History facts

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A Roman emperor is dyeing his purple toga in a huge vat. He shouts "DYE, OH, CLEAN it!" and four little emperors climb out, each holding one Tetris block. Then he walks off to a seaside palace to grow cabbages.

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A ragged army has been fighting since 1618. A clock on the wall counts 30 years exactly, then a western fail-safe trips: everyone drops their swords and sits down to sign a treaty. 1618 + 30 = 1648.

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A judge in Babylon brings down his gavel (a HAMMER) on a giant black stone, and a bee buzzes off it: "HAMMER-AH-BEE!" Laws are carved all over the stone, including "an eye for an eye."

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A British admiral unwraps a candy bar labeled ZANZI-BAR. Before he finishes eating it, the war is over: under 45 minutes. The wrapper's 'best before' date reads 1896.

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A boxing CHAMPion parrot named Polly stands on a big dark slab, reading it on and on. The slab has the same message in three scripts. Polly squawks the hieroglyphs out loud.

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King John sulks in a meadow by the Thames. A barons' clock strikes 12:15, lunchtime, and he angrily stamps his seal on a great (magna) card (carta).

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Cleopatra stands at a crossroads. Behind her, a far-off ancient pyramid; ahead, an astronaut planting a flag on the Moon. She squints and realizes the astronaut is closer.

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A sheep wearing a tall hat, covered head to hoof in soot ("hat-SHEP-soot"), sits on Egypt's throne. Tied to its chin is a long, braided false beard, the kind every pharaoh had to wear, even a queen.

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A Spanish and a Portuguese sailor grab the same map and pull until it tears down the middle of the Atlantic: "TOR-de-SEE-yas!" (tore the seas, yes!). The torn map is stamped 1494, two years after Columbus's first voyage.

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On a hill near the English coast, a Norman duke named WILLIAM charges uphill on horseback. An arrow flies into King Harold's eye. A scoreboard on the hill flips to 10-66: ten minutes, sixty-six arrows.

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A young sultan wants a city so badly he drags his warships overland on greased logs, around the chain across the harbour. He shouts "MEH, MEDiocre walls!" and the old Roman city falls. Clock hands spin: 14:53.

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Diplomats crowd into a palace room lined with MIRRORS, so every signature is copied a hundred times over. The date is chosen carefully: five years to the day after the shot in Sarajevo that started it all.

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In 1961 a wall goes up overnight through the middle of a city. In 1989 a crowd climbs on top of it with hammers, and chunks of concrete fly. Flip one over: '61 on one side, '89 on the other, like an upside-down mirror.

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It's Christmas morning in Rome. A huge Frankish king kneels to pray, and a pope named LEO (a lion with three stripes) sneaks up and pops a crown on his head. The year is a perfectly round 800.

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A goldsmith builds a GOOD MOUNTAIN ("Guten-berg") of tiny metal letters and squeezes them in a wine press. In the MAIN square of his town (MAINZ), the first printed Bibles roll out.

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A baker forgets his oven overnight. Flames burst out of his shop on a street called PUDDING LANE, and soon all of London is a flaming Christmas pudding. Three devils (6-6-6) dance on top: 1666.

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In a muddy Belgian field, Napoleon slips on a puddle and lands with a splash: WATER-loo. Standing over him, laughing, is a duke wearing a pair of rubber WELLINGTON boots. A sign reads: 18-15, "eighteen tries, fifteen falls".

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An Indian emperor stands on a battlefield covered in bodies, so horrified he drops his sword: "A SHOCKER!" (ASHOKA). The battlefield is in KALINGA, where a CALLING bell rings for peace. He becomes a Buddhist on the spot.

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In 1324 a king rides into Cairo on his way to Mecca, with a caravan of camels sagging under gold. He hands it out so freely that gold loses its value for years. His MUSE ("MANSA MUSA") whispers: "maybe slow down."

