I agree and is ready to take that challenge. You need to bring more such puzzles to achieve the standard. Viswa
Yes, I do know about that battle, and many more like it, from Actium all the way through the Somme and the Highway of Death in our own times, each a massacre in its own way. But then, how did you rationalize the printer/printing press? That was emphasized three times after all! And errrrmmm ... I did notice the 'silly' bit before deletion! Tsk, tsk. I shudder to imagine what the next officially deleted post might have originally said!
Err.. I took it for coin / currency printing! I didn't intend to sound offensive or judgemental. I had assumed the puzzle must be about some great historical tragic event, given the massacre keyword and the cat story just didn't seem a fitting answer to my biased neurons. I meant to convey this only. I couldn't agree more. hashtag-sleepless-morning-3AM-blah! Sorry.
Puzzles are enriching on follow-up discussion on what-else, what other partial or full representations were embedded in that collage, so on, like kaniths’s “Battle of the Teutoburg Forest”. Micro-History: books, adaptations, here. Elephants, cats, meat, killing, massacre? May be the famous incident of During an 1870 Siege, Trapped Parisians Dined on Rat, Cat, and Elephant And Castor and Pollux (elephants) - Wikipedia Hold on, there’s printing press.
Oh, I didn't take it that way. Just giving you a hard time! Indeed! That was a trick. By "historical", I meant "something that really happened and is documented". I did expect that some people may imagine earth shattering events and wander off. That was my lead-in into micro-history - relatively minor events that reveal a lot about people, their times and society. In a similar vein, in South Asian history/postcolonial studies, we have "history from below" as practiced by the Subaltern Studies Group. Apart from the main story, and the Mir Zakah coin, the puzzle was was also an effort to draw your attention to these.
ha ha! Thank you. I did wander but in a funny way I guess! Alexander + Yannai (Elephant in Tamil) + coins lead me to 'HASMONEAN COINAGE' (and Widow's Mite from The Bible). Before his time they had animal and other common elements printed on coins (I took it for the img clue : Cat!). He stopped that practice, a significant change in their coinage, and released new set of coins with his very own face (my keyword interpretations : coin minting for img 3 of the puzzle). He ruled Acre. He had massacred many in a bloody civil war and infamously got nicknamed 'The hangman' for the same (Img 4,5; keywords Acre, Israel, Massacre fitted well here). His new coins weren't popularly accepted and to prevent more war and rebellions, the coins were taken back and his face print was overstruck with other acceptable impressions again (img 6, my keyword interpretation - reprinting!). Since the last Puzzle img had on its top a 'minting' image, I assumed maybe you meant to hint 'overstruck'. Annnd I realized half the IL mass here wouldn't know Yannai is Elephant! I see that now, Thanks for the Puzzle.
Here's my narrative: I knew it was Pangur Ban, a medieval cat, an inky cat, a cat. I also knew that Viswamitra also would have known that it was a cat. So there were two players with unfair leads. And a printer! And a history lover in you! The most flippant "history cat printer" compound keywords yields the answer straightaway in the search results. The challenge was to link the answer back to the clues. The puzzle crawled backwards. There was no intuitive way to overlay the answer onto the clues except the cat. Great: I could not crack at all. How to link the word "great" to the image. Great coin? Recently, Cheeniya and I discussed another coin where an elephant engraving was botched up. Surely, some historic coin with "great" trivia that I had no clue. Mass Acre: What with all that Lagrangian selfies on moon?! Did you draw them? "Mass" could be retrofitted, but, c'mon, "acre" was a stretch, eh? Not too remote. Early printing press, Gutenberg, German-Prussian fudge! The diet during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 is parodied and spoofed in popular consciousness. As I mentioned, the follow-up was fun than subversion of the original puzzle. Regardless of the puzzle or the clues, the MFK Fisher in me would invariably source gastronomical trivia out of anything. I must admit that backfilling the answer to the clues was stumbling and creative. Overall, a good one with induction into micro-history and surreal over-arching clues. Why surreal? Many scholars have written about Alexander the Great and his streadfast horse Bucephalus and not many have written about his palm-sweatingly, spine-tinglingly, stomach-churningly terror-struck cat phobia.
@kaniths, Probably Raghavendra Lawrence would have triggered the word "Mass" for me besides President Nixon firing his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General on a Saturday night. @Iravati, Despite that unfair lead that we both got, I went in the wrong track and could not crack the puzzle. I got F grade. I would have never in my life time figured those stick figures as "Mass". I got "The Great" (the golden coins somehow led me to "The Great") and "Cat" (thanks to the post in QPQ) but not Massacre as I never thought of splitting it into "Mass" and "Acre". Soka reminded me of a class I attended for accent reduction when I came to the US. They taught me how the Americans split the words (to make me pronounce the words right and understandable to the Americans) and how many words they deliver in a minute. It was a big eye opener for me. Bottom line is, I need more puzzles from Soka to have fresh approach to solving puzzles far away from things that we know leading us in a wrong direction. Viswa