Mankind’s love of records left behind countless documents. Needless to say, some are so common that the very sight of them makes people regret going to the museum.

Then there are the secret codes and oaths, unique manuscripts, and caves marked with people’s fear. Text-obsessed scholars are talking in dead tongues and admit once again that the ancient Egyptians did some amazing things.

The world of rare words and pictures is a magnetic one. Sometimes, it’s even downright funny.

10 Oldest Near-Death Case

In 1740, a French doctor called Pierre-Jean du Monchaux described a curious case. An unconscious patient had recovered, only to describe a light so pure and white that the man was convinced he had stood with one shoe in Heaven. The case was included in the doctor’s book, Anecdotes de Medecine.

It might have gone unnoticed if not for Phillippe Charlier, who recently riffled through an antique shop. Ironically, he was also a French doctor. He found the book by chance and bought it for less than $1.

When he read about the case, Charlier realized he was looking at the world’s oldest report of a near-death experience. It was a time when people leaned on religion to explain such things, but the ancient physician stayed professional. He suggested a medical reason—too much blood rushing to the brain.

Monchaux’s assessment nearly matched modern explanations. Today, researchers think a lack of blood flow and oxygen to the brain cause the sensations of a near-death experience.^[1]

9 The Mysterious Devourer

In 2017, archaeologists took their shovels to a shrine-like building. The small structure stood at Zincirli in Turkey and soon yielded a pot. The stone vessel originally held cosmetics but was reused to display an incantation.

A story was carved over the surface, describing the capture of something called a “devourer” which was said to bring “fire” to its victims. The only way a person could recover was to use the devourer’s own blood.

The incantation did not specify how the blood was to be administered or the creature’s identity. Illustrations suggested that it was either a centipede or a scorpion. The “fire” sounds like a painful sting.

The author was a magician called Rahim, who carved the advice in Aramaic 2,800 years ago. This made it the oldest Aramaic incantation ever found. Archaeologists believe that the incantation was important enough to preserve after the magician’s lifetime because the inscription was already over a century old by the time the temple was built.^[2]

8 Dirty Bathroom Jokes

Ancient bathrooms with floor mosaics are rare. When one was found in 2018 in Turkey’s ancient city of Antiochia ad Cragum, it was a cause for celebration. However, the images were not beautifully rendered legends or geometric patterns. The tiny tiles told dirty jokes.

As Roman men visited the latrine around 1,800 years ago, they would have been amused by the antics of Narcissus and Ganymede. Both men belonged to real myths. Narcissus was in love with his own image. Ganymede was kidnapped by the god Zeus as a slave but also as a love interest.

The mosaics twisted the stories, first by giving Narcissus an ugly nose. Instead of admiring his reflection, he appeared to be fixated on his genitals. Ganymede’s scene was even more detailed. He was getting his private parts sponged clean by a heron. The type of sponge was usually reserved for cleaning toilets, and the bird represented Zeus.^[3]

The unusual theme stunned archaeologists but at least proved that bathroom humor is nothing new.

7 The Creswell Marks

The border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire is marked by a limestone gorge. Called Creswell Crags, the site is historically significant. Apart from past discoveries of ancient remains, Creswell holds the only Ice Age art in Britain.

After years of investigations, the caves managed to deliver a big surprise in 2019. A tour group stumbled upon the country’s largest collection of apotropaic marks. The engravings had nothing do to with the Ice Age gallery. The latter were thousands of years older, while the newfound carvings were from medieval times until the 19th century.

Historians recognized several of the symbols. Also called witches’ marks, their purpose was to protect the living from bad supernatural influences. Among the most popular was “VV,” invoking the Virgin Mary. Others—like boxes, mazes, and diagonal stripes—captured whatever mysterious evil brought diseases and made the crops fail.^[4]

Dense clusters of symbols lined the ceilings and walls of the caves, a testament to the local people’s fear of the unknown.

6 The Nag Hammadi Library

Around 1,400 years ago, a jar was buried in Egypt. Containing 13 codices, the vessel was rediscovered in 1945 near the town of Nag Hammadi. The rolls contained Gnostic records of Jesus. The Gnostic tradition, an early and sometimes mystical branch of Christianity, is considered to be heretical by mainstream Christians. Most were traditionally penned in Coptic, a language that was spoken in Egypt for centuries.^[5]

In 2017, researchers in Texas found that one codex was different. Instead of Coptic scribbles, the text was Greek. This was exceptional. The work in question, the First Apocalypse of James, had never been recovered in ancient Greek before. The piece covered a conversation between Jesus and James, the latter taking instructions on how to continue teaching after Jesus’s death.

