Camp Gagnon - Ancient Egypt Expert on The Pyramids, Cleopatra, & Freemasonry

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

We've got Professor Joseph Manning of Yale University back in the tent today to answer all the Ancient Egypt questions you've always wanted to ask. What did the Egyptians know about Atlantis and how did they build the famed pyramids after all? Were King Tut and Cleopatra overrated? And is the Alexandria Library fire a myth? Professor Manning is back to explain it all. WELCOME TO CAMP! 🏕️ JOIN S'MORE CAMP INNER SANCTUM HERE: https://camp.beehiiv.com/ Shoutout to our sponsors Morgan&Morgan and Bluechew TIMECODES 0:00 Intro 0:54 Unknown Findings In Egypt 4:54 Egypts Famine 6:39 Could Farmers Write? 8:31 Timeframe of Ancient Egypt 12:28 King Tut 16:01 Where Did Egyptians Get Horses? 17:24 Regaining Control 21:20 Cleopatra Reign 24:57 Cleopatra's Death + Importance of Understanding Time 31:22 Why Do Some Records Last Longer Than Others? 36:02 How Much Writing Have We Found? 40:45 The First Pyramid 50:50 Materials For Pyramids 51:43 Obelisk 57:34 Freemasonry 1:03:09 First Egyptian Dynasty 1:05:35 Atlantis Story 1:09:30 Most Documented Egyptian Era + Scribes 1:15:33 Corruption of Scribes 1:19:19 Everyday Life of Egyptian Citizens 1:20:24 Importance of Property + Egyptian Lawyers 1:26:14 Gender Roles In Egypt 1:29:46 Cleopatra Records + Greek Influence 1:34:08 Lighthouse of Alexandria 1:35:58 Ptolemaic Navy 1:37:38 The Library of Alexandria 1:42:18 Cleopatra’s Dream 1:49:24 What Were The Pyramids Built For?

Who actually built the pyramids? And what were they for? Who could read the hieroglyphs? Did people have literacy in ancient Egypt? Who were the pharaoh? Who was Cleopatra? What was life like as just an average person living in the Nile Valley at the time? And what were the battles that the early Egyptian military was fighting?

And how did they win? Well, today, all of these questions and more will be answered because I've got the very, very interesting. Dr. Joseph Manning. He's a professor of history at Yale with his specialty in ancient Egypt. And today he's answering every question you've ever had. He explains the early kingdom to the middle kingdom, the new kingdom, all the way up to the Greek dynasty in Egypt. This is an absolutely fascinating episode. Just come chill with me, nerd out about some Egyptian history, and welcome to camp.

I'm really excited to have you here. Thank you. It's great to be here, Mark. Dr. Manning, which I'm not allowed to call you, I have to call you Professor Manning or Joseph. Or Joe. Or Joe. Or Joe. I just, again, I always have this thing with professors or academics where it's like, you put in all the time, you put on all the effort, you get the diploma, and then some schlub like me, some comedians going to be like, hey, Joey, you know what I mean? It just feels like, but if you insist, I'll call you. It's contact. So we're among friends here, because this is a conversation. My boy, you're my dog. On the street, it better be professor. Of course. Yeah. But here. Yeah, okay. All right. It's contact. While we're in the tend to friendship. you can be Joe.

Thank you, man. You can call me Dr. Gagnon. Okay. Yes, sure. Yeah, I wonder if we're just picking up names. I'm excited to talk about all things, Egypt. I have so many bizarre and interesting questions. And we spoke a little bit on the phone,

and you just were a wealth of knowledge. And I'm really excited just to jump in. So I'm really curious if you can kind of like just take us away. My initial thing that I would love to start on, broadly speaking, what is a specific document or artifact from ancient Egypt that you've looked at or analyzed that you think more people should know about or is interesting to you for a specific reason. Is there anything that sticks out immediately? Lots, but immediately I would say go across the river to the Metropolitan Museum and in a dark corner that no one visits,

there's a series of letters by a farmer back to his family from 2000 BC at a time of now river failure and looming famine. So there's a lot of urgency in the letters. He's away on business. He's a way on business. And he writes to his family these instructions very detailed about how to survive, how to run the family farm, go out and rent land there, grow that crop, that land next to the house. He should grow X, Y, and he lays out a budget for the food for the entire household into the household of something like 19 people. He's married a second time. He has a young wife in the house, and the X is also still in the house. Hell yeah. Let's go playboy. Yeah, I mean.

And his youngest son from the second wife is a spoiled brat that comes through really clearly. He gets a lot of extra food and a lot of extra attention. In other words, an entire household from 2000 BC, which is rare anywhere in the world, is completely exposed to us. It's an extraordinary. There's three letters. We don't know if they were sent because they were found in a tomb in Phoebs, which is where he was. his home was some distance away. So at a time of famine, at a really important time in Egyptian history, these were so interesting,

the Agatha Christie, when these were found, her husband, Max Malawan, was a pretty well-known nearest and archaeologist. So she was somewhere in the Near East, whether it was Egypt of the Near East, but she heard about this fine, and these things were translated pretty quickly. She wrote a novel based on these texts called Death Comes a, says the end. It was really cool. She was so struck by it. So it is rare from 2000 BC, middle of what we call the Bronze Age, to have a household detailed, 19 members, we have names, we have a budget, we have instructions about how to survive. He even urges them on by saying, I hear they're eating

people now. That is cannibalism happening. Probably an exaggeration. That was like the Fox News at the time. That was a little bit like, people, reading people out here. Yeah, yeah. You better get your shit together now because we're going around our food. So there's a sense of urgency, but also they're very touching letters. I mean, they're beautiful as well. No one visits these things. Literally, last time I saw them, it's in a dark corner that everyone wants to look at, you know, stone statues or tombs or whatever. And here are these, this is real life, life on the ground, real people.

How interesting. It's, it is a fascinating group of letters. What else do we know about the famine of that time? Was that a sort of like one-off disparate famine that affected a small area? Was this a widespread famine? That one specifically that he was writing about. We don't actually know from that far back. The estimates are actual famines in ancient Egypt, probably similar to medieval times, because we have good records then.

And about once a century, a real famine where people are dropping dead in large numbers. Food crises, food shortages, probably relatively more common than very. than that, but, you know, once a century focuses the mind. And there's a lot of texts that say, last time the Nile failed to flood for two years in a row, there was a real famine. So, oh, my God, we might be on the verge again. The thing is that Egyptians don't actually know. They don't know the source of the river, which is their lifeblood.

And they don't know enough about when the Nile will fail or not. So every year, at the low ebb, there must have been kind of a worry that maybe there's no flood this year. You know, do we have enough stored for a year? What about for two years? And you can store food in Egypt. We should remember maybe a couple years. Okay. So that's your, that's your resilience. That's your padding. They had like a couple years and things. Yeah, grain storage and you could distribute a little bit. Temples or big areas for grain storage. The king could distribute a bit. And people in households, like the elites in towns and villages also had grain store. So they were expected to open up to everybody in time of crisis, which is really interesting.

Interesting. So there was a lot of, there was safe guards around this really strange river that has a lot of variability year by year, which I don't understand. And was it, was it common for farmers to know how to write at that time? Like literacy amongst farmers seems like, if I had to wager a guess, I would say pretty low. You're exactly right. So this guy, these letters are written by, you know, sort of middling class guy. He was a funerary priest for some aristocrat. That's why he was on business. So either he wrote them or he had a scribe write them. I mean, often that happened as well. But literacy rates and ancient needs of kind of broadly speaking, we think, is something like 1%. Oh, wow. Yeah. So really, really low. It's just the elite

class. That's interesting. Of people. Could they read hieroglyphs easier? No. Those are actually the really exotic ones. Only a few priests knew how to read. Those are very restricted. So, so interesting. So hieroglyph's sacred writing, literally,

was quite restricted, which is why Egyptian sort of dies out in the end because few and few people could actually read hieroglyphic right now. As opposed to the cursive stuff that these letters are written in kind of like our cursive handwriting.

On like a papyrus scroll or something like that. That would be a little bit more broadly accessible. A little bit more. That's interesting. A little bit more. So if I took a time machine back 2,000 years ago, And I had a papyrus scroll and I'd grab a random Egyptian. I was like, yo, what does this say?

They'd be like, I don't know. They would. And then even furthermore, if I took 10 random Egyptians and brought them into a tomb, it was like, what do these hieroglyphs say? They would just kind of look around and be like, we don't have no idea. What are we doing here? Weird. In my mind, like, I guess we have this warped idea that like, oh, Egyptians speak in hieroglyphs.

So they know what all this shit means. They can speak. They're speaking the language. But writing was a very restricted technology. Let's think of it that way. Very restricted to elites and to certain class. as a priest. There's not all priests were literate, probably either. And most kings, or at least many kings, were probably not literate. Wow. Not a lot. So it was a very restricted technology. That's interesting. Now, these letters come from 2000 BC. 2000 BC, yeah. Can you just give me like a little bit of a timeline, like a window that we could look at as far as like, when are the pyramids of Giza created? When are like the proto-Egyptians walking around? When does Cleopatra come in? Just to kind of like give me a window of time to sort of,

of wrap my head around. Okay, great question. Broad Egyptian history. The Nile Valley is settled sometime after 5,000 BC or so. Maybe a bit before then, it gradually fills out once the Nile River starts flooding more regularly. In the early coming out of the last ice age, there were wild Niles. You couldn't manage the river at all.

It's really high flooding. So it took a while to settle down. Agriculture comes around that time. Agriculture comes late to Egypt. It's 9,000 BC in the Near East. It's more like 5,000 BC in Egypt or so. And then once agriculture gets going, though, it's civilization happens quite rapidly.

So 3,100 or so BC is when we think civilization gets organized, the first state, the first unified polity or state in Egypt. Pyramids 2,500 BC or so. At the Giza, the Great Pyramid, let's say, is something like 2,500 BC, the Old Kingdom, this first phase of centralized political control goes away after about 500 years. It's a period of 100, 150 years of no state, really. People are still there and possibly quite liking that there's no state coming around because the state means the tax man. Right.

Taxman usually with guys with pointy sticks following, saying give us the tax money. State probably also means a little bit of defense, some security. Exactly, yeah. Kind of give or take. Exactly. Yeah, that's the bargain. I always, when I'm teaching classes around this stuff, it is, it is mafia family or early states. It's protection. It's a protection record. We're going to protect you, but you got to give us half of your, half your agriculture. And then we're good. The Nile Valley offers a little bit of geographical protection, I imagine. It does. It does. If you're going to go on your time machine back to anywhere in the world where you get to be king and therefore you're going to have revenue from taxes, Egypt. would be the place. You take Egypt. Oh, for sure, 100%. It's the best natural taxing environment in the world. Just look at a satellite image of Egypt. Thin now River Valley, 20 miles wide, big deserts on both

sides. So you have farmers sitting in that space. They don't like to be in the desert. So they're captured by the environment. It's perfect. If you're an elite person who wants tax revenue, that is grain usually in ancient Egypt. It is, it is the most natural taxing, environment on the planet. And the desert offers a little bit of protection from invaders and things like that. So you save on the security and then you also just get really fertile land that can't spread too far into the West. Yeah, it's quite manageable. Wow. It's a really good environment for an early state. Okay. For kings. 1941, Hitler took command of the German army. In 1997, Titanic premiered in the theaters.

