Luke Caverns
speaker
1,858 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 May
Luke Caverns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And then, you know, at the end of the podcast, when he said, you know, the kind of temperature came down. And then I think maybe you asked something like, you know, well, what can people do to help archaeology? And he was like, oh, well, you can donate to the SAA. But the SAA is the one that wrote the letter. And it's like, oh, man, that's just – It's not a good look.
Several different times, like five different times. God. Mm-hmm.
Well, you know, so the first time Caesar is chasing his rival Pompey across the Mediterranean, and Pompey flees to Alexandria, and... Alexandria was kind of in the basket of Rome. The Ptolemies, who are the Greek pharaohs in Egypt – so the Greeks are controlling Egypt after Alexander comes in 332 BC. So Alexander dies. His best friend Ptolemy becomes pharaoh. So –
But the Ptolemies were very weak, not very good rulers. And so Rome kind of does like what the US does where they get pulled into conflicts. And then once they're there and they conquer everything, they seize all the power. And so Rome had done this to Egypt. And so they controlled Egypt and they were pulling all of their – they were keeping the Ptolemies in power.
the Roman soldiers were, and they were pulling all that grain into Egypt. And so Caesar follows Pompey, chases him to Alexandria, and so that Pompey can't flee, Caesar says, we'll burn the docks. Well, when you landed in Alexandria, you would land at this dock that went to a road called Soma Road. So you had Soma Road and Canopic Way, and it was like the street corner.
It must have been amazing to see in real life. Think about this. You have the Library of Alexandria, This is all in one block. You have the Library of Alexandria. You have the Museon, which is right next to it. So both together, they make the world's first university. And I mean, you can just imagine like walking through those halls. Across the street from that is Alexander's mausoleum.
So his mausoleum, we think the Emperor Hadrian, if you've heard of Hadrian before, that he modeled his mausoleum on Alexander's. So we kind of have an idea of like what the mausoleum may have looked like. And we have a marble statue of Alexander on top. So people are walking by every day in the middle of this town.
And then across the street from that is the palatial district where all the rich people live. And then off by the bay, you would have had Cleopatra's palace. And so it's this beautiful place. But when the boats come into the dock, you had to give up all the scrolls that you had because the Ptolemies are obsessed with obtaining the world's knowledge and they want the originals.
They don't want a copy. So what they would tell people is, you give us your writings, we'll write down a copy, and we'll give you back your original. But what they would do is give back the copy and keep the original. And this is something called the Library Wars. This is the whole thing. But it was connected to the docks.
And so most of the buildings in Alexandria are made out of stone to prevent fires. But the interior of Alexandria's library would have had all these wooden shelves that would cross where you'd stack all the scrolls in. So everything just – maybe the actual structure of the building doesn't burn down, but the entire interior of it burns up.
And so when Caesar sets fire to the docks to burn all of Pompey's ships, it crawls up the docks and burns the library down. Well, Augustus did the same thing a decade and a half later. Augustus came and he seized Alexandria. And this is when Cleopatra and Mark Antony die. He seizes it. And then there are rebellions because the Alexandrians are very rebellious.
They don't want to be ruled by the Romans. And So I think it's Caracalla that he was being made fun of by the Alexandrians. There was a theater in town. It's actually the place where stand-up comedy was invented in Alexandria. Really? And the butt of all the jokes was always the Roman emperor.
So you'd have people talking shit about the Roman emperor standing up in the middle of Alexandria's theater. And so the Roman emperor was always the butt of the joke. Well, Caracalla – I believe it's Caracalla – He's one of the brothers in Gladiator 2, the new Gladiator if you've seen it. I haven't seen it. He's one of the brothers.
But the movie doesn't really depict the actual emperors very accurately. But he gets tired of it. So he just comes down to Alexandria on like a royal visit and executes 25,000 people in the city of Alexandria and burns down parts of it. So he burned down the library for the third time.
And then there was another emperor named Aurelian when a local Alexandrian declared himself the new Egyptian pharaoh. I think he was a real Egyptian. He declared himself like the newest pharaoh and he created this revolt. And then Aurelian had to come and put the revolt down and he burned down the library again. So this is – we're getting close to like 300 AD at this point.
Now, in 365 AD, there was a huge earthquake that was off of the coast of Crete, I think, which is the most southern Greek isle. It's where the Minoans lived. I believe it's there or it's off the coast of Cyprus. And so that earthquake just reverberates down to Egypt and this massive tsunami destroys the entire city of Alexandria. And it said it was so catastrophic that –
I think it's Pliny the Elder or Pliny the Younger comes down in a rescue mission from Italy and he comes to Alexandria and he records that 50,000 people in the city are missing because of, you know, the wave that gets pushed in and that all of the giant boats, these are giant, giant, gigantic boats in Alexandria's harbor, are sitting on top of all the rooftops in the city.
And it's after this point that the location of Alexander's body and the location of Alexandria's library just... Completely go missing. So so they're both utterly destroyed. And most likely, all of the giant stones that were used to build the city were repurposed for, you know, other things.
But in one fell swoop, Alexandria's library, the museum and Alexander's mausoleum completely disappear from the historical record.
A really long time. A really long time. I think about that with foraging. Yesterday I was reading Exploration Faucet. Have you ever read this before or listened to the audio book? It's Percy's personal diary. Oh, wow. There's an audio book of that? Yeah, it's on Audible. Dude, you'll get wrapped up in it. You won't be able to stop listening to it. He just has these amazing experiences and
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