From medieval beginnings, the samurai have inspired art, fiction and films, from Shōgun to Star Wars. But their true story is more complex and surprising than we might realise.

The enduring legacy of the samurai is a singular phenomenon in cultural history. No other medieval social group has been as celebrated or mythologised so relentlessly in popular culture – from ukiyo-e prints of the 18th Century to contemporary video games, TV shows and films.

The arc of fame always bends to falsification, and so it is with the samurai: were these fabled knights of old really as fearless, loyal, self-sacrificial, disciplined, and uniquely Japanese as we thought? Not according to the British Museum’s new Samurai exhibition, which wants to lift the smokescreen of fantasy around these mysterious and much misunderstood warriors – and reveal their true, and far more compelling, history.

So who were the samurai and how did their story begin? “They were not a unitary group of people, the same throughout history,” the exhibition’s curator Rosina Buckland tells the BBC. “I think the perception in the West is that samurai are warriors – and they certainly were. That’s how they emerged and rose to positions of power in the Middle Ages. But that’s not everything.”

The origins of the samurai lie in the 10th Century, when they were first recruited as mercenaries for the imperial courts. They gradually evolved into rural gentry, but they were not, as people tended to think of them later, gallant crusaders following time-honoured chivalric codes. In battle they tended to use opportunistic tactics like ambush and deception, and they were often motivated more by rewards of land and status than a sense of honour or selfless duty.

Their adaptive outlook meant that they also embraced multicultural influences and foreign technology – another surprising facet of samurai identity. The cuirass of a magnificent samurai suit of armour on display at the exhibition was based on a Portuguese design. It has a pointed front and angled sides to deflect musket bullets, features which only became necessary after the importation of European firearms into Japan in 1543.

‘Culture is power’ 

The samurai attained political power by exploiting the chaos caused by disputes over imperial succession. Eventually, one controlling clan – the Minamoto – took over and established a new government in 1185, parallel to the imperial court. Over the years, there was a rise and fall in these warlord dynasties involving various battles between clan leaders. But, as Buckland points out, “even in these early stages, culture is hugely important. Culture is power”.

Alongside being adept in the art of war, the samurai became conversant with the refined arts of painting, poetry, music performance, theatre and tea ceremonies

The military leaders – called Shōguns – realised that they couldn’t wield authority successfully with the outlook and mentality of tribal warlords. So, they found ways to supplement their military strength with the more subtle and sophisticated modes of power brokerage within courtly society.

Their playbook for statecraft was based on Chinese philosophy, principally the ideas of Confucius. “In Neo-Confucian thought,” says Buckland, “you have to have a balance between military power and cultural skill.” The ramification was increasing investment in soft power in the incense-infused chambers of the court.

Alongside being adept in the art of war, the samurai became conversant with the refined arts of painting, poetry, music performance, theatre and tea ceremonies. A fan depicting orchids, painted in the 19th Century by a samurai artist, is one of the more beautiful and unexpected items in the exhibition. 

Shōgun, the Disney/FX series whose second season is currently in production, provides a fictionalised account of one of the turning points in samurai history. In the 1500s, one clan leader, Tokugawa Ieyasu (represented by the fictional Yoshii Toranaga in the series), established a government that was so successful it lasted for 250 years.

This meant that there were no more major battles within Japan, and the samurai took on new roles. Rather than marshalling the battlefield, they now managed the state. “They’re the ministers, the lawmakers, the tax collectors,” says Buckland. They took on jobs that percolated throughout the court, “right down to being the guards in the castle gates”.

Tam O’Shanter is a rip-roaring tale of witches and alcohol, but it has hidden depths. On Burns Night this Sunday – and 235 years after the poem was published in 1791 – Scots everywhere may well be treated to a masterwork with a unique, universal appeal.

