The Middle Ages' most famous children's drawings were left by a Novgorod boy named Onfim.

1260

Aged six or seven, in the 13th century, he practised letters on birch bark, drew himself as a horseman spearing a foe, and wrote by a beast: 'I am a wild beast'.

◍ Show on the globe

The event

• Birch bark lettersc. 1050 · Novgorod. From the 11th century, Novgorodians scratched letters on birch bark: IOUs, quarrels, a boy named Onfim's school exercises with drawings. Waterlogged soil has preserved over a thousand of them. Found since 1951, they showed literacy in Rus' was widespread, not confined to monasteries.

13th century

More amazing facts

• 1250 · 1260 · 1517 The Mongols were stopped at Ain Jalut by former slaves.
• 1250 · 1905 Colonial Rhodesia refused for decades to admit that Great Zimbabwe was built by Africans.
• 1250 · 2012 The moai of Easter Island may have "walked". Island tradition says the statues walked on their own, and in 2012 researchers showed how: 18 people with ropes rocked an upright 5-tonne replica forward.
• 1256 The word "assassin" comes from a nickname for the Nizari Ismailis of Alamut.
• 1257 For decades scientists saw traces of one of the biggest eruptions in thousands of years in Greenland and Antarctic ice without knowing where the volcano was. Only in 2013 was it found: Samalas on Lombok, 1257.
• 1258 Chroniclers say that when the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258, the Tigris ran black with ink. So many books from the city's libraries, including the House of Wisdom, were thrown into it.

All amazing facts (1058) →