Empires, Intrigue & Infamy
The Defenestration of Prague in 1618 helped trigger this major European War.
Thirty Years’ War
This term describes a word formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word, such as “NASA."
Acronym
This Spanish artist painted The Persistence of Memory, famous for its melting clocks.
Salvador Dalí
This mechanical device, recovered from an ancient Greek shipwreck, was used to calculate astronomical positions and cycles.
Antikythera mechanism
In Greek mythology, He was condemned to roll a boulder uphill, only for it to roll down again whenever he neared the top.
Sisyphus
This Haitian revolutionary leader was captured by the French in 1802 and died imprisoned in France in 1803.
Toussaint Louverture
This literary term describes a seemingly unsolvable problem abruptly resolved by an unexpected outside intervention.
Deus ex machina
The Catalan architect who designed Barcelona’s Sagrada Família and Park Güell.
Antoni Gaudí
This surname is shared by the Italian mathematician whose sequence begins 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and the sequence itself.
Fibonacci
In Norse mythology, it is the name of the immense tree connecting the nine worlds.
Yggdrasil
This Byzantine emperor ordered the compilation of the Corpus Juris Civilis, a foundational collection of Roman law.
Justinian I
This term describes a novel told through letters, diary entries, or other documents.
Epistolary novel
This British composer wrote the orchestral suite The Planets.
Gustav Holst
The name of the sculpture at CIA headquarters that contains four encrypted passages.
Kryptos
This Egyptian deity, usually depicted with the head of an ibis, was associated with writing and wisdom.
Thoth
This West African empire was ruled by Mansa Musa, famous for his lavish pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324.
Mali Empire
The term for a word that can mean its own opposite, such as “sanction,” meaning either permission or a penalty.
Contronym; auto-antonym ; Janus word
This Dutch artist painted The Garden of Earthly Delights .
Hieronymus Bosch
This chess-playing “automaton,” first exhibited in 1770, secretly concealed a human chess player.
The Mechanical Turk; The Turk
In Japanese mythology, this sun goddess retreats into a cave, plunging the world into darkness.
Amaterasu
This 1494 treaty divided newly claimed lands outside Europe between Portugal and Spain along a meridian in the Atlantic.
Treaty of Tordesillas
The rhetorical term that describes a part standing for the whole, as in “all hands on deck.”
Synecdoche
The architectural term that describes the triangular curved sections that allow a circular dome to rest above a square space.
Pendentives
This term describes a string containing every possible combination of a specified length from a given alphabet exactly once, when read cyclically.
De Bruijn sequence
In Mesopotamian mythology, this goddess descends into the underworld and passes through seven gates, surrendering garments or ornaments at each.
Inanna; Ishtar