Egypt Reaching for Deity
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and in our series on world history we are approaching ancient Egypt.
We’re shortly after the Tower of Babel, so Mizraim has just gone down to Egypt and we’re talking about a certain geographical area, which I will now describe for you. When I was a kid and I would look at a map of ancient Egypt and I would see the division between upper and lower Egypt, I was always terribly confused. Can you guess why I was terribly confused?
Greg: Oo, oo, it was upside down!
Emily: It was upside down, because if you’re looking at a map with north being up, as north should always be, upper Egypt is below lower Egypt. It’s actually referring to altitude, because as we know water flows downhill from upper Egypt, which is to the south, through lower Egypt, which is to the north, and into the Mediterranean Sea.
Greg: Through the delta.
Emily: Right. But don’t all rivers have deltas? I thought that was a given.
Rachel: But it’s a very large delta. It’s quite the significant piece of land there. Also, the interesting thing about the Nile is it flows from the south to the north, but it has two different headwaters, which made for a lot of fun for people exploring back in the 1800s.
Emily: “I have found the headwaters!” “No, I have found the headwaters!”
Rachel: “Oh wait, we both found the headwaters, but they’re different!”
Greg: The rumor that there was this huge lake up there somewhere in the middle of darkest Africa got Stanley a lot of laughs at the World Geographic Society because he reported what David Livingston had told him and everybody said, “That’s ridiculous. No river works like that. There’s no lake up there. Whatever is in darkest Africa, it couldn’t possibly be what you’re describing. You are a fake, sir. You never met David Livingston.”
At that point, word came from David Livingston’s bearers that he was dead and they’d left his heart behind in Africa, but they brought his body home and with it a message saying, “Give my regards to Mr. Stanley.” Oops.
But we did not know where the Nile started until 1800+ years after Christ, so a lot of mystery, a lot to explore, and it doesn’t get explored for a very, very long time.
Rachel: And it’s very interesting when you start seeing the beginnings of all the exploration particularly of Egypt, so many things if they’d had modern technology would have been a cinch. Think of being able to fly over Africa. But when you’re reading the stories of David Livingston and he’s exploring, he literally can’t see something because there’s a hill in the way and he can’t figure out how to get to the top of the hill and see if the Nile’s on the other side. He can’t get up the hill.
Emily: Google Earth, let alone Google Maps.
Rachel: It’s just so fascinating to read their stories and realize how hard it was for them and how much they endured and how sick they got, especially exploring Africa.
Greg: Says the young lady who’s spent a good deal of time in Africa.
Rachel: Near where he was, yes. I was more to the west, but I can still appreciate being in the heart of tropical equatorial Africa and knowing how treacherous it is there. We claim pretty much everything is trying to kill you, and it’s true. It was a challenging place to explore.
Greg: And we thought Australia was bad.
Emily: I’ve never been to Australia. I don’t really have any desire to go to Australia.
Greg: Not many people do once they hear that all the creatures that can kill you that aren’t in Africa are in Australia.
Rachel: Those two places together pretty much house all the worst of them.
Greg: In the wake of the flood, the dispersion of mankind and creatures of various sorts moved and kept moving. Some stopped in Africa because of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, and others – before the water levels rose at the end of the Ice Age – were able to walk or swim or somehow get to Australia just before it got cut off.
So back to Egypt, we’re not at the ends of the earth exactly. People were still moving, but a lot of people, including Ham and his family, moved to this place that we call Egypt. The naming of countries is a difficult matter. It’s not just one of your holiday games. You may think the Greeks mad as a hatter. They didn’t care what anybody called themselves, they just assigned whatever name they thought, so out of their own mythology they came up with the name Egypt. But as Emily already pointed out, they called themselves Mizraim, which means basically “the two Egypts.” I wonder why.
We mentioned the Nile delta and you asked, “Doesn’t every river have a delta?” Not every river has a delta but a lot do, but the thing is this delta looks like a delta. That’s why we call them deltas. This is the mother of all deltas, but apparently originally it was more like a lake.
One thing the Egyptians did – either Mizraim or one of the first Pharaohs, if it wasn’t in fact Mizraim – is they banked it in somehow, so from henceforth Egypt was the gift of the Nile. There wasn’t a lot of rain, and still isn’t, but once a year the Nile would overflow its banks and the waters, as they swished down, would overflow and carry silt, bottom soil, and water to all the farmlands.
