Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: An Animated Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown of the Ancient Chinese Treatise

in Books, History | June 13th, 2022

Though not a long book, The Art of War is nevertheless an intimidating one. Composed in the China of the fifth century BC, it comes down to us as perhaps the definitive analysis of military strategy, applicable equally to East, West, antiquity, and modernity alike. Hence the minor but still-productive industry that puts forth adaptations, extensions, and reinterpretations of The Art of War for non-military settings, transposing its lessons into law, business, sports, and other realms besides. But if you want a handle on what its author, the general and strategist Sun Tzu, actually wrote, watch the illustrated video above.

A production of Youtube channel Eudaimonia, previously featured here on Open Culture for a similarly animated exegesis of Machiavelli’s The Prince, it runs more than two and a half hours in full. Far though it exceeds the length of the average explainer video, it does reflect the tendency of Sun Tzu’s succinct observations to expand, when seriously considered, into much wider and more complex discussions. To each of the original text’s chapters the Eudaimonia video devotes a ten-to-fifteen-minute section, conveying not just the content of its lessons but also their relevance to the history of human conflict in the roughly two and a half millennia since they were written.

In chapter two, on waging war, Sun Tzu writes that “in order to kill the enemy, our men must be roused to anger.” It was in this spirit that, during the Second World War, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Information launched a media “anger campaign” meant to “increase resolve against the Germans, as until then, the British had little sense of real hostility towards the average German.” In the chapter on weaknesses and strengths, Sun Tzu recommends “the divine art of subtlety and secrecy” as a means of becoming invisible and inaudible to the enemy — much as Julius Caesar did in the Gallic Wars, when he sent scouting ships “painted in Venetian blue, which was a similar color to that of the sea.”

Other examples come from diverse chapters of history. These include the American Civil War, Gandhi’s negotiation of Indian independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the British defeat in Zululand, Joan of Arc’s siege of Orléans, the revolt against the Turkish led by T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), and even Steve Jobs’ turnaround of a nearly bankrupt Apple. Most of us will never find ourselves in situations of quite these stakes. But given that none of us can entirely avoid dealing with conflict, we’d could do worse than to keep the guidance of Sun Tzu on our side.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Werner Herzog’s New Novel, The Twilight World, Tells the Story of the WWII Japanese Soldier Who Famously Refused to Surrender

in Books, History | June 10th, 2022

As everyone knows, Japan conceded defeat in the Second World War on August 15, 1945. But as many also know, certain individual Japanese soldiers refused to surrender, each continuing to fight the war for decades in his own way. The most famous was Lieutenant Onoda Hiroo, who hid out in the Philippines mounting guerrilla attacks — at first with a few fellow soldiers, and finally alone — until 1974. Onoda became a celebrity upon retuning to his homeland, and his admirers weren’t only Japanese. In Tokyo to direct an opera in 1997, Werner Herzog requested an introduction to one man only: the soldier who’d fought the war for 30 years.

Now Onoda has become the subject of one of Herzog’s latest projects: not a film, but a novel called The Twilight World. In his native German (brought into English by translator-critic Michael Hofmann), Herzog has written of not just his own meeting with Onoda but narrated Onoda’s own long experience in the Philippines.

“Onoda’s war is of no meaning for the cosmos, for history, for the course of the war,” goes one passage quoted by A. O. Scott in The Atlantic. “Onoda’s war is formed from the union of an imaginary nothing and a dream, but Onoda’s war, sired by nothing, is nevertheless overwhelming, an event extorted from eternity.”

One thinks of the protagonists of Herzog’s films, both imagined and real: the steamship-dragging rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, the downed Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, the deluded conquistador Lope de Aguirre, the ill-fated wildlife activist Timothy Treadwell. In Onoda’s case as well, Scott writes, “Herzog declines to treat him as a joke. He is clearly fascinated by the absurdity of this hero’s situation, and also determined to defend the dignity of a man who had no choice but to persevere in an impossible mission.” Anyone familiar with Herzog’s career, full of harrowing encounters and unpredictable turns but clearly operating by an iron logic all its own, can imagine why he saw in Onoda a kindred spirit.

