Ramdas Iyer's- Travels around the globe

While on an expedition ship, Quark Ultramarine, coming down from the High arctic along Baffin Bay in the Labrador Sea in 2025, the ships polar historian pointed to a radar station that we watched from the top deck. This was one of the decommissioned first line warning radar system that the US and Canada had deployed during the cold war to thwart aerial attacks on the USA. Cape Dyer in Baffin Island, 200 miles above the arctic circle, was one of 63 radar stations built along the 69th parallel covering the entire north American continent from Alaska to Baffin Bay, for over 3600 miles. A real feat of engineering showing the might of US military capabilities. I was fascinated by the subject and had always wanted to share this with my readers. While neither a military expert nor a cold-war specialist, I merely garnered information from many sites including Western Electric archives, The DEW line museum and other sources for an article about this amazing engineering feat that may have stalled any intention of a Soviet attack on North America. To understand the immensity of the project one of the engineers had written that it was like building 2500 Statue of Liberties, dismantling them, and erecting them 200 miles north of the arctic circle spread across nearly 3600 miles with an extension of three sites on the Greenland ice cap in just two and a half years. As someone born during the cold-war era I could understand the fear of a Soviet strike happening in the west was never too far from reality.

Scope of the Project
The Distant Early Warning Line, commonly known as the DEW Line, was one of the Cold War’s most ambitious and strategically important military infrastructure projects. Built by the United States and Canada in the 1950s, it responded to the growing threat of Soviet long-range bombers and missiles that could reach North America by way of the Arctic—the shortest route between the superpowers. Extending roughly 6000 kilometers (3,600 miles) from northwestern Alaska across the Canadian Arctic to eastern Baffin Island, and later into Greenland and the Aleutian Islands, the DEW Line comprised more than sixty manned radar stations in some of the harshest and most remote environments on Earth. Together, these stations formed a vast electronic barrier designed to detect incoming Soviet aircraft or missiles before they could reach major population centers or strategic targets in the United States and Canada. The project grew out of early-1950s scientific assessments, especially studies conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which warned that North America was dangerously vulnerable to a surprise Soviet air attack over the North Pole. Existing radar networks, including the Pinetree Line near the U.S.–Canada border and the Mid-Canada Line near the 55th parallel, offered too little warning time for defensive forces to respond effectively. As Cold War tensions intensified, U.S. officials concluded that only a far-northern radar network, positioned close to the Arctic approaches, could provide the advance warning needed to scramble interceptors, prepare air defenses, and launch Strategic Air Command bombers before Soviet forces could strike. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved construction of the DEW Line after a panel led by presidential science adviser James R. Killian warned that a surprise nuclear attack could cripple the United States unless early-warning systems were dramatically improved.

Constructing the DEW Line was a monumental logistical achievement. More than 25,000 workers, including engineers, contractors, and military personnel-built radar sites, airstrips, hangars, communications towers, housing facilities, and supply depots across vast stretches of Arctic tundra. Many locations were accessible only during brief summer periods when sea lanes were navigable. Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T, oversaw the project and confronted challenges ranging from permafrost engineering to transporting heavy equipment through ice-choked waters. Despite these obstacles, the DEW Line became operational in 1957, only three years after construction began. Its rapid completion reflected both the urgency of Cold War defense planning and the scale of resources devoted to continental security. Once in service, the DEW Line functioned as a “virtual electronic fence,” with radar stations placed at overlapping intervals to maintain continuous Arctic coverage. U.S. and Canadian personnel staffed the stations around the clock, monitored radar screens, maintained equipment, and relayed data to command centers, including Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. The system was designed to provide approximately thirty minutes of warning in the event of an attack—enough time, planners believed, to launch interceptors and prepare retaliatory strikes. Although some enemy weapons might still penetrate North American defenses, the DEW Line strengthened deterrence by making a surprise attack less likely to succeed.

The DEW Line was not an isolated system. It was the northernmost and most capable part of a layered early-warning network that also included the Pinetree Line, the Mid-Canada Line, U.S. Navy radar systems in the Atlantic and Pacific, and stations in Iceland, Great Britain, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. Together, these networks created a multi-tiered defensive shield that combined ground-based radar with air and sea patrols to monitor potential Soviet attack routes. The Arctic’s strategic importance lay in geography: it offered the shortest and most direct route for Soviet bombers and missiles targeting North America. Early detection in this region was therefore essential to the credibility of U.S. and Canadian defense commitments under the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The DEW Line also affected nearby Arctic communities. Although the radar sites were primarily military installations, they brought infrastructure, employment opportunities, and modern technologies to sparsely populated areas of Canada and Alaska. At the same time, construction and operation left environmental consequences, including fuel spills, abandoned equipment, and long-term contamination that later required cleanup and remediation.
Technologically, the DEW Line marked a significant advance in radar detection. Unlike the Mid-Canada Line’s unreliable bistatic radar, the DEW Line used conventional long-range radar systems that could detect aircraft and assess their speed, direction, and altitude. This capability helped commanders distinguish genuine threats from false alarms and improved the reliability of early-warning data. Stations transmitted radar information through tropospheric scatter links, microwave relays, and later satellite connections, ensuring rapid communication with command centers. The Arctic environment placed constant strain on equipment and personnel. Radar systems had to withstand extreme cold, high winds, and ice accumulation, while crews often lived in isolation for months, relying on supply flights and occasional ship deliveries for food, fuel, and spare parts. Despite these hardships, the DEW Line operated continuously for decades and remained a cornerstone of North American defense strategy during the height of the Cold War.

By the 1960s and 1970s, however, modern technologies, especially intercontinental ballistic missiles and satellite surveillance began to reduce the DEW Line’s strategic relevance. The system had been built primarily to detect bomber aircraft, while missile threats required different tools, including space-based sensors and advanced radar capable of tracking high-speed ballistic trajectories. Even so, the DEW Line continued to provide valuable surveillance data and supported North America’s deterrent posture as other early-warning systems were decommissioned or repurposed. The Mid-Canada Line shut down in the early 1960s because of operational limitations, and portions of the Pinetree Line were transferred to civilian use. The DEW Line remained active until the late 1980s, when the United States and Canada agreed to modernize Arctic radar coverage through the North Warning System. This transition, formalized during the 1985 “Shamrock Summit,” led to the gradual deactivation of most DEW Line stations beginning in 1988, with a smaller number upgraded and incorporated into the new system. The official handover to the North Warning System occurred on July 15, 1993, marking the end of the DEW Line era and the beginning of a more automated approach to Arctic surveillance.

Although it was eventually decommissioned, the DEW Line remains a powerful symbol of Cold War strategy, technological innovation, and U.S.–Canadian cooperation. It showed how far nations were willing to go to protect themselves in an era defined by nuclear brinkmanship, and it underscored the continuing strategic importance of the Arctic. Its legacy also endures in modern military planning. Today’s early-warning systems rely on satellites, over-the-horizon radar, and advanced sensors, but the underlying principle remains the same: detecting threats early enough to prevent surprise attacks. In retrospect, the DEW Line was more than a technological achievement; it was also a geopolitical statement of North American resolve. Its construction required extraordinary cooperation, major financial investment, and immense human effort, all directed toward preventing catastrophic nuclear conflict. Although the DEW Line never detected an actual Soviet attack, its existence strengthened deterrence by ensuring that hostile action would be identified quickly and met with a swift response. In that sense, the DEW Line fulfilled its purpose: it helped keep the peace by making war too risky to contemplate.

Development and construction
Improvements in Soviet military technology made the Pinetree Line and Mid-Canada Line insufficient for providing adequate early warning. On 15 February 1954, the Canadian and United States governments agreed to build a third radar network, the Distant Early Warning Line, across the High Arctic. The new line would run along the 69th parallel north, about 320 km (200 mi) north of the Arctic Circle.
Before construction could proceed, specialists with the required knowledge, skills, and experience were recruited from Bell Telephone companies across the United States and several Canadian provinces. Much of the work was then assigned, under close supervision, to a large network of subcontractors, suppliers, and U.S. military units.
The initial contract with the United States Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force called for the design and construction of a small experimental system to determine whether the concept was practical. At the time, available communications and radar equipment were known to be poorly suited to the Arctic’s severe weather and atmospheric conditions.
Early development benefited from an unexpected opportunity: the U.S. Navy had recently ended oil exploration activities in Alaska, leaving behind infrastructure that could be repurposed for the DEW Line. Converted material included 1,200 tons of supplies, Caterpillar D8 tractors, heavy-duty cranes, diesel generators, and radio equipment. The surplus also included sixty equipped wanigan, sled-mounted buildings about 12 by 20 feet in size which allowed field camps to be established at construction sites. These units were outfitted for camp operations and included cooking, mess, bunk, power, water, shop, storage, utility, and steam-point facilities.

Prototypes of several stations were designed and built in Alaska in 1953. After the experimental phase succeeded, the Air Forces asked the Western Electric Company to proceed as quickly as possible with construction of the full DEW Line. That request came in December 1954, before the eastern route had even been finalized. Siting crews surveyed the region first from the air and then on the ground, using scientific methods to identify locations for main, auxiliary, and intermediate stations. Working in primitive conditions, they traveled vast distances by aircraft, snowmobile, and dog sled through blinding snowstorms and extreme cold. They completed their work on schedule and prepared the way for the construction crews that followed. The line consisted of sixty-three stations stretching from Alaska to Baffin Island, covering 10,000 km (6,200 mi). The United States agreed to pay for and construct the line while employing Canadian labor whenever possible.
The target date for completing and activating the DEW Line was 31 July 1957. This schedule allowed only two short Arctic summers and six months of workable conditions in total. Much of the construction therefore had to continue through long, dark, and bitterly cold Arctic winters, including more than a month of polar night.

Construction process
Beginning from a standing start in December 1954, thousands of skilled workers were recruited, transported to the polar regions, housed, fed, and supplied with the tools, machinery, and materials needed to build the line. They constructed buildings, roads, tanks, towers, antennas, airfields, and hangars in some of North America’s most hostile and isolated environments. In total, the project employed about 25,000 people.
Western Electric and Alaska Freightlines, supported by the United States Army Transportation Research and Development Command, contracted with LeTourneau Technologies to build two Arctic overland trains known as TC-264 Sno-Buggies. At the time, the TC-264 was the longest off-road vehicle ever built: its six cars, including the locomotive, measured 274 ft (84 m) in total. Each car was driven by four 7.3 ft (2.2 m) wheels and tires, and the 24-wheel-drive system was powered by two 400-horsepower Cummins diesel engines connected to hub motors. With a payload capacity of 150 short tons (140 t; 130 long tons), it could cross nearly any terrain and proved highly effective during its first season hauling freight to the DEW Line. Later, military and civilian airlifts, massive summer sealifts, and barges moved enormous quantities of cargo along the line to build permanent settlements at each site. Much of this work fell to military and naval units. More than 3,000 U.S. Army Transportation Corps soldiers received special training to unload ships in the Arctic. During the summers of 1955, 1956, and 1957, they accompanied U.S. Navy convoys and raced against the short ice-free season to land supplies at dozens of points along the Arctic Ocean coast.
Military and commercial pilots were central to the operation, flying aircraft that ranged from small bush planes to four-engine turboprops. The United States Air Force developed the ski-equipped Lockheed C-130D, a version of the C-130 Hercules, specifically for this mission; it was operated by the 61st Troop Carrier Squadron from Sewart Air Force Base, Tennessee. In the 1959 season alone, twelve of these aircraft airlifted 127,985 tons of cargo to the ice cap sites DYE-II and DYE-III in Greenland. Other transport aircraft, including the C-124 Globemaster and C-119 Flying Boxcar, provided the only winter access to many stations. In total, 460,000 short tons of material were moved from the United States and southern Canada to the Arctic by air, land, and sea.
As materials accumulated at the station sites, construction advanced quickly. Under the direction of Western Electric engineers, subcontractors experienced in difficult construction projects completed much of the work. Crews produced and moved enormous quantities of gravel, built housing, airstrips, aircraft hangars, outdoor and covered antennas, and antenna towers. More than 7,000 bulldozer operators, carpenters, masons, plumbers, welders, electricians, and other tradespeople from the United States and southern Canada contributed to the project. They poured concrete in Arctic winter, erected steel antenna towers, built airstrips, and hangars, and installed electrical, heating, and fresh-water systems while working through darkness, blizzards, and subzero temperatures.
After the buildings were completed, crews installed radar and communications equipment and then conducted extensive testing of each unit and of the system as a whole. On 15 April 1957 just two years and eight months after the decision to build the Distant Early Warning Line—Western Electric delivered to the Air Force a complete, operational radar system across the top of North America, supported by its own communications network.
Operations
The DEW Line included three types of stations. Small, unstaffed “gap filler” stations were inspected by ground crews only every few months during the summer. Intermediate stations typically had a station chief, cook, and mechanic. Larger stations employed more personnel and could include libraries, recreation facilities, and other accommodation. The stations used long-range L-band systems known as AN/FPS-19 radars. The gaps between stations were monitored by directional AN/FPS-23 Doppler radar systems, similar to those pioneered on the Mid-Canada Line. The stations were linked by White Alice, a radio communications network that used tropospheric scatter technology.
At the western end of the line, buildings from the deactivated Pet-4 U.S. Navy camp at Point Barrow were converted into workshops where prefabricated, fully insulated panels were assembled into modular building units. Each unit measured 28 ft (8.5 m) long, 16 ft (4.9 m) wide, and 10 ft (3.0 m) high. The modules were mounted on sleds and hauled hundreds of miles to station sites by powerful tractors. Each main station had its own airstrip, placed as close to the buildings as safety regulations and terrain allowed. Service buildings, garages, connecting roads, storage tanks, and, in some cases, aircraft hangars completed each site. Drifting snow posed a constant threat. Siting engineers and advance parties learned this quickly when tents could disappear beneath snow within hours. Permanent H-shaped buildings at the main stations were therefore oriented in the prevailing winds, with connecting bridges raised high above the ground.
Commercial aircraft frequently crossed the Arctic on polar routes between Europe and western North America or between Europe and Asia via Alaska. Because these flights crossed the DEW Line, crews had to submit flight plans to an Air Movement Identification System center at Goose Bay, Edmonton, or Anchorage. These centers forwarded the information to the DEW Line. If a station detected an unknown flight, it contacted AMIS to determine whether a flight plan had been missing; if not, NORAD was notified. Military aircraft, including B-52 bombers, also operated frequently in the polar regions and used identification friend or foe systems to authenticate their flights.
The warning provided by the DEW Line was not effective against ICBMs or submarine-launched attacks, which were addressed through the broader logic of mutual assured destruction. Instead, the DEW Line was designed to detect the airborne component of a coordinated attack, which would have had to appear in the far north before any warhead launches to succeed. Some intermediate stations were later decommissioned when their effectiveness proved lower than expected. Staffed stations remained in service both to monitor potential Soviet air activity and to support Canada’s assertion of sovereignty in the Arctic, where active occupation and defense strengthened territorial claims under international law.

Because ICBMs introduced an attack scenario that the DEW Line could not counter, the United States federal government authorized construction of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System in 1958, at a reported cost of $28 billion.
In 1985, officials decided to upgrade the most capable DEW Line stations with GE AN/FPS-117 radar systems and integrate them with newly built stations to form the North Warning System. Automation increased, and additional stations were closed. The upgrade was completed in 1990. After the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States withdrew its personnel and transferred full operation of the Canadian stations to Canada, while continuing to subsidize Canadian-sector costs. The United States retained responsibility for North Warning System stations in Alaska and Greenland.
Deactivation and clean-up
In 1996, the United States government entered into an agreement with the Government of Canada to support environmental remediation of DEW Line sites in Canada and related locations. Although the United States maintained that it had no legal obligation to reimburse Canada, it agreed to deposit US$100 million (equivalent to $211,290,675 in 2025) into Canada’s Foreign Military Sales Trust Account to help cover cleanup costs for four projects.
Cleanup has proceeded site by site. Research on remediation has suggested that off-road vehicles damaged vegetation and organic matter, contributing to permafrost melt, an important factor in the region’s hydrological systems. The DEW Line has also been associated with depleted fish stocks, disturbance of local animals such as caribou, and non-seasonal hunting. These effects have been described as damaging to local Indigenous subsistence economies and the Arctic environment.
Footnote:
In Greenland, four specific stations known as DYE-1, DYE-2, DYE-3, and DYE-4 were established in the late 1950s and early 1960s under an agreement with Denmark. While DYE-1 and DYE-4 were located on coastal bedrock, DYE-2 and DYE-3 were famously built directly on top of the moving ice sheet. To prevent these massive, heavy steel structures from sinking into the snow or being crushed by accumulating ice, engineers designed them with unique, adjustable stilts that could elevate the buildings as the snowpack rose around them. Throughout their operational life, these isolated outposts were manned by civilian contractors and military personnel who endured extreme arctic weather, total isolation, and grueling maintenance schedules. The Greenland stations filled a critical gap in the absolute eastern flank of the DEW Line, tracking airborne threats over the North Atlantic and providing early warnings to North American air defense command centers. With the advent of advanced satellite technology and ballistic missile systems, the strategic importance of the aircraft-detecting radar line declined. The Greenland DYE stations were officially decommissioned between 1988 and 1991, leaving behind abandoned, frozen structures that today serve as historic relics of Cold War engineering and popular destinations for extreme polar expeditions. In my travels through Greenland in 2017 I stayed at the DYE 6 station in Kangerlussaq ( Sondrestorm Air Base) which served as the HQ for Greenland operations. The DYE 2 station was further 160km east of Kangerlussaq on the Ice sheet, the second largest in the world after Antarctica. An image of me on the Ice sheet is shown adding to my polar credentials.

The End

Introduction
After traveling through Southern Italy to explore the region’s Greek legacy, I decided to write a three-part series on Magna Graecia, or “Greater Greece.” I am not a historian, but this project lets me connect my travels with the history of a remarkable island that flourished between roughly 800 and 200 BCE as a Greek colony. This second article is about Sicily, where the history of Magna Grecia becomes more complex because of Phoenician influence and the rise of Carthage in the central Mediterranean.
Beginning in the eighth century BCE, Greek settlers crossed the Ionian Sea for more than 250 years, driven by population pressure, land shortages, internal conflict, and trade. Their colonies developed as independent coastal city-states. Plato famously compared Greek settlements around the sea to “frogs around a pond,” while Cicero described them as a fringe along non-Greek lands. With familiar climates and fertile soils, Southern Italy and Sicily became major centers of Greek colonization, preserving Hellenic traditions and contributing lasting achievements in art, literature, philosophy, and science. The Oracle of Delphi also played a key role by providing the divine sanction believed necessary to found new settlements, or apoikiai.

Settlers came from across the Greek world, including the Peloponnese, Athens, Thebes, Euboea, the Aegean islands, Crete, and Asia Minor. They brought their language, religion, customs, and civic ideals. Over time, Magna Graecia preserved core Hellenic traditions while adapting to local conditions and influences. See the attached table for details on each city’s foundation.
Greek communities in Sicily largely retained the customs of their mother cities, including language, religion, architecture, and ties to the wider Greek cultural world. They built monumental sites such as the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento and made Syracuse a major Mediterranean power. Sicily also produced major scientific and cultural achievements, from Archimedes’ work in physics to enduring contributions to theater and philosophy.
Major Greek settlements in Sicily included Syracuse, Gela, Akragas, Naxos, Selinus, Himera, and Catana.
Although politically independent, these colonies remained linked to their mother cities through culture, trade, and regular contact. They also interacted closely with local Italic and Sicilian peoples. Over time, Magna Graecia developed a distinctive identity that blended Greek traditions with regional influences and became a major Mediterranean center of commerce, religion, politics, art, and architecture.

