Culture: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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WonderMusic

Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian singer known as 'the Star of the East', was one of the most celebrated voices of the twentieth-century Arab world. Her monthly radio concerts of classical Arabic poetry, sung with long improvised passages, drew listeners across the region.

Born in a village in the Nile Delta in the early 1900s, she learned to recite the Qur'an as a child and sang religious songs in her father's small troupe, dressed as a boy so she could appear on stage. That training shaped the ornamented, flexible phrasing she later brought to love songs. From 1937 she gave a concert on the first Thursday of each month, broadcast live across the Arab world. A single song could last more than an hour as she repeated and varied a line in answer to the crowd, building the shared musical ecstasy known in Arabic as tarab. After Egypt's defeat in the 1967 war she gave concerts at home and abroad and handed the proceeds to the state. Her funeral in Cairo in 1975 drew an estimated four million people.

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StillnessMusic

Fado is a Lisbon song tradition that took shape in the early nineteenth century in the city's old working-class districts near the port, such as Alfama, Mouraria and Bairro Alto. Its name probably comes from the Latin fatum, fate. A solo singer is usually accompanied by a classical guitar and the twelve-string Portuguese guitar.

It was first sung among sailors, dock workers and the poor of the port districts. UNESCO describes fado as a blend of Afro-Brazilian sung dances, local song and dance, rural traditions brought to Lisbon by migrants, and the city songs of the early nineteenth century. Its lyrics range over love, loss, fate and everyday city life. Saudade, a hard-to-translate longing for someone, somewhere or some time that is gone, runs through much of it, though not every song. Fado is still sung in concert halls, small fado houses and neighbourhood associations, and joined UNESCO's list of humanity's intangible heritage in 2011.

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DriveMusic

Delta blues is the guitar-and-voice blues that grew among African Americans in the Mississippi Delta in the early twentieth century. Drawing on work songs, field calls and storytelling, it went on to shape later blues, rock and much of popular music.

Delta blues took shape among Black sharecroppers, tenant farmers who paid their rent with a share of the crop, and labourers in the Mississippi Delta. It drew on field hollers, the calls workers sang across the fields, on work songs and church singing, and on new guitar techniques such as sliding a bottleneck or knife blade along the strings. Charley Patton, often called the father of the Delta blues, and Son House played in juke joints, informal rural bars where Black workers gathered to drink, dance and hear music. Racial violence and the debts of sharecropping shaped the world the music came from. In the Great Migration many Delta musicians moved north; in Chicago Muddy Waters took up the electric guitar, and his electric blues fed directly into rock and roll.

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WonderArchaeology

Skara Brae, a village on Orkney off the north coast of Scotland, was built about 5,000 years ago, and its stone houses still hold their beds, hearths and dressers. It is one of the best-preserved Neolithic, or New Stone Age, villages in Europe.

Built in stone around 3180 BC and lived in for perhaps 600 years, Skara Brae is older than Stonehenge's famous stone circle and Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza. A storm in 1850 stripped away the sand dune that had buried the village, revealing houses linked by covered passageways, each with a stone hearth, box beds and a dresser for displaying possessions, all built from slabs because Orkney has little timber. The archaeologist V. Gordon Childe carried out the first scientific excavations in the 1920s. The site now forms part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, alongside the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness, two nearby stone circles from the same era.

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DriveDesign

Isotype is a way of showing social and economic data with rows of small repeated pictures, so that people can understand it across languages and levels of schooling. It was developed in 1920s Vienna by Otto Neurath, Marie Reidemeister (later Marie Neurath) and the graphic artist Gerd Arntz.

Isotype stands for International System of Typographic Picture Education. Otto Neurath developed it in 1920s Vienna at the Social and Economic Museum, aiming to let ordinary readers, including people with little schooling, compare social and economic data at a glance. Its central rule was to never resize a single icon to show a bigger quantity; instead, a larger number was shown by repeating the same small icon more times, so a reader could count as well as compare. After Austria's political turmoil forced Neurath to flee in 1934, he continued the project first in the Netherlands and later in England. The approach's descendants are visible today in transport maps, road signs and the small repeated icons used in modern infographics.

