Historically High - Ancient Alexandria

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

Imagine the internet was a city, now imagine that city about 2,300 years ago. There once existed a city for the sole purpose of gathering all of the knowledge in the known world, that attracted the great minds for hundreds of years, where discoveries where made about the stars and planets. That place was the City of Alexandria (as in founded by Alexander the Great himself), who's library was so wondrous that it became one of the original 7 wonders of the world. Join in as we talk about this melting pot of ideas and discuss what we think we lost along with the library. Pens and papers at the ready.Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ah, yes, Stumpus. Come in, come in. What can I do for you? Doc, I have an issue that I don't really know how to bring up, but there's just, there's got to be something that you can help me with here. What is it, my dear boy, we have herbs, we have tonics, what seems to be yelling you? Is there an herb that will make me feel more like a man? I mean, there are several things. There's a wine I have that can give you a vigor inside to warm your belly. There are herbs that can heat your blood. What particularly part of being a man are you talking about?

So say, I'm in a bathhouse, and I disrobe, go sit with the other men. We wrestle, we laugh, we play games together in there. we all come out of the bathhouse and it seems like all these other men are smuggling figs while I'm only smuggling olives. You're talking about we've got a, you've got yourself a Statue David's situation is what you're saying. Yeah, unfortunately I feel like you hit the nail on the head there, Doc. Well, there's nothing that I can do for enlargement of, your family heirlooms but um there has to be something I have to be known for more than what I am now is there okay there's not like a procedure you can't like reach

in there and add another inch I've been pulling on it as much as I can but some for some reason it's just not coming out any further well there there is a place that I've heard tale of it's a faraway land in which I've heard of wondrous medical advances and they don't have the same shackles that I'm placed on my that are placed on me here in here in Greece. Are you saying that they might have bathhouses that have men with smaller?

No, no, no. What I'm saying is they may be able to help you enlarge your situation to grow your potential is what I'm saying. They can make thing bigger. Why don't we have that kind of medical technology here? Why would we have to travel a great distance? I don't know.

Listen, I think we could all use it. But where you're going to want to go is you're going to want to travel to a faraway land called Egypt and a city called Alexandria. The mine's there. I've heard of the brightest in the land. And, well, I can't think of any other pursuit to go after. It's more noble and refined than making. someone's penis bigger. So I say you go.

I feel like I don't have a choice in this matter. Will you send me the way? I will. I will send you. I'll call the instructions into my assistant. She will go ahead and get you a map and see you out. Thank you. Thank you, doctor. What, 200, it would take us four years at this rate? Once you start getting more people, I think it kind of extrapolates a little bit. bit faster than that. How about that's the deal? If we do 200 episodes and we're both still working

and not making a good amount of money from this, we just call it quits. I feel like 200 episodes is a good plateau. We'll get that achievement and then we'll just drop it. Is that like the same agreement that people have like, hey, if we're both not married by 30, we're going to do that. We'll just marry each other.

I thought you were going to say murder, suicide. That's the next contract after. If we're not married, it's, it's the if we haven't gained if we haven't done this in life at this point you have a murder suicide pact the addendum to the contract

is if we're both not married by 30 we'll marry each other and then we'll go out and a murder suicide at 60 yeah because our lives were so sad for the first 30 years if they're going right that's the next logical step okay so I was thinking about something on the way over here I was thinking about something too

okay do you want to go first no no you go first okay so do you ever think about I feel like every single one of my questions starts like that like do you ever think about good questions okay

so what would the population of the world look like had there not been like war it would be bad it would be so many people just because if you think about it what was it

During the 1918, the Spanish flu, or whatever they wanted to call it, didn't it kill off like 2 million people or something like that? Yeah, it was a very short period of time. Yeah, it was a huge number. So even if you were to say, out of those 2 million people, that you got 33% of the children, because obviously... It only got 33%.

No, like out of that 2 million people, 33%. Gotcha, okay. Yeah, 33% had children. Everybody had one child after that. Which back then, probably not. It's probably they would have doubled themselves. So at one point, that would have been another breeding pair and then just working down the math.

And that was just the flu. That wasn't even the war or anything else. I know, because, like, so just even recent war within the 20th century, that's how it works, right? The 1900s is considered the 20th. 20th century. Yes, because... It's always what you're saying

in the century you're going into, right? That's why it always made sense when it was called 20th century Fox. Well, and we have to figure out, obviously we're doing a history podcast, and I need to know why we count down to zero and why we count up from zero. It's the...

Okay, so the religious version of it is BC before Christ. Yeah, and then it's AD after Christ. Anos Domini is... That's what the technical term for it is, which is an entire podcast in itself that it's so crazy that modern time is based off like a religious event like that. And not only that, because I think Jesus Price

did probably exist. Like, he was definitely a person. I believe he was a real person. But not obviously what all the stories were. But were they counting down? How was that... No, no, no, no. This is just a time that we've given them.

Correct. I think at the certain... point, what probably happened is they started keeping time after he died and like, okay, this is when we're going to go ahead and start our recorded history. And then it became so big that that's how it became more widely known, I think. But how do we know, like, time lengths going the other way? So then we just count backwards. So then we just look at records and we try to, I would imagine, I'd talk about my ass, but I would imagine what they would do is they would go ahead and any literature or documentation they had for any time before Jesus, they would go ahead and, they would go

ahead and try to use, try to find out where he died in their history. And then at that point, they would start backtracking it in time. It's crazy to think about. But the population thing, so even before the 20th century, you know, even taking out all the people that died for World War 1, World War II, that's just not casualties. Like, I want to do an entire podcast on casualties versus it's the casualties of war versus the casualties of civilians as a result of the war for like starvation and everything like that.

Well, and even to go weirder with it, if you were to count the alleged floods that happened in the world that wiped a bunch of people out or massive earthquakes, Mount Vesuvius, shit like that, like natural disasters that have kind of... Volcanic that could wipe a city or a country

or, you know, population off the map. That, I think, is the earth like trying to call the people That's got to be Mother Nature's way. That and disease. Yeah. But then you also on the tricky slope of do you blame like if you're saying mother nature and disease, what do you say about like when the Native Americans got had 90% of their people wiped out from smallpox or whatever it is?

That's technically a disease, but that's then introduced by a man during the, it was almost when they were in conflict. Correct. Yeah. So is that a result of the conflict or is that Mother Nature taken in to go? head. It's like a weird combination. Well, and it's like us turning coca leaves into cocaine. I don't think Mother Nature thought that we would put

coca leaves through a gigantic manufacturing process and create a sweet white powder that we put up our noses. No, but that in itself, whoever found that out, think of like that science used what they would consider

the wrong way, but that's still amazing science. I don't consider use the wrong way. We made something better. better. That's true, but how many, initially, how often was that used it in medicine? A ton. They used it. People still use it for like altitude sickness when they, like we were talking about the Inca and all those people. When you're climbing up into those higher elevations, the coca leaves, the alkaline that's in them stops like getting sick. Does cocaine thin your blood? It would have to because it's a stimulant. I would think so because one of the other things you think about like a little bit of a nose.

bleed or it would make sense for altitude because when your blood is a little thicker, your heart's having to pump it, it's harder to pump. It's more viscous. So if you're chewing coke leaves up there, your blood's a little thinner, it's able to pump through your body. Could kind of your joy in yourself, you're dizzy. You're dizzy from that instead of dizzy from the height. So, but then, oh shit, that was, okay, so what was I saying before that about? It's kind of like wars, coal population. Maybe that's, That's what I was talking about. Yeah.

So kind of leading in what I was thinking about, the time frame that we're going to be talking about, is think of how, you know, the people were already hardier back then. Like, if you survived childhood and, like, illness and stuff like that, you were just generally a more sturdy, like, I'm trying to think of the right word. What are they always, what's the word they always use? Corn fed? Like robust. Yeah. You have a more robust system because you were able to fend off all of those without a lot of, without probably any medicine or things like that. that you had fevers, your body just beat them.

You didn't take ibuprofen or whatever you take. So you're still going to go ahead and be a little hardier, but all these like battles and everything back then were just literally with just sharp shit. So you're getting cut, you're getting dinged up, you're getting stuff chopped off. There's not really an established medical procedure or like kind of overall care, you know, belief of care.

Each country probably had found stuff that had worked for them So they had like medics and everything like that Like crush these herbs into the wound Yeah But think of the likelihood of just literally getting A cut and infected And if you're fighting in like a strange land People were just dying left and right

Like in battle So that itself like how Imagine if that stuff didn't happen Like that far back Those guys weren't dead how crazy the population would be now. We wouldn't be able to sustain that. There's a lot of debate over if there is like a,

I don't want to use the word climax, but like a max number of people that can be on the planet, I think there definitely is. I don't think climax is the right word. I think you're just thinking max. Yeah. Like in max capacity. And then the top, I mean, you don't get better than a climax.

Max. Here's the other part about that. Do you think back then, before they had modern technology, that that was a reason why people put more faith in God because they would see people heal from injuries that they didn't expect them? Like the likelihood of that person surviving was low, so it had to have them praying that was the key factor in them surviving.

Yeah. Like, because you couldn't say, oh yeah, it's because of, the bat behind you oh okay well yeah because you couldn't say oh it was because of the care this person received which in most cases they probably didn't receive care but if you know you know you live on a farm and the dude down at the next farm

you know cut his foot off plowing a field or something like that and you're like oh I've seen like five people beforehand lose a foot and they're just dead like there's no coming back from it and then all of a sudden he survives and he's like what you do and he's like I just prayed me and my family just like oh shit there's something

to this yeah either that or god love that guy and those other four were sinners there was no as weird as there was no science to challenge the religion religion was the only like oh the only way this could have happened was religion yeah god damn it I'm gonna see yeah thing's gonna

get me but at that point who do you you know then who do you think because it wasn't at that point depending on your I guess depending on your religion if we're talking about like Greece in that area in the Mediterranean, you have like 14 different gods. So then you're asking anybody, so which God was it that you actually like, you know, prayed to for that?

Either that or did you pay tribute to the God of hell? Did you go knock that out? And not to mention, if you see somebody do something bad and then they die, like if you see them going against the beliefs and then they get killed, that's the easiest thing. Yep, that's what happened to that guy. Or you, you know, you're standing behind him in line when you're doing your, you know, donation to the temple. And you see him put it only in like two coins. He reaches his hand in and drops one and grabs four.

Yeah. And then all of a sudden, the next week, a rock falls on his head. And you're just like, not going to do that. Always going to make sure to give the money. And kind of one of the other things that I was thinking about was. So I think it's safe to say. say that without some of the major events in the world and some like non-major events, it's safe to say that if something would have went differently, like you or I wouldn't be here.

Our families wouldn't be here. Butterfly effect. It's exactly that. And I'm not saying that that means that one person, depending on who that person is, dies in 32 BC on a certain part of the world. It has an impact on the other side. It's not like that tiny enough of a body. That can be possible.

but like World War II that doesn't happen the way that it happens nothing is the same here at all all so at that point do you have to be is it kind of a philosophical thought to be like it was horrible what happened in World War II but at the same time you have to think to yourself

it's good that it happened not necessarily good that it happened but if you're if you're happy with how the world is which I know there are things that like I'm not saying I'm 100% happy, but I think there are positives. We're born, we're alive, we're here. Do you technically then have to be grateful that all those people died?

That's a tough one. That's a high brain question. I know, yeah. When I think about just the occurrences that had to happen for us to be where we are and the people that had to hook up and the trips that brought them into the same city to meet and all that kind of stuff, it's also random that I feel like life as we were going to be alive somehow

we just might have been in a different position like we could have been over in England or Australia our number somehow I don't not believe in God but I also have trouble with the way that religion does things you could go down a rabbit hole on like that thought that we would still exist in just different positions so that like feels like it opens up that discussion of is there just a pool of like

consciousnesses I guess is the best way so think of like a giant pool of just and they're just waiting for their chance so all of a sudden some life you know life's being created and everything like that and it just pulls that con this it's like my turn my turn and that consciousness gets to go up into that body it's sucked down into the body yeah so down down up wherever this. And so you're always, there's always, you know, you were always in that fool. It's just when you had your ticket, your number called. Life is literally just a powerball deal.

Like your being in your consciousness, I guess, is just in one big powerball tube with a bunch of other ping pong balls and then it just gets sucked up in. And I'm not saying that that predetermines the type of person you're going to become. Like if I was born, you know, in another part of the world, I'm not saying I would be this person already predetermined. I think that it's also, it's nurture. how you are is determined by how you're raised and everything like that in your environment.