1777, George Washington led troops into the winter quarters of Valley. forged. There's all these explanations for everything that's going on in our newsletter. That's right. That's where I learned all this. You go on a first date and you're talking to a grill. You're like, hey, did you know? 1941. Hitler took over Germany today. Whoa. And she's probably like, that's you, you're an awesome guy. You could be the most interesting person on every date. Get laid easier and make more friends if you subscribe to the newsletter. And not only that, I'm sure you've seen. I've been wearing merch. I've been wearing sick. Brand new merch on episodes of Flagrant. I'm sitting right next to 50 cent in this picture right here, wearing brand.

brand new merch, everything that's going on in the camp world, in my world, and in our world is going on in the newsletter. Smoor Camp, click on the link in the description below, and I'll see you there. Let's get back to the show. So we get the pyramids around 2,500. Yep. When does King Tut happen? Did we know anything about King Tut?

We just always hear his name. King Tut. Yeah, he gets a really good press. He was like 15, right? Yeah, he doesn't deserve the press he gets, actually. He has a pretty good tomb, which is literally a hole in the ground because he was buried pretty quickly. But he's in the New Kingdom. So these letters at the Met that I was talking about, that's the Middle Kingdom, the next phase, the classical phase of Egyptian civilization, we call it.

Lots of wonderful literature that's being generated in this classical period. It's the first literature used as political propaganda in the world in the Middle Kingdom. What does that look like? They're amazing story, adventure stories, the tale of sinewase, the classic one that was very popular, even much later in Egyptian history. about a kind of a courtier physician who overhears about a coup plot to kill the king, which does happen a lot in Egypt. That's the downside of being a king. He has a target on your back often.

He leaves Egypt out of panic, wanders the Near East for years, becomes a famous physician, because Egypt was famous for medical practices, gets called back, gets forgiven by the following king, the son, and comes back to Egypt because he's getting ready to die, and the only place for an Egyptian to be buried is Egypt, of course. You can't conceive of. So the whole story, its adventure story is an Egyptian success story abroad, but the lesson is Egypt is for Egyptians.

You have to return to Egypt if you're outside. And it's propaganda in the sense that it is literature about what the state is and the hierarchy and the expectations of courtiers to the king and so on. It gives an entire social hierarchy in this text. So it's really interesting literature. It's a whole series of these stories generated by Middle Kingdom scribes. So it's literature that basically reinforces the cultural status of what it means to be Egyptian. Yeah, it gives you definitely exactly. If you call yourself an Egyptian, that means you have to be.

buried in Egypt. And so in order to be buried in Egypt, you got to stick around Egypt. Is that sort of more or less the message? Yeah. There's no, why would you be anywhere else? Right. If you're in Egyptian. Don't take your talents to Jordan. Don't go to Lebanon. Just stay right here. Yeah. So it's the best place. And it's a place where there's a just king who protects everybody. And he's loyal to you if you're loyal to him. And Sunuhei, the hero of the story, comes back to an amazing welcome by the king, but also this amazing burial. that he gets. So all's well in the end. But that's the lesson of what a state is. It reinforces the state the state is good. And so a lot of that literature comes out of the classical middle kingdom. That's right. And what is the first one called? The five thousand. The old kingdom. That's the

old kingdom and then the middle kingdom. And then that would bring us then to. Bring us to Tut and the empire period and the new kingdom around 1,300, 1350 BC or so at its height. Okay. And that's Cleopatra? No, no. We're not even there. We're only halfway through, man. We're at the Egypt as one of the first empires in the world in the New Kingdom. It's the most powerful state, certainly in the West. It's powerful mainly because of its chariot.

Charitory, it's horse and chariot technology, which is cutting edge technology in the ancient world. Where do they get horses? Horses and chariots both come from the outside, interestingly. They come from Central Asia. They come from the Central Asian steps. spread in all directions in the second millennium BC. Is the Huns? Yeah, like the Mongols?

Yeah, related. All related. Central Asia is a super important driver of a lot of world history. And they start trading with these folks. There's exchange. And they see them on the horseback and they're like, that's pretty sick. Well, yeah. They're invaded by a group that Egyptians called the rulers of hill countries,

the Hicksos in Egyptian. And they come into Egypt. They're similar. They're a parallelist in Chinese history. as well. They come in Egypt, and then they run it for 100 years. Oh, wow. They take it over. And they bring with them the horse and the chariot. The Egyptians, I'd like to imagine there's an Egyptian, like a really smart one who says,

holy shit, this is really good. Yeah. And the Egyptians don't we take it over, but they improve the chariot technology, the axle especially, and they use really exotic materials that only the king can control from all over the Near East and these exotic woods, special kinds of glue they develop. It's extraordinary. They improve the bit of the horse. So they improve the entire horse chariot package, let's say.

And that allows Egypt to control a good chunk of the Near East for a couple hundred years. How does the Egyptian people regain control over Egypt from the Hixos? We have stories. We have tomb biographies, biographies written in tombs of certain high level soldiers who tell us about the reconquest of Egypt. They kick out these horrible foreigners. Oh, wow. And between the middle and new kingdoms, they kick out these invaders and they form this empire.

Partly, they say, so this never happens again. So we never have these foreigners running around Egypt, even though they're always present. Throughout there have been in Egypt and the Delta, especially forever. Interesting. So, again, it's kind of propaganda about who is Egypt for. But we have these narratives of why they kick out the Hixos. But they certainly adapt on the technology. The Egyptian stories tell us the Hixos were these horrible, evil foreigners.

But everything we know about this period is they're kind of running things like good Egyptian pharaohs did. It's not a horrible time, probably. We don't know a lot, but it doesn't seem to be as horrible as the Egyptian text tell us. But I can imagine, though, if you are a culturally homogenous nation, and all of a sudden some outsiders occupying you, you're going to be a little pissed off. Even if they're doing a good job, you're going to be like, what the fuck? Get out of here. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I imagine that these people probably were like a little overextended, like in terms of their territory. Like,

I imagine, I mean, Egypt is a little far from Central Asia. So they might, they might have like some enforcements over there, but you got a little bit of rebellion brewing. Yeah. It might not be the hardest battle to fend off. That's just my high thought. Yeah, that's right. And the horse and charity are coming from Central Asia. The Hicksos are probably, most of these, people were probably in the Delta all along. Oh, the Hikosos were in the Delta. Probably. Probably. Probably. I mean, they're close by. They're probably semi-nomadic peoples, but they're probably in the Delta forever. It's interesting that after, so Tuck goes away, there's two military commanders who become kings at the end of what's called Dynasty 18, the first ruling family of the New

Kingdom. And then the second two dynasties of the New Kingdom, dynasties 19 and 20, Egyptologists are really creative with how they make chronologies. These families are coming from the Eastern Delta also by and large, and they seem to have names that suggest they're also Hixos. And the capital moves to the Eastern Delta, which is exactly where the Hixos were all along. So there's some argument that the ruling families, even in the New Kingdom, have ancestry with these foreign groups. Wow.

So the history that we're given is kind of telling one official story, the complexities, the underlying social reality is probably quite different. And that's what we would call the emperor period. Yeah, empire. The whole new kingdom is the Egyptian empire. And all the famous pharaohs and things that we know more or less come from that period? Yes. Ramsey's.

Exactly. Think Ramsey's the second. Think Yule Brenner, which I always do, because I think he's. He's the best version of Ramsey's the second ever. Okay. Yeah, these are Tudmosis the third, the Napoleon of ancient Egypt, who was a guy maybe 5-1 or something, 5-2. But this great military conquerors on military campaign permanently throughout his reign. Yeah, these are all New Kingdom military conquerors.

That was the ideology. And that's about, what, 1,300? 1,200, 1,200, B.C. It ends in, we know the exact date. 1069. BC, the new kingdom goes away. And then there's a very interesting first millennium period with a lot of foreign rulers, Libyans and others, Nubians from the south at one point. Finally, the last ruling dynasty is the dynasty of Cleopatra, who's the last monarch of the Ptolemaic kingdom, these Macedonians

who come in with Alexander and form the last ruling dynasty. Got it. And what year is that? The dynasty is officially formed in 305 BC. Alexander the Great comes in in the late 320s, mid to late. And Ptolemy, one of his generals, eventually gets the easier by as a province, forms a dynasty in 305. And then Cleopatra is the daughter? No, she's the last of the line of monarchs in 30 BCs. when she commits suicide.

Wow. So there's 200 and whatever that is, 270 years-ish of Ptolemaic rule. Interestingly, the longest ruling dynasty in Egyptian history are the Ptolemy's. Oh, really?

Yeah. Yeah, which I think is always a good thing. The Ptolemies are often, most Egyptologists don't like this period. Greco-Romanesea, but it's not very sexy. It's not ancient Egypt anymore. That's sort of the attitude. But in fact, it is in a lot of ways.

And the Ptolemy's, despite their reputation, lasts the longest of any ruling family under a lot of pressure for various reasons, including Roman pressure constantly. So I always think they're doing something right

if they're lasting almost 300 years. And what contributed to their dynastic succession? Lots of, well, the succession or their success over 300 years? Yeah, like why were they able to rule for so long and pass on this heritage? Yeah, yeah. Well, so one thing that they did was carefully study how Egypt works.

I think they knew. They had really good advisors through the priesthoods. Even with Alexander, before he died, he was in Egypt. And being a good student of Aristotle, I think he was pretty sensitive to different cultures. And so the Ptolemy's adopt this kind of attitude where they prop up Egyptian culture. What's remarkable is look at the temples that are built. under the Ptolemies, for example, lots of great ones that are still standing.

Some of the most beautiful temples ever built in Egypt were built in this period. I think for specific reasons that they're allowing Egyptian culture to flourish. So the best literature we have outside of this classical literature we talked about earlier is coming from the Ptolemaic period. They're copying old texts.

There are lots of new stories. So Egyptian culture is flourishing under the Ptolemies. I think that's on purpose that the Ptolemy's wanted Egypt to flourish. It makes sense because what do rulers want? Revenue, taxes. We want you to flourish. What makes you flourish?

The temples, the priesthoods are a really important cog in the wheel of how Egypt has always worked. So being really sensitive to religious traditions, to temples, you guys can do your thing. No problem, but just we work out a deal where, as usual, we're protecting Egypt, what we expect revenue from the land

of whatever rate. And that works reasonably well, I think, despite, again, the reputation of the Ptolemaic period is not very interesting, not really ancient Egypt anymore, run by foreigners with a bad reputation.

