The Great Library of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy I Soter in 3rd century BC, was one of history's greatest intellectual institutions, housing approximately one million books and serving as a research institute that produced groundbreaking scientific discoveries including Eratosthenes' calculation of Earth's circumference, Aristarchus' heliocentric model, and Heron's steam engine; however, its destruction in 391-392 AD by Christian mobs under Archbishop Theophilus represents a catastrophic loss of accumulated human knowledge that may have delayed technological progress by centuries, as Carl Sagan estimated humanity would be 500 years ahead without this loss.
Install our extension to search inside any video instantly.
The Great Library of Alexandria – Dr. Roy | Museum of the Future: Lessons from the Past
Added:Hello everyone. Uh good evening and hope you're all doing well and having a wonderful week. Tonight's session is about the great library of Alexandria and I hope you enjoy the session. Can we please welcome Dr. Roy. Thank you.
>> Hi.
Okay. So, uh, let me start with my outfit.
Uh, since this conversation tonight is going to be about Greek, Roman, and Egyp and Egyptian cultures, because the three are going to collide, uh, I couldn't figure out what to wear, so I decided to go with contemporary Egyptian with cowboy boots.
Um, all right. uh that I always find these starting so difficult, but we're I'm just going to just start saying something and maybe a coherent thing will come out. So, like I said, it's these three cultures clash and and collide and then mix and then create something new. Actually, you know, I forgot to check Salman. Did we put the did did we do the pictures?
Okay, so like we can start. Okay. So, at some point I'll I'll show you some pictures and we'll resolve some things.
It makes me want to talk about race to start. That that's that's where my mind goes because I want to get something out of the way. Um, there is this really weird thing we do with the Mediterranean and it's that we've we've used the Mediterranean as some kind of imaginary boundary that um, okay, so this this is good. This kind of helps. Um, the Mediterranean is by no means in any way, shape or form historically ever been a boundary. It's a super highway that connects North Africa to Europe to Southwest Asia. That's what it's done in history. In other words, it's not like a mountain range that cuts people off. Um, let's hold it there for for a while because No, go back go back to the to the sarcophagus picture. Yes, this is a fume sarcophagus picture. Um, I don't think it's actually from Fume, but that's what we call these because I think the first the first ones found were from Fume. So, one of the things that happens as a result of this arbitrary imagination thing that's wrong that says that the Mediterranean is the boundary is it negates the fact that all the cultures in the Mediterranean are intimately completely connected to each other linguistically, culturally, genetically, like even to the point where if you stood in Italian next to a Swede and then stood an Italian next to a Tunisian, the Italian is going to look more like the Tunisian than the Swede. So there's this kind of almost bizarre weird thing that we do where somehow the Italian is a European and somehow the Tunisian isn't related to the to the Italian, right? So one of the reasons why I wanted to show you this. So this is aerary mask from Egypt.
Uherary masks like this were put over the top of a sarcophagus for about 300 years, mostly during the Roman period.
uh about 62% of this lecture covers Rome because Rome owned Egypt for about 62% of this lecture. So 300 of those years they were makingerary masks like this. And the reason I wanted to bring it up is because they answered the question that for some reason keeps getting asked which is who who really were the the Egyptians during the Greo Roman period? Well, I don't know what you're seeing when you see that. I don't see a Swede.
I'm a quarter Swedish. This isn't me attacking Swedes. I I have no hatred towards Swedes. I love Swedes. I was rooting for Sweden in the World Cup. Um because Italy wasn't in it. So, uh they answered the question. We don't even have to ask this question. I mean, I I think if you went to Egypt right now and looked around, you're going to see people who look just like this person.
But archaeologists of course were like, "Well, maybe there was something wrong with the artists because we all know that the Romans and the Greeks were white. How do we know this?" Because the Greeks love to make their statues out of white marble.
And so when you look at them, you see they're they're really white, like like dead white. Like, oh my god, I think something terrible happened to you.
White. And so what they of course what everybody forgets is they painted those statues. It's just it's so long the paint's gone. So, actually, they used white marble because it was easy to paint on. It wasn't because they thought of themselves as white. So, archaeologists decided to do DNA tests to kind of figure out who those people were, who were the sort of the upper, right? Because to get a sarcophagus like this, you needed to be a fairly rich, wellto-do, connected Egyptian. It wasn't like you were just an average person.
And of course what they found was that they were mostly native Egyptians that a lot of them had taken Greek names. They were using Greek as their as their primary language but they were genetically mostly Egyptian. Um they found plenty of Greek DNA in this in in those tombs and the tiny hint of Roman DNA in those tombs, but it was overwhelmingly Egyptian. So I wanted to get that out of the way in part because I want to ask a question.
So first of all, everything in Egypt is the great, right? The great lighthouse, the great library, the great pyramid, the great sphinx. And if you've ever been to Egypt, you immediately know why.
Because as soon as you go to the first ruin, you're in shock and awe because you feel like you're this small. Because Egyptian monumental construction was meant to be on the scale of gods.
And by the time you're there, like when you're standing next to the Hufu pyramid, the Great Pyramid in Giza, and you're trying to comprehend what you're looking at, you can't like your brain just goes sideways. And you find yourself thinking, is this a human-made mountain? And the answer, of course, is yes. And so, one of the things that of course we've done is we've decided, well, aliens must have built it. Um, nobody's saying, "Did aliens build the Eiffel Tower?" Nobody's asking, "Did aliens build the Empire State Building?"
Right? That it's, "Did aliens build these things?" One of the weird things about that is the ruins in Balbeck.
So Balbeck has a Roman temple that is the largest known Roman temple ever built. You go to Balbeck, you feel small like you do when you go to Egypt. The columns are 20 m tall and you know if you go to Carac and looks are the columns are 20 meters tall, you get that same like okay I can't quite comprehend this thing. Um, the largest stones in the Hufu pyramid are probably about 80 tons that we know of, right? Because obviously we don't have a full understanding of what the interior of the pyramid is like. So they, you know, the big ones are running between 20 and 80 tons. They're huge, massive. How could they have moved it?
the big stones at Balbeck that make the platform because the temple is actually built on a human-made mea.
The big stones at Balbeck are 1,000 tons, not 80 tons.
Which then makes me ask the question, why aren't you asking why the ro did the how did the Romans build? I mean, surely aliens must have built it. It's those stones are even bigger than the pyramid ones. I mean, don't get me wrong, the pyramid in Giza is still a much more involved structure than the temple in Balak just because of its volume, its sheer size, right? It it was the tallest building on Earth until 1887.
That's a long time to have that status.
Um, by the way, the Great Lighthouse was the tallest building on Earth. The pyramid was taller. So, Egypt had those two titles until 1887 AD. So, just over what, 150 years ago. And that's a long time to have that status.
One of the things I want us to start to do is reimagine the world. And one of the things that I hate is the term Middle East. I've ranted about this before. You've probably heard me go off on this. I'm going to do it one more time. Hopefully, this will be the last time. First of all, Middle East of what?
For there to be a Middle East, there must be a far east and a near east or a northeast and a southeast or something, right? There needs to be something that anchors it as the middle.
there was when the English like Adam in the Garden of Eden began naming everything in the world because that's what the British Empire was like, right?
So they made a far east which we call East Asia today. They made a Middle East which we call South Asia today and they made a near east which we call the Middle East today which is makes the story even weirder. But then of course as you know western civilization was created on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris and the Nile. So how on earth can the birthplace of the west be in the middle of the east?
It doesn't even make sense. It's completely illogical because no matter what happens once you found a civilization it's your civilization.
It's not like the Europeans came and stole Western civilization and then brought it to Europe and now all of a sudden that meant that meant that the civilization in Iraq and Egypt was no longer Western.
But of course that's exactly the narrative we we tell ourselves.
Here's here's how we should see this.
Instead of having a Middle East and a North Africa and a South Europe, there's a Mediterranean.
And I would define the Mediterranean as every country that touches the Mediterranean or the Adriatic or any any of the seas that are clearly just the Mediterranean plus Portugal and then throw in Bulgaria and Romania for good measure and the entire Middle East including Iran and the GCC states and even Yemen.
And then I would run it into Afghanistan because culturally, historically that region has been intimately tied to itself for millennia, not not centuries, for thousands of years. And culturally, the linkages between them make it so that to separate them, to break them down into little pieces makes zero sense.
I can't tell the history of the Great Library without talking about Greece and Rome. And I probably have to bring the Persians in at some point because it's it's there there there were no boundaries like like the way we think today. So to ask the question, were they were they white?
It's just ludicrous. It doesn't even make sense. They were Mediterranean there and and so that's that's part of where I want to start. But I want to do one more thing which is a geography thing. There have been three attempts to figure out the center of the old world.
So if you treat Africa, Asia, and Europe as a single land mass, you know how we took away Pluto's planet status?
When are we going to do that for Europe?
If you've ever looked at a map, it's pretty obvious Europe isn't a continent.
It's a peninsula in Asia. Like, what what's that about? Actually, I've actually seen a map. Uh, a friend of mine had it. So, shout out to Jess. It showed it I I think it was 1700's map.
It showed the boundary between Asia and the and Europe to be I think it was the Indis River. So everything that we call the Middle East was in Europe according to that map.
That cool because when you think about it where the boundary is now, it's just so arbitrary and random. the Euro mountains, the Vulga River, the Cauasus Mountains, and the Caspian Sea. Like, what drunk maniac drew that line? Just so random.
You could have put the line literally anywhere because it makes no geographical sense that no historical sense. Anyway, okay. So, back to Europe.
Sorry, back to Asia, including the European Peninsula and Africa. treating those two continents as a as a land mass. Where's the center?
There are three attempts to figure this out that I know of.
There's probably more just I know of three. The first one dropped it on the border between Turkey and Iran in Kurdistan.
That interesting in the Middle East, which is weird because it looks like it's just the middle middle.
I don't I don't see why it's east if it's in the middle.
The second one dropped the middle on the ismouth of Suez, which is the narrow neck where Africa and Asia touch that the Suez Canal is built on.
And it makes me wonder, the guy who created the simulation that we're a part of, the video game that each of us are playing a a character in, decided to drop an Easter egg by putting the center of the world on the canal that connects Europe to Asia and East Africa. It's the trade center of the world, but it's also the literal geographical center of the old world.
That just seems like a weird coincidence.
The third one is freaky.
It's Giza.
Giza, Egypt, as in where the Great Sphinx and the Great Pyramid are. Which forces me to ask that question that nobody wants to ask. Did they know that was the center and that's why they put those pyramids there? And then if they did know how or was it just another coincidence?
All right. So, where I'm going to start this story, I I just want to make it clear. You can't it can't be the Middle East if it's the middle.
Where I want to start this story is 356 BC. So, some of you were here three weeks ago and I did part one of Rome and I ended in 321 BC. So, I'm backing this up 35 years. This is not Rome part two.
