Ancient City’s Destruction by Asteroid Gave Rise to Biblical Sodom Story

29. The Horrific Sudden Disaster That Befell This Ancient City

One day, circa 1650 BC, the inhabitants of a Bronze Age city a few miles northeast of the Dead Sea went about their daily business, blissfully ignorant of the doom headed their way. Unbeknownst to the residents of what is now known as Tell el-Hammam, an archaeological site in Jordan, an unseen icy space rock was hurtling their way at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour. As it ripped through the atmosphere, the small asteroid left a fiery trail in its wake, before it burst about two and a half miles above the ancient city. The explosion was roughly 1000 times more powerful than the nuclear blast that destroyed Hiroshima. Those unfortunates whose eyes had been focused on the plunging space rock when it blew up were instantly blinded. In minor mercy, they did not have long to contemplate their loss of sight.

In a flash, Tell el-Hammam was transformed into an inferno. Wood and clothes burst into flames, while pottery, bricks, swords, spears, and metal began to melt as air temperatures spiked about 3600 degrees Fahrenheit. A few moments later, the shockwave arrived. Winds whose speed exceeded 740 mph tore through the city and destroyed all in their path, sheared the top of the ruler’s four-story palace, and blew the wreckage into the next valley over. Everybody in the city, an estimated 8000 people, and every animal, perished, mangled, ripped apart, their bones broken, and their body parts burnt. The shockwave continued on, and a minute later, slammed into biblical Jericho about fourteen miles west of Tell el-Hammam, and brought down its walls. As seen below, scholars believe that this ancient catastrophe gave rise to the biblical narrative about Sodom and Gomorrah.

28. A Biblical Narrative Based on a Real-Life Ancient Natural Disaster?

For a decade and a half, archaeologists oversaw excavations by hundreds of people at Tell el-Hammam. Their findings were examined by dozens of scientists in the US, Canada, and the Czech Republic. One thing that jumped out was a five-foot-thick layer from around 1650 BC, comprised of charcoal and ash, intermingled with melted metal, melted pottery, and melted bricks. There was also shocked quartz, generated at pressures of 725,000 psi or more, and diamonds, wood and plant particles turned tough as diamonds under great heat and pressure. It was evidence of an intense firestorm, but not one caused by ancient warfare, an earthquake, or volcano: they don’t generate enough heat to melt metal, pottery, or bricks. The only known culprits that could inflict such damage are nuclear blasts and asteroid airbursts. Nuclear weapons were unknown 3650 years ago, so that narrowed it down.

The site and the region for miles around Tell el-Hammam were abandoned for centuries after the disaster. It is believed that the explosion vaporized and deposited so much Dead Sea saltwater in the area, that it became impossible to grow crops. It took about 600 years before rainfall washed out enough salt to render the soil sufficiently productive for habitation to resume. Accounts of the ancient city’s obliteration were likely handed down over the generations, and a version probably made it into the Old Testament as the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Similarities about cities near the Dead Sea destroyed by fire and rocks from the sky make it plausible – even likely – that the biblical narrative can be traced to the airburst that demolished Tell el-Hammam.

27. The Seven Wise Men of Ancient Greece

Ancient Greek tradition bestowed the title “Seven Wise Men” or “Seven Sages” on seven statesmen, lawgivers, and philosophers, who lived circa the sixth century BC. They include Pittacus of Mytilene (circa 640 BC – circa 568 BC). A general who ruled the island of Lesbos, Pittacus tried to reduce the power of the aristocracy and governed with the support of the commoners. Another was Thales of Miletus (circa 624 BC – circa 546 BC), a philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer whose advice “know thyself” was engraved on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. The wise men’s numbers include Bias of Priene (flourished sixth century BC) a skilled advocate known for his probity and defense of what was right.

Chilon of Sparta, who also flourished in the sixth century BC, was a politician who played a key role in establishing the militarized structure of the classical Spartan state, and coined a proverb that translates as “brevity is the soul of wit“. Solon (630 BC – 560 BC) was a reformist legislator who established the framework for what became Athenian democracy. Opinions differed about the sixth and seventh sages. They are variously given as two of the philosopher Anacharsis the Scythian (flourished sixth century BC); Cleobulus, tyrant of Lindos (flourished circa 600 BC); Periander, tyrant of Corinth (circa 634 BC – circa 585 BC); and the philosopher Myson of Chenae (flourished sixth century BC).

