Danny Jones Podcast - #264 - Atlantis, Ancient Egypt & Graham Hancock's Lost Civilization | Flint Dibble
Aired: 2024-10-07
Duration: 03:17:07


=== Scholars Examine Atlantis (13:37) ===

[00:00:07]  It's great to be here.
[00:00:08]  Thanks for having me.
[00:00:09]  Yeah, man.
[00:00:09]  Thanks for making the trip.
[00:00:11]  We got a lot of stuff to talk about.
[00:00:13]  A ton of shit to talk about.
[00:00:15]  What have I got myself into?
[00:00:19]  First of all, I want to say I was super impressed with your podcast on Joe Rogan with Graham.
[00:00:25]  I thought you were extremely reasonable.
[00:00:28]  I thought some of the evidence that you came with was incredible.
[00:00:32]  I thought that you did a great job of filling in the blanks with a lot of the stuff that Graham.
[00:00:36]  Wasn't sure, you know, Graham was bringing a lot of points up and talking about a lot of his research.
[00:00:43]  And you were doing a fantastic job filling in the gaps for him because it's obvious that you've spent your life in archaeology doing the work, hands on, eating the gruel, as you say, the bones.
[00:00:57]  You know, not just looking at the fascinating stuff, but also looking, doing the boring shit too, right?
[00:01:02]  Like doing the hard work.
[00:01:04]  And I understand your perspective.
[00:01:09]  when it comes to people like Graham, somebody who comes up, who's sort of doing this as a fun thing and writes a bunch of books about it.
[00:01:17]  And he's looking into it and getting all this attention for it, making all this money from it.
[00:01:22]  And no one's paying attention to the guy who spent his whole life in the dirt, you know, knees deep in the mud, digging through up, digging up all these bones and doing all this research.
[00:01:32]  So, so that being said, I understand your perspective of it.
[00:01:36]  And I think that when you, when, as far as people like Graham, And his followers.
[00:01:44]  Because the one thing I can say about Graham is that he did get people like me interested in this stuff.
[00:01:51]  I mean, look, I have colleagues that got interested in archaeology because they read Graham Hancock.
[00:01:55]  Right.
[00:01:56]  And now they're full blown archaeologists.
[00:01:57]  They don't anymore in any way agree with him.
[00:02:00]  Yeah.
[00:02:00]  But that's how they got into the field.
[00:02:02]  I know several people like that.
[00:02:04]  And at the same time, I think that when you believe you're on the right side of history or the right side of an argument, You can go so far to defend it that you end up becoming the very thing that you think you were fighting against.
[00:02:22]  Yeah.
[00:02:23]  I want to make clear, first of all, that I have nothing against Graham as a person.
[00:02:27]  Right.
[00:02:27]  Right.
[00:02:27]  I want to make that really clear.
[00:02:28]  And I have nothing against people who disagree with mainstream archaeology, if you will.
[00:02:34]  I hate the term mainstream because it's just insulting.
[00:02:36]  But I have nothing against people that disagree with archaeologists and have fun thinking about the ancient world in a variety of different ways, whether they're just hanging out, drinking a beer, or getting stoned and saying, Right.
[00:02:47]  Oh, could aliens have done this or something like that?
[00:02:49]  There's nothing wrong with that, right?
[00:02:52]  But part of the issue when an idea gets really popular, like, say, some of Graham's books on, you know, Fingerprints of the Gods and stuff like that, I mean, even today, if you go on Amazon.com and you look up bestsellers in the field of archaeology, his book is almost always there, often at the top, sometimes usually in the top 10.
[00:03:09]  And so, what that leads to, and like I started getting on social media, what?
[00:03:13]  Six years ago.
[00:03:14]  And you get swarmed with questions about this.
[00:03:17]  Yeah.
[00:03:17]  And Look, as you said, I'm knee deep in the evidence.
[00:03:21]  I'm going to give the honest perspective from that evidence.
[00:03:26]  That's what I'm here to do.
[00:03:28]  I'm here to tell you honestly what the evidence says.
[00:03:30]  So that's really all it is in my mind.
[00:03:33]  So, why are you and your colleagues trying to cover up this advanced ice age civilization?
[00:03:37]  We're being paid for it.
[00:03:38]  The Smithsonian.
[00:03:39]  Who's paying?
[00:03:39]  Yeah, the Smithsonian.
[00:03:40]  The Smithsonian.
[00:03:42]  The UN.
[00:03:43]  The UN.
[00:03:44]  All these kinds of things.
[00:03:45]  George Soros?
[00:03:46]  No, he doesn't really write too many checks for archaeology, but you know.
[00:03:50]  I do use Windows computers, so Bill Gates funds the technology and stuff like that.
[00:03:55]  And so, you know, it's really nice to get access to this.
[00:03:57]  I mean, my computer here is about four years old.
[00:03:59]  And, like, you know, it's like, it still works because this was top model four years ago, like a supercomputer.
[00:04:05]  And so, you know, meaning I paid $1,000 for it four years ago.
[00:04:10]  Oh, my God.
[00:04:10]  But, you know, so yeah, I'm making the big bucks, right?
[00:04:13]  Yeah.
[00:04:14]  I was telling you before we started recording that I was talking to my friend, my new friend, Amon Hillman, who was recently on the podcast and brought me into this whole world of classics and ancient Greece.
[00:04:28]  And I asked him about Atlantis.
[00:04:29]  I asked him because he is, as far as I'm aware, one of the people that has read probably more Greek than he's read more Greek than anybody I know personally.
[00:04:38]  Let's put it that way.
[00:04:39]  I know a lot of people have read a lot of Greek, so he's probably up there among them.
[00:04:41]  He spent 30 years reading Greek and translating Greek.
[00:04:43]  Yeah, of course.
[00:04:44]  And he, his, and it clearly shows.
[00:04:47]  He thinks one thing he always says is it's all about the primary sources.
[00:04:50]  He's like, if it's not a primary source, he's like, you can get lost.
[00:04:54]  And I asked him what his opinion was on Plato's description of what he thought about Plato and what he thought about Plato's.
[00:05:02]  Writing about Atlantis.
[00:05:04]  He's like, Plato to me was boring.
[00:05:06]  He's like, he bores the out of me.
[00:05:08]  And I thought he was an ass, but let me look into it and see what I can find.
[00:05:12]  So he spent all morning looking up everything Plato wrote about Atlantis.
[00:05:16]  And his conclusion was that Plato basically lied about it, which kind of bummed me out, to be honest, because I'm a fan of the Atlantis story.
[00:05:26]  And that he was a propagandist.
[00:05:28]  And a lot of people thought he lied, including Aristotle.
[00:05:32]  And a According to a lot of people in academia and a lot of scholars, apparently it's consensus that Plato did lie a lot about Socrates.
[00:05:44]  Yeah, we can talk about that.
[00:05:45]  And I think, so all right, the term lie is a loaded term, right?
[00:05:51]  But when it comes to Plato and particularly the Atlantis story, it's a perfect example of what we call a noble lie, right?
[00:05:58]  And so this is actually, I have a YouTube video coming out in about a month on this.
[00:06:01]  It's the reason I joined YouTube, was to make this video.
[00:06:05]  Because I'm writing a book on Atlantis, right?
[00:06:07]  And so, my goal here is everybody's interested in Atlantis right now.
[00:06:11]  It's all over YouTube.
[00:06:12]  It's all over the internet.
[00:06:13]  It's all over what people are talking about.
[00:06:15]  And so, let's take an actual scholarly perspective on it.
[00:06:18]  And like Amon, I have experience reading ancient Greek.
[00:06:21]  I've not read nearly as much as him because I focus on archaeology.
[00:06:24]  But at the same time, I also have done a lot of archaeology.
[00:06:26]  So, I've excavated in Athens, Greece, right?
[00:06:30]  So, right where Plato grew up and taught, I study material from there.
[00:06:35]  And I work with an excavation team there.
[00:06:36]  I'm one of the.
[00:06:37]  You know, one of many, but one of the world experts on ancient Athens.
[00:06:41]  And so I realized it was a few years ago, actually, this is how I got started on this topic.
[00:06:45]  I was on social media and there was a new TV show on the Discovery Channel coming out about Atlantis.
[00:06:49]  And the host thought that he'd done some research and he wrote this paper that he was hoping to get published.
[00:06:56]  And that's what the show was based on.
[00:06:58]  And so he tried, he's like, no, this is really scholarly.
[00:07:00]  Let's have scholars look at this.
[00:07:02]  So I told him, I said this publicly on Twitter.
[00:07:04]  I said, if you want to send it to me, I will do a public peer review of your paper.
[00:07:09]  But warning, I'm going to.
[00:07:10]  You know, be honest and critical, right?
[00:07:12]  That's what you do as a scholar to other scholars.
[00:07:15]  And so he sent it along, and it was actually, in many ways, just like Graham's books, a well researched paper in the sense that he'd done a lot of reading, cited a lot of stuff, but sometimes people who don't have the training and the experience miss the forest for the trees.
[00:07:29]  And so that's where some of these issues come in.
[00:07:32]  And I realized that because I focus on Athens, that actually I had the smoking gun on how to demonstrate to people why.
[00:07:41]  Atlantis doesn't exist.
[00:07:42]  So let's think about this.
[00:07:45]  And I want to say first off that maybe I found Atlantis in a certain way.
[00:07:49]  If you think about it like that, and we can actually sit there and fact check it.
[00:07:52]  How would you yourself go about taking a text with descriptions of places and look for Atlantis and fact check it?
[00:07:59]  And so, just so you get the context of that text, it's a conversation between friends with Socrates and Critias and Timaeus.
[00:08:06]  And they're sitting there and they're talking about it's set up like this where the, you know, Plato's Republic?
[00:08:12]  You ever heard of that?
[00:08:12]  Yep.
[00:08:13]  In Plato's Republic, he has a conversation, Socrates has a conversation with other people, and they build this ideal city, the perfect constitution for how people can live in kind of peace and harmony.
[00:08:23]  Right.
[00:08:23]  And then, like, A few days later, it's a group of people that they're saying, Now, Socrates, he starts off, he says, Now, I want to see how that ideal city acts in a certain situation, in war.
[00:08:35]  How is this city going to act in war?
[00:08:37]  And so, one of my colleagues, he's a, where is he?
[00:08:40]  University of Vermont, Mark Usher, he's published on Plato's Republic, and he sort of thinks of it as Sim City.
[00:08:45]  You ever play Sim City?
[00:08:46]  You sort of build this city block by block by block.
[00:08:49]  That's what they do in the Republic.
[00:08:51]  Now, for the Atlantis story, Socrates is saying, Let's play the game of civilization.
[00:08:56]  We're going to create this civilization over here.
[00:08:58]  It looks like that.
[00:08:59]  This is the ideal city, and what we're going to do is we're going to make this early version of Athens from 9,000 years ago.
[00:09:05]  That's going to be our ideal city.
[00:09:08]  And then we need an opponent for it to fight against.
[00:09:10]  That's going to be Atlantis.
[00:09:11]  And so we're going to create this Atlantis sort of thing with this island and concentric rings, and we're going to build it up block by block by block.
[00:09:19]  And then we're going to see what happens if they fight.
[00:09:22]  And that's what the story is, right?
[00:09:24]  That's the whole war between Athens and Atlantis.
[00:09:27]  And that's what the entire thing is about.
[00:09:29]  That's if you go and read the Plato from cover to cover.
[00:09:32]  That's what it is.
[00:09:33]  And so, how would you actually fact check this as a true or false story?
[00:09:38]  Well, going back to Atlanta, like what his evidence was for the story of Atlantis, it was that allegedly Solon.
[00:09:48]  Right.
[00:09:48]  We can talk about that too.
[00:09:49]  Solon.
[00:09:49]  Well, let's not go there yet.
[00:09:50]  Okay.
[00:09:50]  Let's not go there yet.
[00:09:51]  Well, that's a different topic, and I have stuff ready on that as well.
[00:09:55]  Okay.
[00:09:55]  But let's first think how would you actually go and fact check a war between Athens and Atlantis?
[00:10:03]  You would have to go look for evidence of.
[00:10:07]  Dead people?
[00:10:08]  Maybe.
[00:10:08]  Where would you look though?
[00:10:10]  Where would you first look?
[00:10:12]  You would look somewhere between Atlantis and wherever the description of Atlantis apparently was and where Athens is, right?
[00:10:18]  But what do we know?
[00:10:20]  What can we start with?
[00:10:21]  If you want to fact check something and ground truth it, archaeologists work from the known to the unknown, right?
[00:10:26]  So if we're saying there's a war between Athens and Atlantis, what do we want to look for?
[00:10:30]  We want to first look at Athens.
[00:10:32]  Does Plato's description of Athens actually match up with what we know of Athens?
[00:10:37]  Because we've done a lot of work in Athens.
[00:10:40]  People have been excavating there for 200 years.
[00:10:42]  We have dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands.
[00:10:46]  I'm not sure.
[00:10:46]  I have to count.
[00:10:47]  But we have hundreds of historical sources for Athens and thousands if we include inscriptions, we include art, we include all this kind of stuff of Athens.
[00:10:55]  And we have millions and millions of pottery fragments and sculptural fragments, houses that stretch back 5,000 years.
[00:11:01]  Guess what they don't do?
[00:11:02]  They don't stretch back 9,000 years, though.
[00:11:04]  Nobody lived in Athens 9,000 years ago.
[00:11:07]  So, you know, for him to say there was a city there 9,000 years ago, no.
[00:11:12]  Way.
[00:11:13]  There wasn't anybody there.
[00:11:14]  There's literally nothing there.
[00:11:15]  And you say, oh, well, maybe archaeologists haven't dug enough.
[00:11:18]  Well, you do realize that the Athenian Acropolis, here, let me pull up my screen if you don't mind.
[00:11:25]  This is the Athenian Acropolis.
[00:11:26]  This is what everybody thinks of when you think about Athens, right?
[00:11:30]  And so you pull it up.
[00:11:31]  This has been excavated to bedrock.
[00:11:34]  You can't dig down any further.
[00:11:36]  It's been fully excavated.
[00:11:38]  And if you sort of look off down to the left, this is where the.
[00:11:41]  Wait, yeah, I'm looking the right way.
[00:11:42]  Down to the left is the Athenian Agora.
[00:11:44]  It's right sort of here.
[00:11:45]  This is where the Americans excavate.
[00:11:47]  Further off this way, the Germans excavate, the Greeks excavate every single time there's construction going on.
[00:11:52]  Everywhere around Athens, there's been hundreds of different archaeological excavations, and we're always trying to go down until there's no more human material there, until bedrock, if you see what I mean.
[00:12:02]  And there might be practical reasons we can't.
[00:12:03]  It's dangerous to go too low or something like that.
[00:12:05]  But when we can, and that's a lot of times, we dig down as far as we can until there is no human material left.
[00:12:12]  And then we keep digging to test that there's nothing underneath that, right?
[00:12:16]  And so we can actually check.
[00:12:18]  Plato, does he get stuff right about Athens?
[00:12:21]  And the answer is no, he does not.
[00:12:23]  Not only is the chronology of it wrong, so there's nobody here 9,000 years ago.
[00:12:28]  So this is when he's writing about it in Republic, you're saying?
[00:12:30]  No, he's writing about it in the Atlantis story, in the Timaeus Critias.
[00:12:33]  In the Timaeus Critias.
[00:12:34]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:34]  So he's writing about a hypothetical war between Atlantis and Athens.
[00:12:38]  And he spends about half of the Critias describing this early Athens, and then the next half of the Critias describing early Atlantis.
[00:12:45]  And everybody, everybody goes and takes the descriptions of Atlantis.
[00:12:50]  Round circular island and stuff like that.
[00:12:52]  And they're like, oh, there's something round over here.
[00:12:54]  That might be Atlantis.
[00:12:55]  But dude, there's a bazillion round things.
[00:12:58]  You know what I mean?
[00:12:58]  Like, you can't be confirmed one thing is Atlantis or not.
[00:13:02]  So, what you're saying is that when he's talking about a war between Atlantis and Athens, this is involved in his sort of noble lie to create a society?
[00:13:16]  Yes, it's involved.
[00:13:18]  No, I wouldn't call that a noble lie.
[00:13:20]  It's involved in his way of demonstrating the right way of creating a government.
[00:13:25]  And so, Athens in this story is the ideal city.
[00:13:28]  It has all the virtues, all the goodness of what they described in the Republic, while Atlantis is actually the bad guys.
[00:13:36]  It's kind of, you know, it's funny because today we have this conception that Atlantis was hyper civilized, advanced, and stuff like that.
[00:13:43]  That's not according to Plato.

=== Plato's Dystopian Warning (02:38) ===

[00:13:45]  According to Plato, this is a dystopia, it's a bad place to be.
[00:13:49]  And so, you know, it had too much wealth, it was corrupted, and that's why it fell.
[00:13:53]  So, was the idea that he wanted a Paint some sort of an enemy?
[00:13:57]  Yeah, it does.
[00:13:57]  Like an enemy that only they knew didn't exist, but maybe that the population thought was real to keep everyone.
[00:14:03]  Not that the population thought it was real.
[00:14:05]  The idea was to create a story that would show how his ideal city works, a clear fiction.
[00:14:09]  Okay.
[00:14:09]  You know, and we'll get into the dissemination of it, the story, how it got passed on, and how that shows that it's a fiction.
[00:14:16]  But from a modern perspective, we can actually ground truth or fact check Plato by checking what he gets wrong about Athens or right.
[00:14:23]  And he gets it all wrong.
[00:14:24]  What he describes.
[00:14:25]  So, for example, I have this arrow here on the screen, right?
[00:14:27]  Yeah.
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[00:16:08]  But he had all these ideas on how he wanted to shape society.
[00:16:11]  Yes.
[00:16:11]  And like re engineer society.
[00:16:12]  And that's a philosophical question rather than a material question.
[00:16:15]  Right?
[00:16:15]  It wasn't like we need to innovate new technology.
[00:16:18]  That was like we need to understand how to educate people.
[00:16:21]  Okay.
[00:16:22]  That's what a lot of it was around.

=== Oral History of Athens (12:51) ===

[00:16:23]  We want the philosophers to rule rather than the warriors, for example.
[00:16:27]  We live in a society today where the philosophers don't rule, and that's part of the problem.
[00:16:31]  So he had this idea in the Republic of the philosopher kings.
[00:16:34]  That's who's supposed to rule to create a just society that educates people and sort of a.
[00:16:39]  And the knights were below them.
[00:16:40]  And he was very into censorship.
[00:16:42]  They have a long discussion in the Republic of Homer.
[00:16:44]  Yeah, he wanted to get rid of Homer.
[00:16:45]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:16:46]  Yeah, that's a good point.
[00:16:47]  That's in the section on the noble lie.
[00:16:49]  He wanted to get rid of a lot of different myths because he thought that, like, even if those myths are true, they teach bad morals.
[00:16:56]  So we should instead only have myths that teach people how to behave correctly.
[00:17:01]  That was like, I compare this to Santa Claus.
[00:17:03]  It's sort of like, you know, you have your kids, you're raising your children around Christmas time, and you sort of say, you got to be good.
[00:17:09]  So you get presents from Santa Claus, right?
[00:17:12]  And that's how Plato saw education, right?
[00:17:15]  That was his way of seeing education, was to teach good behavior through the stories that you tell.
[00:17:20]  And so, you know, and so, yeah, so like here you can see, if you just want to like look at this materially, you see how there's the Athenian Acropolis right here.
[00:17:27]  Yep.
[00:17:28]  But then to the left, there's another big hill.
[00:17:30]  That's called Lycavitos.
[00:17:31]  I used to live right near it.
[00:17:32]  There's a church on it, it's a beautiful place.
[00:17:34]  But in the story of Atlantis, when he's describing Athens, he describes geologically that these two hills, which are miles and miles away from each other, were actually connected and part of the same thing.
[00:17:47]  And geologically, we know that's not true.
[00:17:49]  They were never connected, and there was no rainwater that eroded them away.
[00:17:53]  So, we just know based off of natural sciences that his description of this early Athens doesn't match up with what we can tell.
[00:18:03]  Could he have meant connected in a different way?
[00:18:05]  No, because he describes very clearly a rainstorm that strips the sediment and causes it to flood away.
[00:18:11]  That's actually what he describes.
[00:18:13]  It's one of his floods, let's say.
[00:18:15]  Yeah.
[00:18:15]  And so we know that flood just didn't happen here.
[00:18:17]  It was just simply knowing.
[00:18:20]  Another one, let's check this out.
[00:18:24]  That these warriors in this early Republic version of Atlantis had this temple of Athena right here, right?
[00:18:30]  And it's really cool.
[00:18:31]  Do you see the outline of that temple there?
[00:18:34]  There's like small walls that are not a major building there, right where the arrow is pointing in the middle of.
[00:18:40]  That's called the Old Temple to Athena.
[00:18:42]  And it's the most important building on the Athenian Acropolis, despite the fact that it's ruined.
[00:18:47]  And so what it was was it was ruined by the Persians when they invaded in 480 BC.
[00:18:52]  And we know really well from dozens of historical sources.
[00:18:56]  And the archaeological evidence from the excavations that happened in the early 20th, late 19th century.
[00:19:01]  They're called the Dorpfeld Foundations today after Wilhelm Dorpfeld, the archaeologist that described them.
[00:19:05]  And so we actually know when it dates to.
[00:19:07]  And guess what?
[00:19:08]  It was built around the time Solon was around.
[00:19:11]  So, you know, it was not built, you know, 9,000 years earlier.
[00:19:15]  In fact, it was built right when Solon lived, you know, the late 7th century, early 6th century.
[00:19:21]  We have the, I should have put some in here, we have the sculptures from it, right?
[00:19:25]  And in fact, you can still see the paint on the sculptures.
[00:19:27]  We can Google it and look it up if you want.
[00:19:29]  Okay.
[00:19:29]  Because they're really friggin' cool.
[00:19:30]  People don't really realize that paint is on all these marble things were painted.
[00:19:35]  This is what's called the Bluebeard sculpture.
[00:19:37]  This is the sculpture.
[00:19:39]  It's named after the blue beards these guys have.
[00:19:42]  And so, my point is that all this marble that we see from the ancient world is mostly painted.
[00:19:46]  And the only time we see it in this case, it was the temple was knocked down by the Persians and it was buried rapidly.
[00:19:53]  So, therefore, it was protected by being buried.
[00:19:55]  And so, that's why the paint is still on it.
[00:19:57]  And if you go to Athens today, it's in the Acropolis Museum.
[00:20:00]  They have a whole section on painted sculpture and all this painted sculpture they found so you can see the past like how you should see it.
[00:20:07]  We see it as this bare white marble.
[00:20:09]  No, it was actually really colorful.
[00:20:12]  Really, really colorful.
[00:20:13]  This is faded, of course, but if you were to reconstruct it, it would almost look like Vegas.
[00:20:17]  You know, like when we look at this picture, we see this bare white marble.
[00:20:22]  No, it would all be very colorfully painted like Vegas, like very garish.
[00:20:26]  And so, you know, when Plato's describing this temple, dude, this is the most famous structure.
[00:20:31]  So the Athenians, very consciously, because it was their most sacred temple to Athena, and they're named after Athena, and the Acropolis is Athena's rock, after the Persians destroyed the city, they.
[00:20:42]  Specifically, did not build anything over the foundations of this temple.
[00:20:46]  They left it visible as a reminder of that destruction by the Persians.
[00:20:51]  And so it was always visible through antiquity.
[00:20:54]  It's something everybody knew really well.
[00:20:56]  It was part of your education as an Athenian what this temple was and what it signified, you know, what it meant in terms of the city, the foundation of the city as the city of Athens, and the destruction by the Persians, which also then shows how Athens ended up beating the Persians, which led to its glory days.
[00:21:14]  Right?
[00:21:14]  So that's like a major component of Athenian history.
[00:21:18]  So if Plato is getting that wrong, his audience who are Athenians are going to know that immediately.
[00:21:23]  They're going to be like, no, the Archaeos Neos, the old temple, that's right there.
[00:21:28]  I know all about it.
[00:21:29]  So everybody who saw, who read that story and who was an Athenian, the people he knew, the people he was talking to and whatnot, they would immediately know this is not a true story.
[00:21:38]  Right.
[00:21:38]  Because they know the real history of that temple, which was only a few generations before them at the time Plato lived.
[00:21:44]  So, you know, it's not that long.
[00:21:45]  It's within living history, right?
[00:21:48]  And so, you know, this is really well understood.
[00:21:50]  So, you know, we can go and ground truth Athens and demonstrate that that's not right.
[00:21:55]  So, if we can't trust the details about Plato's Athens from the same story, why would we trust the details about Plato's Atlantis as being anything worth checking for?
[00:22:06]  So, that's what I mean by ground truthing or fact checking.
[00:22:09]  And we do this all the time in archaeology.
[00:22:11]  We're always ground truthing our evidence.
[00:22:13]  You know, like think about it you're out in a field with, let's say, a metal detector.
[00:22:16]  We don't usually use metal detectors, we might use ground penetrating radar.
[00:22:19]  Or something like that, you're trying to understand what's underneath there.
[00:22:22]  You get a ping.
[00:22:25]  Are you gonna assume there's necessarily treasure there and just walk away and say, hey, we got treasure?
[00:22:30]  Cool, I got a ping on my metal detector.
[00:22:32]  Or are you gonna test that?
[00:22:34]  You're gonna test that, right?
[00:22:35]  You're gonna actually excavate that carefully and understand what's there.
[00:22:39]  So you're not just gonna assume something.
[00:22:41]  This is what we do as archaeologists.
[00:22:43]  Everything we do is from the known to the unknown.
[00:22:46]  When we're digging a new layer of sediment, a new layer pops up, we don't just jump to the other side of the trench.
[00:22:52]  And assume it's going to show up there, we peel back that layer until it's fully exposed.
[00:22:57]  Same thing with a bit of a wall.
[00:22:58]  We find a bit of a wall.
[00:22:59]  We don't just start digging somewhere else.
[00:23:01]  No, we expose the entire wall carefully from the known to the unknown.
[00:23:05]  And so that's what we do as archaeologists.
[00:23:07]  And so this is how an archaeologist would look at this sort of Atlantis story, right?
[00:23:13]  Now, if you want to think about it how a philosopher would look at the Atlantis story.
[00:23:19]  Oh, actually, before I go on, let me go back a couple.
[00:23:23]  Why is my computer being weird?
[00:23:26]  Should we talk about Solon?
[00:23:27]  Yeah, that's what I want to get to.
[00:23:30]  The origin of this Atlantic Solon.
[00:23:32]  Yeah, so let's get to that.
[00:23:33]  I have that right here as a slide.
[00:23:35]  So, look.
[00:23:35]  Okay.
[00:23:37]  So, yeah, we already covered this.
[00:23:39]  They start off the story by summarizing yesterday's conversation about the Republic.
[00:23:43]  And then they say, here's the direct quotes from Socrates.
[00:23:46]  He's like, I'd like to hear from someone an account of our city, the Republic, contending against others in a typical intercity contest.
[00:23:54]  I'd like to hear how it does itself proud as it goes to war and how in wartime its citizens display qualities appropriate to education, upbringing, military, da da da da.
[00:24:02]  That's the whole setup, right?
[00:24:03]  That Socrates asks for.
[00:24:06]  This guy Critias shows up and he's like, I'm gonna tell you a fully true story though.
[00:24:11]  And you know, it's this sort of rhetorical thing.
[00:24:14]  Can you punch in on that, like zoom in on it a little bit?
[00:24:16]  Yeah, well, so this is actually the title of an article by a guy who's analyzed this.
[00:24:20]  But he sort of says, I'm gonna tell you a fully true story.
[00:24:23]  And you know, have you ever watched a movie where the start of the movie is like, everything in this story is 100% true, right?
[00:24:31]  Do you immediately think that every single little detail in that movie is 100% true?
[00:24:35]  No, not at all.
[00:24:36]  Like, that's just, it's a, it's a, It's who accuses, excuses first, right?
[00:24:42]  You know, it's like, yeah, so that's this rhetorical thing.
[00:24:45]  So then you think about where does this story come from?
[00:24:48]  And so Critias says, he says, I heard it from my grandfather when I was 10 years old and my grandfather was 90 years old.
[00:24:57]  He heard it from his father, who heard it from Solon, who went to Egypt and talked to a priest who said that he had read texts that dated from 8,000 years ago about a story that dates to 9,000 years ago.
[00:25:12]  So, here we can have it all in reverse.
[00:25:13]  There's the destruction of Atlantis 9,000 years before Solon, so 9,600 BC.
[00:25:19]  That's an oral history or something for a thousand years.
[00:25:22]  We don't really know.
[00:25:23]  It's not explained.
[00:25:24]  Then it's written down by Egyptians a thousand years later than that.
[00:25:28]  And there's no actual writing at this time in Egypt, by the way.
[00:25:31]  We have no writing from Egypt till like, you know, 4,000 years before Solon, 3,000 years before Solon.
[00:25:36]  So, that's a red flag to modern scholars.
[00:25:38]  There's no writing in Egypt that early.
[00:25:41]  In fact, there's no writing anywhere in the world that early.
[00:25:43]  Then the priest read the record.
[00:25:46]  Years pass, he tells it by memory to Solon without consulting the written records and even says, I'm not consulting the written records.
[00:25:52]  But there are no written records, though.
[00:25:53]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:25:54]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:55]  Okay.
[00:25:55]  This is just a story.
[00:25:56]  This is in the fictional story.
[00:25:57]  That's what he's saying.
[00:25:58]  Then Solon tells his relative Dropides, who then tells it to his son Critias the Elder, who at the age of 90, Critias the Elder tells it to his 10 year old grandson, Critias the Younger.
[00:26:08]  Then Critias the Younger tells it to Socrates.
[00:26:10]  Then 50 years later, Plato writes down the story.
[00:26:16]  But we don't even know that, like, did Plato actually say he got this from Socrates?
[00:26:20]  Did he say he got it from Solon?
[00:26:21]  No, no, no.
[00:26:22]  Plato is never there in his stories.
[00:26:24]  He's never a character.
[00:26:26]  He's mentioned briefly in the trial of Socrates, where he's one of the people that helped post bail or whatever for Socrates.
[00:26:34]  And then he's mentioned briefly in one of the conversations that happens, like, the night before Socrates dies.
[00:26:40]  And there it's mentioned that he's sick and that's why he's not present for the conversation.
[00:26:44]  But other than that, Plato is never a character.
[00:26:46]  In his own stories.
[00:26:47]  And nobody, no people really believe that his stories are all true either.
[00:26:50]  They're constantly.
[00:26:52]  Apparently, it was an Egyptian priestess or something like that.
[00:26:54]  No, no, priest.
[00:26:55]  I thought it was a woman.
[00:26:56]  No, no.
[00:26:57]  I don't think there's any evidence that this person even existed.
[00:27:00]  We don't have a name for that person.
[00:27:01]  We don't know a name.
[00:27:01]  We don't know anything about that.
[00:27:02]  We don't have a name or anything.
[00:27:03]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:04]  So if this, if you want to do the math, this was apparently, so apparently Linus existed 12,000 years ago, something like that.
[00:27:12]  For Moss, it would be like 11,500 years ago.
[00:27:14]  11,500 years ago, right.
[00:27:16]  And Homer doesn't talk about it at all.
[00:27:18]  Nobody in antiquity ever talks about it at all.
[00:27:20]  Until Plato.
[00:27:21]  Until Plato.
[00:27:22]  And then, Steve, can you pull up those two texts or those two, the text from Amun, the text message?
[00:27:28]  He talks about a historian in the first century who wrote about it.
[00:27:33]  Just go to the text thread.
[00:27:34]  Yeah, there you go.
[00:27:35]  Can you punch in on that?
[00:27:37]  So, this is what I was texting.
[00:27:38]  There's a good reason Plato is not.
[00:27:40]  And yeah, that's actually another really good point.
[00:27:41]  Go back to that.
[00:27:42]  Plato is not a historian, he's a philosopher.
[00:27:45]  His goal with all of his dialogues is to make philosophy, not history.
[00:27:48]  Right.
[00:27:49]  He said, Plato is a goddamn liar.
[00:27:52]  He is making up sources.
[00:27:54]  And that's the title of my YouTube video.
[00:27:56]  Is Plato a lying liar?
[00:27:57]  Using Solon and fake Egyptian sources.
[00:28:00]  Typical.
[00:28:01]  Plato is a huge douche.
[00:28:03]  I'll call you when I'm finished.
[00:28:04]  There is a good reason Plato is not considered a historian.
[00:28:08]  He fakes his sources.
[00:28:09]  And then Amon goes on to show me some sources.
[00:28:11]  Go to the next thread with Amon, or the next text screenshot.
[00:28:14]  There you go.
[00:28:15]  Here's Plato in Critias admits he's got no written sources from the Egyptians.
[00:28:19]  This is why nobody in antiquity writes Atlantis into the histories.
[00:28:25]  Greeks were very anal about written sources and quotes.
[00:28:28]  Because of the above statements in Critias, other Greeks didn't take Atlantis seriously.
[00:28:33]  Herodotus, a real historian, only mentions the name as part of his Mediterranean Sea geography.
[00:28:39]  Why?
[00:28:40]  No sources.
[00:28:41]  There are no written records of an empire that controlled all of the Western Mediterranean from Athens to Etruria.
[00:28:49]  Nobody in antiquity believed Plato's bullshit.
[00:28:51]  This is why I hate Plato.
[00:28:53]  The following is Strabo, Strabo.
[00:28:56]  He points out that people know Plato is making Atlantis up.
[00:29:00]  He appears to quote Aristotle, saying Plato made it up and was full of it.
[00:29:06]  He doesn't mention Aristotle by name, but they basically think that Aristotle wrote that.
[00:29:10]  There's two scholars that have talked about that.
[00:29:11]  And that's the source that he's talking about right there.
[00:29:13]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

