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- [00:01]
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- [00:32]
Afwa Hersh
Welcome back to another episode of Legacy. Peter, I'm so excited for our topic today.
- [00:38]
Peter Frankopan
Do you know why I'm so excited? My favorite thing in the entire world is to sleep. I love a nice bed with a pillow. And at this time of year when it's freezing cold outside, it's time to hibernate, right? So I we were thinking about wellness and thinking about what are the ways in which people have found thought about curing their physical illnesses, the depression of the cold winter bed seems like quite a good place to start.
- [01:04]
Afwa Hersh
I thought you were going to say a hot water bottle because it's sacrilege to mention bed without a hot water bottle in my opinion at this point.
- [01:11]
Peter Frankopan
You're a big hot water bottle person, aren't you? I love clutching your hot water bottles.
- [01:14]
Afwa Hersh
I travel everywhere with them. I sometimes even take them to restaurants if I feel like it's necessary. And I have actually done a lot of work on sleep. So in my book Decolonizing My Body, I wrote basically a whole chapter about sleep because it sounds very simple and obviously it's universal to the human condition that we need it. But I learned there were a lot of things about sleep that I had unlearned and that I think modern western culture encourages some quite toxic ideas about rest and recharging. And again, these are things that I think the modern wellness movement is trying to tap back into what's really common sense that the ancients knew well. So I'm really looking forward to finding out what what the ancients believed and knew about sleep and how they practiced it because it sounds very simple, but there are so many different ways you can sleep.
- [02:13]
Peter Frankopan
Hello and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Frankopan.
- [02:16]
Afwa Hersh
I'm Afwa Hersh.
- [02:18]
Peter Frankopan
And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives and events and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputations that they deserve.
- [02:34]
Afwa Hersh
This is episode three in our history of wellness and well being. The importance of sleep and exercise.
- [02:45]
Peter Frankopan
One of the things I love about sleep, sleep aphorism is a really good, solid night's sleep. You know, when you close your eyes, your head hits the pillow, and then you wake up a long time later and you really feel refreshed. But that's not how people slept. In the ancient world, people didn't tend to sleep in one solid block.
- [03:02]
Afwa Hersh
In fact, for most of human history, the night was divided. People would fall asleep soon after dusk, sleep for five or six hours, then they'd wake up, maybe have some food and drift back into a second sleep.
- [03:14]
Peter Frankopan
And.
- [03:14]
Afwa Hersh
And we know this not only from ethnography, but from deep patterns that are visible archeologically. For example, Peter, can you tell us about the Holocene sites in northern Syria and eastern Turkey? And have you been there?
- [03:26]
Peter Frankopan
I have. And they are so fascinating. I mean, you get fire residues that show that a flame and fire was burning a slow and steady temperature through the night. Right. So it wasn't sort of how we sometimes, if you see people in their cottage in the Cotswolds or Jude Law this time of year, falling in love again, you know, with this big raging. It was low level rather than intense and, you know, not for cooking. It's about. It strongly suggests nighttime waking. Someone keeps tending a smoldering fire, maybe they add a stick or two, then they roll over and they go back to sleep. And we know that because there are ash layers that are stratified in quite thin streaks. So it's not very intense, heavy burning. It's small nighttime firings rather than one large one. So probably that's to do with the gap between the first and the second sleep. But I'm also interested now for it about how people slept, that that what you're doing while you're asleep is because you're not often on your own in the ancient world.
- [04:22]
Afwa Hersh
Also, you know, just listening to that, any parent of a small child will know that the idea of having a long unbroken sleep is much more fantasy than reality. So one of the reasons that the ancients were waking up at regular intervals is because they often would have small children and people lived more communally. So, you know, most communities would have lots of children of different ages in close proximity. But I also wonder whether it's something to do with climate, because if you go to any hot country, I mean, if you go to the Gulf today, for example, people kind of emerge at around midnight, you know, even when it's not the hottest time of year. It seems like the whole culture is geared towards starting your day when the sun has gone down and the temperature is a little more bearable. So that means you're not going to go to bed at 10 and sleep till 6 in the morning. You're going to be up late. Then maybe you'll sleep for a bit at night, but maybe you'll have another nap later in the day. So being available to the more conducive climate to get things done is another reason for not having these quite rigid sleep patterns.
- [05:24]
Peter Frankopan
But sleep is also communal. People are sleeping in groups, not alone. And again, if you've traveled to lots of parts of the world, that won't surprise you when you see that people don't live in their own houses and they have their own bedrooms, but they're sleeping in groups, sometimes of family groupings, but sometimes just with neighbors too, because building materials can be difficult or they can be expensive. And the ways in which societies are structured do things in different ways. It's sleeping alone or the solitary sleep, or sleeping as a couple is quite a modern invention. For most of human history, you'd fall asleep to the sound of people breathing around you, to the noises of perhaps people having sex, of children chatting, of people working, when you're trying to sleep, too. And so it wasn't that kind of way in which you can block the blinds, have a complete silence and nod off. It was something that was noisier, and therefore, not surprisingly, you wouldn't be sleeping the whole way through all the time.
