A clay tablet, an Inca bridge, a Norman court, a Roman cup, and an empty ship. Five verified facts that almost no one knows.
Ur, Mesopotamia, around 1750 BC. A man named Nanni inscribes an angry letter on a clay tablet to the merchant Ea-nasir. He paid for copper and received poor-quality goods. Moreover, his servant was treated badly. He wants his money back. The tablet, less than twelve centimeters tall, was found by archaeologist Leonard Woolley and is in the British Museum. The Guinness World Records recognizes it as the oldest written complaint.
In the Peruvian Andes, above a gorge of the Apurímac River, there is a suspension bridge made only of grass. It is called Q'eswachaka. Every year, four Quechua-speaking communities cut the straw, weave it into thin ropes seventy meters long, and in three days replace the entire bridge, tying it to the ancient stone bases. They use Inca techniques passed down from generation to generation. Since 2013, the ritual has been an intangible UNESCO heritage.
Falaise, Normandy, 1386. A pig kills a child, disfiguring his face and arms. It is not simply put down: it is judged. The punishment mirrors the crime: the animal is inflicted with the same mutilations, then hanged. A fresco of the scene was painted in the village church. It was not an isolated case: in 1474, in Basel, a rooster was burned at the stake for laying an egg.
At the British Museum there is a glass cup from the 4th century AD, sixteen centimeters tall. Illuminated from the front it is green. If light passes through it from behind it becomes red. It is the Lycurgus Cup, the only complete Roman object of this kind. The secret was discovered with an electron microscope: gold and silver particles about seventy nanometers wide are dispersed in the glass. Today we would call it nanotechnology.
At the beginning of December 1872, between the Azores and Portugal, the brigantine Dei Gratia spots a sailing ship adrift. It is the Mary Celeste, departed from New York for Genoa. There is no one on board. The cargo, 1,701 barrels of alcohol, is intact. Supplies are abundant. Only the lifeboat is missing. The last entry in the logbook is from nine days earlier. Of the ten people on board, including the captain's young daughter, nothing more was ever known.