26. The Most Influential of the Seven Wise Men

Of the Ancient Greeks’ Seven Wise Men, the most influential was probably Solon, who established the foundations of what eventually grew into Athenian democracy. Nicknamed “The Lawgiver”, he is credited with reforms that ended the aristocracy’s exclusive control of government and replaced a political system dominated by a blood nobility with an oligarchy controlled by the wealthy, regardless of pedigree. The reforms were a necessary response to major transformations in Athens’ economic – and thus political – landscape. For millennia, wealth had been based on land ownership, which ownership was disproportionately concentrated in the hands of a hereditary aristocracy.

As in the rest of Ancient Greece, Athens was dominated by nobles who owned the best land and thus monopolized government. The Athenian region of Attica was made of three parts. There was the Plains region, a prosperous agricultural interior. There was the Coast district, which relied on fishing and trade. Finally, there was the Hills district, an impoverished region that contained a majority of the population, mostly shepherds and small farmers who scratched a meager living from the poor soil. Then things began to change.

25. Changed Circumstances Threatened to Plunge Ancient Athens Into Civil War

Over the centuries, a pattern had developed in ancient Athens and the surrounding region of Attica, in which poor farmers borrowed seeds from rich aristocrats to plant on their small plots. They then repaid the loans at harvest time with grain and labor on the aristocrats’ estates. That pattern was disrupted in the seventh century BC when commerce revived after a centuries-long slump. The non-aristocratic Athenians of the Coast district got into seaborne trade and bought land with their profits.

The new class of traders and businessmen then used slave labor to farm their newly-acquired estates more efficiently than the traditional aristocrats did theirs. As a result, Athens’ nobility found itself out-competed by the nouveau riche tradesmen. So they squeezed their poorer neighbors, enslaved them and seized their farms whenever they failed to repay their seed loans on time. That outraged other Athenians. Not because they objected to slavery per se, but because they objected to the enslavement of fellow Athenians.

24. A Compromise That Worked, Probably Because it Left Nobody Happy

Outrage over the ancient Athenian aristocrats’ enslavement of poorer citizens mounted steadily. Combined with the resentment of the middle tier of farmers, craftsmen, and the rising merchants at their exclusion from government, it brought the polis to the brink of revolution. So the citizen body met in the Ecclesia, the Athenian Assembly, to try and hammer out a solution that would avert a destructive civil war. They entrusted Solon, a respected aristocrat, to reform their city-state, and bound themselves with solemn oaths to accept his decisions.

Solon came up with a set of structural reforms that solved the immediate problems, even as they upset all sides. The rich were upset by Solon’s new laws because he canceled debts, freed the debt slaves, and prohibited the future enslavement of Athenians. The aristocrats were upset because the new laws granted the vote to all adult male citizens, regardless of class or wealth. The wealthy were subdivided between the aristocrats and the rich non-aristocrats because some government positions were reserved for aristocrats, to the exclusion of the non-noble rich. As seen below, the poor also had reason for discontent.

23. The Reforms That Established the Foundations for Ancient Athenian Democracy

While ancient Athens’ rich stewed over Solon’s reforms, the poor also had some bones to pick. They were upset because Solon’s laws did not return the lands that had been seized by the aristocrats, refused to break up the big estates and redistribute the land, and he reserved all posts in the Athenian government for the wealthy. Despite the widespread discontent, the Athenians kept their promise to accept Solon’s decision. That done, and in order to avoid the need to constantly have to defend and explain the reforms, he left the Athenians to work out the kinks in his new system.

Solon hit the road to travel around the ancient world and informed his fellow citizens that he would be gone for at least ten years. His reforms alleviated the immediate crisis and averted civil war. However, they did not resolve many of the deeper tensions that would continue to plague Athens for years to come. Solon made all citizens equal before the law and reduced the power of the aristocracy, which was a significant step towards democracy. However, it still took generations of reformers to build upon and fine-tune what he had created before Athenian democracy was established.

