The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her
That checks out for Scotland.
TIL Rome once had an empress.
Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I'm afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control
That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there's no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses
We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight 
who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster 
. These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.
These don't look too dissimilar to things I'd doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.
It's fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The "head with arms and legs" stage seems universal, and amusing.
I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said "if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country"....
...and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.
Later, some dude was like "screw your catholicism, I don't like my wife any more, I'll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife," and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.
I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that's about it.
Your version makes more sense 😃
Oxford University Is older than the Aztec civilization.
And, probably from the same Reddit thread, there were a pocket of woolly mammoths still doing woolly mammoth things when the pyramids were put up. In the same spirit the Sahara hadn't fully stopped being habitable (as it was during the late ice age) yet, and that had an impact on Egyptian history.
The Near East really did get rolling pretty quickly once the warm period began, which is funny because there were areas that were arable all along. In a fair world we'd all be speaking an Australian language or something.
Harvard University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than Harvard University.
Edit: Which isn't really surprising, but I posted anyway for the sake of completeness. Oxford is so old it's not super clear when in the middle ages it started.
There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was "As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge."
The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.
Dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy!
As in, it was so long ago that Earth has done half of a great cycle since then.
That North and South Korea maintain a fax line between their countries... which they use almost exclusively to send threats and insults to each other.
Also related to North Korea, the hilarious fact that Dennis Rodman, former NBA player, is so well liked by the Kim family that he's basically a diplomat to North Korea, or at least the one they turn to when things really start going badly.
Proof: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/12/20/north-and-south-korea-exchange-faxes-threatening-to-attack-each-other/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-sends-fax-threatening-strike-south-korea-without-notice-flna2d11781034 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-KRTB-4721
Another fun fact about North Korea: They have their own Linux Distro by the name Red Star OS, which has its 3.0 version leaked to the Internet, while the newest known version is 4.0.
My observations while trying out the leaked 3.0 are:
*It is a fedora derivative,its package manager made me think it's something close to CentOS 6.3.
*It's visuals are really similar to Mac OS. Perhaps the state official behind this project really liked Mac?
*Every piece of software installed has its credits removed, they have help prompts that refer to them being made in some sort of university.
*It leaves strange markings to created files. I couldn't understand what they do exactly, but I assume it could be used to track the computer that made the files.
*Their browser does not support https, and does not have English support at all.
*Packages intended for developers aren't installed by default, doesn't have a remote repository but instead was intended to be installed with a physical media drive.
*Just for fun, I tried to request the Linux kernel's source code that the developers behind used, as it's licensed by GPL. I was unsuccessful; which means this is the first time a state sponsored software is violating GPL.
Report to the FSF so they can help you sue North Korea.
"Mad" Jack Churchill, who fought in the Second World War with a longbow, a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword, and a set of bagpipes.
And still survived. Legend
Allegedly German soldiers said that they didn't shoot him because they assumed he'd lost his mind, and took pity on him
The first manned hot air balloon was mistaken for an eldritch monster by rural French citizens who didn't understand it and was "beaten to death" by a French mob after it descended to the ground.
I'm skeptical. Can I bother you for a source?
(He even "decreed" the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)
Benjamin Franklin got the flow of electricity wrong.
Yep. It was 50/50 given that he only knew it was moving from between two points somehow. Tough luck, Benny. (Specifically, he was the one that figured out charge is conserved)
Now we all have to deal with circuit diagrams that don't match what's actually happening inside the components, which confuses at least me when I have to think about electrochemical reactions, semiconductors and/or induction.
Edit: He actually didn't have complete circuits at that time, it was all static experiments where charges were moved manually. Fixed.
End of the bronze age. Have a set of letters between citystate rulers, one writing that help is urgently needed as seaborne invaders have been spotted nearby and his military is off with the hittite empire.
The response back, in modern slang amounts to "lol ur fucked."
One of Sir Issac Newton's famous phrases is
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”
This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!
The fact that they dug up Oliver Cromwell's body for a posthumous execution. It's just insane on so many levels
Probably the one about tin cans and can openers. IIRC, can opener was invented decades after the tin
To be fair that makes a lot more sense than it happening the other way around
There was a roman emperor named Pupienus which is pronounced poopy anus
What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behavior like that.
The US newspaper billionaire William Randolph Hearst owned enough of congress that he started a war with Spain.
There are lots of great answers here so I want to post something entirely silly and much much more recent:
About 8-9 years ago someone on Reddit transcribed and revised the entirety of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven to instead be about an Emu.
For the life of me I have never been able to find it again.
There's a lot to choose from, but it's early so I'll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.
In 1938, Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds" for the radio, apparently causing mass hysteria and a major part of the continental United States to believe that a martian invasion had occurred.
"A few policemen trickled in, then a few more. Soon, the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys, and CBS executives, who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness."[26]
During the sign-off theme, the phone began ringing. Houseman picked it up and the furious caller announced he was mayor of a Midwestern town, where mobs were in the streets. Houseman hung up quickly, "[f]or we were off the air now and the studio door had burst open."[4]: 404
How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven't you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?)
This was a year after he adapted Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to be set in Nazi Germany.
That one of the US presidents died from eating too many cherries.
https://www.grunge.com/630116/how-cherries-are-tied-to-president-zachary-taylors-death/
Germany could have disavowed the Zimmerman Telegram and avoided or postponed the U.S. entering The Great War, but they fucking owned that shit.
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