Ancient Egypt Expert on The Pyramids, Cleopatra, & Freemasonry

Summary

Podcast Summary: Camp Gagnon – "Ancient Egypt Expert on The Pyramids, Cleopatra, & Freemasonry"

Date Released: January 7, 2025
Host: Mark Gagnon
Guest: Dr. Joseph Manning, Professor of History at Yale specializing in Ancient Egypt

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Introduction

In this enlightening episode of Camp Gagnon, host Mark Gagnon welcomes Dr. Joseph Manning, a renowned Yale history professor specializing in Ancient Egypt. They embark on a comprehensive exploration of ancient Egyptian civilization, addressing fundamental questions about the pyramids, literacy, pharaohs, Cleopatra, daily life, military conquests, and the intriguing connections to Freemasonry.

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Ancient Egyptian Documents and Literacy

Dr. Manning opens the discussion by highlighting a remarkable artifact housed in the Metropolitan Museum: a series of letters from a farmer dating back to 2000 BC. These letters, found in a tomb in Thebes, offer a rare glimpse into the life of an average Egyptian household facing Nile river failures and impending famine.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Manning [02:10]: “An entire household from 2000 BC, which is rare anywhere in the world, is completely exposed to us. It's extraordinary.”

These letters reveal the farmer's detailed instructions on farm management, grain storage, and family dynamics, including interpersonal tensions stemming from polygamy. Dr. Manning emphasizes the uniqueness of such documents, as literacy rates in ancient Egypt were estimated to be around 1%, predominantly confined to the elite and priestly classes.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Manning [06:37]: “The writing was a very restricted technology, limited to elites and certain classes of priests.”

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Timeline of Ancient Egyptian Civilization

Dr. Manning provides a comprehensive timeline of ancient Egypt, spanning from the early settlement around 5000 BC to Cleopatra's reign in 30 BC.

1. Early Settlement and Agriculture (Pre-3000 BC):
   The Nile Valley began to stabilize post-Ice Age, allowing agriculture to flourish around 5000 BC.

   • Dr. Manning [08:50]: “The Nile Valley is settled sometime after 5000 BC... Agriculture comes around that time.”

2. Old Kingdom (c. 2700–2200 BC):
   Marked by the construction of the pyramids, including the Great Pyramid of Giza (c. 2500 BC). This period saw centralized political control but eventually experienced decentralization due to potential social unrest and resistance to state-imposed taxes.

   • Notable Quote:
     Dr. Manning [09:15]: “The Old Kingdom, this first phase of centralized political control, goes away after about 500 years.”

3. Middle Kingdom (c. 2000–1700 BC):
   A classical phase characterized by robust literature and the use of political propaganda. Dr. Manning cites the Tale of Sinuhe as an example of Middle Kingdom literature that reinforces state ideology and social hierarchy.

   • Notable Quote:
     Dr. Manning [14:30]: “It's literature that basically reinforces the cultural status of what it means to be Egyptian.”

4. New Kingdom (c. 1550–1069 BC):
   Egypt emerges as a formidable empire, thanks to advancements in chariot and horse technology introduced by the Hyksos. This era includes famed pharaohs like Ramses II and Thutmose III, who expanded Egypt's influence across the Near East.

   • Notable Quote:
     Dr. Manning [20:22]: “The New Kingdom is the Egyptian empire.”

5. Late Period and Ptolemaic Dynasty (305–30 BC):
   Following Alexander the Great's conquest in 332 BC, the Ptolemaic Dynasty integrates Greek and Egyptian cultures, culminating in Cleopatra VII's reign.

   • Notable Quote:
     Dr. Manning [22:16]: “The Ptolemies adopt an attitude where they prop up Egyptian culture.”

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Technology and Architecture: Pyramids, Obelisks, and Lighthouses

Dr. Manning delves into the architectural marvels of ancient Egypt, focusing on pyramids, obelisks, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

Pyramids

The discussion begins with the evolution of pyramid construction:

• Step Pyramid of Saqqara: The earliest pyramid, built during Dynasty 3 by the architect Imhotep, who later became a semi-divine figure in Egyptian lore.

  • Notable Quote:
    Dr. Manning [42:32]: “The Step Pyramid complex is a time machine designed to make the king live forever through rituals.”

• Bent Pyramid: An experimental structure from Dynasty 4 that showcases architectural adjustments to prevent collapse, reflecting the Egyptians' learning process in pyramid construction.

  • Notable Quote:
    Dr. Manning [50:22]: “Most scholars think it's kind of an age of experimentation until the Great Pyramid.”

• Great Pyramid of Giza: The pinnacle of Old Kingdom architecture, representing immense organizational and engineering prowess, though specific construction records remain elusive.

  • Notable Quote:
    Dr. Manning [111:59]: “They're definitely tombs built for the king as a funerary monument. Archaeologically, we know who they belong to.”

Dr. Manning emphasizes the logistical complexity involved in pyramid construction, including quarrying, transport via the Nile, and labor management, despite the scarcity of direct records detailing the processes.

Obelisks

Obelisks are highlighted as extraordinary feats of engineering, often more impressive in their singular granite form than pyramids themselves.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Manning [52:35]: “I totally do [think obelisks are more impressive than pyramids]. It’s a single piece of granite.”

The Great Obelisk in Central Park and the unfinished obelisk in Aswan serve as testaments to the Egyptians' advanced stone-working techniques and their symbolic significance, representing sunlight and divine power.

Lighthouse of Alexandria

The Lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is discussed as a monumental structure designed to aid maritime navigation. Dr. Manning clarifies misconceptions about its destruction:

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Manning [99:58]: “We have debates about the destruction, but it's more likely that the library faded away due to a cessation of the copying tradition rather than a catastrophic fire.”

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Socio-Political Structure: Pharaohs, Scribes, and Priesthood

The conversation shifts to the socio-political hierarchy of ancient Egypt, emphasizing the roles of pharaohs, scribes, and the priesthood.

• Pharaohs: Viewed as divine or semi-divine rulers responsible for maintaining Ma'at (order) and ensuring the prosperity of Egypt through proper management of the Nile's resources. Their legitimacy was closely tied to their ability to perform religious rituals and manage natural disasters.

• Scribes: Held significant power due to their literacy and administrative roles. They managed tax records, property transactions, and legal matters, acting as intermediaries between the pharaoh and the common people. Dr. Manning discusses the possibility of corruption among scribes, akin to modern bureaucratic challenges.

  • Notable Quote:
    Dr. Manning [73:36]: “The Ptolemies are kind of ancient Egyptian in their style... power is really with the priesthoods and the local scribes.”

• Priesthood: Integral to maintaining religious and cultural practices, supporting the pharaoh's divine status, and managing temple resources. They enjoyed privileges and played a pivotal role in sustaining the state's ideological framework.

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The Ptolemaic Dynasty and Cleopatra

Dr. Manning provides an in-depth analysis of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, particularly focusing on Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Egypt.

• Integration of Cultures: The Ptolemies adeptly blended Greek and Egyptian traditions, establishing Alexandria as a cultural and intellectual hub comparable to Athens.

  • Notable Quote:
    Dr. Manning [93:04]: “The Ptolemies are saying early on, when they're building the capital at Alexandria, when they're building the library... they’re saying to the world, welcome to Ancient Egypt.”

• Cleopatra's Reign: Contrary to Roman propaganda depicting her as a mere temptress, Dr. Manning posits that Cleopatra was a strategic and charismatic leader aiming to preserve Egypt's sovereignty amid rising Roman power. She sought to establish a Mediterranean empire that could rival Rome but ultimately succumbed to Roman military might at the Battle of Actium.

  • Notable Quote:
    Dr. Manning [102:28]: “She must have been brilliant and charismatic and able to influence some pretty serious Roman generals.”

Dr. Manning critiques the Roman portrayal of Cleopatra, suggesting that much of what is known stems from biased Roman sources lacking perspective from Egyptian accounts.

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Freemasonry and Egyptian Symbolism

The discussion touches upon the influence of ancient Egyptian symbols in modern Freemasonry, particularly the adoption of the obelisk in American landmarks like the Washington Monument.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Manning [56:36]: “The origin of the column is ancient... the idea of a column comes from ancient Egypt.”

Dr. Manning speculates that the founding fathers' fascination with Egyptian imagery stems from Freemasonry's embrace of hidden and ancient wisdom, paralleling the symbolic use of obelisks and columns to represent power and enlightenment.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Manning [57:58]: “There's Egyptian symbolism... it's like hidden, the hidden knowledge from the past kind of idea.”

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Daily Life and Legal Systems in Ptolemaic Egypt

Dr. Manning sheds light on the everyday lives of commoners in Ptolemaic Egypt, utilizing family archives, marriage contracts, and legal documents to reconstruct societal norms.

• Marriage and Property Rights: Egyptian women enjoyed significant legal independence, able to own property, initiate divorce, and manage financial affairs through detailed marriage contracts.

  • Notable Quote:
    Dr. Manning [86:17]: “Women in Egyptian law had full independence. They could write contracts in their own name. They could bring lawsuits in their own name.”

• Legal Proceedings: The existence of intact court records from periods of crisis illustrates the sophistication of the legal system, including appeals processes and property disputes.

  • Notable Quote:
    Dr. Manning [80:44]: “We have a verbatim court record... it's really detailed about this trial.”

These records highlight the complex interplay between local and centralized authorities, the role of scribes, and the potential for corruption within the administrative framework.

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Conclusion

Mark Gagnon and Dr. Joseph Manning conclude the episode by reflecting on the intricacies of ancient Egyptian civilization, emphasizing the continuity and change across millennia. They acknowledge the transient nature of human advancements and societal structures, drawing parallels between ancient and modern governance, legal systems, and cultural symbols.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Manning [89:39]: “It's possible that things can get reversed or lost. It's not guaranteed.”

This episode provides a deep dive into the multifaceted aspects of ancient Egypt, challenging conventional narratives and inviting listeners to appreciate the complex legacy of one of history’s most enduring civilizations.

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Key Takeaways:

• Ancient Egyptian Literacy: Extremely low, confined to elites and priests, limiting the broad dissemination of knowledge.

• Pyramids and Obelisks: Symbolic and functional architectural marvels reflecting Egypt's religious and political ideologies.

• Ptolemaic Dynasty: A period of cultural synthesis and political maneuvering that ultimately succumbed to Roman expansion.

• Freemasonry Influence: Modern institutions and landmarks often draw inspiration from ancient Egyptian symbols, reflecting a long-standing fascination with their enigmatic legacy.

• Legal and Social Systems: Ancient Egypt possessed sophisticated legal frameworks allowing significant rights for women and intricate property laws, mirroring aspects of modern bureaucratic systems.

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This summary encapsulates the rich and engaging discussions between Mark Gagnon and Dr. Joseph Manning, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of ancient Egyptian history and its enduring impact on modern society.

Transcript

[Mark Gagnon]

Who actually built the pyramids and what were they for? Who could read the hieroglyphs? Did people have literacy in ancient Egypt? Who were the pharaohs? Who was Cleopatra? What was life like as just an average person living in the Nile Valley at the time? And what were the battles that the early Egyptian military was fighting? And how did they win? Well, today, all of these questions and more will be answered because I've got the very, very interesting Dr. Joseph Manic. He's a professor of history at Yale with his specialty in ancient Egypt. And today he's answering question you've ever had. He explains the early kingdom to the Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom, all the way up to the Greek dynasty in Egypt. This is an absolutely fascinating episode. Just come chill with me. Nerd out about some Egyptian history, and welcome to camp. I'm really excited to have you here.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Thank you. It's great to be here. Mark.

[Mark Gagnon]

Dr. Manning, which I'm not allowed to call you. I have to call you Professor Manning. Or Joseph or Joe or Joe or Joe again. I always have this thing with professors or academics where it's like you put in all the time, you put in all the effort, you get the diploma, and then some schlub like me, some comedian's gonna be like, hey, Joey, you.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Know what I mean?

[Mark Gagnon]

It just feels like, ah, but if you insist, I'll call you Joe.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's context. So we're among friends here because this is a conversation, my boy. It better be Professor.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, of course. You know, yeah.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

But here.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, okay. All right.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's context.

[Mark Gagnon]

While we're in the 10 to French, you can be Joe.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Thank you, man.

