EP26 Dig This!

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: History on Fire
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Napoleon, Giovanni Belzoni
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Rosetta Stone, Dan Carlin, Heinrich Schliemann
4. 30:00 – 40:00: Dan Carlin, Heinrich Schliemann, Pompeii, Rosetta Stone
5. 40:00 – 50:00: Great Zimbabwe, Giovanni Belzoni, Kenny Wickman, Mangas Colorado
6. 50:00 – 1:00:00: Elsa Timotea Aguilar, Gonzalo Guerrero
7. 1:00:00 – 1:10:00: Dan Carlin
8. 1:20:00 – 1:30:00: Xenophon, Joe Madison Crow, Statue of Liberty
9. 1:30:00 – 1:40:00: Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, Rosetta Stone, Xenophon
10. 1:40:00 – 1:42:02: History on Fire

Notable quotes from "EP26 Dig This!"

• That I stay in regular touch with and have known for years is the wonderful daniele belly host of the history on fire podcast which if you have not checked that out and you…

  about History on Fire · at 0:15

• The history and talks about how these early guys started when Napoleon invaded Egypt and you know there's that great line from Napoleon where he's addressing his troops right before they fight the mamluks in Egypt and he tells them.

  about Napoleon · at 13:08

• Somebody who destroys tons of things while he's looking for artifacts is the great Giovanni Belzoni and if you go and you look at belzoni's stuff he's famous because he made…

  about Giovanni Belzoni · at 15:05

• Archaeologists cry I mean think about even like one of the most famous early figures in archeology Heinrich schliemann the guy who discovered Troy and the whole his fascinating…

  about Heinrich Schliemann · at 20:24

• If I if the only way I think I would have the patience to be a modern archaeologist I call it Dan Carlin archaeologist if you said we're going to flood this entire Valley and…

  about Dan Carlin · at 25:22

• Right and this is something archeology can do too like the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the Rosetta Stone for those who don't know is a perfect example of what daniele…

  about Rosetta Stone · at 29:06

• There once upon a time who were eventually wiped out I mean for example there's a place called The Great Zimbabwe which is an archaeological site that they found in sub-Saharan…

  about Great Zimbabwe · at 47:01

• Our show on the Assyrians Judgment at Nineveh but the great line from xenophon and for those who don't know xenophon was an ancient Greek General who fought in a Persian Civil…

  about Xenophon · at 1:26:33

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Xenophon — Person · 6 mentions · first at 1:26:39
• Daniele Bolelli — Person · 5 mentions
• Dan Carlin — Person · 3 mentions · first at 25:26
• Napoleon — Person · 2 mentions · first at 13:13
• Giovanni Belzoni — Person · 2 mentions · first at 15:10
• Heinrich Schliemann — Person · 2 mentions · first at 20:28
• Gonzalo Guerrero — Person · 2 mentions · first at 56:27
  To me like one my favorite story in regards to this kind of tale is the story of Gonzalo Guerrero is one of them and the other one is Geronimo de Aguilar where two Spaniards to Shipwrecked on the coast of Mexico in 1511 like 80 years before.
• Elsa Timotea Aguilar — Person · 2 mentions · first at 56:31
  Story of Gonzalo Guerrero is one of them and the other one is Geronimo de Aguilar where two Spaniards to Shipwrecked on the coast of Mexico in 1511 like 80 years before Cortez arrived by the time Cortez arrives the two Spaniards have been.
• Joe Madison Crow — Person · 2 mentions · first at 1:20:04
  Participate like for example there's one guy that I always I love this guy I did an episode about him at one point Joe Madison Crow he was the last man of the Crow tribe to…
• Alexander the Great — Person · 2 mentions · first at 1:30:27
  That don't yeah I mean is it that like so people for people that don't know when Alexander the Great died who and he was in his early 30s which of course blows people away we…
• Mangas Colorado — Person · 1 mention · first at 43:25
  Not somebody's ancestor of to me there's absolutely no question that the 150 year old you know the head of Mangus Colorado's the Apache Chief was in some museum for a long time…
• Ptolemy — Person · 1 mention · first at 1:31:43
  Transport him back to Macedonia and it was hijacked by one of his generals Ptolemy because you know whoever has the corpse is in you know possession is nine tenths of the law…

Books & papers

• History on Fire — Book · 3 mentions · first at 0:19

Products & tech

• Rosetta Stone — Product · 4 mentions · first at 29:10

Concepts & topics

• Statue of Liberty — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 1:25:11
  One of the concepts I remember reading in steveling's book that blew me away because it reminded me of my Statue of Liberty and the sand idea he referred to it as a controversy…
• Kenny Wickman — Concept · 1 mention · first at 42:56
  Seems a very different story than something like the Kenny Wick man that they found here so-called Kenny Wickman that they found here in the Pacific Northwest that when they…

Places & events

• Great Zimbabwe — Place · 4 mentions · first at 47:04
• Pompeii — Place · 1 mention · first at 34:09
  About that idea of a moment Frozen in Amber I always think of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and cities like that and you know one of the things I don't…
• Gobekli Tepe — Place · 1 mention
• Herculaneum — Place · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 hey everyone make sure to stay tuned at the end of today's show for an important announcement hardcore history one of the other big history podcasters that I stay in regular touch with and have known for years is the wonderful daniele belly host of the history on fire podcast which if you have not checked that out and you like my show you really ought to because you'll like that probably as well and for a while up until recently it was behind a paywall but now it is free for everyone just like my show is so go check that out if you haven't or if you haven't checked it out in a while there's going to be a whole bunch of new shows you haven't heard daniele is a university lecturer when he's not doing podcasts he has degrees in history anthropology Native American studies a subject on which he is an expert he's written four books the first one was published when he was only 22 so he's a very accomplished guy

1:02 and we were talking the other day and I was working on ideas for a hardcore history addendum and he said you know we should talk about archeology now saying we should talk about archeology is a little like saying we should talk about history I mean it's a giant subject isn't it and neither one of us are archaeologists although he's more qualified to talk about it with his anthropology degree than I am but we're both kind of geeking out about it for a while and so we decided you know what we'll have this conversation and we'll just sort of talk a little bit about you know our interesting stories or things that we would like to see or things from the past that you know would resonate maybe with the listeners and maybe talk about it in terms of you know I I proposed an Ebenezer Scrooge Christmas Carol kind of organization right the the ghost of archeology past the ghost of archeology present and the Ghost of archeology

1:54 future sounds great in my head we'll see how it works out in practice in this discussion with the wonderful charismatic and intensely knowledgeable daniele host a history on fire all right with me right now my long-term friend Danielle to talk well like a couple of Geeks geeking out about archeology really and as I said I think what we'll do is organize this into sort of a ghost of archeology past ghost of archeology president ghost of archeology future and we'll leave those categories a little fungible we might be moving between them a little bit but let's start off with sort of the early things that you can find out there where early peoples showed an interest in their even earlier past I mean I always wondered how the ancient Egyptians thought about their ancient history or how what the ancient Chinese from the Shang Dynasty thought about history a thousand years before them or if they knew anything

2:58 about it at all so I was doing a little research and I found some material that shows that certain Kings or sons of Kings in places like Egypt and famously in in Babylon during the neo-babylonian empire about 550 BCE where they showed an interest in Empires that came before them so for example uh in Egypt they would often maintain temples and tomb sites uh sort of reverently and this was connected I think to the fact that the religion that was being worshiped was still viable and you'll often see that where sites will be protected and refurbished and sometimes if they've been robbed in Antiquity uh put back together again as long as the belief system holds but once the belief system is replaced by another belief system those things often became relics of the past that were either ignored or deliberately shunned I was reading that after Rome converted to Christianity some of the ancient temples from the

4:05 polytheistic era were not just some sometimes they were just reused but other times they were actively avoided because it wasn't that the Christians didn't believe that the previous Gods existed they did believe they existed sometimes and thought they were demons and Devils so better to avoid those sights altogether um in some of these early attempts at what you might call proto-archeology too there was a vested interest the kings that were looking back like um nabanitis looked back toward the Acadian Empire of naurum's sin for example which existed I believe more than the Millennia before he did but part of this rather than just trying to do what a modern-day archaeologist would do and try to reconstruct the past sometimes this was a part of establishing the Royal pedigree of some of these rulers right if you were if you were connected to this great king of the past it made you look like you were even more August and

5:02 that your heritage was even more uh Royal so some of this stuff we would say today was perhaps had a vested interest for the rulers and stuff involved I mean That's a classic right you see it is a classic you're right in just about every culture there's that desire to connect yourself to some mythical past like for example in mesoamerica long after teotiwakan declined that the only memory is remained of the Splendor that have been to otiwakan just about every every other state that propped up in mesoamerica tried to connect themselves whether there was an actual connection or whether it was completely invented because it was a cool story and everybody likes to be connected to some cool mythology that that everyone else knows about I think it also bolsters your credentials to rule right and it wasn't just uh attaching yourself to earlier rulers I mean sometimes when you well oftentimes when you look at the invented

5:58 lineage of some of these people sometimes going back you know 60 70 80 Generations eventually you find it going back to some deity somewhere so you know you're you're descended from a God if you go back far enough right so who so who better to rule right that's that's what it always works that way that's what I love about uh invented genealogies or invented connection with the mythical past that while you know if you look at it Through The Eyes of a strict historians those would be considered lies there's something interesting about why those Lies come into being in the first place what does it say about the necessity to make those claims what does it say about the culture you know again even though they are too fully invented they may they may tell you a lot about a particular time and place and the culture of the people living in it I think it just tells us about human beings overall right what's in it for me

