The History Advent Calendar

The History Advent Calendar

Somewhere behind the first key is a family crouched around a new fire, learning that night doesn't have to be frightening. Behind another is an emperor buried with eight thousand clay soldiers. Behind a third is a woman who gave away so much gold on one journey that she accidentally crashed the economy of Egypt.

This is a history advent calendar built like a museum with twenty-four locked rooms - and the reader gets the keys.

Each day opens one door and delivers a proper story, not a fact dumped on a page: what happened, who was there, and why it still matters. Then come Five Things That Will Surprise You, a look at what the rest of the world was doing at that exact moment, an everyday word with a very old story hidden inside it, something to actually go and try - and a riddle teasing tomorrow's key. The last page of every day is blank on purpose.

Inside the twenty-four doors:

• The oldest art gallery on Earth, painted by torchlight
• The bored accountant who invented writing
• The city with flushing toilets 4,500 years ago - whose language nobody can read
• A kingdom that raised the tallest stones ever quarried
• Sailors who found islands the size of a full stop, with no compass at all
• An empire that ran on knotted string
• And twenty-two more, ending on the Moon

Deliberately not just European history. Aksum and Great Zimbabwe, the Indus Valley, Mali and Timbuktu, Shang China, the Pacific voyagers and the Inca get the same space as Greece and Rome - because that's what actually happened.

Written for curious readers of about nine and up, and for the grown-ups who end up reading it over their shoulder. Perfect as a countdown gift, a bedtime chapter, a classroom starter, or a reason to argue with somebody at dinner about whether Vikings really wore horns. (They didn't.)