1923 Archaeologist opens tomb of King Tut

On this day in 1923, in Thebes, Egypt, English archaeologist Howard Carter enters the sealed burial chamber of the ancient Egyptian ruler King Tutankhamen.
Because the ancient Egyptians saw their pharaohs as gods, they carefully preserved their bodies after death, burying them in elaborate tombs containing rich treasures to accompany the rulers into the afterlife. In the 19th century, archeologists from all over the world flocked to Egypt, where they uncovered a number of these tombs. Many had long ago been broken into by robbers and stripped of their riches.
When Carter arrived in Egypt in 1891, he became convinced there was at least one undiscovered tomb–that of the little known Tutankhamen, or King Tut, who lived around 1400 B.C. and died when he was still a teenager. Backed by a rich Brit, Lord Carnarvon, Carter searched for five years without success. In early 1922, Lord Carnarvon wanted to call off the search, but Carter convinced him to hold on one more year.
In November 1922, the wait paid off, when Carter’s team found steps hidden in the debris near the entrance of another tomb. The steps led to an ancient sealed doorway bearing the name Tutankhamen. When Carter and Lord Carnarvon entered the tomb’s interior chambers on November 26, they were thrilled to find it virtually intact, with its treasures untouched after more than 3,000 years. The men began exploring the four rooms of the tomb, and on February 16, 1923, under the watchful eyes of a number of important officials, Carter opened the door to the last chamber.
Inside lay a sarcophagus with three coffins nested inside one another. The last coffin, made of solid gold, contained the mummified body of King Tut. Among the riches found in the tomb–golden shrines, jewelry, statues, a chariot, weapons, clothing–the perfectly preserved mummy was the most valuable, as it was the first one ever to be discovered. Despite rumors that a curse would befall anyone who disturbed the tomb, its treasures were carefully catalogued, removed and included in a famous traveling exhibition called the “Treasures of Tutankhamen.” The exhibition’s permanent home is the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

This Day in History: June 17th- Vlad the Impaler and Mehmed II

You may know him as a terrifying blood sucking vampire, but the real “Dracula” was a prince named Vlad Dracula, Son of the Dragon, also known as Vlad Tepes, (Vlad the Impaler). Bram Stoker’s literary creation will give you a shudder, but the exploits of Vlad the Impaler, Prince of Wallachia, are enough to make you sleep with the lights on indefinitely, though he was considered something of a hero throughout Christendom in his day for his war against the Muslim world.
Vlad had pretty good reason to hate the Turks, at least by his own estimation. When his father, Vlad II Dracul was still in power, he handed over his two younger sons to the Ottoman Turks as a sign of good faith. Vlad Dracula lived as their pseudo-prisoner for five years and fostered a deep hatred for both the Turks and Islam, On the flipside, his brother thrived in the environment, becoming friends with Sultan Murad’s son, and even converting to Islam.
When Vlad came to the throne, his tiny principality was a mess. The crime rate was high, the food supply was low, and trade was virtually non-existent. He knew a country in such a sorry state didn’t have a chance of fending off the Ottoman Turks, so he enacted many new, strict laws and enforced incredibly harsh penalties on those who stepped out of line.
Vlad got his “impaler” moniker in “honor” of one of these punishments. While he certainly wasn’t the first to use this particularly nasty form of torture and death, the sheer number of people he put through this heinous ordeal was extremely noteworthy.
When Vlad’s victims were impaled, the sharpened wooden stakes were rammed through their bodies in various ways.  One skilled in this “art” could even do it in such a way that the pole would slide nicely through much of the body, often from bottom up, without penetrating any vital organs. In this way, the condemned could sometimes live for several days suspended in mid-air and left to their agonizing demise. Their remains were often left as a cautionary reminder to Vlad’s subjects. Reportedly, sometimes their agonizing deaths served as a floorshow for Vlad while he and guests were enjoying dinner.
It wasn’t just his subjects who felt his wrath. When Sultan Mehmed II sent emissaries inquiring why Vlad hadn’t coughed up his non-Muslim tribute yet, the seething Dracula explained he was all tapped out thanks to a recent war with Hungary. He then questioned why the ambassadors hadn’t removed their turbans as a sign of respect when they approached him. They replied it wasn’t customary for them to do so.
That didn’t sit too well with Dracula. He ordered his guards to seize the emissaries and nail their turbans to their heads. The Turks died a horribly painful death. Vlad sent them back to Mehmed II with a little note asking that he never send such uncouth ambassadors to his court again.
Things were about to get real.
In 1462, Vlad and his troops crossed the Danube wreaking havoc wherever they went.  He wrote a letter about this on February 2, 1462 to the King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, stating,

I have killed peasants men and women, old and young, who lived at Oblucitza and Novoselo, where the Danube flows into the sea… We killed 23,884 Turks without counting those whom we burned in homes or the Turks whose heads were cut by our soldiers… Thus, your highness, you must know that I have broken the peace.