6:52 what can I get from this archaeological Discovery right rather than the sort of amorphous idea of let me reconstruct the past so I better understood what came before me it's more how can reconstructions of the past benefit me so I mean you take a guy like uh Ramesses the second son who supposedly goes in and rediscovers uh temples and and cleans them out and fixes them up or tries to bolster up or restore pyramids that came from a long time before his lifespan well he may have been doing this for sort of generalized philosophical reasons but he's the kind of guy that stood personally to benefit from this I mean take a guy like nebonitis that we mentioned earlier right uh 550s BCE a neo-babylonian king who stumbles upon what are ruins for him in 550s BCE finds some of the sites can connected to an ancient Acadian King named narum sin so he's from about the time where you have guys like Sargon of

7:54 akkad some of the great first Empire Builders and nabanitis may be just generally interested in this stuff on the other hand if you connect yourself to some of the first great you know true Kings I think that's what Sargon means true Kings it benefits you personally he's supposed to have actually tried to date this stuff if you can imagine a guy in the 550s trying to date something from a thousand or fifteen hundred years before his time period sometimes people call him by the way the first archaeologist and they call Ramesses II's son sometimes the first egyptologist but you obviously have ruins and past histories the world over right so it's hardly just people from ancient Egypt or the ancient near East I mean the Chinese have a long uh and very deep history and they had people who were interested all during their history in studying their past but oftentimes for the same reasons right what can we

8:47 get out of it can we find some artifacts can we find some hidden knowledge that we can use now uh every now and then though you find these people and I don't want to Tar them with the same brushes all these what's in it for me types who seem to maybe have a generalized interest in re-sort of connecting the world of the past so they understand it better and some of these Chinese Scholars may have fallen into that category there's a famous medieval Indian scholar who may have written the first Indian history book a guy named kalhana I believe who may have been one of these people with a real you know sort of a general interest in history for history's sake rather than what's in it for me but of course it's the period when Europeans start dominating this whole thing that gets the Lion's Share of interest because they're so overwhelming in the 1700s and 1800s and I was reading in uh one of my

9:47 books on the history of archeology and they were connecting this whole resurrection of interest in the past to the Renaissance where Europe first sort of rediscovers the classical civilizations of places like Greece and Rome and it's the era where the writings of Greece and Rome start influencing things and this becomes very important I mean Aristotle and Plato and all those guys are sort of rediscovered and Infused the Renaissance Era science and philosophy with a lot of the ancient classical values but it also means people start getting interested in ancient Greece and Rome again and just like the people in the past one of the things that they're most interested in rather than some generalized knowledge about what did the past look like and how can we better understand it is where are the artifacts right it's a it's a little like you know a giant treasure hunt right where can we get the stuff absolutely and I think

10:43 that's what the before there was an archeology that's what people were looking for they were looking for the shiny gold object that makes everybody go oh wow more than necessarily trying to reconstruct the past the car fully the way an archaeologist would do today and it's funny to me you know you mentioned the example of Rome it's funny how certain things that today we consider archaeological Treasures WordPress served for very different reasons and various points in their history like one thing I read at some point is that the Coliseum in Rome at a time when pretty much everything was torn down for building materials by later generations the Colosseum was preserved because some of the early Christians believe that many Christian Martyrs were killed in the Colosseum so that made it somewhat of a holy site in a way and so you wouldn't touch it now today we know that probably many of those massacres did not happen the way

11:41 we think maybe they did happen on a much much smaller scale but people believe they happen and so Danny was like okay I used to be a pagan thing but it was made Holy by the blood of the markers so we need to preserve it fast forward another few generations and people don't necessarily believe that anymore but now they are interested in the Coliseum for its historical importance once the Roman Traditions are rediscovered and all of that so it's interesting out the same bunch of rocks can be perceived in such different ways and this preserved for different reasons over the centuries well and you know what I'm fascinated by the amateur nature of a lot of the early archeology after the Renaissance period because when you read about a lot of these guys some of whom are not treasure Hunters we should say some of them are more hobbyists where they're you know diagramming and making sketches and

12:36 stuff of the various uh things they found the megaliths or the great buildings or what have you but that quickly gets followed by the guys that I like to think of as the Indiana Jones version of archaeologists right the guys who are hired by Rich folks in places like Europe to go get them Antiques and artifacts and whatnot and I was reading one book because I pulled out one of these books I have on the history of archeology it's called uncovering the past a history of archeology by William H steaming Jr and he sort of goes over the history and talks about how um these early guys started when Napoleon invaded Egypt and you know there's that great line from Napoleon where he's addressing his troops right before they fight the mamluks in Egypt and he tells them soldiers 40 centuries of History are looking down on you because the pyramids are right there right um but what Napoleon did was he brought

13:36 a lot of scientists with him and his army and while he's conquering Egypt and fighting in that part of the of the world these scientists are examining the ruins of Egypt and it's part of what starts this real craze for Egyptian artifacts and everything connected with that and then what ends up happening of course is because he's fighting the British in that area there almost becomes a Scramble for who's going to get their hands on the Egyptian Antiques and they both you know it's funny because normally you would think they would go in there and rape and pillage the Antiques but because they're it's two European powers sort of vying for the antiques they would actually go to the authorities at that time the authorities were not Egyptian they were Turkish and they would they would try to seek the approval and get permits from the authorities so that they could use those permits against you know if there

14:27 was the British they could use the permits against the French or vice versa and say you can't dig here we have the official you know signature which otherwise they probably wouldn't have cared about if there hadn't been another European power you know opposing them but this is where you start to see now very wealthy Europeans who want to hire individuals to go find them stuff that can be carted back to museums or even and I always find this interesting even to their personal property like a lot of statues and obelisks and things like that ended up as like backyard pieces in some englishman's Garden or something and and the guy who I always love from this time period if you can love somebody who destroys tons of things while he's looking for artifacts is the great Giovanni Belzoni and if if you go and you look at belzoni's stuff he's famous because he made sure he would be remembered as the guy who let's call it

15:20 rediscovered because tomb robbers found a lot of these places in Antiquity before he ever got to them but rediscovered a bunch of these tombs in the Valley of the Kings and stuff he would carve his name graffiti style and it's still there today into the walls as sort of a way to say his version of Kilroy was here right wow Giovanni was the artist that's that's your father of archeology that way that's hilarious well and remember he was to show you what an amateur this guy was he was a circus strong man six foot seven inch tall this massive guy and and he well I've got I actually uh wrote down or recorded one of the uh accounts where he wrote about one of these places that he was Excavating and in it's mentioned in the history of archeology book that I have and when you realize as many of us do today how painstaking modern archeology is and how many years archaeologists can spend working on just one Temple or one tomb

16:20 or one dig listen to what it was like in like the wild west of the Indiana Jones era of discovering these places because here's what Belzoni writes about one of these I think it was a temple or a tomb or a mortuary that he that he broke into and starts telling you what it's like when he gets in there so so let me do the lead in that that uh William H steving gives and then I'll give you the Belzoni quote so Stephen says quote throughout his explorations Belzoni continually looked for portable Antiquities and papyri that he could sell to the consul general or other European collectors he openly admitted that his purpose in entering ancient tombs was to quote Rob the Egyptians of their papyri end quote from belzoni's account of his experiences while exploring dark unventilated tomb passages and Chambers one can get an impression of the amount of Destruction that must have taken place during this

17:19 era and now he quotes from belzoni's writing so listen to what You Know listen to the care that Belzoni took in in exploring these ancient places where he was often the first person to enter into these areas since maybe tomb robbers had been in there in the ancient world he writes quote this is from Belzoni after the exertion of entering into such a place through a passage of 50 100 300 or perhaps 600 yards nearly overcome I sought a resting place found one and contrived to sit but when my weight bore on the body of an Egyptian it crushed it like a band box I naturally had recourse to my hands to sustain my weight but they found no better support so that I sunk all together amongst the broken mummies with a crash of Bones rags and wooden cases which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour waiting for it to subside again once I was conducted from such a place to another resembling it through a

18:25 passage of about 20 feet in length and no wider than a body could be forced through it was choked with mummies and I could not pass without putting my face in contact with that of some decayed Egyptian but as the passage inclined down downward my own weight helped me on however I could not avoid being covered with bones legs arms and heads rolling from above end quote can you imagine the tears of the modern day archaeologists thinking how they would have lovingly used a paintbrush to just remove the tiniest bits of dust off every one of those objects yeah that was today that same thing you described would have taken probably three years to go slowly inch by Lynch layer by layer and he's just bulldozing through the whole thing rolling over skylator you truly can at the end of this quote you truly can hear the tears of archaeologists worldwide then again we can possibly cut this guy a little SLA because he wasn't in the

19:27 early 1800s when archeology as we understand it today wasn't even on the horizon no it's and it's interesting because the author of the history of archeology that I read actually tried to grade Belzoni on a curve if you will and compared him to some of his contemporaries one of whom I believe was an Englishman who when he couldn't find the entrance to the third pyramid at Giza just put gunpowder between the stones and blew a hole into the side of it so that gives you an idea about this Indiana Jones period of archeology and how nobody was waiting years you know to to get the artifacts that somebody was paying them to go grab for them I guess when the bar is that low yes maybe it's not that harder to be above it but but yes you know when you look at what was done in the 1800s never mind before that but even just as recently as the 1800s that's more than enough to make modern archaeologists cry I mean think about

20:26 even like one of the most famous early figures in archeology Heinrich schliemann the guy who discovered Troy and the whole his fascinating mission for the Trojan War and all of that I mean the guy was like on one end people give him credit because he believes in the American story he was actually able to find something to back them up and find some evidence for the Trojan War but on the other end the fact that he started just bulldozing through the side digging everything and even ending up digging the wrong layers at time like destroying some of the layers where the conflict would have taken place because he believed that the real stuff was uh was below that yeah that's not exactly the best kind of archaeological work ever done no but it's there's almost like a little karmic Justice in it right because so so the story you're talking about is how schliemann his life's Obsession was the Troy of the Trojan Wars from The Iliad

21:28 right so he finds this mound in turkey called hyserlik which is uh which had often been linked to the Trojan Wars right so these Mounds a lot of these architect architectural um archaeological digs revolved around these Mounds because a lot of these big locations like cities from the ancient world they turn into these giant they look like Hills or small mountains sometimes so he goes to Historic and he didn't expect that the site was going to be occupied through many different eras and as we know now you know this is their strata right there's layers and as you go down you're going earlier so one layer of occupation might be nearer to the surface and then you find another one 12 or 15 inches below that and that's an earlier era and so when schliemann goes and finds this Troy that he's you know this is his life's Obsession he doesn't realize that there are multiple layers and when he runs

22:19 into the multiple layers he makes an assumption and the assumption is that his Troy the one from The Iliad from Homer's era or from Homer's uh from earlier than Homer's era is going to be the very lowest layer and instead of doing what a modern archaeologist would do and painstakingly you know go layer by layer and excavate he just bulldozes through the layers destroying much of what exists above them gets down to the lowest layer having destroyed much of the above layers only to find that the Troy he was looking for was in a middle layer and he had done tons of damage to it on the way down so there's a little karmic Justice in there for the bulldozing archaeologist definitely and I think you know one thing that we probably should have mentioned early on but it makes sense is the fact that we need to remember that archeology is a destructive is the destructive form of research and may not be in the future if

23:12 we discover progressively more sophisticated Technologies to look deep into something without how to destroy in the top layers but the reality today is that still to this day let alone in the previous decades once you dig up a site you you get whatever information your current technology is able to give you based on the evidence but you also destroy often a whole lot of the evidence in the process and so it's always that you know in some cases we discover sites and we're like maybe we should hang on on digging too much to it because maybe down the road in 20 or 30 years our technology will be better and we'll be able to do the job in a much cleaner fashion in a less destructive fashion of course these were not the kind of concerns that people like schliemanned because not only they're wearing wire that way they weren't educated that way and they didn't even have the perspective that that could be

24:07 something that in the future things would change it reminds me of things like earlier crime scenes right if if they had known that we would want DNA evidence today they would have gone about investigating the crime scene differently a hundred years ago or what have you but you're stuck with it right I mean because by the time you look back on it now the entire thing's been contaminated you don't have the original stuff anymore and the people back then were investigating in a totally different way than the way we would do it today 100 and that's the the Tariq of archeology that we we wanted dig as much as possible to have the information today and we want to do it before whether it's climate change or anything else that could be damaging to a site whether it's grave robbers coming in because the year that there's something to be found or whether it's because a changing climate exposes to different conditions aside

25:00 that leads to in distraction so we have the pressure to rush to it and at the same time we have this pressure of ah maybe we should hang on a second until our technology improves you know one of the things it's a great point one of the things that destroys a ton of these archaeological sites are the creation of dams and the flooding of places into reservoirs and I always said if I if the only way I think I would have the patience to be a modern archaeologist I call it Dan Carlin archaeologist if you said we're going to flood this entire Valley and all the Antiquities in it are going to be flooded and lost forever you have six months to get everything out and then I could pull down down the bulldozers and I forget the little you know paint brushes that that get the dust off the shards of pottery I'm going in and saving what I can that's the only way I would have the patience to to do it rescue every mummy you can before they

25:53 flood the whole region I can hear listeners wishing that there was the equivalent of the time for your episodes it's like yeah three months to get an episode out whether you like it or not it's three months my wife would feel the same way and you know the part that we didn't get into too and this is when you really start to see I think the the ability to have earlier societies talk to us now and almost like adding water allowing them to sort of Revitalize and and talk again is when they start uh uh translating and deciphering the writing and the language of these peoples from so long ago I mean for example the coming up with the ability I mean these guys are like archaeological code Breakers but when they start doing things like deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Mayan writings or Acadian or any of these various things that allow all of a sudden the people from you know thousands of years ago to

26:55 talk to us again and give us an idea I mean we have from ancient Sumeria the Epic of Gilgamesh which is a story from a people that have been gone for thousands of years but because somebody wrote it down and somebody was able to translate that all of a sudden the Sumerians and their worldview and the way they thought and the stories that they listened to are allowed to live again it's like a resurrection isn't it absolutely because that's the reality that when we are talking I mean now we are going from just artifacts to actual writing when you can recover writing in some cases we have recover right you know we have no way to say to know what they say because we haven't deciphered it but when you can't recover writing and you can decipher it well now you are as it's basically the archaeological dream it's as good as it's ever gonna get now of course people can lie in their writing of course you're gonna run

27:51 into bias of course you know but that's like a real Prime Body Source where people you can hear people thoughts you can hear their words you can hear the way they describe the war they lived into some historical events that happen so of course that adds a layer of context that often fewer archeology can not give us because sometimes it can give us this one quick snapshot in time but we don't know what's around it what happens before or after or where the characters involved and for that kind of depth it's hard to it's hard to find any substitute for writing you know writing is the thing it reminds me of of the line that is attributed to Cicero the ancient orator from Rome who's supposed to have said writing is the only true form of immortality yeah of course that's given that the language survived because of course languages are constantly changing in many languages die off without anybody having an idea how to translate

28:49 them centuries down the road so you know it still is likely on the optimistic side his quote but but I can see the point you know compared to most other things yes that's where you have a better shot at things being preserved for sure but sometimes you get lucky right and this is something archeology can do too like the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the Rosetta Stone for those who don't know is a perfect example of what daniele was talking about earlier uh where where let's call it recycling to be kind when earlier peoples would tear apart um uh structures and things that we would consider to be uh you un cultural heritage sites because they wanted the building material again and they found this Stone embedded in one of the walls reused as a piece of building material and the stone had had a a message from I believe it was a Hellenistic ruler of Egypt and he was trying to make a proclamation and he wanted to make sure

29:50 his people could read it so he wrote it in three languages one above the other and by the way the Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum and you can see it today and and the the two languages that he wrote for the Egyptians was unknown at the time that the Rosetta Stone was found but the third language used was Greek which they had already deciphered and so by having the Greek there it was almost like having a code breaking tool where they could then sort of reverse engineer what the hieroglyphics above that had said and what uh the earlier uh another Egyptian writing system had said and so it's like a shortcut to deciphering an ancient language and when you think about how many of these pieces of writing that they've found this is the part that boggles the mind there are so many more pieces of writing and tablets and Records than we would normally think I mean in one city alone a place called nepur in Western Asia

30:45 they found 30 000 tablets just in that City administrative stuff all sorts of commercial records diplomatic records all sorts of things and in places like Nineveh and and some of the excavations they've done in Babylonia I mean they find tons of this stuff and so when you talk about what would be missing if you play the what if game and ask what would we know about these places if we couldn't decipher this stuff it is shocking yep 100 percent and that's why that's why you also have the feeling of like what are we gonna find out in the future what are the history books gonna look like down the road because of course you know the reality is that we are constantly discovering new things that shine new light on history that sometimes had been forgotten until this point or maybe it hadn't been forgotten but we know only a Tiny's liver of it and that's where I keep hammering on this idea of context because to me

31:41 context is everything without context I mean I was thinking uh there's this beautiful archaeological discovery that they made in New Mexico where they found these Footprints dating from roughly around 10 000 years ago and these Footprints they give you it's a perfect window in time because the archaeologist archaeologists were able to figure out that this was either a woman or a young man walking along with a toddler who sometimes is clearly they are carrying this toddler and sometimes suddenly these small tracks pop up next to them as they put the toddler down to get them to walk they could figure out from where to where they were going so they followed these Footprints for a long distance they could figure out that it started raining short after their walk 10 000 years ago they figured out that the person carrying this toddler came back the same way without the toddler we don't really

32:37 know what happened to the kid whether he was left at a village or what happened they could see how a mammoth and the giant sloth cross their tracks within just minutes or possibly almost a few hours of them walking by so you have these you know if you like your imagination go this is a fantastic picture because you really get this snapshot in time of these two individuals Crossing this environment the kind of animals that lived in there and yet we don't know who these people were we don't know what happened we don't know we don't know anything you know on one end we know so much like to the point where really you can see uh at what speed was the person walking with the toddler in arm and on the other hand we know nothing because we don't know the context of the story and often archaeologists that that's kind of what the field does it gives you these little tidbits that seems so precise but

33:37 lacking the necessary context this of course is precise only to a point and instead what you just described when you find the miracle Discovery when you find the Rosetta Stone of the story suddenly all kind of context become available to you when you start fleshing out and adding layers to stories that maybe you knew just a tiny tiny bit about you know that's fascinating it's like a moment Frozen in Amber and when I think about that idea of a moment Frozen in Amber I always think of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and cities like that and you know one of the things I don't know how current this is because my history of archeology was written about 30 years ago so this may have changed but what the author talks about is he said in um in uh I think it's uh in uh herculinium where where it was buried in I guess Pompeii was more Ash and its sister city was more like hard lava so they're actually chipping

