Amazing facts from the pages of History

1. At the height of its power, in 400 BC, the Greek city of Sparta had 25,000 citizens and 500,000 slaves.

2. Bock`s Car was the name of the B-29 Bomber that dropped the Atom Bomb on Nagasaki.

3. Fourteenth century physicians didn`t know what caused the plague, but they knew it was contagious. As a result they wore an early kind of bioprotective suit which included a large beaked head piece. The beak of the head piece, which made them look like large birds, was filled with vinegar, sweet oils and other strong smelling compounds to counteract the stench of the dead and dying plague victims.

4. In 1892, Italy raised the minimum age for marriage for girls - to 12.

5. In the Holocaust between 5.1 and 6 million of Europe`s 10 million Jews were killed. An additional 6 million `unwanted` people were also executed, including more than half of Poland`s educated populace.

6. Many of Rome`s most ambitious emperors idolized Alexander the Great. When Julius Caesar was a 33 year-old general in Spain, he wept when he saw a statue of Alexander, lamenting that he had accomplished nothing, while Alexander had conquered the whole world by his age. The schizophrenic emperor Caligula built a bridge of wooden boats across the Bay of Naples and rode back and forth across it on a horse, wearing armor he stole from Alexander`s tomb. Emperor Caracalla set out to conquer the same eastern lands Alexander had conquered, and made a great show of visiting his grave in Alexandria, Egypt.

7. Napoleon took 14,000 French decrees and simplified them into a unified set of 7 laws. This was the first time in modern history that a nation`s laws applied equally to all citizens. Napoleon`s 7 laws are so impressive that by 1960 more than 70 governments had patterned their own laws after them or used them verbatim.

8. On August sixth, 1945, during World War Two, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing an estimated 140,000 people in the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare.

9. Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn`t added until 5 years later.

10. The ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone.

11. The first country to abolish capital punishment was Austria in 1787.

12. The Hundred Year War actually lasted 116 years (1337 to 1453).

13. The name of the first airplane flown at Kitty Hawk by the Wright Brothers, on December 17, 1903, was Bird of Prey.

14. The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

15. Until Sunday, September 3rd, 1967, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekend at 5 p.m. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize `this` was the day of the changeover.

16. Yellowstone is the world`s 1st national park. It was dedicated in 1872.

17. The word "republic" comes from Latin, the language of the Romans. Literally it means "the people`s thing".

18. Kong Fu Tse or (Confucious :551-478BC) was a Chinese philosopher who developed his philosophy during the period of anarchy in China. His preachings on moral values and responsible behaviour influenced China for more than 2000 years. Confucious stressed on loyalties and obligations. (i) A son must be loyal to his father. (ii) He recommended strict upbringing of children. (iii) In the interest of political stability, he advocated loyalty to the king.

19. The Aryans were worshippers of nature. The forces of nature were invested with divine powers and worshipped as male or female gods. They did not build temples or idols to worship their gods, but worshipped them by chanting hymns in the open air in praise of them.

20. The Bhagwat Gita shows a way towards attaining peace that overcomes all earthly troubles. The soul is eternal. It is only the body that dies. The Gita says that the soul discards one body to enter another , just as we change clothes. It also states that in order to free oneself from the bonds of life and death, one must perform ones duties(actions) selflessly, without expecting the fruits thereof.

21.The Romans dominated the ancient world for almost 500 years. At the peak of their power, they controlled an area that extended from the Atlantic coastline of Spain in the west to the shores of the Caspian Sea in the east; from the misty forests of Britain in the north , to the sun baked deserts of Egypt in the South.

22. Abraham Lincoln, who invented a hydraulic device for lifting ships over shoals, was the only US president ever granted a patent.

23. According to the Gemological Institute of America, up until the 1730`s, India was the only source for diamonds in the world.

24. The only one of his sculptures that Michelangelo signed was the "The Pieta," completed in 1500.

25. Marie Curie became the first woman Nobel laureate when she, her husband and a colleague were jointly awarded the prize for physics in 1903 for their work on radioactivity. A few years later she won the Nobel prize for chemistry too, for her discovery of two elements, polonium (named after her native Poland) and radium, and for her work in isolating radium and studying its chemical properties. The unit of measurement of radioactivity, curie, is named after her.

26. Tamil has certain literary types, which are not found in Sanskrit or other Aryan languages and traces it`s history to Tolkappiyam, the earliest extant manuscript of Tamil, grammar dated 500 BC.

27. In a major contribution to trigonometry, Indian mathematicians changed the use of chords to sines and cosines, making the system more convenient and the various theorems on triangles much neater.

28. The earliest magic squares (4X4) are found in Kaksaputta, a text written by chemist and philosopher Nagarjuna in 1A.D.

29. The Meenakshi Temple and Dilwara temple were built at the same time as the great cathedrals in Europe. In sheer conception, scale and aesthetics, India matched and challenged the best.

30. The corridor in the Ramanathswamy temple at Rameshwaram, Tamilnadu, is 1,220m long. It has 983 pillars and is popularly known as the `corridor with a thousand pillars."