Your consciousness at least. But yeah, like that blank slate consciousness, just that number that got drawn. I don't know if that's necessarily, like, that's a really, like, far out thing to think about, but it's kind of cool to think if you always would have had the chance to exist. Well, and it's, it might be far out,

but there's no, like, actual explanation that's not far out. No, and I don't even think that that's, like, a religious thing. I think that's, like, a kind of a cool, like, metaphysical type of universal question to ask for like well and it's kind of what you got to tell yourself because i go down the rabbit hole sometimes of thinking we just die and that's it like we just we're done our consciousness is just done and we're in a box like we got god willing 80 years on this planet to figure things out and then that's just all for not okay this is going to lead into

our topic today yeah do you see no i do i can leave directly in here well we're You still got to get to my question, which will also lead perfectly directly in there. I forgot. I'm sorry, though. What's the coolest thing you've ever done in a library? I'm actually trying to find one. I'm trying to figure out if I have done anything what I would consider cool in a library. I, as a kid, I liked the library. We had a small one, and it was where, like, I would look at all my, like, dinosaur books

and, like, the, like, National Geographic and all that kind of stuff. Shaping Little C.K.'s mind. Yeah, yeah. Having to deal with the fucking do. decimal system not ever understanding why that thing even existed they just weren't in alphabetical order it's an asshole um it's disappointing i've never dated anyone while i was in a library so i could never do anything like that um god i actually i might have to go do something in a library just to get it out of your system just to get it's great nothing i'm not going to go beaten off in a

library or anything like that but maybe go burn one in the stacks or something like that and that's when i was in college living off campus If I wanted to have like a group get together, we would always have to go to the library. And I don't think that I ever learned much in a library, but we created, I think it was the fourth floor. There just wasn't anybody up there. We did the longest line of book dominoes

that I've ever seen in my entire life. And yeah, we did also sit outside and get high by the river first and then go in and do it, but it was probably 100 books. Really? Yeah. And nobody else was. up there. It was perfect. It was like midday. We had basically the whole floor to ourselves

and didn't get a lot of studying done that day, but it was awesome. I just see the random person coming up and looking up the stairs and you just looking and be like, what? We're doing Dominoes. And it worked. It was, I guess we learned engineering. I think it was English class while we were there, but we engineered a sweet-ass planet dominoes. So that does, yeah, that does go into what we're talking about. Do you think that this kind of stuff, the conversations that we like to have where it's just asking each other these random kind of out-there questions. This is what this place was made for. That's mainly what I do think it was. It was just a bunch of people with ideas that were bouncing things off of each other and kind of feeling out different processes and different

things like that. The library of Alexandria was kind of the cultural melting pot before the cultural melting pot because you had people from North Africa. You had people that were coming up from Africa. You had Persians that were still there after they had been to defeated you had Greeks it was a part of trade routes for different spices and things like that were everybody was there well that's the biggest thing too is I was trying to figure out what would be even um there's no modern equivalent that I could come to America I would say okay as a whole just because there were so many cultures that came in not for learning definitely not for learning I didn't I was thinking about small scale yeah like city or like a place

like the only thing I could think of, America's perfect, because it really is. That at that point, everyone would come and pool the resources here. It was just on so much larger scale. I didn't even think about that. Good for you. Well, I think it said that it grew, again, kind of like when we were talking about the Inca culture, they grew out of nothing. But they built this city out of somewhere where Alexander had like a vision that this is where he wanted it. Yeah.

So, in 50 years, it became one of the biggest cities. in the world. That's incredible growth. How he ends up finding it. So I think it was, it was about nine, nine years before his death. So he ends up coming over to Egypt. And that's,

again, that's going to be an amazing podcast. The Alexander... His empire. Just his... Where he went throughout his life. So he ends up conquering Egypt. They fight the Persians, which Egypt had been under Persian rule for a very

long time. And I think that is more people's general when someone depicts in their brain or they think of a depiction of an Egyptian, it is the Persian Egyptian. It's like the darker skinned. It's the more pronounced facial features for like pharaohs and stuff like that.

I'm not talking about like the... That's how I think of them. Like more ethnically, like in line with the Persians. And what comes to pass is then you get these guys like Alexander coming in that are like fully Greek and more, you know, what you would consider like pronounce facial features. Yeah, like like not Anglo-Saxon, that's not what I'm trying to think, not blonde, blue-eyed,

but you would get more of like that fair skin. Less melanin in the skin because they grew up further away from the equator. Like how you would imagine a Roman, like I said that time, more like light skin and everything. True. So he comes in, kicks the Persians out. And he selected Alexandria. There were a couple different reasons. When he came in, apparently everyone wanted to be a pharaoh.

Like, if you came in someplace, he wasn't like, no, I'm already king of Macedonia and all of this, you know, other area. You're just going to refer to me as the king of Egypt. He saw what the pharaoh's got, and he was like, fuck, I want to be a pharaoh. Well, and I think part of his reasoning to be that way was because he didn't want to come in and just push Greek rule like they had fought through with the, Persian Empire, he wanted to help kind of foster some of their cultural things and then bring himself in slowly. Because one of the things that the Egyptians really made him, they really embraced him, was because he would go visit these temples and he would give up the offerings to the gods that

they were. The Egyptian gods. Yeah. So he was obviously smart enough. What do you think the trial and error was like? Again, I don't want to get too far into him specifically in his history. But that had to have been lessons learned, taking over other countries and seeing how easily he was able to go ahead and then hold the populace. He probably ran into situations where the first time he did, he's like, nope, you guys are all believing in the gods we believe in.

And he would probably have revolts and more unrest. Next time he was like, okay, you guys can keep a little bit of your stuff. Here's some of our stuff. A little bit less unrest, a little bit less revolts. Then finally he was just like, here's what we believe in. If you guys like it, cool, you guys can keep doing your thing too. You're just still going to answer to me. Everyone was like, oh, cool, we're not changing anything.

We're just answering to the new guy. You're helping us with our culture while slowly kind of putting your thumb on the scale and bringing yours into it. Yeah, you're just new management, but it's still business as usual. So then he ends up being made pharaoh when he gets to Egypt. They called him the son of the chief Egyptian god was how much they loved him. So they believed that he came from the lineage of the older pharaohs. Correct. So what he does to find this out, because he finds out what happens when you're a pharaoh. You get the full afterlife treatment. Like, apparently in Greek culture, the afterlife was much less appealing. I'm not sure what it is. That's something that we'll cover it another time. But you even know about Egyptians. Like, you know cursory knowledge about Egyptians.

Look at the tombs that they had in the design. Just incredible. They packed the tombs with all of their treasure and everything. like it was all so they could spend it in the afterlife and use these things in the afterlife it had to have been a party so he sees this and what I actually read about it was he gets made Pharaoh he's Pharaoh in name at that point they start calling him the son of the guy what what Ammon I think Amman I think that's one of our so what he does is he finds out he doesn't get that Pharaoh after like trebin unless he is like a born Egyptian or kind of incorporated into this religion so he

he has a dream that confirms his father is actually the Egyptian god Amman and not i'm trying to think what his father's name was um shit Alexander the greater no no no it wasn't it was something different Alexander the great senior it wasn't Alexander how is it not because we have guys this is the other thing that's going to get me is when we get into this and we start talking about tommy philip was his dad his dad was philip of macedonia so um so they didn't care about there. Well, his dad wasn't a conqueror though, was he? Yeah. Yeah. Alexander inherited a lot of stuff from his dad, not the lands, but his father had gone ahead and made like Macedonia a pretty powerful player in the Mediterranean already. So he just took it to the next level. So he has this

dream. He actually is the, and he found out he was his father because the god almond came and gave him a hug. That's nice. It's a good dream. So he's like, oh, guess what? what guys, come to find out. My father, Philip, wasn't really my dad, the god, the Egyptian god, Amon, came to Macedonian, actually had sex with my mother.

So, this all just works out perfectly. This is a little bit of like a Jesus thing. Exactly, yeah. So he also has a dream that Amman tells him to build his city by the island of pharaoh. So the way Alexandria is set up, it's got this island that's a pretty, I mean, not huge,

not like a huge livable island. You would think of like Crete. And it wasn't that far off the coastline. No, it was three quarters of a mile. So that's how they built the causeway in between the two to create the port. Exactly. So he's like, build it here because of this natural location for a military, it's strategic military because of the harbor.

It could store a lot of warships. Once he built the harbor, it was in proximity to the Nile. It was at the edge of the Nile River Delta. And then it was also, as far as strategically being to the Mediterranean. training you had instant access to the Mediterranean to get to all the different other locations but yet it was closer for people coming up Africa turning into the Mediterranean it was one of the closer areas than selling further into the Mediterranean well probably because you would back in the day when you didn't have a map you would want to follow the coastline correct in the first

you're not going to you're to get to if you're doing that you got to go all the way around Africa then up along like I think like the Middle East and then back down to like or then back around to like Rome and everything. It would have to be. Correct. So he picked this. I mean, it was a great location as far as being a cultural hub and getting, you know, basically having all the advantages right there. So he ends up building it and he intentionally wanted it to be the intellectual hub in the world.

He built it. He wanted this city raised for exactly that reason. Well, there's different ways of dominance that you have in the world, I think. There's the physical dominance where you're going to be taking over lands. You're going to have a great, great mass of people, great mass of land to take over and rule. But there's also the intellectual power that you have from gaining everybody else's knowledge. So you're going to walk into a situation anywhere in the world, anywhere that you have that knowledge, and be able to fit in, be able to understand what they're doing.

If they want to fight you, if they want to declare war, you kind of understand what they know already. Do you think that was more common, though, that back in that time, I think it was probably pretty uncommon for the people that were going to go out and be conquering to also be almost as equally interested in the intellectual pursuits? You had to have, of course, you had to have at least some smarts in battle, tactical, you know, tactically, you had to be intelligent to be able to defeat another army and be able to take over their land and then maintain that land. but do you think that obviously he's an outlier Alexander is because of us still knowing who he is today and everything like that but he was just a stud he was like do you know who his tutor was like his private tutor uh it wasn't socrates it was aristotle yeah i'm pretty sure it was aristotle he's getting and then do you know i saw what the um kind of the line of teaching was between all of the most well-known like

Greek intellectuals. So there was Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, right? I'm trying to remember who was first, but there was a, like a hierarchy. So this guy taught this guy, this guy, and all three of them were that hierarchy of teaching each other. I just can't remember who was the... Didn't they all, like, get hot,

and people followed them and loved them, and then ended up almost as pariahs towards the end of their lives because they weren't as accurate as the people had hoped? yeah I think they ended up they from what it sounds like a lot of these guys would just go and they would both speak to each other they would speak to people with common interests and then they would go and just speak in public and it was man it was almost like a religion but it was an intellectual religion like these people would hear what they had to say and be like you know

I never thought about that before that's so they started to gain fame notoriety more people were you know started to listen to them it was almost like they were intellectual cults Yeah. So Plato is the first. He's the first one as far as like time frame goes. And he'll show back up into this. Yeah. So Plato is the first one. Oh, hold on. Never mind. Socrates. Okay. So Plato, he's widely considered. Pivotal figure in the history of ancient Greece, Western philosophy. His teacher was Socrates. Then Plato, then Aristotle.

Aristotle, I believe, was the actual teacher of... The mentor kind of. The mentor. He basically, you know, tutor at this point was in royal families. It was,

you are going to go ahead and teach my child everything about education, um, strategy, everything like that. Because the king isn't going to,

you know, you think a king's back, the king's weren't like, come on, son, let's go have a catch. They were like, no,

like raise my kid to be my heir. I got shit to do. I got to go rule or get drunk or, it sounds kind of like his dad was out there on the forefront in battle too because it had said that Alexander was out feet on the ground fighting and leading battles in like his 20s which he didn't live that long he only lived to be like 38 is that yeah it sounds right yeah it was something like that the other crazy thing too is how long he actually spent uh at alexandra

it was like oh I'm going to go spend six months a year once the city is complete This was like him founding the city, getting it, getting the guy that he wanted to grid out the city, which that in itself is insane to me. Like, if you think of ancient civilizations, you never think of the city planning feature of it. Cutting it up into quarters to have different areas in the city of arts, sciences. For drainage, plumbing, irrigation systems. So he called on some guy from Greece. I want to say he was, he didn't design Athens, but it was one of the more well-known cities. he actually was the architect of that city

calls him in, he's like, I need you to come down, map this thing out so we can start building this. So, you know, cities like this, they're not just thrown together. Like, there was some mock-ups that I saw of how they were, and it's like a lane going this way down a huge street, a lane going the other way, like we would, in the middle is like the canal,

supplying the water and stuff like that to certain districts. It's just, you know, I never really, you look at something, you're kind of in Aubin, And you're like, what went into this? It's not just the building. Some guy sat down that was smart enough to be like, okay, this is how big of an area we have. I think it should be this street, should be this long with a block, this size, housing this many structures. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go in route water from here to, for, you know, plumbing was probably minimal.

But it was more about, you know, we need to have a fountain here where people can come fill of water. Well, the other thing, too, is they had to have had a lot of help in Egyptian influence, because if you are pulling water off of the Nile that's right there, that's that was the river, right? The Nile River. The way it was set up from the images that I saw, Alexandria had like, so it was on the coast, then it has the island just three quarters of a mile out, and then behind it was almost like a tributary of the Nile. So it was landlocked, of course, but it had this section of the Nile that,

came up and that's one of the other reasons it became such a huge hub of trade is because you could barge everything up the Nile into the back of Alexandria. They had a canal system built that could then transport stuff from that those docks that were on the Nile side, transport it through the city to the actual Mediterranean part. Yeah, it makes sense and they would have had to have had Egyptian influence because they no doubt went and toured other cities and looked around and said, how do you guys live in the middle of a desert correctly? How are you Alexander and you see Cairo and Giza and you see all of that and you don't say, I build it like this, build it like they did?

You see temples and pyramids that you just, your mind can't wrap itself around. We still can't do it today. I know. I know. And a lot of, you know, some of the stuff within Alexandria, the ancient stuff still does exist. Some of it's in ruins. and some of it was built over by the next civilization, but the influence that they have,

it's so crazy that you don't think about. It's Egypt. You don't think of Greek influence in Egypt. You think of pyramids. You think of obelisks. Oblis came from Egypt. Whenever those show up in Greece and everything like that, they saw those in Egypt first.

And they're everywhere. Exactly. There's one in the Vatican City that's ginormous. Right in the middle of the Washington Monuments, giant obelisk. So you, but they, because it was Alexander, coming from, you know, Greece and everything, you have all of these things being built

also in the Greek style. So you're like, it's like a Greek city with some Egyptian influences just plop down in the middle of Egypt. They had so many influences in their designs just from everything. A land that's been conquered at least once is going to have at least three different cultural.

And one that's been around for that long. Yeah. Like the pyramids are 2,000 years older than Alexandria. Or no, wait, are the pyramids are 2,000 years old now, or was it? Alexandria is about

2,300 years old right now. So it was built between 2,600 and 2,500 BC. So way before. Way before. Way before. You had about 2,000-plus years.