It became important to harvest that water, channel it with canals and such, and save it in reservoirs, because that’s what you lived on, and they did. In some places it was a garden spot on the edge of what was quickly becoming the Sahara Desert. This was something that was still not that far from Sumer, from Babel.
When you’re teaching history, you start with Babel and Ur of the Chaldees, and you follow the two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, up toward their headwaters. Then you take a hard left and bend down toward Canaan, and this is called the Fertile Crescent because these were garden lands. They were well-watered, until the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and they were places to be.
A lot of Ham’s descendants, the Canaanites particularly of various brands, stopped and settled in Canaan, but apparently Ham himself – because Egypt in scripture is called the land of Ham – moved on down from Mizraim into the place that would be called Mizraim (the Greeks called Egypt) and would create a rather advanced society.
Perhaps now is the time to say something about the pyramids. From ancient times people have speculated as to what exactly is going on with these things. Nobody remembers how they were built, although there are some increasingly intelligent explanations these days. I found one online and forgot to reference it, so maybe we can stick it in the Show Notes.
We’ve heard everything from aliens to telepathy to antigravitation. It’s probably none of the above. It was probably something a lot simpler. Ham and his father and brothers had built a boat half the size of the Queen Mary. They had come out of an advanced technological civilization and they brought specific tricky concrete ways of building stuff like huge towers.
Now the question is why pyramids? Well, Babel was a ziggurat. It was a stepped tower. The pyramids are a little more stylish, a little more cool, a little more geometric. Yes, they’re lined up with stars and longitudes and latitudes and all kinds of things.
Emily: It’s a minimalist stepped tower. They didn’t want the steps.
Greg: Here’s the thing that evolution did to the historical sciences. Mankind had evolved from lower primates over a course of whatever the number is these days – hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Obviously, anything that came before us must have been primitive, ignorant, barbaric, savage. They couldn’t possibly know all the cool stuff we know, yet here are these pyramid things.
There was a lot of simply ignoring the fact that we didn’t know how to build them, and thus door opening for all kinds of speculations around magic and aliens. But there was also more and more an assumption that it took a long, long time.
Although tradition said that these were each tombs for pharaohs and that they had each been built within a pharaoh’s lifetime, how could that possibly be? It would take us forever because we don’t even know how to do it. Maybe they lied, but one thing we are absolutely sure of, every pharoah had exactly one pyramid because that’s all you need, and who would invest all the manpower to build two or three in his lifetime? Until we found out that someone had.
The particular pyramids – and I don’t remember their names, but if you look at them, one is kind of slanting at an awkward angle and either did collapse or is about to collapse. The next one goes halfway up at the first angle the first one did, and then suddenly everything bends in real fast like, “Oh!”
Emily: “We figured out there’s a problem with that angle. Let’s fix it.”
Greg: “There’s a design flaw,” but the thing is they discovered it in the middle of building the second pyramid. In other words, the first one is barely off the line when they started on a second one, and they were able to fix the design flaw, and in the third one they simply changed the angle altogether and the same pharaoh bears the names.
In other words, first of all, it didn’t take nearly as long as anybody thought, so obviously, short of magic and aliens, there’s a fast mechanical way of getting these things up. Also, there’s something wrong with the theory that they’re primarily tombs for pharaohs because you’re not going to bury your body in three places, so the question becomes what was really going on? Why did the Egyptians build these things and keep building them when the pharaoh already had two. Why build a third one? What were they really after?
Another thing that feeds into this is that we used to assume that these were huge public works programs. Obviously this is what you have your slaves do – until excavations around the Great Pyramid showed actually they were built by Egyptians in the off-season when they weren’t doing their farm work.
We have records not only of the general names of what’s going on here, but each group picked a team name. It’s like field day at school. They had their team name and their colors and their shirts or whatever. They were obviously in competition with one another and it became a “Rah-rah! Let’s go Egypt! Let’s have some national spirit!” Rachel, I think you had looked into this a little bit.
Rachel: Yes. It gives the opportunity for devotion to a work that is outside of their regular life. It’s pulling them away from the bonds of their normal family life, their tribal life, and they’re instead coming to a particular place to work on behalf of the nation. So there’s a sense of that early form of nationalism, but it’s centered around a project for the pharaoh.
And if you’re going to have that many different people working for you doing these things – and their accuracy was incredible. They’re building these things that are a couple hundred meters across, and their margin for error is in the millimeters. They had built a system that was able to standardize what they were doing across many different groups, which means lots of bureaucracy and a whole state system that is basically managing the workforce.
