The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages.

The Rosetta Disk fits in the palm of your hand, yet it contains over 13,000 pages of information on over 1,500 human languages. The pages are microscopically etched and then electroformed in solid nickel, a process that raises the text very slightly - about 100 nanometers - off of the surface of the disk. Each page is only 400 microns across - about the width of 5 human hairs - and can be read through a microscope at 650X as clearly as you would from print in a book. Individual pages are visible at a much lower magnification of 100X. The outer ring of text reads "Languages of the World" in eight major world languages. We have now engineered a special numbered edition of the Rosetta Disk, shown in the image below, that can be yours as a gift for joining The Long Now Foundation as a Lifetime Member. Proceeds support the Rosetta Project and our work to build the largest open, publicly accessible collection of resources on the world's languages.

The graphic below is an interactive version of the Rosetta Disk that gives you an idea what it is like to browse the contents of an actual Rosetta Disk through a microscope.

Very few Gentiles have a chance to see the Word of God without translation.

These Manuscripts have been carefully copied by our Jewish friends from around the world for the last 3,500 years.
Among the Jewish community there is no argument about the correct “translation”. They have the original Word of God without translation which has been so carefully copied, that if a Sefer Torah is written according to Halacha STaM (the law of the Sofer) it is .00004 (four one hundred thousands) in “world wide agreement correct”. A Sefer Torah contains 304,805 Hebrew letters and only six can not be agreed upon.

Basic formula for ink
(The following recipe is from the International Stam Forum stamforum.com/2012/03/dyo-making.html
This will produce about 2 quarts of fine, durable ink.

3 oz oak galls
1 oz logwood shavings
2.2 oz gum arabic
1.9 oz copperas

The trick to making really, really good iron gall ink is long, slow cooking of the galls and logwood. Some recipes I’ve seen call for just tossing all four ingredients together in a jar of water and allowing it to ‘macerate’ for a few weeks. This is great if you want to write with a disappointingly grey ink. However, if you’re like me and want an rich, deep black ink, straight from the bottle then we need to prepare the ingredients a bit more.

Stage One:
Assemble, weigh and prepare the ingredients for cooking.

This is a closeup of the actual Torah scroll at my synagogue. It's written with a natural ink designed for preservation on deerskin vellum (deerskin is very unusual but allowed). The scroll was written by hand in the 1700's and used regularly by a synagogue in Europe until stolen by the Nazis (who murdered all the residents of the village) and put in a warehouse for decades.

It was donated to a nearby synagogue likely in the 1960's, then transferred to us. It lives in a cabinet that has no special environmental controls. The scroll consists of sections of vellum stitched together then rolled up on wooden rollers. It is tied shut with a ribbon then covered with a cloth and stored upright.

enter image description here

This scroll is handled regularly. Many synagogues pull out their scrolls and read them several times a week (they often have several scrolls they rotate), others less often. Any given scroll might be exposed to air and movement a couple dozen times a year. We use implements to touch the writing so our hands do not leave oil and dirt, and the scrolls are handled with care, but basically there isn't a lot of special treatment. We never wear gloves or anything like that.

There is some maintenance involved, but nothing major. The scrolls should be cleaned every few years. The covers get replaced now and then. I'm not sure if our wooden rollers are original (probably not) but every 100 years wouldn't be unreasonable for replacing them (your society could use a more durable material, like metal).

So this scroll which is around 250 years old is definitely fading and has a couple of stains and the vellum is eroding a bit on the edges. But it's still in use and is completely readable.

“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
Frederick Douglass | July 5, 1852
the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. , you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon.

“Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved.”

Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary.
The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now.

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too — great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.

They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.
hey were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit.

Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men shout — “We have Washington to our father.” — Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.

The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft-interred with their bones.

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic, are distinctly heard on the other. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment.

In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:

God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,

And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered fights again
Restore.

