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

Episode Date: June 12, 2021

Greg Jenner is joined by Prof Sarah Parcak and comedian Maria Shehata to learn all about the magnificent Egyptian pyramids. We discover how and why pyramids were built, who constructed them, and how space archaeology can help us discover and protect hundreds of pyramids and tombs that are yet to be found.

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Hello, Greg here. Just popping in to say that this is a radio edit of the episode, which means it's a bit shorter and some of the naughty stuff has been removed, so it's a bit more appropriate for family listening. If you want to hear the full length versions, scroll down to the original episode further back in our feed. Thanks very much. Enjoy the show. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a 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. I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. You may have heard my other podcast,

Homeschool History, but that one was mostly for the kids. In this show, we do things a bit differently. If you're looking for some learning with your lols, then you've come to the right place. Today, we are chucking our chisels, trowels and SPF 50 sunblock into our bum bags and journeying back thousands of years to ancient Egypt to lift the lid on one of the most fascinating facets of the ancient world, Egyptian pyramids. And to help me do that, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, we have a full-on archaeological superstar with us. She is a professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, not the one in the Midlands, and she's an expert

on Egyptology and also, wait for it, space archaeology. It's Professor Sarah Parkak. Hey Sarah, how are you? Hi there, I'm great. Thank you so much for having me on. And in Comedy Corner, we're thrilled to have her back on the show. She's an award-winning comedian, writer and podcaster. You may have seen her doing stand-up live, you may have caught her on the telly doing things like BBC's period dramas. You may have heard her new podcast, Tune On Doctors, which is medical advice from people who have no medical training. It's the wonderful Maria Shahata. Maria, how are you? I'm so good. How are you? I'm very good. You are from an American Egyptian background. Your family are from

Cairo. Yeah, my parents are from Cairo and I'm from Ohio. So that... Anything with O in the title. Yeah, anything with O. And so, yeah, I've been to the pyramids three times in my life. Recently? Or was that sort of when you were a kid? No, last time was 12 years ago

and my mom and my aunt took me and they dropped me off because they'd seen it before. So they were like, enjoy that. We'll see you in a couple hours. You are Egyptian. You've seen them three times. So I'm expecting you to be very knowledgeable.

I'm going to surprise all of you with how little I know. So, what do you know? Time for me to do the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a guess at what you at home might know about today's subject. The Egyptian pyramids are some of the most famous structures on the planet. So I think you've probably heard of them and you probably have a pretty clear picture in your mind of what they look like. Giant sandy triangles plopped into the middle of a desert. And of course, ancient Egypt crops up in our pop culture all the time and is positively peppered with pyramids. So perhaps you're thinking of the 1932 film The Mummy. Of

course you're not. Who's seen that film? No one's seen that film. You've definitely seen the 1999 film The Mummy though, haven't you? Yes, lovely Brendan Fraser, so handsome, and Rachel Weisz. And then there's also X-Men Apocalypse, and then there's the idiotically bad Transformers Revenge of the Fallen, where the Great Pyramid of Giza contains an alien robot machine for destroying the sun. Of course it does. Now, whether it's from books or blockbusters, you probably know the pyramids were often tombs bursting with treasures for really important kings. And you may have heard loads of theories about how these marvelous monuments were built. Spoiler alert, it wasn't the aliens, all right? Let it go. But what else is there to know about the pyramids? Let's find out. Okay, Sarah, before we start, sorry, I'm going to have to bring this up here.

One Earth is a space archaeologist. Are you like Indiana Jones, but in a spacesuit? I think in my in my dreams. So essentially, a space archaeologist is a person that uses pictures taken from satellites or drones or airplanes, and they allow us to look at the Earth and the features on the ground and different parts of the light spectrum, often parts that we can't see. So think of it almost like a space x-ray or CAT scan. I always thought archaeologists just kind of went by instinct, like, should we just start digging here? Like, there's something, I didn't know you use all that technology to find stuff in the middle of the earth. Unfortunately, you know, now with such limited funding and time in the field,

