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1,670 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 13 of 28.

721. The Orsini feud with the Colonna took a papal bull to stopFor centuries two Roman clans, the Orsini and the Colonna, fought for control of the city, until a papal bull ordered a halt in 1511. Sixty years later the heads of both houses se…
722. Athenians voted to exile a neighbour by scratching his name on broken potteryOnce a year the Athenian assembly asked a strange question: shall we banish someone? If the answer was yes, citizens returned two months later with names scratched on pottery shar…
723. Scripts across Southeast Asia, including Khmer, trace back to a South Indian dynastyThe Pallavas, rulers of southern India from 275 to 897, built the Shore Temple at Mamallapuram and made Kanchipuram their capital. They also developed a script that became the anc…
724. Palm oil is both the most land-efficient oil crop and a driver of deforestationPalm plantations cover about 5 percent of the world's vegetable oil farmland yet yield around 38 percent of its vegetable oil. Swapping palm for other crops would take far more la…
725. Nobody in the Viking Age called themselves Norsemen; Walter Scott popularised itThe English word Norseman first turns up in Walter Scott's 1817 poem Harold the Dauntless, and viking in Old Norse and Old English simply meant pirate. The peoples who met these S…
726. The steppe dynasty southern China mocked as barbarians shaped the Sui and TangWriters of China's southern dynasties sneered at the Northern Wei as Plaited Barbarians. Yet this Tuoba-ruled state reunified northern China in 439, carved tens of thousands of Bu…
727. Nubian kings once conquered Egypt and ruled it as pharaohsEgypt usually plays the conqueror in ancient history, but in the eighth century BC the Nubian Kingdom of Kush reversed the roles. Under King Piye it took over Egypt and ruled as t…
728. In Chewa masquerade, one mask portrays a sunburnt Englishman in ragsAmong the hundreds of masks of the Nyau, the Chewa people's secret society, is Simoni: red-faced, dressed in a ragged suit, probably lampooning a British colonial officer. Others …
729. The earliest Chinese was probably spoken without tonesTones seem inseparable from Chinese today, yet most recent reconstructions of Old Chinese, the ancestor of every modern variety, describe a language without them. Instead it had c…
730. Asia's top-ranked university began in an emptied asylum blockIn 1905 a new medical school opened in a vacant wing of a government asylum at Pasir Panjang, funded by 87,077 Straits dollars raised from Singapore's Chinese and other non-Europe…
731. The Navajo Nation is bigger than ten US states, and it kept growingMost Native American reservations shrank over time. The Navajo Nation did the opposite: from about 3.3 million acres in 1868 it expanded, reaching its current borders in 1934, and…
732. Achilles' son gave Greek a name for poetic justiceNeoptolemus, son of Achilles, killed King Priam at an altar during the fall of Troy. Years later he himself was struck down at the altar of Apollo in Delphi. The Greeks turned tha…
733. Nevada wired its whole constitution to Washington to become a state in timeWith a presidential election days away and its mailed constitution lost, Nevada sent the entire document by telegraph in October 1864, at a cost of $4,303.27, the priciest single …
734. New Mexico was named long before Mexico itself existed as a countrySpanish explorers were calling this land Nuevo Mexico in the 1500s, centuries before Mexico adopted its name on independence in 1821. They hoped to find another rich empire like t…
735. Over a third of India's benchmark stock index is banks and financeThe NIFTY 50 tracks fifty of the biggest companies on India's National Stock Exchange, yet one sector dominates it. As of August 2026, financial services carried 36.47% of the wei…
736. India swapped its 65-year-old Planning Commission for a think tankFor decades India's economy was steered by five-year plans drawn up in Delhi. In 2015 the government abolished the Planning Commission and created NITI Aayog, a policy think tank …
737. Air is mostly nitrogen, yet almost no living thing can use itEvery protein and strand of DNA needs nitrogen, and the air around us is full of it. The catch is the triple bond holding each nitrogen pair together, which is too strong for most…
738. Mycenae's walls were so huge later Greeks credited them to giantsSome blocks in Mycenae's gates weigh over 20 tonnes, and a few may approach 100. Later Greeks decided only the one-eyed Cyclopes could have lifted them. From this hilltop in the P…
739. Judaism's most frequent name for God has gone unspoken for over two thousand yearsThe four Hebrew letters YHWH appear 6,828 times in one standard edition of the Hebrew Bible, yet nobody knows for certain how they were once pronounced. By at least the 3rd centur…
740. How linguists rebuilt the sound of Tang-era Chinese from a rhyme dictionaryNo one recorded how Chinese sounded 1,400 years ago, yet linguists have reconstructed it. Their key is the Qieyun, a rhyme dictionary of 601 that sorted characters by tone and rhy…