=== Aristotle Questions Plato (04:39) ===

[00:29:14]  And there are several sources like that as well, where they're the, you know, especially in much later in antiquity, like right before the Middle Ages and the late Roman Empire, there's like the later, the Neoplatonism, it's called, sort of the new school of Plato and stuff like that.
[00:29:27]  And you see that different philosophers had totally different ideas, but they really had no idea.
[00:29:32]  And so nobody ever took this seriously as a history at all until really just a few hundred years ago.
[00:29:37]  Hold on.
[00:29:38]  Whatever happened to the legend Chuck Norris?
[00:29:40]  That's the wrong question.
[00:29:41]  What did Chuck Norris happen to?
[00:29:43]  I just saw a video of him on the interweb and I was shocked.
[00:29:46]  He's already in his 80s, but he's still kicking ass, working out, and staying active.
[00:29:50]  And what's even more shocking is he's even stronger, can work out longer, and has more energy to hang out with his grandkids.
[00:29:57]  And he did all this by making one change.
[00:29:59]  And he said he feels like he's only in his 50s.
[00:30:01]  Yeah, his wife even started doing this one thing too, and she's never felt better.
[00:30:05]  She says she feels 10 years younger.
[00:30:06]  Her body looks leaner, and she has energy all day.
[00:30:09]  Go to chuckdefense.comslash Danny or click the link in the description.
[00:30:14]  It will change the way you think about your health.
[00:30:16]  Just check it out, chuckdefense.comslash Danny, and click the link in the description below to watch the video.
[00:30:23]  You won't believe how simple it is.
[00:30:25]  Just a reminder the legendary Chuck Norris is 84 years old and has more energy than me.
[00:30:32]  He discovered he could create dramatic changes to his health simply focusing on three things that sabotage our body as we age.
[00:30:40]  Watch this method by clicking the link in the description box below at chuckdefense.comslash Danny.
[00:30:47]  Is your interest peaked yet?
[00:30:49]  Don't forget, chuckdefense.com slash Danny.
[00:30:52]  It's linked below.
[00:30:54]  Hail Chuck Norris.
[00:30:56]  Right.
[00:30:56]  And we can talk about that as well because that's interesting.
[00:30:58]  But I do want to.
[00:30:59]  Do you mind booting back up my slides?
[00:31:02]  Yeah.
[00:31:03]  So, this chain of transmission, which, you know, does this seem preposterous to you?
[00:31:07]  Mm hmm.
[00:31:08]  Okay.
[00:31:09]  Guess what?
[00:31:09]  Plato does the exact chain of transmission for other preposterous stories.
[00:31:13]  So, in Plato's Parmenides, it's this great debate between Socrates, Parmenides, and Zeno.
[00:31:19]  So, Two different philosophers from earlier generations than Socrates.
[00:31:23]  And it's witnessed by a guy named Pythodorus.
[00:31:25]  Pythodorus then tells it to Antiphon when he's a child.
[00:31:28]  As an adult, Antiphon tells it to Cephalus.
[00:31:30]  Cephalus then tells the story of a trip to Athens where he heard this story, and then decades later, Plato writes it down.
[00:31:36]  But the dates we have for these people tell us that Parmenides was way too old to debate Socrates.
[00:31:42]  Parmenides would have been something like 100 years old, and Socrates would have been like 15.
[00:31:46]  Right.
[00:31:46]  You know?
[00:31:47]  And so it's just like, we do not think this debate ever happened.
[00:31:50]  It's philosophy.
[00:31:52]  It's for Plato to explain how different philosophical schools of thought would argue against one another, right?
[00:31:58]  Because that's how dialogues work.
[00:32:00]  And that's one of Plato's.
[00:32:02]  I actually disagree with Ammon.
[00:32:04]  I think that Plato is a brilliant scholar, or not a scholar, he's a brilliant storyteller.
[00:32:09]  Because he just writes these arguments with people arguing with one another, and he also gets to hide his own point of view, therefore.
[00:32:15]  Because his point of view is never there, it's just his characters that are speaking, right?
[00:32:19]  And you can see this again.
[00:32:21]  You ever heard of Plato's Symposium?
[00:32:22]  That's a famous one.
[00:32:23]  And so in this Plato's Symposium, there's this story about the birth of love, you know, the goddess love.
[00:32:30]  And Diotima tells the story to Socrates when he's a young man.
[00:32:34]  As an old man, he then tells the story at this drinking party, the symposium, hosted by Agathon.
[00:32:39]  And then Aristodemus, who was there and passed out drunk at the end of the night, then tells the story to Apollodorus.
[00:32:44]  Apollodorus then tells the story to Glaucon.
[00:32:47]  Apollodorus then tells the story to an unknown companion about how he told the story to Glaucon.
[00:32:53]  And then Plato then writes it all down.
[00:32:55]  And that's the preposterous transmission of this story.
[00:32:57]  And we don't think this drinking party ever happened because both Socrates and Aristophanes, the famous comedian, were there and they hated each other.
[00:33:07]  Because Aristophanes made a comedy.
[00:33:09]  Made fun of Socrates all the time.
[00:33:10]  Nonstop.
[00:33:11]  He has a whole comedy where it's all about fart jokes.
[00:33:13]  And Socrates is going around sounding like an asshole and farting the entire time.
[00:33:18]  And it's called The Clouds.
[00:33:19]  It's a lot of fun to read.
[00:33:21]  And so even in the Apology, so the story of Plato's trial, or sorry, Socrates' trial, Socrates in there talks about Aristophanes and other comedians and how it's their fault that he's on trial.
[00:33:34]  So they hated each other.
[00:33:35]  And there's no way they'd have a congenial.
[00:33:38]  Dinner party drinking together and telling stories.
[00:33:41]  And what's really cool is even in this story where they set up the story behind the symposium, there's a wrong version where somebody misremembered the story of this drinking party.
[00:33:51]  And Apollodorus is like, no, no, that's wrong.

=== Common Sense Fails Archaeology (13:26) ===

[00:33:54]  You need to, this is the right version, you know?
[00:33:56]  And so it shows how they even recognize there's this tongue in cheek transmission of who remembers what orally.
[00:34:03]  And look, this all makes sense because all of the characters, or most of the characters in Plato's dialogues, were real people.
[00:34:10]  And they're written down just, you know, while some of those real people who were there were still alive.
[00:34:14]  So, you know, Plato creates a situation which explains why this is not a real story, if you see what I mean.
[00:34:21]  So the Athenians who were there recognize why they didn't actually say that, but they're in the story for philosophical reasons.
[00:34:26]  Right.
[00:34:27]  Right.
[00:34:27]  And so that's what it is.
[00:34:29]  It's tongue in cheek.
[00:34:30]  And this is where, you know, look, I hate to beat the drum of expertise and stuff like that, but having familiarity with, These kind of sources, if you want to go look for Atlantis via Plato, you need to first read all of Plato.
[00:34:45]  Exactly.
[00:34:46]  You need to understand Plato.
[00:34:48]  Because if you don't and you just start looking for Atlantis, well, you're not working from the known to the unknown.
[00:34:53]  You're just jacking off, if you see what I mean.
[00:34:55]  No, totally.
[00:34:56]  And so, a good example of that is like we have this issue today.
[00:35:00]  This is an image that will be in my video on Atlantis, created by my lovely wife, Yonita Martini.
[00:35:06]  So, I got a question for you.
[00:35:07]  What is this?
[00:35:07]  How did we make this image?
[00:35:10]  AI.
[00:35:11]  AI.
[00:35:11]  So we made this AI.
[00:35:13]  What makes you think that?
[00:35:14]  I'm just guessing.
[00:35:15]  You're just guessing?
[00:35:16]  Yeah.
[00:35:16]  Which makes a lot of sense, but no.
[00:35:18]  That's how most people make their creative images online these days.
[00:35:20]  I know it is.
[00:35:21]  And we thought about it, but the results weren't real enough.
[00:35:23]  The reason why is because it doesn't look real.
[00:35:26]  This image right here of this temple on the left, that is the Hephaestion in Athens.
[00:35:30]  It is the best preserved temple in all of Greece.
[00:35:33]  And you photoshopped it on the left?
[00:35:34]  Photoshopped it in and everything.
[00:35:35]  You could have just told AI, put this.
[00:35:37]  Yeah, but then it's going to make some bullshit like this.
[00:35:39]  On the left is AI.
[00:35:41]  Look at this.
[00:35:41]  Is that really AI on the left?
[00:35:42]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:35:43]  This is really AI on the left.
[00:35:45]  Look at how this column has a different design at the bottom than that column.
[00:35:49]  Anybody who knows their shit is going to immediately know that that's AI while the other one is real.
[00:35:54]  Right.
[00:35:55]  Not real, but photoshopped off of real sources, right?
[00:35:57]  Right.
[00:35:58]  And so the reality is, you need to know the Context and know the material really well.
[00:36:02]  So let's look at this.
[00:36:04]  Look, Plato and Socrates, these are statues of them in marble from the ancient world.
[00:36:09]  They're in museums today, right?
[00:36:11]  So when you look at these, they are both Socrates, right?
[00:36:13]  Do they look like the same dude?
[00:36:15]  Yes.
[00:36:16]  Yeah, they do.
[00:36:17]  So what would that tell you?
[00:36:18]  You think that this is how Socrates actually looked?
[00:36:21]  I'd say it's pretty, it's better evidence that they look the same.
[00:36:27]  If they look different, it would be different.
[00:36:28]  We have dozens of statues that seem to represent the same person.
[00:36:33]  Would that tell you?
[00:36:33]  Dozens of statues that look similar.
[00:36:35]  That look, yeah, like.
[00:36:36]  So, yeah, I would guess that that's how he looked.
[00:36:38]  Okay, but if you really know your sources and you read.
[00:36:41]  So, Aristophanes describes Plato.
[00:36:43]  Okay.
[00:36:44]  Sorry, Aristophanes describes Socrates.
[00:36:46]  Jesus, there's so many names.
[00:36:47]  Socrates, right, right.
[00:36:48]  Plato describes Socrates.
[00:36:49]  Xenophon describes Socrates.
[00:36:51]  They all describe him in the same way, and they all knew him when he lived, right?
[00:36:55]  So, they all knew him at the time when they wrote their text down.
[00:36:58]  Now, Deborah Nales, one of the biographers of Socrates, as she says, is a quote from her in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[00:37:05]  The extant sources agree that Socrates was profoundly ugly, resembling a satyr more than a man, and resembling not at all the statues that turned up later in ancient times and now grace the internet sites and the covers of books.
[00:37:17]  Well, I mean, those statues aren't that hot.
[00:37:19]  I mean, he's not that hot.
[00:37:19]  He had wide set, bulging eyes that darted sideways and enabled him, like a crab, to see not only what was straight ahead, but what was beside him as well.
[00:37:27]  A flat, upturned nose with flaring nostrils and large, fleshy lips like an ass.
[00:37:33]  So, why do all these statues of Socrates look like the same dude?
[00:37:37]  Why?
[00:37:37]  Because they're all marble copies of a very famous bronze statue made by the famous sculptor Lysippus, who also sculpted Alexander the Great.
[00:37:46]  He was like his personal sculptor.
[00:37:47]  And he was born well after Socrates died, like 15 years after Socrates died.
[00:37:51]  So, what did he base the sculpture off of?
[00:37:53]  Description.
[00:37:54]  Well, so.
[00:37:54]  You're trying to make a prettier version?
[00:37:55]  Yeah, it's idealizing.
[00:37:57]  So, Greek statues are idealized.
[00:38:00]  Fuck.
[00:38:00]  Yeah.
[00:38:01]  And so, this is why you can't just use common sense to interpret archaeological evidence.
[00:38:07]  You need to look at the history of the field.
[00:38:09]  And how we have all tangled with this evidence over hundreds of years to actually understand what the fuck is going on.
[00:38:15]  Right.
[00:38:15]  Right.
[00:38:15]  And so, like, I love people being interested in archaeology, but I'm just going to tell you how it is because I'm not going to infantilize people.
[00:38:22]  Right.
[00:38:22]  I'm not going to treat you like a kid who believes in Santa Claus if I'm talking to an adult.
[00:38:26]  I'm going to say, this is our evidence.
[00:38:28]  Right.
[00:38:30]  And what Plato does is he talks.
[00:38:32]  Do you think Plato lives to get that good looking?
[00:38:34]  No, again, it's idealized.
[00:38:36]  Right.
[00:38:36]  All of these sculptures from the classic.
[00:38:38]  They made Plato look pretty handsome.
[00:38:39]  Yeah.
[00:38:39]  And so, and notice that they all look the same.
[00:38:41]  They all have what you'd call a nice.
[00:38:43]  Big beard, deep souled eyes, a furrowed brow.
[00:38:47]  That's a philosopher trope.
[00:38:49]  Looks like a UFC fighter.
[00:38:50]  Yeah.
[00:38:52]  It's the same reason why I wear an archaeology hat, right?
[00:38:56]  So when somebody sees that statue, they know that's a philosopher because that's how they always make philosophers look.
[00:39:02]  It makes it easy.
[00:39:03]  You don't need to think twice about it because that's a cliche, right?
[00:39:08]  Same thing with an archaeologist wearing an archaeology hat.
[00:39:11]  I'd rather people immediately just say, yeah, Flint's an archaeologist, not have to pay attention and think twice, and instead start.
[00:39:18]  Listening to me, right?
[00:39:19]  And so you want to use cliches sometimes so that the brain doesn't want to get complicated by stuff.
[00:39:25]  That's why comic book heroes all look the same.
[00:39:27]  Right.
[00:39:28]  Right.
[00:39:28]  It's easy.
[00:39:29]  Yes.
[00:39:29]  You know, it's easy.
[00:39:31]  And then, yeah, as Ammon said, Plato is a philosopher, not a historian.
[00:39:36]  And that's why we're not looking for Plato's cave.
[00:39:38]  Right.
[00:39:38]  We know it's a philosophical thought experiment, which is what Atlantis was.
[00:39:42]  Right.
[00:39:43]  If you see what I mean, it was that game of civilization.
[00:39:45]  Yeah.
[00:39:46]  I mean, it makes so much sense.
[00:39:50]  It just makes so much sense.
[00:39:52]  That's why I'm writing a book on it.
[00:39:53]  And I'm upset because I want Atlantis to be real.
[00:39:56]  I know.
[00:39:57]  I know.
[00:39:58]  And if you still believe in it, I don't got a problem with you.
[00:40:00]  But just don't, like, you know, go crazy on archaeologists that are saying, hey, this is why it doesn't exist.
[00:40:05]  You know, you can still believe whatever you want, right?
[00:40:09]  Scott, like, this is something that comes up on this podcast all the time is that a lot of people, not scholars, not people like you, but a lot of people who write books, right?
[00:40:20]  Authors who write about anything.
[00:40:22]  Most of the guests that come on the show are authors.
[00:40:25]  But these authors, 99% of the time, they are writing their books based on other people's books.
[00:40:35]  They don't go to the original source.
[00:40:37]  Very, very, very, very rarely do people go to the original source when they write books, right?
[00:40:42]  So, I mean, that just goes back to what I'm saying, though, is you can't just go to the original source because if you just go to the original source, you don't understand the context of these statutes.
[00:40:50]  Right.
[00:40:51]  And so, you know, you definitely also need to go to scholarship.
[00:40:54]  Yes.
[00:40:55]  Because you can't, it's common here.
[00:40:57]  I have a good example of common sense and why it just doesn't work.
[00:41:01]  So, Heinrich Schliemann, you know who he is?
[00:41:03]  Yeah, I've heard of him.
[00:41:04]  Okay, he's the guy who excavated Troy.
[00:41:06]  And in 1872, he discovered Troy, and everybody says he proved Troy existed.
[00:41:10]  Bullshit!
[00:41:11]  Everybody already knew Troy existed because Alexander the Great visited it, Augustus, the first Roman emperor, visited it.
[00:41:18]  There was a bishop of Troy up until like the 15th century AD.
[00:41:22]  So, you know, nobody really doubted Troy existed as a city.
[00:41:25]  It was just a question of where it is.
[00:41:27]  Right.
[00:41:27]  And so he found Troy, good credit, and he didn't actually.
[00:41:30]  Frank Calvert before him found it.
[00:41:31]  Who heard about it from local Turkish people.
[00:41:33]  But either way, he was the first one to do major excavations, and credit to him.
[00:41:37]  But his interpretations of it used what he, his version of common sense in the 19th century.
[00:41:43]  So here's a description from his publication of Troy in 1872.
[00:41:47]  I cannot conclude the description of the lowest stratum, so the lowest level of earth there, without mentioning that among the huge blocks of stone, I can't do a German accent, at a depth of from 12 to 16 meters, 39 and a half to 52 and a half feet, I found two toads.
[00:42:02]  And at a depth of 39 and a half feet, a small but very poisonous snake with a scutiform head.
[00:42:08]  The snake may have found its way down from above, but this is an impossibility in the case of the large toads.
[00:42:14]  They must have spent 3,000 years in these depths.
[00:42:17]  It is very interesting to find in the ruins of Troy living creatures from the times of Hector and Andromache, even though these creatures are but toads.
[00:42:26]  And so that was his version of common sense in the 19th century.
[00:42:29]  This made sense in the 19th century without a good understanding of biology, of how long toads lived.
[00:42:36]  Right?
[00:42:37]  And so, you know, we cannot just go and interpret stuff with common sense.
[00:42:40]  There's a whole history of the field and how to interpret this stuff.
[00:42:44]  And it doesn't mean we're fossilized in our ways.
[00:42:46]  We're constantly reinterpreting the past with new studies, but it's in an incremental level, right?
[00:42:52]  It's not like we throw out the baby with the bathwater.
[00:42:55]  And it's this kind of stuff that shows why we can't just use common sense.
[00:42:58]  We have to understand the history of how everybody has talked about things like Plato or Athens or Atlantis or Troy and Schliemann and stuff like that.
[00:43:08]  Without that background knowledge, you're just lost.
[00:43:11]  And you're, you know, and it, it, it, it, you're, you're, fantasizing is the wrong word, but you're using common sense is the right way to put it.
[00:43:18]  And common sense is not the same thing as, you know, using scholarship, if you see what I mean.
[00:43:23]  No, yeah, I totally understand what you're saying.
[00:43:25]  And then, you know, it comes to just like where we are right now in the world, too, and how we're evolving.
[00:43:29]  Like, this story has been the story of Atlantis since Plato wrote it, which was, you know, so the original source was full of shit.
[00:43:38]  But since then, people have just compiled and piled and piled on it.
[00:43:41]  And it's just been this like game of telephone ever since he started.
[00:43:44]  And then people started making money off of it and writing books about it.
[00:43:49]  And then here comes the internet.
[00:43:51]  Now people are making videos about it, making documentaries about it.
[00:43:55]  And people don't want to do the hard work.
[00:43:57]  They just want to make money off of it.
[00:43:58]  And it's fun to talk about.
[00:44:00]  People are obsessed with the unknown and what they don't understand.
[00:44:03]  It's the same thing with UFOs and with aliens and all this stuff.
[00:44:06]  People just, there's something about the human mind that is gravitated towards the unexplainable.
[00:44:12]  Yes, you're exactly right.
[00:44:14]  And you're right, it's like a game of telephone.
[00:44:16]  And we can actually trace that with Atlantis.
[00:44:18]  So basically, most people didn't really believe much in Atlantis until they discovered the Americas.
[00:44:24]  As soon as people discovered the Americas, people in the 15th and 16th centuries were like, whoa.
[00:44:29]  Let's rethink Atlantis, right?
[00:44:31]  Maybe this is what Plato's talking about, right?
[00:44:35]  And so it started off, though, still as fiction.
[00:44:38]  So, Sir Francis Bacon, you've probably heard of him, he wrote the book The New Atlantis in the early 16th century.
[00:44:44]  And this is the first time where there's a story about survivors.
[00:44:48]  Plato doesn't have any survivors.
[00:44:50]  Zeus destroys Atlantis, everybody dies, you know?
[00:44:54]  But in this fictional book, it's totally a fictional book.
[00:44:57]  He didn't mean it in any way as nonfiction.
[00:44:59]  There's European sailors that are in the Pacific.
[00:45:02]  And they find this island of refugees from Atlantis who have advanced technology and a new way of learning.
[00:45:08]  It's at this, they have their capital is called New Bend Salem, and they have this whole way of it's even sort of modeled off of Plato because it's meant to show how to do education.
[00:45:18]  And our modern university system, in many ways, is based off of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis.
[00:45:23]  Really?
[00:45:23]  The way that it's modeled with different departments and different things, the first sort of description of that that inspired the modern university system comes from this text, which of course comes from Plato's Atlantis and was very intentionally fictional.
[00:45:35]  But after he creates this fictional story, over the next 100, 200, 300 years, it starts being picked up and written about as nonfiction.
[00:45:44]  And so you see this there's a Swedish author, Olaf Rudbeck, who in the late 17th century describes Atlantis in Sweden.
[00:45:51]  And then it all comes to a big head.
[00:45:54]  There's a lot of people, there's like, you know, Le Plungeon and other people.
[00:45:56]  But the real ur text is this guy, Ignatius Donnelly, in the late 19th century, 1882, maybe, I think, if I'm remembering that right, published his book, Atlantis, the Antediluvian World.
[00:46:07]  And that's where he sort of drew on a variety of Fake facts, real facts, fiction, and kind of just twisted it all into this grand narrative where there's this lost civilization from before a giant flood.
[00:46:22]  So he combines biblical sources as well.
[00:46:24]  And he says that this lost civilization had survivors that taught technology, agriculture, even gunpowder, and all this kind of stuff to the hunter gatherers that were living in different places.
[00:46:36]  And so, and he ended his book.
[00:46:37]  The very last paragraph of his book, written in 1882, was Who shall say that 100 years from now, the great museums of the world may not be adorned with the gems, statues, arms, and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of our day?
[00:47:01]  The end.
[00:47:02]  We're now 150 years later.
[00:47:05]  We got nothing in our museums.
[00:47:07]  We got absolutely nothing.
[00:47:09]  As Graham Hancock said, there's no archaeological evidence for Atlantis, for his civilization.
[00:47:15]  And if you read this book, And then read Fingerprints of the Gods, it's the same exact text.