middle of the earth. Unfortunately, you know, now with such limited funding and time in the field, we've got to be as laser focused as possible. And so we use every tool at our disposal. So let's start with the absolute basics. Sarah, what is a pyramid? I know what it is like mathematically, but what is it? So a pyramid is a triangle superstructure over a tomb. So a pyramid is a tomb. Everyone looks at the Great Pyramid and thinks, oh my gosh, it's amazing. How did they do that? Well, pyramids weren't built in a day. They were developed over many hundreds of years. They started off essentially as graves beneath the ground. And then over time, the graves got deeper and there were chambers added and things evolved. Over time, there was something called a mastaba, which is Arabic for bench, built on top around the first dynasty. So this would have been about 5,000 years ago. There would have been rooms

for offerings as well as chambers around it, where the king would have been buried with many, many goods for the afterlife. And those things wouldn't have been visible when the monument was complete. These very, very early tombs had small hills over the top, and over time they evolved and got bigger and bigger and bigger, and about 400 or so years later, that's when we start seeing pyramids. So the person who started it never got to see the finishing. That sort of sucks for that guy. But the person in the end gets to put the cap on the pyramid.

I imagine that triangle part would be the last part, the like point. Certainly for the pyramids of Sneferu and then the pyramids at Giza. These are pyramids that would have been built over decades with pretty large work crews. So if the king was lucky, he would get to see the end of the construction of the pyramid. So the earliest pyramids are small structures or hills over a burial chamber, and then things really kick into gear with step pyramids, which sounds like something in a CrossFit gym, but it's not. Sarah, what are the sort of the next evolution in pyramids? And is the first pyramid built for King Djoser? That's right. So that would have been

the pyramid that would have been built for King Djoser at Saqqara, built by his architect Imhotep. that would have been built for King Djoser at Saqqara, built by his architect Imhotep. And instead of a standard mastaba tomb or bench tomb, you know, this rectilinear tomb made of stone, what Imhotep did that was amazing is he decided to stack these mastabas one on top of the other to get this triangular feature reaching up into the sky.

And to me, it's not just the pyramid which is amazing but Imhotep constructed this recreation of the known ancient Egyptian world with structures made of stone that represented upper and lower Egypt so essentially it was an entire map of the cosmos of the known Egyptian world in stone for eternity. Imhotep, Hollywood's not been very kind to him and Maria you you've seen The Mummy, haven't you? He was the bad guy. It's been years. I just remember Brendan Fraser, really. And yeah, well, like, how did they make him out to be the bad guy? He's living forever. And he's running around trying to kill Rachel Weisz. Oh, that's no good. I know. I mean, Rachel Weisz is

lovely. You should never try and kill her. She's lovely. He's sort of like this terrifying, evil, undead guy. But he is one of the great geniuses of the ancient world sarah what is his job title you know engineer is he an administrator is he prime minister what does he do he was the chief architect for uh for joseph and the ancient egyptians recognized his genius they in effect deified him about 2 000 years later So in a period of time known as the late period, so about 600 BC, we see a lot of amulets and representations in bronze showing Imhotep as a god. To this day, we haven't found his tomb in Saqqara. But give me a few more years. Get the satellites on him. It's being deified like getting a blue checkmark on Twitter.

Like he's a celebrity of the time. It's a little bit easier. Later on, we then go, you've mentioned already true pyramids, Sarah. Maria, can you guess what a true pyramid is? One that was built first, before the other pyramid, because there are a lot of like, you know, copycat pyramids oh I see no true pyramid is one that's just got the straight lines on it that's when they've reached their perfect mathematical gorgeous triangular architectural design I mean the thing I find extraordinary about the Great Pyramid of Giza for example this pyramid is so old that Cleopatra would have looked

at it and it would have been ancient history to her oh how many years before cleopatra was the great pyramid built sarah so about 2 400 years plus or minus bonkers that is old that's 4 000 years now four and a half thousand years probably isn't it and they're still standing strong i'm they don't move just i mean they're just this might be a stupid question but is stonehenge older than the pyramids? Same age. About the same age. So while we were building like some rocks in a field, Egyptians, King Khufu was the king. Which pyramid built for him?