Before the arrival of reliable, easy-to-use LED displays like the Monsanto MAN-1, companies came up with a vast array of impractical methods to display numbers and characters. Projection displays, such as the one shown here, are one of these fringe display types, and were designed to compete directly with the neon filled Nixie tubes that were the leading display of the time. Also known as a "One Plane Readout" or "In Line Display", these devices were invented by IEE in 1956 for use in their proprietary industrial control systems; the devices proved so popular with customers that IEE began producing and selling the displays as a stand-alone product.

A projection display functions like a miniature slide projector, only the "slides" are numbers, each with its own separate lamp for electrical control. In this IEE display, light from one of 12 different lamps is projected through one of 12 focusing lenses, which directs the light beam onto the appropriate number mask. Light exiting the digit mask passes through a second set of lenses, which bends the light to project the image of the digit mask onto the center of a fogged plastic screen at the front of the display.

Projection displays are complex devices with numerous parts, and were expensive to manufacture compared to a Nixie tube.

The design decisions behind the popular operating system
Tim Paterson
Seattle Computer Products
The purpose of a personal computer operating system is to provide the user with basic control of the machine. A less obvious function is to furnish the user with a high-level, machine-independent interface for application programs, so that those programs can run on two dissimilar machines, despite the differences in their peripheral hardware. Having designed an 8086 microprocessor card for the S-100 bus and not finding an appropriate disk operating system on the market, Seattle Computer Products set about designing MS-DOS. Today MS-DOS is the most widely used disk operating system for personal computers based on Intel's 8086 and 8088 microprocessors.

Four World War One battleships sunk in Scapa Flow in Orkney in 1919 are being sold on eBay - with an asking price of just over £800,000.

The vessels, which were part of the German High Seas fleet, were deliberately scuttled 100 years ago.
the seller explained that they had been bought from a defunct salvage company.

The ships - the Markgraf, Karlsruhe, Konig and Kronprinz Wilhelm - are scheduled monuments, which recreational divers are not supposed to enter.

But Drew Crawford, agent for retired Tayside diving contractor Tommy Clark, said the owner of the wrecks would be allowed to access them.

They cannot be removed from the seabed.

Mr Crawford told BBC Radio Orkney it might be possible to obtain licences to retrieve artefacts from the ships, although the commercial salvage of the wrecks themselves would no longer be allowed.

He said: "The wrecks ended up under the ownership of Scapa Flow Salvage.

"That company went into receivership and they were put out for tender at the time, and Mr Clark purchased them from the receiver.

"There's a sense of pride associated with these absolutely iconic vessels, but ultimately he's come to a time in his life where he's not going to do anything further with them, so it's a case of passing the baton on to the next owner."

In waters off Orkney a century ago, 52 German warships were sunk in one day - but this huge naval loss was not inflicted by enemy forces.

Instead the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet in Scapa Flow was a deliberate act of sabotage ordered by a commander who refused to let his ships become the spoils of war.

It was the single greatest loss of warships in history and the nine German sailors killed that day were the last to die during World War One. The final peace treaty was signed just a week later.

After the fighting in WW1 ended in November 1918, the entire German fleet was ordered to gather together in the Firth of Forth, near Edinburgh, to be "interned" by Allied forces.
Image copyright Courtesy Orkney Library and Archive
Image caption

Nine German battleships, five battlecruisers, seven light cruisers and 49 destroyers - the most modern ships of the German High Seas Fleet - were handed over to the victorious forces off the east of Scotland.

Within a week, the 70 German ships were escorted to the sheltered waters of Scapa Flow, off Orkney, where they and four other vessels were held while the details of the peace talks were worked out.

"The ships were not actually surrendered and that's why there were no British troops on board them to prevent them being scuttled," Tom Muir from Orkney Museum told BBC Radio Scotland's When the Fleet Went Down. "They were German government property and remained that throughout their time here."

The German commander, Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, was not kept informed of what was happening outside of his ships.
On the morning of Sunday 21 June 1919, the British fleet took advantage of good weather to steam out of the harbour on exercise. At 10:30, von Reuter's flagship, Emden, sent out the seemingly innocuous message - "Paragraph Eleven; confirm". It was a code ordering his men to scuttle their own ships.