It's giving a new slant to the culture, where it’s not localized and everybody in their own little area doing things. It’s bringing a centralization to the nation and a lot more focus on the pharaoh as directly ruling over all the people, rather than being the guy far away that we know as a representative of the gods. No, he and his bureaucratic forces are managing probably lots and lots of the aspects of how they did all of these things.
It shifts Egypt to being more of a statist and centralized society from what it would have been before. So I would assume it creates what the pharaoh wanted, a nation very much focused on him and giving all of the power to him.
Greg: In the 1940s in America we saw something similar – ‘we’ being none of us here because we weren’t alive, but my parents were.
Emily: I was waiting for the 1940s to come up actually, with all this talk of state work projects.
Greg: Exactly – Works Progress Administration, or it was fondly called We Piddle Along. There was the National Industrial Recovery.
Emily: There was a whole alphabet soup.
Greg: Yes. When I am introducing Franklin Delano Roosevelt to my students in Econ or World History, I simply open the encyclopedia of American history to the chapter that covers historically and chronologically the New Deal and I just start reading the titles of all of the acts, all the bureaucracies, all the departments, all the lawsuits, all the judicial decisions. It goes on and on and on, and there is hardly anything that the New Deal did not try to encompass, regulate, limit, and put under the authority of the federal government.
Another generation would not have tolerated this in America, but the Great Depression and now war scared people good. And here comes this grandfatherly guy on the radio, a new technological invention, with his little doggie at his side, doing fireside chats and playing grandfather to a nation.
Emily: The dog gave fireside chats?
Greg: Yeah, the dog gave fireside chats, exactly [laughing], with the help of his owner, FDR. That generation, poorly trained in economics and in God’s law, became convinced that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had saved them.
When I was a kid, if you talked to anyone who was around from that generation (unless it was my dad) and tried to criticize FDR in any way, you would raise hell because they would tell you in no uncertain terms, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, kid. He saved us. He saved us from the Depression. He saved us from war.” Short of God walking on earth, it’s hard to come up with another phrase that that generation was willing to imbue to him. That was in a nation with a Christian heritage.
Think of Egypt, where the heritage goes back to Ham, who was not exactly the most godly of Noah’s three sons. They come through Babel. They were already piddling around with polytheism, so it became a very practical way for the pharaohs – pharaoh is a title that means ‘great house’ but it became the name for the emperors, the kings of Egypt, the sons of the divine son. This became the tool that they were able to use to create an incredible bureaucracy such as the world did not see until the late 1800s or early 1900s again.
You mentioned the kind of precision. This had to be passed down in writing, in notes, recorded, regulated, checked and rechecked. They had to get it just right, and you had to do this, as you said, with all kinds of people all over the place. By the time you were done, yes, you’d go back to your farming but you remembered that you were a part of something literally really big. You just built a mountain to heaven, and the mythology of Babel still lingered.
Emily: The significance of the mountain to heaven – I feel like there’s so much we could talk about there. Are there a lot of natural mountains in that area? Obviously, we have Upper Egypt so there’s got to be something. It’s a change of altitude, but mountains?
Rachel: Once you come down, I think where the Valley of Kings is, and you continue towards the delta, it becomes progressively more flat, desert, nothing. The mountains are the things that are far away. They’re at the horizon line. They’re the edge of the world, but that area doesn’t have a lot of big mountains like we see here.
Emily: But if the top of the mountain is where you meet with God, you’ve got to have a mountain.
Greg: You’ve got to have a mountain nearby, yes.
Tied into this and something that the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century really picked up on was the whole idea of life beyond death. Because of the Christianization of Europe and America in times past, when we hear ‘life beyond death’ we normally recast it in Christian terms.
When we hear, for instance, that the pharaohs were embalmed and mummified and prepared for the afterlife, we get the idea of, “Oh, they preserve their bodies so they could rise again.” No, that’s not what was going on.
Emily: I don’t know that a lot of Christians would even think of that today. I think we’ve really lost a sense of burial as a testimony to the resurrection.
Rachel: I don’t think most people know the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, because what is everybody’s hope? To make sure everybody can go to heaven.
Greg: Die and be with Jesus, which is the great hope for now, but it’s not the end of the story by a long shot.