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WonderArchaeology

The Vindolanda tablets are thin sheets of wood written on in ink around AD 100 at a Roman fort in northern England. Their letters, lists and army records show everyday life on the empire's frontier.

The first tablets turned up in March 1973, when the archaeologist Robin Birley, alerted by a student excavator, Keith Liddell, noticed that what looked like wood shavings had writing inside: two stuck-together pieces peeled apart to reveal ink. More than 1,700 have now been found, preserved in damp, oxygen-poor ground. Most are slightly older than Hadrian's Wall, which was begun nearby in AD 122. They include a cavalry officer's polite request for more beer for his men, a note about underpants sent to a soldier, and a birthday invitation from Claudia Severa to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina. A scribe wrote most of it, but Severa added the closing greeting herself, one of the earliest known examples of writing in Latin by a woman. Most of the tablets are held at the British Museum.

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WonderArchaeology

The Hoxne Hoard, found in Suffolk in 1992, is the largest hoard of late Roman gold and silver ever found in Britain: nearly 15,000 coins, with jewellery, spoons and pepper pots, buried early in the fifth century.

Eric Lawes, a retired gardener with a metal detector, found it on 16 November 1992 while helping a farmer, Peter Whatling, look for a lost hammer. When silver spoons and gold coins appeared, he stopped and reported the find, so archaeologists could excavate it the next day with the objects largely in place, packed inside the remains of an oak chest. The latest coins show it was buried after AD 407, as Roman rule in Britain was ending. Among its treasures are four silver pepper pots, one shaped as the bust of an elegant lady and known as the Empress; pepper, most likely what they held, came from India. Lawes and Whatling shared the £1.75 million reward. The hoard is now at the British Museum in London.

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WonderArchaeology

The Lewis chessmen, carved mostly from walrus ivory in the twelfth century and found on a Scottish island in 1831, turn chess into a cast of kings, worried-looking queens, bishops, knights and warriors biting their shields.

The pieces were found in 1831 in the parish of Uig on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, together with plain discs for another board game and a belt buckle. They were probably carved between about 1150 and 1200, most often thought to be in Trondheim, Norway, when the Hebrides were under Norwegian rule, and they seem to come from several incomplete sets, perhaps a merchant's stock. The warriors biting their shields are berserkers, fighters of Norse legend who worked themselves into a battle frenzy. The queens resting a hand on their cheek probably meant calm and wisdom, not worry. The British Museum holds 82 objects and the National Museum of Scotland 11. In 2019 a warder (the equivalent of a rook), unrecognised for decades in an Edinburgh family's home, sold at auction for £735,000.

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WonderArchaeology

The Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, a figure with a human body and a cave lion's head carved from mammoth ivory, is one of the oldest known sculptures. It was made in what is now Germany some 35,000 to 41,000 years ago.

The geologist Otto Völzing found the first fragments on 25 August 1939 in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in southern Germany. The Second World War broke out a week later, and the pieces lay forgotten in the Museum Ulm for about thirty years, until the archaeologist Joachim Hahn sorted more than 200 fragments and saw a figure with human and animal features emerge. New pieces found in the cave in later decades, including tiny fragments sifted from its soil in 2008, were added in later restorations. The last, finished in 2013, brought the figure to 31.1 centimetres. Carbon dating of the layer where it lay gives an age of 35,000 to 41,000 years. It was carved with flint tools and is on show in the Museum Ulm.

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WonderArchitecture

Fujian tulou are huge round or square houses in south-east China with walls of pounded earth, built by Hakka and Minnan communities. One fortified ring could house a whole clan, sometimes several hundred people, around a shared courtyard.

