An Iranian fire sacrifice Zoroaster/Zarathustra himself Around 1000 BC (probably), about the same time that people in India were writing the Rig Veda, a man named Zoroaster (also called Zarathustra) was a priest in a small temple in the eastern part of West Asia, in an area with a lot of small kingdoms and no major power. Zoroaster believed that [...]
Sibidu Cave, South Africa. People lived here from about 77,000 BC until about 38,000 years ago. In the early years of human history, beginning with the earliest humans about two million years ago, every place in the world was in the Stone Age, and all the people in the world got their food by hunting and gathering. For a [...]
A Neanderthal stone awl People have been using engineering to solve the problems of their daily lives since the first caveman picked up a rock and chipped away at it to make a handaxe. That was in the Paleolithic, about 70,000 years ago. It is impossible to list all of the inventions that people have made since then, [...]
The Roman emperor Nero In the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, during the night between the 18th and the 19th of July, 64 AD, there was a great fire in the city of Rome. It started in a very poor area downtown called the Subura (suh-BOO-rah), and at first none of the rich people cared very [...]
Sunshine through the clouds and Earth's atmosphere You can see that the sunlight that reaches the Earth travels at different wavelengths. On a sunny day, put a full glass of water (a real glass glass) in the sunshine on your windowsill. Look where the sunshine goes through the water, and you should see rainbows on the floor or walls. [...]
Stone carving of a fish (San Francisco, ca. 7000 BC) The first people probably reached California about 17,000 BC. They were probably fishing people, coming south along the Pacific coast in small boats, following the fish. Some of them kept on going south and reached Central America and then South America. Some moved inland, fishing out of Lake Tahoe and [...]
Carrying a puppet of Guy Fawkes to burn him There's a famous verse about Guy Fawkes' plot to blow up the King of England and the Houses of Parliament in 1605, and it goes like this: Remember, remember the Fifth of November Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason Should ever [...]
Chartres on the horizon Why was Chartres so important? Even though Chartres, near Paris, France, was only a small town, it had an important treasure: the dress that people said Mary was wearing when she gave birth to the baby Jesus (or maybe when she found out she was pregnant). Thousands of people came on pilgrimage every year to [...]
Animal sacrifice: a sacrificial procession (Pitsa, ca. 530 BC) Sacrificing an animal In English, when we say "sacrifice", we mean that you have given up something you wanted in order to get something else, like you sacrificed your best piece of candy in order to get your friend to tell you his secret. In [...]
Prometheus makes people (now in the Louvre museum) One of the Titans Prometheus was a Titan, one of the children of Ocean. He and his brother Epimetheus were Zeus' and Hera's cousins. They were not as powerful as Zeus and Hera and their brothers and sisters, but still had some god-like powers. They were very big, giants (that is why the famous [...]