34:34 away and and and getting that city out of stone when they're when they're Excavating it but they found a library of burnt Scrolls that when they founded uh Steven says they looked like logs like they'd been burnt and then what happened is the outside layer had been burnt but all of the inside layers are still okay and they just require the technology because you can't really unroll them without tearing them to pieces now and and if you could just use the technology to read what's on the Scrolls and 30 years ago they may not have had that they may be doing that now I'm not aware but that's an example because Steven says that much of the stuff we have from Rome whether you're talking about Livy or polybius or some of these great writers that we have there's often big chunks of their writing that that have been that have disappeared over the eras and we may be able to fill in some of those gaps when

35:25 these scrolls are deciphered or even have authors that we were never exposed to so one of my big fantasies is that they continue to find these libraries all over the world and will be able to flesh out a lot of stuff we don't know right now 14 year old me would be very disappointed in this because in high school in Italy I had to they torture me making me translate ancient Latin and ancient Greek if there was even more material like I remember going through all of this guy Levy and you know just about every one of those writers from back then if suddenly you were to Triple or quadruple the material available would be a great thing for history a less great thing for 14 year old daniele translating all this stuff oh but I'm jealous that you got to read them in basically closer anyway to the original language you know it's funny though because with those languages because they are not languages that

36:21 people use all the time I mean I've seen later people starting to try to revive Latin and actually have conversation in Latin and all that but when you deal with the language that's essentially a dead language that people are not using on a day-to-day basis it's very different like you know if you learn Spanish today after a while you'll be semi-decent at having a conversation with Latin or Greek for some reason of despite years of studying I always found uh it was still a challenge I mean you do pick up layers that you wouldn't pick up if you read them in translation for sure but it was still a much harder challenge than learning a living language well and as you pointed out earlier languages change I mean look how different English was in Shakespeare's time and that's a much shorter period of time between then and now than trying to you know take Cicero's air and and read his Latin yep yeah for sure

37:15 and you know even with all that was lost from the 1700s to the late 1800s with guys like Belzoni doing the Dan Carlin equivalent of taking like backhoes and tractors to the Valley of the Kings to you know to scoop up mummies and everything you can't help but notice how much progress was made I mean the difference between what humankind knew about the world of the past from the time of the American Revolution in the 1770s to the 1890s or the 1900 era is night and day and the difference in the approach of archaeologists is as well I mean people like Belzoni weren't really concerned with piecing together the past so we had a you know sort of clarified picture of things but neither would most of the people in his time period one of the sort of dirty little secrets of the whole thing is while a guy like Belzoni is sawing precious multi-ton statues into pieces so he can cart them off across the

38:18 landscape and take them overseas to Europe the locals in those areas weren't all that concerned with them either I mean he may have as he said been stealing the Egyptians papyri but the Egyptian peasants I mean there's a great story of Belzoni having to leave one of these statues that he's dragging across the landscape at one point and when he comes back the local peasants have lit it on fire trying to turn it into lime which they can use for things like farming purposes right so nobody was really concerned with preserving these ancient artifacts because they were special to the heritage of the people and by the way the governors and the rulers of these areas weren't either they were giving away artifacts as gifts they were giving away the rights to dig this stuff up to other countries for diplomatic reasons it's only by the time that Heinrich schliemann is tearing up the mound at hyserlick in the 1870s that you begin to

39:11 see a very different sort of archeology take hold maybe we could call it the archeology of the ghost of archeology present where by the time you have Howard Carter in the 1920s opening up King Tutankhamun's tomb you see what looks much more like modern archaeological sorts of approaches right where they're going more methodically they're taking their time they're noting all the strata down they're marking every location where they find stuff and they're paying attention to things that a guy like Belzoni would have considered to be archaeological trash right even broken shards of pottery are important to the modern archaeologists and so maybe we could say it's about that time period where you transition from the ghost of archeology past to the ghost of archeology present and once you hit the Contemporary era you start getting into contemporary moral questions the sorts of stuff that a guy like Giovanni

40:09 Belzoni never even considered if you'd have said to him listen maybe you shouldn't go into these tombs and destroy all these mummies after all this is the sacred resting place of a lot of human beings he didn't even consider stuff like that but we do and there's all sorts of questions that a lot of people especially lay people ask about archeology like is it really cool to go in and desecrate tombs and move people from their final resting place and take them for study or maybe even long-term storage in a museum or a university what do you think about that well and this is where the modern controversy is kick in because in many cases when you're dealing with artifacts or even more so when you're dealing with human remains the question is where's the right to them and in some cases it's obvious you know nobody goes to dig up your grandma at the cemetery there's there's a personal connection not yet

41:06 not yet exactly but it's like how many generations need to pass before your grandma is somebody's great great grandma now it's getting a little fuzzier now it's like well in the interest of science we want to know what people were doing back then and and in some cases you know there's still a connection with living people in some cases the connection if it exists is so long gone in memory that nobody has any idea and that's also goes into the complicated issues regarding identity regarding a race regarding all sorts of things because sometimes you know you have you make a Discovery at one place and and somebody may have an attachment saying hey that was our ancestors but that's based on the idea that people don't move in some cases somebody who lived there two thousand years ago as next no connection with the people living there today now not always of course in some cases there is a connection but it gets it start getting

42:06 complicated because it brings up political issues at that point it starts bringing up the meaning of what does it mean to belong to a particular ethnic group like does ethnicity really survive through the centuries whether on a biological level or a cultural level or any level and those are all questions that clearly are unsettling because they go they end up messing with people's sense of identity which is one of the Sacred cows that usually you don't want to mess up if you want to if you value your life well and look clearly we can look at things like Native American skeletons from 150 years ago that are in museums or in universities now and that to me seems a very different story than something like the Kenny Wick man that they found here so-called Kenny Wickman that they found here in the Pacific Northwest that when they dated it it was dated to be over 9 000 years old which means it predates all recorded human

43:08 history but some of the peoples in the Pacific Northwest have claimed that Kenny Wickman as an ancestor and are upset at the fact that you know there it's being studied and treated like it's not somebody's ancestor of to me there's absolutely no question that the 150 year old you know the head of Mangus Colorado's the Apache Chief was was in some museum for a long time that to me is an obvious case where you can look and say that's an ancestor of ours because that's relatively recent history the Kenny Wick man well there's also I mean then you start saying well if somebody finds a Cro-Magnon man but it's in the location where your peoples are now is there a claim that's much more difficult don't you think that's the difficulties putting it generously you know when you're talking about thousands of years the odd that there's any connection becomes next to none I mean I remember when I started studying the

44:01 places where I come like I grew up in Milan in Italy and I remember reading books and I was like oh so this was a site that was first settled and I permanently based by some Celtic tribe and I was like oh cool so there's a connection with and then I turn the page and it's like and 50 years later this other group came by and killed them all and you go like okay so now those guys it's these other guys who are my ancestors but then 25 years later this other group came in and they mix heavily and 50 years and before you know once you look at like a deep history you look at the two thousand three thousand years of History whatever we know you realize that just about everyone and their Grandma pastor liaria and so who I am today I have no idea who I'm connected to from hundreds of years ago you know there's it's very very they're doing better and better job with DNA trying to but even that is very

44:59 it doesn't tell you personal stories you know it doesn't so to be able to trace somebody living today to somebody so deep into the past is at best a challenge if we want to be generous in many cases it's not right impossible well and you know there's a trade-off I think that's sometimes missed on some of these deals in other words um some peoples in some parts of the world may feel like there is a violation going on when tombs are opened and artifacts are removed but there's a payoff sometimes and I notice I don't want to call it defensive but I noticed that in my history of archeology uncovering the past the author several times at the end of various chapters will say something like and because we found this we allowed these people's Heritage to be restored to them and there's some examples that are maybe worth citing so for example you know the the great period when archeology exploded is in like the 1800s and as we

45:58 all know in the 1800s amongst Europeans there's quite a bit of racism and ethnocentrism and superiority complexes and so the belief system was was often that these peoples in the other parts of the world whether we're talking about the Americas or whether we're talking about places like Africa especially sub-Saharan Africa were unsophisticated and they didn't know how to build great monuments like the great civilizations and because of that they extrapolated out assumptions like you know you hear it from racists even today all the time about black Africans they'll say well you can tell they're not as sophisticated as we were because where are all their great civilizations well the archeology it shows you that they don't know what they're talking about but the archeology shows that for example sub-Saharan Africa had great civilizations and the racism and ethnocentrism is so deep that when they

46:49 were first discovered the white archaeologists who discovered them in the 1800s could not bring themselves to attribute their building to the black Africans and had to concoct theories of how there must have been white people there once upon a time who were eventually wiped out I mean for example there's a place called The Great Zimbabwe which is an archaeological site that they found in sub-Saharan Africa that so bowled over the excavators when they found it that they couldn't believe the locals had built it and steaming has an account from one of the early archaeologists who founded and was one of the people that couldn't believe the locals could build this but he described what he saw and here's his description so according to Steven's book this site that became known as the Great Zimbabwe was taboo to the people who lived there when the discoveries were made so they didn't go to the site and they also were

