In 1983, the famous magician David Copperfield caused a sensation by making the New York City Statue of Liberty disappear in a live television broadcast. It is curious that almost forty years before, in the middle of World War II, another illusionist also performed a magical feat of great proportions, although in his case it…Continue readingJasper Maskelyne, the magician who fooled the Germans with his tricks in World War II
Egypt
Throughout History, men have not had enough of tearing each other apart in an endless number of wars, but they have incorporated all kinds of animals into the slaughters, from the most orthodox such as horses, mules, elephants and dogs to other rarer ones, such as pigeons wrapped in fire, birds in flames to burn…Continue readingPelusium, the battle the Persians won over the Egyptians by throwing cats at them.
The great Library of Alexandria was founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC by Ptolemy I Soter. At its peak it housed an impressive 900,000 manuscripts. It was not only a storehouse of books, but also an entire research and teaching center that brought together numerous scholars from different centers of classical culture.…Continue readingWhere did the books from the Great Library of Alexandria come from?
Today we are going to discover an almost unknown individual, a good representative from other times, who may have been the first to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs almost nine centuries earlier than is believed. We are referring to the Arab scholar Ibn Wahshiyya. In mid-September 1822, Jean-François Champollion managed to finish off the work…Continue readingIbn Wahshiyya, the Nabataean who could have translated Egyptian hieroglyphs before Champollion.
Three millennia ago Egypt was at the height of its Empire. After the war campaigns of Senusret III and a period of splendour and Egyptian pax during the government of Amenhotep III, and having saved a phase of weakness and decadence led by pharaohs like Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, the times of splendour returned with the…Continue readingThe solar alignment that occurs twice a year in the temple of Abu Simbel
The fact that the African continent was for the most part an unknown place until the second half of the 19th century does not mean that it did not gather several exploratory missions attempting to unravel its mysteries. And not only in Contemporary Age because the list of them goes back to Antiquity. For instance,…Continue readingThe Egyptian-Phoenician expedition that circumnavigated Africa more than 2,500 years ago