Way before. Which, at that point, that's going to inspire your confidence if you're Alexander to have Egyptian builders be like, oh yeah, you can handle this city. Like, you guys know what you're doing if you built these that long ago. Well, and creating that bond between the Egyptian people only furthered his abilities to be able to do the things that he did because he had them on his side.

It wasn't, they weren't slaves that were doing. He was the, he came and liberated them from the Persians and he was the son of their God. So he's only there during like the initial stages for like six to 12 months and left to go ahead and go back on his conquest. He invaded Egypt in 332 BC and ended up dying in 323 BC. So he was 10 years from the time when they hit Egypt to the time he died was the amount of time that he got to spend in Egypt. And he loved the place it sounded like. It was just a new culture that he absolutely loved.

But think about that. So you're dead nine years later. They're building the city. I'm sure they made great. You know, they did a lot of progress on the city within those nine years. He never got to see it and everything, but it's still going to start becoming a hub. The library gets built. But that wasn't until the library didn't even get built until Alexander dies.

At this point, there's a power grab by, like, all of his top generals, which I think he had quite a few. He had three that basically branched off. Ptolemy and two others. Ptolemy wanted to be a part of Alexandria because he, probably knew. He wanted the Egyptian empire. He wanted that part of the empire and then the other two I think divided it between like what they had taken over in like India

and Persia maybe and then the other one was like I want to handle the like Greek area. And I can't remember the name of the other two but Ptolemy is the guy that was like okay I called dibs on the Egyptian empire I'm heading there. So he ends up

showing up he gets made the ruler of Egypt and he dictates that it's going to be Alexandria that's actually the capital so not Cairo or anything he's going to make Alexandria the capital of it

part of kind of the plans of building Alexandria I'm not sure when it kind of came into play but so you have the island that's off the coast and it's basically just open water between it so that's not like when you're designing a city you want to have

a port or a harbor that's going to be like breaking the waves it's not going to be a rough sea so they designed like you were saying the causeway that went three quarters of a mile out to this island which did they say how they did it I imagine it was just dudes tossing stones into the water until they they built kind of a land bridge yeah but you have to think too like you're doing that to make it big enough for you to get carts and everything past there because now you're you know on that island is where the lighthouse is going to be. You're connecting to...

Correct. So you have to make it structurally sound enough to be able to support it when you're moving these huge ass pieces of stone for this lighthouse across. So that in itself, three quarters of a mile of a stone causeways that you're having to place in the ocean

and then build... This stuff is just like the engineering aspect of it when you really break it down to the nuts and bolts is insane to me. Like they're using... They have the wheel, of course, at this time because they have chival. chariots and everything.

But at the same time, man, you're having to buy either animal power or manpower build this stuff. I imagine they probably had a few humans that were making a lot of this stuff happen because that's how the Egyptians built the pyramids. Nothing gets built without slave labor in this day and age, yes. I'm sure, and especially because the whole,

it was Alexander that had, founded it and had also gone ahead and taken over from the Persians. How many Persians do you think were there that weren't just like, oh, hey, we're cool with you and everything. There were probably a good chunk of them from the Persian army. I'm glad you're cool with this. Now you can do all the grunt work around here. Tollamy and Svshonov after Alexander Dix.

Did you know he kidnapped Alexander's body? It was weird reading about it because some of them said that it was tolomi the first. Some of them said that was Ptolemy the second. It would have had to have been the first because it was in, it's when they were transporting it, he, like, hijacked it. And they supposedly have found a site where they believe that it could have been Alexander's final resting place, but he never made it there because Ptolemy stole him.

Yes. Tolomis throwing me through a loop. The P is, it's like teradactyl. Now that I know that there's a P there, I look at it and I want to say Ptolemy, but I can't get my brain over. When I was writing out the fact board, I almost just omitted the P because it makes no sense. We should do that to words now. just start making them the way that they phonetically sound yeah yeah why do we need a pee in front of that

it's fancy it's how they did back then what does he do during his rule tommy was somebody i think that really wanted to focus the the first three tolemy one two and three and i think four to a certain extent all kind of had different aspirations and the first tolemy his aspiration was to build that cultural center he wanted the library excuse me he wanted the library built and he ended up building something way bigger than the library

his real thought was doing a full what they call a museum which is I think what did they say that it was it's it's like a place where you have muses where you have correct it's an inspirational center because that's what

the muses were meant to do they were meant to inspire art and culture and intellectual progress, all that kind of stuff. Basically, what he's saying is like, when they use the term in the museum or library, it's because there wasn't a word for like a university or a learning center. Okay.

Like, if you boil it down, I look at almost like the library of Alexandria as like an Oxford University. Well, and it wasn't like its own freestanding thing. It was just one part of the museum. There were cultural halls. There were places that they would sit down to eat together. there were two different lecture halls and kind of the shitty thing about

where it was set up is it sounds like a lot of it is now underwater or in such bad ruin and disrepair that they can't quite figure out the layout of it but it was just one branch of the museum that was huge and it was almost like that was

their hub of learning to then fuel the rest of the museum so from what they've been able to put together location-wise so Alexandria is as a city. It's a large city. It has different districts. You have certain religious sects that live in certain districts, but are free to travel throughout the other ones. About a quarter of the city they said was the royal, like the royal district, like where the, you know, Pharaoh or

King's Palace would be. So within this district, which again is about a quarter of the city, this is where you actually get like the library of Alexandria. It's built as this, it's not just a building, it's like a sprawling complex. It was huge. Where you had all these different places, almost acting as like dorms, like for all the people that were there, could go ahead and live there, sleep there. And for my guess, this will come into play also.

Later when we kind of talk about its suspected destruction, I'm guessing the Royal District was closer to the harbor and the water. It would have had to have been just based on what happens, yeah. Well, and that's where it sort of seems like you wanted to be,

because that's where all the newest things were coming in. That was somewhere where when you pull into harbor and you see a royal area, you think, oh, shit, this place has its stuff together. Well, and that comes into play with how they start kind of building out the library. So it's actually the first, if not one of the first, it is the first instance of government subsidized learning. So in a lot of situations you would have in the ancient world, you would have libraries being built, but these were all done by specific. big benefactors. They were just people trying to go ahead and build out private collections, just for the sake of having them learning it. It wasn't traditional in a sense because the libraries

of the collections of knowledge beforehand were all on stone tablets. So it was the space factor of what they could bring in was... It was limited by just size. Yeah, exactly. Size and the ability to and then the ability to transport that without it being destroyed from wherever you were transporting Correct. Yeah. Stone tablets don't travel well. It's definitely part of the advent of papyrus and the more heavily used of papyrus, invented in Egypt, that led to being able to go ahead and actually store all of this. And I'm going to go between using the terms books. Books in this situation, everything was on scrolls. There weren't actual like real books, but they called them books

because, like for example, the Odyssey by Homer was 23, I want to say between 23 and 28. I can't remember the exact number of scrolls. So I'm going to say the number of scrolls that they suspected it has, but keep in mind that a book can take up a large. And Homer's Odyssey, that to me seems like probably on the larger end of books in that time. That thing was huge. We still read it to this day, which is amazing in itself. The fact that that did survive, and I don't know if it survived from Alexandria or if it was a copy that they had made. I think at that point a story like that would probably be popular enough that there were multiple copies.

That's a Greek times bestseller if you're going to ever have one. Well, so much of what they did was they would bring in when they were amassing the collection, they would be copies from some of the best literary works that they would find some of the most original ones because they didn't want to get anything that had any editor's notes in it from the last few people that had written it down. They wanted the closest to the actual knowledge. If they weren't able to keep what someone brought into them, because they would put out these feelers and send people out to go ahead and gash, these books and scrolls throughout the world to bring them back here.

That's how Sirius Tommi was. He's like, I'm going to pay you guys to do this. I'm also going to pay people to travel throughout the world, the known world, gather up. If we don't have it, I want it. I want it to be the most comprehensive source of information on the entire planet. They would bring the ships that would bring things in. They would send people onto the ships to look for any sort of written work.

They would bring them back. They would look them over and say, yes, we need this. You can't have it back, or we'll make a copy of this and give it back to you. Exactly. Some dirty things that they pulled, one of the best things, did you see the story about the ones that they got from Athens? No. So Euripides and Sophocles were like kind of the,

in the arts and poetry area, they were kind of like how you would lay out different pieces of poetry, different literary words. Like they define like the structure and prose and everything like that. Correct, exactly. and Athens had them locked up tight, which Athens, a part of Greece. Not as a prisoner. They were just so famous there and everything that they wanted to, there were celebrities there.

Well, their books were what they had a hold of that they didn't want to lend out. There was nobody else that could get a hold of them. They wanted to be the, hey, we got this. Athens is the only place you're going to find this. And obviously, if this is all still one empire, there should be sharing within the empire. But Athens is like, nah, we know what you're doing down there. This isn't going to happen. And they said...

At this point, it wasn't even really like that. Had it all still been under Alexander, would have been probably be way easier, because Alexander's like, no, you're my empire. Give me the information. Just unilaterally making that decision. They're still kind of cooperating a little bit. They probably have an agreement

not to go to war with one another for now. But I don't think they're helping each other out to try to make... No. Yeah, they're not going to be like Athens. It's going to be like, hey, oh yeah, you guys are trying to be the most... Have all the information.

Yeah, here, have ours. We're all Greek, but you're trying to build a better city. Exactly. So they end up sweet talking Athens, and they sent them, I want to say it was like some amount of silver to the point where Athens is like, hey, okay, here's the deal. We'll send them down to you. You guys take a copy, take a look at them, make sure the silver's in our account, we'll send it down, everything will happen. They send the books down there. All of a sudden, everybody in Alexandria is like, hey, these are sweet.

They make a copy of them. then they send the copies back to Athens and keep the two original books and what are you going to do at that point? Yeah. It's not like Athens is going to come down and declare war against their own people over two books. No, because what you're going to do is you're going to try to

present that to the ruler of Athens or whoever's ruling Greece and then be like, I'm not doing that for two books. Did you get the... Well, he sent us copies back. So you still have the information? It's still all there. It's just not the original. It's not the books that are valuable.

It's the information in the books. Like, we have the same information. Unless, then, They modified them in Alexandria to cut out moment, certain useful stuff. Yeah, like you were saying, they would go onto ships. Can you imagine them going onto a ship? And there's just like, it would be like the old world version of like just dirty drawings of making women. They're just going through and they're like, we don't have this one.

We need this one. Here's a couple of coins for confiscating this. The guy's sitting there on the ship looking at this dude's drawings that he made and it's like half sea creature. Hey, this is kind of hot. He slips it into his tuning. Didn't find anything. That's how the legend of mermaids got invented. It was some pervert who had a fish fetish,

but he still liked the top half of a woman. So his drawings. And he's like, what is that? And he's like, uh, I saw it. Like, what do you mean? You saw it? He's like, uh, sailing around. There's these creatures out here that are like half woman and fish on the bottom.

I forgot what it was, but they've said that they figured it out that it was like a manatee or something like that they would see. Yeah. And somehow they were just so horned up out at sea probably from being on a boat with a bunch of other dudes. You're dehydrated. You're just like the sun's being down on you. Mirage, you know, the heat waves on the... Yeah, scurby going.

And thank God they didn't catch any of them. They might have, and there might have been some terrible things that happened to some poor sea creatures. Yeah, just it could have been everything. They were every single port or every single ship that was pulling into port they were doing this. So they were getting stuff from the Spanish. They were getting stuff from other sides of Africa that are coming through. They're getting things from Asia. They're collecting so many different things.

And there were so many different... I don't think it was the Torah, but there were a lot of different religious books that were coming in. Was it the Torah that translated? Because there was a sizable Jewish population there. So they were translating different things into Greek that had never been translated into Greek before. And... Excuse me. Back then, thinking about that ability to try...

translate and to learn a whole new language from somebody else that knew that language but may not have been great at teaching it? You got to, you got to look at it like, is there a place that gathers information? Like, I know that they're, like, if you were to go on the, it was the internet before the internet happened is basically what it was. It was. And the closest thing that I can think today that we would have that's like the Library of Alexandria would be like the Smithsonian and DC. Or the Library of Congress. Library of Congress, yeah, to a certain extent, because it does collect everything. But more the Smithsonian. Just because of the fact that it's broken down

into the different sciences. I think there's six buildings in the Smithsonian. So you have six different studies of all this different history. And it's all in one big place where you can walk in and out of. And there's different accounts of how the library of Alexandria

was set up, but you couldn't just be a commoner that would walk in and start learning. You kind of needed some sort of a footholder ability to have access to the grounds. So as far as like the advancement that took place here, it became so well known that it started to draw a lot of these intellectual people from Greece, Athens, you know, other centers of like intellectual thought. They were like, we need to go down and check this place out. Just because you wouldn't have any restrictions on what you could learn.

You're, you know, you're getting to study things that you would have never had access to. One of the things that they ended up kind of seeing through the medical field was there were a lot of Greeks that would come down that wanted to study the body because there were only so many things that they could do to like a dead body in Greece. But coming down to Egypt where there was more of an understanding just from the embalming and the mummification process of how a body works, that they would be able to see these different things. they would be able to open up the arm of a dead person and see a muscle structure. They would be able to open up the cranial area and be able to see different portions of the brain, different wrinkles, everything that was in there,

and kind of be able to study anatomy in a way that they had no real prior knowledge of because of either religious rules or decency rules. Well, yeah, the Greeks prohibited dissecting bodies at all. It reminds me, you know, when people say they went somewhere else for a surgery or for a treatment, that's exactly what it is. You're like, oh, I can't do this here in Greece, but I really need to do this to advance medicine. No, I went over and did my studies in Alexandria because they allowed you to do that. And exactly like you were saying, they've been doing it for so long with preserving mummies and taking out organs.