47:44 not the original people there because the these people had only moved in there about 50 years beforehand so it had been another group of sub-Saharan Africans but here's what they found when they uncovered the ruins and Stephen's book it says quote during several excursions from the village in 1871 and 1872 Carl Mark the archaeologist or pseudo-archaeologist finally got to explore the stone ruins about which he had heard so much at the foot of a high hill he found a great circular enclosure with granite walls about 20 feet high inside were lower partially crumbled walls and a conical Tower about 30 feet high all were constructed of stones about twice the size of bricks that had been fit together without mortar on the hill were more ruins protected by a strong fortification wall that varied between 6 to 12 feet in thickness these massive structures as well as many smaller ones between the Citadel and the

48:47 great enclosure were overgrown with trees and vegetations Mark had found the site now called Great Zimbabwe end quote so later on Steven points out that the people that moved in once this site were found were all these Prospectors and people looking for gold and they did a lot of damage to the site one of the companies I love this one of the companies was actually called the ancient ruins company which is a great name for a company that actually deals in ancient ruins but here's an example of Steven pointed out not maybe even sounding a little defensive about what archaeologists have to do to these sites in terms of violating taboos or digging up Graves but points out that because they did they're able to give back these people's Heritage and he writes quote archeology has now solved many of the mysteries of Zimbabwe perhaps in dispersing images of the Queen of Sheba or King Solomon's M voice walking around

49:45 the ruins meaning it was really white people who did it it also destroyed some of the Romantic lure that had drawn westerners to the area in the past but truth is almost always less romantic than myth archeology has restored Great Zimbabwe and other Iron Age sites in southern Africa to their True Builders thus returning to Black Africans an important part of their Heritage end quote so is it worth it Danielle well and I think that's where it gets uh I guess there are two different points to that like on one level of course it's super fascinating to ReDiscover aspects of history that would have been long forgotten that some people would have used for racist reasons to say oh you see these people are below us because they didn't do this and that and when you discover that the history is much more complicated well that's of course is a good thing there's another aspect though that's funny that like

50:40 in itself this kind of discoveries seem to be seems to be based on and the assumption that you are only civilized they are only Advanced you are only good almost on a moral level if you build the complicated stuff if you have complex civilizations if you have a Monumental architecture if you have urban planning which in itself is kind of interesting because to me I don't know I may be coming at it from a different angle but to me there is no superiority in this or rather yes that shows that your civilization is capable of building complicated stuff but complicated doesn't necessarily always mean better on a quality of life kind of way I mean look at like the the a bunch of people throughout history who did live in the midst of some of the biggest greatest civilizations ever from the point of view of complexity where slaves were absolutely miserable for a whole variety of circumstances and

51:44 sometimes when you compare their life with a bunch of hunters and gatherers living with their tribe in a fair legalitarian scenario you're like I don't know that that's a superior way of living it's a it's a more complex way of living is a way of living that give access to many certainly many advantages but also this so I don't know to me I tend to have a little bit of a more relativistic approach to ranking called stores in this fashion in the way that these guys seem to do some time when they were thinking oh if we find big cities that's a sign that you guys are civilized they are not primitive I think that's a great point it's almost our own cultural bias and and the measurements by which we decide something is valuable or not valuable like you said if we measure it in terms of human satisfaction and happiness we may come up with a very different answer exactly and that's where I feel that we

52:36 do and this is something that we still have in history books to this day there is this bias that we are constantly moving from a place of Simplicity to a place of complexity which that in itself is not true because there are many gaps in there there are many times when more advanced civilizations collapse and are replaced by centuries of less Advanced civilization from a technological standpoint but even if we were to grant that assumption also the second assumption is that this is an improvement this is somehow better and better again as you are saying better according to what Matrix what are we talking about you know are we talking about the capability to affect the environment yeah then yes more complex will give you that are we talking about human beings being happier living more fulfilling lives well then probably not so much so again it's uh some of these assumptions are unstated but they probably should be stated

53:34 because they I do feel that they mess with our perception of it all I think that's a great it's a great point and and when I was a kid and when you were a kid and we were reading about things like the fall of Rome's Western Empire and The Barbarians taking over in the west it was always portrayed as some sort of a catastrophe and all of a sudden you know the great technology of Rome and all of the things that the Roman civilization brought to these people was replaced by barbarism and a lower level of civilizational technology and capabilities but some of the stuff in the last 20 years and I think we used them in a show we did a while back some of the great histories written about this lately point out that another way of looking at this is that maybe the people in these areas that formerly were hooked up to the great Roman version of the internet were being better served by what came afterwards for example some of

54:28 these barbarians that took over didn't tax the locals to the same degree that the Romans did and some of these barbarians that came later were able to better protect the locals than Rome had been near the end so it's very possible that we're looking at this through our own lens and saying my goodness I wouldn't want to lose those wonderful baths and the wonderful aqueducts but the people there might have made a different decision might have felt very differently about it absolutely and I think that's where the cultural trade-offs are interesting because the rarely you're gonna run into a civilization that's clearly a hundred percent Superior to another by and by Superior I mean that any person that you put in at the proverbial Crossroads say do you want to go to path a or to path B they all say clearly a is better in most cases it's a mixed bag in most cases it really depends sometime on the

55:20 individual on your particular cultural makeup on your priorities on your own that's why I mean when you think about it the fact that and this is something that Euro Americans demoned to no end in the 17 and 1800s sometimes people were captured by certain native tribes in North America they didn't want to go back when they had a chance to go and could be freed and that clearly messed with the whole set of assumptions that some Europe Americans said where the Assumption was we are clearly Superior in every possible way and anybody who has a choice would want to be with us And yet when your own people once they spend some time in another culture decided not to come back well that throws a ranch into all those assumptions and again I'm not trying to argue I'm not trying to argue that one culture is better than the other in Reverse by say kind of having some noble savage kind of thing that clearly the

56:19 native cultures were better in heaven that's not what I'm saying at all I mean to me like one my favorite story in regards to this kind of tale is the story of Gonzalo Guerrero Gonzalo Guerrero is one of them and the other one is Geronimo de Aguilar where two Spaniards to Shipwrecked on the coast of Mexico in 1511 like 80 years before Cortez arrived by the time Cortez arrives the two Spaniards have been separated and they have been living in different Maya towns for a while and Cortes and this man ran into Geronimo dagilar and Aguilar could not be any happier he's like I prayed every day that this would happen I'm gonna get to see Spain again you know he's ecstatic to be able to be reunited with some Spaniards and to go back to Europe eventually but he said oh we should go look for my friend Gonzalo he's I haven't seen him in a few years but I know he's in a village down the road let's go check up on him and they arrive

57:18 and they find Gonzalo Guerrero covered in tribal tattoos from head to toe he's married to a Maya woman he has three kids with this woman and when they tell him he's like how we are here to free you and bring you back to Spain he's like well nice of you guys to show up it was good seeing you but I'm good here you know say hello to Spain for me because I and the point to me of this story that is beautiful is the role that individuals play in history right it's not like old Spaniards who have made the jump or old Spaniards would have been ecstatic to return to Europe one person is and one person is not and then that's where a layer of complexity to the stories that the over simplistic version of one culture Superior to another tend to gloss over all this stuff well and needless to say the vast majority of let's just take North American natives but this could apply elsewhere the vast majority when shown

58:16 you know the white man's civilization didn't want that they wanted to go back and live the way they traditionally had they were happier that way and as to your point earlier about you know if you measure this stuff by happiness rather than you know the amount of technology and whatever you have I mean there were very few Native Americans who saw white civilization said give me some of that yeah exactly or maybe you want one aspect it's like hey I like those uh sharp knives I dig them all right I like the fact that with the still ax I can cut down a tree and make a canoe in one day instead of a week but that's it I don't want everything else I just want the shower pack you know it's often a selective thing where it's like yeah I like ABC that you bring to the table but I don't want everything else when I think of the archeology though and you think about people saying something like well you shouldn't dig up those tombs I

59:08 always wonder about the what if I try to examine a lot of problems that way and say okay can we really imagine people seeing all these tombs and saying you know we shouldn't break into that King Tutankhamun's tomb it wouldn't be a good thing there's a curse on it anyway they wouldn't have wanted us to do it so we're just gonna leave it there I find it difficult to imagine human beings doing that especially if the if we're not so so like if you said the ancient Egyptians who still practice the religion and whatever that you shouldn't do this I can see them laying off but once that religion's gone and the connection to that's over I mean we had tomb robbers raiding the vast majority of tombs especially in Egypt but all over the world tomb robbers are raiding these things so clearly they're not deterred and they don't care one wit about you know what somebody would have felt about their grandmother being dug

1:00:00 up I wonder if there's a little bit like if it's a little like virginity if the tomb is already raided by robbers in the past does it matter if you're the second one who comes there anymore right right if the tomb is pristine we don't want to destroy it but when they've already gone in there you know thrown The Mummy on the floor or broken open it's it's chest cavity to try to take the scarabs out at that point doesn't matter anymore Dan Carlin for you virginity and Grave Robin an obvious connection that's right a clear obvious connection I love that the no and I think that's where things get uh got really interesting because of who gets to make those choices and is it even like one of the most fascinating archaeological discoveries of the last three decades or so to me has been the discovery of what sometimes is referred to as the ice Maiden uh skitian mommy from um I think it was the fifth century

1:00:58 Before Common Era or so so we're talking a really long time ago where she was the Gap and she was super perfectly preserved that you could even see the tattoos on her skin that's how good it was uh interesting Enough by the way the tattoos there's plenty of people today who because that discovery made the headlines ended up in National Geographic and was all over and because the tattoos are so beautiful there are plenty of people today who have them tattooed on their skin today which in itself is uh weird can you imagine like some lady 2500 years ago roaming the steps she gets her tattoo done and some almost 3000 years later people to this day walk into a tattoo part or with a copy of National Geographic and go I want this that's the repeat itself but you know this was a fantastic Discovery was uh was beautiful oh sorry I should nerd out on one more detail on the tattoos there's if you post the image toward the

