Notes on Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms

I’m learning many things from this book.

• I learned about Biruni, the first anthropologist, the first person that distinguished between astrology and astronomy and apparently the one that own the division of hours in 60 minutes and seconds. Hell, according to wikipedia, he almost predicted the radius of the planet, and thought that a landmass must lie between Asia and Europe (!).
• I didn’t know St Agustin was a Manicheist before becoming a Christian priest! That is very impressive.
• There’s lots of small history lessons in this book. It’d take too much time to write them down here, but still.
• I didn’t know the handshake had a religious history in Mithraic cults either.