Eight years after his death at the age of 91, Onoda remains a figure of general fascination, the subject of history videos viewed by millions as well as last year’s Onoda: 10,000 Nights of the Jungle, a feature by French director Arthur Harari. Of course, “the guy who stays in the field long after the war is over is, to modern eyes, a comical, cautionary figure, an avatar of patriotism carried to ridiculous extremes,” writes Scott. “We rarely pause to look for motives other than blind obedience, or to imagine what those years of phantom combat in the wilderness must have felt like.” Perhaps we twenty-first century Westerners simply lack the imaginative power necessary to do so — all of us, that, is except Werner Herzog. You can pre-order his novel, The Twilight World, now. It hits the shelves next week, on June 14th.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Happened to the Missing Half of the Roman Colosseum?

in History | June 10th, 2022

What happened to the missing half of the Colosseum? It may be a question about ancient Rome you were afraid to ask in school, as the title of Dr. Garret Ryan’s video above suggests. Or maybe, after seeing the massive ancient ruin’s jagged profile all your life on pizza boxes and softball t‑shirts sponsored by your local Italian eatery, you never thought much of the Colosseum’ shape at all. You could spend hundreds of dollars and build a LEGO Colosseum, hundreds more and visit it yourself, or drive past it every day on your commute, and never think much about it.

Despite currently hosting more visitors per year than Trevi Fountain and the Sistine Chapel combined, the monument to bread and circus imperial Rome suffered from severe neglect in the millennia and a‑half after it was used as a gladiator arena – “some 1,500 years of neglect and haphazard construction projects,” Tom Mueller writes at Smithsonian, “layered one upon another.” Used as a quarry after the 6th century, for most of its long, decaying life, the amphitheater and its “hypogeum” (the intricate system of tunnels and earthworks underneath) went fully to seed.

For most of its history, that is to say, humans mostly ignored the Colosseum. But curiosity about its history pays:

Down through the centuries, people filled the hypogeum with dirt and rubble, planted vegetable gardens, stored hay and dumped animal dung. In the amphitheater above, the enormous vaulted passages sheltered cobblers, blacksmiths, priests, glue-makers and money-changers, not to mention a fortress of the Frangipane, 12th-century warlords. By then, local legends and pilgrim guidebooks described the crumbling ring of the amphitheater’s walls as a former temple to the sun. Necromancers went there at night to summon demons.

In the late 16th century — before popes paraded through the arena to honor Christians fed to wild beasts — “Pope Sixtus V, the builder of Renaissance Rome, tried to transform the Colosseum into a wool factory.” The venture failed, and soon after the huge variety of wild plant life began to attract botanists, who catalogued some 337 different species. The hypogeum, the architectural mechanism that once powered spectacles on the floor above, was only cleared in the 1930s by Benito Mussolini in his glorification of classical Rome.

Restoration on the Colosseum did not begin until the 1990s and visitors have only been allowed to see the ruin’s inner workings since 2011, almost 2000 years since it was first constructed between 72 and 80 AD. Originally called the Flavian Amphitheatre, the building’s name was changed to reflect its proximity to the Colossus of Nero, a monument to imperial hubris that has itself long disappeared. So, what about that missing half? “The short answer,” writes Dr. Ryan, “is: earthquakes and popes, in that order.”

The longer answer, as you might imagine, is far more colorful, and far bloodier, involving events like the Emperor Trajan’s 123-day celebration of his victory in Dacia, “in the course of which 5,000 pairs of gladiators fought and 11,000 animals were killed.” After around 500 years of this kind of bloodsport (and other amusements) and another 1,500 years of deterioration, I’d say the Colosseum has held up remarkably well, a tribute to Roman architectural engineering, the one thing the Roman Empire seemed to love more than violent death.

The Roman Colosseum Has a Twin in Tunisia: Discover the Amphitheater of El Jem, One of the Best-Preserved Roman Ruins in the World

An Animated Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Virtually-Recreated Streets

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

The History of the Byzantine Empire (or East Roman Empire): An Animated Timeline Covering 1,100 Years of History

in History | June 9th, 2022

The history of Rome is, more or less, the history of the modern world. But the Roman world seemed to shrink during the Neoclassical period, an Enlightenment-era movement to purify the arts. Where Rome once encompassed a global empire, it began to inhabit a narrow range of ideas, imposed by humanist scholars, French Jacobins, bourgeois revolutionaries in the North American colonies, and the courts of Louis XVI, George III, and Napoleon. Neoclassical art was an ennobling artifice in a time when European empires were swallowing up the globe. (It was later the favored style of Mussolini and, more recently, Donald Trump.) Academics and statesmen redefined the cultural boundaries of ancient Rome to suit the agendas of their age.