Pre-Greek Sicily
Long before Greeks settled the Sicilian coast, the island was home to several indigenous peoples, most notably the Sicanians, Sicels, and Elymians. According to Thucydides the Sicanians were the earliest historically documented inhabitants and lived mainly in central and western Sicily. Some modern scholars have suggested Iberian or North African origins. The Sicels later migrated from the Italian mainland, occupied the eastern plains, and pushed the Sicanians west and south. The Elymians, concentrated in northwestern Sicily, are often described as having mixed indigenous, Mycenaean, or Anatolian influences. These pre-Greek societies were sophisticated: they practiced advanced agriculture, developed proto-urban centers such as Morgantina and Pantalica, and traded with Phoenicians and Minoans. I will discuss my visits to Morgantina, Pantalica, and the Elymian city of Segesta later in the series.
At the same time, Phoenicians established western trading outposts such as Motya and Panormus, modern Palermo. While they resisted Greek territorial expansion, native communities in eastern and central Sicily gradually underwent deep Hellenization. Through centuries of trade, conflict, and cultural exchange, the Sicels and Sicanians adopted Greek architectural forms, minted Greek-style coinage, and incorporated Greek language and religion into their traditions. These changes helped make Sicily a vital part of the wider Hellenic world.
The Phoenicians, a Semitic people from the region of present-day Lebanon, were primarily a maritime power. Rather than settling Sicily on a large scale, they founded strategic trading bases and built a powerful empire centered on Carthage, near present-day Tunis.
My Travels Through Sicily
Messina: Gateway to Greek Sicily
On my second trip to Sicily, I visited many of the island’s Magna Graecia cities and archaeological sites. After crossing the Strait of Messina from Reggio Calabria, I arrived in Messina, a beautiful city founded by Greek settlers as Zancle in 757 BCE. Around 493 BCE, it was renamed Messana in honor of settlers from Messenia in the Peloponnese and from Samos. Strategically located across the strait from mainland Italy, Messina became an important trading and political hub linking Magna Graecia with the wider Mediterranean world. Repeated destruction over the centuries, however, has left relatively little visible evidence of its Greek past.
Naxos and Taormina: Sicily’s First Greek Colony and Its Legacy
My next stop was Taormina, one of Sicily’s most celebrated destinations. Enroute, I visited Naxos, about twenty minutes away. Founded by Chalcidian settlers in 734 BCE, Naxos was the first permanent Greek colony in Sicily and played a key role in spreading Hellenic culture across the island. Although it was destroyed by the tyrant of Syracuse in 403 BCE, the ruins at modern Giardini Naxos still preserve important evidence of early Magna Graecia urban planning and architecture. After Naxos fell, native Siculian communities on nearby Mount Taurus welcomed its survivors, who founded Tauromenion, later known as Taormina. The new city adopted the features of a Greek colony, including an agora, an acropolis, and an ancient theater. The Ancient Theatre of Taormina, originally carved into Mount Tauro by the Greeks in the third century BCE, remains one of Sicily’s most striking monuments. The Romans later expanded and remodeled it for gladiatorial games and animal hunts.
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Catania: A Detour Around Mount Etna
On both of my trips, I avoided driving into Catania, which lies between Taormina and Siracusa. The traffic was so difficult that my attempt to enter the city proved futile. Even so, Catania has deep Greek roots: it was founded in the eighth century BCE by Chalcidian settlers. Because of its proximity to Mount Etna, the city was destroyed several times, and most of the surviving ruins date from the Roman period rather than the Greek era.
Syracuse: The Great Power of Greek Sicily
I reached Siracusa with great excitement. Few places capture the dramatic history of Magna Graecia as vividly as Syracuse. Founded in 734 BCE by Greek colonists from Corinth, Syracuse grew into one of the most powerful and splendid metropolises of the ancient world. Cicero later praised it as “the greatest Greek city and the most beautiful of them all.” It was also the birthplace of Archimedes and, over time, came under Roman, Byzantine, and Arab rule.By the fifth century BCE, Syracuse had become a major Greek power, rivaling Athens in military strength, architecture, and intellectual life. It flourished as a center of philosophy, science, theater, and the arts, demonstrating that Greek culture thrived far beyond its Aegean heartland.
Under Gelon, Syracuse achieved a defining victory over the Carthaginians at the Battle of Himera in 480 BCE. This triumph established Syracuse as the leading Greek city in the western Mediterranean. Using wealth seized from Carthage, Gelon launched an ambitious building program that included temples, public buildings, and imposing city walls. One of his most notable projects was the Temple of Athena, later incorporated into the Cathedral of Syracuse.
Perhaps the most celebrated figure associated with Syracuse was Archimedes (287–212 BCE), widely regarded as one of ancient Greece’s greatest mathematicians and inventors. His work laid foundations in mathematics, anticipated ideas later developed in calculus and included a remarkably accurate calculation of pi. Archimedes also made major advances in physics, especially in hydrostatics and mechanics. His most famous discovery, the principle of buoyancy, arose from a practical problem: determining whether a crown commissioned by Hieron II was made of pure gold. According to legend, Archimedes realized while bathing that displaced water could reveal volume, prompting his famous exclamation, “Eureka!” The principle he formulated remains fundamental to science today.
Archimedes was not merely a theorist; he also applied his ingenuity to the defense of Syracuse. During the Roman siege of 213–212 BCE, he designed innovative war machines, including catapults and the “Claw of Archimedes,” which was said to lift and capsize enemy ships. A long-standing but debated tradition also claims that he used mirrors to focus sunlight and set Roman vessels aflame. Despite these efforts, Syracuse fell to Rome in 212 BCE. Archimedes was killed during the city’s capture, despite orders from Marcus Claudius Marcellus that he be spared. His death marked both the loss of a brilliant mind and the end of Syracuse’s independence as a Greek city-state. While there are several places attributed to his burial place on such location is supposed to be inside the archeological park. I had photographed this location a decade ago but now the entire area has been shut down.
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Gela and Agrigento: Power, Wealth, and the Valley of the Temples
Agrigento was my next major stop, especially because of the UNESCO-listed Valley of the Temples. While little remains of ancient Gela beyond modest ruins and an impressive museum, Agrigento more than compensates with its extraordinary beauty. Gela and Agrigento were among the most powerful Greek colonies in ancient Sicily. Rhodian and Cretan colonists founded Gela around 688 BCE along the island’s southern coast. As Gela grew, its population sought further expansion. In 580 BCE, settlers from Gela joined new Rhodian immigrants to found Akragas, later renamed Agrigento by the Romans. Situated on a defensible plateau between two rivers, Akragas quickly rivaled its mother city in wealth and influence. Both cities reached their cultural and political height under powerful tyrants during the fifth century BCE. Cleander and Hippocrates expanded Gela’s territory, establishing it as a dominant military force. Hippocrates’ successor, Gelon, captured Syracuse in 485 BCE, moved his court there, transferred half of Gela’s population, and shifted the center of power eastward.
Agrigento experienced its golden age under the tyrant Theron, who ruled from 488 to 473 BCE. Allied with Gelon of Syracuse, Theron helped defeat the Carthaginians at the Battle of Himera in 480 BCE.( read the section on Himera later in the article)
That victory brought immense wealth and thousands of enslaved laborers to Agrigento. Theron used these resources to launch a massive building program, including the temples that still define the site today. During this era, Agrigento became a renowned center of art and philosophy and was home to the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. The Valley of the Temples deserves special attention. Spanning roughly 1,300 hectares, the archaeological park protects the monumental remains of ancient Akragas, founded around 581 BCE and once among the most prosperous cities in the Mediterranean basin.

The park features a magnificent row of seven main temples built in the Doric style during the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. The crown jewel is the Temple of Concordia, built around 430 BCE and considered one of the best-preserved Greek temples in the world, largely because it was converted into a Christian Basilica in the sixth century CE. Nearby, the Temple of Juno still bears dark fire scars from the Carthaginian attack of 406 BCE, while the Temple of Hercules, the oldest on the ridge, displays eight re-erected columns.
Other significant ruins include the colossal Temple of Olympian Zeus, once among the largest temples of antiquity, and the iconic four columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, now a modern symbol of Agrigento. Surrounded by ancient olive trees, deep aqueducts, and the lush Garden of Kolymbetra, the site remains a breathtaking testament to classical civilization.

Carthaginian Destruction and Roman Rule
The prosperity of Gela and Agrigento collapsed in the late fifth century BCE, when Carthage launched a devastating invasion of Sicily to counter Greek expansion. Carthaginian forces besieged and sacked Agrigento in 406 BCE. The population fled, and the grand temples were burned. Gela met the same fate the following year, in 405 BCE. Both cities were later rebuilt but never fully recovered their former glory. Gela was ultimately destroyed in 282 BCE, when the tyrant Phintias of Agrigento razed the city and relocated its remaining inhabitants to a new settlement named Phintias, modern Licata.
During the Punic Wars, Agrigento became a battleground between Rome and Carthage. The Romans captured the city in 210 BCE and renamed it Agrigentum. Under Roman rule, it functioned as a stable agricultural and sulfur-mining hub.
Segesta and Selinunte: Rivalry on the Western Frontier
These two sites are among my favorites in Sicily because of their fascinating history. Founded by the indigenous Elymians in northwestern Sicily, Segesta became a major ancient city known for its deep Hellenization, long rivalry with neighboring Selinus, and exceptionally well-preserved monuments. The centuries-long conflict between Greek Selinunte and indigenous Segesta shaped the geopolitics of western Sicily, eventually drawing in Athens and Carthage before both cities were absorbed into the Roman world.
Selinunte: The Grand Greek Powerhouse
Founded around 650 BCE by Greek colonists from Megara Hyblaea, Selinunte, ancient Selinus, grew into one of the most prosperous cities in Magna Graecia. Known for its vast and carefully planned urban layout, the city took its name from selinon, the wild celery that grew across the surrounding landscape. Its wealth came from fertile farmland and lucrative trade, which funded the construction of massive temples on the acropolis and eastern hills. Selinunte is one of the most important archaeological sites from the Greek period in Italy .The city was famous throughout the ancient world for its rich farmland and monumental temples. It prospered from the second half of the seventh century BCE through the mid-third century BCE, and its public spaces, temples, fortifications, and houses remain remarkably well preserved.

Segesta: The Enigmatic Elymian Center
Segesta, ancient Egesta, was the chief city of the Elymians, an indigenous Sicilian people who claimed Trojan descent. Although culturally distinct from the Greeks, the Segestans deeply assimilated Greek culture and built a monumental Doric temple in the late fifth century BCE. Unlike Selinunte, Segesta relied heavily on diplomacy to maintain its independence against larger neighbors. I was surprised that this once-isolated ruin, which previously had no gates or official presence, has become a major destination over the past ten years, complete with the features of a major archaeological park, including restaurants and bookshops.
For centuries, Segesta was locked in territorial disputes with the neighboring Greek colony of Selinus, modern Selinunte. Seeking an advantage, Segesta formed a pivotal alliance with Athens in 458 BCE. This relationship ultimately helped trigger the ill-fated Athenian Expedition to Sicily in 415 BCE, when Athens intervened under the pretext of defending Segesta. After the failure of the Athenian expedition, Segesta allied with Carthage in 405 BCE to fend off Greek pressure. The city then endured a turbulent period, including a notorious sack in 307 BCE by the Syracusan tyrant Agathocles, who reportedly killed many of the city’s men by throwing them into a deep ravine. At the beginning of the First Punic War, Segesta aligned with Rome in 263 BCE. Claiming shared Trojan ancestry, Rome granted Segesta preferential status and exempted it from taxes. The city remained free and prosperous during the early Roman Republic, though it gradually lost economic and political significance in the centuries that followed.

Morgantina: A Sicel-Greek City
Morgantina, located in east-central Sicily, began as an indigenous Sicel village. By the sixth century BCE, Greek colonists had integrated with the native population, transforming the settlement into a thriving urban center with a distinct Hellenic culture and infrastructure. The ancient city followed a classic layout, with monumental lower and upper agoras, an ekklesiasterion, or assembly hall, and a grand Greek theater that could seat up to 5,000 spectators. During the fourth and third centuries BCE, under the patronage of the Syracusan king Hieron II, Morgantina reached the height of its prosperity. The city had advanced civic amenities, including innovative domed bathhouses and luxurious hillside estates. It also housed sanctuaries dedicated to deities such as Demeter and Kore. After the death of Hieron II, Morgantina faced a turbulent fate during the Punic Wars. The city briefly defected from Rome to Carthage, which led to its conquest by Roman forces in 211 BCE.

Sicily: A Battleground for Many Wars
Sicily’s strategic position in the Mediterranean made it a central battleground for overlapping conflicts among the Greeks, Carthaginians, and Roman Republic from 800 BCE to 100 BCE. The island experienced successive waves of warfare driven by colonization, imperial ambition, and internal uprisings.
Key conflicts during this era include:
• The Greco-Punic Wars (580–265 BCE): A prolonged series of wars between the Greek city-states, primarily Syracuse, and Carthage for control of the island. Famous confrontations included the First Battle of Himera in 480 BCE, which checked Carthaginian expansion, and the Sicilian Expedition of 415–413 BCE, in which Syracuse decisively defeated an invading Athenian force. The Second Battle of Himera in 409 BCE was a devastating Greco-Carthaginian conflict fought to avenge Carthage’s defeat there in 480 BCE. Led by Hannibal Mago, the Carthaginian army besieged and destroyed Himera, permanently erasing the city from the map.
• The First Punic War (264–241 BCE): The first major war between the Roman Republic and Carthage was triggered by a dispute over the Sicilian city of Messina. It ended in a hard-fought Roman victory, with the Battle of the Aegates in 241 BCE, off the western coast of Sicily, bringing Carthaginian dominance to an end.
• The Second Punic War (218–201 BCE): After Carthage attempted to regain influence, Rome invaded Sicily. The pivotal Siege of Syracuse in 213–212 BCE ended with the Roman capture of the city after they overcame defensive machines designed by Archimedes, cementing Roman control over the island.
At this point, I must discuss the ancient city of Himera, located between Palermo and Messina. The two Battles of Himera had enormous consequences for Sicily’s broader well-being. Ancient Sicily, rich in resources and strategically located, was home to both Greek and Carthaginian colonies, which coexisted peacefully for a long time. However, when Terillus, the tyrant of Himera, was ousted by his own people in 483 BCE, he called on his Carthaginian allies to help him retake the city.
Three years later, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Mago sailed from North Africa to Himera with an expeditionary force that Herodotus estimated at more than 300,000 soldiers, though modern historians place the figure closer to 20,000. Cavalry and infantry from two neighboring Greek Sicilian city-states, Syracuse and Agrigento, came to Himera’s aid. Hamilcar’s troops were routed, and his ships were set ablaze. When all seemed lost, the general is said to have killed himself by leaping into a pyre. The defeat at Himera crippled Carthaginian power in Sicily for nearly seven decades, ushering in an era of peace, wealth, and cultural flourishing for the Sicilian Greeks.
In 409 BCE, Hamilcar’s grandson, Hannibal Mago, returned to settle the score in the Second Battle of Himera. This time, the Greek army consisted mainly of Himera’s own citizens, with few reinforcements. The Greeks were defeated, and the city was razed.
The graves and western necropolis at Himera were discovered in 2009 during construction of a rail line connecting Palermo and Messina. The site has since yielded remains from more than 10,000 burials from the second Battle of Himera. For archaeologists, one of the clearest indicators of a mercenary, whether foreign or local, is burial in a communal grave.

Conclusion:
In the eighth century BCE, adventurous settlers from mainland Greece arrived on Sicily’s shores. Seeking new land and opportunity, they established thriving coastal city-states, including Syracuse and Akragas. By blending Hellenic culture with local populations, the island became a powerful, prosperous, and culturally rich anchor of Magna Graecia.
These colonies quickly developed into major centers of trade and innovation. Their fertile agricultural lands and strategic Mediterranean ports created unprecedented wealth. Syracuse, a leading Corinthian colony, grew into one of the largest and most formidable cities in the entire Greek world. In these bustling urban environments, foundational arts, mathematics, and philosophy flourished.
However, this prosperity provoked fierce geopolitical rivalries. The Greeks repeatedly fought the Carthaginian Empire, which also sought dominance over the island. While Sicilian tyrants such as Dionysius I successfully expanded their territories, prolonged wars drained the region. Internal conflicts among rival Greek city-states further weakened their collective military strength.
Eventually, this golden age succumbed to the rising military dominance of the Roman Republic. During the Punic Wars, Sicily became a brutal battleground between Rome and Carthage. Following the prolonged Siege of Syracuse in 212 BCE, the island was absorbed into Roman territory.
Although the era of independent Greek city-states faded, the Hellenic legacy endured. Rome absorbed the architectural, philosophical, and legal advancements of Magna Graecia. Today, the breathtaking ruins of the Valley of Temples still stand as monumental testaments to this vibrant civilization.
The End
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Gallery:

Introduction to Magna Graecia
During six weeks of travel in southern Italy, I could only begin to explore what I had set out to examine: the cities of Magna Graecia. But what exactly was Magna Graecia? When most people think of ancient Greece, Athens usually comes first to mind. The Parthenon, democracy, philosophy, and drama dominate the standard image of Greek civilization. Yet Greek culture extended far beyond the mainland. In southern Italy and Sicily, Greek settlers founded flourishing cities that became known collectively as Magna Graecia, or “Great Greece.” As historian Themistocles Kritikakos notes, these settlements were not simply outposts but vibrant extensions of the Greek world. The Hellenization of southern Italy and Sicily left a legacy of art, architecture, and culture that still shapes the region today. From the eighth century BCE onward, Greek settlers crossed the Ionian Sea for more than 250 years in search of land and opportunity. This movement was driven by overpopulation, scarcity of farmland, internal conflict, and the desire to expand trade. Each city-state usually founded colonies independently, and each colony became a new and self-governing political community. These settlements remained largely coastal rather than spreading far inland. Plato famously remarked, “We Greeks sit around the sea like frogs around a pond,” while Cicero observed that the Greek coastline formed a fringe along the lands of the so-called barbarians. Southern Italy and Sicily were among the earliest and most extensive regions of Greek colonization. They closely resembled the Greek homeland in climate and agricultural potential, especially for wheat, olives, and vines. These regions also excelled culturally, not only keeping pace with developments in Greece and Ionia but also making important contributions of their own to Hellenic art, literature, and philosophy. Memories of my visit to Delphi a few years ago have prompted me to add that the Oracle of Delphi played a central role in this colonial movement between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE. It served as the highest religious and strategic authority for the founding of new settlements, or apoikiai. Its approval was widely seen as essential, providing divine legitimacy through Apollo and helping unite groups of colonists undertaking a risky venture.

The settlers came from many parts of the Greek world, including the Peloponnese—especially Sparta, Achaea, and Corinth—as well as Athens, Thebes, Euboea, the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, Crete, and Asia Minor, particularly Phocaea. Sent out by their mother cities, or metropoleis, they carried with them their language, customs, religious traditions, and civic ideals. Over time, the culture of Magna Graecia preserved its Hellenic foundations while adapting to local conditions and the varied backgrounds of its settlers. The following table summarizes the principal cities, their modern names, founding 'metropoleis', and approximate foundation dates.

A Greek living in Italy spoke the dialect of his mother city, dressed in a similar fashion, worshipped the same gods, built temples and public buildings in familiar styles, and took part in athletic and poetic competitions at places such as Olympia. He also remained aware of artistic and literary developments in Greece itself. Yet Greek civilization was far from uniform. Even within a shared cultural framework, each region and city retained its own identity. Magna Graecia developed distinctive features of its own, including a notable attachment to mystical cults and secretive communities such as Orphism and Pythagoreanism. Orphism was a syncretic religion that blended elements from pre-Greek, Greek, West Semitic, Egyptian, Iranian, and Indian traditions. Although it remained limited to initiates and never dominated society as later scriptural religions did, its influence was still profound. It shaped the works of Euripides, Aristophanes, and Plato, and, through its absorption into Pythagoreanism, parts of it survived within later philosophical traditions.

Across what is now southern Italy, major Greek settlements arose mainly along the coasts. In Apulia9 Puglia), the principal center was Taras, also known as Tarentum, now Taranto. Basilicata included Metapontum, Heraclea, and Thurii. Campania was home to Cumae, Poseidonia (Paestum), and Neapolis (Naples). In Calabria, important cities included Croton (Crotone), Epizephyrian Locris (Locri), Sybaris (Sibari), and Rhegion (Reggio Calabria). Sicily, meanwhile, contained major Greek centers such as Syracuse (Siracusa), Gela, Akragas (Agrigento), Naxos, Selinus (Selinunte), Himera, and Catana (Catania). The Temple of Hera II at Paestum remains one of the most striking monuments of ancient Poseidonia in Campania.
Although these colonies remained politically independent, they maintained strong cultural and economic ties with their mother cities. Through trade, intermarriage, and contact with local Italic peoples such as the Oenotrians, Sicels, and Lucanians, they gradually developed a distinct identity. Magna Graecia became a major center of commerce, religion, politics, artistic production, and architectural innovation. Its cities built wide-ranging Mediterranean trade networks dealing in wine, grain, olive oil, pottery, and metalwork.

My travels through Magna Graecia on the mainland
In this article, I have tried to condense more than 1,200 years of history into an accessible account that helps readers appreciate the spread of Greek culture across the Mediterranean. I plan on writing three parts with the second focusing on the Magna Grecia cities of Sicily. In mainland Italy, I traveled through Puglia, Basilicata, Campania, and Calabria, all regions shaped by Greek colonization. As I drove through Calabria past Croton, once a great city on the Ionian coast, I found myself thinking of Pythagoras, who settled there around 530 BCE. Founded by Achaean Greeks led by Myscellus around 710 BCE, Croton became renowned for its athletic triumphs, especially in the Olympic Games, with Milo of Croton as its most celebrated champion. My next destinations were Locri and Reggio Calabria. For a long time, Locri maintained one of the most exclusive aristocratic systems in Magna Graecia, with power legally concentrated in one hundred families. Plato himself referred to the city in his writings, praising Locrian civic life and philosophy. Archaeological excavations at Locri Epizefiri in Calabria have confirmed its importance as one of the major ancient cities of southern Italy. Temples dedicated to Persephone, Athena, and Zeus, along with terracotta plaques, marble statues, bronze objects, city walls, private buildings, and a large Greco-Roman theater, testify to its rich religious and artistic life. Although I missed the archaeological park at Locri, I was able to admire many of its finds in the outstanding National Museum of Reggio Calabria, home to the famous Riace Bronzes as well as other impressive artifacts from Locri and Sybaris.