- [06:16]
Afwa Hersh
And actually, I think one of the things that surprised me, because I know this very well from my Ghanaian heritage, where people still sleep very communally, is that in England, for example, until quite recently, people would sleep together. When we were doing our series on Jane Austen. PETER Jane Austen basically never slept alone. She slept with her sister in the same bed for a lot of her life. And that wasn't because they were too poor to afford separate rooms. It was because, you know, they didn't have modern heating technology. It was often very cold. You kind of pool body warmth in the bed. And also, there just wasn't such a value on privacy and individual space. So even until quite recently in Western Europe, there was this absence of an idea of sleep being an individual, separate, private act. It was just part of the life that you live in family and community.
- [07:00]
Peter Frankopan
CHARLIE the Chocolate Factory has everybody sleeping in. In one bed for lots of different reasons. But you see that in things like longhouses in Central Europe, 6,7000 years ago. They're the size of. They're basically like huge barns. So they are homes to multiple families. There are no walls, there's no privacy, and you can work out, the archaeologists can work out from which wear the sleep zones because of their wear patterns on clay floors or because of the ash rings of those fires we mentioned, or because there are distributions of dropped tools that show kind of rest areas where people would stop and sleep. And, you know, obviously, like I said, that evening experiences are noisy. You get coughs, you get people whispering. It's really annoying. There is heat that you share, too, but it's also, you know, there's people coming and going all the time. So it's profoundly communal. So that also shapes your experiences and your interactions with other people, too. So rather than being anxious about other people at their presence, people find safety in it. You know, company means security. So it means also that sleep is not your time to escape from society. It's very much an extension or part of it.
- [08:07]
Afwa Hersh
One of the things I love about this is the idea of dreams also being a kind of shared endeavor and communal data that's kind of distributed around the family or the community. So because people are sleeping together, they're kind of dreaming together as well. I mean, they are side by side while they're going on these subconscious journeys. And then they're waking up and discussing their dreams and interpreting them. And the interpretations apply not just necessarily to the individual, but to the whole society.
- [08:35]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah. And you know, as well as, you know, in the modern age of linking rest and good sleep to mental health, you know, there's lots of questionings about what it is that dreams mean, how to interpret them. So your dreams also aren't private. They get talked about, they get discussed, they get recorded. And so, for example, in Mesopotamia, there's lots of material about dream cultures. There's a book called the Ishkar Sakiku, which is basically written about 4,000 years ago, and it shows a really sophisticated system for interpreting dreams. So you'd wake up in the morning and talk about things that often would you be concerned about or you'd be scared about. So you'd have, for example, discussions about why you are worried, what are you worried about, what are the inauspicious night signs, you know, so if you dream you're drowning, you know, then you're about to fall ill, or if you dream that you're going to eat ripe dates, you're about to be lucky and joy is about to follow. So all those things about how you're correlating your state of mind, both euphoria and depression are, you know, you require people then to. To be able to interpret. And what you're looking for are Explanations. But I love the idea, like you said, AFWB of being communal data. People are also talking about what you dreamt about and how you therefore explain it and talk about it with your friends. It's explaining what this bridge to the divine means. You know, where do these ideas of the subconscious come from and why are they sometimes troubling as well as sometimes euphoric?
- [10:04]
Afwa Hersh
Do you dream, Peter?
- [10:06]
Peter Frankopan
Do you know what? I've got this terrible problem with my sinuses for the last five or six years. So I sleep so badly I'm ready for the ancient world.
- [10:16]
Afwa Hersh
I was going to say you're sleeping too communally because it's your dog, isn't it, that's causing your problems. Ancient proximity to animals problem going on the zoonosis.
- [10:26]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah, that'll finish me off. Yeah. So no, I, I say I'm very, I'm acutely aware that I never fall into sort of the deep sleep element where the, where you're, where you're having these very vivid ideas. And it's very important to do that because it allows things to sort of get out of your system too. You know, we know a lot about sleep therapy and how important it is to be fully rested. But yeah, no, it's been a while since I, I mean I quite often force myself to, to fall asleep dreaming that I'm about to win Wimbledon or play test match cricket. So things that I absolutely no chance ever of happening and then I'll wake up a bit later with, with no news on, on what's, what's happened since. But you know, I do. Are you a big dreamer? Afwa?
- [11:03]
Afwa Hersh
I'm a big dreamer, yeah. One of you asked me actually about New Year's resolutions at the beginning of this series. One of the resolutions I make every time I'm in the process of making resolutions is that I'm going to record my dreams first thing in the morning in my dream journal. And I do go through phases of doing it religiously and then you know, warnings happen where I have to like rush my daughter to school or to karate or, you know, and I don't have the energy to get up earlier enough than the already early start to do it. But when I do it I feel so good because it's amazing how quickly they go. And my dreams are very rich and can be, can feel very prophetic or can feel very crazy.
