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 […]
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 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 inAntiquity, Culture
How the Karatepe bilingual inscription from the 8th century B.C. led to the decipherment of Anatolian hieroglyphs
Just as the Rosetta Stone was fundamental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, other writing systems followed a similar process, sometimes more rugged and convoluted. Some contributed in part to the decipherment of the Anatolian hieroglyphs, in a sort of curious domino effect. In 1694, the Cippi of Melqart, two pedestals bearing bilingual inscriptions, in […]
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 inAncient Greece, Culture
The Lemnos Stele, a funerary inscription from the 6th century B.C. that links the Pelasgians to the Etruscans
In 1885, a unique stele was found as part of the walls of a church in the town of Kaminia on the Greek island of Lemnos. It has been dated to the 6th century BC, prior to the conquest of the island by the Athenians in 510 BC to the Pelasgians. This was the name […]
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 […]
Posted inCulture, Science
The foundation researching how to avoid gravity, whose essay prize was won by Stephen Hawking and five Nobel laureates in physics
A boy who witness his sister drown in a Massachusetts river and comes to the conclusion that gravity is to blame for everything: she was unable to fight gravity, which came up and grabbed her like a dragon and carried her off, he wrote. As an adult, he studies at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), […]