22. Woolly Mammoths Were Still Around When the Pyramids Were Built

Woolly mammoths like Manny from the Ice Age animated movie franchise flourished in the Pleistocene epoch and lasted into the Holocene in which we now live. The now extinct pachyderms were roughly the size of modern African elephants. Males reached shoulder heights greater than eleven feet and weighed in at around six tons. Females reached nearly ten feet at the shoulders, weighed around four tons, and calved newborns that were around two hundred pounds at birth. The furry pachyderms are most commonly associated with the ice age.

Their shaggy coats were comprised of outer layers of long guard hairs atop a shorter undercoat. That made them well adapted to the harsh winter environments of their frozen era. Other evolutionary woolly mammoth adaptations included short ears and tails, to minimize heat loss and frostbite. They were thus able to thrive in the Mammoth Steppe – the earth’s most extensive biome in the ice age, which extended from Canada and across Eurasia to Spain, and from the Arctic Circle to China. We commonly associate them with the stone age, but as seen below, woolly mammoths still existed when the Great Pyramids of Ancient Egypt were built.

21. Just When Exactly Did Woolly Mammoths Go Extinct?

Woolly mammoths, scientific name Mamuthus primigenius, are among the extinct species that are better known to science. Paleontologists have not only discovered complete fossils but also recovered entire frozen carcasses of woolly mammoths in Alaska and Siberia. Some of those frozen finds were remarkably well preserved, despite the passage of thousands of years. That enabled scientists to not only recover their fur, skin, flesh, and stomach contents, but also woolly mammoth DNA. Today, scientists are busily reconstructing the extinct pachyderms’ DNA.

Indeed, scientists have made such great strides in the reconstruction of woolly mammoth DNA that we just might be able to someday de-extinct the species and bring it back to life. It is quite possible that, within the lifetime of many or perhaps most people alive today, woolly mammoths might once again walk the earth. But when, actually, did woolly mammoths go extinct? The last ice age ended about twelve thousand years ago, circa 9700 BC. It is widely assumed that woolly mammoths must have vanished sometime around then, if not sooner. What is the truth about that assumption?

20. Woolly Mammoths Still Existed When Ancient Egypt’s Civilization Arose

Contrary to popular perceptions, woolly mammoths did not vanish when the ice age ended around 12,000 years ago, give or take a few centuries. While no man ever saw a live dinosaur, mankind and its hominid ancestors did share the planet with woolly mammoths for hundreds of thousands of years. The ice age pachyderms were actually still around while the Ancient Egyptians were busily engaged in the construction of the Great Pyramids. Most woolly mammoths were hunted by humans into extinction, and disappeared from the continental mainland of Eurasia and North America at some point between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago.

The last mainland population, in the Kyttyk Peninsula in Siberia, vanished about 9650 years ago. However, small populations survived in offshore islands, such as Saint Paul Island in Alaska, where woolly mammoths existed until 5600 years ago. The last known population survived in Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, until 4000 years ago, or roughly 2000 BC. That was well into the era of human civilization and recorded human history, and centuries after the Great Pyramids of Giza, whose construction concluded around 2560 BC, had been built.

19. The Nomads Who Terrorized the Ancient World

For thousands of years, the nomadic inhabitants of the Eurasian Steppe terrorized the civilized lands on their periphery with frequent raids. On those occasions when they were unified under powerful warlords, their fear factor skyrocketed, as they launched terrible invasions that could extinguish empires. Steppe nomads had strategic mobility that allowed them to raid settled lands at will, and depart with their booty before the locals could mobilize a response. They could choose when, where, and whether to fight the forces sent by the civilized lands to bring them to heel. The nomads’ strategic mobility was complemented by three tactical advantages.

First, their horses gave them battlefield mobility, which made it difficult for adversaries who were not also similarly equipped with horses to force them to fight to the death. If things began to go wrong for them, the nomads could usually retreat, and live to fight another day. Second, their preferred weapon, the recurved bow, led to tactical mismatches that afforded a standoff distance from which to kill in relative safety. They could thus attrit less mobile armies with arrows until they were weakened and demoralized before they swept in to finish them off. As seen below, the most important advantage was the third.