[Mark Gagnon]

You can call me Dr. Gagnon. Okay? Yes, sir. Yeah. Even if we're just picking up names, I'm excited to talk about all things Egypt. I have so many bizarre and interesting questions, and we spoke a little bit on the phone, and you just were a wealth of knowledge. And I'm really excited to jump in. So I'm really curious if you can kind of, like, just take us away. My initial thing that I would love to start on, broadly speaking, what is a specific document or artifact from ancient Egypt that you've looked at or analyzed that you think more people should know about or is interesting to you for a specific reason? Is there anything that sticks out immediately?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Lots. But immediately, I would say go across the river to the Metropolitan Museum and in a dark corner that no one visits, there's a series of letters by a farmer back to his family from 2000 BC at a time of Nile river failure and looming famine. So there's a lot of urgency in the letters. He's away on business and he writes to his family these instructions, very detailed about how to survive, how to run the family farm, go out and rent land there, grow that crop, that land next to the house you should grow X, Y. And he lays out a budget for the food for the entire household. And it's a household of something like 19 people. He's married a second time. He has a young wife in the house and the ex is also still in the house.

[Mark Gagnon]

Hell yeah. Let's go, playboy. You know what I mean?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And his youngest son from the second wife is a spoiled brat. That comes through really clearly. He gets a lot of extra food and a lot of extra attention. In other words, an entire household from 2000 BC, which is rare anywhere in the world, is completely exposed to us. It's an extraordinary. There's three letters. We don't know if they were sent because they were found in a tomb in Thebes, which is where he was. His home was some distance away. So at a time of famine, at a really important time in Egyptian history, these were so interesting. The Agatha Christi when these were found. Her husband, Max Maliwan, was a pretty well known Near Eastern archeologist, so she was somewhere in the near east, whether it was Egypt or the Near East. But she heard about this find and these things were translated pretty quickly. She wrote a novel based on these texts called Death Comes as the End. Really cool. She was so struck by it. So it is rare from 2000 BC, middle of what we call the Bronze Age, to have a household detailed. 19 members. We have names, we have a budget, we have instructions about how to survive. He even urges them on by saying, I hear they're eating people. Now that is cannibalism happening. Probably an exaggeration.

[Mark Gagnon]

That was like the Fox News at the time.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

That was a little bit.

[Mark Gagnon]

People reading people out here.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah, you better get your shit together now because we're going to run out of food. So there's a sense of urgency. But also, they're very touching letters. I mean, they're beautiful as well. No one visits these things. Literally last time I saw them. It's in a dark corner that everyone wants to look at stone statues or, or tombs or whatever. And here, these, this is real life, life on the ground, real people. How interesting. It is a fascinating group of letters.

[Mark Gagnon]

What else do we know about the famine of that time? Was that a sort of like one off disparate famine that affected a Small area, or was this a widespread famine? That one specifically that he was writing.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

About, we don't actually know from that far back. The estimates are actual famines in ancient Egypt, probably similar to medieval times, because we have good records then. And about once a century, a real famine where people are dropping dead in large numbers. Food crises, food shortages, probably relatively more common than that. But once a century focuses the mind. And there's a lot of texts that say last time that the Nile failed to flood for two years in a row, there was a real famine. So, oh, my God, we might be on the verge again. The thing is, the Egyptians don't actually know. They don't know the source of the river which is their lifeblood, and they don't know enough about when the Nile will fail or not. So every year at the low ebb, there must have been kind of a worry that maybe there's no flood this year. Do we have enough stored for a year? What about for two years? And you can store food in Egypt, we should remember maybe a couple years. Okay, so that's your. That's your resilience, that's your padding.

[Mark Gagnon]

They had like.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. Grain storage. And you could distribute a little bit. Temples or big areas for grain storage, the king could distribute a bit. And people in households, like, you know, the elites in towns and villages also had grain storage. So they were expected to open up to everybody in time of crisis, which is really interesting.

[Mark Gagnon]

Interesting.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So there was a lot. There was safe guards around this really strange river that has a lot of variability year by year.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Which they don't understand.

[Mark Gagnon]

And was it common for farmers to know how to write at that time? Like literacy amongst farmers seems like if I had to wager a guess, I would say pretty low.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

You're exactly right. So this guy, these letters are written by, you know, sort of middling class guy. He was a funerary priest for a. Some aristocrat. That's why he was on business. So either he wrote them or he had a scribe write them. I mean, often that happened as well. But literacy rates in ancient Egypt, kind of broadly speaking, we think is something like 1%.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. So really low. It's just the elite class. That's interesting people.

[Mark Gagnon]

Could they read hieroglyphs easier?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, those are actually the really exotic ones. Only a few priests knew how to read. Those are very restricted.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's so interesting.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So hieroglyphs, sacred writing literally was quite restricted, which is why Egyptian sort of dies out in the end because few and few people could actually read hieroglyphic. Right. Wow. So the cursive stuff that these letters are written in, kind of like our.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like our cursive handwriting on, like, a papyrus scroll.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Exactly like that.

[Mark Gagnon]

That would be a little bit more broadly accessible.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

A little bit more.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's interesting. If I took a time machine back 2000 years ago and I had a papyrus scroll and I'd grabbed a random Egyptian, I was like, yo, what does this say? They'd be like, I don't know.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

They would.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then even furthermore, if I took 10 random Egyptians and brought them into a tomb and was like, what are these hieroglyphs? Say they would just kind of look around and be like, we don't know.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

What are we doing here?

[Mark Gagnon]

Weird. In my mind, like, I guess we have this warped idea that, like, oh, Egyptians speak in hieroglyphs so they know what all this shit means.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

They can speak. They're speaking the language. But the writing was a very restricted technology. Let's think of it that way. Very restricted to. To elites and to certain classes of priests. Not all priests were literate, probably either. And most kings, or at least many kings, were probably not literate.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Not a lot. So it was a very restricted technology.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's interesting. Now, these letters come from 2000 B.C.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

2000 B.C. yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Can you just give me like, a little bit of a timeline, like a window that we could look at as far as, like, when are the pyramids of Giza created? When are like the proto Egyptians walking around? When does Cleopatra come in? Just to kind of like give me a window of time to sort of wrap my head around.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Okay, great question. Broad Egyptian history. The Nile Valley is settled sometime after 5000 BC or so, maybe a bit before then. It gradually fills out once the Nile river starts flooding more regularly. In the early coming out of the last ice age, there were wild Niles. You couldn't manage the river at all. It's really high flooding. So it took a while to settle down. Agriculture comes around that time. Agriculture comes late to Egypt. It's 9,000 BC in the Near East. It's more like 5,000 BC in the Egypt or so. And then once agriculture gets going, though, civilization happens quite rapidly. So 3100 or so BC is when we think civilization gets organized. The first state, the first unified polity or state in Egypt, pyramids, 2500 BC or so at Giza. The Great Pyramid, let's say, is something like 2500 BC. The Old Kingdom, this first phase of centralized political control goes away after about 500 years. It's a period of 100, 150 years of no state. Really. People are still there and possibly quite liking that there's no state coming around because the state means the tax man. Tax man. Usually with guys with pointy sticks following saying, give us the tax man.

[Mark Gagnon]

State probably also means a little bit of defense, some security.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Kind of give or take.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Exactly. Yeah. That's the bargain. I always, when I'm teaching classes around this stuff, it is. It is Mafia family or early states. It's protection. It's a protection record. We're going to protect you, but you got to give us half of your. Half your agriculture.

[Mark Gagnon]

But the Nile, and we're good. The Nile Valley offers a little bit of geographical protection, I imagine.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It does. It does. If you're going to go on your time machine back to anywhere in the world where you get to be king and therefore you're going to have revenue from taxes, Egypt would be the place you would take Egypt. Oh, for sure. 100%. It's the best natural, taxing environment in the world. Just look at a satellite image of Egypt. Thin Nile River Valley, 20 miles wide. Big deserts on both sides. So you have farmers sitting in that space. They don't like to be in the desert, so they're captured by the environment. It's perfect. If you're an elite person who wants tax revenue, that is grain, usually in ancient Egypt.

[Mark Gagnon]

Interesting.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It is. It is the most natural taxing environment on the planet.

[Mark Gagnon]

And the desert offers a little bit of protection from invaders and things like that. So you, you save on the security and then you also just get really fertile land that can't spread too far into the West.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, it's quite manageable.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's. It's really. It's a really good environment for an early state.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

For. For kings.

[Mark Gagnon]

1941, Hitler took command of the German army. 1997, Titanic premiered in the theaters. 1777, George Washington led troops into the winter quarters of Valley Forge. There's all these explanations for everything that's going on in our newsletter. That's right. That's where I learned all this. You go on a first date and you're talking to a girl, you're like, hey, did you know 1941, Hitler took over Germany today. Whoa. And she's probably like, that's you. You're an awesome guy. You could be the most interesting person on every date. Get laid easier and make more friends. If you subscribe to the newsletter. And not only that, I'm sure You've seen I've been wearing merch. I've been wearing sick brand new merch on episodes of Flagrant. I'm sitting right next to 50 cent in this picture right here wearing brand new merch. Everything that's going on in the camp world, in my world and in our world, is going on in the newsletter. S'more Camp. Click on the link in the description below. I'll see you there. Let's get back to the show. So we get the pyramids around 2500.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yep.

[Mark Gagnon]

When is King Tut happen? Do we know anything about King Tut? We just always hear his name, King Tut.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, he gets a really good press.

[Mark Gagnon]

He was like 15, right?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, he doesn't deserve the press he gets, actually. He has a pretty good tomb, which is literally a hole in the ground because he was buried pretty quickly. But he's in the New Kingdom. So these letters at the Met that I was talking about 2000 BC, that's the middle Kingdom, the next phase, the classical phase of Egyptian civilization, we call it. Lots of wonderful literature that's being generated in this classical period. It's the first literature used as political propaganda in the world in the Middle Kingdom. What does that look like? They're amazing story, adventure stories. The tale of Sinew, the classic one that was very popular even much later in Egyptian history, about a kind of a courtier physician who overhears about a coup plot to kill the king, which does happen a lot in Egypt. That's the downside of being a king. You have a target on your back. Often. He leaves Egypt out of panic, wanders the near east for years, becomes a famous physician because Egypt was famous for medical practices, gets called back, gets forgiven by the following king, the son, and comes back to Egypt because he's getting ready to die. And the only place for an Egyptian to be buried is Egypt. Of course, you can't conceive of. So the whole story, it's an adventure story. It's an Egyptian success story abroad. But the lesson is Egypt is, for Egyptians, you have to return to Egypt if you're outside. And it's propaganda in the sense that it is literature about what the state is and the hierarchy and the expectations of courtiers to the king and so on. It gives an entire social hierarchy in this text. So it's really interesting literature. It's a whole series of these stories generated by Middle Kingdom scribes.

[Mark Gagnon]

So it's literature that basically reinforces the cultural status of what it means to be Egyptian.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, it gives a definite Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

If you call yourself an Egyptian, that means you have to be buried in Egypt. And so in order to be buried in Egypt, you got to stick around Egypt. Is that sort of more or less the message?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, there's no. Why would you be anywhere else? If you're in Egyptian city, don't take.

[Mark Gagnon]

Your talents to Jordan. Don't go to Lebanon. Just stay right here.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, it's the best place. And it's a place where there's a just king who protects everybody. And he's loyal to you if you're loyal to him. And Sinuhe, the hero of the story, comes back to an amazing welcome by the king, but also this amazing burial that he gets. So all's well in the end. But that's the lesson of what a state is. It reinforces the state is good.

[Mark Gagnon]

And so a lot of that literature comes out of the classical Middle Kingdom.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

That's right.

[Mark Gagnon]

And what is the first one called? The 5,000?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

The Old Kingdom.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's the Old Kingdom and then the Middle Kingdom. And then that would bring us.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Then to bring us the Tut and the empire period and the New Kingdom around 1300, 1350 BC or so, at its height.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay. And that's Cleopatra.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, no, we're not even there yet. We're only halfway through, man. We're at the. Egypt as one of the first empires in the world. In the New Kingdom, it's the most powerful state certainly in the West. It's powerful mainly because of its charitary, its horse and chariot technology, which is cutting edge technology in the ancient world.

[Mark Gagnon]

Where do they get horses?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Horses and chariots both come from the outside. Interestingly, they come from Central Asia. They come from the Central Asian steppes and they spread in all directions. In the second millennium BC Is the Huns. Yeah. Related. All related. Central Asia is a super important driver of a lot of world history.

[Mark Gagnon]

And they start trading with these folks.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

There's exchange.

