Ancient Mesopotamia

• Also known as Twenty Squares, this 4500-year-old game, first unearthed in ancient Mesopotamia, is impressive in its complex rules and intricate design.
• The beautiful game board uses twenty squares and has a narrow bridge in the middle part, was played in Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Turkey and many other ancient civilizations.
• To finish the game as winners, players had to race their opponent to the opposite end of the board, moving pieces according to knucklebone dice rolls.

• Named after the Egyptian serpentine deity, Mehen is also known as the Egyptian Snake Game and was played between 3100 to 2300 BC.
• Six players could simultaneously play this spiral board, each having a piece crafted in the shape of a lion or a sphere.
• The rules of this game are not very clear because it lost its popularity after the decline of Egypt’s Old Kingdom and is hardly found in archaeological records.

Much of the knowledge about the natural world during the middle ages dates back to the teachings of the Greeks and Romans. Many did not question these ideas, despite the many flaws.

• Aristotle taught everything beneath the moon was comprised of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire.
• Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy thought that heavenly bodies such as the sun, moon, planets and various stars all revolved around the earth in perfect circles.
• The ancient Greeks and Romans held to the idea that illnesses were the result of an imbalance of four basic substances and was related to the theory of the four elements.

• During the Renaissance, there was a renewed interest in the arts and literature. It led to a shift toward more independent thinking.
• In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Roman Catholic Church. Luther promoted his thoughts by printing and distributing them, encouraging churchgoers to read the Bible for themselves. This led to the Protestant Reformation.
• In the process, the criticism and reform led to placing the burden of proof ahead in understanding the natural world, paving the way for the scientific revolution.

Brokerage and loans started in an advanced form with merchant banks, though crop loan was still used for lending and credit activities.

Italy was the home of the earliest banks (which evolved into the modern banks), and even the word ‘bankrupt’ comes from the Italian word ‘Banca Rotta’.

• London was where the biggest action was in the banking world, with the Goldsmiths of London being the first proper bank. Services like vaults, bank debts, deposits (made inside the bank) and loans became popular.
• Banknotes were first offered by the Bank Of England and were called promissory notes. Soon other services like cheques and overdrafts followed.
• The Rothschilds started their financing business in the 19th century, eventually becoming the richest family in history.

Coffee cultivation and trade began on the Arabian Peninsula. Coffee was being grown in the Yemeni district of Arabia. By the 16th century, it was known in Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey.

Coffee was enjoyed in homes and also in the many public coffee houses. Coffee houses quickly became such an important center for the exchange of information that they were often referred to as “Schools of the Wise.”

By the 17th century, coffee had made its way to Europe and was becoming popular across the continent. Despite the controversy, coffee houses were quickly becoming centers of social activity and communication in the major cities of England, Austria, France, Germany, and Holland.

Coffee began to replace the common breakfast drink beverages of the time — beer and wine.

The first ice cream cup was found in Egypt in a tomb in 2700BC.

It was a kind of mould made from two silver cups, one of which contained snow or crushed ice, and the other cooked fruit.

• Ancient Rome had special wells to store ice and snow. The ruins of Pompeii left traces to make us think that some shops specialised in selling crushed ice sweetened with honey.
• In China and Japan, ice was gathered to preserve food. During the Tang Dynasty, a drink was recorded, consisting of milk cooked with flour and camphor, ten placed in iron containers, and buried in snow.
• Before the Incas conquered the Caranquis, large blocks of ice were brought down from the top of the volcano. A large cauldron was filled with ice, snow, and fruit juice (and sometimes milk), and mixed until the juices and ice froze together.

Chinese literature is based on the Book of Songs, a collection of simple poems that have accrued much interpretation and commentary.

The Book of Songs enshrined poetry as the most important form of literature across East Asia.

As more and more parts of the world became literate, new technologies such as paper and print increased the reach and influence of written stories. More readers meant new stories started to appear.

When Dante Alighieri wrote his Comedy in the spoken dialect of Tuscany, it helped to turn the dialect into a legitimate language we now call Italian.

Humanity has been vulnerable to rapidly spread illnesses because disease propagates more easily in concentrated populations without adequate sanitation.

Advances in sanitation have allowed people to live near one another in cities with less risk to their health, in particular, safe disposal of effluent to spare the water supply from contamination.

The Indus Valley civilization arose in the floodplains of the Indus and Sarasvati rivers around 5000 years ago.

In the largest structure in the city Mohenjo-Dar was an immense, elevated public bathhouse, measuring almost 900 square feet. The status of the bathhouse as the city's largest structure suggests that the people highly valued cleanliness.

• Before the modern office, monasteries introduced timekeeping to the monk's daily routines.
• Later, the office was understood to be a factory-like environment.
• Work was depicted as a series of tasks that could be rationalised, standardised and calculated into an efficient production machine.

• The telegraph, telephone, and dictating machine changed the concept of work and office design as telecommunications meant office could be separate from factories and warehouses and differentiate between white and blue-collar workers.
• While these technologies made a distributed workforce possible, American offices became more centralised.
• Online connectivity potentially ensures a move away from the office to working from home.

• On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established. Pope Gregory III later expanded the festival and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1.
• The influence of Christianity spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church made November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It was probably done to replace the Celtic festival.
• All Souls’ Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints’ Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas, and eventually, Halloween.

The celebration of Halloween was limited in colonial New England, but as the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups and the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with Irish immigrants, fleeing the Irish Potato Famine. This helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally.

The earliest known heliocentric theory of the solar system came from Aristarchus of Samos (310BC to 230BC). He argued that the Sun was central. He also placed all the then known planets is their correct order of distance around the Sun. His original text was unfortunately lost to history.

Nicolaus Copernicus rediscovered the theory in the 16th century. He acknowledged Aristarchus during the development of his own work.

In one of Aristarchus' books that did survive, he laid out the earliest known attempted calculations of the sizes and distances to the Sun and Moon.

From solar eclipses, where the Moon passes in front of the Sun, they realised that the Sun was further away. Aristarchus estimated that the size of the Moon was approximately one-third that of the Earth, based on the careful timing of lunar eclipses. He was surprisingly accurate in determining the ratio of the size of the Earth to the Moon. (the Moon has a diameter 0.27 times that of Earth).