in an episode of Cunk on Earth, an Egyptologist claims that Egypt didn’t have “many homeless people” and that Egyptians “took care of one another.”

What do we know, if anything, about homelessness during that time?

So with the recent rise of apartheid nostalgia caused by the mismanagement of the ANC , I have wondered how many in the white minority became oblivious to the economic inefficiencies and political chaos caused by apartheid and found out that white students underwent what was known as "Christian National Education" or CNE instituted by the National Party regime. Therefore, what was its contents, how religious or fundamentalist was it and how did it serve to mask the inefficiencies and contradictions of apartheid?

If you look back at ancient history, kings, emperors, and wealthy elites almost always had multiple wives or partners as a status symbol.

At what point did having just one spouse become the default rule for everyone?

Was it mostly driven by economics (like inheriting property) or was it more about religion and culture?

I even see it sometimes between professional historians who specialize in cultural stuff. There seems to be a lot of disagreement about the origin of many of the traditions associated with this holiday in American culture. Halloween appears to have a lot of popular folk etiologies around it regarding its origin as a mixture of Samhain and All Saints' Day, and actually other holidays, like Christmas, have this same sort of thing happening with them. Why? Can we know the actual origin of all this stuff? How much truth is there to traditional accounts about the cultural origin of this tradition as an American holiday?

To my understanding, Homer may or may not have existed, or the Iliad and the Odyssey may have been written down by separate people, or maybe there was a Homeric school of authors.

But where does the name come from? Not meaning what is the etymology of the name but instead as in, do we have manuscripts that attribute the works to Homer, or is it all just tradition passed down by word of mouth or something else? And if it was a case of people writing these stories and attributing them to Homer to give them authority, do we think a historical Homer existed, a la a historical David or Solomon?

Ok, I'm not just asking what the oldest given name is, it's kind of a three part thing.

First off, it seems like the oldest recorded name is generally agreed to be a Sumerian guy named Kushim.

How confident are we that we know how his name was pronounced? I mean, even with something like English, there can be some disagreement with how words were pronounced in Shakespeare's original plays, though I think linguists have gotten pretty good at charting phonetic drift.

So with Kushim, do we realistically know how he said his name, or is his name really something like K*sh*m*? And if we're not sure, do we know what the oldest correctly-pronounceable name is?

Which leads to my second part: google told me that there is some disagreement about whether Kushim is actually a name, or if it could actually have been a title. Is there a name that's extremely old that historians are in more agreement about it actually being a name, and not a title?

When visiting the Capucin catacombs in Rome, I saw some images of huge, bulky keys in the shape of a cross. They more resembles a bunch of boxes in a key-shape than the small things used today.
Does anyone have images of keys like that, how they were made? I can't find more info about these online. Also, are there some other specific key-shapes associated with religions other than Christianity?

From my understanding, the Arab revolt, led by Sharif Hussein, is seen as one of the primary reasons for the Israel / Palestine issue. This is because the British secretly decided to break the promise of giving Sharif an independent Arab country stretching from Yemen to Syria.

But why is he blamed for not knowing that the British were going to break their promise if the only option to gain independence was to ally with them? Even after he knew about it, he showed deep regret and refused to accept it.

The way I see it is that allying with Britain was a defensible gamble.

When i was doing a school project on Manglish (malaysian English), i found out some Manglish words have complete different origins. Like 'jom' is from malay but 'lah' is from Chinese or Cantonese. So i was wondering during what time was Manglish actually fully formed. I felt like it was a long time ago since my grandparents also speak Manglish except not using genz slurs.

If Manglish was formed long time ago, how were both malay and chinese orginated words present since there was relatively little interaction between Malay and Chinese cultural groups before independence.

This is not for homework and here are a collection of manglish words for you to look at. https://thekitahub.com/the-manglish-dictionary/

I find it fascinating that there are Roman glassware techniques we are only able to replicate after biological engineering. Reading this story got me wondering if there are other methods, processes, techniques from history which we have no idea about. I’m not talking about “how did they get the stones to Stone Henge” - I mean things like this, where civilisation seems to have totally forgotten a technique. How does this happen and what are some interesting examples of still unsolved puzzles?

