Curious History’s (odditiesoflife) Top Ten Posts for June, 2013
The following links will take you to the most popular posts for the month of June. Curious History had an excellent month. Or come and see what is new at Curious History.com!
- Devil’s Bridge - 61,675 Reblogs & Likes
- The Astonishing Annual Red Crab Migration - 41,517
- Abandoned Enchantment - 29,153
- Montaña Mágica Lodge (Magic Mountain Lodge) - 28,095
- Dreams in Blue - 23,927
- Mount Roraima - 21,280
- Abandoned (Haunted) Hotel in Colombia - 15,954
- Living Plant Sculptures - 13,044
- Moving Through Color - 12,157
- The Ancient Ones: Oldest Living Organisms - 10,361
The drawing shows us an expert, sitting behind the patient
lying, extracting a tooth and helped by two assistants. The man on the
left pokes fire with bellows, and the other on the right, holds fire
with a grip near the “dentist”.
Charaf-ed-Din (1404-1468) left us his famous Chirurgie of
Ilkhani, an ancient dental manuscript, written and illustrated by him in
1465. This Turkish manuscript of ancient dentistry is preserved at the
BNF (National Library of France).
The remains of the immaculately dressed ‘Princess
Ukok’, aged around 25 and preserved for several millennia in the
Siberian permafrost, a natural freezer, were discovered in 1993 by
Novosibirsk scientist Natalia Polosmak during an archeological
expedition.
Buried around her were six horses, saddled and bridled, her
spiritual escorts to the next world, and a symbol of her evident status,
perhaps more likely a revered folk tale narrator, a healer or a holy
woman than an ice princess.
There, too, was a meal of sheep and horse meat and ornaments
made from felt, wood, bronze and gold. And a small container of
cannabis, say some accounts, along with a stone plate on which were the
burned seeds of coriander.
‘Compared to all tattoos found by archaeologists around the
world, those on the mummies of the Pazyryk people are the most
complicated, and the most beautiful,’ said Dr Polosmak.
The tattoos on the left shoulder of the ‘princess’ show a
fantastical mythological animal: a deer with a griffon’s beak and a
Capricorn’s antlers. The antlers are decorated with the heads of
griffons. And the same griffon’s head is shown on the back of the
animal.
The second longest geographical name that is accepted in the
world is “Taumatawhakatangihangak oauauotamateaturipukaka
pikimaungahoronukupokaiwhe nua kitanatahu” (85 letters) which is a hill
in New Zealand – it is a maori phrase which translates to “place where
Tamatea, the man with the big knees, who slid, climbed and swallowed
mountains, known as land-eater, played his flute to his loved one”. It
was the longest until recently (though the Guinness Book of Records
still regards it as the longest).
A city in Thailand is called Krung thep maha nakorn amorn
ratana kosinmahintar ayutthay amaha dilok phop noppa ratrajathani
burirom udom rajaniwesmahasat harn amorn phimarn avatarn sathit
sakkattiya visanukamprasit (163 letters). This translates to “The land
of angels, the great city of immortality, of devine gems, the great
angelic land unconquerable land of nine nobel gems, the royal city, a
pleasant capital place of the Royal Palace, eternal land of angels and
reincarnated spirits predestined and created by the highest Devas.”
The shortest named city is simply “Å” it is located in both
Sweden and Norway. In Scandinavian languages, “Å” means “river”. The
image above is one of the newly replaced road signs for the area – they
are frequently stolen for their novelty value.
Behind the Hallstatt Catholic Church in Austria, near the
12th-century St. Micheal’s Chapel, in a small and lovingly cared for
cemetery is the Hallstatt Beinhaus (bone house), also known as the
Charnel House. A small building, it is tightly stacked with over 1200
skulls. Because Hallstatt finds itself in such a lovely location, it
also finds itself in very short supply of burial grounds. In the 1700s, the Church began digging up corpses to make way
for the newly dead. The bodies which had been buried for only 10 to 15
years were then stacked inside the charnel house. Once the skeletons
were exhumed and properly bleached in the sun, the family members would
stack the bones next to their nearest kin.
In 1720, a tradition began of painting the skulls with symbolic
decorations as well as dates of birth and death so that the dead would
be remembered, even if they no longer had a grave. Of the 1,200 skulls,
some 610 of them were lovingly painted, with an assortment of symbols,
laurels for valor, roses for love, and so on. The ones from the 1700s
are painted with thick dark garlands, while the newer ones from the
1800s on, bear brighter floral styles.
For thousands of years women slowly poisoned themselves by
wearing face makeup called Venetian Ceruse. Venetian Ceruse was a 16th
century cosmetic used as a skin whitener. It was in great demand and
considered the best available at that time.
Ceruse had the effect of making a woman’s skin look ghastly white. The
women who wore it usually kept adding more to the old layer rather than
washing it off. But the pigment of white lead was extremely
poisonous. It rotted teeth and turned skin color to horrible shades. It
made hair fall out and caused eyes to swell. Usage of Venetian Ceruse over an extended period of time could cause death.
The most notable user of Venetian Ceruse was Queen Elizabeth I
of England seen above. It is believed that the Queen’s constant use of
ceruse, which created her trade-mark look of snow white skin, led to her
extreme hair loss. She wore a large variety of wigs during her reign.
There were many rumors that Queen Elizabeth I was bald by the age of 30
due to her extremely high hair line, but there is no historical proof to
verify this fact.
This illustration was found in the margins of a calendar in a
14th-century Flemish Book of Hours. Various historians of sport have
identified this as a version of “stool ball” or “stump ball”, which was
baseball played with only one base.
