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TIL George Smith (1840-76)(modest family, left school at 14) had a keen interest in Assyriology and was so often seen at the British Museum that he was employed as classifier. He taught himself Sumerian and literary Akkadian and became the one to discover the oldest story we have: Epic of Gilgamesh.

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ANpB TIL that in China, strippers were often hired for funerals until recently
7rvmZ TIL writing down a complex password on paper is significantly better than repeating a non-complex one stored on PC. The likelihood of the paper getting stolen or compromised is WAY less than the PC one via malware, hacking etc.
VMjn8 TIL that the first American newspaper, Publick Occurrences, was published September 25, 1690
LkZAV TIL of the Great bison belt. A tract of grassland that ran from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico around 9000 BCE, which allowed the bison to outlive other Ice Age animals and let the animal become the staple food of the Plains Paleo-Indians
LQjP TIL the largest multi-purpose stadium in the world belongs to North Korea (with a capacity of 150,000), and an execution was staged there in the late 1990s