A well travelled man could have met Socrates, Confucius and Buddha.
Herodotus, the father of history/and or lies, exists almost at the half point of recorded human history, 500 BC.
Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Ceaser, and also Hannibal, Scipio etc are closer in time to the Neil Armstrong and tbe moon landing then they are to the building of the Pyramids. I think Alexander is about equidistant.
Oxford University is older then Maccu Pichu.
The earliest Bublical figure whose existance is attested is King Ahab, about 850 BC. There are recoreded historcial Egytian and Mesopotamian figures from 2000 years prior.
Sharks have existed longer than the Rings of Saturn. Also trees and grass.
Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin owned the same Tortoise, which outlived both of them.
The oldest school in the world (probably) is King’s School, Canterbury. It was founded in 597 AD.
At that time Saxon England was still pagan, but King Ethelbert of Kent converted to Christianity and allowed the foundation of a monastery and a kind of ‘missionary school’. Tradition has it that a temple of Woden was re-purposed for the monks and their school. A large stone abbey was completed in 613, and the ruins still stand today next to the modern school.
When the Normans conquered England, it was already over 450 years old. It’s 1000th anniversary was in the reign of Elizabeth I.
Not sure if it’s an oddity, but: A person born in 1902 who died in 1970 was born before the first lighter-than-aircraft flight and died after a man walked on the moon.
Speaking of Woden - last time I was in England, I saw a gigantic genealogical chart of the royal family, published recently and for sale to tourists … at the bottom was the current Queen Elizabeth II and her offspring; at the top, the first ancestor of the first Saxon monarchs of England - “Wotan”. He’s still there!
This has my vote as “most amazing”. Never in human history has there been so much change in such a short period of time. The difference between 1918 and 2018 is the kind of stuff that science fiction is made of.
It took a bit of digging, but I found it in Wikipedia. The Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies trace back to Woden via Cerdic, the founder of Wessex (but this seems to be disputed). Cerdic’s descendant is ̣̉Alfred the Great, who is an ancestor of the current royal family.
So, the Queen of Canada, whose visage adorns the $20 banknote, is descended from Wotan (and there is a day named after this remote ancestor). This means that she is also related to Thor.
I always thought it was interesting that Columbus discovered America and Magellan sailed around the world before Galileo was persecuted for his theories.
In the year of the birth of Mohammad there was supposedly an attempted invasion of Mecca by a Christian army from Ethiopia. There’s a church in Ethiopia, also, which claims to have the Ark of the Covenant.
In the Eighteenth Century the first Duke of Marlborough, a Churchill and the brother of one of Winston Churchill’s ancestors, was given a small country in the Holy Roman Empire. He later swapped it for another country. The Duke’s right hand man at the decisive battle of Bleheim was a Prince Eugene of Savoy. The Nazis named a heavy cruiser after him. His mother was banished from the French court due to a scandal involving witchcraft and love potions, and the French king refused to allow him into French service, before he fought against the French with the English.
Technically, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies only contained one Sicily.
The founder of the Church of Scientology was part of a bizarre religious group run by the inventor of moulded fuel rockets, and referred to in FBI documents as “The Cult of Thelma”.
The populations of Turkey and Iran are each now greater than the popultion of the USA when my father was born. The US population then doubled by the time I graduated from high school. It has doubled again since then.
And I think most people who are interested in historical trivia know this, but just in case anyone doesn’t: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day: the 50th anniversary of July 4, 1776.