Campania in southern Italy was home to several important Greek colonies, including Cumae and Poseidonia, present-day Paestum. These settlements were centers of trade, culture, and government that helped spread Greek art, architecture, and ideas. Founded around the eighth century BCE by settlers from Euboea, Cumae was the first Greek colony on the Italian mainland and served as an important gateway for Hellenic culture. From Locri, I traveled to Paestum, originally founded as the Greek city of Poseidonia around 600 BCE and later refounded as the Roman colony of Paestum in 273 BCE. It was one of the highlights of my journey and an essential stop in southern Italy. A cousin jokingly remarked that I was taking part in my own version of the Grand Tour, a tradition in which upper-class young men of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries traveled through Europe, especially Italy, as an educational rite of passage. The archaeological site of Paestum contains three of the best-preserved Greek temples in the world. It is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with a museum filled with frescoes, ceramics, and artifacts, including the famous Tomb of the Diver.
Today, visitors to Paestum can still admire the Temple of Hera, the Temple of Neptune, and the Temple of Ceres, which some scholars identify as a temple of Athena. The temples of Neptune and Hera stand side by side at the southern end of the site, while the smaller Temple of Ceres lies to the north. The site also preserves substantial defensive walls, a Roman forum, the remains of a Roman amphitheater, and several ancient tombs.
My final stop on mainland Italy was Naples, a magnificent city of monuments, palaces, and churches, though at times marked by neglect. Unlike many cities of Magna Graecia that were conquered outright by Rome, Neapolis (Naples) was taken by the Roman Republic as early as 327 BCE but was granted favorable treaty terms that preserved a degree of autonomy. Greek language, religion, and architectural forms remained prominent, showing the enduring strength of Hellenic culture alongside Roman influence. During the early Christian and Byzantine periods, Greek-speaking communities continued to flourish and maintained important ties with the eastern Mediterranean. The earliest Greek settlement at Naples, established in the late eighth century BCE, was called Parthenope. According to myth, Parthenope was the Siren who cast herself into the sea after failing to enchant Odysseus, and legend says her body washed ashore where the first settlement later arose. Building on this foundation, Neapolis was formally established around the sixth century BCE by settlers connected to nearby Cumae. Meaning “New City,” it was laid out on an organized grid following the urban principles associated with Hippodamus of Miletus. Walking through the historic center and along Spaccanapoli, one can still trace the street pattern set out by the ancient Greeks. Naples is now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage city.
In the first century BCE, the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara taught in Naples, promoting tranquility through measured pleasure, friendship, and emotional balance while making philosophy accessible beyond elite circles. His writings, preserved at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, show how Greek thought continued well into the Roman era. The Roman poet Virgil also spent time in Naples, drawn by its Hellenic atmosphere and the calm it offered away from the politics of Rome. Centuries later, the city still retained a strong Greek identity. During the siege of 536 CE, the historian Procopius described its inhabitants as “Hellenes,” and Edward Gibbon later argued that Naples preserved its Greek character into the sixth century. From the Roman imperial age through the early Byzantine period, Greek language and traditions remained central to Neapolitan cultural life, reflecting the city’s origins as the Greek colony of Neapolis.

The National Archaeological Museum of Naples houses an outstanding collection of artifacts from Magna Graecia. Painted vases, sculptures, tombs, funerary stelae, bronze tools, and everyday objects provide valuable insight into the beliefs, social structures, daily life, and cultural practices of ancient Greek communities. I spent a day and a half in this remarkable museum, which devotes a major section to Magna Graecia alongside its celebrated collections from Pompeii and Herculaneum.
I have not mentioned other minor Greek sites in Calabria that I visited which are numerous such as Gallipoli, Ostuni and Otranto which still maintain a Greek look with whitewashed homes often set on a hillock. Notably I did not have time in my schedule to visit Taranto, the only Spartan city in Magna Grecia (Taras). Sparta was a hermit Greek kingdom and had little interest in expansion, its history is preserved in the precious artifacts in the National museum of Taranto and in the many underground hypogeum, burial tombs of both Greeks and Romans.

Philosophical Schools
Unlike the civic religion of the Greek city-states, which centered on public ritual rather than written doctrine, Orphism was a more universal and text-based faith that promised personal redemption and immortality. In this respect, it resembled later scriptural religions such as Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In the sixth century BCE, the two main centers of Orphic literature were Athens and southern Italy. Plato even attributed one of its key ideas to “a clever mythologist, perhaps some Sicilian or Italian.” Of the eight surviving gold tablets containing Orphic texts, six were found in southern Italy, one near Rome, and one in Crete, showing how strongly the region was shaped by this tradition. Croton, in particular, became the leading center of Pythagoreanism, an esoteric movement that was at once religious, philosophical, and political. Born on Samos in 571 BCE, Pythagoras traveled widely in the Near East before settling in Croton around 530 BCE. There he founded a secret brotherhood of initiates united by strict discipline and total commitment. Politically, the movement was strongly aristocratic and sought influence over the wider community. Religiously, it absorbed many Orphic ideas and practices while elevating Pythagoras himself as a teacher of truth and a semi-divine figure. At its philosophical core was the idea that the world is structured through number and proportion, forming an ordered harmony, or harmonia. Pythagoras’ most important contributions were in arithmetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy. Pythagoreanism gained many followers among the aristocratic elites of Croton and other cities of southern Italy, but its political ambitions provoked resistance from broader sections of society. Pythagoras eventually fled Croton for Metapontum, where he died in 497 BCE.
For many years, I have been interested in the connection between Jainism and Pythagoreanism, particularly as discussed in Indian scholarship. The clearest parallels between the two traditions lie in their shared commitment to non-violence, vegetarianism, and the transmigration of the soul. Both emerged during the Axial Age and viewed the universe as an ordered system in which the soul is caught in a cycle of rebirth : the “wheel of birth” in Pythagorean thought and samsara in Jainism. To break free and attain liberation, both traditions emphasized strict self-discipline, ascetic practice, and purity. They rejected animal sacrifice, common in their surrounding cultures, and insisted that all living beings possess a soul worthy of respect. Both also functioned as semi-monastic communities that valued silence, meditation, and the belief that higher truth could be reached through intellectual and moral purification through Right Conduct in Jainism or through the Pythagorean pursuit of mathematical harmony. Scholars have long debated these similarities. Some argue for direct influence, while others see them as parallel developments within the wider exchange of ideas in the ancient world.

Centers of Intellectual Innovation
The thought of Pythagoras profoundly influenced the Platonic, Stoic, and Neoplatonic traditions of later centuries. Croton also produced other notable figures in the sixth century BCE, including Milo, the champion athlete who won seven Olympic and six Pythian victories and embodied the aristocratic ideal of the kalos kagathos, or “perfect gentleman.” Another was Democedes, whom Herodotus described as the finest physician of his age. He served as a public doctor at Aegina and Athens and later as court physician to Polycrates of Samos and Darius I of Persia. Croton also became an early center of medical inquiry through Alcmaeon of Croton, a fifth-century BCE philosopher and scientist. His claim that the brain, not the heart, was the seat of thought reflected an empirical approach that helped shape later medicine and philosophy.
The Phocaean colony of Elea became another major center of philosophical thought in Italy. Its earliest guiding figure was Xenophanes, born in Colophon in Ionia. After the Persian conquest of Ionia in 545 BCE, he left his homeland, wandered widely, and eventually settled in the newly founded Elea, where he died around 473 BCE. Writing in hexameter verse, he criticized Greek mythology as the naïve invention of earlier ages and rejected the anthropomorphic and polytheistic features of traditional religion. In place of this, he proposed the existence of a single supreme god, unlike mortals in body or mind, who governs all things effortlessly by thought alone.
The true founder of the Eleatic school was Parmenides, who flourished in the first half of the fifth century BCE. Though he began as a Pythagorean, he later developed an original philosophical system. In his poem On Nature, he argued that thinking and being are inseparable. From this he concluded that what truly is cannot come into being or pass away, cannot be divided or moved, and contains no void. For Parmenides, reality was one, continuous, unchanging, and complete, like a perfectly rounded sphere.
His disciple Zeno sought to prove through paradox that motion does not truly exist, and he opposed early atomist theories that described the world as made up of tiny units moving in a void. Another follower of Parmenides was Melissus of Samos, a philosopher, statesman, and naval commander, who defended his teacher’s ideas and argued that the senses are deceptive and that reality can be grasped only through reason. Rhegium produced at least two figures of wider fame. One was Ibycus, a lyric poet of the late sixth century BCE, remembered as one of the nine canonical Greek lyric poets. Though only fragments of his work survive, he was especially admired in antiquity for his erotic poetry.
The poetry of Nossis of Locri offers a rare glimpse of third-century BCE Greek life from a distinctly female perspective. Although only twelve of her epigrams survive, they reveal a confident writer concerned with love, beauty, and religious devotion, and they show her conscious alignment with the literary legacy of Sappho.
The other famous figure from Rhegium was the sculptor Pythagoras, active in the early fifth century BCE. A bold innovator, he helped lead the transition from archaic to classical Greek art. His contemporaries admired his ability to portray the human body in motion. Instead of the rigid, two-sided figures typical of the earlier period, he created fully three-dimensional statues. Examples of this artistic shift can be seen in the museum at Reggio Calabria, where I was struck by the way earlier stiffness gave way to lifelike movement through a more careful study of human form.
Locri claimed the semi-legendary lawgiver Zaleucus as one of its own, sharing with Charondas of Catana the distinction of producing one of the earliest Greek law codes. Cumae was renowned for its Sibylline oracle. At Tarentum, the physician Heraclides was said to be the first to dissect human corpses in order to study physiology and disease. Even when the names of many prominent citizens have been lost, all the Greek colonies contributed to the rich cultural and artistic life of Magna Graecia.

The Fall of Magna Graecia and the Rise of Rome
The Greek settlers also carried with them one of the great weaknesses of the mother cities: intense rivalry, narrow patriotism, and deep mistrust of neighboring states. Greek warfare was often brutal, marked by massacre, enslavement, and destruction. Siris, for example, was demolished by a coalition of three Achaean cities. Not long afterward, in 510 BCE, Croton destroyed Sybaris, despite their shared origins and scattered its population, ending the life of a city famed for its wealth and luxury. Constant rivalry and repeated wars between neighboring cities gradually dimmed the brilliance of Magna Graecia. Rhegium clashed with Messana across the strait; Tarentum opposed Thurii; Elea rivaled Poseidonia; Naples opposed Cumae; and Locri fought Croton. Cities in the far south also suffered under Dionysius I of Syracuse, whose expansionist campaigns devastated the region. In 389 BCE, he destroyed Caulonia and Hipponium and deported their inhabitants to Sicily. Rhegium and Croton were also captured and sacked and never fully recovered. At the same time, the Greek settlers were reminded that, although they proudly called themselves Italiots, they controlled only a small part of Italy. Cumae, for instance, had to defend itself against Etruscan expansion in Campania.
Meanwhile, Rome emerged as a new power. After defeating the independent peoples of central and south-central Italy and forcing them into a federation under Roman control, it turned toward the far south. By the beginning of the third century BCE, only the southernmost Greek cities remained outside Roman rule, and even that would not last. The Pyrrhic War (280–275 BCE) ended in a costly Roman victory and brought new hardship to the Greek cities. They were enrolled in the Roman federation as “naval allies,” required to provide ships and crews for the Roman fleet. Although they retained a limited degree of self-government and benefited from the imposed peace of Roman Italy, their populations and prosperity steadily declined, and with them their independence. The First Punic War exposed them to naval disaster and Carthaginian raids, but the greatest destruction came during the Second Punic War, when much of southern Italy became the main theatre of conflict. Most of the Greek cities sided with Hannibal, along with the Samnites, Lucanians, and Bruttians. By the war’s end, many lay in ruins. Tarentum fell to Rome in 209 BCE, was brutally sacked, saw 30,000 inhabitants sold into slavery, and lost much of its land. When Hannibal withdrew from Italy, he evacuated much of the population of Thurii and Petelia and killed those who refused to leave. The region became so depopulated that Roman and Latin colonies had to be planted throughout it. Though these cities retained some ancestral laws and customs, their separate history effectively ended after the Social War (90–88 BCE), when Roman citizenship was extended to all Italians. Symbolically, the only surviving copy of Julius Caesar’s municipal law, which introduced a uniform system of local administration across Italy, was found at Heraclea. Yet even after political independence was lost, Greek culture in Italy continued to exert enormous influence. The first settlers had introduced the cultivation of vines and olives, and the Chalcidian alphabet of Cumae became the ancestor of the Etruscan and Latin scripts. Long before Rome conquered Greece, Hellenic influence had already shaped Campania and Latium. In this sense, Greek civilization survived defeat and lived on within its conquerors. The persistence of Byzantine rule in the far south during the early Middle Ages helped preserve remnants of the Greek language there long after the Norman conquest. In this way, Magna Graecia carried part of the Greek inheritance across the divide of the Dark Ages and into the emerging world of medieval Europe.

Credits:
In the interest of personal development, I wanted to read and learn more about Magna Grecia. I had visited many sites and museums but could not get a comprehensive grasp of timelines and other details. I came upon six articles in the Greek Herald, an Australian newspaper, written Dr. Themistocles Kritikakos a historian and writer. But the bulk of the information especially sections on philosophy, literature and the fall of Magna Grecia came from a book “Greek civilizations in Southern Italy” by Michaeal Astour, Professor of Historical Studies at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Given the grand nature of this subject, I asked Google AI many questions that I did not find an answer for readily. This work was stitched from many other sources to satisfy my needs as a curious traveler.

Gallery of images/ Magna Grecia

During a recent three-week journey through Botswana’s iconic wilderness—spanning the Okavango Delta, Moremi Reserve, and Chobe National Park—I spent several days exploring the hauntingly beautiful Savuti Marsh and the adjoining Mababe Depression. These regions, shaped by the Okavango River as it spills into the dry Kalahari sands, offer a rare glimpse into nature’s annual rhythm. The eastern arm of the Delta flows through the Savuti marsh and ends in the Mababe Depression, a place where water meets wilderness in a quiet, dramatic finale.
Mobile camping in these remote lands was exhilarating. It granted me access to areas far removed from the well-trodden tourist paths.

The Painted Dogs of Botswana
Among the many species that interest me is the African wild dog—also known as the painted dog—stands apart. These animals are not only visually striking but behaviorally extraordinary. They form deep social bonds, communicate with nuance, and exhibit a level of cooperation that rivals any mammalian society. Tragically, they are also among Africa’s most endangered carnivores, second only to the Ethiopian wolf continent-wide, and the most endangered in Southern Africa.
Once numbering half a million across Africa, their population has plummeted to around 6,600. Botswana, however, remains a sanctuary—home to over 30% of the continent’s wild dogs. Its central location links populations across five neighboring countries, making it a vital corridor for the species’ survival.

A Fourth Element: Trauma in the Wild
I write this not just to celebrate these animals, but to highlight something often overlooked: trauma. Safari guides often say animals live for three things—food, reproduction, and survival. But I have come to believe there is a fourth: the emotional toll of loss.
One cold July morning, my wife and I encountered a group of wild dogs curled together for warmth beside a dusty track. Respecting their rest, we returned later, only to find them gone. My guide, however, knew of a nearby den—a rare opportunity, as July marks the pupping season when packs remain anchored to a site. He promised me that we would see them later in the day near the den.
Wild dogs often repurpose abandoned dens—those of aardvarks or warthogs—modifying them to suit their needs. These dens are critical: they shelter vulnerable pups for the first three months of life and must be chosen with care. In regions like the Okavango Delta, where rocky terrain is scarce, packs prefer mopane woodlands, which lions tend to avoid. Still, the threat remains.


A Glimpse into Their World
That evening, we returned to the den and were greeted by a heartwarming scene: over a dozen pups tumbling in the sand, watched over by exhausted mothers. Some suckled, others played. A few adult dogs lingered nearby, while a Bataleur eagle and a tawny eagle perched patiently, hoping for scraps of regurgitated food. The regurgitation process is instinctual and serves as a key element of wild dog feeding behavior. Initially, the young pups are confined to the safety of their den, where they rely on their mother’s milk. As the weeks pass, they venture out and encounter the adults, tasting their first bites of meat, albeit in tiny amounts at two weeks old. The adults, while away on hunts, leave behind a babysitter to watch over the pups, and this adult also receives regurgitated food from the hunting party. Unfortunately, the pack we had seen had not returned from their hunt and we missed them that evening.

The next morning, the den was deserted. Lions had been spotted nearby, and the females had relocated their pups. Such moves are not uncommon. As pups grow, dens can become unsanitary, infested with parasites. More urgently, predators like lions pose an existential threat—any pup discovered is killed instantly.
We searched the area in our Land Cruiser, hoping to spot the new den. Returning to the original site, we witnessed the arrival of eight adults, their bellies full from a successful hunt. But their joy quickly turned into panic. They searched frantically for a couple of hours, whimpering softly, unable to find their young. The distress was palpable.
The Weight of Loss
For hours, the pack combed the area, returning repeatedly to the empty den. They consoled one another, regurgitating food for those who had searched farthest. It was a heartbreaking display of confusion, fear, and deep social connection.
We had to leave Savuti for Moremi that afternoon, our hearts heavy with uncertainty. Had the pups been found? Would they go hungry without the fresh kill?
My wife and I questioned our emotional response. Were we projecting human feelings onto wild animals? But science suggests we were not entirely wrong.


Trauma in the Animal Kingdom
Since the 1990s, researchers have explored the “ecology of fear”—the idea that trauma in animals is not fleeting but profound. Early studies assumed that surviving a predator attack left no lasting impact. But we now know that animals, like humans, carry emotional scars.
Wildlife trauma has been most dramatically observed in African elephants. Decades of poaching and habitat loss have shattered their social structures. Orphaned elephants, having witnessed the slaughter of their families, often grow into troubled adolescents, lacking the guidance of elder matriarchs.
The brain circuitry responsible for fear and memory—centered in the amygdala—is ancient and shared across species. Whether it is a snowshoe hare evading a lynx or a human recovering from a car crash, the responses are strikingly similar. PTSD in humans arises from the same primal systems that keep prey animals vigilant.

Watching the wild dogs that day, I saw more than instinct—I saw grief, confusion, and resilience. Their trauma was real, and it reminded me that the emotional lives of animals are deeper than we often acknowledge.
We left the Delta changed. Not just by its beauty, but by the silent stories unfolding in its shadows.

The End
Ramdas Iyer can be reached at [email protected]
References
• Sharon Levy, BBC Features Correspondent-Do animals suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Rudy Boonstra, University of Toronto

Gallery of relevant images

" After dark all cats are leopards". This African saying rings heavy since it is the most elusive, alluring and mysterious creature often referred to as an allegory for perfection in natural design – sleek, smart, and powerful. I am drawn to it, captivated by it and hypnotized by it. My love for the leopard began with my first visit to Kruger Park in 1995. Since then I have been trying to photograph them all across east, central and southern Africa.

Early one morning before dawns light, while driving through dense jungle near the Cameroon border with Congo (DRC) in 2016, I observed a leopard emerge from nowhere, stare at the vehicle and disappear in a flash. Soon thereafter my driver started talking about murderous leopard cults that existed in West Africa. The Leopard Society, also called "Anyoto Aniota", was a West African secret society active in the early- to mid-20th century that practiced cannibalism. They were centered in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Nigeria.
Members would dress in leopard skins, waylaying travelers with sharp claw-like weapons in the form of leopards' claws and teeth. The clubs they carried were designed to leave 'foot print' marks on the ground. The victims' flesh would be cut from their bodies and distributed to members of the secret society. They believed that the ritual cannibalism would strengthen both members of the secret society as well as their entire tribe.
Encounters with what is to be believed to be the survival of " The Leopard Society "into the post colonial era is described at length by David Macintosh in "Travels in the white man's grave: memoirs from West and Central Africa".

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I recently laid my hands on "Tarzan and the Leopard Men:" written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and the comic series "Tin Tin in Congo" by Herge , both of whom refer to the leopard men in their stories written in the 1930s, since it was a popular news item in Europe then.
The leopard has been venerated by powerful rulers of the past and present. I inspected the Alexander II (Seleceus) coin in my collection which revealed the emperor wearing a leopard skin helmet. The first King of the Babylonians, Nimrod, whose name means" Leopard subduer", was often depicted wearing a garment of leopard skin. The priests of Bacchus, the Egyptian High Priest of Osiris, had to be clothed in leopard skin. A golden head of a leopard was buried with King Tutankhamen which I had the opportunity to see in Cairo museum a few decades earlier. Modern rulers like Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire sported leopard hats and capes.

The leopard has been a highly totemic representative for many African tribes for millennia. Totemism, is system of belief in which humans are said to have a mystical relationship with a spirit-being, such as an animal Such animal totems were prevalent among ancient hunter- gatherer shamanistic societies like American Indians ( both North and South), African tribal societies and Asian shamanistic cultures found in Siberia and Central Asia.
In 2015 I returned to Kruger where I photographed some amazing leopards in the Sabi Sands area. However, I sadly discovered that the leopard population of South Africa is currently threatened. Leopard-skin coats were legal for many years and are still sold secretly. Many trees in leopard habitats have been cut down for building projects. Because leopards prey on livestock, ranchers trying to protect their animals frequently poison the large cats. All leopard subspecies; African, Indian, Persian, Sri Lankan and Indo-Chinese are either endangered or threatened.
Scott Ramsay of Love Wild Africa (LWA), a photojournalist documenting protected areas, national parks and nature reserves in Africa laments the loss of leopard habitats in his blog. He mentions that leopards are in danger of being wiped out in many areas of the continent – partly because of uncontrolled hunting, but also because of traditional cultures which use the leopard skin as ceremonial attire. He further indicates that roughly 50,000 leopards were being killed every year to fuel this demand.

