Are there any descendants of William Shakespeare today? The answer is no. It is known that the family endures through another line, that of his younger sister Joan, but the famous playwright’s line has died out. This is because, despite having three children with his wife Anne Hathaway, two were girls and thus took their […]
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
Intervision, the Soviet Bloc Festival that Replicated Eurovision with Voting by Turning the Lights On and Off
This is evident with NATO and the Warsaw Pact or the European Common Market and COMECON. But interestingly enough, the Eastern countries also had a response to something much less serious. In 1977, the ISC, the Intervision Song Contest, was born, which, as you can guess, was a copy of the Eurovision Song Contest in […]
Posted inCulture, History
Go, the Oldest Continuously Played Board Game to Date
Born in Berthelsdorf (Saxony, before German unification) in the mid-19th century, Oskar Korschelt had barely reached adulthood when he accepted a position as a chemistry professor at the Tokyo Medical College, later working for the Japanese government and industry. He spent almost a decade in the land of the rising sun, enough time to develop […]
Posted inArchaeology, Culture
The Anasazi Used Conch Shells as Trumpets to Communicate 1,000 Years Ago
Research into senses and perceptions can greatly enrich our understanding of human experiences in the past. In recent decades, sensory studies have gained ground in archaeology, allowing researchers to explore new ways to understand how people experienced and related to ancient landscapes. An interdisciplinary team has just published a fascinating study using Geographic Information Systems […]
Posted inCulture
Books from the Library of the Brothers Grimm Discovered in Poland May Provide Clues to their Method of Selecting Fairy Tales
The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are known for their fairy tales, which have entered the literary canon. However, they spent almost their entire lives developing Germanic philology. New discoveries of previously lost books from their private library may help in investigating their work. Twenty-seven books, believed to have been lost after World War II, […]
Posted inAncient Greece, Culture
Jørgensen’s Law or Why Mortal Characters in the Homeric Poems Cannot Distinguish Which Gods Intervene in Their Lives
Anyone who hasn’t read the Odyssey and the Iliad, the two great Greek epics attributed to Homer that form the basis of Western literature, doesn’t know what they’re missing out on. And those who have read them may have missed, undoubtedly, a curious detail: despite the constant interference of the gods in the characters’ lives, […]
Posted inAncient Greece, Culture
Pyrrhic, the War Dance of Ancient Greeks with which Spartans Trained their Sons
The ancient Greeks had a series of rituals related to war and combat. Among them are war dances, of which the oldest and best known, thanks to sources and art, is the Pyrrhichios (πυρρίχιος, Pyrrhic Dance). It was a war dance, probably of Dorian origin, commemorating bravery and skill on the battlefield. It began to […]
Posted inCulture, Middle Ages
Rare Andalusian Astrolabe Discovered in Verona Reveals Islamic, Jewish and Christian Scientific Exchange
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 […]
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 […]
