Innehållsförteckning för History’s 50 greatest mysteries från Inside History Collection

The bible is packed with the names of long-forgotten people and tales of bloody battles, horrific disasters and individual heroics, but are they based on real people and events or are they simple parables? And what about King Arthur? Was he the first king of England, or just a legend designed to unite the people of Britain? Modern historians are inclined to believe the latter – yet the myth has endured. And why did the ancient Egyptians build pyramids and embalm their dead, preserving their corpses for millennia? In this special bookazine we’ve collated 50 of the most intriguing historical riddles that still arouse wonder and debate, and track the progress archaeologists and scholars have made in unravelling history’s greatest mysteries. Happy reading!…

The idea that a mystical man in a lonely chamber could predict world events centuries into the future has fascinated millions of people over the last 450 years. Even today, the prophet Nostradamus is shrouded in a veil of mysticism – he even helped promote the myth of his supernatural abilities himself. In the first verse of his famous book, The Prophecies, he wrote: Sitting alone at night in secret study;it is placed on the brass tripod.A slight flame comes out of the emptiness andmakes successful that which should not bebelieved in vain. Because of this verse and a series of stories about his life, many Nostradamus biographies focus on his alleged association with the occult. And as the centuries have passed, the stories about him have got more and…

THE WEST ■ Western orders have been at the centre of a series of conspiracy theories. In particular, Freemasons and the 230-year-old German Illuminati have been suspected of running Western governments and economies. However, the truth is rarely as exciting as the myths. The vast majority of orders no longer exist, and the “influential” order of Freemasons is, in theory, open to all – as long as you are male. INITIATION The Freemasons admit two new brothers at a time. They are called Apprentices, the lowest degree in the order. The initiation rituals are rarely as bizarre as the public thinks. Klan members swear to work towards white supremacy in the USA. MIDDLE EAST ■ Christian knights, highly trained assassins and a brutal cult of man-maneating African nationalists have all…

Henry Layard wandered to and fro, searching the top of the ancient mound that the local Arabs called Nimrud. The 28-year-old Briton gently turned over bits of bricks and pottery with his foot as the dust danced in the morning sun. The mighty River Tigris lay 20 metres below, winding through the land the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia – the land between two rivers. A few weeks before, the British ambassador to Constantinople had given the 28-year-old Briton two months to find traces of the ancient Assyrian kingdom near the city of Mosul, 350 kilometres north of Baghdad. For five years Layard had dreamed of excavating the Nimrud mound. He was convinced that some of the greatest and most notorious kings of ancient times had constructed their magnificent palaces there.…

Journey to the afterlife began in a clay pot Many of the children were laid out in a foetal position and placed in a clay pot whose shape resembled an egg or womb. The vessel is he vessel is probably related to the Egyptians' belief in rebirth. Graves revel Egypt’s origins The inhabitants of Adaïma left no written accounts, but archaeologists have learned a great deal about early Egyptian life along the Nile’s lush banks after unearthing the graves of more than a thousand children. Mummies faced the dying sun Deceased children were laid on their left sides, facing west. For the Egyptians, the setting sun marked the entrance to the underworld. More than five thousand years ago, the parents of a deceased infant boy laid their son’s body to…

The modest sepia-coloured drawing depicts a mountain landscape with a river cutting through a steep valley. Perched on a ridge to the left, a castle overlooks the lowlands. Above the castle’s tower, the artist has dated the picture: “Di di sea Maria della Neve, a di 2 d’aghosto 1473” [The day of St Mary of the Snow, 2 August 1473]. But it takes more than ordinary literacy to decipher the crabbed writing, because the letters are backwards and run from right to left. Today, the cryptic style of writing has become synonymous with the signature in the bottom-right corner of the drawing, which simply says “Leonardo”. The drawing is the earliest of Leonardo da Vinci’s recognised works. For 500 years, the works of the early Renaissance artist have caused historians…

Marine archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur glided through the water off Alexandria’s fortress, Qaitbay. The Frenchman’s gaze scanned metre after metre of the seabed, when suddenly his heart began beating violently. In the sand beneath the diver lay hundreds of ancient relics – statues, columns and stone blocks. Some blocks were huge and lay in a straight line. Several were broken, as though they’d fallen from a great height. The sight was so incredible that Empereur felt dizzy. On that warm winter day in early 1993, he saw the ruins of Alexandria’s lighthouse – one of the Seven Wonders of the World, which in ancient times competed with the pyramids and the Colossus of Rhodes to be proclaimed as man’s greatest architectural feat. The lighthouse had disappeared without a trace in the…

On 18th October 1905, German linguist Hugo Winckler made the discovery of his life near the town of Bogazkale on the Anatolian plateau. In the hilly landscape, 150 kilometres east of Ankara, he found the ruins of a forgotten city. Stone lions guarded its ancient portals and collapsed palace. Local villagers also showed Winckler clay tablets they had found there, which were engraved with a cuneiform script. In his diary, Winckler noted that the tablets were found at the foot of the hillside of an ancient royal residence, referred to in Turkish as Büyükkale, meaning great castle. The German concluded that the tablets must have come from a collapsed royal archive. Over the next six years, local workers dug out thousands of clay tablets and took them to Winckler’s tent,…