=== Lost Civilization Survivors (04:00) ===

[00:47:21]  And I don't mean 100%.
[00:47:22]  Graham Hancock updates it with some different things, but it's the exact same argument, 100%.
[00:47:27]  Graham Hancock's not the only one.
[00:47:29]  Ignatius Donnelly was a bestseller in his time.
[00:47:32]  You can even do, I do a lot of research into how this becomes popular, and Google has a database of words, right?
[00:47:38]  And how often they're used.
[00:47:40]  And the year that he publishes this book, everybody's talking about Atlantis from that year on for like decades.
[00:47:45]  And that's where all of our Atlantis stuff comes from.
[00:47:48]  And Graham Hancock, look, he's honest.
[00:47:50]  He gives credit in his acknowledgments.
[00:47:52]  He says Ignatius Donnelly was my biggest inspiration for that book.
[00:47:55]  Really?
[00:47:56]  Oh, yeah.
[00:47:56]  And he cites Ignatius Donnelly through there and everything.
[00:47:59]  How many times have you read those books, Fingerprints of the Gods?
[00:48:02]  I mean, I've read them all the way through once and then I've gone into different sections at different points.
[00:48:07]  Because you show blocks of paragraphs that he wrote.
[00:48:13]  Yeah.
[00:48:13]  Right?
[00:48:13]  Or where he sources, where he'll combine sentences from vastly different parts of the book.
[00:48:20]  So he'll put like a sentence followed by from like one page of a source book and then follow it up with a sentence from like 100 pages later.
[00:48:29]  Yeah.
[00:48:30]  That are completely out of context from each other.
[00:48:32]  It's even worse from that.
[00:48:33]  Let me explain.
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=== Misquoted Primary Sources (14:51) ===

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[00:51:39]  Now back to the show.
[00:51:40]  He has an argument in Magicians of the Guzz.
[00:51:43]  Right.
[00:51:43]  So his more recent book from what was it, 20?
[00:51:46]  I'm going to get this wrong.
[00:51:48]  I should know what year he published it.
[00:51:49]  I don't know.
[00:51:50]  It was around 2012, I think.
[00:51:51]  Maybe 2015.
[00:51:52]  I can't remember exactly.
[00:51:52]  People can look it up.
[00:51:53]  We can look it up.
[00:51:54]  So, in there, he talks about these hieroglyphic inscriptions from Egypt from this temple in Edfu, which he claims describe Plato's Atlantis.
[00:52:05]  So, he thinks that these are a record of those Egyptian sources that we talked about earlier that Solon apparently talked about with the priest, right?
[00:52:13]  Okay.
[00:52:13]  Now, there are 10,000 things wrong with this.
[00:52:16]  And where is this?
[00:52:17]  It's in Egypt.
[00:52:18]  In Egypt.
[00:52:18]  Yeah, it's a place called Edfu.
[00:52:20]  It's a well excavated site.
[00:52:21]  Okay.
[00:52:23]  It's very well known.
[00:52:24]  This temple that they come from, here's a drawing of it from.
[00:52:27]  A really older book, a German book, because I think the Germans excavated it.
[00:52:30]  And you can see all these hieroglyphs.
[00:52:31]  This temple is filled with hieroglyphs.
[00:52:34]  It's just, it's really impressive.
[00:52:35]  I've never been there, but I've seen a lot of photos and stuff.
[00:52:37]  Really impressive.
[00:52:38]  So many crammed in hieroglyphs.
[00:52:40]  And they tell a series of different stories of origin and stuff like that.
[00:52:43]  Different Egyptian mythological stories.
[00:52:45]  Right.
[00:52:46]  Now, there are several problems with connecting this to Atlantis, though.
[00:52:48]  For one, this temple was built after Plato wrote about Atlantis.
[00:52:54]  Like 100 years afterwards.
[00:52:55]  It was built 100 years after Plato?
[00:52:57]  Yeah.
[00:52:57]  And Graham.
[00:52:58]  Absolutely uses this as evidence for Atlantis.
[00:53:01]  He claims that even though it was built and recorded 100 years later, it's based off of earlier stories, which arguably maybe, but stories change over time.
[00:53:09]  That's just life, right?
[00:53:10]  We know stories change.
[00:53:11]  We can talk about how Homeric stories have changed over times and stuff like that.
[00:53:16]  Happy to talk about that.
[00:53:17]  It's like you're not going to take the movie Troy and think that's an accurate representation of Homer's Iliad, right?
[00:53:23]  Especially if it's a story 9,000 years earlier, just like our movie Troy, that's from thousands of years after.
[00:53:29]  The Iliad, right?
[00:53:30]  It's created in our own context for our own audience, for our own people.
[00:53:34]  We want to see a hunky Brad Pitt, right?
[00:53:36]  That's what we want.
[00:53:38]  That's not how Homer describes it, though.
[00:53:40]  So that's one problem.
[00:53:41]  The second problem is he makes a mistake, and I'll grant it, it's probably an honest mistake, but I hope most of these are honest mistakes, but he is not actually quoting from the Ed Food texts themselves.
[00:53:52]  He is quoting from a book on Egyptian religion by Eve Raymond, published in 1969, which is describing the Ed Food texts and stuff like that, but not quoting them.
[00:54:01]  It's not a translation of them.
[00:54:03]  So that's another issue.
[00:54:04]  He thinks that he's quoting from these actual primary sources when he's not.
[00:54:08]  He's quoting from a book on Egyptian religion, which addresses the Ed Food text at various points.
[00:54:14]  And David Miano, Dr. David Miano, has a video on this, by the way.
[00:54:17]  So far, a lot of what I got came from David Miano's video, The World of Antiquity.
[00:54:22]  Big shout out to David Miano.
[00:54:24]  He's a great ancient historian who has a big YouTube channel.
[00:54:28]  He's close to here, isn't he?
[00:54:29]  I don't know where he lives.
[00:54:30]  He's actually in Bradenton.
[00:54:31]  I should ask him.
[00:54:31]  I think he's like an hour away from here.
[00:54:32]  Because we're in touch sometimes.
[00:54:34]  But then, when I'm reading through this, you know, I always tell my students, and I'm going to tell everybody in public as well read the footnotes.
[00:54:42]  For fuck's sake, please read the footnotes and track down the sources.
[00:54:45]  Do your own research.
[00:54:46]  I'm fully with that.
[00:54:47]  But that means going and checking people's sources, right?
[00:54:50]  So, for example, here are direct quotes from chapter nine from Magicians of the Gods on the Ed Fu text quoting Eve Raymond.
[00:54:58]  And so here's quote number one.
[00:54:59]  And he does this as a single block paragraph, right?
[00:55:03]  So, does he, in his book, do you see these page numbers?
[00:55:07]  There are footnotes that you have to then go track down and find the page numbers.
[00:55:09]  At the bottom of the page.
[00:55:10]  Yeah.
[00:55:11]  At the bottom of the page.
[00:55:11]  But when you're reading.
[00:55:13]  I can't remember if they're endnotes or footnotes, but they're there to find.
[00:55:15]  But when you're reading the book.
[00:55:16]  You don't see it.
[00:55:17]  You see all this text minus the page numbers.
[00:55:19]  Yes.
[00:55:19]  Okay.
[00:55:20]  And you just see the dot, dot, dot with a footnote, right?
[00:55:23]  I see.
[00:55:23]  I added the page numbers so we can see this.
[00:55:25]  Okay.
[00:55:26]  So he says first, and it's quoted all in one quotation mark, right?
[00:55:30]  So it literally looks like it's a single quote.
[00:55:32]  So it's not clear when he writes this that it's from separate pieces of a book.
[00:55:36]  Unless you track down the footnotes.
[00:55:39]  So it deceptively looks like it's one paragraph written together in context.
[00:55:43]  It appears that way at first, yeah.
[00:55:45]  Okay.
[00:55:45]  To anyone who's not tracking it down carefully.
[00:55:47]  And he says, an upheaval, quote, so violent that it destroyed the sacred land, dot, dot, dot, the primeval water.
[00:55:55]  Dot dot dot, submerge the island, dot dot dot, and the island became the tomb of the original divine inhabitants, dot dot dot.
[00:56:03]  The homeland ended in darkness beneath the primeval waters.
[00:56:07]  Does it again?
[00:56:08]  I think it's on the same page of the book.
[00:56:10]  So, and what you just said are three sections of a source book from three separate pages.
[00:56:16]  Not even a source book, remember, it's a book on, it's a scholarly book.
[00:56:19]  It's a book written about a book.
[00:56:20]  And so that first sentence comes from page 113, the next group comes from page 109, and then the next group comes from page 127.
[00:56:28]  Okay.
[00:56:29]  Then he has another of these block quotes.
[00:56:31]  A process of continuous creation by the emergence of a progressive series of plots of land.
[00:56:38]  The creation of these sacred domains was, in fact, a resurrection and restoration of what had been in the past but had vanished.
[00:56:47]  In any place in which they settled, they found new sacred domains.
[00:56:50]  And this, as you can see, stretches hundreds of pages.
[00:56:53]  This stretches hundreds of pages.
[00:56:54]  The first bit comes from page 173, the middle bit from page 324, and the last bit from page 190.
[00:57:00]  And again, he's trying to make everything you just said sound like it was.
[00:57:03]  One coherent statement.
[00:57:06]  And you can even read it, and it does sound vaguely like Plato's, not even Plato's Atlantis, more like Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis with survivors and stuff like that, or Francis Bacon's Atlantis that has survivors.
[00:57:18]  But it sounds like that story of Atlantis everybody's familiar with a flood, survivors, teaching stuff.
[00:57:24]  That's what it sounds like, right?
[00:57:25]  It really does.
[00:57:27]  But he's creating this.
[00:57:28]  Or the quote three where he does it again that the gods left the Pei lands, page 274, they sailed to another part of the primeval world.
[00:57:35]  Page 187, and journeyed through the lands of the primeval age, page 274.
[00:57:40]  In any place in which they settled, they found new sacred domains.
[00:57:44]  This is a lot of work for you to go through the original book this came from.
[00:57:51]  Divisions of the Gods.
[00:57:52]  No, what was it?
[00:57:53]  Oh, Eve Raymond, 1969.
[00:57:54]  Well, I didn't have to because he did leave footnotes.
[00:57:57]  So he left you the footnotes, but you actually went and pulled out.
[00:58:00]  I checked to make sure he was cited the right pages.
[00:58:01]  Yeah, yeah, he did.
[00:58:03]  And some of his dot, dot, dots don't actually change the meaning.
[00:58:06]  Some do, though.
[00:58:07]  Some very much are linking together things that don't make sense in the book that he's quoting from.
[00:58:12]  Yeah.
[00:58:12]  You can find this book online, by the way, the Eve Raymond book.
[00:58:14]  It's on archive.org, though there was a big lawsuit against them, so I hope it'll still be up there.
[00:58:19]  But it was, at least until recently.
[00:58:22]  So, you know, I actually prepared this for my conversation with him on Joe Rogan.
[00:58:26]  And when he mentioned, what about the Evfu text?
[00:58:28]  And I said, let's go there.
[00:58:30]  I think he saw the glint in my eye and then he never brought it up again.
[00:58:34]  Because it was near the end of the conversation and I was, I think I did pretty well.
[00:58:38]  And so he was just like, oh, maybe I shouldn't go there.
[00:58:41]  And so.
[00:58:42]  What I did to prepare is I created the Hancock texts, right?
[00:58:46]  So here's the Hancock text with my dot dot dots, my dastardly ellipses.
[00:58:51]  Flint dot dot dot had been involved in another project.
[00:58:54]  I was a young archaeologist, he explains.
[00:58:56]  I was looking for my own project.
[00:58:58]  Soon afterwards, the American archaeologist made a second unsettling discovery.
[00:59:02]  All was confusion, all was paradox, and all was mystery.
[00:59:06]  The extraordinary story of Atlantis, the whole tale of the lost Ice Age civilization, was not and never under any circumstances.
[00:59:13]  Could have been a high civilization at that time because of hard evidence, which absolutely rules out the existence of an Atlantis type civilization in the Upper Paleolithic.
[00:59:23]  These are all words that Hancock wrote it.
[00:59:25]  You just did some magic and put them all together out of context.
[00:59:28]  Because if you're going to use a series of dot, dot, dots and a series of footnotes, you take stuff out of context, you can say whatever you want.
[00:59:36]  It's really easy.
[00:59:37]  This is how a lot of people deal with real archaeology.
[00:59:40]  They take something that looks like something else and they say, Voila, they're like the same thing.
[00:59:45]  And it's like, dude.
[00:59:47]  How did you and Graham first get in contact with each other?
[00:59:51]  How did this first start?
[00:59:53]  Do you want the story?
[00:59:54]  Yeah.
[00:59:56]  I was told by Mini Minutemen.
[00:59:57]  I met Mini Minutemen when I was in Miami last week.
[01:00:00]  And he was like, You gotta make this into a video.
[01:00:03]  The story of how I got into this.
[01:00:05]  So there's the long version and the short version.
[01:00:07]  I'm just gonna skip through and get to the Graham Hancock version.
[01:00:10]  In a sense, I started realizing Atlantis was a big deal.
[01:00:13]  And I realized that I, as a scholar, am.
[01:00:16]  Uniquely placed to address Atlantis just because of my own experience and background.
[01:00:21]  My dad was a Paleolithic archaeologist.
[01:00:23]  I grew up on Stone Age digs and I'm really familiar with Paleolithic archaeology.
[01:00:28]  But to get out of his shadow, I went into classics because, you know, in America, you have archaeology, there's no archaeology departments, there's anthropology departments, and then there's classical archaeology departments, classics departments.
[01:00:39]  And nobody in classics departments had heard of my dad.
[01:00:41]  So I said, I'm going to go do ancient Greek stuff where I don't have to look like some little Nepo baby, right?
[01:00:47]  I can actually do stuff on my own and build my own name.
[01:00:50]  And so that's when I started doing ancient Greek stuff.
[01:00:52]  And I'm an expert in ancient Greece.
[01:00:54]  I work on projects all over the ancient Greek world.
[01:00:57]  And when you talk about the modern version of what Atlantis is, it takes this Greek myth, it's not really a myth, but it takes this Greek story, and it then uses, says that it talks about the Ice Age.
[01:01:09]  And I'm one of the only people in the world, there's a few, I'm sure, besides me, but I'm one of the only ones who has really a whole lot of hands on experience with the archaeology of the Greek world and the archaeology of the Ice Age world.
[01:01:20]  Interesting.
[01:01:21]  And so I can, because they're not taught in the same department.
[01:01:24]  Archaeology is a huge field.
[01:01:25]  Right.
[01:01:25]  And there's millions of sites.
[01:01:27]  Nobody can cover everything.
[01:01:28]  It's not.
[01:01:28]  There's very few people that are multidisciplinary in that sense.
[01:01:31]  And so, in that sense, I realized look, this stuff is so popular right now.
[01:01:35]  Somebody that can actually talk about the hands on evidence and describe it in a real way that represents the field.
[01:01:43]  Because, you know, you always have to worry when you're talking about a field that's not your own or a sub discipline that's not your own that even though I'm a scholar, I'm misrepresenting them.
[01:01:51]  I don't want to do that, right?
[01:01:52]  I would say that this happens sometimes with archaeology where you get somebody who's writing a big book, the overall picture of archaeology, and they're familiar with this stuff, but they're less familiar with that stuff, and therefore they make mistakes.
[01:02:04]  It's accidental.
[01:02:05]  And so I don't want to do that.
[01:02:06]  So, you know, I try to focus on what my expertise is, right?
[01:02:10]  And so that's where I got started.
[01:02:11]  And so, excuse me.
[01:02:14]  So I'm reading more and more on Atlantis because, you know, it's not something you're taught in school.
[01:02:19]  That's so interesting, man.
[01:02:20]  You're.
[01:02:21]  Your specialty just happens to line up perfectly with the story of Atlantis.
[01:02:26]  Exactly.
[01:02:27]  Greek classical period and the archaeology that goes back to when it apparently existed, the Ice Age.
[01:02:33]  Exactly.
[01:02:34]  That's why I started getting.
[01:02:35]  And at the same time, I'm active on social media.
[01:02:38]  I've always done a lot of Twitter threads that go, that the people read and stuff like that.
[01:02:42]  And I think you do a great fucking job, man.
[01:02:43]  I think you're doing, you really do.
[01:02:46]  You're a tremendous communicator.
[01:02:48]  You're really good at explaining this stuff.
[01:02:50]  And you.
[01:02:50]  Check out my YouTube.
[01:02:51]  You've done, yeah, yeah.
[01:02:52]  I'm going to link it below.
[01:02:53]  And, um, There's a it's it's crazy how diabolical the backlash has been towards you online.
[01:03:02]  I don't know what to say, I'm just trying to tell the truth.
[01:03:06]  I'm not even really stunning because I'm sitting here with you listening to you.
[01:03:09]  You're super reasonable.
[01:03:10]  You make so much sense.
[01:03:11]  You've done the fucking work.
[01:03:12]  You've done the, you've eaten the gruel and you've studied this stuff your whole goddamn life.
[01:03:17]  And I just, I don't, I don't see where it's coming from.
[01:03:20]  I just don't understand it.
[01:03:21]  So I'm, I'm trying, that's why I'm trying to ask you more about the Graham or, yeah, yeah.
[01:03:23]  So how did I get into that?
[01:03:24]  So I started researching.
[01:03:25]  Why is there so much hate towards you?
[01:03:28]  That's a different question.
[01:03:29]  Look, I think I, I don't actually quite understand it myself.
[01:03:34]  I think that people really like the narrative Graham tells because Graham, look, let's be honest, he's an amazing storyteller.
[01:03:41]  You read his books, they're very compelling.
[01:03:43]  I mean, like I said, he's gotten now archaeologists into archaeology.
[01:03:47]  Like, I'm not, there's no denying his ability to tell a story.
[01:03:51]  He is gifted and he's a great public speaker as well.
[01:03:54]  And so, you know, I'm not denying that.
[01:03:56]  And he's a smart guy.
[01:03:57]  And when I met him, he was kind and everything, right?
[01:04:00]  But he, a lot of people, he's developed a fan club, I guess, of people that are just really attached to these ideas and they don't like the idea of being told that they could be wrong.
[01:04:11]  And I don't quite understand why that's the case, but it is the case.
[01:04:15]  And I wish people would simmer down a little bit because I'm just trying to really, my main goal is to share what archaeology is.
[01:04:22]  As I think I started on Joe's podcast, one of the things I've learned over the years of communicating with the public is nobody really gets what we do today.
[01:04:31]  The only way you understand archaeology is if you took it at university level because it's not taught in kindergarten through 12th grade.
[01:04:37]  It's not taught at university unless you choose to take that class.
[01:04:41]  And so nobody understands it.
[01:04:43]  And a lot of the popular communicators for archaeology.
[01:04:46]  They're not archaeologists.
[01:04:47]  Even the ones who try to do a good job with it, like who don't want to say they know more than the archaeologists.
[01:04:52]  Because there's some people, and Graham does this, he says, he's right, archaeologists are wrong.
[01:04:57]  He says that in Ancient Apocalypse all the time.
[01:04:59]  He's like, I am overturning the paradigm of history, which means we're all wrong and he's right, right?
[01:05:04]  And so there's a lot of YouTubers that do that as well.
[01:05:06]  They say, I'm right, but this discipline with tens of thousands of people that have been working for 200 years, they're all wrong.
[01:05:14]  And it's like, this is a problem.
[01:05:16]  The public understanding of what I do.
[01:05:19]  Is totally warped, and not just by them, it's by people who don't think we're wrong, by people who think we're right.
[01:05:25]  But, you know, a lot of the biggest channels that share archaeology on YouTube, some of my friends, like David Miano, he's a historian.
[01:05:33]  He has a PhD in ancient history, and he's an amazing historian, and he's an amazing public communicator.
[01:05:39]  But because he doesn't have the same level of archaeological experience, he's not presenting it in the same way I would, having that depth of experience, if you see what I mean.
[01:05:47]  And so I don't think he's doing anything wrong, but it means that the perspective of an archaeologist is not represented.
[01:05:53]  If you see what I mean, in the public consciousness.
[01:05:55]  And so, you know, most of the big YouTube channels, most of the big authors on archaeology, with few exceptions, are historians or they're people that somehow want to challenge our field.
[01:06:07]  And so it's like, that's an issue.
[01:06:09]  We need to have people that know the field really well sharing it with the public.

=== Ancient Drilling Technology (15:44) ===

[01:06:13]  Eric Klein is one of several.
[01:06:15]  Jennifer Raff, she has a great book on the peopling of the Americas.
[01:06:18]  So there are real legit archaeologists that are doing big things and becoming famous for it.
[01:06:23]  Best sellers, they have lectures on YouTube.
[01:06:25]  I have a video with Jennifer Raff coming out actually next week.
[01:06:28]  Just had one with Eric Klein.
[01:06:29]  And so, you know, but my goal is to get an archaeological perspective out there because archaeology is not history.
[01:06:35]  We're dealing with the material sources, those statues of Socrates that don't talk to you, if you see what I mean.
[01:06:41]  You don't have those words there.
[01:06:43]  And so, you know.
[01:06:44]  You know, Amon was telling me he did an archaeological dig in Israel.
[01:06:48]  Yeah, I think he said Megiddo.
[01:06:50]  Mattel Megiddo.
[01:06:51]  Eric Klein worked there.
[01:06:52]  He did not remember him.
[01:06:53]  So I couldn't get any words on him.
[01:06:54]  Yeah.
[01:06:55]  Interesting.
[01:06:55]  Eric Klein directed the project.
[01:06:57]  He said that there were astrological zodiacs.
[01:07:01]  There were zodiacs on the ceilings of the temples there.
[01:07:04]  I have no idea.
[01:07:05]  I've never been there.
[01:07:06]  I have no idea.
[01:07:07]  We could ask, like I said, Eric Klein would be the person to ask because he directed the project and he's published on it.
[01:07:12]  Right.
[01:07:12]  There's a book, I think, like Excavating Armageddon or something like that.
[01:07:16]  Right, right, right, right.
[01:07:17]  Yeah.
[01:07:19]  Can we talk about this shit?
[01:07:21]  Oh, Jesus.
[01:07:23]  That's by some people who think that all of us are wrong.
[01:07:27]  Is that a real one?
[01:07:28]  No, this is a 3D print.
[01:07:29]  Okay, good.
[01:07:31]  I've never heard you talk about this.
[01:07:32]  This is the one thing I cannot get a reasonable explanation for.
[01:07:37]  Because these things, from my understanding, and I had my friend Matt come in here and brought like a couple dozen of these things that he purchased.
[01:07:46]  And they're made out of like red granite.
[01:07:49]  And they had them measured in light scanners at an aerospace, big aerospace company.
[01:07:54]  And they found out that they are completely, perfectly symmetrical within the deviation.
[01:07:58]  The deviation is like within less than the width of a human hair.
[01:08:03]  Yeah.
[01:08:03]  And that's measuring like literally in here, the dimension between the opening, the edge here, and then all around the whole thing is like so.
[01:08:11]  Perfectly symmetrical, it had to have been made on like a CNC machine today.
[01:08:16]  I disagree with them.
[01:08:18]  Sorry.
[01:08:18]  What part do you disagree with?
[01:08:21]  I have, let's see.
[01:08:22]  I have, so I'm trying to eventually do a video on this.
[01:08:25]  Okay.
[01:08:26]  But it's not my specialty.
[01:08:27]  I am not an Egyptologist, but I've been talking with people who study this material from archaeological sites, right?
[01:08:34]  Okay.
[01:08:35]  So this is something that right now I'm focusing on Atlantis, so it might take a year before I do a video on this.
[01:08:39]  But here's some initial thoughts.
[01:08:41]  Okay.
[01:08:42]  Let's just go with initial thoughts.
[01:08:44]  And this is just me having seen a few videos that these people have done.
[01:08:47]  Okay.
[01:08:48]  First.
[01:08:49]  So you're not, your expertise is not involved in like Egypt or Egyptology.
[01:08:53]  No, I worked in Abydos when I was an undergrad.
[01:08:55]  So a long time ago.
[01:08:56]  When I was, you know, before I really got into my expertise and stuff like that.
[01:08:59]  Right.
[01:09:00]  At the time, I did a lot of digital mapping.
[01:09:03]  I've done a lot of digital mapping.
[01:09:04]  I've designed large scale GIS and database systems for projects.
[01:09:07]  And so that's what I was doing at that time before I got into environmental archaeology.
[01:09:11]  And so I was at Abydos, which is, you know, That's one of the major pre dynastic cemeteries right before the next dynasty that builds the pyramids.
[01:09:19]  And it's where a lot of these stone vessels come from.
[01:09:21]  And they also, the consensus is that these things were from 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.
[01:09:29]  And I believe the lathe, correct me if I'm wrong, but we know that the Egyptians didn't, the earliest we know they had the lathe was 1300 years BC, 13 BC.
[01:09:37]  I don't know.
[01:09:38]  I don't know that.
[01:09:39]  That's what I heard.
[01:09:40]  Maybe we can talk about that.
[01:09:41]  I talked briefly to Matt on Twitter, but I think that we do know that they had.
[01:09:46]  Rotating devices like a ceramic wheel around that time.
[01:09:49]  So there's around 5000 BC.
[01:09:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:09:51]  And in the Near East and in that area, I think around that time, even in Egypt, they had the ceramic wheel.
[01:09:56]  So to assume that they would not use something that rotated around to make a stone vessel is a big assumption, if you see what I mean.
[01:10:02]  There's, I don't think, any reason to assume that.
[01:10:04]  We also have tomb paintings that show how these are being made with a drill that you rotate around.
[01:10:11]  And so with a flint drill bit and stuff like that.
[01:10:14]  So really, yeah, paintings of a drill bit.
[01:10:17]  Yeah.
[01:10:18]  Really?
[01:10:18]  And we have reconstruction.
[01:10:19]  I just saw them in the British Museum.
[01:10:20]  Ancient Egyptians used lathes.
[01:10:22]  Sorry, go up.
[01:10:23]  Go up.
[01:10:23]  Used lathes for a variety of reasons.
[01:10:25]  I'd be careful with the term lathe, though.
[01:10:27]  I'd be careful with the term lathe because that is a thing.
[01:10:29]  Okay.
[01:10:30]  Egyptians developed a two person lathe around 1300 BC.
[01:10:33]  Yeah, and I'd also be careful with Google.
[01:10:34]  I'd go with scholarship.
[01:10:35]  Right.
[01:10:35]  Of course, right.
[01:10:36]  Especially AI stuff.
[01:10:38]  But they certainly, before 1300 BC, there's a tomb painting that I saw a depiction of just now recently in the British Museum.
[01:10:44]  I was there and I was looking at some of these stone vessels.
[01:10:46]  How would we search for this if we wanted to find it on YouTube or on Google, rather?
[01:10:50]  Hmm.
[01:10:50]  Like a two, like a Egyptian tomb painting of a drill vessels, maybe.
[01:10:57]  Oh, look, is this what you're talking about?
[01:11:01]  Yeah, it's something else with a drill.
[01:11:03]  Yes, the one on the left is, I think, an example of drilling a stone vase.
[01:11:06]  There's several of them, actually.
[01:11:08]  It's not just one, there's a bunch of different examples of people making stone vases.
[01:11:12]  And in the British Museum, they actually had flint artifacts that were the drill bits themselves, and they reconstructed it on the wood and stuff like that.
[01:11:18]  And so they had a whole section on exactly how these vases were made, as the Egyptians themselves described it, if you see what I mean.
[01:11:25]  Now, don't get me wrong, these tomb paintings are later, because at the time that some of these really early ones were made, they weren't painting their tombs.
[01:11:32]  That's just how it was.
[01:11:33]  Right.
[01:11:33]  And so, but later on, they show what they do to make.
[01:11:36]  Stone vases, and there's a YouTube channel, Scientists Against Myths.
[01:11:41]  It's a few Russian scientists who have reconstructed stone vases.
[01:11:45]  I watched it, it was terrible.
[01:11:47]  Well, just because the recreation they made took them years.
[01:11:50]  Well, okay, because the and they did a terrible job, it was awful.
[01:11:54]  They had one that measures more accurate than the ones that Uncharted X did.
[01:11:58]  No, they didn't.
[01:11:58]  I watched the video.
[01:11:59]  Well, they have several videos.
[01:12:00]  You need to find one of their more recent ones where they actually make one where they do the measurements and it's more accurate than the measurements Uncharted X did.
[01:12:06]  Steve, you gotta find it.
[01:12:07]  I want because I watched one recently.
[01:12:08]  I don't know what video it is because they have several videos on this topic.
[01:12:11]  But they definitely have a video where it's more accurate.
[01:12:15]  And just because something takes years, Danny, by people who are trying to figure out how to do it as they go, when there's an industry of people that have passed on over generations how to do something, they know how to do it, right?
[01:12:26]  They have the expertise of having made many of them, so it won't take them years.
[01:12:30]  Sure.
[01:12:30]  And remember, these guys are just doing it in their free time.
[01:12:33]  There's a difference between somebody doing it as a job versus doing it in their free time.
[01:12:37]  You need to find scientists against myths.
[01:12:39]  Oh, oops.
[01:12:40]  Scientists.
[01:12:43]  Steve, see if you can just find it.
[01:12:44]  We'll keep going.
[01:12:45]  So, that's one reason I have an issue with scientists against myths.
[01:12:48]  So, how were they able to get it so goddamn perfect?
[01:12:54]  Well, I think it just has to do with the circularity of spinning something.
[01:12:57]  You make a compass and you spin it around, you make a perfect circle.
[01:13:00]  Within one one thousandth of an inch of space.
[01:13:04]  If you have a compass, that should do that, yeah.
[01:13:06]  With that kind of.
[01:13:08]  And how do people.
[01:13:09]  That's how a compass works.
[01:13:10]  What tools did they use?
[01:13:12]  What kind of drill bits did they use?
[01:13:14]  I think for these, they used flint.
[01:13:16]  And it was all by hand?
[01:13:17]  There was no pallet?
[01:13:18]  No, it's something that spun.
[01:13:20]  And they might have had a pallet, they put it on.
[01:13:21]  I don't really know.
[01:13:22]  That's something we can't tell.
[01:13:23]  And these handles that were built into it with the tubes that go through it, like with the holes that go through it, they're all over it.
[01:13:28]  Now, that's actually one of my problems.
[01:13:29]  One of my problems is every single one of these I've seen, this is a replica.
[01:13:33]  These are a little bit off.
[01:13:34]  Or something's off.
[01:13:35]  Sometimes you can look inside and you can see bits where it's not perfect inside, where the drill bit has left an impression.
[01:13:43]  So, you know, that tells me you can see.
[01:13:44]  The insides are more imperfect than the other ones.
[01:13:46]  Yeah, which if you're doing it with a modern machine wouldn't happen, right?
[01:13:51]  And so, one of the things that I would say is, technically, I also think that they're measuring this with the wrong technology, these scanning light measurements.
[01:14:00]  They should be using CT scans.
[01:14:01]  That's kind of the standard.
[01:14:02]  They do.
[01:14:03]  They did that too.
[01:14:03]  Good.
[01:14:04]  They did that too.
[01:14:05]  But the aerospace, I think it was light scanners or something, whatever they did, was able, that was the one that was able to measure the variation and how symmetrical it actually is.
[01:14:17]  Well, no, that's just about capturing a 3D.
[01:14:18]  You can do that with anything.
[01:14:19]  And the thickness of the walls and how.
[01:14:23]  CT scan gets that.
[01:14:24]  And how thick it is on this side versus.
[01:14:25]  You can do that even better.
[01:14:26]  What a CT scan does is it shoots x rays through it.
[01:14:29]  A series of x rays.
[01:14:30]  Right.
[01:14:30]  That's what computerized tomography, I think, stands for.
[01:14:34]  So it shoots a series of x rays through something to get fully measured the inside, outside, down to the most precise measurements.
[01:14:40]  Right.
[01:14:40]  It is the state of the art for us doing kind of measurements in archaeology at precision levels.
[01:14:45]  Okay.
[01:14:45]  That is what I use.
[01:14:46]  I know people that do this with animal bones.
[01:14:48]  I know people that do it with pretty much everything just to get tiny little anatomical differences to be able to see if a goat was moving up and down a mountain.
[01:14:56]  Right?
[01:14:57]  So.
[01:15:00]  With the naked eye.
[01:15:01]  Okay, so let's talk about this.
[01:15:03]  Let's talk about this.
[01:15:04]  So, what do you want to ask?
[01:15:05]  You want to ask me something first.
[01:15:07]  You're saying that they did this out of granite by hand with the naked eye, no measuring.
[01:15:16]  Think about it like this, Danny.
[01:15:17]  Within one thousandth of an inch.
[01:15:18]  Well, let me explain why.
[01:15:19]  It's just like a compass.
[01:15:20]  You have a compass.
[01:15:22]  That's another question.
[01:15:23]  Why?
[01:15:24]  Why does it have to be so perfect?
[01:15:25]  Well, it's just the way they're making it that makes it so perfect, is what I'm trying to explain.
[01:15:30]  When you have something that's rotating around, so you have the drill.
[01:15:35]  And then you have the bit that comes out here.
[01:15:37]  That's at a set distance from the center of that.
[01:15:40]  It's the radius of a circle, if you see what I mean.
[01:15:42]  As it spins around, it's just making a perfect circumference.
[01:15:46]  Just like how a compass works.
[01:15:48]  You don't need high tech to do that.
[01:15:50]  It's just the motion of creating it in a circular way that's going to naturally make it reasonably perfect, if you see what I mean.
[01:15:57]  It's not like they're pounding at it.
[01:15:58]  If you're pounding at it to make it, or you're jamming something in there to go tink, tink, tink, tink, like imagine using a pick.
[01:16:04]  Right?
[01:16:05]  If you're doing that, making something perfect is going to be pretty much impossible.
[01:16:08]  So, is that what the Egyptologists, the conventional Egyptologists say about these?
[01:16:12]  That they were made on circular bits?
[01:16:14]  Circular bits.
[01:16:15]  So, a drill that's moving around circular bits.
[01:16:17]  Yeah.
[01:16:19]  But how do they open it up on the inside?
[01:16:22]  Well, you put something in and then you attach it.
[01:16:26]  So, there's a wooden thing going in and you attach the drill bit on it so that it circles around.
[01:16:32]  If you're making wood.
[01:16:34]  The thing you're spinning is wood and stone is attached to it.
[01:16:38]  So, there's a.
[01:16:39]  Okay, so they put a stone.
[01:16:40]  So they go like this, and they somehow go like that and hollow out the inside of the granite.
[01:16:44]  Well, they put the lever.
[01:16:46]  Let's go back to those tomb paintings.
[01:16:48]  They show them best.
[01:16:49]  Let's look at the actual ancient Egyptian evidence of how they tell us they made these.
[01:16:53]  Okay.
[01:16:53]  Like, let's stick with the evidence, guys.
[01:16:55]  Yeah.
[01:16:56]  This is what I say go from the known to the unknown.
[01:16:58]  You know, I totally understand what you're saying.
[01:17:01]  Yeah.
[01:17:01]  So it's something exactly like that.
[01:17:03]  Yeah, I mean, that was the tool.
[01:17:05]  How did they suck so bad at drawing, but they were so good at making it?
[01:17:08]  Oh, they didn't suck at drawing.
[01:17:10]  Remember, these are.
[01:17:10]  Come on, compared to this?
[01:17:13]  They can do this, but that's what they're drawing.
[01:17:15]  It's not value judgments.
[01:17:17]  But so that's the thing that comes down.
[01:17:19]  You're spinning that around.
[01:17:20]  At the bottom of that are these drill bits that are attached that rotate around.
[01:17:25]  Okay.
[01:17:25]  Right?
[01:17:25]  Do you see what I mean?
[01:17:26]  So that's a different kind of drill with a bow.
[01:17:28]  And that lets you go back and forth with a bow to make it spin very quickly and effortlessly.
[01:17:33]  So that's a bow drill right there.
[01:17:35]  Oh, okay.
[01:17:35]  You see what I mean?
[01:17:36]  Yeah, totally.
[01:17:36]  So that's sort of how these kind of drilling technology are around for thousands of years.
[01:17:41]  This is a really, and not just in Egypt, elsewhere too.
[01:17:43]  I would have to, like, I would have to see somebody use this and create something like this that's this perfect.
[01:17:50]  And to answer the question of how can you fit the bit in there, the same thing would be true if you made it on a machine.
[01:17:55]  You still have to figure out how to get the thing in there.
[01:17:57]  Of course.
[01:17:57]  Yeah.
[01:17:58]  Sure.
[01:17:58]  So that's not an issue.
[01:17:59]  We know that whether they made it on a machine or whether they did it by hand, they were able to get a damn drill bit in there that could go around in a circle to get it to work.
[01:18:06]  Right.
[01:18:07]  And so obviously, look, now that takes a long time.
[01:18:10]  That's a lot of effort to do that by hand.
[01:18:12]  And there's thousands of them.
[01:18:13]  But it's doable.
[01:18:14]  Yeah.
[01:18:14]  But dude, they have a lot of people who are constructing these over thousands of years, by the way.
[01:18:19]  It wasn't like there's thousands of them constructed in a 10 year span.
[01:18:22]  We're saying there's thousands of them constructed in a several thousand year span.
[01:18:27]  Do you see what I mean?
[01:18:28]  So I don't know why that's such a huge issue because, look, these pharaohs and wealthy people, they had huge numbers of people that they controlled.
[01:18:38]  It's just the perfection is ungodly.
[01:18:41]  And that's why I think we sometimes, in our world with modern technology, underestimate our ancestors.
[01:18:49]  But we can't even do it now.
[01:18:53]  That's the whole argument for them being more like an advanced civilization making this.
[01:18:57]  Or rather, they were smart people with simple technology and effort to make that is what they were.
[01:19:04]  They were smart, skilled people who had a tradition of how to do this and they did it.
[01:19:09]  You know, like these were people like you and me who are as smart as you and me.
[01:19:13]  They just don't have the technology around us that other people created, by the way, that we use in our day to day lives.
[01:19:19]  And so, you know, they had their own technology and they knew how to master it.
[01:19:22]  The people in the past were fucking smart.
[01:19:25]  They lived in a tough environment and they survived and thrived.
[01:19:28]  What do you make of the giant?
[01:19:30]  Saw blade marks in some of those stones that are found around the pyramids.
[01:19:33]  Like there's giant stones with like perfect cuts that look like they were done with circular saws that you can fit a credit card into.
[01:19:39]  And they even measured the depth of it, and it's like a circular, the depth gets deeper towards the middle, and like it looks just like a circular saw did it.
[01:19:46]  So look, I mean, some of this is I find it silly because people say this about the Egyptians, but like the Romans also have those same perfect cuts.
[01:19:52]  The Greeks have those same perfect cuts.
[01:19:54]  We don't assume they couldn't do that stuff.
[01:19:56]  So why is it that we assume the Egyptians couldn't?
[01:19:59]  That's kind of one of my.
[01:20:00]  I'm saying like, but what is the, like, yeah, this stuff.
[01:20:03]  Look at that.
[01:20:03]  Yeah.
[01:20:04]  Dude, that's just very careful, slow.
[01:20:06]  Look at the one with the three cuts.
[01:20:08]  Yeah, they realized they fucked up and they went and did it again.
[01:20:10]  How the hell did they do that?
[01:20:12]  Well, so they probably had a saw blade with copper, but then they used water and sand because the copper is not dense enough, so it's going to wear down really badly.
[01:20:22]  It's actually the granite sand and other kinds of sand that you put there.
[01:20:25]  And again, Scientists Against Myths and others have done a lot of videos on this that show that you can cut through very precisely and slowly, slowly, no doubt, and you are going to use a lot of copper blades because they wear down eventually.
[01:20:37]  But if you use sand and water there, you can saw very, very precisely through stuff, through hard granite.
[01:20:44]  It's just, you know, I mean, people have done it.
[01:20:48]  I know, they look cool.
[01:20:50]  I mean, that's insane.
[01:20:51]  It's mind blowing.
[01:20:52]  I just don't doubt that these people could do it because they were smart and they had time.
[01:20:57]  They had time and expertise, is what they had.
[01:21:01]  You know, I mean, people will say the same thing about us in the future.
[01:21:03]  They're going to be like, how the hell did they make these highways?
[01:21:06]  That was so much work.
[01:21:08]  And it's like, well, yeah, it was a lot of work, but we did it.
[01:21:10]  You know, with the technology we had in the future, they'll have some faster way to do that kind of stuff.
[01:21:15]  And they'll be mind boggled at the civilization we built.
[01:21:18]  And they'll be like, nah, they probably had our future technology, right?
[01:21:21]  Because that's what makes sense to them because they see that all around.
[01:21:25]  This doesn't make sense to us because we don't live back then, you know?
[01:21:29]  So in Christopher Dunn's book, he interviewed a guy who runs a granite quarry, a guy who has a huge company that produces granite.
[01:21:37]  They make countertops, they make all kinds of crazy stuff out of granite.
[01:21:40]  And he basically said to him, he goes, He was showing him some of the big granite blocks that exist, like in the Serapium, the big granite boxes.
[01:21:52]  And he was asking him, if you were to recreate this, A, how would you do it?

