37
votes
Did China shut down a port for one COVID-19 case and did this closure have a bigger impact than the blocking of the Suez canal?
No, it wasn't one case, but an outbreak. That appears to have been a misinterpretation of the claim.
Fortune put the outbreak at 'about 150' COVID-19 cases.
The size of the disruption to supply chains ...
- 133k
28
votes
Is it possible to reliably examine if a girl is a virgin?
According to Manual of Forensic Emergency Medicine by Ralph Riviello at page 118:
There are many enduring myths and misconceptions about the hymen. It is essential to note that first coitus does ...
- 99.2k
23
votes
Accepted
Is it true that 4th century Christians "destroyed all they could reach of ancient learning"?
The author is repeating an old, hoary chestnut from the days of Edward Gibbon about a sudden decline in Roman prosperity after the conversion of the Empire to Christianity. This is basically a false ...
- 40.3k
20
votes
Accepted
Is the Eye of Horus symbol based on the human brain?
Short answer: Most certainly no, but as so often, it's impossible to prove a negative.
The Cultural Meaning of the Brain
There are many descriptions of how the brain was discarded during mummification,...
- 771
19
votes
Did the Hebrew exodus from Egypt ever happen?
In his essay, Was There an Exodus?, Joshua Berman states that the book of Exodus was written by someone intimately familiar with the structure of early Egyptian dynastic life; and that the Biblical ...
- 40.3k
16
votes
Did ancient Egyptians look white?
There are three ways of currently trying to define what skin color ancient Egyptians had: History records, DNA and language. All three seem to agree on Egyptians having a darker complexion, however ...
- 1,566
15
votes
Did the Hebrew exodus from Egypt ever happen?
The overwhelming consensus of scholars, based on sound evidence, is that the Exodus from Egypt never happened as described in the Bible.
Wikipedia describes the Exodus as the founding myth of Israel,...
- 647
15
votes
Accepted
Did ancient Egyptians look white?
Please let me start with a small rant. This tweet is, in my opinion, outright ignorant and quite distasteful:
Assumption that modern Egyptians are the same as Ancient Egyptians. I doubt that he ...
- 558
9
votes
Accepted
Did 120,000 Egyptians die building the Suez Canal?
Using the reference originally provided by JoeW:
The Suez Canal had 120,000 deaths among its 1.5 million workers during
the 11 year excavation project — the most construction worker deaths
of ...
- 5,509
9
votes
Accepted
Is there an alignment between Giza pyramid complex and Orion's Belt?
The 3 stars in Orion's belt are in one line and very nearly equally spaced, as are the 3 pyramids. The first is a coincidence. The second may be as well, or it could be deliberate because the ...
- 5,871
8
votes
Accepted
Did the ten plagues take place in Ancient Egypt?
I'll take a crack at an answer based on Matthew's sources (Ipuwer papyrus. This is a "best effort" answer, since we don't really have anything definitive, and can't prove a negative. ...
8
votes
Were slaves involved in the building of the Pyramids of Giza?
Overall, I would say that we still don't know for sure, but the general consensus of the experts seems to be that the labor force that built the pyramids were not free wage workers in the modern sense,...
- 7,049
7
votes
Did 120,000 Egyptians die building the Suez Canal?
No
Using the figure from the Wikipedia article on the Suez Canal, around 1.5 million people worked on the construction of the canal in total. At any one time, over 30,000 people would be working on ...
- 470
5
votes
Did the Ancient Egyptians use twenty-sided dice?
During the Ptolemaic Period [305 BC–30 BC], there was Greek rulership over the land of Egypt.
The Greeks were familiar with icosahedra. They were described by Plato, a 5th century BC Greek ...
- 159
5
votes
Have edible jars of honey been found in thousand-year-old Egyptian tombs?
Evidence for it seems to be lacking. This is the closest I've found to an exploration of the sources and the most likely source for the claim is the 1907 account of explorer Theodore Davis regarding ...
- 5,926
5
votes
Did the Hebrew exodus from Egypt ever happen?
The Exodus
The Exodus is considered a myth by most non biblical historians.
Wikipedia defines the Exodus as:
The Exodus (Hebrew: יציאת מצרים, Yeẓi’at Miẓrayim: lit. 'Departure from Egypt') is the ...
- 2,514
5
votes
Did the ten plagues take place in Ancient Egypt?
Cristobol's answer discusses an Egyptian text that lists generic disasters hitting Egypt. There is, however, another Egyptian source which connects such disasters to the Jewish Exodus... supposedly.
...
- 40.3k
4
votes
Accepted
Has Egypt sold two French-made Mistral warships to Russia?
Both the French defense minister and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov have publicly denied the allegation referenced in the original claim.1,2
According to Defense Industry Daily, which has detailed ...
- 10.7k
3
votes
Accepted
Did Herodotus call Egypt the "Gift Of The Nile"?
The 1786 article Memoirs of Baron de Tott in The Monthly Review volume 73 says:
Herodotus, in calling Egypt the Gift of the Nile *
and gives the original Greek text in a footnote at the bottom of ...
- 99.2k
3
votes
Accepted
Does the following banner mandate wearing a hijab in an Egyptian school?
This photo was taken by Lamya Lotfey, a Egyptian Coptic Christian. She posted this photo in her Facebook public profile on Sunday, October 16, 2016 at 5:01 pm (according to GMT +6, timezone of where I ...
- 15.5k
2
votes
Did ancient Egyptians look white?
Modern Egyptians have been depicted in a different answer above.
Ancient Egyptians have been depicted on temple walls, tombs and in other archaeological sites in Egypt. These depictions consistently ...
- 663
1
vote
Does the following banner mandate wearing a hijab in an Egyptian school?
The image is that of "A sign stipulating Islamic veil as a mandatory part of girls' dress code at a school in Egypt's Sharqiya governorate".
A higher resolution version and further explanation is ...
- 99.2k
1
vote
Did Herodotus call Egypt the "Gift Of The Nile"?
What Herodotus actually wrote is: “For even if a man has not heard it before, he can readily see, if he has sense, that that Egypt to which the Greeks sail is land deposited for the Egyptians, the ...
- 945
1
vote
Did ancient people have flying vehicles?
An unmanned aerial vehicle is an aerial vehicle, so... the Kongming lantern is famously attributed to Zhuge Liang (courtesy name Kongming), from the second century AD, who used it to send a signal to ...
- 219
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible