Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

This is an early example of operational psychology in battle. We are in 480 BC and a massive Persian fleet is heading south along the Greek coast to meet the allied Greek navy. However, within the Persian flotilla, are the ships of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, Greek-speaking communities who, just ten years before, […]

Say it quietly, but there is a strong case to be made that, a score of years before Christ was born, a Buddhist monk came to Greece and  set himself on fire in a public display of piety. Sources c. 20 BC an Indian embassy made its way into the Mediterranean to pay tribute to […]

If you want to write a wacko book about humanoid lizards and immortals with kilts and poor sword etiquette living among us this might just be the passage for you. Beach’s reading from today is from Herodotus (‘I never disappoint’) of Halicarnassus and the hero is one Aristeas (seventh century BC), known among the Greeks […]

There are a number of antique and medieval references to massive numbers of arrows creating arrow storms in battles. Some readers will remember, for example the arrows blotting out the sun at Thermopylae: ‘Good, we shall fight in the shade etc’. But did these arrow storms really take place? Just how many arrows could an […]

The half million club is a select group of nine human settlements that managed to break the half million population mark in Antiquity or in the Middle Ages: the biggest cities around before the discovery of the New World. To give some sorts of limit to this exercise six chronological moments have been chosen at […]

It is one of the earliest dreams recorded in history. Very approximately 1400 BC an Egyptian prince, Menkheperure, was riding out by the pyramids. We know this with some exactitude because Menkheperure later had the events of that memorable day written out in stone (pictured above). After some hunting, Menkheperure decided to shelter from the […]

Location: Roman Italy where leprosy is well documented. This is one of these ancient treatments that is presented as science but reeks of magic. Aim: limit progression of leprosy Ingredients: bugs, fire, earthenware pot, linen cloth, rose leaves, salt, vinegar and water. Method: (i) Gather some insects in. These should be cantharides (spanish fly, fat […]

It is the single most important mermaid sighting of them all, because it is the Babylonian creation myth (or part of the same). Our source is Berossus, a Chaldean historian, writing in the Greek tradition of history: a Herodotus wannabe, in the third century B.C. In one of the surviving fragments of his book (which […]

Here is a remarkable feat of arms recorded as a poem on an inscription, put up in AD 118 on the banks of the Danube by a Roman soldier, Soranus. Given that this is a public statement of the feat, we can assume that it actually happened. This is I, once the best known of […]

Anthony Kaldellis, A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History’s Most Orthodox Empire (OUP 2017) Between about 1880 and 1960 British and American publishers occasionally brought out curiosity books in small print runs by capable people. These books were on delightful but inconsequential subjects: the eccentricities of Chinese court etiquette; descriptions of […]

Seven twentieth century myths follow. Any other contributions or angry rebuttals, drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Great War: A Disaster Waiting to Happen, 1914 The Great War was going to happen sooner or later because two countries, Germany and France, wanted it. However, the consensus that the Great War would have inevitably led to the ‘breaking […]

In the rusty old filing cabinet that provides fodder for this blog there is somewhere a file on men being buried upright. However, Beach has failed to find said file for the last three years, so despairing he hands the problem over to his readers. Famous or not so famous people from history who decided […]

This blog has long championed the lost books of antiquity and the middle ages. But there have been few greater tragedies for the bizarrist, surely, than the disappearance of an early Greek volume entitled On the Power and the Nature of the Chameleon. The chameleon is to be found through large part of the Mediterranean […]

This little tale appears in a vaguely sceptical Aulus Gellius, whose Attic Nights provides some very enjoyable reading for those wishing to travel back into the ancient world. that which Archytas the Pythagorean [obit 347 BC] is said to have devised and accomplished ought to seem no less marvellous, but yet not wholly absurd. For […]

***Stephen C got this*** Scroll down for the answer*** The Index Biography is a quiz pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The creator must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the individual’s life. We offered up […]