Monumental Madness

One of the reasons I found history interesting was that it always had some truly bizarre, utterly crazy, completely bonkers occurrences that were happening all the time. At the same time, I’d also found history terribly boring because all these absurdly fascinating tales were narrated in a very matter-of-fact way and you were simply expected to remember it as a bunch of facts and figures instead of really getting into the stories. Take the Mughal emperors, for example. All of them were painted as such great rulers, but their stories always began with “Shah Jahan was one of the greatest Mughal emperors known for being a patron of the arts and architecture. He ascended the throne after killing his brothers, and then went on to rule for three decades. He is most famous for building the Taj Mahal, India’s greatest monument of all time.” I mean, isn’t it crazy how the fact that he killed his brothers to ascend to the throne has just been glossed over like it was some humdrum, everyday task that he performed, like waking up and brushing his teeth? Only Aurangzeb, who’d ruthlessly accumulated a staggeringly large portfolio of atrocities that was impossible to ignore, was painted in negative light. It would’ve been so much more interesting, and possibly accurate, if the paragraph on Shah Jahan were changed to “Best known for building the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan was certifiably crazy. He had no qualms about indulging in a spot of fratricide to ascend to the throne. He then developed an unhealthy, psychotic obsession with his wife Mumtaz, which led to an early onset of senility that manifested itself in devoting 22 years of his life to building the Taj Mahal. As if this wasn’t enough, he proceeded to chop off the hands of the people who’d worked on the Taj Mahal – certainly not the sort of thanks you’d expect for helping someone build a great monument. In this day and age, such a man would be locked away in an asylum or run for the US Presidency, but the 15^th century was a little more lax about such degenerate behaviour”.

The craziness was not just confined to the Mughals – the Vikings had their terrible fashion sense, the English were always fighting with everyone, the Greeks were busy inventing philosophy and triggering off long, pointless arguments on the human condition that continue to this day, and the Mongols spent so much time looting, plundering and pillaging everyone else that they had no culture or cuisine to speak of despite being around for so long. Perhaps the greatest sign that ancient man was just as crazy as modern man, though, was in the monuments. Sure, most of them are magnificent structures that make you gape in awe and marvel at their breathtaking beauty, but once you get past all that, the lingering feeling you’re left behind with is “What on earth were they thinking?”

Take the Great Wall of China, for example. It was built over hundreds of years with the aim of protecting China from regular Mongol invasions. It seems that the ancient Mongols had made it a habit to invade China regularly – probably whenever they were bored, which was pretty often given that there’s nothing much to do in Mongolia. So the Mongols were pretty crazy, but the Chinese were even more so given that they were perfectly happy spending hundreds of years just to build a wall. Surely, while it was getting built, the Mongols must’ve had a great time merrily raiding China from the sides where the wall wasn’t ready – but the Chinese still thought that putting up with periodic pillaging was worth it as long as, eventually, it stopped the Mongols.

To its credit, though, the Great Wall at least had some functional purpose. What are truly baffling, though, are the pyramids.  Sure, ancient man was highly enthusiastic in celebrating the dead and forever building monuments to commemorate them – but even by those standards, the Egyptians took it to an altogether different level. Today, after thousands of years, the pyramids remain truly magnificent structures that stand testament to how bonkers the ancient Egyptians really were. Yes, it’s an engineering marvel and a remarkable architectural feat. You wonder how the Egyptians moved all those huge boulders and created those impossibly big triangular buildings – but the bigger question is – “Why?” Like most civilizations, the Egyptians did slightly nutty things like burying the dead along with their cats and some slightly cool things like inventing paper – but what were they thinking when they decided to build the pyramids? What possessed them to wake up one day and announce – I’m going to spend the next decade building a giant stone triangular building, and then spend the next few hundred years building many more of the same? I'm guessing it set civilization back a few hundred years – the Egyptians could’ve invented a lot more things if they weren’t spending their entire time building pyramid after pyramid.

The Pyramids and the Great Wall provide an insight into why, even today, the Arabs and the Chinese spend so much time building absurd things. I’d recently seen a TV program on a ridiculous elevator being built all the way up a mountain, along the face of a cliff, and was not at all surprised to know that it was in China. It’s the same whenever someone sends you a link about some preposterous new thing that’s built like an underwater complex that’s as big as a city, or a skiing lodge in the middle of a desert, or an entire European-looking village being built in the middle of nowhere – you know it’s either China or the UAE that’s committed the atrocity. Although given that a good chunk of taxpayer money has now been allocated to building a pointlessly gigantic statue of Sardar Patel, India might soon be joining that list.

Perhaps if history had been taught in a more interesting way in school, we would not be repeating the mistakes of the past. But no one was really paying any attention, were they?