=== Costly Granite Blocks (10:02) ===

[01:21:57]  B, how much would it cost?
[01:21:59]  And he first said, just the freight alone would be like $250,000 to move this thing.
[01:22:05]  And it would be so ridiculously, it would be so much more expensive.
[01:22:09]  Which is, by the way, why we don't redo this stuff, because we can't.
[01:22:12]  Meaning, we don't have the money to employ thousands and thousands of people for years to build a pyramid.
[01:22:18]  Who's gonna fund that?
[01:22:19]  You know what I mean?
[01:22:20]  Because if you wanna do that, you have to employ.
[01:22:23]  Look, everything in our world, the most expensive thing is human labor.
[01:22:26]  Let's be honest.
[01:22:27]  If you're doing something in America, the most expensive thing is human fucking labor and skilled human labor, right?
[01:22:34]  And so if you're gonna build a pyramid, you need to be able to employ thousands of people over years to build it.
[01:22:41]  So how are we gonna do that if we don't get Elon Musk or someone like that or Bill Gates to actually employ thousands of people to reconstruct a fucking pyramid?
[01:22:49]  So if you're gonna say, I've never seen someone build a pyramid.
[01:22:52]  Well, fuck you.
[01:22:54]  Like, seriously, how are we logically going to do that in our world today?
[01:22:57]  Because we'd have to pay all those people.
[01:23:00]  So, of course, nobody's done it because we'd have to get those skills and teach the people these kind of traditional stonemason crafts.
[01:23:07]  And then get enough people to do that.
[01:23:08]  Get them all together and spend like 10 years of their lives doing it.
[01:23:13]  And like, we don't have the resources to do that.
[01:23:15]  We have some guys, some scientists in Russia who are willing to invest a couple years into making a stone vase in their free time to show that it can be done.
[01:23:25]  Yeah, but they failed.
[01:23:26]  No, they did not.
[01:23:26]  The one I saw, they failed.
[01:23:28]  Steve, you got to find the consensus.
[01:23:29]  They have one from a few months ago where they measured it and it's more precise, is what they said.
[01:23:33]  They compared it to one of the.
[01:23:35]  We need to find the video.
[01:23:36]  Yeah.
[01:23:37]  Look for Scientists Against Myths, Stone Vase, more precise, maybe.
[01:23:40]  I mean, it doesn't look too bad to me.
[01:23:42]  Look at all the flat.
[01:23:43]  No, it looks terrible.
[01:23:44]  I mean, the one on the right is like.
[01:23:47]  They said that they used the same exact measurements.
[01:23:49]  And so, can we go on to my second critique of these people, Uncharted X and Matt B. All of them?
[01:23:53]  Well, first of all, we got to find out, like, what.
[01:23:56]  What is the actual consensus of what they finished?
[01:23:59]  Like, can we find something?
[01:24:01]  Go on Reddit, go on somewhere.
[01:24:03]  So, some of the reasons why that exterior surface looks less perfect is because they didn't do the last step, which would be to polish it.
[01:24:08]  Polishing.
[01:24:09]  Right?
[01:24:09]  Yeah.
[01:24:10]  So, that's just how do you make the stone vase?
[01:24:12]  The last step would be let's polish it smooth.
[01:24:14]  I want to see a write up somewhere, like find on Google or on Reddit or on Twitter somebody who did like an unbiased, basically, analysis of the video and compare it to like some of the things that Ben, the vases that Ben talks about.
[01:24:28]  I know David Miano has a large, long video that.
[01:24:31]  Critiques the stone vases.
[01:24:32]  No, but he's biased.
[01:24:35]  We got to find somebody.
[01:24:36]  Who's not biased?
[01:24:37]  Come on.
[01:24:37]  In the world, everybody is biased.
[01:24:39]  We got to find somebody who doesn't have a YouTube channel that's dedicated to one side.
[01:24:43]  Like you have people like Ben who makes this stuff that shows the evidence for it, and you have people like David who everything on their YouTube channel is based on this.
[01:24:50]  You can't do it if you claim you're not biased.
[01:24:52]  Right.
[01:24:52]  No, I don't know if you are not biased though.
[01:24:56]  I think I am biased.
[01:24:57]  I don't think that.
[01:24:59]  I have not seen any evidence, and you're not convincing me that this stuff was done by hand.
[01:25:03]  So, second point.
[01:25:04]  Second critique.
[01:25:05]  I have three critiques.
[01:25:06]  And the last one is the most important, by the way.
[01:25:08]  Okay.
[01:25:08]  Second critique.
[01:25:10]  Okay.
[01:25:11]  Whenever I've seen one of these videos, and I'm not going to lie, I've not seen all their videos.
[01:25:14]  I'm not ready to make my video on this.
[01:25:16]  Right.
[01:25:16]  Okay.
[01:25:16]  So this is my impression.
[01:25:18]  I could be wrong, but I've seen a few videos.
[01:25:20]  I've seen a few critique videos.
[01:25:21]  I've seen some sort of sample of both sides, let's say.
[01:25:26]  And I am not an Egyptologist, so I don't have a horse in that race, let's say.
[01:25:30]  But I am a scholar, and I think that in general, my colleagues are more correct than not.
[01:25:36]  So.
[01:25:37]  So that is my bias, let's say.
[01:25:40]  Every time I've seen measurements on a stone vase, they're always different measurements from vase to vase.
[01:25:46]  Sometimes it's the angle of the lip, sometimes it's the circumference, sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that.
[01:25:51]  Yes.
[01:25:52]  I've also never seen two stone vases that are exactly the same.
[01:25:55]  Again, yeah, and let me say, even when he brought in all his vases, he made it very clear that not all of them are perfect.
[01:26:01]  A lot of them are very imperfect.
[01:26:03]  And so to me, that's what I would call a red flag.
[01:26:07]  Where, if you have something where you're trying to argue that this is machine made, and maybe, look, machines usually make the same thing, excuse me, over and over again.
[01:26:17]  That's what factories do, for example, right?
[01:26:19]  They make the exact, you have a blueprint, you have a design, and you make it there.
[01:26:24]  And what you don't have is because you make your blueprint perfect, you don't have other imperfections in there.
[01:26:30]  Everything is perfect when you make it with a machine.
[01:26:32]  And so, when you can look at the handles being wonky, that doesn't make sense to me if it's machine made.
[01:26:38]  Well, maybe the handles didn't matter.
[01:26:40]  Well, but.
[01:26:41]  Why would they just, if they're making everything perfect, why would you not make the handles perfect?
[01:26:46]  It's a good question.
[01:26:46]  I mean, I just don't get that.
[01:26:48]  And at the same time, why would you have some dimensions perfect in one vase, but in a different vase, it's different dimensions that are perfect?
[01:26:55]  But why were these things so perfect, so precise?
[01:26:59]  But I'm saying they're not, is what I'm trying to explain.
[01:27:01]  A lot of them are.
[01:27:02]  No, they're not.
[01:27:03]  They're not all perfect in the same way.
[01:27:05]  If they're all perfect, they'd be perfect in the same way.
[01:27:07]  This thing is perfect.
[01:27:09]  They don't all look the same, right?
[01:27:11]  There's different ones that are different shapes, different sizes, but the ones which a vast majority of them are perfect, the ones that are perfect, Are perfectly symmetrical from side to side, going from the top to the bottom.
[01:27:22]  I don't know.
[01:27:22]  I've seen videos where they don't even talk about the symmetry and they talk about the way it is.
[01:27:25]  This guy brought in the scans.
[01:27:26]  Matt Bell brought in the scans.
[01:27:27]  He showed us the scans.
[01:27:27]  Yeah, I've not seen them all.
[01:27:28]  Now let's get to the turbo.
[01:27:29]  Wait, wait, wait.
[01:27:29]  Hold on.
[01:27:31]  Why is it that these are apparently from earlier than the ones that are older and imperfect and look like they were in the museums in Egypt and they came from later?
[01:27:42]  It looks like they came in and tried to, and they made them out of softer stones.
[01:27:45]  I think that's just a bias of our own part.
[01:27:47]  I think this is something, for some reason, a lot of people that think archaeologists are wrong.
[01:27:51]  Claim that older stuff is more perfect than later stuff, and that's just not true.
[01:27:55]  I mean, it's just not this idea.
[01:27:58]  I don't know why it pervades in public culture that that that that that's the case.
[01:28:03]  Like, they they talk about, for example, the great pyramid being more better than later pyramids, and it's like, but wait a second, we also have pyramids that are earlier than the great pyramid that show the progression up there, right?
[01:28:14]  Or one of my examples that I like to give a good example is Graham Hancock sometimes talks about Gobekli Tepe, yeah, where you have the ceremonial core.
[01:28:22]  With those stone circles with the megalithic stones and the beautiful sculpture.
[01:28:26]  And then you have outside of it, you have less perfect stuff, right?
[01:28:30]  These houses on my last video on my YouTube, it will be second to last when you see this, is about Gobekli Tepe with the director of excavations.
[01:28:38]  And we talk about what those less perfect structures are, let's say, less perfect.
[01:28:42]  And what that is, is think about it like this, Danny.
[01:28:45]  You ever been to Washington, D.C.?
[01:28:46]  Yeah.
[01:28:47]  Is the White House really impressive?
[01:28:49]  Sure.
[01:28:50]  Is the Capitol building really impressive?
[01:28:51]  Yeah.
[01:28:52]  Yeah.
[01:28:52]  How about just the houses?
[01:28:53]  That big stat.
[01:28:54]  How about just the houses in downtown?
[01:28:56]  Are they as impressive as the White House and the Capitol building?
[01:28:59]  No.
[01:28:59]  Okay.
[01:29:00]  And yet they're built more recently.
[01:29:01]  Is our technology now worse than the technology of the people that built the 19th century?
[01:29:06]  The function's different, yeah.
[01:29:07]  Yeah.
[01:29:08]  It's meant to be presented as phenomenal.
[01:29:12]  And so that's what the issue is at Gobekli Tepe.
[01:29:14]  You have the ceremonial core where people are going for their ceremonies, they're politicking, they're doing religious stuff, they're doing whatever.
[01:29:22]  Right.
[01:29:22]  And then you have the houses where people are living.
[01:29:24]  And guess what?
[01:29:25]  The houses are shittier than the fucking ceremonial core.
[01:29:28]  Right.
[01:29:28]  Right?
[01:29:28]  That's just function.
[01:29:29]  Sure.
[01:29:30]  It's what you're doing.
[01:29:31]  And so that's oftentimes a lot of these kind of things.
[01:29:33]  The Egyptian tombs changed in style as time went on because of grave robbers, because of the amount of wealth that the state had.
[01:29:41]  It doesn't mean they have less technology, it means that they're doing something different.
[01:29:46]  Right?
[01:29:47]  And so they're still doing some things that are extremely perfect when they try to make them extremely perfect.
[01:29:51]  But now, stone vases, everybody wants a stone vase, so they figure out how to mass produce it.
[01:29:56]  You have the same thing with Athenian painted pottery.
[01:29:58]  You have the Athenian painted pottery.
[01:29:59]  It starts off in this kind of geometric, you know, it's more simple, more crude, let's say, style, right?
[01:30:05]  And then they develop black figure at the archaic period, it's called sixth century BC.
[01:30:11]  And that looks pretty good.
[01:30:12]  It's getting better.
[01:30:13]  Then they develop what's called red figure.
[01:30:15]  And the way they do that is so tough, right?
[01:30:18]  So you think about it like this you have orange clay and you paint on a glaze that's black, and that's black figure, right?
[01:30:24]  But if you want to do red figure, what you do is the red clay is still the vase color.
[01:30:30]  And then the black is the glaze you paint around it.
[01:30:32]  So you're painting the outline of the characters.
[01:30:34]  And then what that lets you do is the character now, you can put on little details with a very thin paintbrush of little black things that show what they're holding or whatever, right?
[01:30:43]  And so it looks beautiful.
[01:30:45]  This is the height of Athenian vase painting that red figure.
[01:30:49]  And then guess what happens?
[01:30:50]  Then they realize, oh shit, we can make pots using a mold really quickly and mass produce them so that everybody gets pots really fast.
[01:30:57]  And then it doesn't look as good.
[01:30:58]  Right.
[01:30:59]  And it's like, dude, it's not that they got less technology, it's that they started doing mass production.
[01:31:05]  Yeah.
[01:31:05]  And we see this all the time.
[01:31:07]  You look at stuff made 100 years ago by hand and it's durable and it lasts.
[01:31:12]  Yeah.
[01:31:12]  I have my cast iron frying pan that's been in my family for.
[01:31:15]  150 years or something like that, right?
[01:31:18]  It is the best frying pan you could imagine.
[01:31:20]  Perfectly non stick.
[01:31:22]  It's durable.
[01:31:22]  You go buy some frying pan in the supermarket, it lasts you like two years with a stupid Teflon non stick shit, but it's cheap and it's fast and it's simple to make.
[01:31:31]  And so, you know, you have to recognize that the way people produce stuff changes over time for different reasons, right?
[01:31:37]  Sometimes they're just interested in mass producing schlock.
[01:31:40]  And that's what we see in America around us, too, right?
[01:31:43]  So we live in that kind of world where sometimes it looks like things are.
[01:31:47]  Not as perfect as they used to be.
[01:31:48]  You know, they're not as glorious and grand and monumental.
[01:31:51]  And then we say, hey, America is not like it used to be.
[01:31:54]  Right.
[01:31:54]  Other things are better today, though.
[01:31:56]  Right.
[01:31:56]  You know, the quality of certain things is much better.

=== Academia Follows Consensus (02:23) ===

[01:31:59]  I would really like to hear, which I'm, I don't know why I haven't done it yet, but I would love to hear a mainstream academic Egyptologist explain exactly how these were made.
[01:32:11]  Because I haven't, yeah, I don't study these.
[01:32:14]  I know some people that do it.
[01:32:15]  I'm trying to get in touch with some people that do it even more so so that I can, because look, my YouTube channel.
[01:32:20]  Is all about actually talking to the actual expert who does the stuff.
[01:32:24]  Right?
[01:32:24]  So, you know, that's why I have on the director at Go Bethlehem Tepe.
[01:32:28]  That's why I had on the director of excavations at Gunung Padang.
[01:32:31]  That's why, you know, this is who I go to because I know them all.
[01:32:34]  I've been in the field for 30 years.
[01:32:37]  I've worked on a few dozen different projects.
[01:32:40]  I am active on social media.
[01:32:42]  So, you know, like I know most of the people around the world that do archaeology.
[01:32:46]  So when I look at an archaeological question, I recognize, hey, I can kind of answer this.
[01:32:53]  But I'm not the expert.
[01:32:54]  And so that's who I always try to talk to.
[01:32:57]  And, uh, okay.
[01:32:58]  Well, isn't, can't we say, isn't it fair to say that in academia, there's something to be said to where don't question the narrative if you want to climb the ladder and have a career in this?
[01:33:09]  Like, not at all.
[01:33:10]  Let's go back to Amon Hillman, okay?
[01:33:13]  When he went to do his dissertation to get his PhD, the head of the department, of the classics department there, said, you have to remove any references to recreational drugs.
[01:33:23]  In antiquity by the Romans.
[01:33:25]  And he said, why?
[01:33:26]  He said, because they wouldn't have done such a thing.
[01:33:27]  So he.
[01:33:29]  I look.
[01:33:29]  He went out and he, he, at the time, he took it out so he could get his PhD.
[01:33:36]  Now I'm sure he regrets doing that, but he did get his PhD.
[01:33:39]  So there is pressure.
[01:33:41]  So you would just have.
[01:33:42]  So you can say it's true that there is pressure in academia to follow the narrative and go with the consensus.
[01:33:47]  That is not pressure?
[01:33:49]  No.
[01:33:49]  I would argue that it depends on a case by case basis.
[01:33:52]  When I, the same year that Ahmed Hillman, or a year after.
[01:33:54]  After Amen Hillman submitted his PhD, what was it, 2002, 2003?
[01:33:57]  I don't remember the year.
[01:33:58]  I looked it up because you asked me to address some Amen Hillman stuff.
[01:34:01]  I looked it up, I think it was like 2002, 2003.
[01:34:04]  In 2003, I was finishing my undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, right?
[01:34:08]  We're talking bastion of academic archaeology.
[01:34:11]  The Penn Museum has been excavating around the world for hundreds of years, right?
[01:34:15]  And it's Ivy League school, that kind of thing.
[01:34:18]  You know, you were talking literally one of the epicenters in the world of academic archaeology.

=== Ancient Magic and Drugs (06:23) ===

[01:34:23]  And me at the time, I'm like a dude who gets stoned.
[01:34:27]  Right?
[01:34:27]  So I'm like, you know what?
[01:34:30]  I didn't even know I really wanted to be an archaeologist at that point.
[01:34:32]  Even though my dad was one, I really didn't want to be one for a while because I was like, I don't want to just follow in my dad's footsteps, right?
[01:34:38]  In the end, I realized, look, I actually love this stuff.
[01:34:40]  So I went to it.
[01:34:41]  So I said, all right, what am I going to write my undergrad honors thesis on, right?
[01:34:45]  To graduate with honors.
[01:34:47]  Because I was a good student despite being a stoner.
[01:34:49]  And I also smoked pot because I have a chronic disease and it helps with it.
[01:34:54]  And I smoked a lot of pot.
[01:34:56]  And so I asked my advisor, and I said, head of the department at the time, I said, look, what should I write my honors thesis on?
[01:35:03]  Do you have any suggestions?
[01:35:04]  He's like, you know, you're about to go on a dig in Ukraine.
[01:35:06]  Why don't you ask them if they have any projects?
[01:35:09]  So I get in touch with them and they just ghost me.
[01:35:11]  So, but I, but because of the rules, I had to do an honors thesis if I wanted to graduate honors, and I had to decide in my junior year before my senior year started so I could get going.
[01:35:20]  And he's like, just pick anything you like.
[01:35:22]  And I'm, I think it over, and then I go in there and I'm like sweating bullets.
[01:35:25]  I'm like, uh, can I do something on drugs in the ancient world?
[01:35:29]  That would be really cool.
[01:35:30]  And he's like, yeah, man, go for it.
[01:35:32]  Go talk to Peter Strzok.
[01:35:34]  He studies like ancient religion and different stuff like that.
[01:35:37]  Go talk to him.
[01:35:38]  He, he might have some ideas.
[01:35:40]  And so I talked to Peter, and he's just like, Dude, that sounds like an interesting idea.
[01:35:43]  People don't look at this.
[01:35:45]  And so you should come and take my classes next year.
[01:35:48]  Let's think about how you could study drugs in the context of ancient religion.
[01:35:52]  Right?
[01:35:52]  Because that's what he focuses on.
[01:35:54]  So the next term, he teaches a course on ancient Greek magic, or ancient magic in general, Greco Roman, Babylonian, et cetera.
[01:36:02]  And I'm sitting there and we read the Greek magical papyri.
[01:36:04]  And I'm just reading through it.
[01:36:06]  I'm still trying to get my specific thesis topic.
[01:36:08]  At the same time, you know, this is 2003, so we don't have the same kind of library resources we have today.
[01:36:13]  So I'm going and Googling around.
[01:36:15]  Drugs in the ancient world, and I'm getting like old issues of High Times Magazine where they're like, This is the argument in there is like the Romans used hemp fiber for their ropes, so therefore they're getting stoned all the time.
[01:36:27]  And me being, I hope, a smart stoner, I'm thinking to myself, That's not the best argument.
[01:36:33]  Like hemp rope is useful, you know.
[01:36:35]  Hemp fiber we know today is very useful, it's a very strong fiber to make, you know, textiles out of.
[01:36:40]  So, but that doesn't mean they're getting high off the stuff, it means they're making, you know, rope.
[01:36:45]  And so, I wanted real evidence that's direct that tells me.
[01:36:49]  They are using drugs 100%, right?
[01:36:53]  So, as I'm taking this course, I'm reading the Greek magical papyri, which are a series of about 100 different papyri.
[01:37:00]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:37:01]  Yeah, that are all found in Egypt, and they date from something like I think the earliest are from like the second or third century BC, so when Egypt was ruled by the Greeks, and the latest are something like the sixth century AD, so like, you know, sort of early medieval period, right?
[01:37:16]  But most of them are from like the third century AD, the height of the Roman Empire type period, right?
[01:37:22]  And what's really cool is, Even though you can only find papyri in Egypt because it's so dry, they preserve.
[01:37:28]  We do have some papyri elsewhere, like Herculaneum, the lava flow from Vesuvius preserved this ancient library there.
[01:37:34]  It's a philosophical library, and AI just helped unpeel it and translate it.
[01:37:39]  The big news, like six months ago.
[01:37:41]  So we do have some from elsewhere, but we get most of our papyri from Egypt.
[01:37:45]  That's where we get fragments of Homer that dates from the oldest fragments of Plato and Homer and whatnot, usually come from papyri in Egypt.
[01:37:54]  So, we have all these papyri.
[01:37:56]  Some of them are used as mummy cartonnage.
[01:37:58]  They're recycled on these mummies.
[01:38:00]  And when they take apart the mummies in the 19th century, they see there's writing on it.
[01:38:04]  And they're like, and then they read it.
[01:38:06]  And at the time, in the 19th century, this stuff was like satanic, right?
[01:38:09]  Because it's like the mishmash of polytheism.
[01:38:12]  It's the stuff that ends up becoming, you know, the witch trials and stuff like that, right?
[01:38:16]  Yeah.
[01:38:17]  And so, scholars didn't want to touch it with like a 10 foot pole back in the 19th, early 20th century.
[01:38:23]  The first class ever taught.
[01:38:25]  Did something just happen?
[01:38:27]  Yeah, I saw the light change.
[01:38:28]  A light just went out or something.
[01:38:29]  That was weird.
[01:38:31]  It did change, I'm with you.
[01:38:33]  But okay, so the very first class, early 20th century on this stuff, they couldn't even call it ancient magic because they were worried about the reaction.
[01:38:39]  So they called it selected papyri.
[01:38:41]  And that was it.
[01:38:41]  And then, of course, it's a class.
[01:38:42]  You were worried about the reaction from who?
[01:38:44]  I don't know, fellow scholars or the church or something like that because everybody's very conservative.
[01:38:48]  And then over time, especially in the last 30 years, 40 years, the first translation, the major translation of them by what?
[01:38:56]  Betts.
[01:38:57]  And Scarborough was the guy who did all the plants in them and stuff like that.
[01:39:01]  That came out in the 90s.
[01:39:02]  And since then, it's been exploding.
[01:39:04]  The field of ancient magic is huge because it actually changes how we understand ancient religion.
[01:39:09]  And so, what's really cool is we have throughout the Mediterranean world, and even as far north as Bath, England, for example, there's, you know, we have these lead curse tablets, right?
[01:39:21]  And these are, you know, this is when you do magic.
[01:39:24]  You basically inscribe a lead curse tablet, you roll it up because it's paper thin, and then you put it in a grave or you put it in a well or you put it underground, you bury it.
[01:39:34]  If you're trying to curse your neighbor's business because they're your competitor and you don't like them, You bury it under their doorstep.
[01:39:39]  If you want to curse that chariot driver because you root for the other team, you bury it on the racetrack.
[01:39:45]  And we still have examples of this today.
[01:39:46]  When they were doing Yankee Stadium, one of the construction workers was a Red Sox fan, or maybe it's vice versa.
[01:39:51]  It's in the news.
[01:39:52]  One of the construction workers was either a Yankees or Red Sox fan, the opposing team.
[01:39:56]  And they actually put in the hole a jersey of the opposite team as a curse, in a sense, right?
[01:40:01]  Because this stuff pervades, right?
[01:40:03]  And so what's really cool is we have some of these lead texts that are word for word the exact same spell on these papyri in Egypt.
[01:40:11]  So, we know this culture of magic and what's going on is very widespread.
[01:40:16]  We don't know whether the Egyptian sources are a little biased.
[01:40:20]  They have a lot of kind of Egyptian religion in them, like a larger amount than one would expect.
[01:40:26]  But the whole culture of magic, it mishmashes different religions.
[01:40:30]  It has kind of a little bit of Babylonian religion, a lot of Egyptian religion, Greek religion, Roman religion, Phoenician religion, different kinds of sources, Jewish religion, Christian religion, all in there.
[01:40:43]  All within the same spell because it's what's called syncretism.
[01:40:46]  It's paganism.

