50 Fun Facts About Humanities

Which Leonardo da Vinci portrait gained worldwide fame after a former Louvre workman stole it in 1911?

The Mona Lisa was taken by Vincenzo Peruggia, a workman who had helped build its glass case. He hid the painting in his apartment for two years, saying it belonged in Italy.

Which German composer was almost completely deaf when his Ninth Symphony was first performed in Vienna?

Beethoven was several bars adrift and still conducting when the contralto Caroline Unger turned him round to face the cheering audience. They waved hats and handkerchiefs so he could see the ovation.

In Miguel de Cervantes's novel, which structures does Don Quixote attack in the belief that they are giants?

Windmills are the first thing Don Quixote charges once the farm labourer Sancho Panza has joined him as squire. The scene gave English its idiom for fighting imaginary enemies.

Which Athenian philosopher was sentenced to drink hemlock after a jury found him guilty of corrupting the young?

Socrates spent his last day in prison with friends who offered him a way to escape, which he refused. He wrote nothing himself, so the trial is known mainly through his pupils' accounts.

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 hieroglyphs, Demotic script and ancient Greek, so the readable Greek unlocked the other two. It went on show at the British Museum in 1802.

Which novel did Mary Shelley begin after Lord Byron proposed a ghost-story contest beside Lake Geneva?

Frankenstein came to her as a waking dream several days after the challenge was set. The party was stuck indoors because the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora had brought a cold, rainy summer.

Which artist, a sculptor who was reluctant to take the job, spent four years painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling?

Michelangelo suggested that his young rival Raphael be given the commission instead. He saw himself as a carver of marble, yet the ceiling became a cornerstone of High Renaissance art.

Which Egyptian pharaoh's nearly intact tomb did Howard Carter's team uncover in the Valley of the Kings?

Tutankhamun has the only royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings to be found nearly intact. Carter's patron, the Earl of Carnarvon, was close to ending the search and had agreed to pay for one last season.

Which art movement took its name from a critic's satirical review of a Claude Monet harbour painting?

Impressionism began as a jibe: Louis Leroy mocked Monet's Impression, Sunrise as barely a sketch, and the name stuck to the whole group. His review ran in the Paris paper Le Charivari in 1874.

Which American port city, home to Congo Square and the Storyville district, is regarded as the birthplace of jazz?

New Orleans heard many of its early players in the bars of Storyville, the red-light district around Basin Street. Visiting tourists spread the music further before the government shut the district in 1917.

Which tragedy, the longest play Shakespeare wrote, follows a Danish prince avenging his murdered father?

Hamlet hears of the murder from his father's ghost, who names the prince's uncle Claudius as the killer. Claudius has taken both the throne and the dead king's widow.

Which ancient Greek poet, described as blind in most ancient biographies, is credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey?

Homer was most often pictured as a blind bard from Ionia, on the coast of present-day Turkey. Scholars still debate whether such a poet existed, and many think the two epics had separate authors.

Which Dutch painter based The Starry Night on the view from his asylum window at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence?

Vincent van Gogh had admitted himself to the asylum, a former monastery, a few weeks before he painted it. The village under the swirling sky is imaginary, added from sketches rather than the real view.

Which Italian city, home of the Medici banking family, is widely considered the birthplace of the Renaissance?

Florence grew rich as a trading and banking commune before its artists reshaped European art. The Medici, who were bankers to the pope, ruled the city for periods of its turbulent history.

Which goldsmith from Mainz printed a celebrated Bible in the 1450s using his new movable-type press?

Johannes Gutenberg borrowed from the moneylender Johann Fust to print his Bible, and Fust later demanded the money back. Movable type already existed in East Asia, but his press printed far faster.

Which religion grew from the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, said to have reached awakening under a tree at Bodh Gaya?

Buddhism dates its beginning to that awakening under a sacred fig, now called the Bodhi Tree. He is said to have spent the next 40 or 45 years teaching everyone from nobles to servants.

