True or False: History

Explication : TRUE! The Colosseum could hold between 50,000 and 80,000 spectators depending on estimates. It was the largest amphitheater ever built.

Explication : TRUE! The pyramids were built around 2500 BC. Cleopatra lived from 69 to 30 BC, about 2450 years after the pyramids. The iPhone came out in 2007, about 2060 years after Cleopatra.

Explication : FALSE! Napoleon was about 1.69 m (5'7"), which was average for French men of his time. The legend of his short stature comes from confusion between French and English inches.

Explication : TRUE! Teaching at Oxford began as early as 1096. The Aztec Empire wasn't founded until 1428, more than 300 years later.

Explication : FALSE! This phrase was falsely attributed to her. It appears in Rousseau's "Confessions", written when Marie-Antoinette was only 9 years old.

Explication : FALSE! No archaeological evidence confirms this image. Horned helmets are a 19th-century romantic invention. Real Viking helmets were simple and rounded.

Explication : TRUE! Hamida Djandoubi was the last person guillotined in France on September 10, 1977. The death penalty was abolished in 1981.

Explication : FALSE! Ancient Greeks, notably Eratosthenes, had calculated Earth's circumference as early as the 3rd century BC.

Explication : TRUE! The last mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic until about 1700 BC, while the pyramids date from 2500 BC.

Explication : FALSE! The Revolution had already begun, notably with the Tennis Court Oath on June 20, 1789. The storming of the Bastille was symbolic but not the beginning.

Explication : TRUE! It lasted from 1337 to 1453, which is 116 years. The name "Hundred Years" is a historical approximation.

Explication : FALSE! Magellan died in the Philippines in 1521. It was his second-in-command, Juan Sebastián Elcano, who completed the voyage around the world.

Explication : TRUE! The Titanic only had 20 lifeboats that could hold 1,178 people, while it carried over 2,200 passengers and crew.

Explication : FALSE! The term "cesarean" comes from the Latin "caedere" (to cut). At the time, the operation was fatal for the mother, yet Caesar's mother lived long after his birth.

Explication : TRUE! Nintendo was established in Kyoto in 1889 to make traditional Japanese playing cards (hanafuda). Video games wouldn't come until 80 years later.

Explication : FALSE! Roman legionaries wore caligae, sturdy military boots with nails, designed for long marches.

Explication : TRUE! The first fax (pantelegraph) was invented by Alexander Bain in 1843. Bell's telephone dates from 1876, 33 years later!

Explication : FALSE! Charlemagne learned to read late in life but never mastered writing. Einhard recounts that he kept tablets under his pillow to practice.

Explication : TRUE! Built for the 1889 World's Fair, it was to be demolished in 1909. It was saved thanks to its usefulness as a radio antenna.

Explication : FALSE! Gladiators were expensive athletes to train. Most fights ended in surrender. Fights to the death were the exception, not the rule.