=== Syncretism in Spells (03:16) ===

[01:40:47]  It's just a mishmash of stuff, right?
[01:40:49]  They want to appease everybody they can to get the result they want, right?
[01:40:54]  So I'm reading these, and guess what?
[01:40:56]  A lot of these have drugs in them.
[01:40:58]  Very clear drugs.
[01:41:00]  Things like opium, right?
[01:41:01]  That is very clearly described.
[01:41:04]  You burn opium incense, that then is supposed to summon a lover.
[01:41:09]  And they even, I like this one.
[01:41:10]  This is my favorite, actually.
[01:41:11]  So it tells you how it works, right?
[01:41:13]  Because it's this spell to get a lover.
[01:41:16]  You're in love with somebody, you want to get them.
[01:41:17]  So, what you do, let me find it.
[01:41:19]  Sorry, I'd like to read it on air because it's friggin' cool.
[01:41:25]  Apparently, Galen wrote about Marcus Aurelius' physician, wrote about how much opium Marcus Aurelius was taking.
[01:41:31]  He said he kept having to up his dose.
[01:41:34]  And he said he was getting so annoyed by it.
[01:41:35]  He's like, this fucking guy, he keeps having to get more and more opium for him.
[01:41:41]  Okay, so here we go.
[01:41:42]  So, this is the spell to Sword of Dardanus.
[01:41:46]  It immediately bends and attracts the soul of whomever you wish.
[01:41:48]  So, you basically need to be a stalker to do this.
[01:41:50]  Don't fucking do this.
[01:41:51]  Just go, like, buy whoever you love some roses or something.
[01:41:55]  Do something good, okay?
[01:41:56]  But what you do is you sort of inscribe some charms and stuff on these statues that you make.
[01:42:01]  And then what you do is you burn.
[01:42:04]  Why does my computer suck right now?
[01:42:06]  And then you burn this offering to Eros, which includes four drams of opium.
[01:42:11]  There's a lot of opium, right?
[01:42:12]  We're talking like grams and grams of opium.
[01:42:16]  And then.
[01:42:17]  And then you say this incantation.
[01:42:20]  I call upon you unmoved by prayer, by your great name.
[01:42:25]  You want to go next?
[01:42:27]  No, you're going.
[01:42:29]  I make my students do this.
[01:42:37]  You practiced.
[01:42:38]  I read this for my YouTube video on this.
[01:42:40]  And like I said, I make my students do it sometimes when I'm teaching ancient religion.
[01:42:44]  First shining, night shining, night rejoicing, night engendering, witness, erikistwe, erakara.
[01:42:50]  All right, whatever.
[01:42:52]  You got to read all that stuff and you got to get it perfect.
[01:42:56]  And you're supposed to say it, I forget how many times, but you're supposed to say it several times.
[01:43:00]  And so it's really cool because the spell actually says, It has an excuse if it doesn't work.
[01:43:05]  So you make the burnt offering and you continuously say the spell of invocation and send him the daimon that you summon, and he will act without fail.
[01:43:14]  And whenever you bend her to your will with the stone, on that night it sends dreams.
[01:43:19]  For on a different night it is busy with different matters.
[01:43:22]  Now think about it.
[01:43:23]  You're doing this spell, you're obsessed with somebody, you're going, you're inhaling all this opium.
[01:43:30]  You go to bed, you have a bunch of dreams.
[01:43:33]  Right?
[01:43:34]  Because that's what's going to happen, right?
[01:43:37]  And whoa, that spell worked.
[01:43:39]  The diamond was summoned.
[01:43:41]  I had all these dreams.
[01:43:42]  It didn't quite work right.
[01:43:44]  I need to say Azharakhtva instead of Azharakha, you know, that kind of thing.
[01:43:49]  And so it's an explanation kind of for how it can work.
[01:43:52]  And so I started reading these and I found dozens of spells that involved ingredients that would, in our mind, alter your mind state, right?

=== Hellebore Hallucinations (08:45) ===

[01:44:03]  They'd get you high, let's say, right?
[01:44:05]  Something like that.
[01:44:06]  And so I realized actually in these texts, there's a whole bunch of evidence for actual ancient drug use that isn't hemp fibers on rope.
[01:44:15]  It isn't saying, well, this is a code word that might mean drugs.
[01:44:19]  This is saying, these are the drugs.
[01:44:22]  This is wormwood.
[01:44:23]  This is opium.
[01:44:24]  This is nightshade.
[01:44:25]  This is henbane.
[01:44:26]  This is what they're using.
[01:44:27]  And they're using it oftentimes, ingesting it in some way or another.
[01:44:31]  Not always, but sometimes.
[01:44:33]  And so, and like the nightshade ones are great.
[01:44:36]  They have these ones of nightshade, some of them involve wormwood as well.
[01:44:39]  Where they actually rub nightshade on their body.
[01:44:41]  There's one where they draw the diamond, they paint it on with this ink that's infused with the juice of wormwood, and then they put some nightshade in their ear.
[01:44:49]  And then they have this the description is amazing.
[01:44:52]  They have this vivid, vivid vision of this diamond that comes to them and talks to them and answers any question they want to have answered about the past, present, and future.
[01:45:02]  And it's like super described.
[01:45:03]  There's some there, it's like everything becomes light.
[01:45:06]  You know, it's almost anybody who's hallucinated will know that this kind of stuff sounds like what you experience, right?
[01:45:12]  Light gets changed and things become trippy and stuff like that.
[01:45:15]  And so you have these texts where they're describing it to you directly.
[01:45:19]  We are taking a substance that alters the mind.
[01:45:21]  We are having visions.
[01:45:23]  And so I did a statistical analysis of it.
[01:45:25]  Every single one, I mean, there's like a couple exceptions, but there's like several dozen examples of spells that involve clear mind altering substances.
[01:45:34]  And 90% of them involve some sort of altered state of mind that's very clearly altered state of mind, usually a vision.
[01:45:41]  And so it's like, This is evidence of ancient drug use.
[01:45:44]  And I wrote my honors thesis.
[01:45:46]  My committee fucking loved it.
[01:45:47]  They were like, this is.
[01:45:48]  And so I guess my point is it's not a thing as a field.
[01:45:52]  Sometimes it's just individuals that are assholes.
[01:45:55]  And I was scared of this.
[01:45:56]  I was like, I now apply to grad school, a different group of people.
[01:46:00]  And I'm like, fuck, what are they going to think of this?
[01:46:02]  But this is my writing sample.
[01:46:03]  I have to use something for a writing sample.
[01:46:05]  It's going to come from what I know best that I'm, at that point, that was my expertise.
[01:46:10]  And so I'm like, man, everybody's going to reject me.
[01:46:13]  I didn't.
[01:46:13]  I got into grad school.
[01:46:15]  And, you know, my very first conference paper was about this.
[01:46:18]  And everybody in the audience loved it.
[01:46:20]  They were like, that's really interesting.
[01:46:22]  And so, I mean, there are some people that were probably like, meh, fuck this.
[01:46:26]  And I talk about this even on my YouTube video and in my conference paper how, especially early scholars, up until the late 20th century, maybe middle 20th century, with the hippie movement coming in, they really did sneer at this stuff.
[01:46:39]  And you could see it in their texts.
[01:46:40]  I criticize this guy, E.R. Dodds, who is one of the preeminent scholars of ancient Greek religion.
[01:46:46]  And he has this, he describes this vision that this guy, alias Aristides, saw, where he sees the God coming to him and he describes how.
[01:46:56]  The emotions he feels, he's full of joy.
[01:46:59]  It describes exactly what you think of somebody who's high, right?
[01:47:03]  You know, they're seeing stuff, their state of mind has changed.
[01:47:07]  And then he's like, I loved it so much that the next day I drank even more and I saw God again.
[01:47:11]  And then I, you know, and so it's like, bam.
[01:47:14]  And then E.R. Dodds, in his book, he cuts out the segment of that passage from Alias Aristides, The Sacred Tales, that says that what he's drinking is wormwood, a wormwood concoction.
[01:47:25]  The same thing in absinthe.
[01:47:26]  And then he's like, no, drugs couldn't have been the result.
[01:47:29]  And so, like, don't get me wrong, there are biases, but to think it's everybody, my experience is not that.
[01:47:34]  My experience is that there are plenty of people who are open minded about this.
[01:47:38]  And I think, especially in the last 10, 15 years, the younger generation is now much more open minded towards that kind of thing.
[01:47:44]  It's like nobody cares.
[01:47:46]  Totally.
[01:47:46]  I think it's responsible for the foundation of religion and the idea of these pagan religions and dying and rising gods and experiencing these states of mind that is like tearing open the fabric of the universe.
[01:48:00]  I mean, it is like the closest you can get to God, to the universe, to like it's.
[01:48:06]  I think it's one tool.
[01:48:08]  So if you're alias Aristides, is a great example.
[01:48:10]  So this dude, he's like a really wealthy Greek guy from what we would call modern day Turkey, super wealthy, but he's always sick.
[01:48:21]  He's just a sickly dude, right?
[01:48:23]  He has chronic illnesses like you could not imagine.
[01:48:26]  But he's also very famous because he is one of the best public speakers in the Roman Empire.
[01:48:31]  So he travels around the Roman Empire.
[01:48:34]  Giving speeches.
[01:48:35]  You know, like he knows the top people, like the imperial family and different senators and everything, right?
[01:48:41]  He is super wealthy, super popular.
[01:48:43]  He has a love for giving speeches and he's also a priest to Asclepius, the god of healing and stuff like that.
[01:48:49]  And I think he's been initiated into different sort of religions as well.
[01:48:52]  So he's, you know, the upper crust.
[01:48:54]  And he left for us his autobiography, right?
[01:48:59]  It's called The Sacred Tales.
[01:49:00]  There's some translations in English that you can find online.
[01:49:03]  Maybe not online.
[01:49:04]  You probably might need to just go to a library.
[01:49:06]  Suck it up, go to a library, kids, if you want to read this stuff.
[01:49:09]  So he left this autobiography, and it's really cool.
[01:49:11]  It's like, you know, on this day I saw God, on that day I saw God, on these days I did this and that.
[01:49:16]  And he's so trippy that he doesn't even do things in chronological order.
[01:49:20]  So parts of it he starts off with like later on in his life, then he goes back to early in his life, and he just jumps around.
[01:49:25]  It's really kind of fascinating, and it gets you kind of out of your mind a little bit because you're like following it is tough.
[01:49:31]  And so, but the thing is, if you want to look at it from, say, a modern perspective, how is he altering his mind to see God?
[01:49:39]  All and he sees God a lot, and this is one of the big questions.
[01:49:41]  How do you how do people actually see God, right?
[01:49:45]  How do you get to that kind of state where you believe that you have an encounter with God?
[01:49:49]  And as you know, how would a scientist approach that, right?
[01:49:52]  And so, one explanation is certainly drugs.
[01:49:55]  Yes, he used drugs, he especially wormwood.
[01:49:58]  He also drank a lot.
[01:49:59]  He also did use this Egyptian incense type of thing, which we don't have any recipes.
[01:50:05]  It's called kufi, we don't have any recipes from his period, but later periods, like a few hundred years later, we have the recipe for kufi.
[01:50:12]  And different ones, so it's not always made the same way, but oftentimes narcotics and also like near death experiences.
[01:50:19]  Often in modern times, they explain that to be very similar to like DMT trips.
[01:50:24]  Exactly.
[01:50:25]  And that's what I was going to say.
[01:50:26]  He doesn't just do drugs, he does a lot of different things that all through his mind.
[01:50:31]  He won't eat for like a week and a half.
[01:50:33]  Yeah.
[01:50:34]  And then the next thing he does is he eats a whole chicken.
[01:50:36]  And it's like, dude, that's going to make you high.
[01:50:39]  Like, he's like, I'm sorry.
[01:50:41]  You don't eat for a week and then you devour a whole chicken.
[01:50:45]  That's going to give you some feels, right?
[01:50:47]  Or when there's a blizzard outside, he goes swimming naked in the river.
[01:50:52]  Oh, yeah.
[01:50:52]  That's going to do something to you.
[01:50:53]  Yeah.
[01:50:54]  One of my favorite stories.
[01:50:55]  Just like specific types.
[01:50:56]  Of, like, meditation and breath work and yoga, you can do to achieve these states.
[01:51:00]  All kinds of things.
[01:51:00]  All these kinds of things.
[01:51:01]  And, you know, the Asclepius cult is all about incubation.
[01:51:04]  And this is also key.
[01:51:05]  You know, scholars oftentimes call it culture patterning.
[01:51:09]  So, when you expect to have a certain kind of experience because everything around you is just right, right?
[01:51:16]  It's set up with the images of different deities, and you have the chanting around you, and it's a dark space.
[01:51:23]  And you've heard before you came in that this is what happened with people.
[01:51:26]  And you have inscribed on the walls around you the experiences of previous people.
[01:51:31]  And you believe when you're surrounded by these people and you have the symbolism and you believe you're channeling something, it makes it more real.
[01:51:40]  Exactly.
[01:51:41]  And so, you know, we have this, and especially these Asclepius temples, the people, the priests that worked there, they knew how to initiate visions.
[01:51:48]  You know, they had it down to a science in a sense.
[01:51:51]  And it's clear because, you know, Aristides is our best example of what they did.
[01:51:57]  Unfortunately, he's one of the only ones.
[01:51:58]  So.
[01:51:59]  We can't tell if maybe in different periods they did different stuff, if different temples did different stuff.
[01:52:04]  Who knows?
[01:52:05]  But what he's doing is a little grab bag of everything, right?
[01:52:07]  My favorite story is he always has an entourage around him, right?
[01:52:11]  Because he's just rich, right?
[01:52:12]  And he has his entourage and he goes around and he travels all the time and he always has his entourage do fucked up crazy shit, right?
[01:52:19]  And so one day he's taking this plant called hellebore, which don't take it, it's poisonous.
[01:52:25]  And that's one of the problems is a lot of the things, like today, we really mostly, mostly, Don't take drugs that can possibly kill you.
[01:52:35]  You know, like, obviously, drugs can kill you.
[01:52:38]  So, like, don't overdose on shit, guys.
[01:52:40]  Like, it's stupid.
[01:52:42]  Take something like pot where you're not going to die, right?
[01:52:45]  Or mushrooms or something like that where we know you're not going to kill yourself.

=== Pausanias on Mysteries (15:15) ===

[01:52:49]  Don't go take hellebore because if you take too much of it, you die.
[01:52:52]  So, he's taking this hellebore.
[01:52:53]  Where does hellebore come from?
[01:52:55]  It's in the Mediterranean.
[01:52:56]  It's a type of plant.
[01:52:57]  I think it's a type of root.
[01:52:57]  Yeah.
[01:52:59]  And what is the effect that you get?
[01:53:00]  I have no idea.
[01:53:01]  Is it an upper downer?
[01:53:02]  It's a toxic substance.
[01:53:03]  So, it's like taking a small dose of poison.
[01:53:06]  Okay.
[01:53:06]  Yeah.
[01:53:07]  And so he's, and the hellebore is also throughout the Greek magical papyri.
[01:53:11]  It's one of the more common toxic substances that's used.
[01:53:15]  It's like nightshade.
[01:53:15]  Nightshade is used by witches even in the 17th century.
[01:53:18]  There's this guy, Johann Weyer, who describes seeing, yeah, it's a flower, who describes, I got that wrong, I said it was a root.
[01:53:28]  Johann Weyer in the 17th century, he describes seeing witches, and what they do is they rub their bodies full of nightshade and then they claim that they're flying.
[01:53:37]  You know, but don't do that because you can die.
[01:53:40]  Like, I mean that you can die, and so, uh, I want to be sure to say that when I have an audience like him.
[01:53:46]  According to Carl Ruck about it, when he used to uh wrote his book Road to Eleusis, he was saying that a lot of people died during those uh during the Eleusinian mysteries every that happened every year.
[01:53:56]  Maybe they didn't have the dose right, a lot of people would drink too much and they would die.
[01:54:01]  I need to reread Road to Eleusis.
[01:54:02]  I don't remember anyone dying, but maybe I need to reread it.
[01:54:05]  Yeah, so it was Carl Ruck and it was um Strassman and Hoffman.
[01:54:11]  So, Wasson?
[01:54:12]  Gordon Wasson.
[01:54:13]  Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman.
[01:54:14]  Yeah, Albert Hoffman was the inventor of LSD.
[01:54:16]  Yes, exactly.
[01:54:17]  And Gordon Wasson was an ethnographer who studied Siberian shamanism and mushrooms.
[01:54:23]  And we can get into that in a second.
[01:54:24]  Let me just finish the story about Helibor.
[01:54:25]  Yes.
[01:54:26]  Because Elias Aristides, he takes his entourage, he does Helibor, and he says, Let's go sailing.
[01:54:31]  They go sailing.
[01:54:32]  Then he sees God, and God tells him to crash the boat.
[01:54:36]  So he crashes the boat, and then they have to swim to shore.
[01:54:38]  Right, right, right, right.
[01:54:39]  That's the kind of shit that happens when you take Helibor.
[01:54:42]  Don't do that.
[01:54:43]  But yeah, so, all right, I got some problems with that road to Eleusis.
[01:54:47]  It's been a while since I read it, but I'm going to tell you what my issue is with it.
[01:54:51]  So, as far as I remember, And I was reading it when I was doing my undergrad thesis, the same thesis where I did this stuff.
[01:54:59]  And when I was trying to figure out what I am going to write on, I read the book and I left my reading dissatisfied.
[01:55:05]  And this is also something that I really want to do a YouTube video on, especially because I didn't realize that it's still really popular in pop culture.
[01:55:13]  So I'm going to do a YouTube video on this in the nearest future, in the next, let's say, few months.
[01:55:18]  Especially since I mentioned it here, I got to fucking do it now.
[01:55:22]  But so when reading the book, I remember being very dissatisfied because what they claim.
[01:55:26]  So let's think about what the mysteries of Elusis are.
[01:55:28]  Okay.
[01:55:29]  First of all, just get out the idea of mystery as we think of mystery.
[01:55:34]  It's this very flashy word and stuff like that.
[01:55:36]  What it meant was, unlike most religions that are open to all, this was only the only people that could know the details of it were those who chose to go and become initiated.
[01:55:45]  And you had to pay a lot.
[01:55:46]  It was expensive, right?
[01:55:47]  Yeah, no, actually, enslaved people did it as well.
[01:55:50]  Yeah, it was available to all.
[01:55:52]  I thought the way he described it in the book was that you had to pay a lot of money to go do that.
[01:55:57]  If you want, you had to be able to buy a little pig.
[01:56:00]  And it's not a long trip.
[01:56:01]  It's a day's hike.
[01:56:02]  It's only a few hours.
[01:56:03]  But people came from all over.
[01:56:04]  Later on, in the Roman period, yes.
[01:56:06]  In the Roman period, people came from all over and it became an extremely popular cult that sort of got exported from Athens elsewhere.
[01:56:13]  Pausanias talks about it to Pausanias.
[01:56:16]  Pausanias is this Greek dude who did these trips around the Roman Greece.
[01:56:21]  And he described it all for us.
[01:56:23]  He's actually like one of the best sources for archaeology.
[01:56:26]  He like describes stuff that's no longer there and he does it.
[01:56:29]  And we've tested him, we've ground truthed him, just like with.
[01:56:32]  Plato, I was talking about ground truthing a text.
[01:56:34]  With Pausanias, his description of the Athenian Agora matches exactly what we find, right?
[01:56:39]  This is there, that's there, that's there.
[01:56:41]  Boom, we know he's telling the truth, if you see what I mean.
[01:56:44]  It's just right there.
[01:56:45]  And so he loves the Olympics.
[01:56:48]  He's like, the Olympic Games are the badass thing, the rites in honor of the Zeus, Olympian Zeus.
[01:56:56]  That's the greatest thing.
[01:56:57]  And the other greatest thing is the mysteries of Eleusis.
[01:56:59]  And so he tells us a little bit about it, but he's also like, I can't tell you too much because that part's hidden.
[01:57:04]  That's only if you're initiated.
[01:57:05]  It was very secret, right?
[01:57:06]  Well, only if you're initiated.
[01:57:08]  Yes.
[01:57:08]  But anyone could be initiated, but only the initiates can know what's up with it.
[01:57:13]  So you have to choose to do that.
[01:57:14]  And in many ways, these mystery cults, a lot of scholars think they are the early versions that Christianity ended up developing out of.
[01:57:22]  Yeah, they're the first cults that talk about saving your soul.
[01:57:26]  And Christianity denies that vehemently, right?
[01:57:29]  I don't think so.
[01:57:31]  I think they said Christianity was in its own bubble, and they didn't take anything from the pagan cults, they didn't take anything from.
[01:57:37]  But there's clearly lots of evidence of it.
[01:57:39]  I mean, most scholarly Christians say that.
[01:57:40]  Most, most, most.
[01:57:41]  Yeah, I had a Bible scholar in here a couple months ago, and he said, absolutely not.
[01:57:45]  He goes, none of it came from any of the pagan stuff.
[01:57:46]  I mean, I've talked with Bible scholars who teach what I'm teaching.
[01:57:49]  So, again, there's evidence of divides and divides them.
[01:57:52]  Like Persephone and the dying and rising gods.
[01:57:55]  And there's, what was the thing that came from?
[01:58:03]  There was a festival, Hararia.
[01:58:05]  Harari, what was it?
[01:58:07]  Harari.
[01:58:08]  Or something like that, that was very similar to Easter.
[01:58:10]  There's all these crazy parallels to some of these ancient mystery cults and what you find in modern Christianity and in the Bible.
[01:58:17]  Okay, yeah, no, I agree with you there.
[01:58:18]  There are a lot of parallels, and Christianity did not develop in a vacuum.
[01:58:22]  It developed within the Roman world, where there's a whole bunch of cults that are becoming very popular.
[01:58:28]  There's a huge amount of cults.
[01:58:30]  I completely disagree with that.
[01:58:31]  But I mean, you can see this in their iconography.
[01:58:34]  It matches, there's a lot of comparisons between Christian iconography and Dionysus iconography, because one of the big competitors to Christianity at the same time.
[01:58:43]  So, in the Roman Empire at around that time, mystery cults are becoming big.
[01:58:48]  So, before that, mystery cults were kind of a sideshow.
[01:58:52]  If you see what I mean, some people did it, a lot of people didn't.
[01:58:55]  But in this sort of early Roman imperial period and middle Roman imperial period, the people were really interested in mystery cults.
[01:59:03]  And so the Dionysus mystery cult was big, the one to Mithras was another one.
[01:59:10]  Yes, yes, yes.
[01:59:11]  The one to Isis, the Egyptian goddess, was another big one.
[01:59:15]  And we have all sorts of texts and iconography for all of these cults.
[01:59:20]  Yeah, you talked about this a lot.
[01:59:22]  With my friend Neil on his channel, Gnostic Informant.
[01:59:25]  Yeah, yeah, he was here before, yeah.
[01:59:27]  That was a fascinating discussion you guys had.
[01:59:28]  Yeah, I really liked it too.
[01:59:29]  He was a good guy.
[01:59:30]  Check out Gnostic Informant.
[01:59:31]  Yeah, check out Gnostic Informant.
[01:59:33]  So, yeah, so it's not developing in a vacuum.
[01:59:35]  I mean, look, dude, Christianity today, as it is, is part of our culture in today's world.
[01:59:40]  It's not the same thing as 2,000 years ago.
[01:59:42]  And so, you know, everything we do is part of the culture we're in.
[01:59:46]  It just is what it is.
[01:59:48]  And anybody that denies Christianity was related and part of a conversation that was going on.
[01:59:54]  2000 years ago is not looking at the historical sources in an honest way.
[01:59:59]  And that's the thing.
[02:00:00]  That's the interesting thing to me, too, about Bible scholars and people who go and get a degree in the Bible is that the vast majority of them subscribe to the very religion that they're dedicating their studies to.
[02:00:12]  So they're doing a scientific endeavor that is directly aligned with their spirituality.
[02:00:17]  I share an office with a guy who studies biblical law and stuff like that.
[02:00:23]  And he's not religious?
[02:00:24]  I don't think so.
[02:00:25]  Yeah, I mean, a lot of, I mean, if you're at a Christian university, maybe, but, and I've met, you know, religious scholars who are religious too.
[02:00:33]  I've just meant that there's both out there.
[02:00:34]  There's plenty of people who are interested in this just as a phenomenon to study historically, right?
[02:00:39]  From a more dispassionate point of view, right?
[02:00:42]  Like I said, everybody has biases.
[02:00:44]  That's just fucking life, right?
[02:00:45]  Not gonna say that from an unbiased point of view, because screw that.
[02:00:49]  But from a more dispassionate point of view, they're not there to prove Christianity right or wrong.
[02:00:54]  Yeah.
[02:00:55]  That's not the emphasis of their study.
[02:00:56]  The emphasis of their study is to understand how Christianity developed and changed over time with the cultures that it existed in, the practice of Christianity, if you see what I mean.
[02:01:05]  Right?
[02:01:05]  And so, you know, that is, yeah, there's lots of people that study it that way.
[02:01:09]  Lots of them.
[02:01:10]  And I've taken classes from them and stuff, yeah.
[02:01:13]  But where were we?
[02:01:14]  Eleusis.
[02:01:15]  Yes, Eleusis.
[02:01:15]  Okay, so let's bring us back to Eleusis for a second.
[02:01:18]  So, Eleusis.
[02:01:18]  And are you familiar with Brian Mararescu and his work?
[02:01:22]  No, this is why I need to read that before I actually do this video.
[02:01:25]  I know the road to Eleusis, and I've read it, and I had notes on it from the time that I read before coming here, so I could talk to you.
[02:01:31]  But I also did not have read it for a while.
[02:01:34]  So I'm going to admit that.
[02:01:35]  Whatever, take what I say with a grain of salt.
[02:01:37]  I'm giving my own opinion that I have had for 20 years.
[02:01:41]  Okay.
[02:01:41]  So our sources for the mysteries of Eleusis are difficult.
[02:01:46]  Yes.
[02:01:46]  Because nobody's allowed to write certain details, if you see what I mean.
[02:01:52]  And because certain details are allowed to be public information, other details are not allowed to be public information.
[02:01:59]  And so what that means is we don't have the full picture.
[02:02:01]  Of what's going on with these mysteries of Eleusis.
[02:02:03]  There's an incomplete picture of what our sources are.
[02:02:06]  And that to me is one red flag.
[02:02:08]  If our picture of what's going on is incomplete and they're only allowed to present one side of the story in these written sources, the initiates, because that's what they're allowed to talk about, but they can't talk about other things, that's a very biased picture we're getting, right?
[02:02:22]  Then the other bits we have so we have people like Pausanias, who was an initiate who talks about it, but he holds back because he can't reveal everything.
[02:02:31]  And he loves it, right?
[02:02:32]  He's all into it.
[02:02:33]  Then we have this trial that happened at the end of the fifth century.
[02:02:38]  Where, so what happened is the Peloponnesian Wars are going on, and this group of young, wealthy people who, one of them is Alcibiades, he's the one that convinced Athens to go fight the Sicilians.
[02:02:49]  But then he ended up not leading that failed expedition because of what's happened.
[02:02:53]  He got drunk with a bunch of people.
[02:02:55]  He's also in the symposium, he gets drunk with Socrates and stuff like that.
[02:02:58]  He gets drunk with a bunch of people, and a bunch of these rich young men get very, very drunk, and they go out and they vandalize stuff.
[02:03:08]  Like sometimes young men do when they're really drunk.
[02:03:10]  Happens today.
[02:03:11]  And what they vandalize is, you know, have you ever seen Greek statues and how they have wangs on them?
[02:03:16]  Right?
[02:03:16]  So there's these statues of Hermes, which are like a bust and then they have a phallus sticking out.
[02:03:21]  And they knocked off the dicks.
[02:03:24]  They were erect wieners, right?
[02:03:26]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:03:27]  And I mean, dude, like, I could see drunk young people doing that today.
[02:03:30]  Yeah.
[02:03:30]  Right?
[02:03:31]  Like, this is a lot of times you look at the past and things are different from what we imagine today.
[02:03:36]  Sometimes you can say, actually, that makes a lot of fucking sense, right?
[02:03:39]  That shit happens today.
[02:03:40]  I don't necessarily think drunk young dudes should do that, but.
[02:03:43]  We know that happens.
[02:03:44]  So, this is sacrilegious, of course.
[02:03:46]  These are statues of a deity.
[02:03:48]  So, there's a big trial.
[02:03:50]  And in this trial, a lot of these people are initiates of Eleusis.
[02:03:54]  And so, it becomes this big scandal.
[02:03:56]  And we have these texts of legal, you know, at the time, some of these speeches in law courts are recorded by people like Andakites.
[02:04:06]  I'm blanking right now, but whatever.
[02:04:07]  The main ones are from Andakites, and he has this speech on the mysteries and stuff like that.
[02:04:13]  But again, This is going to have a lot of biases involved in what it's describing because it's in a very legal context.
[02:04:19]  And he's still not allowed to say everything because they can't talk about what they're talking about.
[02:04:23]  But here it's used as a defense and prosecution and shit like that.
[02:04:26]  And that's, of course, biasing what you get.
[02:04:30]  And then the third source we have, that's a sort of type of source we have that's a lot later, is Christian sources where they talk about this, like Christian bishops describe this kind of stuff.
[02:04:40]  And that, of course, is going to have its own set of biases.
[02:04:42]  These people were never actually initiated into it.
[02:04:45]  And they're describing it as like this pagan type thing that.
[02:04:48]  Is evil and da da da da.
[02:04:50]  Right?
[02:04:50]  And so all this stuff gives us this really tricky picture of what goes on in the mysteries to Eleusis.
[02:04:59]  So now think about how possibly the ingestion of drugs is happening in these mysteries.
[02:05:07]  So there's all sorts of cool things that happen for these mysteries.
[02:05:09]  For example, if you're going to be initiated, you got to walk from Athens to Eleusis, which is a doable walk.
[02:05:14]  It's just a few miles, you know.
[02:05:16]  And you have to do this.
[02:05:17]  You have to lead a little piggy.
[02:05:18]  So you have the little pig that you're leading along.
[02:05:21]  And then at one point you go.
[02:05:22]  By this bridge.
[02:05:24]  And the bridge on the bridge is all the former initiates.
[02:05:28]  And what they do is they insult you from above.
[02:05:30]  So you sort of have to break you down, right?
[02:05:32]  They're shouting insults like, hey, you're ugly, like that kind of shit.
[02:05:36]  And then you get through that.
[02:05:37]  And then you get to Eleusis.
[02:05:39]  And one of the things you do is you sacrifice your pig.
[02:05:42]  So that's a big thing.
[02:05:43]  And there's been some scholars.
[02:05:45]  This is, again, something you could debate.
[02:05:47]  This is something I'm really interested in since I study animals and food and stuff like that.
[02:05:51]  But you kill the pig and everybody dumps them in these pits called the telesteria, I think.
[02:05:56]  And, uh, and we've actually excavated some of them at Eleusis.
[02:05:59]  I've been to Eleusis several times, and I know somebody who studied some animal bones there, in fact, found some pig bones and stuff like that.
[02:06:05]  And you throw them in these pits, and then later on, the women, when they do the lesser mysteries, it's for the, what is it, for the Thesmophoria, I think it is.
[02:06:17]  They then take the soil and scatter it in the fields because it's all in honor of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture.
[02:06:23]  And so, one of the modern interpretations, which might be right, might be wrong, is that's a form of fertilizer.
[02:06:29]  You have these dead decomposing pigs, they decompose for six months, and then you take them and you scatter them in the fields, and even though they don't know why, it actually improves the crops, right?
[02:06:38]  So I think Kevin Clinton, Dr. Kevin Clinton, who's one of the main scholars on the mysteries of Eleusis, has published on that idea.
[02:06:47]  So you do that, and then the main ritual, we don't have a lot of evidence for.
[02:06:53]  One of the key things we do have evidence for, and this is where there might or might not be drugs, is they drink this drink called a cacaon.
[02:07:00]  Kykion, yeah.
[02:07:01]  Yeah.
[02:07:01]  And this thing, it's actually a fairly common drink, right?
[02:07:04]  It's used in other contexts as well.
[02:07:06]  It's basically like milk and grains.
[02:07:10]  So, like barley and stuff like that, which makes a lot of sense when you have Demeter, goddess of agriculture, goddess of grains, and stuff like that.
[02:07:16]  And in the hymn to Demeter, which is called a Homeric hymn, these Homeric hymns, they probably weren't ever written down by the same people that recorded the Iliad and the Odyssey.
[02:07:27]  Whether there even is a Homer, fuck, that's a big question.
[02:07:30]  It's called the Homeric question, even.
[02:07:32]  And so.
[02:07:33]  But these Homeric hymns, they're probably written down in the sixth century BC, which is about the time when we start seeing maybe the first bits of this Eleusis cult.
[02:07:43]  There was a cult at Eleusis earlier, but it doesn't seem to be the same thing as what's going on later because religions change over time, right?
[02:07:50]  The consensus is Eleusis was going on for like 1500 years, right?
[02:07:55]  Well, so the Eleusinian mysteries as we know them, probably a good start date could be that hymn to Demeter, late sixth century BC.

