An explorer from medieval China may have visited an island off the coast of Kenya, archaeologists say.
A joint expedition by The Field Museum and the University of Illinois at Chicago unearthed a 15th-century Chinese coin on the Kenyan island of Manda, according to a Field Museum press release. Starting around 200 A.D., Manda was a trading hub and home to an advanced civilization.
The coin, shown here, is an alloy of copper and silver and was issued by the Ming Emperor Yongle, who reigned from 1403-1425 A.D. The coin bears the emperor’s name.
Emperor Yongle sent Admiral Zheng He, also known as Cheng Ho, on an epic mission of exploration to find new trading partners. He traveled around the coasts of south and southeast Asia, east Africa as far north as Somalia, and the Arabian Peninsula.
“Zheng He was, in many ways, the Christopher Columbus of China,” said Dr. Kusimba, curator of African Anthropology at The Field Museum. “This finding is significant. We know Africa has always been connected to the rest of the world, but this coin opens a discussion about the relationship between China and Indian Ocean nations.”
Sadly, later Chinese rulers took a more insular policy and banned foreign expeditions. If they had continued Yongle’s work, the great Age of Exploration may have been more Chinese than European. Manda was mysteriously abandoned around 1430, shortly after Emperor Yongle’s death.
Chinese contact with east Africa has become a hot topic of research in recent years. Back in 2010, we reported that a DNA study found genetic links between China and Africa.
While the focus has been on Kenya, researchers might want to take a look at the city of Harar in Ethiopia, which has been a trading center for centuries. Some Hararis have vaguely Chinese features, and Harari coins have been found in China. When I was doing research there some Hararis told me that the city used to trade with China many centuries ago.
If you lived in London in 1348-50, you’d hear that call a lot. All of Europe was swept with the Black Death, a virulent plague that killed an estimated one-third of the population. London, like other congested urban areas, got hit hard.
Now archaeologists working in London have uncovered a mass grave of Black Death victims, a Crossrail press release reports. Digging ahead of the planned London Crossrail transportation project, the team discovered a mass grave of 13 bodies at Charterhouse Square, an area known as a burial ground during the plague. Pottery from the mid-14th century found at the site helps confirm the identification.
The bodies were laid out neatly in rows, hinting that the burial ground was from the early stages of the Black Death. When the plague was going full force, bodies were simply dumped into giant pits.
Now archaeologists are examining the bones to learn more about how the people lived, including diet, physical health and work-related wear and tear on the body. They also hope to find surviving DNA from the plague to give scientists a better idea of how it developed. Researchers stress that the plague bacteria cannot live for long in the soil and the excavation poses no health risk.
This is only the latest in a series of finds by the Crossrail workers. Earlier we reported on their discovery of a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age trackway. The Crossrail project is a high-speed train system that will link 37 stations along 73 miles of track through London. It’s due to open in 2018.
Sadly, the 14th century plague was only the first wave of a persistent contagion. The Black Death returned to London several times, the worst being in 1665-6, when it killed 100,000 Londoners.
The first time I ever saw a bidet, I peed in it. I was young; I wasn’t very well traveled, and, well, the porcelain bathroom apparatus for washing one’s nether-regions found in many European hotels and homes looked like a toilet. That was in Florence. And it was also on that trip when I first learned about gnocchi (which I’d grossly mispronounced). And since then I’ve had a bit of a torrid culinary romance with the dumpling.
I order it in restaurants, where, if made right, is pillow soft. I buy them in supermarkets – at least when I can find them. Just last week, I was wandering around a big chain supermarket in Los Angeles unable to find my favorite dumpling. When I uttered the word “gnocchi” to an employee, she just stared back at me. After the third supermarket employee asked me “what’s a gnocchi?” I gave up.Gnocchi, for the uninitiated (listen up, LA supermarket employees) are little Italian dumplings. They’re usually made with potatoes but sometimes restaurants serve gnocchi – pronounced nyo-kee – made with ricotta. If you’re in Rome and obeying the traditional day-of-the-week eating agenda, Thursday is gnocchi day and that means many restaurants will offer it as a special. The word itself, which is in the plural, could mean “lumps,” but others have argued it comes from the word “nocchio,” which is a knot in wood, or possibly “nocco,” meaning “knuckle.” The origins of gnocchi are even less clear – though most culinary historians say that gnocchi was absorbed into the Roman Empire’s culinary traditions via conquest, likely from the Middle East.