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A general HANDS out BALLS of snow to his elephants ("HANNI-BAL") as they trudge over the Alps, slipping and trumpeting. They've marched all the way from CARTHAGE, pulling a CART.

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In a narrow pass between cliffs and sea, steaming HOT springs bubble ("THERMO-pylae", the hot gates). A Spartan king, LEON, a lion in a red cloak, holds the gap against a vast Persian army.

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A samurai shogun from the TOKUGAWA family, who "TOOK a GAWA" of power for 250 years, finally hands the keys back to a teenage emperor. Japan races into the modern age. The emperor eats 18 cakes in 68 seconds.

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On a beach in New Zealand, British officials and Māori chiefs gather. Everyone keeps saying "WAIT... TANGI..." while the paper goes round ("WAI-TANGI"). A seagull poops on it: 18... 40.

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Napoleon is shipped off to a little island near Italy, ELBA, and simply elbows his way out. So they send him to a speck in the middle of the South Atlantic, SAINT HELENA, where he spends his days yelling "HELL!" at the waves.

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An emperor walks into his new church, looks up at a gigantic dome that seems to float on light, and says "JUST IN!" (JUSTINIAN) because it was finished just in time. The workmen's badge numbers read 5-3-7.

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In 1974 farmers dig a well near XI'AN ("SHEE-an"), and their spade hits a clay head. Below them, thousands of clay soldiers stand guard over the tomb of China's first emperor, CHIN (QIN), who shouts "SHE WANTS my tomb!" ("Shi Huang").

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In 1922 a man holds a candle up to a hole in a sealed door in the Valley of the Kings. Gold glints everywhere. "Can you see anything?" "Yes, wonderful things!" He's HOWARD, and he CARTS the treasure away: HOWARD CARTER. Twenty-two (22) golden chariots sit inside.

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A referee blows the final whistle on a war between England and France after a hundred years, but they keep fighting through extra time: sixteen more years. The scoreboard reads 116.

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A Portuguese captain sails around the bottom of Africa, past the Cape of Good Hope, and lands in India with a GAME of cards: "DA GAMA's here!" The cards read 14-98.

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Magellan sets off to sail round the world but is killed in a battle in the Philippines. His second-in-command, a Basque sailor named EL CANO ("the canoe"), paddles the last battered ship home to Spain in 1522.

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A general on horseback gallops through South America, freeing country after country from Spain. One grateful new nation names itself after him: he's SIMÓN BOLÍVAR, and his namesake is BOLIVIA.

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A volcano near Naples, VESUVIUS, belches up a mushroom cloud like a giant VEST being shaken out. Ash falls on Pompeii until the whole city is buried. The sundial stops at 79.

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French knights in heavy armour slog through a muddy field, sinking with every step. English longbowmen shout "AGIN, COURT!" ("again, of course!") and fire another volley. Their young king, HENRY the FIFTH, holds up five fingers.

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Colonists dressed up in disguise creep onto three ships in Boston Harbor at night and hurl crate after crate of tea into the water, turning the whole harbour into one giant, cold cup of tea. The ships belong to the EAST INDIA COMPANY. The teapot's label reads 17-73.

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A Roman general stands at a small ruby-red river with his legion behind him. Crossing it with an army is treason. He tosses a dice into the water: "The die is cast!" and wades in.

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On the 15th of March, a soothsayer grins at Caesar on the Senate steps. Inside, senators draw daggers. Caesar sees his friend Brutus among them, holding a brute of a knife.

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A wild black horse with an ox-head mark (bucephalus means "ox-head") bucks at its own shadow. A boy turns it to face the sun, calms it, and rides it all the way to India.

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After conquering half the known world, a young king falls ill at a feast in Babylon in 323 BC and dies at just 32. His generals carve up his empire.

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A pharaoh coughs ("KHU-fu!") in the desert dust as two million stone blocks are hauled up a ramp at Giza. His pyramid stays the tallest building on Earth until Lincoln Cathedral's spire beats it in the 1300s.