=== Burning Bones for Gods (08:27) ===

[02:08:04]  And then they went on until kind of really the end of the Roman period.
[02:08:07]  So.
[02:08:07]  Over a thousand years, I guess a good thing would be about 1100 years, 1200, where we have firm evidence of it being practiced.
[02:08:16]  Right?
[02:08:17]  There's a lot of questions about earlier.
[02:08:21]  I am very skeptical of sort of Bronze Age interpretations there.
[02:08:24]  That's not what I see at all.
[02:08:27]  My colleague, Deborah Roussillos Kosmopoulos, who studied animal bones from Eleusis, for example.
[02:08:31]  What is the Bronze Age interpretation?
[02:08:33]  What do you mean by that?
[02:08:34]  Well, some people think that what you see at Eleusis, even though we don't have many buildings, even though we don't have that much evidence for cult in the same way, That the mystery started that early.
[02:08:45]  But we don't have any writing from that period, right?
[02:08:47]  The only writing we have is in these palaces and it's just, it's receipts.
[02:08:50]  It's like this much stuff comes into the palace, that much stuff goes out.
[02:08:54]  Okay.
[02:08:54]  Right?
[02:08:54]  And we do know that there is evidence for a certain level of continuity of certain aspects of Greek cult between this prehistoric Bronze Age and classical Greece when we have all these texts that describe this stuff because we have the same name as some of the gods.
[02:09:08]  We have animal sacrifice, and that's where I'm very familiar because the idea that you slaughter an animal.
[02:09:15]  Feast on much of its meat, but then you burn some of the bones for the gods.
[02:09:20]  The burning of the bones of the gods, the physical evidence for this, that's what I study, right?
[02:09:24]  Physical evidence.
[02:09:25]  That certainly begins in the Bronze Age, but it's not the same as what shows up in the classical period.
[02:09:30]  So, you know, if you read this guy Hesiod, Hesiod was, assuming it's one person, he was around around the same time as Homer, assuming that's a person.
[02:09:39]  And these are all oral poetry.
[02:09:41]  We can get into that later because that's really interesting.
[02:09:43]  But if there are these figures that existed, they existed in like the eighth.
[02:09:48]  Maybe seventh century BC.
[02:09:50]  He wrote a series of books on Greek religion, the Theogony, which is how the world is formed, and stuff like that.
[02:09:56]  And then he has a book on agriculture, works and days, how to grow crops in the right way, right?
[02:10:02]  And in these books, he describes sacrificing animals.
[02:10:05]  And he explains why the Greeks burned these bones.
[02:10:08]  And the story is that basically Prometheus, you know, the guy who stole fire, the guy who was chained up and his liver was eaten, one of the ways that he tricked Zeus, besides stealing fire and shit like that, is he killed a couple cattle.
[02:10:23]  He invited the gods and people to the feast.
[02:10:27]  And what he did was he divided the portions up.
[02:10:30]  Right.
[02:10:30]  And he got the bones and wrapped them in fat.
[02:10:34]  And he got the meat and wrapped them in like the intestines and the hides.
[02:10:38]  Right.
[02:10:38]  Trying to trick Zeus.
[02:10:39]  Yeah.
[02:10:40]  And the story goes as he sees a text in, I think it's the Theogony mentions this.
[02:10:45]  And he talks about how Zeus knew what was up, but he chose the fat wrapped bones anyway.
[02:10:52]  And then it says, that's why we burn bones for the gods.
[02:10:56]  Right.
[02:10:56]  That is the Theogony for sure.
[02:10:57]  That's why we burn bones for the gods.
[02:11:00]  And look.
[02:11:01]  Dozens and dozens of sites, many I've studied.
[02:11:04]  I've studied probably a dozen sites with these kind of burned bones for the gods, right?
[02:11:08]  Hundreds of them.
[02:11:10]  And I've studied them in the Bronze Age.
[02:11:12]  I've studied them all the way through the Roman period.
[02:11:13]  We're talking 1,500 plus years of activity of people burning bones at different sites in temple contexts, sometimes in household contexts, in different types of places, right?
[02:11:25]  Very clearly, sacrificial ritual because it isn't just random burning.
[02:11:30]  So, you know, and that's the key here, right?
[02:11:31]  It's not just random burning.
[02:11:33]  Hesiod doesn't tell you which bones to burn.
[02:11:35]  He just says we burn bones.
[02:11:37]  Homer, though, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, dozens and dozens and dozens of times, he tells you exactly which bones are burned.
[02:11:45]  You wrap the thigh bone in fat and burn that for the gods.
[02:11:48]  And what we see this is an article I'm actually working on right now.
[02:11:51]  So if you're a scholar listening, you're getting a heads up on this.
[02:11:54]  So what we actually see is in the Bronze Age, they're burning, they're selecting certain body parts to burn, but it's sort of different in different places.
[02:12:04]  So at the Palace of Nestor in Pelos, we have this great archive room, which is where when the palace burned down, So, those clay tablets that we have with writing on them, they're just receipts.
[02:12:13]  They're like, this stuff comes in and out of the palace.
[02:12:14]  It's like, two oxen go there to plow fields, then they go there to plow fields.
[02:12:18]  We collected this much wool, now we gave it to these people to spin it into garments, right?
[02:12:23]  That's what it is.
[02:12:24]  Or we have a feast in honor of Zeus and we sacrifice this many animals, right?
[02:12:29]  That's what these tablets are.
[02:12:30]  And they're temporary accounts.
[02:12:32]  So, they're made on clay, they're inscribed with their linear B text, is what it's called.
[02:12:36]  Then they're stored for a little bit.
[02:12:38]  And then they're actually, Tom Palima has a great article on this with the spatial aspect of this room.
[02:12:44]  And you can see where different tablets are and how they're stored and stuff like that.
[02:12:47]  But then they get melted back down into raw clay and then reformed into new tablets when that receipt is no longer needed.
[02:12:53]  Right?
[02:12:54]  But what happened is the palace burned down, so it baked the clay.
[02:12:57]  So we have tablets that date right to the end of the palace's life as a palace, when it was a function as a palace.
[02:13:04]  Right?
[02:13:04]  And so that's what we have.
[02:13:05]  But right in that room, and so one of the, actually it was my supervisor that studied this, Paul Halstead and Valsi Izikilu, they studied the animal bones there.
[02:13:13]  One of the interesting ideas is that maybe these are a receipt as well of a feast.
[02:13:18]  Because what they have is they have the burned jaw bones, upper forelimbs, and thigh bones of cattle and red deer.
[02:13:26]  And red deer, by the way, at that time were as large, if not larger, than cattle.
[02:13:30]  So they're big deer, right?
[02:13:32]  They don't exist in Greece today of that size because they've been pushed out due to deforestation and shit like that.
[02:13:37]  And the few that exist are in Scotland and they're tiny.
[02:13:40]  But they're not extinct, but they're just, you know.
[02:13:43]  Yeah, those guys.
[02:13:44]  I have found some giant red deer bones that are bigger than cattle bones.
[02:13:47]  They're like an elk.
[02:13:49]  They're like the elk of Europe, is the right way to.
[02:13:52]  Think about them even.
[02:13:53]  Wow.
[02:13:53]  They're really impressive and really cool.
[02:13:55]  And so, in this room, they have a series of deposits of these specific burn bones.
[02:14:02]  And that's why we can tell it's ritual because it's the same bone burned over and over again the jawbone, the upper forelimb, or the upper hind limb, the thigh bone, right?
[02:14:11]  But elsewhere in the branch, at Eleusis, it's something else.
[02:14:14]  We have the burned lower legs of pigs.
[02:14:19]  At this other sanctuary at Ayos Konstantinos on the little peninsula of Methana, studied by Eleni Konsolaki and Yannis Hamalakis.
[02:14:29]  They also have the lower legs of pigs.
[02:14:31]  At a site that I studied on Crete, Halasmenos, it's the lower legs of sheep and cattle.
[02:14:38]  And then what happens is so you have all this different stuff.
[02:14:40]  You have thigh bones and jaw bones here, you have lower legs there of one species, but over there you have lower legs.
[02:14:47]  So it's like a mishmash of different ways of burning bones for the gods, but it's not done all the same way, right?
[02:14:54]  So time goes on, and over time it becomes much more orthodox.
[02:14:58]  In temples, it ends up becoming only thigh bones.
[02:15:02]  So, you know, when you think of classical Greek temples, whether in Athens, I've studied some of this in Athens.
[02:15:07]  I've studied, I've seen some of it, though it was published by David Reese at Isthmia.
[02:15:11]  People have published it at, I don't know, temples all over the Greek world, really.
[02:15:14]  It's always the thigh bones, right?
[02:15:16]  That's what you see.
[02:15:17]  But in houses, sometimes still people burn different things.
[02:15:19]  So, at this site I work on in Crete, one of my big projects is this super cool site called Azoria.
[02:15:24]  It's like a totally modern excavation where we've uncovered the entire city core.
[02:15:28]  And right when they intentionally abandon the site and burn it down when they leave, And we know this because there's no signs of violence.
[02:15:35]  And they actually purposefully dismantle the buildings.
[02:15:38]  So, like, they take apart some of the interior walls to cause them to collapse in.
[02:15:42]  So, it's kind of like an abandonment ritual.
[02:15:44]  And they also do a sacrifice.
[02:15:46]  And that sacrifice is those burned lower legs, if you see what I mean.
[02:15:50]  But right after that, that's like one of the last examples of that.
[02:15:53]  After that, anything that's at a temple is burned thigh bones.
[02:15:58]  And I actually, my main argument is that this is because Homer, Homeric poetry is becoming so popular.
[02:16:04]  Everybody sees that and they say, Oh, we got to do it like that.
[02:16:08]  You know, this is our religious text.
[02:16:10]  This is why we're going to do this.
[02:16:11]  So we're going to do it just like they do in Homer.
[02:16:14]  Even though, at the time of Homer, let's say, when those poems were really crystallizing into their more final version, they're doing things actually in a lot of different ways, if you see what I mean.
[02:16:25]  And so at Eleusis, if you see what I mean, at Eleusis, you have the, let's go back there, we have these mysteries going on.

=== Purple Dye Origins (05:03) ===

[02:16:31]  And these mysteries, we know what they do with the pigs.
[02:16:33]  Guess what?
[02:16:34]  They don't burn them.
[02:16:36]  They throw the pig still alive into that pit, the telesterion, they let it decompose.
[02:16:41]  They don't even eat it.
[02:16:42]  And then they take that soil and spread it in the fields later on during the Thesmophoria.
[02:16:47]  Right?
[02:16:48]  And so that's different, though, from what was going on at Eleusis a thousand years earlier, which Deborah Cosmopoulos Rusillo has published and her husband Michael Cosmopoulos.
[02:16:58]  And they have published that they're burning these bones.
[02:17:02]  So stuff has changed in that intervening period.
[02:17:05]  Whatever's going on is a different form.
[02:17:07]  And they're doing it in like a household.
[02:17:09]  It's not like a giant temple or anything in the Bronze Age.
[02:17:11]  It's not the.
[02:17:12]  Big sanctuary we think of.
[02:17:13]  So we want to always avoid thinking the same thing is always happening all the time in the same place, right?
[02:17:19]  And so when you look still, so okay, so now we have this mystery.
[02:17:23]  We have the cult of Demeter, and they're drinking this cacaon.
[02:17:27]  That's going to be the best potential vector for consuming some sort of drugs.
[02:17:33]  Maybe there's something else they're doing that we don't know about, but again, we just don't know then, right?
[02:17:38]  So the argument that Carl Ruck and Albert Hoffman and Gordon Wasson make.
[02:17:44]  In Road to Eleusis, is that they think that the grain that's growing, I think it's barley, that's growing near Eleusis is infested with ergot.
[02:17:53]  Yes.
[02:17:53]  Which is a type of fungus.
[02:17:54]  Yep.
[02:17:54]  And there's an alkaloid that comes out of the fungus.
[02:17:57]  And there's, there's, Ergot, especially at that time when they published it and in a few decades afterwards, was really popular among scholars to explain weird things.
[02:18:08]  So some people think that the witch trials were because of infested Ergot causing people to behave irrationally.
[02:18:15]  Right.
[02:18:16]  But in all of, in many of these cases, a lot of things apparently accidentally were infested with Ergot.
[02:18:22]  Yeah.
[02:18:23]  And so in many of these cases, the problem is, is we just don't know.
[02:18:26]  Mm hmm.
[02:18:27]  The ancient people, the people even a few hundred years ago, they didn't know what ergot was in the same way we do.
[02:18:35]  It's just some mold growing on stuff.
[02:18:36]  There's a lot of different molds that can grow on stuff, right?
[02:18:39]  And so that's a possibility without a doubt.
[02:18:43]  But the problem to me with their argument is the only evidence that it is ergot is because the color purple is described as sacred at Eleusis.
[02:18:52]  And ergot has a purplish color.
[02:18:55]  And that was my big red flag.
[02:18:57]  Ergot does have a purplish color?
[02:18:58]  Yeah, I think I've looked it up.
[02:18:59]  We can look it up here actually.
[02:19:00]  I haven't looked it up in a while.
[02:19:01]  And this, and look, and I want to clarify again I tried to look for the book before I came here.
[02:19:05]  My library did not have it.
[02:19:07]  I have to enter library loan it to find it to read it again.
[02:19:10]  But I did write about it in my thesis, and so I went back and reread that, and that's what this is coming from.
[02:19:15]  So I just want to be really clear about this.
[02:19:16]  This was my impression 20 fucking years ago.
[02:19:20]  But it's based on what I read, and it had good footnotes, if you see what I mean.
[02:19:24]  Yeah.
[02:19:24]  And so my main issue with the hypothesis that Ergot was at Eleusis was the evidence of purple.
[02:19:33]  It sounds intriguing as a possibility.
[02:19:35]  Hey, ergot is a purplish color.
[02:19:38]  They describe purple as an important color at Eleusis.
[02:19:41]  So maybe that's what that's referring to.
[02:19:45]  The problem is that purple is like the most prestigious color in ancient Greece and Rome and the ancient Near East and everything like that.
[02:19:53]  Purple is the color that was meaningful for religious purposes and political purposes throughout the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age and even earlier.
[02:20:05]  Down through the Roman Empire.
[02:20:06]  And the reason why is because it's extremely expensive to make.
[02:20:10]  It's the dye, the purple dye they used was worth more than its weight in gold by a lot.
[02:20:15]  And so it dyed sort of fabric this brilliant, bright color that everybody wanted, right?
[02:20:22]  It was how you stood out, was with that purple.
[02:20:24]  The problem is, to get purple dye, you get them from this snail shell, the sea snail called murex, right?
[02:20:32]  And so you have to extract this gland from the sea snail.
[02:20:36]  That is the purple.
[02:20:37]  And it's an extremely laborious process.
[02:20:40]  Yeah, exactly.
[02:20:42]  I have studied hundreds, if not thousands, of these kind of murex shells.
[02:20:46]  And I've seen them on various sites.
[02:20:48]  And I have colleagues like Dimitra Milena, who studied a purple dye manufacturing workshop from Bronze Age Crete, actually a little tiny island off the coast of Crete called Creasy.
[02:20:58]  And so I've seen Roman period purple dye manufacturing workshops.
[02:21:02]  There's this myth that goes around, the Greeks actually pretty much read this myth that it all comes from Phoenicia.
[02:21:07]  It's like it's Tyrian purple.
[02:21:09]  Not true.
[02:21:10]  People have been making it in Greece and elsewhere where Murox comes about, but that's what it was associated with, right?
[02:21:15]  It's kind of like how we call the turkey turkey.
[02:21:17]  We associated it with turkey when it's actually not from Turkey, right?
[02:21:21]  And so that's just life.
[02:21:23]  And so they did, don't get me wrong, they did make these in Phoenicia.
[02:21:27]  I'm not trying to argue that.
[02:21:28]  And that's where probably much of the purple dye came from, but it wasn't only from Tyre and Phoenicia.

=== Plato's Republic Blueprint (10:45) ===

[02:21:35]  What do you think contributes to it?
[02:21:37]  It seems like the classical period in Greece was just, it's just.
[02:21:42]  Known for this incredible explosion of intellect and philosophy that was happening then.
[02:21:49]  Seemed to have it seems to have died off like around three to four hundred AD.
[02:21:55]  It seemed to die, no, like after Eleusis was burned down, it just changed.
[02:22:00]  So, I mean, you know, again, I think that we have this perception of these ebbs and flows to history, and I think that that's not that I think that's more of a public perception than what we would say in academia.
[02:22:12]  I think that like if things change is what happens, and we still have people writing stuff down.
[02:22:17]  So, ancient Athens is a cool example, right.
[02:22:20]  So, why do we get this stuff from ancient Athens?
[02:22:23]  And people have always started to look at it and say, is it democracy that led to this flourishing, right?
[02:22:28]  It's one of the really common explanations.
[02:22:30]  But, you know, I think that one of the most important explanations that sometimes we forget is just how evidence survives for us, which means they wrote it down.
[02:22:38]  And I think that's really important because the Athenians, for whatever reason, just like to write shit down.
[02:22:45]  Like, they just really like to write shit down.
[02:22:49]  And it's not just the poetry and the philosophy.
[02:22:52]  And all that kind of stuff.
[02:22:53]  They inscribed every single law they made on marble, right?
[02:23:00]  They scratched graffiti on pottery, right?
[02:23:03]  They wrote stuff down all the time.
[02:23:06]  It wasn't that everybody was literate, but it was a culture that prized writing stuff down in that medium, if you see what I mean.
[02:23:15]  While other cultures didn't prize that as much.
[02:23:16]  And so to say that some culture, just because they didn't write stuff down, wasn't doing that kind of stuff, like philosophizing or having.
[02:23:24]  Cool poetry and stuff like that.
[02:23:26]  I think that's a mistake.
[02:23:27]  That's a bias based on what survives for us today.
[02:23:30]  Are the Greeks the ones that came up with democracy?
[02:23:32]  Well, I think the Athenian democracy probably is the earliest version of democracy recorded.
[02:23:37]  And that was Solon?
[02:23:38]  Well, no, he developed the Constitution.
[02:23:40]  Solon was kind of like George Washington.
[02:23:42]  Yeah, well, he developed the Constitution, and he's also very much a mythical figure.
[02:23:46]  He comes from a period, the late 7th century BC, where we don't really have many sources.
[02:23:51]  So we have people that are describing him 200 years later, and just like today, we think of George Washington as like this.
[02:23:57]  Crazy fucking dude, you know, like that kind of stuff.
[02:23:59]  He probably was totally different back then.
[02:24:01]  The people who read like 18th century stuff, they probably have a totally different picture of George Washington than you and me do, you know, because they read what he wrote and they read the people that knew him.
[02:24:11]  We don't have any of that for so long.
[02:24:12]  We don't have the people that knew him.
[02:24:13]  We don't have what he wrote.
[02:24:15]  And so, but he didn't establish the democracy.
[02:24:17]  The democracy was established in the late 6th century BC by Cleisthenes and it kept changing, you know, so the Persians then invade and the fact that the Athenians beat the Persians was like a big rah rah sort of win for democracy, sort of showed, hey, this system of government can work, right?
[02:24:33]  And then they sort of created what scholars call the Athenian Empire.
[02:24:37]  It's actually like a Delian League.
[02:24:39]  And so, but throughout this, even it begins in the sixth century, we get this kind of culture of let's write stuff down.
[02:24:47]  And we have other places.
[02:24:49]  On Crete, there's this city state that was there earlier than Athens in the seventh century BC and into the sixth century where they have a ton of writings of laws and stuff like that.
[02:25:00]  Right, and so for whatever reason, they're alone, they're the ones doing that at that time.
[02:25:04]  They're writing down these early legal codes and like that.
[02:25:07]  And it's really cool, it's a bunch of inscriptions with it, and nobody hears of it though, because it's not a famous city, right?
[02:25:13]  And uh, and so that's why I always say we don't want to be biased by what survives.
[02:25:18]  Survivorship bias is a big problem, yeah, something that scholars always have to overcome, and it's tough, right?
[02:25:24]  It's tough as hell to sort of say, Hey, I'm biased by what actually survives.
[02:25:28]  A lot of our biases of what survives is due to Christian monks choosing what to.
[02:25:31]  Write copy or not in medieval libraries.
[02:25:34]  Like everybody thinks that the burning of Alexandria is what destroyed knowledge.
[02:25:38]  No, what destroyed knowledge was slow decay over time, and then what preserved knowledge was monks copying it.
[02:25:45]  Right.
[02:25:45]  And that was like a, from what I understand, that was like a long, laborious process of rewriting those books because the Alexandria was right near the water.
[02:25:52]  A lot of those books were decaying and they had to preserve them by like copying them all the time.
[02:25:58]  Oh, yeah.
[02:25:58]  And same thing in the medieval period.
[02:26:00]  You have to constantly copy stuff because it's decaying, right?
[02:26:03]  And so every few hundred years, you better copy that text or it's going to be gone.
[02:26:07]  So if you don't have somebody that's invested in doing that, it doesn't survive.
[02:26:11]  This is why we have all of Plato's works because the Christians really liked Plato.
[02:26:15]  Augustine was a huge fan of Plato and he became known as the divine philosopher.
[02:26:20]  In the medieval and Renaissance period.
[02:26:22]  So there was a huge concerted effort to preserve what he wrote because it was useful for Christians.
[02:26:28]  On the other hand, other shit was chosen not to be recorded and preserved.
[02:26:33]  And so, you know, that impacts what we know.
[02:26:36]  That's interesting.
[02:26:37]  It's funny because Amon said Plato was the enemy of classical culture and Aristotle knew it.
[02:26:44]  No, I don't think they thought that because Plato was worshipped in the Neoplatonists and stuff like that, the second sophisticated.
[02:26:51]  In the second century AD, they loved Plato.
[02:26:53]  And I mean, he set up an academy that persisted for centuries.
[02:26:56]  Yeah.
[02:26:56]  I mean, Aristotle was his student.
[02:26:58]  Right.
[02:26:58]  Yeah.
[02:26:59]  Aristotle was his student.
[02:27:00]  But apparently, Aristotle talked a lot of shit about him, said he was a liar.
[02:27:02]  Maybe a little bit.
[02:27:03]  Well, no, but Plato himself praised lying, is the point.
[02:27:07]  We didn't get to that part of my PowerPoint.
[02:27:08]  Okay.
[02:27:08]  So Plato actually makes a big, I mean, not him, Socrates in the Republic makes a large argument.
[02:27:15]  We talked about how you might not do a myth because it's not moral, right?
[02:27:20]  Yes.
[02:27:20]  So Plato, or Plato's Socrates came up with this idea of what's called a noble lie.
[02:27:29]  A good lie.
[02:27:30]  And the entire idea is that Socrates and the Republic think that it's a good idea to make new myths so that we can teach citizens the correct behavior.
[02:27:42]  Yeah.
[02:27:42]  And this is a key part of the Republic, right?
[02:27:45]  But what I love.
[02:27:46]  Well, this sounds like it's the foundation of religion as we know it.
[02:27:49]  Huh.
[02:27:50]  It sounds like it's the first.
[02:27:51]  Well, a little bit, but I think that.
[02:27:53]  I think a lot of ancient religion is less moralizing than we think.
[02:27:56]  No, but I'm saying new religions.
[02:27:57]  Yes.
[02:27:57]  Like Christianity.
[02:27:59]  I can see that, yeah.
[02:28:00]  Because a lot of ancient religion is just a weird thing.
[02:28:02]  You know, there's a difference between belief and faith versus practice.
[02:28:06]  And so a lot of ancient religion was not about belief and faith, it was about a community coming together to practice.
[02:28:12]  Right.
[02:28:13]  If you see what I mean.
[02:28:13]  Yep.
[02:28:13]  Totally.
[02:28:14]  It's just what we always did.
[02:28:15]  And they didn't.
[02:28:16]  And because of polytheism, you were free to believe whatever you wanted and dip and dive into different cults.
[02:28:22]  You could belong in a bunch of cults.
[02:28:24]  Nothing wrong.
[02:28:25]  And everybody belonged in different cults, sometimes based on family, sometimes based on citizenship, sometimes just based on your own interests, right?
[02:28:32]  Or even your profession.
[02:28:33]  If you're this job, you might have your own cult, right?
[02:28:36]  That kind of thing.
[02:28:38]  And so, you know, but yeah, and so Plato, Socrates in the Republic, he argues strongly that the philosophers should create new myths that embody what to do.
[02:28:50]  And my favorite thing, let me pull up this quote because it's just so cool, because this is to me what I love about Atlantis.
[02:28:57]  This is how I end my YouTube video that we're working on.
[02:29:02]  I got animation and voice actors and everything.
[02:29:04]  It's fucking cool.
[02:29:05]  And then I also end part of my book on this.
[02:29:09]  So, times when it's good to lie, this is according to Socrates telling children stories to teach morals, telling lies to trick an enemy, telling lies to help a friend who is making a mistake.
[02:29:19]  And then the rulers, the philosopher kings, should control information for citizens, discard harmful myths, even if true, discard even harmful genres of storytelling.
[02:29:28]  And then make up new myths that demonstrate good morals.
[02:29:31]  This is kind of a long, complicated conversation that I'm trying to summarize in one slide.
[02:29:36]  So don't get me wrong.
[02:29:36]  There's more, they even try to outlaw certain meters of music because that meter of music is associated with a certain kind of storytelling.
[02:29:43]  So, like the Dorian mode or stuff like that.
[02:29:46]  Because a lot of stories were told to music back then, right?
[02:29:48]  You can see how this can become a slippery slope.
[02:29:51]  Oh, yeah.
[02:29:52]  And then the Atlantis story wait, wait, wait.
[02:29:55]  This is the end of the section of the Noble Lie in the Republic.
[02:29:59]  Socrates asks Plato's brother, Glaucon, how then could we devise a useful Noble Lie?
[02:30:06]  It would certainly take a lot of persuasion to convince people to believe in it.
[02:30:10]  And Glaucon says, I can't see any way to make them believe it themselves.
[02:30:15]  But perhaps their children and later generations might believe such a story.
[02:30:19]  And it's like, that's like Atlantis.
[02:30:22]  If you see what I mean, nobody around Plato's time believed in Atlantis.
[02:30:26]  50% of Americans believe in Atlantis today.
[02:30:29]  That's what the polls show.
[02:30:31]  50% of Americans believe in Atlantis today.
[02:30:33]  So if you believe in Atlantis, no harm, no foul on you.
[02:30:37]  Like you're just normal, if you see what I mean.
[02:30:40]  But this is the kind of evidence.
[02:30:41]  Yeah.
[02:30:43]  Though it's now a totally different morals and story than Plato intended.
[02:30:46]  But yeah.
[02:30:46]  Yeah.
[02:30:47]  You can see how this all can go to hell, though, with corruption when you get people, bad actors in the philosopher kings or whoever they are, getting replaced by people who have financial incentives or have their own.
[02:30:59]  And there's a lot of questions of whether Plato tried to set up his own version of the Republic in Italy or Sicily.
[02:31:05]  What state was that?
[02:31:06]  I forget.
[02:31:07]  But he was associated with one of the tyrants there, and it was a disaster.
[02:31:11]  And the oligarchy that ruled Athens after the democracy ended, after the Athenians lost to the Spartans, the Spartans said, no more democracy.
[02:31:21]  You're going to be ruled by an oligarchy.
[02:31:23]  And guess who ruled that oligarchy, by the way?
[02:31:25]  Who?
[02:31:26]  Critias, the guy who tells the story about Atlantis.
[02:31:28]  Critias, the tyrant.
[02:31:30]  And he slaughtered his own citizens.
[02:31:32]  He's like a distant cousin to Plato.
[02:31:33]  Plato, he was a student of Socrates.
[02:31:35]  Socrates and him got into big arguments.
[02:31:38]  Socrates was like, What the fuck are you doing?
[02:31:40]  And he would like diss him in the agora.
[02:31:43]  And then Critias summoned Socrates at one point.
[02:31:45]  There's the story in Xenophon about that.
[02:31:47]  And like, you know, so Plato and Socrates sort of distanced themselves from Critias, which also should be a signal to you.
[02:31:55]  Why would Plato have Critias, the tyrant, tell this story?
[02:32:00]  Critias, the tyrant who he thought was a totally bad actor, everybody thought was a bad actor.
[02:32:05]  And he's the one telling the Atlantis story.
[02:32:07]  It's almost like a signal in and of itself.
[02:32:10]  This ain't trustworthy because that dude's not fucking trustworthy, right?
[02:32:13]  He has betrayed Socrates' ideals.
[02:32:15]  He has gone and ruled this state in a capricious way until he was overthrown, you know?