Elites of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th century, for example, believed there was no separation between themselves and ancient Rome. They called themselves Rūmī, Romans, inheritors of the Empire. Western Europeans, however, exclusively used the terms Ottomans or Turks, in rhetoric designed to evoke fears of dangerous, threatening others. Similarly, the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire, ruled from Constantinople by Constantine and his successors, never thought of itself as anything other than Roman, and certainly not as “Byzantine,” a word that comes from the city’s ancient name, Byzantium.

As the poster of the video above writes, “the empire this video is about was neither called ‘Byzantine’ nor ‘Eastern Roman,’ but simply ‘Roman/Romaioi’ but its contemporaries. ‘Byzantine empire’ is a made up term that appeared in the course of the 16th century.” Originally meant to suggest the Greek influence on the late Roman Empire, the word became a way of bracketing off the late empire as strange and exotic. Then it became a pejorative adjective meaning “excessively complicated.” Not coincidentally, this also happened to be the opinion of the Neoclassicists when it came to the late Roman Empire. Neoclassical ideals emphasized order, perfection, simplicity, virtue, rationality, all qualities retroactively applied to the Rome of antiquity, but not to the “Eastern” Empire.

Like many a term of abuse, both the Ottoman Empire and Byzantine Empire were reclaimed by nationalists who had no desire to identify with ancient Rome. During the Crimean War, Greek nationalists embraced the Byzantine Empire as a historical reality and a vision of a future restoration once Istanbul had been reclaimed. The inhabitants of Constantinople and many of the territories under its sway during the period covered by the animated timeline above, however, just called themselves Romans. “Indeed, the ‘Byzantine’ sovereigns,” the video notes, “never ceased to consider themselves as the legitimate successors of the Roman empire which had been divided in 395 and whose Western part had fallen in 476.”

How the Byzantine Empire Rose, Fell, and Created the Glorious Hagia Sophia: A History in Ten Animated Minutes

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illustrated Film

in Books, History, Politics | June 2nd, 2022

Niccolò Machiavelli lived in a time before the internet, before radio and television, before drones and weapons of mass destruction. Thus one naturally questions the relevance of his political theories to the twenty-first century. Yet in discussions about the dynamics of power, no name has endured as long as Machiavelli’s. His reputation as a theorist rests mostly on his 1532 treatise Il Principe, or The Prince, in which he pioneered a way of analyzing power as it was actually wielded, not as people would have liked it to be. How, he asked, does a ruler — a prince — attain his position in a state, and even more importantly, how does he maintain it?

You can hear Machiavelli’s answers to these questions explained, and see them illustrated, in the 43-minute video above. It breaks The Prince down into seven parts summarizing as many of the book’s main points, including “Do not be neutral,” “Destroy, do not would,” and “Be feared.”

These commandments would seem to align with Machiavelli’s popular image as an apologist, even an advocate, for brutal and repressive forms of rule. But his enterprise has less to do with offering advice than with describing how real figures of power, princes and otherwise, had amassed and retained that power.

The video comes from Eudaimonia, a Youtube channel that has also featured similarly animated exegeses of Stoicism and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Its creator makes these ancient sources of knowledge accessible with not just his cartoonish illustrations, but also his inclusion of illuminating examples from more recent history. In the case of The Prince, these come from eras like the Russian Revolution, World War II, and even our own time of instant global communication, attention-hungry media, and a seemingly weak political class. In much of the world, we live in a time much less nasty and brutish than Machiavelli’s. But looking at the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of our own leaders, we have to admit that the principles of The Prince may not have gone out of effect.

To delve deeper into the world of Machiavelli, you can watch a BBC documentary on the Renaissance political theorist below.

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Allan Bloom’s Lectures on Machiavelli (Boston College, 1983)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the Byzantine Empire Rose, Fell, and Created the Glorious Hagia Sophia: A History in Ten Animated Minutes

in Animation, Architecture, History | June 1st, 2022

If you only know one fact about the Roman Empire, it’s that it declined and fell. If you know another, it’s that the Roman Empire gave way to the Europe we know today — in the fullness of time, at least. A good deal of history lies between our twenty-first century and the fall of Rome, which in any case wouldn’t have seemed like such a decisive break when it happened. “Most history books will tell you that the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century CE,” says the narrator of the animated TED-Ed lesson above. “This would’ve come as a great surprise to the millions of people who lived in the Roman Empire up through the Middle Ages.”