[Mark Gagnon]

And they see them on the horseback and they're like, that's pretty sick.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Well, yeah. They're invaded by a group that the Egyptians call the rulers of hill countries, the Hyksos in Egyptian. And they come into Egypt. They're similar. They're parallelists in Chinese history as well. They come in Egypt and they run it for 100 years.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

They take it over and they bring with them the horse and the chariot. The Egyptians. I'd like to imagine there's an Egyptian, like a really smart one who says, holy shit, this is really good.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And the Egyptians not only take it over. But they improve the chariot technology, the axle especially. And they use really exotic materials that only the king can control from all over the Near East. And these are exotic woods, special kinds of glue they develop. It's extraordinary. They improve the bit of the horse, so they improve the entire horse chariot package. And that allows Egypt to control the good chunk of the near east for a couple hundred years.

[Mark Gagnon]

How does the Egyptian. How do the Egyptian people regain control over Egypt from the Hyksos?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

We have stories, we have tomb biographies, biographies written in tombs of certain high level soldiers who tell us about the reconquest of Egypt. They kick out these horrible foreigners. Oh wow. And between the middle and new kingdoms, they kick out these invaders and they form this empire. Partly they say so this never happens again. So we never have these foreigners running around Egypt, even though they're always present throughout. They have been in Egypt and the Delta especially forever.

[Mark Gagnon]

Interesting.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So again, it's kind of propaganda about who he's Egypt for. But we have these narratives of why they kick out the Hyksos, but they certainly adapt and the technology. The Egyptian stories tell us the Hyksos were these horrible evil foreigners. But everything we know about this period is they're kind of running things like good Egyptian pharaohs did. It's not a horrible time. Probably we don't know a lot, but it doesn't seem to be as horrible as the Egyptian texts tell us.

[Mark Gagnon]

But I could imagine though, if you are a culturally homogenous nation and all of a sudden some outsiders occupying you, you're going to be a little pissed off. Even if they're doing a good job, you're going to be like, what the fuck, get out of here. You know what I mean?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And I imagine that these people probably were like a little overextended, like in terms of their territory, like I imagine. I mean Egypt is a little far from Central Asia. So they might, they might have like some enforcements over there, but you get a little bit of rebellion brewing. It might not be the hardest battle to, to fend off. That's just my.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, that's right. The horse and chariot is coming from Central Asia. The Hyksos are probably. Most of these people were probably in the Delta all along.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, the Hyksos probably.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Delta probably. Probably. I mean they're close by, they're probably semi nomadic peoples, but they're probably in the Delta forever. It's interesting that after so Tut goes away, there's two military commanders who become kings at the end of what's called Dynasty 18 the first ruling family of the New Kingdom and then the second two dynasties of the New Kingdom, Dynasties 19 and 20. Egyptologists are really creative with how they make chronologies. These families are coming from the eastern delta also, by and large, and they seem to have names that suggest they're also Hyksos. And the capital moves to the eastern delta, which is exactly where the Hyksos were all along. So there's some argument that the ruling families, even in the New Kingdom, have, have ancestry with these, with these foreign groups. Wow. So the history that we're given is kind of telling one official story. The complexities, the underlying social reality is probably quite different.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that's what we call the Emperor period.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, Empire. The whole New Kingdom is the Egyptian empire.

[Mark Gagnon]

And all the famous pharaohs and things that we know more or less come from that period.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yes, Ramses, exactly. Think, think Ramses ii. Think Yul Brenner, which I always do because I think he's the best version of Ramses II ever.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay, okay.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

These are Thutmoses iii, the Napoleon of ancient Egypt, who was a guy maybe 5:1 or something. 5:2. But this great military conquerors on military campaign permanently throughout his reign. Yeah, these are all New Kingdom military conquerors. That was, that was the ideology.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that's about what, 1300, 1300, 1200 B.C.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It ends in. We know the exact date, 1069 B.C. the New Kingdom goes away. And then there's a very interesting first millennium period with a lot of foreign rulers, Libyans and others, Nubians from the south at one point. Finally, the last ruling dynasty is the dynasty of Cleopatra, who's the last monarch of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. These Macedonians who come in with Alexander and form the last ruling dynasty.

[Mark Gagnon]

Got it. And what year is that?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

The dynasty is officially formed in 305 BC. Alexander the Great comes in in the late 320s. Mid to late. And Ptolemy, one of his generals, eventually gets the Egypt province, forms a dynasty in 305.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then Cleopatra.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Cleopatra is the last. No, she's the last of the line of monarchs in 30 BC when she commits suicide.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So there's 200 and whatever that is. 270 years ish of Ptolemaic rule. Interestingly, the longest ruling dynasty in Egyptian history are the Ptolemies.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, really?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah. Which I think is always a good thing. The Ptolemies are often. Most Egyptologists don't like this period. Greco Roman Egypt. It's not very sexy. It's not ancient Egypt anymore. That's sort of the attitude, but in fact it is in a lot of ways. And the Ptolemies, despite their reputation last the longest of any ruling family, under a lot of pressure for various reasons, including Roman pressure constantly. So I always think they're doing something right if they're lasting almost 300 years.

[Mark Gagnon]

And what contributed to their dynastic succession?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Lots of, well, the succession or their success over 300 years.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. Like why were they able to rule for so long and pass on this heritage?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah, well. So one thing that they did was carefully study how Egypt works. I think they knew they had really good advisors through the priesthoods. Even with Alexander, before he died, he was in Egypt and being a good student of Aristotle, I think he was pretty sensitive to different cultures. And so the Ptolemies adopt this kind of attitude where they prop up Egyptian culture. What's remarkable is look at the temples that are built under the Ptolemies, for example. Lots of great ones that are still standing. Some of the most beautiful temples ever built in Egypt were built in this period. I think for specific reasons that they're allowing Egyptian culture to flourish. The best literature we have outside of this classical literature we talked about earlier is coming from the Ptolemaic period. They're copying old texts, There are lots of new stories. So Egyptian culture is flourishing under the Ptolemies. I think that's on purpose that the Ptolemies wanted Egypt to flourish. It makes sense because what do rulers want? Revenue, taxes? We want you to flourish. What makes you flourish? The temples, the priesthoods are a really important cog in the wheel of how Egypt has always worked. So being really sensitive to religious traditions, to temples, you guys can do your thing, no problem. Just we work out a deal where as usual, we're protecting Egypt. We expect revenue from the land of whatever rate, and that works reasonably well. I think despite, again, the reputation of the Ptolemaic period is not very interesting. Not really ancient Egypt anymore, run by foreigners with a bad reputation. I think that's not true. I think they're doing a lot of things really well now.

[Mark Gagnon]

I want to talk about this region basically from like 5000 BC to, you know, basically like the populating the Nile Valley up until Cleopatra. And there's a bunch of things I want to touch on with that. But before we even get to that, what happens after Cleopatra kills herself and like, what does Egypt generally look like from, you know, 30 B.C. until the modern era?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Wow, that's a big question mark. You know, what's interesting about Egypt, and it's one of the few places in the world that you can actually do this, China, I guess, is the other one to some extent, the near east as well. But Egypt's really good.

[Mark Gagnon]

Egypt keeps going, constantly populated, constant civilization.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, continuous, continuous, despite changes, despite other groups coming in and governing it. But the basic economy, the basic structure, the basic Nile river annual flood, when the flood is good, it's extremely rich productive soil, some of the most productive soil in the entire Mediterranean basin. Beautiful grain crops, life is good. And that goes all the way through. Despite political regimes changing constantly. That is sort of a. That's the theme until the High Dam is finished in 1970. That's when I end my Egyptian history classes usually saying that ancient Egypt ends in 1970 A.D. when the High Dam prevents the river from flooding every year. But that basic structure of Egypt before then is how it always was.

[Mark Gagnon]

Because you consider that ancient period, the subsistence off of this Nile flooding. And up until the 70s, that's what it was doing just naturally, pretty much.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

With a lot of political changes, obviously in Egypt under British rule and so on, or in the 19th century under Muhammad Ali. I mean, things changed substantially once you're growing cash crops, sugarcane and cotton, and then, oops, we don't have enough food. We have to import food from elsewhere. So, I mean, there are major changes politically that changes life in the river valley Even in the 19th century, of course. So there are changes that matter quite a lot. But the basic idea of the river and the annual flood is the thing that dictates the history of the place.

[Mark Gagnon]

Got it.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

By and large.

[Mark Gagnon]

I just think looking at that B.C. period is the most fascinating thing. And I've heard this sort of like, you know, it's like a quote or a little like fun fact, I guess. People throw out that Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the pyramids of Giza. You know, roughly speaking. Right?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, that's true.

[Mark Gagnon]

2,050 years from the iPhone and you know, 2,500 years from the pyramids of Giza, which, when you frame the conversation of ancient Egypt that way, I just really think it's a important for people to have a broader grasp of one ancient human history and the anthropological record of what it means to be a Homo sapien. And furthermore, looking at Egypt as it's not just one little time in history, like a lot of different empires and things, this is a vast, vast changing society that sort of ebbs and flows from 5,000 BC until today.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

And I just think it's important for people to kind of broaden their scope. I know for me, especially when I was in high school and college, you know, I just looked at like, oh, BC was like, you know, 200 years. And then AD was everything else. And my whole record of how long human beings have been doing was like, you know, 2,000 years. You know what I'm saying? Like, that was like. It kind of was like, confined, probably by like, the Bible and things like that. Kind of confined. What I saw the world as.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

It was like, oh, yeah, there were people in Egypt and then Jesus happened and then now we're here. But I think broadening the scope to say, like, Cleopatra is, you know, when she was the, you know, the emperor, the empress of Egypt had very little connection to the pyramids of Giza, you know what I mean? Like, she wasn't even really technically Greek or technically Egyptian. And I just think framing these things in that context really, really helps.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I totally agree, man. The last stage of ancient Egyptian language is called Coptic. It's the language of Christian Egypt. It's kind of actively spoken till around a thousand AD or so. And it becomes kind of a ritual language. But let's say that's the end date, for sake of argument. That means ancient Egyptian as a language was spoken for two thirds of recorded human history.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, it's crazy.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So that's a significant shadow on Western civilization, at a minimum, on world history as well. This kind of broad scope that you're talking about is a really important thing to understand and appreciate.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. And then bringing up the letters that you brought up initially, I think that the sort of, like, petty, minor details that we would consider today, sort of like innocuous records, a letter, you know, a tax document, little pieces of record keeping that seem sort of trivial to us now, you know, in our modern day. If looking at those things in the ancient times, I think really contextualizes what it means to be human. I think it really, like, creates a human texture to the people that lived back then. It's really hard to kind of wrap your head around, like, you know, King Tut was a guy. Like, he was just a dude like me. You know what I mean? Ramses was insecure maybe about his acne or something, you know what I mean? There's a human element that I think is found in sort of these sort of innocuous records that you've spent so much of your time really diving into and researching. Yeah, and I don't know, I think that's another important element that I think People should be aware of, like, these little debts here and there that are kept on these papyrus scrolls possess so much of the character and the flavor of what it means to be ancient Egyptian.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. What it means to be human more, more broadly. And even professional Egyptologists kind of forget that they think in abstract terms and cataloging texts, are interested in verb forms or, or whatever. But when you look at a document, it's actual human beings. This is actually a person writing this.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

At a specific place, at a specific time, in certain historical context. And yeah, I think that's, that's why I like studying this. These are actual humans, not just the golden mask or the tomb or whatever. That's sort of nice. But what I care about are actual humans and how they operated in the world, what they thought about and so on.

[Mark Gagnon]

And I'm so grateful for the Egyptians for writing all this shit down. You know what I mean? There's so many cultures that just are like, oral tradition, let's just talk about it. But the Egyptians are like, no, we're putting pen to paper and we're going to keep all this stuff for so long. But I'm curious, you mentioned before that it was like, largely like Chinese dynasties and Egyptian dynasties that have, like, the best record keeping. Why do the Egyptian records last longer? Is there something about the climate? Is there a way that they preserve them? Is it because it's been, you know, constantly occupied by different people groups? Why do those records persist?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Well, why they're preserved is because papyrus, it turns out, is really hardy. Think of it like the outer wrappings of a cigar. I mean, it's really hardy writing material. And Egypt generally is pretty dry climate, so unless they're destroyed or so on or get wet, they. They survive in large numbers. Having said that, though, what would you guess would be the percentage written versus what survives? Now, I'm asking you a question now.