Which Greek philosopher pictured chained prisoners mistaking shadows on a cave wall for reality in his Republic?

Plato imagines one prisoner set free, who at first turns back in pain to the shadows he is used to. The allegory compares the effect of education with the lack of it.

Which Salzburg-born composer was writing music at five and later wrote The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute?

Mozart played his first little pieces to his father Leopold, who wrote them down for him. An aria from The Magic Flute now travels through space on the Voyager Golden Record.

Which document did King John of England seal at Runnymede in 1215 to make peace with rebel barons?

Magna Carta failed as a peace deal: neither side kept its promises and Pope Innocent III annulled it, leading to the First Barons' War. Its name, meaning Great Charter, was only given a few years later.

Which Titan of Greek myth was chained to a rock by Zeus for stealing fire and giving it to humanity?

Prometheus carried the stolen fire away hidden in a fennel stalk. In the best-known telling, Zeus sent an eagle to eat his liver every day, and it grew back every night.

Which Spanish artist painted Guernica in Paris after German and Italian aircraft bombed a Basque town in 1937?

Pablo Picasso left the canvas in the care of New York's Museum of Modern Art, asking that it stay out of Spain until liberty and democracy were restored. It finally reached Madrid in 1981.

Which English novelist's Pride and Prejudice first appeared credited only to the author of Sense and Sensibility?

Jane Austen published every one of her novels anonymously, and her first had been signed simply as the work of a Lady. The four that came out in her lifetime brought her little public fame.

Which Chinese teacher's sayings were compiled by his followers into the Analects, many years after his death?

Confucius won official backing under Emperor Wu of Han, when works linked to him became required reading for would-be officials. They were still on the syllabus when China scrapped its civil service exams in 1905.

Which temple on the Athenian Acropolis, dedicated to Athena, later served as a church and then a mosque?

The Parthenon came through both conversions basically intact, until 1687, when a Venetian bomb struck the munitions the Ottomans were keeping inside it.

Which professor at Wittenberg wrote the Ninety-five Theses against indulgences that launched the Protestant Reformation?

Martin Luther was later hidden away in Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament from Greek into German. He called the refuge his Patmos.

Which Russian composer wrote the music for the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker?

Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake opened at Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre in 1877, but most companies now dance the 1895 revival by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. Its heroine Odette is a princess cursed by a sorcerer.

French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian all descend from the everyday spoken form of which ancient language?

Latin as ordinary people spoke it, not the formal written kind, is the ancestor of the whole Romance family. The word Romance itself comes from a phrase meaning to speak in Roman.

Which pen name did the English writer Eric Blair adopt for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four?

George Orwell took his surname from the River Orwell in Suffolk, one of his favourite places, and his first name from England's patron saint.

Which Japanese verse form, mastered by Matsuo Bashō, traditionally has seventeen sound units in three short phrases?

Haiku traditionally also carries a seasonal reference and a cutting word that divides the poem. Even Bashō sometimes broke the seventeen-unit pattern.

Which volcano buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in an eruption witnessed by Pliny the Younger?

Mount Vesuvius was watched by Pliny from Misenum, across the Bay of Naples, and his two letters are the only surviving eyewitness account. They never mention Pompeii by name.

Which French philosopher argued in his Discourse on the Method that the very act of doubting proved his own existence?

René Descartes began by doubting everything, so that he could judge the world free of preconceived notions. He died in Stockholm, where Queen Christina of Sweden had invited him to her court.

Which Italian poet made the Roman poet Virgil his guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy?

Dante Alighieri swaps guides for Heaven, where Beatrice, his ideal woman, leads the way. By writing in Tuscan he helped turn that dialect into standard Italian.

Which architectural style of pointed arches, rib vaults and flying buttresses began at the Abbey of Saint-Denis?

Gothic started as a term of abuse: the Renaissance writer Giorgio Vasari called it a barbarous German style and blamed the Goths who had conquered Rome. Saint-Denis was the work of Abbot Suger.