Another feature that set the scroll apart was little dots that divided the text into syllables. This rare technique is known from educational texts, which suggested the writer used the heretical gospel to teach Greek to students.

5 Unique Palimpsest

Centuries ago, writing material was expensive. Sometimes, an old manuscript would be scraped clean and inked with new information. These recycled documents are known as palimpsests.

In 2018, Dr. Eleonore Cellard assessed fragments containing Quran script. She noticed ghostly letters behind the eighth-century Arabic text and identified several Bible passages. Written in Coptic, they belonged to the Old Testament’s Book of Deuteronomy.

The find was extraordinary. Quran palimpsests are rare enough, but never before had a Christian document been erased to make space for the Islamic holy book. The writing style dated the Arabic text, but the Coptic was more difficult to place.^[6]

The fragility of the manuscript prevented carbon dating. Even if the document was strong enough, the technique can only date the paper and not the writing. Once again, the style was the only clue.

Unfortunately, it was a very broad one. The original Coptic was not written before the seventh century. Despite the dating issue, the palimpsest remains invaluable for its uniqueness.

4 Earliest Record Of Algol

The star Algol is actually a 3-in-1 deal. Officially discovered in 1669, the three suns move around each other, causing the “star” to dim and brighten. A papyrus studied in 2015 suggested that the ancient Egyptians discovered it first.

Called the Cairo Calendar, the document guided each day of the year, giving auspicious dates for ceremonies, forecasts, warnings, and even the activities of the gods. Previously, researchers felt the ancient calendar had a link to the heavens, but they never had any proof.

The study found that the calendar’s positive days matched Algol’s brightest days as well as those of the Moon. The appearances of one deity, Horus, also matched the star system’s 2,867-day cycle.

This strongly suggests that the ancient Egyptians were the first to follow Algol around 3,200 years ago. More remarkably, they did so without a telescope even though the system was almost 92.25 light-years away.^[7]

3 Unique Ninja Oath

In Japan, rumors of a written ninja oath persisted for almost 50 years. If true, this was a historic gem. Unlike movie ninjas, the real guys used stealth to gather intelligence and rarely used weapons. Most of their traditions and training were passed down verbally from master to student. A written document, especially an oath, would be a first.

In 2018, the piece finally surfaced. It was donated to a museum by the Kizu family, once a ninja clan from the town of Iga. The donated cache consisted of 130 ancient documents, but the oath was the most remarkable. Written by a man called Inosuke Kizu, he thanked his masters for the ninjutsu training and vowed to never reveal the secret knowledge. Not even to his immediate family.

The 300-year-old paper also captured the penalty of sharing ninja techniques with outsiders. The author accepted that his betrayal would cause his descendants to be tortured by the gods for generations. The letter was probably handed to his masters and returned to the Kizu family after his death.^[8]

2 Ferdinand’s Code

To safeguard military information from his enemies, King Ferdinand of Spain wrote in secret code. It was a little too effective. His correspondence with a commander named Gonzalo de Cordoba went undeciphered for 500 years.

Ferdinand sponsored Christopher Columbus’s trips to the Americas and fought several enemies. He recaptured Spain from the Moors in 1492 and battled France for the Mediterranean.

The letters promised interesting insights into the war king’s mind. Spain’s intelligence agency picked up the challenge. Ferdinand’s alphabet had 88 symbols, 237 letters, and six accompanying characters (such as numbers and triangles) that made each letter’s meaning more complex. In addition, the “language” ran continuously without breaks to indicate words.^[9]

In 2018, after six months, the agency cracked enough of the code to read four pieces of correspondence. They revealed details ranging from instructions on troop deployment in Italy to berating the commander for making decisions without Ferdinand’s approval. The breakthrough is a good step toward cracking the rest of the royal mail.

1 Extinct Language Spoken Again

A Cambridge academic loved ancient Babylonian so much that he decided to learn the language. Not just to read it but to speak it correctly. Babylonian went extinct around the time that Jesus was born.

Nearly 2,000 years of silence did not deter Dr. Martin Worthington, who already spoke Sumerian, Assyrian, English, Italian, and French. For over 20 years, he dove into ancient scripts and compiled a unique archive of research.