It's the great library. It's meant to be a standalone lecture. I don't even know how to integrate it in um because some of the history I'm going to be talking about will easily fit into Rome part two and three and four and probably five.
So, like I'll number it in. I'll put it into the Rome playlist when we get there, but I don't know like is it 4.5 because 420 years that I'm going to talk about Rome owned Egypt and the Great Library played a really crucial role in the Roman Empire. Like it cannot be overstated how important the Great Library was. uh Egypt for that matter.
So, okay, 356 BC. So, I'm starting there because I want to give you a little bit of background really to flesh out the character Poleami. Poleos, that was his real name, uh is the guy who creates the great library. But I'm a firm believer that is correct. I never I'm never good at quotes. Let me see if I can do it. Uh, no.
Something to the effect of since all things have causes.
No, I I can't do it. I'll just do it my way. Paraphrase. Since all things have a cause, to understand a thing, you have to know its causes. So, in other words, I feel like we have to tell the story that got to the point where a group of crazy Macedonians end up in Egypt and then create the Great Library because I don't know how else to tell this. So, maybe we pull the map back up because the map will be somewhat useful. Um, so in 356 BC, there is a guy named Filipos II.
Phillip. Philippos literally means lover of horses. That was his name. I always wonder about parental choices when it comes to names. What should we name him?
Lover of horses. Maybe he'll hate horses. I don't think so. Not with that name.
Um, Philip is the king of Macedon and he's been doing something that was actually really difficult to do and that is unify the Greeks. He's not by gentle. His methods are violent. He's he's conquering the Greeks. He's putting to them together by force. And he's doing it from what is today northern Greece.
Uh southern northern Macedonia is right. That was the compromise.
North Macedonia would become the name of that state because it's not Greek, it's Slavic, it's Western Bulgaria. Don't tell them that. They get really mad.
But when Yugoslavia was created, it wanted to divorce the western Bulgarians from the eastern Bulgarians. So there weren't any land claims. So it took the historical name Macedonia, which was a Greek name, and dropped it on. And now Western Bulgarians have this new identity. And Greece said, "If you keep the name, we're going to attack you and go to war with you and make you change the name." And so the the the agreement was North Macedon. Yeah. North Macedonia is the so that there doesn't have to be a war. So see where Pella is in Macedon?
That's the capital for the Macedonians.
That's where Philip II has his capital.
He didn't conquer all of that. Uh that gets conquered later. But he conquered what is today southern Albania, southern Bulgaria, uh the European part of Turkey, and the northern part of of Greece. And his goal was to finish Greece off. He's just going to conquer the whole thing.
In 356, he's actually in the area putting down Greek uprisings, conquering other little Greek citystates in the area, turning them to vassal states, or just outright annexing them. But he gets to go home regularly. So he goes to his wife Mortal on a regular basis. That's an important detail because uh about 7 months after they marry, she gives birth. So that creates a little bit of a stir, right? Because either Alexander III, her son, was premature or there was some premarital sex going on.
And then the question was, was the premarital sex with Philillip or was it with somebody else? And it caused a little bit of a stir.
The weird twist is there's absolutely no evidence that Alexander III is anything other than Philip's son. In other words, if I had to guess, I would say it was either a premature birth or there was premarital sex with Philillip. So, in other words, it's his kid probably.
How how can anyone ever really know?
But that's not what Mortal told her son.
For whatever reason, she decided to to raise her son to believe that her father was the god Zeus and not actually Philip II.
And that's despite the fact that Philip's like, "No, you're my son."
And they're like, "But dad, mom says a God made me." No, I I was in the area.
Like there's not even I know it was me.
So anyway, just a just a warning. Don't tell your children they are half god. You will create a sociopathic narcissist.
Like this is not a formula for creating a wellbalanced person. you were going to create like I don't think there's enough drugs or psychologists in the world to fix that person by the time Alexander is 13. So in 343 Philip decides he wants his son to have a really good education. So he goes to Aristotle who of course was the the student of Plato who is the student of Socrates who is the student of Espasia.
He goes to Aristotle and he says, "I'm going to move you to a villa outside of Pella, some village, middle of nowhere, and I'm going to make a school and I'm going to pay you and you're going to teach Alexander."
And Aristotle goes, "Okay." And then Philip says, "But I don't want you to tutor him. I want it to be a school. So, I'm gonna send four of his friends, and you're gonna teach them, too."
Um, one of those friends was Poleley.
So, Poleley ends up getting this fantastic education hanging out with Alexander.
Uh, Lucim Lucimus is another one. Lucamakus is one of the generals who will rise during the Alexandrian wars. Um, another one is a guy named Cassander. He's going to come into our story later. and Hiion is the fourth of the classmates. For the record, Hiion was Alexander's best friend. In fact, he loved him so much that on multiple occasions when Hifistion was dealing with other people, Alexander said, "You will treat him as if you're dealing with me. I'm he's my other." Um, and they were lovers. just so we're clear case in case you're one of those people like to keep track of those details. Um, so those five kids are at age 13 taking classes together with Aristotle.
They get a fantastic education and then a shock happens just seven years later.
Philip is killed. He's assassinated and all of a sudden Alexander III is the king of Macedon at age 20 as a full-fledged sociopathic narcissist.
A guy who literally believes Zeus is his dad.
And he decides, "Cool, I'm probably immortal because Zeus is my dad. So, I'm going to do something completely insane.
Now, he has a real incentive to do this.
So, in the Greek religion, there are all these gods. The gods are petty. They act like humans. They backstab each other.
They're they're vindictive. They're ruthless. Uh they're constantly interfering in human affairs, having sex with humans, right? All all the Romans and all the Greeks trace their ancestry to some god.
Uh, gas Julius Kaiser thought he was a descendant of Venus. Um, Alexander the Great thought he was a descendant of u Heracles Hercules for Heracles in Greek, Hercules in in Latin. So in other words, there's this constant and then of course Alexander actually also thinks Zeus has come into his life in this really powerful way. So there's this constant sense of this in the religion that the gods are petty and they interfere.
But there is a twist. So when you died, everybody went to Hades. So Hades wasn't strictly like hell because everybody goes to Hades. Hades had basically three three and a half levels. The first level was for the people who angered the gods. Tarterus.
If you made the gods mad, they would put you through some sort of petty cruelty that would occur for the rest of your immortal undead existence like Seisphus, right? Or uh I'm trying to think of the other the other famous one that where you just have like you you roll a boulder up and then it rolls back down and you roll a boulder up and it rolls back down. You're hungry and you're in a pond and as you bend over to drink the water level drops but there's fruit trees above you and you as you reach up to the fruit trees the fruit moves away and you're just stuck like this.
Very few people ended up there but people did. Then there was the big piece of Hades.
It's gray, dreary.
There's nothing. It's boring.
It's horrific.
That's where the average person goes. If you're an average person who had an average uneventful life, you will go to this just dull planes where you're stuck for all eternity being bored with a bunch of boring average people.
That that sounds like worse than trying to roll a boulder up. At least you're doing something.
Then there's the plains of Alisium.
The heroes go to the plains of Alisium.
But don't think of heroes the way I think we think of heroes today. When we think of heroes today, it's the good guy. For the Greeks, that wasn't what was at stake.
The goal wasn't to be good. The goal was to be remembered.
Every time somebody said your name, it helped you stay in the plains of Alisium. If your name got forgotten, you'd end up in that gray hell with all the boring people.
So, Alexander the Great has done fantastic because even if you don't know somebody named Alexander or you don't think of him on a daily basis, there's a huge portion of the Egyptian population saying his name on a regular basis. And there's an Alexandreta in Turkey and there's an Alexandria in Romania and there's an Alexandria in Central Asia that are still called that. There were also like hundreds of other Alexandrias that are no longer called that because he was such a narcissist. He founded towns named after himself everywhere he went.
There was already a town where Alexandria Egypt is. He refounded it and then renamed it after himself. I mean, why not? He's half god. Well, more than half god because then there's Hercules who was also the son of Zeus. So, he's got a lot of gods in his ancestry.
Now, inside the plains of Alisium, there was an island.
If you wanted and you were a hero who ended up in the plains of Alisium. If you wanted, you could choose to come back.
And if you were a hero a second time, you could get back to the plains of Alisium.
And if you did, you could choose to come back to Earth a third time.
And if you were a hero a third time, you got to go to the island in the lake in the middle of the plains of Allesium where the heroes of heroes went. But if you weren't a hero on your second or third trip, the dough place. So it was high risk, high reward.
And that's his goal.
He needs to be a hero's hero if he's going to end up in on that island in the plains of Elisium. And so that's part of his mindset because he really does believe he's the son of Zeus and he really does think he's going to end up in the plains of Alissium.
And if his religion is correct, he is there. It's 100%. No matter how much evil he committed, no matter how much good he committed. Alexander Alexander.
Alexander, right? Isn't that cool?
Anyway, not a very good religion for us today, right? Because like what's the highlight of our lives?
Oh, I had more screen time today.
Great. More dopamine. I'm so addicted to dopamine. It's the only thing that gives my life meaning. Can't wait to have more dopamine. Um, it wouldn't work. We'd all be in the dull gray part. Just it's not not okay.
So, all right.
It takes Alexander two years. He finishes conquering most of Greece. He doesn't finish Greece off, but he conquers a big piece of it. One of the pieces he misses is Eperis, the pink state in the west. Um but he really for the most part secures Greece in 343. So two years after his dad dies when he's 22 years old he crosses into the Persian Empire. So at that moment the Persian Empire's borders was the basically the Boserus and the Dardinels.
Technically the uh Alexander did have a vassal state on the eastern side but for all intents and purposes everything that way was the Persian Empire including Egypt. So uh one another pet peeve I have if you ask the average person how many dynasties were in Egypt they will tell you usually if if they know right 32.
There were 33. There were 33 dynasties.
I'm still trying to figure out why the last one for some reason doesn't keep getting counted. Here's my hypothesis.
The 33rd one is Poleamy. It's the Ptomeic dynasty. I think what happened was people went well they were white so we don't have to count it because it's not that Egypt it's Egypt's first foreigner dynasty. The first foreigner dynasty was the 15th dynasty. And then uh the 25th dynasty were Nubians.
The 26th dynasty, Assyria invaded, put a puppet in charge, pulled out, and then once the puppet had enough power, he rebelled against the Assyrians. So it wasn't really technically foreign rule, but it briefly was. Uh the 27th dynasty was the Persians. So another foreigner. The 28th dynasty broke away from the Persians.
The 31st dynasty was the Persians again.
The Persians reconquered Egypt 7 years earlier.
I want to also point out that during the last Perso Roman war, the one that starts in 602 AD and ends in 628 AD, the Persians captured Egypt again for the third time and then were destroyed.
There, I'm just saying this now. The lesson I learned from history is every time Persia conquers Egypt, it is shortly afterwards invaded and destroyed. So going forward, I think Persians just need to not conquer Egypt.