Leopards' skins are a symbol of pride and royalty in the Shembe religion ( Nazareth Baptist Church), which was founded a century ago in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal region and has roots in Christianity and Zulu customs. Zulu people revere leopards, and consider it a totem animal with special powers. Several high-profile individuals, including President Jacob Zuma and King Goodwill Zwelithini wear real leopard skins to traditional ceremonial events.

In 2004 South Africa introduced, the Biodiversity Act, aimed at saving endangered species like the leopard, that adds an even higher level of protection than the CITES convention on International Trade in Endangered species, an international treaty established in 1973.
Yet the law means little to a cultural group that has valued leopard skins for over a century. “Each one of these millions of worshippers is quite fond of leopard skins,’ says Tristan Dickerson, a leopard researcher for conservation organization Panthera. ‘Such demand is clearly not so good for the conservation of leopards.’
The religion has more than five million members, tens of thousands of whom flock to a special service every January at which older men move to the rhythmic sound of drumbeats and low trumpets.Participants must wear the colourful ceremonial dress, which includes a loincloth of monkey tails, a leopard skin belt, elaborate headgear with ostrich feathers, and above all a cape of leopard skin slung across their chests.
"This is the biggest display of illegal wildlife contraband on Earth," said Guy Balme, Africa leopard programme director with the US-based conservation group Panthera.
Balme estimates – based on research with other leopard experts around Africa – that in the last 100 years, the species has disappeared from 40% of its traditional range. It is estimated only 5000 of the 700,000 African leopards are extant in South Africa.
In South Africa, where wildlife and livestock farming is big business, a leopard can cause much damage. It’s estimated that 68% of suitable leopard habitat is found outside of protected areas in South Africa. This means leopards regularly come into contact with farmers, communities and urban areas, where they pose real threats.
Despite the crash in leopard numbers, CITES still allows for about 2 000 leopards to be hunted for sport across 13 African states every year. In Tanzania and Zimbabwe, 500 leopards are on quota.

Early in February of this year I was driving from Masai Mara to Tsavo in Kenya in search of leopards and wondering about their health among sub saharan Africa's fastest growing population. I was fortunate to photograph at least 6 leopards within a span of 10 days, some of which are shown in this article. While their habitat is well preserved in the National parks and other protected areas, they are disappearing rapidly in populated areas primarily due to poisoning to protect livestock, poaching for fur trade and unregulated trophy hunting. Recently US President Trump's sons were ridiculed for the trophy hunting of leopards in Zimbabwe.
We humans certainly love the leopard to death. But many solutions are being worked out to conserving the leopard. African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) works closely with pastoralist communities to institute preventative measures to protect livestock from predation. In Tanzania, AWF is building bomas for communities living in close proximity to carnivores. Bomas are predator-proof enclosures where livestock are kept to prevent their attack. By taking proactive steps, they are able to prevent both livestock and carnivore deaths.
AWF believes that the key to ensuring the future of the leopard lies in an integrated approach to conservation that looks not only at the species itself, but at the needs of local people, land use, and the ecosystem as a whole. This approach to conservation led AWF to launch the Greater Kruger Leopard Conservation Science Project in South Africa. AWF researchers have placed GPS collars on leopards to study their populations, evaluate resource competition with other carnivores, and study leopard interactions with people.
Christopher Torchia of Associated Press in January 2017 reported new developments that are reducing the Zulu church's dependency of leopard furs. In this year's Shemebe dance ritual, at least 1,200 men in ceremonial attire danced wearing a mix of hides of illegally hunted leopards and Chinese-made, spotted capes designed by conservationists to reduce demand for the real thing. While the replica pelts, called "amambatha," have been distributed for free or a small levy, vendors near the dance site were selling real leopard skins for about $370, as well as the tails of monkeys, genets and serval cats worn by dancers, often around the waist. A few skins of cheetahs, another imperiled species, were also on display.

The imitation leopard skins, besides being a free or cheap alternative to the real item, are more durable in the rain. The mock versions generally look shinier and neater than their real counterparts, which need to be replaced after about a decade.
Learning about fashion was a challenge for Panthera's "Furs for Life" project, which modeled imitations on a haul seized from a poacher and used a complex weave technology that wasn't available in Africa.

"We took those skins, we photographed them, we then digitized them into the pixels that the machine needs and then we sent that into the factories to try and make it exactly as that original fur," said Tristan Dickerson, the project manager.
Worn by everyone from royalty to rock stars for over thousands of years, the love for real leopard skin has been supplanted by prints in the western societies. Leopard print has been both valued as luxurious and sophisticated and dismissed as kitschy and trashy. According to writer and entertainer Jo Weldon, the 20th-century vogue for leopard print in the west started in the 1920s with the rise of mass-produced fashions inspired by movie stars like Joan Crawford and fashion houses like Christian Dior. Over the past century, leopard has fluctuated from a sign of taste and wealth to its utter opposite, as fictional characters like Peg Bundy in the 1980s and '90s demonstrate in Married with Children, an American sitcom. Currently, wearing the print can be approached with so much caution that Forbes dedicated a column to the burning question “Can I Wear Leopard Print to the Office?” .(Short answer: yes, but “you just need to tread carefully.”). The American comedienne Lily Tomlin once quipped "There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic."

Weldon also notes that the great cats themselves serve as inspiration for some people who wear the print. She explains that many women continue to find leopard print attractive and daring because “the pattern designed to help these dangerous animals blend in was one that a woman used to stand out. She's not necessarily saying that she is a predator, but she sure isn't prey.”

END
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This article was written for Forbes Woman Africa by Ramdas Iyer and published in April 2017
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Staring at the magnificent temple at the foot of the Songshan Mountain range in Henan province southeast of Luoyang, I had at last arrived at a place that I had longed to visit for many years. I stood mesmerized at the legendary Shaolin temple, home of the famous Indian monk Bodhidharma, founder of Zen Buddhism and the martial arts of Kung Fu. The Temple's historical architectural complex, standing out for its great aesthetic value and its profound cultural connotations, is on the UNESCO world heritage list.
After my usual photographic survey of the temple, I sat in front of a statue of Bodhi dharma and went into deep meditation. As a practitioner of transcendental meditation, it was easy for me to slip into dhyana despite the occasional tourists noisily walking around the temple mostly known to the common public as the foundational seat of Kung Fu martial arts.
My personal connection with this temple including many of my brethren from my home state of Tamil Nadu, India is through the great Bodhidharma who arrived here from our city of Kanchipuram in the year 520 AD to spread Mahayana Buddhism to China. He lived in the Shaolin temple for nine years and I will tell his story through the lens of Tsutomu Kambe (Former Physics Professor of University of Tokyo) extracted from his book 'Bodhi Dharma and Oceanic Silk Road'. I have been wanting to write about the great Bodhidharma to my clutch of blog readers for a long time since I traveled to these parts in 2003. Safety is always important to me when traveling to remote parts.

Buddhism came to China 2,000 years ago. As early as A.D. 65, a community of Buddhist monks was reported living under royal patronage in the northern part of Kiangsu Province, near to the birthplace of Confucius. Since then, thousands of Indian and Central Asian monks have journeyed to China by land and sea, but among those who brought the teachings of the Buddha to China, none has had an impact comparable to that of Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma was born around the year 440 in Kanchi, the capital of the Southern Indian kingdom of Pallava. He was the third son of King Simhavarman. Pallavas were followers of Hinduism and In line with the prevalent customs, some of the rulers performed the Aswamedha and other Vedic sacrifices. They were, however, tolerant of other faiths, especially Buddhism.
Tsutomu Kambe in his book has done amazing research to establish Kanchipuram to be the birthplace of Bodhidharma. In 2007, his search revealed that documents published just after Tang dynasty (ending in 907) describe that the name of the Kingdom is expressed with two Chinese characters ‟香至‟. The Chinese name 香至 means “fragrance extreme” and is pronounced as Kang-Zhi. By examining various documents, Tstomu Kambe happened to come across the identification of 香至 to be Kanchipuram, an old capital town in the state Tamil-Nadu. The Chinese monk Xuanzang who visited Kanchipuram during the reign of Narasimha Varman I( 630-688 AD) reported that there were one hundred Buddhist monasteries, and 80 Hindu temples in Kanchipuram. When Bodhidharma ( born Bodhi Tara) was young, he received instruction in the Dharma philosophy from the Buddhist scholar Prajnatara, whom his father had invited from the ancient Buddhist heartland of Magadha. It was Prajnatara who also told Bodhidharma to go to China. Since the traditional overland route was blocked by the Huns, and also since the Pallavas had commercial ties throughout Southeast Asia, Bodhidharma left by ship from the nearby port of Mamallapuram ( current day Mahabalipuram). After skirting the Indian coast and the Malay Peninsula for three years and using the directional winds of the monsoon seasons, he finally arrived in Southern China around 475.

At that time, China was divided into the Northern Wei and Liu Sung dynasties. This division of China into a series of northern and southern dynasties had begun in the early third century and continued until the country was reunited under the Sui dynasty in the late sixth century. It was during this period of division and strife that Indian Buddhism developed into Chinese Buddhism, with the more military-minded northerners emphasizing meditation and magic and the more intellectual southerners preferring philosophical discussion and the intuitive grasp of principles.

Following his arrival in the port of Nanhai in the Pearl river delta ( Guangdong province) Bodhidharma visited Buddhist centers in the South and had begun learning Chinese. Bodhidharma later crossed the Yangtze River and lived near the Northern Wei capital of Pingcheng ( now famous for the Datong caves which I visited earlier). In 494, when Emperor Hsiao-wen moved his capital south to Luoyang on the northern bank of the Lo River, most of the monks living in the Pingcheng area moved too, and Bodhidharma was among them.

Later, in 496, the emperor ordered the construction of Shaolin Temple on Mount Song, in Hunan Province southeast of Luoyang. The temple, which still exists (although as a tourist attraction), was built for another meditation master from India Buddhabadra who was its first abbot. But while Zen masters have come and gone at the temple for the past 1,500 years, Bodhidharma is the only monk Buddhist historians associate with Shaolin. It was here, on Mount Songshan that Bodhidharma is said to have spent nine years in meditation, facing the rock wall of a cave about a mile from the temple. Shaolin later became famous for training monks in kung-fu, and Bodhidharma is honored as the founder of this art as well. Bodhidharma noticed the Shaolin monks were physically weak due to their sedentary lifestyle. Their practice after all involved sitting for many hours a day and, aside from drawing water and walking for alms, their physical state was totally neglected. Bodhidharma’s vision of awakening, however, was radically different. His idea of Zen was one of complete integration of mind and body, inner and outer. Coming from India, he undoubtedly instructed his disciples in yoga and a form of Tamil martial arts to the monks at Shaolin as an early form of kung Fu. This martial known as Kalarippayattu, strongly associated with the Nadars of Travancore. The similarities between Shaolin kung fu and the form of Kalarippayattu known as Varma kali once widely practiced among the Nadars, with its emphasis on sparring with a variety of weapons ranging from swords-and-shields to unarmed grappling with blows aimed at pressure points are mentioned in writings from that era. A note of clarity is needed here. Nadars are a community in Tirunelveli district of Tamil country who moved to Travancore, a royal state in today's Kerala state during local warfare.


Bodhidharma taught the Shaolin monks a series of physical exercises to increase strength, flexibility, and vitality. These movements—known as Yi Jin Jing and Xi Sui Jing—were not just for external strength but also tools for building mindful awareness and concentration. These techniques were meditation.

Over time, Bodhidharma’s physical exercises evolved into more structured and sophisticated forms of martial arts. The monks at Shaolin Monastery used this basis to develop techniques for self-defense, combat, and physical conditioning, drawing inspiration from various sources, including Indian martial arts and Indigenous Chinese fighting styles. The unique style of the Shaolin Monastery became known as Kung Fu.

In his literary work 'Transmission of the Lamp', Taoyuan writes that soon after Bodhidharma had transmitted the patriarchy of his lineage to his disciple Hui-k’o, he died in 528 AD.

Bodhidharma’s approach to Buddhism tended to reject devotional rituals, doctrinal debates, and verbal formalizations, in favor of an intuitive grasp of the “Buddha mind” within everyone, through meditation. In contrast with other Buddhist schools, Bodhidharma emphasized personal enlightenment, rather than the promise of heaven.
Bodhidharma also considered spiritual, intellectual, and physical excellence as an indivisible whole necessary for enlightenment. Bodhidharma’s mind-and-body approach to enlightenment proved highly attractive to the Samurai class in Japan, who made Zen their way of life, following their encounter with the martial-arts-oriented Zen Rinzai School introduced to Japan by Eisai in the 12th century.
Currently, a project is being planned to build a memorial structure at the land (in Kanchipuram) owned by the Institute of Asian Studies (Chennai, India) to remember this great master who spread Mahayana Buddhism to China.

This trip to China in 2003 fulfilled many spiritual quests on my part. Especially visiting the Temple of the White Horse, also in Luoyang, where tombs of the great Indian scholars Kashyapa Matanga and Gobagarana who traveled from India overland to China in the First century AD and are credited with bringing Buddhism to China are buried. Buddhist manuscripts including the Diamond sutra were translated by these scholars which they brought atop a white horse from India, which is also buried in a large tomb there.
The End
How to protect oneself from travel calamities

Staring at the magnificent temple at the foot of the Songshan Mountain range in Henan province southeast of Luoyang, I had at last arrived at a place that I had longed to visit for many years. I stood mesmerized at the legendary Shaolin temple, home of the famous Indian monk Bodhidharma, founder of Zen Buddhism and the martial arts of Kung Fu. The Temple's historical architectural complex, standing out for its great aesthetic value and its profound cultural connotations, is on the UNESCO world heritage list.
After my usual photographic survey of the temple, I sat in front of a statue of Bodhi dharma and went into deep meditation. As a practitioner of transcendental meditation, it was easy for me to slip into dhyana despite the occasional tourists noisily walking around the temple mostly known to the common public as the foundational seat of Kung Fu martial arts.
My personal connection with this temple including many of my brethren from my home state of Tamil Nadu, India is through the great Bodhidharma who arrived here from our city of Kanchipuram in the year 520 AD to spread Mahayana Buddhism to China. He lived in the Shaolin temple for nine years and I will tell his story through the lens of Tsutomu Kambe (Former Physics Professor of University of Tokyo) extracted from his book 'Bodhi Dharma and Oceanic Silk Road'. I have been wanting to write about the great Bodhidharma to my clutch of blog readers for a long time since I traveled to these parts in 2003.

Buddhism came to China 2,000 years ago. As early as A.D. 65, a community of Buddhist monks was reported living under royal patronage in the northern part of Kiangsu Province, near to the birthplace of Confucius. Since then, thousands of Indian and Central Asian monks have journeyed to China by land and sea, but among those who brought the teachings of the Buddha to China, none has had an impact comparable to that of Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma was born around the year 440 in Kanchi, the capital of the Southern Indian kingdom of Pallava. He was the third son of King Simhavarman. Pallavas were followers of Hinduism and In line with the prevalent customs, some of the rulers performed the Aswamedha and other Vedic sacrifices. They were, however, tolerant of other faiths, especially Buddhism.
Tsutomu Kambe in his book has done amazing research to establish Kanchipuram to be the birthplace of Bodhidharma. In 2007, his search revealed that documents published just after Tang dynasty (ending in 907) describe that the name of the Kingdom is expressed with two Chinese characters ‟香至‟. The Chinese name 香至 means “fragrance extreme” and is pronounced as Kang-Zhi. By examining various documents, Tstomu Kambe happened to come across the identification of 香至 to be Kanchipuram, an old capital town in the state Tamil-Nadu. The Chinese monk Xuanzang who visited Kanchipuram during the reign of Narasimha Varman I( 630-688 AD) reported that there were one hundred Buddhist monasteries, and 80 Hindu temples in Kanchipuram. When Bodhidharma ( born Bodhi Tara) was young, he received instruction in the Dharma philosophy from the Buddhist scholar Prajnatara, whom his father had invited from the ancient Buddhist heartland of Magadha. It was Prajnatara who also told Bodhidharma to go to China. Since the traditional overland route was blocked by the Huns, and also since the Pallavas had commercial ties throughout Southeast Asia, Bodhidharma left by ship from the nearby port of Mamallapuram ( current day Mahabalipuram). After skirting the Indian coast and the Malay Peninsula for three years and using the directional winds of the monsoon seasons, he finally arrived in Southern China around 475.

At that time, China was divided into the Northern Wei and Liu Sung dynasties. This division of China into a series of northern and southern dynasties had begun in the early third century and continued until the country was reunited under the Sui dynasty in the late sixth century. It was during this period of division and strife that Indian Buddhism developed into Chinese Buddhism, with the more military-minded northerners emphasizing meditation and magic and the more intellectual southerners preferring philosophical discussion and the intuitive grasp of principles.

Following his arrival in the port of Nanhai in the Pearl river delta ( Guangdong province) Bodhidharma visited Buddhist centers in the South and had begun learning Chinese. Bodhidharma later crossed the Yangtze River and lived near the Northern Wei capital of Pingcheng ( now famous for the Datong caves which I visited earlier). In 494, when Emperor Hsiao-wen moved his capital south to Luoyang on the northern bank of the Lo River, most of the monks living in the Pingcheng area moved too, and Bodhidharma was among them.

Later, in 496, the emperor ordered the construction of Shaolin Temple on Mount Song, in Hunan Province southeast of Luoyang. The temple, which still exists (although as a tourist attraction), was built for another meditation master from India Buddhabadra who was its first abbot. But while Zen masters have come and gone at the temple for the past 1,500 years, Bodhidharma is the only monk Buddhist historians associate with Shaolin. It was here, on Mount Songshan that Bodhidharma is said to have spent nine years in meditation, facing the rock wall of a cave about a mile from the temple. Shaolin later became famous for training monks in kung-fu, and Bodhidharma is honored as the founder of this art as well. Bodhidharma noticed the Shaolin monks were physically weak due to their sedentary lifestyle. Their practice after all involved sitting for many hours a day and, aside from drawing water and walking for alms, their physical state was totally neglected. Bodhidharma’s vision of awakening, however, was radically different. His idea of Zen was one of complete integration of mind and body, inner and outer. Coming from India, he undoubtedly instructed his disciples in yoga and a form of Tamil martial arts to the monks at Shaolin as an early form of kung Fu. This martial known as Kalarippayattu, strongly associated with the Nadars of Travancore. The similarities between Shaolin kung fu and the form of Kalarippayattu known as Varma kali once widely practiced among the Nadars, with its emphasis on sparring with a variety of weapons ranging from swords-and-shields to unarmed grappling with blows aimed at pressure points are mentioned in writings from that era. A note of clarity is needed here. Nadars are a community in Tirunelveli district of Tamil country who moved to Travancore, a royal state in today's Kerala state during local warfare.


Bodhidharma taught the Shaolin monks a series of physical exercises to increase strength, flexibility, and vitality. These movements—known as Yi Jin Jing and Xi Sui Jing—were not just for external strength but also tools for building mindful awareness and concentration. These techniques were meditation.

Over time, Bodhidharma’s physical exercises evolved into more structured and sophisticated forms of martial arts. The monks at Shaolin Monastery used this basis to develop techniques for self-defense, combat, and physical conditioning, drawing inspiration from various sources, including Indian martial arts and Indigenous Chinese fighting styles. The unique style of the Shaolin Monastery became known as Kung Fu.

In his literary work 'Transmission of the Lamp', Taoyuan writes that soon after Bodhidharma had transmitted the patriarchy of his lineage to his disciple Hui-k’o, he died in 528 AD.

Bodhidharma’s approach to Buddhism tended to reject devotional rituals, doctrinal debates, and verbal formalizations, in favor of an intuitive grasp of the “Buddha mind” within everyone, through meditation. In contrast with other Buddhist schools, Bodhidharma emphasized personal enlightenment, rather than the promise of heaven.
Bodhidharma also considered spiritual, intellectual, and physical excellence as an indivisible whole necessary for enlightenment. Bodhidharma’s mind-and-body approach to enlightenment proved highly attractive to the Samurai class in Japan, who made Zen their way of life, following their encounter with the martial-arts-oriented Zen Rinzai School introduced to Japan by Eisai in the 12th century.
Currently, a project is being planned to build a memorial structure at the land (in Kanchipuram) owned by the Institute of Asian Studies (Chennai, India) to remember this great master who spread Mahayana Buddhism to China.

This trip to China in 2003 fulfilled many spiritual quests on my part. Especially visiting the Temple of the White Horse, also in Luoyang, where tombs of the great Indian scholars Kashyapa Matanga and Gobagarana who traveled from India overland to China in the First century AD and are credited with bringing Buddhism to China are buried. Buddhist manuscripts including the Diamond sutra were translated by these scholars which they brought atop a white horse from India, which is also buried in a large tomb there.
The End

How to protect oneself from travel calamities

Osmund Smith was a 28-year-old shepherd in 1948 when he observed the first pair of King penguins arriving at Volunteer Point, 30 miles northeast of Port Stanley, in the Falkland Islands. Little did he realize that by 2025, his family would benefit financially from their descendants, earning thousands of pounds annually from their presence on the land which they now own . Upon further research I determined that this colony was established because of overpopulation in South Georgia Islands 980 miles away. In 2011 I witnessed a solo King Penguin, my first, lost in the seas and living alongside in a Megallanic penguin colony in Martillo Island near Ushuaia, Argentina
King penguin colonies are found across the subantarctic and Southern Ocean north of 60°S, with large populations on Iles Crozet, Iles Kerguelen, and South Georgia. Some colonies consist of hundreds of thousands of breeding pairs each summer (see population distribution map).
In 2015, I had the opportunity to visit South Georgia and photograph these beautiful animals. There are approximately 450,000 pairs of king penguins in South Georgia, which account for about half of the world's population. The island has more than 30 colonies in total, with the largest located at St Andrews Bay, home to around 150,000 pairs. Additionally, I visited Salisbury Plain, which hosts another 60,000 pairs.