1:01:59 end of Kill Bill 2 that whole one of the tattoos that this lady had on her skin is painted on a wall in one of the houses in Kill Bill too so you know you see this but aside for me geeking out on this stuff what's fascinating is that they found this woman they were able to tell so much about who she was her life the culture that she came from there were all sorts of goods that have been placed in the grave with her they give us a snapshot of what skition culture was like 2500 years ago but of course there's also the other side of it the local population today or like hey we don't want Russian archaeologists to come in and take our ancestors now Russian archaeologists come back and say Well about that being your ancestor not so sure because we ran the DNA and she's way more European than she's Asian and then the guys from the the local population start contesting the DNA results and argued that the DNA shows a

1:02:59 much more complicated teacher which was many was true who knows because people were rarely belong to a single ethnicity back then there was so much movement back and forth you know it gets into this into this fight that has much more to do with modern politics and sense of nationhood and sense of people wanting to who this lady was 2500 years ago and their relationship to today gets to be the literal truth of it got to be swept under the rug in the name of all the political conflicts that a discovery like these races and I find it fascinating to see how people negotiate them because in some cases they negotiate them very well you know in some cases the local population and archaeologists make a deal they find a point of agreement they feel like you know the ideal scenarios where archaeologists say okay we're gonna work on this for 10 years we're gonna discover every single weekend and then

1:03:55 we're gonna return the remains to you and you re-burry them however you want and in some cases they shake hands and do that because they each see a legitimate claim on the other side and in some cases they don't and they go at each other's throat with hey we need to know it for science versus the screw your science this is our ancestor you don't touch her and and again I find myself switching my opinion pretty much case to case depending of how long ago we are talking about as you are saying if you're talking about 150 years ago is a very different story than from 2000 years ago so how strong is the connection to the present and and all of that well and you can't have any sacred cows right you can't say we can dig up your ancestors but no one can dig up ours if it's okay to dig up somebody else's ancestors we need to be prepared for somebody who want to dig up George Washington Thomas Jefferson and all

1:04:51 those guys too right what's good for the goose is good for the gander absolutely you know in that sense yeah you cannot if you lay down a ground rule of what's acceptable and what's not that absolutely applies to everybody and you bring up scythians so I can't let that go because you know how much I love the Eurasian peoples of the step um and you know here in the United States we're so attached to the issues involving Native Americans and Graves and all those sorts of things that it it's a known subject but I don't think many in in the United States especially but maybe even in Western Europe uh also I'm not sure they understand exactly how much there is buried on the Eurasian step so there have been some good books that have come out lately and it's funny how they often come out in clusters and you'll get a few good books on the same subject in quick succession I have one uh called Empire of Horses by John Mann

1:05:43 that came out recently uh man is um a historian who specializes in this particular area and period and he talks about because he visited and was visiting all of these various sites and their giant burial grounds and what's now places like Mongolia or Eastern Russia or western China and he talks about the sheer scale and scope of this and you know I've been researching these people for years and it still caught me off guard listen to this quote from the book to give you an idea of the the not just the the scope of this but how long different people's waves of successor peoples were using the same places as sort of like giant uh uh hundreds and hundreds of square mile mortuaries man writes quote the scythians and many sub-groups prove so successful that they built substantial kingdoms recalled not by cities but by the tombs of their leaders how many tombs no one knows certainly tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands

1:06:45 they run from north of the Black Sea across present-day Southern Russia and Kazakhstan into Mongolia and Southern Siberia to my eyes they are like Braille dots on the pages of history that reveal truth to those with the skill to read them many were treasure chests of possessions presumably to sustain the rich and Powerful in the afterlife so for centuries they were literally gold mines for grave robbers end quote he then talks about another tomb area and again it boggles the mind and a bunch of these tombs by the way freeze on the first Frost and so when archaeologists find these things they're basically blocks of ice which is why they've been able to find as you pointed out the skin of these people and the tattoos that were on them textiles the sacrificial animals and I was blown away by one of the accounts of them uh thawing out one of these tombs and the sacrificial horses and sheep that had

1:07:47 been put in the tombs started to rot and it was the smell was bothering the archaeologist and you thought this is the smell of decaying animals that were killed you know 2300 years ago or something man writes this quote scythian subgroups organized prodigious grave sites often burying vast amounts of wealth in southern Siberia for instance the menu since I probably mispronounced that uh minusinsk Hollow is prime past your land some 125 miles across it and its surrounding territory have some 30 000 kurgans these are these Mounds where they erect over the tombs acquired over a thousand years the biggest the great saubach kurgan is surrounded by 23 gigantic Stones weighing up to 40 tons each cut and hauled from a quarry 60 kilometers away end quote so this is wild you have just like you said maybe hundreds of thousands of these tombs I know that in Russia they've they've taken the bodies of something like at

1:08:57 least a thousand of these uh peoples buried in these places back to Russia to study so it's it's it's archeology and let's just call it tomb excavation on a massive scale but think about what they learn they learn a lot and in fact you know when you look at something like the ice maiden or any of these burials you discover so so much and the part of me is extremely thankful for it on the other hand you do understand the controversies that are swirling around this stuff because for example like today and you made a good point about you know people being familiar with some stories in U.S perhaps but when you talk about something happening in Siberia probably most people don't know the details and the thing that's interesting is that you know you look at a political map and you say oh that's Russia uh yes and no I mean because the reality is that you're dealing in some cases with tribal people who have had a very

1:09:50 contentious relationship with the Russian government for decades or even centuries you deal with the newly discovered sense of sell food as a people that's clashing with Russian nationalism so suddenly you discover a mummy there and it's not just a scientific discovery it's not like what you or I would say oh great we got more information about the past that's like poking The Hornet's Nest of nationalism of relationship between the state and as particular ethnic groups and things that you you know since we don't live in the contest we probably barely are even aware of it but to those people that overwrites the importance of the scientific discovery you were talking to me a little bit about the famous ice man can you tell us a little bit more about that yeah that was probably the one discovery that really turned the light on for me regarding the power of archeology because this is goes back to 1991 there

1:10:54 was Discovery at the border between Italy and Austria where these as glaciers were melting at the time this one perfectly preserved mummified body popped up and you know there was a whole crazy series of coincidence that allow for it to be found and not to be destroyed there were so many things that happened that day it happened one day before or one day later we would have never found this thing but the fact was it was found we found this body they did once they started studying it they realized that it was over 5000 years old so you're talking about 3 000 years before Julius Caesars more than two thousand years before the Olympic Games several hundred years before the pyramids were even there and what we found was not only the man's body but we found all the tools he was carrying with him they started studying and based on the kind of stuff you were describing by studying his digestive

1:11:56 tract they were able to figure out the last few days of his life which part of the mountain he was on how he was probably way up in the mountain went down into the valley dropping several hundred feet to go to some Village down there went back up the mountain where he was murdered where we found evidence that he was shot with an arrow by somebody who was clearly a skilled Archer because they could even figure out the trajectory of the arrow and we were shot from down the mountain they could figure out how many yards he was shot from and then whoever shot him just walked up to him and bashed him in the head so on one end it's trippy because we know so much about the guy how tall he was how much did he weigh how old he was what he ate or as his last meal or what where he walked the last few days of his life we found out even other crazy things for example he had all these tattoos that are some of the very first

1:12:58 example of tattoos that we find in the archaeological record and then doing a study they realized that all these tattoos which are not cool you know imagine they were dots and lines so things that is like why are you even doing this stuff they realized almost every one of them was located in a spot where the guy was suffering from arthritis so they started thinking oh this is some form of like ancient acupuncture before there was even an acupuncture and so there's all this stuff about like the medicine of it all and what so you know we have all these incredible amount of details about the man's life and yet of course we're still teased by the mystery of who was he who killed him why the people that he belonged to who were the you know we don't know the broader context and we probably never will and yet we can know so much about the one little window in time of the last few days of his life at least part of it and so I

1:14:02 always found it fascinating because it's like reading a murder mystery in a way where it's sad in pieces it's adding pieces and you start beginning to see the picture but of course since we don't have the benefit of a screenwriter and this is real science you only get so far and there are so much more well and I think maybe we're focusing a little a little too much maybe on the tomb side of it because there's other things that maybe don't bring up the same level of controversy so for example I was reading about how the new technology uh it's called lidar Uh is is impacting the study of ancient sites in places where jungle and rainforest tend to hide ruins and whatnot from the naked eye so it's a lot easier for example to see the giant structures in a desert in ancient Egypt than it is in Central or South America where the foliage quickly covers this stuff so for those who don't know this

1:14:58 lidar technology um I was reading about it basically what it does is it sees through the vegetation so they can fly a plane over these areas and it exposes the structures underneath and the amount of stuff they're finding is crazy so I was reading a story online about how much it's doing and the story says that uh before the lidarge study that was recently done archaeologists biologists and historians had identified about 50 sites of importance in this one area in Central America in a decade now it says there are more than 900 settlements that they've found that they couldn't even see without this technology and what it's doing and this ties into the idea of how you know there's a benefit even to the native populations uh to all of this what it's doing is completely revising the sophistication level of some of these places like Central America some of these places they found by Looking Through the Jungle are so