They had all this knowledge. And now you're taking all these brilliant people from Greece and you're allowing them to then step in and study all this kind of stuff. So there had to have been just a huge jump in just the understanding and the field of not so much medicine. in itself like pharmaceuticals of learning that kind of stuff but just understanding like the way that the human body

functioned. I think there was probably a pretty big jump in any sort of pharmaceuticals too because you're getting all this cursory knowledge from all these other places that are coming over on books

because if you had an incident out at sea on a ship there had to have been away like you had to have had a medicine from home that you knew would prevent sea sickness or something like that so those things are coming across

to a new country and they're able to adapt and use them. So I think, pharmaceutically even, there were leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else because they were getting all the knowledge of how people are treated in other countries. It had to have been, you know, calling it a library, it does it a huge disservice because it was like a large university

where you have like, you know, where they say like UCLA Medical Center and everything, they have medical schools at these giant universities that would study things. And think of being able to work here. So, yeah, you have your stuff, like you're known remedies in Greece, you know that this herb does this, this tonic does this. But now imagine you're also studying and talking with someone that was from somewhere in Africa

where they had different herbs and medicines and a different tactic. Their native plants are more antibacterial. And all of a sudden you're like, hey, what if we mixed yours and this? And all of a sudden you get something that's like penicillin or an antibiotic. So it's sort of a super cleaner to clean out wounds to stop infections and gangrene. When we first started looking into this, the first parallel that I drew was there were, obviously, the Olympics started in Greece. The best athletes went to Athens. They competed at the Pantheon, Parthenon, whatever it was.

This was like the nerd Olympics was in Alexandria. All the intellectuals flocked to Alexandria, like all the athletes would flock into Athens. It's like Silicon Valley. Like as soon as Silicon Valley in the boom for like the tech boom, that's exactly kind of what I like to compare it to. That makes sense, just because that's more of an intellectual side. But it's like all that athletes and everything go like, oh shit, we got to go prove ourselves there. I think there was a lot of intellectuals that came down and wanted to prove themselves in Alexandria. Yeah.

You see Plato's Academy showing up to teach just specifically out of there. Well, Aristotle, his entire private library, he willed it to the library of Alexandria. He moved, they moved everything down there? He willed it. Holy shit. I know he willed it, which I assume if they, if it didn't make its way down, they would have pointed that out and saying,

but it never made it there. But think of like his private collection and stuff that he added to and his writings and everything. He willed all that to Alexandria. Well, and all of his, all the people that listened to him, everybody that was in his cult, his circle, all of them had added their stuff in there too.

So there probably wasn't a known scientific discipline at the time that didn't have like, study your representation at the Library of Alexandria. I know for a fact that astronomy did, because finding out what was discovered here, it makes you really realize how much thought and knowledge came out of here. So there was a guy named Aristarchus. Aristichus, I think. Yeah.

So he is the one that discovers that the Earth rotates around the sun. He's studying astronomy. They also kind of merged both astronomy and I think astrology. It was different at that time, but it was still the study of the sky and everything. That would kind of blow you away too, because if you're sitting in Greece and you're looking up at the stars, and then you move 900 miles south into Alexandria and you go back up to look at those same stars, you're going to be looking in a different direction because you're in a different part of the world. So that has to go off in your mind thinking, okay, there has to be...

You're not always going to see the same constellations at certain times a day. You're going to get a different... And that actually comes into play with how something else was discovered that was huge here. So he calculated also that the solar year, which is the sole year 365 days, right? Okay. Anyway, he calculates the solar year to within seven minutes. Oh, and they figured out leap year there too, huh?

Yes. There's another guy also. So he's kind of the guy that's more known coming out of there for like the astrology and the astronomy, probably more so astronomy, I guess. There's another guy named Aristotisotisotoc, Aristotines. Aristotines. Sounds good to me. I know.

so he figures out the circumference of the earth okay circumference of the earth is 22,600 something or maybe 24,600 I'm not trying to be exact exactly what I'm trying to prove here is how close he got again there's no travel around the planet at this point he gets it within 200 miles of the actual circumference of the earth how he does it and I don't the way these guys' brains work

just when you read about it, it fucking blows my mind. He set up two objects. One, I think somewhere maybe in Giza Cairo. It was a city within Egypt. And then he set up another object like, almost like we were just talking about him, the obelisk. And what he did is he studied at the same times of day what it would be the shadow. How big the shadow was, how much it moved. and everything. He's able to take the shadows, do some type of equation between the way they moved

between the distances that they were between these two cities. And again, this isn't like calling up a buddy and being like, hey, what's yours doing right now? And then being like, okay, mine's at this degree and this is how big the shadow is. No, he's studying it at one place. He either has someone else that he trusts it in another place or he's traveling to this other city that is hundreds of miles away. Then he's doing his studies there. So this is his life's work apparently to put this together and discovers from the way that the shadows expand and move and the way that the calculation works between them he's able to determine within 200 miles the circumference of the earth that's so close how does your brain even like comprehend i understand if this is your life

study and obviously if you're here in alexandra you're reading stuff that you didn't know so if you're stuck on a problem it's like getting rid of like writer's block whatever that would be for a scientist, you come in and you're like, I can't figure this out. And some guy from another part of the world that the scroll just happened to be on a boat that they copied down, studied the one thing you didn't know, and all of a sudden every piece of it comes together and now you know. Well, that's kind of what I think the biggest takeaway from the library was, was it wasn't necessarily a bunch of mind-blowing works that were in it. I think it was a lot of inspiration for the thought

that brought these things about. There weren't concrete answers there. There were other pieces that gave the ability to come up with some of these things. There was a lot of philosophical debates. Yeah, it was the collective... And imagine those debates, man. You have literally the greatest minds of the time

all sitting around, just balshing. And you know that they were doing whatever drugs were available at the time. I had to do. How do you think these people expanded? The guy that figured out the circumference of the earth, You're telling me that he was just sitting there without any type of mind alteration and thought to himself. You know, these shadows probably tell a story.

So if I measure them between two cities and know the exact distance between those two cities, and I can tell the shadows or move in a certain way, I'm sorry, no. No one would sit there and think about that unless you were stoned or drunk or something. They also didn't have a whole lot else to do. No. But imagine, you know, even their prophet, not their prophets, who were the, they were, they were, would always go to for like advice, they could see the oracles.

Claire, the oracles were on drugs and that's how they came up with visions. I'm guessing Alexander probably was on something when he had the vision of his god, son, godfather hugging him and now he was a pharaoh. It wasn't hype pills, I know that. No.

He was a short king. He was a little fella. That's like a common theme throughout history. Like him, Napoleon, like certain, like even like a lot of the Russian czars were I think like short. Also people were smaller back then, I think, wasn't it? Depending on where you were.

How would they get on horses? Because did horses grow too? Or was it like three guys trying to launch him up on top of the horse? If you're Alexander or you're freaking Napoleon, you have like three or four dudes that just follow you around that are just your bitch to do whatever. They're walking steps. Yeah, they basically, one lays down,

one gets on his hands and knees and you just step up onto the horse. Do you think the library, like, height of the roof and everything was smaller back then too, just because there were like littler places to be? No, because I think it was probably dictated with trying to keep scrolls. So there would have been a taller height so they could do that. Yeah, I see. Well, not needing to use stone tablets anymore. Correct.

Your space is going to be so much different. And how do you catalog this stuff? It's rolls of, like, it's rolls of scrolls. It's just rolled up like papyrus, and you're having to keep it in safe in a way to, like, you've got to know about having it not degrade. Because again, you're in Egypt. They're like the masters of preserving. Not to mention you're dealing with a formerly live substance in papyrus that can dry out,

that bugs are attracted to to eat through. Yeah, you're dealing with humidity. You're dealing with heat because you are in Africa technically, even though you're right on the coast. There were so many things that were happening all at the same time. And this wasn't like it was a one trick. Like this wasn't the only stop in town. They had other libraries that were kind of trying to do the same thing and trying to mimic the same thing. There was another place called Pergamum, which was over in Turkey, I believe.

And I think that it was one of the other fellas that was a general that went over there. Yeah, it's in Pergamum, Turkey. And they were doing a lot of the same things as to trying to collect as much knowledge as they could because it was almost like an intellectual race to see who could do it better. And there are stories that allegedly Egypt would stop exporting papyrus to try to slow down their abilities to get this knowledge down and get it written down. Yeah, it's sabotage. And that's where the advent of papyr, or not papyrus, but parchment came from.

Because you see them switching to a different medium to write their stuff down on parchment paper. At a necessity from a lack of another one. Yeah, because they couldn't get what they needed. They had librarians that were kind of, they were supposed to be hailed as somebody that's the superior academic, the guy that you turn to to go to. And they created catalogs like you were talking about that were kind of the first styles of management for these things

where they would divide them up by form and then by genre, and they did it alphabetically, which the Greek alphabet has to be different than that. I would imagine. The English alphabet. But it would have the name of the author and then it would give like a little bibliography

of like what his areas and fields of studies were. And then it would list all of his studies that he had done and all of his writings alphabetically too. So they had some sort of a system that they would build in to be able to... You would walk in and be like, I'm looking for something by... I'm looking for Plato. greatest works. They would pull out

some type of filing system, a card, and be like, okay, this is what we have on Plato. They would, yeah, they would send you to the genre that you were looking for, then they would break it down from genre or you would go form for like if you're looking for playwrights, different things like that, then you would go into genres

of like tragedies, comedies, I'm assuming they had those back then. And then you would find the authors underneath those, and then you would find the works that they made underneath those. So it was a pretty good system. but like you were saying before with scrolls your system's only as good as the way

that you put it back and put it together so I'm sure it was just a mishmash and it wasn't like it was just flat books with like a spine that you could see you had to have some barcation on it cap or something like that well and that's the other thing too is if someone was bringing in

you know off these ships, scrolls and everything like that stories information you wouldn't just go sit in front of someone be like copy real quick or we're taking this. They had a system in place, and I'm not saying that the turnaround times on these guys selling enough port was like, hey, we've got to be out of here in two hours.

No. They were there for days at a time, if not weeks. But you also had to have a system in place where if you brought something in, you weren't wasting your time and saying, we already have that. Let's copy that down again. They had a system in place enough to read it and say, let's look in the system. Okay, we have something similar to it on this guy. Go pull that file and be like, this is the same one.

It's the same story. We don't need this. Well, and there were paid scribes if they didn't have it already. that they would sit down and they would translate or they would copy over what they would find for their collection. And then, yeah, like you were saying, if they were there for two days, they would say, we'll get this to you in three. And they're saying, well, we need two. It's like, hey, tough shit, we have your stuff. So there were two guys, aside from all the other people whose names, you know, probably aren't known,

but probably advanced so many different fields of study from studying at this place. There were two guys that I thought just kind of stood out to me. One, his name was Philo of Byzantium. He invented the water wheel. Figured out the mechanics of the water wheel to use it to go ahead and generate force power. And he actually invented the first gimbal. The hell's a gimbal. So a gimbal is like the best way to think about it.

You ever seen like behind the scenes footage of like a movie where someone's in like a fighter jet or like a spaceship? And the behind the scenes just shows them in front of a green screen like in the cockpit. like in the cockpit, but the cockpit moves to where they're able to do that kind of stuff. A gimbal is what gives it all the degrees of rotation. It's basically like on a pivot and it's like a claw or something that holds whatever you're sitting in and it can move it side to side, up and down side to side. Think about it too. Like if you were sitting in a, like remember arcade games,

they used to have like the fire drive one where you'd sit in and it would really move and rock and everything like that. Or they'd get in and it enclosed you and it rolled. So not like a gyroscope to keep something. on center or something to be able to move and kind of articulate around. Kind of in the same degree as a gyroscope to keep something level. What he used it for, he would use it for a pot of ink. So if he was on a ship.

If he was dipping his feather into it, something or his quill. What would happen is the pot would then almost move with the motion, and it would always try to stay up right. You weren't having to spill your ink all the time. Okay. So, yeah, counterbalance almost. Correct. He also invented the precursor to the thermometer,

which was called the thermoscope. It had to be something with a chemical that was discovered that reacted to heat or something was steam. I don't know. I don't even, I can't, again. You think it was mercury? Because there's talk that there was mercury back then, and that was poisoning a lot of different people. A ton of thermolors had mercury.

All the silver ones that had the silver stuff in it. That's mercury, yeah. And then the other guy, I mentioned this guy Tio a long time ago that I'd watched that, like, ancient mysteries or something like that. And he was talking about this, dude. So his name is Heron of Alexandria. So his title was of Alexandria. So what this guy basically did, 2,000 years before the Industrial Revolution, he started making steam-powered devices.

This, I've read up on this guy, steam-powered devices is very generous for what he created. Okay, but at the same time, he discovered that steam could be used to force air into something to make an action or movement happen. the technology behind that in itself, 2,000 years before the Industrial Revolution, I'm sure, you know,

some of it happened by accident, the study of steam where you figured out that, oh, if, you know, you trap steam, it could make something rise or to make something float, or something of that nature.

But you had him then designing, shit, I don't know, what copper, I guess, would be, I assume copper would be what you were working with at that time, copper and iron,

but if you're wanting a malleable, I want to say they were in the bronze age. There's a weird... It's either copper or bronze, but he's designing these pots that were sealed enough to trap water, heat it, forced steam through some type of tube hose,

you know, again made out of metal, into something else that then made it move. So he would be commissioned by people throughout ancient Greece to design these features for temples. So a few of the examples of things that he designed,

there was a temple, and I'm not going to name the places of where they are because I can't remember their exact locations. There was a temple that was known for its doors opening by itself.

Okay, yeah. Which, you look at that now and you're like, that's not that impressive. You know, we have stuff, we have garage doors. Like, it's just at that time, though, to imagine something moving

without wind or manpower you saw that, that was divine. So what he designed is he designed a counterweight system in which, at a certain point when you wanted the doors to open, it wasn't an instantaneous thing. You would light a fire under this certain area. It would heat the water in this

enclosed, pressurized bin. It would then force the steam to go ahead and the steam would run through some type of mechanism that then forced a counterweight to move. The counterweight then controlled the doors opening. So as a priest, all you had to do was walk around, you were lighting the incense and everything like that.

