Religion

A widely repeated legend has two Rajput warriors' statues honouring their loyalty to Akbar, but a modern historian traced the story back only as far as a Dutch chronicle written decades after the event it claims to describe.

970

He walked away from the most prestigious teaching post in the Islamic world at the height of his career, and only then wrote the work that made him a renewer of the faith.

Angkor Thom's walls were built to model a Hindu-Buddhist cosmos, not to keep an enemy out, and they still failed to stop the Ayutthaya army that finally emptied the city.

-7500

The Analects, the book most people mean when they cite something Confucius said, was assembled by his students' students long after his death, which means most quotations attributed to him rest on someone else's memory of someone else's memory.

Whether he marched to Kufa out of ambition, principle, or a deliberate wish for martyrdom is a question the evidence supports three ways and settles none.

Only one ancient writer ever names Cyril of Alexandria as responsible for Hypatia's murder, and that writer also demeaned her intellect elsewhere in the same text, a contradiction later admirers of Hypatia rarely mention.

-9600

The line most people quote to sum up Louis XIV's absolutism does not actually appear in the standard record of what he said when he took personal power in 1661, which was a considerably more measured statement about governing for himself from then on.

1096

He wrote nothing himself, so the man scholars still argue over is entirely a construction of students, satirists and a philosopher born after his death.

Deciphered in the 1830s, the emperor's own carved words went unattributed to him for another eighty years until one inscription finally named its author.

1995

680

Muhammad's biography was written more than a century after his death, by which point, one historian notes, almost nothing of documentary use to a historian remained beyond confirming he had lived.

A Qing general secretly sabotaged the siege his own government had ordered, withholding artillery and shielding foreigners because he judged a simultaneous war against eight nations unwinnable, a quiet act of self-preservation that likely saved the legations from being overrun.

The Chinese character Sima Qian used to describe how Qin Shi Huang killed his critics originally just meant pit or moat, and only came to mean burying someone alive in later centuries, which is a fairly large amount of weight to hang on one word's drift in meaning.

395

Four states built by a permanent minority of settlers, which lasted nearly two centuries only because their Muslim neighbours were often more interested in fighting each other.

Eyewitnesses who watched the same fifty-three day siege could not agree afterward whether the attacking army numbered fifty thousand or three hundred thousand.

1970

2003

One emperor's tax records survive well enough that historians still argue, streets and centuries later, whether Mughal cities were more or less urbanised than Europe's.

1302

The Roman Curia has been rewritten by nearly every kind of pope going, and the latest version, in force since 2022, quietly let a nun run one of its departments for the first time.

Historians can't even agree Luther nailed anything to a church door; the story rests partly on a secretary's note that was not found until nearly four hundred years after the fact.

The most successful sustained indigenous resistance to European colonisation anywhere in the Americas is barely known, and its organiser survives mostly through the words of people who feared him.

Nineteen people hanged in a colony of a few thousand, during a decade when witch panics were already fading out across the Europe that colony had come from.

1925

1850

1648

-3800