- [11:42]
Peter Frankopan
Do you share your dreams and your dream journals with other people? Do you ask what they mean? Do you do so self diagnose?
- [11:47]
Afwa Hersh
I will. My mum's definitely got Some kind of gift when it comes to dreams and understanding and predicting things. So I'll sometimes discuss them with her. I'll discuss them with my partner.
- [11:57]
National Debt Relief Announcer
Yeah.
- [11:57]
Afwa Hersh
And if it's relevant to someone, like sometimes a friend I haven't seen or spoken to in a while or pop up in a dream, but it's always weird. It's not usually something really feasible. It's something that they wouldn't do. But then I'll call them and say, hey, I dreamt about you and this happened. And then we'll try and work out together what it could mean. So they're a big part of my life. But I do often think I'm kind of muddling along. Like, I wish I had a more coherent system for maybe pooling the data or interpreting them or, you know, using them rather than. I try with my quite amateur interpretation skills to make it make sense. But I find them quite profound because I have experiences that I would never have in any other facet of life. So I'm a big fan of kind of delving. And I did once try to teach myself how to do lucid dreaming.
- [12:46]
Peter Frankopan
The fact you're trying to read about it and to try to understand it, that's part of this deep continuum about trying to work out how your body mind is connected towards the subconscious, you know, and how to interpret things and how to direct it, to steer it. So all of those things, I think, ring lots of bells. But, you know, so too, I suppose there's also the fact that because in this ancient world where people are. It's noisy sometimes people want to have dreams, have very vivid experiences. And that can be very disconcerting because it's like watching somebody have a seizure when they start shouting out in the middle of the night. So your experiences in communal spaces are obviously hyper intense. And of course, as we've already mentioned, when people are living close to each other, the levels of infection go up too. So living with each other, apart from it being noisy and chaotic and so on, it means that there are more disruptions in how you're living, but also lots of material to share with other people too. But there's also disruptors to your circadian rhythms because if you have a light on and you have warmth and there's noise, then the ways in which you're disengaging are also showing that, you know, sleep is not uniform. Darkness isn't uniform too. And it also means that you are not just properly resting, partly because there's a reason why you keep that flame on it's not just because somebody else does it. It's because you're aware of predators. Lots of things like lions or hyenas, wolves and animals on the peripheries of settlements are drawn in because of the availability of, you know, relatively low budget food to be able to acquire from rubbish tips or from, you know, et cetera, or. In many ancient cosmologies, spirits come out in the night and that's where there are ghosts and demons. So you wanted to be able to see because people are often scared of the night. And also because oral stories, particularly narratives, lots of things happen in nighttime and on the COVID of darkness where you can't quite see. So the ancient night is not an empty space. It's a place where people are moving around and there's an awareness of other things, beings, animals, et cetera. Sounds moving around too.
- [14:50]
Afwa Hersh
I just want to mention two things about sleep. One is that in many ancient cultures, people often literally slept with their ancestors. So they would bury ancestors in or around the house. And actually in my culture in Ghana, it's still the practice in some more rural areas that you bury your loved ones on under the living room floor, basically, or the bedroom floor. I've got relatives in my family who are buried under the floor in, you know, the main room in the home. And the idea of that is that it's a kind of physical manifestation of the belief system that, you know, the unseen realm and the seen realm all kind of unite in the present. And I think nighttime is a time because this idea of the veil is lifted. You know, there's a more porous boundary between the world we understand and the one we don't, that that all comes together. The other thing I wanted to mention was because I said in my book, I did a lot of work on sleep and I read this incredible book which I recommend by a woman called Tricia Hersey called Rest is Resistance. And it was quite life changing for me, Peter, because, you know, much as it's such common sense that we need sleep and the ancients obviously knew it and had different approaches to how to achieve it. I think in the modern world and certainly, you know, the way I was raised in quite a pressurized environment, there's a lot of emphasis on ambition and achievement and success, you know, and I think especially for girls, this sense of, like, now you can do what men do too, but you just have to work really hard. And as a black woman, you have to work twice as hard. And there was this sense that sleep is kind of disposable. You know, like, if something has to give to achieve that and make the most of the sacrifices your immigrant parents and grandparents made to tap into the establishment or rise up, you can sacrifice sleep because it's in a worthy for a worthy cause. And Tricia Hersey, who's an African American woman, is really critiquing that idea that we think sleep is optional or something you can dispose of in service of all the other things you have to do. And that might be financial pressure or the needs of family or the demands of a career. And she kind of analyzes how especially black women in America come from a lineage of exhausted women because of course, they came to America as enslaved people, then they worked under very punitive conditions for lower wages in urban environments that were unsafe and insecure. And how, you know, many of our generation come from women who still have all the domestic responsibilities of traditional societies, but are now trying to achieve some kind of equity in the workplace and need to be financially independent. So we're kind of doing it all. And one of the biggest consequences is just complete exhaustion. And that instead of really seeing and critiquing that, we just normalized it. You know, it's just life. You just, you know, you'll sleep when you're dead is something that I've even heard personal development coaches saying, sleep, sleep is for weak people. Try harder, get up earlier. And I think I was guilty of internalizing those ideas and thinking, if you are successful and you are serious, you will grind, you'll just keep going and you'll overcome tiredness and fatigue. And reading her book, and I think this modern movement around reconnecting with ancient ideas has really showed me how unwise that is. It's not an abundance mindset that you, you can't separate your body's need to rest from your dreams. And that actually it's a bit of a con, you know, this idea that our labor should just be extracted for the good of the economy or for the good of impressing our family or gaining status is really, really damaging to health and all round well being. So I'm trying to tap back into some of these ancient ideas about maybe having a nap if you haven't had enough sleep at night, or how to understand rest as a communal activity, not something you go and pay for some luxury retreat and then, you know, do meditation and massage. But actually, how can you, in your life with other people trying to do what you're trying to do, find ways where you rest and you support each other resting. And most of all, that we get rid of this like competitive exhaustion, you know, where people boast about how little sleep they had because they're so hardworking, which I remember when I was at university. You know, it's like you boast about how many all nighters you did to get your essay in on time. So I've been unlearning a lot of these really toxic ideas and I think it's been great for me and I hope other people do it too.