After gleaning correspondence, treaties, letters, and scientific reports written in Babylonian, Worthington arrived at a point where he could speak it. He was the first to admit that the project was not perfect. Although he could give a speech in the lost language, he was not fluent.

Worthington now teaches the language to Assyriology students, mainly to bring them closer to the ancient world they chose to study. Interestingly, if the two were to meet, ancient Babylonians might understand modern speakers because the language is related to Hebrew and Arabic, which replaced Babylonian as the Middle East’s dominant language.^[10]

Literary critics have invented a host of phrases and concepts to separate artists from their art. By far the best known is “death of the author,” which comes from a 1967 essay by Roland Barthes. Essentially, the notion is to imagine that the author cannot be asked for their intent, or how their own life experiences shaped their writing, so the theorist’s interpretation is at least as valid as the author’s intention–provided said interpretation is reasonably derived from the text.  

While that’s a worthwhile literary exercise, there can be a problem that comes from many people knowing pieces of writing through cultural osmosis instead of actually reading the text. Indeed, sometimes there are aspects of the text that simply aren’t as haunting as the passages in stories that become touchstones. So interpretations of stories can be demonstrably incorrect. As is the case with…

10. The Hunchback of Notre Dame

When the 1995 Disney adaption of this movie came out, many critics and audience members were united in decrying the supposed borderline desecration of the original story. They pointed to the 1939 or 1920 versions of the story as proper adaptations, which properly portrayed the unsavory nature of Quasimodo, the tragic fate of the gypsy Esmeralda, clergyman Claude Frollo, and so on… and all in the shadow of one of the most celebrated buildings in French history.

It was a criticism completely undermined by how Victor Hugo wrote the original 1831 version of the story. As Lindsay Ellis explains in her highly recommended video essay, in the original novel, Quasimodo is a mere bit part and certainly not a sympathetic figure. There’s no tragic romance with the gypsy Esmeralda, who it turns out was actually a caucasian abandoned as a child. In brief, Hugo didn’t write his novel as a tragedy, so much as a tribute to the cathedral itself, which at the time of writing was less a French institution than a wreck that had been vandalized numerous times over the centuries and neglected.

That Hugo’s sympathies were with the building over the people who lived in and around it is much less surprising to anyone who knows that the original title was “Notre-Dame de Paris” and that he did not approve of the English title change. Perhaps that theme would resonate with misanthropic architecture students, but it certainly wouldn’t have been the crowd pleaser many subsequent adaptations have been  

9. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving’s 1820 story, set in a Dutch community in 1790s New York (loosely based on real events), as we all know is about a schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane, who gets chased by a headless horseman across a bridge. When the horseman can’t catch him, he throws a pumpkin at Crane. Those who read an abridged version in class might remember that it was heavily implied that Brom Bones was pretending to be the Headless Hessian Horseman to scare off Crane so that he could marry Katrina Van Tassel without any competition from superstitious schoolteachers. Considering Ichabod disappears and Bones gets what he wants through pretty underhanded and aggressive means, it seems like this slice of Americana should be a pretty dark, spooky tale where the villain wins in the end, be he ghost or local tough guy in disguise.

Readers have that impression because many of them lost track of how odious a person Irving wrote Ichabod Crane to be. Like many schoolteachers of the time, Crane is described as having romantic interest purely for financial reasons (Irving explicitly describes him as looking at her father’s fortune with “green eyes”). He’s also explicitly a mooch and a glutton, only getting away with it because he knows a lot of local ghost lore. The story also ends with a postscript noting there was talk in Sleepy Hollow that Crane was seen again later, having moved to another community and becoming a judge. However, the locals rejected that because his supposed disappearance made for a better story. If anything, Irving went overboard in assuring audiences not to worry about ol’ Ichabod.  

8. Jabberwocky

Lewis Caroll’s titular monster, which was first introduced to readers in Alice Through the Looking Glass, has been portrayed as a serious beast in such adaptations as the 1985 movie. Even those who know better than to portray such serious versions of the monsters from the poem assume that “slivey toves” and “more raths” from the opening verse mean “unidentifiable beasts,” such as in the version done for The Muppet Show.

Jabberwocky’s origin was in 1855, in a magazine called Misch-Masch, which had a circulation of Lewis Carroll’s immediate family. It was not only meant as a parody of folk poems, but he actually handily explained what all the words meant, so those terms aren’t so much nonsense as coded. For example, “slivy toves” are actually cheese-eating badgers. “Mome Raths” are turtles. Bryllyg is said to be the early afternoon, as it refers to the time of broiling dinner. All things considered, the opening verse is much closer to a slightly offbeat version of Wind in the Willows than it is a surreal menagerie of cryptids.

