You're Dead to Me - The Aztecs (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: November 14, 2020

Travel back to the land of the Aztecs for stories of sacrifice and fancy diets. Greg Jenner is joined by comedian Joel Dommett and historian Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock to ask just how much food can be traced back to the Aztecs? Was cannibalism really a respectful process? And at what age were Aztec children expected to contribute to the family?Produced by Dan Morelle Script by Greg Jenner Research by Emma Nagouse assisted by Josh Daniels Radio edit by Cornelius MendezA Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4.

Hello, Greg here. How are you? Hope you're well. Right, good news first of all. We are busy recording series three of You're Dead to Me. Takes a lot of work in fairness, but we are recording a new episode this week and we hope that the series will launch in the early new year, just after Christmas. That's the plan. So that's exciting. In the meantime, you are possibly aware that we've been playing out shorter, swear-free versions of You're Dead to Me on Radio 4 on Saturday mornings. So we are now putting them into the feed for you to be able to access. They will be here permanently. The short versions and the full-length versions are going to be in the same feed. So just scroll

down and you'll see the originals. And these are, yeah, half an hour long. They're a bit less rude. And of course, we'll see you after Christmas for the new episodes of Series 3, which is shaping up to be a lot of fun. Anyway, I wish you well, take care of yourselves, and we'll see you in the new year. Thank you. Bye. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, people who do like history,

and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. You might have heard my other Radio 4 series, Homeschool History, although that one's mostly for the kids. In this show, I'm joined by an expert historian with a head full of fascinating facts, and an A-grade comedian with a smart mouth and nice hair. And today we are jumping back 500 years, sharpening our sacrificial knives and preparing to eat roast iguana as we get to grips with the Aztecs. Joining me to fill in the blanks in your memory banks are two lovely guests. In History Corner, her Twitter account describes her as historian and human sacrifice enthusiast.

Hopefully that's just a professional thing. She's a leading Aztec specialist from the University of Sheffield. It's Dr Caroline Dodds-Pennock. Hi, Caroline. Thanks for coming. How are you? I'm all right, sir. You've got laryngitis. I'm going to press on. Well, thank you for battling on. We appreciate it.

And in Comedy Corner, he's the best loved Joel in the land, apart from Billy Joel. Sorry, but you can't you can't argue with billy joel i just i don't i don't argue with him at all it is the wonderful joel domic so what do you know this is the segment where i summarize some of the things that our listeners might know about the aztec and i don't think we know that much really so the aztec are are in pop culture you're thinking pyramids, you're thinking gold, you're thinking big chunky statement jewellery, there's the sacrifices, there's the jungle, you're probably thinking Indiana Jones being chased by a huge boulder after nicking a fertility statue from a booby-trapped tomb which actually wasn't

an Aztec tomb but never mind. You might be imagining dudes running around with elaborate headdresses, maybe you're thinking of the Aztec zone on a crystal maze. Dr Caroline, first and foremost, why are you an Aztec specialist? Did you just sort of start at the beginning of the course directory and go, hey, Aztecs, that'll do? No, there weren't that many Aztec courses when I was a student. And I would have been an Anglo-Saxon specialist, surely, if I started at the beginning. That's me told.

That's why she's here. Honestly, it was just a childhood interest that never really let go of me. I mean, who doesn't love temples and human sacrifice? And it just seemed so fascinating and exciting from when I was really small. Joel, have you got any Aztec knowledge? Kind of a little bit. I think the only two things that I can really remember from primary school is we did Romans and Aztecs. I remember Pyramid E things did Romans and Aztecs. I remember

pyramid-y things and then the human sacrifice stuff and stuff like that. And I also went to Mexico with this program, Joel and Nish versus the world. We went to the Tarahumara tribe. I genuinely don't know where it was, but we were really deep, far away from where planes land. Let's look at the aztec just can we have some basics how long ago are we talking what is an aztec how big is the aztec empire so the aztecs are in central mexico from about 1325 we're talking about the people of the city of tenochtitlan is what you're usually talking about and the empire that surrounds it they're about contemporary with the tudors and you're talking about a sphere of influence

of something like 200, 220 square kilometres, which is about the size of the UK, but only five or six million people. So much more dispersed in terms of the population. Oh, imagine how great that would be. Five or six million people. How much easier it would be to get to work if there was only six million people in the UK.