- [19:01]
Peter Frankopan
And I think they're not just toxic, I think they're genuinely dangerous. I mean, you know Matthew Walker's book, he's a, he's a neuroscientist at University of California, Berkeley. He wrote a book about seven or eight years ago called why We Sleep the New Science of Sleep and Dreams. And you know, he argues very persuasively that sleep deprivation is linked to lots of fatalities and linked to things like dementia. It's actually really very dangerous for you not to sleep. And you mentioned that with students, I mean anybody who's had kids doing GCSEs, A levels or equivalent exams, age 16, 18 and at university, you think that your body is just relentlessly forgiving and that you can function by pushing it to burning the candles at both ends. And in fact it does. Obviously there's a link to cognitive behavior and to cognitive decline. So I mean, it's not a coincidence that you get Ayurvedic texts in India a thousand BC so 3000 years ago or so that are talking about sleep literally as a pillar of life and that they treat sleep or nidra, not as a pleasure or as a passive thing that you should do, but one of the three foundations of good health alongside food and sexual conduct. And you know, sleep disturbances in the Ayurvedic tradition gets analyzed through digestion that sleep after meals is heavy and harmful. It's connected sleep to your emotional state, that you're more likely to be angry, or if you are angry or fearful, you'll go to sleep badly. The seasonal shifts, those are absolutely being discussed millennia ago about how people sleep more deeply in the winter and the summer fragments it. And also about the kind of the spiritual imbalance that if you're not sleeping well, you have thoughts that are more tend to lead you towards nightmares. So the importance of eating well, the importance of sleeping well and the importance of actually conducting yourself through, looking after yourself properly is something that people have thought about a long time ago. And it's not just in the ancient Indian tradition. In the Ayurvedics, you Find that in Greece too. You know, people like Hippocrates writing texts about the importance of how important it is to sleep quietly through the night and evenly, and that you're more likely to get better if you're ill. So what's really interesting is like you mentioned afraid the continuities going back towards things that seem to us to be quite faddish and quite new and sort of voguish rather than being rooted in proper experience.
- [21:21]
Afwa Hersh
I think Covid has had a big impact on helping people get back to some of those ancient ideas about sleep. Because until Covid, for example, if you had a job in an office, you would go in when you were sick. It was just kind of standard. And, you know, the idea was that if you're really committed and you're really disciplined, you'll just push through. And of course, one of the consequences, you make everyone else sick. And another is it takes you much longer to recover and can have long term consequences for your health if you don't listen to your body and rest. And I think Covid ended that because you couldn't go out and work if you were sick. You know, it was too risky to expose others to the virus. Everyone was often at home anyway, except for key workers, you know, who didn't have the choice. And then being at home, people were able to actually connect better with how much sleep they needed because they now had options. You know, they weren't going out at night, they weren't doing many of the things they usually do, and they were actually sleeping probably the way we should, like long enough and, you know, when they needed to. And I think it's helped people recalibrate that actually. It's not healthy to just keep going out and acting like everything's fine when you're ill and that sleeping really does transform how you feel and what you feel able to do. So it's one of the, I think, positive benefits that it's opened up people's minds to. How did we get so far away from common sense? And how can we get back to a life where, you know, the purpose of your life is not just to provide labor, it's also to achieve some kind of balance. But, you know, I could just feel the ancients watching our podcast on YouTube, Peter, or subscribing and being like, you guys had to go through all this to relearn what we knew 5,000 years ago. It's kind of crazy.