This is an intriguing example of proto globalization. An ingredient or dish that is inextricably tied to a certain culture did not originate in that culture. Knowing this, it was all the more fitting that when some friends and I had a gnocchi-making competition, I did something radical. Anna Watson Carl, food writer and chef, I feared, was going to easily win. I had to do something crazy. I didn’t make straight-up gnocchi, which is sometimes served with pesto or a tomato-based ragu or a brown-sage butter sauce. I made kimchi gnocchi, which I’d named Gnocchi3000. True to the dumpling’s murky origins, I was re-appropriating it for another culture. This time it was getting fused between Italy and Korea. And it was simple enough to do: I infused kimchi spices, of which I’d procured at a supermarket in New York’s Korea Town, into a traditional batch of potato gnocchi. Then I made a brown sage butter (I opted for goat butter) and topped it all off with pancetta and pieces of kimchi.
The other contestants besides Anna were food and travel writer Jessica Colley and Time Magazine photo editor Natalie Matutschovsky. Travel writer and historian Tony Perrottet was meant to compete but instead he just came to eat. The other competitors cooked the more traditional variety. I didn’t get a chance to try everyone’s because I was cooking. But I re-call there was butternut squash gnocchi with a brown sage butter; there was also potato gnocchi with a tangy ragu. They were all delicious and we had no idea which way the judges – in this case Savuer senior editor Gabriella Gershenson and Bon Appetit digital editor (and author of the new book, “The Turk Who Loved Apples“) Matt Gross – were going to go.
In the end, they said it was, indeed, a tough decision but they went with the one that, in their words, they “just wanted to keep on eating.” And it was mine. I have to admit, I didn’t see this coming but I’ll take it.
It’s unlikely on my next trip to Italy, I’ll see kimchi gnocchi on any restaurant menus. Just a lot of traditional ways of preparing the dish, which is fine with me.
As for any bidets I may encounter, I’ll gladly leave them be.
The famous Cyrus Cylinder, a baked clay tablet from the 6th century B.C. that’s often called the “first bill of rights,” has made its U.S. debut at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C.
The Cyrus Cylinder was deposited in the foundations of a building in Babylon during the reign of the Persian king Cyrus the Great. It commemorates his conquest of Babylon and announces religious freedom for the people displaced by the Babylonian king Nabonidus. Among them were the Jews, who had been in captivity in Babylon. Many Jews soon returned to Jerusalem and built the Second Temple.
While Cyrus’ announcement and inscription isn’t unique for that time, the cylinder became instantly famous upon its discovery in 1879 because of its connection to events that are mentioned in the Bible. Ever since, Cyrus has been considered the model of a just king ruling over a diverse empire.
It’s the centerpiece of a new exhibition titled “The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: A New Beginning,” which examines the religious, cultural and linguistic traditions of the vast and powerful Achaemenid Empire (539–331 B.C.) founded by Cyrus the Great.
The exhibition runs until April 28. After the Smithsonian, the Cyrus Cylinder will tour the U.S., stopping at Houston, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. You can see the full details of the schedule here.
As a longtime Chicago resident, I’ve walked or driven past the Nickerson Mansion on Erie Street hundreds of times. But I never thought about going inside the place, which is now the Richard Driehaus Museum, until I read all the rave reviews of it on Trip Advisor. I had no idea that we had one of the country’s finest Gilded Age mansions and resolved to see the place for myself.
It’s easy to overlook historic sites in your hometown as you get caught in a routine, but every time I return home from a trip and feel a little sick about being home, I make a point of putting on my tourist cap and doing something I’ve never done before. On my first weekend back in Chicago after a glorious trip to warm and sunny Central America, I piled in the car with my wife and two little boys on a typically gloomy, cold March day to check out the Driehaus Museum.
