Intellect Plus
History
1,670 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 15 of 28.
- How a Bihar village's name became a language spoken from Fiji to TrinidadAbout 50.5 million people in India speak Bhojpuri, named after a village capital founded by descendants of Raja Bhoj. Between 1838 and 1917 plantation labourers carried it to Fiji…
- Scythian warriors were allowed only three blood brothers at a timeSwearing brotherhood by mixing blood turns up almost everywhere: Viking sagas, Scythian wine cups, Philippine treaty rites, Mongol steppe alliances and Balkan rebel bands. The Scy…
- Nigeria's Borno State is the heir to a thousand-year Saharan empireBorno is the only Nigerian state touching three countries, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, and it holds Nigeria's share of Lake Chad. Its name and its emirs descend from the Kanem-Bornu…
- Zoroastrian scripture survived for centuries in a language nobody spokeAvestan, the sacred language of Zoroastrianism, died out long before anyone wrote it down. Priests carried its hymns by memory for centuries, and when an alphabet was finally inve…
- The famous Aztec calendar stone is not actually a calendarThe great carved disc in Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology is often called the Aztec calendar stone, but it is the sun stone. The real calendar meshed a 365-day solar …
- Baal started as an ordinary word for owner, and still means husbandBefore Baal was a god, baʿal was simply a Semitic title meaning owner or lord. It became the favoured name of the storm god Hadad, perhaps because his true name was too holy to sa…
- A forgotten Bronze Age civilisation built walled cities in Central Asia's desertsAround 2000 BC, fortified towns with palaces, temples and reservoirs stood in what is now Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Soviet digs uncovered this Oxus civilisation, b…
- The Aromanians' name for themselves comes straight from the Latin word for RomanScattered across Greece, Albania, North Macedonia and Bulgaria, the Aromanians speak a Romance language close to Romanian, a living echo of the Latin once spoken in the Balkans. T…
- Lions once roamed from Arabia to central India; now wild ones survive only in GujaratUntil the 19th century, lions prowled from Saudi Arabia and eastern Turkey across Iran and Mesopotamia to central India. Today every wild Asiatic lion lives in and around Gujarat'…
- Egypt tried worshipping a single sun god for twenty years, then erased itIn the 14th century BC the pharaoh Akhenaten raised the Aten, the disc of the sun, above every other god, shut traditional temples and built a new capital in its honour. The exper…
- Attica's villages lost their independence only when Cleisthenes redrew the mapLegend says twelve small communities of Attica were merged into Athens by the mythical king Theseus. Historians think the absorption was slower, stretching through the 8th and 7th…
- Argos has been lived in for 7,000 years and spent centuries fighting SpartaPeople have lived at the foot of Aspida hill in Argos since a late Neolithic village about 7,000 years ago, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities anywhere. In …
- Refugees built a new Armenia on the Mediterranean and befriended the CrusadersDriven from their highlands by Byzantine annexation and the Seljuk advance, Armenians rebuilt a state on the Cilician coast of what is now southern Turkey. For nearly three centur…
- The first Christian state also invented its own alphabet in 405 ADArmenians call themselves Hay, a name tradition traces to a legendary patriarch who founded the nation near Ararat. Their kingdom became the first to make Christianity a state rel…
- A mother's boast chained Andromeda to a rock and put her in the starsQueen Cassiopeia claimed to outshine the sea nymphs, so Poseidon loosed a monster on Aethiopia and an oracle demanded her daughter as payment. Perseus, flying home with Medusa's h…
- The Roman emperor who ruled 23 years and probably never saw a legionAntoninus Pius presided over the calmest stretch of Rome's Principate, from AD 138 to 161, and one historian doubts he ever came within five hundred miles of a legion. Yet his rei…
- The Arameans lost their kingdoms to Assyria, but their language conquered empiresThe Arameans never formed a single nation, and Assyria swallowed their city-states in the 8th century BCE. Yet Assyria's habit of uprooting conquered peoples scattered Aramaic spe…
- Maize farmers by the Great Lakes became the Arapaho, horse nomads of the plainsAround 3,000 years ago the ancestors of the Arapaho grew maize in the Red River Valley. Pushed west by the Ojibwe, they reached the Great Plains before 1700, swapped dog-drawn tra…
- A librarian's epic about the Golden Fleece helped invent the romance novelApollonius of Rhodes wrote the Argonautica in the age of the Library of Alexandria, packing Jason's voyage for the Golden Fleece with geography, religion and origin stories. Its r…
- Oliver Stone recut his flop Alexander three times over a decadeOliver Stone's Alexander cost $155 million, earned a D-plus from audiences and six Razzie nominations, and lost as much as $71 million. Stone refused to let it go. Over the next d…
- Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet sold just 1,159 copies in its first yearA $5,000 advance from a father launched one of America's great publishers in 1915. Knopf went on to sign Willa Cather, Julia Child and Toni Morrison, and to champion a slow-burnin…
- Jordan's capital Amman takes its name from the ancient kingdom of AmmonAmman, Jordan's capital, stands on the site of Rabbah, chief city of the Ammonites, a small kingdom east of the Jordan River that outlasted Assyrian and Babylonian conquerors. A G…
- Anambra's name began as colonial shorthand: the Anam branch of the riverIn south-eastern Nigeria, bronzes dug up at Igbo-Ukwu reveal a kingdom whose priest-kings held sway for nearly a thousand years. Today the same state is home to one of West Africa…
- Egypt signed history's earliest known peace treaty, with the Hittites of AnatoliaAround 3150 BC a ruler named Menes joined Upper and Lower Egypt into one state. What followed lasted roughly three thousand years, built pyramids and obelisks, invented planked bo…
- Ajax is never wounded in the Iliad, yet he lost the one contest that matteredSecond only to Achilles among the Greeks at Troy, Ajax fought Hector to a standstill, held the ships almost single-handed and carried Achilles' body off the field. He lost the dea…
- Europe's first farmers set out from the shores of the AegeanBefore 5000 BC, Neolithic farmers from Greece were carrying agriculture westward across Europe, one branch up the Danube and another along the Mediterranean to Iberia and eventual…
- Rome chose a defeated Trojan, not a Greek victor, as its founding heroAeneas was a minor figure in Homer's Iliad, a Trojan the gods kept rescuing as if saving him for something. Rome supplied the something. In Virgil's Aeneid he escapes burning Troy…
- Race-based slavery in colonial America was built law by law, not inheritedThe first Africans recorded in English Virginia arrived in August 1619 as indentured servants, a status that ended after years of unpaid work. By the 1640s some African families a…
- The Sahara was grassland dotted with lakes until about 5,000 years agoAround 14,500 years ago the Sahara began turning green. Grass, trees and lakes spread across North Africa, people herded cattle and paddled canoes where there is now sand, and pai…
- A herder's son from Khorasan rebuilt Iran's largest empire since the SasaniansNader was born into a humble semi-nomadic family and began as a local warlord. Within about fifteen years he had expelled Afghan invaders, forced Russians and Ottomans to hand bac…
- Greece's supreme commander at Troy was undone by his own arroganceAgamemnon led the Greek host to Troy, yet the Iliad's drama springs from his worst trait. Forced to return a captured priest's daughter to end a plague, he seized Achilles' prize …
- Cologne owes its Roman name to Nero's formidable mother, AgrippinaAgrippina the Younger was the sister of one emperor, the wife of another and the mother of a third. She survived exile, plotted, and steered her son Nero toward the throne. She wa…
- A deserter claimed to be Catherine the Great's dead husband and raised an armyIn 1773 a Don Cossack fugitive named Yemelyan Pugachev announced that he was Tsar Peter III, secretly alive after his overthrow. He promised to end serfdom, and tens of thousands …
- The oldest known dig was ordered by a Babylonian king 2,600 years agoExcavation is controlled destruction: once a layer is dug away, all that survives are the notes, drawings and photographs made of it. Modern archaeologists peel sites apart one th…
- Why there is no year zero, unless you ask an astronomerThe calendar most of the world uses was invented by a monk around 500 AD, extended backwards by Bede, and still skips straight from 1 BC to AD 1. Astronomers found that gap so awk…
- A house fire can preserve writing for millennia, if the tablets are clayEpigraphers read writing that was never meant for a library: words carved in rock, stamped into metal, scratched on pots or painted on walls. Some of it survived only by luck, lik…
- The oldest flag ever found is 4,400 years old and made of bronzeNobody knows who raised the first flag, but the oldest one yet discovered comes from Shahdad in Iran, around 2400 BC, and it is metal rather than cloth. Fabric flags came later, p…
- Anglo-Saxon kings traced their ancestry to Woden, then kept going to AdamConfucius has the largest surviving family tree on Earth, kept for more than 2,500 years. At the other extreme, English royal chroniclers simply invented descent from the god Wode…
- The three lions of England probably trace back to one Angevin countMedieval heralds happily gave coats of arms to Christ, King Arthur's knights and ancient heroes. In reality, hereditary arms appeared only in the twelfth century. One of the earli…
- Livy wondered what if Alexander had attacked Rome, inventing alternate historyHistoriography is history about history: not what happened, but how people have chosen to tell it. Its long story includes Herodotus sorting reliable reports from unreliable ones,…