And then you would know the timing. You would stand in front of the doors and you would ask the God to open them. And they would open on their own. Just a sick party trick. Yeah. He also designed there was a temple of a priestess. I'm trying to remember what her name was, but she was the priestess of like childbirth and fertility.

So she was, she had like 18 boobs all across her chest. That sounds awesome. Yeah. There are any drawings of her? Yeah. Is this something I can look up? Mm-hmm.

Okay. Yeah. What's her name? I can't remember. Just put 18 boot grease, Greek office. That's probably already in my search history, so it should be easy to find. So he designs a device that goes in this marble or stone statue, and what it does is it basically is able to use steam to heat up water, to then force it through piping that then comes out of all the breasts. So it looked like she was lactating to feed her people.

I got to see this. That's awesome. And they would do this during ceremonies, and people would be in wonder and awe, because they were like, how is this happening? He designed a holy water vending machine. Uh-uh. Yes. So you would have these specialized coins. You would drop them.

The coin would land on a paddle. The weight of the coin, being the exact weight, would depress the paddle down. And what that would do is that would pull a plug out of the bottom of a jug. and it would dispense a set amount it would drop down and then once it came back up it would plug the thing and you would get a preset amount of holy water for this coin when do you say that

I think that how funny would it be if they set that up where it was like two dudes inside of a vending machine like that and they see somebody shove the coin in and then some guy takes a drink out of a jug like how you see the gags about the ATM about the guy sitting in the ATM and yeah some dude takes a drink out of a

and like sticks his mouth up to the hole and just spits it on somebody's face. You're like there's something wrong with your guys's machine. It's snoring. You got a pound on the guy. Hit the side of it. Hey, fucker, get up. And then he developed a self-filling wine bowl. Okay, I'm down at that.

Yeah. How does that work? That one I actually didn't look into. I just saw that, you know, I was like, oh yeah, that I would think that that would be probably his most popular invention to be used in the problems of, nobleman and everything like that be like oh I'm sorry my wine bowl is oh what's that it's filling itself again people would be like what is happening the only reason that I say it seems like it was like it sounds like he had a good understanding of it the fact that it took that technology

then 2,000 years to break into the industrial revolution it kind of gives me pause as to how legitimate it was that he it sounds like he did invent good things to use it forward but to be able to harness that it seems like it took a lot more extra knowledge extra ability to be able to harness that for like i can see where you're getting out with that my counter to that would be this what if he was the one that only knew how to do this like he had let's say he wrote down 80% of what it was but then what if the 20% was the key was the one thing that his brain made click and figure out and he never wrote it down or he made one copy and that copy happened to be in Alexandria and it got

destroyed imagine you know sometimes there's people there are people that are so smart that they're the one person that has this idea something just clicks for them they look at something and they're like what if this for it's the splitting of the atom it's how many people thought about you know it's Galileo it's it's one person having one idea about something and that is something I'm that you really can't get out of my head is the the what if about this whole thing. And I want to get into it more once we get closer to like the destruction of it. Yeah. But part of me just thinks about what was in that library that maybe didn't exist anywhere

else in the world because the whole point of this place was to gather all of this in one place, all of this information. Well, when all this information gets put into one place, that information then turns into combined information that can then be, that is only probably kept in Alexandria. What happens if all of that gets destroyed? And it was someone's life work and they spent 60 years doing it. Then all of a sudden, two years before they can write down the information and get it all transcribed out again, they die.

And that information is lost. That's certainly one way to look at it. And it is an interesting thing. My personal belief on it was they supposedly, and I say supposedly, because these numbers are all just wildly out of the blue. History is always written by the winners. So if you have something ginormous, you're going to write that it's ginormous. If you kill something ginormous, you're going to write that it's ginormous.

They say that it contained between 45,000 and a half a million scrolls. So half a million bucks, that's a shitload of books. And that's a lot. I think it was scrolls. So it didn't, books, because books could be over the course of a ton of scrolls. Is that what it was? Yeah. So it doesn't mean necessarily that it contained that many books.

But if you're saying that even if every book was the Odyssey, taking up 28 scrolls and you have 400,000. I think that's the number that I kept coming back to was like 400,000 scrolls. It was between 40 and 400,000. But again, something happens in a fireman. You're not going to be able to tell how many you were in there. It's all ash. It doesn't, but you can also see like what they've seen in Pergamum. Pergamum is the other library that was in Turkey. They said that they allegedly had about 200,000

scrolls of Pergamum. They can go back and look at the footprint of Pergamum and they can kind of see how big the structures were. How many of you could, okay. Yeah. And I know one of the ways that they figured that out or speculated about the library of Alexandria was that the Seraphium, Serapium was a sister library. It was basically built when they started filling up the library at Alexandria. They were like annexes. Correct. They created this annex and that also had like a fire. So, but what they were able to determine was the Serapium was able to hold about 40,000. So what they did is they kind of extrapolated that and figured if that was this size.

This is how big the library of Alexandria was described or selected as being, so they were able to kind of determine. I'm also sure that there's some type of account of somebody that did not live in Alexandria visiting the library and then taking that information back to Greece or Athens where it was preserved and not destroyed. And that person making account like, you know, they're taking the average of accounts, like five people visited the Library of Alexandria. They all came back and one person.

said it was 40,000. The next person said 400,000. The next person said 300,000. And they just take this and just say, let's just average it all out. To me, it sounds far more grand, and I'm not discounting at all what was there, because even 45,000 scrolls,

that's so much knowledge that I don't know what an average library nowadays hold, but it has to be way bigger. That's a shitload of area that you have to have. Speaking of shit, can we stop for bathroom break? Absolutely. Okay, I got, I'm Gotta be so bad.

And we're back. All right. My biggest takeaway, before we get to the downfall of it and the destruction, or the ways that it's suspected have been destructive, destructive, is that that's not the right word. Destroyed. Yeah. Close enough. Close enough.

Destructed sounds cooler. So I like to write down questions that I think about that I want to kind of get your feel on. Oh, I love this part. You always have a good question. How many years of advancement do you think mankind was set back by this? Even little things. Let's say medical stuff, because I know other stuff is being done around the world, but the known world at this point, it's not huge.

When we say the known world in relation to this time frame, the known world is kind of this sphere around the meta, if you were to take an oval around the Mediterranean and then basically kind of expand it and stretch it toward Asia a little bit, that's kind of the sphere. of the known world that Alexander conquered. Because remember, he said he took over 90% of the known world at the time. That's kind of the sphere.

While nowadays, it doesn't seem that impressive. If that's the known world and you're traveling by nothing but horse and traveling an army with you, that's huge. It's forever. Yeah. It's the ends of the earth at that point that they knew it. I like that this question came up because this brings me kind of right back into what I was headed towards before when we were talking about. the scrolls. There were so many scrolls that were there,

but the first beginnings of it were so much music, poetry, and playwrights that I think there was a good portion of that that we lost, which artistically, that's huge, that's ginormous. That's a lot of different things that we lost, that we could have seen. There's a lot of plays, a lot of poems, a lot of intellectual stuff that I'm sure just went by the wayside, that disintegrated that we never got to see.

I'm not 100% sure what the breakdown was as far as technological advancement, health advancement, things like that. Because anything at that point that would have been written down probably would have been implemented somewhere that we would have seen. If you were to write it down

and put it in there, there would have been more of a working knowledge of it. There may have been, but you look at what we've discovered about ancient artifacts and everything, what could have degraded. Like, the only thing standing out of ancient Alexandria, it's a lot of just stone stuff.

It's stuff that can withstand the, you know, the test of time. Yeah. So, I mean, even if this stuff had practical applications, if it's advanced enough, like if you were to take a microchip and you were to go ahead and put a microchip and just have the elements get to it, how long before that would degrade enough to not be usable or understandable to what it is? I mean, I know with like polyplastics and that stuff, it would last longer. But a lot of this stuff that these guys are working on is, you know,

It's made of stuff that is degradable. I guess my overall thought was, let's say it even, from a worldwide perspective, there was cumulatively between technology, medicine, literature, there was 20 years of knowledge lost. There could have been. Think of where we could be now. Think of what we've done in 20 years since now, and now say, take.

that, extrapolate that and say 20 years in the future. It's just, I think this was such an important part. I think this was a linchpin. The destruction of this library was a linchpin moment in time. I think there are very few of those. Very serious points in time when you can say this

had a significant alteration in the course of history. It absolutely could have been, and there could have been things like you say that set us back, which I don't doubt that there were probably a few things. I just think that this place was centered so much more on the arts over the sciences that I think we lost

a lot of arts. We lost a lot of cultural advancement. True. Yes. Okay. That's that's more of the way that I would put it. Yeah, I see. I think you see it from that perspective, which I like, because where can we be cultural advancement? That can mean things that avoided war, understanding of each other's cultures, things like that, things that made us seem like we had more, you know, things in common than differences, especially seeing this place, if you could see the library as a collection of all these different mindsets and ideas coming together, had that been something that would have been able to be pursued? Think of what would happen if countries all over Synthra ambassadors, and this place still existed what it could have done throughout history as almost like unifying

certain countries that would have never had an understanding of one another. Absolutely. There was so much thought that was collected there, but there were also so many humans that were collecting there. Not in the literal sense of like collecting people, but... People willing to go there for the opportunity to discuss this stuff. Correct, yeah. You have so many different cultures that want to be there and that can build those ties that war, I think, is inevitable pretty much all the time. But there are certain conflicts that we have seen in the world that could have been avoided through more diplomatic means. A basic understanding of the other side.

That, I think, is the invaluable part that they lost. I don't know so much about the technology, but from the relationships that could have been built out of it, I think that's really what hurts. And a more unified, not world, because obviously we see what happens when they come over and they find the Americas. That side was definitely not a unification process.

But like what you were saying, think of it in this, like this just, kind of jumped out of me. If you're a king, most of these kings had tutors and advisors that were the smartest people of the time. Alexander had Aristotle. And that's why I think he was so successful. Imagine a place where if you're the ruler of a country that you send your guy to this place to study for like 10 years before you get to take over whatever land you live in. And your guy comes back and has all of this information. Yeah, they could, if a king is too trusting, that guy could use it to his advantage, used to make decisions that were going to benefit him. But what if you got people that were

more interested in the intellectual pursuits of like humanity understanding itself like your Greek philosophers? You get people that are telling a king, hey, you know what? Don't go to war with this country because this is something that I learned about them. It's not that they believe in a different God or it's not that they do this. This is just what they were founded on and they're actually really good at this maybe a peace treaty between us could be the best thing because then we can share our resources and our knowledge and become even stronger they have 10,000 people in their army we have 20,000 people in our army we could have 30,000 people total instead of whatever the spoils come out of it. It's not yeah it's just not about the knowledge

that was lost there it's about for me it's almost about what the potential the potential that was lost for what it could have done for the world. Well you know, you know, look at it from Alexander, obviously war mongrel. You could probably say killed a lot of people. There was a lot of destruction seen in his time. Anybody that has the idea that they

need to themselves conquer the known world, you're a killer. Inherently, there's some bad stuff there. Yes. And not to say that any of that stuff gets washed away because I'm sure he would have done that anywhere and did do that a lot of places.

But the way that he approached this much like the way that we saw in the in the inca episode about how when they would take over a new village they would try to implement some things that were known to those people into what they were doing you're still taking them over but you're

also still giving them a sense of self and a sense of independence of the other things they're going to make the medicine go to down yeah it's actually perfect right there and I think that had that been adopted more we would have seen a lot less casualties and a lot less bloodshed which

leads back to the initial question that you said there would have been more people and things would have been vastly different. I don't know if that would have been for the good, but I don't know if it would have been a terrible detriment. Yeah, it's all speculation on it. Well, here's another point too. It was obviously famous enough

because it was named one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. And what's even more nuts about Alexandria is that there's seven wonders of the ancient world. You have, I think it's the Colossus of Rhodes that huge statue that protected the harbor. I'm going to get some of them wrong.

You have the hanging gardens of Babylon. You have the statue of Zeus. I want to say the Parthenon or something like that in Athens was one of the seven wonders, the pyramids of Giza, the library of Alexandria. And I feel like there's one I'm missing besides the other one that happens to be in Alexandria.

So this is how... What are you going up exactly? So the Seven Wonders of the World or... Ancient world. It's got to be ancient. Because they come out with these updated lists because the Great Wall of China is on I think the seven wonders of like a different

time frame. The Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon like you said, the statue of Zeus, the Temple of Artemis, the mausoleum of Halakarnasus Colossus of Rhodes like you said and the pharaoh lighthouse in

Indiana and Alexandria. There we go. And then I mean, one of the eight wonders of the modern world, China, the professional wrestler. There you go. So that's the other point, too, about Alexandria. And I know we've focused. Fockest. I know we've kind of stayed focused on the library, and that's just simply because it's so cool to me.

But the other thing is the library, or not the library, the lighthouse of Alexandria, the great lighthouse. I didn't study much of that. I mean, if it's a seven-wander of the ancient world, it's got to be insane. Okay, I'm going to learn you up on this. Brain fuck me on this one. I have so many questions about it, because when I think lighthouse, I think they have to have power to have a lighthouse. Exactly. No, you would think that.

Ptolemy first is the guy that takes over after Alexander. He starts the library, like you were saying, Ptolemy, one, two, three, and a little bit, four. All of them have the same kind of goal of pursuing and growing that intellectual. You didn't have a son in there that was like, nope, fuck it, we're going to go do something else. There were different aspects. There were different sciences, literature, all the different stuff. They all had the same vision.

It's a good job raising your kids if they all want to do that same thing. So under Ptolemy II, that's when they consider like the golden age of Alexandria to occur. What he does also is he, because Alexandria is growing, it's going to be this cultural hub, huge harbor, tons of shipping. They design a lighthouse. to go out on this island of Ferris.