This medieval Roman Empire, better known as the Byzantine Empire, began in the year 330. “That’s when Constantine, the first Christian emperor, moved the capital of the Roman Empire to a new city called Constantinople, which he founded on the site of the ancient Greek city Byzantium.” Not only did Constantinople survive the barbarian invasions of the Empire’s western provinces, it remained the seat of power for eleven centuries.

It thus remained a preserve of Roman civilization, astonishing visitors with its art, architecture, dress, law, and intellectual enterprises. Alas, many of those glories perished in the early thirteenth century, when the city was torched by the disgruntled army of deposed ruler Alexios Angelos.

Among the surviving structures was the jewel in Constantinople’s crown Hagia Sophia, about which you can learn more about it in the Ted-ED lesson just above. The long continuity of the holy building’s location belies its own troubled history: first built in the fourth century, it was destroyed in a riot not long thereafter, then rebuilt in 415 and destroyed again when more riots broke out in 532. But just five years later, it was replaced by the Hagia Sophia we know today, which has since been a Byzantine Christian cathedral, a Latin Catholic cathedral, a mosque, a museum (at the behest of secular reformer Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), and most recently a mosque again. The Byzantine Empire may be long gone, but the end of the story told by Hagia Sophia is nowhere in sight.

360 Degree Virtual Tours of the Hagia Sophia

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Did Cartographers Create World Maps before Airplanes and Satellites? An Introduction

in History, Maps | May 30th, 2022

Regular readers of Open Culture know a thing or two about maps if they’ve paid attention to our posts on the history of cartography, the evolution of world maps (and why they are all wrong), and the many digital collections of historical maps from all over the world. What does the seven and a half-minute video above bring to this compendium of online cartographic knowledge? A very quick survey of world map history, for one thing, with stops at many of the major historical intersections from Greek antiquity to the creation of the Catalan Atlas, an astonishing mapmaking achievement from 1375.

The upshot is an answer to the very reasonable question, “how were (sometimes) accurate world maps created before air travel or satellites?” The explanation? A lot of history — meaning, a lot of time. Unlike innovations today, which we expect to solve problems near-immediately, the innovations in mapping technology took many centuries and required the work of thousands of travelers, geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, historians, and other scholars who built upon the work that came before. It started with speculation, myth, and pure fantasy, which is what we find in most geographies of the ancient world.

Then came the Greek Anaximander, “the first person to publish a detailed description of the world.” He knew of three continents, Europe, Asia, and Libya (or North Africa). They fit together in a circular Earth, surrounded by a ring of ocean. “Even this,” says Jeremy Shuback, “was an incredible accomplishment, roughed out by who knows how many explorers.” Sandwiched in-between the continents are some known large bodies of water: the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Phasis (modern-day Rioni) and Nile Rivers. Eventually Eratosthenes discovered the Earth was spherical, but maps of a flat Earth persisted. Greek and Roman geographers consistently improved their world maps over succeeding centuries as conquerers expanded the boundaries of their empires.

Some key moments in mapping history involve the 2nd century AD geographer and mathematician Marines of Tyre, who pioneered “equirectangular projection and invented latitude and longitude lines and mathematical geography.” This paved the way for Claudius Ptolemy’s hugely influential Geographia and the Ptolemaic maps that would eventually follow. Later Islamic cartographers “fact checked” Ptolemy, and reversed his preference for orienting North at the top in their own mappa mundi. The video quotes historian of science Sonja Brenthes in noting how Muhammad al-Idrisi’s 1154 map “served as a major tool for Italian, Dutch, and French mapmakers from the sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century.”

The invention of the compass was another leap forward in mapping technology, and rendered previous maps obsolete for navigation. Thus cartographers created the portolan, a nautical map mounted horizontally and meant to be viewed from any angle, with wind rose lines extending outward from a center hub. These developments bring us back to the Catalan Atlas, its extraordinary accuracy, for its time, and its extraordinary level of geographical detail: an artifact that has been called “the most complete picture of geographical knowledge as it stood in the later Middle Ages.”

Created for Charles V of France as both a portolan and mappa mundi, its contours and points of reference were not only compiled from centuries of geographic knowledge, but also from knowledge spread around the world from the diasporic Jewish community to which the creators of the Atlas belonged. The map was most likely made by Abraham Cresques and his son Jahuda, members of the highly respected Majorcan Cartographic School, who worked under the patronage of the Portuguese. During this period (before massacres and forced conversions devastated the Jewish community of Majorca in 1391), Jewish doctors, scholars, and scribes bridged the Christian and Islamic worlds and formed networks that disseminated information through both.