[Mark Gagnon]

But I feel like you've, you've primed me, so I'm going to go lower. My initial guess, if we just started this, I'd probably be like 25%. But now based off the context clues, I'm going to go 2% survived.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. Way less than that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Less than 2% point.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, much less. Much less. Way under 1%.

[Mark Gagnon]

And how can you say that confidently?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Well, if you look at, you can sort of. We know what, what, we have pretty well cataloged stuff is still coming out of the ground every day practically. But we have a rough idea of what survives when and where, and we have rough ideas of population. We have Rough ideas, especially in later periods, the number of people who were scribes. So you can sort of calculate in my period that I specialize in the Ptolemies, we actually have bureaucratic correspondence, like one letter surviving in a series of 80 letters or documents. And it says, like, send this letter to that guy. Send that copy over there so we can reconstruct. My God, there's like 80 plus letters that this one petition generated. And we have one letter. And so you get. You can build a picture of in the later periods. We have more stuff that survives in the Old Kingdom. Not a lot of written outside of tombs. Stuff on paper, on papyrus survives. So you can sort of ballpark what literacy rates were. You can ballpark what survives, which is an important thing to think about if you're writing history with the stuff that survives. You know, are we right about this? What happens if only the weird stuff survives?

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And the normal stuff doesn't survive? Oh, gosh, how do we. How do we know?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yo, that's a good point.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And, and we have to ask ourselves that when we're studying this stuff. Like, is this typical? Is this weird?

[Mark Gagnon]

For starters, like, if the whole Internet gets wiped out except for the weird people 2000 years from now might look at us and be like, yo, Americans, freaks.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Anyway.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, that's for sure. But if it's just only porn, they're just like, what is wrong with these people? These people are. They created a whole porn machine. And it's like, I did other stuff too. It also does porn.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, look, I mean, the letters in the Metropolitan Museum that we started talking about, I.e. middle Bronze Age, we have nothing like that from Egypt or anywhere else. Like a picture of how a household operates in detail until the Ptolemaic period, until like 250, we start getting lots of evidence. 250 BC or so. So there's nothing in between. It's like one person, three letters. There's nothing on either side of that for, well, infinity before, pretty much. And until a couple thousand years later now, do we just get lucky and. And have the only letters written from the one guy who is concerned about his family? I mean, it stands in isolation like that. Or do you have to say, well, this is probably typical. This is probably a typical household. The household size and how it operates and a father riding home. Maybe this is like, normal. Maybe everyone's doing this, or lots of people. It's important to think about that sort of.

[Mark Gagnon]

If people 5,000 years from now could infer that everyone today gets five emails a day. And they only have digital records of, you know, like a thousand emails. They can infer, oh, we only have 1% of the emails that are sent. This is kind of like analog for back then.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. I mean, mean, even if. Even if our electronic stuff survives at all, because now we're fully dependent on.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

On. On the. On the cloud for everything to survive. So.

[Mark Gagnon]

Interesting. So how many records do we have from this old kingdom going all the way back 5000 BC?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It depends. The records meaning everything. Hieroglyphic stuff in tombs and papyrus records.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. And more or less what I see in media and things like that. Like, do they have hieroglyphs then? Okay, so 5000 B.C. you still.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, 5000. So writing only starts with civilization around 3000 B.C. or so, 3100. Before then, we don't have writing.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

We know there are people there. We have archeology for a long time. But writing was a specific technology that was.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that includes hieroglyphs and petroglyphs.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Petroglyphs. There probably is some earlier rock. Rock inscriptions out in the deserts.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. And there's plenty of drawings. And the stuff in the Sahara is fascinating. When the Sahara was a savannah before it dries out, all these famous rock drawings, they're really interesting. A lot of people living out there. In 8,000 B.C. it was flourishing.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And there's a historical memory of that in. In ancient Egypt even.

[Mark Gagnon]

Really?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the cattle culture is coming out of these. These herders were living, flourishing in the. What's now the Sahara. It was a savannah in 8,000 BC and slowly dried out and people went to permanent water, which was the Nile. And that's one of the genesis of ancient Egypt.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

As people coming in. So there's a. There's a desert culture. There's still oases out there. There's still some historical memory, I think, of that culture that's important in ancient Egypt.

[Mark Gagnon]

Didn't they find ships, like, near the Sahara, like boats and things like that?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

There are boats in pyramid tombs of the old kingdom, for example. Why boats? Because that was the main transportation in Egypt as riverboats along the Nile. And their conception of the afterlife was you travel around in a boat. Basically, it's the main transportation. So we have some of those ships at Giza in the pyramids. Nothing in the Sahara, as far as I know.

[Mark Gagnon]

Got it. Okay. And so that's the old kingdom. You start getting writing around like 3000 BC.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

That's right.

[Mark Gagnon]

And what does this writing look like in the documents that you've looked at, are they just as innocuous as these little letters from a farmer?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. Well, the first writing we have are basically names. They're kind of jar labels and things. So it's around property and specifically the king and some obscure ceremonies. It looks like in early, early tombs of people that look like they resembled something like kings in 3000 BC on the Nile River Valley. So it was all very specialized kind of technology for kings, for kingship, for claiming property rights around certain things. And it gradually expands over many centuries for rituals, for tombs, tomb biographies, eventually in the Old Kingdom letters. We have letters that survive from the Old Kingdom. We have an amazing document found out on the Red Sea coast, which is really remarkable also with boats, because in the Old Kingdom, they were going out that far for pyramid building, bringing stone back and so on, and going to get copper in the Sinai. So the French found a few years ago a whole kind of a cave site with disassembled boats. They were bringing these boats from the Nile Valley out to the Red Sea overland and assembling them out there. And among that stuff was found this huge papyrus text in kind of cursive Old Kingdom hieroglyphic writing. And it's kind of a day book of what we call the vizier, the chief of the head of state, for the king who's going around inspecting everything out to the Red Sea, back to the Nauvoor Valley, all over the place. And we didn't know about this before. It's really a fascinating document.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And quite detailed about what the head of state is supposed to be doing. Mainly taking care of the king and his burial, it seems to be. But that's. We've learned so much in the last couple years about how the Old Kingdom actually worked. You know, the pyramids are obvious. You see them there they are. But how they were built and what kind of work was required to do that. The administrative capacity of this early state to pull that off is pretty impressive. And we only sort of guessed at it before, but now we have this amazing document that tells us details about a specific person going around making it happen.

[Mark Gagnon]

Were they building pyramids basically from the start, like around 4,000 3,500 B.C. when are the earliest pyramid records that we have? Obviously, Giza is the main one that we're familiar with.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. So the first actual pyramid is the step pyramid at Saqqara, it's called, which is Dynasty 3, the ruling dynasty before the Giza pyramids were built. And that was built like similar things from 3000 BC to 2500 or so. A sort of a bench tomb they're called, where elites and early kings had these tombs. They were kind of built up a little bit, but they looked like a bench. Nothing fancy. The Step Pyramid is. Is weird because it has this kind of bench tomb in it. And then on top of it, they started building steps like. Like a kind of a. Not a true pyramid yet, but they're heading in that direction for whatever reason. And it's, you know, we know that the architect of the Step Pyramid by name Imhotep, was one of the great geniuses of Egyptian history. Was idolized as a semi divine being even in the Ptolemaic period. So his name lives on because he's this great architectural genius. It's like Galileo or da Vinci or something from the old kingdom who built this thing.

[Mark Gagnon]

Why, what was his name?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Imhotep.

[Mark Gagnon]

Imhotep, yeah. Okay, I gotta remember that.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, no, he's really interesting character and he becomes a semi divine being as a result. If you want in with the king, by the way, always in Egypt, be his architect, because you're. You're making him immortal. That's the important thing. So the architect probably did everything else too. But the king's builder was the place to be in really important position.

[Mark Gagnon]

He kind of kicked off the whole pyramid fad, it seems.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So for whatever reason, we have this thing inside that's a normal tomb from earlier. And then it probably. Maybe the king wasn't about ready to die. So they said, well, let's just keep going. Let's see what we can do here. Let's build another step. Oh, we still have time. Let's keep going. We don't actually know what that development was, but we know that's the first pyramid in Egypt is this thing. And we can see the original tomb inside. You can look at photographs and see this outline of a normal tomb.

[Mark Gagnon]

Normal tombs in the Old Kingdom that you can compare to this and say this is the same thing, except this one's got some steps on it.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, this is the pyramid. It's pretty big. It's a pretty big building. And it has a huge wall around it, mostly restored, but some of it's still there. You can see. So it's a whole complex with a big wall around it and all sorts of temples in it. It's a whole ritual complex. The thing is a time machine, actually, the Step Pyramid complex. It is a machine designed to make the king live forever through rituals. He's seen running around this courtyard there's certain rituals kings had to do. It looks like earlier the tradition was, we get a certain age and, sorry, you got to go, we need a new king. It's an age thing.

[Mark Gagnon]

Do you know how old that was?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I can't remember if we know specifically what the age was, but it looks like that was a serious worry early on, that you have to be a strong, virile king, otherwise you're going to get replaced or more likely bumped off anyway.

[Mark Gagnon]

We should have that in America. I agree. You hit a certain age, it's like, all right, guys, come on, come on.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Egyptians, being clever, though, came up with a ritual that goes all the way through Egyptian history called. It's the. The Jubilee Renewal Festival. So the king goes through these magic rituals, hidden, connecting to the gods, and you get renewed and you emerge like this ageless, being sort of still vero. So they figured out how not to be bumped off by having this nice ceremony. Clever. Yeah. No, these guys were thinking, look how young I am. Look, I got restored. I just had my renewal festival. And that step pyramid complex is wholly preserved thing to do just that in front of all the gods of Egypt and the king. One of the things was going around, like doing a race around these two obstacles in a courtyard. Probably wasn't time because they didn't have watches, but it was. There's something like that where you could prove that you're still virile.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And this thing was meant to last, and it's still around. It was meant to last forever. It's like a perpetual time machine for this one king.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's pretty extraordinary.

[Mark Gagnon]

And when was this discovered? Or was it kind of always known?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, it was. It never was fully hidden, so it was always sort of there. It's very famous. French archaeologists in the 50s and 60s kind of restored it and mapped it out and published it fully. That's an extraordinary thing to see.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And this is a huge cemetery at Saqqara. That's a cemetery all the way through the Roman period. So this is like one of. It's like a national cemetery, like in D.C. or something. This is a national cemetery for kings, but also for elites. Everyone wants to be buried there next to one of these great kings, next to these monuments. And it was a place of pilgrimage even in the Ptolemaic and the Roman periods. You'd kind of come there and Imhotep was one of the guys you'd want to visit because he's all genius. I mean, he's like a famous genius in Egyptian History. He lived all the way through Egyptian history and memory as this guy who went from like a normal tomb to let's design this step pyramid thing.

[Mark Gagnon]

I wonder if it was just like a, like a competition with the former king where he had his tomb built before he died. And it looked like the other kings tomb. And he was like, nah, that. Fuck that guy. Let's have a bigger one. Because how else do you build a bigger thing? You're like, the easiest way to build a bigger thing is to stack things in sort of a. A triangular shape.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Exactly, exactly. The pyramid is. It's not that special. It's one of the most natural landforms on earth, is like a mound. Right. So that's. That makes sense to go. To go from that to something else. Yeah, but it requires a lot of organizational capacity and figuring out like, how do you, how do you build something? And we don't have information, which is why there's all this speculation about how the pyramids were built. But I had, I had a site, a construction engineer at one point when I was at Stanford who was interested in pyramids. And he wrote out for me.