I think that's not true. I think they're doing a lot of things really well. Now, I want to talk about this region, basically from like 5,000 BC to, you know, basically like the populating the Nile Valley up until Cleopatra. And there's a bunch of things I want to touch on with that.

But before we even get to that, what happens after Cleopatra kills herself and like what does Egypt generally look like from, you know, 30 BC until the modern era? Wow, that's a big question, Mark. You know, what's interesting about Egypt? And it's one of the few places in the world and you can actually do this. China, I guess it's the other one, to some extent, the Near East. as well, but Egypt's really good. Egypt keeps going.

Constantly populated, constant civilization. Yeah, continuous, continuous, despite changes, despite other groups coming in and governing it. But the basic economy, the basic structure, the basic Nile River, annual flood, when the flood is good, it's extremely rich productive soil, some of the most productive soil in the entire Mediterranean basin, beautiful grain crops, life is good. That goes all the way through, despite political regimes changing constantly. That is sort of a, that's the theme until the high dam is finished in 1970.

That's when I end my Egyptian history classes, usually saying that ancient Egypt ends in 1970, AD, when the high dam prevents the river from flooding every year. But that basic structure of Egypt before then is how it always was. Because you consider that ancient period, the subsistence off of this. mile flooding. And up until the 70s, that's what it was doing just naturally. Pretty much, with a lot of political changes, obviously, in Egypt under British rule and so on, or in the 19th century under Muhammad Ali, I mean, things changed substantially. Once you're growing cash crops, sugar cane and cotton, and then oops, we don't have, we don't have enough food. We have to

import food from elsewhere. So, I mean, there are major changes politically that changes life in the in the river valley, even in the 19th century, of course. So there are changes that matter quite a lot. But the basic idea of the river and the annual flood is the thing that dictates the history of the place. Got it. By and large. I just think looking at that BC period is the most fascinating thing. And I've heard this sort of like, you know, it's like a quote or a little like fun fact, I guess, people throw out that Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the Pyramids of Giza. Mm-hmm.

You know, roughly speaking, right? No, that's true. It's true. It's true. Furthermore, looking at Egypt as, you know, it's not just one little time in history, like a lot of different empires and things. You know, this is a vast, vast changing society that sort of ebbs and flows from 5,000 BC until today. Yeah, exactly. And I just think it's important for people to kind of broaden their scope. I know for me, especially when I was in high school and college, you know, I just looked at like, oh, BC was like, you know, 200 years and then AD was everything else. And my whole record of how long. human beings have been doing shit was like you know two thousand years you know what I'm saying

like that was like it kind of was like confined probably by like the Bible and things like that yeah confined what I saw the world as yes it was like oh yeah there were people in Egypt and then Jesus happened and then now we're here but I think broadening the scope to say like Cleopatra is you know when she was the you know the emperor the empress of Egypt had very little connection to the pyramids of Giza you know what I mean like she wasn't even really technically Greek or technically Egyptian and And I just think framing these things in that context really, really helps. I totally agree, man.

The last stage of ancient Egyptian language is called Coptic. It's the language of Christian Egypt. It's kind of actively spoken until around 1,000 AD or so, and it becomes kind of a ritual language. But let's say that's the end date for sake of argument. That means ancient Egyptian as a language was spoken for two-thirds of recorded human history. Yeah, that's crazy. So that's a significant shadow on Western civilization.

at a minimum, but on world history as well. This kind of broad scope that you're talking about is a really important thing to understand and appreciate. Yeah, it's fascinating. And then bringing up the letters that you brought up initially, I think that the sort of like petty minor details that we would consider today, sort of like innocuous records, a letter, a tax document, little pieces of record keeping

that seems sort of trivial to us now, you know, in our modern day. If looking at those things in the ancient times, I think really contextualizes what it means to be human. I think it really creates a human texture to the people that live back then. It's really hard to kind of wrap your head around. Like, you know, King Tut was a guy. Like, he was just a dude like me. You know what I mean?

Ramsey's, like, was insecure maybe about his acne or something. You know what I mean? Like there's a human element that I think is found in sort of these sort of innocuous records. Yes. that you've spent so much your time really diving into and researching. Yeah. And I don't know. I think that's another important element that I think people should be aware of.

Like these, you know, little debts here and there that are kept on these papyrus scrolls possess so much of the character and the flavor of what it means to be ancient Egyptian. Yeah. What it means to be human more broadly. And even professional Egyptologists kind of forget that. You think in abstract terms and cataloging texts are interested in verb forms or, or whatever, but when you look at a document, it's actual human beings.

This is actually a person writing this at a specific place, at a specific time in a certain historical context. And yeah, I think that's why I like studying this. These are actual humans, not just the golden mask or the tomb or whatever. That's sort of nice, but what I care about are actual humans and how they operated in the world, what they thought about, and so on. And I'm so grateful for the Egyptians for writing all this shit down. You know what I mean?

There's so many cultures that just are like, oh, world tradition. Let's just talk about it. But the Egyptians are like, no, we're putting pen to paper and we're going to keep all this stuff for so long. But I'm curious, you mentioned before that it was largely like Chinese dynasties and Egyptian dynasties that have like the best record keeping. Why do the Egyptian records last longer?

Is there something about the climate? Is there a way that they preserve them? Is it because it's been, you know, constantly occupied by different? people groups. Why do those records persist? Well, why they're preserved is because papyrus, it turns out, is really hardy. Think of it like the outer wrappings of a cigar. It's really hardy writing material. And Egypt generally is pretty dry climate. So unless they're destroyed or so on, or get wet, they survive in large numbers. Having said that, though, what would you guess would be the percentage written versus what survives. Now I'm asking you a question. Now, but I feel like you've

primed me, so I'm going to go lower. My initial guess, if we just started this, I'd probably be like, 25%, but now, based off the context clues, I'm going to go 2% survived. Yeah, way less than that. Less than 2%? Point, yeah, much less, much less. Way under 1%. And how can you say that confidently. Well, if you look at, you can sort of, we know what we have, pretty well cataloged. Stuff is still coming out of the ground every day, practically, but we have a rough idea of what survives when and where. And we have rough ideas of population. We have rough ideas. So it's actually in later periods, the number of people who were scribes. So you can sort of calculate, in my period that I specialize in the Ptolemies, we actually have bureaucratic correspondent.

like one letters surviving in a series of 80 letters or documents. And it says, like send this letter to that guy, send that copy over there. So we can reconstruct. My God, there's like 80 plus letters that this one petition generated, and we have one letter. And so you can build a picture of, you know, in the later periods, we have more stuff that survives. In the old kingdom, not a lot of written outside of tombs, stuff on paper, on papyrus, survives.

So you can sort of ballpark what literacy rates were. You can ballpark what survives, which is an important thing to think about if you're writing history with the stuff that survives. Are we right about this? What happens if only the weird stuff survives? Right. And the normal stuff doesn't survive. Oh, God. How do we know?

Yeah, that's a good point. And we have to ask ourselves that when we're studying this stuff. Like, is this typical? Is this weird for starters? Like if the whole internet gets wiped out, except for the weird shit, people, two thousand years from now might look at us and be like, yo, Americans are fucking freaks. What's wrong with these people? I mean, that's for sure. But if it's just only porn left, they're just like, what is wrong with these people?

These people are, they created a whole porn machine. And it's like, oh, I did other stuff too. It also does porn. Yeah. Look, I mean, the letters in the Metropolitan Museum that we started talking about, that is middle bronze age. We have nothing like that from Egypt or anywhere. else, like a picture of how a household operates in detail until the Ptolemaic period, until like 250, we started getting lots of evidence 250 BC or so. So there's nothing in between.

It's like one person, three letters, there's nothing on either side of that for, well, infinity before, pretty much, and until a couple thousand years later. Now, do we just get lucky and have the only letters written from the one guy who is concerned about his family? I mean, it stands in isolation like that. Or do you have to say, well, this is probably typical. This is probably a typical household, the household size and how it operates and a father writing home. Maybe this is like normal.

Maybe everyone's doing this. There are lots of people. It's important to think about that sort of. People with 5,000 years from now could infer that everyone today gets five emails a day. and they only have digital records of, you know, like a thousand emails. They can infer, oh, we only have 1% of the emails that are sent. This is kind of like an analog for back then. Yeah, I mean, even if our electronic stuff survives at all.

Right. Because now we're fully dependent on the cloud for everything to survive. So interesting. So how many records do we have from this old kingdom going all the way back? 5,000 BC. It depends. The records meaning everything, hieroglyphic stuff in tombs and papyrus records. Yeah, and more or less what I see in media and things like that.

Like, do they have hieroglyphs then? Yeah. Okay, so 5,000 BC, you still... No, 5,000, so writing only starts with civilization around 3,000 BC or so, 3,100. Before then, we don't have writing. Okay. We know there are people there. We have archaeology for a long time, but writing was a specific technology that was...

And that includes... Hieroglyphs and petroglyphs. Petroglyphs, there probably is some earlier rock, rock inscriptions out in the deserts. Okay. Yeah. And there's plenty of drawings. And the South in the Sahara is fascinating

when the Sahara was a savannah before it dries out. All these famous rock drawings, they're really interesting. A lot of people living out there in 8,000 BC. It was flourishing. Wow. And there's an historical memory of that in ancient Egypt even. Really? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the cattle culture is coming out of these herders who are living flourishing in what's now the Sahara. It was a savannah in 8,000 BC and slowly dried out. And people went to permanent water, which was the Nile. And that's one of the genocities of ancient Egypt is people coming in. So there's a desert culture. There's still oasis out there. There's still some historical memory, I think, of that culture. that's important in ancient Egypt.

Didn't they find ships like near the Sahara? Like boats and things like that? There are boats in pyramid tombs of the old kingdom. For example, why boats? Because that was the main transportation in Egypt as river boats along the Nile.

And their conception of the afterlife was you travel around in a boat. Basically, it's the main transportation. So we have some of those ships at Giza in the pyramid, nothing in the Sahara as far as I know. Got it. Okay. And so that's the old kingdom. You start getting writing around like 3,000 BC.

That's right. And what does this writing look like in the documents that you've looked at? Are they just as innocuous as these little letters from a farmer? Yeah. Well, the first writing we have are basically names. They're kind of jar labels and things. So it's around property and specifically the king. And some obscure ceremonies, it looks like, in early tombs of people that look like they resemble something like kings in 3,000 BC on the Now River Valley.

So it was all a very specialized kind of technology for kings, for kingship, for claiming property rights around certain things. And it grabs, expands over many centuries for rituals, for tombs, tuned by al-a-a-turb. eventually in the Old Kingdom. Letters, we have letters that survive from the Old Kingdom. We have an amazing document found out on the Red Sea coast, which is really remarkable. Also with boats, because in the Old Kingdom, they were going out that far for a pyramid building, bringing stone back and so on and going to get copper in the Sinai. So the French found a few years ago a whole kind of a cave site with disassembled boats.