Just stay away. It's not good luck because Alexander attacks Persia seven years after they conquered Egypt again.
And okay, so when I was a kid being taught history, I was told Alexander had 15,00015 and he faced somewhere around 600,000 maybe a million Persians. That's wrong.
It's really bad exaggeration. Mostly by Alexander and the propagandists that were around him. We now today believe Alexander had somewhere between 43,000 and 53,000 men. So somewhere at least around three times bigger than what Alexander claimed he had. He his father had already sent 10,000 men into the Persian Empire and then he invaded probably with about 43,000 men. The low number is 33,000.
So then add the 10. The Persians had a massive empire. So, uh, one of the cool things about this map is the yellow is the Persian Empire with half that orange and then the blue. So, the Persian Empire came to the Indis River.
It was huge.
So, the the reality was is if the Persians wanted to, no, let me rephrase that. If the Persians had the economic ability to, they probably could have recruited a million a million man army.
They just couldn't do it. That was economically completely unrealistic. It would have not been something they would have been able to pull off. They probably had about 120,000 men. So if you go with the low number 43,000, then the Persians outnumbered the Greeks 3 to1, which is, I think, a reasonable way to think about it. The problem is that 120,000 Persians are scattered across the empire. So when Alexander fights them, he's not fighting battles where he's outnumbered 3 to one. He's fighting battles where actually he frequently even outnumbered the Persians because he's fighting them peacemeal.
And so if you've ever been like, "Oh wow, how did Alexander pull this off?"
It's because of that. In a in a weird way, Persia's massive size worked against it.
That was part of the problem for the Persians. Another part of the problem for the Persians was they didn't take him seriously.
They were like, "We're this massive empire. What's Greece? It's just a nuisance. It's an irritant to the west of us. We Why would we take them seriously? And that was a really, really big mistake. Always take your opponent seriously.
Alexander is going to pull off one amazing attack after the other until he finally destroys the Persian Empire.
uh he brings it down in after three years 331 BC the Persians fight their last battle and he has conquered them. He put them down. It was a shock.
Nobody on the planet could comprehend what had just happened. this the Greeks, these ununified, unruly barbarians, that's how the Persians saw them, but kind of rightly so. Technologically, the Persians were ahead of the Greeks. The Greeks were a sideshow nuisance. The Persians had fought them before. And yeah, technically they were defeated, right? Because at the uh Battle of Salamus, the Persian navy went to the bottom. the Greek Navy prevailed but that's after they sacked and destroyed Athens.
So in a way the Persians had actually won the war just at the end of the day the Persians withdrew. They kept th they had most of the orange on the European side. But then little by little the Greeks pushed them out because the Persians were like this is low priority.
There's really rich land elsewhere like Egypt. Let's focus on that. Anyway, three years is all it took for Alexander the Great to bring down this incredible powerful empire.
What he does next is he decides he's the new emperor. He marries a Persian princess. Her name is Roxana.
And he moves his capital to Babylon.
He doesn't move the capital to Macedon.
He puts it right in the middle of the middle.
And then he tells his generals, "I need you guys to be governors." and he sends them off to the various satropes that the Persians had. He doesn't disassemble the Persian state. He just he's the new ruler and he has them govern. And that's what he does. Well, for a few years he gets bored and in 327 decides I'm going to conquer India.
And he takes an army into India and they march right about where Delhi is. like they get deep and they're winning. They're beating the Indian armies one after the other. And Alexander is like he's beside himself with joy. He's like, "Wow, I'm going to get India now." And his troops mutiny and they go, "No, we're not we're not fighting anymore. We're done. We have all these slaves. We have all this gold.
We have all this land. Why are we fighting? I just want to go home and abuse my slaves."
and they mutiny and literally start marching back and you know he at one point he's like on his hands and knees crying going please let's do this let's finish India and they're like dude you're crazy why and he's like okay look I know I said we would get China afterwards okay no China we'll just do India and they're like no it's not going to happen and they and he he has to march back with them in shame and humiliation And then he began working on plans.
The plans were to go the other way, Carthage.
And he's setting it up. It's like 3:24.
He's written out how he's going to move the troops, how he's going to get over there.
And then he dies.
It's 3:23.
He was the ruler from 336.
So 13 years his empire was established in 331 when he when he finished off the Persians. So his empire was 8 years old when he dies.
At that point there's a guy named Pedicus, one of the top generals.
Everybody sees him as a natural person to become the regent of the empire.
There's a problem though.
Roxana is pregnant, but that's all they know, right? They they didn't know the gender of the child. And so the army actually comes to Pericus and says, "You know what? You become the next emperor. We don't want to wait for this birth to turn into an adult in 16 years. Let's just let's just make you the emperor now." Perkus says, "I'll make you a deal.
I'll become the emperor if Roxana gives birth to a daughter. if she becomes if she gives birth to a son, we'll name him Alexander IVth and I'll become the regent.
And the army goes, okay, I guess that makes sense. Not really, but we'll go with it. And that's what they decide to do.
But Perkos has another problem. his generals, one in particular, one of the generals, and that guy by the name of Poleos, one of Alexander's close friends, one of the generals who ran around with with Alexander conquering places. Poleos wants to become the next emperor. He's he's not admitting that, but he's thinking, how does that happen?
and he's doing a calculation and his calculation is the generals who end up in charge of a chunk of real estate in the empire are the guys who are going to be in a position to become the next emperor.
But you want to be in charge of the best piece of real estate. And so what he does is he makes the calculation. Is it Persia? Is it Asia Minor? Is it Macedon?
Is it Mesopotamia?
Where where is that best piece of real estate? And Patmaus decides it's Egypt.
Of all the lands that he had traveled to and all the lands that Alexander had conquered, he said Egypt.
There's three reasons. One, food.
When the Roman Empire conquered Egypt in 30 BC and integrated Egypt as a province into the empire, Egypt produced more than half of the Roman Empire's total caloric output.
The Romans could field legions and conquer whole swasts of the Mediterranean because of Egyptian grain.
Because if they didn't have Egyptian grain, the Romans would have had to leave their their legions in farm fields and not make them into professional armies.
The way they turned them into professional armies was Egyptian grain.
So Bolley already sees this. Egypt's food output was through the roof. You got to remember the chunk of land that's actually arable in Egypt is really small.
I think my son told me it was the size of Switzerland.
It's just the land is so insanely fertile and you can get two sometimes three crops per year and you don't have to do any of theow stuff where you let the land rest. You can use it year after year after year because of the Nile flood that it it just could produce crazy amounts of food. Also, the Egyptians had built massive irrigation systems that made it so that the desert on either side of the river was completely irrigated. So the if you've never been to Egypt, once you go into upper Egypt, it's mountains on either side, but there's a plane that's just green basically right up to the desert and it's like a it's like a line. You can you can put one foot in the desert and one foot in the green. It's it's it's a very pronounced boundary. Most of that land w wasn't green. The Egyptians built irrigation ditches and stretched the amount of land that could be irrigated out to the mountain edges.
Andy is looking at this and going, "That's cool. If I'm going to have armies in the field, I want that grain."
Another reason he liked Egypt is because it was the center of the world for trade. So even if you don't think it's the center of the world because you think it's on the border between Iran and Turkey, for trade purposes, it was the center because the ancient Egyptians had dug a canal from the Nile River to Suez. So if you were in Athens, you could take a ship, go up the Nile River to that canal, and then pop out in the Red Sea and head to India.
They built that canal 4,500 years ago. I know you think the French did it. They did using Egyptian labor that they worked literally to death, but they were the fifth or sixth iteration of that canal. The ancient Egyptians had built it multiple times and rebuilt it multiple times. It finally went out of use. I think it was only a thousand years ago. And then the French uh enslaved and abused Egyptians and and then they built it, which is something weird to me. Wait, so you're the rich guy with all the money, but the actual laborers don't get the credit for it.
That's so weird. Capitalism is bizarre.
Have you noticed?
Anyway, it feels, you know what it feels like? It feels like the the Greek religion.
There's that one guy whose name is going to be remembered, but the people who did the actual work, they're going to be living in this really dreary Hades.
No, you don't agree. You guys like capitalism?
Let's see in 20 years after global warming has completely reshaped everything. If you still like capitalism, we're going to Spain in a week and a half. And I'm dreading it. I'm like, I want to stay in Dubai.
It's too hot in Spain.
What the heck?
What idiot goes to Europe in the summer when you can stay in Dubai?
You think I'm kidding? I'm not kidding.
There's infrastructure here.
Dubai is prepared.
Think about what trade does. It does a bunch of things. But if I'm trading with India and I'm going through Egypt, I'm spending money as I travel through Egypt. And I'll bring trade goods that I'll sell in Egypt and I'll trade with the Egyptians along the way. In other words, every trade expedition gives Egypt direct money, even if you don't charge a tax or a tariff on it. In fact, you wouldn't want to because you want to encourage more to grow your economy faster because you want to be that central location for trade. But it does something else that's even better, that's even more important. It brings foreigners to your country because foreigners have different cultures. So if you think of the human experience as like a a circle, well, your culture is a sliver in that circle.
So in other words, if if you never left the place you were born in and the only the culture you'd ever been exposed to was that culture you were born into, you would know a little sliver of what it is to be human.
But if you travel and see other people and experience other cultures, you start to get more and more of that circle. And in other words, that's how you become a fully formed person intellectually is contact with others because they approach problems differently. They see the world differently. It forces your mind to change its opinion and to reshape itself and adapt.
Have you ever seen white tourists in Egypt? the first time they go that they have the big eyes and they look like they're in shock and you're like, "Dude, what the hell? Come, I'll help you. What? Why are you freaked out? It's going to be okay." And the reason is is because our brains do heristics.
We have shortcuts that we employ.
Those heruristics allow us to draw really fast conclusions. So when we see a certain indication, a certain thing, we go, "Oh, I know what that that's going to lead to." But when you're in a different culture and you see that indicator and you know where it's going to lead to, it doesn't because that different culture has a different ending. And then it shocks you because it upsets your heristic devices. And what it does is it starts to make you realize you can't rely on those. The world is way too complex for that. And then your brain builds new neuropathways because your brain is like a muscle and you can use it until you die. Like it's like as my muscles get sore, I'm starting to feel like I can use them less. But your brain you can keep using it. I know at some point I'm going to completely lose that ability, but for now anyway.
Anyway, it means Egypt is a really innovative place whether it wanted to be or not.
just because of the constant contact with other cultures.
And that's actually the third piece.
The Tommy looked at Egypt's technology and went there light years ahead of everybody else. So I want to talk briefly about what he saw when he went to Egypt with Alexander.
So they went they went all the way into Upper Egypt. So they saw they did the full tourism thing.
They even went to Siwa. Like they even went to the Oasis. By the way, when they went to Siwa, the Oracle at Siwa really messed things up. So the the two oracles that everybody relied on was the Oracle Adelfi and the Oracle at Siwa. Usually they got some young priestess high on something and then they had her say what the future was going to bring. Sometimes it was a priest.
