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Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartradio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you as always so much much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the man, the myth, the legend, Our super producer, Mr. Max no Red light, Williams.
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The wonder of your own heart.
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The eleventh wonder. How many wonders are there again?
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Well, there's Wonders of the ancient world. That's right.
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I don't know why I whipped out 11. That is. It's just a number. That's fun. Fun for me.
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Noel, it's good to see you again, man. I don't want to sound weird, but you're Noel Brown, I'm Ben Bullen, and I missed you a little bit.
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Oh, it's okay, Ben. You're allowed to miss me. I missed you too. We've both been on. I did. It's true. It's true. The myths and the legends and the stories are true. We've both been on various adventures across this great wide world of sport. And now we're back reconvened, talking about lighthouse. A mythical lighthouse. Well, is it mythical? I don't know.
A
Ah, this is the thing. Okay, so we are returning to one of our favorite series, an ongoing exploration of wonders of the world. And you and I and our research associate for this episode, Max, we just had a brief bit of banter that didn't make it on air where you and I were talking about how many wonders are in the world?
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I was wondering.
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Yeah, you were saying 11. And I said, that sounds like a good number. And then Max popped in and said, ah, guys, this is our series about the ancient wonders.
C
Ah, yes, of course.
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Yeah. And there's only seven of them, which is hotly debated because what makes a wonder a wonder? Well, one day we will attempt to answer that.
C
Well, seven's also a fun number.
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Meaningful.
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Seven goes to heaven. Eleven. Seven. Eleven. Anyway, they're related somehow.
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Oh my God, you guys, Noel's about to wrap.
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Nope, not me. Never. Not in a million years. Not my wheelhouse. I stay in my lane. And today my lane does involve. Our lane involves historical lighthouses. Or a historical lighthouse. Great. Indeed. The great lighthouse of Alexandria.
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So not our wheelhouse, but our lighthouse.
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We're going to start with diving into the context. Okay everybody Knows the idea of a lighthouse, right? It's a big tower along the coast, right? And the idea is a lighthouse will let you as a sailor, know where, when you are about to hit the.
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Dirt and run aground, as they say in nautical parlance.
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So there's this city called Alexandria and it is named in a burst of humility after a guy who calls himself Alexander the Great.
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Yeah, and Alexander the Great founded the city, which he named after himself in the aforementioned burst of humility in 332Bce, after the start of one of his many warring campaigns. He liked to start beef with folks, and this was beef with Persia, the Persian campaign. He made it the capital of his new dominion, the Egyptian dominion, and established a naval base there where he would wield naval control over the whole of the Mediterranean.
A
Again, super humble guy, probably fun at parties.
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I mean, I don't know. I bet he was a good hang.
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I bet he was a good like 35 minute hang.
C
I do imagine he likes to talk about himself a bit. But after Alex, our buddy, not Alex Williams, who composed this theme left Egypt. I love this title. A viceroy. I guess I'm always thinking of the Star wars thing. Wasn't there like a vice? Those little flappers mouth alien guys, weren't they? Viceroys in the trade blockades and all that stuff. We got a viceroy here named Cleomenes. Cleomenes. Cleomenes. I'm gonna say Cleomenes.
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Nailed it.
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He continued in the creation of this capital city of Alexandria in Alex's stead when he was off warring it up, you know, elsewhere.
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Famously beefy guy, our pal Alexander. Alexander dies in 323 BCE and as you said, no. The viceroy takes control and another viceroy shows up. Ptolemy. And Ptolemy founds the dynasty. So this takes us now to what our pal Max likes to call the who. Not the band, just the who of whom constructed this great lighthouse called an ancient wonder. So Ptolemy Soter is born in Macedonia, he dies in Egypt. He's a Macedonian general of Alexander the Great.
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And.
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And he ultimately this guy Ptolemy, he founds the Ptolemaic dynasty. And no, since we are an audio show, I guess we have to tell people the pronunciation of Ptolemy is not the same way it's spelled. There's a silent letter.
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I love a silent P. Remember the song Friends of P by the Rentals?
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I loved it. Right. Is that the guy who was the bassist from Weezer?
