Julian Dorey Podcast - #272 - Inside the Fall of Egypt's Pharaohs, Moses & Alexander the Great | Luke Caverns

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

SPONSORS: - Download PRIZEPICKS & use Code "JULIAN" to get $50 w/ your first $5 play: https://shorturl.at/2XCLm - Buy MANDO WHOLE BODY DEODORANT at https://www.ShopMando.com & use code "JULIAN" to get $5 off your first starter pack (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Luke Caverns is an Ancient Civilizations Historian, Researcher, and Anthropologist. He specializes in the lost civilizations of Egypt, South America & the Amazon Jungle. PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey GUEST LINKS - Luke YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lukecaverns - Luke Twitter: https://twitter.com/lukecaverns ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Great Pyramid Story 12:41 - King Khufu’s Tomb Mystery, Khufu’s Sarcophagus, Archaeologists Discrediting Graham Hancock, Coverup Controversy 23:07 - Amon Ra’s Egyptian Figure (2 Burials), Barbarians & Enemy 32:01 - Slavery in Ancient Egypt, Bible Moses Story, Moses Parting Sea of Reeds 43:43 - Luke Questioning Issues within Bible 48:19 - Khafre’s Pyramid (Cult of Ra), Great Pyramids (Accident/Happen to Get Right?), Sphinx 01:03:44 - Diorite Kaffara Statue, Aerial POV of Spinx & Valley Temple 01:17:03 - Fall of Egypt & Lack of Power from Pharaoh's 01:25:43 - Mentuhotep II Collapse of Old Kingdom 01:32:13 - Greatest Female Pharaoh, Karnak Temple Obelisk 01:40:23 - Cleopatra’s Needles Story, Hatshepsut 01:55:20 - Ancient Rome & Julius Caesar, Statue of Akhenaten, Nephrotic Egypt Statue 02:10:40 - Building Mini Egypt & Persians Attack, Persia’s Rise, Alexander the Great (Persian Battle) Domination 02:22:31 - Iliad & Odyssey & Alexander finds Island from Homer, Alexander’s Fractioned Macedonian Empire 02:27:30 - First Greek Pharaoh (Ptolemy Period) 02:40:15 - Republic of Rome & Being “Reluctant” Conqueror, Julius Ceasar Murdered After Returning to Rome 02:50:53 - Augustus Set Sail for Alexandria & Burns it to the Ground, Last Pharoah of Egypt CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian Dorey - Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 272 - Luke Caverns Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right. So we're about 30% into the timeline of Egypt based on the last podcast we finished. And this has been mesmerizing, by the way, so far going through all this. Like your scope, this history is amazing and it's far beyond where it was like 14, 15 months ago when we talked. So are we at the great pyramid? Is that pretty much where we are? Yeah. So, you know, it took a long time to get for us on the last episode to get through all the prefaces. You need, you need a lot of foundation when you're, when you're heading into Egypt so that you know, you know, you have, you have, you have some foundation to build up off of. So you kind of know the background of what we're about to get into. And I appreciate you saying that about, about, you know, me coming a long way in Egypt, you know, that was, this was

my first love. And I was into this for years before I started my degree and before, you know, a couple of years after I finished it, it was so deep in Latin America. And, you know, when I came on your pod and Danny's pod, I realized, you know, again, and it was obvious how much people, how much other people love this. And it sparked this in me again. And so I just dive back in. And as we said on the last pod, you went there. And going there just helps so much. So it's taken a, it took a little bit for us to establish the foundation, establish where Egypt exists, why it exists, how long it took Egypt to form, why the Nile is so important, why the Nile made Egypt, made the Egyptians rich to be able to achieve these things. Although the means by which a lot of these accomplishments happen, um, are still not

quite understood. Um, you know, how they move some of these huge stones, how they move these megaliths, how they carve such hard stone in such incredible detail with such high amounts of polish. You know, a lot of these details are lost to history and probably because the Egyptians never wanted anybody to know about them. One thing I should also say is, as we continue, you know, one question is, well, how did the Egyptians build wanted anybody to know about them. One thing I should also say is, as we continue, one question is, well, how did the Egyptians build the pyramids when they never wrote down how they did anything? Well, the Egyptians never wrote down how they did anything,

or how they built things. People say, why did the Egyptians never write down how they built the pyramids? Well, the Egyptians never wrote down how they built anything at all. They never even with dude there's been 100 sorry cut that no you're good we don't cut anything so so there's been over 100 000 mummies found throughout the course of Egyptology. Not one time in any temple ever did the Egyptians ever even show us how they mummified somebody or the embalming process. They never did that. We have completely tried to re-engineer. That's why that documentary we were talking about last episode in the mid-90s, they mummified a person in modern day history to try to

re-engineer how that would have happened. So the Egyptians never recorded how they did these things. And it's probably on purpose. These monuments and the things that make Egypt special, they make Egypt special. They elevate Egypt above the other civilizations on Egypt's peripheral. This isn't public knowledge. It's kind of like why our government doesn't publish how we build a nuclear bomb or things like that. Maybe they do that. I don't think they do, but I don't know. But I'm just saying, these are national secrets, trade secrets, right? It's what elevates Egypt above the rest of the world. So they don't publish that and they

don't publish how they mummify people. So anyways, we have now gone through the early pyramidal age. We've gone through, you know, uh, Neolithic Egypt, prehistoric Egypt. We've gone through pre-dynastic Egypt from 35, you know, 4,000 BC to 3,100. We now have the unification. And we've gone from there to the beginning of the early pyramid age. And we've gone through why tombs exist, which is so important. And it's so important for approaching the rest of Egypt. And so all that's pretty dense and it takes a little while. So now we are at the precipice of Egyptian civilization in many people's minds. There's probably two, and maybe there's a third peak that we've lost in Egyptian civilization. The first one is the Age of the

Pyramids, the fourth dynasty, the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau. After that, the Age of the Pyramids kind of falls off and they lose the technology. And they either lose the technology or they lose the resources, or it's a combination of both, but they lose the ability to be able to build these monuments. And then you have a middle kingdom, but Egypt kind of reaches its height in the new kingdom, which is two eras, two macro eras later. But this is really under the Egyptian empire. It's how much power and wealth and prestige they have not necessarily their huge gigantic temples and there's no pyramids being built at this time then you have the end of of the new kingdom and it kind of falls off and then we get to

just before the annexation of egypt uh egypt has this last little hurrah with its last 300 years where it reaches another height again that is maybe not – it shouldn't be compared to the age of the pyramids, but it's something close. So that's what we have in store. That's what we're about to get into is this whole rest of Egypt. So we've reached this point of the Great Pyramid. This is what stands at the center of ancient Egypt. And what year are we in? Approximately 2000? Probably about 2550 BC.

Okay. Roughly. And so the idea for the Great Pyramid is that it's following this template of what has been done before. But yet now, stonemasonry and the construction of pyramids has reached an entirely new level, a level that people have been gawking at and drooling over and mystified by for nearly 5,000 years. And it's the size of these stones, these 2 million stones that are used in the Great Pyramid. These stones weigh anywhere from 2 tons. Your average limestone block, much less dense than this granite that's being brought up the Nile, brought down the Nile, brought north from 500 miles away.

Each of these limestone blocks weigh about two tons, but the granite blocks that line the walls of the interior chambers go from anywhere from 10 to 80 tons. And it's the ceiling blocks that weigh upwards of 60 to 80 tons, huge, huge stones. It's somehow they jumped from, from the, uh, from the bent pyramid Red Pyramid, like we were talking about. Those intercasing stones of the Red Pyramid are made out of these huge blocks of granite. But even the monumentality of those stones takes another leap in the next. So you have Senefru, his son is Khufu, who's attributed to being the builder of the Great Pyramid. And for people who watched the last episode, we saw that even Graham Hancock,

since in Fingerprints of the Gods, he was originally on, well, the pyramids, they're 12,000 years old. And so many people have held that so close. And as the alternative side has gotten more rigorous, or as some people have gotten more rigorous, and I think Graham is one of those guys. I think he's very honest about his thoughts.

And I think you can see that because his thoughts change over time, which is good. And they even change in the opposite direction of what his fans would expect him to go, right? And so I think we can see that as a great deal of honesty on his part. And so you see this jump from Senefru to his son Khufu. Somewhere in there, there is an architectural and engineering leap where they're moving stones that are on a scale that nobody will do after that. And raising these stones hundreds of feet in the air and setting them in place. And with the granite stones that line the chambers inside the Great Pyramid, they're cut so precisely that there isn't mortar between those stones. It's really, really amazing. It's actually only going to be surpassed by one other monument, and it's going to come the next generation. But the traditional idea is that Khufu's pyramid is a pyramid that's going to mark his death, right?

I mean, you can see the rock-cut burial of what they think is a rock-cut burial beneath it, but it's on that primordial mound. Now, there's a lot to address with the Great Pyramid, and it should be addressed. The Great Pyramid is completely surrounded by a necropolis, again, a dead city. And this necropolis is completely filled with these limestone, very well-built mastabas, like we were talking about earlier. These mastabas start out as the precursor for the pyramid, but later on, they become this standard burial place for lower people just to show people who didn't see the last episode could we just pull up the mastaba real quick alessi so they can see what this looks like but essentially it's it's a flat without a tip

yeah yeah it's it's yeah if you cut the if you cut the lowest you know it's a three by one structure there you go yep maybe even pull up mastaba diagram because I think that... Yeah, yeah. Hit images. Or mastaba illustration. Hit images up there and then hit the fourth one. There it is. There we go.

So this is what we believe eventually evolves into a pyramid, but it also becomes the standard burial for people lower than the pharaoh later on. So, you know, the pharaoh's right-hand man would have been buried in a very nice mastaba, made out of huge stones too. And on the inside of these mastabas, that line, that line, the pyramid of Khufu, this is kind of the reason, like when people say, you know, there's very, very limited scant evidence that connects the pyramid to Khufu. Well, it's kind of the reason like, like when people say, you know, there's very, very limited scant evidence that, that, uh, that connects the pyramid to Khufu. Well, it's kind of, you know, I don't know how intellectually honest that's really being because sure. Walking around the base of the great pyramid, looking at the artifact record of things that have come out there,

come out of the great pyramid, um, walking through the interior chambers. There's nothing on those walls. And we're going to get to that because it's a big thing. And it's a big blind spot in my eyes. It's a huge question mark. I can't explain it. It's counterintuitive to everything I'm about to, the foundation I'm about to, the precedence I'm about to lay out. You walk all around Khufu's Pyramid and it's completely lined with these huge mastabas made out of huge limestone blocks. And you walk in on the inside and it's lined from floor to ceiling with hieroglyphs telling you who this person was. And in the cases of the people of these mastabas and these buildings all around Khufu's pyramid, it tells you, okay, this is, you know, this is this person. And he was the vizier to Khufu. I mean, it explicitly writes it out on the temple wall.

This is the role that he had under Khufu's reign. This is his relation to Khufu. Here are the other things that this individual guy did as well. And by reading the hieroglyphs, because hieroglyphs change over time, you know that this guy was writing in a language that was a proto-language to later Egyptian hieroglyphs. You can see the evolution, and you can see the evolution in the art. And along the temple walls is showing you, you know, this guy, he loved fishing. He loved, you know, farming on his fields. He loved overseeing. He loved hunting hippos. You know, you can just see all the things that he wanted to do later on in his life.

You get a very good image of the identity of these people. And there's dozens of them around the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of Khafra, and the Pyramid of Menkaure. Those are the three Great Pyramids. The big game is almost here, and it's now or never. Don't miss out on the last football game of the season with PrizePix, the best place to win cash while watching the big game is almost here and it's now or never. Don't miss out on the last football game of the season with PrizePix, the best place to win cash while watching the big game. PrizePix is also giving away a free pick for the Super Bowl where one of the starting quarterbacks will only need to throw one yard to win.

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this Super Bowl when you and your crew run your game on prize picks. So download prize picks today and use code JULIAN, J-U-L-I-A-N, to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup. The link to download prize picks is down below in the description. And once again, make sure you use code Julian to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup. Prize picks run your game. And all of the outer buildings are tell are, I all have one thing in common with each other is that they all reference either one of the three great Pharaohs that we attribute to the giza plateau so you look around the giza plateau and you go okay there's all these people buried here where are the three pharaohs buried that are referenced in all of these tombs

it's probably this gigantic building that they're all that they're all pointed at, right? That took a lot of self-research and me opening up these old textbooks that, there are these old research books that are based on Flinders Petrie and Covington, these early archaeologists who excavated a lot of these mastabas. It took me doing that to find this context, to have the realization of, oh, okay, I get it now. This is the context for this. I can say all that in one hand. In the other hand, I did walk inside of Khufu's pyramid and Mankara's pyramid. Khafre's pyramid in the center is closed off. I guess they're doing something in it. But I walked all through those pyramids, and why don't I see the hieroglyphs telling me who this person was? You mean the most powerful person on the entire planet? Didn't have anything written about him.

Didn't have anything written about him, and his name isn't inscribed anywhere? Sketchy, sketchy. What is that? Why is that such a blind spot in Egypt? Sketchy, sketchy. hell are these guys and why is everyone who worked underneath them buried here where are they it creates another big question you know if these aren't tombs and i and i'm out of gridlock here you know like honestly i'm out of gridlock i don't know what the answer is to how to explain these things they're made with technology and techniques that we can't understand that we can't we haven't re-engineered that we can't explain And they're attributed to who were – I mean we're pretty sure who built these monuments. Everything is pointing at who built it.

But why on the inside is the guy not in there? Why is Khufu's sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid? We should pull that up. Khufu's sarcophagus? Yeah, yeah, or Great that up um sarcophagus yeah yeah or great pyramid sarcophagus you know i was in the cairo museum and i saw a fourth dynasty which he's the fourth fourth dynasty i saw a fourth dynasty sarcophagi that are much nicer yeah here's here's here's it what's that made out of uh this is red asmongranite. So go one to the right if you would.

So that's about what it looks like. It's not very nice. I mean, you know, I hear people say, you know, I hear people like really dog on it. But you also have to think like this is probably the most violated and touched sarcophagus in all of human history. However, it really doesn't explain why there are intrinsic qualities about it that make it less impressive than less important people who lived at the same time as Khufu. I've seen other Fourth Dynasty sarcophagi. They're a lot more impressive than this. Why is this – the Great Pyramid was the biggest building on the face of the planet until the Eiffel Tower was constructed. It's such an important thing, and we attribute it to somebody who's obviously must have been so important to be able to build it.

But he's not inscribed on the inside of it. How do I make sense of that? If it really is not a tomb and it's something else, well, what is that thing? Well, of course, that's been speculation forever, and there's never been a concrete, something great great some great idea that's been come up for it yet you know that we've been able to prove um if it's not kufu's tomb why is his entire government and all of his relatives and his wives buried right next to it um and where's he where Where is he at? A simple and boring explanation I can come up with is that he did something that pharaohs seem to do later on. Oh, I should also say there are some archaeologists who they're wrong. They're very wrong. These are people who are anti-Hancock. They will come back and go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The interior of tombs were not decorated, you know, cause what, what people will do is they'll go, they'll go, okay, look at the

inside of the great pyramid. This is clearly not a tomb. These are alternate history researchers. They'll look and say, this is clearly not a tomb. The interior of the great pyramid has no hieroglyphs, nothing decorative that would, that would show us this is a funerary monument. Look at this. This is a funerary monument. Look at this. This is a funerary monument. This is what the Egyptians were capable of. And it'll be the Valley of the Kings, which are these rock cut tombs. Like I was telling you that workers' village in the first episode, that is a thousand years later after this. The style of tombs are completely different at this point. But archaeologists who probably don't have enough education in Egyptology to be combating

this will then return and say, uh-uh, the Great Pyramid was built at a time where there were no hieroglyphs and funerary monuments, and that's why you don't see it in there. That was a trend that was started later on. Well, you shouldn't be teaching anybody, let alone combating or putting people down for asking questions about Egypt, if you don't realize that all the freaking mastabas around the Great Pyramid all have hieroglyphs in them. And Zoster's Pyramid, that first step pyramid, those shafts and chambers down below it are all decorated with these turquoise scarabs that make it look like it was, we think it was trying to be symbolic of the palace that Zosar would

have had in Memphis. So it's all decorated underneath. It is clearly set up from the traditional Egyptological view that the inside of pyramids are going to be decorated, and you can see hieroglyphs of Zosar in the afterlife, in the iconic pharaonic pose, performing divine ceremonies and visiting these places in the afterlife and doing the things he wanted to do. That's set up, but we don't see it in the pyramid of my doom as far as we know. I've never been inside, and it's hard to get into the pyramid of my doom. It's hard to get permission. Why is it hard to get permission? There's just some things in Egypt that are – there's two barriers of entry to almost everything in Egypt.