1:15:58 large that the people that I was reading who wrote the story are saying that you have to reinvent evaluate how these Societies in mesoamerica compared to what was going on in places like Europe or Western Asia or even China during the Middle Ages because they're every bit they're equal and maybe even larger and more sophisticated than those so this is a little bit about what the archaeologists who wrote my history of archeology book was talking about I mean this sort of archeology restores these places to their to their to the to the place that they belong I mean for example in Stephen's book he talks about the early excavations of some of these pyramids in Central America and it's very similar to what we had in in sub-Saharan Africa where in this era the archaeologists were not willing to give the locals credit for building such sophisticated sites and tried to you know find all sorts of of weird ways of

1:16:54 of explaining how it might have happened not involving the people in the area and and of course they they fail to do that but for example he talks about this um Two Gentlemen by the way uh John Lloyd Stevens and Frederick catherwood were discovering some of these uh temples in the uh late 1800s I believe it was in places like mesoamerica and they found um it says as they began clearing some of the jungle growth they uncovered Stones steelies and portions of pyramids even more wonderful than they had imagined Stevens later described his thoughts at the moment and this is from his diary I think he says quote America say historians was peopled by Savages but Savages never reared these structures Savages never carved these Stones we asked the Indians who made them and their dull answer was who knows there were no associations connected with this place none of those stirring Recollections which hallow Rome Athens

1:17:55 and the world's great mistress on the Egyptian plain but architecture sculpture and painting all the Arts which embellish life had flourished in this overgrown Forest orators Warriors and Statesmen Beauty ambition and Glory had lived and passed away and none knew that such things had been or could tell of their past existence books he writes the records of knowledge are silent on these themes end quote we should point out by the way that one of the reasons they may be silent is because the early Christian priests often burned the records of the Maya and people like that when they found them early on yeah exactly exactly that's a very funny I can't believe you guys didn't preserve your history after he got burned and if you were found in possession of any of that you would you yourself were probably burned on the Public Square but yes I can't believe you didn't do it it's yeah that's that's it's a tiny bit

1:18:57 tone deaf to say but you can see the trade-offs here for archeology even for some of the people whose whose sacred sites may be death desecrated it's part of restoring them to their proper place I mean it's it is a question of trade-offs isn't it yeah absolutely and ultimately you know from a scientific standpoint all knowledge is good knowledge in that regard anything that we can discover helps uh clearly yeah one needs to be aware of the modern day controversy that one steps into with some of these things but ultimately history is history right so there's no such thing as bad information about the past as long as it's accurate and you do your best to cater to just not step on people's sensibility by digging the proverbial grammar you know you just make deals you try to convey the importance of these and ultimately because you know there's a PR job involved in this there's a convincing

1:19:51 people that what you're doing is valuable that what the information the ud Gap is useful to them first and foremost and so you would want people to participate like for example there's one guy that I always I love this guy I did an episode about him at one point Joe Madison Crow he was the last man of the Crow tribe to ever become a war chief of the tribe by performing four Deeds they are supposed to be able to perform to be considered a war chief for the crows but he did it during World War II and one of them even included stealing horses from the Enemy at the time when he went into this French farm and was able to take a bunch of horses that the Nazis were using in any case Joe Madison Crow star is fantastic in itself there's a he has a clip in a camp Burns documentary where you can hear him talking about his experience at war was awesome but okay that was a tangent back to the point Joe

1:20:46 Madison Crow also was he had a master degree in anthropology and was well on his way of getting his PhD from USC when World War II broke out and afterwards after he came back from World War II he became a tribal historian both were very well steeped in his tribes tradition and history from purely the native oral history side as well as having a footing understanding archeology the advantages and the problems that comes with archeology and that way being able to negotiate between two different World Views and I think that's essential anytime you're talking about you know if you are not talking about thousands upon thousands of years ago where nobody has a claim where you're talking about things that are more recent then I think is very important to create those bridges well and as we said there's maybe a difference if you don't have ancestors bodies and tombs involved I mean I was reading a story the other day about

1:21:47 something that I was completely ignorant about by the way uh known as the desert kite traps and this is something from pre-history but apparently there's like 6 000 of these things and they didn't discover any of them until uh until flight was invented because you can only see them from the air but what they are are these sometimes massive traps designed to Corner animals that you drive into the Trap and then at the very end of the Trap I guess there are these killing pits and you're able to then drive the animals into it seems like a maze but it doesn't curl around in circles and stuff as much but once you get them into the entrance of this trap and keep driving them there's no escape and then they hit the killing pit and uh and all of a sudden everybody's eating for a long time afterwards but it's one of these things where not only are these sophisticated things that people did not think people in pre-history could do but

1:22:42 the story I read the other day said that they think that they have found actual blueprints for these the the creation of these kite traps drawn to scale and they did not think that prehistoric man was was capable of drawing blueprints for structures that they eventually built to scale like that so once again we're learning more and more that our ancestors in the really deep dark past could do more than we thought they could do I mean just take a look at all of the information starting to come out in turkey at goblecki Tepe right absolutely that is one of those archaeological sites that has just blown away our understanding of the past and it's still we are trying to come to terms with the implications of it because traditionally what we have always believed was that hunting and Gathering culture where relatively small they involve small numbers of people and they could never mobilize the kind of

1:23:39 Manpower needed to deal the Monumental architecture and then we come up with Robert which changes everything because either like the current understanding is that this was built by hunting and Gathering people and yet is this extremely complex I would say some people call it a temple because they believed it as a religious importance there's all sort of disagreements regarding what exactly was but there's no disagreement regarding the incredible complexity required to build on the scale that they did and you know this flies in the face of everything we have ever assumed about hunters and gatherers and it's really forcing us to rewrite the history of our entire history in that regard it also complicates things because the older layer at the site are more sophisticated and the more recent ones and again we are used to thinking that sophistication is a straight line where we go from Simplicity to higher complexity and

1:24:41 that's not the case we the first artifacts are incredible and then they get progressively worse over time and it's like wait why how could these people build it if they were hunters and gatherers back then why did their ability to put stuff together seem to decrease over you know it's really one of those discoveries that we are probably gonna still trying to figure it out a hundred years from now that was one of the concepts I remember reading in in uh steveling's book that blew me away because it reminded me of my Statue of Liberty and the sand idea he referred to it as a controversy in archeology that's been solved now known as the unilinear concept this idea that you move and you alluded to this earlier that you moved from sort of barbarism to civilization and it's a one-way Street and he pointed out he was talking about and again this is in your area of expertise but he was talking about the

1:25:34 North American mound builder culture and for those who don't know it's funny because it's a little reminds me a little of the step peoples who build their kurgans uh in Eurasia but there were these there were these mysterious mounds and I think Thomas Jefferson of all people was one of the really early guys to sort of dig into it to try to figure out what it was but when they did dig into it it didn't help them very much because they there is still ongoing trying to figure out what these mound builders whoever they may have been were and what Stephen says is is that they've they've confirmed now that the people who built these Mounds all over North America were more sophisticated than the people who came after them and because of that that unilinear concept the idea that you know technology and growth and civilization and capacity always moves in a straight line isn't true and that it can sort of Rise and Fall Decline and

1:26:28 and fall kind of an idea the same way that you know and I love this story because I use it used it to Anchor our um our show on the Assyrians uh Judgment at Nineveh but the great line from xenophon and for those who don't know xenophon was an ancient Greek General who fought in a Persian Civil War he's sort of the key leader in in a story that when I was a kid we all study called the the uh the uh the the the Flight of the ten thousand right the the famous ten thousand Greeks who were able to march away from the battlefield all the way back home to Greece Harry by the Persian army the whole way but in xenophon's writing he's writing about the various places that he and his troops come across during this flight from the Persians and at one point he he stumbles upon what I always refer to as ghost cities these these cities that are literally sort of turning to dust in the desert and he doesn't know what they are

1:27:24 and they're grander than anything back in Greece so you look at these things and you're thinking okay here's a city that was inhabited in the past that's more sophisticated than what we have right now and he talked to the locals and said do you know anything about who built these and the locals didn't know and the Syria had built them but Assyria had only been gone about 200 years and already they'd forgotten who they were the cities are degenerating and eventually by the way when they find those in more modern times they look like hisser lick you know that schliemann uh uh had excavated with Troy they look like the kurgans I mean they turn to sort of mounds of material that look like natural Hills almost but when xenophon found this it became one of those examples of what I like to call the Statue of Liberty in the sand moment from the Planet of the Apes where all of a sudden you realize that there may have

1:28:15 been a high water mark in civilization in the past that's higher than the level you currently are yeah that I remember when you first managed from that story on an early episode of yours I love that story so much and I love the way you framed it too because I had read the xylophone and I read the same story but it didn't quite stick in my mind the way you described it after reading it from you I was like oh I need to dive back so that was actually an inspiration one of my very very early episodes I did a two-part series on the ten thousand and and xenophon and it was directly inspired by you telling that story because it is an iconic moment right it is uh you know think about xenophon we're talking so far back in the past compared to us and yet to him 200 years before was just as far back in the past if not more I mean we today know more about xenophon than he did about 200 years before and it's I don't know it's