18. A Tough Life on the Steppe Made its Warriors Formidable and Fearsome

The final and greatest advantage enjoyed by the Steppe nomads was their very persons. Their upbringing in the harsh Steppe, with much of their lives spent on horseback, created a deep pool of hardy warriors. In the settled lands, only a minority of the population could be mobilized as fighters, because most people are needed in the fields and workshops. The Steppe nomads had no fields and little manufacture, while their food source, their animal flocks and herds, could be tended to by children and women.

That left nearly the entire adult male population of fighting age available as warriors. The one saving grace that allowed civilization to survive is that it was difficult to unite the Steppe clans and tribes. To bring together the fractious nomads in sufficiently large numbers to overwhelm their civilized neighbors was a bit like herding cats. While small-scale raids on settled lands were a near-constant, leaders of the caliber of a Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, who could realize the Steppe’s full and horrific potential, were few and far in between.

17. The Fearsome Ancient Scythians

Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun are the most famous Steppe leaders, but there were others who in their day gave their civilized contemporaries no end of trouble. One such was Idanthyrsus, a sixth-century BC king of the Scycthians, a nomadic Iranian-speaking tribal confederacy that inhabited the Steppe between the Carpathians and central China. The Scythians controlled an overland trade network that connected the Greeks, Chinese, Persians, and Indians, and they formed the first of the Steppe empires that terrified the adjacent settled lands for millennia.

In the seventh century BC, the Scythians began to raid into the Middle East. Their first major disruptive role was the key part they played in 612 BC in the destruction of the Assyrian Empire, an event that forever extinguished a nation that had existed for over a millennium, and that had dominated the ancient Middle East for centuries. In 513 BC, King Darius I of Persia sought to end Scythian raids on his empire once and for by conquering the troublesome nomads. As seen below, it did not go well.

16. An Ancient Persian King’s Attempt to Tame the Scythians

King Darius I assembled a huge army and launched an invasion along the western Black Sea coast and into today’s southern Ukraine and Russia. The Scythians simply retreated into the vastness of the Steppe, took their families and herds with them, and avoided the decisive pitched battle sought by Darius. King Idanthyrsus laid waste in the countryside, blocked wells and destroyed pastures, and all the while, his warriors attrited the invaders with skirmishes and hit and run attacks. A frustrated Darius challenged Idanthyrsus to stop his flight and fight, or admit his weakness, submit, and recognize the Persians as his lords. The Scythian’s response, as recorded by Herodotus, highlights just how difficult it was to bring turbulent nomads to heel and force them to fight if they did not want to.

Idanthyrsus replied to Darius: “This is my way, O Persian. I have never fled in fear from any man and I do not flee from you now … We have neither cities nor cultivated land for which we might be willing to fight with you, fearing that they might be taken or ravaged … As for lords, I recognize only my ancestors Zeus and Hestia … As to you calling yourself my lord, I tell thee to ‘Go weep’“. Darius had to give up and turn back, and his invasion amounted to little more than an expensive and fruitless demonstration. Scythians continued to raid the Persian Empire for centuries after until its destruction by Alexander the Great and continued to raid the former Persian lands for centuries beyond that.

15. Darius Got Off Light Compared to This Predecessor on the Persian Throne

Darius got off relatively easy in his failed attempt to conquer his Steppe nomad neighbors. He wasted time and effort and money, and suffered some embarrassment and loss of prestige, but came out of it alive. Not so Cyrus the Great, the greatest king of ancient Persia, founder of the Persian Empire, and one of Darius’ predecessors. Cyrus experienced a fatal debacle when he took on the Massagetae, a nomadic confederation that stretched across the Central Asian Steppe from east of the Caspian Sea to the borders of China.

They were led by Tomyris (flourished 500s BC), a formidable warrior queen who defeated Cyrus and brought his brilliant career of uninterrupted conquests to a sudden halt in 530 BC. As recounted by ancient sources, the Massagetae were nomads who spoke an Iranian language and led a hardy pastoral life on the Eurasian Steppe. They tended their herds most of the time, interspersed with raids into the civilized lands that bordered the Steppe. Their raids eventually grew too bothersome for Cyrus, who had recently founded the Persian Empire, and whose realm now encompassed many of the territories subjected to Massagetae attacks.