- [23:01]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah. And they didn't have, you know, blood scans, tests, you know, stethoscopes, you know, the idea that sleep is the original diagnostic to make sure that you are healthy in mind and in body. A really good salutary reminder that as the January sales are here, it's the best time to stock up on the right kind of pillow and in my case, to pray that the winter ends and my sinuses recover, which they do when the spring gets to us. But you know, I think that that importance of being able to rest well is something that's easy to think, like you said, Alfred, that if you just keep on working and if you, you know, it's expendable, it's a luxury rather than absolute necessity.
- [23:37]
Afwa Hersh
Well, we've been talking about sleep, which is something that many of us do reconnect with at this time of year when the nights are so long. But there's another thing that happens in January, Peter. It's one of my bugbears because my gym is suddenly overflowing for about four weeks as everybody makes the unoriginal New Year's resolution of joining a gym and going every day until they inevitably drop off again by the end of the month. And so when we come back, we are going to talk about the birth, the history and the legacy of exercise.
- [24:17]
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- [24:46]
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- [25:47]
Peter Frankopan
AFRO youV've mentioned the gym a few times. Right. So I know that you, you love making sure that, that you're in peak condition and that you're, you know, keep yourself going. I'm, I'm much less good, not just in January. And if I, like you just said the fact when a gym is full, it's like a library being full, it's actually really annoying. I much prefer to begin my health regime in sort of April when there are a few people around.
- [26:09]
Afwa Hersh
I'll tell you a good time to begin a health regime, Peter, is Christmas where there's absolutely no one in the gym. Everybody's too busy eating mince pies or drinking mulled wine. And it's empty. Which is one of the reasons why January can be so irritating when everyone kind of en masse rediscovers it. I'm there in December, and I'm not saying that because I'm virtuous, because I think I've discovered for life how important movement is as medicine. And I'm quite proud that I think that's an ancient idea that I've cottoned onto there. Peter.
- [26:39]
Peter Frankopan
Well, you know, again, you find these very old sites, almost 10,000 years old, showing skeletal remains of really powerful lower limbs, thickened femoral shafts and robust muscle attachments that are showing long distance walking. And people must be climbing riverbanks and hills, hauling in nets and carrying loads. And in this particular place in Lepenskiyr, in what's now Serbia, you find lots of obviously quite intense fishing capabilities and exercises. People going sometimes kilometers upriver to go to exploit the seasonal locations of salmon or surgeon stocks. So we can see from some of these skeletons that people are walking 10 to 20 kilometers a day. They're balancing obviously on slippery stones. You can tell that from their feet, the skeletal bones of their feet. They're throwing nets or spears, they're lifting heavy baskets. And they're not doing this because they want to be beach ready or they're doing it for their physical health. They're not doing this to train. They're doing it because you have to survive. So strength and agility equals cultural capital in early settled societies.
- [27:48]
Afwa Hersh
I'm laughing because I'm thinking of all of the exercises in my gym that have been designed probably by an overpaid exercise consultant to replicate these activities. I don't. If you've seen these medicine balls, you know, you kind of pick them up and throw them over your shoulder. That's to replicate the movement of like lifting heavy baskets. You do slam dunks with them.
- [28:06]
Peter Frankopan
That's kind of like, so you're ready for industrial fishing. That's what you could. We could. We could do that. That would get some views, wouldn't it, on YouTube?
- [28:14]
Afwa Hersh
I'm worried that someone listening to this might think that would be a good idea for me. This is not an audition for any kind of show involving any extreme outdoors. I am not your girl. But you give me a nice bougie gym and I'm quite happy to simulate digging storage pits.
- [28:31]
Peter Frankopan
But it's interesting, Afro, you said that a couple of times on these episodes about how some of these ancient way or old ways in which people have worked are being replicated in gym exercises. I mean, is that just complete by chance or.
- [28:44]
Afwa Hersh
No, because I think what happened was gym technology became so detached from natural movement. You know, think about a cross trainer or a treadmill or an exercise bike. I mean, in theory, those are movements that replicate a real life activity. But actually, the way our species evolved, we wouldn't just be running all day, we wouldn't be sitting on a bike. We would be running a bit and then digging something or trying to catch something or trying to build something or trying to chop something. And so I think over time, the exercise world has cottoned on to the idea that actually the closer you get to the way the body was designed to move, the more you'll serve it. And so, you know, just like endless repetitive exercises are only going to compound the already physical problems you have from endless repetitive exercises of being sedentary. So you can't kind of fix that with more repetitive exercise. They have to be kind of holistic in the way you move. But it is funny to see people basically like throwing arrows or picking up baskets, only instead of with real arrows or baskets, they're using this overpriced gym equipment. It does feel like a bit of a parody of how ludicrous modern life has become.
- [29:58]
Peter Frankopan
But you see that with the sort of particularly the male body, which men look like triangles, these really broad shoulders and big guns, hands on their, you know, their arms and then tiny little waist. And you know, obviously the more you exercise, the way you exercise, this shapes what your body looks like. Now you've written about bodies, Afro, and how important, how the. The ways in which they get conditioned by other parts of society, how they get viewed, how they get exploited. What about the gendering of bodies thanks to physical exercise?