In response, Sultan Mehmed II’s troops, led by Hamza Pasha crossed the Danube River, moving closer to Wallachia. Vlad sent decoys suffering with everything from the bubonic plague, leprosy and tuberculosis into the enemy’s encampments as a form of biological warfare and employed a scorched earth campaign. He had far fewer troops than the Turks (who came with an army of about 90,000) and depended on guerrilla warfare tactics.
By June 16, 1462, the Turks were just outside the Wallachian capital of Targoviste. Vlad decided a surprise attack with the purpose of assassinating Mehmed II, was his best bet.
Just after the stroke of midnight on June 17, 1462, Vlad Dracula and his troops attacked. The Turks desperately rose in defense against the Wallachian onslaught for the next several hours, but the carnage was brutal, with an estimated 15,000 Ottomans killed that single night. While this was good for Vlad, it only put a small dent in the enemy army and wasn’t his main objective. As mentioned, what he was really trying to do was to kill Sultan Mehmed II.
In spite of all the careful planning, confusion set in during the heat of battle. The Sultan’s two commanders, Ishak Pasha and Mahmud Pasha, were killed, but Mehmed escaped unscathed.
As dawn approached and the Ottomans began organizing an efficient counterattack, Dracula ordered a retreat without achieving his prime objective. This spelled the end of the famous Night Attack, which would be heralded as a great day for Christendom and see Vlad named a hero.
The Turkish Army approached Targoviste four days after the Night Attack. The gates to the city were wide open, and they were greeted by an ominous silence. However, the sight before them was unimaginably grotesque. An endless field of decomposing corpses made up of thousands of Turks and Bulgarian Muslims impaled in every configuration possible.
It had the desired effect. According the 15th century historian Laonicus Chalcondyles:

The Sultan’s army came across a field with stakes, about three kilometers long and one kilometer wide. And there were large stakes on which they could see the impaled bodies of men, women, and children, about twenty thousand of them, as they said; quite a spectacle for the Turks and the Sultan himself! The Sultan, in wonder, kept saying that he could not conquer the country of a man who could do such terrible and unnatural things.

Vlad continued the war, but ultimately was betrayed for reasons unknown today by one of his former allies, the aforementioned King Matthias Corvinus.  After Corvinus captured Vlad, he was imprisoned, but around 1475 was released and began to once again wage war against the Turks.

Some two years later, he was dead. It isn’t clear how or exactly when he died, but it is generally thought he was killed in battle, with his head being taken as a trophy by the Turks.

This Day in History: May 26th- Dracula

On May 26, 1897, Irish author Bram Stoker’s masterpiece Dracula was released for sale in London. Dracula was not only a sensation in its own right, but inspired a genre of horror that remains immensely popular today. But Bram Stoker certainly wasn’t the creator of vampire lore; the history of the blood-sucking undead spans back into the mists of pre-history.
Stoker based much of his novel on Romanian tales from medieval times, which became the basis for most interpretations of vampire characterizations that still exist today. For this reason, Stoker is lauded as the creator of the modern vampire novel (whether this is a compliment or not we’ll leave up to you).
Stoker’s work has also spawned theatrical productions and countless motion pictures, the most famous being the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu, and the iconic 1931 film Dracula starring the legendary Bela Lugosi.
In the eyes of at least one contemporary reviewer, however, the re-telling of the ancient vampire legends was hopelessly old fashioned and hokey to the eyes of savvy modern readers in the late 19th century. The Manchester Guardian opined:

Man is no longer in dread of the monstrous and the unnatural, and although Mr. Stoker has tackled his gruesome subject with enthusiasm, the effect is more often grotesque than terrible…. The plot is too complicated for reproduction, but it says no little for the author’s power that in spite of its absurdities the reader can follow the story with interest to the end. It is, however, an artistic mistake to fill a whole volume with horrors. A touch of the mysterious, the terrible, or the supernatural is infinitely more effective and credible.

Being able to complete the book without dying of boredom is hardly high praise.
When Stoker was interviewed in June of 1897, he was quick to acknowledge his debt to the old myths, and admit his life-long fascination with the vampire legends. He said, “It is undoubtedly a very fascinating theme, since it touches both on mystery and fact. In the Middle Ages the terror of the vampire depopulated whole villages.”
When asked if there was any factual basis for the vampire legends, Stoker replied,

It rested, I imagine, on some such case as this. A person may have fallen into a death-like trance and been buried before the time. Afterwards the body may have been dug up and found alive, and from this a horror seized upon the people, and in their ignorance they imagined that a vampire was about. The more hysterical, through excess of fear, might themselves fall into trances in the same way; and so the story grew that one vampire might enslave many others and make them like himself. Even in the single villages it was believed that there might be many such creatures. When once the panic seized the population, their only thought was to escape.

It is true that the normal signs of human decomposition, such as blood seeping out the corpse’s mouth and nose, discoloration around the nails and the appearance that the hair and nails have grown, were taken as signs that the deceased was among the ranks of the Undead. One wonders what Stoker would think of angst ridden vampires that sparkle.

