Along with Journey to the Center of the Earth, Five Weeks in a Balloon, and some others, An Antarctic Mystery has always been one of my favorite novels by Jules Verne; partly because of the work itself and partly due to the magnificent comic book adaptation by artist José Duarte Minarro in 1973 for that […]
Culture
Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society (E.B. Tylor)
Posted inCulture, Modern Era
Dalrunes, the Nordic runes that were used until the 20th century in a region of Sweden
Runes are the letters used to write by some Germanic peoples during Antiquity and the Middle Ages, mainly in Scandinavia but also in other areas where these peoples settled. The oldest known runes date back to the 2nd century AD. The first chronologically would be the comb inscription found on the Danish island of Funen, […]
Posted inArt, Culture
The History of the Prinkipo Orphanage, the Largest Wooden Building in Europe
Büyükada is the largest of the nine Princes’ Islands located in the Sea of Marmara, so close to the city of Istanbul that they are considered its neighborhoods. Its barely 5 square kilometers, where motorized vehicles are prohibited, boast some historical monuments, Byzantine churches and monasteries, along with a mosque, an abandoned amusement park, and […]
Posted inCulture, Science
How the Nocturnal Works: the Device that allowed Sailors to tell Time in the Dark (Video)
A nocturnal is a device used to determine local time based on the relative positions of two or more stars in the night sky. Sometimes called a horologium nocturnum (nighttime timepiece) or nocturlabe (in French and occasionally used by English writers), this tool is related to the astrolabe and sundial. Typically constructed of materials like […]
Posted inAncient Rome, Culture, Middle Ages
When the Codex Overtook the Scroll as the Format for Books
Recently, following the article we published about the origins of the books in the Library of Alexandria, a somewhat finicky (and indeed quite mistaken) reader confronted us on a social media platform, asserting that those were not books but rather handwritten scrolls. What he evidently didn’t know is that scrolls are simply one form of […]
Posted inAncient Rome, Culture
The oldest surviving text of Latin prose is a manual of agriculture and recipes, including the placenta cake
As we mentioned in a previous article, only one percent of all the literature produced by the Romans in Antiquity has survived to our days. The oldest surviving text in Latin is a hymn recited by the priests of Mars during their annual festival, which was found inscribed on a stone in Rome in 1777. […]
Posted inCulture
Abram Gannibal, the African slave who became a military engineer, general of the Russian army and great-grandfather of the writer Alexander Pushkin
There is an episode from the eighteenth century that in a way seems to come from a work of fiction: that of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, an African prince kidnapped by the Otmans but bought by a Russian ambassador who took him to his country, where, after a careful education, he reached high military and political […]
Posted inCulture
Superman Red Son, the alternative history of the superhero in the Soviet Union
As we know, a huge cataclysm destroyed the planet Krypton but a scientist managed to save his newborn son, Kal-El, from total destruction by putting him in a spaceship and launching him into space. Thus, the baby arrived on Earth, to a farm in Smallville, Kansas, where he was adopted by a couple who discovered […]
Posted inCulture
A BBC documentary made millions believe that they could grow spaghetti at home
“Put a sprig of spaghetti in a can of tomato sauce and wait for the best“. This is the answer the BBC gave to viewers who called asking how they could grow spaghetti at home. We are not crazy. This is a funny episode that happened in the United Kingdom in 1957, after the famous […]
Posted inCulture
Delia Bacon, the writer who proposed the first theory about Shakespeare’s true identity
The debate about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works is not recent; it began about a century and a half after his death, when Herbert Lawrence suggested it in 1771, and it has continued ever since, with people like the famous poets John Milton and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the historian J. Thomas Looney or the journalist […]