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1,670 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 12 of 28.

661. Wisconsin became the Badger State because miners lived in holesIn the 1820s and 1830s, lead deposits in southwest Wisconsin drew fortune seekers from across America and Europe. Some sheltered in the very pits they dug, and people started call…
662. Ancient Israel's religion was not monotheistic at first, many scholars argueThe name Israel honours not Yahweh but El, chief god of the Canaanite pantheon. Archaeology and close reading of the Bible suggest early Israelites worshipped a family of gods, pe…
663. Steppe herders buried in ochre may be ancestors of Europe's languagesAround 3300 BC, herders on the grasslands north of the Black and Caspian seas began burying their dead in pits under earthen mounds, bodies dusted with red ochre, elites sometimes…
664. The word Comanche comes from the Ute word for enemyThe Utes, who call themselves Núuchi-u, 'the people', gave Utah its name and once ranged across the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin. The Comanches were their allies before becomi…
665. Athens paid for its warfleet with a lucky silver strikeIn 483/2 BC Themistocles talked the Athenian assembly into spending the windfall from newly found silver mines at Laurion on 200 triremes. Within a few years those fast, three-ban…
666. A medieval sultan's copper coins turned ordinary homes into counterfeit mintsShort of silver after costly wars, Muhammad bin Tughluq of the Delhi Sultanate issued brass and copper tokens carrying the face value of silver coins. Households simply cast their…
667. Jacob had twelve sons, but the tribe list never quite adds up to twelveThe Hebrew Bible traces Israel's twelve tribes to the twelve sons of Jacob. Yet Levi received no territory, and Joseph's descendants became two separate tribes, carrying the names…
668. Ötzi was first mistaken for a recently dead climber, then found in Italy by 92 metresWhen two German hikers spotted a body sticking out of Alpine ice in September 1991, police assumed a modern mountaineer had died. The man was over 5,000 years old. A survey weeks …
669. Mesopotamia's first farming villages may lie buried beneath river siltThe Ubaid period, running from about 6500 to 3800 BC, gives us the oldest known settlements on the southern Mesopotamian plain, the land that later became Sumer. But archaeologist…
670. Theseus had two fathers, a king and a sea god, in one nightGreek myth gave Theseus a double birth. His mother Aethra slept with Aegeus, king of Athens, then waded to a small island and was possessed by Poseidon the same night. That mixed …
671. Jainism's 24 ford-makers: only the last two are accepted as historicalA tirthankara, in Jain belief, is a ford-maker who builds a crossing over the endless river of rebirth for others to follow. Tradition counts 24 of them in each half of a cosmic t…
672. Titus reigned barely two years yet faced Vesuvius and a great fireTitus became the first Roman emperor to follow his own biological father onto the throne, in June 79. Within months Mount Vesuvius erupted, and the next year fire swept Rome. His …
673. The most easterly Indo-European languages broke a neat theory of the familyEarly in the 20th century, explorers in China's Tarim Basin found Buddhist manuscripts in an unknown tongue. It proved to be a lost branch of the Indo-European family, spoken fart…
674. A small Indian kingdom defeated the Dutch at Colachel in the 1740sIn the war of 1739 to 1746, the forces of Travancore, a young kingdom at India's southern tip, beat the Dutch East India Company's troops at the Battle of Colachel. It is regarded…
675. The earliest known chariots come from graves on the Ural steppeBurials of the Sintashta culture, which flourished in the Southern Urals from about 2200 BCE, hold the oldest chariots yet found, making it a leading candidate for where that tech…
676. Horses were domesticated around 4000 BC, but stirrups took millennia to followStirrups are often ranked among the biggest military inventions before gunpowder, yet they came remarkably late. Riders in India used a simple loop for the big toe by the second c…
677. The Buddha reportedly sketched the stupa with a folded robe and upturned bowlAsked what a stupa should look like, the Buddha, according to some early sources, folded his robe on the ground, set his begging bowl upside down on it and placed his staff on top…
678. Sumerians believed every soul, good or bad, went to a cavern where dust was foodIn Sumerian belief heaven belonged to the gods alone. When anyone died, saint or scoundrel, their spirit went down to Kur, a cold, dark cavern ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal, whe…
679. The Syriac Orthodox Church split from its rivals in 512 over Christ's natureIn 512 a synod at Laodicea chose Severus, an opponent of the Council of Chalcedon, as patriarch of Antioch, and the Syriac Orthodox Church became a distinct body. Rivals nicknamed…
680. Taormina's ancient theatre, rebuilt in brick by Romans, still stages operaPerched on a cliff above the Ionian Sea, Taormina's ancient theatre spans 109 metres, second in Sicily only to the one at Syracuse. Built mostly of brick, probably in Roman times …