Historically, king penguins have rarely visited Antarctica itself, preferring the relatively temperate conditions around the Antarctic convergence for both breeding and feeding. However, they are beginning to migrate southwards towards the Antarctic peninsula, with individuals sighted on Elephant Island and the South Shetland Islands. According to researchers, this movement is almost certainly a direct result of climate change.
During my trip to the Antarctic peninsula and the Falklands in 2025, accompanied by my wife, I aimed to show her a large King penguin colony. Approximately 2,000 breeding pairs are found at Volunteer Point on East Falkland Island, accessible via a challenging off-road journey from Stanley. Visiting Volunteer Point is essential, though attempting the drive independently is inadvisable due to difficult terrain. We were a convoy of 24 Land Rover vehicles driving through a tundra landscape and soft peat bogs. Getting stuck is quite common and therefore many ships do not send their passengers to this spot 36 miles and 2.5 hours away on rough track.(Travel safety is paramount) A smaller colony of 20 pairs exists near The Neck on Saunders Island, which we also visited.

Despite the scientific specific name patagonicus, King Penguins no longer breed in Patagonia. King penguins used to breed on Islas de los Estados (Staten Island) until the colony was wiped out by sealers in the 19th Century.
The king Penguin is the largest of the penguins found in the Falklands, with a typical weight of 12 - 14 kg and an average length of 90 cm. It is second in size only to the Emperor Penguin, which rarely strays far from the frozen waters of Antarctica.
The King Penguin has distinctive orange patches on each side of the head, extending down and meeting beneath the chin, where they become yellow and blend into the silvery-white breast plumage. The mandibular plates on either side of the bill are also orange. The female is slightly smaller than the male but has similar plumage.


King Penguins do not build nests; instead, they lay a single egg weighing around 310 g, which they hold on to their feet for the entire incubation period of about 55 days. This behavior allows breeding in much colder terrain than species that lay their eggs on the ground and eliminates the need for nesting material. Both parents take turns brooding the egg, with shift changes every 6 - 18 days while the other parents go to sea for extended foraging trips.
The newly hatched chicks are also held on the parents' feet for the first 30 - 40 days, during which time they develop plumage and can regulate their own body temperature. During chick-rearing, parents continue to alternate brooding duties, although the periods may vary from 3 - 14 days, resulting in potentially prolonged waits between feeds. King Penguins travel far from the Falkland Islands in search of food during chick-rearing.
Chicks are eventually left in creches, allowing both adults to undertake extended foraging trips at sea, with chicks being fed even less frequently. During the austral winter, chicks may go up to 3 months without a feed, with healthy chicks capable of surviving up to 5 months without nourishment. Chicks can lose up to 50% of their body weight during the winter.
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Despite this lack of food, King Penguin chicks can survive prolonged cold weather by increasing metabolic activity through burning body fat in muscle tissue while remaining inactive. Stored body fat reserves are usually adequate to sustain the chicks for at least 3 months. However, as body fat becomes depleted, chicks must start breaking down body protein for energy, leading to rapid weight loss and potential starvation unless the chick is fed. Nonetheless, starvation typically does not occur until a chick, initially weighing around 10 kg at the start of winter, drops to just 3 kg. Few animals can survive a 70% loss of body weight and still recover.
Preferred breeding sites are flat coastal plains near the ocean, accessed via sandy beaches. The breeding cycle differs from that of other Falklands penguins, with chicks taking nearly a year to fledge. This requires them to overwinter at the breeding colony, during which time they remain in creches and are well insulated from the cold by their long brown downy coats. They eventually fledge the following summer and will not return to breed until they are at least 3 years old.

King Penguins can live over 30 years in captivity and typically return to the same site to breed throughout their lives. Breeding is preceded by the annual molt, which lasts 4 to 5 weeks. The return to the breeding colony is poorly synchronized, so birds often change partners each breeding cycle.
King Penguins are highly curious about humans, with chicks particularly likely to approach and investigate people sitting quietly, using their bills to probe boot laces, hair, or other items. In contrast, adults can be quite aggressive towards each other within the colony, pecking and striking each other with their flippers. Adults announce themselves by extending their necks skyward and emitting a trumpet-like call, while chicks produce a squeaky piping call.
King Penguins generally forage at depths of 150 - 300 m, with dives of up to 500 m recorded. These are the deepest dives among penguins, second only to the Emperor Penguin, which is not found outside Antarctica's frozen waters. King Penguins mainly feed on small bioluminescent Lanternfish and some squid species. Deep dives are made during daylight hours, but King Penguins can also feed at night by making shallow dives, presumably hunting by sight due to the bioluminescent light emitted by their prey. Foraging depth may be influenced by diurnal migration patterns of prey species rather than solely by light penetration. In the Falkland Islands, the foraging range extends to the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Atlantic coast of South America as far north as Buenos Aires, and across to South Georgia and possibly beyond.
King Penguins at Volunteer Point are occasionally preyed upon by Orcas (Killer Whales), which patrol close to shore in search of Gentoo, Magellanic, and King Penguins. Sea Lions and Leopard Seals also hunt penguins in Falkland waters. No terrestrial predators pose a threat to adult King Penguins, but birds such as skuas and gulls may target eggs and small chicks if given the opportunity.
I have shown some nice images of turkey vultures eating penguin eggs.


Human impact is currently minimal, despite King Penguins being a major tourist attraction. They tolerate human presence well, provided tourists remain on the outskirts of the colony. There is no direct exploitation of King Penguins in the Falkland Islands, and they are rarely caught accidentally by commercial fishing nets. There is little overlap between King Penguin prey and commercially harvested squid and fish species, meaning the Falklands’ fishing industry is unlikely to significantly affect King Penguin population trends. Nevertheless, the fact that virtually the entire Falklands population resides at Volunteer Point makes it vulnerable to incidents like an oil spill in the area.

The End
Travel safety is always paramount!
Ramdas Iyer/[email protected]
Source Credits: Falkland Conservation, Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition

Gallery:









https://safetywing.com/nomad-insurance/?referenceID=26279180&utm_source=26279180&utm_medium=Ambassador

I love albatrosses. I am especially fascinated by their long circumpolar flights. In 2015 whilst in the sub Antarctic Islands of the Falklands in November I presented you with over 300 pairs of mating pairs of Black Browed Albatross, some sitting on eggs( November) along with a photograph of mine exactly where my hero David Attenborough sat in his Living Planet' series on BBC. In 2025 I was back in Falklands in April when the eggs had hatched and the fledglings almost ready to fly. My interested readers will find only one image of a parent feeding a chick and a few others flying out to bring food. Most of the other chicks( note the down still left on their bodies)can be seen moving their wings a lot to strengthen the flight muscles since they will be taking off in a few days along with the Austral winter winds soon to blow them away. Their parents have already abandoned them forcing them to leave the rookery.

Black-browed Albatross is a large seabird known for its impressive physical appearance. It has a wingspan that can reach up to 7.9 feet (2.4 meters), making it one of the largest birds in the world. With such a vast wingspan, it is capable of soaring through the skies effortlessly, utilizing the ocean’s winds to its advantage often covering 10000 miles in a journey.
As primarily pelagic birds, Black-browed Albatrosses spend most of their lives at sea, only coming to land for breeding purposes.
During the breeding season, Black-browed Albatrosses gather in large colonies on remote islands, often returning to the same nesting site year after year. These colonies can contain thousands of pairs, creating a bustling and noisy environment. The birds construct nests on the ground using vegetation, feathers, and mud, and both parents take turns incubating the single egg. The incubation period lasts around 70 days, during which the parents endure harsh weather conditions, including strong winds and freezing temperatures.

Once the chick hatches, it is entirely dependent on its parents for food and protection. The parents take turns foraging at sea and returning to the nest to feed their chick. They regurgitate a thick, oily substance called “stomach oil” that provides essential nutrients to their offspring. This feeding process continues for several months until the chick is ready to fledge. Black-browed Albatross chicks have a long fledging period, typically taking around 140 days to gain the strength and skills necessary for independent life."
How to protect oneself from travel calamities
















The greatest threat to these birds seems to be an increase in by-catch due to long-line sea fishing practices in the southern oceans, particularly off the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay along the Patagonian shelf. Further threats include natural disasters (fires, floods, and volcanic activity), disruption of prey populations, ingesting plastic, pollution, habitat destruction, and disease.

How to protect oneself from travel calamities

Growing up in India in the 1960s and1970s references to the Nagas evoked awe and fear. Nagaland was created during this period, which upset several separatist tribes opposed to joining the Indian Union. Insurgencies and killings continued until 1975 when India imposed Presidential rule and sent in the army.
The British who ruled India until 1947 had a very checkered history in the Naga Hills. The Naga Hills, with tropical and subtropical evergreen forests, border Burma, where many tribes live on both sides. The Nagas consisted of 17 major tribes who have been referred and written in Indian History since the 13 th century. Assam, the tea cultivation region for the British, bordered Nagaland. Between 1839 and 1850, the British conducted ten military operations, eventually subjugating the lower half of Nagaland. The northwestern part of Nagaland was marked as an unadministered area on British India maps due to continued resistance from the warriors who were vary of British intentions.
This area has captured the attention of many anthropologists and showcases a culture distinct from that of the Indian subcontinent. Of the tribes that occupy that area the Konyak Nagas still maintain a degree of isolation from the rest of Nagaland. While Nagaland is well integrated as an Indian state with many of its younger population working in the rest of the country.
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I became interested in Nagaland due to its cultural similarities with other Southeast Asian tribes I encountered during my travels. Similarities in head hunting traditions, burial customs, body art, dormitory system and terraced rice fields found by me in Burma, Sulawesi, Borneo, and Sumatra motivated me to travel to norther Nagaland’s Mon district which is the home of the Konyaks. Although not part of Sino-Tibeto-Burmese cultures, Fiji and Micronesia (Papua New Guinea) and Madagascar have many similar customs thus raising the specter of a culture that likely spread into the Pacific from a central location, the Yunnan province of today’s China.
Modern developments are rapidly transforming traditional practices, but in several villages of the Mon district, the tattooed headhunters of Nagaland can still be found. These octogenarian warriors still tell stories of their past and dress in their native outfits for visitors like me. In another few years it will be another culture lost to time.

In this article I will proceed to compare my travel experiences and photographs of Batak, Dayak, Bugis, Toraja and Iban people with those of the Nagas and other photographs extracted from the web to establish their common ancestry that emerged from China.
While cultures all over the world have given up traditional practices and have adopted to an everchanging world, any references to the past regarding their cultures are in no way a poor reflection of the modern Naga Indian citizens.
Headhunting Practices.
The Igorot-Kalinga of Philippines were well known for their Headhunting like the Nagas in India. Like the Nagas, they carried home the chopped off head of their victims as trophies. Great celebrations were held to honor the brave warrior for his deed. Headhunting was driven by the belief that a human head held great power and could bring fertility and good harvests. It gradually became taboo with the advent of Christianity to both the Igorot and Nagas.
The Iban of Sarawak and the Dayaks of Kalimantan are both reputed to be the most fearsome of Borneo’s headhunters not so long ago. They too celebrated the captured heads of their enemies with a great festival called Gawal Kenya Lang (the Hornbill festival). The heads were thought to bring strength, virtue, and prosperity to the long house. Hornbill skulls are currently utilized as substitutes for human heads in these ceremonies. Such festivals were also common among the Nagas and known as the “Feast of Merit.”
In 2015 I traveled 6 hours on a speed boat from Panganiban, Kalimantan to spend a night with the Beconsu Pyan Dayaks in their long house in Borneo. ( Read my Blog: A night with a head-hunting tribe in Borneo) to witness their burial customs and to catch a glimpse of their lives. The long house, which previously displayed skulls of victims, now features hornbill casques as decorations.
In Sumatra there are six groups of Batak living around Lake Toba who distinguish themselves with their languages and habits. I had the privilege of visiting several Batak villages in 2022. The Batak, like the Naga tribes, were well known for their headhunting. They lived in isolation for centuries in the hilly regions. Their bloody feuds and guerrilla attacks on each other’s villages gained a well-earned reputation for ferocity. They also practiced ritual cannibalism in which a token piece of flesh of a slain enemy or of one judged guilty of a major violation of traditional laws was ceremoniously consumed. War captives' heads and hands were kept as trophies, similar to the practices of the Dayaks and Nagas. The Naga tribes, along with the Dayaks and the Atayal tribe of Taiwan, had a tradition where individuals needed to bring back a head to demonstrate their manhood and qualify for marriage within the village.


Dormitory culture
The Morung (Nagas Dormitory) system in the past was similar to that of the Igorot. The young Naga boys and girls slept in their Morungs (dormitories) in ancient times. Back then, the Morung served as the educational hub for various life skills. In every village there were two or three Morongs, both for boys and girls. The young men and women continued to live in Morungs till they are married. While men were permitted to enter the women's Morung, the women were not allowed to enter the men's Morung, a practice that is also observed in the Tsou tribe. The Nagas believed that if woman enter the men’s dormitory, it would bring misfortune in the village.
The boys were allowed to go to the girls' Morung, but the girls were not permitted to do the opposite. After the advent of Christianity in the Naga Hills – Morong culture vanished from the villages. The Bontoc and Kankanaey groups of Igorot were also well known for their dormitory system. I could not find any photographic evidence from a web search.
There are ten tribes in Taiwan (Formosa) with each having different cultures and traditions. The Puyuma and Tsou tribes of yore exhibited certain traditional similarities to the Nagas tribe. The Puyuma tribe had special institutions for males known as Assembly Halls, to train them in warfare and physical strength in order protect their tribe. Before men got married, they lived in their assembly halls.
The activities in Puyuma assembly hall and Nagas Morung are largely similar.
Village design and long houses:
Traditionally, the Dayaks live in communal long houses known as Lamin in East and West Kalimantan, Sarawak, and Brunei. Long houses are usually built parallel to the river. Rice barns and storehouses containing valuable items are kept separate from the main building to mitigate the risk of fire. Most Naga villages have separate houses for living and storehouses, like the Dayak tribes.
Storehouses near the main house protect rice, millet, and other grains in the event of a fire in the main house. The Bugis people are seafarers spread throughout the Indonesian archipelago. They have settled in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sumbawa, and Malaysia and have trading with all the smaller Islands. The Bugis have traditionally lived in pile-built wooden houses with slatted bamboo floors similar in style and layout to the basic Malay prototype. The characteristic decorative feature is a pair of crossed roof finials symbolizing buffalo horns.
Certain Naga tribes resided in stilt houses, similar to those of the Bugis people. The Nagas old house structure is remarkably like that of Bugis’ old house, which have a pair of crossed roof symbolizing the buffalo horns. Nagas who hosted the 'Feast of Merit' had houses with wooden beams crossed diagonally, attached to the eaves to symbolize buffalo horns.
Toraja is a name of Bugis origin given to the different people of the mountainous regions of the northern part of Sulawesi, which remained isolated until recently. Their traditional religion involves the worship of natural elements and spirits, and includes practices such as animal sacrifices, elaborate funeral rites, and large communal feasts. Historically, Toraja villages were strategically located on hilltops and fortified with walls and a gate similar to the Nagas. The villages of Taroja were fortified to a degree that access was occasionally restricted to tunnels carved through rock. This was all part of the common Indonesian custom of headhunting and inter-village raids.
Batak also have separate houses and granaries like the Toraja people and have crossed wooden beams symbolizing buffalo horns. In addition, the Batak builds architecturally significant homes remarkably like the Torajans. The inverted boat like roofs is supposed to remember their ancestors who arrived by boat.

Burial traditions:
The disposal of the dead varies from tribe to tribe. The Angami and Lhota Nagas buried, often in stone- lined graves, sometimes
excavating a vault out of sandstone, and sometimes using a canoe-like coffin. Canoe-like coffins are very similar in Toraja villages. The Ao Nagas dispose of their dead on platforms; the Chang Nagas practiced both plat-form disposal and burial; the Konyak disposed of died on platforms, but separated the head, which was placed in a pot, or into a stone cist, or facing inwards into the side of a hollow cone of sandstone covered with a bamboo sheath. Some of the more easterly Konyak tribes set up a human effigy in wood or wicker-work on which the head of the deceased was placed for a time to let the soul descend into the effigy and wooden effigies of the dead again are set up by many of the Angami over the grave Some Konyak villages
disposed of their dead in baskets which held them in a sitting but more or less upright position. The one form of disposal of the dead regarded with unanimous disapproval is cremation.
Tana Toraja people, who live in the central highlands of Sulawesi, conduct elaborate feasts after burials. I had the privilege of visiting Toraja in the nineties and attending funeral ceremonies shown in the images. They bury their dead in caves, in steep cliffs and in elaborate casks. Like the Nagas the Toraja people create effigies of the dead and place them in areas overlooking their villages. The number of buffaloes killed on such events bring pride to the family. The houses are decorated with buffalo horns, like that of the Nagas who decorate their homes with Mithuns, a domesticated bison, along with other mammalian skulls.

While a few articles have been written on the comparative studies of tribal cultures of SE Asia, I have attempted herein to include my travel experiences and photographs to further enhance earlier works.
The end
Ramdas Iyer/ [email protected]
How to protect oneself from travel calamities(CLICK HERE)

Sources include:
J.P.Mills- Royal Anthropological Society publication
Dr. Thohe Pau, NDA, Pune
Illustrations: Last of the tattooed Konyaks by Phejian Konyak

On a recent trip to Oslo and while Standing on the massive deck of THE FRAM, the famous wooden ship that sailed to the north pole and Antarctica I decided to write about one of the greatest polar explorers that ever lived: Dr. Fridtjof Nansen. As someone who has stood on the Greenland ice cap and traveled past the 80th parallel twice and to Antarctica and sub-Antarctic islands twice I believe I can convey to my readers the dangers and thrills of polar travel, especially in the early twentieth century.
Polar exploration in the early nineteenth century captivated the world with exploits of new regions that the world has known before. However, reaching the Poles has always been a challenge for humankind. Adventurers, and scientists wanted to conquer these territories preserved from all human activities. They embarked towards the unknown to conquer frozen lands, sometimes without preparation for the extreme conditions that awaited them. Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, Robert Scott, and Robert Peary, to name a few comes to our mind when we think of polar explorers. But Nansen, a Nobel laureate, is cut of a different cloth. He was an arctic explorer, a scientist, and a humanitarian who saved upwards of seven million people. The biography of Fridtjof Nansen almost defies belief. He was the first to traverse Greenland, ventured further into the Arctic than any man yet before him, and was an 11-time cross-country skiing national champion. When he was not completing a feat of human endurance, he wrote scientific accounts of his adventures and became deeply involved in the global humanitarian crises in Russia and Armenia winning him the Nobel Peace prize in 1922.
The blogs that I write are extracts from the writings of others and edited with my own travels and insights. Here I am trying to portray his achievements in five sections. 1) Nansen’s early years and preparation as an explorer 2) The Greenland expedition where he traversed across the massive island by skis. 3) The building of the first ever polar research ship, The Fram. 4) The Arctic expedition to the North pole. 5) His achievement as a diplomat and humanitarian winning him the Nobel peace prize in 1922.
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1) Early years:
Nansen was born in Aker, Norway, on October 10, 1861, to Baldur and Adelaide Nansen.
Though Fridtjof’s parents were strict, they were caring, and they worked hard to instill self-reliance and a sense of duty in their son. These would prove to be important qualities for his later adventures and allowed him to persevere where others had failed. Fridtjof Nansen shared his mother’s love of the outdoors, and the Norwegian countryside offered plenty of opportunities for him to develop his physical prowess. Nansen would often force himself into situations that would evaluate his endurance and wander into the wilderness where he would “live like Robinson Crusoe.”
Eventually, he reached the point where he could ski fifty miles in a single day, and at 18 he broke the world one-mile skating record. The next year, he won the national cross-country skiing championship and did so eleven more times.
His athletic skill would become indispensable during his Arctic explorations. Nansen trained himself to endure physical hardships from an early age.
Nansen enrolled in the University of Oslo in 1881 and decided to study zoology. A friend of his father's needed a zoology student for a whale and seal hunting expedition in the Arctic Ocean near Greenland. The ship had a crew of 62 -and the student Nansen became its only passenger. On this voyage Nansen made his first acquaintance with the Arctic. He soon became so fascinated by this hostile, savage part of the world that he knew he must return. The young scientist found inspiration in the study of animal life, of temperature conditions, sea currents, ice formations, northern lights - many kinds of natural phenomena every single day. At the same time, the arctic en¬vironment appealed to his artistic sense, as he experienced the play of color and light, extraordinary ice formations, the ani¬mal life and its human inhabitants. Even though the scientific results of this expedition were not immediately significant, it was during this voyage that Nansen made the first observations of the sea currents which run from Eastern Siberia over the Polar Sea towards Greenland. He found drifting timber which he originally believed to be American pine, but which he later realized must have drifted with the ice from Siberia. He found grey, organic spillage on the ice, and after his return home it was proved that this came from the land near the Bering Straits. This and other finds would be amongst the evidence which indicated that the ice constantly drifted over the Polar Sea from the sea north of Siberia. On this voyage the seed of an idea began growing in him that a vessel would be able to withstand lying frozen in the ice if it were suitably con¬structed.