741. Moab's king carved his own version of a battle the Bible also tellsThe Bible describes Moabites tricked by water glowing red as blood and routed by Israel. A 9th-century BCE stone set up by Moab's King Mesha tells the same war the other way round…
742. Roman soldiers stuffed mugwort in their sandals against tired feetMugwort is a humble roadside herb with a remarkable résumé. Roman soldiers tucked it into their sandals to ward off fatigue, medieval Europeans wore it against evil on St. John's …
743. Stone Age farmers at Mehrgarh drilled living people's teethIn a Neolithic graveyard in Balochistan, archaeologists found eleven molars from nine adults with holes drilled into them while their owners were still alive. Published in Nature …
744. Menelaus, the wronged Spartan king whose marriage launched the Trojan WarMenelaus is the husband whose wife Helen left with Paris, prompting a thousand ships to sail for Troy. Yet ancient writers could not agree on what happened next: whether he spared…
745. Mescaline, the cactus compound called the first psychedelicPeople have been eating mescaline-bearing cacti such as peyote for more than 6,000 years. When Western chemists isolated the compound in the 19th-century rush to study peyote, it …
746. Between two rivers, Mesopotamia hosted three thousand years of rising and falling empiresThe land between the Tigris and Euphrates saw some of humanity's first farming around 10,000 BC and is credited with the wheel, cursive writing, mathematics and astronomy. Then, f…
747. There were at least three King Midases, and one was realThe Midas of the golden touch belongs to myth, but a flesh-and-blood Phrygian monarch of that name reigned in the late 8th century BCE, most likely the Mita whom Assyrian scribes …
748. Rome's first co-emperor got the job because Marcus Aurelius insistedWhen Antoninus Pius died in 161, the Senate meant to crown Marcus Aurelius alone. Marcus refused unless his adoptive brother Lucius shared equal powers. So for the first time Rome…
749. Unpaid volunteers begin every criminal case in England and WalesEvery criminal prosecution in England and Wales starts in a magistrates' court, and most benches are staffed by unpaid volunteers with no legal qualification. The word they carry …
750. The letters you are reading reached Rome through a Greek colony near NaplesThe Latin alphabet, now the most widely used on Earth, began as a local Greek script brought to Italy by settlers at Cumae. The Etruscans borrowed it, and from their version came …
751. Ancient India's sixteen great states, and the one that swallowed the restAround the time of the Buddha, northern India was a patchwork of sixteen great kingdoms and republics, spread across a belt running from Gandhara near the Indus to Anga far to the…
752. Why so many Buddha statues touch the ground with one handIn countless statues the Buddha sits with his right fingertips resting on the earth. The gesture recalls the night of his awakening, when the tempter Mara challenged his right to …
753. Rome's sharpest insult poet lived in a third-floor garretMartial wrote 1,561 surviving epigrams, short barbed poems mocking Roman social climbers, quack doctors and men who torched their own houses for the insurance. He has been called …
754. A Swiss sample archive grew into a giant of open-access scienceMDPI began in 1996 as a Basel archive for swapping rare chemical samples. By 2020 it was the world's largest publisher of open-access papers, turning out well over 200,000 article…
755. Medea's most infamous crime may not be the oldest version of her storyMost people know Medea as the woman who killed her own children to punish Jason. That is Euripides' version, from the 5th century BC. Earlier poets told it differently: in one, sh…
756. In 1989 Japan had 32 of the world's 50 biggest firmsAt the end of the 1980s, 32 of the world's 50 most valuable companies were Japanese. By 2018 only Toyota remained on that list. Between those dates lay a bubble, a crash and three…
757. No party has ever won a majority in Israel's KnessetIsrael's parliament has 120 seats, a number borrowed from an ancient assembly of sages. Since the first sitting in 1949, no party has won the 61 seats needed to govern alone; the …
758. The kingdom that organised the Vedas became the stage for the MahabharataAround 1200 BCE, two tribes in northern India merged into the Kuru kingdom, the subcontinent's first recorded state-level society. Its kings and priests gathered scattered clan hy…
759. Lakshadweep means a hundred thousand islands, yet it has only 36Its name promises a hundred thousand islands, but Lakshadweep is a scatter of 36 coral islands off India's southwest coast with barely 32.62 square kilometres of land. Around that…
760. The farther from Africa, the more giant animals vanishedIn the Late Pleistocene about 65 percent of the world's large animal species died out. The losses were milder in Africa and South Asia and worst in Australia and the Americas, the…