Uh and at Siwa it was a priest and when he approached Alexander he greeted him but he tried to do it in Greek and he wanted to say uh welcome son to Siwa and it came out welcome son of Zeus somehow and Alexander went see that's proof I really am the son of Zeus and the guy's like what did I say and then people explain it to him he's like oh oops and so uh Zeus Zeus Ammon became Alexander's chief god. So from that point on he worshiped the god Zeus Ammon as in Aman Raw as in the Egyptian god and Zeus got merged in that moment in that glorious that would have been weird to me. Wait wait wait there they were two gods right? No they're one now but but they were two. How did that happen?
For me, that would have caused a moment of skepticism. But for some reason, people like, "Oh, well, that's cool.
This is like a marriage, I guess."
Could they get divorced?
What it was is the the Greeks and the Romans did this a lot, too. They kept they believed there really was one pantheon and that people with a different culture just said interpret it. So, right, so Jupiter is Zeus is Ammon.
Hades was Osiris, right? And so they just kept finding the the connections.
But then they merged Apus with Osiris.
Osiris in in Egyptian is Alsar. And Apus in Egyptian is happy. So isn't that cool? God named happy. Uh so it was Alsar happy. But then the Greeks have to add an s to everything. So, it became Alsar Hap Hapis, which just became Alsar Appis over time, which turned into Sarapus. And that's where the god Sarapus came from. And you're like, wow, what the heck? Um, which makes me then want to answer the question, how did Egypt get the name Egypt?
So, I'm going to do that real quick and then we'll do why did the Greeks get called Greeks? Actually, let's do the Greeks first. So the Greeks were called the Greeks called themselves Helens because they were named after a man named Helen.
So they were named Helens. If you look at Greece when it official government documents, it'll say Ellas, not Helas.
Uh the reason is is because at the time the Greeks had actually invented diiocritics, the little marks you put above letters to indicate sounds because the Greek alphabet didn't have the letter H. It didn't have an H. It had a letter that looked exactly like an H calleda, which made the sound e. It didn't make the sound H. So what the Greeks did was they would put a mark over uh that vowel to indicate what if there was another sound and they had a mark to do with the H sound. So LS is helas is that mark over epsilon then lambda lambda alpha sigma. So it it made helas not but contemporary Greeks dumped that sound. So there's no H in it today.
And they don't even say alas, they say elada. So they've even just changed their name. But sometimes you'll see like on the official Greek documents, it'll still say Ellas for Greece. So then how did we end up with the word Greece? So Eperis, where the pink is, there was a Greek tribe named the Gracoy. and the grioy see all that green land in Italy including where Napoli is today Neopololis uh it's western and southern Sicily and then southern Italy right you know here this uh to to this day there are people who speak Greek that live in that part of Italy they're they're called Greeko and the gryoy colonized it. And since that was the first group of people from Greece that the Romans had had contact with, the name stuck and g so magna is what the Romans called the southern part of Italy. Gracia just became Greece. That's how we have the term Greece. Um Egypt was named Kemet. Now, we don't actually know what the vowels sounded like because the ancient Egyptians, unlike a or like another language that I know, were really sloppy with vowels. They just leave them out. You know what I'm talking about.
It's so cruel to people trying to learn a language to leave vowels out, but then you can put the diiocritics in, but then that requires you to sit there and put the diiocritics in. Nobody's going to do that anyway. So we don't know if it was chemtum.
We have no idea, but it's KMT. Chem's good enough. We'll just go with it. What happened was Memphis, which is probably right about there, um was the capital of Egypt when Egypt unified 5,100 years ago. And even though the capital changed multiple times after that, it still remained Egypt's largest city for the most part. Not always, but usually. And it was the center for Egyptian trade. So it was like the New York City for for Egypt. In the middle of it was a temple to the god Pata.
The god Pata in the Egyptian pantheon is the god who would think of a thing and then it would come into being. So he had the concept of mountain and then mountains were formed. He had the concept of river and a river was formed.
He's a creative force and uh there was a temple in the middle of the town um called h wait hutpa wait hutka.
I got it. Hutkapata.
And so the Greeks would go to Egypt and they would go to Hutkapata and they would trade there and then they would go home. And so they just started calling Egypt over time hutkapata except that the Greeks couldn't say hutkapa. It's too hard for them. So they said I guptus hutka iigupus like where how I I like I don't I don't I guess there's a pt in there. There is the p they got that was it's just this thing humans do right. Uh at some point later in in this year I'm going to do a talk on the Hodnachoni.
And when the French fur trappers first made contact with the Hodnon there must have been a conversation where what do you guys call yourselves? Heni what? No I didn't say anything similar to that.
Uh, so when you travel, in addition to trying to lower your heristics so that you can be more open to possibilities, Q-tips, get get in there, get some of that wax out. That's that's what I think needs to happen. Like, too bad it didn't happen more often. Of course, that happens to Egypt later again because when the Arabs conquer Egypt, they set up the first capital as Masul Fustat, the citadel of tents, and they kept writing letters to Mas. And now Egypt's called Mus in the same way. So it happened to Egypt twice like what bad luck.
Renamed twice anyway. Oh, well sa v or is it sail?
You like it? Sale. All right. So, um, now that we got that out of the way goes to Perkos and he goes, "I want Egypt." And Pericos goes, "I can't just give you Egypt." In part because there's already a guy running Egypt. His name is Cleo Menis.
I can't just take Egypt from Cleo menus and get hand it to you. And so he asks him why he's doing this. And here's what Pollamy says. He says, remember when we went to to Giza? Like, yeah, we were looking at three humanmade mountains.
Yeah. Said, remember when we went into the sarcophagus chamber?
Yeah. By the way, way to think of this is the Tommy was 2,300 years ago. That pyramid was 2,300 years old when he visited it.
Isn't that cool? Alexander the Great was halfway between us and that pyramid.
He goes, "That ancient structure that was built 2,300 years ago, a number I can't comprehend.
You couldn't when we were in the sarcophagus chamber, there were granite blocks budded up against each other. You you couldn't slide a piece of paper between them. And Pericus goes, "So, how can you build a structure that lasts 2,300 years in a plane that has regular earthquakes and there's no movement in the granite blocks?
I don't I don't comprehend what I I couldn't comprehend what I was looking at. And then the granite was smooth. I mean, there's little divots in it, but it was polished.
And the the angles were all 90° angles.
And of course, the Great Pyramid is a perfect compass. It's off by a tiny tiny fraction of a degree. And so, people originally when they measured it and realized it was a near-perfect compass went, "Oh, look how close the ancient Egyptians got." Astronomers now think they actually nailed it and are using the pyramid to measure how much our pole is shifting because it was a perfect compass in the middle of the middle.
And he goes, "That's just one tiny thing. They're doing brain surgery. They know more about human anatomy than the whole rest of the planet combined.
They they understand how to shape granite. They can move these mountains. I want to tap into this. I want a I want a piece of this. And Perkos goes, "Okay, we're going to have to get the other generals to agree." So he calls for a council and they do the partition of Babylon.
And Poleamy is given Egypt.
The partition of Babylon basically created this map.
Not quite exactly this map, but something very similar to it. And Poleamy got Egypt.
He's now that's the only thing he cares about going forward. He has to keep Egypt because this is a crazy thing.
This isn't solved. This isn't a done deal. Within a year, Perkos is bringing an army against Egypt from Babylon.
And in 3:21, so this is just two years after Alexander is dead, Perkos attacks, Tommy put his army on the other side of the Nile. Pericos is crossing the Nile.
They're fighting. It's a disaster. A bunch of Perkos's men are are killed.
And his officers are so furious at the defeat. Pericos's officers murder him.
And the generals for Alexander the Great's Empire are now at war with each other.
They was once perkos is dead. That's the first diode uh diodori war. So the diodori were the generals. It's a a term that I feel like is similar to the samurai daimo like they were warlords after Perkos dies. By the way, Cassander uh in the north and his father Antipur actually helped Poleamy. So there was an alliance against Pericos. After he dies, they they get they form a council and they try to figure out what to do next.
Oh, for the record, Cleo Menace, as soon as Perkos started moving against him, Poleamy murders Cleommen. So that's out of the question. Poleamy is the person in charge of Egypt at that point.
There's there's no doubt.
So they get together and try and figure out what to do next. They decide to put Antipatau, the guy who had been running Macedon in Alexander the Great's absence, as the next regent for Alexander IV. For the record, I kind of skipped over this, but Philip III, Alexander's halfbrother, Alexander's uh what's the politically correct term?
Uh I I don't want to get in any trouble here.
low IQ.
That's That's it. Uh he's an adult with a child's IQ.
He ends up becoming the co- king with Alexander IVth. And so there's this awkward situation where there's this child who's too young to rule and there's this adult who's too young to rule. And uh they put Antipata as the regent to try to figure out how this is going to end in the end. Auntie dies one year later and it trigger it's going to then in 318 trigger the second diodi war.
What happens is Alexander's mother who by the way is no longer Mutali. Her name was changed. So when she married she had her name changed to Mortal. I don't remember what her first her original name was. And then shortly after giving birth to Alexander III, she had her name changed again. Here's why. Phy Filipos horse lover had entered a horse into the Athens Olympics and the horse won. He won gold medal.
So to celebrate, Filipos went to Mortal and said, "I'm changing your name." And she went, "You're doing what?
Changing your name? What are you changing my name to? Olympias.
As in the sports event in Athens? Yes.
Why? Cuz my horse won the gold medal.
And to celebrate, you get a new name.
And he renames his wife Olympus.
They must had a really interesting relationship.
And Alexander is my son.
No, he's not.
I don't I don't know how to put that together. So, Olympius isn't some passive person on the side. She hates her stepson, Philip III. She decides she's going to get rid of him. And so, she ends up doesn't appoint his son to be the guy that takes over. His son's name is Cassander. He puts this poly perhon guy in charge and so the diodori side against each other and they create a second war. Um, Cassandra, Poleami, Lissamakus, and Selucas are on one side and then Olympus and uh, a guy named Umemenes are on and Poly Purkan are on the other side. And so they're in their second civil war, right? So Alexander died in 3:23, it's 218 and they're in their second civil war. This this empire is doomed.
They'll do more. There's there's more coming.
Anyway, long story short, because it's but it's it's a fun story, but maybe I'll save it for another time because I know you want me to start talking about the great library at some point. Um, long story short, what ends up happening is Olympus go fields an army and then Philip III and his wife uh field an army and it's Yuri DK is is is his wife. Yuri DK dresses as a man. She has armor on, a sword, a shield, a helmet. She's ready to go to war. She goes onto the field and of course everybody roars when they see her because she looks so amazing. And then Olympus walks onto the field dressed as a priestess and she does a little dance.