14. The Ancient Nomad Queen Who Did in a Great Conqueror

Cyrus the Great led an army into the Steppe to bring the Massagetae to heel. He won an initial victory against a nomad contingent commanded by Queen Tomyris’ son, with a ruse in which the Persians “forgot” a huge stock of wine in an abandoned camp. The Massagetae captured the wine, and unused to the drink, got gloriously drunk. Cyrus then turned around, fell upon the inebriated nomads, and killed many of them, including Tomyris’ son. The Massagetae queen sent Cyrus a message in which she challenged him to a second battle, and the overconfident Cyrus accepted. She personally led her army this time.

As described by Herodoutus: “Tomyris mustered all her forces and engaged Cyrus in battle. I consider this to have been the fiercest battle between non-Greeks that there has ever been…. They fought at close quarters for a long time, and neither side would give way, until eventually, the Massagetae gained the upper hand. Most of the Persian army was wiped out there, and Cyrus himself died too.” The Persian army was virtually wiped out. After the battle, Tomyris had Cyrus’ corpse beheaded and crucified. She then threw his severed head into a vessel filled with human blood. According to Herodotus, she is quoted as having addressed Cyrus the Great’s head as it bobbed in the blood: “I warned you that I would quench your thirst for blood, and so I shall“.

13. Artemisia, the Formidable Ancient Warrior Queen

Queen Artemisia I of Caria (flourished in the fifth century BC) ruled Halicarnassus in Caria – a satrapy, or province, of the Persian Empire in southwestern Anatolia. She was the daughter of the king of Halicarnassus, who named her after the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis. In addition to being a queen, she was also a formidable naval commander who fought for Persia’s King Xerxes when he invaded Greece. Artemisia was most famous for her role in the naval Battle of Salamis. Her side lost that engagement, but she nonetheless distinguished herself in combat.

When Artemisia came of age, she married the satrap of Caria, and after his death, she assumed the throne of Caria as regent for her underage son. Ancient reports depict her as a courageous and clever commander of men and ships, who was an asset to Xerxes when he decided to invade Greece. She demonstrated that she was a capable commander and a tactician in the naval Battle of Artemisium, 480 BC, which was fought simultaneously with the more famous Battle of Thermopylae. She so discomfited the Greeks in that engagement that they put a sizeable bounty on her head, and offered 10,000 drachmas to whoever killed or captured her. The reward went unclaimed.

12. The Only Persian Naval Commander Worthy of Mention by Herodotus

The naval Battle of Artemisium was followed by the even greater naval Battle of Salamis soon thereafter. Herodotus describes Artemisia as the only commander on the Persian side worthy of mention: “I pass over all the other officers [of the Persians] because there is no need for me to mention them, except for Artemisia, because I find it particularly remarkable that a woman should have taken part in the expedition against Greece. She took over the tyranny after her husband’s death, and although she had a grown-up son and did not have to join the expedition, her manly courage impelled her to do so“.

After the Battle of Salamis, Artemisia escorted Xerxes’ sons to safety, after which she fades from reliable ancient history records. Legend has it that her end came after she fell madly in love with a man who ignored her, so she blinded him in his sleep. However, her passion continued to burn hot despite his disfigurement. To rid herself of her feelings for him, she decided to leap from a tall rock that reportedly held mystical powers, such that jumping off it would snap the bonds of love. Instead, she fell down and snapped her neck.

11. Solon Returned to Ancient Athens to Find Factionalism and a Would-be Tyrant

As seen above, after he enacted his reforms, Solon left Athens for a decade. When he returned, the Lawgiver discovered that his city-state had divided into regional factions, one of them controlled by Peisistratos, a popular general. Solon suspected that Peisistratos planned to overthrow the government and set himself up as a tyrant. He was not wrong. To be fair to Peisistratos and other ancient Greek tyrants, however, it should be noted that the word “tyrant” in that time and place did not carry the modern connotations of brutal oppression.