The "paragraph eleven" signal, using semaphore and searchlights, took a while to reach all the ships because they were positioned right across the vast flow. "They would have waited and like a wave it went through the ships from north to south," says Mr Muir.

Beneath decks, German sailors began to open seacocks - valves that allow water in - and smash pipes. Mr Muir says: "They had all been deliberately flooded from one side first so that they would turn over and sink because they believed it would make it more difficult for them to salvage them."

By 17:00, most of the German High Seas Fleet had disappeared beneath the surface of Scapa Flow. The Hindenburg, the biggest German battlecruiser, was the last to sink.

During the 1920s and '30s many of the 52 ships were lifted from the sea bed by commercial contractors and broken up.

The seven wrecks that remain are now classed as scheduled monuments, nationally important archaeological sites given protection against unauthorised change.

"The scuttling of the German fleet removed them from being a bargaining chip in peace negotiations but it was seen as a hostile act by the British," says Mr Muir. "In Germany it was seen as a way of restoring some honour. The navy had not let the ships fall into enemy hands."

A senior German officer declared at the time that this act had wiped away the "stain of surrender" from the German fleet.

Americans in 1913 showed by their votes they had forgotten the purpose of the Framers’ design for the Senate. We've done even worse. //

We have forgotten so much of what Americans once knew about America. To choose just one example—a simple but telling one—there is the name of the city of Cincinnati. //

Once upon a time, every American knew quite a bit about the men known as the Cincinnati—and about the man they were named for. That man was George Washington.

Washington was celebrated as “Cincinnatus.” He earned that name by being an astonishing example of republican virtue. //

He then again astonished the world by declining to serve a third term, leaving office in 1797 and retiring to Mount Vernon, a private citizen once more.

It was for these actions specifically that Washington was known as Cincinnatus. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a hero of the Roman Republic. In the fifth century B.C., the Roman Senate called on Cincinnatus to lead the army of the republic against foreign invaders. After leading the army to victory, he resigned his commission and retired to his farm. //

So, who were the Cincinnati? The Cincinnati were the officers who served with Washington in the Revolutionary War. They were bright with fame because they reflected the glory of their leader. In 1783, they founded the Society of the Cincinnati, and the city was named in their honor in 1790. //

The Founders would say we no longer have a federal system, that the 17th Amendment in effect overthrew the 10th Amendment. Here is the 10th: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” //

Lord Acton, the great scholar of the history of liberty, agreed with them: “Federalism: It is coordination instead of subordination; association instead of hierarchical order; independent forces curbing each other; balance, therefore, liberty.” //

Direct election of U.S. senators undermined this critically important protection of liberty.

During World War I, the British and Americans faced a serious threat from German U-boats, which were sinking allied shipping at a dangerous rate. All attempts to camouflage ships at sea had failed, as the appearance of the sea and sky are always changing. Any color scheme that was concealing in one situation was conspicuous in others. A British artist and naval officer, Norman Wilkinson, promoted a new camouflage scheme. Instead of trying to conceal the ship, it simply broke up its lines and made it more difficult for the U-boat captain to determine the ship's course. The British called this camouflage scheme "Dazzle Painting." The Americans called it "Razzle Dazzle."U-boats did not aim their torpedos directly at a ship to sink it. Because the target was moving, it was necessary to aim ahead of its path in order for the torpedo to arrive in the correct spot at the same time as the ship. If the torpedo is too early or too late, it will miss. The primary goal of dazzle painting was to confuse the U-boat commander who was trying to observe the course and speed of his target. As you can see in the photo of the French Cruiser "Gloire" on the left, contrasting diagonal stripes can make it hard to see just which direction the ship's bow is pointing. The American merchant ship "Mahomet" is another example. How many bows can one ship have?

It took staff at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris 23 minutes to discover the fire that gutted the historic 850-year-old icon. //

Professor Peter McPhee, a specialist in French history at the University of Melbourne, said he feared "that the sheer heat of that fire may have chemically compromised some of the masonry" in the historic building.