In its depiction of North Africa, for example, the Catalan Atlas shows images and descriptions of Malian ruler Mansa Musa, the Berber people, and specific cities and oases rather than the usual dragons and monsters found in other Medieval European maps — despite the cartographers’ use of the works like the Travels of John Mandeville, which contains no shortage of bizarre fiction about the region. While it might seem miraculous that humans could create increasingly accurate views of the Earth from above without flight, they did so over centuries of trial and error (and thousands of lost ships), building on the work of countless others, correcting the mistakes of the past with superior measurements, and crowdsourcing as much knowledge as they could.

To learn more about the fascinating Catalan Atlas, see the Flash Point History video above and the scholarly description found here. Find translations of the map’s legends here at The Cresque Project.

Download 91,000 Historic Maps from the Massive David Rumsey Map Collection

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The Evolution of the World Map: An Inventive Infographic Shows How Our Picture of the World Changed Over 1,800 Years

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Bach Played Beautifully on the Baroque Lute, by Preeminent Lutenist Evangelina Mascardi

in History, Music | May 27th, 2022

In the two videos here, see Argentine lutenist Evangelina Mascardi play passionate renditions of J.S. Bach compositions on the rich, resonant Baroque lute. In Bach’s time, lutenists were some of the most widely-admired instrumental players, and it’s easy to see why. The Baroque lute is not an easy instrument to play. Much less so were the theorbo and chitarrone, instruments like it but with longer necks for longer bass strings. We see Mascardi concentrate with utmost intensity on every note, a virtuoso on an instrument that Bach himself could not master.

Indeed, there has been significant debate over whether Bach actually composed his four pieces for solo lute for that instrument and not another. For one thing, he seems to have had a “weak grasp” of the instrument, guitarist and lutenist Cameron O’Connor writes in an examination of the evidence.

“The lute may have been an intimidating subject even for Bach.” There are several problems with authenticating existing copies of the music, and “none of the pieces in staff notation is playable on the standard Baroque lute without some transposition of the basses and changes in chord positions.”

Classical guitarist Clive Titmuss notes, “as student guitarists, we learned that J.S. Bach wrote four suites and a number of miscellaneous pieces for the lute, now played on the guitar.” However, recent scholarship seems to show that Bach, that most revered of Baroque composers, “did not write any music specifically intended for solo lute.” As O’Connor speculates, it was “the Lautenwerck, or lute harpsichord… which Bach most likely had in mind while composing many of his ‘lute’ works.” You can see it in action here.

What does this debate add to our appreciation of Mascardi’s playing? Very little, perhaps. British lutenist and Bach scholar Nigel North writes in his Linn Records Bach on the Lute set, “Instead of labouring over perpetuating the idea that the so-called lute pieces of Bach are proper lute pieces I prefer to take the works for unaccompanied Violin or Cello and make them into new works for lute, keeping (as much as possible) to the original text, musical intention, phrasing and articulation, yet transforming them in a way particular to the lute so that they are satisfying to play and to hear.”

A lutenist with the skill of North or Mascardi can transform solo Bach pieces — whether originally written for violin, cello, or lautenwerck — into the idiom of their chosen instrument. In Mascardi’s transformations here, these works sound positively transporting.

Related Content:

How a Bach Canon Works. Brilliant.

Hear Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos Played on Original Baroque Instruments

Hear J.S. Bach’s Music Performed on the Lautenwerck, Bach’s Favorite Lost Baroque Instrument

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: An Animated Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown of the Ancient Chinese Treatise

Werner Herzog’s New Novel, The Twilight World, Tells the Story of the WWII Japanese Soldier Who Famously Refused to Surrender

What Happened to the Missing Half of the Roman Colosseum?

The History of the Byzantine Empire (or East Roman Empire): An Animated Timeline Covering 1,100 Years of History

Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illustrated Film

How the Byzantine Empire Rose, Fell, and Created the Glorious Hagia Sophia: A History in Ten Animated Minutes

How Did Cartographers Create World Maps before Airplanes and Satellites? An Introduction

Bach Played Beautifully on the Baroque Lute, by Preeminent Lutenist Evangelina Mascardi

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