If you’re Scottish, or if you wish you were, then this Sunday is a red-letter day. Scotland’s greatest poet, Robert Burns, was born on 25 January 1759, and Burns Suppers are now held every year, all over the world, to mark his birthday. The guests drink whisky (not “whiskey”, please – that’s the Irish and US spelling), they eat haggis, tatties and neeps (don’t ask), and they hear some of the bard’s many ballads and poems. Ae Fond Kiss, To A Mouse and Auld Lang Syne are usually on the bill. And somebody may well recite Tam O’Shanter, a rip-roaring yarn about witchcraft and heavy drinking that was first published 235 years ago in 1791. It’s a poem that has even more to it than most Burns Supper regulars might realise.

“Tam O’Shanter is Burns’s masterpiece, it really is,” says Pauline Mackay, professor of Robert Burns studies and cultural heritage at the University of Glasgow. “It’s one of his most popular works, so when you say it’s your favourite Burns poem, people say, ‘Urgh, that’s so obvious’. But actually, I’ve been studying it for many, many years, and it’s so multifaceted. Burns brought all of his considerable talents to bear on capturing what inspires him, what motivates him, and his own perception of humanity and human nature.”

And that’s not all. Robert Irvine, the editor of Burns: Selected Poems and Songs, notes that there is a darkness to the poem that goes beyond its spine-tingling descriptions of the devil and his minions. “There’s some weird stuff going on there,” he says.

Most of the revellers are ‘rigwoodie hags’, but one witch, Nannie, is young, attractive and scantily clad

The poem tells the mock-heroic tale of Tam O’Shanter, a farmer who spends as much time drinking as he does working. At the end of one market day in Ayr, he retires to the pub with his “ancient, trusty, drouthy crony” Souter Johnnie (ie, Johnnie the shoemaker), never mind that his wife Kate is waiting at home. It’s only after hours of boozing and flirting with the landlady that Tam finally sets off on his horse, Maggie. But it’s a dark and stormy night, so he has to hold on to his hat, and sing songs to keep up his spirits. “Whiles holding fast his gude blue bonnet; / Whiles crooning o’er some auld Scots sonnet.” This reference to a “blue bonnet”, incidentally, is why beret-like flat hats with pom-poms are called Tam O’Shanters.

When he approaches Alloway’s Auld Kirk, Tam notices that a diabolical party is underway inside: witches and warlocks are dancing, and the devil himself, Auld Nick, is playing the bagpipes. Most of the revellers are “rigwoodie hags”, but one witch, Nannie, is so young, attractive and scantily clad that Tam yells out the only words he speaks in the poem: “Weel done, Cutty-sark!” This cat call would later lend its name to the Cutty Sark, a 19th-Century clipper ship that can be visited in Greenwich, London. Roughly translated, it means: “Well done, Short Dress!”

Nannie and her cohorts aren’t pleased to hear it: Tam has to flee on horseback with a crowd of screeching witches in hot pursuit, “Wi’ mony an eldritch skriech and hollo”. Luckily for him, witches can’t cross running water, and the River Doon is nearby. Tam manages to race over the bridge to safety, but Maggie the horse isn’t quite so fortunate. Nannie grabs hold of her tail just as she steps on to the Brig O’ Doon, and – spoiler alert – she is left with “scarce a stump”.

Rude jokes and chilling imagery

Carruthers calls it a “fairly hackneyed ghost story plot”, but the way Burns tells his story means that “there’s no other poem like it in Scottish literature”. Tam O’Shanter is “incredibly rich, so visual, so carefully crafted and so well-paced”, Mackay tells the BBC. “There’s just so much in there: everything from the way Burns has absorbed and assimilated the landscape and folklore of Ayrshire where he was born, and Dumfriesshire where he was writing the poem, to his keen interest in the supernatural, to the various comments that he makes on the complexities of human relationships and gender. All of this is so fascinating.”

There are lines in Scots, and others in English. There are rude jokes, and there is chillingly macabre imagery. There are tributes to the joys of getting drunk with friends in a cosy pub: “Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious. / O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious!” And there are rueful philosophical musings on how transient those joys are: “But pleasures are like poppies spread, / You seize the flower, its bloom is shed.” Sometimes the narrator will address Tam himself: “O Tam, hadst thou but been sae wise, / As ta’en thou ain wife Kate’s advice!” At other times, he will address another character or the reader / listener – one reason, says Irvine, why the poem “lends itself to performance”, and has become a Burns Supper staple.