681. Thebes sided with Persia, then briefly ruled Greece after beating SpartaFew Greek cities switched sides as often as Thebes. It joined the Persian king Xerxes in 480 BC, backed Sparta against Athens, then turned on Sparta and, under Epaminondas, crushe…
682. A mound of crushed sea snails reveals ancient Sidon's royal purple industryNear Sidon's southern harbour lies a huge heap of broken Murex trunculus shells, waste from a Phoenician dye industry so prized that its purple became a byword for royalty. Alongs…
683. Sine and cosine began as jyā and koṭi-jyā in Gupta-era Indian astronomyThe functions that describe sound waves, oscillating springs and the changing length of the day trace back to the jyā and koṭi-jyā of Indian astronomers in the Gupta period. At he…
684. A Japanese village has ten scarecrows for every living residentNagoro, on the Japanese island of Shikoku, is home to 35 people and more than 350 scarecrows. The humble field decoy, meant to keep crows and sparrows off fresh seed, has turned i…
685. The Buddha grew up in an aristocratic republic that voted with wooden chipsSiddhartha Gautama is often called a prince, but his people, the Shakyas, had no king in the usual sense. They ran an oligarchic republic from an assembly hall at Kapilavastu, whe…
686. China's Divine Farmer supposedly tasted every plant, and found tea by accidentShennong, the mythical Divine Farmer, is said to have had a transparent body so he could watch each herb act on his own organs. Legend credits him with swallowing seventy poisons …
687. Shu Han never called itself Shu; the name was a rival's insultLiu Bei's state in south-west China called itself simply Han, claiming to be the rightful continuation of the fallen Han dynasty. Its northern rival, Cao Wei, tacked on the region…
688. The Shunga Empire's own name appears in just one ambiguous inscriptionFor roughly a century after the Mauryas, a dynasty historians call the Shungas dominated much of northern India. Yet the name survives in stone only once, on a Buddhist gateway at…
689. Thebes built its elite fighting unit from 150 pairs of loversThe Sacred Band of Thebes was 300 hand-picked infantrymen, arranged as 150 couples of an older lover and a younger beloved who swore vows at a hero's shrine. For about four decade…
690. Sati may rest partly on a mistranslated word in an ancient hymnSati, the historical Hindu custom of a widow dying on her husband's funeral pyre, was long defended as scripturally sanctioned. One historian argues the Rig Veda described a symbo…
691. Persia's satraps ruled like kings, but a royal eye watched them yearlyA satrap governed a Persian province with his own court, his own troops and the final say in local lawsuits. To stop these viceroys becoming kings, the empire split off their trea…
692. Scandinavia is still rising after shedding four kilometres of iceDuring the Ice Ages nearly four kilometres of ice pressed the Scandinavian Peninsula down into the Earth's crust. Since the ice melted, the land has been springing back at about a…
693. A Roman triumph made a general king for a day, and moved marketsFor one day a victorious Roman general dressed like the statue of Jupiter, perhaps with his face painted red, and rode a four-horse chariot to the Capitol while his own soldiers s…
694. Rome's founding legend hinges on a bird-counting contest the twins could not settleRomulus and Remus agreed to let the gods pick the site of their city. Remus saw six vultures first over the Aventine; Romulus then saw twelve over the Palatine. One claimed priori…
695. The steppe empire whose enemies nicknamed it wriggling wormsFor about two centuries the Rouran ruled a domain stretching across Mongolia to Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, raiding northern China and taxing the Silk Roads. Their Tuoba rivals mocke…
696. When Alaric took Rome in 410, it was no longer even the capitalOn 24 August 410 the Visigoths under Alaric entered Rome, the first foreign capture of the city in almost 800 years. Oddly, the emperor was not there: the court had long since mov…
697. No gospel describes the resurrection itself, only an empty tomb and appearancesChristianity calls the resurrection its central mystery, yet none of the four gospels narrates the moment Jesus rose. They report an empty tomb and later sightings. The oldest wri…
698. The Roman Empire fell in 476, or in 1453, depending which half you meanRome did not fall in one go. Its western half ended in 476 when a Germanic commander deposed a teenage emperor ironically named Romulus Augustus. The eastern half, run from Consta…
699. One Roman legion founded by Augustus was still serving in Egypt six centuries laterLegio V Macedonica, raised by Augustus in 43 BC, was still on duty in Egypt during the Islamic conquest of the seventh century. Three of his other legions had the opposite fate: w…
700. Roman senators invented the filibuster because every meeting had to end by nightfallThe Roman Senate's decrees were technically only advice, yet magistrates nearly always obeyed them. Every senator could speak before a vote, and sessions had to close at dusk, so …