C
Matt Sharp? Yeah, he was the bassist from Weezer. I've been on a Friends Of P Kick recently when a friend of mine was visiting from St. Louis and we had one of those like YouTube diving evenings with a little bit. It may have been a few glasses of wine involved, but I rocked out the video of Friends of P. So that song, ooh, ooh, it's been stuck in my head. This is Silent P. Not to be confused also with the lies of P, which is apparently a really cool, very difficult souls like game that looks really awesome, but seems very unpleasant to play. Play. But yeah, we're talking about Ptolemy Silent P Soterolome. I. In fact, Silent P Soter, who as we know, did go on to become the ruler of Egypt. And he did reign longer than any other dynasty that was established after the Alexandrian empire, only to eventually be toppled by the Romans, as the Romans were wont to do there in 30 BCE. So if you can guess our buddy Silent p, the first P1, if you will, was a pretty. Yeah, exactly. P Prime was a pretty modest ruler dictator that didn't necessarily need any kind of props for his ego in the forms of ostentatious monuments. I'm being sarcastic on behalf of Max, who was being sarcastic when he wrote that in the doc.
A
All right, Max, give us a record scratch. No, make it sound older.
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45, 78 rather. Yeah, there we go. Nice and warbly. So, okay, we're going to move on to the pyramid. Just kidding. Max also wrote that we're here to talk about this lighthouse. So there's always lighthouses, there's always man, there's always a city, which is apparently a line from a song that. I don't know. Max.
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No, it's Bioshock Infinite.
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Oh, okay, got it.
B
That's what it says at the end of the game. There's always.
C
Is that like a movie with like a Springsteen jam or like some kind of steely thing?
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Put that in like four of these. And I keep trying to use it over and over until it finally makes sense.
A
Okay, all right, Max. You did, you did deliver on this one, Max.
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The Great Deliverer would be his nickname if he were a despot.
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All right, sarcasm aside, right?
C
Exactly. Silent P Prime definitely did in fact commission himself one of these wonders.
E
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All right, so we're going back to a guy called Mark Cartwright, because that is his legal name. And he. He told us through our various explorations a lot about wonders of the ancient world. And Mark Cartwright summarizes the adventures of Ptolemy. This way. He says, essentially, Ptolemy the first commissions the building of a massive lighthouse to guide ships into Alexandria and. And to cheer note about humility there. No, to provide a permanent reminder of his power and greatness. So this is a guy who is building a statue for himself while he is alive. This takes forever. He dies, the project is completed 20 years later or so by Ptolemy Prime's son, Ptolemy II, again named in a burst of humility and creativity.
C
Yep. And the structure just added to a giant running list of things that the great city of Alexandria boasted, including, of course, the Tomb of Alexander the Great Museum, which was an institution for the learned folk of the area. The Serapeum Temple, and of course, the Library of Alexandria. Very, very famous. Exactly. Very famous. Lost to time house of data tomes.
A
Yeah, it's a bummer. We'll never know what could have happened with civilization if that library was not burned. However, this is some classic dictator compensation. And yeah, lighthouses are kind of phallic. Thanks for the joke there, Max. But the idea behind a lighthouse is pretty solid.
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It's a functioning piece of architecture. Like you said, Ben, it keeps those ships from, you know, wrecking.
A
Yeah, yeah. So if we look at the. If we look at the geography, then we see two natural harbors. There's the. Again, humbly named Great harbor. And then there's the harbor of Fortunate Return. The mainland is linked to the island of Pharaohs. P H A R O, S. The P is pronounceable there. Right, so this lighthouse is intended to help sailors get to where they're going without wrecking the whole boat. And at this time in history, everything is dedicated to some sort of deity or another. So you got Zeus Soter, AKA Deliverer.
C
Wait, so last name? Last name, I guess. Is that. Okay, wait, so is he. I'm confused. Was this version of Zeus named after Ptolemy or was Ptolemy named after this version of Zeus? We do have the Deliverer, by the way, which is Max's despot nickname. How about that?
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Yeah, there we go. The Deliverer. The freight train.
C
And then delivering that freight.
A
Yeah. So it's a famous lighthouse, but it is not the first version of the thing. It's just the biggest version of the thing.
C
And just, again, we've mentioned, I think everybody knows what a lighthouse looks like and what a lighthouse is for, but in this. Thasos, which is an island in the Aegean Sea, was known to have had multiple towering lighthouses in the archaic period. These were landmarks as well as these beacons that were used by cities to help sailors cross the Mediterranean. The ancient lighthouses were primarily built for function over form as navigational aids, pointing out or showing through the murky fog of the open ocean leading up to land where the sea ended and the harbor began.
A
Oh, yeah, yeah. So it was less like, watch out, and more like, come here. Right. So this is the spot where you should hang out. The issue is here that we're talking about the Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean is just absolutely riddled with difficulty navigation. Right. And there are a lot of treacherous waters. So the kick here is that a lighthouse this big, this cool, is supposed to, as you said, no function as both a warning and a commemoration. We actually don't know too much in 2026 about how this lighthouse worked. Just like the Library of Alexandria, we're not certain of the structure nor the architecture of the thing, other than the fact that a lot of people saw it. A lot of people said it was made of white stone. It was three floors tall. Right. Three stories tall. And it was kind of like a ziggurat.