Yeah, but you wouldn't have any bus drivers would you sometimes when i'm in like really heavy traffic i went to watch the avengers movie right and then i was in really heavy traffic on the way home and i was like oh i think thanos had a point all right so we're five minutes in and already we're advocating the wiping out of half of all humanity that's a good start great so the aztec are essentially you say they found their sort of empire in 1325, which is what, 700 years ago? Yes. Although that's not the founding of the empire, that's the founding of the city. The empire, they only really come to power about 100 years after that.

So only about 100 years before the Spanish arrived. They're quite a new empire. Who did they take over from? It's not so much an empire in the way we might understand it, where you sort of take over loads of territory. It's not so much an empire in the way we might understand it, where you sort of take over loads of territory. It's more cities fighting to be supreme and be at the top of a tribute pyramid, be in charge of the region. And so in the early 1400s, the triple alliance of three cities, of which Tenochtitlan is one, fight it out for who's going to become dominant. They negotiate and Tenochtitlan comes to prominence.

So it's at that point that they become the head of a pyramid that stretches across most of central Mexico. Tenochtitlan is the capital city and it's massive. How much bigger is it than London at this time? We think of London this time being busy, but actually we're talking about a much bigger city. It's maybe five times larger. It's almost certainly the largest city any of the conquistadors have ever seen, which is amazing.

Reasonable estimates for the population are somewhere between about 150,000 and 700,000. I would come down at about a quarter of a million in 13 square kilometres. So it's a really bustling place. And that's the capital city, but there are other people outside that as well, living in the suburbs. It's not just the capital. It is the place where the Aztecs, by which we mean the Tenocca, the people of the city of Tenochtitlan, those are the people we mean when we think about the Aztecs.

Don't they call themselves Aztecs? They don't. So we call them Aztecs. We call them Aztecs. And there is some suggestion in some of the sources that maybe they called themselves something like that because they came from a place called Aztlan. They are the people of Aztlan.

That's where the word Aztec comes from. It sounds so like Azkaban. It does, doesn't it? It's so Harry Potter right now. And it's got, well, it gets even more like that. It's a kind of seven caves and seven tribes come out of seven caves in this place of the white herons, you know, in

Aztlan. It's a mythical history, actually. And you can't disentangle those things in Aztec culture, the myth and the history. They would have called themselves either the Tanoka, the people of the city of tanostitlan or mexica or mexica chichimeca the people of mexico which is where we get mexico from exactly mexica becomes mexico how are they building this whacking great city then if they're a relatively new power is it slave labor they have a labor service so it's a really communal collective kind of place. So each district, each Kalpuli, as they're called, they send a certain number of men for a certain number

of days, essentially. It's a society where people have communal obligations. There are also slaves, but they're not mostly used in that way. So like everyone has to do their bit. It's sort of communism in a certain way, right? Is that what it is? And that filters all the way down. So they have communal grain stores. People share the workload at a local level. They have land that is owned locally. And if you get a piece of land to work, you don't own the land.

You own the fruits of the land. And if you don't work it, then someone comes and warns you that you have to. And if you don't work it for another year, for another season season then they take it off you and give it to somebody else it seems like a very good way of living did they write they do write but it's pictographic writing right some of it is phonetic there's a big row so what do you mean by pictographic do you mean like like hieroglyphs somewhere between pictures representing things and hieroglyphs. So it's a pictoglyph system is what it's called. It's where images represent concepts rather than words. So a picture of a temple is a temple.

But then there are some concepts, so a flag means 20, for example. And it's starting to develop phonetic elements, but they're not fully developed. So when Cortés arrives, because his name sounds like coatl, which is snake, his name glyph is a snake. Wow. Oh, that's very fitting, though, isn't it? So it's a kind of adaptive language.

And the pyramids? Pyramids are pretty much exclusively for religious purposes. The one in Tenochtitlan has two temples at the top, one to Huitzilopochtli and one to Tlaloc. So that's the god of war and the god of water, which are basically the two foundations of the civilisation. War, sacrifice, tribute and agriculture and fertility and so on from rains and things like that. And you mentioned gods. How many gods in the pantheon and how do they worship them? What's the religion? Loads, loads of gods. I couldn't give you a number because there are so many of them and so many of them have different aspects. And people argue about whether one god has two aspects or whether it's two gods.

Like the Romans, like the Greeks. I mean, the idea of functional gods with their own little purview, their own little ministry. And some of them have large purviews, like the god of water. And some of them have small purviews, like the god of pulque, which is alcoholic drink. Hello. OK, let's hear more about that god. Yeah. So there's a god of pulque.