Instead, a tyrant was more narrowly defined as a populist strongman who, often with a support base of commoners excluded from power by an aristocracy, overthrew an oligarchy and replaced it with his own one-man rule. Many tyrants were wildly popular – except with the aristocracy and the aristocrats whom they had removed from power, of course. Commoners had little power in the aristocratic system, so they were no worse off ruled by one tyrant than when they had been when they were ruled by a clique of nobles.

10. Ancient Greek Aristocratic Governments Were Usually Bad For Business

In many ways, while some Greek tyrants could and did turn bad, tyranny as an institution in ancient Greece was not all bad. Tyrants typically overthrew oligarchic regimes in which all the power had been hogged by a narrow slice of aristocrats. Once the power of the aristocracy was reduced, government under tyrants tended to be more equitable, rather than wildly skewed to benefit the nobles. Economically, commoners also tended to be better off under the tyrants, who usually encouraged endeavors such as commerce and crafts and manufactures.

Such activities had typically been viewed by the nobles and their overthrown governments as socially gauche at a minimum. Thus, in a best-case scenario, commerce and manufacturing suffered from the aristocratic regimes’ benign neglect. That is when they were not actively opposed by the aristocrats’ governments. Commerce and manufacturing were often seen as threats to the nobility. From their perspective, such activities destabilized the social order because they allowed jumped up commoners to become as rich as or richer than their social betters.

9. Ancient Greek Tyranny Was Often the First Step Towards Democracy

An ancient Greek tyranny was often a necessary step on the road to democracy because it removed out of the way the barrier of a strongly entrenched aristocracy. Tyrants had a strong interest in weakening the nobles who had monopolized power for centuries. So they tended to adopt populist policies that appealed to commoners, whose support was necessary for the tyrant’s continued hold on power. Only after the aristocracy had been weakened, and its stranglehold on power broken, would there be an opening for democracy.

That is what happened in ancient Athens, whose poorest and the most populous region was the Hill District. Its impoverished residents had derived little practical benefit from Solon’s reforms except for a prohibition against their enslavement for debt. Other than that, all that Solon had given them was a meaningless vote. So the people of the Hill invited Peisistratos to make himself a tyrant of Athens. With their support, he marched on the city in a procession headed by a tall girl dressed up as the goddess Athena, who blessed Peisistratos and declared it her divine will that he be made a tyrant. The other Athenians saw through the mummery, however, and chased him and his followers out of town.

8. Ancient Athens’ Popular Tyrant

Peisistratos fled Athens and headed to northern Greece, where he bought silver and gold mines, and got rich off their proceeds. He then invested his wealth in mercenaries, returned to Athens and tried again, this time with a well-equipped private army instead of a girl dressed up as a goddess. It worked, and in 546 BC, he overthrew the government and proclaimed himself a tyrant. He governed as a champion of the lower classes, and his tyranny was a wild success. Peisistratos suppressed Athens’ rival factions, exiled his aristocratic enemies, and confiscated their landholdings. He broke up the nobility’s large estates into small farms, which he redistributed to his followers, and thus cemented their support for his regime.

The new tyrant adopted a slew of other popular policies. He loaned small farmers money for tools, lowered taxes, and standardized the currency. He enforced the laws even-handedly, promoted the cultivation of olives and grapes, and encouraged commerce and craftsmen. He also funded popular religious rites such as the Dionysia and promoted theater, culture, and the arts. By way of infrastructure, he built an aqueduct, implemented a public buildings program, and beautified the city. By the time Peisistratos died, circa 527 BC, Athens was peaceful and more prosperous than it had ever been, with a growing and increasingly affluent middle class.

7. The Fierce Ancient British Warrior Queen

Ancient British warrior queen Boudicca (circa 25 – 61 AD) reigned over the Iceni tribe, and sparked and led a massive revolt against the forces of the Roman Empire that had recently conquered Britain. She was born into a tribal royal family, and as a young woman married Prasutagus, the king of the Iceni. Prasutagus ruled his tribe as a nominally independent ally of the Romans, and upon his death in 60 AD, he left his wealth to his daughters and to the Roman Emperor Nero.