And when Uraik's because right Philip can't lead the army, poor guy. So his wife has to. When when Urkeay's army sees Olympus and they remember she's the mother of Alexander III, Alexander the Great, they burst into tears, march across the field and join her and Unity is standing there by herself going, "Uhoh, this is bad." Um, she's captured, Philip is captured, they're executed.
So now it's just Alexander IV. Cassander had been in Athens putting down another Athenian uprising. And I I meant to say another because that's what Athens did.
It just constant uprisings.
He goes back. He puts uh Olympus under siege. The army under her command runs out of food. They're they're literally turning to cannibalism. Things are bad.
Olympus negotiates out a deal with Cassander. she will be spared and he will spare Roxana and Alexander IVth and and she'll surrender. And he goes, "Okay, that's good." So they do this.
When she killed Yur DK, she killed a hundred of Cassandra's best friends. He had a hundred friends. Was he on Facebook?
How did How did you have a hundred friends back then? Uh she had them executed, his honor of his friends. So after she surrenders, he brings in a hundred family members from the hundred friends, hands them each stone and said, "I'm not letting you live." And stones her to death. But he does keep Roxan and Alexander IV alive.
The third war breaks out. This time the guy who does it is Antiggonus. So Antiggonus had played a major role in the second war. He was basically everybody's friend. Now he goes to war with everybody else. The third war basically ends in a stalemate. But in the treaty they make, they agree that as soon as Alexander IV turns 14, um, Cassander will hand over Macedon to Alexander IV.
So when Alexander IVth is about 13 and a half, Cassander murders him and his mother, wiping out Alexander IV's bloodline.
That's it. He's done.
Isn't that crazy? Just like that. So if you're like, "Oh, am I a descendant?"
Maybe, because who knows how many children he made along the way?
Probably. Just not not from a legitimate source.
they will have a little war in between the third civil war and the fourth civil war. Uh Selucas actually manages to capture Babylon back from Antiggonus and basically starts to create the Siluced Empire. That's the the b the birth of it. And Antigonus had stolen Salucas's land from him. He gets it back, some of it back. And then of course they're going to do a fourth civil war. That civil war started, if I remember correctly, in 307 BC and it goes to 301.
It lasts six years.
In 306, Antiggonus, who by this point owns the yellow minus Babylon because Silucus has that, he uh he's he's a regional power. He's the guy that to beat. He declares he's the king and as not the emperor, the king. So he's effectively announced the breakup of the empire. The next year 305 lusakus declares that he's the king of uh Asia Minor. Cassander declares he's the king of Macedon. and Patamy the first sotier becomes the faroh of Egypt creating the 33rd dynasty.
The the 32nd by the way was Alexander the Great's dynasty.
So I don't get why the Patamies don't get counted if Alexander was counted. It just seems so random and arbitrary. So in 301 BC there's a battle of Ipsus and Antigonus is killed and that's it.
That's the end of their civil wars at that point. Um kind of what ends up happening then is Cassander dies if I remember correctly in 298. He dies of illness. When he dies there's a struggle, a power struggle between Antigonus' son Demetrius and a guy named Piros of Eperis. Piros is going to end up in Rome part two. So he's coming back. They both try to grab Macedon.
Demetrius wins and we end up with three states. There's Egypt under Poleamy, the Saluced state which basically owned all of Turkey all the way to the Indis River and then Macedon and Thrace which was owned by Antiggonus's son Demetrius.
That is the point where our story really should have started. I just needed to make sure you got the crazy out of the way because this is crazy. These people were insane.
Which is why they're so fun to study.
Boring. People aren't interesting. Like, have you ever seen a news report where it went and today nothing happened?
Like, you just click the channel. Let me watch something else. Like, I'll just we'll just watch madeup murder story or something.
Poleami now finally has the space that the wars are over to figure out what he wants to do. He's been in contact with a philosopher named Uklid. Uklid has been working on not creating geometry. It's so tempting to say he created geometry.
Taking all the work that had been done on geometry and compiling it together.
and he ends up moving to Alexandria and he's hanging out with Poleos.
Ptomeus, by the way, early on, Pedicos is going to send Alexander the Great's body to Macedon. He actually ran and captured it and buried it originally in Memphis. Uh they're going to move him to Alexandria. So, Alexander the Great almost certainly was buried in Alexandria.
Nobody's ever found his body, so we don't really know for sure, but probably. Anyway, so Yuka comes and he starts teaching he's codified geometry.
He's he's taken all the different pieces and put it together in one coherent book. He's basically made it so you can learn geometry because up until then it was just a nightmare trying to figure out what this thing was. And he starts teaching it to Patmos.
And Poleameus goes, I want you to make a school and I want you to teach geometry to everybody. And so they do. They create a school. And then sometime around 397, we don't know for sure, but somewhere right around there, Poleamy founds the great library.
Now the reason he's doing this is because he wants to take all the innovation and knowledge that's in Egypt and he wants to compile it and put it in one place so that they can advance the technology even faster. So part of the great library was a library. There really was a library.
um they start collecting books from all over the world and putting them in there and then trying to translate them whenever whenever they have the ability to do this into Greek so that there's just sort of a universal language that everybody can turn to. Um but in addition to this there were classrooms. So the great library wasn't actually just a library it was actually also a research institute that taught.
In addition to that, the first structure ever called a museum was built. It's Museon in Greek O. But then when the Romans come, they don't like O. They like M. And so it becomes museum. That's why we have the term. But the first place ever called a museum was built as part of the great library. The museum is more like this museum, the way you probably think of when you think of museums. So, right, we're doing this lecture in the Museum of the Future.
That's actually what the Museum of Library of Alexandria was meant to be like. So, when I say museum, you're probably thinking that uh you know, it's an art museum or natural history museum or just a history museum. No, they didn't. They weren't worried about those things. What they did was they took all the most advanced technological objects they had and they put them on full display and you could come assemble and disassemble them and learn from them for free. There was no concept of copyright.
The idea was if you made an innovation, you were supposed to bring one of your innovations and put it in the museum to advance to the next level.
In other words, it was a museum not for the past or for art. It was a museum to develop new technology for the future.
That was the original museum. That cool.
Shortly after they do this, people start to flock to Alexandria. And before you know it, they start to do some really amazing innovations. Um, one of those innovations uh is Aerist Starkis. So, Ariscus comes along and he says, "You know, up until now, we've been pretty sure the Earth is at the center of the universe. I don't think it is.
I think the sun is at the center and the Earth orbits around it and that the Earth is on an axis."
That work, the first time that was actually debated, was done at the Great Library. One of the reasons he believed this is he tried to make a calculation on the size of the sun and he concluded that the sun was seven times bigger than the earth. Um the sun's diameter I think is like 110 times the earth's diameter.
So seven times is like really wrong.
But his thinking was surely the smaller object orbits around the bigger object.
And so he concluded that the earth must be in orbit around the sun and not the other way around. Shortly after Aristotarkus is a guy named Aristoines.
So Aristoines is bored.
Don't avoid boredom.
Boredom is the key to creativity.
We live in a society where we're in the process of making it so creativity will be very difficult for our species going forward because our dopamine addiction to our devices keeps us from feeling boredom. And if you don't feel boredom, you can't be creative. And now we've got AI and you can just tell AI to create for you. We're finished.
I I just hope we leave some kind of marker so that the next civilization will go, "Oh, oh yeah, avoid that."
By the way, there's actually a group of archaeologists trying to figure out what kind of marker they can put on top of Chernobyl so that after this civilization collapses, future humans will know not to go there.
I I love the fact that we're we know we're finished. And we're just trying to figure out how we can make it so our species doesn't go.
That's cool. Always thinking about the future.
You know, we could start thinking about the future and doing something about it, but we won't. It's okay. Every civilization eventually ends. The tragedy is petroleum.
Think think about what a gift that was.
And we've already gotten access to all the easy to get to stuff. So the next iteration of civilization is going to h only have the hard to get to stuff.
It's not going to be the same. We're squandering this incredible gift we've been giving we've been given. It's a shame. It's going to be really hard for the next civilization.
Oh well. Why would you care about future generations?
I actually don't know what the purpose in life is other than our children and our grandchildren. I know I'm probably being like a myopic jerk right now, but really seriously, like if there's nothing for future generations, why are we doing anything? Because when we die, like what's left? The ripple effect is what happens in future generations. Like we don't, when you think about it, the impact that you have on the world can only happen if there's another generation to feel that impact.
So, I don't care if you're going to send a spaceship to Mars. If there's nobody here to enjoy the fact that you sent a spaceship to Mars, who cares? Your life was utterly worthless and meaningless.
Anyway, what you should do is name cities after yourself.
That's the key.
Does it count if they mispronounce it?
Alisandrea.
Oh, I think it does. Anyway, all right. Aristotines. Aristotines is bored, which is a beautiful thing. And he goes, "You know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to go to the library. You just start looking at some books." And so he's like pruising through books, randomly reading stuff. And he reads an account of a guy who went to a swan.
And the guy in a swan said, "I looked in a well on the longest day of the year." So it's usually like June 21st, June 22nd, right around there. He said, "I looked in a well.
There was no shadow."
And Aristotines goes, "Oh my god, that's insane." So he waits until the summer solstice and he goes running over to the nearest well in Alexandria and he looks in. He's got his protractor and he sees a shadow and he measures it and it was 7.2 degrees. Well, we don't know because they didn't use Greek degrees because it had already been created by the Mesopotamians. Just the Greeks hadn't adopted it yet. He said 150th. So 7.2, right? Because 50* 7.2 is 360.
He measured it and then he went, "Uklid, I have angle, angle, all I need is side and now I can tell you the size of the earth."
So he hired a guy to walk from Alex to a swan and count his steps.
So, first of all, the Nile isn't straight. It's actually about as straight as a river can be. Uh, the Nile is really a weird river because it doesn't move. So, if you go to Egypt and you go to say Kumbbo, which is a temple right on the Nile River. Well, it was built 3,500 years ago on the Nile River.
It's still on the Nile River.
No river does that. Rivers move. They change course. So Kumbbo should have been destroyed by now or landlocked and really far from the river. It turns out Texas&M did a study on in Egypt trying to figure out why the Nile is locked in place and has been locked in place for 20 million years. It just hasn't moved because it should have it should have come out here by now. It should have actually come out through Libya. It should have been slowly shifting to the west and it and it doesn't. It just stays there. It's the only river on Earth that doesn't move ever.
I don't understand this, but according to the Texas study, there's a magma chamber that's rotating underneath Egypt. And somehow that locked the Nile in place, and it doesn't shift for 20 million years. It's the only river still in its place from 20. The reason for 20 million years ago is the Earth's climate dramatically changed because Antarctica got a divorce from South America.
And uh Egypt used to have forests.
There's petrified logs in Egypt that you can find from the forest that died 20 million years ago. And when the the weather system changed and the forest died, the monkeys dropped out of the trees and then had no use for tails and a giftythecus evolved. The first ape.
Isn't that cool? Antarctica divorcing South America led to our evolution.
