* Herodotus, the father of history/and or lies, exists almost at the half point of recorded human history, 500 BC.
* Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Ceaser, and also Hannibal, Scipio etc are closer in time to the Neil Armstrong and tbe moon landing then they are to the building of the Pyramids. I think Alexander is about equidistant.
* The earliest Bublical figure whose existance is attested is King Ahab, about 850 BC. There are recoreded historcial Egytian and Mesopotamian figures from 2000 years prior.
At that time Saxon England was still pagan, but King Ethelbert of Kent converted to Christianity and allowed the foundation of a monastery and a kind of 'missionary school'. Tradition has it that a temple of Woden was re-purposed for the monks and their school. A large stone abbey was completed in 613, and the ruins still stand today next to the modern school.
When the Normans conquered England, it was already over 450 years old. It's 1000th anniversary was in the reign of Elizabeth I.
Not sure if it's an oddity, but: A person born in 1902 who died in 1970 was born before the first lighter-than-aircraft flight and died after a man walked on the moon.
Surely you mean 'heavier-than-air'? The Montgolfier brothers' balloon flights were in the late 1700s.
Speaking of Woden - last time I was in England, I saw a gigantic genealogical chart of the royal family, published recently and for sale to tourists ... at the bottom was the current Queen Elizabeth II and her offspring; at the top, the first ancestor of the first Saxon monarchs of England - "Wotan". He's still there!
This has my vote as "most amazing". Never in human history has there been so much change in such a short period of time. The difference between 1918 and 2018 is the kind of stuff that science fiction is made of.
* Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Ceaser, and also Hannibal, Scipio etc are closer in time to the Neil Armstrong and tbe moon landing then they are to the building of the Pyramids.
I've reflected frequently that this was the case with both my grandmothers. (My grandfathers both died before 1970)
It took a bit of digging, but I found it in Wikipedia. The Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies trace back to Woden via Cerdic, the founder of Wessex (but this seems to be disputed). Cerdic's descendant is ̣̉Alfred the Great, who is an ancestor of the current royal family.
So, the Queen of Canada, whose visage adorns the $20 banknote, is descended from Wotan (and there is a day named after this remote ancestor). This means that she is also related to Thor.
I always thought it was interesting that Columbus discovered America and Magellan sailed around the world before Galileo was persecuted for his theories.
In the year of the birth of Mohammad there was supposedly an attempted invasion of Mecca by a Christian army from Ethiopia. There's a church in Ethiopia, also, which claims to have the Ark of the Covenant.
In the Eighteenth Century the first Duke of Marlborough, a Churchill and the brother of one of Winston Churchill's ancestors, was given a small country in the Holy Roman Empire. He later swapped it for another country. The Duke's right hand man at the decisive battle of Bleheim was a Prince Eugene of Savoy. The Nazis named a heavy cruiser after him. His mother was banished from the French court due to a scandal involving witchcraft and love potions, and the French king refused to allow him into French service, before he fought against the French with the English.
The founder of the Church of Scientology was part of a bizarre religious group run by the inventor of moulded fuel rockets, and referred to in FBI documents as "The Cult of Thelma".
The populations of Turkey and Iran are each now greater than the popultion of the USA when my father was born. The US population then doubled by the time I graduated from high school. It has doubled again since then.
And I think most people who are interested in historical trivia know this, but just in case anyone doesn't: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day: the 50th anniversary of July 4, 1776.
My favorite example is that Laura Ingalls Wilder traveled west in a conastoga wagon and flew in an airplane before she died.
Ho Chi Minh at one time worked as a cook and dishwasher in Harlem. In Boston, he worked at the same bakery that Malcolm X worked at about 30 years later.
General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, victor at the Alamo, lived in Staten Island in New York after the Civil War for a time after being exiled from Mexico .
Lorenzo Da Ponte, who wrote the libretti for Mozart's operas The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte, later moved to New York, where he ran a grocery store. One of his New York friends was Clement Moore, author of "A Visit from St. Nicholas," who helped him get a job as a professor of Italian literature at Columbia University.
Jean Paul Marat, the French Revolutionary (famously assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday) was also a scientist. He independently discovered the use of shadowgraph imagery to detect and make visible air currents and convection, anticipating later Schlieren imagery. He once demonstrated it by showing colleagues the hot air rising from the head of Benjamin Franklin.
Speaking of Franklin, his illegitimate son William was the Royal Governor of New Jersey during the American Revolution (something I first learned from the play 1776)
As of May 26, 2017, the U.S. was still paying one veteran's pension to a child of a veteran of the Civil War. Irene Triplett gets $73.13 every month. Cite.
I just want to say that "Bublical figure" is a great typo. We need a term for grandmothers in the Bible.
At first I thought you meant they all lived together in the same apartment. Hey, I'd watch that sitcom!
Stalin: "Adolf, how many times do I have to tell you: your dirty clothes are all over the lebensraum, and some are on MY side again! You cannot come over here without permission!"
Sir Richard Francis Burton, the African explorer and aficionado of exotica (especially sexual), once met Brigham Young. He decided to visit Utah in 1860 because of his interest in polygamy.