So that's another reason I think in addition to building the harbor. That's why they also designed that causeway that goes three quarters of a mile out to sea to connect this island. Well, and great idea because if you have an island out there, you're going to want to point that out for everybody that's coming in. Oh, yeah, definitely. So they build this lighthouse, and the reason that it was so spectacular was that for the longest time, it was the second highest structure in the known world. Pyramid of Giza was first. And I think that

a lot of pictures of the Pyramid Gis, I said this to the other day. I think a lot of pictures do not do how big that thing is justice. No, it can. You need to almost have a picture of someone standing next to the very bottom stone step and see that that

stone is bigger, taller than most people to understand how really big it is. So the lighthouse is actually just a little bit shorter than the Pyramid of Giza. It's, so imagine the, it's out kind of near, of course, the edge of the island that's going to go ahead and be

closest to the Mediterranean. Huge square part goes up first. Then another second tier that's the shape of, I want to say it's a, it's not an octagon. It's a, what's the one that has six size septagon? It's a septagon or an octagon shaped. Another tower that goes up and then at the top one, a circular cylinder tower extends up from that. So it's over 400 feet tall.

The total thing is it's got a statue on top and they never could determine who the statue was. But it was either Zeus, Poseidon, some think it was Alexander. Is it still standing? No, no, no, no. It got knocked down by earthquakes. Like everything awesome does. The area itself was prone to earthquakes. And you're also on an island.

So, I mean, it's... So how they actually got this thing to work, they don't really understand the inner workings of it, how they provided fuel. up to this top of it but basically they had a huge piece of I believe it I want to say bronze or copper and it was... Not to cut you off but the renderings

of it are insane. Yes it's huge holy shit it almost looks like how a building would be built nowadays like a skyscraper right to me it looks like a blending of like a pyramid and a castle yeah because of the the tier systems and obviously when you get up towards the top they figured out that around

ground structure isn't going to take wind. No, but it doesn't look Greek because there's like not columns or anything. There are, it looks like a little bit to the outside of it, which obviously they're all rendering, so it could just be what they want to see. Why they have, they found ruins and stuff so they know there might have been stuff like that. Yeah, that's, it looks nothing Egyptian or it looks nothing Greek, but it does in a way look Egyptian Greek. Yeah, so the top basically how they functioned it during the day is they had this huge piece of

copper or bronze that was so polished it was basically a mirror and it would rotate around to reflect light to show people like a lighthouse does during the day then at night it basically just had a huge what are they called like a brazier like the thing that they make fires in everything a cold room yeah basically a huge fire pit at the top where the kind of the mirror was okay they would like this huge thing the mirror would still be there and it would be able to turn but the fire itself of course would be a beacon for people yeah so You know, this in itself, how long it took to do this, 400 feet tall, you've got to design a system to go ahead and be able to load fuel into it to manage it. You've got to develop a foundation that can exist on a small island like that.

And not to mention that 400 feet in the air, they didn't have glass back then, so they had to still be able to see it. You're dealing with the elements, you're dealing with rain, you're dealing with wind as you're trying to keep a gigantic fire going. And you're, and this isn't like, what's crazy to me is this isn't like, uh, it's 400 feet tall. I know when you look at like a, a building, like a stereotypical Roman building, like a pantheon or something like that. You have all of the columns around it, then you have the roof. But to me, when I see that, I can understand how that's built. You can use, you know, mounds of dirt to the side of it to get up to that level. You then build it, help get the roof into place.

Then you get rid of all the dirt. 400 feet tall, man, without using any type of modern construction equipment, how are you getting stones into place to get that? Like, pyramid makes sense. It's a pyramid. It's at a slope. You can make a pathway that goes up to it. A tower like that, that's insane.

Well, you have to, the way that they would do something like that nowadays would be to build scaffolding around it and then bring it up. But 400 foot tall scaffolding is not a thing. You're not? That's not. That's not. That's not. That were that big and that weighed that much up scaffolding? Yeah.

So, let me see. Tallest buildings. Just for, like, reference. Why are they showing American buildings in meters? What building is comparable to it? Well, I have to figure out meters. How much is 400 meters? Oh, well, 400 meters.

A meter is three feet. I thought a yard was three feet. A meter is close to a yard. It's very close. Like, they're very comparable. All right. Let's see. How many, you know what, the best way that I actually thought about it,

how many stories is 400 feet? Because I think that puts it into perspective, because then people can view a building. Should be 40 stories. 40 stories, man. I know for people that live in larger cities, metropolitan cities, 40 stories might be kind of par, I'm not sure, but like a 40-story building, that is enormous.

The term skyscraper was originally applied to buildings 10 to 20 stories tall, but in the late 20th century, the term was used to describe high ride buildings of unusual height generally greater than 40 to 50 stories. So it would fit the definition, modern days, of a skyscraper. Which, yeah, that's ginormous. And not to mention, the footprint could only be so big

because it wasn't like the island was ginormous. The island wasn't that small. It took a smaller portion of the island. It's pretty sizable island. There actually used to be before Alexander built the causeway and took a, over the island. There was a group of people that lived on that island specifically known as the wreckers. And that was like their tribe because ships would get shipwrecked on that island, thinking

they were working their way into Alexandria. And the people would raid the ships, the shipwrecked. So it's not a cluttered nickname, but there was a group of people that were known for that. I like it, though. That's awesome. But yeah, it ends up being destroyed over several earthquakes. One earthquake toppled off part of the top. And then I think it tried to get rebuilt. Another earth. earthquake happened that then actually part of it it was so close to the water that when it collapsed a bunch of it collapsed into the sea so they've actually gone and done expeditions for um artifacts and to go ahead and tag you know the artifacts underwater um and they've been able to go ahead and

they've found like 30 pharaoh's head statues that were on this thing it's it's crazy so if they were to do that they would have known the direction that it fell too correct and but i you know who knows if that can be from the first earthquake the second. It could have fallen, it could have also fallen on the ground and then the ground could have given way into the ocean. It would have been cool to know the final time that it tipped, which direction that it fell. So on the site right now, they know where the foundation was and how big it was because what happened is when the Persians ended up coming back in to take over Egypt. Pick up the scraps. They actually cleared off what remained of the lighthouse and built a fort. So they can tell, because

they use the existing footprint of it, so they have a good idea of how big it was. Because they just knocked off the blocks and used the blocks to make the fort and the foundation and everything. They knew that that was so good and sturdy enough. Yeah. There's a lot of that you see as far as different peoples that took over this area. They would just use the existing structures for whatever suit would then be honest. Well, and then you, apparently in like, I think I want to say like 79, since 79, 1979, there's been talk from like the Egyptian, preservation. I don't know if it's preservation, but it's the Egyptian government

about them talking about potentially reconstructing the lighthouse. Because this day and age... The lighthouse? The lighthouse? Okay. Because yeah, they've already started kind of reconstruction, not in the same area because it's underwater, but reconstruction of the library. Yeah. And so they, nothing's coming in it. But that seems like a cool idea, man. You have this thing from your past and you know to an extent what it may have looked like,

Fuck yeah, build the thing. Well, if you can build to scale a former ancient wonder of the world, that's a huge drama for everything. And I know that, you know, the ancient pyramids wouldn't be as popular if they were recreations.

Fuck, you're still getting a ton of people coming to see those things. If you put in the time to recreate what it was, look how many people still, you know, it's not what it once was, but look how many people go to see the Coliseum. Well, it's like those goofy assholes in the Midwest that have built replicas of what they think Noah's Ark looked like,

and then everybody, Someone's still pulling off the interstate to look at that. Every single time. You're still getting someone to pull off the interstate. All right. So, kind of getting back to not the downfall of Alexandria itself, but specifically the library. The pre-downfall of the library.

So what are the suspected, there's three of them, right, that are kind of like tossed around as ideas how it met its end? Yeah, three and kind of a fourth, which I think kind of the last one would be the thing that makes the most sense to me. Leading into the downfall, the last librarian known in the library was hypatia, hypatia, I don't know how to say it.

She was the daughter of Theron, and she was a very smart person herself. She did a lot of good research towards the end. The rulers of the time were kind of starting to turn away from the intellectual, I guess the intellectual hub that was the library and that was the museum. Well, was it still the Ptolemy's at this time?

It was because we'll get into that first downfall at that point, but there were different kind of warring factions inside of Alexandria that were starting to question them. And one of them was a guy named Cyril, and he was basically the ruler of the Christians in Alexandria. Okay. And that stuff is coming from Rome, correct? Yeah. At this point, Rome has taken on Christianity as the primary religion.

And so being that technically Alexandria is a Greek city for the most part, there's still trade going on between that. You're going to get people coming over as missionaries to kind of spread Christianity. Correct. They're trying to widen their landscape in a way that sounds better than war, but is basically worse than war. Well, it's the Roman Empire. That's all you got to say. There's going to eventually be war. There always is.

So he gets a band of fellas together, and it's debatable whether he was the one that called the shot on Hypatia. But they round her up, they take her into a former, I believe it was a former pagan temple that they had taken over and uses a Christian temple, tied her up.

And the other thing, it's, I guess they kind of, the translation got lost, but it was either broken roof tiles or oyster shells that they used after they tied her up to scrape the flesh off of her body. Just one of the worst things that you can think of to go out using a broken roof tile

or an actual oyster shell to scrape the skin off of your body. So with the thing that you mentioned, the pagan thing, so anybody from like the Christianity standpoint at that time, it's the normal Greek religion was a pagan thing. religion that they determined, right? Because the whole thing about the pagan religion was it, they considered anybody that had multiple gods to be pagans. And the whole system of ancient Greek religion was that there was a god almost for all natural occurrences. So he had Zeus for lightning and storms. You had Poseidon for the sea, Hades for the underworld, Helios for the sun,

I think. They became reasons for everything. Correct. And there were also gods for the harvest and Dionysus of wine. So, yeah, I guess I mean, in a, I always think when someone says paganism, you always think of almost like Irish or Gaelic. That's how I kind of view it. It's like nature gods. But at the same time, your Greek religion can be considered paganism because it's multiple gods representing kind of those earth type things.

Yeah. I always think, for some reason, I guess it's just influence from being a kid. But you remember Dragnet, the movie with Dan Aykroyd, Tom Hanks? and they were fighting against the pagans, the people against goodness and niceness. Yeah, but weren't the, were the pagans a motorcycle gang? Yeah, it was a motorcycle gang

where they had a big area where they would go get dressed in furs and dance around and take drugs and they were trying to sacrifice the Virgin who ended up being Dan Aykroyd's lady. Just a solid, great old movie. But whenever I hear pagan, that's the first thing that my brain goes to

is people against goodness and niceness, which is a good way to see still in this day, that they're talking about pagans in a negative light. I know, right? Like, it doesn't make, like, when you actually break down the stories between all religions, like the pagan ones, sounds so crazy.

Like, to me, it makes more sense the whole view on, like, a pagan or, like, a Greek religion. Because if you didn't understand the aspects of science and nature, it would make sense to assign a god to all these acts. Like, I'm going out on the ocean, man. I don't know what's going to happen.

Well, did you pray to the god of the sea? Oh, I can do that. that? Yeah, he's the one that gives you good fortune on the ocean. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Well, what happens when there's a storm? Oh, he's angry. He's angry when there's a storm, but if there's no storm, you did good. It's obviously not right, but it's a way to explain it that to me makes more sense. When you think that the pagans get a bad rap from everybody trying to take it over, like allegedly the birth of Christ being a certain pagan holiday that they used, Easter, different things where they were trying to get pagans to convert to Christianity.

Those were pagan holidays though, weren't they? The harvest festivals, different things like that, where they were doing... Well, it's like you said earlier, man. Like, who writes the histories? Winners. The winners. So, I mean, if Christianity ends up bump these guys out, they get to end up describing them however they wanted. That's kind of the history of the world. So they end up killing hypatia or hypatiaia. And so at that point, there's no, I guess, like person to run the library.

No, there's, they went through, there were others set in kind of afterwards, but there were plants. There were people that weren't coming from the Ptolemy lines that were looking into it. Ptolemy at that point, I don't know which Ptolemy it was, but there was less of a focus on that being an intellectual hub, which probably because the city was even bigger by then,

that they were having a hard time justifying having such a big area for learning. Well, yeah, to kind of give some concept and scope to it. So the Ptolemy dynasty, from the time that he comes in to rule Egypt, it's like, it's like 300 years. So once you get closer to the end in this time where Caesar actually comes into the play, you're nearing the end of that 300 years. So you could be up to, depending on how quickly they're dying.

I think what was it like, there was like a Ptolemy, the 13th? The 13th is the one that Caesar comes in contact with. Okay. So, yeah, you have up to 13 of these people. So, yeah, at some point, maybe the shine of, or that allure of chasing the ancient arts and everything like that, or intellectual stuff kind of wears off for one of those pharaohs, and he just, it would only take one guy in line. He's like, I'm not interested in doing this, don't do it anymore. And then the next guy in line, he never knew about that, so he doesn't really institute it.

And the same thought, he's not, maybe he's interested in it because there are other factors that are coming. into play. You're seeing other religions that are coming in and trying to dominate, so you're going to shift more of your focus on trying to keep what you have than grow what you have. Yeah. So we get to Tall Me the 13th, and Tolomey the 13th is really interesting. This part blows my mind. Because she is probably the most well-known Egyptian queen. Her in Tutankham Common, the kid that was like eight years old, that was just a terrible incest baby. But isn't He only well known because of his tomb? That, and he was only eight years old when he died.