The Great One. It is the Great One, absolutely. The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest human-made structure on the planet for 4,000 years. So, I mean, they built it a long time ago and it stayed as a sort of record breaker for a long, long, long time. That seems to be a really important thing for cultures, having the tallest of something to this day. Yeah, I guess so. I guess it's proof that the thing kept standing, which I guess is hard to do. But they don't know what's going on halfway across the world because they didn't have any technology and it would take a really long time to travel, I imagine. So they could just say that and everybody would be like,

wow, really? It's like, yeah, the tallest in the world. My training is in settlement archaeology and I'm really interested in the lives of everyday people from ancient Egypt and from elsewhere. And to me, the pyramids, especially the pyramids at Giza, are really extraordinary because they're symbols of the formation of the Egyptian state and the bureaucracy.

And when you get really close to the pyramids and you look at the stones, you can see hundreds of chisel marks on each individual stone. And those chisel marks were made by copper. And copper was obtained in Sinai, which is an area where I've done a lot of archaeological work. And so Egyptians would have to send out expeditions across the eastern desert and across the Red Sea to mine for copper to create the tools to build the pyramids. And this huge infrastructure had to be developed. So when you are gnashing your teeth, because you're dealing with horrible bureaucracy, whether it's the NHS or immigration in the UK or the US government, wherever you are in the world, when you're angry about bureaucracy, you can blame pyramids, because this is where bureaucracy

started. I took a bus from Cairo to Sinai to Sharm. It was a long journey. And that was on a bus with a motor. I just can't imagine having to go all the way to Sinai to get copper to come back to build that. Did anybody actually want these besides the kings and rulers? The people who had to build them probably weren't like, yeah, I'm really excited about this. When it's done in 400 years, it's going to be amazing. If you're building the pyramids, think about the amount of calories you're burning in a day. You're going to need massive amounts of protein because you're part of these teams that are pushing these massive stones. And so you would have been fed incredibly well. You would have been given daily rations of bread and beer and

probably good cuts of meat. We know, especially in the fourth dynasty, which is the period of time of Sneferu and Cheops, we see a proliferation of estates across the delta where they're raising cattle. And the reason they're raising cattle is that you can't build a pyramid unless you're doing your protein shakes. And in ancient Egypt, it was cow. And actually, it's funny, there's an inscription inside one of the pyramids. So the gangs of men that moved the blocks had nicknames. And one of the nicknames of one of the gangs was the drunkards of Menkaura, which I love. So you sort of think of this as free decor. Yeah, okay, they're not going to be buried there, but certainly they're getting good afterlife mojo

in service of the king and they're able to eat well. People on the internet are very confident that the pyramids were built by enslaved people. That's the famous thing that everyone knows. But it's not true, is it really? I mean, the vast bulk of this team are not people who are enslaved. They are Egyptians and they are rewarded with, as you say, good food and wages. Do they get wages or how does it work? In ancient Egypt and many ancient cultures, you don't see the development of this concept of payment until much later. I mean, certainly you're getting rations of bread and beer or measures of grain or cuts of cloth. So in essence, it's kind of payment, but not in our sense. You would have made amazing PR back in the day. Like, well, let's start with what is payment, really? Is it not nourishment? Is it not a sense of fulfillment,

self-worth? They're doing it for the exposure. There's no money for this job, but it's really good exposure and literally exposed to the exposure. There's no money for this job, but it's really good exposure. And literally exposed to the sunlight. These workers are getting food and cloth and useful things, which you would buy anyway if you had money. So I guess it is a type of currency. Yeah, there's a whole barter and exchange and value system that existed then. We have the tombs of a lot of pyramid builders. And it would have required an enormous amount of skill.

Moving heavy stones, you know, if you're a kind of a skinny dude. Hello. I'm not pointing any fingers at anyone. You show up on the job. It's like going to the gym. Day one, okay, you're going to be bench pressing 240 pounds go. It's impossible. You have to build up to it. So you have to think there was an initiation period. Maybe you're clearing rubble at first, you're providing water to the workforces, you're slowly building up your strength over time. And after a couple months on the job, after you've, you've built some muscle, then you're able to join the heavier pushing or

pulling. And over time, you know, some people would have shown a real skill and an aptitude for whether it's managing people carving stone, and there would have been apprenticeships. A lot of people don't realize it's not just these tens of thousands of men that are pushing stone, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of skilled laborers. So there's stonemasons, there's architects, there's engineers, there's the people that would have had to have made the rope to pull the sleds. So you imagine this really rich environment. There weren't slaves then, because I can't tell you how many times people have said to me, after I've bragged about my people building the pyramids, like Egyptians didn't build pyramids,