Pulque is a cactus drink. You don't really get it over here, because unlike where tequila is distilled and so it keeps really well, pulque is fermented, and so you have to drink it fresh. You basically chop the top off the cactus and you can make pulque. It's a milky, kind of bitter drink. Well, we've talked a little about religion. We've talked about pyramids.

It's time to talk about what we've all come for, human sacrifice. Oh, yeah. I mean, we look at the Aztecs and kind of go, wow, crazy, barbarous, violent, but there's a logic to it. There are actually lots of different kinds of sacrifices, but the most common one is to sacrifice someone on top of a pyramid. And was the person being sacrificed complicit? Were they happy with being sacrificed being picked,

or was it like a horrible thing to be picked? Theoretically, they were happy with being sacrificed, being picked, or was it like a horrible thing to be picked? Theoretically, they were happy. Sign here. So people believed when they were being sacrificed that it was for a greater cause. It's a bit like martyrdom, actually. It's quite like martyrdom. And that you're going to a better place.

That said, the sources suggest that some people went happily leading and heralding their cities and shouting triumphantly and other people were dragged kicking and screaming. And that's exactly what you would expect. Is there a little bit of cannibalism? There is some cannibalism, but it's on quite a small scale. There was some work that said that they were committing sacrifice for cannibalism. And there just isn't enough of it for that to make sense. Let's move away from slightly gross cannibalism,

move on to food you might have heard of and would like to eat. Joel, I'm going to fire some foods at you and you have to guess which one of these does not come from the Aztecs. Okay. Odd one out. So here is your list. Tomatoes, corn, potatoes, avocado, quinoa, chocolate, chili peppers and turkey. Which one did not come from the aztecs oh i don't know i feel like quinoa oh he's done it have i really ding ding ding i mean that's that is good

we get that from the inca that's the peruvian inca so that's slightly further south everything else comes from from aztec food i mean that's and that's introduced into europe by the conquest of the spanish but you know it's interesting isn't it avocado is a an aztec word is it no hatel word um yes derived from no at all the aztec language um shokolatel is also from no at all um so we actually get quite a lot of words and tons and tons of our food yeah from the aztec world i mean try and and imagine Italian cooking without tomatoes or peppers. Or potatoes even, yeah. Or potatoes, not just things like chocolate and chocolate,

but squash, all beans except soybeans come from the Americas. And they also eat lizard, they eat chihuahua, newt, anything else that's not on that list? Pond scum, basically. Pond scum, right. They live on an island in a lake. Right. So there's a lot of stuff, small-scale stuff, that they get from the water.

So they sort of fish that out and drink that, chew it? What's the... Yeah, you can cook it. Oh, OK. And maize. Maize is the really, really big one. Yeah, so corn and maize are... That's a huge...

Yeah, maize is what we think of as sweet corn, but it's used... Like, we use wheat. Yeah. So they make tortillas out of it. They make a paste that they can just eat while they're on the go or working. You know, you keep it in a pouch. Yeah. You eat your paste.

Fascinating. That drink was made from corn. Yeah. Yeah. Corn starch now, of course, is used in loads of products as well. Yeah. And we get that from the Aztecs. Yeah.

But that came about. Well, from the Americas. Yeah. Through violent conquest, isn't it? Yeah. So it's what colonialism does for us, obviously, is that we get to have nice food and they all died. Hooray. Let's look at the lives of ordinary people.

A newborn Aztec baby arrives in the world. What is their childhood going to be like? Does it differ if they're a girl or a boy? So we think of the Aztecs as being quite brutal. We think of all these grand rituals, but actually they're very loving towards their children. When a small baby is born, the whole family gather around and touch it and kind of welcome it into the family. Small children, it's quite clear, are tolerated in Aztec culture. They're given a bit of license that most people don't have. But once they're weaned, so once they

start eating maize, they are then under obligations to the god of maize and to their communities, and they start having to contribute. Life is very different for boys and girls once children are weaned boys go with fathers and girls go with mothers so women don't do all the child care even if you get divorced the boy children go with the dad and the girl children go with the mom it's really interesting and they had divorce they did have divorce fascinating um They tried to discourage it, but you could get divorced. And we know it was a real possibility because people draw up marriage contracts to say what would happen to the staff if they got married. It's so fascinating, isn't it?

Different things happened in different parts of the world without knowing that that was happening in other places. They probably didn't call it divorce at the time. But, of course, the Spanish call it divorce. And they're much more tolerant of it than the Spanish at the time were or the British would have been. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Because you don't want, I think it's because you don't want a community that's at each other's throats all the time. If people are going to do things together.