%Gallery-181310% The moment you step foot in this opulent place and feast your eyes on the main hall, with its decadently ornate grand staircase and dimly lit foyer, you are transported to Gilded Age Chicago, when this was the finest home in the city. If you want to see how the super rich lived in 19th Century America, look no further than the Nickerson mansion, which was called the Marble Palace in its heyday.
The mansion was built between 1879-1883 for Samuel Mayo Nickerson, (see photo) a self made millionaire who made his fortune distilling alcohol during the Civil War when it was used for explosives thanks to a shortage of gunpowder. Samantha, our tour guide, told us that the Nickersons original home on the site burned down in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The family lived in hotels for most of the next dozen years and as they constructed their new dream home, using mostly skilled German-American craftsman, they used 17 types of marble in a bid to make the place the city’s first fireproof house.
Built at a cost of $450,000 and located in the neighborhood that was then called McCormickville, it was the city’s largest and most expensive home. (The Potter Palmer house, which was destroyed in 1950, later eclipsed it in terms of square footage). The three-story, 25,000 square foot mansion is filled with period antiques that belong to Richard Driehaus, the financier and philanthropist who bought the house in 2003 and spent five years refurbishing it before opening it as a “gift to the city” part time in 2008.
Driehaus, whose capital management company is headquartered in two stunning mansions diagonally across the street from the museum, is a showman who reportedly rode into his 65th birthday party on top of an elephant. According to Chicago magazine, he has one of the largest collection of rare Tiffany objects in the country, and many of his lamps, chandeliers and tabletop pieces are on display in the mansion.
Every room in the house has something of interest and even the quarters for the Nickerson’s 11 servants are noteworthy, but for me, the real jaw dropper is the art gallery, which has a stunningly opulent, domed stained glass ceiling and sculptures one would expect to find in a fine art gallery in Florence. Samantha told us that the Nickersons were keen travelers and on one of their trips to Spain they developed an appreciation for Moorish architecture, and you can see that influence in the house’s smoking room (see photo above) and in Mrs. Nickerson’s sitting room.
The house’s only relatively plain rooms in the house are the women’s bedrooms and this is by design because, at the time, men thought that if women had overly decorative bedrooms, they would be overstimulated and have nightmares. And even the bathroom near the
entrance has something you’ll want to photograph: a very cool reproduction of an original Thomas Crapper toilet.
We learned that despite the house’s grandeur, its value steadily declined in the years after it was built while Nickerson expanded his business empire, which included ownership of a dozen local banks. In 1900, the Nickersons decided to move back to Mr. Nickerson’s native Massachusetts (his family came over on the Mayflower, but he made his own money) and they sold the house to Lucius Fisher, a paper-bag manufacturer for just $75,000. In 1919, his heirs decided to sell it, but by that point the neighborhood was more commercial than residential and it took a collection of 30 prominent Chicago families who pooled their resources to buy it, in order to save it from demolition.
The preservationists donated the property to the American College of Surgeons, who used it as their headquarters until 1965 and then leased it out to various tenants, including the R. H. Love Art Gallery, which occupied the house until Driehaus bought it in 2003. He first visited the gallery in the 90’s, intending to buy a bust of Abraham Lincoln and became interested in the place. He never bought the bust, but eventually bought the whole place and refurbished it, restoring the mansion’s iconic stained glass dome and cleaning the exterior the building.
Five years after it opened on an appointment-only basis, the place is now open full time and it can also be rented out for occasions. They also have a host of lectures and special events, including a Christmas party for kids, a puppet show (coming up in April 28), and a Father’s Day celebration, which will feature a few of Driehaus’s antique cars. (And free admission for dads)
Visiting the Nickerson Mansion is an amazing little escape from the city that is just blocks away from the Magnificent Mile, which, if you ask me, is one of the city’s more overrated attractions. So take a break from all the chain stores on Michigan Avenue- you can find most of them at your local mall anyway- and travel back in time to the Gilded Age at the Driehaus Museum.