And this is also why I kind of think it's funny when people say like, it's a big cover-up. Everything is a big cover-up. Fucking sorry. You can buy your way into anything in Egypt. If you have enough money, um, there's really nothing, there's really nothing that's, that's, you know, uh, locked off. Like there are no passages in any of the great pyramids that, that people aren't allowed inside of you. You can explore every single corner of the great pyramid. If you have enough money,

if you have enough money, but see, that's not expensive. That costs like $100 to do that. What I mean is that there are pyramids way off in the desert that Egypt hasn't built the infrastructure to allow tourists to go see. So if you want to go see it, you really want to get – they know you really want to go see it if you're asking, so you're going to pay a lot to do that. That's how it works. And in some places, they are actually scared that if you bump in to a board or something that's holding up this rock that you will actually die. And so it is locked off. Some

places, money can't get you into it, but it's probably more for your safety and for liability. Um, it's not at all like Mexico, like in Mexico, there are these sacred secret places all over, all over these ancient sites all over Mexico. No money, no money, power, or prestige could get any man entry into. There are places that are that locked off. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll get to that someday. Yeah. I guess some other episodes. Yeah. So, so, um, but Egypt, if you have enough money and connections, you can get into anything. Um, so that's why, you know, I kind of laugh from like, you know, and they act like it's a coverup. It's like, I mean, you can literally go see it all for yourself. They're not hiding clicks.

It's good for clicks. They're not, they're not hiding anything from you. You can go buy your way into looking at all of it, videotape all of it, do what you want. So, oh gosh, where did I, where was I at? We were on the Great Pyramid. Yeah, you were talking about the Great Pyramid and how this is the one that doesn't have anything written inside there. Sure, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So his family was buried there, but he wasn't. Sure, sure. And the other buildings all had people buried there.

Yeah. So that's the big mystery. And this is me being intellectually honest here and laying out the chronology to say it is this, this, or that. Yeah, yeah. I just – I don't know, and I think that that's the thing that's insane about it is how can we be at this place where you have this thing that seems like it's very obvious to you? You look at the peripheral of the Great Pyramid. It's all pointing towards – it all makes sense because we don't have this body. Oh, you know what? I was telling you I think Khufu did something that other pharaohs seem to do because it goes against – well, and then I got on to their know, their archaeologists who say that, you know, hieroglyphs didn't exist in funerary monuments during the time of Khufu. So, you know, there's

that whole thing. Khufu may have done something that some pharaohs seem to do later on. I think it was in the first episode where I say that sometimes pharaohs had two burials. You had a burial in the south and you had a burial in the north. The north was where the government of Egypt was run. You had, the government of Egypt was run out of Memphis. That's why it's the capital of Egypt. And that's typically where the pharaoh lived. The religious heart of Egypt was in a city called Abydos, which was near modern-day Luxor or in modern-day Luxor. And Abydos, that's where the high priest of Amun, Amun-Ra, that is the god of ancient Egypt. All the other gods are pretty much lesser gods. He's a great player on the Detroit Lions too.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Amun-Ra. He's the truth. So he is the god in ancient Egypt for the vast majority of Egypt's history. He's only toppled a couple times in his importance. And so he may – Khufu may – and this is a hyper-conservative, hyper-sober answer. He may have had two burials. And the Great Pyramid was never meant to be entered. No one was ever meant to see it. And he wasn't actually buried in it. All it was, was a shell and that the monument was meant to speak for itself. And he thought that nobody

would ever see the interior of it. So they didn't bother decorating it. When in fact, he is actually buried in an undiscovered tomb somewhere near Abydos, which was the religious heart where a lot of pharaohs did bury themselves. I mean, the Valley of the Kings is near Abydos. It's in Southern Egypt where the religious capital was. It would make sense that he had enough power to bury himself in some place that has never been discovered. And all the pyramid was, was an incredibly elaborate monument to dedicate to his existence. But why are there so many chambers and labyrinths inside of it? I don't know. I can't explain that. So that's the Great Pyramid. We get to Khafre's Pyramid.

And by the way, one quick question on the Great Pyramid before we go off. What is the – what do you think is the length of time it took to build that? You know, I wouldn't say – the traditional answer is 20 years. Yeah, but what's the Luke Cavern's answer? They say that – the combat to that is, well, if you laid a stone like every minute, it would take however many centuries to do that. I don't think that it's 100 – I mean I don't think that it's 20 years. It's got to be – if Khufu built that pyramid in its entirety, the whole thing, it has got to be at least the entire course of the guy's life, the entire course of his life. How long did he live?

Maybe three times as long as 20 years into his 60s. We don't really know. I mean these are people who lived a tremendously long time ago, and we don't have their body. He's never – his actual resting place, his body has never been discovered. And that could be because the tomb was raided in ancient times and every single thing out of the tomb, including his own body, was removed, but it doesn't answer this big blind spot of why are there no hieroglyphics carved into the walls when they were clearly capable of that. So what I would say is another possible answer is that maybe it was done in 20 years, but maybe his portion of it was done in 20 years.

The outer part that he built, you know, like Graham was saying is that, you know, these are built on top of older structures and, uh, brothers of the serpent, they have ideas that, you know, it, it wasn't just, it wasn't just two phases where you have this primordial mound that then Khufu built this giant pyramid on't just two phases where you have this primordial mound that then Khufu built this giant pyramid on top of, but maybe it's a primordial mound that's venerated. And then something slightly bigger is built on top of that. And something slightly bigger is built on top of that. And then somebody comes in and finishes it off and finalizes it. And so maybe 20 years of work can be done on that final phase. Does that make sense?

That's, that's kind of another possible answer there. But I would say that I cast a very weary eye on the 20-year mark because they say 20 years for Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure's pyramid that all three of them took. That's crazy. Took, each one of them took 20 years to do, if that makes sense. And I just don't buy that. I have no doubt that they worked hyper-efficiently. You look at the monuments they were able to create. I'm sure that they were hyper-efficient people, but 20 years, I just don't know.

It's not like they're working 24 hours a day. Do we have an estimation of the Egyptian population at that time? That's an exact question. I want to say it's around a million people across all of Egypt. And does that include slaves? Yeah, yeah. So they got a lot of slaves working on this, no? Well, you know, no. It is not even the official explanation that slaves built the pyramids.

It's that it was- Maybe not themselves, but I'm saying helped to work on it. Sure, sure. Maybe just moving stuff. But as far as the stone masonry, setting things into place, obviously the design of it and everything, those were all done by highly educated people. And slavery in Egypt is different than what we recognize as slaves today. Like sometimes people would give themselves into slavery because they had a debt to pay. But that's indentured servitude. Sure, sure. That indentured servitude is more of an accurate term for slaves in Egypt. And who were these people? Were these people from the East or South, like the Nubians

or something like that? Sure. It's a combination of everything, including Egyptians themselves. Okay. Probably more Egyptians were enslaved than foreign people. Because the other thing you don't hear about when discussing Egyptian history online is the conquest aspect of it. All these other peoples that we read about through history, they went to other places. They conquered. They took land. They did all these things.

Egypt is kind of its own self-fulfilling ecosystem. And they're powerful and they have more money than everyone and they're like the most – at points the most powerful place on earth. But for some reason, none of these fucking pharaohs are like, let's get the whole army together and take over all of Africa or take over Asia. Why is that? Just wasn't a part of the Egyptian mindset. They didn't – at a few times in the Bronze Age, they extend out into the Middle East and conquered places. Yeah, but how far? Up to about Babeck lebanon okay yeah they they were uh balbeck is a famous place have you heard of this uh with it

with the famous trilithon stones uh they were up there um but matt laquori discussed that sure yeah so so the egyptians were out there um and it's thought that they may be the guys who built those stones or laid those stones there. That's a huge question mark, Baalbek, because it's really beyond anything you see in Egypt too. It is a straight up anomaly in ancient history. more impressive just the size of the stones and getting them from one place to the other is more impressive than the size of really it's definitely top five in all of the ancient world yeah um you know huge question mark and totally out of place because those people in that area are building mud brick buildings so anyways you have this small period of imperial egypt uh in the bronze age um but what about all the eras outside the Bronze Age where they weren't imperial, but they're getting slaves? Yeah, yeah. So they got connects, obviously. Sure, sure, sure. So I would say they're not imperial. They were always imperial in the aspect of they went out

and beat people up. They went down into Nubia and beat up the Nubians and took their gold and constantly let the Nubians know how much more powerful the Egyptians were. And then they would go out and sort of conquer the Hittites or make sure that the Hittites always knew that they need to pay their tax, which is women and probably slaves and gold. And they went out there once a year just to remind the Nubians. And basically, they either give it up easily or they just raid the town and take it all. There's a lot for you to think about before you go on a first date. You got to have the right outfit, get a good haircut, or maybe you just rock the messy flow. Either way, there's another non-negotiable that you cannot overlook, and that is deodorant. And for my go-to deodorant, I use Mando.

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That's about as far as imperial power goes in Egypt. They were really happy with bringing everything home and not establishing colonies outside of Egypt. Reason being is that they were kind of scared of leaving the Nile. They were very pampered by the Nile. They called the Mediterranean Sea the Great Green. And you don't see Egyptian fleets sailing across the Mediterranean and conquering other places in the way that you see the Greeks do it or the Phoenicians or the Romans. It's not an Egyptian thing to do that. It's not an Egyptian thing to leave the sacred lush Nile Valley. They're not desert people that wander through the desert. Those are barbarians. That's how they saw them as these lesser barbarian people that are less

than a slave, really. And so- And those barbarians are going to come in and conquer them because of that thinking. They will. They will. Loser mentality. On more than one occasion. So, yeah. So in Egypt, you have Egyptians. It's mostly Egyptians that are slaves.

And it's a higher form of slavery, or I should say a better life than slavery that you see in later civilizations, and maybe a better life than you see in Roman slavery. And so, you know, slaves in ancient Egypt, they could marry, they could own land. Slaves could own land. Yes, but... That seems so counterintuitive. But you had to pay your debt. You had to pay your debt or it would cost you your life. So basically, you do me a huge favor and I can't – there's no way I can pay you back, dude. I will serve you. I'll serve you.

And that's kind of on your terms. Pause. Sure. Sorry, sorry. So it's kind of on your terms, but there was probably a standard by which you could not drop below. You know what I mean? Like, you can't, even though I'm sure it happened, but generally there's probably a standard that you shouldn't drop below where you can't treat me like I'm less than human, but I am indentured to you, and I have a certain debt that I've got to pay off to you. And sometimes that debt can be paid off by, my daughter's 18 years old, would you like her as your wife? And you go, that'll do. And that can be in a regretful way, or it can be in a very respectful way, where I like you as a person.

You like me as a person. You've done me such a great favor. I can never repay the favor. Take my daughter. Take my daughter. But that could have been done because a lot of people see it as like selling your daughter away. I mean that's kind of what it is. That's what it is.

But the women growing up in that world knew that it was that way too. It's just the harshness of reality. But that's kind of how debts can be paid off. It's what it is. But the, you know, the women growing up in that world knew that it was that way too. It's just the harshness of reality, but that's kind of how, you know, debts can be paid off. It's either that I find some way to, to, you know, appease this, this debt that I owe you, or I work on your farm or you make me, cause, cause I'm a person you respect. You make me the overseer of your farm for the next 10 years you know and in return you pay me very well but you pay me a little bit less than you would have to pay somebody else right you get you get this great service for a little bit less i still have all my rights as an egyptian but i am paying off a debt to you you know i got it so it's that it's that kind of thing they're very

fast and loose with the term slave it's varying levels well we're fast and loose with it the term slave didn't even exist in Egypt. Oh, so they didn't use that. No. No, no, no. Well, what about like the Hebrews and shit? That was Moses' whole thing. No, I mean they weren't slaves.

The Hebrews weren't slaves? No, not really. Not in the same way that we understand slaves today. These were people who had a job to do. And a lot of them made mud bricks with straw. You know, we get that from the Bible. Mud bricks with straw. Yeah. So they, you know, they grind up straw and they put it in the mud bricks and it gives the mud bricks stability. So in the Bible, you have the story of Joseph and it's about 1800 BC or 16, 1700 BC, and this leads on to Moses.

And so the Pharaoh basically tells the Israelites that they're going to have to make their mud bricks without straw. And what that's telling us is that these aren't slaves in the way that we understand it. These are people who work in a grueling industry. They're kind of a lower class citizen, but they still would have had rights. As far as our entire understanding of Egypt, these people would have had rights of some kind. They could buy land, they could marry other people. However, they're lesser citizens in the fact that the Egyptian government would only allow so much of a population of these people in their country. The Egyptians really cared about keeping their national identity and their cultural identity. There were certain times in Egyptian history when a certain culture became too populous and they kicked all of them out.

So they had strong borders. Yes, they did. It was very, very important that Egypt was compromised of Egyptians and that they had Egyptian culture and you worshipped Egyptian gods. You had some religious freedom. Under a decent pharaoh, you had religious freedom. You know, under a decent pharaoh, you had religious freedom. But there was not going to be any more than 10% of the population of Egypt being comprised of any specific race of people. So the Jews would have been second class citizens, but they weren't, you know, slaves being, you know, whipped on the back. This is not how I learned that story.

Sure, sure. Yeah. And so they had their own industry of making these mud and straw bricks. And so archaeologists will go all throughout Egypt looking for evidence of these bricks without straw. That's not what the pharaoh meant. What the pharaoh meant is the government isn't going to subsidize your straw anymore. You got to pay for that or you have to go out and get it yourself. So it's more expensive and they make less profit. Slaves aren't supposed to make profit. What it's telling you – they're not slaves. They're lower class citizens.

As you said, we've changed this conveniently to be able to broad brush certain things that are more – could be better explained in class structure. Or you see – what's the famous cartoon about Moses? I forget what it is. Cartoon. Yeah, yeah. It's the famous like Christian cartoon about Moses. God, I forget what it is, man. I wouldn't have any idea.

It's the story of Exodus. But in there, they show the Egyptians whipping the Jews as they're building the pyramids, which is silly. But yeah, so the – I think in the Bible, what does it say? It's 600 – it's an exodus of 600,000 Israelites from Egypt. And that's a, you know, that can't be right because the population of Egypt is about a million people during the time of the Exodus. So more realistically... The Bible exaggerated? Come on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would never happen.

You know, yeah, I want to say that they say, when we calculate it to today, it's about 600,000 Israelites had a mass Exodus egypt um that just can't be right there weren't it wasn't 60 of egypt's population we have an estimation of around a million people um and it probably wasn't 60 000 people either uh it was probably more like 600 uh israelites 600 600 yeah yeah maybe maybe 6 000 is Israelites. Somewhere between 600 and 6,000. That's what I would say. 6,000 feels like the number. Yeah, 6,000 out of a million people.

Sure. Sounds perfectly right. The name Moses is an Egyptian name. It's not even an Israelite name. So it makes perfect sense. I mean, Moses was raised as an Egyptian. And so you have this mass exodus from Egypt where we kind of jump forward in Egyptian history quite a little ways. Yeah, that's all right. You're explaining the slaves

thing. Yes. And so they feel like they're not being treated right by the Pharaoh. And then they have their prophet Moses now who was raised in... he was raised in a palace in Egypt. He's perfectly educated, much more educated than most of the Israelite people are. He's the perfect guy to be their prophet and lead them out of Egypt. And, you know, what's funny is that this undoubtedly happened. An exodus of some kind undoubtedly happened. There's lots of little clues that show us that whoever wrote the book of Exodus was intimately familiar with the way things worked in Egypt during the Bronze Age. Really no doubt about it. If it were more vague, it'd be more of a question, but whoever wrote that book was clearly in Egypt at that time. There's lots of little details in there

that, like the way that they describe women giving birth in Egypt is exactly time. There's lots of little details in there that, like the way that they describe women giving birth in Egypt is exactly right and unique to Egypt. And there's many more details than that. Even the kind of verbiage that they use when it's translated from Hebrew, it's exactly similar to common phrases that would have been said in Egypt during the Bronze Age. But so probably what it was, it's funny how it's this exodus from Egypt, which from our Western point of view, that has been so influenced by Judeo-Christian religion and the Abrahamic religions,

we see the exodus as this monumental event that completely shapes the rest of world history. What's funny is the Egyptians didn't even care. A bunch of Israelites walked out of Egypt and the Egyptians go, in the total history, they go, you know, okay, whatever. You know, they don't record that it happened. It wasn't a massive defeat to the Egyptians. It wasn't like this huge military loss. Like, you know, a portion of their – an entire portion of a population just – and probably not even an entire portion.

Probably a lot of Jewish people didn't want to leave. So, you know, but you have a large portion of this Israelite population exodus-ing or leaving Egypt. Part in the Red Sea. Yeah, yeah. And probably what that is, this Red Sea, they talk about how the carts, the Pharaoh's carts, as they're chasing the Israelite people, it probably did piss off the Pharaoh or some vizier of Egypt who probably did want to chase down the leader of these Israelites and smite him and kill him. But the chariots start getting bogged down and they can't go forward anymore. And the Israelites are able to walk across the sea because they're on foot. Well, probably more likely what this is,

is the Sea of Reeds. It is the Sea of Reeds that connects um uh the sinai you have to cross the sea of reeds to get through that sea of reeds sinai peninsula yeah yeah um it's uh it's somewhere in the in the sinai desert like maybe the northwest side of the sinai i don't know the exact location of it but um it's more than likely it's a sea of reeds rather than literally splitting the red sea um and honestly man it's in such a remote part of Egypt. I would do... The green one, the lush green one? Yeah, why don't you go to the bottom?