The Athenian envoys stood in silence with heads bowed. The temple priest had put their questions to the oracle behind the curtain, and now the men waited for her response. The air in the dimly lit room inside Delphi’s Temple of Apollo was pungent with a sickeningly sweet smell, and the wait felt unbearably long. And then suddenly the silence was broken by a woman’s desperate cry: “Get out, get out of my sanctum and drown your spirits in woe!” The envoys were forced to summon all their courage to ignore the cry; they had been tasked with seeking the advice of the Pythia, the famous oracle of Delphi. Athens’s powerful neighbour, the Persian Empire, was threatening to attack the city-state, and the Athenians had no idea how to respond.…

Mysterious Americans African – not Portuguese The Melungeons thought they were descended from Portuguese immigrants until DNA analysis carried out in 2012 showed that they had African ancestry. Now, the question is why the Melungeons thought they were Portuguese. Most likely, their ancestors invented the story to avoid persecution.. ORIGIN: Africa. Japanese Indians? Monks went to the Americas? The Zuni Indians differ markedly from the rest of North America’s indigenous population, most notably in their language, which bears no similarity to any other language in the region.Professor Nancy Davis of the University of Chicago has a different theory. She believes the Zuni Indians’ language, religion and dominant blood type suggest Japanese ancestry. According to the professor, a group of Buddhist monks from Japan emigrated around 1350 on a quest to…

On Thursday, 18th September 1698, an unusual prisoner arrived at the Bastille, France’s most notorious prison, in the heart of Paris. The man’s face was hidden under a mask of black velvet, and those staff at the prison who knew his name were banned from speaking it. As soon as he arrived, the inmate was taken to a room to wait for nightfall. It was a precaution to ensure that no one would see the new prisoner as he was moved to his cell. At 21.00, the prison’s deputy governor and a sergeant arrived and led the inmate to the third room in the old fortress’s Bertaudièret tower. By this time, the masked man had already spent 29 years behind bars. Persistent rumours in France had transformed the mask that…

A new mighty warrior emerged in the sixth century from a British battlefield, the very sight of whom terrified his enemies. Ancient Welsh chroniclers described his wrath as being so great that when he drew his sword “flames of fire might be seen as from the mouths of serpents, and so dreadful was he that none could look upon him.” The warrior was the legendary Arthur: a deadly warlord who helped defend early Dark Age Britain. His reputation was quite unlike the fabled King Arthur, who ruled over a court of chivalrous knights and forbidden love affairs. But the second Arthur evolved from the first to give us the world-famous myth we know today. Arthur’s tale began 1,500 years ago with the battlefield hero, who was transformed over the following…

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte embarked on a campaign in Egypt to strengthen France’s position in the Middle East. On 21st July, his army reached the outskirts of the capital, Cairo, where the French fought a battle against the local Mamluks – the Battle of the Pyramids. The battle was fought with the ancient structures just visible on the horizon, and the Mamluk army was routed. Napoleon was able to occupy the city and enjoy a view of the magnificent monuments on the Giza Plateau. To demonstrate his victory, the mighty French commander reportedly ordered his soldiers use the Sphinx for target practice, shooting its nose off in the process. This story is popular but isn’t true. In the 15th century, Egyptian Muslim historian al-Maqrizi described how the Sufi priest Sa’im…

It was around midday on 14th September 1822 when the breakthrough came in the small house at 28 Rue Mazarine in Paris. Jean-Francois Champollion hardly dared to believe his own eyes. All morning he’d worked on several new inscriptions from Egypt when suddenly – as if by magic – he discovered the system behind the hitherto incomprehensible hieroglyphs. He’d solved a riddle no one else could answer. Champollion rushed from his house and down the narrow street, clutching his notes and sketches. His destination was the Institute of France, a few hundred metres away where Champollion’s elder brother worked. Jacques-Joseph Champollion had been concerned about his younger brother’s wellbeing for some time – Jean-Francois worked day and night on his beloved hieroglyphics, and his health was declining by the day.…

1 Middle Eastern ziggurats Iran and Iraq, 3000 BC – AD 600 A total of 32 stepped, temple structures known as ziggurats remain in modern-day Iraq and Iran. Shrines to gods who protected the local area once stood on their flat tops. The largest consisted of seven levels and measured 25 metres high with a 105 metre-square footprint. Each ziggurat was constructed from sun-dried mud bricks which were subsequently painted in bright colours. 2 Pharaoh’s tomb Egypt, 2680-2180 BC Most Egyptian pyramids were erected during the Old Kingdom, the first golden age of Egypt. According to Egyptian mythology, the sun god Ra rose in the morning from a mountain to create man. The pyramid symbolised that mountain and was built to secure the dead Pharaoh’s rebirth in the afterlife. For…

Israeli archaeologist doctor Eilat Mazar was unable to mask her excitement as she revealed the sensational discovery she’d made near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to the Israeli press. It was February 2010, and Mazar had unveiled the remains of a 70-metre-long and 10-metre high castle wall, which – according to the archaeologist – dated back to King Solomon’s era. “This is the first time that a structure from that time has been found that may correlate with written descriptions of Solomon’s building in Jerusalem,” Mazar claimed to the assembled journalists. Prior to her announcement, centuries of intensive searches had found no definitive traces of the king who, according to the Bible, built the First Temple of Jerusalem, received shiploads of gold from the mysterious Ophir and developed ancient Israel…