Sutton Hoo helmet

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Ecclesiastes 3 in the Leningrad Codex

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Dug from a Suffolk garden in 1939, the Sutton Hoo helmet's iron face-mask — with its dragon-eyebrow crest — belonged to a king whose name no one can agree on.

Teresa Margolles humidified a gallery with vapor from water used to wash unclaimed murder victims at a Mexico City morgue. Visitors breathed it. She has also sewn with thread soaked in corpse fluid.

Nero's Domus Aurea covered 300 acres of central Rome, featured a rotating dining room ceiling that rained flowers, and had an artificial lake where the Colosseum was later built. He called it merely 'a house fit to live in.'

Abdoujaparov was metres from a Paris stage win, green jersey on his back, when he hit a Coca-Cola advertising barrier on the Champs-Élysées and somersaulted into the tarmac. He still finished — and kept the jersey.

Painted 36,000 years ago on a cave ceiling in northern Spain, the Altamira bison are so anatomically precise that 19th-century archaeologists accused the discoverer of fraud — they simply could not accept the ancients were capable.

Ecclesiastes uses the word 'hebel'—breath, vapor, nothing—38 times in 12 chapters. Its conclusion that all human effort is meaningless is so extreme the rabbis debated pulling it from the canon entirely.

Fred Lorz crossed the 1904 Olympic marathon finish line first, accepted the gold medal from Alice Roosevelt, then admitted a car had driven him 11 of the 26 miles. He claimed it was a joke.

117 colonists settled Roanoke Island in 1587. Governor John White left for supplies and returned three years later to find the word CROATOAN carved into a post and every person gone — no graves, no blood.

In 1961 Manzoni sealed his own excrement into 90 numbered tins, priced each at its weight in gold, and signed them. Tin No. 18 sold at Sotheby's in 2016 for £182,500.