1:29:19 one of those mind-blowing moments in in ancient literature for sure okay let's move on to the ghost of archeology future right so the the idea of our Maybe as yet to be discovered things I mean we so so we've gone from you know inventing tools like radio carbon dating to the DNA technology to the isotope stuff which I was reading Cat jarman's book River Kings for the Viking show that we're doing and I was shocked by what some of the isotope uh work does I mean you know she was talking about Vikings that they found in places like Ireland and England but they can do isotope work on them which shows what they ate when they were children growing up so they could say well this person may have been buried in England but they came from Scandinavia originally stuff like that to the lidar technology that we just mentioned I mean they're only going to invent more things in the future that help us so maybe we have a chance of

1:30:16 finding some of our you know favorite things that we've been hoping for and you know me personally I've been hoping that they find Alexander and for people that don't yeah I mean is it that like so so people for people that don't know when Alexander the Great died who and he was in his early 30s which of course blows people away we when you realize that I love the story of you know whether it really happened or not of Julius Caesar crying at Alexander's statue because Alexander had already conquered the known world and Julius Caesar was already older than Alexander was when Alexander died but Alexander dies in Babylon nobody knows how that's one of the great Mysteries was he poisoned was it malaria was it I mean I even read one book that suggested it was West Nile virus from a mosquito another author had talked about the obvious alcoholism that he had and maybe it was that another of course theory is that he

1:31:07 was assassinated because everybody wanted him dead because he was turning into like Hitler in the bunker type things killing everybody but once he died his body became sort of a symbol of rulership and all of his various generals which split his Empire apart into multiple pieces wanted to get their hands on the body so I think that I'm going from memory here but I think they mummified it in like honey or something so that it wouldn't deteriorate build this giant um sort of a a caravan and a way to transport him back to Macedonia Macedonia and it was hijacked by one of his generals Ptolemy because you know whoever has the corpse is in you know possession is nine tenths of the law right and Ptolemy takes it back to Alexandria the city founded by Alexander puts it on display in a giant place like a mausoleum and it's on display for centuries I mean later Roman emperors would come and view it one supposedly

1:32:03 knocked Alexander's nose off another supposedly stole his armor but then it disappears from history and no one knows what happened to it I remember when I was working at a news station in Los Angeles and I I was just a kid compared to the the producers and stuff there but a producer found out I was into Alexander and lent me a book she had you know and it's both one of the silliest books on Alexander I've ever read but one of the most interesting because there's a lot of books on the search for Alexander but this book was like they went and found a modern day psychic and had the psychic try to find Alexander and and so the book would mix like you know the latest information we know about where Alexander might be with the psychic stuff and it was so fascinating and so ever since I've just wondered where the heck is this honey preserved mummy that people looked at and were able to view for centuries after he died

1:32:55 that's just disappeared so so for me my favorite as to be discovered thing is where the heck is the body of Alexander the Great I can see why that would be fits with your interest and it's a powerful one for me I think one of the things that fascinates me and frustrates me as a somebody who loves history is the fact that what we know about human history is a tiny fraction compared to the time we have been on Earth and if I have to pick one thing one one place where I would love to see the spotlight in a shine a little clearer is what we would call prehistory you know the fact that nine depending on who you listen to anywhere between 90 to 99 percent of the time we have lived as small bands of hunters and gatherers with no writing leaving behind very little because so much of what we used was made of perishable materials that don't Preserve in the archaeological record so that would be something that whenever

1:33:56 we can find you know because clearly we find less than from civilizations that I've uh Left Behind the massive buildings or things that tend to last in time but I would love to see something that allows us to reconstruct a little bit what life was like 10 000 years ago fifteen thousand years ago 20 000 years ago 50. you know all of that that would be if I have to pick if I have to limit myself to one thing and you know I get the genie who tells me you go one wish that would be the area of history that I would like to know a whole lot more about do you think anybody's ever gonna dig up our ruins in the same way I mean I remember when I was doing one of the shows we did on nuclear weapons and I was reading you know accounts of some of these thinkers during the early nuclear period they were talking about how one of these days after a nuclear war when our society maybe returns to the way we

1:34:53 were 15 or 20 000 years ago in terms of lifestyle and capability and capacity that somebody might eventually come back one civilization had risen up to the levels that had previously been right when when our own xenophon uh walks by and sees the ruins of our civilization and our skyscrapers are bigger than anything he could imagine will they one day be digging up our ruins does George Washington sleep in safety or are they going to be Excavating his tomb one of these days now George Washington is screwed they are definitely Excavating Stone but that's not even but also I think one of the big questions is the continuity or not with that because of course people are gonna want to find out regardless but whether you have a pretty good understanding of a culture because so much has been preserved and you just want to sort of dig the deeper layers or whether we have lost so much because again things don't always one of the

1:35:48 rules of life is that hardly anything lasts forever so if much of the knowledge we currently have about who we are today gets lost in to 300 500 a thousand years you know you can lengthen the scale and of course the bigger the scale the easier it is for all that information to get lost then it would be interesting because you could have the the person who has an archaeological being centuries from now Evin perhaps as little as an idea of who we are today as we do with people two thousand years ago and the Rosetta Stone of the future if they want to unlock our writings may have to have the source code for Microsoft Word written into it right exactly because you know think about it so much of what we have today is not Material you know we don't leave a piece of paper behind we don't leave something carved in stone it's all in in cyberspace so to speak so if you get rid of that well suddenly these guys didn't

1:36:49 really write much no they did write a lot just not in a way that you can access my friend thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today thank you always a pleasure to have a chance to sit down and chat with you thank you so much for having me

1:37:10 so I did a speaking engagement one of my rare speaking engagements at the end of January in Boston and at the end of the engagement there was a meet and greet where I got the chance to meet the attendees and talk to them and a Gentleman came up to me afterwards identified himself as a businessman and said can I give you a friendly piece of advice he said now I know you shared news about this event on social media beforehand but I didn't hear about it and I follow you he said you need to find a way to be able to reach the people who like what you do directly when you have something that they would want to hear about and he suggested we explore really an archaic old-fashioned internet sort of Technology email newsletters and I thought about this on my way home on the flight and I was doing some research and trying to figure it out and what was involved and was it worth the trouble and all these kinds of things

1:38:13 and when I sat down and discussed it with some friends one of them said to me well why are you trying to reinvent the wheel here with some old internet newsletter technology when there are companies today that do this and it's easy peasy it's all set up it's ready to go it takes very little effort it's easier on the user end of things why don't you just sign up with something like sub stack now for those of you who don't know about sub stack essentially part of what it does is what the old-fashioned email newsletters do so if you wanted to follow for example what we do you would go to sub stack essentially you give them your email address there's no credit cards or anything like that you're not paying for anything at least not with us and at least not right now um you give them your your email address and then anytime we put out a notification maybe a new show drops maybe a new piece of merchandise becomes

1:39:01 available maybe I'm doing an appearance somewhere you'll get an email about it and the email will say whatever we type into the text box to say now sub stack is set up mainly for writers to be able to make a living off their writing without having to be part of some giant firm right if you you work for the newspaper before but now you leave the newspaper now you write on sub stack they have a setup you know you switch a button and you can charge for your stories now maybe we'll do something like that someday but one of the great things about substack is that you can set that up and still not charge anything for the email newsletter side of things right so if I want to tell you about our merchandise that's always free if someday we're putting out two articles a week and we want to charge for that well we can flip a button and charge for that but the person who doesn't want to pay for that still gets the merchandise

1:39:53 information or the new show drop information or the personal appearance information for free so we set up a substack page you can get to it off of our website we linked to it you can also just go to dancarlin.substack.com and sign up and then anytime we have something to tell you for example a new show drops we will put it in the sub stack text box it will go out to you and you'll get an email about it a direct connection between us and you and maybe that way the next time we have something we think you might like you won't miss it so check it out see what you think and just a reminder danielelli's wonderful history show history on fire now away from the paywall and available for free anywhere you normally get your podcasts he also has a sub stack account at substack.com forward slash at symbol Danielle ebullellelli that's d-a-n-i-e-l-e-b-o-l-e-l-l-i but I hope you'll sign up for it I actually have a

1:40:57 couple of things you know I didn't think I was going to write articles and stuff because I didn't know that I had anything to say but lo and behold if you go there I wrote a couple so maybe I was wrong about that and well one of them has some stuff about me wargaming with some photos teasing the audience there with some old photos another one has to do with pronunciations of you know the letter c and Latin and Greek which is you know a little point of contention sometimes with the listeners so maybe something worth checking out I hope you'll sign up and become part of you know what the listeners have named the hardcore dancarlin.substack.com

1:41:41 Wrath of the cons Punic nightmares Apache tears and of course ghost of the OST front just a few of the classic Hardcore History titles available from dancarlin.com every true fan has heard these favorites hey they make great gifts too

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "EP26 Dig This!"?

In order: 0:00 History on Fire; 10:00 Napoleon, Giovanni Belzoni; 20:00 Rosetta Stone, Dan Carlin, Heinrich Schliemann; 30:00 Dan Carlin, Heinrich Schliemann, Pompeii, Rosetta Stone; 40:00 Great Zimbabwe, Giovanni Belzoni, Kenny Wickman, Mangas Colorado; 50:00 Elsa Timotea Aguilar, Gonzalo Guerrero; 1:00:00 Dan Carlin; 1:20:00 Xenophon, Joe Madison Crow, Statue of Liberty; 1:30:00 Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, Rosetta Stone, Xenophon; 1:40:00 History on Fire.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

20 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Xenophon, Daniele Bolelli, Rosetta Stone, Great Zimbabwe, History on Fire, Dan Carlin. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP26 Dig This!"?

The episode runs 1 h 42 min; the transcript is about 18,218 words in 108 timestamped sections.

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