ...

The following year, nearly a year after that first encounter, she went to the imperial palace again for an all-night entertainment. She didn’t know that the gentleman was also there and, being of a retiring disposition, stayed in her room.

At dawn she pushed open the sliding doors onto the corridor. The moon was glimmering, very faint and beautiful. Then she heard footsteps on the veranda and that voice she had yearned for, reciting a sutra. He stopped in front of the open doors.

‘I never forget that night of softly falling rain,’ he said, ‘not for a moment, and the precious time we spent together!’

There was no time for a proper answer so she replied with a poem:
nani sa made omohi idekemu nahozari no ko no ha ni kakeshi shigure bakari wo
‘Why, I wonder,
Should you remember it so well?
It was only
An autumn shower
Falling on the leaves.’

Then his companions joined him and she retired to the back of her room without waiting for his answer. That morning she had to leave the imperial palace with the princess and her retinue.

Later her friend brought his reply: ‘If we should ever have another such drizzly night, I should like to play my lute for you, every melody I know.’

'I should like to play my lute for you ...'

She yearned for such another meeting and waited and waited for such a chance. But it never came.

The following year, on a quiet spring evening, she heard that he had come to visit the princess’s palace. She and her friend crept out of their room hoping to meet him but the veranda was bustling with people and the reception rooms were full of ladies-in-waiting so they turned back. She guessed that he too had chosen that night to visit thinking it would be quiet. But he had left without seeing her because of the crowds.

Regretfully she composed a poem:
Kashima mite Naruto no ura ni kogare idzuru kokoro ha eki ya iso no amabito
‘Burning with passion
I yearned to row my boat out
To Kashima on the Bay of Naruto.
Did you know that,
Fisherman on the rocky shore?’

And that’s the end of the story. He never enquired who she was. He was too much of a gentleman to pry. His personality was perfect and he was far from an ordinary man, she writes, but time passed and neither called out to the other ...

The gentleman with whom our heroine had this brief encounter was Minamoto no Sukemichi (1005 - 1060). She was thirty three and he was thirty seven. He was of very high rank, far too grand to mingle with ordinary court ladies like her, and a famous musician and lute player.

Later our shy heroine and her diary became famous. Her poems, particularly the passionate poem about rowing out her boat, were celebrated and included in the imperial anthology, an extraordinary mark of distinction. Today everyone in Japan knows The Sarashina Diary. Ironically, grand though he was, Minamoto no Sukemichi’s name has come down to us only because he was the object of Lady Sarashina’s unspoken passion.

Two ladies, one playing the biwa lute,
the other the koto.

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death in nineteenth century Japan. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

There are three translations of The Sarashina Diary:
in Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan by Annie Shepley Omori and Kōchi Doi (1934)

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh Century Japan, by Ivan Morris (1971)

The Sarashina Diary: A Woman’s Life in Eleventh Century Japan, by Sonja Arntzen and Itō Moriyuki (2014)

Illustrations:
I haven’t found any illustrations of The Sarashina Diary so have used illustrations of The Tale of Genji and other Heian works to give the mood of the period:

Picture 1: Murasaki Shikibu composing The Tale of Genji at Ishiyamadera by Yashima Gakutei (1786 - 1868), Gift of Charles Lang Freer, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, public domain, courtesy wikimedia commons and the Smithsonian.

Picture 2: Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 - 1858), Utsusemi from The Tale of Genji in 54 chapters, 1852, National Diet Library, public domain, courtesy wikimedia commons.

Picture 3: Genji monogatari emaki, 1130, owned by Tokugawa Art Museum Nagoya 1937, courtesy wikimedia commons

Picture 4: unknown author, Sei Shonagon, 17th century drawing, courtesy wikimedia commons

Picture 5: Fujiwara Takayoshi, Genji monogatari emaki, Yadorigi chapter, 1130, owned by Tokugawa Art Museum Nagoya 1937, courtesy wikimedia commons

Picture 6, Kobo Shunman (1757 - 1820), Two ladies, one playing the biwa lute, the other the koto, 1815, H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs H.O. Havemeyer, Met Museum, public domain