Saint Pontius Pilate
The Ethiopian and Coptic Orthodox Churches hold that Pontius Pilate, the governor who condemned Jesus Christ to death, later converted to Christianity himself, and they revere Pilate as a saint.
Category: Middle East
The author of Aladdin
Neither Aladdin nor Ali Baba were in the original Thousand and One Nights (aka the Arabian Nights). The tales first appeared in the French translation, probably from a Syrian Christian storyteller named Hanna Diyab who lived in Paris from 1708 to 1710.
Largest cemetery
Wadi al-Salaam, the Valley of Peace, in Iraq is the largest cemetery in the world; more than five million people are buried there.
Science wars: Non-periodic crystals
Up until 1982, all crystals were believed to be, by definition, periodic. But then an Israeli materials scientist discovered something strange…
Dragon blood island
Socotra, the alien island wedged between the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden, is home to the dragon blood tree: a source of dye, paint, medicine, varnish, and magic.
Triple clarinet
The Sardinian launeddas, also known as a triplepipe, sounds like someone playing three clarinets at the same time.
Houdini and Lovecraft and the mummies
The escape artist Harry Houdini and the author H. P. Lovecraft collaborated on a “true” Egyptian horror story.
Portugal vs. Egypt in India
How about that time that the Egyptian Mamluks, with secret support from Venice, battled the Portuguese in the sea off the coast of India?
Eight years on the Suez Canal
In 1967, fifteen ships and their crews were trapped on the Suez Canal because of the Six-Day War. The ships would remain there for the next eight years.
Salt men
Most accidental mummies are preserved by heat, cold, or peat bogs. But in the Chehrabad mines in Iran, the bodies of ancient miners were buried in salt.
Relic souvenirs
In early Christian tradition, the power of saints’ relics could be transferred from object to object by a simple touch.
Solomon’s laser
The shamir is described in the Talmud and Midrash as a tool capable of slicing through solid stone, iron, and diamond – but was it a worm, a laser, or a radioactive rock?
Reconstructed ancestor language
Proto-Indo-European is thought to be the ancestor language of English, Latin, Greek, French, Russian, Urdu, Sanskrit, Farsi, and dozens of others. But what did it sound like?
Cursed stone city
Al-Khazneh, the temple carved out of a cliff in Petra, is the most famous remnant of the Nabataean Kingdom. But to its south lies Hegra, the cursed stoneland city.
The order of the Quran
The Quran contains 114 chapters, but they are arranged neither chronologically nor thematically. Instead, they go from longest to shortest.
Ancient dioramas
We all know that Egyptian tombs contained models of servants, boats, and animals to accompany the deceased in the afterlife. But they sometimes also contained model gardens, granaries, bakeries, breweries, stables, and slaughterhouses.