If you brought Abraham Lincoln back from the past to the modern world, he wouldn't know how to open a door.
On the other hand, indoor flush toilets (admittedly not with the modern mechanism) are surprisingly ancient: they have been found in the Indus Valley civilization, 2600-1900 BC.
When the British first came to India, what did they think of the Taj Mahal? Nothing, it had not been built yet and would not be for 50 years.
That doesn't quite capture it -- Mormon polygamy was understandably a "hot" topic of discussion in Europe. Burton, who had written about Near Eastern polygamy, wanted to see how it compared. Having proposed to his future wife Isabel, Burton made the trip to Utah while awaiting her reply (!). When he got back after the trip, he wrote it up as the City of the Saints. It's a good read.
Burton had previously made the Pilgrimage to Mecca in the disguise of an Egyptian Muslim doctor. He wrote that trip up, too, as the two-volume Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Mekka and al-Medinah, which is also worth reading (although, of course, things have changed enormously since Burton's time)
When Burton got to Salt Lake City, he had a private audience with Brigham Young (both were world-famous figures, after all), and Young was rumored to have greeted Burton with the words "I understand you've done something like this before." A great story, but probably not true. Burton reports nothing like it in his book, although he does say he was impressed with Young and his knowledge.
Burton wasn't that impressed with a lot else, though. He regarded Truman Angell's Salt Lake Temple as an architectural monstrosity. (I like it, myself). He found Mormon polygamy to be dry and straitlaced compared to the practice in the Near East (exactly how he decided this, I don't know). His overall impression of Mormonism seemed to be (although he certainly didn't put it this way) It's No More Ridiculous Than Any Other Religion.
Burton gives a synopsis of the Book of Mormon in the footnotes of his book, along with a listing of all the pro- and anti-Mormon literature he'd read before and during his journey. he read a LOT of stuff.
Jefferson died a few hours prior to Adams, but since the news hadn't yet traveled from Virginia, where Jefferson had died, to Massachusetts, where Adams had died, Adams' final words were, "Thomas Jefferson survives."
During his pontificate (1099-1118), Pope Paschal II issued "Piae Postulatio Voluntatis", in which he officially recognized the existence of the Crusaders as an operative and militant part of the Catholic Church.
My grandfather was born in 1902 and died in 1981, so his life spanned both events. He was even alive for the first test flights of the Space Shuttle Enterprise.
Maybe. David is (likely) mentioned in the Tel Dan Stele, although there are those who say the mention of "his house" is not proof of his existence as an individual, and there are also some who question that the inscription refers to that at all.
The writings of Procopius, a sixth-century Byzantine historian, speak of his having seen a marble column in Libya on which was inscribed that the residents were Canaanites who had fled from the Biblical Joshua. I don't know if a secondary source like that counts as "attesting" to.
"Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks."
Not very surprising that there are almost no contemporary images of Jewish kings (and the one we have is from a non-Jewish source), given the Biblical prohibition against graven images. Granted, there was rampant idol-worship in Israel during much of that era, but very possibly people felt it was justified for (supposed) deities but not for self-aggrandizement.
I think the more dramatic changes started about two hundred years ago. From the beginning of human history to that date, all machinery was dependent on muscle power (human or animal) or maybe water or wind power. And the only lighting was fire (and really the only source of heat as well).
Today many, many people have no experience with horses or know how to build a fire. Your ancestors would have found that unimaginable.
The famous painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware depicts two future Presidents. The officer holding the flag behind George Washington is James Monroe, who was one of Washington's aides during the war.
That he has graced the local musical stages over the last few years in two great bands – Para Zali! and The Kindest of Thieves is also in no doubt.
So how should we feel if he strips it all down to solo acoustic guitar, and vox recorded in a seriously reverbed room – no drums and no bass?
In this context, although Fox readily admits the recording is “very lo-fi and stripped” (two ribbon microphones and an acoustic guitar) , the quality of the voice and the song-writing comes through strongly.
And maybe this album is Fox’s “Nebraska”, a career defining moment which shakes him away from the original sleazy blues feel of the first band, and the indie pop, rock n’ roll, and, rockabilly sensibilities of the second band. He sounds like he is redefining himself here – there’s a bit of growing up going on and the mature nature of the lyrics and feel of the songs perhaps signals a future direction.
Chris says of this set of songs…..” It seemed like all 7 songs really seemed to tie in to the same concepts which were Families, Loveless Relationships, and trying to fix relationships that are beyond saving. I’ve thought a lot about families, as at this point in my life I can’t ever imagine having children of my own, and this thought has unsettled me greatly. I’ve focussed on saving relationships because when I observe people in love, I always ask myself if they can really be as happy as they appear. This was the first time ever I’ve written songs that aren’t solely autobiographical.”
For my part I found this to be a very compelling set of tunes – I would maybe like to hear songs of this quality given a good recording session to bring out the nuances of the material – but maybe they would lose something if this was to happen – perhaps it’s the simplicity of the recording technique that brings out the best in his writing?
Probably best described as a mini-album – half way between an EP and a full album – it’s 21 minutes 30 seconds well spent.