The assumption was that Nero would return the favor and bestow imperial protection upon the deceased tribal king’s family. Instead, the Romans simply seized all of Prasutagus’ assets and annexed his kingdom. When Boudicca protested, she was flogged, and her two teenage daughters were assaulted by Roman soldiers. Understandably incensed, she launched a revolt in East Anglia, which quickly spread. In the course of the revolt, Boudicca and her warriors put London and numerous other Roman towns and settlements to the torch and killed as many as 70,000 Romans and British collaborators.

6. When Fire and Blood Swept Across Roman Britain

Disgruntled Britons rallied to the side of Queen Boudicca by the tens of thousands, and she led them in a whirlwind campaign of vengeance. They swept out of East Anglia with the Iceni queen at their head on a war chariot and annihilated a legionary detachment sent to subdue them. They then went on a rampage, in which they burned the ancient predecessors of modern Colchester, Saint Albans, and London. They also massacred tens of thousands of Romans and Romanized British collaborators. They tortured and executed their captives in a variety of gruesome ways. Those who fell into their hands were often impaled, flayed, burned alive, or crucified.

Eventually, the Romans rallied, gathered their legions into a powerful force, and marched off to meet Boudicca. When the armies finally met, the Romans were greatly outnumbered, but they were a disciplined force of professional legionaries, pitted against a poorly trained and disorganized enemy. Boudicca led her forces in person and courageously charged at the Romans in her war chariot, but courage was not enough. Discipline and professionalism prevailed, and the Romans won. Defeated, Boudicca committed suicide to deny the Romans the satisfaction of parading her in chains in a triumphal parade.

Read More:

• The Rise and Fall of Roman Britain
• Ruled Britannia: 8 Events That Defined Roman Britain

5. Athletic Events Proliferated in the Ancient World

Athletic scenes can be seen on the walls of many tombs, temples, and palaces of various ancient civilizations such as the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Minoans, and Mycenaeans. The Minoans for example really liked gymnastics, and they depicted such events, plus scenes of bull jumpers, boxers, runners, and wrestlers on graceful frescoes. However, those athletic events were usually one-offs and were mostly for royalty, aristocrats, and the upper classes. The ancient Greek Olympics were the first regularly held athletic competitions, open to all freeborn Greek men. Women could enter chariot races by proxy if they sponsored a team, but could not personally participate.

The first Olympic Games were held in 776 BC at Olympia, in the city-state of Elis, to honor Zeus. They were one of the four Panhellenic Games, although the most prestigious one. The others were the Pythian Games, held at Delphi in honor of Apollo; the Nemean Games held at Nemea, in honor of Zeus and Heracles; and the Isthmian Games, held in the Isthmus of Corinth, in honor of Poseidon. Olympic Games were held for over a thousand years, with the last recorded competition in 393 AD. However, archaeological evidence indicates that some games might have been held after that date.

4. The Early Olympics Had Only One Athletic Event

The modern Olympic Games are a mega global event – the mega global event – whose only close rival is perhaps soccer’s FIFA World Cup. In the most recent games, the 2020 (or 2021) Tokyo Olympics hosted more than 11,000 athletes from 205 nations, plus the International Olympic Committee’s Refugee Olympic Team. All of them were eager and primed to compete over a seventeen-day stretch for glory and medals in 339 events, divided between 33 sports and 50 disciplines. The difference between that and the original Olympics is stark, to say the least.

The variance between the scope and scale of today’s Olympics and the original event would probably astonish and amaze ancient Greek participants and audiences. They simply could not have imagined what their competition would one day become. When the Olympic Games were first inaugurated in 776 BC, and for over half a century through 724 BC, there was only one athletic event: the stadion. It was named after the building in which it was held, which became stadium in Latin, and from which the English word stadium is derived.

3. Ancient Olympic Runners Differed From Modern Ones

The sole athletic event in the early ancient Greeks’ Olympic Games was the stadion. It was named after a building that was big enough to contain 20 competitors, who ran an approximately 200 yard or 180-meter sprint. The first few races might have been slightly longer, however, as the original stadion in Olympia had a track that was 210 yards or 190 meters long. The athletes lined up, and games officials were positioned at the jump-off blocks to keep a sharp eye out against false starts.

