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By Patrick J. Kiger

The Sumerian people of Mesopotamia had a flair for innovation. Here’s how they left their mark.

The ancient . Goodman says that there’s evidence the Sumerians had such carts for transportation in the 3000s B.C., but they were probably used for ceremonies or by the military, rather than as a means to get around the countryside, where the rough terrain would have made wheeled travel difficult.

The Plow

According to Kramer, the Sumerians invented the plow, a vital technology in farming. They even produced a manual that gave farmers detailed instructions on how to use various types of plows. And they specified the prayer that should be recited to pay homage to Ninkilim, the goddess of field rodents, in order to protect the grain from being eaten.

Textile Mills

While other cultures in the Middle East gathered wool and used it to weave fabric for clothing, the Sumerians were the first to do it on an industrial scale.

“The Sumerians’ innovation was to turn their temples into huge factories,” Goodman explains. He notes that the Sumerians were the first to cross kin lines and form larger working organizations for making textiles—the predecessors of modern manufacturing companies.

Mass-Produced Bricks

To make up for a shortage of stones and timber for building houses and temples, the Sumerians created molds for making bricks out of clay, according to Kramer. While they weren’t the first to use clay as a building material, “the innovation is the ability to produce bricks in large amounts, and put them together on a large scale,” Jones explains. Their buildings might not have been as durable as stone ones, but they were able to build more of them, and create larger cities.

Metallurgy

The Sumerians were some of the earliest people to use copper to make useful items, ranging from spearheads to chisels and razors, according to the Copper Development Association. They also made art with copper, including dramatic panels depicting fantastical animals such as an eagle with a lion’s head. According to Kramer, Sumerian metallurgists used furnaces heated by reeds and controlled the temperature with a bellows that could …read more

Source: HISTORY

By Becky Little

Among the superstitious: FDR carried a rabbit’s foot for good luck and Sarah Jessica Parker says “rabbit rabbit” at the start of every month. Here are some theories behind the rabbit superstition.

If you go on Twitter during the first of the month, you may notice “rabbit rabbit” trending. That’s because of a superstition that if your first words that day are “rabbit rabbit,” you’ll have luck for the rest of the month.

Alleged followers of this tradition have included actress . He explains that in the early 20th century, U.S. companies that sold rabbits’ feet vouched for their authenticity by claiming that a black person had cut them off under specific, unlucky-seeming conditions.

“A 1908 British account reports rabbits’ feet imported from America being advertised as ‘the left hind foot of a rabbit killed in a country churchyard at midnight, during the dark of the moon, on Friday the 13th of the month, by a cross-eyed, left-handed, red-headed bow-legged Negro riding a white horse,’” he writes. “While other collected versions disagree about exactly when the rabbit must be killed, all indicate that the rabbit’s foot historicizes an especially uncanny or evil time: the dark of the moon; a Friday; a rainy Friday; a Friday the Thirteenth.”

It’s hard to say whether these marketing descriptions reference a real tradition, a joke among African Americans or a cruel joke about African Americans (at least one marketing description for a rabbit’s foot used a racist slur). But it is true that other superstitions about body parts can be found among early European and African Americans, as well as in Europe and Africa. Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer, suggest the rabbit’s foot could be connected to a European good luck charm called the Hand of Glory.

“The Hand of Glory was a hand cut from a hanged man,” he says. In medieval Europe, authorities sometimes left hanged men’s bodies out in public to warn others against committing crimes; “but oftentimes, people would go and cut off one of the hands…usually the left one, and pickle it.”

Like the Hand of Glory, Ellis writes that rabbit’s feet were sometimes considered lucky because of their association with the body of a criminal. According to the early 20th-century folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett, Grover Cleveland was said to have received the foot of …read more

Source: HISTORY

By Evan Andrews

Multiple people have been suspected of informing the Nazis of the Franks’ hiding place, while one theory suggests it may have simply been bad luck.

On August 4, 1944, police in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam raided a warehouse and arrested eight Jews who were hiding in an annex disguised behind a bookcase. Among those captured was Anne Frank, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who had spent over two years living in the cramped safehouse with her parents and older sister.

The diary Frank kept during her confinement is now considered one of the most important accounts of the Holocaust, but the circumstances of her arrest have always been cloaked in mystery.

It is believed that an anonymous tip helped guide the Nazis to the secret annex, yet despite decades of investigations, the identity of the informant has never been proven.

Investigators began taking a fresh look at the case in 2016, hoping to provide new answers. A 20-person team for the Anne Frank House was led, in part, by two retired FBI officials; former special agent Vince Pankoke, and behavioral scientist Roger Depue. As The New York Times reported, they hoped to bring new technology, including forensic accounting, computer modeling and even crowd sourcing research, to examine existing evidence such as Anne Frank’s diary and the Amsterdam building where the Franks hid.

Meanwhile, in 2018, a new book claimed to offer evidence that Anne Frank and her family were betrayed by a Jewish woman who was executed after World War II for collaborating with the Nazis.

Multiple Suspects Named in Frank Family’s Betrayal

Anne Frank’s father Otto—the only member of the family to survive their subsequent deportation to the concentration camps—was among the first to assert that a betrayal had led to their capture. The group’s hideout was located inside a warehouse he had once owned, and they were aided by several of his employees as well as other Dutch sympathizers.

Shortly after World War II ended, Otto Frank suggested that the culprit was Willem van Maaren, a warehouse employee who was not in on the secret. Van Maaren was later the subject of multiple investigations related to the betrayal—including one by famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal—but he always maintained his innocence, and none of the cases ever produced any evidence against him.

In the …read more

Source: HISTORY