[Mark Gagnon]

A.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Timing, like a schedule of the building, a pyramid schedule. This is what a construction engineer would lay out like stone at a certain time of year. And you need X, Y and Z all delivered in certain moments, in certain years or whatever. It's this really complex document he came up with. This is how construction engineers have to work. And we have nothing like that from the old kingdom. But they must have done that because you can't have 20,000 men running around doing all these things and quarrying 50 or 60 miles away, bringing stone by boats and lifting the stone up and designing the size. It's extraordinarily complex. And they must have written it out like this construction editor did for me. But we don't have.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's peculiar to me. I mean, again, I know we have less than 1% of the records that have persisted, but it just seems so peculiar that you go from, you know, these little like step tombs, right, like these kind of ziggurat type things to then Giza. And there's so much mystery about how it happens. You know, these people that were taking such good records, you would, you would presume that it would be inscribed somewhere. Is there any ancient, you know, hieroglyphs or anything that would lead us to believe like, oh, this was built in this sort of fashion?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, I mean that text I mentioned from the old kingdom at the time of the Great Pyramid being built, that gives Us a lot of hints, particularly on the not very sexy topic of logistics and how somebody managed people and materials. That is there, and that's really clear in that text. What we also have are a lot of pyramids. So before the Great Pyramid, before the Giza pyramids were built, we have three pyramids by this one king who preceded Cheops, and one of them is called the Bent Pyramid because it starts off with one angle and then it gets shallower toward the top. There's a collapse pyramid. Whether it really collapsed or not. There's a lot of speculation, but there's. It looks like there's experimentation early on in Dynasty 4, the dynasty of the all the Great Pyramid building, to kind of get the. The angle correct, because that's kind of tricky to calculate, and if you don't get it right, then it'll. It could collapse on itself under its own weight or. Or so. So. But they built this entire built bent pyramid. But it's still there.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, I've seen pictures of that one.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

But I have a feeling the king said, no, that's not quite right after melting.

[Mark Gagnon]

Bro. What is that?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

What is. It's like a funny angle all of a sudden. What the.

[Mark Gagnon]

No, I can't be buried in there.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Can you imagine?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, I'd be pissed. Was anyone buried in the Bent Pyramid?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Not that I don't think so.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, because we know the king and he built three pyramids and he. They finally got the. You know, this. I think it's called the Red Pyramid. I think is his final one. That. That one looks pretty good.

[Mark Gagnon]

He got a different contractor.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, something. Yeah, something. But not. Would not want to be the guy in charge. Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, yeah. I can't imagine that ended well for him. You have a bent Pyramid. I mean, get out of here.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No. Yeah, that's a bad reputation to have for, like, eternity.

[Mark Gagnon]

I'm. I'm shocked that they kept it up. Like, I figured they would have been like, I mean, we got these bricks already here. Let's just redo it, you know, Like. Like, I figured they would like, scrap it or something if it wasn't exactly how they wanted.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Well, maybe he disliked employing a lot of people to build pyramids. I keep going. Okay, next, let's do another one at a different angle. There's some mystery here about that. It does. I think most scholars think it's kind of an age of experimentation until the. The Great Pyramid, which is like, solid and like, really good. And, you know, we missed some of the experimentation, some of the failures, probably along the way.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, they might have scrapped some or built on top of them or who knows?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So the Bent Pyramid and the Step pyramid, Zakara, where are these pieces of stone coming from? Are they being shipped in?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, mostly local, I think in that area west of the. The river and Giza, we know that the Tura quarries outside of Cairo, the other direction was the main one for the, for the limestone, for the really nice stone, the outer casings of the. The stone in particular. But there's also local quarries nearby, which is one reason they're located where they are. I think there's local stone there, which, which helps.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, in like Saqqara and near the Ben Pyramid.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And the, the really fin at is in the Mukatan Hills, east of Cairo. A little bit. Quite a long way that they're transporting, but we know for sure that's where they're. It's coming from. So quite a lot of effort.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then what about obelisks? When do they start making the obelisk?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Oh, man. Boy, now you're quizzing me. Certainly New Kingdom. I don't know anything. Yeah, I think so. There's some speculation that Middle Kingdom. There's maybe that's there, but. But the famous ones, including the one in Central park, is New Kingdom military first.

[Mark Gagnon]

We'll get to those later.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Oh, my God. Okay.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's crazy. Those. In my mind, I'm like, no, obelisks and pyramids are doing them at the same time, but I guess not.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, no. Although they're depicted earlier. So we have images of things that look like obelisk sun rays. That's the basic concept. They go pretty far back. But in terms of the actual obelisk. I'm sorry, obelisk? Yeah, I mean, those are probably the most extraordinary feat of engineering from ancient Egypt. So much so that the Romans stole. Stole him and brought him to Rome.

[Mark Gagnon]

You think that the obelisk is more impressive than the pyramids?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I totally do.

[Mark Gagnon]

In what way?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, it's a single piece of granite for. For one thing. So go quarry that we know. We know the, the quarries in Aswan where red granite comes from, and there's one still sitting in the ground with a big crack in it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So again, the guy in charge of that project.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's a tough day.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Done. Yeah, no, he's, he's, he's heading south.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, yeah?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, no, no longer with us. Oh, dude, could you imagine after all that, I mean, years of. Yeah, that is not hard to. To. To excavate. To lift, to transport up, you know, downriver, up to Cairo or Alexandria later. Really heavy. And then to. To prop it up on a base which is perfectly level because, you know, if it's not, you know, it's just not going to stand. You know, we know something about how they did that with big mounds and then they get rid of the dirt, the sand, but hopefully it's going to be nice and level. I think it's a pretty extraordinary freedom engineering.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. It is pretty crazy, actually, when you think about it, because the pyramids is just, like, logistical. It's oppressive logistically. Right. It's like, again, we can discuss manpower and the man, but it's just, you get enough people around, you can lift some stones and move them around. But the obelisk is like, okay, we're going to cut this thing out. One singular piece. Get it down the river on what, just a bunch of rafts or something?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah. On boat, for sure.

[Mark Gagnon]

Just hundreds of boats just all the way around. Does limestone float?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, well, this is granite.

[Mark Gagnon]

Sorry, Granite?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. The obelisks are particular. I don't think so. There must have been ships that are transporting these things. But even getting it from the Aswan quarry out to the river, I mean, it's not given the technology of the Bronze Age, let alone coring, like excavating hard granite with the tools they had, which is basically bronze.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And some harder stone. But the sheer raw power.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, dude.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

To do that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Couldn't imagine cracking that thing.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No.

[Mark Gagnon]

I'd feel so bad.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Go to Central park and have a look at that obelisk behind the Metropolitan Museum. Yeah. You know. Impressive.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. The one that's still in the Red Quarry. That one, I think, was the tallest one that's been discovered. But it never actually got erected, right?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, no, it's still the. It's not complete. It just looks like a crack developed in the stone, man.

[Mark Gagnon]

But I think it's taller than, like, the Statue of Liberty or something. It's like.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's insanely tall. It's big. I don't know the relative heights, to be honest, but.

[Mark Gagnon]

And what, they get ropes and just pull on the shit and just lift it up?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, I guess so.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, just absurd.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, I think so.

[Mark Gagnon]

You gotta have someone on the other side because if it tips over, you got to pull it back.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's incredible. And I think, you know, a lot of the. That kind of art we have lost from. I mean, we can do it now. I mean, but we. We don't know exactly how The Egyptians did it. We have depictions of them hauling really big statues of stone, a solid piece of stone again with these wood sleds. They're lubricated by water probably, maybe some, maybe grease. But there are just lots of men hauling on wood sleds. These large pie of stone.

[Mark Gagnon]

What did the oblos like? Do you know what it meant to them?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Sunlight. I think. Divine. It meant power as well. It's symbolic of the divine. They're, they're sitting in front of temple gates, usually two of them with colorful flags, which is Egyptian temples were very brightly painted, very colorful, very festive places. And nabilis were sitting in front of temples. Kind of symbolic of the divine inside. I guess. So yeah, it's sort of like a lot of Egyptian architecture. It's organic or natural material that it's representing, but it's in stone. The origin of the column is ancient.

[Mark Gagnon]

Egyptian, even like the Ionic and Yeah.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

The Greeks got the idea from ancient Egypt from thousands of years earlier. And we have a whole history of columns at the Step Pyramid complex is one of the first examples of just two dimensional columns kind of carved out. So not fully in the round yet, but you can see experimentation over a lot of, a lot of time. But these are reed bundles that are sort of collected together. So it's a natural, it's supposed to be kind of a garden, the Garden of Eden, the garden of creation that these things represent. And the Greeks took it over completely and developed it a little bit. But the column, the idea of a column comes from ancient Egypt.

[Mark Gagnon]

The idea of these reed bundles, like literally like sticks put together to create like sort of like a little cylinder. Wow. And then they etch it out of stone sort of figuratively. And then that slowly evolves into the column that we see in Greece.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

That is fascinating.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Do you know why America has co opted the obelisk in such a profound way? I mean it's on the money. It's in Washington D.C. the Washington Monument is a big obelisk.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Oh yeah. Well, I mean, I guess the argument is that some of the founding fathers were members of this secret society.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is it the Freemason thing? Yeah, like the Freemasons were just obsessed with the argument.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure obsessed, but there is some Egyptian imagery which is sort of, you know, it's exotic, it's like hidden, the hidden knowledge from the past kind of idea. I think. I don't know too much about freemasonry, but I think that's the basic idea. And there's Egyptian. There's Egyptian symbolism. Think Mozart's Magic Flute also, which is representative of, to some extent, freemasonry in the 18. What this great opera. I'm a big Mozart opera fan, and one of his operas is the Magic Flute, which is this initiation ritual that's depicted with a lot of Egyptian imagery in it. And so that's late 18th century, same time as the Founding Fathers. It was very popular then to. It's kind of general wisdom, seeking wisdom and friendship and so on. It's very noble thoughts. And some of it goes back to ancient Egypt. So this original wisdom comes from Egypt.

[Mark Gagnon]

I see. So there's sort of like this aristocrat, democratic romanticization of this hidden occult knowledge that people are, you know, finding in this new place called Egypt. And, you know, I'm sure at the time you had people that were going and finding artifacts, bringing them back to England and to Paris, where I'm assuming the Founding Fathers probably saw it and they were like, oh, this is a part of, you know, this little society that we're in. And it represents something that's, you know, hidden and secretive, but very not.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Not well known, like secret knowledge, but also kind of deep time. This idea goes pretty far back, late 18th century. We didn't know much about ancient Egypt other than the classical authors like Herodotus, who writes a lot about Egypt. But Egypt directly. Hieroglyphs were not understood in the 18th century yet. So it is this idea, I think, that there's kind of wisdom back far into these early civilizations that we are somehow heirs to.

[Mark Gagnon]

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[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Okay, Back to the pyramids.

[Mark Gagnon]

Back to the pyramids again. This is 3,000. 3,000. Is that classical or is that old? Or is that right in the little brackish window?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

3000 B.C. no. So that's the origin of Egyptian civilization. The first organized state is around 3,000. But would that be 100?

[Mark Gagnon]

Middle Kingdom?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, no. That is even before the Old Kingdom. Old Kingdom formerly begins with around the step pyramid.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, got it. Okay.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So civilization gets going around 3000, 3100 BC where we think there are kings who are controlling extensive parts of the Nile River Valley. That takes a few hundred years. We forget how time actually goes because looking back on ancient history, we tend to compress time. That's just the nature of looking back at the past rather than we're living real time by the second.

[Mark Gagnon]

I see.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

For example. But when we look back 3000 or 5000 years ago. Wow. It happened around 3000 BC but it could be 2700 BC. Ish. But that's several hundred years, right? Yeah. Social process that we haven't. We don't know.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. We basically scope of American history and turned into a rounding error.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Pretty much. Yeah. It's like connecting two dots over 500 years and that's what happened. But imagine American history over 500 years.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Lots of details and we don't have them. So we tend to compress observations we have into some sort of story. Probability of it being accurate is close to zero. Probably we want to know, but we don't.

[Mark Gagnon]

Interesting.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So it must have taken several hundred years to get institutions, to get practices in place to get enough people trained up in writing, whatever you need to record. I think it's really cool stuff to think about. I think just like building Pyramids and. And this experimentation over several hundred years probably to kind of figure out how to do this. And then they go away. Replaced by building bigger temples. But there's a whole experience there and probably experimentation, probably failure, disasters. People losing their lives because they completely fucked up some building project.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. People losing their lives. Probably work site accident, like, oops, a giant block fell on.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Xerxes over there. Now he's out of here, you know. That's too bad.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. Well, we even have some stories, even from the middle kingdom of this famous one that has some hints of the Atlantis myth in it. Okay, here we go. Yeah, there we go.