- The Philippines flies its flag upside down to announce a warMost national flags have one fixed orientation, but the Philippine flag legally flips in wartime, putting its red stripe above the blue. Flags carry more coded meaning than they s…
- Dating a manuscript by its handwriting is far fuzzier than it soundsPalaeographers can often tell roughly when and where a manuscript was written just from the shapes of its letters. Roughly is the key word. Specialists warn against dating a hand …
- When archaeologists say culture, they mean pots that keep turning up togetherNobody ever dug up a people, only their leftovers. An archaeological culture is a bundle of objects, buildings and burial habits that recur together in one place and time. Decidin…
- Before fighting the slave trade, Wilberforce was a gambling Cambridge socialiteAs a rich student, William Wilberforce spent his nights on cards and drink, and at 21 he bought a seat in Parliament for over £8,000. A religious conversion in 1785 redirected him…
- Rosa Parks was an organiser for twelve years before her famous bus rideThe tired seamstress who simply would not stand is only part of the story. By 1955 Rosa Parks had spent over a decade as secretary of Montgomery's NAACP branch, investigating raci…
- A Colorado study trip helped turn an Egyptian literary critic into an IslamistIn the 1940s Sayyid Qutb was a Cairo education official who loved Hollywood films and Victor Hugo and had helped promote Naguib Mahfouz. Two years studying in the United States ha…
- Sojourner Truth probably never said Ain't I a Woman in that famous voiceThe speech everyone knows was published twelve years after she gave it, rewritten in a Southern dialect and built around a repeated question. The earliest report contains no such …
- China's founding revolutionary was once held captive inside a London legationIn October 1896 Qing agents detained Sun Yat-sen at the Chinese Legation in London, planning to ship him home for execution. His old medical teacher, the British press and the For…
- Susan B. Anthony first wanted equal pay, not the voteAs a young teacher she was amused by her father's excitement over a women's rights convention. What angered her was earning far less than men. Within a few years Anthony was the m…
- Did the Dreyfus affair really make Theodor Herzl a Zionist?Herzl said the crowds he heard in Paris during the Dreyfus trial converted him. Some historians now doubt it. His early accounts barely mention the case, he may at first have thou…
- Thomas Müntzer went from Luther's protégé to leader of a peasant revoltLuther once recommended Thomas Müntzer for a pulpit. Within a few years the two men were bitter enemies. Convinced the world was about to end, Müntzer preached that believers must…
- Two sisters took sixty-five towns from the Han Empire in AD 40In AD 40 the aristocratic sisters Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị led a revolt against Han Chinese rule in what is now northern Vietnam. They seized some sixty-five settlements, and Trưn…
- W. E. B. Du Bois used door-to-door fieldwork to demolish racial stereotypesIn 1896 a young sociologist walked Philadelphia's Black neighbourhoods, mapping who lived where, how they worked and how they died. The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, beca…
- Rosa Luxemburg cheered the Russian Revolution, then warned against its authoritarianismA Marxist who defended democracy against fellow revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg argued with reformists, nationalists and Bolsheviks alike. She coined the slogan socialism or barba…
- Malcolm X's dishwashing friend in Harlem became the comedian Redd FoxxBefore he was Malcolm X, he was Detroit Red, a Harlem hustler whose red-haired pal from Chicago later found fame as Redd Foxx. A burglary sentence in 1946 changed everything. In p…
- Marcus Garvey called himself Provisional President of Africa but never set foot thereMarcus Garvey built a mass movement urging people of African descent to unite, take pride in themselves and, for some, return to Africa. He launched a shipping line to carry them.…
- Margaret Sanger coined a campaign around two words: birth controlIn 1914 it was a federal offence in the United States even to mail information about contraception. Margaret Sanger broke that law on purpose, was arrested eight times, and popula…
- Martin Luther King Jr. was born Michael, renamed after his father's trip to GermanyThe boy born in Atlanta in 1929 was Michael King Jr. In 1934 his father, a Baptist pastor, travelled to a church congress in Berlin, toured sites linked to the reformer Martin Lut…
- Robespierre quit as a judge because he opposed the death penaltyAs a young magistrate in Arras, Maximilien Robespierre resigned rather than rule in capital cases, and in 1791 he urged the French Assembly to abolish execution altogether. Within…
- Mexico's founding father was a rule-breaking priest who taught villagers to farm silkwormsMiguel Hidalgo was a priest who read banned French philosophy, questioned papal power and clerical celibacy, and fathered several children. In Dolores he set up brickworks and vin…