Let me do a dog leg here. I know you ladies have heard this from me, but it’s been a while and I don’t know who out there knows the story. What became very key to the pyramids and the cult of the dead and the afterlife and all of this was the story or myth of Isis and Osiris.
The story goes that at the beginning of Egyptian history, which for them was some horrible time in the past, there had arisen this great king named Osiris. He was the son or grandson of Ra, I forget the exact genealogy, and Isis was his sister and his wife. He brought peace to Egypt, he brought culture, he brought crops and farming, and most of all he brought ale and beer.
Emily: That’s important.
Greg: It’s important. It does not get any better than that. And because of this the Egyptians honored him, as he was a god, and they encouraged him to go and spread the gospel of beer throughout the savage tribes all around them. So he set off to do this, leaving his wife behind and his brother, the villain of the story called Set.
Set was jealous (think Lion King) and wanted the throne and wanted the wife, but she was able to put him off and stall until Osiris returned. So we have our villain saying, “Curses, foiled again,” but he’s not done yet. He’s had just enough taste of power and possibilities that he’s going to make the definitive move. He’s going to get rid of Osiris.
So stealthily he acquires Osiris’s measurements – horizontal, vertical, depth – and has a chest made, or coffer it’s usually called. We might think coffin and it’s just Osiris-sized. He overlays it with gold and jewels and gems and velvet linings and all that kind of thing, and he throws a great party and invites all the judges of Egypt, all the princes, and Osiris. And while everyone is drinking themselves drunk, he wheels this thing out and says, “I just happened to find this thing lying around, and I’m in such a good mood and I’m so generous that I’m just going to give it away to whoever fits inside of it exactly.”
So we play Goldilocks. People line up to see if they fit. One guy’s too fat, one guy’s too skinny, one guy’s too tall, one guy’s too short, and they go through it all. Everyone is like, “Aww, no, I don’t fit the thing,” and then finally Osiris comes and it was just right. Then they slam the lid on it, nail it shut, throw it in the Nile, and Set takes over the kingdom. He tries to make moves on Isis, who runs for her life and other things.
Meanwhile, the Nile has carried this coffer in which Osiris has now suffocated to death, and carries it down through the Mediterranean to the Phoenician city of Byblos. There it gets lodged against the bank and rocks of a cliff and a tree grows up around it, so that in the end the coffer is in the heart of the tree.
Isis goes looking for this, weeping and wailing and hoping and wanting. Maybe there’s something she can do. After all, she is a goddess. She comes eventually to Byblos and senses a disturbance in the Force or something, and realizes, “I’ve got to get that tree.”
While she’s thinking about, “What’s my next move?” she presents herself as a governess for the new royal infant. With her impeccable credentials she’s accepted and she’s given complete charge of the baby, and since she’s in a good mood because things are going well now, she decides to give the baby immortality, divinity. So every night she puts the baby in magical flames to burn off it’s mortality and grossness, and turn it into a god.
Well, mom walks in, is horrified, snatches the baby, and says, “What are you doing?” Then Isis manifests and says, “I am a goddess and I would have made your child divine, but you forfeited that. Ha! Now never mind.”
“Uh, yes, goddess person, what can we do for you?”
“Give me that tree.”
“Ok. Chop down the tree and give her the tree.”
So the tree is chopped down and, lo and behold, there’s the coffer. She gets it all the way back to Egypt and is ready to try to find some way to reanimate the body. She stashes it in a cave, and while she’s out coming up with options and talking to other gods, Set finds it. He says, “No more of this,” takes the body and cuts it in pieces, and takes those pieces and throws them out into the Nile and into the delta.
Well, Isis comes back and says, “Oh no, not again.” So with help from Thoth, the god of magic and writing, she sets out.
Emily: Interesting, by the way, that magic and writing and go together.
Greg: Oh, of course they do. She goes out with her little papyrus boat because, for future reference, crocodiles do not like papyrus. See footnote to Moses’ mom. Anyway, using this little lamp in the dark she finds every piece of the body except one. Not being able to recover this crucial part of the body, she has one made out of wood or wax or something and inserts it in the proper location, and because of this the Egyptians went on to worship this particular part of male anatomy for long centuries after that.
While this is going on, she assumes the form of a bird and flutters over the dead body, because it’s still really dead, and becomes pregnant somehow and eventually gives a sort of virgin birth to the child Horus, who becomes the new Sun god and the avenger of Osiris.
