If you enjoy an occasional cocktail, you likely have heard, at some time or another, the origin stories for some of your favorite mixed drinks. But you might not know that for most of these drinks, someone else somewhere else is telling a different origin story. In fact, there is even dispute over the origin of the word cocktail.
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”.