2) The Greenland Expedition
In an article he wrote for a geographical periodical he recounted his observations of the ice formations along the East coast of Greenland and mentioned that it should be possible to reach land by walking over the ice, pulling the equipment on sledges. Inhospitable Greenland fascinated Nansen and so in 1887, after he submitted his doctoral thesis, Nansen began a daring adventure into the island’s interior. The knowledge available to the Victorians about much of the island had changed little since the days of the Vikings centuries earlier — and Nansen was determined to change that.
The implication of going in an east-westerly direction was that retreat would be impossible. Even though conditions might indicate that retur¬ning to the East coast was the only alternative, this would be precluded by the fact that it would be impossible to make con¬tact with the outside world, and no ship would be able to come to their aid. The attitude of burning one's bridges, leaving only one course available, the way forward. Fridtjof Nansen and the five members of his expedition were faced with great difficulties and troublesome delays, caused by adverse weather and ice conditions on the sea and land around the East coast, and the ascent of the glacier could not begin until the 15th of August 1888. By this time, the Arctic summer was already on the wane. It was an extremely strenu¬ous expedition, ascending to over 2 700 meters between peri¬lous crevasses, with temperatures sinking to minus 45 °C and with no other equipment or provisions than what was possible to continue the ski sledges. They also suffered from an acute fat deficiency caused by an error in the pemmican compound which proved to be fat free. Nansen’s gamble paid off, though, and by October of the same year, he and his team safely arrived at an Eskimo village on the west coast. They survived temperatures as low as -49 degrees Fahrenheit and traversed 2,500 miles on sleds and skis. They were the first explorers to traverse Greenland.
At the end of September, they arrived at the West coast, and at the beginning of October they reached the inhabited area of Godthab, where they received the dis¬appointing news that the boat from Godthab had left two months earlier which was before they had even begun the expedition across the ice.
The expedition had to spend the winter in Greenland and Nansen used this time to study the life of the Eskimo. He sketched, photographed, and went hunting thereby experiencing the full primitive life which he loved. Fridtjof Nansen wrote the book «Eskimo Life» (1891) after his return, in which he described vividly his love for Greenland and its people. The material he published played its part in increasing the knowledge of Eskimo life and culture, and established beyond doubt his ability to conduct systematic studies in the field of ethnography.
The six-man expedition crossing the Greenland inland ice will always be regarded as a heroic achievement. To endure and accomplish such a feat in one of the world's most inaccessible areas, using only the primitive equipment avail¬able at that time, required a high personal level of self-disci¬pline and an iron will. Assistance from others was out of the question, there was no possibility for retreat, and no means of communication with the rest of the world; always dependent on their own strength, capabilities and judge¬ment. The men who conducted this remarkable feat were com¬pletely aware of the fact that the effort could cost them their lives. The expedition was of vital importance to our knowledge of inland Greenland, which several experts had thought was ice free, and it also provided overwhelming publicity all over the world for the sport of skiing. Nansen and his men received an enthusiastic welcome in Denmark and Norway when they arrived with the first boat in the spring of 1889, and their safe return was celebrated widely in many other countries.

3) The building of the Fram
After the Norwegian parliament had made a grant of NOK 280 000 available for the venture, and various enthusiastic private citizens had added their contributions, the work of building a polar exploration vessel to Nansen´s specifications commenced.
Nansen´s closest adviser on the project was Otto Sverdrup, while the building work was entrusted to Colin Archer. It was a formidable task. Nansen wanted a ship which, though small and light, would be strong enough to withstand the tremendous pressure of the pack ice, a ship with a hull designed to ensure that it would be lifted by the ice and not forced under and churned to pieces. The principle can be illustrated by squeezing a round nut between the fingers and seeing how it pops up.
Moreover, it had to provide a comfortable home for the crew, who would have to be prepared to spend several years on board. In the event, the ship proved bigger than Nansen had envisaged. It had a displacement of eight hundred tons loaded, measured 39 m from stem to stern, was 11 m in the beam, and had a draught of 5 m. The proportion of wide beam compared with the length gave better strength in the ice, but also made the Fram roll most uncomfortable in the open sea.
Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, and Colin Archer had close consultations throughout the building process. Archer made three models and four drawings before the construction started, and adjustments and changes were made constantly during the construction. The materials were hand-picked: oak and iron in the main, with pitch pine, Norwegian pine, and greenheart in addition.
The separate pieces were either laid double or were strengthened in many ways. The ribs were of naturally formed oak bolted two together for double strength and laid only 5 cm apart. The space between was filled with a mixture of pitch, tar, and sawdust. The keelson was of pitch pine, which has a naturally high resin content which protects it from decay. This was laid double, apart from under the engine room where there was not enough space.
The ice sheathing on the outside of the hull was of greenheart and was fastened so that it could be torn off by the ice without seriously damaging the hull. Greenheart is hard and durable and is the densest wood that is traded.
The ribs were covered on the inside with planks of pitch pine, while on the outside there were two layers of oak under the ice sheathing. In the living quarters the pitch pine was covered with a layer of tarred felt followed by three layers of paneling with insulation between.
In addition to the choice of materials and the extra strengthening of the hull, there were other adaptations that would make the Fram resistant to damage from the ice. The rudder was strengthened with three heavy U-shaped iron frames and both the rudder, and the propeller could be lifted. The stern had a special construction that gave a double end with a well in between. This was divided into two parts where the rudder and the propeller could be hoisted away from the ice. The rudder was sited low to avoid most of the inevitable collisions with ice.
The Fram was designed as a three-masted schooner, with the standing rigging of steel wire and the running rigging of hemp. A windmill was included on board, which ran a generator to provide electric power for lighting by electric arc lamps. A triple expansion steam engine of 220 hp gave a speed of 6-7 nm/hour in calm seas.
On 26 October 1892, the Fram was christened by Nansen’s wife Eva and launched at Colin Archer’s shipyard in Larvik, Norway.

4) The Arctic Expedition to the North pole
In the summer of 1891 Nansen commenced the preparations for a courageous expedition by ship over the Polar Sea. The plan was based on the theory that strong ocean currents from the areas north of Siberia flowed in the direction towards Greenland and Alaska. Wreckage from the American Jeannette expedition which had floundered in the ice north of Siberia in 1879-80, was found on the south-west coast of Greenland years later. This proved that the theory of the ocean currents was correct. For those interested in the Jeannette, I would strongly recommend the book by Hampton Sides “Kingdom of the Ice” which ranks high among my travel adventure books.
On the 24th of June 1893, the expedition departed and after one month left Norwegian waters turning eastwards from Vardø. After having sailed along the whole of the Northern Siberian coast, they reached the area around the New Siberian Islands at the end of September. It was here that the Fram froze fast in the ice. The construction proved itself to be correct, the vessel was pressed up onto the ice and in this way the lethal grip of the ice which had crushed so many vessels previously, was averted. The slow passage across the Polar Sea now began.
Sometimes they drifted southwards and at other times they advanced quickly towards the north, only to drift back again. The current was not particularly strong, and it was a mental strain for the small crew of thirteen men to endure the pas¬sivity on board. At Christmas time they had passed 79° N and the speed was so slow that Nansen calculated that it could take 6-7 years to drift over the entire Polar Sea. In his most pessimistic periods prior to the commencement of the expedition he had estimated that it could, perhaps, be a voyage of about 4-5 years' duration. On the 2nd of February they passed 80° N, and the temperature was down to under -50 °C. On the 28th of May, the Fram reached 81° 34' N. Just to make a point, the research ship Sergei Vavilov reached 81 degrees in my first trip to the high arctic. At this position Nansen began to realize that they would not drift as far north as he had originally hoped, nor would they drift over the actual pole point.
Finally, he made the courageous decision to attempt to reach the pole by skiing. He knew he could entrust the ship in Captain Otto Sverdrup's safekeeping and the crew had enough provi¬sions of every kind to last them for years. He took with him one man, Hjalmar Johansen, and left the Fram on the 26th of February 1895. They lashed their equipment to six dog sledges and would, of course, be completely self-reliant during the whole expedition. No communication with the outside world or retreat was possible, and they would have no chance of finding the Fram again. They were left completely to their own devices on the path into the unknown. After they had reached the North Pole, they would have to try and return southwards in the direction of Spitsbergen or Franz Josef Land. To succeed, ice and weather conditions would have to be favorable; delays would mean that by the spring the ice would be impassable and then they would have little chance of survival, even though they had their self-made kayaks lashed to the sledges.


The first attempt failed. The sledges were too heavy and the ice conditions too difficult, so they turned back to reduce the equipment load. The sledges were improved, and a new attempt was made but this also failed. Finally on the 14th of March they left the Fram at 84° 4' N in a temperature of -32 °C and turned their course northwards. It was an inhuman struggle through the ice masses. The many dogs which for so long had been bound and confined on board the Fram, behaved in a way which caused delays. They fought each other, and continually bit through the traces which had to be knotted again - this was not easy when the tempera¬ture was at around -40 °C.
At the beginning of April Nansen realized that in all proba¬bility, it would be impossible to continue right to the point of the pole. The ice conditions were too difficult; because of open water they were forced to make long detours, and the incidence of screw-ice meant that they had to lift the sledges. Sometimes they struggled for 20 hours without stopping. On the 7th of April they were forced to admit that it was not possible to advance any further towards the north. They were then 86° 14' N, the farthest north any person had reached until then. Their own calculations lead them to believe that they were at position 86° 13.6' N.
We can only imagine what these two men felt when they were forced to abandon the direction of their journey, so near to the very point of the North Pole
The return journey was, if possible, even more dramatic than the expedition northwards. During the first days they pressed themselves hard to advance as far as possible before the ice began to give way to more open water. Once they travelled 36 hours without resting. By the 14th of May they were managing with just two sledges and twelve dogs of the orig¬inal twenty-eight with which they had set out. Each of the two remaining sledges weighed over 250 kilos.

At the beginning of June, they were forced to take longer rests. They were despondent, because they had long expected to see land lying to the south. There were also only six dogs left. In front of them lay long stretches with open water or slushy ice. There was little food left and for several days they had only eaten some gulls which they had been lucky enough to shoot. On the 20th of June they had to use the kayaks, and they lashed the sledges across them. On top of this load sat the two remaining dogs.
It was a hard struggle as each time they had negotiated a stretch of open sea, they had to pull the kayaks up onto the ice, hitch themselves to the sledges and continue skiing or on foot through the slushy ice to the next stretch of open water. Their lives were in peril several times. On the 5th of August Johansen was attacked by a polar bear in an area which was so full of ice hummocks that there was not even enough space for the small tent. They were about to launch the kayaks onto the water, and Nansen stood holding onto his sledge to prevent it from sliding in, when he heard Johansen shout behind him: «Get the gun!» Nansen turned and saw the bear throw itself over Johan¬sen, who fell backwards. Nansen failed to reach the gun at once, as it was lying in the front of the kayak which by now had slipped into the water. He heard Johansen's calm voice politely saying: «You had better hurry, otherwise it will be too late»! Johansen had received a blow on the head from the bear, and even though he had been knocked over he did not faint but lay right between the bear's legs. With both hands he had grabbed the bear's throat and was hanging on fast. The bear that had been momentarily distracted by the dogs strode over Johansen and struck out against the dogs with his huge paw, sending them rolling and howling across the ice. Nansen then shot at close range and killed the bear. Johansen was unhurt, but the bear's claws had grazed his face and white stripes appeared in the layers of grime and grease on his cheeks.
Not until the 15th of August did, they have land beneath their feet. They had reached Franz Josef Land, on the northern tip of the island. It had become late in the year, and they realized it was becoming urgently necessary to prepare to spend the winter here. First, they had to build a shelter for their winter quarters. They hacked away at the surface to make a hollow and then surround¬ed this area with stone walls which they filled as best they could with moss. A long pine-log which had been washed ashore served as the ridge-piece, and over this they laid walrus skin. There were many walruses near the hut, and they shot several to make use of the skins, blubber, and meat. They were also able to shoot several polar bears and seals, which would provide a food reserve during the long polar darkness. They used the skins to make warm clothing and covered the floor of the hut with polar bear skins. To preserve warmth, they refashioned the woolen sleeping bag, so that both could creep into it. Here they remained for most of the day and night while the storm raged in the darkness outside. Water was scarce, and soot from the primitive oil lamps gradually blackened their faces. But the friendship between them was good, and they even had enough strength to make plans for a new expedition after their return to civilization.
It was a long winter in the «den», as they called the stone-hut. There was little to do, they missed having reading matter but amused themselves as best they could with their almanac.
Not until the middle of May was it light enough or spring-like enough for them to leave the hut to make their way towards Spitsbergen. In the beginning it was difficult for them to cover long distances each day. During the long winter there had been little opportunity for exercise and their physical condition was not at its best. Most of the journey southwards was made by kayak. They experienced several dangerous incidents on their way - on one occasion their kayaks floated a long way off while they were on an ice floe, but Nansen succeeded in swimming after them in the cold arctic waters. Without these flimsy vessels they were doomed.


On the 17th of June 1896, quite by coincidence, they came upon members of a British expedition which was on Franz Josef Land. It was a dramatic meeting, which can best be compared to the meeting between Dr. David Livingstone and the Ameri¬can Henry Stanley at Lake Tanganyika in 1871. Nansen and Johansen were received warmly by Frederick G. Jackson, the leader of the British expedition. It was agreed that the two Norwegians should accompany the British expedi¬tion ship to Norway.
Although he did not reach the North Pole, Nansen had traveled further North than anyone on record by that time.
Such a long time had elapsed since the Fram expedition started, that many had begun to believe that the whole expedi¬tion had perished in the ice. There had, of course, been no pos¬sibilities for any form of communication with the outside world since they became locked in the ice.
Just after Nansen and Johansen arrived in Norway in August 1896, the news was received that the Fram too was safe. She had drifted across the Polar Sea towards Spitsbergen, and as soon as the ship had cleared the ice, she set course for Norway. The Fram and her entire crew arrived in Norway only five days after Nansen and Johansen - an utterly amazing coincidence. The members of the Fram expedition were given a hero's welcome in Norway and Fridtjof Nansen became world famous. Letters and telegrams arrived from every corner of the globe. People worshipped this new hero from the icy wastes. Institutions and Societies from many countries had to wait their turn for him to come and give lectures about his experiences.
Fridtjof Nansen published his account of his Arctic adventures across six books. His explorations had resulted in a tremendous wealth of new research and the explorer was considered the leading expert on the polar regions. Over the next 15 years, he would make several other research voyages that produced important current information about the oceans.

5) Nansen the Diplomat and Humanitarian
The experience awakened Nansen's interest in oceanography. In 1908, he founded and led the University of Oslo's Institute of Oceanography and participated in several Arctic expeditions. His scientific contributions were instrumental in establishing the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.
By this time, Nansen had achieved international acclaim. During the negotiations for Norway's separation from Sweden in 1905, Nansen lobbied in London for Norway's independence. After Norway's peaceful secession, he served as its first ambassador to Great Britain (1906-1908).
Simultaneously, Nansen addressed the housing of 1.5 million Russian refugees who had fled the Bolsheviks. Many lacked identification and wandered from country to country, often dying from starvation and typhus in squalid camps. Nansen devised international agreements for refugee documentation, eventually establishing the "Nansen Passports" recognized by fifty-two nations. Through Nansen's tireless efforts, refugees gradually found shelter.
In the summer of 1921, a devastating famine hit Soviet Russia. Appointed the League's High Commissioner for Refugees in June, Nansen appealed to governments to provide aid, setting aside political differences. While the League denied his request for a loan, countries like the United States provided $20 million. Funds raised by governments and aid organizations saved an estimated ten million lives. Nansen also facilitated refugee exchanges during the 1922 Greco-Turkish War.
In recognition of his tireless efforts to assist the vulnerable, Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922. "The Nobel Prize has been given to many different men," wrote a Danish journalist, "but never before to one who in so short a space of time has achieved such outstanding success in the practice of peace." According to Fredrik Stang, the Norwegian Nobel Committee's spokesperson, "What strikes us most about him is his ability to dedicate his entire life to an idea, a thought, and to carry others away with him."
In his Nobel lecture, Nansen outlined the desperate conditions caused by the Great War and hailed the League of Nations as the means to prevent future tragedies. "It is the blind fanaticism on both sides that makes every dispute a matter of conflict and destruction, whereas discussion, understanding and indulgence may lead to a far more fruitful result," he argued. He donated his Nobel funds to refugee aid.
Nansen died in Oslo in 1930 from exhaustion after a ski trip, his funeral taking place on Norway's Independence Day, May 17th. His pioneering spirit, unwavering compassion, and unwavering belief in peace left an enduring legacy in the world.
I strongly recommend reading his book “Farthest North: The incredible 3-year journey to the frozen latitudes of the north (1897). With his amazing writing skills, he takes you on an adventure not experienced by many. “Northwest Passage” written by Roald Amundsen is an interesting study of how polar explorers navigated to frozen lands and spent winters with the indigenous Inuit of northern Canada. We are set to sail the Northwest passage in September 2025 following the path of the failed Franklin expedition from New Found land to the Canadian High arctic near Alaska.
The Fram was the first ship specially built in Norway for polar research. She was used on three important expeditions: with Fridtjof Nansen on a drift over the Arctic Ocean 1893-96, with Otto Sverdrup to the Arctic Archipelago west of Greenland - now the Nunavut region of Canada - 1898-1902, and with Roald Amundsen to Antarctica for his South Pole expedition 1910-12. The Fram is now housed and exhibited in the Fram Museum at Bygdøynes, Oslo.
In March of 2025, my wife and I will board the hybrid ship “Fridtjof Nansen” on my third journey to Antarctica and the sub Antarctic Falklands.
I cannot imagine a world without ice.

Ramdas Iyer( [email protected])
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Sources: The Fram Museum, All that’s interesting ( editor John Kuroski) and writer Gina Dimuro.

Nearly four decades ago my college mate, Rupak Swali used to tell me about his family’s fabled presence in Zanzibar for over 200 years, until the 1940s, as advisors to the Sultans of Oman who ruled this famed 'Spice Island". Despite being Hindus, his family took the name Swali for the Swahili language spoken by the Bantu peoples of east Africa. His amazing ancestral home in India's west coast, Bhuj, is testimony to the trade and wealth amassed by Indian merchants as they followed the trade winds from the State of Gujarat in India’s west coast to the African continent.
Fascination with such tales and my travels across Africa eventually inspired me to write about the African dispersal into the Indian subcontinent, a subject of much scholarship lately. In preparing this article my research on the subject included the works of African and Indian scholars on this subject in order to gain a proper perspective.
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The history of African arrival into India is complex and broad, however, it started with oceanic trade. The Africans came in two separate waves to India. The first wave came from the Abyssinian empire of Aksum between 4th and 8th century mostly as Ethiopian traders, settlers and along with a few who were sold as slaves. They were the old order and were called the Habshis, meaning Abyssinian in Arabic. They were mostly Christian and despite conversions to Islam, many still maintain their original identity. The second wave arrived between the 13th and 18th century mostly extracted from Tanzania and the Somali coast to become soldiers or servants during the Muslim conflicts in India at that time. As North and Central India was invaded by Islamic rulers between the 12th and 19th centuries, they accelerated the import of Africans to India.

Although Africans have been crossing the Indian Ocean for over a millennium, most of those who make up the Afro-Indian population in India came in the past five hundred years. Not all of them were brought as slaves as India's caste-based society provided ample cheap labor for the ruling elite. Some arrivals were fortune hunters, herbalists, musicians, sailors, job seekers, merchants and even conquerors. The largest concentration of Africans was found in the western part of India, particularly in and around port cities facing Africa. It is reported that there were about 40,000 soldiers and 12,000 artisans of African origin in Mughal Delhi alone in the 14th century.
African immigrants, who are locally known as Siddis, presently live in various geographical pockets of India forming their own ethnic enclaves amidst their host societies. A recent chromosomal analysis of a comprehensive group of Siddis from different parts of India indicate a 67-72% Bantu Sub Saharan markers while the balance shows an inherited ancestry of Indian and Portuguese Europeans.

Many agree that the main source of slavery among the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa were the prevalent wars among the various tribal peoples of the African continent. War captives were often enslaved and either retained to work for their new masters or sold to other parts of the world including India. The enslaved Africans were taken across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden to the Arabian Peninsula and then onto the Indian subcontinent. In time, the descendants of Afro-Arabs would become among the leading sailors in the region. Guiding dhows propelled by seasonal winds, these mariners transported and traded a range of commodities, including slave cargo, between Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Gujarati merchants used to trade in Africa, selling Indian commodities and buying in return African raw material that was required in India. The most important item sought by traders was African ivory, but importers faced difficulties transporting from the inaccessible inland Africa to the coast.