Bonus Fact:

• Twilight was rejected by fourteen publishers before one finally bit.

This Day in History: Christopher Columbus Tricks Native Jamaicans into Giving Him Supplies by Using His Knowledge of an Upcoming Lunar Eclipse

 This Day In History: February 29, 1504
On this day in history, 1504, Christopher Columbus convinced a group of Native Jamaicans that his god was angry with them for ceasing to provide his group with supplies and that god would show his anger with a sign from the heavens.  The sign was a lunar eclipse that Columbus knew was imminent.
This event occurred on Columbus’ fourth and final voyage to the Americas, which began in Cadiz in 1502.  Columbus landed near the north coast of Jamaica on June 20, 1503 with only two of his original four caravel ships still afloat, but barely sea worthy due to a shipworm infestation.  At first, the natives welcomed Columbus and his crew, providing them with food and other supplies in exchange for various trinkets, generally welcoming the sailors into their community with open arms.
This arrangement didn’t last very long. Over the next several months, the natives became discontented with the guests of their island.  Columbus’ crew repaid the generosity of the natives by frequently stealing and cheating them, as well as raiding villages for supplies, among many other indiscretions committed by the crew (murder, rape, etc.).  As a result of this, by January of 1504, the indigenous peoples decided to stop supplying the stranded Europeans, regardless of what they might offer in trade.
Without a significant source of food or means to leave, Columbus’ expedition was in serious trouble.  Luckily for his crew, Columbus had certain astronomical tables with him including the ephemeris compiled by the German astronomer Johannes Müller von Königsberg, better known today by his Latin name, Regiomontanus.  In this almanac, Regiomontanus predicted there would be a total lunar eclipse on the evening of February 29, 1504.  He also gave an estimation of what time it would occur, though this start time was based on Nuremberg, Germany time, so Columbus had to do a bit of estimating.  Regiomontanus even included fairly accurate information as to how long the eclipse would last.
Armed with this knowledge, which Columbus was choosing to gamble would be extremely accurate, he called a meeting with the chiefs of the nearby tribes shortly before the eclipse was to take place.  In this meeting, he told them his god was angry with them for ceasing to give him supplies.  As a result, his god would take away the moon as a sign of his anger and subsequently punish them for their actions.
Luckily for Columbus, the predicted lunar eclipse took place more or less on schedule and according to Columbus’ son, Ferdinand, who was 13 and had made the voyage with his father:

The Indians observed this [the eclipse] and were so astonished and frightened that with great howling and lamentation they came running from every direction to the ships, laden with provisions, praying the Admiral to intercede by all means with God on their behalf; that he might not visit his wrath upon them…  and promising they would diligently supply all their needs in the future.

Columbus agreed to take their case before his god and went into his cabin to “pray”.  What he actually did in there was watch an hour glass.  Columbus knew the moon would stay completely in the Earth’s shadow for around 48 minutes, so he waited for the appropriate time for the moon to begin to emerge.  Shortly before this took place, he came back out and told the natives that he had asked his god to forgive them and god had acquiesced.  The moon began to reappear and Columbus no longer had trouble getting the provisions he needed. He and his crew were picked up a few months later when a ship from Hispaniola arrived in Jamaica on June 29, 1504.  They arrived back in Spain on November 7, 1504.
Bonus Facts:

• Mark Twain was likely inspired by this event in his 1889 work, a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In this story Hank Morgan is going to be burned at the stake, but pretends to use his “powers” to black out the sun, when in fact he simply knew a solar eclipse was about to take place.  It should be noted that the date Mark Twain used in this book for the solar eclipse to happen, June 21, 528 A.D. in reality had no eclipse.
• A shipworm is not actually a worm; it is actually a type of saltwater clam.  Shipworms bore into wooden structures, such as wooden ships, eating the wood as they go.  They are able to process the wood thanks to a special type of bacteria in their gland of Deshayes, which help them process the cellulose.
• Regiomontanus’ almanac provided astronomical tables covering 1475-1506, including dates and times of eclipses, among many other things.
• Regiomontanus was not called such in his lifetime, rather going by his real name: Johannes Müller von Königsberg or, in his writings, by the toponym Joannes de Monte Regio.  The Latin name Regiomontanus was given to him around fifty years after he died by the famed theologian Phillip Melanchthon.
• Contrary to popular belief, most of the educated and the vast majority of sailors knew the Earth wasn’t flat when Columbus set out for India in 1492.  The major debate was not whether the ship would fall off the edge of the Earth, but rather how far to India it was from Europe, traveling west.  Most thought, based on various estimations on the Earth’s circumference (some of which were amazingly accurate), that the journey would be too far to be able to do without stopping for supplies.  Columbus disagreed as his estimation of the Earth’s circumference was much smaller than what it is in reality.  If not for the Americas and neighboring islands, Columbus would have learned, to his doom, that he was wrong about the size of Earth.  Sometimes it’s better to be bold than right.