The Seven Wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka Podcast Por arte de portada

The Seven Wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka

The Seven Wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka

Escúchala gratis

Ver detalles del espectáculo

Acerca de esta escucha

 Welcome to The Seven Wonders of Ancient Lanka, a Ceylon Press Complete Audio Book.This Audo Book is written by David Swarbrick and is published in 2025 and is copyrighted 2025 The Ceylon Press.Although the book itself is given over to exploring and celebrating the seven greatest wonders of the ancient Sri Lankan world, it is dedicated to the country’s paramount modern wonder, Marina Hussein.Despite their iconic status, the original seven wonders of the ancient world come up short when compared to the seven wonders of ancient Lanka, this subject of this podcast. The world’s first Seven Wonders was assembled in the 1st century BCE by the historian, Diodorus of Sicily, albeit with help from Herodotus who began the tally 400 years earlier. Their list, focused on the Mediterranean and near east, comprised a garden, two tombs, two statues, a temple, and a lighthouse. It featured the Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Sri Lanka’s list, though, is not all architecture with a nod to gardens – it is comprehensive, including as it does a painting, a monastery, a book, a piece of revolutionary new technology that enabled a treasured dish, a shrine, a tree, and a lake. It covers around a thousand years of the island’s first period of recorded history from around 500 BCE to 500 CE. Each item is more than a mere wonder for each helped set the abiding characteristics of the nation that has been called many magical names before settling on “Sri Lanka “– the Sanskrit words for shining island. This apparent lexical borrowing is no random thing - for Sanskrit, a Bronze age Indo-European language, is the lexis that has most influenced Sinhala, the language spoken by most Sri Lankans today. And its words, like the clues of an antique detective story, can be traced right back to many others that occur in European, Iranian, and North Indian languages. Orphan language it is most certainly not. Its lexical connections demonstrate the astonishing antiquity of the island’s culture, and, likewise, the seven wonders explored here connect the country not just to its past, but also to its present. Invaded, occupied, plundered though it has been so often, there was ever something inimitably robust and resilient about its culture that ensured that the island, with each new renaissance, was able to use the best of its past to inform its future - with deep and confident certainty. The story starts, quite inappropriately, where it ends - when the ancient world itself came crashing to a bloody end around the base of a 1000-foot mountain in central Sri Lanka in 495 CE. With it ended one of the most notorious parties the world had yet enjoyed, one that, at 22 years, totally out lasted even Cleopatra’s Feast. The party was Gatsbyesque in its exuberant excess. More opulent than the Rothschild’s surrealist ball of 1972; more majestic than the Shah of Iran’s 2,500-year dynastic celebrations the year before, this party, like the ancient world itself, raced to its corporeal end with all the aplomb of the last serving of the last martini on board the Titanic. Of course, 500 CE is little more than a marker, a slender signal, a humble and iconic rounded-up figure that has been invented by historians eager to bring closure to the world of the Romans and Greeks, the Pharaohs, Assyrians, Hittie, Persians, or Han. But the date has stuck. Thereafter follows the medieval age, the early modern age. And the later early modern age; even the later modern age, and our own post-modern age, an age shorn of parties, or glamour, decadent or otherwise. Sri Lanka’s 22-year end-of-history party followed exactly the dates of the reign of one of its most outrageous kings, an equatorial Nero with mesmeric hints, like the best of expensive wines, of other things - Vlad the Impaler; Nebuchadnezzar, Louis XIV. In joy, as Mark Twain observed, is sorrow - and Kashyapa, king, party giver, gourmand, and libertine, knew that his moment of doom was due to come sooner rather than later. Gazing across the plains from his high fortress walls in Sigiriya, he would have been presciently aware that his brother would eventually arrive to stop all the fun. And so he did. Commanding a specially recruited mercenary army from nearby India, Moggallana had come to take back what he considered his by right – the throne. The legitimate son of Dhatusena, one of the country’s greatest kings, as his heir, Moggallana would have looked forward to a reign of plenty after this father had chased the occupying Dravidian Tamils from the kingdom, and rebuilt the country, tank by tank, temple by temple. It was years of milk and honey (or Kittel) he had in mind – not penurious exile. But it was not to be. His half-brother, Kashyapa played family politics with a ...
Todavía no hay opiniones