=== Critias the Untrustworthy Tyrant (15:49) ===

[02:32:20]  And so that itself is another key thing that I write about in my book that I'm writing right now.
[02:32:26]  The issues with this story, you need to know the context, man.
[02:32:29]  You need to know who's telling it, right?
[02:32:30]  Right, right, right.
[02:32:31]  All down to that level.
[02:32:34]  I want to go back to the Egypt stuff for a little bit.
[02:32:36]  Have you, have you, are you familiar with Chris Dunn's pyramid power plant theory?
[02:32:41]  I have not read the book at all.
[02:32:42]  I've seen some YouTube videos, so I'm probably not going to address it very well, but I'll, I can address to you the modern consensus on the pyramids.
[02:32:48]  No, I know the, I know the, I know the consensus is that they're tombs, right?
[02:32:51]  Yeah, I can explain why though.
[02:32:54]  Okay, go ahead.
[02:32:55]  Yeah.
[02:32:55]  Okay, so why are they tombs?
[02:32:57]  Hmm.
[02:32:58]  Let's think this through.
[02:32:59]  What do you find in tombs?
[02:33:01]  Dead people.
[02:33:02]  Yeah.
[02:33:02]  What have we found in pyramids?
[02:33:04]  Dead people.
[02:33:04]  We've found pieces of dead people in most pyramids.
[02:33:08]  Yes.
[02:33:09]  Why have we not found many?
[02:33:11]  Because we have found some.
[02:33:12]  It's really common on the internet where people say, there's no mummies in the pyramids.
[02:33:16]  Bullshit.
[02:33:17]  There are a few that have complete mummies, but there's others where they have pieces of mummies.
[02:33:21]  Is it possible that a civilization came to these pyramids and these pyramids existed before they were there, right?
[02:33:30]  And they saw these things.
[02:33:32]  Maybe they weren't a part of them, but they thought.
[02:33:33]  They thought they were these grandiose structures that were unexplainable to them.
[02:33:37]  They looked like they were built by gods.
[02:33:39]  And they thought this makes sense.
[02:33:41]  This is the perfect place to bury our dead people.
[02:33:43]  The most important people, the pharaohs, the kings, we're going to make these the places we bury them.
[02:33:48]  Okay.
[02:33:49]  Does that make any sense at all to you?
[02:33:51]  Not if you know the evidence.
[02:33:53]  So, okay, let's think about it this way then.
[02:33:55]  So, what's happening before the Great Pyramids are built, right?
[02:34:00]  So, we have two major cemeteries.
[02:34:02]  I've worked at one of them, Abydos.
[02:34:03]  There's another one called Hieronkopolos.
[02:34:05]  And these are the two sort of pre pyramid cemeteries where extremely wealthy royal people were being buried.
[02:34:13]  Right?
[02:34:14]  And it's in these cemeteries that we can see the developments that lead to the pyramids, if you see what I mean, in a step by step way.
[02:34:20]  And these cemeteries, by the way, are radiocarbon dated, as are the pyramids.
[02:34:24]  We can get to that in a second.
[02:34:25]  And so you have two different ways of the tombs at that point.
[02:34:31]  One of them at Abydos is the idea of a large fucking tomb, right?
[02:34:37]  And what they did there, and this is like the first dynasty in Egypt, they built these giant mud brick enclosures.
[02:34:44]  I mean, you know, Far bigger than this room.
[02:34:46]  I've excavated in one of them.
[02:34:48]  It's the last one.
[02:34:49]  The last one is still standing.
[02:34:50]  We could Google it.
[02:34:51]  It's called the Shuna.
[02:34:52]  It's the tomb for Qasim Kemwe, who is the last pharaoh of either the first or second dynasty.
[02:34:58]  I'm not an Egyptologist.
[02:34:59]  I should know since I've worked there, though.
[02:35:01]  But the thing is, each ruler always tore down the previous enclosure for his previous ruler and then built their new one.
[02:35:10]  And they keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
[02:35:12]  So you see this trend towards monumentalization, not in a pyramid form, though.
[02:35:17]  It's not even a roofed one, it's just a Rectangular enclosure, but enormous.
[02:35:21]  The walls are way up there and it's huge, right?
[02:35:25]  And the last one, especially, but the other ones are really big too that have been excavated by plenty of really cool people like Matt Adams and David O'Connor and people I've worked with, Laurel B. Stock.
[02:35:34]  And the other cemetery, and this is where, so you have monumentality developing over here.
[02:35:39]  So that's key ingredient number one for pyramids.
[02:35:41]  They're big, right?
[02:35:43]  The second key ingredient is what are pyramids made from?
[02:35:46]  How do they actually physically come to be?
[02:35:49]  And we can see that in the very first pyramid ever built.
[02:35:51]  And so at this other cemetery, Here in Kampolis, all the royal people are built in these rectangular sort of structures.
[02:35:59]  They're rectangular still, but they are covered.
[02:36:02]  It's a room.
[02:36:03]  It's like a mausoleum.
[02:36:04]  We could think of it like this.
[02:36:05]  It's probably about the size of this room, a little smaller sometimes, right?
[02:36:09]  So that's where they're all buried with their sort of grave goods and animals and whatever, that kind of shit.
[02:36:14]  And then when you get the very first pyramid, the step pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, you can actually see this.
[02:36:21]  If we get the right photo, we could try to find it.
[02:36:23]  I should have gotten one.
[02:36:25]  You can find it.
[02:36:26]  But you need the right photo, is the point.
[02:36:28]  There's plentiful drawings of it, but if you want to trust it by seeing it with your own eyes, it's good, right?
[02:36:32]  And you can see it, but we need the right photo.
[02:36:35]  I don't have one because I've never been there.
[02:36:36]  But what they do when they build this step here is they first build this mastaba, this rectangular thing, the size of the room.
[02:36:44]  Then they decide, you know what, let's build another mastaba on top of it.
[02:36:49]  And then another one, and another one.
[02:36:51]  And so they expand the mastaba in different directions until it ends up.
[02:36:56]  As a pyramid, and you can see that in the phasing of the walls, right?
[02:37:01]  You can see it really clearly.
[02:37:03]  Uh, yeah, yeah, here it is.
[02:37:06]  The one the drawing on the right is the key one where you see that red part at the bottom.
[02:37:11]  Uh, no, no, not that one, the one to the left of that.
[02:37:13]  Oh, this guy, yeah.
[02:37:15]  So the original tomb is just that rectangle at the bottom with a chamber below, and then they choose to expand it and then they choose to build another mastaba.
[02:37:25]  Then they end up with a smaller step pyramid and then they turn it into a bigger step period.
[02:37:29]  And in that one pyramid, you see the development, the invention of a pyramid, if you see what I mean.
[02:37:34]  It's invented right there from the Mustaba.
[02:37:37]  And we have those Mustabas even earlier, right?
[02:37:39]  And so then after that, they start getting even fancier.
[02:37:42]  They build different kinds of step pyramids.
[02:37:44]  Then eventually they put them with smooth sides, and then boom, the pyramid is born as you have it.
[02:37:48]  And so we see this step by step progression.
[02:37:51]  I have a video, I've interviewed Dr. Beth Hart on this.
[02:37:54]  She's an expert on this stuff.
[02:37:55]  And so it's called From Hironkopolis to Giza.
[02:37:58]  And it's not done yet, it's coming out soon.
[02:38:00]  The interview's done.
[02:38:00]  But so that's the development that we see.
[02:38:04]  So we can see that in construction.
[02:38:06]  And all well dated from context.
[02:38:07]  What are all these shafts doing?
[02:38:09]  The burial shafts, yeah.
[02:38:11]  How big are those shafts?
[02:38:13]  I don't know.
[02:38:13]  I've never been down there, but they'd be bigger, big enough to walk in, and a lot of them.
[02:38:16]  Really?
[02:38:16]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:38:18]  Oh, yeah.
[02:38:18]  And the purpose of those shafts is to walk.
[02:38:20]  Yeah, I've been in the biggest pyramids, and they're small, the shafts, into even the Great Pyramid.
[02:38:24]  But yeah, it's very walkable.
[02:38:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:38:26]  Well, the purpose was probably to bury the Pharaoh down there, right?
[02:38:30]  And so having it underground gives it extra protection and stuff like that.
[02:38:34]  So the second reason why you want to talk about the Great Pyramid of Giza.
[02:38:38]  Sure.
[02:38:38]  Yeah, the Great Pyramid of Giza has the key thing there is that it actually has wood in it.
[02:38:46]  And within the stones, right?
[02:38:48]  And then the plaster.
[02:38:50]  From what I understand, from what I've heard, is there's only been wood found in other pyramids.
[02:38:55]  The bent pyramid had wood in it that was radiocarbon dated to much later.
[02:39:00]  Much later than what?
[02:39:03]  Later than when they think, well, basically, what they're carbon dating the wood at is what they're saying when the pyramid was built.
[02:39:09]  Yeah.
[02:39:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:39:10]  But the wood could have been added later, right?
[02:39:12]  Not if it's like fixed within the stones.
[02:39:14]  So this is why Graham Hancock even accepts the dates of the pyramid.
[02:39:18]  What is the epic pyramid?
[02:39:19]  So it is absolutely a fact that it would not be possible that wood could have been added after.
[02:39:25]  You'd have to basically deconstruct and reconstruct a big part of it.
[02:39:28]  Do we have any photos of this?
[02:39:30]  I don't know.
[02:39:30]  There's a big article on it, but I haven't read it in a while.
[02:39:32]  I read it.
[02:39:33]  We pulled it up on a previous podcast, I believe.
[02:39:36]  But I mean, the bent pyramid wood, the cedar.
[02:39:38]  This is where you want to get someone like Zahi Owas or Mark Lehner because this is their stuff, right?
[02:39:43]  But, you know, yeah, they took, and they have a map of it at least.
[02:39:48]  I imagine they must have archival photos as well.
[02:39:50]  But they took.
[02:39:51]  Samples from the Great Pyramid of Giza and the other pyramids at Giza.
[02:39:56]  Yeah, see, I'm not talking about wooden beams though.
[02:39:58]  I'm talking about plant material that's in the plaster.
[02:40:02]  Right?
[02:40:03]  That's part of it and in between the joins, in between the joins of the stuff.
[02:40:07]  And they took the plant material and radiocarbon dated it, and it dates to the Old Kingdom of Egypt.
[02:40:12]  Right.
[02:40:13]  And so.
[02:40:14]  So the arguments that are made about this is that the plaster and the wood came later to try to repair it and restore it and make it look better.
[02:40:21]  Yeah, but again, it's multiple lines of evidence here.
[02:40:25]  And I want to be clear.
[02:40:26]  What is that?
[02:40:27]  Like, if the plaster's there and it's radiocarbon dated to.
[02:40:30]  But I guess my point is if you want to make that argument, that's also the argument that I'm making is built up also by that development from Mustaba to pyramid, right?
[02:40:39]  So we have multiple lines of evidence that tell us the pyramids date to the same period.
[02:40:43]  We have more than that, by the way.
[02:40:44]  For example, when is Giza, when do we have our first evidence of people on Giza?
[02:40:48]  During Old Kingdom Egypt, right around there.
[02:40:50]  We have plentiful tombs.
[02:40:51]  It pops up as a cemetery right at that time.
[02:40:54]  And so, you know, the reality is all the artifacts date to that time, all the radiocarbon dates to that time, and we can see at a variety of sites this development that gets to that point.
[02:41:05]  And so, with those three independent lines of evidence, it seems pretty secure that the pyramid was built at that time, if you see what I mean.
[02:41:12]  And to argue otherwise, I'm not saying that it's not impossible, but it's really fucking unlikely.
[02:41:17]  You have a lot of evidence, a lot of data points of artifacts and radiocarbon dates and different sites that show this change in tomb construction that are all securely dated.
[02:41:29]  And so, you know, and then you even have the texts that come later.
[02:41:31]  Yes, admittedly, the texts from ancient Egypt are dating later than the construction of it, but they describe a consistent story as well.
[02:41:38]  So, you even have the historical sources from the Egyptians of what their ancestors did that says that what they're doing matches our archaeological evidence.
[02:41:47]  And so, you know, that's multiple lines of evidence built by so many different experts from so many different excavations.
[02:41:54]  That's why I'm really damn sure, 99.9% sure, the pyramids were built by the Egyptians during Old Kingdom Egypt.
[02:42:01]  And I can't see how anything that I've never heard anything at least that would make me even remotely consider otherwise.
[02:42:09]  Not even like the all the shafts and the chambers that are in there and those 100 like 500 ton granite blocks that are inside these chambers, that are cut perfectly and placed perfectly and like like even the the it.
[02:42:24]  How would you get the giant granite box up that tiny little shaft?
[02:42:30]  What was the purpose of the tiny little shaft?
[02:42:33]  Probably to make it tough to access.
[02:42:34]  There it is.
[02:42:34]  Yeah, they don't.
[02:42:35]  They don't want it to be robbed.
[02:42:37]  These were all.
[02:42:37]  And so here's another thing, Danny.
[02:42:39]  So You know, we talk about, well, like, our mummy's there, and like, well, they were probably robbed, right?
[02:42:45]  And the reality is, the Egyptians tell us about the struggles they have with tomb robbing.
[02:42:49]  And so, at the end of the Old Period, you have the intermediate period.
[02:42:52]  During these intermediate periods, at the end of the Old Kingdom, during various intermediate periods when the state's power breaks down, we have papyri that talk about tomb robbing.
[02:43:02]  And in fact, the Egyptians, what they need to do is they need to collect the Pharaoh's bodies and protect them.
[02:43:07]  So they take them out of their original tomb.
[02:43:09]  We have this one tomb I forget.
[02:43:10]  And I'm sure they kept treasure in there too.
[02:43:11]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:43:12]  That's why they're robbing.
[02:43:13]  Yeah, sure.
[02:43:14]  And so, you know, we have textual descriptions of the Egyptians moving their pharaohs to protect them from being desecrated from generations ago, right?
[02:43:22]  And then we have these caches of pharaohs.
[02:43:24]  They end up all in one tomb because they're hidden there so that they couldn't be found because their other tombs were found.
[02:43:31]  And so, you know, we have all, again, that's part of the independent evidence that even though we don't find a complete mummy in here, that's got to be a pyramid, a tomb.
[02:43:40]  We have the sarcophagus, we have grave goods.
[02:43:43]  We're missing the mummy, but they moved these mummies because they had to move them to protect them.
[02:43:49]  And they tell us they do this.
[02:43:50]  And they tell us about punishing tomb robbers by killing them.
[02:43:53]  You know, all this stuff is written down.
[02:43:55]  It's actually in the beginning of Eric Klein's book.
[02:43:57]  I found out about this.
[02:43:58]  No, I don't doubt that these were used as tombs.
[02:44:00]  Yeah.
[02:44:01]  I think that this was built for a different reason initially.
[02:44:05]  I think that if you look at the shafts that go in, the way the chambers are constructed, the subterranean chamber, all these shafts that are clearly meant, I mean, I've never been in there, but I've talked to a lot of people who have.
[02:44:16]  And everyone I've talked to that's been inside these pyramids say that it's, Does not feel like something that was made for people to move through.
[02:44:23]  You've talked to me now.
[02:44:25]  I've been in them.
[02:44:26]  I've been in that pyramid.
[02:44:27]  And I'm telling you, I think it was built for people to move through.
[02:44:31]  I think it was built for people to get the grave goods and the pharaoh in there.
[02:44:36]  And what do you think the reason is for the shafts that go out on the top out of the king's chambers that go?
[02:44:40]  Some of those air shafts, I think, actually are really well lined up with astronomical stuff.
[02:44:45]  And so there's actually some good articles on that.
[02:44:48]  So they're intentionally lining that up with archaeoastronomy.
[02:44:51]  We call it archaeoastronomy.
[02:44:52]  Sorry.
[02:44:52]  That's the archaeology of astronomy.
[02:44:54]  But it does seem to match because look, the Egyptians did want to orient things very precisely.
[02:44:58]  That's actually another argument that they are built by the Egyptians because they are oriented like others of their structures, the due north, right?
[02:45:06]  And to get due north isn't too hard in a desert.
[02:45:08]  On the equinox, you hold up a stick, you see his shadow, and you draw the line from dawn to dusk, and you have a direct east west line that you can then make a north south line on.
[02:45:17]  And of course, it's a square.
[02:45:18]  So when we say north south, it's actually a line perfectly east west, right?
[02:45:22]  So because it's a square.
[02:45:23]  And I mean, you know.
[02:45:25]  Again, the other reason, like I said, that it was designed as a tomb is because you can see the development of tombs and it matches because you go from mastaba to step pyramid to, you know, true pyramid like this, smooth pyramid.
[02:45:39]  And so seeing that step by step by step progression over a thousand, I don't know if it's a thousand years, but over hundreds of years, that's really compelling evidence in my mind, you know?
[02:45:49]  And let alone the Egyptians telling us these were tombs and have always been tombs, you know?
[02:45:54]  I just, I. Look, and don't get me wrong.
[02:45:59]  I am the first one to say, hey, when you go in there, it's a creepy, otherworldly feeling.
[02:46:05]  I am not denying that.
[02:46:07]  Like, at all.
[02:46:08]  It is creepy and otherworldly.
[02:46:09]  And I can see why people would be enamored by it and interested in it and come up with different explanations because they're describing what they feel, if you see what I mean.
[02:46:20]  Right.
[02:46:21]  And so I can totally get that.
[02:46:24]  But to me, the independent lines of evidence are.
[02:46:27]  Damn convincing.
[02:46:28]  It's been argued about for a while.
[02:46:30]  And the radiocarbon dates are fairly new in the last 20 years, 30 years.
[02:46:33]  But the rest of it has been known for a while.
[02:46:35]  And they've been putting together this picture very slowly.
[02:46:38]  And what is the consensus for why some of these pyramids smell like ammonia on the inside?
[02:46:47]  Like some of them reek of ammonia.
[02:46:49]  I think it's super.
[02:46:49]  I've never heard that or smelled that.
[02:46:51]  Is that the.
[02:46:52]  It smelled musty ammonia.
[02:46:53]  It was the Red Pyramid.
[02:46:55]  It was the Red Pyramid.
[02:46:56]  I've not been in the Red Pyramids, so I don't know.
[02:46:58]  Okay.
[02:46:58]  Yeah.
[02:46:58]  Apparently, there's a lot of those pyramids.
[02:47:00]  There's this.
[02:47:01]  The guy by the name of Jeffrey Drum, who has this channel called Land of Chem, where he has a theory that these things were chemical plants.
[02:47:08]  And he thinks that they were, they were used to, they were creating, they were using like sulfuric acid and these other, there were acids and chemicals and they were producing ammonia and they were using these chemicals for metallurgy and to create fertilizer.
[02:47:30]  No idea.
[02:47:30]  I mean, to be honest, creating fertilizer is pretty easy.
[02:47:33]  You just take your shit.
[02:47:35]  And we know people did that in antiquity.
[02:47:37]  I don't know about Egypt specifically.
[02:47:38]  I know about in Greece that they're using fertilizer quite a bit, meaning just poo and animal dung as well.
[02:47:44]  A lot of animal dung.
[02:47:45]  Well, I thought it was they would collect the fertilizer and shove it into one of these chambers and close it off.
[02:47:55]  And then through some action, it would create ammonia and they would use the ammonia for a variety of things.
[02:48:01]  It was to extract the ammonia out of the.
[02:48:04]  Out of the fertilizer for other chemical uses.
[02:48:07]  This is a new one to me.

=== Ethical Archaeology Permits (09:11) ===

[02:48:09]  I think it's a really interesting idea.
[02:48:11]  I think a lot of these alternative theories on the pyramids being power plants or chemical manufacturing plants, I think there's something to it.
[02:48:20]  I think it's really interesting, and I don't think it should just be dismissed.
[02:48:23]  I think, I mean, I understand that archaeology is important, and we need to look at it from the lens of archaeology and excavating and radiocarbon dating and figuring out like human remains and.
[02:48:38]  You know, domestication of plants and all this stuff, and looking at it from that lens.
[02:48:41]  But I also think it's important to consider and not just dismiss some of these other ideas because I think I like to think I'm not a total idiot.
[02:48:50]  But so let me explain my problem with some of these ideas.
[02:48:53]  Okay.
[02:48:53]  Like, ethically speaking, like the, and I don't think just believing this stuff is an ethical issue.
[02:49:00]  That's fine.
[02:49:01]  Just believing this stuff, if that's what you're doing, you're doing your own research, totally cool.
[02:49:05]  That's cool.
[02:49:07]  I would say the problem comes about when it leads to.
[02:49:11]  Damage to archaeological sites because sometimes that does happen.
[02:49:15]  There's this guy on Twitter, I can't remember who it was, I don't know his name.
[02:49:19]  He believes that the stones are not stones, but they're like fucking concrete or something like that.
[02:49:25]  Geopolymer?
[02:49:26]  Yeah, that's what it is.
[02:49:27]  Yeah, which is totally ridiculous because we have the evidence of where they're quarried.
[02:49:30]  Okay, we have done chemical testing on the stones on the pyramid to the quarries where they are.
[02:49:36]  We know exactly what they are.
[02:49:37]  There'd be a mixed up signal if you did what is it, geopolymer?
[02:49:42]  Geopolymer.
[02:49:43]  Yeah, whatever the hell you call it.
[02:49:44]  Casting.
[02:49:45]  It would just be mixed up then.
[02:49:46]  It would be crushed up, mixed up.
[02:49:47]  You couldn't say this stone came from that area of the quarry and that stone came from this area of the quarry.
[02:49:52]  It wouldn't work.
[02:49:53]  And this is just basic geological sourcing.
[02:49:55]  I do it on animal teeth.
[02:49:56]  People do it on human teeth.
[02:49:57]  I know the methods.
[02:49:58]  I use a mass spectrometer all the time to do this.
[02:50:01]  So it's really well known and studied and been published at Giza for 20, 30 years, right?
[02:50:06]  Which, by the way, is another evidence for the date of the pyramid because we have the quarries and we can actually source those stones back to the quarries and archaeological artifacts in the quarries tell us when they were built or when they were carved out, right?
[02:50:17]  So that's another independent line of evidence, if you see what I mean.
[02:50:19]  Explain so, how can archaeological artifacts in the quarries?
[02:50:24]  Tell us exactly when those things were cut.
[02:50:26]  If we have pottery that's Old Kingdom pottery right there at the bottom of the quarry, that's when that stuff was cut out, right?
[02:50:31]  So we can tell like where in the quarry the stone was cut.
[02:50:36]  Yeah.
[02:50:36]  We can compare it to other things that they've used.
[02:50:38]  And we can see.
[02:50:39]  So a lot of people think that archaeological dating is only radiocarbon or something like that because that gives you like a hard date.
[02:50:45]  But to be honest, and this is where it's sort of like I wish people talk to more archaeologists.
[02:50:50]  A lot of what we do is we have a handful of radiocarbon dates on a site.
[02:50:54]  What we've done before we get the radiocarbon dates, because we selected samples and sent them off to labs, is we've already done a sequence of phasing on the site, physical relationships.
[02:51:03]  You cannot have built that wall before that wall because you see that it abuts like this, right?
[02:51:08]  So this one had to come first.
[02:51:10]  That stone had to be placed first.
[02:51:12]  Architects work with us all the time.
[02:51:14]  I've worked with an architect that designed skyscrapers in Dubai.
[02:51:18]  We work with people that know this stuff.
[02:51:20]  And so, same thing with geologists, they put together geological phasing.
[02:51:24]  And then, once you have the relative sequence, This comes first, then that, then that, then that, then that, you get some radiocarbon dates to lock that sequence into absolute chronology.
[02:51:33]  And so that's what you can do with a quarry, if you see what I mean.
[02:51:35]  When you have a quarry, you can tell physically which parts were carved out before other parts.
[02:51:40]  And then you put together the datable evidence you have from each of those parts.
[02:51:44]  You see, you therefore check yourself as well.
[02:51:47]  If you said this is earlier, but somehow the radiocarbon date is later, well, that's a problem, right?
[02:51:52]  Or the pottery is later.
[02:51:53]  Sure, sure.
[02:51:54]  And so that's actually how we do this.
[02:51:56]  And so the chronology of the quarrying.
[02:51:58]  Also, matches the chronology of the construction, if you see what I mean, that we're proposing.
[02:52:03]  So, it's another independent line of evidence.
[02:52:05]  And so, this guy, he was talking about how it's this geopolymer, whatever it is, and he was saying how he was licking a stone from the pyramid that somebody stole from Giza.
[02:52:16]  Because this shit happens.
[02:52:18]  You know, there was an example, I think it was one of Graham Hancock's friends.
[02:52:22]  This is why Zahi Awas stormed out of that debate with him, was because Graham Hancock wanted to highlight Robert Boval, and Robert Boval had been prosecuted by the Egyptian government for taking.
[02:52:33]  Antiquities out of the country illegally.
[02:52:35]  And so, you know, like Zayawasis, I'm not going to talk about this dude.
[02:52:38]  This guy is, he's robbing our heritage, right?
[02:52:43]  Now, this is where it gets into a gray area.
[02:52:46]  But to me, as an archaeologist, gray areas matter.
[02:52:50]  When we talk about Matt Bial coming in here with all those stone vases, and we didn't get to that part, all those stone vases, we don't know where they came from.
[02:52:59]  They were not excavated by archaeologists that took photos and documented them with a total station or a plan or anything like that.
[02:53:05]  We don't know where they came from.
[02:53:07]  Which means one of two things.
[02:53:08]  Either they're illegally looted or they're forgeries.
[02:53:13]  And we have no idea.
[02:53:13]  Sure.
[02:53:14]  He had missed that too.
[02:53:15]  Yeah.
[02:53:15]  And we have no idea.
[02:53:16]  He's not dogmatic on that.
[02:53:17]  No, no, no.
[02:53:18]  But then you're missing my main point here where if some of those could be illegal looted stuff, looters are my enemy.
[02:53:26]  I've worked on sites where people come and loot.
[02:53:28]  They go into my trench and they fucking loot and they're robbing and then sending it to a black market where wealthy people somewhere else are buying.
[02:53:38]  Oh, yeah.
[02:53:38]  This happens.
[02:53:39]  Cartels in Mexico are doing this.
[02:53:40]  This is why I've decided I can't speak to Matt Bial.
[02:53:44]  I wish, if he's listening, I don't think you're a bad person.
[02:53:48]  I think that you just don't understand some of the ethical issues involved in collecting antiquities.
[02:53:54]  And there's a lot of research that shows much of the looting that happens, particularly in the Near East, not necessarily in Egypt, but in the Near East, when ISIS, the terrorist organization, not the Egyptian goddess, took over different areas of Syria, you could see this.
[02:54:08]  People were tracking this.
[02:54:09]  People who I know were tracking this with satellite imagery.
[02:54:11]  You could just see looters' trenches popping up everywhere.
[02:54:13]  And then the black market explodes.
[02:54:14]  Moshe Diane.
[02:54:15]  Yeah.
[02:54:17]  And then you see this in areas where drug cartels in South America control the antiquities trade.
[02:54:23]  And so, you know, I like it is written very strongly into the code of ethics of the Archaeological Institute of America.
[02:54:29]  I can do nothing to not that might promote, not just not buy.
[02:54:33]  I can't even talk about, like, look at Matt Bial's stone vases and authenticate them.
[02:54:40]  Because if I was to do so, that would potentially increase their value, which would therefore feed into the antiquities market.
[02:54:47]  So, me as a member of the AIAs, I would be kicked out immediately if I did something like that.
[02:54:52]  That's one reason I could never sit down with Matt Bial and his.
[02:54:55]  Stone vases, because as soon as an archaeologist looks at something and publishes it, it's been authenticated and it becomes worth more money, which therefore fuels the antiquities market.
[02:55:07]  And so, because as soon as a scholar gives it its seal of authenticity, now all of a sudden, boom, it's worth more, right?
[02:55:14]  It's worth a lot more if I was to go say, Yeah, I think that's authentic, right?
[02:55:18]  I think that's that thing.
[02:55:19]  And so, you know, there's a real ethical conundrum in my mind with people going and doing it for themselves, like a I, when I go and study stuff, I have to submit permits to the Greek government or the Romanian government.
[02:55:34]  And it's not easy.
[02:55:35]  You know, I get permits denied all the time, right?
[02:55:38]  I'm not trying to say this is a walk in the park, but we have to do things and go about it in the right way, if you see what I mean.
[02:55:44]  We can't do it in a way that's promoting looting or forgeries or whatever.
[02:55:48]  We need to be careful about what we do because it has knock on effects.
[02:55:52]  And so, you know.
[02:55:54]  I don't think he considered what you're talking about.
[02:55:57]  And that's why I said I don't hate him.
[02:55:58]  I don't think he's just fascinated.
[02:55:59]  I don't hate him for it.
[02:56:00]  I don't hate him at all for it.
[02:56:01]  I'm not trying to say that I fully accept that he's not heard this argument before and that he's not a bad person.
[02:56:07]  I'm not trying to make that argument at all.
[02:56:09]  I'm not even trying to say all his stuff is illegal or whatnot.
[02:56:13]  I'm just trying to explain the rationale that archaeologists have and the ethics we have.
[02:56:18]  And this is why I think it's important to inform the public of this stuff.
[02:56:21]  So that hopefully, Matt, if you are watching and listening, you don't go buy more of this stuff.
[02:56:25]  Go do it the right way.
[02:56:27]  Figure out a way to get a permit to study stuff.
[02:56:29]  And that's not easy.
[02:56:30]  Like I said, just this last summer or spring, In March, I had a permit from the Greek government to go collect what?
[02:56:39]  A hundred or so animal jaws from Knossos.
[02:56:42]  You've heard of Knossos, it's the big palace on Crete, Minos, and everything.
[02:56:45]  So, you know, that's one of the sites I work on.
[02:56:47]  So, I had this permit in hand, all stamped, sealed, everything.
[02:56:52]  Turns out the British school at Athens had made a mistake and had not gotten the approval from the Central Archaeological Council because they were told by somebody they didn't have to.
[02:56:59]  So, I got there, I flew there, I spent my own money, I got there.
[02:57:03]  I'm ready to take my material to go study it.
[02:57:05]  Nope, sorry.
[02:57:06]  You cannot go.
[02:57:08]  You're stuck.
[02:57:09]  I had to come back in June, despite the fact that my grant was almost up and I had to just get everything done as quickly as I could.
[02:57:15]  I'd already delayed going there for so long because I was dealing with fucking cancer and I was on chemo and I didn't want to travel.