Most tulou were built between the 12th and 20th centuries in the hills of south-western Fujian, where bandits and feuds between clans made a house that could be shut like a fortress worth the effort. Walls three to five storeys high were made by pounding earth between wooden boards, layer upon layer. The outside has a single gate and few windows; inside, timber galleries run round every floor. Each family had its own rooms from the ground to the top floor, while the courtyard held the well and the ancestral hall, where the clan honoured its forebears. The largest tulou could house up to 800 people. UNESCO listed 46 of them as a World Heritage Site in 2008.

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WonderArchitecture

The Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia, founded in 670 and largely rebuilt in 836, is one of the oldest mosques in the Islamic world. Its courtyard, columned prayer hall and square minaret became a model for mosques across North Africa.

The Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi chose the site when he founded the city of Kairouan in 670. The mosque was rebuilt several times, and most of what stands today dates from the reconstruction ordered by Emir Ziyadat Allah I in 836. Its prayer hall is hypostyle, meaning the roof rests on rows of columns: 414 of them, in marble, granite and porphyry, taken from ancient sites such as Carthage, so their shafts and capitals vary. The 31.5-metre minaret, rising in three stages from a square base, is thought to be the oldest minaret still standing. The mosque became a model for later mosques across the Maghreb, the part of North Africa west of Egypt, and is part of Kairouan's World Heritage Site.

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StillnessArchitecture

A mashrabiya is a projecting window enclosed by a carved wooden lattice, common in old Arab towns. The screen breaks up glare, lets breezes through and allows people inside to watch the street without being seen.

The earliest evidence of the mashrabiya in its present form comes from 12th-century Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphs. It spread to Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, Arabia and beyond, reached its peak under the Ottomans, and goes by other names: shanashil in Iraq, rawashin in Jeddah. The lattice is usually finer at the bottom and more open at the top, so air moves fast above head height and gently lower down, and jars of water placed in the window cooled the breeze by evaporation as it passed over them. Privacy mattered too: the household could follow life in the street while staying out of sight. Mashrabiyas fell out of use in the 20th century, but architects now study them again as a way to cool buildings without machines.

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WonderArchitecture

Muqarnas is a form of Islamic architectural decoration made of tiers of small niches, stacked like a honeycomb. It bridges the corners where a square room meets a round dome, and crowns doorways and vaults.

Western writers have often called muqarnas 'stalactite' or 'honeycomb' vaulting. The earliest surviving examples are simple three-part corner niches beneath domes, such as those in the Arab-Ata Mausoleum at Tim in Uzbekistan (977–978) and the Gonbad-e Qabus tower in Iran (1006–1007). The oldest complete muqarnas dome known to modern scholars crowned the Imam Dur Mausoleum at Samarra in Iraq, finished in 1090. Historians still debate whether the technique began in north-eastern Iran or in Abbasid Iraq. Built of brick and plaster, carved stone or wood, it spread across the Islamic world: Seljuk builders in Anatolia set it over great stone gateways, and in Spain it fills the ceilings of the Alhambra.

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DriveDesign

The Ulm School of Design in West Germany, open from 1953 to 1968, taught design alongside science, sociology and industrial production rather than as decoration. Its teachers and students helped shape Braun's clean-lined products and Lufthansa's visual identity.

The school was founded by Inge Scholl, the designer Otl Aicher and the Swiss artist and architect Max Bill. Scholl's brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, had been executed in 1943 for resisting the Nazis, and the school was set up partly in their memory, to educate responsible citizens after the war. Bill designed its building and was its first head. Teaching became increasingly methodical, drawing on mathematics, psychology and the study of how signs communicate. The teacher Hans Gugelot worked with Braun on its 1950s radios and record players, and Aicher's team designed Lufthansa's complete corporate identity in the early 1960s; Aicher later created the pictograms for the 1972 Munich Olympics. The school closed in 1968 after losing its public funding.

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WonderTrade

In the Kula ring of Papua New Guinea's Massim islands, partners sail between islands to exchange shell valuables: red necklaces travel clockwise around the ring and white armbands anticlockwise. No one keeps them for good; each is passed on and carries the story of those who held it.