They were bringing these boats from the Nile Valley out. to the Red Sea overland and assembling them out there. And among that stuff was found this huge papyrus text in kind of cursive Old Kingdom hieroglyphic writing. And it's kind of a daybook of what we call the vizier, the chief of the head of state for the king who's going around inspecting everything out to the Red Sea, back to the Navarra Valley, all over the place. And we didn't know about this before. It's really a fascinating document. And quite detailed about what the head of state is supposed to be doing, mainly taking care of the king and his burial, it seems to be.

But that's, we've learned so much in the last couple of years about how the old kingdom actually worked. You know, pyramids are obvious. You see them, there they are. But how they were built and what kind of work was required to do that. The administrative capacity of this early state to pull that off is pretty impressive. Yeah. You know, and we only sort of.

guessed at it before, but now we have this amazing document that tells us details about a specific person going around making it happen. Were they building pyramids basically from the start, like around 4,500 BC? When are like the earliest pyramid records that we have? Obviously, Giza is the main one that we're familiar with. Yeah. So the first actual pyramid is the step pyramid at Sakara, it's called, which is Dynasty 3, the ruling dynasty before the Giza pyramids were built.

And that was built like similar things from 3,000 BC to 2,500 or so. That's sort of a bench tomb they're called, or elites and early kings had these tombs. They were kind of built up a little bit, but they looked like a bench, nothing fancy. The step pyramid is weird because it has this kind of bench tomb in it. And then on top of it, they started building steps, like kind of not a true pyramid yet, but they're heading in that direction for whatever reason. And it's, you know,

we know the architect of the step pyramid by name, Imhotep was one of the great geniuses of Egyptian history. He was idolized as a semi-divine being, even in the Ptolemaic period. So his name lives on because he's this great architectural geniuses

like Galileo or Da Vinci or something from the old kingdom who built this thing. What was his name? Imhotep. Imhotep. Yeah. Okay. I gotta remember that.

Yeah, no, he's really interesting character and he becomes a semi-divine being as a result. If you want in with the king, by the way, always in Egypt, be his architect. Because you're making him immortal. That's the important thing. So the architect probably did everything else too, but the king's builder was the place to be. A really important position. He kind of kicked off the whole pyramid fad. It seems so, for whatever reason.

reason we have this thing inside that's a normal tomb from earlier and then it thought probably maybe the king wasn't about ready to die so let's just keep going let's what we can do here let's let's let's build another step oh we still have time let's keep going uh we don't actually know what that development was but we know that that's the first pyramid in Egypt is this thing that and we can see the original tomb inside you can look at photographs and see this outline of like a normal tomb a They had normal tombs in the old kingdom that you can compare to this and say, this is the same thing, except this one's got some steps on it. Yeah, this thing, this is a pyramid. It's a pretty big.

It's a pretty big building. And it has a huge wall around it, mostly restored, but some of it's still there. You can see. So it's a whole complex with a big wall around it and all sorts of temples in it. It's a whole ritual complex. The thing is a time machine, actually, the step pyramid complex. It is a machine designed to make the king live forever through rituals. These seem running around this courtyard, certain rituals kings had to do.

It looks like earlier the tradition was, we got a certain age and, sorry, you got to go. We need the new king. It's an age thing. Do you know how old that was? I can't remember if we know specifically what the age was, but it looks like that was a serious worry early on that you have to be a strong, virile king, otherwise you're gonna get replaced or more likely bumped off anyway.

We should have that in America. I agree. I agree. You hit a certain age and say, all right, guys, come on, come on. The Egyptians being clever, though, came up with a ritual that goes all the way through Egyptian history called the Jubilee Renewal Festival. So the king goes through these magic rituals hidden,

connecting to the gods, and you get renewed. And you emerge like as ageless. being sort of still virile. So they figured out how not to be bumped off by having this nice ceremony. Clever. Yeah, no, these guys were thinking. Look how young I am. Look, I got restored. I just had my renewal festival. And that step pyramid complex is a wholly preserved thing to do just that in front of all the gods of Egypt. And the king, one of the things was going around, like doing a race around these two obstacles in a courtyard. Probably wasn't time because they didn't. didn't have watches, but it was, there's something like that where you could prove that you're

still virile. Wow. And this thing was meant to last, and it's still around, it was meant to last forever. It's like a perpetual time machine for this one king. Wow. It's pretty extraordinary. And when was this discovered or was it kind of always known? Yeah, it was, it never was fully hidden. So it was always sort of there. It was very famous French archaeologists in the 50s and 60s kind of restored it and mapped it out and published it fully. That's an extraordinary thing to see. Wow. And it's a huge cemetery at Sikkar.

It's a cemetery all the way through the Roman period. So this is like a national cemetery, like in D.C. or something. This is a national cemetery for kings, but also for elites. Everyone wants to be buried there next to one of these great kings, next to these monuments. And it was a place of pilgrimates, even in the Ptolemaic and the Roman periods. You'd kind of come there and, and Imhotep was one of the guys you'd want to visit, like this genius. I mean, he's like a famous genius in Egyptian history. He lived all the way through Egyptian history and memory as this guy who went from like a normal tomb to let's design this step pyramid thing.

I wonder if it was just like a competition with the former king where he had his tomb built before he died and it looked like the other king's tomb. And he was like, fuck that guy. Let's have a bigger one. Because how else do you build a bigger thing? You're like, the easiest way to build a bigger thing is to stack things in sort of a triangular shape. Exactly. Exactly. The pyramid is, it's not that special.

It's one of the most natural landforms on earth is like a mound, right? So that's, that makes sense to go from that to something else. Yeah. But it requires a lot of organizational capacity and figuring out like how do you, how do you build something? And we don't have information, which is why there's all this. speculation about how the pyramids were built. But I had a site, a construction engineer at one point when I was at Stanford who was interested in pyramids.

And he wrote out for me a timing, like a schedule of the building, a pyramid schedule. Like this is what a construction engineer would lay out. Like stone at a certain time of year and you need X, Y, and Z all delivered in certain moments in certain years or whatever. It's this really complex document he came up with. This is how construction engineers have to work. And we have nothing like that from the old kingdom, but they must have done that. You can't have 20,000 men running around doing all these things and quarrying 50 or 60 miles away, bringing stone by boats and lifting the stone up and designing the size. It's extraordinarily complex. And they must have written out like this

construction interdit did for me, but we don't have that's peculiar to me. I mean, again, I know we have less than 1% of the records that have persisted, but it's just so peculiar that you go from, you know, these little like step tombs, right? Like these kind of ziggurat type things to then Giza, and there's so much mystery

about how it happens. You know, these people that were taking such good records, you would presume that it would be inscribed somewhere. Is there any ancient, you know, hieroglyphs or anything that would lead us to believe like, oh, this was built in this sort of fashion. No, I mean, that text I mentioned from the Old Kingdom at the time of the Great Pyramid being built,

that gives us a lot of hint, particularly on the not very sexy topic of logistics and how somebody managed people and materials. That is there, and that's really clear in that text. Well, we also have a lot of pyramids. So before the Great Pyramid, before the Giza pyramids were built, we have three pyramids by this one king who preceded key ops.

And one of them is called the bent pyramid because it starts off with one angle and then it gets shallower toward the top. There's a collapse pyramid, whether it really collapsed or not, there's a lot of speculation. But it looks like there's experimentation early on in Dynasty 4, the dynasty of all the great pyramid building to kind of get the angle correct because that's kind of tricky to calculate. And if you don't get it right, then it could. collapse on itself under its own weight or so. But they built this entire bent pyramid.

It's still there. Yeah, I've seen pictures of that one. But I have a feeling the king said, no, that's not quite right. After a hundred of the year. What is that? It's like a funny angle all of a sudden. What the heck?

No, I can't be buried in there. Can you imagine? Yeah, be pissed. Was anyone buried in the bent pyramid? I don't think so. No, because we know the king, and he built three pyramids. And they finally got the, you know, this, I think it's called the red pyramid.

I think is his final one. That one looks pretty good. He got a different contractor. Yeah, something. Yeah. Something. But I would not want to be the guy in charge. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I can't imagine that it ended well for him. You have a bent pyramid? I mean, get out of it. No, yeah. That's a bad reputation to have for, like, eternity. I'm shocked that they kept it up. Like, I figured they would have been like, I mean, we got these bricks already here. Let's just redo it.

You know? Like, I figured they would, like, scrap it or something. if it wasn't exactly how they wanted. Well, maybe he just liked employing a lot of people to build pyramids. I keep going, okay, next. Let's do another one at a different angle. There's some mystery here about that.

It does, I think most scholars think it's kind of an age of experimentation until the Great Pyramid, which is like solid and like really good. And you know, we missed some of the experimentation, some of the failures probably along the way. Yeah, they might have scrapped some or built on top of them. or who knows. Yeah.

So the bent pyramid and the step pyramid, Zakara, where are these pieces of stone coming from? Are they being shipped in? Yeah, mostly local, I think, in that area west of the river. And Giza, we know that the Tura quarries outside of Cairo, the other direction, was the main one for the limestone, for the really nice stone, the outer casings of the stone in particular.

But there's also local quarries nearby, which is one reason they're located where they are, I think. There's local stone there, which helps. Oh, in like Zakara and near the bent pyramid. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And the really fine limestone is in the Mokotam Hills east of Cairo a little bit, quite a long way that they're transporting, but we know for sure that's where it's coming from.

So quite a lot of effort. And what about obelisks? When do they start making the obelists? Oh, man. Boy, now you're quizzing. me. Certainly New Kingdom. I don't know if we have anything. Yeah, I think so. There's some speculation that Middle

Kingdom, there's maybe there's there, but they're famous ones, including the one in Central Park, is New Kingdom. We'll get to those. We'll get to those later. Oh my God, okay. That's crazy. Those, in my mind, I'm like, no, Obelisk and Pyramas, they're doing them at the same time, but I guess not.

No. No, although they're depicted earlier. You know, so we have images of things that look like Obelis, you know, sun rays. That's the basic concept. They go pretty far. back, but in terms of the actual... Obelisk, yeah. I mean, those are probably the most extraordinary feat of engineering from ancient Egypt, so much so that the Romans stole him and brought him to Rome.

You think that the obelisk is more impressive than the pyramids? I totally do. In what way? Yeah. It's a single piece of granite for one thing. So go quarry that. We know the quarries in Aswan, where red granite comes from. one still sitting in the ground with a big crack in it.

Yeah. So again, the guy in charge of that project, done. That's a tough day, dude. Done. Yeah. No, he's heading south. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

No longer with us. Oh, dude. Could you imagine? After all that, I mean, years of, yeah, that is not hard to excavate, to lift, to transport up, downriver, up to Cairo or Alexandria later. really heavy, and then to prop it up on a base, which is perfectly level. Because, you know, if it's not, you know, it's just not going to stand. You know, we know something about how they did that with big mounds and then they get rid of the

the dirt, the sand. But hopefully it's going to be nice and level. I think it's a pretty extraordinary freedom of engineering. Yeah, it is pretty crazy, actually, when you think about it, because the pyramids is just like logistical, it's oppressive logistically, right? It's like, again, we can discuss this. And the man, but it's just you get enough people around. You can lift some stones and move them around.

