50 Fun Facts About History

Which inscribed slab, found by French soldiers in Egypt in 1799, gave scholars the key to reading hieroglyphs?

The Rosetta Stone repeats one decree in three scripts, and the Ancient Greek at the bottom let Jean-François Champollion work out the Egyptian above it by 1822.

Which queen of Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty allied herself with Julius Caesar and then with Mark Antony?

Cleopatra is the only ruler of her Greek-speaking family known to have learned Egyptian, the language of the people she governed.

Which volcano buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash and pumice in AD 79?

Mount Vesuvius left one eyewitness account: Pliny the Younger watched from across the Bay of Naples and described the eruption in two letters.

Which charter did rebel barons force King John of England to seal at Runnymede in 1215?

Magna Carta failed at first: neither side kept its word, the pope annulled it, and England slid into the First Barons' War.

Which Mongol ruler, born Temüjin, founded the largest contiguous land empire in history?

Genghis Khan was a title, taken at a great assembly in 1206; as a boy he had lost his father and seen his family abandoned by its tribe.

Which teenage peasant helped lift the English siege of Orléans in 1429 and was later burned at the stake?

Joan of Arc was cleared in 1456, when a church court overturned the verdict that had condemned her, and in 1920 she was made a saint.

Which Paris fortress-prison did a crowd storm on 14 July 1789, a date France now marks as its national holiday?

The Bastille held only seven inmates that day and was already scheduled for demolition, but revolutionaries saw it as a symbol of royal abuse of power.

Which country became the first in the world to give all women the vote in parliamentary elections, in 1893?

New Zealand let women vote in 1893 after petitions led by Kate Sheppard, yet women could not stand for Parliament there until 1919.

Which seamstress's refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 set off a year-long boycott?

Rosa Parks was not the first: nine months earlier, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in the same city for the same refusal.

Which general marched war elephants across the Alps to invade Italy during the Second Punic War?

Hannibal got elephants over the mountains and fielded them at the Trebia that December, but most or all of them died of wounds or cold that winter.

Which pharaoh's tomb did Howard Carter's team discover in Egypt's Valley of the Kings in 1922?

Tutankhamun died at about 19, and the more than 5,000 artifacts buried with him set off a worldwide wave of interest in ancient Egypt.

Which river did Julius Caesar lead a legion across in 49 BC, an act that began a Roman civil war?

The Rubicon marked a boundary Caesar was not allowed to bring an army across, so crossing it meant defying the law at the risk of his life.

Which Greek philosopher did King Philip II of Macedon hire to tutor his son, the future Alexander the Great?

Aristotle's fee was a town: in return, Philip agreed to rebuild the philosopher's hometown of Stageira, which he had razed, and to free its enslaved citizens.

Which Greek city-state's king Leonidas died holding the pass of Thermopylae against a Persian invasion in 480 BC?

Sparta's 300 did not stand alone at the end: 700 men from Thespiae stayed with them after a local named Ephialtes showed the Persians a path behind the pass.

Which ruler, the first emperor of a unified China, was buried near a life-sized Terracotta Army?

Qin Shi Huang's clay soldiers stayed buried until 1974, when farmers digging wells struck them. He also joined older state walls into a single Great Wall.

Which prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain was built partly with rocks hauled all the way from Wales?

Stonehenge was a burial ground too, and bone tests suggest many of the dead had come from near the Welsh source of its bluestones.

Which Mesopotamian king's law code was carved on a basalt pillar that now stands in the Louvre?

Hammurabi's pillar was carried off as plunder 600 years after it was made and was found again in 1901 at Susa, in present-day Iran.

Which domed cathedral in Constantinople did Sultan Mehmed II convert into a mosque after taking the city in 1453?

Hagia Sophia had served as the city's cathedral since its dedication in 360; it became a museum in 1935 and was redesignated a mosque in 2020.

Which battle of 14 October 1066 saw Duke William of Normandy defeat King Harold and begin the Norman Conquest?

Hastings was fought from 9 am until dusk, and the English army gave way after Harold was killed, probably near the end of the day.

Which Norse explorer is thought to have reached North America about 500 years before Christopher Columbus?

Leif Erikson's voyage was known only from Icelandic sagas until the early 1960s, when a Norse site was identified at the northern tip of Newfoundland.

Which emperor of Mali handed out so much gold in Cairo on his 1324 pilgrimage that its value there reportedly fell?

Mansa Musa befriended officials in Cairo, and what they learned from him is how historians such as Al-Umari came to write about his distant country.

Which goldsmith had a movable-type printing press running by 1450 and used it to print a celebrated Bible?

Johannes Gutenberg did not invent movable type, which was already in use in East Asia; his press made printing far faster.

Which Venetian merchant dictated the story of his travels through Asia to a cellmate while a prisoner of the Genoese?

Marco Polo's cellmate, the writer Rustichello da Pisa, wove in tales of his own, and the finished book later inspired Christopher Columbus.

Which 14th-century pandemic, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe's people?

The Black Death was not called that by those who lived through it: at the time, no European language described the plague as black.

Which Aztec capital, built on an island in Lake Texcoco, fell to the Spanish and their allies in 1521?

Tenochtitlan shared its island with a second city-state, Tlatelolco, and both now lie beneath Mexico City.