Marriage will do that. And be well organized and, you know, have communal activities. You have to accept that relationships might end. And so they organise for that. And they also go about making sure everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing. So coming back to childhood, boys and girls are educated. They have universal education.

It's the only pre-modern culture I know that has universal education. Where boys get more education in warriorhood, things like that, both girls and boys go to a thing called the Kwikakali, the house of song, where in warriorhood, things like that. Both girls and boys go to a thing called the Kweka Kali, the House of Song, where in the evenings they learn songs and stories about their mythical past and their history and so on and rhetoric and philosophy and religion, all those things. Wow. So if they've got divorced, they must also have marriage. And obviously marriage is a hugely important part of it.

I'm happily married, you're happily married. Joel, you're soon to be happily married. Soon to be. Do you want to hear about Aztec wedding customs? Yes. Caroline, can we hear what a wedding ceremony would be like? The woman would be dressed in a large cape and she'd be carried on the back of an older woman,

probably one of the matchmakers who made the pairing, carried to the house of the husband-to-be. And then there's a fascinating reciprocal ceremony where it's about setting them up as a partnership really the mother of the bride dresses the son-in-law-to-be in a cape she feeds him mouthfuls of food and the mother of the groom does the same thing for the bride okay and then they tie their clothes together into a knot they literally tie the knot that's nice um and there's lots of other things so the bride is very um adorned and so on um and then which i think is amazing does she wear feathers

she does she gets feathers the bird feathers face paint lovely um like iron pyrites so it's really sparkly okay it's a moment where the community all kind of come together and that's the moment where you become liable for paying into the communal grain store for doing communal labor service and also if you're poor you get given capes from the communal store from your community to set up your household so it's like they see this marriage as the beginning of being an adult but also at the beginning of your contribution to set up your household so it's like they see this marriage as the beginning of being an adult but also the beginning of your contribution to the community any of that sound applicable to the the domit wedding it's actually a massive coincidence because it sounds

just like what we've planned you're doing feathers you're doing for my mom to feed me whilst i'm going down the aisle while your partner is carried by an old woman yeah it's all it's all on the list actually i think maybe we might have had a uh aztecian wedding planner so uh we've talked about marriage we talked about um women and men coming together um we i guess need to talk about warriors we've mentioned warriors already going off um joel you do a bit of combat stuff i know you enjoy martial arts and in this show jo Joel Nish versus the world, you often fight people, usually children. Usually children.

That's the worst part of it. I'm not very good at fighting. I'm not a very combative person. You're a very nice man. Yeah, I just don't like the fight and stuff. So they can't obviously put me against someone who's good at fighting. So they tend to just put me against the children. Who still defeat you.

Yeah, I think the show should be genuinely called Joel goes around the world and fights children. Who still defeat you. Yeah, I think that the show should be genuinely called Joel goes around the world and fights children. I mean, what is warrior training like? What is warrior combat like for an Aztec warrior? What kind of weapons? Are they using obsidian? What kind of weapons are they wearing? What kind of armour? They wear cotton armour, so sort of padding, and they would have shields as well, often wooden shields. And then, yeah, the weapons are made from obsidian. So you would very often have something called a maquahuitl, which is like a big club

with bits of obsidian stuck into it. Like a mace? Somewhere between a mace and a sword. So it's a longer blade, more pieces stuck into it. And it is sharp, but you sort of hit people over the head with it. Yes. But actually you don't hit people over the head because as a warrior what you're trying to do

is to take captives for sacrifice. So most of Aztec warfare is to try and make them fall over so you can drag them off the battlefield. That's interesting. It's quite interesting, isn't it? So there's a whole other technique of warfare which is you're trying to maim rather than kill. It puts them at a massive disadvantage against the Spanish.

Yeah, the Spanish, yeah. Because the Spanish are like, I'm going to kill you. And they're like, would you mind lying down over there? Yeah, it's probably much more of an issue than stuff like the Spanish. Yeah, the Spanish, yeah. Because the Spanish were like, I'm going to kill you. And they're like, would you mind lying down over there? Yeah, it's probably much more of an issue than stuff like the guns. People overemphasise the significance of guns. But actually the Spanish didn't have that many guns when they encountered the Aztecs,

maybe 20 or 30 in terms of... And there's a thing called the Flower War. Joel, do you know what this is? It sounds wonderful, though. It sounds like sort of... My mum's a garden designer, so it sounds like something my mum would sort of do at the local garden centre. Sort of horticultural battle.