7. Harrison Bergeron

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story, equality is perverted so that every exceptional person is limited to be no better than the worst performing person, either by restraints that weigh them down or by zapping them if they think too much. This idea has been embraced by right wing publications like National Review. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited it in a ruling requiring tournament golfers to walk between shots.

What they don’t seem to notice is the portrayal of the eponymous character. As critics have more recently pointed out, Bergeron is a ridiculously overpowered human being who not only stands 7-feet tall at age 14, he is also literally capable of flying as he dances (once he removes his restraints that weigh hundreds of pounds). More revealingly, he proclaims himself “emperor,” which probably isn’t something Vonnegut would have a “heroic” character do.

He also makes this declaration and displays his powers on live television, which of course means that the Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers would have no trouble hunting him down and shooting him, as she does seemingly effortlessly in the story. Clearly, Bergeron is a parody of the Howard Roark and John Gault-type supermen that are so perfect and so, so underappreciated in Ayn Rand’s novels. Considering Vonnegut’s left-wing views throughout his writing career, it’s objectivism that’s in his sights at least as much as socialism.

6. The Satanic Verses

When it was published in 1988, author Salman Rushdie struck free publicity gold when his book was interpreted as blasphemous and banned in India while the Ayatollah demanded his head. He surely didn’t celebrate this, as he had to go into hiding from very real threats. Several translators of the book were attacked—one fatally. Considering that the book is a formidable 600 pages long, it’s not so surprising that many people didn’t read the entire story and were content to go off a vague sense of what the novel was about, or a heavily abridged version.

The Satanic Verses tells the intertwined stories of two Southeast Asian Muslims, one born wealthy and the other poor. The pair both survive a plane crash, and the rich one becomes cursed (one way is he smells bad) while the other becomes angelic. Still, the rich one survives the novel while the other commits suicide while wanted for murder (he is unambiguously responsible for several deaths). The offending portions of the book are a secondary narrative of a few dozen pages about the rise of the prophet Mahound, written in an approximation of Koranic verse.

The “Satanic Verses” of the title are an allusion to a claim by the prophet that, for some contradictory statements he made, it must have been Satan pretending to be Allah. In a manner that paralleled a scene that offended many in The Last Temptation of Christ, Rushdie styled his parody of the prophet as a very elaborate dream sequence to give him plausible deniability that he was portraying an in-universe, fictional version. The version many Muslims were given, however, only showed the dream sequence without the larger context, and so inevitably it misled many on the intent of the book.     

5. Valley of the Dolls

These days, this 1966 novel is better known for selling forty million copies than it is for its contents. Its story of three women who try to enter show business but run into such pitfalls as creative compromise, sexual exploitation, and drug addiction (the “dolls” of the title are upper/downer pills) was so salacious for its time that it couldn’t help but become one of, literally, the bestselling books of all-time. No wonder it got a couple film adaptations: a much derided smash hit in 1968, and a TV movie in 1981.

An aspect of the literary juggernaut that, for decades, was held up as the impetus for its success was the titillation of guessing which characters were modeled on which specific real people. For example, was the character that had a pill addiction Judy Garland? Was the over-the-hill singer who stands in the protagonist’s way based on Ethel Merman? According to Jacqueline Susann, the answer to all these guesses was “no” and that all of the characters were invented to fit a theme instead of to reveal the truth behind a real entertainer’s persona. She eventually said of the misconception, “Let them think that, it sells more of my books.”  

4. Dracula

Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic isn’t just one of the two most influential horror novels of the 19th century (alongside Frankenstein). For many outside Central or Eastern Europe, it was the popularity of Dracula that led them to learn of 15th century Romanian ruler Vladislav III, better known as Vlad the Impaler. Deposed early in life, Vlad fought against both the Ottoman Empire and fellow Romanians and eventually died in battle, but not before leaving behind battlefields laden with impaled prisoners of war as an attempt to demoralize his enemies. Such a person seems tailor-made to inspire a monster in human shape.  

