by Melvyn Bragg
CLIVE OPPENHEIMER: We see a significant summer cooling in the continental regions of the northern hemisphere, so parts of Europe, Scandinavia, parts of North America. If we average the effect over the planet over a year, it might be about half a degree of cooling, but if you look at the regional scale, you see that the cooling, compared with average temperatures, is more like 3–4°C. These are significant in terms of harvests.
People in these parts of Europe and North America were not to know of the veil of sulphurous ash cooling their climates, but they did notice the change. News of the eruption had reached London at the end of 1815 and America the following year, before the harvests. Nobody made the connection being made now, but Lawrence Goldman said there was a mass of evidence that people had observed the dramatic change in the weather.
LAWRENCE GOLDMAN: In the summer of 1816, The Times is full of discussion of what it means, and even talks about fears of God’s wrath, providential explanations of this and that. It’s noticed by many that, in Britain and France, more people are going to church and chapel in the summer of 1816 as it becomes clear that the harvest is being ruined.
There were many observations of the change in temperature, collected by amateur meteorologists. People noted that harvests were bad, that the price of food was going up, that there were economic problems and social disturbances. The impact of Tambora was not known, but Lawrence Goldman believed we now had the evidence that allowed historians to begin to say, ‘Here is a further causal problem in this period.’
The unusual weather was an inspiration to the poets around Lake Geneva, and Jane Stabler told us that this aspect of the natural world was the base rock of the poetry of the period. The poets were attuned to the sublime, supposedly the strongest emotion that the mind was capable of feeling, according to Edmund Burke, emotions that were dependent on terror and the experience of vastness, infinity, obscurity, darkness, loudness, everything that a thunderstorm was. Byron’s manuscript of Childe Harold (Canto III) was punctuated with exact observations of what was going on along the shores of Lake Geneva.
Villa Diodati, near Geneva, which Bryon and Polidori rented. Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley, stayed nearby and were frequent visitors.
JANE STABLER: He’ll say something like, ‘2 June, this was written in the eye of Mont Blanc, which even at this distance dazzles mine.’ Or, ‘13 June, the storm in these lines took place at midnight on 13 June.’ The poetry is almost akin to diaries in that it keeps a close record of exactly what was happening in the atmosphere of the time.
When looking more widely at poets’ diaries, Jane Stabler added, the experience of the summer of 1816 was very varied. Some people talk about the weather a lot and other people seem wholly preoccupied with other things, with political matters. William Wordsworth, for example, did not mention the weather much in 1816, although Dorothy, his sister, did.
There may have been other factors that made Tambora so significant. From discoveries in the polar ice cores, it appears there was another substantial eruption in 1809, perhaps similar to the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Volcanologists have no idea where it took place other than somewhere in the tropics, deduced from the distribution of the ash and sulphur at both poles. As this unidentified eruption was within about seven years of Tambora, there may still have been a memory of it in the climate system when Tambora hit.
CLIVE OPPENHEIMER: One of the things that we find is that multiple events can lead to more prolonged impact on the global climate system. And there’s even an idea that the little Ice Age might have been triggered by machine-gun detonations of volcanoes in the mid-thirteenth century.
Lawrence Goldman commented that the decade 1810–20 was one of the coldest in the past 200 years or so, and the years before Tambora were cold in the northern hemisphere, especially in North America, so perhaps that earlier eruption had an impact there in particular. The year 1816 was especially bad and, in response, more people than before migrated westwards, both from Europe to America and from the east coast of America inland. Listeners could walk around parts of Massachusetts today and find homesteads that were abandoned at that time. The evidence that this followed the change in climate is not foolproof, he said, but it is there.
Arguably, the movement westwards within America brought a new fusion of people. From the coasts of New England there was migration into western New York state and Ohio and the area bordering the Great Lakes, what was known as the burned-over district as it had been burnt over so many times by religious revivalism. This was a combustible area, with social movements emerging alongside the religious ones.
LAWRENCE OPPENHEIMER: They bring from New England, these people going west, a profound and already established anti-slavery commitment, making this area the kind of epicentre of abolitionist politics in America thenceforth. And there is this suggestion, but one can’t be much stronger than [this], that what you’ve got is the combination of factors that explains why anti-slavery takes root here and then spreads.
Melvyn left that thought there and crossed the Atlantic back to the writers in Geneva who were encapsulating the unusual weather in their verse, and he remembered the poem ‘Darkness’, which Byron wrote in July 1816, and which starts:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air …
Melvyn described this as a terrible dystopian vision that Bryon had, from a day he had lived through. It transpired it may also have alluded to a prophecy.
JANE STABLER: It’s a day he records as being one where the fowls all went to roost at noon and candles had to be lit as at midnight. I think it’s also been suggested that it comes from apocalyptic suggestions at the time that the world was about to end. There was something called the Bologna Prophecy in 1816 where an Italian stargazer had predicted that the sun would be extinguished and the world would end on 18 July.
MELVYN BRAGG: And he turned out to be right!
JANE STABLER: The sun actually rose on the eighteenth, as it did on many of the other days on which the end of the world was predicted in this period …
These prophecies were very much a flavour of the time, with anxiety about the end of the world being bound up with the tumultuous world events and the very unsettling weather.