C
Ooh, yeah. What was that? One of those little step, the stepping ones, kind of.
A
Yeah, yeah. The bottom was a big rectangle. The bottom floor, the second floor was like an octagon, and the top floor was round. And most people are going to tell you that at the top floor there was a statue of Zeus, or to your earlier point, Zeus Soter.
C
Right. And we have accounts from Arab writers who describe it as a ramp rising around the outside of the lower part of the tower, containing an internal staircase used to reach the upper level. And then accounts from modern historians do vary a bit when it comes to the height of the tower, but estimates range from 100 to 140 meters, or 330 to 460ft. And this is again coming from our buddy, Mark Cartwright.
A
And this would have made it the second tallest structure on the planet after the pyramids over in Egypt. So this is like, this is at the point where if you are a sailor and you are going toward this part of the world and you mess up, that's on you because the lighthouse is pretty clear. But Noel, what kind of stuff lit the lighthouse here?
C
It's a good question, Ben. And when I think about the lighthouses and lighthouse technology, I guess my mind goes back to the Robert Eggers film the Lighthouse. There's. What is it? There's magic in the light. Very, very creepy stuff. Lovecraftian lore surrounding that particular lighthouse and the idea of what summons the light. We're talking about a time before, of course electricity, but mirrors of course existed and it's all about reflecting the light in a circular way that allows it to act as this beacon. So of course the light source would have had have been maintained. The idea of a lighthouse keeper, which is still a modern thing, or at least the idea of someone having to maintain the lamp and make sure the light was always on because the stakes were pretty high. If a lighthouse were to burn out, for example, we would see catastrophic results from these ships not being able to tell where the land began. So it's a little confusing because we're talking about a lighthouse that's in the name. You gotta have a light, whether it be the more modern version using incandescent bulbs or something like that, perhaps halogen bulbs that are then reflected and refracted and made to throw across long distances. What we're talking about here, according to various accounts, may have not had a light at all because the types of materials that were required to maintain such a light were pretty scarce in the region. So a lot of historians seem to think that this was more of a, a landmark slash thing that would have been helpful during the day rather than something that would have, you know, lit up the night. Because a lot of the accounts don't mention a light at all, which seems counterintuitive to calling it the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria if you ask me.
B
Right.
A
So now it's just a non functional or it's a half functional lighthouse. It's a building you can see at sea during the day. Some of the only reports we have of a lamp burning in the lighthouse at night are from folks like Pliny the Elder. Notorious liar by the way.
C
Is that true? I always thought Pliny was the authority. No, I guess I do recall some questionable reports from that dude. But you know, he's the elder, that means he's wise, but I guess old people like to lie sometimes.
A
And he got the pronounced P in his name, so take that Ptolemy.
C
Otherwise it would have been like Limey the Elder. I do love a silent P. It's just, it's a little confounding, but I'm here for it.
E
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C
So to double back on the aforementioned question of what makes a wonder? The Lighthouse of Alexandria made it onto that hallowed list of the seven wonders a bit later than some of the others because, you know, it was a tall and unique structure. The design was intended to protect the harbors and the sailors who were traveling across the Mediterranean in the ancient world. And the design of it was so, I guess, efficient and well done that it was kind of, it served as a bit of a template for other lighthouses that were built, you know, in other parts of the world.
A
Yeah. It set a precedent.
C
Right.
A
And it became a functional blueprint, essentially. Right. So you could look at Alexandria, you could look at their lighthouse and you could say, I could build something like that. That's what happened. That's why it became a wonder of the ancient world. But back then again, obviously fellow ridiculous historians, people of the day did not call these wonders of the ancient world. Please tune in for our episode on what doth make a wonderful Alexandria continued to prosper way after Alexander the Great passed away. Alexandria was part of the Roman Empire. It was actually the second most important city in that world for a long time. And then again, earthquakes. Right. Just like in our previous conversations on other ancient wonders, we got earthquakes. In 7, 96, 9, 50, the lighthouse again falls over. You know, Noel, it reminds me of the first time I saw the Tower of London. And I was kind of a jerk about it because you and I are used to very tall things being called towers.
C
Right. Apparently it's a little underwhelming when you behold it for the first time. I have not had the pleasure. But is that, is that what you're saying?
A
That's what we're saying, yeah. Because this thing as the Lighthouse of Alexandria here is three stories tall. It's going to look small to a lot of people in the modern world. But we also have to remember, three stories was a big deal at the Time.