- [30:24]
Afwa Hersh
Well, women have borne the brunt of the physical demands of ancient life differently. And you when we look at skeletons from say 9,000 years ago in Turkey, women Show extreme stress markers in the shoulders and elbows from grinding grain. Grinding grain is very demanding, repetitive exercise. And I've never ground grain, but you know, if you ever try and grind something with a mortar or pestle or, you know, you're making a stiff cake and it requires a lot of hand mixing. I'm a bit old school, I never use an automatic mixer. I like to mix things by hand. But it can really work. Your biceps, your shoulders, your elbows. And I'm doing that as a recreational activity for 15 minutes.
- [31:04]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah, yeah.
- [31:05]
Afwa Hersh
To feed a community. It really, really does take a toll. But women become basically specialists in endurance labor, whereas men develop these ability, these kind of fast twitch muscle muscle fibers for bursts of strength and agility for hunting. So we're already seeing the kind of the way their bodies are evolving and strengthening become quite different.
- [31:24]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah. And then on top of that you get ritual movement where you have things like ceremonies and rituals and dance and sort of choreographed, I suppose you call them workouts. So I mean, long before sport, ritual creates formalized movement patterns that resemble exercise. And one really nice example is Lituvian communities who are living in the Levant. About 10,000 years ago, they built stone floored houses, they harvest wild cereals with sickle blades, they hunt gazelles, birds and that sort of stuff. And also they're famous for their very distinctive art, their personal ornaments and how carefully they bury their dead, etc. They love their dogs, by the way, the Natufians. They're the first evidence of dogs and humans living side by side as companions. But they also produce circular stone platforms and these appear to be places for hosted communal gatherings, feasts, and possibly for ritual dances. And we can tell that because of repetitive footfall on the stones, not just people occasionally standing there. So some ethnographers think that these are societies and other ones like them have synchronized group emotions. You move in the same way you create in a collaborative way through dance and the way in which you're standing on the stage, you're training balance and stamina. And you see similar kinds of things like this in Indus Valley cultures too. So I don't think it's quite the same as, you know, sometimes when you, when you travel to cities, particularly in Asia, you see hundreds of people all working out with a leader in the town square, making you do sort of particular Tai Chi moves or things like that, nor quite like, I guess a gym exercise class with somebody at the front urging the class on. But obviously there's some form of idea that people, when they are together, they can behave in combined and conjoined ways that are collaborative and assert and affirm their friendship, their kinship, their cohesion and societal groups. But it reminds me a bit of these kind of joint exercises that people are doing together.
- [33:24]
Afwa Hersh
If you ever go to, you know, a wedding that's from a culture that involves a lot of communal dancing, I think it's always a reminder for me because, you know, most of my lifestyle, I'm not dancing with a big group of people or just kind of, you know, being in sync with music and community. But when you are, it feels so good. It feels so good. It's so bonding. It releases all kinds of stuff. Serotonin and oxytocin. I think it's something that we've lost a lot. You know, we need a reason. Like, you're going to a party, it's a wedding, it's some kind of celebration, and then you tap into it. And every culture has some form of going to an occasion and dancing with others. But you can see in the ancient world, that was incorporated more into ritual wellness, the connection between the sacred and the physical. And it really makes sense because it's a really important component of life. And I can imagine as long as we've had bodies, we found a way to. To use them to express ourselves differently along with rhythm.
- [34:21]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah. And a good test of that is, you know, put on. Put on y YMCA at a party by the Village People. And everybody's doing the same movements. Right. There are not many other dancer.
- [34:31]
Afwa Hersh
But yes, that works.
- [34:33]
Peter Frankopan
Village People in a. In a. On well being. You know, it is January. No one's going to be going to any parties this month because that's not what anybody does in January. People are feeling so sorry for themselves. They've eaten, eaten too much and they're trying to make themselves thin and healthy again. But, you know, I think that idea of how you. There are these kind of moments where suddenly you goes, okay, I do know what it feels like to do that.
- [34:50]
Afwa Hersh
And everybody takes part. You know, I'll never forget the first time I ever went to Ghana, you know, as a child going to the village and being thrust into, you know, the center of the circle. And the drums are drumming and everyone's dancing. And, you know, as a young teenage girl, you're so mortified because dancing is something that you feel awkward doing. You do it in front of your friends. You do it to the music you're used to doing to. You don't kind of perform it for your community with the elders and the grandparents and the kids, everyone watching you. But you know, in so many cultures, it's just part of life and everybody is kind of conditioned and has the expectation of, of taking part and everyone takes part. It's not like the good dancers go and show off how good they are. It's something that everybody does as a way of expressing their identity and belonging. And I've really, over time and having shed my adolescent embarrassment now I'm like the first one to go forward because it's so fulfilling and nurturing to feel.
- [35:44]
Peter Frankopan
Part of that space that happens with age. Yeah, I turned that one a long time ago.
