1) During the Stone Age it has been reckoned that there were as many left-handed people as right-handed people. By the Bronze Age this number had fallen by half and today about 5 per cent of the population are left-handed.
2) When Mohammed Ali was ruler of Egypt he created two infantry regiments consisting solely of one eyed soldiers.
3) Cleopatra, queen of Egypt was one of the most beautiful women in history. She was born in 69 BC. She married the famous Roman general Julius Caesar. After Caesar’s death she fell in love will mark antonym, the successor of Caesar who jointly ruled the Roman Empire with his wife Octavia’s Brother Octavian’. Antony divorced Octavia and married Cleopatra. Octavian declared war on Antony and Cleopatra and defeated them. Antony committed suicide, by falling on his sword. Cleopatra tried to charm Octavian. Falling to do so, she also killed herself. She is said to have held a snake to her breast and died from its venom.
4) Gunpowder was first used by British force in 1346; one hundred years after the Chinese troops had used it against the invading Mongols.
5) When Ram was sent to the forest for 14 years of exile, his brother Bharat installed Ram’s sandals on the throne and discharged the king’s duties on his behalf, paying reverent homage to his sandals.
6) At first we did not have letter –boxes as we have them today. In London, Paris and Vienna, postmen would carry sacks or boxes with slits in them and the people could drop their letters inside these boxes. The postmen then took these letters to the post office to be sorted. Fixed letters boxes were put in Paris in 1653 but postmen, afraid of losing their jobs put mice in the boxes. It took 50 years to set things right.
7) Cats were regarded as sacred by the ancient Egyptians 4,000 years ago. The Egyptians believed that cats had the power to protect them from evil. They worshipped a god with a cats face. When a domestic cat died, it was buried with great respect and mummified to preserve it.
8) The crusades were wars between Christians and Muslims in the middle ages. They took place in Palestine, the holy land. First, in 1071 Muslims captured the city of Jerusalem in Palestine. The Muslims stopped Christians from visiting the holy places in Palestine. The Christian forces started the first crusade and took Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1099. There were seven more crusades after the first one.
Many of them failed because the crusaders quarreled with each other. The Muslims took back much of the holy land from the Christians.
9) The first ship to soil around the world was the Viltoria commanded by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. The Voyage took nearly three years-from 1519 to 1522. Magellan was killed during the Voyage, and the 18 sailors who survived became the first people to travel around the world.
10) The British liner, Titanic, was the world’s largest ship at that time and experts believed that it was unsinkable. But on the night of 14 April 1912, during its first voyage, it hit an iceberg in the middle of the Atlanta Ocean. It sank and, out of more than 2200 people on board, over 1500 was drowned.