Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of curiosities. It's not always reasonable, but sometimes you just need someone else to blame for your misfortune. Those in power almost never claim responsibility for what happens to them, and instead lay that responsibility at the feet of others. That was the route taken by Boris Godunov.
Boris was a regent, someone appointed to govern in the event the next monarch in line was a miner or unable to reign. He had been appointed to watch over Dmitri Vassilyevik, the son of Ivan Vassilievik, also known to us as Ivan the Terrible. Dmitri would have been destined to take over for his father, but he was an
infant and he had an older brother, Payador. Boris had been a member of Ivan's counsel in the years leading up to his death, and had been tasked with helping guide phayedor in leading Russia after his father was gone. But the young man was unfit to rule, both mentally and physically. He was weak and Dmitri was too young. That left Boris to rule as acting csar until Dmitri came of age. But Boris noticed something unsettling about the
young Dmitri. He was smart. It wouldn't be long before he was old enough to sit on the throne of his late father, thus taking all of Boris's power with him. The ambitious regents couldn't let that happen, and so he had the boy and his mother exiled to a small town in western Russia, out of sight, out of mind. The two Vassilievik's lived there for several years, waiting until the boy was old enough to return to the palace, where he would follow in his father's footsteps. It's just
too bad he'd never see the throne. In Fife, while Dmitri was only eight years old, he was found dead with a knife wound in his throat. This being Russia in the late sixteenth century, the initial thought was foul play had been involved. As such, Dmitri's mother had the town church bells rung, alerting the town to what had happened and gathering them together. A rebellion had been started. The target of their anger Boris Dmitri's mother knew who
was behind the killing and why he'd done it. It was a preemptive measure to ensure his place at the top of the Russian royalty, but the Czar was ready. He first denied responsibility for Dimitri's death, claiming the boy had been playing with knives before suffering from a mysterious seizure. The boy had simply impaled himself on one of them in a tragic accident, and yeah, that didn't sound right
to the residents of the town either. Second, Boris had a whole army at his disposal, and the little village did not, so he sent a small group of troops to take care of the rebellion before it could even get going. The soldiers moved swiftly, successfully taking back the town and killing most of the townsfolk. Those who weren't killed, including Dmitri's mother, were all exiled to Siberia, but Boris
still wasn't satisfied. There was one other party that had been involved in organizing the rebellion, and he wanted to punish them too. To make an example of them, first, he had their tongue cut out, and then he exiled them to Siberia with the surviving townsfolk. Except this wasn't a person. It was the church bell that had riled everyone up in the first place. It hadn't been enough for Boris to wipe out the town. He wanted every last shred of evidence of rebellion removed, and that included
the accursed bell. In the years following his death, Dmitri was sainted, and roughly one hundred years after that, a new church was erected on the site where he was killed. The bell, however, would remain in exile for almost three hundred years before finally returning home. Today, the bell is on display at the Church of Prince Dmitri on Blood, where it's rung regularly. It's bright, loud tone, singing out for everyone to hear, and thankfully it hasn't started any
new rebellions since its return. Despite the collections we have of artifacts and fossils spanning millions of years, we still don't know a whole lot about early civilizations. We deduce and make inferences based on what we find, such as pottery and grave sites, but we still have much to learn about how ancient culture has truly lived, especially when they leave behind things that aren't so easily explained. Russian archaeologists found such an object in while working in the
Ural mountains. It was a slab of stone nearly five feet tall and three and a half feet wide. It also weighed a ton literally. It's called the Doshka stone or the map of the Creator, and one scientist believes it could be over one twenty million years old. That in and of itself isn't so odd. We have fossils dating back billions of years. What sets the Doshka stone apart from other artifacts are its structure and what it represents.
The slab is made up of three layers. The first is a seven inch layer of a compound with a dolomite base. The middle layer is an inch thick and made above a dioxide glass and silicone, and the top is only a few millimeters of calcium mixed with porcelain. This kind of layering doesn't happen in nature. Someone they think had to make it. On its surface is a series of lines intersecting at various points. These lines were
etched with some kind of primitive tool. Cartog refers from Russia and China looked more closely at the lines and noticed how similar they looked to a particular area in the Ural mountains known as Bashkira. The accuracy was uncanny. What archaeologists had found wasn't just a slab with pictures on it. It was a topographical map, one drawn with a bird's eye view of the mountains. There were also lines representing waterways and dams. Undecipherable inscriptions adorn the sides
of the stone as well. Now, naturally, they didn't have drones back then, or even airplanes, so how could an ancient civilization depict such a precise image of the mountains without help? That's what has baffled scientists since the stones discovery. However, the claim that it's one twenty million years old doesn't sit well with everyone. Some scientists get hung up on the fossils that were found within the slab. One was dated to one million years ago, while the other is
about five hundred million years old. That makes dating the map were difficult. That's because Homo habilists, who lived roughly two point eight million years ago, is one of the earliest species that has left us evidence that they use stone tools. To say that this map was created one million years earlier, well before humans evolved enough to fashion rocks and sticks into makeshift hammers and chisels does seem
a bit far fetched. What the map does illustrate, aside from the ural mountains, is that the area was home to an advanced civilization that had figured out how to see the world from high above, something no one else could do at the time. They didn't draw any roads on the map, since none existed, but they did learn how to navigate the nearby rivers and streams to get to different places. There's also the possibility that there might
be more than one map. According to some reports, there may be as many as two hundred similar stones in existence. None of the other slabs have been found yet, though for now, scientists, cartographers and archaeologists only have that one stone to perform their re Sir John, but there's a lot that single stone can teach us. It also opens up the possibility that what we think we know about
ancient civilizations could all be wrong. We can only move forward based on the information and artifacts that we already have. There's more out there waiting to be found. We just have to figure out how to use one map to find another, and then another and then another. Curious, isn't it? I? Hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.