I thought everything was wrong: historical facts that may greatly surprise (11 photos)

What historical fact struck you to the core and destroyed all previous ideas about the world?





The post was compiled based on comments from Reddit users.



- In Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, temples and statues were not snow-white - on the contrary, they were painted in bright colors. The Parthenon Temple was a bit like Disneyland. The same applies to European churches! The statues were also polychrome. Those on the outside are now washed white, but some of those stored inside have pigment residue. By today's standards this would be considered in poor taste.

- But the Egyptian pyramids, on the contrary, once sparkled with whiteness. They looked completely different.





Ancient Antarctica was actually a rainforest, a lush and green paradise with rich flora and fauna. This continent was inhabited by animals about which we will never know anything, since their remains are locked under a kilometer-long layer of ice. But what struck me most was that Antarctica only froze completely about 35 million years ago, although it broke away from the supercontinent about 180 million years ago. That is, it was a separate continent on which life developed independently, and this happened over the course of 145 million years! It destroyed my entire understanding of the historical timeline. We are truly specks of dust on this planet.



On a plantation in the Dominican Republic

- For me, a real revelation was immersion in the history of slavery. Slavery has existed in many world cultures since ancient times. Slavery predates written records; evidence of its existence is found in the code of laws of the Babylonian king Hammurabi. Slavery as an institution flourished already in those days. It has not been completely eradicated today and affects approximately 46 million people worldwide. It's amazing how badly people have always treated each other. And it is amazing that we still cannot achieve basic human rights for everyone.

- In Ancient Rome, slave owners thought about dressing all slaves in uniforms - it gives them facelessness. But they quickly realized that then the slaves would see that there were many, many more of them than their masters.

- I was on vacation in the Dominican Republic and, through an acquaintance, I was invited to a sugar plantation owned by an American company. Haitian slaves worked there. It was two years ago. Slaves because they were paid $200 a month and all that money went back to the company in the form of food, water and housing. If you find yourself on a plantation, there is no escape. There is no option to leave. There were even supervisors on horses shouting at the workers. And I even saw someone get shot. The most terrible memory of my life.



- It turns out that Napoleon was not a short cartoon at all. The British deliberately drew him small and this caricature has survived to this day. What powerful propaganda! He was of average height for that time.



- If all of human (Homo) history was compressed into a 500 page book, modern (anatomically) humans wouldn't appear until page 450, and Homo Sapiens wouldn't build empires until page 490, the atomic bomb and the founding of Rome would be on the last page page and just a paragraph later. All technological advances, from the discovery of the atom to modern technology, would be listed in the last few sentences of the last paragraph of the last page. And people still wonder why we are so reckless. Yes, we are actually still apes, but with shiny toys in our hands.

- In every generation of modern humans, there was probably at least one person who lived to be 100 years old, and his life probably overlapped with someone else who lived to be 100 years old. So, if you gather these people in one room, then 20 people are enough to create an unbroken chain of intersecting lives from our days to the Roman Empire. And only 60 people to bring it to the beginning of written history.



- We domesticated pigeons thousands of years ago, and then decided that we no longer needed them. People treat them like vermin after we have relied on them so much in the past (food, postal couriers, etc.). The pigeons you see in your cities are not wild, they are abandoned by humans.



- Leopold II, King of Belgium, treated the Congo as his personal property. People who couldn't collect enough cocoa had their hands cut off. Or they cut off the hands of their children. In addition, the Belgian genocide in the Congo is the largest genocide in human history.

- And France forced Haiti (one of the poorest countries) to take out a loan from a French bank in order to pay compensation to the French government for expelling the French occupiers and slave traders. They paid it for almost 100 years. I know people can be disgusting, but for some reason I thought there was a limit.



- There was a Spanish explorer who was the first to visit the Inca Empire and saw many prosperous cities and a great civilization. He told about this when he returned home. But when other Europeans followed in his footsteps, they found nothing but the jungle, and decided that he had simply lied. And here's a fact that amazed me: it recently turned out that his story was true. The Incas he met died from diseases brought to their world by foreigners, and the cities they built were swallowed up by the jungle in just a few years.



Nero

- It turns out that after the Roman Emperor Nero’s wife died, he married a former slave named Sporus (Dispute). The young man was castrated, married to the emperor, and forced to dress in magnificent outfits. It was said that he looked very much like Nero's late wife. And after Nero's death (just 1.5 years after the wedding), Sporus continued to play the role of Nero's wife.



- What struck me most was that the entire history of mankind tells us that no one has ever learned lessons from history.