C
Yeah, sure. No, I mean, you got to start with three stories before you can get to, you know, hundreds or whatever. The tallest. But what are we talking? What's the tallest building in the world now? I think it's somewhere in the Middle east, perhaps Dubai, maybe. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. So you gotta start somewhere.
A
You gotta start somewhere. Add the lighthouse definitely starts somewhere. It disappears from the historical record after the 14th century, probably due to earthquakes around the 1300s.
E
The.
A
The tower has granite foundations. They are reused to build a fort in the 15th century. And the sea level is rising right over these centuries. This is a true wonder of the ancient world. It did exist. You can visit the ruins. You should also probably, if you are sailing, not trust those ruins. And Noel, for this episode and this series, we always like to conclude with a conversation about one of our favorite games, Civilization. I say we throw to Max. How do we feel about that?
C
Yeah, well, I guess, y', all, I'm still not particularly versed in the civ universe, so everything that I've learned about it, I've learned right here on this podcast. So I know that a lot of these ancient wonders are. Look, add on things that you can build that give you, like, buffs or something in your. In your civilization. Is this a good one to build, Max, or what's the deal? What kind of buffs are we talking? How does it aid in. In. In your. In your. In your civilization?
B
It is one you can build. Is actually. It's funny. It's one that's in. Basically, it's. I think it's actually in every single game. It is a very famous one, and it Honestly, it really does. A lot of these wonders change a lot throughout the games to match the game context. This one doesn't. It basically just makes it so your ships move faster and you can have better at shipping and visibility.
A
Right?
B
Yeah, it's like a nice wonder. And it's also one that the AI always really wants, so it's really hard to get, but I've always thought it's kind of mid. We have the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. We have the Temple of Artemis. We have the Colossus at Rhodes. These are all, you know, wonders you could build around the same time that are vastly better. Of course, I'm talking Civilization 6 on this, because I'm still having weird feelings with Seven, but I'll give it a C minus. Great.
A
All right, well, let's do a Max with the facts on that one. And we're back. And folks, we cannot be more happy to be back together behind the curtain. We've been traveling a bit. Noel, you are returned from northern climes and I'm returned from some oceans as well. And dude, I think we're gonna finally do it. I think we're gonna get to the Waffle House episode.
C
Oh, my gosh. Yeah. No, it's true. It's true. You've done some excellent research on that. And, you know, we will combine our collective appreciation and various understandings of the history of Waffle House, which is a very important part of southern culture that. That folks not from around these parts might not know about. But I think you're gonna be a little more. It's gonna be a little more interesting than you might think.
A
And don't let Noel sell himself short here, folks. Noel, Max and I actually did some on the ground research for this. What are we talking about? Find out in our next episode. For now, thank you as always so much to our, our research associate for this episode and Our super producer, Mr. Max Williams, as well as Alex Williams, who composed this slap and bop.
C
Alex the Great Williams. Christopher Osiotes. And he is Jeff Coates. Here in spirit, of course. Jonathan Strickland.
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Bahamas Jacobs the puzzler.
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Yeah. Rachel. Dr. Big Spinach. Lance the rude dudes at Ridiculous Crime. If you like, you'll love them. Shout out to Sauce on the side by none other than good friend of the show, Gandhi. Noel, we gotta get up there soon.
C
Let's do it. We will see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Podcast by iHeartPodcasts | Hosts: Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown | Date: February 12, 2026
In this engaging installment of Ridiculous History, Ben and Noel return to their recurring “Wonders of the World” series to dive deep into the origins, mysteries, and enduring legacy of the Lighthouse of Alexandria—one of the famed Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. With characteristic banter and plenty of sarcasm, they unpack the historical context of this monumental structure, its builder’s not-so-humble motivations, architectural details, technological mysteries, and its place in ancient and modern culture.
The episode maintains Ridiculous History’s signature blend of sarcastic humor, pop culture references (Bioshock Infinite, Steely Dan, video games), and thoughtful historical analysis. Ben and Noel’s dynamic is playful but informed, oscillating between earnest wonder and tongue-in-cheek commentary on the vanity of ancient rulers.
The Lighthouse of Alexandria stands as both a literal and metaphorical beacon of ancient ambition, blending function, ego, and myth. While its exact technology and grandeur remain shrouded by history (and a few earthquakes), its influence on architecture, navigation, and even modern pop culture is clear. This episode offers listeners not just a history lesson but a meditation on why humans, ancient and modern, build things to outlast themselves—even if sometimes, as the hosts note, it’s just “classic dictator compensation.”
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