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TIL some Viking raiders converted to Islam and became cheese traders after their attacks were repulsed by Muslim Spain

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M7Qem TIL I learned how Champollion cracked the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. The reason why he succeeded -23 years after the Rosetta Stone discovery- is that he spoke Coptic, and it meant that the sounds written in hieroglyphs made sense to him.
jNPXE TIL of the Sahara pump theory, which states that in about 10,000 years from now, the change in the orientation of the rotational axis of Earth's poles will move the North African Monsoon far enough north to convert the Sahara back into a tropical climate, as it was during 5,000–10,000 years ago
epApL TIL that Walt Disney refused to allow Alfred Hitchcock to film at Disneyland in the early 1960s because he had made "that disgusting movie Psycho."
v1Y6x If the task requires creativity or mental rotation, music can increase performance.
dD6D9 TIL about the Arabic novel Theologus Autodidactus, (“ The Self-taught Theologian"), which is considered to be one of the earliest Science Fiction stories. Its ‘impact event’ climax ends with a catastrophic doomsday apocalypse. It was written between 1268 and 1277.