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In AD 122, a Roman emperor with a beard (the first to wear one) visits Britain and orders a stone wall from coast to coast to keep out the northern tribes. It's 73 miles long.

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In 73 BC a gladiator breaks out of a training school near Capua with kitchen knives. Tens of thousands of slaves join him and beat Roman army after army.

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In AD 64, Rome burns for six days. Rumour says the emperor sang and played as it burned (fiddles didn't exist yet). He blames the Christians and builds a golden palace on the ashes. His name is a zero with an N: Nero.

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In AD 476, a teenage emperor named after Rome's founder and its first emperor (Romulus Augustus) is told to step down by a Germanic chieftain, Odoacer, who owes a certain debt to no one.

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Two baby boys float down the Tiber in a basket and are nursed by a she-wolf. In 753 BC one of them, Romulus, kills his twin Remus and names the new city after himself.

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In 399 BC, an old Athenian philosopher, condemned for corrupting the youth, chats calmly with his friends and drinks a cup of hemlock. "Crito, we owe a cockerel to Asclepius."

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In 480 BC, Persia's huge fleet squeezes into a narrow strait off a Greek island and can't turn. Smaller Athenian ships ram them one by one. A salami floats among the wreckage: Salamis.

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A red-haired queen in a chariot leads her Iceni tribe against Rome in AD 60. The Iceni ice the Romans: they burn Londinium to the ground. Her name means victory: Boudica.

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A warlord on horseback sweeps across Europe and Romans call him the "Scourge of God". He dies on his wedding night in 453 of a nosebleed. He's a till-a full of looted gold: Attila.

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In 793, dragon-headed longships land on a holy island off Northumberland. Vikings storm the monastery and steal the gold. A monk hides a beautiful gospel book in a linen farm: Lindisfarne.

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In 1086, William the Conqueror's clerks ride into every village and count every pig, plough and person. The result is so thorough people say there's no appeal, as on the Day of Doom: Domesday.

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In 1347, ships dock in Sicily with dead and dying sailors. Black swellings, rats in the rigging, fleas jumping. Within five years, perhaps half of Europe is dead.

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A defeated Scottish king hiding in a cave watches a spider try again and again to spin its web. Inspired, he tries once more and crushes the English at Bannockburn in 1314. He's Robert the Bruce, bruised but unbeaten.

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In 1297, English knights cross a narrow wooden bridge two at a time. A Scot with a huge sword waits until half are over, then charges. The bridge is as precious as sterling silver: Stirling Bridge.

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A boy on the steppe, his father poisoned, eats roots and fish to survive. He grows up to unite the Mongol tribes and conquer the largest land empire ever. As a boy, he was called Temüjin: "tame gin".

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A Venetian merchant arrives at a summer palace of marble and gold, with a park full of tame deer. The khan who welcomes him is the grandson of Genghis: Kublai. The palace: Xanadu.

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A teenage peasant girl in armour lifts the siege of Orléans in 1429 after hearing voices of saints. Two years later the English burn her at the stake in Rouen, roaring flames ("roo-AHN").

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King Henry II grumbles at dinner about his archbishop. Four knights take him at his word, ride to Canterbury in 1170 and kill Thomas Becket at the altar. Pilgrims have walked there ever since.

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In 2012, archaeologists dig under a council car park in Leicester and find a skeleton with a curved spine and battle wounds. It's the last king to die in battle, at Bosworth in 1485.

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In 1485, a king loses his horse in a marsh and is cut down. A Welshman picks the crown out of a hawthorn bush and is crowned on the battlefield. The Tudors begin; the Wars of the Roses end.

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In 1099, after three years' march, crusader knights wheel siege towers up to the walls of Jerusalem and break in. The First Crusade has reached its goal.

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In 1187, a Kurdish sultan defeats the crusaders at the Horns of Hattin and retakes Jerusalem. Even his enemies praise his mercy. He tosses a salad to his troops: Saladin.