Meanwhile, with Thoth’s help and Anubis’s help, they bandage up the body and put all the pieces together, with the one piece being supplied artificially, and through magic Osiris comes to life but not in this world, and this is the key for understanding the Egyptian cult of the dead, Egyptian mythology, and the Egyptian idea of the resurrection.
What it means for Osiris is that because his body is preserved here, his ka or soul self is able to survive on the other side in an alternate dimension in the other world, call it what you will, and there finally realizes his full potential for godhood. He becomes a god.
Meanwhile, Horus sets about taking down Set, and that’s another story where the virgin-born child comes back and destroys the bad guy, and the dying and rising god is part of this, but the resurrection or rising is not a returning of the soul in the flesh. It’s not a resurrection of the flesh. They did not embalm the bodies hoping the body would come back. They believed rather that as long as the body was preserved, the soul self would exist safely on the other side.
This is not at all different from what we’ve seen already from the ancestors of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Canaanites, who preserved the bodies of their ancestors, fed them, bring them water, drinks, and surrounded them with pictures and things. It’s the same idea. There is something divine in man, and death has the potential to bring it out.
What the Egyptians added was, “But you need magic and you need to preserve the body. Don’t just bury it so you know where the bones are, but you need to preserve it as best you can, and you need to supply it with all the things it will need in the afterlife.”
Originally this meant that when the pharaoh died, not only would he take his favorite couch and bed and lamp, he’d also take his favorite wives and his favorite slaves. They’d just be thrown in and the thing would be sealed, because you never know what you might need. Later on it became evident somehow that symbols of these things would be good enough, much to the relief of many wives, concubines, and slaves.
What we have seen in the excavations, especially those around the Great Pyramid, is that although the pharaoh could afford to do this in style, every Egyptian shared the same hope. Pharaoh was the leader. He set the pace. He crossed over, and in his death he became an Osiris. He became a little god, and every Egyptian could do that if you could preserve the body and provide him with just at least the basics, including specifically the magic spells you needed, because here’s the rest of the story – perhaps not for Osiris but for those who came afterward.
When you cross over, you don’t immediately stand at the throne of God, as Christians would insist. You’re more or less where you are, except in a different dimension. It’s scary and frightening and dark, and there are demons and monsters and things out there. You need to get past these and go find the gods and stand before them for judgment.
You need magic spells, so inside the tombs or the coffins they would paste all the magic spells in hieroglyphics as necessary, so in case you forgot you had your cheat sheet. You could ward off the demons and make your way to the gods, and there you would stand before Osiris as the first of the gods to survive death.
The jackal-headed god Anubis would weigh your soul against the feather of truth, and if your soul was light enough then you would be welcome to fellowship with the gods and pass on to the happy fields beyond, become a god like Osiris, blah blah blah. But if you were found unworthy, then you would be tossed into the mouth of the devourer of souls, a kind of hybrid hippopotamus/crocodile thing, and you would be digested in its bowels for centuries before finally meeting oblivion.
Among the spells that were included in the coffins were spells to deceive the gods, because nobody wanted to be swallowed by a crocodile. So when you stood before the gods you wore a scarab upon your heart to quiet a heart that might give you away by beating too hard or too fast because you’re afraid, and had the right words to say to charm the gods into believing that you were okay after all.
We have a list of some of the things that you were supposed to say, and they largely amount to not “Here’s all the good things I did” but “Here’s all the bad things I didn’t do. I didn’t steal. I didn’t oppress the widow” and all those kinds of things. So even the gods themselves could be the victims of this magic.
Magic was the way of dealing with death, of dealing with even the gods themselves, and of ensuring that you became divine on the other side. And so the intense obsession with preserving bodies, and if you had the money or you were pharaoh, you put an awful lot of money and took an awful lot of stuff with you.
We have no evidence that the pyramids were ever used for tombs. They may have been, but there were so many grave robbers that if they ever were, it’s all gone. The Valley of the Kings survived better. If you want a tomb, don’t put it in the middle of the plain and say, “Hey look, this is where I’m going to die and leave all my treasures.” That’s dumb. You hide it away in a valley and put curses on it and don’t tell anybody it’s there.
So as we come to God’s people interacting with Egypt, this is all in the background. When Moses spoke to Pharaoh, someone could look out the window and see the Great Pyramid standing there. They could talk to any of the wise men around and they would know these stories. They would know the whole polytheon of Egyptian gods. They were versed in magic.