But the obelisk is like, okay, we're going to cut this thing out, one singular piece. Get it down the river on, what, just a bunch of rafts or something? Yeah, yeah, on boat for sure. Just hundreds of boats just all the way around. Does limestone float? Yeah, well, this is granite. I'm sorry, granite. Yeah, the obelisks are particular.

I don't think so. There must have been ships that are transporting these things, but even getting it from Aswan quarry out to the river, I mean, it's not, given the technology of the Bronze Age, let alone coring, like excavating hard granite with the tools they had, which is basically bronze. Yeah. And some harder stone, but the sheer raw power to do that. I couldn't imagine cracking that thing. No. Oh, I'd feel so bad. Go to Central Park and have a look at that obelisk behind the Metropolitan Museum.

Yeah. You know, impressive. Yeah. The one that's still in the Red Quarry. Mm-hmm. That one, I think, was the tallest one that's been discovered, but it never actually got erected, right? No, no, it's still the, it's not complete. It just looks like a crack developed in the stone.

Mm-hmm. Man. But I think it's taller than, like, the Statue of Liberty or something? It's, like, it's insanely tall. It's big. I don't know the relative heights, to be honest. And what? They get ropes?

and just pull on the shit and just lift it up. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, just absurd. Yeah, I think so. You got to have someone in those, I guess if it tips over, you got to pull it back. It's incredible. And I think, you know, a lot of that kind of art we have lost from, I mean, we can do it now. I mean, but we don't know exactly how the Egyptians did it.

We have depictions of them hauling really big statues of stone, a solid piece of stone. Again, with these wood sleds that are lubricated by water probably, maybe some, maybe Greece, but there are just lots of men hauling on wood sleds, these large pieces of stone. What did the obel represent? Like, do you know what it meant to them? Sunlight, I think, divine. It meant power as well. It's symbolic of the divine.

They're sitting in front of temple gates, usually two of them with colorful flags, which is, Egyptian temples were very brightly painted, very colorful, very festive places. and novelists were sitting in front of temples, kind of symbolic of the divine inside, I guess. So, yeah, it's sort of like a lot of Egyptian architecture, it's organic or natural material that's representing, but it's in stone. The origin of the column is ancient Egyptian.

Even like the ionic and... Yeah, the Greeks get the idea from ancient Egypt from thousands of years earlier. And we have all this year of columns at the step pyramid complex is one of the first examples of just two-dimensional columns kind of carved out. So not fully in the round yet, but you can see experimentation over a lot of time. But these are reed bundles that are, you know, sort of collected together. So it's a natural, it's supposed to be kind of a garden, the garden of Eden, the garden of creation that these things represent. And the Greeks took it over completely.

developed it a little bit, but the column, the idea of a column comes from ancient Egypt. The idea of these reed bundles, like literally like sticks put together to create, like sort of like a little cylinder. Wow. And then they etch it out of stone sort of figuratively. Exactly. And then that slowly evolves into the column that we see in Greece. Exactly. Wow. That is fascinating. Yeah. Do you know why America has co-opted the obelisk in such a profound way? I mean, it's on the money. It's in Washington, D.C. The Washington Monument is a big obelisk. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I guess the argument is that some of the founding fathers were members of this secret society.

Is it the Freemason thing? Yeah. Like the Freemasons were just obsessed with ancient Egypt? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure obsessed, but there is some Egyptian imagery, which is sort of, you know, it's exotic. It's like hidden knowledge from the past kind of idea, I think. I don't know too much about Freemasonry, but I think it's the best. basic idea. And there's Egyptian symbolism. Think Mozart's magic flute, also, which is

representative of, to some extent, Freemasonry. In the 18th, this great opera, I'm a big Mozart opera fan. And one of his operas is the magic flute, which is this initiation ritual that's depicted with a lot of Egyptian imagery in it. And so that's late 18th century, same time as the founding fathers. It was very popular then to, it's kind of general wisdom, seeking wisdom and friendship and so on. It's very noble thoughts. And somebody goes back to ancient Egypt. So this original wisdom comes from Egypt. I see. So there's sort of like this aristocratic romanticization of this hidden occult knowledge that people are, you know, finding in this new place called Egypt. And, you know, I'm sure at the time you had people that were going and finding artifacts,

bringing them back to England and to Paris, where I'm assuming the founding fathers probably saw it, and they were like, oh, this is a part of, you know, this little society that we're in, and it represents something that's, you know, hidden and secretive, but very advanced. Yeah, not well known, like secret knowledge, but also kind of deep time,

this idea goes pretty far back. Late 18th century, we didn't know much about ancient Egypt, other than the classical authors, like Herodotus, who writes a lot about Egypt, but Egypt directly, hieroglyphs, you know, were not understood in the 18th century. yet. So it is this idea, I think, that there's kind of wisdom back far into these early civilizations that we are somehow heirs to. It's so interesting. What's up, guys? We're going to

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Again, this is 3,000. 3,000, is that classical or is that old? Or is that raid in the little brackish window? 3,000. BC. No, so that's the origin of Egyptian civilization. The first organized state is around 3,000. But would that consider 1,000?

Middle Kingdom? No, no. That is even before the Old Kingdom. Old Kingdom formally begins with around the step pyramid. Oh, okay, got it. Okay. So civilization gets going around. 3,300 BC where we think there are kings who are controlling extensive parts of the now River Valley.

That takes a few hundred years. We forget how time actually goes, because looking back on ancient history, we tend to compress time. That's just the nature of looking back at the past, you know, rather than we're living in real time by the second. I see. For example. But when we look back 3,000 or 5,000 years ago, Well, it happened around 3,000 BC, but it could be 2,700 BC-ish. But that's several hundred years.

Right. Of social process that we don't know. Yeah, we basically have the whole scope of American history and turn it into a rounding error. Pretty much. Yeah, it's like connecting two dots over 500 years and that's what happened. But imagine American history over 500 years. Right. Lots of details.

And we don't have them. So we tend to compress observations we have into some sort of. story, probability of it being accurate is close to zero. Probably we want to know, but we don't. Interesting. So it must have taken several hundred years to get institutions, to get practices in place, to get enough people trained up and writing whatever you need to record. You know, I think it's really cool stuff to think about, I think, just like building

pyramids and this experimentation over... Several hundred years probably to kind of figure out how to do this. And then they go away, replaced by building bigger temples. But there's a whole experience there and probably experimentation, probably failure, disasters. People are losing their lives because they completely fucked up some building project. Yeah. People losing their lives probably a work site accident. Like, oops, a giant block fell on, you know.

Yeah. Zerxes over there. Yeah. That's too bad. Yeah. Well, we even have some stories, even from the Middle Kingdom of this famous one that has some hints of the Atlantis myth in it. Okay, here we go. Yeah, there we go.

Come on, Joe. Here we go. Now we get to the real stuff. Now we're talking. It's called the tale of the shipwrecked sailor. These guys were on some expedition, I think, for a king out in the Red Sea. They get caught in a storm. They get shipwrecked on this island.

There's a monster snake on the island who tells stories and so on. It's really interesting. and then the island sinks into the Red Sea, never to be seen again. That seems to be some hint that classical authors like Plato pick up as the Atlantis Smith, maybe. I like that idea. But these guys are freaked out because they fucked up. They're on a royal mission, and now they're shipwrecked. And they actually don't want to get back to Egypt because they know they're going to die.

They're going to be not living good lives anymore. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's sketchy business working for the king. It's good and bad. It's good and bad. It can be really good. Yeah, if you do. You know, it's a risk.

Same with taking risks on the Nile. The kings make this game also that we control the environment. We control nature. We're the king. We have the bat phone to the gods. We guarantee prosperity in Egypt. We protect the country, but we also guarantee its economic prosperity because now is going to flood really well every year, and everyone's going to be happy.

The problem is that in bad years, also the king gets blamed. is, hey, dude, now that now didn't flood. Talk to Ra. You're going to... Well, yeah, see you later. We need a new king, obviously. Oh, really? They'll else the king.

Yeah, they do. I think for, you know, specific reasons. Now, it's a pretty good game to play because we know roughly 70% of years in Egypt pretty good floods. You know, good enough floods. 70% of the time. So the odds are in your favor,

but there's 30% of the time when you're taking some risk that oh well okay we had bad year you know my bad but we'll recover but two or three years of no flood now now we need a new king we got a bad king because clearly the gods don't like this king because look look at this environment we're living in

that's not so different from today though isn't it funny? Yeah we have two years of economic recession no matter who's the president and people are like yeah we gotta get this guy out of here I mean grant it's a little different because we have monetary policy and things like that but still sometimes it's probably a little random. You know what I mean? I think it's random. I think it's on us, but also the president's claim kind of look at the market as if they're controlling the stock market. No, they're not. But it's the same

thing with these pharaohs. They're like, look at the harvest as if they're controlling the Nile, which they're not. No, that's the political game of legitimacy. It goes pretty far back. It's one of cool stories about how Egypt works. You need this and you need priesthoods who are writing these grand texts on temples eventually and propping up kings we love you king and kings giving us all these cool tax breaks and and so on but you could afford to give tax breaks when you have 30 years of amazing harvest right is that fair to say wow but also their your priesthoods are getting a lot of special deals they're allowed to have their own industries and operate as they like in their local area He just guarantees certain revenue for the king, basically.

And it's very much a quid pro-crow. I king am very pious. I support the gods, i.e. you guys, the priesthoods. And I'm kind of a ritualist in every temple anyway. That's how this system works from gods to the king, king to the temples, temples to the people. And priesthoods get a lot of benefits from that, and they prop up these good kings. but when shit hits the fan, there's a lot more farmers,

it turns out, than there are priesthood types. At what period in Egyptian history, do we have the most sort of fleshed out record of what the political hierarchy looks like? Talamake and Roman periods are by far the best documented periods for Egyptian history.

Okay. And so what does that look like? Do you so have pharaohs at that time, or pharaohs are old kingdom? No, no, pharaohs are all the way through. Well, kings are all the way through. They're not really called Pharaoh until the new kingdom, actually. Oh, really?

Even though there's kingship, they're not actually, you know, it isn't actually a title, I think. But they're still kings all the way through. The Ptolemies are the last ones. They actually claim to be heirs of Egyptian pharaohs. That's their game. The Roman emperors don't. They make a hard break.

The Ptolemy's, one reason maybe they're successful is, hey, guys, we're just like the old kings. So you've had foreigners here before. Egyptians don't care if a foreigner is running Egypt. They care about how it's run. Like run it like we expect a feral to run the country. We don't care if you're from somewhere else. There isn't an ethnic component necessarily.