761. Every surviving word of Linear A would fit on under two pagesThe Minoans of Crete wrote in Linear A for some 350 years, and scholars can pronounce many of its signs. They still cannot read it. Part of the problem is scale: typeset in 12-poi…
762. In Sanskrit logic, smoke is the lingam of fireThe lingam at the heart of Shiva temples takes its name from a word that simply means sign. Indian logicians used it for the clue in an inference, like smoke pointing to fire; phy…
763. A man once crossed the Roman world from Cádiz just to look at LivyLivy was never a senator, never a soldier and never held office, yet his history of Rome made him a celebrity. Pliny the Younger reported that a man travelled from Cádiz in Spain …
764. Lombardy is named after the long beards of Germanic invadersItaly's richest, most populous region takes its name from the Lombards, a Germanic people who swept into Italy in 568. Their name probably meant long beards, though some scholars …
765. Japan's Jōmon made pottery and settled in villages without becoming farmersSettled villages and pottery usually go with farming. Japan's Jōmon had both for more than ten thousand years while mostly hunting, fishing and gathering nuts. Their name, meaning…
766. The Qing emperor who waited three years to rule, then toppled his father's favouriteThe Jiaqing Emperor took the throne in 1796, but for three years his retired father kept making the decisions. Days after the old man died in 1799, Jiaqing turned on Heshen, the n…
767. Jyutping spells Cantonese in Latin letters, and its tone numbers must never be superscriptCantonese has nine tones, yet Jyutping, the Hong Kong romanisation scheme from 1993, marks them with just six plain digits. Its creators even issued a notice insisting those digit…
768. The Caribbean is named after the Kalinago, whose cannibal reputation lacks hard evidenceColumbus recorded the name Caribe, and the whole sea came to bear it. Spanish accounts cast the Kalinago as raiders who roasted human flesh, but no hard evidence backs that up. Wh…
769. Kamakura Japan was run by regents controlling puppet shoguns who overshadowed a figurehead emperorFor much of the Kamakura era, Japan's real rulers were neither emperors nor shoguns. The Hojo family governed as regents for shoguns who were themselves figureheads, while the emp…
770. Japanese schools once banned cute handwriting that teenage girls had inventedIn the 1970s Japanese teenage girls began writing sideways in fine mechanical pencil, with fat rounded characters decorated with hearts, stars and little faces. Teachers found it …
771. The Nubian kingdom that once conquered Egypt and ruled it for a centuryFor centuries Kush was written off as Egypt's shadow to the south. Then its kings marched north, founded the Twenty-fifth Dynasty and governed Egypt for over a hundred years. Exca…
772. The Kiowa's sign-language name comes from a haircut designed for archeryIn the sign language shared across the Great Plains, you say Kiowa by sweeping two fingers from beside your eye back past your ear. The gesture traces an old Kiowa hairstyle, crop…
773. Jiangxi's river valley was southern China's highway for two thousand yearsSoutheast China is a jumble of rugged mountains, but one river valley cuts cleanly through them. For centuries the Gan River corridor in Jiangxi carried trade and armies between t…
774. Before Europeans arrived, a third of Native Americans in today's US lived in CaliforniaMild weather and abundant food once made California the most densely populated Native region north of Mexico, home to perhaps a third of all Native Americans in what is now the Un…
775. One language branch links Romani in Europe to Sinhala in Sri LankaMore than 300 languages, spoken by around 1.7 billion people, descend from a single ancestor called Proto-Indo-Iranian. Their range is astonishing: Romani in Europe, Ossetian in t…
776. India's Intelligence Bureau may be the oldest spy agency still operatingIn 1887 the British rulers of India, uneasy about a new political party called the Indian National Congress, set up a secret branch to watch political, social and religious moveme…
777. Italy may be named after calves, and it once meant only a toeThe name Italia may trace back to an Oscan word meaning land of calves, and early Greeks applied it only to the very tip of the peninsula. Over centuries the label crept north to …
778. Odysseus's island home has changed hands more often than he changed shipsIthaca, the rugged Ionian island most people link with Homer's Odysseus, covers just 96 square kilometres and had 2,862 residents in 2021. Yet Romans, Byzantines, Normans, Ottoman…
779. At its 1942 peak, Japan's empire governed over a fifth of humanityWithin half a century of beating Qing China in 1895, Japan had built one of history's largest empires. By 1942 it controlled about 8.5 million square kilometres, and by 1943 some …
780. A lost sandal told a usurping king that Jason had come for his throneAn oracle warned King Pelias to fear a man wearing one sandal. Years later Jason strolled into Iolcus with a bare foot, having lost the sandal while carrying a disguised goddess a…

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