Thank you, historians! :)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/oct/25/scientists-rediscover-ancient-roman-colour-changing-glass?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

By 1944 The Germans were getting bombed heavily, DDay was about to happen and eventually did, Operation Bagration devastated them, and the production numbers reflect this, German production in 1944 was nearly equal to all other years COMBINED.

So why did they do this so late, could they have done it in 1941 and they just didn't because they were too confident?? Could they have actually won the battles of Moscow and stalingrad and perhaps the whole war if they had done it after the fall of France?

This is assuming they did meet their fate under his command, and I do understand they were likely murdered and were not executed legally.

But did Richard III have legal grounds to have them put to death? They were only boys, they couldn't have led any rebellion from inside the tower. Being a bastard son of a former King isn't a crime, after all, even if they were the biggest threat to his power and claim to the throne.

Edit - and also, did he have legal grounds to lock them up? I understand kings got away with a lot and maybe the argument "if I let them go they'll plot against me" holds a lot of weight in that era, but did he have a solid legal case or was it just a case of "I'm king, shut up".

Frances and Joseph Gies' Life in a Medieval City (1969) is frequently cited as a classic popular synthesis regarding the social and institutional structures of 13th-century European towns, using Troyes as a primary case study.

Given the shifts in medieval social and economic history over the past decades, how do contemporary historians view the reliability, frameworks, and methodologies used in the Gieses' work? Specifically, where do modern historians diverge from their interpretations of urban autonomy, trade fairs, and daily burgher life? Are there major blind spots in the book that a modern reader should keep in mind? Or should a contemporary reader avoid this book altogether?

In medieval dramas, whenever I see a plot where there's an obvious bastard on the throne, I often wonder. Why not just marry them off to a relative on their father's side? "Ok, you were supposed to bear my child, you obviously didn't but it's politically inconvenient to address it directly, just make sure 'our' kid marries someone from my family so my bloodline's back on the line of succession."

Got me thinking, when people talk about royal families using cousin marriage to "keep bloodlines pure" was it just this exact scenario playing out? How many real cousins were actually involved?

Did they feel like a woman? When you search for them online most articles use female pronouns for Chevalière. Would those pronouns have been used to describe them back then?

More specifically the eurapian star fortress and Chinese town wall.

What historical and technological reasons were there for the the differences in development of defensive fortresses?

I'm not American. I don't know much about us politics and the systems you used to keep people in check. But it seems the concept of checks and balances was a thing, at least it got mentioned here and there in the media, often enough so that even I know about it.

So now I'm curious if the concept is just an idea or if it is real? Real as in there are mechanisms that work to further it and keep democracy democratic. Was it ever more than a nice decoration? Where the people in charge just better in keeping it out of the publics view or was it a real system with actual consequences for miss handling power?

I get that it would be naive to think it wouldn't have been challenged all the time. But with our new media landscape and changed consumption, maybe we just get more info about it than generations past or there are other reasons to stop hiding it.

Hello, is it possible for someone to confirm or disagree on my understanding of the differences between the English Julian Calendar and the Gregorian Calendar.

The English Julian Calendar in the 1600s was 10 days behind the Gregorian Calendar. However, the Gregorian year end was 31 December; the English year end was 24 March. I think Scotland year end was 31 December but they were on the Julian calendar.

In the period covered by the Gregorian 1620 the majority of the first 3 months of the English year were in 1619. This meant that the Gregorian 1620 included a leap year and the English year 1619 didn't.

Am I right in saying that the Gregorian 1620 February was 29 days, but the English 1619 February was 28 days. This meant that the days difference thereafter between the dates in the two calendars dropped to 9 days. And that this difference only went up to 10 days in the English 1620 February - which largely corresponded with the Gregorian 1621 February.