slaves built the pyramids. Absolutely no slaves. I'm just going to have to cut this clip out and just play it for people. So the pyramids are functionally, they are the tomb for one person. So this is where a person goes, but it takes tens of thousands of people to build it, which feels very inefficient. But that also speaks, I guess, to the cosmology, to the hierarchy, the glory of the pharaohs. That's how important they are, that one person gets all this work dedicated to them. The 1%. Yeah. It's the whole, the whole, the tat se mua, the state is me.

Just as the pyramids held up the concept of the king as this living God, so they also helped the king to form ancient Egypt and to solidify the state. Because you're not going to be able to build a pyramid unless you have people who are very highly organized and efficient. They didn't just say, well, let's just go build this pyramid. What you're looking at when you look at the pyramids of the Giza is the formation of a system of government and rule that lasted for over 2000 years. So it all began here. Isn't there a spiritual aspect to that? I thought it was about a god pointing to the gods. I thought that something happened. And just like this, when the sun was in the right place, it's shown down on the pyramids. And then like,

it was all supposed to be in worship of gods rather than the government. So that was an important part of it, too. So there was a whole ancient Egyptian cosmology, the pyramids helped the king to ascend to the afterlife. There was a whole religious aspect as well. A lot of what you've been saying so far, Sarah, has come from archaeology. But we do actually have historical documents too. We do have, for example, the logbook of Merere, who was perhaps a project manager. Now this is Merere, or Merere, M-E-R-E-R. Merere. Merere. Is he in charge? What's his job?

There are a series of caves that a French archaeological team excavated and found these papyri. They're from this project manager named Merer. It's a daily accounting of what he saw as he sailed downriver to deliver stones to the pyramids. And what's amazing is he mentions a prince, the brother of Khufu, who we have suspected for a long time was the project manager or the overseer of the work going on at the Great Pyramid. Was it all written in hieroglyphics? Yes.

Did he talk about anything else, like his girlfriend? Was he keeping a log of what he ate? Sadly, a lot of the papyri is gone. So we'll never know. We can only hypothesize. What did it look like, Sarah, in terms of the landscape? You've kind of got desert around it. You've got the Nile.

Are people living nearby? Are there shops? Are there houses? Or is this sort of a flat, almost alien landscape with these three huge Toblerones sticking out the top? So the pyramids wouldn't have just been pyramids you know they would have had their pyramid temples they would have had their causeways but also a little bit to the south you would have had a pretty significant workman's village for 15-20,000 men there would have been large barracks homes homes, gardens, and the Nile River would have been flowing right next to the pyramids in antiquity. You know, today it's a number of

kilometers to the east, but even old photographs from 120 years ago showed just how close to the banks of the Nile the pyramids were. The Nile coming all the way up to the pyramids, did that make it easier to build? That and also the position in the landscape. You know, it's a little bit more elevated. It's pretty close to the Toro limestone quarries. But also, you know, there would have been canals connecting to the main Nile for delivery, essentially right to the doorstep. And this is kind of a cool fact.

A lot of people don't realize this. So when you go to Giza today and you look at the pyramids, most of the outer casing stones are missing. to Giza today, and you look at the pyramids, most of the outer casing stones are missing, and they would have been cased or had an exterior stone facade of this amazing bright white limestone. So to look at the pyramids in the middle of the day in Egypt, you almost couldn't look at them because they glow. It's almost like you're seeing this living embodiment of the king's power as a god on earth. So did it wear away or is it just that it got so hot they were like, let's get rid of this white

stuff? So a lot of the exterior casing stones were robbed, taken away over time. You can actually see some of the exterior casing stones today around the base of the pyramids. I love the idea that they're so white you couldn't even look at them, like Ryland's teeth. It's so bright, like my eyes, I can't see. Let's talk about what's inside the pyramid because as we've already said, these are massive monuments dedicated to one person. When we think of the inside of pyramids, I'm visualizing hieroglyphs on the wall, beautiful art. Is that there from the very beginning or does that come in later no we don't start seeing texts inside pyramids until later so dynasty six the pyramid of unas which is a sakara that's when we start seeing this thing called the pyramid texts and they're absolutely beautiful you know a lot of people are disappointed when they go inside the pyramid and they kind of go down and they go

up into the grand chamber and they go inside the king's chamber and there's a sarcophagus and it's empty. What's a sarcophagus? So a sarcophagus is a stone or wood rectilinear item in which the coffin would be placed. Now, of course, it's time to talk about the thing that Hollywood loves most, the curse. In the classic film, The Mummy, there is obviously a curse. Are curses real, Sarah? I mean, are they written above the doors? There were curses, but not like you think.