701. Sri Lanka kept one of the world's longest unbroken written historiesHistory, strictly speaking, starts when people write things down, around the late 4th millennium BCE in Sumer and Egypt. But different cultures began at very different times, and …
702. The Dutch king refused a regnal number because it reminded him of cattleBefore his inauguration, Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands had planned to reign as Willem IV. He changed his mind, saying he had lived 46 years as Willem-Alexander and was not a…
703. In 1680 Pueblo peoples drove Spanish colonists out of New MexicoThe Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was the first time a Native American group expelled European colonists from North America for years at a stretch. It came from communities that had built…
704. The Aztecs never conquered their western rival, the Purépecha kingdomWhen the Spanish arrived, the second-largest state in Mesoamerica was not Aztec. It was the Purépecha kingdom of western Mexico, which beat back an Aztec invasion in the 1470s, fo…
705. Not formally scripture, the Puranas shaped Hinduism more than the VedasThe Puranas run to more than 400,000 verses across 36 major and minor texts, covering everything from the birth of the cosmos to grammar, medicine and love stories. They lack the …
706. Purdue paid for the plane Amelia Earhart flew on her final attemptIn 1936 Purdue University's research foundation bought the Lockheed Electra that Amelia Earhart took on her round-the-world attempt. She had joined the faculty a year earlier, adv…
707. King Pyrrhus beat Rome twice and still lost the warIn 280 and 279 BC King Pyrrhus of Epirus defeated Roman armies in southern Italy. The Romans actually lost more men, but they could refill their ranks almost at once, while Pyrrhu…
708. The state that unified China began with a gifted horse breederLong before Qin Shi Huang united China in 221 BC, his state began as a small fief handed to a man called Feizi because the Zhou king admired his horse breeding. Perched on the wes…
709. Three of Islam's first four caliphs were assassinatedIn under thirty years after Muhammad's death in 632, the first caliphs carried a new state from Arabia to Egypt, Persia and the edge of Central Asia. Yet only Abu Bakr, the first,…
710. An Arab chronicle of 851 ranked India's Rashtrakutas among four great world empiresIn 851 an Arabic text, the Silsilat al-Tawarikh, counted the Rashtrakutas as one of the world's four principal empires. At their height these Deccan rulers stretched from the Gang…
711. South Korea's constitution traces its legal roots to a government in exile in ShanghaiIn April 1919, with Korea under Japanese rule, 29 activists met in Shanghai's French Concession and declared a democratic Republic of Korea. That government in exile moved from ci…
712. Before he started the Trojan War, Paris was a baby left to dieHecuba dreamed she gave birth to a burning torch, and a seer warned the child would destroy Troy. Paris was abandoned on Mount Ida, nursed by a she-bear, and raised by a herdsman.…
713. In Rome, no fortune could turn a plebeian into a patricianPatrician status in ancient Rome came only by birth. By the late Republic plenty of plebeian senators were just as rich, and some patrician lines had sunk into poverty, but money …
714. Did Greek phalanxes really fight by shoving? Historians still disagreeThe popular image of hoplite battle is a giant rugby scrum: two walls of shields pushing until one side breaks. It is the most widely accepted reading of the sources, yet no Greek…
715. Egypt's kings were not called pharaoh for most of Egyptian historyWe call every ruler from around 3150 BCE to 30 BCE a pharaoh, but the Egyptians themselves did not. The word originally referred to the royal administration, and the first certain…
716. Marianne's red cap began as a mix-up between two ancient hatsThe floppy red cap on France's Marianne is a Phrygian cap, a soft, bent-tipped hat once worn by Persians, Scythians and Trojans. The real Roman symbol of freedom was a different h…
717. Piedmont, the land at the foot of the mountains, launched a united ItalyHemmed in on three sides by the Alps, Piedmont takes its name from medieval Latin for the foot of the mountains. Its rulers, the House of Savoy, drove Italian unification between …
718. The grassland north of the Black Sea may be where horses were first tamedA belt of grass nearly a million square kilometres wide runs from Bulgaria to Kazakhstan. Genetic studies point to it as the likeliest birthplace of the domesticated horse, and th…
719. Italy began with 59 provinces and kept adding more for 140 yearsWhen the Kingdom of Italy was born in 1861 it had 59 provinces. Wars, annexations, losses and endless subdivision pushed the tally to 110 by 2004. Then the state tried to shrink t…
720. The Pandyas of Madurai may have ruled, in some form, for two thousand yearsGreek envoys, an Indian emperor's rock edicts and the oldest Tamil poetry all mention the Pandyas. The South Indian dynasty is counted among the longest-ruling in history, holding…

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