Right there. Yeah, that photo right there. No, I'm sorry. The one you were on, the one to the left. There you go. That is, they probably crossed a huge area that looked like this. And the Israelite people were able to walk through it. But because we're in the Bronze Age, we're now in the Age of Chariots, and the Pharaoh's people are – they're riding these horses with these big chariots.

They can't get the chariots through these marshes and these sea of reeds. But the Israelites are able to kind of wade through it and get through to the other side and then they're gone off in the desert and so there's this barrier that the that the egyptian army doesn't want to follow them through and then they're gone well so ramses didn't drown in the sea when it got shot by moses no no no probably not hate to see it and uh although um i believe that it's rams's firstborn son dies through an unknown means. His firstborn son really did die, which is – that's what the Passover is. Yes. They cover your front door with lamb's blood.

Obviously the pharaoh did not cover the palace door with lamb's blood because he doesn't believe in Yahweh. His first son died in some – through some strange cause. God damn. So something interesting there. You know, whoever was in Egypt was intimately familiar with the inner workings of Egypt. It's like Hollywood. They take the truth and they just, you know, they Hollywoodize

it a little bit. You gotta make the story presentable for the people to buy the box office. Yeah, and that's what so much of the Bible is. It's conveying a message to you. So, you know, why let the hard facts and the details get in the way of the overall story? You don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. So, you know, so that's, this is kind of what we're looking at. And, uh, you know, and I'm even, you know, as, as an added element of, of honesty, I'm a Christian. I know. I believe. We talked about that last time you were here.

I believe there's an element of truth to this. There really was an exodus of Israelite people from Egypt. The exodus really did happen in around the time that you can estimate that it did, which is in the Bronze Age. And I think that's the way to look at it. I think, you know, we live in this world where it has to be zero or a hundred, all fake or all real. And that's not really what things are. Things are imperfect. They're done by humans, right? So if there's a basis of Christianity that you believe in at the core that's like, yes, I really like this idea. This dude, Jesus Christ, seemed like the homie, did some cool shit. Might have been the son of God.

I'm going to be a Christian. That doesn't mean you have to co-opt every fucking word written in the Bible because it's there more to – it's supposed to be there to teach you things. Sometimes in the way where it takes stretches of things that aren't real and didn't happen. Sure. You know? Yeah. Well, not to get in this, but Jesus did that. Like you read Jesus Christ quotes and he's telling parables that you know aren't real.

They're not to get in this, but Jesus did that. Like you read Jesus Christ quotes and he's telling parables that you know aren't real. They're kind of exaggerated into simplicity. So anyways, so that's the Exodus. I've now forgotten why I was telling that. Well, we went way ahead because we went down this rabbit hole on slaves and playing fast and loose with that term. And we've been talking about it with the slaves playing a part in building yes yes last thing last thing i was going to say about the last thing i was going to say about this is um is one of the things that we know that the israel one of the things that tell us

that the israelite people are just this migrating group of people that move into you know land and kind of you know occupy it they didn't really have a, was on that dream stela that's erected between the paws of the Sphinx, like we were talking about in episode one. It's the very, very first time in all of ancient history, as far as we know, that we have evidence of, that the Israelites were actually acknowledged by somebody. And you have the Egyptians listing out at the bottom of the dream stellar, you have them listing out these different ancient civilizations using different symbols, like one will be a tower, one will be a big wall. But the Israelites are two people walking.

And it wasn't a city, it wasn't a place, it was a group of people. And they were wandering. And so the Egyptians are acknowledging that the Israelites have left, and they're just a so the egyptians are acknowledging that the israelites have left and they're just a people out wandering around somewhere which is what the bible tells us that they did that they wandered for 40 years in the desert not literally that they're trying to find their way through sand dunes you know and they're turning left and turning right they're they're just they're setting up camp they have now they have now left Egypt, which was this – when they say wandering the desert for 40 years, I always thought that was stupid as a kid. It's the Sinai Desert.

It's not that big. It's not the Sahara Desert. It's not the size of the United States of America. It's the Sinai Desert. And there's coasts all around it. You walk in one direction, you'll hit a coast just like that. What it's saying is it's from the Egyptian perspective. Egypt was not a desert. It was a tropical oasis. Everything outside of it is a desert. Everything. Like go west and go

south. You hit the Sahara Desert. You go south, you hit Nubia. You don't want to be in Nubia. That's not the place Egyptians want to live in, this harsh desert environment. You go east, you hit the Sinai Desert, and then you go north from there, then you're in Mesopotamia along the Tigris and Euphrates, which are bountiful, but they're not bountiful like Egypt is. Everything outside of Egypt was a desert wasteland that you didn't want to be. That's why the Egyptians saw themselves as divine. The sun God gave them what they have. They are way up here compared to the rest of the world. So Moses and the Israelites wandering around the desert, really what they're doing is wandering around from place to place in this drab, disappointing wasteland that's not even close to what they had in Egypt. Does it make sense? Yes. And they're looking for the promised land, which ends up being up in Israel where things are more fertile.

But still, I mean, not on the level of Egypt. So that is kind of an insight to slaves in Egypt. Circle closed. So slaves, in the way that we understand it, slaves did not build the pyramid. So there's the Great Pyramid. These are built with massive stones that we don't have an explanation for. Lots of unanswered questions here. So you have Khafre's Pyramid next, which it's just generally accepted that Khafre is the son of Khufu. Khafre has an interesting name. What do you mean it's generally accepted?

Like we don't know that that's his kid well so it's um i guess what i mean is that uh it's accepted by everybody that that that if we're going by who these actual people were kofra was was kufu's um son i guess what i mean is is you know kofra and kufu are closely tied to their pyramid and there's some debate over whether or not whether or not theid or the Center Pyramid was created first because the Center Pyramid is directly aligned to this limestone outcropping that is made out of the Sphinx. And people wonder, well, the Egyptians would have definitely known that that huge limestone outcropping that faces east that was eventually turned into the Sphinx was there. Why would the first pyramid be offset of that? Why would it not be the center pyramid first and then the two peripheral ones? That's kind of the debate there. We could talk for an hour about that, but it's

less important. So then you have the center pyramid, the pyramid of Khufu, which is believed is attributed to Khufu's son, Khafra. Khafra has an interesting name because now we're entering into, and it's been around, but now it's at its height under Khafra, which is the cult of Ra, which is the sun. And then the sun god later morphs into the Aten, which is the which is the sun disc this is during the amarna period um under the pharaoh akhenaten have you heard of him before uh a very famous pharaoh i believe you and i talked about him we may have yeah he kind of turned egypt on 76 yeah we kind of turned egypt on his head or turned egypt on his head a little bit and then they tried to like basically erase him from history um but the cult of Ra is now beginning in Egypt.

It was really, it had always been around, even, you know, in pre-dynastic times, people were worshiping the sun and acknowledging that the sun gives them every single thing that is vital in their world. And we can see that in some Pharaoh's names like Khafra and then his son Menkaura. And Ka, remember how I was talking to you about the spiritual doubles? You have the Ba, which is your spirit that embodies your body, but then you have your Ka, which is your spiritual double. And the Ka kind of has its own mind as well. We see that the way that Egyptians understand this, it evolves over time. But Ka is the spiritual double, or sometimes it's interpreted as the essence of Ra. So Ka-Fra. So it's the essence of Ra. That was his pharaonic name, was the essence of Ra. He was the human

embodiment of Ra. And so his whole funerary complex, it is aligned to, well, I didn't even get to this, that the Great Pyramid is aligned to true north, not magnetic north, but true north. And to do that takes an incredible understanding of astronomy. And you know what's funny is I watched this long lecture of archaeoastronomy. It was a series. And the last episode that I had been waiting to get to was over the Great Pyramid. And it's this archaeoastronomer, PhD guy.

Man, we go through the whole Great Pyramid he's like he's like you know it would take modern technology and gps coordination to be able to align something like this to true north we would need computers to be able to do this advanced technology and even then we might get it wrong and he's building up to it and building up to it he's like it's absolutely amazing that they were able to do this it must have been an accident that's that's what that's what his interpretation of it is it was not an accident there's no way that they just happen to get it that they just happen to accidentally get it right it's another means of understanding their night sky and and and it's a means of of their science of astronomy that's lost to us today it It's another form of, it's another indication

or evidence for a lost technology. You know, we don't really know how they perfectly aligned it. So that's Khufu's Pyramid and Khafre's Pyramid has the same alignment. It's also aligned, the entire complex is aligned to the east. So it's all facing the east, facing the morning sunrise. So you have Khafra's Pyramid, then you have the Mortuary Temple, and you have this long causeway that goes down to the Nile. Connecting the causeway to the Nile is the Valley Temple.

Now, what's interesting about Khafra's Pyramid is that this causeway, this long, narrow pathway that goes down, is slightly diverted to the right. And then it leads to the Valley Temple, which has never been done before. Usually it's a straight shot from the tip of the pyramid down to the Nile. It's all perfectly aligned. Why is it pushed off to the side? Well, there's an idea that while they are creating the causeway down to the Valley Temple, they then run into this big limestone outcropping. And from that limestone outcropping, rather than paving straight through it and coring all the blocks to use it, you know, wherever else, the architects decide this

big outcropping that faces perfectly east could be used as a monument. And then they carve that into the Sphinx you know that that's what the sphinx then becomes um i don't really buy that they'd found it under coffers rain why not because it's absolutely gigantic we should we should look up uh um the sphinx the sphinx is an absolutely yeah this is one of those sometimes when you look at it in the picture you lose sight of like how big it is because you're like oh yeah there it is the statue but it's fucking huge yeah so can we can we do people walking next to walking in front of sphinx i want to see if there's one because we had that one earlier of the statues by uh on the border of nubia yeah where you could see like the

people walking in the last episode when we were talking where it shows how big those goddamn things are so i want one that's not so that that one is people standing far away yeah that's far it's tough to get people down inside the sphinx pit getting photos of that like this the head the perspective yeah yeah the head is so far away you know there's probably 20 or 30 feet between them and in the go up all the way up hold on there was one do this uh do the the fifth one or sixth one sorry right there yep yeah that's that's that's a drawing yeah yeah it's it's really that's not the sphinx is is marginally bigger than that. It's tough. I've seen some drone footage before where you can see the people and it's just like, whoa. Yeah, yeah.

So, okay. So from here – actually, will you go to the one with the blue sky in the background? The other one to the top right of that. There we go. That's an iconic photo of the Sphinx. Yes. So you see the toes of the Sphinx? Yeah, dog paws. Yeah, the crest of those toes is probably about as tall as a person.

That's about how big this thing is. Actually, I think that the dream stela in the center, does that look like it has somebody standing next to it? I could be misperceiving the height of it. I see what you're seeing. Is there a head there or is that just a shadow? No, I think that's just a shadow. Okay, okay.

You probably have better eyesight than I do. So those paws and the legs are about as tall as a person stands. And so look at it. So from the pyramid, what you're seeing is the eastern face of the pyramid. And they build this long causeway that comes straight, like perfect east-west alignment. It comes straight down to the Nile where they'll then have a valley temple. That valley temple serves as like a museum and a place to worship the pharaoh. You know, normal people probably, this is just our own interpretation, you know,

normal people probably didn't get to go all the way up to the pyramid, but they could go into the Valley Temple. Well, this Valley Temple is offset. It doesn't go straight. It goes around the Sphinx, which looks like it's built in reaction to the Sphinx one way or another. And so the Egyptologist's idea is that while they were coring it, they ran into this giant outstone cropping. Look at where the back used to be, but connecting the top of the head to the bottom of the spine of the Sphinx. Imagine how much stone was actually in that thing. They didn't just find that. They definitely already knew that it was there. And it wouldn't surprise me if it was a venerated monument in

the past because lining the walls of the Sphinx pit is an amount of erosion that geologists, so many geologists have looked at and say this would be thousands of years of rainfall to make something like this. Well, in 2500, 2450 BC, when we think that the Sphinx was carved into the face of a pharaoh right here, there wasn't enough rainfall. Um, uh, an actual, actually a major amount of drought was going to come in 300 years that we think contributed to the collapse of the old kingdom. So there's not enough rainfall happening to make this erosion possible. Um, so I think it's possible that this limestone outcropping that faced due East, which we've talked about due East is so central. It's where the sun rises every day and gives life. And then when it dies every day in the west, that resonated so strongly with the Egyptian psychology that they all buried themselves in the west facing east to be reborn. It's just central to Egyptian psychology. So this huge limestone outcropping that's facing

due east is probably something that they had quarried out, maybe turned into a lion. You know, Graham Hancock's idea is that. So 10,500 years ago. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. Or 10,500 BC, this lion here, if it was originally carved in the head of a lion and it existed 10,500 years ago, it would have been facing due East right during the age of Leo, where the constellation of Leo would have risen above the horizon and bringing the sun

into the night sky. And as these constellations change, um, you enter into different ages. So different constellations over the course of thousands of years end up before the sun, when the sun rises in the morning, uh, that's, that's astronomy. That's a whole other thing, a whole other expertise. Um, but that's essentially what Graham Hancock's idea was. And I actually like that idea. But it is really hard to say. I can say with 0% certainty that this Sphinx was cleared out of the ground and being venerated in 10,500 BC. Man, would it make sense. Man, would two puzzle pieces just, it would make perfect sense, right? I can't say with any amount of certainty, but I can say with

a great amount of certainty that this Sphinx pit must have been excavated before 2400 BC at a time when Egypt was much more green because it was rapidly becoming drier and drier and drier, leading to a drought that would contribute to the collapse of the old kingdom. So the Sphinx may have been, I think the Sphinx had already been recognized and then they just built around it and they re-carved the face into coffers face i mean it's obvious it's a pharaoh's face put on a lion that sets a precedence for the rest of egypt too um there are so many sphinx statues all throughout egypt you know made out of limestone granite diorite whatever um that are in that that are in this sphinx which is the head of a pharaoh

body of a lion um but i have no doubt that one way or another, it was quarried out and venerated long before it was turned into this. So then they build the Great Valley Temple next to it. And the Valley Temple is, you know, the most monumental, maybe the most famous temple in, not the most famous, but for people who are really into construction, it's the most famous one. It's the one that's most mind-boggling with the biggest red granite stones you could possibly move. You know, only real competition in construction style is some of the stuff you see in Peru that's, you know, just as impressive. So that's created there. And then you have Mencara's, then you have Mencara's pyramid. After this, we'll start moving a little bit faster through history, but this is, you know,

something we slow down, pay attention to. So, um, so after Khufu's entire complex, um, and I'll, I'll add one little thing about, about Khufu's, uh, valley temple is that people, you know, it's commonly people go into it and they just, they're just so blown away by the construction that they can't help but be compelled to say, you know, this has got to be some kind of like super ancient temple that was built by a different civilization or something. But I think there's a key piece of evidence there that shows that this must have been Egyptian, d know, dynastic Egyptian, regardless of age and time. When you walk through that temple carved into the calcite floor, and some sections of floor, I believe, are granite. And really, this would have been the most beautiful temple in all of Egypt. When you're walking into the doors on the outside you have this limestone bedrock that actually slopes

down onto the ground, you can actually see the ancient bank of the Nile right there as you're walking up to it the bank of the Nile would have connected went right up to this valley temple, maybe we should pull up the valley temple if you just look that up you'll see it

so you can see where it slopes off and there's these stone docks that actually come out just like how we have out here you know in jersey you have these docks that come out but these would have been made out of stone and then obviously naturally yeah so this is the inside of the sphinx this is the inside of the temple uh so each one of those are is one. Like that column right there is one block. The lintel going across, uh, between each columns, those are all one block. One block. Yeah.

Yeah. It's very impressive. Um, can you do the aerial one that looks like it's at the bottom? God, they look like gold bars. So that, that's Hatshepsut's temple. Do one to the right. Um, this looks like a very old photo of the Valley Temple aerial shot. Can you look up Valley Temple Egypt aerial?

Maybe we can get something from the sky because it kind of is important for the way I'm going to depict this. Man, these may not be super common. Maybe do the one at the top left. There we go. All right. So you see the bottom, right? That is the Valley temple next to the Sphinx.

Um, it's an absolutely gigantic temple now at that front. So the, the face of it, that's to the right, that's facing East. Can you see the little dark spot that makes the triangular shape in the photo? Where? Well, it's just right in front of that eastern face. At the bottom of that wall, you see what I'm talking about, right? No, I don't.

So do you see the temple that's to the bottom right of the Sphinx here? Yes. With the four big walls? Yes. That wall that's to the right, the outside of that is facing east. Does that make sense?

Can you go point? Would you mind on the screen? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I can see this? Because I'm a little bit confused. So this right here is facing. Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay. You see this platform that's standing here?

Yes. He's saying there's a platform to the right of this that he's pointing at. This platform is the dock. And the Nile is right there. That's what that's a platform to the right of this that he's pointing at. This platform is the dock, and the Nile is right there. Oh, all right. So the Niles, can you just repeat that in the mic for people? So they got that right, that platform on the bottom right is the dock, and the Nile is in front of it. So you have this little platform in front. That was the dock where you pulled up to the Valley Temple.