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Spanish soldiers gape at a city of temples built on an island in a lake, bigger than any in Spain. In 1521, Cortés and his allies besiege and destroy it. Mexico City is built on the ruins.

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In 1532 an Inca emperor, captured by Pizarro's men, offers to fill a room once with gold and twice with silver for his freedom. They take the treasure and kill him anyway. He was a tall wallpa: Atahualpa.

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In 1911, a Yale lecturer pays a farmer a coin to guide him up a steep Andes ridge. Under the vines he finds a stone Inca citadel. He becomes famous; it later inspires Indiana Jones. He's Bingham: bingo!

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In 1517, a monk walks up to a church door in Wittenberg with a hammer and 95 complaints about the Church selling forgiveness. The Reformation begins.

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Six women in Tudor gowns line up behind a large king. A rhyme hangs over them: "Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived." The last one, Catherine Parr, curtsies: she outlived him.

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In 1588, a Spanish fleet is spotted off Cornwall. Sir Francis Drake is playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe and says there's time to finish the game. Fire ships and storms scatter the Armada.

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On the night of 4 November 1605, guards find a man in a cellar under Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder and a lantern. His name: Guy Fawkes. Bonfires burn every 5 November since.

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In 1620, 102 passengers squeeze onto a small ship that smells of old wine casks. They aim for Virginia but land in Massachusetts. The ship is named after a spring flower: the Mayflower.

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A grieving Mughal emperor watches 20,000 workers build a white marble tomb by the river in Agra for his wife, who died giving birth to their 14th child. He ends his days imprisoned, gazing at it from a fort.

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A towering tsar, over two metres tall, works as a ship's carpenter in Holland in disguise. Back home, in 1703, he builds a new capital on Baltic marshes and names it after his saint: St Petersburg.

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On a freezing January day in 1649, a king wears two shirts so the crowd won't see him shiver and think he's afraid. He's beheaded outside Whitehall's Banqueting House. Cromwell rules next.

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In 1688, a Dutch prince lands in Devon with an army, invited by English nobles. The Catholic king James II flees without a fight. The prince wears an orange sash: William of Orange.

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In 1692, girls in a Massachusetts village start screaming and twitching. Fingers point at neighbours. Twenty people are executed before the panic ends. The village is named for peace: Salem, from shalom.

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In 1770, Captain Cook's ship the Endeavour drops anchor in a bay on Australia's east coast. The ship's botanist rushes ashore and collects so many new plants they name it Botany Bay.

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In a hot Philadelphia room in 1776, a tall red-haired Virginian scribbles "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" with a quill. He's Jefferson, son of Jeff.

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On 14 July 1789, a Paris crowd hunting for gunpowder storms a hulking fortress-prison. They find only seven prisoners inside. France still celebrates the day: Bastille Day.

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A queen in a towering powdered wig is famously quoted saying "Let them eat cake!" about starving peasants. She almost certainly never said it. She's guillotined in 1793.

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In 1805, flags flutter up the mast of HMS Victory: "England expects that every man will do his duty." Admiral Nelson wins the battle off Cape Trafalgar but is shot by a sniper.

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In 1803, Napoleon needs cash for his wars. He sells a huge slab of North America to the United States for about $15 million, doubling the size of the country overnight.

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A formerly enslaved coachman becomes a brilliant general and defeats French, Spanish and British armies. His name means "the opening": Toussaint Louverture. In 1804, Haiti declares independence.

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A small, sickly MP from Hull stands up in Parliament year after year to argue against the slave trade. Wilber, the forceful one, finally wins in 1807.

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In 1863, a tall president in a stovepipe hat stands on a Civil War battlefield and speaks for barely two minutes. The crowd hardly notices. "Four score and seven years ago..."

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In April 1865, five days after the Civil War effectively ends, a famous actor slips into the president's box at Ford's Theatre and fires. Then he leaps to the stage and breaks his leg. He's Booth, from the booth.