There's probably tensions, but there isn't a requirement or anything. There's plenty of foreigners who were feralds in Egypt. And so how did that happen? Alexander the Great came through and basically conquered Egypt more or less. and then put in his people and his generals to run it. Yeah, basically. I mean, the text, if we believe them, tell us that Alexander and his army were welcomed in Egypt

because the Persians who had run Ethiopia as a province before were not well liked. And probably because the last decade or two of Persian rule, they were kind of turning the screw against the temples and the priesthoods a little bit too much on economic matters. And the priesthoods don't like that. Got it. And then Alexander comes.

And Alexander, being a really smart person, said, hey, we'll cut you a deal. We're going to run Egypt like good kings. You guys can have your temples and your rituals and your all your land, et cetera, and your local areas, it's all good. Just we want a bit of the revenue. It's pretty clever. It's pretty clever. It's exactly, I think, like a corporate takeover these days. If you're a Black Rock or somebody

and you're buying a company, a famous company with a brand, you are not going to say, okay, we're changing everything about the brand now. You're going to say, keep that going as that brand. We wanted to make it bigger. So this is basically just like a modern,

just merger and acquisition. It's a corporate takeover. They came in, they bought it from the Persians, and they're like, hey, we'll take it from here. You guys are mismanaging this whole operation. Yeah. And then they came in and they were like,

yo, let's just run it the way the Egyptians like, you know? Make it easy. Make more money that way. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah, exactly. Now, it took time to get going. They run it in Greek, but the people actually running Egypt always are the scribes at the local level.

What do you mean? So Egypt, we think of it as a highly centralized place, but it's not so centralizable, really. It's all local agricultural production, place by place for various technical reasons of how the flood is controlled and so on. So it's the local level. The farms locally are the really important thing. If you're the king sitting in your palace in Memphis or somewhere in the Delta or in Alexandria later with the Ptolemy's, you don't actually know what's going on in Thebes. Yeah, so far away. It's really far away.

So you either have to go there or send a trusted person to go there or rely on the scribes counting the beans, literally there, saying, oh, the crops are looking good this year. We expect X amount of taxes from this area this year. And they did that. They report things up to a middle-level guy who reports things up to the capital. That requires really accurate information, like trustworthy, or you can have no idea what's going on. What do you think is more likely to have happened? I think they don't have much idea. There were, the Ptolemy's so concerned about this problem that they had a new,

kind of scribe called a checking scribe. And the checking scribe would literally check on the local scribe to make sure he's reporting accurate information. So they kind of added to the bureaucracy to make sure, to try to make sure there's law reporting. But it's a system, early bureaucracies are tricky. We tend to think of them as like a modern bureaucracy. And look at how bureaucratic and successful at Ptolemies were. It has this huge bureaucracy. But isn't necessarily efficient or accurate. Right. You know, bureaucracies just demand some information flowing.

Not necessarily accurate information. So I think it's more likely that they're, they don't have much of an idea. In fact, we have a village scribe responsible for about 10,000 acres of land around his town. And that's huge. This one place of Egypt, it's big enough. It's about 6,000 acres, 10,000 Egyptian aurora. it's called 6,600 acres in the town. We know every ounce of plant life grown in the land

for about 10-year period or so. It's really amazing archive of stuff. But if you look at the records year by year, the figures look suspiciously similar year by year. So not to be too cynical that I think, okay, this guy's just reporting numbers up because he's required to report certain numbers. numbers up to the capital.

So the chief, the big guru who's counting all the beans in the capital, saying, okay, this is the expected harvest throughout Egypt issue. We can, now we can spend X, Y, and Z, because that's your budget is what you're, what you're collecting in agriculture and other kind of taxes, trade, and so on. You can sort of calculate what do you expect. That's a lot of power for the scribes. Huge amount. Are they corruptible?

Huge, yeah, probably. Corruptible, you know, that may be a modern term. I think it's just how life worked. But if you're a farmer, if you're a farmer and you're not having a good harvest for whatever reason, I wonder if there is a psychological feeling of like, oh, the gods are not looking good upon me and therefore I might be punished

because I'm not pulling my end of the deal to supply of my village with the food, da-da-da. Especially if you're monocropping or you have these cash crops probably in the Ptolemeric period, you probably have that more often. So I wonder if you can go to the scribe, be like, hey, bro, let me break you off something. and report that I have a good harvest here.

And then next year, I'll make it up to you and everything will be cool. In my mind, that's what would happen because I don't think these humans are that different than humans today. Is that accurate? Yeah, probably. It's hard to trace that in the actual record that we have,

but you would think human nature being what it is, and you're going to be loyal to your friends and your family, not to some king in the capital. Yeah, the scribe is your boy. He's from the town that you're from. Like, you guys know each other's families. What's interesting about that exact point, Mark, is that when the Romans come in and take over this operation,

they require that, like, the regional officials cannot come from the area they grew up in. They have to be an administrator somewhere else in Egypt. Oh, they intentionally try to break up this, like, cronyism or this kind of like patronage system where people are sort of friends with each other. Yeah. Yeah.

So the Romans are operating a little bit differently. The Ptolemies are kind of ancient Egyptian. in their style. We're just taking this over as is. We're going to try to stay on top of it in management with the expectations. But the power is really with the priesthoods and the local scribes.

Wow. That's my view of things. The normal view is the Ptolemy's where a colonial state, highly centralized and these Ptolemies are like fiercely running everything. But, yeah, I have a different view of the real world in Ptolemaic Egypt. Wow.

I mean, we can... more dependent. I mean, even records that we get today from, you know, like a little voting district or, you know, some type of, like, record keeping, like, even now things kind of get a little, you know, hairy. So I'm imagining back in Ptolemaic Egypt, I'm sure it's even more so. I think so. I like this insight about looking at human behavior. Yeah. If I get a letter, now I'm going to be in trouble. If I get a letter from an administrator at Yale, say, hypothetically. Hypothetically. You. You must do X, Y, and Z, or please, reporting this, you know, okay, in the, in the recycling bin maybe. I might do it, I might not. I mean, it depends on what it is. But if some academic 2000 years from now found that letter from a dean saying this, look how horrible this administration was, or demanding all these things.

They're so strict and da-da-da-da. As if that actually happened. No, it doesn't mean it happened when you have an administrative letter that says top-down these commands. it's just kind of like an ideology of management top-down. It's a function of a formality that may or may not have been followed. Exactly.

And who's to say that didn't happen back then? It's hard to imagine it didn't happen back then. Yeah. Yeah, if I'm a farmer back then, they're like, oh, you got to do this, this, and this. I'd be like, or else what? Like, you know what I mean? They don't have any, like,

any real ability to exert control all the way from Memphis. You know what I mean? Like, I live, you know, however many miles away. Mm-hmm. They got to send someone all the way out here. to punish me, I'll be like, hey, it's all, it's fine. Yeah, it's all, it's all local relationships.

It's all who you know in your area and how that operates much more than the demands. What can you tell me about the casual life of a commoner in Ptolemaic Egypt? A commoner, so the everyday illiterate farmer, not a heck of a lot. I think we can make some good guesses of what life was like, the annual rhythm of a household and so on, but we do have middle-level people. We have a lot of family archives of soldiers from the Ptolemaic period, from the Nile Valley. Greeks from various places, some of them born in Egypt, but from Greek ancestry, they tell us that, married to Egyptian women.

And we have quite a lot of information about what that household was like, loans, leases, marriage contracts, sometimes over 100 years or more. So it's sort of like these letters in the Metropolitan Museum. That's one moment in time. But in some cases, in the later periods, we have a century and more of a family. Wow. And some idea of what their businesses were like, what their worries were like. Did the intercultural marriages create any family strife?

Do we have any record of that? We have the records of property disputes quite a lot. For example, that's what they cared about, is property and passing it on. A lot of disputes about that. In what way? What would be their concern with passing on property? We have time for this. I've written a lot about this.

There's a famous property dispute, a trial. We have a verbatim court record, which is extraordinary in the British Museum, from an out-of-the-way town in middle of Egypt, from the 160s BC at a time of massive Nile flood failure we know about for various reasons, invasions by the rival Salucid King Antiochus the 4th, really bad time. And here we have a trial. A woman brings a lawsuit in the name of her children for the right to claim about six acres of land that belonged partly to her husband and partly to his half-brother for various regions.

It's a complex, but probably a typical family. A lot of interesting details about this trial. We have the whole legal procedure. It's a text that legal stories don't know about unless you work on this particular stuff, which is kind of weird because, again, it's hugely important for understanding how things work. In ancient legal systems, here we have details. a court transcript verbatim of the plaintiff and the defendant in front of judges, making arguments, making legal arguments about this mine.

No, it's mine. My father gave it to me, and the woman is claiming it was pledged to her by her husband who had died, or at least he's not on the scene anymore. We don't know if he's dead, actually. Did they have lawyers? Well, that's one of the questions. I think that there were professional advocates. Lawyers may be a modern term, but there are advocates in the background here.

Advocates, lawyers in Rome, around the same time, middle second century BC, interestingly. I think they're in Egypt because of the complexities of the bureaucracy. This is a Ptolemaic period. So there are priests judging this local dispute, but there's a state representative there, who maybe understood spoken Egyptian. It's a purely legal procedure. It's really detailed. This woman is really insistent.

She ends up losing the case with very technical black letter law reasons. The judges make this decision. They write out why they're deciding it this way. She cites a law and several other decrees, but she didn't cite the whole law. So the judges say, oh, you cite this law, but you forgot the second part of the law. So it's really technical, which is why I think

there's probably professionals there who are telling her, cite this, and there's a decree from this year, and cite that. It's extraordinary. She got mismanaged by her legal counsel. Possibly. Possibly.

But the end of the text, at the back of this text, she appears on her own in the southern capital, Ptolemaeus, it's called, in southern Egypt, the Ptolemaic capital of the Nilever Valley. She's on her own in front of

the highest Greek officials in Egypt. Greek official, who we know a little while later was in Rome as ambassador for the Ptolemy's doing bargains to keep Egypt independent after this Salukic king had been kicked out by Rome. Really extraordinary machinations in Mediterranean history. But here he is in southern Egypt hearing a dispute, this woman just appears saying, I lost this case, but damn it, it's my land. She's being really insistent, which is really amazing. As an individual here, human as a woman on her own, some distance away from her village. Now she's in an appeals process.

Kind of, and we know nothing about the appeals process, but there she is, appearing in front of these guys. The highest, most important official in the entire country is sitting there hearing this woman's dispute of a small bit of land in an out-of-the-way town. At a time when Egypt had invaded, there's now river failures, there's a lot of shit happening in the Mediterranean. Rome is bearing down on the eastern Mediterranean. And this guy's going to be in Rome as ambassador to the Ptolemae Kings.

And he's hearing this trial about nothing really important. It's really amazing, actually. So it's a really bitter dispute. We don't know what happens. It's sort of, the Texas sort of fades off. So we don't know the end of it. But it is amazing at a time of massive transformation of Mediterranean history that we had this trial, this well-ordered and organized.