Modern runners take off from a crouch, but ancient Greek sprinters took off from an upright position, with their arms stretched out before them. They were also naked. It is unclear how the original start line was marked, but by the fifth century BC at the latest, there was a stone start line, known as the balbis. In due course, a set of double grooves about four to four and a half inches apart were carved into the balbis for runners to place their toes and get some leverage to launch themselves at the start of the race.

2. The Ancient Greeks Based Their Calendars on the Olympic Games

Ancient Greek stadion sprinters awaited the start of the race, muscles coiled and ready to take off down the track. Behind and to their sides hovered Olympic Games officials to ensure that nobody left the start line too early. Before them lay a packed earth track, at the end of which awaited another set of games officials, whose task was to decide the winner – and spot and disqualify any cheaters. If it was too close and the officials determined that it was a tie, there would be a do-over, and the race would be rerun. Finally, the signal to start came – a sharp trumpet blow. The competitors exploded into action, took off, and within a few frantic seconds, the race was over.

Because the stadion was the original Olympics’ sole competition, those few seconds encapsulated the entirety of the athletic portion of the original Olympic Games. However, it is hard to grasp today just how important those few seconds were to the participants. The ancient Greeks often dated events not by a numbered calendar like we do today, but by four-year Olympiads, and the Olympiads were named after the winner. So the winner of the original stadion race literally won a place in the history books.

1. The First Winner of the Ancient Olympics

Because the ancient Greeks dated events based on four-year Olympiad cycles, the winner of the stadion race – the only competition in the first half-century of the Olympic Games – achieved a degree of fame and prestige difficult to grasp today. Since the Olympiad was named after him, from then on out, people would include his name whenever they referred to all that happened in the four-year cycle of his victory. Something along the lines of: “such and such happened in the first (or second, or third, or fourth) year of [Olympic Winner’s Name] Olympiad“.

Eventually, more athletic events were added to the competition, such as wrestling, boxing, javelin, discus, long jump, and chariot racing. However, the stadion still held pride of place as the Olympic Games’ most prestigious competition, and the four-year Olympiad cycles continued to be named after its victor. Because of that, historians today are able to name just about every stadion winner. The first of them – and thus the first Olympics champion, was a cook from the city-state of Elis named Coroebus, who won the stadion in 776 BC.

_________________

Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Ancient History Sourcebook – Queen Tomyris of the Massegetai and the Defeat of the Persians Under Cyrus

Classical Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 1 (1999) – Pisistratus’ Leadership and the Establishment of the Tyranny

Daily Beast – The Giant Space Rock That Wiped Out Biblical Sodom

Daily Beast – Things You Probably Don’t Know About the Olympics

Drews, Robert – Early Riders: The Beginnings of Mounted Warfare in Asia and Europe (2004)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Ancient Greek Olympic Games

Encyclopedia Britannica – Sodom and Gomorrah

Encyclopedia Britannica – Solon

Garland, Robert – Celebrity in Antiquity: From Media Tarts to Tabloid Queens (2006)

Grant, Michael – The Rise of the Greeks (1987)

Herodotus – The Histories

Hildinger, Erik – Warriors of the Steppe: A Military History of Central Asia, 500 BC to 1700 AD (1997)

History Collection – Digging it Up: 7 of the Biggest and Best Archaeological Finds of the 20^th Century

Holland, Tom – Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (2006)

Laertius, Diogenes – Lives of the Eminent Philosophers: The Seven Sages

Miller, Stephen Gaylord – Ancient Greek Athletics (2004)

National Geographic Magazine, April, 2013 – Bringing Them Back to Life: The Revival of Extinct Species is No Longer a Fantasy. But is it a Good Idea?

New Scientist, March 27^th, 1993 – Mini Mammoths Survived Into Egyptian Times

Roesch, Joseph E. – Boudica, Queen of the Iceni (2006)

Scientific Reports, 11, Article Number: 18632 (2021) – A Tunguska Sized Airburst Destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle Bronze Age City in the Jordan Valley Near the Dead Sea

Swaddling, Judith – The Ancient Olympic Games (1984)