In fact, Moses grew up in the Egyptian court. Children from noble families were enrolled in basically public schools at the age of 4, and of the many things that princelings learned, huge on the list was magic. You had to know how to find lucky days. You had to know what amulets warded off particular diseases or illnesses, how to force people to do what you wanted them to do.
Moses mastered magic. He just didn’t believe in it. He got his A’s, as Daniel would later in Babylon University, but he just rejected the whole thing. He refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter and he rejected Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king.
So as we stand back and look at the place that Egypt plays in the history of the world, there’s a lot that we can trace. We could talk about hieroglyphics. We could talk about the political history of Egypt. We should at some point talk about Egyptian chronology. It’s the backbone of Western chronology, and if you get that wrong you have a problem. You lose the story, but we’ll do that next time.
And of course the outpouring of the plagues, the exodus, the journey to Sinai, the giving of the law, all that takes place with Egypt immediately in the background. And Egypt is not gone, because we keep running into it again and again all the way to the end of the Old Testament, both in political history but also in prophecy. God has some fascinating thing to say about “here’s the house of bondage,” and yet “one day Egypt will be called my people.”
Emily: Awesome. Next time we can look forward to chronology and political history of Egypt. Let’s finish up tonight with some recommendations. I actually have one that’s sort of inspired by this stuff, so I’ll go ahead and throw that out. This is a sequel to a sequel of a spinoff of a movie.
Rachel: That was a lot of things in the front of that.
Emily: It was, so you would not expect what I’m talking about to be very good, would you? But it is. I’m talking about Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. It’s a really excellent animated movie that came out a couple years ago. The premise of the story is Puss in Boots is a cat and has nine lives, and he’s lost track and suddenly finds himself on his last life and has to confront death and the reality of his own mortality. It’s a thrilling adventure story and the animation is very cool. I highly recommend.
Greg: Oddly enough, it’s the only Puss in Boots movie I’ve seen, because my dear daughter Hayley insisted we see it.
Rachel: I have not seen it, so I’ll have to put it on the list.
Emily: It’s got cats in it. You’ll love it.
Rachel: I was thinking, “I love cats. Why have I not seen this cat movie?”
Greg: Rachel, do you have anything?
Rachel: Yes. Inspired by our discussion of geography, I thought of a book that I read a little while ago called Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World. It’s by Tim Marshall. I read it before teaching geography a year and a half ago, and it’s a fascinating look at how the geographic features of every area have in many ways directed how the players in that area will act.
He wrote the book before the various Russian invasions of the last ten years and basically predicted all of them in the book, based upon the geography of the region and what Russia needs. It goes through Africa and why Africa didn’t develop, based on geography, and it’s really, really interesting and kind of unique in how it looks at the world and at the events of history. I recommend. It’s pretty easy to read, and also you actually learn geography, which most people need.
Greg: I’m going to recommend the book I require of my students in the beginning of World History. It’s called Gods, Graves and Scholars: A Story of Archaeology. It’s by C.W. Ceram. He was not an archeologist. He was a journalist and for that reason could actually write a good story. He tells the story of the development, the creation, the birth of the science of archaeology.
There are healthy chapters about the deciphering of cuneiform and of hieroglyphics, the whole fascination with Egypt, how hieroglyphics began to unlock things, and then he goes on and talks about Schliemann’s discoveries in Troy and Layard’s discoveries in Nineveh. It’s very well written and a lot of fun.
I’ve had, oddly enough, a couple of students who never really liked reading a whole lot come to me and say, “This is great! Is there anything else like it?” and I’ve found out that no, really there isn’t, sorry.
Emily: “Sorry kid. That was the one book you’ll ever enjoy.”
Greg: “Yeah, glad you really enjoyed this.” It’s written as a series of short biographies with a lot of action going on. If you want an introduction to how not through books but through hands-on digging and dusting and looking we began to understand something of these ancient cultures, this is a good starting point. It is well-written and it’s a fun read. After you’ve done this you can go to the British Museum and see a lot of this stuff and say, “Oh, that’s what that looks like.”
Emily: Very cool. Thank you both so much for this discussion. It’s been a delight. I always learn a lot, so thank you very much. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
Thanks to our financial supporters. We really appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, dear listener, you can visit our Patreon page at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
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RECOMMENDATIONS:
Greg: Gods, Graves and Scholars: A Story of Archaeology, C.W. Ceram
Emily: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (movie)
Rachel: Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World, Tim Marshall