And she lost for very specific reasons, the judges say. But she says, God damn it, this is my land. I insist that it's, it was given to me, was pledged to me on behalf of my children now. I think she got it back. Amazing. I'm going to choose to believe that. I love that. It's so optimistic. I love, I love to think that. She definitely got it back.

But the personality, her personality comes through from 2,000 plus years ago. Oh, just that woman was absolutely stubborn and insistent that she, it's her land. And a fiery Arab mother. Like, you're not going to, you're not going to fucking, you're not going to, take my shit. She's fired up. She is very insistent on it, which is amazing. Wow.

Again, she's not Cleopatra, but in both cases, these are women who are operating in surprising ways we think from a modern point of view, how the ancient world works, the world of men. What did gender parity look like in Palaemite Egypt? Well, legally, women, unlike Greek law, women in Egyptian law had full independence. They could write contracts in their own name. They could bring lawsuits in their own name. They could buy and sell property. They couldn't drive.

In their own name. Well, they couldn't drive the ships on the aisle. Neither could men. They can't drive cars. The cars aren't around yet. There are no cars. So it's equal. No, it looks.

And divorce law, we know, we would say it's no fault divorce. Oh, really? Yeah. It looks modern. The marriage arrangements look modern. Wow. Yeah. It's, so in some ways, we've taken some steps back. Did they have pernuptial agreements?

Probably. I don't know we know too much about that, but the marriage contracts we have, they're kind of the upper level of society, these written things. But they probably were written in light of children already, or children about to be born. So before that, there was no marriage ceremony. You just moved into the household of your husband probably. And boom, you're married. But the woman could say, I'm out of here. and theoretically she could.

I mean, practically, it's not so easy to do. But she was protected also by these written agreements where, okay, I'm bringing in all my stuff, my pans, my jewelry, my nice mirror, it's value that X amount. And if we divorce, I'm getting all that stuff back or the money equivalent of it back. Wow. So they actually had like an appraisal process. They had someone come in and say, this is worth X, Y, Z. Wow.

Or it's notional, but we have values. And there are lists of this is what I'm bringing in, certain kind of clothing, cooking utensils maybe, a mirror, whatever, valuable stuff, and it's listed, the values listed. In case of divorce, I get that stuff back or the equivalent in money. It's just so fascinating. I just think it's such a good point to drive home that the, you know, the nonlinear progression of not only technology, but also human rights. You know, like, I think it's, I can kind of see that technology is nonlinear, right?

Like the ways that people built the pyramids of geese or the ways that, you know, they were even doing, like, banking and things like this. These are, like, very sophisticated financial technologies that were lost. And then people restart and different people on the planet are kind of at their own pace and they sort of lose it and get it back. And over the aggregate, it's going up. But, and the micro, it goes down for a hundred years and then back up and just. down and back up and down. And not only is it, you know, technological, but also the way that we view humanity and human rights. That, you know, women were given a ton of independence and then that got erased. And then it probably got reversed. And then men were, there was a large patriarch in the time.

And then it probably got a little bit more, you know, equal. And then it gets reversed. It's just, it's really fascinating. And I think it's important to keep in mind for our own time. Like, this technology that we have could go away. And we could. restart or lose a 500-year gain that we had and human rights can restart. I mean, it's not a guarantee that all people are going to be of the same mind. And we've seen it in history. It goes away. Well, no. And we're seeing it even now as we're living through some ideas. It may be retro. Yeah, right? Let's say. Yeah. So it's possible that things can get reversed or lost. It's not guaranteed. Wow. Now, what do the records tell us about Cleopatra?

Obviously, one of the most famous monarchs in Egyptian history, but comes relatively late to the story. Yeah. And almost everything we have, not everything, but almost everything we have is from the Roman point of view. So it's giving us a fairly negative image of her because Octavian, later Augustus, the first Roman emperor, I think was worried about this very influential woman in her hold on Egypt. I think she must have been, you know, it's supposition, but I think she must have been brilliant and charismatic and able to influence some pretty serious Roman generals, which from the Roman point of view was,

she's this immoral, temptress, and so on, but there's way more to it than that, of course. Interesting. I think she was a serious operator. I think she's underestimated by quite a lot, just as a politician. The fact that she comes to the throne, on her own, technically.

So, King, as a woman, not for the first time in Egypt, but it's extraordinary. She was a young woman facing Rome, facing not great Nile River conditions, we know. So she had a lot working against her. And yet she almost pulled it off, that she almost created a new Eastern Mediterranean Empire, Egypt plus the Near East.

There would have been a serious rival to Rome. Now, do the Ptolemaic emperors, do they have an allegiance to Greece in a very direct way? Or are they sort of operating autonomously? They're autonomous. Culturally Greek civilization is really important to the Ptolemies. They build a library in Alexandria, which they consider to be the new Athens. Egypt is the new cultural center of the Greek world. That was the Ptolemaic play.

That's why the library was built, all these famous scholars. like Archimedes, some of the greatest human minds ever are working in the Alexanderian Library. Oh, wow. That is prestige for these kings. This is the new Athens. But they're also playing this game where they're bringing a lot of Egyptian monuments to Alexandria. We now know stuff coming out of the Mediterranean through archaeology. There's all these Egyptian stuff that they're bringing to Alexandria to build it up.

In the words of a colleague in Cambridge, who wrote a great review decades ago now about this stuff. The Ptolemy's are saying early on when they're building the capital of Alexander and they're building the library, when they're building the famous lighthouse, they're saying to the world, welcome to ancient Egypt, now under

Greek management. That's the game they're playing. We want the best of ancient Egypt. We want the political traditions of Egyptian kingship. We want that relationship with the priesthoods because they have control over local populations and the local land.

production and taxing, et cetera. We want all that. We want to prop up Egyptian civilization, make it better, stronger. But it's Greek management. And we're now part of a wider Greek-speaking world of the Eastern Mediterranean. Wow. I wonder if there's a modern parallel for that. Like, it's not exactly the same, but we could look at like the United Arab Emirates saying, you know, look at Dubai. This is the new Emirates. This is not, you know, an old Bedouin, you know, pastoralist society. This is a metropolis that we've built and this is our like new sort of introduction to the world. I wonder if it had that same effect where you have sort of like, again, it's not co-opted, so to say. I don't know if there is necessarily a metaphor that

parallels. Yeah, I don't know. That parallels. Yeah, I can't think what's up my head. But that's, interesting. Same, yeah, with the Gulf States, same with Singapore. You know, these old, these old trading places that have been trading. wayposts for a long period of time. That urbanized very quickly. Yeah, no, it's been fortified. It's been, it definitely has this image of this is very modern. This is cutting edge in a lot of things.

So it's a destination. It's not just a waypoint for people that are traders. So the lighthouse in Alexandria. Yeah. That's built under the Ptolemaic rule. It is, yeah. Yeah. And it goes on for one time.

From red Oswan granite, by the way. Oh, the same thing as the obelisk. Exactly. Oh, wow. Exactly. We know that. Now, we have the archology, the French archaeology that found the door of the lighthouse in the Mediterranean a few years ago. So it's definitely Aswan Granite, which is really cool.

Where is the door now? It's in Alexandria. It's in a museum there. Yeah. Or maybe it's outside. There's a whole outside open air exhibit two of the archaeology that the French, two rival French teams have been working for a few decades now. Underwater. Wow.

Which is amazing stuff. So the whole city's been kind of resurrected. It subsided into the Mediterranean, a good part of it, including the Royal Corridors, I think. And so that's all been archaeologically found now. We have some of the lighthouse. And that was a, again, it's kind of an Egyptian thing. It's red Oswan granite, at least the lower parts of it are.

And it's really big. It's one of the seven wonders of the world. Right. But that's also a pharyonic thing, this kind of urge to the gigantic. Like we're building really big stuff because we can. because we're rich and powerful. But it's also literally a beacon to bring in ships, bring in business,

the way the Gulf Strait are saying, we want business here. This is a trading center. That's the economic game. That's Hong Kong. That's Singapore as well. Things trading posts like that. Wow.

Attracting business in Athens did the same thing, by the way, in the 4th century BC. After its empire, they're re-fortifying Athens. architecturally, but also in terms of legal institutions, bring, come foreign merchants, we want your business.

Wow. We want to track business in. So this is the game that a lot of early states are playing. Did they have a Navy? The Ptolemies did have a Navy. Because in order to have like successful commercial shipping, you need to have a sort of Navy to protect from,

you know, pirates and things like that. So they had some type of early Navy to protect ships coming in and out of the Port of Alexandria. Yeah, no, navies are really important. Pirates are a serious menace. in this whole period. We know a lot about pirates. Wow.

The last few centuries, B.C. It goes hand and glove with trade using ships. I mean, even now, right? You see China commercializing throughout the 60s and 70s and becoming like a real manufacturer. They get a Navy directly kind of on the front end of their global, you know, shipping operation. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it makes sense.

It protects. Yeah, you need it. It's essential. Yeah. And, I mean, the British were able to control. commerce all over the world because of their ability to control the straits with their Navy. It's just, yeah, it's so fascinating to see that it doesn't change that much despite all these years, even in Ptolemaic Egypt.

Same basic idea. How do they make a lighthouse back then? It's just fire? Oh, I guess so, yeah. Like reflective mirrors and fires. It must have something, something reflective on the top of it. You could see it for quite a distance, but it was essentially a flame. And it was up for a while, right?

Do you know how long it was up? Yeah. Well, I think it fell into the Mediterranean. It was a massive earthquake, probably a series of them, late Roman period. Even, well, do we know exactly when it fell? Late Roman period, possibly? Got it. But massive earthquakes, which is typical Mediterranean anyway.

And when did the fire of Alexandria sweep through the library? Well, that's a whole story about who destroyed the Alexander Library. Do you have a theory? Well, the theory I like is the theory of Roger Bagna, who was Professor Columbia. He's now retired who argues. So, you know, there were fires in the Roman period, but not at the library itself and the warehouses along the Mediterranean. It looked like they were burned. But probably later.

But the idea of the destruction of the library is actually modern analog. What happens to the library is with papyrus manuscripts, they require constant copying for preservation, like an electronic backup or something. But with manuscripts, you have to copy them at a certain point to preserve because they deteriorate through use and through time. And what seems to happen is the copying stopped, the tradition stopped at some point later Roman period.

And the tradition just gets sort of, it slowly fades away. because things aren't preserved, rather than something really dramatic happening to the library. I like that story more. I think it's probably more likely. There's no fire? Yeah.

Not in the library itself, as far as we know. What? This is crazy. I thought the whole point is there's a fire in Alexandria. Yeah, well, there were fires. I mean, there were, there were battles in Alexandria in the early Roman period. It looks like the warehouse district was burned, though,

not the actual library itself. The warehouse district, holding, like, holding all kinds of stuff, presumably, goods. Okay, not documents. And maybe,

well, there may have been Piracy scrolls there, possibly. But, you know, the, this explanation of, it just sort of fading out

over disuse, it's, it's a lot less sexy as an explanation, but I think it's more likely to be the case. Fascinatingly boring. I know.

