It is noon on a humid Saturday in the fall of 1861, and a missionary by the name of Francesco Borghero has been summoned to a parade ground in Abomey, the capital of the small West African state of Dahomey. He is seated on one side of a huge, open square right in the center [...]
Archive for the ‘Africa’ Category
Amazons: inside the King of Dahomey’s all-woman army
Posted: 23 September 2011 in Africa, C18th, C19th, France, War11
Inside the Great Pyramid
Posted: 1 September 2011 in Africa, C19th, C9th, Egypt, Historians and historiography, Mysteries, SourcesThere is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night alone inside the King’s Chamber, the granite-lined vault that lies precisely in the center of the pyramid. This chamber is generally acknowledged as the spot [...]
The strange tale of the Warsaw basilisk
Posted: 5 April 2010 in Africa, Austria-Hungary, Britain, C13th, C15th, C16th, C17th, C18th, C9th, Denmark, Italy, Mysteries, Netherlands, Poland, Rumours and panics, SwitzerlandFew creatures have struck more terror into more hearts for longer than the basilisk: a crested snake, hatched from a cock’s egg, that was widely believed to wither landscapes with its breath and kill with a glare. The example to the right comes from a German bestiary, but the earliest description that we have was [...]