[Mark Gagnon]

Come on, Joe. Here we go.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Here we. Now we get to the real stuff.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now we're talking.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

There's. It's called this. The tale of the shipwreck sailor. These guys were on some expedition, I think, for a king out in the Red Sea. They get caught in a storm, they get shipwrecked on this island. There's a monstrous snake on the island who tells stories and so on. It's really interesting. And then the island sinks into the Red Sea, never to be seen again. That seems to be some hint that classical authors like Plato pick up as the Atlantis myth. Maybe I like that idea. But these guys are freaked out because they fucked up. They're on a royal mission and now they're shipwrecked and they actually don't want to get back to Egypt because they know they're going to die. They're going to be not living good lives anymore.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, I mean, yeah. That's sketchy business working for the king.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's good and bad. It's good and bad. It can be really good if you do it right. It's a risk. Same with taking risks on the Nile. The kings make this game also that we control the environment, we control nature. We're the king. We have the bat phone to the gods. We guarantee prosperity in Egypt. We protect the country, but we also guarantee its economic prosperity. Because the Nile is going to flood really well every year and everyone's going to be happy. The problem is in bad years also, the king gets blamed as, hey, dude, Nile. The Nile didn't flood.

[Mark Gagnon]

Talk to Ra.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

You're going to. Well, yeah. See you later. We need a new king, obviously.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, really? They'll oust the king?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, they do. I think for specific reasons. Now it's a pretty good game to play because we know roughly 70% of years in Egypt, pretty good flood, floods, you know, Good enough. Floods 70% of the time. So the odds are in your favor, but there's 30% of the time when you're taking some risk that, oh, well, okay, we had bad year, you know, my bad, but we'll recover. But two or three years of no flood now, now we need a new king. We got a bad king because clearly the gods don't like this king because look, look at this environment we're living in.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's not so different from today, though. Yeah, we have two years of economic recession, no matter who's the president, and people are like, yo, we gotta get this guy outta here. I mean, Grant, it's a little different because we have monetary policy and things like that, but still, sometimes it's probably a little random, you know what I mean?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I think it's random. I think it's on us. But also the president's claim kind of look at the market as if they're controlling the stock market. No, they're not.

[Mark Gagnon]

But it's the same thing with these pharaohs. They're like, look at the harvest, as if they're controlling the Nile, which they're not.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, that's the political game of legitimacy. It goes pretty far back. That's one of the cool stories about how Egypt works. You need this and you need priesthoods who are writing these grand texts on temples eventually and propping up kings. We love you, king. And king's giving us all these cool tax breaks and so on.

[Mark Gagnon]

But you could afford to give tax breaks when you have 30 years of amazing harvest. Right? Is that fair to say? Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

But also, your priesthoods are getting a lot of special deals. They're allowed to have their own industries and operate as they like in their local area. Just guarantee certain revenue for the king, basically. And it's very much a quid pro quo. I, king, am very pious. I support the gods, I. E. You guys, the priesthoods. And I'm kind of a ritualist in every temple. Anyway, that's how this system works. From gods to the king, king to the temples, temples to the people. And priesthoods get a lot of benefits from that. And they prop up these good kings, but when shit hits the fan, there's a lot more farmers, it turns out, than there are priesthood types.

[Mark Gagnon]

At what period in Egyptian history do we have the most sort of fleshed out record of what the political hierarchy looks like?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Ptolemaic and Roman periods are by far the best documented periods for Egyptian history.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay, and so what does that look like? Do you still have pharaohs at that time or. Pharaohs are old kingdom no, no, Pharaohs.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Are all the way through. Well, kings are all the way through. They're not really called pharaoh until the new kingdom, actually. But even though there's kingship, they're not actually, you know, it isn't actually a title, I think, but they're still kings all the way through. The Ptolemies are the last ones. They actually claim to be heirs of Egyptian pharaoh. That's their game. The Roman emperors. Don't they make a hard break, the Ptolemies. One reason maybe they're successful is, hey, guys, we're just like the old kings. You've had foreigners here before. Egyptians don't care if a foreigner is running Egypt. They care about how it's run. Like, run it. Like we expect a pharaoh to run the country. We don't care if you're from somewhere else. There is an ethnic component. Unnecessarily, there's probably tensions, but there isn't a requirement or anything. There's plenty of foreigners who are pharaohs in Egypt.

[Mark Gagnon]

And so how did that happen? Alexander the Great came through and basically conquered Egypt, more or less, and then put in his people and his generals to run it?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, basically. I mean, the texts, if we believe them, tell us that Alexander and his army were welcomed into Egypt because the Persians, who had run Egypt as a province before were not well liked. And probably because the last decade or two of Persian rule, they were kind of turning the screw against the temples and the priesthoods a little bit too much on economic matters. And the priesthoods don't like that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Got it.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And then Alexander comes, and Alexander, being a really smart person, said, hey, we'll cut you a deal. We're going to run Egypt like good kings. You guys can have your temples and your rituals and all your land, et cetera, and your local areas. It's all good. Just, we want a bit of the revenue. It's pretty clever. It's pretty clever. It's exactly, I think, like a corporate takeover these days. If you're, you know, if you're a blackrock or somebody and you're buying a company, a famous company with a brand, you are not going to say, okay, we're changing everything about the brand now. You're going to say, say, keep that going as that brand. We wanted to make it bigger.

[Mark Gagnon]

So this is basically just like a modern, just merger and acquisition.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's a corporate takeover.

[Mark Gagnon]

They came in, they bought it from the Persians and they're like, hey, we'll take it from here. You guys are mismanaging this whole operation.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then they came in and they were like, yo, let's just run it the way the Egyptians, like, you know, yeah, make it easy, make more money that way.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yep, exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, exactly. Now it took time to get going. They run it in Greek. But the people actually running Egypt always are the scribes at the local level.

[Mark Gagnon]

What do you mean?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So Egypt, we think of it as a highly centralized place, but it's not so centralizable really. It's all local agricultural production place by place for various technical reasons of how the flood is controlled and so on. So it's the local level. The farms locally are the really important things thing. If you're the king sitting in your palace in Memphis or somewhere in the Delta or in Alexandria later with the Ptolemies, you don't actually know what's going on in Thebes.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, it's so far away.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's really far away. So you either have to go there or send a trusted person to go there, or rely on the scribes counting the beans literally there saying, oh, the crops are looking good this year. We expect X amount of taxes from this area this year year. And they did that. They report things up to a middle level guy who reports things up to the Capitol. That requires really accurate information, like trustworthy or you're gonna have, you have no idea what's, what's going on.

[Mark Gagnon]

What do you think is more likely to have happened?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I, I think they don't have much idea. There were Ptolemies were so concerned about this problem that they had a new kind of scribe called a checking scribe. And the checking scribe would literally check on the local scribe to make sure he's reporting accurate information. So they kind of added to the bureaucracy to make sure, to try to make sure there's loyal reporting. But it's a system. Early bureaucracies are tricky. We tend to think of like a modern bureaucracy and look at how bureaucratic and successful autonomies were. They had this huge bureaucracy, but it isn't necessarily efficient or accurate. Bureaucracies just demand some information flowing, not necessarily accurate information. So I think it's more likely that they don't have much of an idea. In fact, we have a village scribe responsible for about 10,000 acres of land around his town. In this one place of Egypt. It's big enough, it's about 6,000 acres. 10,000 Egyptian Aurora, it's called 6,600 acres. In the town we know every, every ounce of plant life grown in the land for about 10 year period or so. It's A really amazing archive of stuff. But if you look at the records, like year by year, the figures look suspiciously similar year by year. So not to be too cynical that I think, okay, this guy's just reporting numbers up because he's required to report certain numbers up to the capitol. So the chief, the big bureau, who's counting all the beans in the capital, saying, okay, this is the expected harvest throughout Egypt this year. Now we can spend X, Y and Z because that's your budget, is what you're collecting in agriculture and other kind of taxes, trade and so on. But you can sort of calculate. What do you expect?

[Mark Gagnon]

That's a lot of power for the scribes.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Huge amount.

[Mark Gagnon]

Are they corruptible?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Huge, yeah, probably corruptible. And, you know, that may be a modern term. I think it's just how life worked.

[Mark Gagnon]

But if you're a place in pre.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Modern Egypt, if you're a farmer and.

[Mark Gagnon]

You'Re not having a good harvest for whatever reason, I wonder if there is a psychological feeling of like, oh, the gods are not looking good upon me and therefore I might be punished because I'm not pulling my end of the deal to supply my village with the food. Da, da, da. Especially if you're monocropping or you have these cash crops, probably in the Ptolemaric period, you probably have that more often. So I wonder if you can go to the scribe, be like, hey, bro, let me break you off something and report that I have a good harvest here and then next year I'll make it up to you and everything will be cool. In my mind, that's what would happen because I don't think these humans are that different than humans today. Is that accurate?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, probably. It's hard to trace that in the actual record that we have. But you would think, human nature being what it is, and you're going to be loyal to your friends and your family, not to some king in the capital.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, the scribe is your boy. He's from the town that you're from. You guys know each other's families.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

What's interesting about that exact point, Mark, is that when the Romans come in and take over this operation, they require that, like, the regional officials cannot come from the area they grew up in. They have to be an administrator somewhere else in each other.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, they intentionally try to break up this cronyism or this kind of patronage system where people are sort of friends with each other.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, so the Romans are operating a little bit differently. The Ptolemies are kind of ancient Egyptian in their style. We're just taking this over as is. We're going to try to stay on top of it in management with the expectations, but the power is really with the priesthoods and the local scribes. That's my view of things. The normal view is the Ptolemies were this a colonial state, highly centralized, and these Ptolemies are like fiercely running everything. But yeah, I have a different view of the real world and Ptolemaic Egypt, wow. Much more dependent.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean even records that we get today from a little voting district or some type of record keeping, even now things kind of get a little hairy. So I'm imagining back in Ptolemaic Egypt, I'm sure is even more so.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I think so. I like this insight about looking at human behavior. If I get a letter now, I'm going to be in trouble. If I get a letter from an administrator at Yale. Hypothetically, hypothetically, you must do X, Y and Z. Or please reporting this, okay, in the recycling bin. Maybe I might do it, I might not. I mean, it depends on what it is. But if some academic 2000 years from now found that letter from a dean saying this, look how horrible this administration was. Or demanding all these things as if that actually happened. No, it doesn't mean it happened. When you have an administrative letter that says top down, these commands, it's just kind of like an ideology of management, top down.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's a function of a formality that may or may not have been followed.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

And who's to say that didn't happen back then?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's hard to imagine it didn't happen right back then.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I'm a farmer back then, they're like, oh, you got to do this, this and this. I'd be like, or else what? Like, you know, I mean, they don't have any, like any real ability to exert control all the way from Memphis, you know what I mean? Like I live, you know, however many miles away. They gotta send someone all the way out here to punish me and be like, hey, it's all, it's fine.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, it's all, it's all local relationships. It's all who you know in your area and, and how that operates. Much more than the demands from.

[Mark Gagnon]

What can you tell me about the casual life of a commoner in Ptolemaic Egypt?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

A commoner. So the everyday illiterate farmer. Not a heck of a lot. I think we can make some good guesses of what life was like, the annual rhythm of a household and so on. But we do have Middle level people. We have a lot of family archives of soldiers from the Ptolemaic period, from the Nile Valley, Greeks from various places, some of them born in Egypt, but from Greek ancestry. They tell us that married to Egyptian women. And we have quite a lot of information about what that household was like. Loans, leases, marriage contracts, sometimes over a hundred years or more. So it's sort of like these letters in the Metropolitan Museum. That's one moment in time. But in some cases in the later periods, we have a century and more of a family and some idea of what their businesses were like, what their worries were like.

[Mark Gagnon]

Did the intercultural marriages create any family strife? Do we have any record of that?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

We have the records of property disputes quite a lot. For example, that's what they cared about is property and passing it on. A lot of disputes about that.

[Mark Gagnon]

In what way? What would be their concern with passing on property?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

We have time for this. I've written a lot about this. There's a famous property dispute, a trial. We have a verbatim court record which is extraordinary in the British Museum from a out of the way town in middle of Egypt from the 160s BC at a time of massive Nile flood failure. We know about for various reasons, invasions by the rival Seleucid king Antiochus iv, really bad time. And here we have a trial. A woman brings a lawsuit in the name of her children for the right to claim about 6 acres of land that belonged partly to her husband and partly to his half brother for various reasons. A complex but probably a typical family. A lot of interesting details about this trial. We have the hope legal procedure. It's a text that legal historians don't know about. Unless you work on this particular stuff, which is kind of weird because again, it's hugely important for understanding how things work work in ancient legal systems. Here we have details, a court transcript verbatim of the plaintiff and the defendant in front of judges making arguments, making legal arguments about. It's mine. No, it's, it's, it's mine. I, my father gave it to me. And the woman is claiming it was pledged to her by her husband who had died. Or at least he's not on the scene anymore. We don't know if he's dead. Actually. Actually, do they have lawyers? Well, that's, that's one of the questions. I think that there were, there were professional advocates, lawyers, maybe a modern term, but there are advocates in the background here. Advocates, lawyers in Rome, around the same time, middle second century B.C. interestingly, I think they're in Egypt because of the complexities of the bureaucracy. This is a Ptolemaic period. So they're priests judging this local dispute. But there's a state representative there who maybe understood spoken Egyptian. It's purely legal procedure. It's really detailed. This woman is really insistent. She ends up losing the case with, with very technical black letter law reasons. The judges make this decision, they write out why they're deciding it this way. She's kind of. She cites, she cites a law, law and several other decrees, but she didn't cite the whole law. So the judges say, oh, you cite this law, but you forgot the second part of the law. So it's really technical, which is why I think there's probably professionals there who are telling her, cite this and there's a decree from this year and cite that.