That's a good way to put it. It is. And they'll, like, ah, that can't be true. It's not fun, kind of, but it's, it is more, it's, I think it's probably more likely that the library, the library goes away because it doesn't get used anymore. And the copying tradition stops there. And things just sort of slowly, wither away, fade away.

So where does the myth of the fire come from? Well, there's, there, we have Roman descriptions of text and there's some dispute about what is referring to. And the debate is, is that the main library? or is at some storage facility, you know, in the harbor districts. Is it possible it's propaganda by the Romans to save face for losing? Like, oops, we didn't actually do that. Oh, yeah, we can speculate till the cows come home and exactly what it did.

Oh, you got to wonder, though, if there's like a couple generations of Romans that are in charge of Alexandria. And then, you know, the emperor's like, yo, where's all the documents from Alexandria? And they're like, oh, yeah, that's it. And they go, oh, it was a fire. You know, you didn't hear about the fire a hundred years ago? They're like, oh, he's a fire. You know, like, I just, it seems. You want that, you want that story.

I just think the negligence of not reporting all the documents and backing things up would just be, you know, it just is such a stupid mistake. Right. Like Archimedes is there just laying down facts. You don't let that go away. Yeah. Well, one of the great geniuses, top five geniuses in human history probably. And we've, we have some of this writing that gets in the tradition, but not. everything. Yeah. We've lost quite a bit of that tradition. But over, again, the compression of time

is maybe deceptive, but over a few hundred years, it's more likely that it just got, it faded the way. Now, were the papyrus scrolls and Alexandria more susceptible to sort of wilting because of the humidity being near the coast? Oh, I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think so. I do think that these things, because they're being used all the time, they do have to be copied to get preserved. I think that's a thing we tend to forget. And it shows you, it reminds us of the fragility of civilization and also of knowledge. How do you preserve it?

If you just left the papyrus alone forever, is it going to still be usable or not? No, you have to recopy. to preserve these things. It's like backing up an electronic file up on the cloud these days. We assume it's getting backed up, by the way. But, you know, it's a little more, a little more mysterious, maybe. Wow.

So, sorry, back to Cleopatra. Yes. You had mentioned that she almost pulled it off. Yeah. Quote, unquote. Yes. What does that mean almost pulled it off and why did she not? This is Cleopatra's dream, as I call it.

And I think other authors say the same thing. I'm not alone. What is Cleopatra doing? What are our aims besides surviving, which all kings, that's job one of a king in the pre-modern world especially, is like staying alive

because it's tough to be stationary as opposed to roaming. She wants to create a Mediterranean empire. A new empire. To rival, Rome, or to rival Athens. Yeah. Yeah, more so. I mean, Egypt, and, you know, the invasion of Antiochus, the fourth that I mentioned as a context of this lawsuit by this woman and out of the way of town, when Antiochus invades Egypt

the second time in 168 BC, we now know from unpublished sources, but it's clear, that he claims Egyptian kingship. He's declared Egyptian kings, even by Egyptian scribes. We have legal documents that are dated to his reign in Egyptian, which means he must be somehow accepted by Egyptian scribes. For a short time, but enough to start that process, that means that Antiochus had consolidated the entire Near East, the old Persian Empire, the entire Near East, Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean coast and Egypt. Really, that's significant. And we know earlier, Ptolemy the Third on military campaign against the Seleucids was at the gates of Babylon about ready to put pay to the Seleucan Empire in 245 BC.

We have sources that look pretty certain that happen. He gets called back to Egypt because of the crisis, probably a massive now river failure and pending famine, looming famine over Egypt. And he has to go back and solve that problem. Otherwise, he could have controlled the entire Near East as well. So there are two moments in the Hellenistic period, we call it, where there could have been this massive empire reestablished. It's kind of Alexander's dream to consolidate the Persian Empire through conquest,

the entire Near East and Egypt, then North Africa, and Greece, all united. And Cleopatra, I think, is intending the same sort of thing to consolidate political power in the Near East. and in Egypt, and is on the way to doing that. And fails through this kind of stupid naval battle at Actium, which doesn't look to me like a real battle. It's just sort of ships that meet and then not much happens. It's a defeat by Cleopatra's Navy, for sure, kind of.

But it doesn't seem so decisive, but I guess she thought it was because she flees back to Alexandria and probably commits suicide along with Mark Anthony. What? That's crazy. Yeah. It's a little bit like, why don't you, you know, rethink or something? But it's, again, this is the stories that we have, the Roman sources.

I wish we had her own sources for what she's doing. It's very hard to have a balanced view because most of the sources are Roman sources who have a very particular propagandistic, belittling point of view. Speaking of belittling, the word pyramid is a Greek word for like a date cake, a little cake. The word obeliskoy, obelisk is how you skewer meats on a barbecue pit, literally belittling Egyptian civilization. On purpose.

On purpose. That's crazy. This is the legacy we have from this period. Wow. This is a program to belittle, to domic. dominate Egyptian civilization. So Pyramid is not... It's not an Egyptian word?

No. What the... Mare is Egyptian word for pyramid, I think, or is that... I've got to check myself. Now, we actually have Egyptian words for these things, but these are Greek, these are Greek words, and they're really weird things that Romans are using

to kind of say, oh, Egypt, you're not that good. That's crazy. You're not that powerful. These are the greatest monuments of stone ever done in the Mediterranean, pyramids, obelisks, and Rome was saying, eh, we're better than that. You guys are just, you guys are yesterday's news. Oh, the Empire State Building, that old pointy thing, that old silver stick that they got over there? Yeah, exactly. So that's, you know, that really is kind of coming full circle here, that these things we associate with ancient Egypt, like very much like the symbols of ancient Egypt. and these really important monuments, engineering.

Or just kind of like, yeah, Rome says no. And actually, okay, well, they're not that bad. We're going to steal a bunch of them and bring them to Rome because they're really cool. We can use them as sundials, which is what they do. But, you know, this is an imperial, a new imperial program to take over a place and to completely absorb. Wow.

That civilization. So the Cleopatra story that we have via Shakespeare and Shakespeare via Plutarch and Plutarch, earlier Roman authors, is all a program. So Cleopatra, she was just, she was just a tempterous, horrible, horrible Egyptian woman who ruined the morals of two good Roman generals, et cetera. So the true story, we have to reconstruct from what do we imagine? What about her scribes? Where are they?

Where are they? Yeah, good question. So, you know, one of the problems with this whole period, the last first century BC, the first century BC, we don't have a lot of written documentary evidence from Egypt. It just doesn't survive. Probably in that library that they... It could all be burned. Stopped copying. It could all be destroyed.

For whatever reason. Maybe they're not writing down so much. But I wish we had more. But it's one of these ironies of history just with Alexander the Great, too. Our sources were Alexander the greater five centuries after he lived by and large. We don't have very much directly from him. It's all later tradition, kind of built on probably his own media strategy, which he definitely had. And then probably his descendants and people that...

The legend of Alexander gets going, and it's really interesting. Before we wrap this up, okay? One more question about these pyramids, these little date cakes as we were talking about. There's all the speculation that, you know, they warrant tombs and that they were found by later, you know, like new kingdom Egyptians that then use them as tombs, yada, yada, yada. Do you have any educated or informed thoughts as to what the pyramids originally were while the speculation comes in and how they built them and what records we have? I know we talked about that a little bit, but I just wanted to button up that conversation about the pyramid specifically.

Sure. Yeah, they're definitely tombs. They're built for the king as a funerary monument. No doubt about that. We don't have a lot of documentation. The Kiyaps, the great pyramid, the biggest one, there's no text in that pyramid that says, this is the tomb of Kiyops, which allows then people to speculate.

Maybe it's not a tomb. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's grain stores of the kings. There's all sorts of ideas that fill the vacuum. And that's a bit of a problem. But I think it's pretty certain archaeologically now what these things are and who they belong to. And there is now some evidence, some written evidence.

Archaeologically has been found in Giza associated with the Great Pyramid and the building of it. The village where some of the workers lived, for example, is now well-known archaeologically. So we have a better understanding of what these things are. We know who they belong to, for sure. So these shafts that go from like the king's chambers, the queen's chambers that don't lead out anywhere. I'm sure you've heard about these.

Yeah, yeah. What are the purposes of those? I've heard like it's, oh, it's a ritual thing so that your soul can ascend, da, da, da, da, but you don't want it to go outside because the rain or something. Do you have a thought or a theory on that? Yeah, I don't really. they may be devices to prevent tomb robbery even

maybe I mean if you look at tombs including Tuts Tuts, Tum was robbed twice Oh really? Yeah but it didn't get away

with much it doesn't look like but we know it was robbed there were people there were people in there and every other royal tomb was robbed probably the minute the barrier was finished so it's a problem

if you're building like the largest tomb in world history. It says inside here are vast riches. It's a little bit of a problem to it. You're attracting a lot of interest already. Right. So maybe these are some false ways in. I don't know. There may be some ritual aspect of some of this. I've seen that as well. It eventually leads to kings getting the idea of having hidden tombs in the valley of the kings, where the ritual building that perpetuates your memory, the temple, and the burial site is separated, as opposed to the pyramids and even Middle Kingdom royal burials, where the priestly ritual of perpetuating the memory of the king, making offerings every day and so on,

and the barrier were linked together. The new kingdom, these things were separated from a temple where that happened, and the vall of the kings, which was protected, and these tombs were dug into the... the living rock in this in this valley quite some ways for like because they saw the robberies of the well yeah they they they said we got to do something else of course it didn't work those got looted also they got looted too probably the guys who built them oh you think so yeah yeah wow and what what makes you think that well it's the obvious uh the obvious choice yeah i mean it makes sense to me right it's an inside job like that's the kind that's the kind of thing where it's like

oh something got stolen from my apartment it's like oh well who's working on your apartment whatever You know, this happens in New York all the time. Yeah, yeah. Well, exactly. There's a Middle Kingdom burial at, no-Mational kingdom burial, where there's a beautiful sarcophagus inside with the lid, pride open, and there's a wooden mallet underneath the lid,

between the lid and the base of the sarcophagus, like sitting there, like, to prop it up. To prop it to keep it open. Yeah, it's still there. You can still see it. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

Just how it was. but it originally was. Exactly how it was. Yeah, whoever the looter was, the guy had tools. And you think, you know, the average farmer doesn't have a lot of tools. This is probably someone with a nice wooden mallet. Wow. But how do you pry that thing open?

It's huge. But anyway, it was done. Wow. So, you know, they leave some evidence behind. So this is maybe someone that had some type of acute knowledge as to how these sarcophagus work. Probably. Probably. Probably.

Humans don't change, bro. We're all the same. Whether you're living in the Nile Valley or you're living in Brooklyn, New York. That's fair enough, man. Yeah, right? Yeah. Well, Joe, this has been absolutely amazing. I really enjoy this conversation.

I did too. Thank you, brother.