And I mean a couple feet from that eastern wall was where the ancient Nile Harbor was. You sailed right up to this temple. Now, this temple, when you walked in, is comprised, the inner walls of it are comprised out of this, you know, very impressive megalithic red aswan granite stones that you can imagine when they're polished

in their day and time, they're just gleaming. I mean, it's just so impressive. But the floor is solid crystal white calcite. And in the ceilings, can you go back to, uh, to the photo of all the columns in the ceilings? You know, this is probably a sun temple because it's, you know, dedicated to Khafra. Um, right there. Yes. Um, maybe go to any of the others and look for an inlet in the floor okay um yeah right there bottom right oh i'm sorry oh yeah you see the little holes in the floor oh yeah in front of that is where those 30 some odd statues of kofra of kofra would have set and so um the the uh the lentils that the lentils that are sitting on top of these

columns, these are going, you know, long way. There would have been other lentils going, you know, or going, uh, these right here are going East and West. There would have been other lentils going North and South, but it wasn't meant as an actual roof. They had little, um, you can see little sections. So can you see on the top lentils that are going above these columns? If you, if you go up a little bit, can you see little indentations in those columns where another column would have

come in the opposite way? So this would have created this little hole in the ceiling where when the sun is directly in the sky, it's shining down into the temple on top of these solid, shining black, if you'll look at this up now, look up diorite kofra statue d-i-a-r-i-t-e yeah so d-i-o-r-i-t-e and then kofra uh yeah so you definitely want to put kofra on there so it's k-h-a-f-r-a it's spelt all different ways but it'll come up right okay is that kafara yeah that's fine here it is that one so these are the kofra statues um go to the one that's all the way to the right if you would right there here we go these are the cop these are an eagle it's It's the falcon. It's like the sacred falcon. And so these are the solid diorite Khafre statues.

You see the way the sun is hitting it on the top? Yeah. That's the way it would have looked in the temple. So you have solid black, shining, most magnificent statues in all of Egypt sitting inside. And that's undeniably Egyptian. I mean, that's what it is. You're looking at it, it's Egyptian. Look at the face and how perfectly carved that is it's absolutely amazing well here in the falcon being separated from the head but it's all one piece of stone i mean it's truly amazing it's

remarkable in the knees on this guy like the uh the the way that they're carved i mean it's just so incredible uh you can go you can go to a full body one too and see that there. And it's different because in Egypt, to compare and contrast here, in Egypt, they casted their statues and their figures with far more stoicism, whereas there was more artistic. There was a more artistic endeavor in ancient Rome with how they carved things and developed things. Yes. Well, you know, the famous philosopher plato he didn't really care for for greek uh statuary work he didn't like it he thought that it was uh he thought that it was trying to put on too much he didn't he didn't really he wasn't really much of a fan of of

statuary artwork in that way um but to him egypt egyptian uh artwork was okay because it wasn't trying to fool you in a way. You knew that it wasn't realistic. This isn't actually exactly what Khafre looked like. It is a pharaonic style, and Plato was okay with that. And so when you look all throughout Greek history, their art style, like if you look at their old statues from 700 BC, they're so much worse in quality than statues from the height of Athens, 450 BC, 400 BC. It's so much worse than that. And the art style changes over time and it becomes much more magnificent, but it's also highly stylized. Egyptian statuary work is very simple, iconic elegant, timeless

and the key word here is eternal it was never ever meant to change, if we go look at that Narmer palette that symbolizes what we were talking about, the smiting the smiting of the northern king and the unification of Egypt it is exactly the same style

that we will see Egyptian artwork for the rest of Egyptian history. They had absolutely no interest in artistic innovation. Artistic style in Egypt wasn't meant to change and evolve over time. It was established at the very beginning and it was kept exactly the same for over 3,000 years. It was never, ever meant to change.

It was this- That's crazy that it stays like that for how long of a time period that is. Think about how much our art changes every fucking year. Yeah. And has forever, by the way, for what seems like forever, by the way. Yeah, well, you know,

when art is a central core part of your religion and it's meant for the gods, it's meant for your religion, it's only and it's meant for the gods it's meant for your religion it's it's meant as a symbol of who you are uh as a civilization oh it's it's meant for who you are as a civilization you never want it to change you have no interest in it ever changing and it stays exactly the same for all you know egyptian history for also when you have pharaohs who are essentially calling themselves gods sure it's like well like, well, this is the God way. This is what we do.

Exactly. It's kind of like they're not so empirical fashion. They have no interest in becoming anybody else or usurping anybody else. They are the end-all, be-all of all civilization. Everybody else is below the Egyptians. They have no interest in assimilating to anybody else or allowing too many people to assimilate into them. They want to be Egyptian. They will always be Egyptian. And that's why they lasted for 3,000 years. They're the world's most conservative civilization ever. And their reign shows it. So these statues are little Easter eggs

that are all throughout Egypt. And you're going to see them. Every little museum you go to, there's going to be this Khafre statue. So this would have been the most beautiful monument really in all of Egypt, to me the most impressive. White shining calcite, crystal floor, huge singular stone columns. And then in between the columns, it will allow sunlight to come through and the sun would fall on the physical embodiment of the sun god, Khafra. And so you would be sailing down the Nile to this big, magnificent temple. Yeah. And the sun is casting in right on him. And you'd be able to go into the temple. And probably the reason there were so many of these statues is probably conspicuous consumption. He had the money to be able to do into the temple. And probably the reason there were so many of these statues is probably conspicuous consumption.

He had the money to be able to do it. He had the resources to be able to do it. He's this powerful. He can do whatever he wants. This is the most powerful person on the planet. No wonder he's doing stuff like this. But also there's so many statues there so that you can have so many people come in and visit him, the embodiment of Khafra, the embodiment of the god Ra, and leave offerings in front of him. So you have this big open space that's kind of like a museum or a tribute to,

it's the center of the cult of the sun, basically. And this is where normal people could come and get a glimpse of the pharaoh. So after Khafra's necropolis construction, we then move on to Menkaure. There's a little bit less to say here. He's a much less powerful pharaoh. His pyramid is much smaller. The mortuary temple is very impressive. Lots of huge, huge stones. Stones that really impressed me.

I've never even seen them before. And then he has this long causeway that leads down to a valley temple that today is unexcavated. It's just sitting in the desert out at Giza. You can walk up to it, but you're going to be standing on top of it because it's completely buried in the sand. But this one would have gone all the way up to the Nile as well. And one of the other key pieces of evidence that kind of locks the construction of these pyramids into a certain era is that there's evidence now of this dump site where a town was completely turned on its head and thrown into the desert. And it's in this gap of desert just between Menkaure's Valley Temple and Khafre's Valley Temple. And so you have this little gap of desert here, and this town was just thrown, buried into the desert. But archaeologists, in the height of Egyptology, are looking for every single little thing.

So of course you're going to end up looking between the two most iconic places in Egypt, which are the valley temples of the Great Pyramids. You look in between them and all of a sudden they find this little workers' village with a lot of tools and clay pots and clay seals, pottery, all this stuff that is similar to workers' villages that they found elsewhere in Egypt, the remnants of them. And so it makes it pretty obvious what occupation these people were. Plus this little town is right down the hill from Giza. You know, it's literally in Giza. It's just on the outer edge of it. And they try to piece together, okay, what was this town? What evidence do we have? When did they exist? Okay, we found all these clay jars with these seals. Okay, this seal contains the cartouche of Khufu. Okay, okay. So this little town that we found existed during the reign of Khufu. Let's see what other stuff that we can find. Okay. Here's the cartouche of Khafra, Khufu's son. Keep looking through it. Keep looking through it. There's nothing in any of this

that has the cartouche of Menkaure, which we think comes after Khafra, nothing there. So the idea is that the construction of Menkaure's valley temple, he cleared it all out and turned this little worker's village on its head and just buried all the trash in the desert nearby the valley temple. He displaced it. And that's why you don't see evidence for his existence in the archaeological remains of this little town because he just ripped up the town and threw it away because the town the town existed where he wanted to build his valley temple so he just moved all those guys somewhere else and told them to dump their trash somewhere get the fuck out and we found that and we yeah and we found that trash so you know you when did we find that 1800s yeah you know probably turn of the century around the year 1900 that's

when a lot of this stuff was found because giza is torn up i mean i think 90 even though there's so much left i think it's like 90 of giza has been excavated now you know it's just it is the center of archaeology yeah um so it's another piece of evidence that kind of locks the pyramids into us into a certain date it locks that technology into a certain era um so that's the great pyramids into a certain date. It locks that technology into a certain era. So that's the Great Pyramids on the Giza Plateau. That's the height of the pyramid age, which has taken us so long to get through now. It's been amazing though, going through it. I really appreciate you giving it such in-depth. Yeah, well, thank you. You know, and there were probably lots of little nuances

and mysteries that we just can't address in five or six hours. Each one of these topics could take up an entire podcast. Each little nuanced thing could take up an entire podcast. But I think this is like such a treat that people get on a podcast, like a sweeping history of Egypt. Because people – it just hasn't been done before. And so anyways, we have now reached the other side of the Great Pyramid Age. It's kind of all downhill from here. There are other people throughout the end of the Old Kingdom trying to build pyramids, but they don't stand the test of time. They're made out of much less

impressive architecture, and they crumble. And you have the Black Pyramid, and they have basically every other pyramid. There's dozens of others that are just these minor obscure pyramids that the stones – the foundation wasn't laid. I didn't even describe that. The foundation of the stones at Giza are man-made. They're not building on just the natural bedrock. They create these large megalithic tiles for the pyramid to sit on to make sure it lasts forever. How large approximately were those tiles? Oh man, I mean, they range in all different sizes. Some of them are bigger than the biggest

stones used in the pyramid, but you know, they're limestone, but hard limestone. And so, you know, it's probably, you know, not a far fetch to say that the economic pull to be able to do this for some reason that's lost to us is decreasing. The pharaohs aren't as powerful as they used to be. We actually do know that that's the reality – that that's a reality because as you go through all of the – you study all these necropoli throughout Egypt, these great graveyards, and you can kind of analyze, okay, in the early dynasties, the pharaohs, their whole government was made up of people that they were related to in their own family. But you can imagine as time goes on, your family members die and you've got to rely on your buddy to step in to where normally your family member, your blood would take up that role. Well, and imagine the trend that that sets in three generations when the Pharaoh's family is

not completely in charge and it's people who don't have an intrinsic loyalty to the Pharaoh by their blood, you start vying for more power and then people start competing with the Pharaoh. And that's bad. You don't want anybody competing with the pharaoh. That's not good for stability in Egypt. And it's about right after Menkaure, the latter half of the fourth dynasty in Egypt, that more and more people start taking up places in government in Egypt and having competition in power with the pharaoh. It's never a good thing. He's tried that multiple times and all three times it brought about the end of Egypt, which they were barely able to scratch their way back from. So this is starting to happen in Egypt for the first time as people started competing with the Pharaoh. And it creates

instability and more of a balance of power and resources in Egypt. Like we see high priests of Ra and other various gods getting really, really nice tombs that are comparable to the pharaohs. And all of a sudden you have this guy who's a vizier or he's the high priest of, you know, ex-god who has a nicer sarcophagus, a much nicer sarcophagus than the pharaoh. Ooh, there's some kind of

displacement of power here. And it's something that's lost to us today, but there's some guy here who has something on the Pharaoh. He's got the Pharaoh by the balls. You know what I mean? And it's happening more and more common. The Pharaoh's power is diminishing while the power of the priest is increasing. And then all of a sudden at the end of the old kingdom, we have this Pharaoh called, uh, uh, Pepe the second,

which is not a very strong name for a Pharaoh. And, uh, you know, I've always thought, I've always thought about like, I've always thought about like the, you know,

the ceremony that's like the incarnation of the Pharaoh or something. And, uh, and they go, and now presenting the second Pepe, you know, it's just not, it's just not, you know, it's not, it's not cough rock, you know it's just not it's just not you know it's not

it's not kofra you know it's not something yeah strong it's not badass it's not it's not ramsay very beta male very beta male yeah and so peppy probably lives a lot longer than he should he lives to be i think you know he's he's the longest reigning pharaoh in egypt is probably lives to be 90 or 92 uh he um he's a similar length and reign to ramsay's the ramsay's the longest reigning pharaoh in Egypt. He probably lives to be 90 or 92. He's a similar length in reign to Ramses the Great, but not nearly as successful. Because by the end of his reign, it's like Weekend in Bernie's. The pharaoh is not actually in charge of Egypt. He probably should have offed himself a long time ago or given up the throne to somebody else. Because he was not in charge of... There are so

many problems that were going on in Egypt that we can't name them all or decide which one that it was that brought down the end of the old kingdom. But Egyptian civilization, we call them intermediate periods where Egypt is kind of knocked off its horse for a little bit and it climbs back, that does not do it justice. Egypt, as a unified civilization, ended. It literally ended. It was only able to crawl back 300, 400, or about 250 years, 350 years later. The entire civilization ended. We think it was due to drought, due to financial strain, due to

invaders just sacking these barbarians that live out in the desert, the barbarians that finally came in, probably under a period of instability under a very elderly king who was not... It was expected, at least as far as we know, that the pharaoh was... Obviously, he's in charge of the army, but not only is he in charge of the army, he's also out there with the army. When they're fighting people, it's expected that he's out there, at least through propaganda, right? It's not – I guess it's not realistic to think they're actually out there like Alexander. Yeah, he's not Mel Gibson and the Patriots. Sure, sure. Yeah, but it's expected that he's very active and that this old, old elderly pharaoh was not role. And so you have mass amounts of instability in Egypt, and the civilization quite literally ends.

And that is probably... What year are we at again? This is 2100 BC, the death of Pepi II. And when he's dead, we now have this period... The end of the golden days of Egypt have now finally come to an end due to instability and the Pharaoh's position being challenged and ultimately toppled, which created, you know, now you have these, you know, now you have these varying chieftains, you know, all these high priests who think that they're in charge, and it just all falls apart because

people on the peripherals, the barbarians at the gates are waiting. They're waiting to come in. And eventually they do at the end of Pepe II's reign. So they bombard Egypt, and Egypt is gone for 300 years. And it's not until a pharaoh named... It should be Montuhotep. Look that up. Montuhotep? Yeah, yeah, Montuhotep II. So how does, hold on, how does a pharaoh, if they're like gone for 300 years,

that's older than our country is right now. How's it, and meaning the pharaoh line dies, how does someone suddenly declare themselves a pharaoh? Probably what it is, if you to go to the description so there's lots of mentu hoteps uh montu hoteps mentu hotep will you read the description okay i got you mentu hotep the second also known under his pronoun or pre-not see how i'm trained now pre-nomin okay so i'm sorry so so pre-nomin pre-nomin nepeheptra this isn't what you want no no look up look up uh first

pharaoh of the middle kingdom he was a he they just to be clear all right first pharaoh of the middle kingdom yeah all right alas alas has been on the on the money today yeah yeah thank you we've had him pull up like fucking six thousand things all right first pharaoh of middle mentu hotep that's what i was saying yeah mentu mentu hotep the first um oh yeah all right copy and paste that and let's go to his youtube or yeah well it's it's yeah yeah yeah perfect yeah so that is the right one yeah well no there's a montu hotep and a mentu hotep that's meant to hotep yeah that's what we were on go Go down. Hit that again, Alessi. This is what we were on. Yeah, Mintuhotep.

Yeah, so... Also known under his pronoun Nebahatra. Yeah, so he's the very beginning... Yeah, sorry about that. All good. So I'll read the description like you want. It was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, the sixth ruler of the 11th dynasty.

He is credited with reuniting Egypt, thus ending the turbulent first intermediate period and becoming the first pharaoh of sixth ruler of the 11th dynasty he is credited with reuniting egypt thus ending the turbulent first intermediate period and becoming the first pharaoh of the middle kingdom he reigned for 51 years according to the turin king list mentu hotep the second succeeded his father in teft the third on the throne and was in turin's seat succeeded by his son mentu hotep the third mentu this is what i want to know mentu hotepep II ascended Egypt's throne in the upper Egyptian city of Thebes during the first intermediate period. Egypt was not unified during this time, and the 10th dynasty, rivaled to Mentuhotep's 11th, ruled lower Egypt from Heraclopolis. Yeah, Heraclopolis.