And they were very, very rare. It's more like a, you watch yourself, more like a warning, a gentle request. Just like mind the gap. Mind the gap. No trespassing, please. I found a quote to share with you because I thought it was really adorable. It is to you that I speak, all the people who will find this tomb passage. Watch out to not take even a pebble from within it outside.

If you find this stone, you shall not transgress against it. The pyramids and all the tombs surrounding it have been robbed a lot. So obviously it didn't work. Like they should have put a camera in there or something. Yeah. Or a guard dog. Probably the Great Pyramid of Giza was first robbed by the party that buried the king. No way. I mean, we'll never know, of course. Did you know that King Tut's tomb actually was not intact when it was discovered? A lot of people think it was. So in the jars that would have held like face creams and lotions, Howard Carter found hand scoop marks from the burial party. And they'd gone and then they'd scooped out these very expensive high-end creams

that would have been perfumed. Because it's one thing to steal an amulet with the king's name on it. And if you try to sell it, you know, you're going to be in big trouble. But you take this expensive hand cream with you, no one's's going to know so if the curses aren't very good they're more just sort of slightly stern words does that mean that hollywood's uh famous booby traps are also a bit dodgy and not really there in pyramids either because i'm thinking in my head swinging axes arrows shooting out the walls a huge boulder rolling towards you. Yeah, I mean, that's why I'm in such good shape. I have to, you know, keep fit for the unexpected. So it's true-ish in that certainly they knew that not just the burial party was going to

steal stuff, but later on robbers would try to get in. So they tried to be a little bit deceptive. You know, they would have large boulders in place, wouldn't necessarily roll into the place to crush whoever was coming in. But they used a lot of different sort of techniques to try to protect the tombs as best they could. I can't believe Hollywood lied to us. Yeah. I mean, they're so reliable. Yeah. Brendan Fraser is the best looking Egyptologist that's ever lived. Oh, that's a shame.

It's not just that we know that things were robbed because we can get into a tomb and there's nothing there. We do also have actual historical confessions from tomb robbers from the Bronze Age. We've got a guy called Amen Panepher. So he was looting in about the year 1110 BCE, and he wrote a little confession. He said, we went to rob tombs, as was our usual habit, and we found the pyramid of King Sobek Kemsaf. We took our copper tools and we forced our way in. We opened the sarcophagi and the coffins. We found noble mummy of the king equipped with the sword. There were a large number of amulets and jewels of gold. He nicked all the stuff and he got caught, but he bribed the official and got away with it. So in terms of the history of pyramids era,

we start with the really early ones, the Mastaba ones, and we get the true pyramids. And then we get to the Middle Kingdom. They're changing a bit because they're made from mud brick rather than stone. There's a big shift in the Middle Kingdom. The state also changes. A lot more power flows to the provinces. So the king is unable to organize groups of tens of thousands of men.

It's probably a couple thousand men. And so the pyramids shrink in size. And instead of being built completely of stone, they will often have rubble or mud brick course, and they'll just be capped with limestone on the exterior. So it takes a lot less effort, and it's a lot less expensive. And the effort there shifts from the superstructure to what's inside the tombs. So you have all of these amazing sculptures, statues, the sarcophagi, papyri, the tombs are inscribed. So the pyramids are getting smaller. They're like chocolate bars in the local corner

shop. Everything's shrinking, but the inside is the good stuff. It's where all the nugget is. Exactly. The lovely stuff. But by the time we get to, say, Tutankhamun, 1400 BC maybe, pyramids are just sort of vanishing entirely. Or they're turning into really small pyramids, like everyone has. So like everyone's got a pyramid in their backyard, like sheds. It's just like they keep their tools in it, and their dog sleeps out there. So when you visit the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, when you look at the very, very top, there's almost a pyramid shaped top of a mountain. For the kings of the New Kingdom, they're like, eh, that's like our pyramid. Close enough. And so the tombs all went into the bedrock

and they had their superstructure. It just was part of the natural landscape. Maria, how many pyramids do you think there are in Egypt? I'm going to go with six. Six pyramids. Sarah? There are over 100. What? Yeah, I was surprised.