Turning to disease, Clive Oppenheimer noted that, while people in this period were not connecting the poor harvests with the volcano, they were connecting the malnutrition from the poor harvests to the illnesses that were spreading and the living conditions that went with poverty and hunger.
CLIVE OPPENHEIMER: There’s a doctor at a fever hospital in Belfast who writes in 1818, that the reason for this typhus outbreak is because of the poor harvest. So many people have been demobbed from the Napoleonic Wars and are out of work and are vagrant and gathering in soup kitchens where the disease is spread because it’s so contagious.
Lawrence Goldman looked at other phenomena at that time that affected health and resulted from poor weather. One of the theories was that epidemics of cholera, which affected the whole world across the nineteenth century, emerged first in the Bay of Bengal as a consequence of the weather disruption, namely drought followed by an inundatory monsoon in 1817 and 1818. Another tempting but unproven link with Tambora looked at Yunnan Province in the far south-west of China, a rice-growing area where the crops were wiped out by cold conditions in 1816–18. When the climate improved, the peasants planted not rice but a cash crop of opium poppies, so Yunnan became the main source of opium in the nineteenth century. Clive Oppenheimer cautioned that the causal links between an eruption and monsoons were more tenuous than those discussed earlier, and, with that, Melvyn had to thank his guests and end.
HATSHEPSUT
In the early fifteenth century BC, a woman came to power in ancient Egypt. Her name was Hatshepsut and
she remained the longest-reigning female pharaoh until Cleopatra 1,400 years later. She was remarkable for ruling in a society normally controlled by men, and she ruled for about fifteen years. But that is far from the most remarkable thing about her. Many scholars regard her as one of the most influential pharaohs of the New Kingdom period of Egyptian history. She for ever changed the public image of the pharaoh, embarked on a far-reaching building programme and increased Egypt’s prosperity by expanding its trade network. Yet at some point after her death, it seems that a systematic attempt was made to erase her memory from the records and her image was removed from many of her monuments.
With Melvyn to discuss Hatshepsut’s life and legacy were: Elizabeth Frood, associate professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford; Kate Spence, senior lecturer in Egyptian archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge; and Campbell Price, curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum.
This was a programme where Melvyn and his guests were sifting through the evidence like Egyptian sand, and he started with Elizabeth Frood, who placed Hatshepsut historically at around 1500 BC after a period of turmoil in Egyptian history. The throne had only been stable for about seventy years, or three full generations, and, before that, the kingdom had been split.
The head of a statue of Queen Hatshepsut.
ELIZABETH FROOD: In the north, you have what we call the Hyksos rulers and these are rulers who probably were of Canaanite origin, so from Syria, Palestine. To the south, and North Sudan, you have the Kingdom of Kush, which was a major African kingdom based in the site of Kerma, which is just south of the Third Cataract.
There were some less powerful Egyptian dynasties squeezed between these peoples, and, among them, the Theban kingdom of Egypt was the one that drove the reascendence of Egypt – it was to this dynasty that Hatshepsut belonged. The Thebans pushed their borders back, enlarging their Egypt.
Hatshepsut was not the first powerful woman in Egypt, as Campbell Price explained, but none was described as pharaoh before Hatshepsut. Usually these powerful women would be regents who had outlived their husbands and ruled until their young sons were old enough.
CAMPBELL PRICE: Immediately before Hatshepsut comes to the throne there’s this warlike dynasty, the seventeenth dynasty, and they comprise again several regents, powerful women. There’s one woman in particular, Queen Ahhotep, for whom we’ve got a nice text describing her bashing up foreigners and mustering the troops. And there’s a sense that she’s a kind of Amazonian queen.
A queen was not a pharaoh, though, and there was no word for queen in the Egyptian language in the sense of ruler rather than spouse of the ruler. For example, Ahhotep was a king’s mother who acted for her young son, while there was another woman, Ahmose-Nefertari, who was regent and was worshipped as a goddess and was so long-lived that Hatshepsut may have met her.
CAMPBELL PRICE: So there’s this precedent for strong female characters with real ability in a world where you don’t live for very long; maybe women have a greater life expectancy …
MELVYN BRAGG: The average is early thirties?
CAMPBELL PRICE: Even less than that.
It appears that there was a close royal group who would intermarry. When connecting the events together, though, to try to understand what happened when or even to whom, Melvyn’s guests emphasised that there are many difficulties. Even for the royal families, there were no family trees in this period, and people were generally described according to their relationship with a king without identifying the king in question.
The period under discussion is described as that of the eighteenth dynasty, where the dynasties were a series of rulers over a more or less united Egypt, each with one common ancestor. There were thirty-one dynasties, with the first thought to have started in the thirty-second century BC and the last ending with Alexander the Great’s conquest in 332 BC.