Heraclopilad, Colopatadon king. Sorry, people desecrate the sacred ancient Royal necropolis of a beatos in upper Egypt. In the 14th year of meant to hoteps reign, Pharaoh meant to hold up the second dispatches armies North to conquer lower Egypt, continuing his father in tough. The third's conquest meant to hold up succeeded in unifying the country

probably shortly before his 39th year on the throne following and in recognition of the unification in regnal year 39 he changed his titulary to semitali okay so so hold on a minute so effectively egypt in the dark periods at some point here formed multiple states within it yeah and so one of the states had a line of pharaohs that started before him at some point, one of them is like, yo, I'm the pharaoh, this bitch right here. And his father was the pharaoh of this state and was trying to start to unify Egypt together. And then this motherfucker came in and

said, I'm gonna unify it all together and reunified the whole country and said, I'm pharaoh of you all call me God. Yep. You know, you know, it's really, you know, it's really interesting is that first, you remember when you asked me how the origins of hieroglyphs began, and I tell you, uh, down in Southern Egypt, which is upper Egypt, um, up in those Eastern mountains is where they found that petroglyph that shows a scorpion. Right. Okay. So that is scorpion the first, who is tangentially the father of scorpion the second. The other name for Scorpion II is Narmer, which is the guy who comes from the south

and conquers the north and unifies Egypt. So the son of this former great pharaoh. The son of Inteph III, which is Mentuhotep II, they also come from the same area of Egypt as Scorpion. And he marches north again and smites the king of northern Egypt and reunites it. This guy did what Scorpion II did. He did exactly the same thing. March north and put the civilization back together. Eventually, they kick out all the foreigners. Each little state kicks out all the

foreigners, or they begin to do that, which kind of reestablishes Egyptians being there. Because they all recognize that having too many people that aren't Egyptian there, your civilization is crumbling. It's eroding away. You have no foothold in your own home anymore. So these states are beginning these little kingdoms these chief uh they're kingdoms that are run by chieftains is kind of like the the word but they all have people who are claiming to be pharaoh right well well eventually one of them is going to have to be pharaoh and to do that he's going to have to grab the last remaining pharaoh by the hair with the scepter and smite him and crush his skull in and say i am the god God, the human embodiment of the God of Egypt.

That's right. And so this guy, Mentuhotep, he does it again. The second time Egypt is unified, but imagine 400 years afterwards. Yeah, these people don't even know what their history was. Exactly. It's a new civilization. And you had people who were trying to keep up with the history. Some of the king's lists, they come during the Middle Kingdom and then in the New Kingdom that comes later on.

They have kings lists going back. They're able to kind of piece together the history and they actually do it accurately in some ways all the way up to Narmer. Because after Narmer, you have a solidified civilization that is making an effort to record events, right? And so you have people that are like historians and archaeologists that we can just assume that we're digging back through their history and reassembling these things after 400 years of being fallen apart. But now it's a new civilization. They're not building, well, I mean, they try, but they're not building pyramids and monuments on the scale of what they were. You know how when people say, well, it must have been a great cataclysm and a disaster that destroyed the civilization that built the pyramids. That did happen. There was a monumental drought that Egypt hadn't seen before that landed at the end of the old kingdom compared with a dozen other

reasons that a cataclysm befell the old kingdom of Egypt, and it literally fell apart for four centuries or three centuries. This guy puts it back together. And then so Egypt has another hurrah, has a second period of the Middle Kingdom. But this is kind of defined as a period of conservatism and stability until it's not. And it's just a few hundred years that this is lived out. And then sometime around 17, 1600 BC, there's kind of an unknown period in Egypt. It's another dark period, but Egypt falls apart again. It's invaded by people. The high priests are starting to compete with the Pharaoh's power, falls apart again for a couple of hundred years. And then this is kind of getting into my new frontier of where I'm studying Egypt, or where, you know, a frontier I haven't ventured

off into yet. But eventually, a pharaoh, and I'm actually, I don't know who this pharaoh is, but another pharaoh unites Egypt again. And you have the reign of the new kingdom, which is a bit outside my purview. But as it goes, you have some of the most iconic pharaohs in Egypt. You have Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep III, you have Ramses II, you have Akhenaten during the Armana period. So you actually have this long reign of, of the 18th dynasty. Um, and the 18th dynasty ends with basically who might be the greatest Pharaoh, you know, now we're through this huge time of stability and prosperity in Egypt. You know, you have a Hatshepsut, which is probably the greatest female Pharaoh in all

of Egypt. She's very interesting. Um, this is kind of the rise of kind of the rise of the new kingdom. After the second falling apart of Egypt, you have the new kingdom rising. And shortly... Had there been, I'm sorry, had there been rules before about there not being a female pharaoh in previous generations of Egyptians? Well, there were female pharaohs, but there were some women who were able to put themselves in a position where they were able to put themselves in a position where

they were able to acquire the loyalty of the people around them. It just worked out perfectly for them. You have a pharaoh before Hatshepsut in the Middle Kingdom called Sobeknefru. And Sobeknefru basically means that the crocodile god is pleased. So she was a girl whose name was dedicated to honor the crocodile god. She was a pharaoh for a little bit, but we don't know much about her. But then later on at the beginning of the new kingdom, you have the start of a new great dynasty. I think it's the glory of the 18th dynasty, I believe. And that's Hatshepsut. And so basically, she is born to a husband, or I'm sorry, her father is Thutmose I. And he's a pretty good pharaoh, and she is married to a man who becomes, a man who is the pharaoh, and he is then named Thutmose II. But Thutmose II is not a very prosperous man. He doesn't really do a lot for Egypt. He doesn't really have a lot of temples

in his name, and it was kind of a boring reign. And Hatshepsut, unfortunately, kind of sat in the background and didn't really do much, but she was watching and she was paying attention for about two decades. Then her husband dies. He's given a nice tomb. But then Hatshepsut finds herself in a position where she is not queen of Egypt. She is the pharaoh, which is a distinction there. And she grabs, she literally grabs the bull by the horn. And she sends her son, Thutmose III, on military campaigns for two decades. And he is just smashing up civilization in the Middle East, Near East, Mesopotamia, beating up on the Hittites, bringing all the gold home. I mean, this is a very, very prosperous time in Egyptian civilization. And Egypt is on top of the world right now. They haven't been here in a thousand years. This is about 1500, 1400 BC. They haven't been at this height since

the age of the pyramids a thousand years before. Egypt is back and they're rocking the world around them, beating up on the Nubians, beating up on the Hittites, bringing all the gold home. The son of the Pharaoh is the general of the military and the Pharaoh at home, she's building Karnak Temple. We should look up Karnak Temple. It's with two Ks. Real quick, can I just go to the bathroom? Yeah. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So we have the Karnak Temple up here. Did I say that right?

Yes, yes. So she is Hatshepsut, you know, the new kingdom is back, or Egypt is back in the new kingdom under the reign of Hatshepsut. I mean, she is just, she and her son is the dynamic duo, maybe one of the most interesting parts of Egyptian history. Egypt is back, and they're beating up on everybody. And Hatshepsut, who is the woman who is the sitting pharaoh, not queen of Egypt, she's pharaoh. She's using the military conquest of her son to build some of the most magnificent temples that Egypt has ever seen. And she uses this wealth to erect – in the course of seven months, she erects two of the biggest obelisks that the that um ancient egypt ever erected and and um an obelisk is essentially one long giant granite tower and they had to be made out of granite they couldn't be made out of limestone because they're they're too long and too heavy and if you try to raise it the weight at the end will snap the monument in half it's got to be made out of granite so right here you can see two of her obelisks. Now, uh, I can't convey to you to the size of this. It's something you got to see in person. I mean, like if you were

standing next to this, you'd look like an ant. Um, absolutely gigantic. Each of them weigh, uh, approximately seven or eight tons. And she was going to erect another one, which is the unfinished obelisk. Maybe you could, you could pull up a, um, uh, a window of this. Uh, it's called the unfinished obelisk. Now this is still in the quarry down in Aswan. This is the one I was showing you on my phone of me standing in the pit next to it. That's absolutely gigantic. This is somewhere upwards of, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw this picture. This is, this is estimated now. It's huge. You were so fucking little. You were standing right in the crevice on the front there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now this is attributed – we don't know for certain, but this is attributed to the reign of Hatshepsut only because she's the only pharaoh that we know of that erected monuments of this size, right?

Now, the reason that they weren't able to erect this, and they don't really know where it would have gone, probably in Karnak, which Karnak is – you have the city you were talking about earlier, Thebes and Abydos. This is in southern Egypt. This is the cultural center, the religious center of Egypt, and it's centered around the modern-day city of Luxor. And so you would have had Karnak Temple in Luxor. And so you would have had Karnak Temple in Luxor. And so this obelisk probably would have been erected somewhere there. And they attribute it to Hatshepsut's reign again, because she's the only one that erected anything on this scale. How do we know that? Because you fly a drone up to the very top of her obelisk, or they used to build rafters to be able to go up there and read it. There are inscriptions written in Egyptian hieroglyphs carved deep

into them at the top of the obelisk. And Hatshepsut is telling, I have read the, it's really interesting. I have read the laments, the translations of her obelisk, and it's very, very interesting. You know what? It might be worth pulling up. Would you pull up a translation of Hatshepsut's obelisk? There's some- What's that?

H-A-C-H? Yeah, H-A-T-C-H-E-P-S-U-T. Hatshepsut obelisk translation. Okay. The translation of the inscription on Hatshepsut's obelisk includes the line, I have set these obelisks before the people who shall come into being two hen periods, which means 120 years. Hence, Hatshepsut erected two obelisks in East Karnak, Egypt,

to mark the entrance to the temple and the location of a precursor to the Akmenu. The obelisks were overseen by Senemut, an important official during her reign. So Senemut will become important here in just a second. Well, you know, it's something for people to go look up. There's a full, you know, maybe five or six paragraphs, translations of her obelisk. But before, I i'm sorry just before we get to the to sentiment i don't want to forget this because you blue balled me earlier off camera with this but the obelisk in central park you were talking about unrelated here but it's egyptian they found this on a boat is that what you were saying what's this yeah yeah so so there's this great story called Cleopatra's Needles.

And I believe that these are obelisks that are believed to have been – they were originally attributed to Cleopatra. They were standing in the city of Alexandria, which we're slowly getting to. Very slowly. So these were two obelisks that were standing in – or there were two obelisks that were standing in Alexandria and they're called Cleopatra's obelisks. And as the story goes, I believe, it would be a great movie and it's the Americans paid, you know, they, um, uh, the Americans had a, played a huge role in Egyptology and we gave a lot of money to Egypt. I mean, we, we saved the temple of Abu Simbel because it was going to be covered up by water. Like the, the ones in the, in the cliff side that we were showing earlier, Ramsey's propaganda against the Nubians, um, that was going to be completely covered up by this southern lake

that it set against. And the level was rising because they had made a new dam and everything. Or they were going to make a new dam, something like that. That's a whole rabbit hole. But they completely cut up the whole mountain and moved the entire monument, like this entire mountainside and rebuilt it somewhere else. Uh, you know, the Egyptians helped, I mean, the Americans helped pay for stuff like that. And, um, but this is way later. Um, but, uh, we essentially bought or purchased, uh, New York city purchased an obelisk from, uh, from Egypt. And so this is the late 1800s, I believe. And they put it on a steam engine tugboat to take across the Atlantic Ocean. So you have the boat that's driving and you have the cargo boat that's attached at the end. So they're pulling this, this obelisk from Egypt straight

across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. And this storm that was unexpected, cast upon this lug boat. And six of the men working on the boat jump across to the tugboat and make sure that the obelisk is secure. But the storm gets so bad that the tugboat actually detaches the weight bearing side detaches from the, you know, the weight bearing side detaches from the steam

engine and they lose each other during the storm. And the steam engine boat is looking around, looking around, trying to find the tugboat with the obelisk on it and they can't find it. And, you know, they're running out of fuel. So they head to New York City with one obelisk missing and six men missing that were on that boat that are now castaways at sea. And so it's not too much longer that a British ship finds an American tugboat with an obelisk laying on it in the middle of the ocean. And so the British go, well, I'll be york they go they go well i'll be damned and they take this thing back to london and so you know they took it to london they took it to

london and so and so uh the americans had to then buy it from from the brits sons of bitches so uh so they bring the obelisk to new york city and how do we pay for it? I don't know. I don't know. I heard this story over a year ago. But they then buy it from London and they bring it to New York City. And it was a thing in New York City for weeks. It took a long time to get this small obelisk. This is the tiny obelisk. When you go out there, you'll be impressed by its size, but it's nothing.

It's certainly nothing compared to Hatshepsut's obelisk at Karnak. It's a small obelisk. And so they're taking it from the New York City harbor. And there are these stories of people that would go get like a Coke and a snack and they'd set up their little chairs outside the store and they'd sit down and hang out. And watch as this obelisk went from one end of the block to the next over the course of an entire day. That's how slow they moved it. So it took just to go one block, took one day. To be able to turn from one street to another took one day.

And that's how slow it got to Central Park where they erected it. Again, that's a small one. So the Egyptians were doing these things quick. Quickly. Quick on a much larger scale. What a story though. But I got you off sentiment, so let's go back there. Yeah, yeah.

So you have a great memory with these things. So basically Hatshepsut and her son, her son Thutmose III after his father Thutmose II has passed away. They're kicking ass. Egypt is back. Now Hatshepsut, she never remarries. She never – probably because she doesn't want to give up power. Born again Christian. Yeah, yeah. She's the pharaoh. She doesn't want to give up power. Born-again Christian. Yeah, yeah. She's the pharaoh.

She doesn't want to give up. I couldn't even get a laugh out of Alessi on that one. She doesn't remarry, which is kind of strange. Now I'm going to fast forward and then I'm going to rewind really quick. So after Hatshepsut's death, Thutmose III, one of the most prolific pharaohs of ancient Egypt, he erases her from history, covers up her monuments. And they start scratching her name out of so many of the temple walls. And people looked at this for a long time as, oh, he resented his mom for sending him off to war for 20 years. And he didn't become Pharaoh

until he was probably in his thirties, you know, maybe his mid thirties when, when she finally passed away. Um, he resented her for that, for, for shortening his reign so much. And he cleared her off of all the temple walls and he, uh, her, her giant obelisk that she has in, in, in, uh, Karnak temple. When you go see it today, you can see that there was an, there was an ancient wall. Uh, there was another wall built around it to cover it up because they didn't pull it down, but they put these walls around it to cover it up, which is an interesting point. But I don't think he resented his mom. I think he actually loved his mom. And I don't think he had any resentment towards her at all. While she was Pharaoh, she never remarried, but she had a lover

called Senenmut. And Senenmut was the overseer of everything under Hatshepsut's reign. It was basically Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, and then Senenmut. And Senenmut, he's the great overseer. But he's depicted on some temple walls as having a little bit of a big gut and a double chin, which means that you're a powerful guy. And we think that some of the tomb builders in the Valley of the Kings, they have this graffiti that we found on the walls in some of their quarries that show a female pharaoh being bent over with a sort of pudgy man with a double chin like behind her and so it's it's it's tomb workers that are making graffiti laughing at their boss is screwing the pharaoh right he's dogging the pharaoh so yeah so so

for him he's dogging the pharaoh it's cool it's a cool story yeah um and then also had sheps it's um had sheps its burial chamber uh she buries herself with her father she loved she loved her father uh but actually she went and got her father's body out of his tomb and buried her with with him like on top of it no no no two different sarcophagi in two different sarcophagi but laying next to you made that sound a little yeah yeah sarcophagi, but laying next to each other. You made that sound a little edible. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, yeah. Laying next to each other in one chamber.

All right. No, that's fair. What's really interesting is that this chamber, the way that it's facing in the ground. Now, I should say, Hatshepsut, she dies quite a little bit after Senenmut dies. And she pays for Senenmut's burial chamber. And it's a very nice burial chamber. It's pointing at an odd direction underneath the ground. Usually burial chambers can be aligned to the east or to the west or something that's more recognized in the Egyptian understanding of cosmology.

But his chamber is aligned in this very strange direction. I believe it's pointing south towards the Valley of the Kings. So you have the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. He's buried north of there and he's facing south towards it. His chamber goes down south towards it. It's pointing in a certain direction. It's very odd. It's just not a typical alignment of a burial chamber. And she, even though she is a female, she's buried in the Valley of the Kings. She's one of the furthest back tombs. And so she paid for his, she built a very elaborate tomb for him. She obviously very much cared about this guy. And all we know is little, yeah, all we know is little rumors that they were- Yeah, I mean, that's a very pictorial rumor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But her tomb that she created for her and her father's sarcophagi to lay in, that one is also facing north. And when you look at a diagram, she built those tombs to face each other. She was facing him in the afterlife. And it was a secret that nobody was meant to know other than her i get goosebumps saying that uh yeah it was her secret lover and she wanted to be with him in the afterlife and both she and his tombs face each other under the ground and nobody knew that they gotta make a movie about that i know i know and nobody i get goosebumps like all my legs talking about that. It's a very cool story in Egypt. But then she passes away too. And Thutmose III, who's a great pharaoh, has been a great general, becomes a great pharaoh, starts covering up her name in Egypt and starts carving out her name on all the temple walls and covers up her great obelisk that's at Karnak Temple, builds like a wall around the obelisk. A lot of people think he did it because he resented his mom,

but I don't think that that's the case. I think that his mom did him an absolutely gigantic favor by not marrying anybody else. She solidified her son's place on the throne by not marrying Senenmut, because had not marrying Senenmut. Because had she married Senenmut, even though he's probably a good guy because he stayed with her romantically throughout his entire life, he never married, she never married, they would have had a child together. And that child, it would have made Senenmut pharaoh, and that firstborn son would have been pharaoh rather than Thutmose III. So she- Why? Because his dad was dead?