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A nurse walks the wards of a filthy army hospital at Scutari at night, carrying a lamp. She counts the dead in careful charts, and proves that dirt kills more soldiers than bullets. A nightingale sings outside.

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In 1854, a muddled order sends 600 cavalrymen charging straight down a valley lined with Russian cannon. They wear woolly hats over their faces against the cold, the original balaclavas.

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In 1845, Irish farmers dig up their potatoes and find them black and rotten. A blight spreads for years. A million people die and another million emigrate.

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A carpenter building a sawmill spots shiny flakes in a Californian river. Within a year, in 1849, 90,000 fortune-hunters pour in, and a football team is later named after them: the forty-niners.

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In 1869, a French diplomat watches ships glide from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea through a channel dug across Egyptian sand. Verdi was asked to write an opera for the opening.

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The French try first and give up, beaten by mud and malaria. The Americans finish the job and the first ship sails through in August 1914, the same month the First World War begins.

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In 1860, a bearded general lands in Sicily with a thousand volunteers in red shirts and conquers the island, then hands southern Italy to the king. Italians still eat a biscuit named after him.

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In January 1871, after beating France, Prussian princes crowd into the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and proclaim a new German Empire, right in the French king's palace. Bismarck smirks in every mirror.

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In April 1912, a giant liner on its maiden voyage from Southampton grazes an iceberg near midnight. There are lifeboats for only about half the people aboard. The band plays on.

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In June 1914, an archduke's car takes a wrong turn in Sarajevo and stalls right in front of a young man eating a sandwich. Gavrilo Princip fires twice. A month later, Europe is at war.

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On Christmas Eve 1914, German soldiers set candles on little trees along their trench and sing "Stille Nacht". The British sing back. On Christmas Day, men from both sides swap cigarettes and kick a ball in no man's land.

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In a railway carriage parked in a forest at Compiègne, generals sign an armistice at 5 a.m. The guns fall silent at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918.

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In 1917, sailors storm the Winter Palace in Petrograd and Lenin's Bolsheviks seize power. Russia still uses the old calendar, so it's October there but November everywhere else.

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In 1903, a Manchester widow founds a women's group with the motto "Deeds, not words". Its members smash windows and chain themselves to railings to win the vote. She's Emmeline Pankhurst, banging pans.

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In 1893, campaigners in New Zealand glue together a petition 270 metres long and roll it across Parliament's floor. That year, it becomes the first self-governing country to give women the vote.

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On 29 October 1929, panicked traders on Wall Street sell everything. Ticker tape runs hours behind. The day is called Black Tuesday, and the Great Depression follows.

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In 1940, hundreds of fishing boats, pleasure cruisers and ferries chug across the Channel to lift soldiers off the beaches of Dunkirk. The rescue is code-named after a dynamo room under Dover Castle.

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At dawn on 6 June 1944, thousands of ships appear off the coast of Normandy. Soldiers wade ashore at beaches code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. The overlord of all invasions.

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On a Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, Japanese planes swoop over a Hawaiian harbour full of pearl-grey battleships. The next day, President Roosevelt calls it "a date which will live in infamy".

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On 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber named after the pilot's mother, Enola Gay, drops a single atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

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Behind a hinged bookcase in an Amsterdam canal house, a teenage girl writes in a red-checked diary she calls Kitty. Her family hides there for two years.

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In 1930, a thin man in a loincloth walks 240 miles to the sea with a growing crowd. On the beach he picks up a lump of salt, breaking the British salt law.

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At the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, Nehru tells the assembly "at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom."

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A prisoner breaks limestone in a quarry on an island off Cape Town, the glare damaging his eyes. He spends 27 years in prison and walks out in 1990 to become president.

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In 1955, a seamstress on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, is told to give up her seat to a white passenger. She stays put. The city's Black residents boycott the buses for over a year.

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In August 1963, a preacher stands on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 people. A singer shouts "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" He puts his notes aside.

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In October 1962, spy-plane photos show Soviet missile sites in Cuba. For 13 days, the world holds its breath as US warships blockade the island. Then Khrushchev backs down.