Kate Spence pieced together Hatshepsut’s claim to power. She was the daughter of Thutmose I, who was a general (probably) and who seemed to have become heir when Amenhotep I didn’t produce any children. The dates are disputed, but Ahmenhotep may have ruled 1525–1504 BC and Thutmose I 1504–1493 BC. His wife Ahmose was the great wife, the chief of many wives within the harem, and Hatshepsut seems to have been her eldest daughter. When Thutmose I died, there was no adult male heir so the throne passed to Thutmose II, who may have been a small child at that point, the son of a minor wife, but old enough to marry Hatshepsut who might have been his half-sister.
KATE SPENCE: Egyptians generally don’t seem to have practised brother–sister marriages but this does occur within the royal family and seems to be particularly strong in the early eighteenth dynasty. The idea seems to have been that this is modelled to some degree on divine precedent but, primarily, probably to keep wealth and power within one family.
As if the flurry of unfamiliar names were not bewildering enough so early in the discussion, Melvyn found himself calling Campbell Price ‘Graham’ for reasons explained later.
With the death of Thutmose I and the youth of his successor, Hatshepsut was in an extremely strong position, perhaps rivalled only by her mother, Ahmose. One of the most important Egyptian gods was Amun, often called King of the Gods, and Hatshepsut was celebrated with the important title of God’s Wife of Amun.
CAMPBELL PRICE: With this title of God’s Wife of Amun, there’s a link, a direct link, between the woman fulfilling that role and the god and it’s a quasi-sexual role that’s not quite clear to us. It’s interesting, after Hatshepsut, that the title of God’s Wife of Amun is dropped for several centuries, perhaps out of fear that women with that title had become too powerful.
Still, Hatshepsut was not yet pharaoh, even if she came to be depicted more and more like one. That started to change once Thutmose II was dead, probably after only three years on the throne although that, as with so many other aspects of this period, is disputed. He may have been in his early teens, old enough to father Hatshepsut’s daughter Neferure. The succession passed to Thutmose III who may have barely learnt to walk by that time, and whose mother seems to have been another minor wife in the harem. His mother did not become regent, as might have been expected from precedent, but instead Hatshepsut had herself appointed.
KATE SPENCE: She is ruling the country effectively for a toddler, even though she’s probably fairly young still herself, maybe sort of late teens, possibly even into the early twenties. She already is ruling the country for this child and trying to hold the dynasty together.
She was in power, but not yet pharaoh. There are inscriptions showing Hatshepsut doing things that were usually reserved for kingship, and it appears that slowly she moved from carrying out the tasks of a king to actually declaring herself king and taking a full royal set of titles.
The Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut.
A lot of our understanding of this time comes from well-informed speculation, but it appears that Hatshepsut was not ruthlessly seeking power. It may have been, as Elizabeth Frood suggested, that her principal concern was to maintain the dynasty, and a sudden grab for power could have destabilised the wider court, a base of advisers that was needed to support the rulers who might otherwise have been too young to be as strong as their role required. That accretion of power over years would have been normal, even unremarkable.
ELIZABETH FROOD: You have a very stable court, very stable family group and so [Hatshepsut] does what is expected: she steps in as queen regent. It’s what happens next that is extraordinary.
It is not possible to put precise dates on many of these events, something that Melvyn put to the test only, as he said, to see a kind of glaze on his guests’ eyes as he tried to press them. Campbell Price identified one significant piece of evidence for Hatshepsut’s transition, which is the so-called Red Chapel that housed a key part of Egyptian temple ritual – the barque in which the statue of the deity would be transported.
CAMPBELL PRICE: In this [chapel], Hatshepsut takes the opportunity to de
pict herself and her supposed co-regent, Thutmose III, but she shows herself and Thutmose III both as men, but she takes the precedent. She is the leading figure in these scenes and, in one text, she says the god Amun speaks to her and says, ‘You are my chosen king.’
That depiction is taken as the acknowledgement that Hatshepsut had seized power and was now pharaoh, not only the regent.
She went on to make her mark by creating monumental buildings, establishing trade and excelling in diplomacy. Beside her own tomb and temple carved into the rock overlooking the vast temple complex of Karnak, she established a mortuary cult for her father, Thutmose I, and it seems she even moved her father’s body and buried it in her tomb.
KATE SPENCE: It was constructed as the culmination point of a big festival called the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, which was a Theban festival of the dead when the cult statue of the god and moon was taken from Karnak Temple, across the river and spent the night in this temple as part of these celebrations of the dead.
Monuments were an essential way of shaping the influence of the dynasty, and she was doing this more than previous kings, changing the whole temple landscape with a range of new routes for rituals.
There was also a new trading culture developing in this period, which it appears Hatshepsut advanced. Elizabeth Frood drew attention to an expedition to what was known as the Land of Punt, a semi-mythical place that may have been by the Red Sea, or in Somalia, or perhaps somewhere else – it may even have been a trading destination that moved around. This was an ancient trading route but one that had fallen into disuse, and it seems Hatshepsut was opening it up again, asserting her connection with traditions. Again, Melvyn was keen to test the strength of the evidence.
ELIZABETH FROOD: She sends an expedition to this strange and fantastic land to bring back all sorts of exotic goods. The key things, which she makes a big deal of in the scenes and texts that narrate this journey, are myrrh trees.