Well, he has the precedence. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I blanked out for a second. So that means Thutmose III gets cast to the side, right? She did him a favor by never marrying another man. She secured, even though she didn't like her first husband, probably didn't like him, he's kind of a loser of a Pharaoh. She honored his son, Thutmose III, by never having another son and never remarrying. She solidified, she allowed him to conquer and become a great

general, and she solidified his rule and died never being married again. Sacrifice for him. To give him a pathway to become the pharaoh. And it's not until about 20 more years into Thutmose III's reign, until he's maybe in his 50s or so, that he starts covering up her name. And so my idea when I look at this is I think an official decision was made that it just can't be acknowledged that a woman was ever pharaoh because it causes too much competition in the palace. You don't want women plotting against their husbands or trying to assassinate them, right? Well, that would later come to fruition with the whole Cleopatra thing.

Sure, sure. You know, you don't want twice as much competition for the throne, right? And, you know, this is totally projection, but it could have been that one of Thutmose III, that he foiled an assassination attempt on himself by a woman who thought that she could be pharaoh, right? So it becomes an official political decision to erase his mother from Egyptian history. However, he makes a very peculiar decision. Her greatest

monument that she ever erected was the solid granite 700-ton obelisk at Karnak Temple, where on the obelisk, she is essentially describing herself in the honor that she wanted to bring to the gods and how much she cared about honoring the people of Egypt and honoring the generations that are going to come after her and being a great pharaoh. This is her proclamation of her existence. He could have easily ripped that thing down if he didn't love her, but instead he permanently encased it and preserved it for the future. But nobody knew that it was there until earthquakes shatter the temple when it falls down and it reveals that his mother's monument is there.

And so I think he revered it and he purposely encased it so no one would see it, but he didn't damage it. Her number one accomplishment as a monument, he didn't damage it. So he revered it. And I bet you that,

you know, when that last stone is placed on there, he was kind of like, you know, he was like, I hate that I'm doing this, but I love you. You know,

he had a reverence for her. It's wild that the the basic emotions and ties of humanity that exist today in a world that's so different yeah it's just biological it's inherent in people and you can relate it to any time period it's it's a tale as old as time yeah and you see you see that in that potential bond right there. It's kind of cool. Yeah. That is a really wonderful story in Egypt. It might be that little period from Hatshepsut through Senenmut and Thutmose III, her son, that little triad, that period might be my favorite part of Egypt because I think you see there's a little bit of mystery there, and there's a lot of heart there. And it's two of the greatest pharaohs of all of Egypt. And one of them, it's cool that it's a woman that found herself as God on earth and was a great pharaoh

and had a great son. Just very, very successful story. And she essentially lived, I mean, think about this, out of her womb came maybe the greatest dynasty that Egypt ever saw, straight out of this woman's womb. And like, she gave up something huge by not remarrying to secure that bloodline for her son, who then all of his sons are some of Egypt's greatest pharaohs, all the way to Amenhotep III. And unfortunately, Amenhotep III to Egypt is like Marcus Aurelius to ancient Egypt. Beginning of the fall. It's the beginning of the end. And so Marcus Aurelius, he obviously has Commodus. And, you know, it's different in Egypt because, you know, the great form, I'm sorry, it's different in Rome because the great formula

in Rome was that the emperor didn't just choose his son, he picked the right heir, right? Well, in Egypt, it worked out well for a while. And most of the time, it worked out pretty well that your, that your, you know, your son made a pretty good successor. And it worked out for a while and most of the time it worked out pretty well that your that your you know your son made a pretty good successor and it worked out for a long time in the new kingdom but eventually amenhotep may be the most prolific pharaoh not not nearly my favorite my favorite has to be had chipset and tutmos the third um that combination um but a great pharaoh uh he has the son um uh ankhana moon and uh ankhana moon becomes pharaoh and this guy turns egypt on its head flips it upside down and outlaws the worship of all other god all other gods other than the atin which is the sun disc and you know why did he do that

we don't know we don't know the reasoning for it he just you know why was cometous the way he was he just maybe he's just that way he's just an asshole yeah i think that's i think that's kind of the gist with this guy people either love akhenaten or hate him and so his he was born akhen akhenamun um but he changed his name to Akan Aten. So this is the Aten, the sun, the solar disc. Um, and he flips Egypt on his head, on its head, and he moves the Capitol from Memphis to this place that he has a vision that he's going to find where the sun is going to rise in the East between these two canyons. Uh, and he actually goes out into the middle of the desert perfectly between, uh, the capital of Memphis and the religious

capital of Thebes and Abydos. And right in the middle of there, he wakes up one morning before sunrise, walks out a little bit into the desert, boom, the sun comes up between these two mountain ranges. This is the new capital of Egypt. What did he name it? Well, there's different names for it. I think it's – let's look it up so that I'm sure. This is not my expertise. But I refer to it and other people refer to it as Aten. But it's also called Amarna.

And so this is the – A-M-A-R-N-A? Yeah, yeah. Let's just look it up to be sure. All right. What do we got? During the reign of Akhenaten, also known as Amarna in historical context, the capital of Egypt was Akhetaten, which is now referred to as Armarna in modern times. The city was specifically built by Akhenaten as his new capital moving away

from the traditional center of thebes yeah so okay yeah ancient name amarna so modern or modern name amarna yeah um but you know with these things with the ancient name it's like you know i've been using the names kafra kufu yeah it's, it's only the capital for 17 years though. Yeah, it's not very long at all. Yeah, okay. So even though it's very famous, it's very obscure, and we may not actually know the ancient name of this place, but we call it Amarna. Got it. And they call it Aten or even it's expanded like as the Akhatatep.

So you have three different names for everything in Egypt. So he moves the capital to this new place, Amarna, for 17 years. And it seems that all the high priests and the officials in Egypt absolutely hate this choice. And he changes the art style of Egypt. Let's look up a statue of Akhenaten. Oh, he changed the – Oh, all the artwork, he changed the... Oh, all the artwork, he changed it. Flipped it all on its head.

The way the people are depicted, it's absolutely like... Went away from the stoic kind of thing? In a way, yeah, yeah. It's absolutely sort of alien in nature. Oh, shit, this looks Anunnaki. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. This guy depicted himself very strangely.

Unless he... See the one in the second row on the far right? Second row. Yeah, far right. That one. Yeah, yeah. Look at that. Wow.

Very different than previous pharaohs. Oh, my God. He's doing the Riz face, that guy. I can't believe I'm the one saying that. Don't even get me started. We do not claim him. Okay, I won't go any further. That little fucking Ozempic ad.

All right, anyway. Go to the one that's just left of that, if you would. Oh, wow, look at that. That's spooky looking. But this is actually kind of a subtle change from their art style. But when you live with the art style for so long, like, you know, you study Egypt, I recognize- Oh, it's different. Yeah. I recognize so many, so many differences here. Now this is just the initial change. You

know, imagine the precedence that this set that, you know, Egyptian high priests and all the officials are very worried about so eventually Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti which Nefertiti was the standard of beauty in ancient Egypt I mean that's well known her the bust that they found of hers like this little head statue that they found in a workshop in the ruins of Amarna is absolutely beautiful yes worth worth pulling out just pull up Nefertiti Nefertiti yeah so his wife absolutely beautiful. Yeah, this is worth pulling up. Just pull up Nefertiti. Nefertiti. Yeah.

So his wife, absolutely beautiful. But this was the heretical couple in ancient Egypt. I mean, these guys flipped Egypt on their head, changed the artwork, which wasn't meant to be changed. You didn't mess with the artwork. There was no like interpretive, oh, this is my version. No, no. That artwork was sacred in Egypt. God, that is beautiful. Yeah, I've seen this is my version. No, no. That artwork was sacred in Egypt.

God, that is beautiful. Yeah, I've seen this a million times. I mean, like, the Egyptians didn't... Nah, she's a rocket. As far as we know, these busts like this weren't made in Egypt outside of the Armada period. And I mean, wow, that's freaking beautiful. They should have kept that, you know, at least.

Or maybe this did exist before. We just have very scant evidence of it, but, um, you know, love that, love that, that little statue bust of her. Um, but, you know, um, they changed, you know, they just, they just disrupted the stability, uh, you know, like so many of the bad pharaohs did. So eventually they die. And his son is actually, his son's name is Tutankhaten. Tutankhaten. Yeah, Tutankhaten. And his son is a young kid. And he has uh vizier over him whose name is i and i is kind of he's he's basically the pharaoh um you know tutank atin is just a little boy and you know he doesn't really know what he's doing probably at all ever during during his reign um and the the overseer i is

basically telling him you know why don't we take the capital back to Memphis? Why don't we restore all the old gods? I think everybody in Egypt would really like you if you did that. I think that would be a very good decision for you to make, young man. So he does it, and he changes his pharaonic name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamen, which is King Tut. This is who this is. Now, all of these officials, because the Amarna period was such a weak period and he's such a weak, unstable pharaoh, King Tut now is not in a good position

as a pharaoh. Everyone around him has leverage over him. He's having to answer for the sins of his father. It's not a stable time for him at all. And he probably has extremely reduced power as a pharaoh. And he's probably answering to all the officials around him who probably have manipulated him. And in his eyes, these people are a lot smarter than he is. And, you know, even though officially it's not the case, to this kid, he probably just has no idea what he's doing. He's raised from all these officials who are using him for their own benefit. You know what I mean? He's just an outlet for everyone else's power. People are ruling through him. He's a puppet. And at some point along the way, King Tut dies as a young kid. He's probably maybe just younger than 20 years old.

And it's a big mystery as to how he died. They think maybe he got sick. They think maybe he was poisoned. There's even evidence too he was smited and hit over the back of the head and killed. But he's given a good burial with lots of riches inside of his tomb. I mean like his tomb is one of the richest tombs ever discovered, maybe the richest tomb ever discovered. But he's just an unimportant, obscure pharaoh. In ancient times, he was. He was not important. He's important to us

because they accidentally found his tomb and it was full of so much gold that it kickstarted the age of archeology. He's important to us. He's not important to the ancient Egyptians. They kick him off to the side. And during this little period between King Tut dying and the next pharaoh, which is Ai, which is his overseer, right? Basically, the guy who raised him after his dad dies. How convenient. That guy becomes the next pharaoh. Yeah. to Medford, his dad dies. How convenient. That guy becomes the next pharaoh. During this little time period, Tutankhamen's sister writes the Hittite king, the people that the Egyptians, just the generation before, were going and beating up on these guys and taking all their gold and taking their women back to Egypt. She writes to the Hittite king, please send me one of your princes. I will not marry a commoner. I'm scared. And

it's showing that people are coming for her. She disappears. The Hittite king is like, this can't be real. I mean, really? Okay, well, who wants to go? Sends one of his sons. That son is encountered in the Sinai desert and slaughtered. That Hittite prince is killed, and we never hear from Tutankhamen's sister ever again. So the children of Akhenaten are slain, and the new pharaoh Ai steps in. Ai's not a very good pharaoh, and his tomb is torn apart later on. It's shortly after this that in the 21st, 22nd, 23rd dynasty that Egypt just falls apart. These people have gotten so much power around the pharaoh's throne that everyone wants to be pharaoh now.

Do we know how large the population is at this point? You said earlier when we were looking at previous dynasties it was like a million this is still about a million people still about a million so it doesn't really grow no kind of stays consistent uh yeah yeah i mean interesting and it lines up pretty much you know with what we know about them they wanted things to keep running the way it was you know um and so egypt begins to fall off at this point. This is around, you know, 1100 to 1000 BC, which actually lines up with the Bronze Age collapse. You know, you have the fall of Mycenaean civilization. You have the fall of so many civilizations around the Mediterranean for an absolutely unknown number of causes. And Egypt falls at this time too. There's this time period during the

22nd dynasty where the city of Tanis that's shown in Egypt, this is why Tanis is famous. The religious capital of the biblical city of Pi Ramses is moved because the Nile is yet again changing its course and the city is starting to get flooded. So they take all these different monuments from all these previous dynasties and build a new capital at the city of Tanis. And it's run by an obscure pharaoh, a guy who thinks he's pharaoh of Egypt, but really he's just like the controller of upper Egypt and then, or I'm sorry, of northern Egypt. And then the controller, the guy who's ruling over southern Egypt is this high priest of Amun. And Egypt is just really not, it's really not looking good at this time. One of the high priests of Amun during the 22nd dynasty, he goes and does an inspection of the Valley of the Kings, which is this sacred place where so many of the great pharaohs are buried.

Like Hatshepsut is buried there. Sedi II is buried there. A few of the Ramses are buried there. King Tut is buried there. He goes in and does an inspection of it, and he realizes that all the tombs have been robbed you know the the egyptian people are so poor now that they're completely robbing and vandalizing everything in egypt and so uh he carries out this um he carries out this um mission where he goes and gathers all of the pharaoh's bodies um that are still that are still remaining where the pharaoh's bodies haven't been pulled out like all their riches are gone but at least least the tomb raiders are decent enough in these

specific cases to not desecrate the body of the pharaoh. So this one guy gathers up all these extremely important pharaohs. And I think it's like Hatshepsut and Ramses II and Thutmose I and maybe Thutmose III as well. He gathers up all these great bodies and moves all their bodies to this secret cache. And I think that the cache is called Deir el-Balri. Some of these are Arabic names that I'm not remembering right now. But it's this famous cache that an archaeologist found around the turn of the century. And it had all these pharaohs' bodies in it. famous cache that an archaeologist found, you know, around the turn of the century. And,

and, you know, it had all these pharaohs' bodies in it. But this, you know, this one pharaoh or this high priest of Amun makes an effort to hide all of these pharaohs because Egypt is just falling apart. It's just an indication that we're reaching another intermittent, intermediate period. And then, you know, at some point after, some point after the 22nd dynasty, you know, at some point after, uh, some point after the 22nd dynasty, um, you know, uh, within it, within a few centuries, well, I should say, um, you have the Nubians that finally come up from the South and they conquer Egypt and the Nubians finally have their day. They conquer Egypt for about 150 years. And what's funny is these guys have been so influenced by – they almost have Stockholm syndrome from the Egyptians.

They've been beat up on by the Egyptians so much that they started to admire them and wanted to become Egyptians. So they marched forward during this period of instability, and they smite the Egyptian – these minor pharaohs, smite all of them and conquer all of Egypt. And they actually become more Egyptian than the Egyptians. They're actually good pharaohs, smite all of them and conquer all of Egypt. And they actually become more Egyptian than the Egyptians. They're actually good pharaohs. And as far as we know, rule over the people fairly justly. And they have their day for about 150 years and they're great pharaohs. And eventually for one reason or another, they end up leaving Egypt and they go back down south and they establish their own mini Egypt called the Kingdom of Kush. And these are the Kushite people. Oh, yeah, baby.

Yeah. So these are the Kushite people. And they have their own mini Egypt. Like if you look up some of their monuments, you're like, wait, that's not Egyptian? Nope. It's a Nubian dynasty that left Egypt and built their own mini Egypt. So we're somewhere around 900 to 700 BC here. Coming up on the Greeks. There's a great pharaoh that – I say great pharaoh. Oh, look up the name of the first Persian pharaoh if you would.

His name always escapes me. First Persian pharaoh. Cambyses II. Camp Isis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I always forget his name. Anyways, Camp Isis, he comes into Egypt and he has no reverence nor respect for the Egyptians. A lot of civilizations have pride in their own civilizations, but a few of them stand out. The Egyptians stand out. The Romans stand out. The Greeks stand out. The Persians stand out.

They have a certain amount of pride. So this Persian king comes into Egypt, Camp Isis, and, you know, like Garrett was saying, he stabs the sacred Apis bull and slaughters it, which is not something you want to do if you want to be a compelling ruler to the people of the place that you've just conquered. So the Egyptians for about 200 years, two or 300 years, they hated Persian rule. It was an oppressive rule. People who, in all fairness, probably grew up through centuries of indoctrination that the Egyptians were evil people who came up here to our land and slaughtered the people before us and took all of their women and gold. And you can see how this imperialness of Egypt beating up on everyone around them is finally caught up and

everyone around them doesn't like Egypt anymore. So the Persians have showed up, they've conquered, and they just disrespect Egypt and basically kick its ass every time they come in, you know, just disrespecting Egypt. Egypt's in this very poor period. And the Persians have also been trying to encroach on Greece. You have the, oh my goodness, what's the great battle of 300? With Leonidas. Yeah, you have where they tried to invade Greece, but those 300 Spartans and it was like 9,000 Athenian or 900 Athenian soldiers.

They fended off Xerxes and gave the Athenians enough time to go war in Athens and be like, hey, I know we're all fighting right now, but get your shit together. The Persians are at the freaking door. So the Persians, they've been knocking on the door of Greece now, now they have, and the reason that they're able to do it, the reason that the Persians are able to fund this huge empire is because they have the granary. They have the bed, the bread basket of the Mediterranean. Where does all the grain come out of the Mediterranean? Where's the vast majority of it come out, comes out of Egypt. So Egypt is fueling the Persian empire. It's, it's the one that's providing, cause you know, you got to put a calorie count on everything. How many billions of calories does it take to fund your army? Where are you going to get all

that from? You get it from Egypt. You conquer Egypt, you can do anything because you have all the food in the world. You're, I mean, your soldiers are, are fueled up and ready to fight. So, uh, you know, but they can't quite push into into greece you know that's one of the things that makes greece so amazing um they can't quite push into greece and around the year um around the year oh gosh i want to say it's 350 bc you have this great king named Philip II who threw very much prowess on a peripheral country or peripheral territory in Greece, the king of Macedon. Wait, Philip was Alexander's father? Yes. Yeah.

