Unruly History in the News #18
Rediscovered treasures edition.
What! A! Week! Between book edits and freelancing, I feel like I haven’t sat still for a single second. But I’m back with this week’s Unruly History in the News, and I’m so happy to be here.
Also—if you got the Mailbag Episode on Friday, I made a mistake in setting up the paywall. Free subscribers should have been able to see most of the written section and listen to a three-minute version of the episode. (The full episode is seven minutes long.) I fixed it Saturday morning, so it should be set up now!
This week, in history acting unruly…
A look at the tangled history of Ukraine and Russia.
This incredibly remote volcano holds one of only eight known molten lava lakes on earth.
The Euphrates River may run dry by 2040, according to a recent government report. For devout Christians, this is a sign of the end times. Regardless of your beliefs, this is worth despairing over: the Euphrates is central to the health and stability of Turkey and Iraq. If the river dries up, we can count on millions of displaced people rushing into nearby countries that probably won’t be prepared for the strain of that many refugees. Revolt and war will follow.
Archaeologists in Greece have identified the potential site of a lost Temple of Poseidon. Fittingly, it’s in a location often impacted by tsunamis.
A list of treasures, crimes, and the people involved in both:
This is a wild one, so bear with me: After Julius Caesar was murdered, Brutus minted commemorative coins memorializing the occasion. They’re known as the Eid Mar coins, and only three such coins are known to exist still. In 2020, a London-based auction house that dealt in ancient coins, Roma Numismatics, had one on auction and sold it for a record-breaking $4.2 million. Now it’s come out that the owner of the auction house, Richard Beale, forged the coin’s provenance. He’s been arrested.
The Eid mar coin sold by Roma Numismatics…with falsified provenance. Source. Scientists just revealed a hidden corridor inside the Great Pyramid of Giza.
How Scotland forged an alliance between archaeologists and treasure hunters.
China kept a 12th-century shipwreck—and its treasure on board—a secret for decades. This allowed them to protect it until It could be salvaged safely.
This Danish treasure—dubbed the Vindelev hoard—contains the oldest known reference to the Norse god Odin. This proves that Odin was being worshipped as early as the 5th century CE—150 years earlier than history’s previously oldest known reference!
A gorgeous treasure of Medieval jewelry was uncovered by a historian with a metal detector in the Netherlands. I’m drooling over some of these pieces.
The find has been dubbed the Hoogwoud Treasure. Source.
Humans probably didn’t mean to tame goats and sheep. But hey, here we are.
Medieval knights probably rode into battle on miniature horses. Cute.
There’s an enormous ancient city that you’ve probably never heard of, and it’s in Illinois.
This fossilized butthole is helping us understand dinosaur sex. Yes, you read that right. Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, studied the fossilized cloaca of a 120 million-year-old Psittacosaurus and learned a lot about this creature’s mating habits, including that cloacas were probably a distinct color to attract mates. “Perhaps there was a glorious past where dinosaurs were strutting around and showing their cloacas off,” Vinther suggests. Fingers crossed, tbh.
If you’ve ever seen a cassowary, you know they’re huge and vaguely terrifying. (This article describes them as “demon birds.”) Well, now we have evidence that humans bred them to be terrifying on purpose!