Anyway, the Earth was a forest planet and all of a sudden it was a grass planet and so all the big herbivores had to switch from eating trees to eating grass.
And thank goodness because I mean cow is very tasty.
I like sheep too.
Um, so Aristoines sends this guy to walk along the Nile.
He tries to figure out the Nile's curve, straighten it, but he also knows the Earth is a sphere. The Earth being proven to be a sphere was done way before the Great Library. There was um a photo named Netis. He was uh he he sent an expedition from Egypt all the way around Africa and they came out. They went through the canal and popped back out. They literally 360° Africa. And when they did, they noticed that the stars had changed and the sun had changed space in the sky, went from being in the southern horizon to the northern. And they concluded the Earth had to be a sphere because it was the only shape that could make what they had seen make sense. That was uh 300 years be not quite yeah no over 300 years before the great library was founded. So Aristocines already knows the earth is a sphere. So he's also guessing the amount of curvature between Alexandria and the swan. It's a guess though, right?
When he's done with the calculation, we think he was off by somewhere around half a percent. He figured out the size of the Earth.
That cool.
Then he went, "Wait a minute. Ariskus says the sun is actually really far from here and it's big.
I I already have side angle side angle.
I could just take this out and measure the distance to the sun." and his his math broke. He couldn't the he knew the number they were going to end up with is just too big.
He like like he couldn't manage it. He couldn't even write the number out. He didn't know how because right zero by the way had been invented multiple times by this point but hadn't become used until the Indians started using it. Um and so he didn't have the ability to notate a zero the zeros that he would have needed. And so he just went there must be a mistake and they left it alone. They didn't pursue it, but they also could have probably figured out the distance to the sun. They had the math.
They just didn't have the math.
That cool.
So when I was being taught history, I was taught that gears and cogs were invented by Europeans, probably English or French around 200 years ago with the birth of the industrial revolution, which by the way is 1,200 years old, not 200 years old. But it's okay. We don't need to quibble over that thousand years. It's just thousand years. Why not make big errors if you're going to make an error? You know, like go for broke.
What they don't what they mean by the industrial revolution is the steampowered part of the industrial revolution that did start 200 years ago in Mirthther England when they started using coal to power a steam engine that moved a conveyor belt. So that's what they mean. The industrial revolution was actually started by the Abbassids uh 1,200 years ago. What what industrial revolution was is you took table a table long table and you put workers on it with stations and then they took part in making something like a shoe each person does a part of the shoe that was started 1 1200 years ago it spread to Italy and Germany and then eventually the English got a hold of the technology and went what if we enslave the workers to a conveyor belt that's powered by steam and took away all of their autonomy because we'll now set the pace they have to work at by using the conveyor belt.
to control that pace. And the English made crazy money doing this. And so they get credit. It's just not the credit that they keep taking.
Um, it turns out the gears were invented at least 2,000 years ago in Alexandria.
We have them, so this isn't speculation.
One of the ways we have them is a thing called the antithetherra device.
So, ah, look, Cather. It's on here. That island right there is Cther.
Next to it is Anti Cathther. It's a little island.
Anti Cathther had a shipwreck on it that was discovered a few decades ago. And when they pulled it up, pulled up the the stuff on the ship, they found a metal box, and they were like, "This is weird." And stuck it on a shelf. years later, somebody went, "What is this weird metal box and started examining it and as they were examining it, they discovered cogs and gears inside. And then the Japanese went, "What if we x-rayed this?" And they x-rayed it. And then they put it together, and it turns out it's part of a bigger device.
They're missing a piece, but the Japanese figured out what the other parts probably were. The anti-ther device was a computer.
In the true sense of a word, I'm not exaggerating. It truly was a computer.
It wasn't an electric powered computer.
It wasn't a digital computer. It was an analog computer with gears. And what you did was you entered the date by turning gears. And when you did, it spit out a result. The as the gears turned, it would tell you what constellation you would see in the night sky that day. Isn't that cool?
Now, why would you need to know that?
Well, I mean, if you're an astrologer, obviously, but even better if you're sailing at night.
So, Poleam the isn't just the guy who founds the great library. He also is the guy who starts construction on the Great Lighthouse.
The great lighthouse, by the way, you can kind of go to it today. So, the great lighthouse uh came down after a series of really nasty earthquakes about 700 years ago. So, it was they started construction on it probably around 290 BC and then it it came down about uh 1,500 years later, 1,500 years later.
Think about that. How long are our skyscrapers going to last? 250 years before the steel and glass gives out.
I'm guessing. I don't know. I It ain't 1,500 years. Let's just go with that.
The Great Lighthouse was built because the way you got to Alexandria, if you're in Italy, is you hug the coast. Well, if you're hugging the coast, there's a lot of that movement, especially when you're in the Gulf of Sid, right? And you're coming along the coast. And it it adds literally two weeks to the journey. And it's dangerous because it turns out that a lot of the currents in that area aren't really great. If you're in what will eventually be Constantinopoulos, you hug the coast because they didn't have oceangoing vessels. They couldn't go into the open sea. They didn't have the technology to do that. So the Great Lighthouse was the fix. The Great Lighthouse had an unusual little geographical feature. the prevailing winds. So, it wasn't all the time, but the dominant winds blow that way towards Creek.
So, as long as you're getting a nice average, if you have a large enough tower and you create a bunch of black smoke during the day, you can send a smoke signal that'll go out tens of miles.
And if you're sailing from CIT straight across the sea, by the time you're about here, you'll start to see it.
And then you can follow it in which is cool but it's not the interesting part. The interesting part is they also invented a laser you know.
So, if I take a beam of light like from a flashlight and it's not a dusty event and I just shine it, you'll see where it hits, but you don't necessarily see the beam unless it's it's dusty and then you'll see the beam. A laser you see the beam. We don't have any clue how they did this. What they if if because of the curvature of the earth, I know some of you don't believe the earth is a sphere, but for those of you who do, if I climb a mast on a ship and you climb a mast on a ship and we're looking at each other, we can see each other from uh like 11 kilometers away.
If I'm at the top of the great lighthouse and I'm looking across, I might be able to see you as far as 60 kilometers away, which to me blows my mind. 65 km is the outer limit, depending on how fuzzy the day is.
I'm looking at the top of your mast from the great lighthouse. So if I made a flashlight then from 65 km out I can see the problem is cret is 320 km away.
So 65 is good because it's 1/5if of the way but what would be better is if I could get even further out. And that's what they did. They by making the laser beam because right the earth is a sphere. So when I shoot a straight line it's coming out. I'm not aiming at the ship. I aim me at the sky and all I have to do is look up. They had figured out a way to make it so the beam could be seen from 160 km away, half the distance. So that ship leaving Cree just needs to make sure it's on the right path and then it starts looking for the beam at night and once it sees the beam, it just locks on and follows the beam in. And they shave two weeks off. Think about it.
If I if if it takes me two months to make my journey, two months and two weeks, two and a half months, well, I can do two trips because you can't they couldn't sail in the Mediterranean in the winter. So, six months of the year they were they couldn't they couldn't do anything. Well, two and a half times two is five, right? So, I'm doing round trip. Two and a half months to do the round trip. But if I can shave two weeks off of each each direction, all of a sudden I can get three maybe four trips in and it dramatically increased the amount of trade you could do. And that's why they did it.
But think about this. They invented a laser beam at the great library. We don't know how.
We don't we don't know what the components are. We know the height of the thing. We know the general shape of the thing, but we don't we don't don't know what they did. Not a while. So, they had a computer and they had a laser beam. Here, one more thing. There's actually we should do more than one. Let me do one more thing for sure because I know we're running out of time because I have to end the story too at some point.
Um, Heron. So, this is about 2,000 years ago. There's an inventor named Heron.
Heron invented the steam engine.
That cool.
So I was taught that the steam engine was invented in the 1700s in a series of steps that included Italians and French and English inventors and they kept adding to it, adding to it, adding to it. And then finally Fulton put it on a ship and put it around on a ship. And eventually somebody went, "What if we put it on a on a car on rails?" And next thing you know, you have a train. Turns out there was a guy in the Ottoman Empire about 200 years before those Europeans named Takiadin who had invented the steam engine. But it turns out there was a guy in Alexandria 1,500 years before Takiad who had invented the steam engine for the first time. Other words, we've done it three times.
Not a waste of time.
Just do it once, move on.
Do the next invention.
Heron made the world's first ever rocket with his steam engine. It was a static rocket because the engine was too big.
He couldn't it couldn't lift off the ground. So, the rocket went But imagine the watching that 2,000 years ago. You go to see this demonstration at the Museum of the Future.
And there's this steam power rocket going in circles. It must have broken people's minds. And they must have been thinking, "Wow, what are the applications for this thing? What could we do with it?" And Heron said, "I have an answer." And he goes, "You know the antithetherra device? I'm going to do something different." He set up a platform with a bunch of gears and cogs.
And he he made it so that as some of the gears turned, it would turn other gears at certain times. So he had like gaps in the teeth. Really elaborate device. He turns on the steam engine. It starts to power the different parts of the mechanism. And what it did was it I it told a story. So, for example, you could have waves because you could have these these things moving across that the gears are turning and then the waves go off the thing and then you could have like a buildings and then a ship moving across the waves going to the buildings and a person and then he included sound effects. So, there' be clacking noises and whistles.
the first TV 2,000 years ago.
Turn it on, you sit there, you drool, and you're entertained.
How fantastic is that?
Isn't that wild?
I'm going to back it up. The second Polemeic photo of Egypt was Poleamy I.
By the way, in case you're wondering, all the men are Poleley. So, it goes all the way to Poley the 13th. It's very easy to remember. The women are the problem. Uh there's multiple Baronas arsenoes and seven Cleopatra.
So the women you have to kind I have to oh is this Baronica the second or the third you know you have to keep track of it. But the men are easy.
Patamy I Philadelphia brother lover. Uh so tier was savior. So Paty the first was the savior and the second guy was he apparently was very fond of his brother.
Um he he's identified a crisis.
Jews had begun moving to Alexandria in really large numbers. Now I know where your brain your brains went and I I did that on purpose.
and he was upset.
And here's why. Because the Jews didn't know Hebrew anymore.
And he went to them and he said, "How can this be? You can't read your holy texts." And they're like, "Yeah, we speak Aramaic and Greek. We don't know Hebrew." He goes, "But your rabbis do."
And they go, "Yeah, I mean, they basically they kind of know it. They can't speak it, but they can read the holy texts, but they're it goes that this just won't do. every religion needs to have access to its holy texts. I'm gonna translate it into Greek for you.
And they were like, really? Yeah. It's on the government's bill. Don't worry about it. I got this covered. He went and hired 70ome rabbis and he made the Septiguant.
He took the 70s something rabbis and he told them, "I want each of you to translate the Old Testament into Greek."
He did 70 because then they would took the 70 and they merged them together to get rid of error and bias.