Which completely misunderstands Stoker’s real writing process. It’s not so much that he didn’t carefully study Vlad Tepisch’s life for inspiration for his iconic character, as there’s no evidence that he even knew the bygone monarch had existed. In 1890 (the year he began working on it) he noted that he read a book on Westphalia and came across the word Dracula, but he misinterpreted it as being the local word for “evil.” While Vlad is from approximately the same area of Europe as Dracula, Vlad was certainly not much associated with Transylvania, which would have been a key connection to invoking the memory of the historical figure. In short, Stoker seemed to have more lucked into the historical echoes than anything else.  

3. The Great Gatsby

Nearly 80 years after its initial disappointing release in 1925, F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age triumph sells roughly 500,000 copies a year. It’s resonated with readers enough to make its way to the silver screen in 1926, 1949, 1976, and 2013. Each release was greeted with a critical thrashing and to very mixed results at the box office.  

But that’s not to say readers, who generally regard themselves as more astute than movie fans, don’t mistake Fitzgerald’s intention with Gatsby. As explained by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian, most people misinterpret Gatsby as being a suave charmer. There are a few telling descriptions that undermine this: His pink suits (tacky even in the Roaring ’20s) and his bewilderment in the face of the high society that narrator Nick Carraway takes for granted. That’s why he overcompensates for his parties, doing such things as hire entire orchestras. Gatsby is a dreamer, pining for the fantasy version from his youth of his neighbor Daisy Buchanan, not a man with his feet on the ground in the present. Not that this dissonance is anything new: Fitzgerald wrote back in the day that, “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one has the slightest idea what the book was about.”

2. Don Quixote

It’s been just over 400 years since Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece was first published in English. Since then, the image of a nobleman putting a washing basin on his head, taking a nag for a noble steed and his trusty assistant Sancho Panza on a number of delusional, pointless quests in an attempt to restore chivalry to the land has only become more poignant. Don Quixote is both absurd and loveable, and many readers have mixed feelings about the ending where he regains his sanity enough to dictate in his will that his niece be disinherited if she marries a man who reads books of chivalry.  

As recounted in the New York Times, the title character actually comes across as much less sympathetic when you really look at the text. While Quixote means well, Cervantes does not skimp on the details of the pain he causes. Not just to his assistant Sancho Panza (who gets beat up because Quixote doesn’t pay a hotel bill), but even mules that can’t drink from their water trough because Quixote insists the water is holy. It’s an aspect of the story that is understandably omitted from adaptations such as Man of La Mancha, which contributed to those interpretations being dismissed as “kitsch.”

1. Slaughterhouse Five

Well, when an author writes as many famous satirical, morally complex, and whimsical stories as Kurt Vonnegut did, it’s not surprising that he’d have multiple works end up on lists like this. So it is with his 1969 anti-war classic (that he self-deprecatingly called his “famous Dresden novel”) about a WWII veteran named Billy Pilgrim, whose subjective experience of his life jumps back and forward through time. Within the intro of the book, Vonnegut quotes an associate who asked authors writing anti-war books why they didn’t instead write an “anti-glacier book.” Meaning, of course, that the human tendency towards war is as implacable as glaciers.

A similar sentiment is expressed by the alien race called the Tralfamadorians, who consider their own atrocities and eventual destruction of the universe as utterly inevitable, because they can see the entirety of all the time they live, all at once. Hence many have viewed it as a pro-fatalism book as they wonder whether the events of the book are real or not.

The text makes explicit that the aliens don’t exist. Within the book, the aliens Billy Pilgrim meets, and the environment they place him in (specifically a zoo), are described as something he read in a novel by hack sci-fi author Kilgore Trout. Further, Pilgrim does not express anything to anyone else about the aliens until after a plane crash that leaves him unconscious (i.e., likely with brain damage and trauma). As Michael Carson of Wrath-BearingTree.com points out, when Pilgrim first discusses the lessons he supposedly learned about the inevitability of war and the atrocities that come from it, it’s with a war hawk named Rumfoord, who Vonnegut mocks. Pilgrim merely echoes Rumfoord and then says he learned all of what Rumfoord told him on Tralfamadore.

On the other hand, Vonnegut also makes it explicit that the Tralfamadorians believe they will eventually destroy the universe. Vonnegut’s message isn’t that war and atrocities are inevitable, but that to follow this fatalist philosophy (that could come from absurd aliens that are the result of head trauma) makes its adherents into puppets, and leads to disaster for everyone.     

Adam & Dustin Koski also wrote the occult horror novel Not Meant to Know. Feel free to read and misinterpret it.