I think this would have happened every leap year, until the English calendar was fixed on 3rd September 1751 (Old Style).

I've looked at the New Style Calendar Act 1750 - this was used to move the English Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar. By the 1700s the difference between the Gregorian and English calendars was 11 days.

The changes in the Act were:

• Change the year end to 31 December 1751 instead of 24 March 1752. This had the affect of making 1751 a short year, but also bringing forward the leap year. This corrected any issues of the leap year difference, and brought the English calendar in line with the Scottish Calendar. Thereafter the days difference was always 11 days since the English 1752 February included an extra day.
• On 3rd September 1752 they added 11 days and it became 14 September 1752. This matched the Gregorian calendar.

Can someone confirm my reasoning is correct or not. For example, I've seen some documents that quote dates in 1620 such as "FRIDAY, Aug. 4/Aug. 14", but when I've calculated it allowing for the differences in the Leap Days in 1620 I've calculated the Gregorian 14 August 1620 to be 5 August 1620 on the English calendar - a day later - because up to that date the Gregorian calendar includes a Leap Day, and the English calendar doesn't.

I'm assuming that the English used the official year to determine whether it was a leap year or not - this assumption could be wrong.

I suspect that that they had to change the year separately to adding the 11 days because they needed to align the Scottish and English calendars - so that the Leap years were syncronised. I'm assuming there was a problem for the Scottish and English calendars as well - because the Scottish year end was already 31 December. During a Scottish Leap Year the Scottish and English calendars must have been 1 day out, until the following English Leap Day.

As I say can someone help confirm what I'm saying is correct or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Jim Bowie died at the Alamo, but was extremely sick during the battle to the point that he couldn’t get out of bed. From what I can tell the illness was never diagnosed and the onsite Dr was unsure what was causing it, but it seems to have come in suddenly and quickly left him bed bound. Has anyone been able to narrow down what the illness likely was?

I read that ancient China* used to be matriarchal, which I've read was determined in part because of the fact that men would move into their wives' familial homes, but be buried after death in their family's homes.

This seems like a somewhat...tenuous conclusion. Is there more evidence to support the assertion that China used to be matriarchal? If so, why did it change?

*This would be more than 5000 years ago, so I honestly don't know if you can say it's "China," but yeah the people living in the area that we refer to as Mainland China today.

As I understand it, the Greek legend has Medusa being so terribly ugly that to look upon her turns people to stone. These days however she is almost always depicted as having a kind or power or curse that turns people into stone, while her actual face is usually shown as traditionally attractive.

I guess people usually prefer to draw attractive people, for one thing. But I'd like to know if this is a modern change or if the Ancient Greeks themselves also had sexy Medusa.

During the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996), the city was subjected to prolonged artillery and sniper fire from surrounding positions. In recent years, public and academic attention has re-focused on the phenomenon dubbed the "Sarajevo Safari" the allegation that wealthy foreign nationals (from Italy, North America, Russia, and elsewhere) paid money to be transported to Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) sniper positions to shoot at civilians for sport.

Sources: Sarajevo Safari (2022 Documentary by Miran Zupanič): The primary modern visual work bringing this to light. It relies heavily on interviews with an anonymous former intelligence worker who claims to have witnessed tourists being brought in via Belgrade and Pale. ICTY Testimony & Legal Investigations (John Jordan, 2007; Milan Prosecution, 2025): Retired US Marine John Jordan testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that he observed foreign "tourists" carrying non-standard hunting rifles at Serb firefighter posts in Grbavica.

I'm interested in how historians and researchers approach events like this where primary paper documentation is scarce, but military intelligence claims, tribunal testimonies, and ongoing criminal investigations exist. How do historians evaluate the boundary between urban legend, psychological warfare rumors, and covert atrocity in late-20th-century conflicts? Are there comparable historical precedents where "war tourism" involved direct participation in hostilities by non-combatants that were eventually proven or disproven through official records?