=== Denied Research Access (02:40) ===

[02:57:21]  And so it's just like, you know, this is unfortunately life.
[02:57:24]  It's not easy to get a permit.
[02:57:25]  I'm not denying that.
[02:57:26]  I've had them rejected and I ended up getting that one, but, you know, it totally screwed up my project, if you see what I mean.
[02:57:32]  And so, you know, like, it's just unfortunately, not unfortunately, ethically, that's the right way to do things.
[02:57:39]  And we should always try to do things the right way and not fuel, you know, illegal antiquities trades or forgeries or shit like that.
[02:57:46]  Sure.
[02:57:47]  But there's still, like, I was.
[02:57:49]  Originally saying, I think it's important to not just dismiss some of these alternative theories to why these things were.
[02:57:56]  I mean, a lot of it is super compelling and makes a lot of sense.
[02:57:59]  And they're looking at it through a different lens.
[02:58:01]  They're looking at it through a non academic lens.
[02:58:05]  They're not going through the process you're going through.
[02:58:07]  They're just going through it because they're looking at it because they're interested in it.
[02:58:11]  And it's mysterious, right?
[02:58:13]  Like there's things like Gate and Brink's Door in one of the shafts of the king's chamber or the queen's chamber in the Great Pyramid, where there's these two electric, they're metal.
[02:58:23]  They look like metal diodes, these two little metal prongs that are hanging out of this block that they had to drill through to find out there was another cavity behind it.
[02:58:33]  And, like, what was the purpose?
[02:58:34]  We don't know the purpose of that.
[02:58:35]  But Chris Dunn came up with a.
[02:58:38]  He reverse engineered by recreating the Great Pyramid with all the shafts that are in it.
[02:58:45]  And he found out a way to reverse engineer it to figure out how it was able to create some sort of free energy.
[02:58:53]  And it's an interesting theory.
[02:58:55]  And if he's tested it, Yeah, there's the two little electrodes.
[02:59:03]  They're like two little pieces of copper that were hanging out.
[02:59:07]  And he believes that there was some sort of acid, I think it was, or no, it was a hydrochloric acid maybe, that filled up that chamber.
[02:59:18]  And then when it touched those two little electrodes, it somehow knew to not fill anymore.
[02:59:25]  And I can't remember all the details of how the theory worked, but.
[02:59:30]  It's compelling.
[02:59:30]  And I don't know what the, I would love to hear what the academic, conventional explanation for those little metal prongs were sticking outside of that door.
[02:59:39]  That I do not know.
[02:59:40]  But look, just to get back to compelling or dismissing or whatnot.
[02:59:45]  Right.
[02:59:45]  I'm not here to dismiss stuff.
[02:59:47]  I'm here to express the evidence that I know about.
[02:59:49]  Right.
[02:59:49]  I want to be really clear about that.
[02:59:51]  If people have an idea and they want to pursue it, I'm fine.
[02:59:54]  Right.
[02:59:54]  But I want to make it clear I want them to do so in an ethical manner.
[02:59:57]  Right.
[02:59:58]  Right.
[02:59:58]  I think that that's what's important.
[02:59:59]  Right.
[03:00:00]  Go there, look at it.

=== Ice Cores and Climate (15:35) ===

[03:00:01]  You don't have to.
[03:00:02]  Deal shit.
[03:00:03]  Yeah.
[03:00:03]  I mean, and please don't go buy antiquities.
[03:00:05]  It's not good.
[03:00:06]  Yeah.
[03:00:06]  I know people who buy antiquities.
[03:00:07]  I've never heard until now that buying antiquities is a frowning thought.
[03:00:10]  Yeah.
[03:00:11]  Most almost, I cannot think of any field archaeologist that would support it because we deal with looters.
[03:00:16]  You know, I've had sites where they're, I had one time in Ukraine where I had the, you know, we set up these total stations on tripods like this to map out sites in 3D with lasers, in a sense.
[03:00:25]  You shoot at a prism and it reflects back and measures.
[03:00:28]  And, you know, so you set it up on a known point and those known points are oftentimes nails in concrete.
[03:00:33]  That you lay.
[03:00:34]  And so some looter thought that that was marking where treasure was.
[03:00:37]  Dug up our fucking datum.
[03:00:40]  Fortunately, they didn't actually dig in our trench that time, though I've seen a note of that happening.
[03:00:44]  But it was wasted the entire day.
[03:00:45]  30 people couldn't dig because we couldn't map, which meant we had to go set up new datums, shoot them all in, get them ready so we're in the right coordinate system before we can start digging in the right way.
[03:00:56]  And so it's just like, I just, you know, I don't have any issues with people believing and pursuing different ideas.
[03:01:03]  I am not here to dismiss them.
[03:01:05]  I'm here to present the evidence that I know.
[03:01:07]  And to try to make the argument for the academic point of view because, in my mind, it's grounded in clear evidence.
[03:01:13]  And just that's it.
[03:01:15]  I really do not have a problem with people believing different stuff.
[03:01:18]  I fully expect it.
[03:01:20]  It's just like with religion.
[03:01:21]  I'm very tolerant on that too.
[03:01:22]  If you don't believe what I believe, it's fucking cool.
[03:01:25]  Would you ever consider like actually investigating it and looking into it and maybe try to?
[03:01:30]  That's what I'm doing right now with Atlantis.
[03:01:32]  The entire argument I just presented to you, the entire argument I presented on Joe Rogan was me taking Graham Hancock's argument seriously and trying to look at the evidence for and against it.
[03:01:42]  Totally agree.
[03:01:43]  I mean, I'm not going to lie.
[03:01:44]  I went in there expecting not to find evidence for or against it, but like, look.
[03:01:48]  If I could prove Atlantis in an evidence based way, I would be far more famous than I am now, having just been on Joe Rogan disproving it.
[03:01:57]  If you see what I mean, like I would be 10 times, 100 times, a million times more famous.
[03:02:02]  Everybody would know my name.
[03:02:04]  So, I mean, like when you talk about academia, you have to parrot the line.
[03:02:09]  Actually, it's the opposite.
[03:02:11]  You become famous by changing the minds of your colleagues.
[03:02:15]  That's actually what makes you famous and prominent in the field.
[03:02:19]  If you can actually make an argument that convinces your colleagues that the standard explanation is the wrong explanation and this explanation is better, that's actually how you get promoted in academia.
[03:02:32]  And so that's what we're all trying to do.
[03:02:34]  One of my big claims to fame is I overturned something called the pastoral hypothesis, which is basically at the end of the Bronze Age, the climate changes, it gets dry, the palaces collapse, that one burns down, several of them actually burned down.
[03:02:47]  And then for a long time, people called it a dark age.
[03:02:51]  We no longer think of it that way because people were living their lives and whatnot.
[03:02:53]  But, you know, writing disappears.
[03:02:56]  What years are we talking about?
[03:02:57]  So, we're talking 1200 BC.
[03:02:59]  Okay.
[03:03:00]  Is when the palace is burned down.
[03:03:01]  The Bronze Age actually ends 1100 BC.
[03:03:03]  And then the early Iron Age starts at that time.
[03:03:05]  Okay.
[03:03:06]  And then 500 years goes by with no writing.
[03:03:09]  Art takes maybe 200 years till it really, figural art, I mean, rather than just a geometric scroll.
[03:03:14]  Right.
[03:03:14]  And figural art doesn't appear for another couple hundred years.
[03:03:17]  You don't get monumental construction until much later.
[03:03:20]  And so, it's this period where.
[03:03:22]  The society is what we'd call today a collapse, right?
[03:03:26]  And for a long time, people read like the Iliad and the Odyssey.
[03:03:29]  They see these Homeric heroes feasting on cattle, cattle, cattle.
[03:03:33]  And they're like, you know what happened?
[03:03:35]  Everybody became cowboys, right?
[03:03:37]  They became pastoralists instead of agriculturalists.
[03:03:41]  And so one of my big claims to fame is I said, no, that's wrong.
[03:03:44]  If you actually study all the animal bone evidence, you look at the totality of evidence for what people were eating, it actually is the opposite.
[03:03:52]  They're eating less animal protein.
[03:03:53]  And more plants.
[03:03:54]  We had it completely wrong.
[03:03:56]  And so, you know, I have a couple articles on this and also how it relates to how food production has to change and adapt related to climate change at that time because it gets very dry.
[03:04:05]  There's a big drought.
[03:04:06]  And so, you know, like that's my claim to fame is overturning the previous thought on what the Greeks were doing at that time.
[03:04:13]  And so, you know, that's why I get funding is because I did that.
[03:04:17]  So, you know, the idea that we're supposed to parrot the party line, no, we're supposed to overturn and rewrite the past.
[03:04:25]  We're supposed to find new evidence, use new methods, have new questions to be able to add to our understanding of the past, is maybe the right way to put it.
[03:04:32]  Right.
[03:04:33]  It's not always meant to overturn what we know, it's meant to say something different, though, for sure.
[03:04:38]  Can you explain, before we wrap it up, we'll talk about the ice cores that you guys talked about with Graham and Rogan.
[03:04:47]  There was a point in there in that podcast where you were explaining how the ice cores don't show evidence for metallurgy used during the ice age, or at least global large scale metallurgy.
[03:04:57]  Global large scale metallurgy.
[03:04:59]  Right.
[03:05:01]  So there were claims on the internet that you used a graph that didn't show the ice age and you were basically trying to deceive or con them.
[03:05:11]  That's one of the claims.
[03:05:12]  Yeah.
[03:05:12]  So, can you lay out what you were trying to explain there and what people are saying online about how you got that wrong?
[03:05:23]  Yeah, I think this is a good question, especially because this has become so popular.
[03:05:27]  And as I told you beforehand, I have a video dropping today on that topic because I realize I have to address this.
[03:05:33]  So many people think I lied, which is, to be honest, ludicrous.
[03:05:36]  I had citations on the screen where people could go and do their research.
[03:05:40]  So, you could argue I was wrong, but to argue I lied is just insulting.
[03:05:45]  But, whatever.
[03:05:46]  Let's just take it at face value.
[03:05:48]  So, Graham Hancock, in several different appearances, has argued that his lost civilization had 18th or 19th century technology.
[03:05:55]  Yes.
[03:05:56]  And I did not know what that meant, of course, because he's not always clear on what that technology means, right?
[03:06:02]  And so I said, I put up a quote that he gave when he was on London Reel, I think, with Brian Rose in 2017 or 18.
[03:06:11]  And he mentioned that they have 18th or 19th century technology.
[03:06:14]  And I sort of said, look, the last time you had a debate, it was with this guy who's a skeptic, not an archaeologist, Michael Shermer.
[03:06:19]  And the start of it was, You know, hey, Graham, what kind of technology are you talking about?
[03:06:23]  Are you talking about metals?
[03:06:24]  Are you talking about writing?
[03:06:25]  And Graham says, well, perhaps the technology for metals was chosen not to be used, right?
[03:06:31]  So, meaning, no, I don't think they had metals.
[03:06:33]  So I acknowledged that and I said, that's good.
[03:06:35]  If you don't think there's metals, because if you go and you look at ice core evidence, we can trace large scale regional metallurgy activity in ice cores.
[03:06:44]  It's been done for the Roman period, it's been done for the medieval period, it's been done in different areas of the world.
[03:06:49]  We can look at different glaciers and test for that.
[03:06:52]  And I showed an example of that.
[03:06:55]  From a colleague of mine at Oxford, Andrew Wilson, who's a Roman archaeologist.
[03:06:58]  I don't know him personally, but he's a great guy.
[03:07:01]  I know people that work with him and stuff like that.
[03:07:03]  And so I use that as an example of how we detect this.
[03:07:06]  And I said, well, this has not been detected in ice age layers of ice cores.
[03:07:11]  And people are saying, but you didn't show the ice age on that graph, right?
[03:07:15]  That's what you just said.
[03:07:16]  Well, dude, of course not.
[03:07:18]  I was using a published graph.
[03:07:20]  This is the graph that was in that article.
[03:07:22]  Like, what do you mean as an example of what we do?
[03:07:24]  Is there another graph that shows the ice age?
[03:07:27]  Are there ice cores?
[03:07:28]  There's not another graph that I know of, but there are other graphs and we can talk about it.
[03:07:33]  Can you pull up my screen?
[03:07:34]  Boom.
[03:07:35]  All right.
[03:07:35]  So I don't know.
[03:07:36]  It was a few weeks, I think, after I was on Rogan, Chris Dunn went on Rogan.
[03:07:40]  Yeah.
[03:07:40]  And he said that Flint's wrong about this.
[03:07:43]  He was the first person to say I'm wrong about this because of this article.
[03:07:46]  This article from what?
[03:07:47]  1996.
[03:07:49]  And he says, now look, in this Greenland ice core, there are changes in metals in there, right?
[03:07:59]  I don't have access to the full thing right this second.
[03:08:01]  I have it somewhere.
[03:08:02]  But I just want to point out that, like, yeah, there are changes to metals in there, but they are all natural lead, copper, zinc, and cadmium concentrations in central Greenland ice.
[03:08:13]  So, how do you distinguish these metals from metallurgy metals, right?
[03:08:19]  And this article actually does this.
[03:08:21]  The reason why is the graphs that it shows here.
[03:08:23]  Wait a second.
[03:08:23]  Let me just pull up the damn paper.
[03:08:26]  I should have access to it since I think I. I'm logged in.
[03:08:31]  There we go.
[03:08:32]  Oh.
[03:08:33]  No, it's just being weird.
[03:08:34]  There we go.
[03:08:34]  Oh, shit.
[03:08:35]  It's flashing like this.
[03:08:36]  No, I know.
[03:08:37]  There we go.
[03:08:37]  Here's the actual paper.
[03:08:39]  We can scroll through it.
[03:08:41]  So, what is this paper explaining?
[03:08:43]  It's saying that during the Ice Age, there's variations in copper, lead, et cetera, different metals in these ice cores, right?
[03:08:54]  And it shows the graphs that go back to the Ice Age.
[03:08:56]  These graphs go back to the Ice Age.
[03:08:57]  This is, it goes back 160,000 years.
[03:09:00]  Okay.
[03:09:00]  Wow.
[03:09:01]  Okay.
[03:09:01]  So, we're talking into the Ice Age.
[03:09:03]  Man, I'm sorry.
[03:09:04]  That's okay.
[03:09:04]  Fuck.
[03:09:07]  We're back.
[03:09:07]  Stop.
[03:09:09]  All right.
[03:09:09]  I need a new computer.
[03:09:10]  I knew I needed a computer.
[03:09:11]  I gotta wait till January 1st.
[03:09:13]  So, the reality is, though, that yes, this stuff varies, but we know it's not related to metallurgy for like three different reasons.
[03:09:20]  Some of them are in later papers that I'll show you.
[03:09:23]  But one of the main reasons is these changes in metals, they actually don't relate anything to human civilization.
[03:09:30]  In fact, during the end of the Ice Age, when Graham claims there's a lost civilization, there's not a spike in metals in these ice cores, right?
[03:09:36]  It's during other periods.
[03:09:38]  And specifically, it even says it in the title changes in natural lead, copper, zinc, and cadmium concentrations in the ice cores.
[03:09:45]  And their association with climatic changes and resultant variations of dominant source contributions.
[03:09:51]  So, in a sense, when the planet gets drier, there's more desert, which means there's more dust that gets kicked up into the atmosphere, and then it deposits these different metals in ice cores.
[03:10:03]  This is 100% different than the paper that I showed about Roman period metallurgy, where it's not all these different things zinc, cadmium, copper, lead, it's just lead associated with silver mining, because lead is there with silver.
[03:10:16]  Okay.
[03:10:17]  Right?
[03:10:17]  And it matches up with a cultural change, not a climatic change.
[03:10:21]  And who presented this paper?
[03:10:22]  Where did this come from?
[03:10:23]  Chris Dunn was the one who presented this.
[03:10:25]  Oh, Chris Dunn presented this as an article.
[03:10:26]  And then other people on Twitter and elsewhere and YouTube have presented it as well against me.
[03:10:30]  And to me, I'm sort of like.
[03:10:31]  So it's lead, natural.
[03:10:33]  This one just says natural lead, copper, zinc, and cadmium.
[03:10:36]  So how do we like.
[03:10:37]  And their association with climatic changes.
[03:10:39]  I want to be clear that the title of the article supports what I was saying and not what these people are saying.
[03:10:45]  Okay.
[03:10:46]  Just really, really clear.
[03:10:47]  Just read the title.
[03:10:48]  And.
[03:10:49]  I know you just said this, but how again do we decipher the difference between climate or from natural lead and silver mines?
[03:10:59]  There's several different ways.
[03:11:00]  Okay.
[03:11:01]  So in this paper, they're fairly sure that it's due to climate change because these changes correlate with changes in the climate.
[03:11:09]  So when the climate's getting drier, you see changes in these metals showing up.
[03:11:14]  Okay.
[03:11:14]  And the explanation for that is when it's drier, there's more deserts.
[03:11:18]  So there's more windblown dust, which deposits a variety of different minerals.
[03:11:23]  In the ice cores.
[03:11:24]  The second argument is when you mine silver, the metal that occurs with it is lead.
[03:11:30]  So, what shows up when they're mining is lead, not zinc and cadmium and shit like that.
[03:11:37]  It's not just random stuff, it correlates with what we expect from climate.
[03:11:41]  And the other one correlates with what we expect from what people are doing.
[03:11:46]  And the other one, by the way, the Roman and medieval one, it does not correlate with a change in climate.
[03:11:50]  It just correlates with the adoption of metallurgy at a large scale.
[03:11:54]  So, it's this independent source of evidence.
[03:11:57]  The other argument where people say I'm lying is because the article I used also went one step further and used one last test to demonstrate it, where you get this lead.
[03:12:08]  Let's get that article up.
[03:12:12]  This is the article that I showed on Rogan.
[03:12:15]  Lead pollution recorded in Greenland ice indicates European emissions, tracked plagues, wars, imperial expansion, yada, yada, yada.
[03:12:22]  So, they did a series of things.
[03:12:23]  Not only did they produce this graph, and this graph is really cool, it lines up.
[03:12:28]  But then what they did is they went a step further.
[03:12:30]  They said, you know what we can do?
[03:12:31]  We know where the Romans mined silver.
[03:12:34]  We can actually do an isotopic analysis of these traces of lead in the ice cores and see if they fingerprint on known mines and known silver sources.
[03:12:44]  And lo and behold, they did.
[03:12:46]  Right?
[03:12:46]  So this one's really clear.
[03:12:48]  This lead came from those mines over there.
[03:12:50]  Wow.
[03:12:50]  If you see what I mean.
[03:12:52]  Super fucking cool.
[03:12:52]  Where were the ice cores taken from?
[03:12:54]  These ones were they all in the.
[03:12:55]  Greenland, you said?
[03:12:55]  I think these were also Greenlands, right?
[03:12:57]  Okay.
[03:12:58]  Yeah.
[03:12:58]  Okay.
[03:12:58]  Yeah.
[03:12:58]  And so.
[03:12:59]  So that's this fingerprinting in a sense, which, like I said, we do this with the stones at Giza.
[03:13:04]  I do it with animals.
[03:13:05]  They're doing it here with lead at ice cores.
[03:13:07]  It's a really common method for archaeology and geology, climatology, et cetera.
[03:13:12]  And so, this was the other argument.
[03:13:13]  Well, they never tested these natural ones in the same way, isotopically.
[03:13:19]  They never tested them for metallurgy.
[03:13:21]  A, you don't test it for metallurgy.
[03:13:23]  What you're testing for is the source of these materials.
[03:13:26]  B, there's a big difference because, and we'll get to even more in a second.
[03:13:30]  Here, it's just lead pollution because that's associated with silver.
[03:13:34]  Here, it's a range of different metals that are what you'd expect when you have windblown dust of minerals.
[03:13:40]  It's a range of stuff.
[03:13:42]  Guess what?
[03:13:43]  Now that I've been accused of this stuff, I've done even more research into this because it's important to check yourself.
[03:13:48]  And it turns out that they have isotopically tested ice age layers from ice cores, including lead isotopic composition in the southern hemisphere.
[03:13:59]  And here we're talking back to 220,000 years ago, right?
[03:14:04]  We're talking lead isotopic composition.
[03:14:06]  So doing that fingerprinting to see where they come from.
[03:14:09]  And guess what?
[03:14:10]  They come from a suite of soil and low S samples in the southern hemisphere.
[03:14:15]  To figure out where they come from, they all come from, I think, South America in this one, and from this dust that gets kicked up.
[03:14:23]  No, no, no.
[03:14:23]  Wait, wait, wait.
[03:14:25]  I have a few different articles, is the problem.
[03:14:29]  Yeah, there it is.
[03:14:31]  Yeah.
[03:14:31]  This is, you could just search through these.
[03:14:33]  Dust, man.
[03:14:34]  This is, and so there are dozens of articles.
[03:14:36]  If you start searching for ice cores, dust, and metals, different metal types, so many articles.
[03:14:42]  This is a well known phenomenon of studying this kind of stuff.
[03:14:45]  And there's like services here.
[03:14:47]  These guys do services.
[03:14:49]  We will do your isotope analysis from dust cores, ice cores.
[03:14:52]  And they even say right here the source of dust within ice cores provenancing can be predicted by analyzing the isotopic composition of various elements, including strontium, which is a method I use in animal teeth, and neodymium, which I don't use, which can be matched to geological mineralogy of potential dust sources.
[03:15:09]  This is what's going on here.
[03:15:10]  And so to argue I lied is just like, A, that's just insulting and ridiculous.
[03:15:16]  I didn't create the graph, I used a published source.
[03:15:18]  As an example, that's just malicious to assume that like that.
[03:15:22]  B, go do your damn homework.
[03:15:24]  Read the damn title of the paper.
[03:15:25]  Yeah.
[03:15:26]  Read the damn.
[03:15:27]  This is the paper they all have used.
[03:15:29]  And it's like right in the title.
[03:15:31]  So, sorry, guys.
[03:15:33]  I didn't lie.

=== Sharing Evidence Publicly (01:30) ===

[03:15:36]  Yeah.
[03:15:36]  I mean, you sure brought your receipts, man.
[03:15:39]  That's what I do.
[03:15:40]  I appreciate it.
[03:15:41]  Yeah.
[03:15:42]  I'm glad you had me.
[03:15:43]  This has been super fun.
[03:15:44]  Thank you.
[03:15:44]  I learned a lot.
[03:15:46]  And I think you're doing great work.
[03:15:49]  You bring your receipts and you've.
[03:15:51]  Dedicated your life to this, and it's obvious.
[03:15:54]  I appreciate that.
[03:15:54]  And seriously, if you believe in different stuff, you're a cool person.
[03:15:58]  I don't have a problem with that.
[03:15:59]  I really don't.
[03:16:00]  But at the same time, I'm going to share the evidence I have because if I'm asked these questions, that's what I have to do.
[03:16:08]  But I don't have a problem with people that believe in different stuff.
[03:16:11]  I don't have a problem with people pursuing research into those different avenues.
[03:16:15]  My only issue is I hope that you do learn a little bit about archaeological ethics, how archaeology works, and stuff like that.
[03:16:22]  Beautiful.
[03:16:22]  Tell people where they can follow.
[03:16:23]  Oh, we're going to do Patreon.
[03:16:25]  We got Patreon.
[03:16:26]  Oh, God, we got Patreon questions.
[03:16:27]  We're going to do like 10 minutes of Patreon after we wrap this up.
[03:16:30]  But before that, tell people where they can follow you on YouTube, Twitter, all that.
[03:16:33]  Yes.
[03:16:34]  My username on all social media is just Flint Dibble, my name.
[03:16:37]  And so I'm on Archaeology with Flint Dibble on YouTube.
[03:16:40]  I'm Flint Dibble on Twitter, Instagram, Blue Sky.
[03:16:44]  Don't follow me on Facebook.
[03:16:45]  I mean, you could follow me on Facebook, I guess.
[03:16:46]  I do post some stuff publicly.
[03:16:48]  But I'm fairly easily findable because my name is so recognizable.
[03:16:52]  Yeah.
[03:16:52]  Which makes it easy.
[03:16:53]  Yeah.
[03:16:54]  It's cool.
[03:16:54]  My brother's name is Chip.
[03:16:55]  My dad was an archaeologist.
[03:16:56]  He studied stone tools made of flint that were chipped to make them.
[03:17:00]  He built robots to test it and stuff like that.
[03:17:02]  Yeah.
[03:17:03]  That's dedication, man.
[03:17:03]  Yeah, seriously.
[03:17:05]  He was crazy.
[03:17:05]  Well, thanks again, man.
[03:17:06]  I appreciate it.
[03:17:07]  Thank you so much.