This is the April 2024 edition of my fascinating facts newsletter, which includes a range of interesting topics. This includes writeups about the jewellery of ancient Egypt and Tutankhamun’s breast plate.
Fascinating Facts April 2024 Contents
You can download the full newsletter to read HERE, however some snippets are listed below.
Jewellery of Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egyptian jewellery was to both beautify the wearer, serve as a talisman of power and show wealth. It was believed to provide power protection, good luck, guidance through the afterlife and ward off bad luck or the evil eye. The makers had minimal tools but possessed terrific skills to create such beautiful, sophisticated and detailed jewellery. Each symbol is like a piece of art. They were the first people to translate abstract art, using a range of wide range of materials into jewellery. Read More…
Tutankhamun’s Breastplate
The Pectoral of Tutankhamun with solar and lunar emblem and scarab. Abounding with symbolism, each amulet was meticulously selected with the purpose of ensuring the King’s safe passage to the afterlife. Made of gold and silver with inlays of carnelian, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and scarab, which was super-heated fused sand created by a meteorite hitting desert sand. The breastplate depicts the god Ra as a winged scarab carrying the sun and moon. Read More…
Wikipedia
A free-content online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, The largest and most-read reference work in history, at 7th it has been ranked consistently one of the world’s 10 most popular and most visited websites in the world. In 2023, it was ranked as the 4th most viewed website. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, on January 15, 2001, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organisation employing 700 people. Read More…
Snowflakes
Snowflakes are unique and one of winter’s most recognisable symbols, creating an infinite number of possible shapes. When falling, the tiny droplets of super-cooled water freeze into ice crystals when temperatures are sufficiently cold, usually −35 °C or lower where they can form around a nucleus such as a dust or pollen particle. Once the ice crystal has formed, if the conditions are right, it will begin to grow, as the water molecules in the air are deposited onto its surface as it falls through the air, clumping together to form a snowflake. Read More…
The QWERTY keyboard
The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by newspaper editor Christopher Latham Sholes, who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In 1867, he filed a patent application for a writing machine he developed with the assistance of Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé. Read More…
Noah’s Ark
Among the many British Museum’s collection of cuneiform tablets are two pre-biblical accounts of a person divinely commissioned to build an ark and so save the animals from a cosmic flood. In deciphering the text in the 1870s, George Smith identified the Epic of Gilgamesh for the first time after more than 2,000 years of oblivion. Read More…
Gingerbread Men
In the second half of the 16th century, in the midst of the English Renaissance, a particularly creative period in the era of William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, it was the time for banquets and sumptuous meals. Also, new exotic fruits, vegetables and spices were being imported from the Americas. One of which was ginger, the underground root of a plant from the tropical rainforests of Southern Asia, and was exported to India and Europe during the early spice trades. Read More…
