Herodotus the History Blog

Thursday 21 January 2010

Newton's mouse-powered windmill
"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank tea, under the shade of some apple trees." The Royal Society has put on line the memoirs of the life of Sir Isaac Newton by William Stukeley. Along the way we learn the truth about Newton being hit on the head by an apple, Newton's childhood invention of a mouse-powered windmill - and his legendary absent-mindedness. Click here to read more.

Sunday 2 January 2010

Happy New Year
After a longish pause, a return to historical anecdotes. Thanks to everyone who has written to me about my books over the past year. The comments, queries, corrections and criticisms have all been stimulating. Over the past few months I have been delving deeply into the Venetian Mediterranean. On a general ship theme, we learn from a clay tablet that the Sumerians knew that the ark was in fact round: 'Draw out the boat that you will build with a circular design; Let its length and breadth be the same' - more a coracle than the pointy shaped vessel of nineteenth century prints.Click here to read more.

Thursday 3 September 2009

The man in the bunker speaks
As the outbreak of the second world war releases a new wave of memory and international recrimination, the last survivor from Hitler's bunker talks about the final hours.Click here to read more.

Saturday 1 August 2009

Before Venice
The top of the Adriatic has always been a strategic point in the trade networks of the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Europe. Before Venice there was the Greek town of Adria, from which the sea gets its name, now silted up and fifteen miles inland. Then the Roman town of Altinum, sacked by Attila the Hun. For greater security people started to move further into the lagoon, and Venice was born. Now the site of Altinum has been clearly mapped, just north of Venice's Marco Polo airport, the remnant of a unique Roman town. See the BBC site for the best images of Altinum, then the Daily Mail for an excellent interpretation of them

Sunday 21 June 2009

Tsunami strikes New York!
2,300 years ago a giant tidal wave hit New York, according to scientists. Today it would flood New York and the Long Island ExpressWay.Click here to read more.

Wednesday 8 April 2009

The Templars, the Vatican and the Turin Shroud
Yet another take on the mystery of the Turin Shroud, which vanished after the fall of Constantinople in 1204 - this time involving the Templars. (Incidentally you can see the Shroud being paraded around the walls of Constantinople in the snippets of wall painting from Romania that I've used as the header for this website. Just above the 'L' of 'CROWLEY, it's the small head on the white background breaking the line of the wall.)Click here to read more.

Sunday 5 April 2009

Henry VIII - the weight problem
An analysis of Henry's ever-expanding suits of armour in a new exhibition shows how the young man ballooned into a corpulent tyrant over a 25 year period.So intricate was Henry's armour that Nasa studied it for tips when designing space suits in the 1960s. The same exhibition displays the world's first football - found in the roof of Mary Queen of Scots' bedroom in Stirling Castle. She was a keen fan - and possible a player. Click here to read more.

Monday 23 March 2009

Elizabeth I's superguns
Phillip II of Spain was extremely worried by the artillery on Elizabethan ships in the run up to the Armada. The recreation of a cannon dredged from the seabed tests their fire power.Click here to read more.

Sunday 15 February 2009

The scent of tragedy
An intricate 650 year-old-perfume bottle from Germany releases the scent of the past. It tells a tale of the Black Death and ensuing pogroms against the Jews of Europe. Small details are revealing: the bottle was stoppered with Egyptian cotton, proof of long-distance trade in the middle ages. The cotton was probably transported by sea to Venice, then carried by mule train through the Alpine passes to the cities of the Rhine.Click here to read more.

Saturday 14 February 2009

H seeks A.B.
Be very afraid if you receive a love letter from Henry VIII.Click here to read more.

Saturday 10 January 2009

Istanbul ages 6000 years.
Work on a new tunnel under the Bosphorus has uncovered not only Byzantine galleys and a fourth century wooden harbour, but proof that the ancient site of Constantinople was inhabited in neolithic times.Click here to read more.

Monday 15 December 2008

Is this the face of Lucretia Borgia?
The sixteenth century gaze is utterly contemporary: she looks us up and down with a long cold stare. The portrait, in an Australian art gallery,may be the only real likeness of Lucretia Borgia, one of history's most notorious women. Click here to read more.

Saturday 29 November 2008

The Credit Crunch 88BC
It's all happened before according to Cicero.Click here to read more.