He is able to, through his cunning and a bit of military expertise that he learned when he was like a captive in the city of Thebes, which is Thebes, Greece, not Thebes, Egypt. You know, he learns to become a great military general and he also learns Greek politics and he's able to unite, uh, Greece under Macedonian rule, which is crazy. We could spend a whole podcast on like how this little peripheral civilization captured all of Greece at this time. And, uh, so then, you know, he's assassinated, he's assassinated at, I believe, a wedding in front of his son, Alexander. And Alexander is basically put at this point where the Persians are still knocking on the front door of Macedonia. And, you know, he really doesn't have a choice here here he has got to take his 50 some odd thousand soldiers and turn and go continue what his father intended to you know launch an assault on the um

on the turkish basically the turkish coast of where these so there were a bunch of greek cities on the turkish coast that were captured by the Persian Empire. And what Philip had planned was to essentially go out there and free these Greek cities that were under Persian rule. And that was – I think it was the extent of his plan. So Alexander takes this on, and this 23-year-old with his 50-some-odd thousand men heads off into the Persian Empire. And the Persians don't really take him seriously in the same way that the rest of the Greeks didn't take him seriously. So sure enough, like at the beginning of his campaigns, he somehow catches Persia on their back foot, and he knocks them down. And before we know it, he's already well into Israel-Gaza area.

And you have some really big battles there where he almost kills Darius III. He even rides out in front of the army and throws that spear at Darius and Darius runs off. And eventually Darius is killed by his own people hiding up in the mountains. Told in Stone actually had a lot of great insight. We spent like maybe a half hour on alexander the great and it was he was a guy who this year like i had really started studying a little more about alexander but yeah the the conquering mentality that that guy had and the eight the young age at which he set out to do it and the short life he lived, but the scope of what he pulled off is, it's breathtaking.

I mean, it's, I don't think it's ever been, I don't think anything like that's ever been done since before it, or it will ever be done again. I mean, we look at people who built huge empires and whatever over a much longer period of time,

by the way, not to take away from their ability to conquer land. Not in eight years. Dude, what he did for the time period he did it in and the resources that they had in that time period compared to what you could do now with an army. Absolutely fucking bonkers. Yeah, it is. It is. So, you know, within just a couple years, the king of Persia, Darius III, is actually killed by his own men. You know, he runs off.

He flees from Alexander the Great. Alexander chooses not to chase him because he's going to get his army slaughtered if he does that. And in the meantime, Darius III, his men assassinate him. And now Persia is really unstable. And so rather than pushing forward towards Babylon, Alexander makes the smart decision and he turns south to capture Egypt, which you need if you're going to push deep into Persian territory. And he kind of wipes Persia up and down clean just to establish, hey, you know, within a couple of years, Persia has already toppled. They already know he's coming

for Babylon. He's going to capture the whole thing. But then after that, you got to go clean up every single little city who thinks, no, we're not going to give in to Alexander. And he's got to go knock them down. You know, he's got to do all that to fund all of that. You got to go get Egypt real quick. So he heads into, he heads into Egypt and the Persians flee and boy, the gates open. The Egyptians are like, thank you so much for being here. They were glad that Alexander was there, or at least history tells us as such. Cause Alexander's approach to it was, at least as it's told, you know, as I'm Alexander, you know, I'm not, I'm Alexander, you're now free. You know, that was the, that was the mentality, but obviously he's conquering

Egypt at the same time too. But he returns religion to Egypt and he takes, he takes being the Pharaoh seriously. He loved Egypt. You know, like all Greeks, all Greeks did. Greeks have, had admired Egypt. This is now, this is now – this is 331 BC. The Egyptians have long revered Egypt for over a thousand years before this point. And he had heard about Egypt in his favorite childhood book, Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey. And in there, Odysseus gets lost after the Trojan War in the Mediterranean Sea. And he lands on this island called Pharos Island. This is, you know, this is in Homer's writing. And so Alexander is intrinsically

fascinated by this. And so while he's in Egypt, he goes to visit Memphis, you know, and I believe on his way to the Sinai Oasis, where he's going to be, you know, told by the, uh, by the high priest of Zeus Amun, which is this combination between a Greek and Egyptian God that, you know, basically this is where he can go out to the Sinai Oasis, meet with this Oracle. So you had an Oracle in Delphi, Greece. You had another Oracle, a Greek Oracle, um, in Egypt that was out at this little Oasis in the middle of the desert that he had to take this long journey to. And if he went and did this journey and he was proclaimed, you know, the son of Zeus Amun, he could officially become Pharaoh, something he had to do,

you know. So during this journey, he stops off on the northern coast of Egypt. Now, like we said earlier, the Egyptians aren't coastal people. They're not Mediterranean people. They're not really sailing out in the Mediterranean. They would do it for trade expeditions to get materials. They were doing that all the way back in 2700 BC, getting those cedars of Lebanon to put in the pyramids. But they're not really sailors in the way that the Greeks have been for a long time now. So on that Mediterranean coast of Egypt, there's not a lot out there, and we're following Alexander's footsteps through this. We know exactly what was going on.

There's so much literature at this time. It's amazing we know more about Alexander. We can follow Alexander's footsteps through his whole life. We know more about him than we know about Jesus, you know? Yeah. Just following his life. Yeah. There's huge chapters of Jesus' life that are just lost. 13 to 31, basically. Yeah.

And so we know that when Alexander, when he went out, he basically, what he wanted to do out of pure curiosity was go find Pharos Island that was mentioned in Homer's Iliad in the Odyssey. And so he goes along the coast and he finds an area with an island that he thinks, oh, this must be it. And so on this little island was this little village called Rakotis, I believe. And it was really just a fishing village. That's all it was, was people who lived on the peripheral of Egyptian civilization and they're just out there fishing every day. That's all it was, was people who lived on the peripheral of Egyptian civilization, and they're just out there fishing every day. You know, that's all they do. And maybe pay a little bit of fish tax back to the government if the government ever comes

around this place. You know what I mean? This is way, way out on the peripherals of Egypt, out in the middle of nowhere, basically. And, you know, probably what happened was that there is this story, you know, from the Bronze Age, because that's when, you know, the Iliad and the Odyssey happened. If Odysseus, whoever this person is, really did arrive on the shores of Egypt, probably Pharos Island really means Pharaoh's Island. And when he arrived, he said, what is this place? And his people said, Pharaoh's, this is the Pharaoh's place. Pharaoh means great house. This place belongs to

the pharaoh. You're in the pharaoh's land. So that's kind of where this loose interpretation becomes. And it's only, I don't know, three or four, or it's three or 400 years after the Trojan War that Homer actually writes his Iliad and the Odyssey. So you probably have this little bit misunderstanding of words here. Anyways, Alexander finds this island that he was looking for. And when he's there, it hits him. He had always wanted to build a city in his name and he built like 10 Alexandrias throughout ancient history. There's a joke in archeology or if you're studying classics and people say name 10 classic cities, you can say Alexandria because there are 10 cities that he tried to establish. The only one that lasted was in Egypt, which was great because it's the best one.

Alexander being a Greek, he recognized the importance of building on an island, building next to big bodies of water and how that could be a defensive structure, you know, because the Greek isles, there's all these cities on these islands and they're great. Uh, they provide great fortification. So he gets, he jumps off of his horse and he, and he's looking around for some chalk and they don't have any. So he grabs some grain out of one of the saddlebags and he lays down and he says, this is where my city is going to be built. We have the Mediterranean sea on one side. Uh, we have this great lake on the other side. We're going to build it right in this little strip of land. And he goes, he goes, goes uh where's some chalk and they're like we don't have any chalk and so

he grabs one of the grain out of one of the saddlebags starts laying the grain down he gets on his knees and he's like laying out the city and he's he says like you know okay the ocean breeze comes from this way we're going to build we're going to build the roads where the ocean breeze will cool the people down because it's freaking hot in Egypt. So we're going to concentrate the air to tunnel down these alleyways to cool the people down in the city. He's like laying out for this paradise and he's telling his – basically his viziers to – or his architects, write this down, write this down. So they're writing it down and everything as he's laying out in chalk. And all of a sudden these seabirds, they come up and gobble up – gobble it all up in front of him and just ruin his plan.

And he's just – he's very distraught by this bad omen. And his right-hand guy is like Ptolemy, who's his best friend. Basically reassure him and they say – He was more than a best friend. Well, I think you're thinking of Hephaestion. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right.

I got it backwards. So Ptolemy – that was probably strictly platonic because Ptolemy, he ended up having a wife and all that good stuff later on. But all of his friends tell him, um, you know, this, this isn't a bad omen. What this is telling you is that the city that you're going to lay out is going to, is going to feed many nations. It's going to feed people for generations to come. You know, that's what the, that's what the seabirds gobbling up the plant, the grain

that you laid out for your city. That's what that means. It's a good omen, not a bad omen. So it kind of reassured him. Well, you know, he leaves the, he leaves his architects there. He leaves a part of his team there in Alexandria. He's got the whole power of the Nile behind him. And he's saying, get started on this city.

So Alexander moves on. He goes out to the Siwa Oasis, becomes pharaoh, and then he heads off to conquer the Persian Empire. During this time, we don't know how much, but the laying of the foundations of the city of Alexandria has begun. It's probably moving rapidly. And so, you know, that's 330, that's the spring of 331 BC and Alexander dies eight years later or in 323 BC, Alexander dies. And when all of his men are standing around him and they say who should your kingdom go to and he says to the fittest and dies you know then they all have to fight over what does that mean so eventually it gets sorted up um among among all of his friends and his his best friend other than

hephaestion uh his best platonic friend i should say uh he because he had obviously shown so much interest in Egypt while they were there, told him he was very into Egypt. He was gifted Egypt to be the overseer of Egypt. Well, all, I don't know, seven to 10 of Alexander's friends overseeing all the different portions of his empire eventually turned into what we call the successor wars, where they're all fighting against each other. And when Alexander's Macedonian empire eventually breaks into all these different kingdoms, well, Ptolemy really has no choice now but to become pharaoh of Egypt. So Ptolemy is the first Greek pharaoh of ancient Egypt, and this brings in Egypt's last hurrah, the Ptolemaic period. So you have the three great Ptolemies, Ptolemy I, Ptolemy II, Ptolemy III. All three of these guys, especially Ptolemy II and III, they begin on Alexandria's most iconic monuments. barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an

Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. The Ptolemies, the first Ptolemies were very obsessed with literature and knowledge and gathering knowledge. And it eventually becomes what we call the library wars where you have the library of Ephesus and Pergamum and the library of Babylon, all warring against each other and conspiring against each other through espionage to get the original copies of ancient texts and get the most original copies.

It's an interesting time. But Ptolemy I, II, and III lay the foundations for the library of Alexandria. They lay the foundations for the Museon of Alexandria. They lay the foundations for the Museon of Alexandria. And Ptolemy even goes out of his way to capture the body of Alexander because he died in Babylon. As it's traveling back to Macedonia to be buried, probably with his father, Philip II, Ptolemy goes out there and stops it and kills, you know, presumably one of his old friends who is transporting alexander's body captures the body brings it back to egypt has him mummified like a pharaoh buried in a pharaoh's solid gold coffin and then buried um in egypt right across the street from the library of alexandria why do

you have to kill the guy who was moving the body because they weren't friends anymore you know uh egypt's uh alexander's empire is now divided among different kingdoms and all of his old friends are warring against i know but if you're so powerful just say step away from the body or i'm gonna shoot you yeah no well no he had to he had to venture outside of egypt into a different kingdom i know but he can send some men you know what i mean well you know that's these guys they always just got to take heads off in history. I know, I know. Very annoying. So he brings his body back and so you have – I think you have this iconic road called Soma Road, which goes right down the heart of Alexandria. And it connected to the library, which is next to the museum.

These two – the library and the museum, this is where we get the museum from. Oh, that's where we get the term. Yeah. This is the world's first university. This is the world's first place of learning. It actually had lecture halls and these big 180 degree lecture halls made out of marble steps with these circular roofs on top, one of which still exists today. It's called Combe Aldica. And beneath these huge granite pillars of this little lecture hall of the Library of Alexandria is where I met Tolton Stone for the first time. No shit. Wait, how'd you meet him there? Was that just random, or did you meet up there? We met in Alexandria. Yeah, we- You met up there. Yeah, that's where we met up. Okay. I thought you just ran into him. I was like, that would be-

Yeah, so- That's interesting. So we met up on the peripherals of the Library of Alexandria. That's where we met up. I thought you just like ran into it. Yeah. So, yeah. So that's interesting. So we met up, uh, on the peripherals of the library of Alexandria, the university of Alexandria. And so I walk in, I walk by one of these 180 degree, you know, solid, uh, solid stone or stall solid marble stepped, uh, lecture halls where, you know, uh, Hypatia, who's this great woman from Alexandria. Um, you know, Hypatia, who's this great woman from Alexandria, you know, this is probably a place where she would have stood and taught the students there. You know, you walk around that and there are these huge granite columns here that are leading to probably the library of Alexandria itself, which is buried beneath the modern city. And standing beneath the last granite column on this long walkway was told in stone when I walked around the corner.

So that's where we walked up and met for the first time. That was really cool. So it is Ptolemy I, II, and III, the first pharaohs of – that begin around 320 BC. The first pharaohs of Egypt's last 300-year hurrah, they lay the foundations for the library, the museum. They build Alexander's mausoleum, and all three of these are on the same street corner. You can imagine how important that place is. that they do is something that's really curious, and it's kind of a testament to Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey. He sees, you know, presumably it's at night, and he sees a light coming from Pharos Island, and that's what guides them there, you know, according to my understanding,

or an interpretation of the story, right? And so we think that they are hearkening back to that by creating an unmistakable light on the harbor of Pharos Island, and they create the world's first lighthouse. And the lighthouse is basically exactly the same. And we think that they were trying to make it, even if it's not exactly correct, exactly the same height as the Great Pyramid. It's within a margin of error of being the same height of the Great Pyramid. And it's constructed entirely out of 65-ton red Aswan granite stones. A 65-ton red Aswan granite stone, you are now back at the monumentality of the chambers in the Great Pyramid. We talked about this earlier. Yeah.

It's back now. What the Greeks are doing, what I think that they're doing, the first Ptolemies, they know they're not Alexander the Great. They're not a god on earth. They're people who fell into place. And the Egyptians aren't stupid. And the Egyptian officials aren't stupid. They know that Alexander went off and he died,

and now these are his buddies that show back up and they have to rule Egypt. They can't do anything about it, but it's important for stability for you to be able to convince the Egyptian people that you can rule over them. So what do they do? Well, the Greeks are very smart, very innovative. They really care about science. They really care about architecture. They want to get to the heart of the Egyptian people. And what exists, let's say, in the back of Egyptians' mind at the very heart, they know that once upon a time, they were the greatest civilization on earth. And the pyramids are a symbol of that. But they're also ruled by Greeks now. It's a new civilization.

It's Greco-Egyptian civilization. And the capital of Egypt has now moved to Alexander's city new civilization. It's Greco-Egyptian civilization. And the capital of Egypt has now moved to Alexander City, Alexandria. So what they do is they say, we're going to build on a scale the size of which the Egyptians haven't seen in almost 3,000 years. We're going to bring it back, and we're going to show the Egyptians what we're going to be once again. So they build this lighthouse, solid 65 ton red Aswan granite stones, almost exactly the same height within a margin of error being the same height as the great pyramid. And there's a fire that's burning at the top with this bronze mirror that is spinning around it. And it's basically casting a beacon of light out into the Mediterranean, you know, telling people this is a safe shelter. They wanted people from outside Egypt to migrate to Egypt and they wanted to, you know, build a new capital, but also convince the Egyptian people that they could return to what once was. And all of the literature about Alexandria tells us that even though all the

great amazing things that, in spite of all the great amazing things that we've seen that the Egyptians built prior to this, this was the peak of their civilization. All the literature tells us that this was the most magnificent thing, most magnificent city ever built in Egypt. Memphis, the longstanding capital from the beginning of Egyptian civilization

up until Alexander conquers it, you know, aside from like Amarna and things like that, and these little places where the capital moves, Memphis didn't hold a candle to what Alexandria was. And it was so monumental and so moving that later on when Augustus annexes Alexandria and he visits it for the first time, he's astonished at the quality of the city. Rome is just a city of mud bricks at the time of Julius Caesar in Alexandria. It's not an impressive city. It became an impressive city with a precedence that the emperor should be building these fascinating marble statues because he was influenced, because the first emperor was

so moved by Alexandria and how impressive that city was. The symbolism and the head nods to the history of the construction and what they did there is incredible. And like how it started and the guy who came there to conquer this place and then they name it after him. It's mythical in a lot of ways. And it's much newer, comparatively speaking, in history than the other things we look at across this 27,000-year pharaoh history of Egypt. But it's truly amazing. And then the influence it has on society, like you said,

because now we're bringing it full circle. We're bringing it full circle from the very beginning of the first podcast we did here before this, where we were talking about you spending time in Egypt with Told in Stone, who we've mentioned today, who was episodes 251 and 252 if you haven't seen him. Absolutely amazing YouTube channel. He's – I said this in the last episode, so sorry to repeat it, but the guy is a PhD in Rome and Greek history and truly incredible. He's written a bunch of books on it, unbelievable source of knowledge. But you were going through Egypt with him where he was basically giving a full outline of all the Roman stuff that was built over or on top of, among, however you want to say it, the Egyptian work that they've done there because they wanted to kind of put their own artistic spin on it. Yeah.