It was relatively easier to buy slaves who would carry the ivory from the interior. This also provided an opportunity to earn an additional profit on both the cargo and the carrier after arriving at the coast. As the demand for labor grew in several rising Asian empires, the trade in humans became more lucrative than the trade in ivory or other items. The profit margin of the slave trade increased tenfold in the 19th century.
The profit margin of the female slave trade was more than that of the males. In Islamic India, unlike in the case of the Americas, slaves were mainly needed for domestic labor, as midwives and inside the harems and not for plantation labor, thus creating a greater demand for females.
Despite the dark side of human cargo transport, Africans rose to prominence in an India which was liberal towards assimilation of foreigners. From Gujarat in the west to Bengal in the northeast to the Deccan in central India, the immigrants vigorously asserted themselves in the country of their arrival. As foreigners and Muslims, some of these Africans ruled over indigenous Hindu, Muslim and Jewish populations.
Malik Ambar remains the greatest of the habshis in India. Born in the 1540s into the Oromo tribe in Ethiopia, he was captured and enslaved by the Arabs and eventually sold in India. His buyer in the 1570s was the peshwa or minister of the sultan of Ahmednagar, also a descendent of slaves. Malik Ambar’s capability as a military leader, his diplomatic skills and land-reform policies contributed to his success in keeping the Deccan free of the mighty yoke of Mughal imperial rule. Eventually this slave-soldier would become king in all but title, thwarting the ambitions of such mighty Mughal kings like Akbar and Jahangir for the conquest of Deccan for decades.

East Africans distinguished themselves in India as military commanders, admirals, ministers, and sometimes rulers. Theirs was a story unparalleled anywhere in the rest of the world — that of enslaved Africans attaining the pinnacle of military and political authority not only in a foreign country but also on another continent.

The Siddis have also left an impressive historical and architectural legacy. As rulers, city planners and architects the imposing forts, mosques, mausoleums, and other monuments that they built nearly half a millennium ago still stand as a testimony to their ingenuity and hard work in north and central India. From humble beginnings, some Africans created their own princely states — Janjira and Sachin — complete with their own coats of arms, armies, mints, and stamps. They fiercely defended their principalities from powerful enemies well into the 20th century when, with another 600 princely states, they were integrated into the Indian State.

Most Indian Siddis are Muslim or Christian, while a small number have adopted Hindu practices. With the disappearance of Indian princely states in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Siddis retreated into their own communities and now live in pockets along the coastal states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Goa.
The Siddis of Karnataka primarily moved into the unpopulated forested areas and lived off the land, in a rather impoverished condition. After years of appeals the local government has legitimized them as Scheduled Tribes of India, which helps them obtain governmental assistance.
Other than these two communities, a small community of African descent is also to be found in the city of Hyderabad, descended from guards employed by the erstwhile Nizam of Hyderabad until 1948. They still live in their original but ramshackle regimental buildings of the African Cavalry (AC) which at one time housed over 300 African guards.

In Gujarat where most Siddis live, music remains the enduring link to Africa. Some Gujarati Siddis look upon Malik Ambar as a patron saint of the community. In the Gir National Park, home to the last population of the Asiatic lion, the Siddis are the keepers of the forest while many are guides. This was an accidental development since the Nawabs of the state (land owning nobility) who had employed them as slaves during the 1700s assumed that their African ancestry would make them familiar with managing lions. Due to the popularity of the park, the Siddis have cashed in on their African lineage by creating exotic performances that involve fire breathing, gymnastics and dancing to the beat of the drums. Tourists are regaled by what they see as authentic African dances performed by Africans.

Many Siddis, who now consider themselves as African-Indians, are slowly giving up their unique identity as a result of their adoption of either Indian or Arab identities. This is mainly as a result of assimilating through intermarriage and cultural integration.

Ababu Minda Yimenean, an anthropologist with the Max Planck institute of Social Studies in Germany and an expert in Siddi history writes in his book Dynamics of Ethnic Identity Among the Siddis of Hyderabad :" It is more probable that those young Siddis who emigrated to Middle Eastern countries in search of jobs will identify themselves as Arabs rather than Africans. However, identification with Africa and its people will continue among Siddis who still physically resemble Africans. This endogamous section of the community does not or cannot identify itself as anything other than African.
The End.
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All photos taken from the Web. This is a non profit article to spread knowledge. If there are any objections please write to [email protected].

GALLERY:

On the flight from Calcutta to Jorhat, Assam I was seated next to a very attractive woman with whom conversation ensued following take off and did not stop for nearly two hours of flying. She insisted that I must visit Shibsagar, her beautiful home town sometime during my travels but did not quite explain the significance of that place. I asked my local guide to take me to Shibsagar but other than showing beautiful buildings and architecture the history of the place had still eluded me.
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Upon return to my lodging I quickly combed the internet to do further research on the place. While 2000 words are not enough to highlight an empire, its mere absence in normal conversations outside of Assam was an object of dismay for me. Having a thick veneer of knowledge in Indian History, the chapter of the Ahoms was completely missing from my knowledge base Not knowing its rich history I deeply regretted not spending enough time especially to see the World Heritage Site: The Burial Mounds of the Ahom Kings. I felt the need to tell the story of the Ahoms and used the quiet time provided by the pandemic to present to my blog readers a comprehensive 600 year history of an amazing kingdom: the Ahom Kingdom of the Brahmaputra Valley in North East India.

The ancient kingdom of Kamarupa once covered the present state of Assam. Pragjyaisha, the capital, was located near Guwahati. Kamarupa is mentioned as a frontier kingdom and tributary of the Gupta Empire in the Allahabad inscription of Samudra Gupta (A.D. 330-375). The Kamarupa -Varman empires (350-650 AD) of the great ruler Bhaskaravarman and his contemporary Harshavardhana ranged up to present day Bangladesh, West Bengal and North Bihar. The Chinese traveler Hsuan Tsang( 602-664 AD) visited the capital of Kamarupa and has written about it. He recorded Bhaskaravarman as the King of Eastern India.

The ancient Kingdom of Kamarupa eventually became the Kingdom of Ahom ( 1228-1826) of Assam being physically distant from the center of India it was ruled by tribal kings for many centuries until the early 19th century. The Assamese tribes today numbering over 106 is what makes it a very interesting place with a variety of cultures melded into mainstream Hinduism.
The Kingdom of Ahom remained virtually cut off from the rest of the world for a long time partly because of its geographical location, separated as it was by numerous hills and rivers interspersed by deep valleys, and partly because of the deliberate Ahom policy of isolation. Most of the inhabitants settled along the fertile banks of the Brahmaputra or on the banks of its tributaries. The journey to and from Assam was extremely long and tedious.

To understand the history of the NE of India one must familiarize them with the Caste and Tribe based system that still dominates India. Scholars have argued that during the Aryan settlement in the Indo-Gangetic plains from 1500 BC onwards, the creation of a Hindu state replete with caste system and the usage of the Sanskrit language were considered mainstream. Since Ahom were never in the Sanskritised part of the Indo Aryan people its importance after the Varman Empire was diminished. It was more connected with the hill tribes from north east India, Nagaland, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Yunnan province's non Han Chinese people.


Origins of the Ahom People
The Ahoms were a Tai speaking people came into prominence first in the Yunnan province of China , from where they moved to mainland Southeast Asia in the middle of the 11th century after a long and fierce battle with the Han Chinese. The Tai-Ahoms are traced today to either the Mong Mao Tribe of South China or to the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar.
According to chronicles kept by the Ahoms—Sukaphaa, a Tai prince of Mong Mao, accompanied by his family, five nobles and many followers, mostly men, crossed the Patkai hills and reached the Brahmaputra valley in 1228. They came with a higher technology of wet-rice cultivation then extant and a tradition of writing, record keeping, and state formation. They settled in the region south of the Brahmaputra river and to the east of the Dikho river; the Ahoms today are found concentrated in this region. Sukaphaa, the leader of the Tai group and his 9000 followers established the Ahom kingdom (1228–1826 CE), which controlled much of the Bramhaputra valley until 1826.
Tai-speaking peoples are widely distributed in southern China, mainland Southeast Asia and the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam. For ethnographic and linguistic purposes many subdivisions are recognized, the most important of which are the Chuang in southern China, the Tho, Red Tai, Black Tai and White Tai of northern Vietnam, the Lao, the Siamese or Thai, the Shan of northern Burma, and the Ahom of Assam. The greatest Tai empire to exist till date is that of the Siamese kings of Thailand( Tai Land).
The Ahoms believed that they were divinely ordained to bring fallow land under the plow with their techniques of wet-rice cultivation, and to adopt stateless shifting cultivators into their fold. They were also conscious of their numerical minority. As a result, the Ahom polity initially absorbed Naga, Borahi and Moran, and later large sections of the Chutiya and the Dimasa-Kachari tribal peoples. This process of Ahomisation went on till mid-16th century when the Ahom society itself came under the direct Hindu influence. That many indigenous peoples were ceremonially adopted into Ahom clans are recorded in the chronicles. Since the Ahoms married liberally outside their own exogamous clans and since their own traditional religion resembled the religious practices of the indigenous peoples along with Hindus, the assimilation under Ahomisation had a little impediment.
The Ahom occupy a rather exceptional position amongst the Tai peoples. In the first place, they have remained relatively isolated from other Tai speakers, their contact with Shan (The Burmese Shans can be found in my 'Peoples" album in RamdasIyerphotography.com) and Khamti groups of northwestern Burma being via long, difficult and hazardous trails, and apparently interrupted for centuries at a time.
When the Ahom conquered a small corner of the Brahmaputra Valley at the beginning of the thirteenth century, they probably brought with them their own script, apparently based upon a Mon example. They maintained historical records throughout the centuries, various versions of which have been preserved until today. Although it is possible that the Ahom may have taken note of the Buddhist traditions which were adhered to in some of the regions they must have crossed on their way to Assam, there is little or no evidence that they had been influenced by Buddhism when they entered Assam. Recent research suggests instead that they brought with them their own indigenous sacrificial religion, traces of which can still be found in the modern Hindu Ahom culture of today.( The famous Kali temple of Kamatakiya in Gauhati which I visited sacrifices animals regularly. For many hundreds of years human sacrifice was common here).

Alas the Ahom people found themselves in a different situation from most Tai in that they had discovered a valley of immense size, further to the west of which were mighty kingdoms and elaborate political organizations.
Gradually, step by step, the Ahom extended their grip over the easternmost part of the Brahmaputra Valley, especially at the beginning of the sixteenth century when they conquered the Kachari and Chutiya kingdoms. Later in that century, and during the seventeenth century, the Ahom kings further extended their influence and gradually became masters over the whole of the Assamese valley. This was the time when the gradual "hinduization" of the Ahom upper classes accelerated. The unified country under Ahom rule was soundly defeated by Muslim invaders in 1662, but a few years later the foreign yoke was thrown off and a new, invigorated Ahom rule was born with Shibsagar as its capital.
In the 17th century, the intellectual elite took the sophisticated Bengal culture as the ideal model. From this time onward the Ahom were firmly set on the path towards full assimilation of Assamese Hindu culture and the Ahom tongue became obsolete. Assamese script took over from the old Ahom characters. Only in a few isolated pockets were the old traditions still remembered; amongst the traditional Ahom priestly families the ability to read the old books and the observance of Tai religious ceremonies were perpetuated.


Ahom Religion and Society
The Ahoms worshipped their own tribal gods. However, Brahmanas (one of a class of Hindu sacred writings composed around the 9th to 6th centuries BC and devoted chiefly to the instruction of Brahmins in the performance of Vedic ritual) during the first half of the 17th century achieved a great influence, further giving rise to Hinduism. The rulers started assuming Hindu names since that time. In the reign, the Sib Singh, Hinduism became a predominant religion. However, the Ahom kings did not completely let go of their traditional beliefs to some extent even after adopting Hinduism.
The Ahom society was very sophisticated. Poets and scholars were given land grants. Theatre was encouraged. The Ahom state was completely depended upon forced labor and was forced to work for the state known as paiks. Near about a census of the population was taken and each village was supposed to send a number of paiks in and by rotation.
Majority of the people from the densely populated areas were moved to the thinly populated areas – further leading to the break of the Ahom clans were. However, the administration had become quite centralized by the first half of the 17th century.
The Ahoms society underwent many changes due to a large state being built. The influence of Brahmins increased. The land was given to the temples and Brahmins by the king.

Mughal Incursions & British Rule:
With the successful capture of the Kingdom of Bengal by the Mughals, their eyes were set on the North east of India. The states of Koch and Dhaka were traditional rivals of the Ahom Kingdom were now under the sway of the Mughals. 17 battles were fought between the Ahoms and the Mughals in which the Mughals suffered many defeats due to the tactical guerilla warfare and river battles fought on the Brahmaputra.
These small skirmishes reached the ears of the powerful Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. The Mughal army commanded by Raja Ram Singh I tried to capture the Ahom State but failed miserably at the hands of Gen. Lachit Borphukan ( A source of great pride even today)commanding the army of the Ahom Kingdom. Even though the Mughals could capture Guwahati for a brief period, the Ahom wrested control in the Battle of Itakhuli in 1682 and the Mughals could never recapture it again.
Around 1800 there was a small rebellion against the Ahom King Gaurinath by the Ahom nobles which was eventually quelled with the help of the East India Company. When the company eventually withdrew, there was a lot of infighting within the nobility thus opening the doors for the expansionist King Mindon of Burma.
In 1817, the Burmese took advantage of the rivalry between the Ahom chiefs, invaded Assam, and established political control. The Burmese presence threatened British commercial interests. In the first Burmese War (1824-1826), the British drove the Burmese out of Assam. Under the Treaty of Yandabo, the territory was annexed by the East India Company in 1826.
The year 1826 saw the final collapse of the Ahom monarchy which ruled for over six- centuries and marked the entry of the British who stepped in to fill the political void in the region due to depletion of state funds as a result of the many wars waged. It was the beginning of the transition from the medieval to the modern age. When the East India Company appeared on the scene, they were heralded by the Ahomese as saviors and were welcomed with open arms.

The East India Company desperately needed the gold from Tibet to finance its growing China trade. Hence, an alternative route to Tibet became an urgent necessity. They believed that such a route might be possible via Assam. And the fate of Assam was to be decided by them only. Assam was governed as a part of Bengal by the East India Company till its collapse in 1858. The British (United Kingdom) government administered the state from 1858 until 1947. India achieved independence in 1947 and Assam became a state of the Indian Union.

The End
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References:
History of India-Romila Thapar
"Mission Assam"- Gen. S.K.Sinha
"Ahom and the Study of Tai Cultures"- Barbara& Jan Tewibl, Australian Nat. Univ, Canberra.

PLATES:

Common introduction to the blog series planned:

Papua New Guinea (PNG) has a long history when it comes to human settlement. However, it is still a relatively new nation in the eyes of the modern world. For centuries, PNG was a mystery to the outside world and, even today, there are areas of the country that Western civilization has yet to encroach upon, making PNG one of the most intriguing frontiers of the modern world.

The culture of Papua New Guinea is many-sided and complex. It is estimated that more than 700 different cultural groups exist in Papua New Guinea, and most groups have their own language. Because of this diversity, in which they take pride, many different styles of cultural expression have emerged; each group has created its own expressive forms in art, dance, weaponry, costumes, singing, music, architecture and much more. To unify the nation, the language Tok Pisin, once called Neo-Melanesian (or Pidgin English) has evolved as the lingua franca — the medium through which diverse language groups are able to communicate with one another in Parliament, in the news media, and elsewhere. People typically live in villages or dispersed hamlets which rely on the subsistence farming of yams and taro. The principal livestock in traditional Papua New Guinea is the oceanic pig (Sus papuensis).


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The Sepik River Cultures:

From above, The Sepik River resembles a serpent meandering its way through lush greenery in gentle coils and curves. As one of the World’s greatest river systems and the largest unpolluted freshwater systems in PNG, the Sepik River plays an integral role in the lives of the inhabitants that live along its riverbanks. Come a little closer however, and you will witness the magic of the rich and diverse culture that is knitted along the longest river on the island of New Guinea. Each twist and bend has a story to tell, as The Sepik is the soul of Papua New Guinea (PNG) sustaining life for an abundance of flora and fauna. At 1,126km long, The Sepik is to the Papua New Guineans what the Ganges is to India.
The culture of the people along the Sepik is a reflection of their vast history, and is heavily influenced by their association with the river itself .More than just a river, The Sepik is home to more than 250 languages, woven together by means of trade and cultural interactions. Tribes are defined by ritual, genealogical and cultural knowledge but all shares a common bond in that their lives revolve around The Sepik. They are genuinely surprised to see you as they are scarcely contacted by the outside world and their remarkable lifestyle has remained virtually unscathed for thousands of years. Arguably, one of the most fascinating aspects of The Sepik are the haus tambaran or literally ‘spirit houses’ which you will find for each clan along the river, located at the centre and highest point of the village. This central location serves as a focal point for the villages’ men, where social and ceremonial acts take place. Once upon a time, it was in the haus tambaran where men prepared for war, however today you are more likely to find the men chewing betel-nut while conversing with each other, perhaps over issues regarding their clan or village. The spirit house itself is a very impressive structure with some reaching heights of 25 meters. Inside, carvings of masks, statues and various figures are held with the purpose of being inhabited by the spirits. While each tribe will vary from the next, these intricate carvings usually serve the purpose of either fending off evil spirits or to help people with specific challenges. Many of the carvings perform specific roles in important ceremonies or life stages. As each tribe has its own beliefs and connections to different spirits, the artistic style from one village to the next varies.

During my travels there not too long ago, I was able to observe both with great interest and sadness the waning of this primitive culture in the face of modernity and Christianity. In the words of the great travel writer Pico Iyer "....the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us."
Having seen the Iatmul, Kwome and the Abelam during my trip there, I felt the need to write about my experiences along with the many photographs taken during my stay.

I have included maps of PNG and that of the tribal areas of the Sepik region. The novice reader not familiar with these parts will find it difficult to envisage the relative geographical areas within which they dispersed and have lived over time. Nevertheless, the traveler in me needs to identify those areas for any future travelers to the area.

The Abelam:
Why have I chosen to write about the Abelam? Two things immediately come to mind. First they may well be the world’s most accomplished yam growers, specializing in the display and exchange of “long yams” Two species of yams are commonly grown: waapi, and ka (jaambe). Ka yams are raised for food, but a few varieties of waapi are grown to gigantic size in special gardens tended by Abelam men. These yams, which have great symbolic and ritual significance for the Abelam people, are exchanged in competitions with trade partners from rival groups. Specimens of the premier waapi variety, the maambutap, can attain lengths of ten feet or more.
Secondly, I was quite blown by the ceremonial haus tambaran and their initiation ceremonies. The ceremonial houses of the Abelam people , in the writings of anthropologist Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin of the University of Gottingen, rank as architectural masterpieces. "The impressive buildings, built on a triangular ground plan, often reached heights of up to 30 meters, towering above even the tallest coconut palms. One of their hallmarks was the richly painted façade. They were constructed completely without nails, all elements being held together with the aid of vines and liana ropes. During initiations they became the place of stupendous ritual installations. The novices entered the house through a low, tunnel-like entrance before they were confronted with dramatically staged cult images inside. Following this revelation they were led out through a narrow exit at the back on to small, hidden ceremonial ground where they remained in seclusion for several weeks".
In my time spent along the Sepik, I spent more time on the river than on the mountainous hinterland where the Abelam moved to avoid wars with the more powerful Iatmul, a few hundred years ago. From fish eaters they became Yam cultivators.

A recent blog by Steve golan shares many of my sentiments;'As we delve deeper into the unknown we lose ourselves. Every kilometre, every hour everything changes. What were once paved roads become bumpy dirt tracks, manicured forests grow wild like a scene from the prehistoric era. Even the looks the locals give us when they notice a truck full of foreigners driving into the unknown are unnerving. Papua New Guinea’s Sepik region is not for the faint of heart, it is a raw, lawless, tribal land that explorers dream of. As the jungle gets thicker, and the sun begins to set you can almost hear the beat of the tribal drums along the Sepik River. Welcome to Papua New Guinea and the Sepik River."

The Abelam people” today number around 250,000. Their traditional territory extends from the grass plains of the Sepik River to the foothills of the Prince Alexander Mountains in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. According to the 2000 census, over half of the people are below the age of 25. There are three distinct dialects of the Abelam; language, kamukundi, mamukundi and samukundi, but the language actually varies from village to village. The Abelam people” today number around 250,000. Their traditional territory extends from the grass plains of the Sepik River to the foothills of the Prince Alexander Mountains in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. According to the 2000 census, over half of the people are below the age of 25. There are three distinct dialects of the Abelam language, kamukundi, mamukundi and samukundi, but the language actually varies from village to village.

In my time spent along the Sepik, I spent more time on the river than on the mountainous hinterland where the Abelam moved to avoid wars with the more powerful Iatmul, a few hundred years ago. From fish eaters they became Yam cultivators and their ultimate unique identity.
The administrative center of Abelam territory is Maprik, roughly 30 feet above sea-level and about 70 km inland from Wewak, the coastal provincial headquarters which is where the airport is located.

I was given a complete tour of the ceremonial house along with an elaborate performance by all the elders of Maprik Abelam community, who are trying to instill in their youth the value of the spirit house culture.


