An Open History magazine
3 articles
Sometime around 2600 BCE, people living along the Indus River and its tributaries built cities. Not camps, not villages. Actual cities, with straight roads, brick houses, public wells, and underground sewers. They did this while most of the world was still working out agriculture. And they did it across a territory bigger than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia put together.
How one of the world’s oldest civilisations survived conquests, empires, colonial intrigue, and revolution to arrive at the name and nation we know today as Iran.
The question seems deceptively simple: when did Sabarimala begin? Yet beneath the contemporary devotional landscape lies a far more complex historical narrative. Where millions now see an ancient Hindu temple dedicated to Lord Ayyappan, historians find a palimpsest of tribal memories, colonial documentation, and remarkably recent transformations.