Got to take a little sip of water there. Keep going. You've been a machine all day. Yeah, thank you. So, well, okay, so kind of just capping off the very end of the Ptolemies. Sorry, I know. You're good, man. There's always something. So capping off the very end of the Ptolemies, Ptolemaic civilization, there again, there's a lot of gray spots because Alexandria has been so covered up. The height of Alexandria continued into the Roman time. The height of Alexandria is about from its founding, 331 BC, or I should say Alexandria in its ancient form and its most legendary form that we have so much writing of but such little archaeological evidence of because so much of it was destroyed. It existed from 331 BC until 365 AD. It was burned to the ground by the Romans not just once.

They say the burning of Alexandria's library. That happened five times. And then to cap it all off, Alexandria was destroyed by a cataclysmic tsunami in 365 AD. It was so catastrophic that one of the plenty, I think it was plenty of the younger or plenty of the elder, uh, he comes down on this rescue mission, uh, to kind of, you know, help the, you know, like a, like a relief mission for, for, uh, the people who just experienced this catastrophe in Alexandria. And he records that 50,000 people have gone missing and all the boats in the Harbor have now landed or have now docked on top of the rubble of the city of Alexandria. And the location of Alexandria's library and the location of Alexander's mausoleum are completely lost after this.

That's how catastrophic it is. And after this, the blocks of the city are quarried to now create Christian Alexandria, a Christian and Jewish Alexandria. And then it becomes Islamic Alexandria. And then it just evolves and evolves through medieval times into what it is today, like colonial British Alexandria. So all of the city is gone. There's nothing left other than a few little tiny fragments of the ancient city.

But getting towards the end of the Ptolemies, you say about the midway through the Ptolemies, Ptolemy X, so you're now 10 generations in, Egypt is not doing well at all. And Ptolemy X is described as desecrating Alexander's tomb and melting down the gold that was used on Alexander's sarcophagus and all of the gold that was used on Alexander's sarcophagus and all of the gold that was, you know, on like the rings on his fingers or, you know, whatever, whatever gold was, was in his burial. He melted all of it down to use as currency and replaced Alexander's tomb with what they call a crystal coffin. It's probably alabaster or something like that. And maybe it really was crystal. Although I don't know where they would, where they would get that from. And,

you know, he's probably using the money for the same purpose that a lot of the later Ptolemies begin using their money for, and it's to pay Roman soldiers to keep them in power. Rome, just like it does in all these other places, kind of hangs back on its own and goes, oh, you need me? Well, okay, I guess I'll come help you out. And they put their foot in and then just wait for the right time. You know, that's what Rome did as a republic. You know, Rome had an empire before it had an emperor. You know, it was the reluctant conqueror. You know what I mean? So the Ptolemies hired the Egyptians or hired the Romans to bring their soldiers in to keep them in power, to keep the Egyptians at bay, to stop them from revolting. This is going on for a long, long time until you get to Ptolemy XII, actually. Actually, I guess it's only gone for for a few generations but these must have been long-lived generations because this is 150 bc to now uh you know it's

about 110 years or so so now you're at 50 bc we have we have uh we have ptolemy the 12th and um ptolemy the 12th decides to take his family on a little vacation down to memphis some ptolemy XII decides to take his family on a little vacation down to Memphis. Some Ptolemy finally – A vacation. Yeah, yeah, because Ptolemies didn't leave Alexandria. They never even visited other places in Egypt. And so he takes his family on this family vacation. They take a little trip down to Memphis.

And what would they have seen while they were in Memphis? Well, they would have definitely been taken to what the Egyptians called the burial of the sacred bull. This is the Apis bulls. And so Ptolemy XII, he's taking his family there, and one of his young daughters is named Cleopatra. And she is seeing all of these Egyptian sites. She's like on a little history tour of Egypt as a little kid. She's seeing all these sites around Egypt, and she's seeing all these people speak Egyptian. She's like, why doesn't my father speak Egyptian? Why doesn't anybody in my family speak Egyptian? We rule over these people. Shouldn't we speak their language? No Ptolemy ever learned to speak Egyptian. No Ptolemy ever learned to read the hieroglyphs as far as we know. No Ptolemy

actually subscribed and worshiped the Egyptian gods. They were, in a way, they freed the Egyptians from Persian rule and then oppressed them under Greek rule. You know, you get what I'm saying? And something about that struck a chord with Cleopatra, and she didn't think that that was right. And she wanted to be like a, she wished that these people had a good, worthy ruler over them. And she probably heard how much people talked negatively about her father. Her father was basically, he was a fiddle player. That's, you know, like Nero was fiddling while Rome burns. That's the way that people perceived her father. Her father was basically, he was a, he was a fiddle player. That's what, you know, like Nero was fiddling while Rome burns. That's the way that people perceived her father and her grandfather and her great grandfather and, you know, all the people

before them. And so she, you know, probably stung how bad of rulers her entire family had been. So she spent a lot of time in Alexandria's library, really cared about that library. She learned to speak Egyptian, I think as well as nine other languages. So she spoke Greek, she spoke Greek Macedonian. Well, she probably spoke Macedonian, she spoke Greek, and then ancient Greek, you know, and then she learned to speak Egyptian as well as the languages of the civilizations around her that Egypt closely communicated with. And without taking you through another hour of just Cleopatra, because again, it's so much more recent. We know so much about her. She comes into power and this lady is full on Egyptian.

And for people out there, what years are we in? Oh, we're between, you know, uh, we're between 45 BC and 30 BC, 44 BC and 30 BC. Um, and you know, of course she seduces, uh, Julius Caesar and really it's, it's to, she knows that Rome is on the doorstep. And so the only thing she can do, because the Ptolemies don't have their own army, that Rome made sure that the Ptolemies didn't have their own army. That's very smart for Rome to do. So she is now, when she rises to power and she becomes Egypt, which we can go, we'll just accept the fact that she has somehow become pharaoh. Her little brother dies. A lot of people died around her. Yes, and she is able to become pharaoh, which is great for Egypt.

She's the only one that was worthy of the throne. And this woman is full-on Egyptian. She – of course she honors her Greek side. Like she names one of her later sons, Alexander. But, you know, it's funny. She doesn't name any of her sons Ptolemy. She skips everyone in her familial line all the way back to Alexander. Skips, jumps over everybody. She only really, you know, maybe she loved her dad and maybe she respected Ptolemy I, but she really respected Alexander and wanted to be like Alexander. And so she named one of her sons Alexander under one of Mark Antony's

children. But she is fully intent on restoring Egypt to the way it was in the ancient days and restoring the religion of Egypt. You know, she keeps some of the Greek gods to keep all of the Greeks living in Alexandria happy, but she fully plans on returning Egypt back to its power. But, you know, you can't do it in the same way that – you can't be isolationist the way Egypt used to be in ancient times because the Mediterranean, the economy of the Mediterranean has grown up so much. And now Rome has a complete foot – you know, has its foot in the door and is preventing the Ptolemies from basically kicking out the Roman army. Because now, you know, Egypt has a contract with Rome and they're providing all the grain to feed Rome. Like, you know, Egypt was the breadbasket of Rome. Egypt, all the food in Egypt, all the bread in Egypt came, or I'm sorry, all the bread in Rome came from Egypt.

So what can Cleopatra do? Well, she can seduce one of these big members of the Roman political realm, this very powerful man, Julius Caesar. And if she can marry this man and form an alliance with him, well, she's taking care of the threat of Rome at that point. And if she can convince him to move the capital of Rome to Alexandria, boy, what a political move that is. Sure enough, Julius Caesar, that's exactly what he wanted to do. And of course, he's murdered in the forum and he was told not to go back. But he spent a lot of time in Egypt with Cleopatra. And as he's sailing down the Nile, getting to see the pyramids, they sleep underneath, they camp out for a night underneath the Sphinx.

You know, he goes on this great adventure where he's being treated as God on earth because, you know, he's seen as maybe he's going to be the new pharaoh. So they worship him like a god. And he realizes, whoa, this is a lot. This is like, you know, emperors don't exist at this time he was drunk on the power so he said i want to drink yeah he was like he's like i might be more than just a i might be more than just a roman maybe i maybe i kind of am like this woman's great great great great great great great grandfather alexander the great you know even though he's not really a grandfather but whatever whatever, you know, that's the way he's perceiving it. Right. He's like, he's like, he's like, I grew up admiring Alexander, loving Alexander, you know,

to the point that I'm crying. Cause I can't, you know, I haven't achieved as much as he did. Now I've kicked ass and conquered the world, you know, in the same way that he has, maybe now I can be Pharaoh of Egypt. Like he did, you know, maybe I am more than just some Roman. Maybe I am a God, you know, Maybe I am a god. Now I can marry one of Alexander's descendants. You can imagine the way this guy's thinking. And so they warn him not to go. The people around him warn him not to go to the forum. Sure enough, he's assassinated. She wasn't done though.

She wasn't done. Cleopatra at this point, she eventually, she returns to Alexandria, you know, flees back to Alexandria and she begins the love affair with Julius Caesar's cousin, Mark Antony. And, you know, and we think that this is one of those things where, you know, Mark Antony is a very powerful man too, controls not all of Julius Caesar's wealth, but had his own wealth. Augustus was named the heir of Julius Caesar. And so now Augustus and Mark Antony are kind of rivals. Mark Antony flees to Alexandria. And he probably had a relationship, like a friendship with Cleopatra.

And you can just imagine that they're closer in age, Mark Antony and Cleopatra. And, you know, you can just imagine that like, they're, they're closer in age, Mark Antony and Cleopatra. And so you can imagine when Julius Caesar steps out of the room, they like maybe make eyes at each other. You get what I'm saying? Think about like the human aspect. They've, these two people have known each other for a little while and probably saw each other as comparable mates, if anything ever happened to the big guy, you know, maybe not in a disrespectful way, but you get what I'm saying. You know, they probably both knew that. And, um, and so he returns back to Alexandria in a place that he's comfortable with a woman that he probably had a little crush on. And eventually they form a, a former relationship and Mark Antony calls, uh, Alexandria home. And, and, uh, you know, that's his new home, even though he's still Roman. And I think he still

contributes to Rome. Rome is outside of my purview, but still contributes to Roman politics, still donates, still builds temples in Rome, things like that. He does what a wealthy Roman should do. But Augustus is in Rome saying, Mark Antony, he's gone foreign. He's becoming like an Egyptian. He's changing. He's not a good example of a Roman. So eventually, Cleopatra and Mark Antony have children together. And rather than, her first son was named Caesarian. And, uh, that was, that was Julius Caesar's, um, son. Um, and Caesarian, you know, he's, he's alive out there somewhere. I believe it may, Augustus, I don't believe has, has killed Caesarian yet. Um, but he also has, she has more children with, uh, with Mark Antony and, um, she names one of them, I believe she names one of them Cleopatra, and then she names the other one Alexander Heliopolis and just names him out of Alexander.

I could be wrong about her daughter's name. But these children pretty much disappear pretty quickly. And so eventually, without getting into the whole story, but Augustus sets sail for Alexandria. It's time. It's time that Augustus finished this thing off. And he basically comes in and sieges the city of Alexandria, burns half of it to the ground again. Julius Caesar did it once before. A little side note on there, Julius Caesar, when he was sieging Alexandria to prevent Pompey from leaving, he burned the docks and the fire from the docks spread up and actually burned down part of Alexandria's library. Now, historians can respond and say, well, the library, as far as we know, was already kind of falling into ruins and wasn't as important anymore. So whatever was lost really wasn't that important. I would then counter that by saying, well, then why did Mark Antony years later after Julius Caesar's death, he gives Cleopatra a gift of, I think, 200,000 papyrus scrolls for the library to kind of make up for the damage that's

happened before. So, you know, that's the first burning of Alexandria's library. Second time is Augustus sets sail for Alexandria, and it's time to end this thing. You know, Egypt is looking at its last, on its last sunrises. And Augustus sets siege to the city of Alexandria and essentially wins this siege. And eventually he and Cleopatra speak to each other, and the gist of it, or I'm sorry, to show that, uh, that Rome and Egypt have now come to an agreement and that the, you know, peace is restored again and, and they're going to go back to the way things used to be, but that's not what's going to happen. Cleopatra knows that she's going to die when she gets to Rome and Mark Antony knows it

too. And so they kind of have this amicable thing where they think that Mark Antony and Cleopatra are just going to come back to Rome with Augustus, but Augustus is a cold, hard killer and, uh, and they all knew it. And, uh, so, um, Mark Antony, he gets word that Cleopatra has committed suicide and he's so distraught, probably terrified because all of his power and, and, and his stronghold in Egypt has now gone. There's, if, if, if his wife has killed herself, you know, it's the collapse of his whole world. So he, he runs himself through with a sword. Um, and then Cleopatra ends up finding out, you know, I don't know how these things are happening so fast, but Cleopatra

ends up finding out that he is, he's attempted to commit suicide. So, uh, she sends for him. He's, he's drug into her palace and they lay him on the bed next to Cleopatra. And you can imagine he's got his head, like, like on her chest, like on her stomach. And, and, you know, he's probably crying, you know, this is the end of his life. He's dying. He's bleeding out all over the bed, all over her. And, um, and she passes, he passes away like in her lap. And, um, and we can assume that this just, just from the context of these things, we can assume that this wasn't just a dynastic marriage, that they loved each other, that they were two young people that were both tied to Julius Caesar, probably fantasized about each other a little bit. And then, and then they

were real lovers after Julius Caesar died. This was a man that she actually deeply loved. And so he dies laying in her lap, pleading out all over her, all over the bed. And we think that they brought in a cobra, this special cobra. They had – the Egyptians, they had run out all the crocodiles, all the hippos, and all the snakes andbras in egypt just to get rid of them you know it's too much of a nuisance to have them around so they had these they had these cobras for special occasions for some reason or another and it's an asp which is the same thing that's in uh you know in indiana jones where they pull the tomb back in tennis and uh was it is it uh is it solely or whatever his name is he goes he goes as he goes, Asps, very dangerous.

You go first. You know, it's, they bring in, they bring in this snake and, and, you know, it, it bites Cleopatra on the wrist and, and, you know, she probably dies shortly thereafter out of like anaphylactic shock or something. And, and so the last Pharaoh of Egypt has died laying on the bed, you know, covered in blood with her husband. And Augustus hears about this. And rather than, you know, Augustus is a pretty politically savvy man. And being raised under Julius Caesar, probably not a disgraceful man either. Like, Julius Caesar wasn't happy about being presented with the head of pompey you know his great rival pompey he wasn't happy about that he was actually disgusted that this great man that he had respect for although they were rivals and he had to kill him he's gonna have to kill him eventually but you know maybe he gives him a soldier's death um these are semi-honorable guys who have lines that even they won't cross. And, um, and so rather than just,

you know, he could just throw them in like a popper's grave or something and, um, and, you know, disgrace them. He honors the Egyptians and he gives them, I believe a year to mourn Cleopatra and he buries Cleopatra and Mark Antony together in the place that Cleopatra had intended them to be buried, which to this day nobody has ever discovered. And he gave them an honorable burial, but he annexed Egypt and made it a state in the Roman Empire, and dynastic Egypt has come to its end. And then they built on top of some of the Egyptian stuff, and here we are. Yep. All right, well, I would have more to go here but we got people waiting

downstairs we came up like right on this reservation we have so good you and me are going to get after that but luke this has been incredible i expected to do some egypt and some south america today we essentially did all egypt for what was two episodes so if you're finishing this one right now and you haven't seen the one before this, we put that, we will have put that out. So make sure you hit that link in description, but you also have a paper sick name of research paper coming out called, uh, the flower that seduced Egypt, the flower that seduced Egypt. I'm going to have to blue balls people and leave that there. But that, I can't believe we didn't even get, I know the outline that you gave me last night blew my mind. I think that's going to be sick.

So we're going to have to talk about that at some point. There's a lot of podcasts within this podcast that we could go off on tangents on that we'll have to do in the future. But I definitely want to bring you back in to go through all the South America stuff you've been doing over the past year and change, which is pretty amazing. So we will have the links to your youtube down below and anything else you want in there but thank you as always my brother no man i'm just uh i this was a real treat to be able to do like the complete history of ancient egypt over a course of a couple episodes this is cool you know fucking awesome people i don't think i've ever seen this on a podcast before and uh you know to get to come here to hoboken hang out in the city and hang out with you and all because I get to talk about Egypt, it's fucking cool.

Let's go. And I am just – I'm very lucky that I get to do this. And I hope that people through this see the enthusiasm that I have and maybe it it, you know, um, maybe it rubs off on, on other people and they get excited about, you know, ancient history. I mean, I just love this stuff and it's an infinite amount of rabbit holes. We can tell you can fucking go all day. It's incredible, but great job today, dude. And we'll do it again. Cool. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button

on the video. It's a huge help. And also, if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory Podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory Podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.