Isn't that brilliant?
We would have just found one guy commissioned them and we would have ended up with a really messed up text.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.
They're 300 AD. So way after Poleam II by almost six centuries, but it's way closer to him than than we are to him.
The Septigent is spot-on translation. He nailed it. Well, the 70 plus rabbis nailed it.
Wild.
So you don't have to change your text if you're Christian or Jewish. Old Testament works just fine because of Alexandria.
There are more accomplishments, but I think I hit some of the the bigger ones, so I feel okay about it. It'd be nice sometime to dive a little bit deeper, but later a disaster happens for Egypt. The poleamies are going to come to an end and it's under the reign of Cleopatra IIIth.
But before the disaster even happens, we got a hint of what was coming by about 140 years. So in 168 BC, Antio IV, the guy who ruled the Saloid Empire, decides he's going to recreate Alexander's empire by conquering Egypt.
And so he brings an army all the way to Alexandria.
The Patelies are done. They can't stop him. This is it. It looks like because when you think about it, the sele are just Greek ruled Persia. The Seleut Empire is really just the Persian Empire version 2.0.
Just it just so happens that Sucus was ethnically Greek. So it looks like Persia is about to conquer Egypt for another a third round.
And the Roman ambassador is his name was gaspilios inus papilio walks up with a delegation of Romans.
It's 168 BC. So if you if you got Rome part one, you know that in 3:21, Rome didn't own Italy.
So this isn't that much further down the path.
He walks up to the the Siluced Emperor Antious IV and he hands him a document and the document says, "You pull out of Egypt right now or you're at war with the Roman Republic.
We're going to come. We're going to defend the Poleies. We're going to fight you."
Antio's response after reading the document goes, "I'm going to go talk to my council.
But Pilio goes, "Wait a minute." He pulls out a stick. He draws a circle in the sand around Antiocus IV.
And he goes, "You will not leave this circle before you tell me your answer.
Are you at war with the Roman Republic?
Yes or no?"
And Antious IV goes, "You just drew a line in the sand."
And Poelius goes, "What's your answer?"
He goes, "Fine. I'm pulling out of Egypt."
That wild.
In case anybody was wondering if Rome was powerful in that moment, it became clear that at least by 168 BC, Rome had become a major player to the point where it could tell that giant empire, no, you can't have Egypt. The reason the Romans couldn't let them have Egypt is even though Rome hadn't conquered Egypt yet, it was already completely reliant on Egyptian grain. It needed that grain to keep its legions in the field. And it knew if Antiocus IV had Egypt, they were finished. They had to go to war. And they psyched them out.
And they pulled it off.
That crazy.
So the first triumphirate of course ends in disaster. It's Crass Gas Ulius Kaiser and Ganas Pompy Magnus.
And it ends up in a bloody civil war.
Ka Kaiser is made dictator for life and then stabbed to death by the Senate. A second triumvirate is formed in the aftermath of this. Lepedus, Marcus Antonius, and Octa Octavianos who of course gets adopted by Caesar. So he's now Octavianos Kaiser.
And that triumpvirate ends up in a really awkward situation.
Somehow Octavianos manages to get Marcos Antonio exiled to Egypt and Marcos Antonio then falls in love with Cleopatra IIIth and they end up doing a second civil war. Really it's a third civil war because there's Solah's civil war but a second triumvirate civil war. And here's the weird twist.
The idea that Marcos Antonios and Cleopatra IIIth have is they're going to create a a Roman Egyptian empire.
In other words, it's not going to be Rome ruling Egypt. It's going to be Roman Egypt ruling the Mediterranean and a co-empire.
Of course, Octavianos wants nothing to do with that. He wants it to be a Roman Empire in Egypt under Rome's jack boot.
And so that's what the war between Marcos Antonio and Cleopatra on one side and Octavianos on the other side is about. It's solved at the battle of Axiom, which if you look at uh the EP emperor state, the pink state, there's a little body of water underneath that.
That's where Axiom took place. And long story short, Egypt should have totally won that. uh Marcos Antonios and Cleopatra II really botched that battle.
They outnumbered the Roman navy, they outmatched the Roman navy. Um they got bottle, they got trapped inside that body of water. They shouldn't have pulled into it. They started to run out of supplies. There's a communication error. Uh and they they fall apart instead of prevailing. It was their victory. They threw it away through bad leadership.
Octavianos then that's 33 31 BC. The next year he shows up in Egypt to get Cleopatra to surrender and of course Marcos Antonius committed suicide and then she kills herself and he now owns Egypt outright. He annexes it officially in 27 BC.
This was absolutely necessary for the Roman Empire to survive. And the reason is he creates the Roman Empire, right?
He's the first emperor. The republic was already an empire. It just didn't call itself that. It called itself the republic. He's now made it so that there's one leader in charge. So, he's turned the republic into a monarchy that hates kings.
He and all the Romans, oh, we hate kings, but we love emperors. Like one person rules. One person rules.
Absolute authority. Absolute authority.
Uh what's the difference again? Well, uh I'm emperor and that guy is a king.
Now, now is it there's a lot of illusion, right? Because the whole reason he was emperor was to save the republic. How are you saving the republic again? By destroying it.
That way nobody can destroy it because it'll already be gone because I'll be the emperor. Yeah, I don't I don't follow. But anyway, that's the cool thing about humans. We don't need logic and rationality. We can do that. We can function just great without those things thankfully because we don't use them.
So the reason why this matters for the Romans is, okay, as a kid I was taught the Romans were great innovators. They were awful innovators. They did innovate from time to time, like concrete, fantastic innovation, totally genius.
But most of the time they didn't innovate. What they did was they conquered somebody else, stole their technology, and that's how they advanced. When they capture Egypt, they're no longer completely reliant on conquest to advance technology because the great library is churning out new tech all the time. It's doing what it was supposed to do.
And so Rome ends up with the Great Library as it as its brain for 420 years. Um the Great Library because it's on the trade network stopped every ship coming through Egypt. And they actually had a guy who would show up and he would he would go onto the ship and he would look for books and he had a card catalog. They they they created a card catalog at the great library. They actually wrote down the titles of the books. And this guy would knew hundreds of thousands of books. He had memorized their titles. And then he would look and if he recognized that book, you could keep it and you could leave. But if you if he didn't recognize the book, it was confiscated. They weren't looking for drugs. They weren't looking for bomb parts. They weren't freaked out because you had a bottle of shampoo.
They were looking for books. And if you wanted to, you could stay until they copied it. They they had scribes. It didn't matter if they knew your language. You could just write the characters down exactly as they are.
They had scribes that they would just sit there and copy. And if you waited for it, they handed you your book back.
Otherwise, you lost your book. And they built the library constantly until it hit probably right around 1 million books. To give you a sense of how much knowledge that is, the United States Library of Congress hit the 1 million bookmark in 1905.
Now in 1905, we had flight, right?
Kittyak was 1902, we had electricity, we had internal combustion engine, we had steam power, and by the way in 1902, Herman Hollith created the company International Business Machine IBM. He was a political scientist. He's the only political scientist to ever do anything.
Um, so we got one.
Uh, so we had the library had steam power.
It had a computer, but it didn't have internal combustion engine, electricity, or flight. So it was it wasn't the same quality of tech, but it was partway there. like it was on that path and then it ends in 301 AD. Emperor Theodosius IV puts forward a decree in the Roman Empire and he says very simply Christianity is now the only legal religion.
So Constantine made Christianity one of the legal religions.
Uh how many decades later?
Seven decades later it became the only legal religion which meant that the that Jupiter was out, Manurva was out, Mars was out but it al Judaism was out but it but it also meant the ancient Egyptian religion was out right the Greek religion all of them the only thing that was legal going forward now was Christianity.
So the archbishop of Alexandria uh Theophilus I Theo means God, Felos is love. So he was God lover. Archbishop Godlover decided he was going to enforce the decree on Alexandria. The problem was is Alexandria was half Christian, roughly a quarter Jewish, and roughly a quarter pagan. So if you're going to force the decree on the city, there's something has to happen to half the population.
He talks a mob into attacking the Jewish quarter and the Jewish people end up fleeing the city or being killed. He then turns the mob, the Christian mob around, and they begin hunting out pagans. It's hard to get the pagans because they didn't have their own quarter. They were mixed with the Christians. But you know, neighbors rat you out.
And then they went to the great library.
And the Christians hated the great library because the great library wasn't a Christian institution. It was an institution that had no religion. It its goal was science. Its goal was philosophy. It it was about mathematics.
And they attack it. And when they arrive, the last director of the great library is a woman named Hipatia. So Egypt had the closest thing we've ever had in human history to gender equality.
So the idea of a woman director of al of the great library was normal in Egypt that like that just not weird. Women were regularly directors of medicalmies.
Women were probably about 10% of Egypt's fo like this was just not weird.
Anyway, Hipatia goes grabs students and professors. She runs to the library and she starts grabbing books and throwing them on the ground. And then the students and the professors ran behind her and picked the books up. She was pulling out the the titles that she thought we couldn't afford to lose.
And they ran to her house and they dumped the books. Out of a million books, how many could they have possibly brought to our house?
10,000? Maybe.
It's a fraction.
Thousand? I I don't know. I don't like I don't even know how that how that would work. Like there's a bunch of guys running around with books and the mob had to break through these big cedar doors that they had bought from Lebanon and they smashed through it and they set the great library on fire and an instant we lost the center of human knowledge.
Now turned out there were other libraries on the planet thankfully but nothing like that. So it turns out in the 3rd century AD, the the guy who founded the the Cisanian Persian state, he was named Shapper the first, he got jealous of the great library. And so he built a Persian version of it and brought books from India and China and Persia and piled them in.
And we get lucky because in the aftermath of the destruction of the great library, they restart the academy of Athens in 529 AD. So the library was destroyed in 391 or 392. So 529 is what uh 130 no 230 years later 130 years later. Um Emperor Justinian I orders the Academy of Athens closed.
The professors there know what's coming because they know what happened to the great library. So they run and they grab the books, as many of them as they can carry. They ran to the docks. They got on a ship. They went to Antioch. They hired a caravan. They crossed through Syria. They got to the Persian border.
And they asked for political asylum for themselves and their books. And the Persians went, of course. and Hus Emperor Husra the first integrated those books into the library at Gandhi Shapur and as a result we actually still have some of those booksto the republic that's how it survived as luck would have it the Arabs will eventually conquer the Persian Empire just a few decades later in fact and when they did because they weren't the kind of sadistic conquerors that the world has seen so often And they were really gentle conquerors compared to most. When they got that to that library at Gandhi Shapur, they left it alone.
They didn't know what to do with.
And then in the aftermath of the Abassad revolution, they got really curious and guys like Al Kindi and Horazmi end up going through that library and they create the Islamic Golden Age.