- [35:49]
Afwa Hersh
Now my teenage daughter's like, oh my God, you're so embarrassing.
- [35:52]
Peter Frankopan
I realized that no one was, no one ever watched, no one ever cared. So you've got nothing to lose. So you. It takes a while to get through that. But then on top of these kinds of communal activities, which are very life enhancing, like you said, afraid, the serotonin release, the kind of the joy and the happiness that you're all there together celebrating or being as one, you then have also the evolution of what turns into things like sports that are competitive rivalries of wrestling and running or throwing, you know, and you see evidence of this in pre agricultural societies too. So you get, for example, rock art in a Sahara, which shows men in grappling positions, their arms are locked, their legs are entwined, and stances that look unmistakably like wrestling drills. And they are representing leisure or initiation or display. And you find that in lots of different cultures too, of the idea that you're testing each other, you're showing that you've got balance and you've got flexibility and explosive power. And sport obviously is a way of settling disputes without lethality. You don't kill people. But the kind of idea about competition and physical competition is something that starts too. And another example of that is of course with hunting, where it's not human against human, it's human against the animal world.
- [37:04]
Afwa Hersh
But I think, you know, you're right about needing a non lethal outlet because there's a long history of men needing a way of expressing a certain kind of physical aggression without it leading to injury. And you know, sport has almost been a way for potentially like hostile male rivals to actually find a communal outlet for that kind of energy and physicality. And these ancient cultures understanding that actually you can harness it for something that benefits everyone rather than just letting it fester. And I find it so interesting to see the continuity of those things. You know, you mentioned the rock art in the Sahara I think it's in Niger, that rock formation you mentioned. But, you know, the forms of wrestling that are popular across contemporary West Africa now have a lot in common with what seems to have been depicted in those ancient times. It's no surprise, you know, like, if you are a football fan, you probably support the club. Your dad or granddad or, you know, grandmother supported. You pass down sporting inclinations and cultures through generations. And so many of these forms of sport have also been passed down, you know, over millennia.
- [38:12]
Peter Frankopan
And then on top, you've got these other collective group exercises that create those bonds that make you feel good about yourself. One of those I mentioned, hunting is the kind of the. The big ritual of going after big animals. You know, the Mesopotamian elites hunting lions and bulls and wild asses, not, not because they want their meat, but because the hunt proves you've got courage and control and speed and strength. And so you have to practice those things, you know, no matter how fit you are, you have to learn how to do these things. So, you know, you've got royal tombs in Ur, for example, in Mesopotamia, that will show scenes of spears being thrust, of archery, of palace release to slightly later periods that are showing kings training in controlled environments. So how you practice with a bow, how you develop that upper body strength, how you can sprint in short bursts, you know, because a lot of this stuff when you're hunting dangerous animals is also very dangerous to you too. So, you know, you find these incredible works of art, I mean, cylinder seals, for example, from the Akkadian periods. One of my favorite people, Naram Sin, he's a kind of Donald Trump of the Mesopotamian world. He puts up these messages everywhere saying how he's the greatest person of all time. But he's depicted in the cylinder seal, which you can see about. You roll it along a piece of clay and he's drawing a longbow. He's firing at this really big wild ass while attendants are checking the wind speed and collecting the arrows. You know, and these develop in humans, you know, the capacity to react quickly. You've got to have really good timing. You've got to have huge core strength. You've got to have very powerful back muscles and shoulder muscles. And as you said, aphrod, that then conditions what it is the ideal body looks like. If you're an alpha man or you're a rich man, and that's what you look like, then that's how you. What you aspire to. So that they're skills that you need to have, but they're also Socially conditioned within a kind of context of what it is that the kind of the ideal body looks like.
- [40:08]
Afwa Hersh
When does this ritualized and social tendency towards exercising in certain ways become a gym culture, Peter? Because I know when I'm talking about going to the gym, there is a Greek concept of a gymnasium from about the 6th century BCE. So I'm curious at how much an ancient Greek from that era would rock up to my gym today and find it a familiar environment.
- [40:36]
Peter Frankopan
Well, he wouldn't be allowed in, I can tell you that, because I mean, gymnasium, gymnasium means you're naked. And unless I'm mistaken about most gyms in, in certainly the United Kingdom, you know, it's. It's very much considered appropriate that you should be wearing clothes, although not many of them.
- [40:52]
Afwa Hersh
I have to say that there's not a huge difference between the nude ancient Greek and some of the people in my gym. But I guess the small difference is a crucial one.
- [41:02]
Peter Frankopan
I think the question that they would ask of anybody in the ancient world is why are you doing this? Are you doing it because you're about to be in direct competition with each other and you're about to fight? Is it because you've got some animal that you're trying to track? Is it because you are competing in some kind of event? And the answer to that for pretty much 0.01% of the population is the answer is no, apart from a tiny, tiny minority. So I think we associate it with better mental health as well as physical health. You know, we understand a bit about the endorphins and the serotonin. I think the body beautiful stuff about what we look like is, is, must be shaped and directly at a. Very heavily influenced by the fact that the, the visual image is ubiquitous now because of social media. But, you know, I think it's the, the way in which people live and the rise of the industrial revolution and the way in which things get automated means that people use their bodies in just very, very different ways. How that process has taken root, I can't. I'm not sure. What do you think?