Likewise, the centuries-old timber within the building's internal structure, much of which was crafted into an intricate support structure by medieval artisans, may be irreplaceable.

"One of the extraordinary things about Notre Dame was that ... an estimated 13,000 trees had been felled to create this delicate timber infrastructure," he said.

"Those trees had been saplings in the 10th century, they were mature trees by the 12th century when they were felled. They're the beams that caught fire and then brought the lead roof down with them.

"Is it possible to recreate that kind of medieval artisan work with timber on that scale? Or in fact is that the great compromise you'd make?"

As fire ripped through France's iconic cathedral, stone vaults developed in the Middle Ages kept it from being destroyed beyond repair. //

According to architectural historians, the cathedral's medieval stone vaults — which served as a buffer for the fire after it burned through the wooden roof — had a hand in this.

Here's how an innovation developed in the 12th century held Notre Dame together, and what we can expect in terms of restoring the world's most famous Gothic cathedral of the Middle Ages.

Dr Robert Bork, an architectural historian at the University of Iowa, told the ABC the cathedral boasts some of the earliest six-part vaults used in the 12th century. //

Innovation and exploration in the Middle Ages resulted in the creation of wider vaults that would better allow for elaborate windows than previous Romanesque churches, he explained.

The general principle of a vault, Dr Bork explained, is the same as that behind an arch, which sees lots of stones that are relatively small work to span a large space.

"So, in Notre Dame, [these stones] cross the span which is about 14 metres across on the inside, and they're all essentially wedged together so that when gravity pulls down on each of those little stones, [the structure] is held into place by the friction of its neighbours in a kind of wedging action."

What this means, Dr Bork said, is that the complete arch or vault will weigh heavily down as well as pushing outwards, and this is where buttresses — which work to reinforce walls — come in to restrain the outward push.

Had Notre Dame not had these stone vaults, Dr Bork said it was "quite likely" we would be looking at an almost completely destroyed cathedral.

"The vaults are designed to be in dialogue with the buttressing system of the building … and if [Notre Dame] didn't have them, the buttresses would have just had brick walls and in cases where you just have a timber roof building and the roof burns off, frequently those walls will collapse."

the roof of the building was supposed to be made up of large concrete sails - a visually arresting but logistically very tricky plan. An even more ambitious design, with flatter sails, had already been ruled out.

What it needed was a strong arch that would be able to support exactly the amount of pressure from the concrete. So he set to work.

Bertony spent the next half a year working on the calculations for that arch support, solving 30,000 different complex equations by hand. Those notes, which are now on display in Sydney's Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, were all neatly and methodically laid out.

"He was a brilliant mathematician," Ms Pitt says. "He did those 30,000 hand-rendered mathematical equations in six months, which is a very short period of time - and that's all he did. He would eat, breathe and sleep the Sydney Opera House."

Ms Pitt says that occasionally, despite years having passed, he would still be in awe of what he had helped to create.

"The last time I drove with him across the Harbour Bridge, he glanced over to the right to the opera house as he was driving and said: 'I still can't believe I did that.'"

It is being hailed as a lucky accident, after salvage teams searching for containers that fell off a ship in a storm discovered a 16th Century shipwreck on the North Sea floor.

The ship, dating back to 1540, was filled with a cargo of copper plates and some of them were put on display on Wednesday when the find was revealed.

It was owned by the Fugger family, one of Europe's richest banking families.

The wreck is being described as "the missing link" in shipping construction.

"It's the way the ship was built that's very interesting because you have to think 100 years later the Netherlands was in the middle of its Golden Age - and this ship is from a transition period," maritime archaeologist Martijn Manders told the BBC.

Although it is still on the seabed, divers intend to revisit the ship during the summer. It is considered to be the oldest seafaring ship ever found in Dutch waters. //

so far the salvage teams have lifted some of the copper cargo along with three wooden planks and 12 wooden ribs from the ship's frame.