Guy Fawkes Day Wednesday 5 November 2008

Gunpowder Plot's innocent victim
Henry Garnett, Jesuit priest, heard things in the confessional that cost him his life. He ended up the subject of a lurid tract bound in his own skin.Click here to read more.

Martin Luther, heavyweight father of Protestantism
Debunking history: archaeological digs reveal more about the 'austere' lifestyle of Martin Luther than we ought to know. They've even found the stone toilet on which he wrote the 95 theses - and, most shocking of all, he never used nails to fix them to the church door of Wittenberg...Click here to read more.

Friday 26 September 2008

Small gun, large consequences
The gun that fired the shot that started the First World War goes on show in London. Click here to read more.

Saturday 20 September 2008

Jack the Ripper again
Jack the Ripper continues to exert an appalled fascination for students of the archives of late nineteenth century London crime. Click here to read more.

Thursday 28 August 2008

Marcus Aurelius survives the passage of time
'Everything material soon disappears and the memory of everything is soon overwhelmed in time', wrote the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, contemplating the prospect of oblivion. Yet the giant image of the stoic Roman, whose dying words open Gladiator, has been resurrected from earthquake debris in the mountains of southern Turkey. Click here to read more.

Saturday 2 August 2008

The disappeared: the Americans in Stalin's gulags
In the 1930s hundreds of Americans emigrated to the Soviet Union for work or ideology. They played baseball in Gorki Park, they surrendered their US passports, then they vanished.Click here to read more.

'Did your mother work in the palace?' - and other jokes from antiquity
The world's oldest joke..it's about flatulence, apparently.Click here to read more.

Thursday 24 July 2008

Napoleon not killed by perfidious British wallpaper
Conspiracy theories abound about Napoleon's death in exile on St Helena. Italian toxicologists have now absolved the British of killing the emperor through their terrible taste in interior decoration. Click here to read more.

A Medici murder mystery
Another poisoning: the mysteriously convenient deaths of Francesco Medici and his wife within hours of each other 'from overeating and grief' have now been explained. Click here to read more.

Tuesday 22 July 2008

Bones of the dead
A new exhibition brings us close to the lives of the people of medieval London. Click here to read more.

Saturday 12 July 2008

Herodotus has been on his holidays
"With Europe, however, the case is different; for no one has ever determined whether or not there is sea either to the east or to the north of it; all we know is that in length it is equal to Asia and Libya combined." (The Histories) Even the Father of History had his blind spots.

Sunday 15 June 2008

The world's oldest Christian church
Archaeologists in Jordan have found a cave that may have been the church for seventy persecuted Christians from Jerusalem, shortly after Christ's death. Click here to read more.

Sunday 8 June 2008

The rag and bone man and the Persian gold cup
An exquisite gold cup from the Achaemenid empire has turned up in an auction house in the west of England. Click here to read more.

Captain Kidd's ship found
The wreck of the Quedragh Merchant, Captain Kidd's last ship, still carrying 26 cannons, has been found off the coast of the Dominican Republic.Click here to read more.

Thursday 22 May 2008

Caesar's true face
Receding hair, face lined and wrinkled by years of war: from the bottom of the Rhone, French archaeologists have recovered a rare contemporary bust of Julius Caesar, which may be the most authentic representation ever seen.Click here to read more.

Otto Rahn and the temple of doom
The bizarre life and death of the archaeologist whose quest for the holy grail ended in a faustian pact with Himmler. Click here to read more.

Monday 12 May 2008

Hear our ancestors burp
It may not exactly be speech, but ingenious researchers in the US have reconstructed a fractional second of Neanderthal vocal performance - the sound of "E". Click here to read more.

Thursday 1 May 2008 Ascension Day

Rebuilding the Golden Boat
On Ascension Day every year, there took place in Venice the great ceremony that expressed the city's sense of mystical union with the sea. The doge, ermin robed and wearing the corno - the pointed hat that symbolized the majesty of the Republic - was piped aboard his ceremonial barge at the quay in front of his palace. Nothing expressed the city's maritime pride so richly as the Bucintoro. This great double-decker vessel, ornately gilded and painted with heraldic lions and sea creatures, covered by a crimson canopy and rowed by 168 men, pulled away from the city. Accompanied by an armada of gondolas and sailing boats, the Bucintoro rowed out into the mouth of the Adriatic. Here the bishop would utter a heart-felt supplication - "Grant O Lord, that for us and for all who sail thereon, the sea may be calm and quiet" - and the doge took a golden wedding ring from his finger and tossed it into the depths with the time-honoured words: "We wed thee, O Sea, in token of our true and perpetual dominion over thee."