Maybe you get there and you don't get there early enough and someone else wants the flowers that you want. A flower war happens at Wyvail. Caroline, is it as lovely as that? Sadly not. The flowers are a metaphor for the spirits of warriors, and so it's a war designed solely for the purpose of taking captives for sacrifice. Some people have argued about whether it actually existed.

I think on balance it probably did. The Aztec Empire is quite large and messages have to be sent and they're sent by runners, aren't they? There's a sort of relay system. Joel, would you fancy being in a little relay system? It wasn't as long as that. How many miles are we talking two and five miles that's doable isn't it bad not a bad amount so you jog out of tenochtitlan with your little message yeah and you go five miles and you pass it to your mate and he'd pass it and they'd pass it and they'd pass it and eventually it's

gone 100 miles yeah is that how it happens so each one does like their own little leg and it's like a sort of relay and it goes eventually to that same person. So what do you know at the beginning of the show we talked about gold. They don't have steel, they don't have iron, but they do have gold, don't they? They've got lovely shiny gold. Do they use it as currency or is it just for making shiny things? They don't have currency in the way we'd understand. It's a barter system. Gold is one of the common media of exchange in gold quills, but no, it's not a currency. And actually, it's not even valued as much as things like beautiful feathers and so on.

They do use it for masks and artwork and jewellery. Right. But feathers were more valued. It's used in medicine because, so one of the names for gold is tonatio equi-ital, which means basically sun excrement, excrement of the sun. Wow. And that leads you into all of these avenues about how you might use it that relate to the sun. So one use is for medicine and the dust or

shavings of gold were eaten by people who had hemorrhoids or skin pustules. And that's because Nanahuatzin, who was the god who became the sun, it's a great tale of the poor boy who's done good. There are these two gods. One is glorious and wonderful and one is poor and covered with pustules. And he is the one who is the bravest, jumps into the fire and becomes the sun. So the idea is it's a sympathetic magic. You know, he had all these pustules and he became the sun. So if I eat the gold, then I will be cured of my hemorrhoids and pustules.

And so was that partly why the Spanish were kind of interested in them because they had loads of gold but didn't know the value of it? Oh, definitely. Yeah. Gold is absolutely a big focus for the Spanish. Yeah. Why do Europeans value gold? Is it because it's rarer to them? And so why is it still valued today? Is it because it's still rare or is it... Yeah, it's still very rare and it's chemically sort of not very reactive. It's quite soft. It's easily used in... You can easily shape it.

It's hugely rare, very, very valuable. The Egyptians had lots of gold, but the Aztec obviously had huge amounts of it. And silver too? They had a reasonably large amount of it. Some silver. But no, so they had quite a lot of gold, far more silver, not just in the Aztec region, but in the regions outside.

It's really in Bolivia, places like that where the silver is. But we think of the Spanish having this sort of river of gold coming from the Americas, but actually the where the silver is. But we think of the Spanish having this sort of river of gold coming from the Americas, but actually the amount of silver massively outweighs the amount of gold. It causes them huge inflation. Yeah, it crashes the Spanish economy because they have so much silver turned up that suddenly everything devalues because there's too much money.

Let's talk about the most famous emperor. And 500 years ago, Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, arrives in Mexico and meets this glorious, powerful emperor called Moctezuma. Moctezuma is what we tend to call him for ease. His actual name was Moctezuma Xocoyotzin. That is a lot harder to say. Yes. So we go with Moctezuma because it's close enough to the original,

but still usable. Like the big daddy. He rules this empire. he's super powerful. He has got two wives, 150 concubines, is that right? A load of kids? Well, he's certainly got 150 wives or concubines. It's not quite clear whether they're wives. I think he can only have one principal wife.

Oh, OK. So the person who he does the real ceremonies of marriage with, the person you commit to, but then he has lots of other wives or concubines or mistresses. There is a question about whether they then support each other and look after each other's kids. But only the children of principal wives are properly significant, if that makes sense. But because Aztec culture isn't dynastic in the way European culture is,

you don't just inherit power. Being in the position of being in the palace already makes you in a position to kind of do well in life. The Aztec are destroyed by the Spanish. You say Cortes turns up and initially tries to negotiate and then it turns into a horrible war. How does such a mighty empire result in so many millions of deaths? Two things I would say. One is that it's not just this handful of conquistadors against the Spanish. There actually are lots of allies of the Spanish quite early on to the Tlaxcalans,