Underwater archaeologist Martijn Manders said the early 16th Century ship marked a period of transition in medieval history, when shipbuilders moved away from the traditional clinker-type model of overlapping timber.

This ship too had elements of the old period, but featured the newer carvel system, with a hull made of planks flush at the seams.

Experts believe the 30m by 7m ship could have been carrying as much as 5,000kg (five tonnes) of copper.

A copper expert from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has identified the chemical substance in the cargo as identical to the first copper coins used in the Netherlands.

Copper coins were at the time being developed as a lower-cost alternative to gold and silver, and it now appears that copper from the mines in Slovakia was being used as currency in the Netherlands.

Description:

GC&CS Sixta History. An account of the work of the Traffic Analysis Party at Bletchley Park. This was named SIXTA (Hut 6 Traffic Analysis) in November 1943 for its analysis role in supporting Hut 6 (Army and Air Force)
Date: 1939 Sep 01 - 1945 Aug 30
Held by: Creating government department or its successor, not available at The National Archives
Legal status: Public Record(s)
Closure status: Closed Or Retained Document, Open Description
Access conditions: Retained by Department under Section 3.4

It will be understood from the nature of the Enigma machine that, having been given a replica Enigma by the Poles, complete with a set of rotors and their internal wiring, the task confronting Dillwyn Knox and Alan Turing, the primary British cryptanalysts, was to determine the particular settings of the Enigma machine used to encipher a particular message. Turing and Knox considered three possible methods of attack:

How to encrypt/decrypt with Enigma

We'll start with a step-by-step guide to decrypting a known message. You can see the result of these steps in CyberChef here. Let's say that our message is as follows:

XTSYN WAEUG EZALY NRQIM AMLZX MFUOD AWXLY LZCUZ QOQBQ JLCPK NDDRW F

And that we've been told that a German service Enigma is in use with the following settings:

Rotors III, II, and IV, reflector B, ring settings (Ringstellung in German) KNG, plugboard (Steckerbrett)AH CO DE GZ IJ KM LQ NY PS TW, and finally the rotors are set to OPM.

Enigma settings are generally given left-to-right. Therefore, you should ensure the 3-rotor Enigma is selected in the first dropdown menu, and then use the dropdown menus to put rotor III in the 1st rotor slot, II in the 2nd, and IV in the 3rd, and pick B in the reflector slot. In the ring setting and initial value boxes for the 1st rotor, put K and O respectively, N and P in the 2nd, and G and M in the 3rd. Copy the plugboard settings AH CO DE GZ IJ KM LQ NY PS TW into the plugboard box. Finally, paste the message into the input window.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, according to the 2019 Forbes billionaires' list released this week. With an estimated fortune of $131bn (£99bn) he is the wealthiest man in modern history.

But he is by no means the richest man of all time.

That title belongs to Mansa Musa, the 14th Century West African ruler who was so rich his generous handouts wrecked an entire country's economy.

"Contemporary accounts of Musa's wealth are so breathless that it's almost impossible to get a sense of just how wealthy and powerful he truly was," Rudolph Butch Ware, associate professor of history at the University of California, told the BBC.

Mansa Musa was "richer than anyone could describe", Jacob Davidson wrote about the African king for Money.com in 2015.
The 10 richest men of all time

1. Mansa Musa (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth incomprehensible
2. Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD, Roman emperor) $4.6tn (£3.5tn)]
3. Zhao Xu (1048-1085, emperor Shenzong of Song in China) wealth incalculable
4. Akbar I (1542-1605, emperor of India's Mughal dynasty) wealth incalculable
5. Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, Scottish-American industrialist) $372bn
6. John D Rockefeller (1839-1937) American business magnate) $341bn
7. Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (1868-1918, Tsar of Russia) $300bn
8. Mir Osman Ali Khan ( 1886-1967, Indian royal) $230bn
9. William The Conqueror (1028-1087) $229.5bn
10. Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, long-time ruler of Libya) $200bn

///

Note that the only two private citizens on the list (non-royalty or heads of state) were products of the American experiment.