Weekly History Quiz No.274

Occurring in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989, when Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker owned by Exxon Shipping Company that was bound for Long Beach, California struck Prince William Sound’s Bligh Reef. The spill was the second largest in U.S. waters, contaminating 2,100 km of coastline.

The General Belgrano was sunk on 2nd May 1982 during the Falklands War by the Royal Navy submarine Conqueror with the loss of 323 lives. Following the loss of General Belgrano, the Argentinian fleet returned to its bases and played no major role in the rest of the conflict.

Losses from General Belgrano totalled just under half of Argentine military deaths in the war. She is the only ship to have been sunk during military operations by a nuclear-powered submarine.

The General Belgrano was originally the USS Phoenix, which saw action in the Pacific theatre of World War II before being sold by the United States to Argentina.

In January 1120, and King Baldwin II of Jerusalem granted the Templars a headquarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque. The new order took the name Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or “Templar” knights. Their emblem was of two knights riding on a single horse, emphasizing the order’s poverty.

The Templars became a favoured charity throughout Christendom, receiving money, land, businesses, and noble-born sons from families who were eager to help with the fight in the Holy Land. After accumulating wealth in this manner throughout Europe and Outremer, in 1150 the Templars began issuing letters of credit for pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land. Pilgrims deposited their valuables with a Templar location in Europe, received a document indicating the value of their deposit, and received equal value upon arrival in Outremer.

After almost 200 years the order became one of the richest and most powerful groups in Europe. This, along with their secrecy created distrust, which was exploited by King Philip IV of France, who was deeply in debt to the order. On Friday the 13th of October 1307, he had many of the order’s members in France arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and burned them at the stake. Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312 under pressure from King Philip.

Best known for commissioning the construction of Offa's Dyke, a large linear fortification that forms a boundary between England and Wales. King Offa ruled Mercia for 40 years, a time at which it was the most powerful Kingdom in the British isles.

Officially the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the 1995 peace treaty recognised the creation of Bosnia and Herzegovina after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Gaddafi ruled Libya from 1969 until his assassination by Libyan rebel forces backed by French secret service during the Arab Spring revolution.

Neanderthals are named after the valley, the Neandertal, (“the Neander Valley” in English) in which the first identified specimen was found. This is in Germany, near Düsseldorf.

The Battle of Kohima, together with the intertwined Battle of Imphal proved the turning point of the Japanese U-Go offensive into India in 1944 during the Second World War. Referred to as the “Stalingrad of the East”, the Japanese were defeated in Burma and never recovered from it.

Nubia is a region along the Nile river encompassing the area between the first cataract of the Nile (just south of Aswan in southern Egypt) and the confluence of the Blue and White Niles (in Khartoum in central Sudan). It was the seat of one of the earliest civilisations of ancient Africa, the Kerma culture, which lasted from around 2500 BC until its conquest by the Egypt around 1500 BC.

Nubia was home to several empires, most prominently the Kingdom of Kush, which conquered Egypt in the eighth century BC.

One of Picasso’s most famous works and arguably the first cubist painting. The mask-like faces of the figures unmistakably echo the aesthetics of African art.