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On 22 November 1963, an open-top limousine rolls through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Shots ring out from a book depository. Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested in a cinema.

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In 1972, burglars are caught taping a door lock in an office building by the river, the Watergate. Secret White House tapes later reveal a cover-up, and in 1974 Nixon resigns.

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On Easter Monday 1916, rebels seize the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation of an Irish Republic from its steps. The rising is crushed within a week, and its leaders shot.

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In 1923, a general with piercing blue eyes founds a new republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, swaps Arabic script for the Latin alphabet, and moves the capital to Ankara. He's given the surname Atatürk, "father of the Turks".

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On Christmas Day 1991, the red hammer-and-sickle flag is lowered over the Kremlin for the last time. Gorbachev resigns on television, and the Soviet Union breaks into 15 countries.

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In 1948, ships full of American grain, fuel and machinery dock in war-wrecked European ports. The plan is named after the US Secretary of State, a general turned diplomat: George Marshall.

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In 1945, two American officers with a National Geographic map draw a line across Korea along a latitude line, the 38th parallel, in about half an hour. It still divides the peninsula.

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In 1957, leaders of six countries sit around a table on Rome's Capitoline Hill and sign a treaty creating a common market. It grows into the European Union.

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In 1840, a schoolteacher's idea becomes the world's first sticky stamp: young Queen Victoria's head on a black background, costing one penny. Rowland Hill licks the first one.

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Neolithic people drag huge blue-grey stones 150 miles from the Preseli Hills in Wales to Salisbury Plain. Nobody knows quite how. They line them up with the midsummer sunrise.

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In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd boy throws a stone into a cave near the Dead Sea and hears pottery smash. Inside the jars are ancient scrolls of the Hebrew Bible, a thousand years older than any known copy. The caves are at Qumran.

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In 1939, a self-taught archaeologist digs into a mound on a Suffolk estate and finds the ghostly outline of a 27-metre ship, packed with gold and a magnificent iron helmet. A king's grave at Sutton Hoo.

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In 1940, a teenager's dog chases into a hole in the French countryside. The boys squeeze in after it and find cave walls covered in painted horses, bulls and deer, 17,000 years old. The cave is Lascaux.

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In 1991, hikers in the Ötztal Alps spot a brown body sticking out of melting ice. They think it's a lost climber. He's 5,300 years old, with a copper axe and an arrowhead in his shoulder: Ötzi.

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In 1553, a 16-year-old girl who'd rather read Greek is crowned queen of England. Nine days later she's deposed by Mary I and later executed. She wears grey.

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After 19 years as her cousin Elizabeth's prisoner, a Scottish queen is beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587. Her little dog is found hiding under her skirts.

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In 1600, two huge samurai armies clash in fog in a mountain pass. Tokugawa Ieyasu wins, and his family rules Japan as shoguns from Edo, today's Tokyo, for over 250 years.

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In May 1940, three days after becoming prime minister, a bulldog-faced man with a cigar tells the Commons: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

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At 1:23 a.m. on 26 April 1986, a safety test goes wrong at a nuclear plant in Soviet Ukraine. Reactor number four explodes. The nearby town of Pripyat is evacuated and never comes back.

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A Sumerian scribe presses a sharpened reed into wet clay, leaving little wedge shapes, to record how many sheep a farmer owes. It's one of the earliest forms of writing: cuneiform, from Latin for "wedge".

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In 732, a Frankish leader forms his infantry into a wall of shields near Tours and holds back the Umayyad cavalry all day. They nickname him Martel: "the Hammer".

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For years, an old Roman senator ends every speech, whatever the subject, with "Carthage must be destroyed!" In 146 BC Rome finally does it, burning the city for 17 days.

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In 539 BC, a Persian king rides into Babylon without a fight and lets the deported peoples, including the Jews, go home. He records it on a clay barrel: the Cyrus Cylinder.