Well, there's the three that we all know about. And then I just figured there were three more that copied it. A lot of people don't realize that in time periods like the Middle Kingdom, so at Lesht, around the pyramid of Samuelser I alone, there are nine smaller pyramids for his queens and his daughters. When you think of like a hundred pyramids, they're not all massive.

A lot of them are really, really small. Pyramid's a pyramid. A pyramid is definitely not just a pyramid. Size matters. The nuance window! All right, well, I think that brings us to the end of our Pyramid Base chat. So it's time for my favourite part of the podcast, which is the Nuance Window. And this is where Maria and I kick back and relax for a couple of minutes

and we listen to our expert, Sarah. I'm going to put two minutes on the stopwatch, Sarah. What are you going to tell us about? The scale of what we don't know about ancient Egypt. Fabulous. Without much further ado, Professor Sarah Parkeck, the nuance window, please. So one of the main questions that I get asked as an archaeologist and Egyptologist is just how much do we have left to find in ancient Egypt? And it's like, how long is a piece of string? Yes, we have 500 pyramids left to find or 10,000 tombs. I wouldn't know. However, I love maths. So I calculated the total volume of all of the known archaeological sites in the ancient Egyptian Delta and roughly guesstimated the total amount that has been excavated by Egyptologists for the last 150 years. And the number and lots of rounding up and lots of generous room for error. I calculated that in the Egyptian Delta alone, we've excavated less than one one-thousandth

of 1% of the sites. Add on top of that, all of the thousands of archaeological sites that we've been able to map using satellite imagery, and we've confirmed not all of them, but a good percentage enough. And all of these amazing features and things that we keep finding,

and I feel very comfortable sharing that I think we've discovered less than 1% of ancient Egypt. And you think about how much we know, there's this rich field that's been around for hundreds of years. I think the next couple decades, you're going to see some of the most extraordinary discoveries ever found in the history of Egyptology. And what I love is that a lot of them are going to be made by Egyptian scientists, is what you're seeing in the news today. So just because there have been all these amazing pyramids over a hundred and hundreds and hundreds of tombs, you know, if you're out there listening right now, especially for the kids,

the field has so much left to discover. Amazing. So in 400 years, your work will finally be done. That's right, 400 years. Well, I'm afraid that's all we have time for. So let me say a huge thank you to my magnificent guests in History Corner or Archaeology Corner, rather. We've had Professor Sarah Parkak from the University of Birmingham, Alabama. And in Comedy Corner, we've had the wonderful Maria Shahata. And we'll be back with more historical laughs next time. But for now, I'm off to go and try and find Atlantis on Google Earth. Must be there, surely. Bye!

Before you leave us, if you're hungry for more history, more ancient civilisations perhaps, why not check out the You're Dead to Me episode on the ancient Babylonians with Kay Curd and Dr Mudi al-Rashid.id. There's also a fascinating one on the Aztecs. Not ancient, of course, but still quite far away. That's with Joel Domet and Dr. Caroline Dodds-Pennock. And if you want more ancient Egypt, then you can hop over to the In Our Time feed. They've got episodes on Tutankhamun, the Rosetta Stone and Cleopatra. All good stuff. So you can find You're Dead to Me and In Our Time on the BBC Sounds app. Thanks very much. Bye. Welcome to Descendants, the series which looks

into our lives and our past and asks something pretty simple. How close are each of our lives to the legacy of Britain's role in slavery? And who does that mean our lives are linked to? Britain's role in slavery and who does that mean our lives are linked to? Narrated by me, Yersa Daly Ward, we hear from those who have found themselves connected to each other through this history. Whoever you are, wherever you are in Britain, the chances are this touches This touches your life somewhere, somehow.