Unless ye be residing under a barnacle covered rock, ye should know that today, Sept 19th, be global Talk Like a Pirate Day. Aaarrrrr!!!!!!! Almost every day represents several unofficial holidays. Where did all these days begin? The underlying idea would be well recognized in ancient Rome, and each celebration has a history all its own.
One of the great questions of antiquity is what ancient knowledge might have been lost with the destruction of the famed Great Library of Alexandria. We can only guess at the answer, but the question itself reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the library- what it was, where it was, why its was, and what happened to it.
In the US alone souvenir shops sold more than 21 billion dollars of merchandise in 2022. It is human nature to try and preserve memories, and one of the many ways we do that is to purchase keepsakes, mementos, or souvenirs - that remind us of where we’ve been. And evidence of that human instinct goes way back, well before anyone “exited through the gift shop”.