The Bucintoro was destroyed by Napoleon at the fall of the Venetian Republic. Now it may sail again. Click here to read more.

Wednesday 23 April 2008

The first human images of Gods
The Guardian - source of most of my historical titbits - brings news of extraordinary finds in the foothills of Anatolia, above the Syrian plains. Turkey is rich in wonderful remains; those at Gobekli Tepe - 'the hill shaped like a navel' - perhaps catch human culture at a moment of significant transition: the end of a nomadic world before the advance of agriculture and perhaps show our earliest attempts to image Gods.Click here to read more.

Things I didn't know last week
The Hittites not only employed biological warfare, they were also the world's first known bagpipe players.The first documented bagpipe dates from a 1,000 BC Hittite carving. The urge to make noises from inflated animal bladders is almost universal - even the emperor Nero enjoyed a blast on the pipes.

Wednesday 16 April 2008

Hittite Germ Warfare
The Ottomans, who were experts at siege warfare, employed artillery for firing rotting corpses over the walls of beseiged towns: they realised that disease was often a far more potent device than cannon shot and massed attacks. The Hittites apparently had their own forms of biological warfare 3,500 years ago.Click here to read more.

Wednesday 9 April 2008

Exit wounds
The first recorded gunshot death in the Americas took place in 1536. Click here to read more.

'If I find one reel I'll have to kill you.'
And a recent tale of cultural heroism from Afghanistan. Click here to read more.

Wednesday 2 April 2008

Stonehenge: 'the Lourdes of ancient Britain'
There are, apparently, two strongly competing theories about the function of Stonehenge. A new archaeological dig hopes to prove that the Welsh bluestones were revered for their healing properties. Click here to read more.

Wednesday 26 March 2008

Da Vinci's Code
I have always been fascinated by the fact that Leonardo wrote to the Ottoman sultan, Bayazit, in 1502, with designs for a bridge across the Golden Horn. (This was just a couple of years after he was offering the Venetians submarines and diving suits for sinking Turkish ships.) But could Leonardo have had some deeper connection with Istanbul and the world of Islam? Click here to read more.

And Leonardo the chess illustrator?
Meanwhile, did Leonardo while away his few leisure moments illustrating chess problems? Click here to read more.

Sunday 16 March 2008

Hitler's lost fleet
Mehmet II’s siege of Constantinople is famous, amongst other things, for an extraordinary feat of practical engineering: the hauling of seventy galleys over land so that they could be launched into the Golden Horn behind the Byzantine defences. Now an equally breathtaking episode from the Second World War: the transportation of a German submarine fleet from the Baltic to the Black Sea to attack Russian shipping, and its recent discovery on the seabed off Turkey. Click here to read more

And off the coast of Norway
The remains of HMS Hunter are found at the bottom a fjord. Click here to read more. And a survivor rememembers the day it went down.Click here to read more.

Pardon for the admiral shot 'pour encourager les autres'?
The unfortunate British admiral, John Byng, was made famous by the manner of his death. Now an attempt to clear his name - just 250 years too late. Click here to read more

Lazare Ponticelli, 110, last 'poilu' of the World War 1 trenches
Following on from the previous week's entry about the last German veteran, comes news of the death of the last Frenchman to fight in the trenches. It's like watching the extinction of a species. One by one, as the dwindling band of living witnesses slips away, the First World War scrolls over the horizon of tangible history. The photographs and recordings will be all that's left. Click here to read more

Monday 9 March 2008

The Antikythera Mechanism
In 1900 a Greek sponge diver recovered some ancient gear wheels from a Roman shipwreck. Scientists have recently solved the riddle of the 2,000-year-old computer. Click here to read more

The Last German Veteran
Whereas the few remaining British survivors of World War I are the subjects of intense interest, it seems that that the passing of Erich Kaestner, Germany’s last veteran, has passed almost unnoticed. Click here to read more