Which Athenian playwright wrote Oedipus Rex, about a king of Thebes who unknowingly killed his own father?

Sophocles has Oedipus hunt the previous king's murderer to end a plague, unaware that the man he is looking for is himself. He is also credited with adding a third actor to the Greek stage.

Which German thinker, buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, wrote The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels?

Karl Marx spent a great deal of time studying in the reading room of the British Museum. He was buried in a part of the cemetery reserved for agnostics and atheists.

Which Surrealist painter introduced the soft, melting pocket watch in his canvas The Persistence of Memory?

Salvador Dalí said the soft watches came not from the theory of relativity but from the sight of a Camembert melting in the sun.

In Roman legend, which twin brothers were suckled by a she-wolf before one of them founded Rome?

Romulus and Remus were nursed in a cave later known as the Lupercal. In the usual telling Romulus killed his brother before founding the city, and the she-wolf became its symbol.

Which Russian novelist wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and died at a railway station in 1910?

Leo Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo station, aged 82, after a day's train journey south. While he wrote both novels his wife Sonya served as his secretary, editor and financial manager.

Which fourteen-line verse form, invented at a Sicilian court, did Petrarch make famous with his poems to Laura?

The sonnet is credited to Giacomo da Lentini at the court of Frederick II in Palermo. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey later pioneered the form in English.

Which English poet wrote The Canterbury Tales, a storytelling contest among pilgrims riding to Thomas Becket's shrine?

Geoffrey Chaucer meant each pilgrim to tell four stories, about 120 in all. He became the first writer buried in what is now Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Which Greek writer from Halicarnassus did Cicero call the Father of History for his account of the Persian Wars?

Herodotus was also branded the Father of Lies by critics, on account of the strange stories and folk tales he passed on. His home city lay inside the Persian Empire, so he was born a Persian subject.

Which Italian diplomat wrote The Prince, a treatise on power that went unpublished until five years after his death?

Niccolò Machiavelli dedicated the book to a member of the ruling Medici family. After he died his name became a byword for the unscrupulous acts it recommends.

Which school of philosophy, founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium, is named after the painted porch where he taught?

Stoicism is said to owe its start to a shipwreck: Zeno survived one on a voyage from Phoenicia, then went to Athens and visited a bookseller. The porch, the Stoa Poikile, was decorated with battle scenes.

Which Mughal emperor commissioned the Taj Mahal to house the tomb of his wife Mumtaz Mahal?

Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb and confined in nearby Agra Fort, from where he could see the Taj Mahal. He was buried in it beside his wife in 1666.

Which philosopher from Königsberg grounded all moral duty in a rule he called the categorical imperative?

Immanuel Kant kept so strict a routine that neighbours were said to set their watches by his daily walks. His birthplace is now the Russian territory of Kaliningrad.

Which German design school, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime?

The Bauhaus had moved from Weimar to Dessau and then Berlin before its own leaders shut it, after it was painted as a centre of communist intellectualism. Its last director was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Which Nigerian author's debut novel Things Fall Apart follows Okonkwo, an Igbo leader who opposes colonial rule?

Chinua Achebe wrote it while working at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation and posted his handwritten manuscript to a typing agency in London, which he had found through a magazine advertisement.

Which French existentialist declined the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, having always refused official honours?

Jean-Paul Sartre was named the winner anyway, despite trying to refuse. When he died, 50,000 Parisians turned out to follow his funeral procession.

Which king of Uruk seeks immortality after his friend Enkidu dies, in the oldest surviving work of narrative literature?

Gilgamesh ends his search with Utnapishtim, who with his wife was the only human to survive a flood sent by the gods. The same flood hero appears in the Babylonian epic of Atra-Hasis.

Which constructed language did the eye doctor L. L. Zamenhof publish in 1887 as a universal second language?

Esperanto, meaning one who hopes, began as the pseudonym Zamenhof signed his first book with. Early adopters liked the name so much that they soon used it for the language itself.