- [41:57]
Afwa Hersh
Well, I want to know what an ancient Greek gymnasium actually looks like. Was it a place, Peter?
- [42:03]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah, I mean, it's very confusing how the world works. So if you're listening to this in Germany and we're talking about the gymnasium or the gymnasium, that means you're high school. And being naked there is even more weird than going to do physical training. Because, you know, if you ancient, you've been to Greece and you know what beautiful weather's like, and it's really quite warm. You can see why you might go skimpy quite early on and then you think, well, you know, forget it, we're all friends. And the ways. The thing about lots of Greek statues, without being certainly too crude, as, you know, no one in classical antiquity is depicted as being very well endowed. If you're a man, you know, there's no body anxiety. That is obvious about the kinds of things that most men think is a big problem today.
- [42:44]
Afwa Hersh
But there are a lot of eight packs going on, though.
- [42:47]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah, but I've never seen any, you know, no one. I mean, unless I'm. Again, I might be wrong, but people are there, you know, if they've got one, then they'll show it off. But people tend to be much more worried about the groin and their genitalia and about what that might show. But I think in the Greek world, people treat the physical body in a, In a. In a. In a much more straightforward way, I suppose. You know, there's some body shaming, I guess, that you do need to look buff. There's plenty of images of that, but the depictions, I think, are slightly different. And that's probably not completely unhealthy, but I'm not a specialist in ancient Greek genitalia and their relative sizes. But I think the idea of how you're expected to carry yourself and what part of yourself you should be ashamed of and proud of feels very different. So it's a world that feels quite familiar in some ways.
- [43:39]
Afwa Hersh
It also sounds like it would be quite sweaty. So Hippocrates talks about how advantageous it is that exercise produces sweat, because sweat is the body's way of expelling harmful residues by exertion and sweating. The superfluities are evacuated, he said, but a man who exercises properly evacuates what is excessive and thus remains healthy. So it sounds like that aspect of an ancient Greek gym would be quite recognizable and then.
- [44:07]
Peter Frankopan
Sounds right. Yeah.
- [44:08]
Afwa Hersh
And there's also an emphasis on diet, which, again, you know, go to my gym, once you kind of come out of the training area, you'll find the food where all of the high protein and there was all the Kit Kats.
- [44:19]
Peter Frankopan
Right.
- [44:19]
Afwa Hersh
Fatty, essential fatty acids and, you know, creatine supplements. And Hippocrates, I think, might approve of that. He says the important balance between the body's heat, between digestion, vitality and metabolism, which are all things, again, that I feel like it's taken several thousand years for us to really get back to an emphasis on exercise and nutrition, going hand in hand, and it really not making sense to focus on one without the other.
- [44:47]
Peter Frankopan
And you see this, like we said in so many different parts of the world, you know, in Ayurvedic texts that we mentioned before, they describe movement or vayana as an essential element of digestion and also of moral regulation, you know, and of your character. So it's not just important to move to be healthy and to be in a good state of mind, but it also shows that you're a good person. You know, you find Taoist breathing techniques and stretching routines, again, going back thousands of years that emphasize how slow, controlled movements harmonize your internal energies. And, you know, these aren't exercise programs in the way we might think of them today, but. But they do formalize the idea that the body needs to be carefully and actively maintained, you know, so if you're going to be healthy, you've got to be conscious of what you eat, you've got to be mindful about how you sleep. You've got to be able to diagnose problems if you're irritable or angry, or if you've got, you know, metabolic challenges, how to be fixing those. And I think it's really fascinating about how early on in human history these things are being talked about and also why we think, like you've asked that afro a couple of times, why we think these things are faddish and new and sort of voguish. And, you know, I think that there are people, perhaps even listening, who think that the gym or healthy diets, it's all sort of nonsense. But, you know, this is a. It's lost memories and lost histories rather than something which we should probably all have been thinking about. For hundreds of years, we've covered sleep.
- [46:19]
Afwa Hersh
And exercise and a world in which the ancients saw everything as connected. So the big missing element that we're going to come back to in the next episode is the sacred realm. Priests, shamans and oracles. Join us in the next episode to find out more.
- [46:35]
Peter Frankopan
Thanks for listening to Legacy.
- [46:37]
Afwa Hersh
Don't forget to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast player. You can also watch all our episodes on YouTube, so make sure you're subscribed there too.
- [46:46]
Peter Frankopan
And of course, we're on all the social media and all the links for those are in the show notes for this episode or just search for Legacy Podcast. I'm Peter Frankipone.
- [46:55]
Afwa Hersh
I'm Afwa Hersh, and we'll see you on the next episode of Legacy.
- [47:17]
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