Which Spanish conquistador captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca in November 1532?

Francisco Pizarro demanded a ransom, and Atahualpa filled a room with gold as high as he could reach, yet Pizarro had him executed the following year.

Which priest's Ninety-five Theses of 1517 attacked the sale of indulgences and set off the Protestant Reformation?

Martin Luther later translated the Bible into German, which opened it to ordinary readers and helped shape a standard form of the German language.

Which English king made himself head of the Church of England after the pope refused to annul his first marriage?

Henry VIII wanted to remarry in pursuit of a male heir; he went on to marry six times and ordered the beheadings of two wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.

Which Portuguese navigator led the Spanish fleet that first circled the globe but died in the Philippines?

Ferdinand Magellan never finished the trip: after he was killed in battle, Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the surviving crew home to Spain in 1522.

Which astronomer was tried by the Roman Inquisition and forced to recant his support for a Sun-centred universe?

Galileo Galilei was found suspect of heresy, and his sentence was commuted to house arrest, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

Which Mughal emperor commissioned the Taj Mahal in 1631 as a tomb for his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal?

Shah Jahan put more than 20,000 workers and artisans on the project, and the mausoleum now holds his own tomb as well as his wife's.

Which Russian tsar toured Western Europe incognito and later made nobles pay a tax to keep their beards?

Peter the Great wanted a European-looking court, so men who refused to shave had to pay a yearly tax to keep their beards.

Which city, the seat of Japan's Tokugawa shoguns, was renamed Tokyo after the shogunate fell in 1868?

Edo grew from a fishing village into what many estimates rank as the largest city in the world, with about a million people by 1721.

Which settlement, signed in Osnabrück and Münster in 1648, ended the Thirty Years' War?

The Peace of Westphalia closed a war that killed between 4.5 and 8 million people, and scholars often trace the modern idea of state sovereignty to it.

Which 1494 agreement split newly found lands outside Europe between Portugal and Castile along a line in the Atlantic?

The Treaty of Tordesillas moved the line far enough west to give Portugal rights to lands that now form the eastern quarter of Brazil.

Which Caracas-born general, known as El Libertador, led six present-day countries to independence from Spain?

Simón Bolívar lost both parents as a child, and one of the six countries, Bolivia, is named after him.

At which battle of 18 June 1815 did Wellington and Blücher's armies end Napoleon's rule for good?

Waterloo lies in present-day Belgium, and Napoleon abdicated four days after the fighting, which ended the First French Empire.

Which island did China cede to Britain as a colony under the 1842 treaty that ended the First Opium War?

Hong Kong was only part of the price: the treaty also made China pay an indemnity and open five ports to foreign trade.

Which Prussian statesman, nicknamed the Iron Chancellor, oversaw the unification of Germany in 1871?

Otto von Bismarck served as the new empire's first chancellor for almost two decades, until the young Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed him in 1890.

Which Ming admiral led seven treasure voyages between 1405 and 1433, reaching the Swahili coast of Africa?

Zheng He brought a giraffe home from Malindi, and the court took it for a qilin, a mythical beast, and read it as proof of Heaven's favour.

In which Virginia village did Robert E. Lee surrender his army to Ulysses S. Grant on 9 April 1865?

Appomattox gave Wilmer McLean a strange double: the Civil War's first major battle touched his farm near Manassas, and the surrender took place in his later house.

Which Ethiopian emperor's army defeated an invading Italian force at the Battle of Adwa in March 1896?

Menelik II's victory left Ethiopia as the only African country of its day to owe its independence to a win on the battlefield.

In which city did Gavrilo Princip shoot the Austro-Hungarian heir in June 1914, sparking the First World War?

Sarajevo's plotters had already failed once that day; Princip got his chance on the archduke's return journey, near the Latin Bridge.

Which Cunard liner steamed through ice fields to pick up more than 700 Titanic survivors in April 1912?

Carpathia arrived after the liner had gone down and took the survivors from its lifeboats; six years later it was sunk too, torpedoed by a German submarine off Ireland.

Which field marshal founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and introduced a Latin-based alphabet for Turkish?

Kemal Atatürk did not carry that surname until 1934, when parliament granted it to him; it is usually translated as Father of the Turks.

Which German cipher machine did a Polish mathematician first break in 1932, years before Bletchley Park took it on?

Enigma first yielded to Marian Rejewski of the Polish Cipher Bureau, and a Bletchley hut chief later wrote that his team could not have started without the Poles.

In which Punjab city did troops under Reginald Dyer fire on a crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in April 1919?

Amritsar's dead moved the poet Rabindranath Tagore to renounce his British knighthood as a symbolic act of protest.

Which Soviet cosmonaut became the first human in space aboard Vostok 1 in April 1961?

Yuri Gagarin's flight, a single orbit of Earth, took just 108 minutes, and it was the only spaceflight he ever made.

Which Apollo 11 astronaut orbited the Moon alone in Columbia while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the surface?

Michael Collins also created the Apollo 11 mission patch, and he was only the second person ever to circle the Moon by himself.

Which country elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike in 1960, making her the world's first female prime minister?

Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, chose her a year after her husband was assassinated; opponents dubbed her the Weeping Widow.