colonization – Further Annotations

From the podcast:

Tania James: Yeah, I don’t think he actually commissioned the elephant clock. I kind of created this moment. But I think he would’ve really responded to that object that was created and designed by a 12th-century Muslim polymath. His name was Al-Jazari and he is well known in the Arab world. I don’t know. But when I discovered this thing, this was a whole other world of automatons that I had not read about.

I had only associated automatons with Europe, but here he was doing it in the 1100s. And I think that Tipu Sultan would’ve been really attracted to this idea behind the elephant clock, which is that each part of it represents a certain part of civilization, but none of those civilizations he’s mentioning are European. So I felt that he would really have been attracted to that, but I didn’t find that anywhere in the historical record. I just made up that he had that commission.