--- title: Ancient times and famous stories — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Ancient times and famous stories», a lesson of the myths course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Isaac is sure the pyramids were built by whipped slaves, Leila knows thumbs down meant death in the arena, and Lucy's cartoon shows cavemen --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Myths](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/) / Ancient times and famous stories # Ancient times and famous stories Lesson 21 of the myths course of Mova's primary school: 19 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/0/) — Isaac is sure the pyramids were built by whipped slaves, Leila knows thumbs down meant death in the arena, and Lucy's cartoon shows cavemen riding dinosaurs. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/1/) — Films and cartoons have painted the past in bright, wrong colours. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/2/) — Archaeologists (people who dig up and study old remains) dig up the real clues: bread ovens and workers' graves beside the pyramids, flakes of old paint on Greek statues, Stone Age huts in open fields, and court records from Salem. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/3/) — Ancient Greek statues, for example, were painted in bright reds, blues and golds; the paint wore off over two thousand years, and later people copied the bare white stone and thought that was the look. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/4/) — Some old stories are half true: Troy was a real city, but the wooden horse is a legend; frogs really were dropped into milk in some villages, but nobody proved it kept the milk fresh. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/5/) — When a mate says "everyone knows", ask "what did they dig up?" and "who first told it?"; and if they turn out to be half right, say so. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/6/) — Evidence near the Giza pyramids, such as workers' villages, bakeries and their own tombs, suggests they were mostly built by paid and fed Egyptian workers, some doing a duty to the king; historians still discuss the details. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/7/) — Many gladiators were expensive trained fighters, and many fights did not end in death; nobody knows exactly which thumb signal the Romans used, and "thumbs down means kill" was made famous by a painting from 1872. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/8/) — A Roman vomitorium was a wide passage that let crowds pour out of a stadium or theatre, not a room for being sick. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/9/) — Ancient Greek and Roman statues were often painted in bright colours; scientists find traces of the paint with special lights and microscopes. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/10/) — Troy was a real city in what is now Turkey, but there is no evidence for the wooden horse, which comes from ancient poems and legends. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/11/) — Stonehenge was begun about 5,000 years ago, more than 2,000 years before the Druids (priests of the ancient Celts) are first mentioned in history. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/12/) — Stone Age people mostly lived in huts, tents and camps in the open; caves were used for shelter at times and for paintings. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/13/) — In the Salem witch trials of 1692, nineteen people were hanged and one man was crushed to death with stones; nobody was burned there, though witches were burned in some other countries. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/14/) — Paul Revere's ride was meant to be secret, and the colonists (people living in Britain's lands in America) then thought of themselves as British; he is reported to have warned that "the Regulars are coming out", meaning the British army soldiers. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/15/) — The famous "The British are coming!" version comes mostly from a poem written in 1860, long after the ride. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/16/) — The last big dinosaurs died out about 66 million years ago, and humans appeared only about 300,000 years ago. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/17/) — In some Russian and Finnish villages before fridges, people are reported to have dropped a live frog into milk; scientists later found germ-fighting substances in the skin of one kind of frog, but nobody has shown it kept milk fresh, and it is not a safe idea. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/21-ancient-times-and-famous-stories/18/) — A film, a painting or a poem made long after the event is a story, not evidence. - ← previous: [Explorers, scientists and inventors](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/20-explorers-scientists-and-inventors/) - next →: [Food on the floor and kitchen rules](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/22-food-on-the-floor-and-kitchen-rules/) - ↑ back to [Myths](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/)