[Mark Gagnon]

But they got.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's extraordinary.

[Mark Gagnon]

She got mismanaged by her legal counsel.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Possibly, possibly. But the end of the text, at the back of this text, she appears on her own in the southern capital, Ptolemais. It's called in southern Egypt the Ptolemaic capital of the Nile River Valley. She's on her own in front of the highest Greek officials in Egypt. Greek official who we know a little while later was in Rome as ambassador for the Ptolemies, doing bargains to keep Egypt independent after this Seleucid king had been kicked out by Rome. Really extraordinary machinations in Mediterranean history. But here he is in southern Egypt hearing a dispute. This woman just appears saying, I lost this case, but damn it, it's my land. She's being really insistent, which is really amazing as an individual human, as a woman on her own, some distance away from her village.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now she's in an appeal process kind.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Of, and we know nothing about the appeals process, but there she is appearing in front of these guys. The highest, highest, most important official in the entire country is sitting there hearing this woman's dispute of a small bit of land in an out of the way town at a time when Egypt had been invaded. There's now river failures. There's a lot of shit happening in the Mediterranean. Rome is bearing down on the eastern Mediterranean. This guy's going to be in Rome as ambassador to the Ptolemaic kings. And he's hearing this trial about nothing really important. It's really amazing.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Actually. And it's a really bitter dispute. We don't know what happens. The text sort of fades off. So we don't know the end of it, but it is amazing. At a time of massive Transformation of Mediterranean history that we had this trial that's well ordered and organized, and she lost for very specific reasons, the judges say. But she says, God damn it, this is my land. I insist that it was given to me. It was pledged to me on behalf of my children. Now, I think she got amazing.

[Mark Gagnon]

I'm gonna choose to believe.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I love that. It's so optimistic. I love. I love to. To think that she definitely got it back. But the personality. Her personality comes through from 2000 plus years ago. This woman was absolutely stubborn and insistent that she. It's her land.

[Mark Gagnon]

And a fiery Arab mother. Like, you're not gonna fucking. You're not gonna take my shit. You know, she's fired up.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

She is very insistent on it, which is amazing.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Again, it's sort of. She's not Cleopatra. But in both cases, these are women who are operating in surprising ways. We think from a modern point of view, how the ancient world works. The world of men.

[Mark Gagnon]

What did gender parity look like in Ptolemaic, Egypt?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Well, legally, women, unlike Greek law, women in Egyptian law had full independence. They could write contracts in their own name. They could bring lawsuits in their own name. They could buy and sell property.

[Mark Gagnon]

They couldn't drive in their own name.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Well, they couldn't. They couldn't drive the ships on the Nile.

[Mark Gagnon]

Neither could men. They can't drive cars. The cars aren't around yet.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

There are no cars.

[Mark Gagnon]

So it's equal.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No, it looks. And divorce law, we know was. We would say it's no fault divorce. Oh, really? Yeah. It looks modern. The marriage arrangements look. Look modern.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, it's. So in some ways, we've taken some steps back.

[Mark Gagnon]

Did they have prenuptial agreements?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Probably. I don't know. We know too much about that. But the marriage contracts we have, they're kind of the upper level of society, these written things. But they probably were written in light of children already or children about to be born. So before that, there was no marriage stone ceremony. You just moved into the household of your husband, probably, and boom, you're married, married. But the woman could say, I'm out of here. And theoretically, she could. I mean, practically, it's not so easy to do. But she was protected also by these written agreements where, okay, I'm bringing in all my stuff, my pans, my jewelry, my nice mirror. It's valued at X amount. And if we divorce, I'm getting all that stuff back, or the money equivalent of it back.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. Wow. So they actually had, like, an appraisal process. They had Someone come in and say this is worth xyz. Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Or it's notional. But we have values and there are lists of. This is what I'm bringing in, certain kind of clothing, cooking utensils, maybe a mirror, whatever valuable stuff. And it's listed, the value is listed. In case of divorce, I get that stuff back. Or the equivalent in money.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's just so fascinating. I just think it's such a good point to drive home that the, you know, the non linear progression of not only technology but also human rights, you know, like, I think it's, I can kind of see that technology is nonlinear. Right. Like the ways that people built the pyramids of Giza or the ways that, you know, they were even doing like banking and things like this. These are like very sophisticated financial technologies that were lost and then people restart and different, different people on the planet are kind of at their own pace and they sort of lose it and get it back. And over the aggregate it's going up, but in the micro it goes down for 100 years and then back up and down and back up and down. And not only is it technological, but also the way that we view humanity and human rights, that women were given a ton of independence and then that got erased and then it probably got reversed and then men were where there was a large patriarchy in the time and then it probably got a little bit more equal and then it gets reversed. It's really fascinating and I think it's important to keep in mind for our own time, this technology that we have could go away and we could restart or lose a 500 year gain that we had and human rights could restart. I mean, it's not a guarantee that all people are going to be of the same mind. And we've seen it in history. It goes away.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Well, no, and we're seeing it even now as we're living through some, some, some ideas that may be retro.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, right.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Let's say. Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's possible that things can get reversed or, or lost. It's not guaranteed.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. Now, what do the records tell us about Cleopatra? Obviously one of the most famous monarchs in Egyptian history, but comes relatively late indeed to the story.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. And almost everything we have, not everything, but almost everything we have is from the Roman point of view. So it's giving us a fairly negative image of her because Octavian, later Augustus, the first Roman emperor, I think was worried about this very influential woman and her hold on Egypt. I think she must have been. It's supposition But I think she must have been brilliant and charismatic and able to influence some pretty serious Roman generals, which from the Roman point of view was she's this immoral temptress and so on. But there's way more to it than that, of course.

[Mark Gagnon]

Interesting.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I think she was a serious operator. I think she's underestimated by quite a lot. Just as a politician, the fact that she comes to the throne on her own, technically so king as a woman, not for the first time in Egypt, but it's extraordinary. She's a young woman facing Rome, facing not great Nile river conditions, we know. So she had a lot working against her and yet she almost pulled it off that she almost created a new Eastern Mediterranean empire. Egypt plus the near east there would have been a serious rival to Rome.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now do the Ptolemaic emperors, do they have an allegiance to Greece in a very direct way or are they sort of operating autonomously?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

They're autonomous culturally. Greek civilization is really important to the Ptolemies. They build a library in Alexandria which they consider to be the new Athens. Egypt is the new cultural center of the Greek world. That was the Ptolemaic play, that's why the library was built. All these famous scholars like Archimedes, some of the greatest human minds ever are working in the Alexandrian library. That is prestige for these kings. This is the new Athens. But they're also playing this game where they're bringing a lot of Egyptian monuments to Alexandria. We now know stuff coming out of the Mediterranean through archaeology. There's all this Egyptian stuff that they're bringing to Alexandria to build it up, up in the words of a colleague in Cambridge who wrote a great review decades ago now about this stuff the Ptolemies are saying early on, when they're building the capital at Alexander, when they're building the library, when they're building the famous lighthouse, they're saying to the world, welcome to Ancient Egypt. Now under Greek management, that's the game they're playing. We want the best of Ancient Egypt. We want the political traditions of Egyptian kingship, we want that relationship with the priesthoods because they have control over local populations and the local land, production and taxing, et cetera, we want all that. We want to prop up Egyptian civilization, make it better, stronger, but it's Greek management and we're now part of a wider Greek speaking world of the Eastern Mediterranean. Wow.

[Mark Gagnon]

I wonder if there's a modern parallel for that. It's not exactly the same, but we could look at like the United Arab Emirates saying Look at Dubai. This is the new Emirates. This is not an old Bedouin pastoralist society. This is a metropolis that we've built and this is our new sort of introduction to the world. I wonder if it had that same effect where you have sort of like again, it's not co opted so to say. I don't know if there is necessarily a metaphor that.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, I don't know that parallels.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I can't think of the top of my head, but that's, that's interesting. Same. Yeah. With the Gulf states, same with Singapore. You know these old, these old trading places that have been trading way posts for a long period of time that urbanized very quickly. Yeah, no, yeah, it's been fortified, it's been, it, it definitely has this image of. This is very modern. This is cutting edge in a lot of things. So it's a destination, it's not just a waypoint for people that are traders.

[Mark Gagnon]

So the lighthouse in Alexandria.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's built under the Ptolemaic rule.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It is, yeah, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And it goes on for a long.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Time from red Aswan granite by the way.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, the same thing as the obelisk.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Exactly. We know that now we have the archaeologist, the French archaeologists that found the door of the lighthouse in the Mediterranean a few years ago. So it's definitely Aswan granite it which is really cool.

[Mark Gagnon]

Where is the door now?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's in Alexandria.

[Mark Gagnon]

They're building museum there.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. Or maybe it's outside. There's a whole outside open air exhibit. Two of the archaeology that the French two rival French teams have been working for a few decades now underwater, which is amazing stuff. So the whole city's been kind of resurrected. It subsided into the Mediterranean, a good part of it including the royal quarters, I think think. And so that's all been archaeologically found now and we have some of the lighthouse and that was, that was a. Again it's kind of an Egyptian thing. It's red Aswan granite. At least the lower parts of it are. And it's really big. It's one of the seven wonders of the world.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

But that's also a. The thing, this kind of urge to the gigantic. Like we're building really big stuff because we can, because we're rich and powerful. But it's also literally a beacon to bring in ships, bring in business. The way the Gulf states are saying we want business here. This is a trading center. That's the economic game. That's Hong Kong, that's Singapore as well. Things trading posts like that but attracting business in Athens did the same thing, by the way, in the 4th century BC after its empire. They were refortifying Athens architecturally, but also in terms of legal institutions. Bring come foreign merchants. We want your business.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

We want to attract business in. So this is the game that a lot of early states are playing.

[Mark Gagnon]

Did they have a navy?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

The Ptolemies did have a navy, because.

[Mark Gagnon]

In order to have, like, successful commercial shipping, you need to have some sort of navy to protect from, you know, pirates and things like that. So they had some type of early navy to protect ships coming in and out of the port of Alexandria.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, no, navies are really important. Pirates are a serious menace in this whole period. We know a lot about pirates the last few centuries BC it goes hand in glove with trade using ships.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, even now, right, you see China commercializing throughout the 60s and 70s and becoming a real manufacturer. They get a navy directly kind of on the front end of their global shipping operation.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, it makes sense. It protects.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, you need it. It's essential. And I mean, the British were able to control commerce all over the world because of their ability to control the straits with their navy. It's so fascinating to see that it doesn't change that much despite all these years.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Even in Ptolemaic, same basic idea.

[Mark Gagnon]

How do they make a lighthouse back then? Is it just fire?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Oh, I guess so, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like reflective mirrors.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Must have something, something reflective on the top of it. You could see it for quite a distance, but it was. Was essentially a flame.

[Mark Gagnon]

And it was up for a while. Right. Do you know how long it was up?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, well, I think it fell into the Mediterranean. There was a massive earthquake, probably a series of them. Late Roman period even. Well, do we know exactly when it fell? Late Roman period, possibly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Got it.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

But massive earthquakes, which is typical Mediterranean anyway.

[Mark Gagnon]

And when did the fire of Alexandria sweep through the library?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Well, that's a whole story about the, the. Who destroyed the, the Alexandrian library.

[Mark Gagnon]

Do you have a theory?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I. Well, the theory I like is the theory of Roger Bagno, who was professor of Columbia, he's now retired, who, who argues so that, you know, there were. There were fires in the Roman period, but not at the library itself. In the warehouses along the Mediterranean. It looked like they were burned, but probably later. But the idea of the destruction of the library is actually modern analysis. What happens to the library is with papyrus manuscripts, they require constant copying for preservation, like an electronic backup or something. But with manuscripts, you have to copy them at certain point to preserve because they Deteriorate through use and through time. And what seems to happen is the copying stopped, the tradition stopped at some point later Roman period, and the tradition just gets sort of. It slowly fades away way. Because things aren't preserved. Rather than something really dramatic happening to the library. I like that story more. I think it's probably more likely there's.