The necklaces are called soulava and the armbands mwali. A participant receives one from a partner on one island and, after a time, passes it on to a partner on another, so the same objects keep circling for generations; famous pieces have their own names and histories. The Polish-born anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski lived in the Trobriand Islands during the First World War and described the Kula in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), one of the founding books of modern fieldwork. He showed that it was not barter: prestige came from taking part, from generosity and from being trusted with valued pieces, while ordinary trade in goods went on alongside the ceremonial exchange. The Kula still continues today.

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WonderTrade

On the Pacific island of Yap, large limestone discs with a hole in the centre, called rai, have long served as valuables in important exchanges. Some are taller than a person, so ownership changes without moving them: everyone knows who owns each stone.

The stones were quarried mainly on Palau, hundreds of kilometres away, and brought back by canoe and raft on dangerous voyages. A stone's value depends on its size and workmanship, but above all on its history: who fetched it, and whether lives were lost bringing it home. The largest surviving stone is 3.6 metres across and weighs about four tonnes. In the 1870s the Irish-American trader David O'Keefe helped bring stones to Yap on his ship in return for dried coconut and sea cucumbers. An old account tells of a rai that sank during transport yet kept changing hands, since everyone agreed it was still there. The economist Milton Friedman compared this to gold that stays in a bank vault while its ownership changes. Rai are still exchanged in traditional ways today.

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WonderMusic

The mbira is a musical instrument of the Shona people of Zimbabwe: a row of metal keys fixed to a wooden board, plucked with the thumbs and a forefinger. Players repeat short interlocking patterns, and listeners hear new melodies emerge from within them.

A typical mbira dzavadzimu, “mbira of the ancestral spirits”, has 22 to 28 keys. For performance it is often placed inside a large hollow gourd called a deze, which makes it louder, and bottle caps or shells fixed to it add a buzzing sound. Among the Shona the mbira is played at all-night gatherings called bira, where families call on the spirits of their ancestors, as well as at celebrations and concerts. In the late 1950s the English music researcher Hugh Tracey began making a simplified version, the kalimba, which carried the sound around the world. In 2020 UNESCO listed the art of making and playing the mbira in Zimbabwe and Malawi as intangible cultural heritage.

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StillnessMusic

The duduk is an Armenian wind instrument made of apricot wood and played through a broad double reed, which gives it a warm, soft, voice-like tone. It is usually played in pairs: one musician carries the melody while the other holds a steady background note.

Its Armenian name, tsiranapogh, means “apricot pipe”. The background note, called the dam, never breaks because its player uses circular breathing: breathing in through the nose while pushing air out from the cheeks. Duduk music is heard at weddings, in folk songs and at funerals alike. Its best-known master, Djivan Gasparyan (1928–2021), took it to audiences around the world, and his playing can be heard in film scores such as Gladiator. UNESCO proclaimed Armenian duduk music a masterpiece of intangible heritage in 2005 and added it to its list in 2008. Related double-reed instruments are played across the region, such as the Turkish mey and the Azerbaijani balaban.

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WonderMusic

In throat singing from Tuva, a Russian republic in southern Siberia, one singer produces two sounds at once: a low, steady hum and, above it, a high whistling melody. The singer makes it by shaping the mouth and throat to bring out overtones hidden in the voice.

Every sung note is really a bundle of tones: the main pitch plus fainter, higher ones called overtones, which give each voice its colour. Throat singers learn to move the tongue and lips so precisely that single overtones ring out as a separate melody. The general term is khöömei; sygyt is a whistling style and kargyraa a very deep, growling one. Tuvans, a Turkic-speaking people, link these sounds with the landscape of herding life, imitating wind, rivers and animals. Groups such as Huun-Huur-Tu took the music to world stages from the 1990s. The physicist Richard Feynman spent years trying to travel to Tuva, a quest told in the book Tuva or Bust!