In other words, everything we have ever done is still linked back in this chain from Alexandria to Gandhi Shapur to Baghdad because then later on Europeans will regain that information when they're doing the Reconista and conquering Spain because two two monastic orders were ordered to destroy the books, the Dominicans and the Benedictines.
And what they did was when they would capture Arab libraries that were filled with all these books that were supposed to be burned, they also had guys who had memorize the titles of all the books that they had in these secret underground libraries.
And they would walk past them with the book and if he recognized the title, they would go to the burn pile and drop the book in. If he didn't recognize it, they would go over and they would hide the book and they would bring it to their secret underground libraries. And they slowly began to translate these books into Latin.
That crazy.
Now, somebody is going to try and push back on my story and they're going to come up with two maybe three different explanations. So, I want to attack them real quick just to get them out of the way cuz they're I don't know why people do this. It's what happened, dude. Own it. Move on.
I mean, look, if if you're one of these people, I highly recommend you read the 12step program.
I'm not saying you're an alcoholic, but you have the mentality of one. One of the first things you have to do in the 12step program is apologize to all the people you hurt. And that's what you do with history. You own what your ancestors did and you move on and apologize for it. Whe even if it's just to yourself, don't try to cover it up.
So one of the things that people will say is the great library was destroyed by gas Julius Kaiser. The great library did catch on fire when he went to Alexandria. That is true. It burnt a section of the library but all those books were replaced and the library was repaired. And we have a list of directors that go from 40 what he was an Alexander about 46 BC. We have a list of directors that goes all the way to 415 AD. So we have over four and a half centuries of directors. We know the last director's name, Hipatia.
So clearly Kaizer didn't destroy the great library.
He just damaged it and it was repaired and we moved on. Another thing people will bring up is that St. Augustine of Hippo said in 410, Christians did not burn the great library. That means two things.
First, the great library was destroyed and burnt. Right? Because why is he saying I'm going to make a statement uh the Chinese did not destroy New York City. Like why would I say that? It's dumb. The only reason I would say that is if New York City was destroyed.
So clearly by 410 AD, the Great Library was destroyed.
Now there's another part to it. He said Christians didn't destroy it. Well, that also means Christians were being blamed for destroying it. So actually what he just did was confirm to all of us that a Christian mob destroyed the Great Library by denying that a Christian mob destroyed the Great Library. Hipatia lived 24 years after the great library was destroyed. She became a highclass tutor and people from all over the Roman Empire would send their children to go live with her. She never married and she just would bring she had all these students living in her house and she would just teach them. And then in 415, Archbishop Carus decided he was going to clean up. He didn't like that she was sort of floating out there. By coincidence, the Roman emperor was Theodosius II. So, it's a Theodosius the first who sets the library on fire and a Theodosius II who kills the last director. She was riding home on her horse, a mob, a group of monks grabbed her, wasn't a mob, and they pulled her off of her horse and they had seashells with her with them and they stripped her clothing and they strung her out in the air and they took the seashells and they scraped the skin and muscle off of her bones.
And of course, while she was screaming, a mob showed up because they're like, "What's happening? Why is this woman screaming?" And we don't know what the intention of the mob was, but it reached in and grabbed her. But by that point, there wasn't enough of her left. So, she just came apart.
And that's how the last director of the Great Library was destroyed because I think feel like saying killed isn't accurate. They took what was left of her. They went to her home. They grabbed all the books that she had saved 24 years earlier. They walked out the western gate of Alexandria.
They piled the books. Then they put her remains on top and they set them on fire.
All of the books at the great library were lost. It was copies that got to Gond Shapur.
That's the story of the great library.
One more thing. Carl Sean, one of the coolest human beings to ever live. Like I I have him in my top 10. He made a TV show called Cosmos.
There's been a reboot that Neil deGrasse Tyson made that's also amazing. Totally.
Both are totally worth watching. Here's the crazy thing. If you watch the one from the 1970s, was it 7980? Right around there somewhere.
I watched it as a kid.
Carl Sean made a lot of guesses about the universe based on the technology and our understanding at the time. He was never wrong. It's freaky. You can watch his old show from four and a half decades ago and go, "Wow, this is still right. Who does that?" I mean, think about it.
Uh Stephen Hawking had to walk back stuff, right? I don't care how smart you are, you will make mistakes.
Not Carl Sean.
Carl Sean said, "Had we not burned the Great Library, we would be technologically 500 years ahead of where we are right now." So to put that in perspective, had we not burned the Great Library, we would have landed on the moon in 1469.
That crazy I didn't even comprehend that. So as we as we watch our civilization start to unravel and come apart, I just want you to know this is a really big cost. We're going to be making future generations pay for this all I want to do is stare at a screen. I don't care about the world around me that's burning attitude that we have. And you know there are countries who are desperately they've got their sleeves rolled up and they're desperately trying to figure out how to navigate this. Why is it only the small countries? Why aren't the big ones trying to figure this out, too? That's the thing that's driving me nuts. I mean, don't get me wrong, China just put a bunch of effort into renewables and as a result are being affected less than most of the other country, big powers in the world right now for the crisis that we're in right now. So, lesson learned, renewables isn't a bad idea.
Uh, is am I right that UAE and Egypt have the two largest solar farms on the planet?
I that's an thing that I keep hearing.
So, something like that is it we're close. I've seen the one here in the UAE. It's insane. Uh, from the road, it's got this awesome tower with the big Mercury thing on the top. Is that Mercury? I don't even know what that is.
Uh, I don't know. We I I think we should look to the past to realize what we have and how cool it is. The Great Library lasted 680 years. Like, think of the tech that they had that we'll never know. AR I'll give you an example.
Aristotle wrote a book. He Aristotle walked around Greece and he went to every Greek city state and when they had a written copy of their constitution, he asked for a copy. But most of the Greek citystates had oral constitutions. So then he had somebody tell it to him and he wrote it down. So after Aristotle was done, there were 150 written Greek constitutions.
And then he did a compare and contrast analysis. He wrote a book and he talked about what worked really well, what didn't work, where things could have been improved in this constitution and that one.
Nobody will ever read it. It's gone.
As a political scientist, I chop off uh maybe a pinky to read it because it'd be amazing. Like think about it. What how many republics are on the planet today? We have an N of what? 150 and probably uh 140 are fake.
Uh they pretend to be a republic, but we all know they're not. Like what are the real republics? Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Ireland, Australia, Botswana.
I think I'm done with my list out of 196 states. So my N is 10. It's terrible. Imagine if I could get a whole other 150 and it's thing after thing like this.
There was the the books on brain surgery that the ancient Egyptians had gone. We don't know what they did. We just know we have the mummies. I I know of one case where the person clearly lived seven years because there's seven years of recalcification where they pulled the skull apart and put it back together.
So, we know that the surgeon was at least successful enough that the person got an extra seven years out of it where we don't have any clue what they did because well, we don't have the text and it goes on like that.
That's sad.
Anyway, um Aristophanes wrote like 25 plays and I think we have five. And for the record, if you've never read an Aristophanes play, it's like British comedy today. It's not much has changed.
Like it's the same kind of humor. Like if you don't like British, don't read Aristophanes.
Except Liz Estrada. Everybody should read Liz Estrada whether you like British comedy or not. Um because it's just that it transcends. But you know, like the clouds and the frogs just it's okay. It's funny, but I'm done.
Thanks for being my audience.
If you wait cuz I know some of you are going to come up to me. I have something. I forgot to bring it. I'll be right back. It's my McLaren sunglasses.
This was a gift. My friend Shhatty gave it to me. Uh, I would have never owned anything like this. I'm a teacher. You don't But I It's not my glasses.
It's coins. So, this is Alexander the Great. Uh, he's Hercules. He He really thought he was Hercules. Um, he minted this coin when he was still alive, when he was the emperor in Babylon.
So, that's what he looked like wear he's wearing a lion skin.
Um, this coin is actually Tryion, the Roman emperor. So that's him. What's really cool about these coins is you get a sense of what they actually look like.
So in a in a way we haven't lost total contact with them. This coin was used a lot, so it's a little rubbed down, so you probably can't really see it from where you are. That's the great lighthouse. The Roman emperor put a picture of the great lighthouse. It's one of the ways we know, at least generally, what it looked like. Um, and then for those of you like, I know it didn't exist. The Earth is flat. No, there's a coin with it on it. It clearly existed. Why would they have done that?
Um, this is Poleam the first and his wife. The coin was actually minted by his son, Patamy I, and he put himself and his wife on the other side uh to represent his dad.
Uh, but I've always thought that Paty the First looks like my friend Jeff. Um, I have a lot of friends named Jeff. This Jeff, in case he watches this, is 6'7.
So, in my mind, I have to think of Poleam as being really tall because he looks like my friend Jeff. Um, this coin here is Silucus, the guy who uh ended up creating the larger empire that that Antiocus IV will be the guy that's the descendant of. Um, and then I I thought it would since I knew I was hoping I would get to Shapur.
There's Shapper the first. Uh, he had crazy curly hair. Like if you probably can't see it, but there's a big ball of crazy clearly hair sticking out from underneath his crown. Um, Iranians have straight hair.
The Mongols really changed Iran.
In case you're wondering, do armies alter the DNA of a place? I think that all the evidence shows Iran got altered and now has straight Mongol hair.
Anyway, shop any cool.
All right, that was my show.
Thank you everyone for coming to tonight's session. The next session will be in August 27th. It's going to be the reconista. So, I hope you all have an amazing summer ahead. And another big round of applause to Dr.
Related Videos
1:05
History
osman bey happy and sad moments
FateheUmmat
201 views•2026-04-19
1:10:29
History
Gregory Williams lecture "Life on the Color Line", 1999-09-14
BallStateUniversityLibraries
1K views•2019-07-31
18:08
History
5 National Parks To Visit In PA's Laurel Highlands
Redoubt_Productions
433 views•2025-06-14
1:26:15
History
Uncovered Untold Histories by Prof. Touraj Atabaki
elaheomidyarmir-djalaliins6723
148 views•2025-01-22
4:41
History
A Super Quick History of Bulgaria
MrHistory1
69K views•2019-09-12
1:29:43
History
Won Over: Reflections of a Federal Judge on His Journey from Jim Crow Mississippi
ndhistoricalsociety
212 views•2019-12-09
1:00
History
St Andrew's Day: Explained, a little.
visitscotland
36K views•2019-11-30
7:59
History
The Times Atlas of World History | Wikipedia audio article
wikipedia-fan02
290 views•2019-06-16
Trending
13:25
Business
Playstation NO DISC/NO BUY Fight Is Over...
DavidJaffeGames
4K views•2026-07-23
22:40
Business
Steam and Xbox Just Dropped The Hammer On PlayStation
OhNoItsAlexx
9K views•2026-07-23
16:52
Anthropology
Americans Confused in Australia for 17 Minutes Straight
IWrocker
17K views•2026-07-23
20:36
Business
SuperBike Factory Has Gone... What's Next for the Motorcycle Industry?
thatbikersimon
11K views•2026-07-22