Yeah, he was the boy king. So who is Ptolemy the 13th? He is the brother, the younger brother, I believe, of Cleopatra. And their power struggle ensues with Cleopatra wanting to lead more of the Egyptian side, Ptolemy wanting to lead more of the Greek side. You get Caesar, who, like we talked about kind of at the beginning of looking, at this just back and forth between us. Thinking that Caesar was around

at the same time that Cleopatra was around, my brain just doesn't connect that. It's just so impossible to know that there were these two great people that you see from history that not only were around at the same time, but that we're interacting, that we're talking, that we're planning things and strategizing together. The fact that there's so much documentation

and well-known people from like this pocket of like Mediterranean, like Greek history. So I know we're talking over the course of like, we said like 300 years, the Ptolemies are here. But like all the dots like connect and they're not hard to connect. You basically have Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. Those are like the three, the big three for, if someone's like, name a Greek philosopher. Oh, Plato.

Like, it's going to be one of those guys. Correct. Then you have him teaching Alexander. Alexander, the great, like, one of the most well-known conquerors in history. You have him founding this city. This city just so happens now to be the place where Caesar comes in. I'm not sure. Did he end up meeting Cleopatra in Giza or was it Alexandria?

I think it was Alexandria because it had something to do with being around the ports because that's where their ships were were in port. Okay. So I guess they could have met in Giza and then... So during this time frame too, depending of like... So in other aspects of kind of the Mediterranean theater. So while, you know, from Ptolemy the 3rd up to Ptolemy the 13th, during that 300-year time, Italy has been developed into the Roman Empire as well as expanded.

So like the Roman Empire is in full swing? And at this point, Caesar is he the emperor? Is he just a high-ranking general? I thought he was the emperor. Would he have been at the time, though? Would he have been foot on the, or feet on the ground? He was an emperor. He would have had a head.

Dubin in general, I think. He was close to it then, if he wasn't at that point. Well, then this could be something that launched him into being the emperor. So he ends up meeting up with Cleopatra, and we got to do an entire one on her. So I don't want to go on her, one on him. Yeah, but I mean, the way that they describe her and the way that she was able to talk to people and, like, attract people, I've seen some, like, accounts and statues that make her look gorgeous. I've seen some that make her look not very gorgeous.

Really? Yeah. Back then, I don't know. I mean, you're going to have the greatest beauty standards as far as, like, makeup and making sure your skin's cool. But then, aren't you going to make sure all statues of you look amazing? True, yeah, the vanity aspect of it. I'm like, how many times have you taken a picture of your girlfriend? And she'd be like, no, delete that one.

Like, I'm sorry, but I think that happens. Like, nope, I don't like that one, delete it. Like, she sees a statue. She's like, nope, break it. I don't like it. Another one. This took us six months. I know.

So she was so, well-educated and worldly. She spoke Latin. I'm willing to believe that she's hot just because hotter people usually have better influence. Correct. Here's the other thing too, though. She is 100% Greek.

Really? She was 100 full-blood Greek. The Ptolemies, they did apparently like, during their royal line, they were all just Greek rulers. So gross. So gross. So, like, when you look

at her, this is going to sound weird, but, you know, The most famous Cleopatra movie, isn't it like Liz Taylor, plays Cleopatra? That's probably closer and look to how Cleopatra actually looked than most people think Cleopatra look, having that more Persian-Egyptian type look. She was more kind of Caucasian, but she was able to seduce Caesar. There's a story the first time they meet, she comes out naked, like speak in Latin and just completely like charms him because she's from Alexandria man she's educated she knows all this Caesar has probably never met a woman like this

especially one that's a ruler I mean I know her brother I know her brother and can handle her stuff I know her brother and her both kind of ruling but like man like how rare was a female ruler back then yeah she was probably

maybe not one of the first but the most famous the most famous yeah that's a good way for her to meet him I'm sure he was pretty pumped that he walked in at that time to meet her and she's just butt-ass naked So they end up leaking up and he allows her to then overthrow her brother because she has his military backing.

She has all the resources for him. I don't know how they decided that this was going to be, but it could have been a little bit of her just being tired of her brother and having another dude come in and say, hey, I'll give you a position of power if we take over and we win this. You're still going to be around. You're still going to be good. We just want to take him out And the rest of your family's rule out So you have the Everybody

There's still a mish mash of Cultural and a religious fighting That's going on Caesar is just adding to it at that point Oh definitely because he's bringing in also he's bringing in the Christianity So there's always that there's already that kind of like conflict in in Alexandria So he actually writes in 48 BC Which again reading these dates man

That's 50 years before you know they say Jesus died in the same area. Yeah, before he was born. Yes, before he was... Yeah, that's right. So, wait, no, it's... The BC is... Wait, is the BC...

Zero is his birth date, and then I think he died when he was, like, 32. Okay, that makes sense. I, for some reason, may have thought it was the date of his death is when they did before, after... Yeah, okay, that makes sense.

That's weird that they say after Christ, like he was doing shit, like, straight as a baby. Like, he came out of the womb, he was like, miracle time. Making shit out of it. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, her and Caesar end up looking up. I could be completely wrong about that.

Give me two seconds. Because it would make sense if it's after death the day that he died. But I got to take a leak real quick. Look it up. All right. We will be back. All right. Welcome back.

All right. What do we have on the... What do we have on Jesus watch? Just more confusion, man. I don't get this. Popular Mechanics says... And like I said, Anything that starts well, actually, I kind of start to question because I just have popular mechanics.

Think popular mechanics is good? You know what? You don't put a magazine in a dentist or a doctor's office since its inception unless it's quality. Fair point. Actually, there is no year zero. The calendar goes straight from 1 BC to 1 AD, complicating the process of calculating years. Most scholars believe Jesus was born between 6 and 4 BC before Christ, and that he died between 30 and 36 AD or Onodomani, which is Latin for in the year of our Lord. So, I don't know.

So it sounds like they don't even know. Yeah, and then it says, there's another one that says, the Christian calendar was created by an Eastern European monk named Dionysus exugus. He invented the now commonly used Anodomini era, which counts years based on the birth of Jesus. He came up with this concept in the year 525 or 525 years after the birth of Christ. Okay. So kind of getting back to the whole Caesar tying into the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

So how this basically occurs is he's hanging out in probably with Cleopatra. He's hanging out in Alexandria. And at this point, he's at war with Pompey. Pompey? Pompey. So it's Neus, Pompeius, Magnus. Oh, so he might have been the reason the city was named Pompey. I think it was.

So he's at war with this guy, and it's considered the Caesar Civil War. So he gets besieged by Pompey's Navy in Alexandria. And so what he does is to try to escape, he has his men set fire to a ton of ships in the harbor. Because I think I would imagine if they're set in fire to a bunch of ships They're a bunch of Pompey's ships Wasn't he trying to escape? He was trying to make a run for it And so what he's basically trying to do is Probably I'm guessing part of it was a distraction

But also you know ships are burning they can't chase you Yeah So what ends up happening and this is kind of how they figure that Where the location of the library was Is that you know Fire systems were non-existent No And all the ships are fucking wood and resin

so you put into the torch and they just take off well the two most flammable things at the time probably and so that then if they're docked spreads to the docks spreads to anything that's right next to the docks buildings catch fire well guess what you don't have a fire brigade fucking running out there with buckets of water too quick it ends up spreading they suspect

to the library of Alexandria and it burns so that's the first suspected occurrence or the first theory they have about how the library was destroyed. Which there were mentions and this is, I only put a whole little bit of stock in this because there are... Do you think this one is like farther on the likely scale or less likely scale?

I would say less likely because there's accounts that there were annexes of books or scrolls, whatever word you want to use. There were annexes in the harbor that weren't the actual great library. So there's obviously something did burn because it was written about. So you think it occurred. but it wasn't the actual library. It was an extension of the library. Correct.

There's a misconception. It was another arm. So it was technically the library, but it wasn't the actual building of the library. So what it was, just to give you some more details, it was actually Egyptian ships that were docked in the Alexandria port.

They were blocking the feet belonging to Ptolemy. Okay. So I don't know if Pompi and Tau like Pompey had backed the brother, and that's how the Civil War occurred. But yeah, so he basically is like, all right, do you watch Game of Thrones?

No. Okay. I had to skip that. Okay. There's a scene where this Navy's coming in. They send out one ship, and the ship is packed with what I guess would account to be like an explosive. They detonate the ship and it blows all the other ships up.

I think that was kind of his idea, was if we burn all this shit down, there's nothing to chase me when I take my ship and hightail it back for... Okay. So, so that's one suspect. cause of the destruction. What was the next one? The emperor theodosus that was there finally

does turn. Christianity finally does take its hold. They do end up winning. They do take power into Alexandria. And a lot of his belief is that the library was formerly the old religion's way of understanding

things in the way that they did things. so if you're taking over the old regime, you're not going to want anything around. So allegedly they sent people into, there's certain writings where they were sent into buildings to burn down scrolls, to basically dismantle any kind of learning that would have been associated in religion with the pagans, and to start to turn things towards the Christian way of life, which it's so tough to figure out what the downfall was because there are, writings from different people that were there that were passed down and some of them mentioned a library some of them didn't correct there's there's like contradicting reports of like you'll see

someone say something about like oh i visited this great library but it was after it had burned from caesar they were like what exactly was going on well and the question is the people that did mention it did mention something that was the library and the people that didn't did they not mention it because it was such a common thing that they decided not to put it in there, which either or that's just kind of up to interpretation. This whole thing is up to interpretation because there's no best answer. So the Theodosians, I'm not, I'm guessing there wasn't like a meeting beforehand where they were like, hey, here's the deal, we're going to go through all the books

and any of the ones that discuss the religion and their teachings and everything like that for paganism or make and dress, we'll just go ahead and destroy those. but make sure you guys aren't destroying any of the scientific stuff. Like the, I'm going to see it was just like, fucking burn it all. There wasn't a lot of discretion that was going on. No. And I'm sure, like, if you're, you know, obsessed with Christianity like that, you probably have some type of, it's almost a vendetta.

Like, you know, you're not viewing it as, like, information and, like, cultural knowledge and everything like that. You're viewing this as the work of pagans. get rid of all of it. It's too much of a risk if there's anything in there, even the scientific stuff that could make people want to worship the pagan gods. Just get rid of all of it. And then you have the interpretation,

the bias of the interpretation too, to look at it. And obviously the Christians have some sort of a light shed for what they did with the Crusades and all that kind of stuff, which isn't a positive one. So it would almost be easy to blame the Christians. just reading some of the things that had happened to say... They don't have a good track record. No, it's quite believable.

Exactly. They don't have, like you say, a good track record, too, of keeping and preserving other cultures. No, not at all. So they're an easy person to turn the blame on, which leads into the third one. Kaleef Omar was headed the, I wouldn't call it an Arab state, but he was kind of their ruler,

and they had a stop in Alexandria, too, where they had... He was the ruler of what you would consider the Islamic State at that point. Yeah. Yeah, the Islamic State. It's obviously has different meanings now, but the former Islamic State had their stay

in Alexandria as well. And going by the Quran... So they took over all of Egypt, right? I believe so? Yes, I think they took back Egypt. They did. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure, well, this won't be the last stop that we take in Egypt.

There will be a lot of others. But Khalif Omar laid out a decree, allegedly that said burn everything because anything that agrees with the Quran we don't need anything that goes against the Quran is worthless yeah so

supposedly what he had done was he had all of his people go and collect the scrolls and then use them as Tinder to heat his bathhouses and there were sayings that it was enough fuel

to heat his bathhouses for six months was how much papyrus that they'd used. And it's papyrs. You ever take a piece of paper and water and throw it on a fire? It's got to be a little bit better than paper is now, but not much. So it was a shitload of scrolls that they had found. Okay, so where's this one on your likely to unlikely? Where's that one on your meter? I put that with the Christians, because obviously the Christians are a religion that gets a bad name for things that Islamic State

gets very unlikely. Oh, you think, okay. So what do you think? So, okay, so. The first three. Caesar, middle of the road? Caesar was probably like a four, I would say, just because he definitely did burn some shit down. I don't think it was the great library, but it was probably a part of their stockpile, you could say.

So like a one or two, both on the Christianity and then the state of Islam? I just feel like there's so much, when you look at religions, there's so many people. that want to bash other religions for doing horrible things, that it's hard to weed that out. Ultimately, in the last thing that we're going to come to, is the fact that you run into so much disrepair and underfunding because this isn't just a place of learning anymore. This has become a place that's war-torn, it's beaten down.

You're going to have to push more of your financials towards defense and fighting than you are to trying to grow your intellectual side. Yeah, that's the thing. And the other thing too about the library, I think a lot, you know, like we were saying back at the very beginning, when the library was first established, it was funded by Ptolemy, it was funded by the crown, the pharaoh. If you get to somebody that's not providing that money anymore, like you're saying, underfunding and misrepair, if you get a ruler who at this point now is going to be,

I think it was Persia that took it over, it was whatever the head of the Islamic State was at the time, took over Egypt, regardless if they destroyed that or not, they probably weren't interested in furthering that version of research or that version of like. So I think for me, the Caesar one is maybe like a five, because I do believe what it was is kind of probably

misconstrued in certain annexes of the library were destroyed. The one, the caliphate coming in and burning it down, the state of Islam doing that, I want to say that one's also on like, I want to say that one's at two for me. Because I read something about, they were talking about all other instances in which the Islamic State has come into a country and gone ahead and taken over.

And there's very, very few instances in which they came over and immediately got rid of the information and culture. They were really good about wanting to preserve that kind of stuff. Not so much to go ahead, maybe even further it or allow it to go ahead and continue growing because I think they just understood that it was information and that maybe it was important to keep that stuff to keep the population under control to let them have that.

I think the one the theodians for me is that one's probably equal to funding and disrepair. So I could see knowing what ancient Christianity's track record is, especially knowing what they did to anybody who thought differently than them, I could see that being something. I'm not saying that it was on the orders of whoever was, you know, not theodosius,

but whoever was in Rome, it was on their orders. But there's probably a pretty good way to ingratiate yourself if you're theodosius to say, hey, remember all that stuff that was down here? Yeah, I got rid of it. That's how into Christianity I am. I did that. I still go ahead.