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StillnessMusic

Qawwali is the devotional music of the Sufis of South Asia. A lead singer sings a line of poetry, a chorus answers, and handclaps, harmonium and drums build the repetition up until the whole gathering is swept along together.

Qawwali grew up at Sufi shrines and gatherings in South Asia, where music is meant to draw listeners closer to God. The tradition is usually traced to the poet and musician Amir Khusrau (1253–1325) of Delhi. The words are Sufi poems in Urdu, Persian, Punjabi or Hindi. The lead singer may dwell on a single line for minutes, shifting its emphasis and improvising around it, while the chorus repeats it and the audience responds. In the twentieth century the Sabri Brothers and, above all, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan of Pakistan took qawwali to concert halls around the world; Nusrat's work with Western musicians in the 1990s brought it a global audience.

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WonderMusic

Mugham, the classical music of Azerbaijan, is largely improvised. Instead of a fixed score, the singer and players follow a mode, a set of notes with its own melodic paths and mood, and shape each performance anew.

A classic mugham trio has a singer, called a khanende, who often keeps time on a frame drum (the gaval or daf), accompanied by the tar, a long-necked lute, and the kamancha, a bowed fiddle. The performers move through a series of sections within the mode, rising gradually in pitch towards a climax, and the singer usually chooses classical poetry by poets such as Fuzuli. The tradition shares roots with Persian and Turkish makam music. UNESCO proclaimed Azerbaijani mugham a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003, and the International Mugham Centre opened in Baku in 2008.

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DriveLanguage

N'Ko is an alphabet created in 1949 by the Guinean scholar Solomana Kanté for the Manding languages of West Africa. Written from right to left, it has its own letters and marks for tone, so these languages need not be squeezed into the Latin or Arabic script.

In Manding languages such as Bambara, Maninka and Dyula, the pitch of a syllable can change the meaning of a word, and neither the Latin nor the Arabic script shows it well. Kanté is said to have set to work after reading a claim that Africans had no writing of their own. He named the script N'Ko, which means 'I say' in all the Manding languages, and spent the rest of his life writing and translating in it, from the Qur'an to histories and medical texts. It spread through informal classes in Guinea, Mali and Côte d'Ivoire, and since Unicode added N'Ko in 2006 it can be typed on phones and computers.

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DriveLanguage

Neo-Tifinagh is a modern alphabet for the Amazigh (Berber) languages of North Africa, developed from the ancient Tifinagh letters. Today it is used in schools, on public signs and online.

The Amazigh peoples, often called Berbers, are the indigenous peoples of North Africa. Their script descends from an ancient alphabet known as Libyco-Berber, found on rock carvings and inscriptions more than two thousand years old, and the Tuareg of the Sahara kept a form of it, Tifinagh, in everyday use. From the late 1960s, activists, notably the Berber Academy in Paris, adapted these letters into Neo-Tifinagh. In 2003 Morocco's Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture adopted it for teaching Tamazight in schools, and the language became official in Morocco's constitution in 2011. Unicode added Tifinagh in 2005, so it can be typed on computers and phones.

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StillnessLanguage

Vedic chanting is the recitation from memory of the Vedas, Hinduism's oldest scriptures, in Sanskrit. For some three thousand years chanters have kept the exact words, pitch accents and pronunciation by also reciting the words in set patterns that make any slip easy to spot.

The oldest of the four Vedas, the Rigveda, was composed roughly between 1500 and 1000 BC and was passed on by memory for many centuries before anyone wrote it down; pupils still learn it by ear from a teacher. Besides reciting a text straight through, chanters learn it in fixed rearrangements called pathas. In a simple one, the words are chanted in overlapping pairs (1-2, 2-3, 3-4); in the most complex, ghana, they run forwards and backwards in long interlocking loops. Because every version must match the others, a slip in one shows up at once. UNESCO proclaimed the tradition of Vedic chanting a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003.

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