Airyanem Atlas
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Evening Posts

A deep fact and a fun fact, every evening.

Deep fact

The oldest Indo-European language on record is Hittite, known from some 30,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments, mostly from Hattusa. Its earliest texts date to about 1650 BCE, in central Turkey, far from the steppe where many place the roots.
#IndoEuropean #Hittite #History

Source: Britannica, "Hittite language"
Fun fact

The oldest known wheel, dated to about 3150 BCE, was found in 2002 in a peat bog near Ljubljana, Slovenia. Its wheel is ash and its axle oak, and the two planks are joined with a tongue-and-groove joint.
#History #Wheel #FunFact

Source: Guinness World Records, "Oldest wheel"
Photo: Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: Daniel Thornton, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Deep fact

Sweden once had a 30 February. A 1712 Swedish almanac lists it, and the parish register at Ystad records a wedding dated 30 February 1712. That couple could never celebrate on the same date again.
#History #Calendar #Sweden

Source: 1712 Swedish almanac; Ystad parish register
Fun fact

Pistachio is a Persian word in disguise. Persian pista passed into Greek as pistákion, then Latin and Italian, reaching English in the 1590s. Merriam-Webster calls its origin Iranian.
#Etymology #Persian #Pistachio

Source: Merriam-Webster
Deep fact

In his early twenties, Ferdinand de Saussure predicted lost sounds of Proto-Indo-European that no known language showed. In 1927 Jerzy Kuryłowicz found them in Hittite, a language not yet deciphered in Saussure's day.
#Linguistics #Saussure #IndoEuropean

Source: Britannica, "Laryngeal consonant" (Saussure, 1879); Britannica, "Jerzy Kuryłowicz" (Hittite ḫ, 1927)
Fun fact

The heaviest coin ever made for circulation was Sweden's 10-daler copper plate of 1644. It weighed 19.7 kg and measured about 30 by 70 cm. Pockets were not an option.
#History #Sweden #FunFact

Source: Guinness World Records, "Heaviest coin for circulation"
Deep fact

The steppe left its mark in earth. Kurgans, burial mounds raised over deep shaft graves, still dot the Western Steppe, and Scythian kurgans alone have yielded thousands of gold objects.
#Kurgan #Steppe #Archaeology

Source: Britannica, "Kurgan" and "Kurgan culture"; Britannica, "The Steppe"
Fun fact

The oldest peace treaty whose text survives, between Ramesses II of Egypt and Hattusili III of the Hittites, dates to about 1259 BCE. A replica, a gift from Turkey, hangs in a corridor at UN headquarters in New York.
#History #AncientHistory #FunFact

Source: UN Photo / UN Audiovisual Library caption, Kadesh Peace Treaty replica at UN HQ
Deep fact

Today is Thursday, Thor's day. Romance languages give the same day to Jupiter: French jeudi, Italian giovedì, Spanish jueves. One thunder-and-sky god, two cultures, and both names still sit in our weekdays.
#Etymology #Mythology

Fun fact

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing (1969) than to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza (about 2560 BCE). The pyramid was already ancient to her, about 2,500 years old.
#History #Egypt #FunFact