An old astrolabe was recently discovered in a museum in the Italian city of Verona. It dates back to the 1100s, which makes it one of the oldest astrolabes ever found. Astrolabes are early scientific calculators that could measure time, distances, the position of stars, and even make horoscopes predicting the future. The newly discovered […]
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
The Extravagant 1903 Russian Fancy Dress Ball that Inspired the Costumes for “The Phantom Menace”
The days of February 11th and 13th in the year 1903 were special in St. Petersburg. If, in the words of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, someone were to peer through the large windows of the palace attempting to catch a glimpse of the party being held inside, they would have been somewhat confused to see […]
Posted inArt, Culture
Bucharest’s Palace of the Parliament is the World’s Heaviest Building
Neither the tallest skyscraper in the Middle East or China, nor even the largest temple in the world, the heaviest building constructed by mankind is the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, weighing in at just over 4 million tons (in size, it’s the third-largest administrative building in the world after the American Pentagon and […]
Posted inAncient Rome, Culture
Researchers Read for the First Time the Contents of One of the Charred Herculaneum Scrolls, an Epicurean Treatise
A team of researchers from around the world has achieved the feat of reading fragments of text from one of the charred scrolls of the ancient library of Herculaneum, buried 2000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. These scrolls were discovered by chance in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum in the […]
Posted inArt, Culture
A Painting by Gustav Klimt, Thought to Have Been Lost for a Hundred Years, Rediscovered
Art enthusiasts around the world received exciting news this year with the announcement that one of Gustav Klimt’s most famous “lost” works has resurfaced after over a century. Im Kinsky, the venerable Vienna-based auction house known for setting world records with iconic Austrian works, will offer the long-hidden painting at their highly anticipated April 2024 […]
Posted inCulture
Voting Rights for Animals Proposed
A new study published by Oxford University Press argues that it may be time to extend voting rights to animals. While the idea may seem ridiculous at first, the study claims it would simply be an expansion of existing practices where some governments allow the legal rights of animals to be represented through proxies. For […]
Posted inCulture
The Byblos Syllabary, a 3800-year-old Writing System whose Inscriptions Have yet to Be Deciphered
In 1928 French archaeologist Maurice Dunand began excavating the ancient coastal city of Byblos, located in what is now Lebanon. Byblos was an important Phoenician city whose origin dates back to around 5000 BC and had a long history of trade and cultural exchanges with neighboring civilizations such as Egypt and Mesopotamia. During four excavation […]
Posted inCulture, Modern Era
Ossip Bernstein, the Chess Player who Bet his Life in One Game
Chess is a game that represents war on a board, where pieces are eliminated in a metaphor of combat and death based on their hierarchy. That’s why it’s ironic that a game played in 1918 literally saved a man’s life. His name was Ossip Samoilovich Bernstein, and he had to win to prove his identity, […]
Posted inAncient Greece, Culture
When Euhemerus of Messina Found the Record of the Birth and Death of Zeus, Uranus, and Cronus
Many lost works of Antiquity can be reconstructed to a considerable extent thanks to extensive citations of them found in later authors, as we saw in the article about Sanchuniaton. Another such case is the Bibliotheca historica (Historical Library) of Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the 1st century BC. Of the 40 volumes of […]
Posted inCulture
Electromote, the Story of the First Trolleybus, Invented by the Founder of Siemens
The early steps in the history of motorized land vehicles left truly picturesque but charmingly pioneering brushstrokes. Seeing those cars with huge spoked wheels and horse carriage chassis makes us smile, the larger their level of extravagance, the more significant the grin. That’s why, sometimes, one must rub their eyes at the sight of primitive […]