Arts: Abelam art is rich, with the emphasis on painting. Paint is seen as a magical substance that gives life to a piece of wood (carving). Only then do the figures become powerful and active. Paint is a metaphor for a magical substance used in sorcery, which in this case is not life-giving but life-taking. Throughout Abelam territory different art styles can be recognized, although there are also many commonalities. Since it was my last part of my Sepik visit and it was late in the day I had no time to visit the area to collect artifacts.

Money: Many things for an adventurer came true in PNG. It is the first time I have seen shell money used for local transactions. I myself bought and used shell money to buy warm beer in a coastal village. While not a major tender, shell money is recognized within villages for small transactions.

The Abelam, since moving inland primarily use rings (yua) fashioned from the hard, marble-like shell of the giant clam. They were, and to some extent remain, the primary form of wealth among the Abelam people. Ceremonial valuables, yua were displayed or exchanged as part of most major rituals and rites of passage. At birth, a ring is presented to the child’s maternal uncle, who later will help guide him through the complex male initiation all offerings to their spirits Ngwalandu, is made with shell discs ( You can see in my photographs where the large statues are worshipped)
At marriage, the groom presents yua to the bride’s parents, the number he is able to give becoming a lifelong source of pride. At death, gifts of yua to maternal relatives help ease the passage of the spirit to the afterlife. Shell rings also play an integral role in ceremonial life. They are displayed during male initiation, the dedication of men's ceremonial houses, and other occasions, as symbols of the strength and wealth of the community. The rings are so prized that a man, wishing to emphasize another man’s status or his affection for him, will address him as wuna yua (my ring).

Religious Beliefs. Ceremonial houses (korambo) and Ceremonial grounds (amei) are the focus of most rituals connected with the life-cycle events for men and women. For girl parts of the first-menstruation ritual as well as the presentation of shell rings as marriage payments take place in front of the korambo. During the death ritual, the corpse is left there for one night. The korambo is also important for its mere presence and does not really serve as a meeting place. It is mainly for housing those spirits ( ngwalndu ) who visit the living temporarily before going back to another world. In a ceremonial building the huge carved ngwalndu figures may be stored until they are used for an initiation. The large painted facade of a korambo is visually dominated by big faces associated with ngwalndu spirits. The soul of a man is thought to live after death with an ngwalndu.
Ceremonies. Initiations of boys and men into the secrets of Abelam religion are divided into many stages, the first taking place when the boy is 5 or 6 years old, the last between 30 and 50. In each initiation boys are acquainted with one category of spiritual beings. This begins at an early age with the least important, and as adults they learn, after they have seen ngwalndu, the last secret beyond which there is only a boundless void.
Important parts of initiation ceremonies take place in the ceremonial house where artists arrange elaborate compositions of carved, painted, or plaited figures, decorated with shell rings, feathers, flowers, and leaves. No explanation is given to the initiates. The aim of these rituals is to show them the secrets rather than to verbalize a meaning. For each display of artifacts in a ceremonial house there is an associated dance. In these dances men are painted and decorated all over—thus they are transformed into beings from another world.

Death and Afterlife. There is almost no "natural" death recognized, apart from those old people who had been sitting already for a long time "at the ashes of a fire." All other deaths are attributed to magic and sorcery mostly performed in other villages. Symbols of people's life souls are kept in specialized villages. As soon as a lethal illness is suspected these are checked in order to find the cause and origin of the Sorcery performed. After death the corpse is displayed in front of the haus tambaran.

This belief in sorcery still pervades the entire island. Everyone's illnesses are attributed to their rivals doing, through sorcery. So the next act in the cycle of revenge is violence through murder. This cycle of revenge killings progresses into a tribal warfare with rampant killing and maiming until both parties are satisfied.

As a result of the endless cycle of wars, war art; weopanry, make-up and dances have had a major cultural impact. Today such wars are limited but the violence continues with guns and modern weaponry. It is unfortunately a land of violence with many troubled spots and many tenuous journeys for travelers.

Contact between Abelam and Europeans began in the 1920s and 30s, but it was not until after WWII, in the 1960s, that colonialism began to have a considerable impact on Abelam culture. Government influence increased, and Christian churches, including the Roman Catholics, AOG (Assemblies of God) and SDA (Seventh-day Adventist), began to attract converts. The 1970s-80s also saw an increase in business and commerce with the Maprik District becoming one of the country’s largest rice producing centers. Conversion to Christianity increased dramatically during the 1980s, and traditional culture went into a decline. One of the purposes of this article is to increase knowledge and understanding of traditional Abelam culture and beliefs.

References:
Ramdas iyer [email protected]
How to protect oneself from travel calamities(CLICK HERE)

Ramdasiyerphotography. com
Richard Scaglion-UCIS Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.
Brigitta Hauser-Schaublin- University of Gottingen- Architecture of Abelam
http://www.gudmundurfridriksson.com- Blogs
Brittanica Encylopedia
Sketches by Mac Ruff-Anthopologist

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My quest to seek ancient cultures and its people has become more difficult since globalization took root these past two decades. What made ancient tribes and communities very special; their myths, traditions, rituals, garb and house building techniques are fast disappearing. The yeoman's effort of anthropologists to preserve some of the hundreds of tongues that are becoming extinct every day, music and verbal traditions have been praiseworthy.
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The Babongo “Forest people,” or Pygmies, inhabit the rainforest of Gabon in West Africa and have an estimated population of around twelve thousand people. The landscape embedding the Babongo villages is characterized by dense tropical rainforest intersected by large river courses, rugged terrain and by hot and humid climate. Access to the villages requires the crossing of the broad Ngounié River by pirogue or embarking on the local ferry which is occasionally out of order. Once on the other side, when transport is available we followed logging roads, crossing numerous precarious wooden bridges. The access road has been carved through the forest canopy by an Asian logging company operating in the area and is maintained only where passage of logging trucks is needed. At the river crossing the watercourse represents the physical divide between forest-dependent, hunter-gatherer communities and the cash economy led “modern” world. After crossing the river communication is cut back to the minimum - phone, radio and TV signals get weaker the deeper one ventures into the jungle. Soon, the only “connection” rest with the sounds and smells of the forest occasionally fended by roaring logging engines. Babongo people have been occupying these areas for centuries, although migrations occurred during colonial times.
It was late in the day when after 10 hours driving through muddy logging roads, dangerously weak bridges built hastily over fast waters, we were approaching some pygmy settlements deep inside the Waka Forest, a 26000 Sq.KM rain forest turned into a National Park in the 90's. Marcel Bombe a Pygmy leader who escorted me along with Antonio Anoro of Gabon Untouched my tour leader and friend, Paul Mbombe a Bantu Bwiti Shaman, and I stopped in front of the tallest and largest tree we had seen that day in utter amazement. Paul and Marcel immediately proceeded to approach the mighty tree( Moutambi-the unsurpassed one) to pray to their god Komba, the supreme creator of everything. Added, they also invoked Jengi, the spirit of the forest. I joined them in their reverence to a great tree which is not too different from our own Hindu worship of Banyan, Peepal and need trees.As we looked up at the canopy, a large Blue Morpho (morpho pelides) butterfly circled above our heads. Paul mumbled to me that this was a forest spirit and would choose to sit on his lips shortly. Lo and behold within a few seconds the butterfly chose to sit on Paul's lips for a while and eventually flew away. The spirituality of this moment can be questionable to some but the event was nevertheless real. I was utterly shocked by this event which well documented by Antonio who was having fun with the camera whilst we were praying. Marcel was moved by that event and bestowed on me the pygmy name Moutambi, which is how everyone addresses me till this date in Gabon.

Getting here was not easy. Heavy rains, much to my dismay had stopped us from visiting another settlement at a different location, which was more remote requiring porters and an 8 hour uphill trek. Antonio reached out to his friend the great Tatayo, master of Iboga medicine in Libreville. Tatayo dispatched Marcel Bombe, chief delegate of all indigenous people (pygmies) in Gabon, Congo and Cameroon to come to our rescue. Marcel, a very small, slight fellow with sparkling eyes traveled for 10 hours, using buses and share taxis to reach us in our lodge located on the banks of the Ngonie river in Fugamou, where we waited patiently. In the course of waiting for him we called for a taxi to take us to dinner to a 'western "restaurant. The taxi that arrived was a late model SUV much to our surprise. The driver a well groomed and well spoken personality joined us for 'Pizza" a southern European mainstay poorly attempted in central Gabon. Paul Mbombe is a well built Bantu shaman and fearless. His father was a government functionary who was assassinated in a purge by the dictatorship of Gabon a decade ago. He asked the taxi driver if he was spying on us on behalf of the secret police.The driver replied that they are aware of a Spaniard, American and Gabonese checking into the local hotel and the hotel personnel were instructed to keep tabs on us and yes he was indeed assigned to us. The conversation eventually turned cordial, yet the policeman asked us to visit the precinct the next day to register since we were going into territory not quite policed. In the interim Marcel arrived from Libreville tired yet eager to escort us the next morning. He set about organizing a Toyota pickup that would take us into the forest along with Bantu businessmen who traded with the pygmies.

Like in most of Central Africa, indigenous peoples, the so-called ‘Pygmies’ are often treated as second-class citizens. Few have birth certificates or identity cards; they lack access to education or healthcare and are frequently subject to exploitation and mishandling when exposed to the “outside world”. Like other indigenous peoples scattered across the Congo Basin, the Babongo have a unique and rich knowledge of the natural resources on which they depend. The practice of Bwiti rituals and the use of Iboga, a powerful hallucinogenic root bark, lie at the heart of Babongo culture, and make members of the tribe renowned for their spiritual and healing powers. The Babongo are surrounded by Bantu people, some of whom regard the first peoples as little better than animals. Babongo people are generally independent of formal authority and they keep their own traditions and decision-making structures. The Babongo have a powerful reputation as sorcerers, and inspire awe in the Bantu neighbors for their knowledge of the forest and of the Ibogha - the sacred plant central to their beliefs and rituals. Exposed to outside forces and authorities, the Babongo are struggling to retain their identity and traditional institutions. When living in the jungle, their hunting skills and knowledge of fauna and flora are unmatched. When exposed to the cash economy or drawn outside the forest, the Babongo risk losing not only their most valuable skills but also their own sense of history, culture and identity (BBC, 2008). The Babongo are hunter-gatherers and live substantially off wild resources in the forest. They usually hunt using wire traps, nets, bows and arrows or guns, often loaned from Bantu neighbors in return for a portion of the valuable bush meat they catch. Men also fish and gather honey from wild bees. Since some years, because of the unsuccessful policy to settle them engaged by mostly all the states in the region, Babongo Women people sometimes grow banana, maize, manioc, peanuts and sweet potatoes on small slash and burn patches. Children catch crabs and freshwater prawns. At the time of our visit the elephants had wreaked havoc on their manioc plants.

The earliest known reference to a Pygmy—a "dancing dwarf of the god from the land of spirits"—is found in a letter written around 2276 B.C. by Pharaoh Pepi II to the leader of an Egyptian trade expedition up the Nile. In the Iliad, Homer invoked mythical warfare between Pygmies and a flock of cranes to describe the intensity of a charge by the Trojan army. In the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a Persian explorer who saw "dwarfish people, who used clothing made from the palm tree" at a spot along the West African coast.
More than two millennia passed before the French-American explorer Paul du Chaillu published the first modern account of Pygmies. "Their eyes had an untamable wildness about them that struck me as very remarkable," he wrote in 1867. In In Darkest Africa, published in 1890, the explorer Henry Stanley wrote of meeting a Pygmy couple ("In him was a mimicked dignity, as of Adam; in her the womanliness of a miniature Eve"). In 1904, several Pygmies were brought to live in the anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair. Two years later, a Congo Pygmy named Ota Benga was housed temporarily at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City—and then exhibited, briefly and controversially, at the Bronx Zoo.

There is no one Babongo language, but three. In the central regions variations of Tsogho are spoken, in the South East it is the same but with Teke and Kaning’i as the starting languages. Interpretations of these vary between groups dependent on historical and cultural differences such as contact with Bantu speaking neighbors. Only a very few speak broken French. As a result we had a Bantu and pygmy in our group to be able to communicate and exchange ideas. Pygmy to Bantu to French to English

As far as it is possible to tell the Babongo have always been hunter gatherers living in bands of up to twenty people, a situation suiting a traditionally nomadic lifestyle in a bio-diverse environment. Some Babongo are famed for using nets in their hunting activities, snaring bush meat to complement the plant stuffs provided by Babongo women and their knowledge of rain forest flora. The Babongo have historically traded with Bantu farmers exchanging forest goods such as honey and meat for metal tools and guns to aid them in their hunting. Though in some respects this relationships has proved advantageous for the Babongo it has also left them open to exploitation at the hands of the Bantu as a recent UNICEF report shows.

The Bantu often do not share the Babongo’s view of themselves as the first people of the earth, yet they are often fearful of them. The Babongo are renowned sorcerers and boast a vibrant animistic tradition called ‘Bwiti’ which centres around the use of the psychedelic Iboga plant which some Bwiti experts believe to be the tree of knowledge. According to the Babongo, Iboga can facilitate soothsaying, healing, and communion with the dead by liberating the soul of the body for a time.
Our journey was getting fraught with serious problems. Many of the bridges, seven in total, did not have wooden slats to make river crossings. We scampered for lumber often substituting with ones in front of us for use in the rear. At that moment I had given up all hopes of moving ahead, especially with the thought of our pickup truck plunging into the river. The 5 pygmy passengers who had hailed us along the way immediately got to work collecting logs for our move forward leaving me holding my heart in my hand.( see video link).
Driving through thick vegetation I realized that it will not be too long before the vegetation completely swallows this ever narrowing road. Out of nowhere I could see children rushing from a far away village towards the car. The sound of our vehicle had given this quiet corner some excitement about the arrival of strangers. Suddenly we were surrounded by two dozen adults and children looking at us with large eyes. The young children became extremely shy as I emerged from the vehicle and actually started looking down trying to avoid my eyes.They were delighted to see us and I was ecstatic to finally meet the pygmies in their heartland.
A fact not lost to us was the knowledge that that this was also Marcel Bombe's home village from which he had left as a child to the city. His mud house consisting of three rooms was made available to us during our stay. Since we arrived in darkness, I could not quite understand the layout of the village. Other than our headlamps the only other source of light was a powerful tree resin used by the locals to illuminate the darkness that surrounded us.
As we settled down the villagers arrived to come and watch us go about our ways like a movie that was playing in front of them. The chief welcomed us and helped unload all our supplies and the many gifts that we had come to exchange with them. Congyani, our neighbor and a very determined and aggressive lady was assigned the role of caretaker. She washed vessels, brought water and prepared our meager meals. The chief asked us not to leave our area for the evening since the village was having a ceremony in the communal hut. It is a well known fact that pygmies keep their rituals secretive and only show the outside world a decoy version of the real thing. Later that night a series of chimpanzee hoots and shrills were made by the villagers which penetrated the quiet darkness of this mountain village. Upon investigation I was told that they were gathered in a ceremony involving the spirits of wisdom from the chimpanzees. The chimpanzee howls were so amazing that when I came home I read up on the evolution of the communication sounds of the pygmies.They were one of the progenerators of spoken languages as we use them today
"When hunters are getting themselves fired up for the Duiker hunt. They clap and do a call-and-response type of chant. Louis Sarno, an American who has been living with the Pygmies for more than 25 years, explains: “It’s a hunting song that calls out to the forest spirits asking for success, although the song is more about the musical rhythm than the actual words.”
The night passed with hundreds of cockroaches and an occasional rodent scurrying on the floor. Being tired, I quietly closed my eyes, quite horrified but yet managed to get some sleep in an unpleasant surrounding. Not a fan of extreme darkness, I had brought with me battery operated bulbs that hangs with a carabiner that kept burning all night. This kept the creepy crawlers on their defensive!.
The village was a large clearing in the middle of the forest. I suppose this village must be in existence for at least 20 years, it was clean and unpolluted except for their waste lagoon that ultimately melds with the rainwater. With over twenty homes I expected the population to be under 100 while another nearby village constituted another 20 homes. Walking past each family and meeting members of their families took up most of the morning.These villages were set up during colonial times when pygmies were 'encouraged' to set up settlements near logging roads.


A formal meeting was arranged with the villagers regarding the purpose of our visit. As an exploited people the villagers were always on alert often demanding exorbitant 'gifts' in return for access to their village , their rituals and dances. All the men and women were gathered along with my contingent of Antonio, Marcel and Paul. With drama and fanfare our pygmy friend Marcel Mombe introduced me to the gathering." Our fathers were pygmies, our fore fathers are pygmies and we are now the proud Babongo. Among us is a visitor who has crossed two oceans, several rivers and forests to come to visit us. He must be a pygmy too since the universe was begun by pygmies. Let us show our hospitality to him. We have brought gifts for all to show our gratitude.....'.
Outside the hut were two strong men carrying two basket loads of gifts, almost worth $300, one for the men folk and other for the women. An equality system that had been established by the forest dwellers long before the west thought that it may be a necessity.
Each basket contained two 5 liter bottles of palm wine, three bottles of Pernod Pastis( Anise liqueur), 12 packs of soda and beer, two cases of cigarettes, match boxes, cooking oil, rice, sugar and candy for the children. Thereafter Congyani, the leader of the women's contingent expressed her dissatisfaction at the gifts offered. Knowing this is the normal course of negotiation, a bucket was brought in, another bottle of palm wine emptied into it and served to the women, who then excitedly started lighting up cigarettes and began warming up to our gestures of reconciliation.
The men had two factions, one reasonable and the other with a completely out of control leader. He mentioned that BBC was there a few months ago and gave them a lot of money and what we have brought in those baskets was an insult. Again the negotiations went back and forth with Paul using his Bantu skills and position explaining to them that the BBC is a rich organization whereas M0utambi( myself), here was acting on his own capabilities. He went on to describe a large hunt versus a small hunt as an analogy. Yearning to lay their hands on the alcohol the men agreed reluctantly .A few CFAs( Central African Francs) exchanged hands that amounted to a few dollars.
Within a matter of two hours the whole village including anyone over 12 years of age were drunk and happy. The women started getting dressed and for two hours gave us an amazing performance of drum and dance. It was expected that the men would do the same after dusk but they conducted a very interesting ceremony with initiated boys performing a ceremony for us. The men still held back and agreed to perform late in the night. These initiated performers who also take the iboga root as a trance inducer can dance all night but nothing in reality happened; the recalcitrant faction did not put out. Around midnight Paul Mbombe an Nganga master gathered the willing and we had music, storytelling and Bwiti dancing all night but with less fanfare. Sleep was scarce that night.


With rain clouds looming, we decided to get out of there lest we get stuck in the forested gauntlet that we had to cross, especially those scary bridges. The send off was very warm especially with all the villagers coming to say goodbye.
On reflecting on my trip the following thoughts came to my mind. If this were 100 years ago, entering their realm and disturbing their quiet life of oneness with nature would have been a gross violation. But today with resettlement, commercial mixing with Bantu villages and the need for modern produces of convenience our trip should have been one that they should have accepted wholeheartedly, especially given that we were encouraging them to practice their culture which has been on the wane. Instead they behaved like spoiled children with ridiculous demands, with the ones with access to the outside world acting as adults on their behalf. It was sad to see their plight. Their land was being deforested steadily, they had no access to schools or health care, while alcoholism was not common they imbibed it with no constraints.
Commercial logging is rapidly depleting Gabon’s rain forest with thirty percent already cleared. As a result of the vast roads bulldozed through the forest many Babongo have experienced the traditionally damaging effects of contact with the outside world, disease, violence and 'governmentality'. Mortality rates have risen as the result of deforestation whilst the governmental contribution has been to begin a resettlement program to move the Babongo to villages beside the roads flayed from the forest. Here, considered as the backward remnant of Gabonese society, the Babongo suffer discrimination in the form of pitiful levels of access to healthcare and education. In socio-economic and political spheres, the Babongo people are not seen as equal to the Bantu villagers. They rely on the farmers for trade opportunities. They exchange some of their primary goods (fruits, wild nuts, medicinal plants etc.) for money and industrial goods. The farmers are the Babongo's only connection to the Gabonese bureaucracies. Because of this, they often work as indentured servants to the farmers.

Gabon covers an area of approximately 26.7 million hectares and maintains some of the largest remaining rain forest in West Africa. Although the actual extent of forest cover is unknown, experts estimate between 17-22 million hectares, or 85% of the total land mass (Christy et al 2003). Indigenous hunter-gatherer communities (known variously as the Baka, Bakoya, Bagama, Babongo, Akoa, etc.) are located throughout Gabon, and include numerous ethnic groups separated by locality, language and culture. According to the most recent census (Massandé 2005), the Pygmy populations number as many as 20,005 out of a total national population of approximately 1,400,000 (previous estimates 7,000-10,000).

Despite the threat of assimilation there are hopes that the Babongo have a brighter future than the negative developments of recent years may suggest. Logging is being rapidly restricted as national parks are established across the country to encourage eco-tourism. Efforts are being made to enable the Babongo to take their future into their own hands given this potentially beneficial transition. One way in which this is being attempted is through the innovative grassroots use of Participatory mapping technologies which have allowed some Babongo groups to commune and mark out their traditional territories, safe guarding them for future generations.

The End
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contact info: [email protected]
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Sources:
Smithsonian Magazine: Pygmies Plight By Paul Raffaele, DEC 2008
National Geographic/ BBC
Gabon Untouched NGO: Antonio Anoro

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