We've seen over the years, too, that with Christianity, If it's, you have an answer and I have an answer, that's not going to stand. No. If you have an answer, it's wrong. My answer is the right one. You need to change your answer and get rid of whatever you thought. Correct.

You have the other answer and then we're cool. But if you want to keep your answer, then we're going to have to get rid of you. It's great that you have your answer, but your answer's wrong and we're going to get rid of it. So, yeah, okay. You've talked me into throwing that one a little bit higher up on that. I do think if it was the underfunding and disrepair. And here's the thing that kind of gets overlooked. this is literally a building

full of highly flammable paper everything is made of wood and there is no fire system to even remotely speak of and something catches on fire here it's literally trapped within a giant stone enclosure it's an oven you're not going to be able to get in to fight the fire that the whole disrepair underfunding

all it would take it could have very it could have you know just as likely been someone carrying a freaking oil lantern tripping, it goes at their hand, the oil spills all over something and it catches a stack of stuff on fire and all of a sudden, it's late at night, there's no one there, the thing burns up.

Well, we see things fall, abandoned buildings that fall into disrepair because of no funding now. And just the way that they're abandoned, they end up falling on their own. Add in different wars that are being fought at this time, it's taking collateral damage everywhere.

Well, even just looking at it from perspective of if you were to look at cases of like house fires or building fires, what's the cases of arson to just accidents? Perchance. Yeah, something happened wrong inside the building. So that, the accident, you know, it's cool to talk about the other ones. The other ones have a lot of pizzazz to them. They do.

It's boring to just say, you know, it makes it feel like more of a shame. If you're like, man, these people came in and destroyed this, just because they didn't want the information being out there. there's more I don't know it's more dramatic it's more romantic I guess to think of it

that way they're just saying like yeah someone was drunk at night and they dropped their oil lantern and they burned it all down and that's why we don't have hovercraft

at this point we had other priorities had we known at the time that it would have led to something he's the guy that left the tape on the door okay yeah he's the guy that left the tape

on the door on Watergate you want to you want to wax poetic about what happened but I do think it was the last choice of just not having the time and the ability to put in the effort to upkeep it and to make sure that all these things are preserved. I'm sure they tried.

I'm sure there were people that did go in and raid and steal to try to keep these things to get them out into the public and so that they would live on. If you're trying to save your life, you're probably not in there trying to save the great literature or literary works. of yesteryear and then I mean the likelihood of any of this being recreated the the Talmake line ends with Cleopatra

because at some point during their civil war her brother does die and she ends up after Caesar ends up getting knifed in Rome she ends up hooking up with his like best friend Mark Antony right I didn't know a whole lot about that

can you can you give me a little bit on more we're going to have to get more into that later because I didn't do any research on him. I just know that that's how it works. So after Caesar, Mark Antony ends up going to Egypt and they I assume they would fall in love

because he ends up dying and then she ends up killing herself because he dies and she does the most famous cause of her death that people want to believe in and she takes the ass the snake and she would sit by her on the chest and then she ends up dying.

You get a little bit of Romeo and Juliet. Correct, exactly. And I'm sure that that was a huge influence on that story. So that's how the Talmecline line after 300 years ends up coming to an end. Well, and they still, she had Cleopatra, Celine the 2nd, Cesareon, Alexander Helios, and another Ptolemy, Philadelphia. So the line did continue. It just sounds like it wasn't in the panell.

The dynasty, sorry. Maybe the dynasty, the ruling the Ptolemy's ruling Egypt I guess is probably the best way to That sounds To go ahead and say that So All right, what do you?

Do you have anything for Follow-up points? Not a lot, just The things that we see When we go through these different things And to know the different aspects Of life that we still There's still connections

Even in name For all these different things Like the fact that there's an Alexandria. I don't know if it has anything to do with it, but we have an Alexandria in Egypt. There's an Alexandria in Virginia. It's a common city name here in this country. I think we do take our stuff from other cities.

I mean, you look at it's New York. There's York. It's New England. There's England. We named a lot of places after places that came. There's a, you know, there's a... Philadelphia has to be a Greek word because of people like Philadelphia is. I think so. I think there's a lot of, you know,

Oh, a couple things that I thought were cool while looking at this and then kind of got me thinking, so how much of a flex is it to name a city after yourself and have that still be in existence? Like how many cities named after some guy were destroyed and taken over, but like how much of a just badass in history you had to be that, you know, when Talomede didn't come in he's like, nope, nope, nope, this is Ptolemyville now. Tolomia? Yeah, this is Ptolemya now. No, no, it was still Alexandria. It's still Alexandria.

Well, you're an extra bad dude if you do it in a country that you weren't even from. Yeah, exactly. And then you look at other things like, so you start the city and it's under your name. Then you look at other situations when you have like Leningrad and Stalingrad that were previous cities before. But then you come in and you're just like, mm-mm, the city's mine. The city's named after me now. Or Lenin had a good run here. Now it's my time. Correct. Or the country is so in love with you. They're like, let's name that. Like we have that here. People don't, we have Washington, D.C.

We have the state of Washington. We don't have the state of Franklin. We don't have, you know, we have cities named Franklin. He gets lower billing. He's not. Correct. But I mean, yeah, we have a state named after the first guy to be the president. So it's just, I don't know, just seems like a huge flux to me.

And then the last thing is, so this whole seven wonders of the ancient world thing, apparently there was a big like flex for tourism to do that like you would go on vacation and your big vacation would be I'm going to see the seven wonders of the ancient world and your vacation would be to go see all seven of them around the Mediterranean.

This is like ancient backpacking. It is but I mean think of how first of all like how wealthy you would have to be to do that. Very. You'd have to have your own ships, your own protection. You'd have to have a little fella to carry around all your gold or whatever your currency is.

Think of the time. You would have to be away for a year? Oh, it would have to be more than that because you're... If you look at the map, everything is pretty centered around the Mediterranean. You have Giza, which is a little bit inland on the Nile, which you could take the Nile to see the pyramids. Alexandria, you can knock out two of them there with the lighthouse and the library. Both right there have a port to the Mediterranean.

You have the Colossus of Rhodes, which was on a Mediterranean city of Rhodes. That's where you were going into the harbor. I think the statue of Zeus, I'm not sure where that one was, but I know one of them was in Athens. Statue of Zeus looks like it's down. It's at Olympia. So it's down further. And then Athens, was Athens coastal or was Athens inland little? That's a good question.

But all of those, regardless, all of those are pretty close. close, you know, to the Mediterranean, to approach my sea. Babylon would have been your hardest one to hit. Babylon is way, it's on a river, so you could take the river. But that one looks like it's quite a ways inland. And that one is... Babylon is where Baghdad is now. Okay.

So that's east of the Mediterranean, quite a ways inland. It's between the Tigris and the Euphrates, so it's way away. Okay. It's on the other side of Jerusalem. It's, that one would be the one that would be hard to hit. Yeah. And you're hoping that just everything goes right when you're sailing and you're traveling. You don't get raided by bandits.

I'm just trying to think how big of a flex that is to be like, oh yeah, I've seen all those. I've seen all seven of them. It's a shitload more impressive now. Yeah, now that you think about it. Now that you have planes and all this different access, there's no chance in hell that anybody would be able to do that the way that they did it back then now. Because you're going to China to go over and see the great wall. You're that far away? No, no, no, I just mean...

Oh, you mean like to see the new seven-wise? Yeah. Oh, impossible. This was only possible because it was within the same theater. It was in that world. It was in that Mediterranean... The discovery. I like, you know, I like doing stuff like this that I don't know a ton about

because when there's this much, you know, in it... And I know not a ton of this stuff is just like grab you by the ball's exciting. But when you look at it as a whole of what... you know, what happened here, you know, how many advances in medicine, astronomy, do we owe back to this? Like, it'd be so cool to kind of trace back inventions or knowledge and be like, all of this, like, spiderwebbed out of all this, you know, all these conversations and all this stuff that was happening in Alexandria. The library is a stoned rabbit hole. Oh, yeah. It's, you start somewhere, you see something on the history channel late at night, you get your relaxation medicine in you.

And then four hours, you're still up doing research and looking into different things and hitting Wikipedia's and watching videos. Imagine if you, and they didn't allow the public in here. So you obviously had to have authorization because it was within the royal area. The annexes, they allow more public people in, but the main source. Just think of being able to, like, be in your room and be like, you know what? I'm going to get a little bit stoned. And you just walk out and you just sit back and relax. And there's a group of guys having a debate.

Some of the smartest people in the world. and you just get to sit back and listen to it. And they're arguing about, you know, what happens after life, you know, theoretical physics, all this stuff, you know, are there additional planets? You have one guy sitting here being like, no, man, I'm actually sure of it, like the Earth, we all rotate around the sun. And you have, like, guys that you can't fathom what that is to be like, no. How do you know that another guy barges in? Guys, I know how big around the planet is. good for you bro how did you figure that out

you have to listen to him explain it and say oh maybe maybe he had it just makes your head hurt yeah and we ponder stuff now unfortunately somehow in this day and age we're still having the debate on a flat earth these fellas had it figured out back then they they understood and this was before like you said this was before circumventing the earth this was before traveling all the way around and knowing what you're doing to be able to see the earth is round we didn't have

I do wonder if there was some guy that was manning the lighthouse And he's like I don't think all these people have this straight This everything around here seems pretty flat I think the world's flat And then they go up and look from a 400 foot high vantage point And they see the curvature like holy shit Okay Can you see that from 400 feet?

I would assume so If you look out if like you're standing on a beach And you look out at the ocean You can see a little bit of the curvature And you can only see a few miles out. I think the way it would be discovered would be if you're looking out and there's

a big enough actually this would probably be the easiest thing. If you had a boat that was sitting out there and you were on the ground and you couldn't see the boat and then you got up the 400 feet and then you could see the boat and that boat never moved because you got a little bit of a know it's always just if you're on the ground it's over the curve

just a little bit but as you get up that 400 you can see you'd have to sit there and be like go back down the boat's not there anymore go back up the top and look in the boats there how many times do you think you'd be confused like what this motherfucker just keeps moving back and forth like why is he moving back and forth

in the same spot and then finally somebody comes up and one of these philosophers is sitting out there looking at it and it's like what are you doing he's like I keep going up and down because the this boat keeps disappearing he's like what do you mean it's right there he's like no go down to the ground philosopher goes down there he's like yeah there's no boat he's like

go back up to the top boat's back he's like hold on a second It's like maybe I can't see it because it's a ball. There's a curvature. Yeah. Well, that's one of the experiments that people push back on today is a guy had set a light on the raft and then sent the raft out there. And eventually when he realized that he couldn't see the light on top of the raft, he knew that it had dipped down past the curvature. And that was one way to prove it was because if it was completely flat, you would be able to see the light. As far as until you can no longer see the light penetrate the wrist.

which is much farther than it would be for the curve. Exactly. Yeah. I just, the thing that I like, that my mind always goes to on this kind of like we're talking about is just what could have been. And I think that's the,

I romanticize about it and think like all this potential, this place that could have been, you know, a linchpin or a turning point for the world was probably lost because it just fell into disrepair and someone's certified. And this could be the one place that we've had this, conversation multiple times offside the podcast that drop yourself in a society naked 200 years in the past and how would you prove that you're from the future without them thinking you're a witch

or killing you and not being able to predict that the Bulls winning the championship or anything? I think this is the one place in the world where if you were dropped, just butt-ass naked, this would be the one place where you could prove something to them where they'd be like, oh, okay, no, you really are from the future. I don't know if I could prove it, but if you were going to be able to, but if you were going to tell a group of people that there existed the possibility of time travel, these are the people that would be least likely to chop your head off. These people will be like, interesting. So tell me how you, tell me how that works.

Well, just to be able to explain anything to them, we have a cursory knowledge. You're a jack of all trades, master of none. There's certain things that you could show them, I think, at that point, that they would understand whether it be through metallurgy, something like that, to be able to make something stronger. These people would be open mentally enough to listen to what you have to say instead of just thinking that it was a magic track. You could, you know, it's easy to explain what's terminal velocity. You could take two objects of different sizes, ask them which one you think is going to fall first drop them both. They both drop at the same time. They can only travel so fast. You know, you'd be able, the other thing too is like, I feel like if I was dropped into most ancient

times when, you know, there was a civilization, you'd think you're going to be able to, you're going to be the smartest guy in the room. You'd get dropped it. It'd be like idiocracy. Yeah. You'd wake up and even though if you were of average intelligence, you would still be brighter by a landslide. This place, you get dropped into the library and you go talk to somebody and try to explain. Half the time, they're going to be smarter than you. And they're going to be like, well, you know, I don't think that's possible because of A, B, and C, or they're going to go ahead and be talking over your head and you're going to be like, well, shit, I didn't see this coming. Certain situations where they're talking about something that you know isn't true,

but it's not something that you can explain to them because you're not smart enough why it's not true. You can't just be like, hey, just trust me on this one. I get where you're going, and we thought about this for a lot of years this way. It's completely different. I can't tell you how it's different. Just trust me, think about it a different way,

and maybe you'll come up with the right one. All right, man. I think we've pretty much covered everything on this. But this is going to open us up to, you know, later down the road in the podcast, getting back to I'm counting three characters right now that we're going to go ahead and revisit

maybe even four we're going to go and cover Alexander the Great Caesar, Cleopatra there's probably someone else's part of this story that will be mentioning probably like Socrates and Aristotle at different points so Islam, Christianity

back in that day it just opens the door so much and you got to look at everything south south past Egypt there were so many different tribes and different things that happened in Africa another cradle of civilization that happened down there that sprung up that we'll get into. It's each one of these old topics that we open up and that we look into,

it's just a plethora of other ideas to go into. Yeah. All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode and see you later. If you do like what you're hearing, you do want to follow us. Our social media handles are on Twitter. We're at historically high. high being hi on Twitter

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