who we mentioned a couple of times. First they fight against the Spanish, then they ally with them. So by the time Cortes gets to Tenochtitlan, he has tens of thousands at least of indigenous allies. So it's infighting. A lot of this is infighting. So it's kind of an it's infighting a lot of this is infighting so it's a civil war exactly the tlachcalans um they slaughter lots of the

tanaka when they get to the city because they've been at war with them for decades centuries maybe um the other thing is disease the indigenous americans have no immunity to european diseases and so wave after wave of european disease not just smallpox but flu measles mumps all kinds of things come and just wipe out civilizations because if there's no one to care for the people who are sick so more of them die and it's just devastating it's the worst thing about colonisation, I think, is the disease part of it. People going over somewhere and colonising via war is horrible. But just by the fact that they're winning because they're disease-ridden just feels so annoying.

The fact that they got wiped out by smallpox is just like, ugh, it feels so frustrating. And it's so horrifying. Tenochtitlan, of course, is a heavily, densely populated area, so it suffers from disease more than other places. And you're talking about maybe 90% in the first 10 years. Wow. History is horrible sometimes.

But it is just horrifying. The nuance window! This is the part of the show where a historian gets to say something that's really important and powerful, and we listen for two minutes without interruption. And then we go, huh. So are you ready, Caroline? Yeah, gosh, that was a bit of a build up.

Yeah, well, sorry, I don't want to put you on the spot. But, you know, this is your big moment. So two minutes on the clock starting now. Go. It's possible everything we've just talked about is wrong because the sources for Aztec culture are so bad, so weak and so flawed that almost everything I've said, I have caveated some things, but I could have caveated almost anything except probably what they ate.

So you have this problem that the Spanish arrive and they destroy all of those wonderful pictographic documents we've been talking about. There were perhaps 13 documents for all of central Mexico still remaining from before the conquest. None of them are from Tenochtitlan. What we have, where we're getting our picture of Aztec culture from, is Spaniards talking to surviving indigenous people or just making stuff up

or misunderstanding or making observations that might be wrong. And then added on top of that is the fact that in the 1430s, when the Aztecs come to power in the Triple Alliance, Awit Sotl, the ruler, destroys all the documents and rewrites the history then. He creates this grand mythical history for the Aztecs, promoting the way that they are. So, of course, they're in charge and it was always destined that they would be in charge. And so he rewrites the past. charge and so he rewrites the past so what we have is a past that has already been rewritten once being told to people who really don't understand the language or know what's happening and they

then write that down in a patchy kind of way and also nearly all of the informants are elite men so what we're getting is an elite male perspective. The Aztecs, as we know, were obsessed with blood, but we don't know anything about menstruation, for example, because it wouldn't occur to friars to talk to the Aztec men they were talking to about menstruation. So the whole thing might just be me interpreting things wrong that were interpreted wrong by Spaniards that were made up by Aztecs. Wow.

There you go. Ignore everything. Yeah. That's fascinating. I mean, that's the problem with history. That is the problem with history, isn't it? Yeah. Historians complain about sauces all the time,

but the Aztec ones really are spectacularly bad. Especially ketchup. Am I right, guys? Sauces, ketchup. Very nice. Cool. That's why I'm here. Bring the big jokes. especially ketchup am I right guys? sauces, ketchup very nice cool that's why I'm here bring the big jokes

well that's it for today's conversation if you've enjoyed the show please do share it with your friends leave a review online and make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me

on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode plus those episodes are longer on the podcast so you get more fun but for now let me say a huge thank you to my brilliant guests

in History Corner Dr Caroline Dodds-Pennock from the University of Sheffield and in Comedy Corner are longer on the podcast so you get more fun. But for now, let me say a huge thank you to my brilliant guests. In History Corner, Dr Caroline Dodds-Pennock from the University of Sheffield, and in Comedy Corner, the fantastic Joel Domet. I'm off to go and listen to Backstreet Boys singing Tearing Out My Heart, which suddenly has a very different meaning. Until the next time, thanks listeners. Bye! Bye! From BBC Radio 4, a new series from Intrigue, Mayday. On November 11th, 2019, James LeMessurier was found dead in Istanbul.

He was the ex-British army officer who helped set up the White Helmets in Syria. Ordinary people trained to save civilians in the aftermath of bomb attacks. The biggest heroes in an ugly war. But lots of people here in the UK say all the white helmets videos are staged. Part of the greatest hoax in history. I'm Chloe Hedgermetho and I've spent the last year investigating the white helmets and James LeMessurier. Who they are, who he was and why he died. Subscribe to Intrigue now on BBC Sounds.