[Mark Gagnon]

No fire in the library.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, not in the library itself, as far as we know.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wait, what?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

This is crazy.

[Mark Gagnon]

I thought the whole point is there's a fire in Alexandria and all these other fires.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I mean, there were. There were. There were. There were battles in Alexandria in the early Roman period. It. It looks like the. The warehouse district was burned, though not the actual library itself.

[Mark Gagnon]

The warehouse district holding, like, holding all.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Kinds of stuff, presumably goods.

[Mark Gagnon]

Good. Okay. Not documents.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And maybe. Well, maybe there may have been pirate scrolls there. Possibly. But, you know, the. The. This explanation of it just sort of fading out over disuse. It's. It's a lot less sexy as an explanation, but I think it's more likely to be the case.

[Mark Gagnon]

Fascinatingly boring.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I know. That's a good way to put it. It is. And though, like, that can't be true. It's not fun, kind of, but it's. It is more. It's. I think it's probably more likely that the. The library. The library goes away because it doesn't get used anymore, and the copying tradition stops there, and things just sort of slowly wither away, fade away.

[Mark Gagnon]

So where does the myth of the fire come from? From?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Well, there's. There. We have Roman descriptions of text, and there's some dispute about what it's referring to. And the debate is, is that the. Is that the main library or is that some storage facility, you know, in the harbor? The harbor districts.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is it possible it's propaganda by the Romans to save face for legalism?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

We didn't actually do that. Oh, yeah, we could speculate till the cows come home and exactly what.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's got to wonder, though, if there's, like, a couple generations of Romans that are in charge of Alexandria. And then, you know, the emperor's like, yo, where's all the documents from Alexandra?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

And they're like, oh, yeah, well, that's it.

[Mark Gagnon]

And they. They go, oh, it was a fire. You know, you didn't hear about the fire 100 years ago. They're like, oh, there's a fire. You know, like, I just. It seems you.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

You want that. You want that story.

[Mark Gagnon]

I just think the negligence of not reporting all the documents and backing things up would just be, you know, it just is such a stupid mistake. Right. Like Archimedes is there just laying down facts so you don't let that go away.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It's one of the. Yeah, one of. Well, one of the great geniuses. Top five geniuses in human history probably. And we have some of his writing that gets in the tradition, but not everything. We've lost quite a bit of that tradition. But again the compression of time is maybe deceptive, but over a few hundred years it's more likely that it just got. It faded away.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now were the papyrus scrolls in Alexandria more susceptible to sort of wilting because of the humidity being near the coast?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

I don't know. I don't. I don't think so. I don't think so. I. I do think that these things do have. Because they're being used all the time. They do have to be copied to get preserved. I think that's a thing we tend to forget and it shows you. It reminds us of the fragility of civilizations and also of knowledge that, you know, how do you preserve it if you just left the papyrus alone forever? Is it going to still be usable or not? No, you have to recopy to preserve these things. It's like backing up an electronic file up on the cloud these days. We assume it's getting backed up by the way but I've never seen a little more mysterious maybe.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. So sorry. Back to Cleopatra.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

You had mentioned that she almost pulled it off.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Quote unquote.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

What does that mean, almost pulled it off? And why did she not?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

This is Cleopatra's dream as I call it and I think other authors say the same thing. I'm not alone. What is Cleopatra doing? What are her aims besides surviving which all kings. That's job one of a king in the pre modern world especially is like staying alive life because it's tough to be stationary as opposed to roaming.

[Mark Gagnon]

She wants to create a Mediterranean empire, a new empire to rival Rome or to rival Athens.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah, more so. I mean Egypt and you know the invasion of Antiochus IV that I mentioned as a context of this lawsuit by this woman in an out of the way. When Antiochus invades Egypt the second time in 168 BC we now know from unpublished sources. But it's clear that he claims Egyptian kingship. He's declared Egyptian kings even by Egyptian scribes. We have legal documents that are dated to his reign in Egyptian. Which means he must be somehow accepted by Egyptian scribes for a short time but enough to start that process, that means that Antiochus had consolidated the entire near east, like the old Persian Empire, the entire Near East, Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean coast, and Egypt, really. That's significant. And we know earlier Ptolemy iii on military campaign against the Seleucids, was at the gates of Babylon about ready to put pay to the seleucid Empire in 245 B.C. we have sources that look pretty certain that that happened. He gets called back to Egypt because of the crisis, probably massive now river failure and pending famine, looming famine over Egypt. And he has to go back and solve that problem. Otherwise he could have controlled the entire near east as well. So there are two moments in the Hellenistic period, we call it, where there could have been this massive empire reestablished. It's kind of Alexander's dream to consolidate the Persian empire through conquest the entire near east and Egypt and North Africa and Greece all united. And Cleopatra, I think, is intending the same sort of thing to consolidate political power in the near east and in Egypt and is on the way to doing that and fails through this kind of stupid naval battle at Actium, which doesn't look to me like a real battle. It's just sort of ships that meet and then. And then not much happens. It's a defeat by Cleopatra's navy, for sure, kind of. But it doesn't seem so decisive. But I guess she thought it was because she flees back to Alexandria and probably commit suicide along with Mark Anthony. What?

[Mark Gagnon]

That's crazy.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah. It's a little bit like, why don't you rethink or something. But again, this is the stories that we have, the Roman sources. I wish we had her own sources for what she's doing. It's very hard to have a balanced view because most of the sources are Roman sources who have a very particular propagandistic, belittling point of view. Speaking of belittling, the word pyramid is a Greek word for like a date cake, a little cake. The word obeliskoi, obelisk is how you skewer meats on a barbecue pit. Literally belittling Egyptian civilization on purpose. On purpose.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's crazy.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

This is the legacy we have from. From this period. Wow. This is. This is a program to belittle, to dominate Egyptian civilization. So pyramid is not by Rome.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's not an Egyptian word?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

No. Mare is the Egyptian word for pyramid, I think. Or is that oblivious? I gotta check myself now. We actually have Egyptian words for these things. But they're. But these are Greek. Greek. These are Greek words and they're really weird things. That Romans are using to kind of say, oh, Egypt, you're not that good. That's crazy. You're not that powerful. These are the greatest monuments of stone ever done in the Mediterranean. Pyramids, obelisks. And Rome is saying, eh, we're better than that. You guys are just, you guys are yesterday's news.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, the Empire State Building, that old plenty thing, that old silver stick that they got over there.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, exactly. So that's it. You know, that really is kind of coming full circle here, that these things we associate with ancient Egypt, like very much like the symbols of ancient Egypt and these really important monuments, engineering are all right or just kind of like Rome says no. And actually okay, well they're not that bad. We're going to steal a bunch of them and bring them to Rome because they're really cool. Cool. We can use them as sundials, which is what they do. But this is a new imperial program to take over a place and to completely absorb that civilization. So the Cleopatra story that we have via Shakespeare and Shakespeare, via Plutarch and Plutarch, earlier Roman authors, is all a program. So Cleopatra, she was just, she was just a temptress, horrible Egyptian woman who ruined the morals of two good Roman generals, etc. So the true story we have to reconstruct from what do we imagine?

[Mark Gagnon]

What about her scribes? Where are they?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Where are they? Yeah, good question. So you know, one of the problems with this whole period, the last, for first, last century bc, the first century bc we don't have a lot of written documentary evidence from Egypt. It just doesn't survive.

[Mark Gagnon]

Probably in that library that they.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

It could all be burned, stop being destroyed. It could all be destroyed for whatever reason. Maybe they're not writing down so much, but I wish we had more. But it's one of these ironies of history, just with Alexander the Great too. Our sources for Alexander the Great are five centuries after he lived, lived by and large we don't have very much directly from him. It's all later tradition kind of built on probably his own media strategy, which he definitely had.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then probably his descendants and people.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

The legend of Alexander, it gets going and it's really interesting.

[Mark Gagnon]

Before we wrap this up. Okay, okay, one more question about these pyramids, these little date cakes. As we were talking about, there's all this speculation that they weren't tombs and that they were found by later New Kingdom Egyptians that then used them as tombs. Yada, yada, yada. Do you have any educated or informed thoughts as to what the pyramids originally were why all the speculation comes in and how they built them and what records we have. I know we talked about that a little bit, but I just wanted to button up that, that conversation about the pyramids.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, they're definitely tombs. They're built for the king as a funerary monument. No doubt about that. We don't have a lot of documentation. The Cheops, the Great Pyramid, the biggest one. There's no text in that pyramid that says this is the tomb of Cheops. Which allows then people to speculate, maybe it's not a tomb, maybe it's something else, maybe it's grain stores of, of the kings. There's all sorts of ideas that fill the vacuum and that's a bit of a problem. But I think it's pretty certain archaeologically now that what these things are and who they belong to. And there is now some evidence, some written evidence, archaeology has been found in Giza associated with the Great Pyramid and the building of it. The village where some of the workers lived, for example, is now well known archaeological basically. So we have a better understanding of what these things are. We know who they belong to for sure.

[Mark Gagnon]

So these shafts that go from like the king's chambers, the queen's chambers, that don't lead out anywhere. I'm sure you've heard about these.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah, sure.

[Mark Gagnon]

What are the purposes of those? I've heard like it's, oh, it's a ritual thing so that your soul can ascend, da da da. But you don't want it to go outside because the rain or something. Do you have a thought or a theory on that?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, I don't really. They may be devices to prevent event tomb robbery even. Maybe if you look at tombs, including Tut, by the way, Tut's tomb was robbed twice.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh really?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, but it didn't get away with much. It doesn't look like. But we know it was robbed. There were people in there and every other royal tomb was robbed probably the minute the burial was finished. So it's a problem if you're building like the largest tomb in world history. It says inside here are vast riches. It's a little bit of a problem. You're attracting a lot of interest already.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So maybe these are some false ways in. I don't know. There may be some ritual aspect to some of this. I've seen that as well. It eventually leads to kings getting the idea of having hidden tombs in the Valley of the Kings where, where the ritual building that perpetuates your memory, the temple and the burial at site is separated as opposed to the pyramids and even Middle Kingdom royal burials, where the priestly ritual of perpetuating the memory of the king, making offerings every day and so on, and the barrier were linked together. The New Kingdom, these things were separated from a temple where that happened and the veil of the kings, which was protected. And these tombs were dug into the living rock in this valley quite some ways.

[Mark Gagnon]

Probably because they saw the robberies of the middle and Old Kingdom.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

They said, we got to do something else. Of course it didn't work.

[Mark Gagnon]

Those got looted also.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

They got looted too. Probably by the guys who built them.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, you think so?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. And what makes you think that?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Well, it's the obvious choice.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense to me. Right? It's an inside job. Like, that's. That's the kind of thing where it's like. Like, oh, something got stolen from my apartment. It's like, oh, well, who's working on your apartment? Whatever. You know, this happens in New York all the time.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah, yeah. Well, exactly. There's a Middle Kingdom burial at Nomatian Old Kingdom burial, where there's a beautiful sarcophagus inside with the lid open, pried open, and there's a wooden mallet underneath the lid. Between the lid and the base of the sarcophagus, like, sitting there, they were like, propping it up to. Propping it to keep it open. Yeah, it's still there. You can still see it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Really?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah. Yep.

[Mark Gagnon]

Just how it was when it originally was.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Exactly how it was. Yeah. Whoever the looter was, the guy had tools. And you think, you know, the average farmer doesn't have a lot of. A lot of tools. Is probably someone with a nice wooden mallet. Wow. But how do you pry that thing open? It's huge. But anyway, it was done.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

So, you know, they leave some evidence behind.

[Mark Gagnon]

So this is maybe someone that had some type of acute knowledge as to how these sarcophaguses work.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Probably. Probably.

[Mark Gagnon]

Humans don't change, bro. We're all the same, whether you're living in the. The Nile Valley or you're living in Brooklyn, New York.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

That's fair enough, man.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, right?

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Well, I agree, Joe. This has been absolutely amazing. I really enjoy this conversation.

[Dr. Joseph Manning]

Excited, too.

[Mark Gagnon]

Thank you, brother.