Battle of Gaugamela

01Koevoet members received a cash bonus for each confirmed SWAPO guerrilla killed; body parts sometimes served as confirmation.
02The unit operated under the South African Police, not the military, deliberately shielding it from the Geneva Convention's oversight.
03Koevoet's kill-to-contact ratio was the highest of any counterinsurgency unit in the Namibian bush war — approximately 1,000 kills per year at peak.

"Queens" of Mysore : left, Krishnaraja Wadiyar III 's first wife, Devajammani has a discoloration around the mouth, thought to be due to the blowing of variolation dust in the nose ("nasal insufflation"). Right, his second wife shows the…

A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting Bishop Odo rallying Duke William 's army during the Battle of Hastings in 1066

Battle of Gaugamela

Alexander personally led a cavalry wedge directly at Darius III, splitting a Persian army estimated at 250,000. Darius fled on horseback for the second time — the Achaemenid Empire, 220 years old, effectively ended in that single charge.

Koevoet

Koevoet — Afrikaans for 'crowbar' — paid South African police-unit members cash bounties per guerrilla body. They drove Casspir armoured vehicles over corpses to confirm kills and claimed salaries. The bush war had a pay-per-corpse tariff.

Diamond Sutra

The Diamond Sutra, printed in 868 AD with a carved woodblock, is the world's oldest dated printed book — 587 years before Gutenberg. It opens with a line about the void and closes with instructions to destroy itself.

Anwar al-Awlaki

Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, was placed on a presidential kill list, denied due process in U.S. courts, and killed by CIA drone in Yemen in September 2011. His lawyers were told they needed a license to represent him.

Variolation

Ottoman physicians rubbed smallpox scabs into children's skin scratches centuries before Jenner's vaccine. The practice cut mortality from roughly 30% to under 2%, yet Europe called it barbarism until the death tolls reversed.

Bayeux Tapestry

Embroidered in wool on linen 70 metres long, the Bayeux Tapestry was likely stitched within twenty years of the 1066 invasion it records — by English hands, for a Norman patron, depicting the death of a king the embroiderers may have watched fall.

Fabio Casartelli

An Olympic gold medalist struck his unprotected skull on a stone culvert at 88 km/h on Stage 15, 1995. Teammates crossed the finish line the next day holding his bicycle above their heads.

Coral Castle

Edward Leedskalnin, a 5-foot, 100-pound Latvian immigrant, quarried and erected 1,100 tons of coral blocks alone at night in Florida — then refused to explain how. He left no drawings.

Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin designed curved cattle chutes that now move a third of U.S. livestock more calmly — by imagining the animal's eye-level view of shadows, dead ends, and unexpected sounds. She drew the first blueprints at her aunt's Colorado ranch.