History's most famous military ruse is completely absent from Homer's Iliad, which ends before Troy even falls. Homer barely gave the wooden horse a passing nod in The Odyssey, leaving the dramatic story we know today to Roman poet Virgil writing seven centuries later. Ancient Greek pottery even depicted the machine with bizarre window portholes, and modern archaeologists suspect the whole myth was just a mistranslated Phoenician trade ship. More

In 585 BCE, fighting between the Medes and Lydians ground to an immediate halt when midday turned into complete darkness. Both armies saw the solar eclipse as a direct order from above, dropped their weapons, and brokered peace through a royal marriage. The legend that Thales accurately predicted the exact day was added later by historians giving early science a victory lap. More

Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt around 30 BCE, roughly 2,500 years after workers finished the Great Pyramid of Giza around 2560 BCE. The Apollo 11 crew touched down on the lunar surface in 1969 CE, approximately 2,000 years after her death. She was centuries closer to watching live television broadcasts of astronauts than to watching her own famous monument go up. More