In fact, there isn’t much that Burns doesn’t do in Tam O’Shanter – and he does it all in rhyming iambic tetrameter. “He’s showing off,” says Irvine. “He’s doing one thing, and saying ‘Hey, look, I can do this other thing as well.’ In his first volume of poems, he does that between one poem and the next. He adopts different verse genres, he switches from Scots to English, he borrows from all sorts of different traditions – both what we think of now as the folk tradition, and the literary traditions of England and Scotland. It’s a virtuoso display of all the different things that he can do. And in Tam O’Shanter, he’s doing all that within one poem.”

Appropriately for a Burns Supper centrepiece, Tam O’Shanter is a feast, its most satisfying ingredient being its fond and insightful portrait of a character described as “the universal everyman” by Prof Gerard Carruthers, the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns. Burns is admired for his egalitarian politics, and even in his rollicking horror comedy, his sympathy for the common man shines through. “Tam O’Shanter is a poem of misdirection,” Carruthers tells the BBC. “Burns is saying: ‘Look at this! Look at the witch! Look at the horse!’ Whereas in fact the real thing that he is talking about is the way in which we’re incorrigible as human beings.” The poem glows with “ridicule and affection at the same time for Tam, and by extension for the human psyche in general”.

It’s a poem about humanity – the pleasures and the appetites, the challenges and the frailties – Gerard Carruthers

Burns – a notorious womaniser – is especially sharp on masculine foibles. “Burns knows the male mind,” says Carruthers. “He knows that men in a lot of ways are stupid wee boys.” On the other hand, says Mackay, women may recognise themselves in Tam O’Shanter, too. “It’s a poem about humanity – the pleasures and the appetites, the challenges and the frailties – and I think that’s one of the reasons why Burns is so universally popular. He talks about what it is to be a human being – and everything that we see in different places throughout his poetic oeuvre is somehow represented in this one poem.”

Still, alongside its compassion, there is devilry of more than one kind in Tam O’Shanter. “The weird and disturbing thing about this poem is that Burns’s father, William Burnes, was a very pious and serious man who despaired of the libertine tendencies of his son,” says Irvine. “He organised repairs to Alloway Kirk when Burns and his brother were boys, and one of the reasons for that is that he wanted to be buried there – and he was. So, in 1784 Burns’s father was buried in Alloway churchyard, which Burns then makes famous as the site of a witches’ orgy. Was he getting revenge on his father for his disapproval of his eldest son?”

As well as everything else Burns is doing in Tam O’Shanter, it could be argued that he is almost literally dancing on his father’s grave. Anyone who hears it at a Burns Supper on Sunday will have plenty to chew on.

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Paris ( Imran Y. CHOUDHRY):- The Embassy of Pakistan organized an event on the archeological studies of the 5000-year-old Indus Valley Civilization with Dr. Aurore Didier, Director of the French Archaeological Mission of the Indus Bassin.

Representatives of the UNESCO World Heritage Center, the Agha Khan Development Network (AKDN), archaeologists, historians and diplomats attended the event, which was organized with the support of the “Cercle des Amis du Pakistan”.

Dr. Didier briefed the audience on the history of the archeological excavations carried out by French archeologists in Pakistan. She gave an update on the latest research resulting from ten years of excavations at Chanhu-daro, one of the emblematic sites of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. She also addressed how the adaptation of ancient populations to river and environmental fluctuations can be a key to understanding the current crises related to climate change and natural disasters that heavily impact South Asia today.

Addressing the audience, Ambassador Mumtaz Zahra Baloch noted the seventy years of cooperation between Pakistan and France in the domain of archeology. She appreciated the contributions made by the French Archeological Mission in Pakistan in research on the Indus Valley Civilization; and in promoting knowledge and competencies amongst local communities and scholars.

The Ambassador also reiterated her warm support for the “Cercle des Amis du Pakistan” for its initiatives in highlighting the cultural richness and diversity of Pakistan.