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
Yeah, well, and then check this out. Hipparchus' discovery detailed in his lost work, but referenced by Ptolemy, the pharaoh over Alexandria in the Almagest, 2nd century CE. So this is happening in the city of Alexandria. All this is being studied in Alexandria's library. Marks the earliest confirmed understanding of procession in scientific sense.
Dude, that was lost in the burning of Alexandria's library. Yeah, how crazy is that?
You would have to be transfixed. You know something interesting that I was just reminded of is this meandering pattern. It continues in the ancient Mediterranean world, so Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, until Alexandria's library is burned and stops after that. You see it on the monument of Augustus. which dates to about 9 BC, but that's for his death. But Augustus would have seen Alexandria.
He would have been familiar with these motifs. I believe after that in Rome, we don't see this motif anymore of the squared spiral. In Mesoamerica, in Mexico and Central America, This squared spiral motif stops with the burning of the Maya codices from Diego de Landa in like 1574.
He gathered all of the writing in the Maya world together in the city of what is modern-day Merida, and he burned it all up. And it was called multiple pyres. So imagine, let's say a pyre is at least from the floor to the ceiling stacked with codexes. Like have you ever seen the sticky notes that are connected on each side? That's how the Maya books looked. and he burned all that history.
Today, we only have three or four that exist, and one of them is controversial as to whether or not it's a forgery. So he destroyed all of the written history of the Mesoamerican world in one fell swoop. And to give you an idea of just how much it was, when the Spaniards arrived in the Aztec world, so the Aztec were standing on the shoulders of giants, being the Maya and all the other cultures.
The Aztecs were producing... 250,000 pieces of paper a year. It's something like that. It's an incredible amount of written knowledge and all of that knowledge is burned and gone. And so, you know, just again, when archaeologists stand behind their opinions so strongly as to chastise other people for speculating about, oh, well, you know, this could be this.
It's so silly because we're disconnected from the ancient world by a considerable margin. I mean, none of us really understand what's going on. I was having a conversation with...
Dr. Barnhart, we were at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and we're looking at all these Maya gods up on this mural, and everything in Mesoamerica, whether it's the Maya, the Olmecs, the Aztecs, Teotihuacanos, Zapotecs, whatever, it's all very fierce and dark and scary, kind of scary to us.
And we're looking up at it, and he's like, you know, I've always wondered, like, where's the love in their religion? Like, you know, where are all the doves that you see, like, in Christian churches and stuff? And he was like, but, you know... In reality, if we could speak to them, we would probably be so embarrassed and shocked at how wrong our ideas are about who these people were.
And, you know, his attitude and his approach to the ancient world, I just love it because, you know, he just presents like the evidence that's available, gives his idea of what he thinks the evidence means while also saying, you know— This is just my idea from this. We could be completely wrong, and we probably are completely wrong.
Think about if you died and 5,000 years from now people started going through your belongings, what would they think of you? It probably wouldn't be a very good representation of you.
I'm not going to say Egypt. I feel like Egypt is such a – like everyone says Egypt. I would say Egypt. I know. I know. If Egypt wasn't an option – But why would you want that to not be an option?
No one can hurt me. No one can scout me.
Yeah, yeah.
God damn it.
Man. Egypt is a creme de la creme, man. It's the most monumental, beautiful, like, you know, when you try to imagine what it would have looked like. You know, if you've seen visual recreations of the Giza Plateau, you know, the Valley Temple must have been absolutely stunning. Okay, so one day when you go to Egypt, hopefully you go this year.
When you go to the Valley Temple, for me, it's the best thing in all of Egypt. I think it's more stunning what it must have looked like than even the pyramids themselves. The blocks are absolutely gigantic. Like one block is bigger than this whole wall. And brought from 500 miles south in Aswan, these are the ones with the cyclopean strangely angled stones like you see in Peru.
And when you walk in, most people ignore it, but that floor is a calcite white crystal floor. And so imagine when it was polished and when it was finished off, it must have been gleaming. And at some point in time, there were these diorite kofra statues. Maybe you've seen them before. They're like impossibly well-made out of the hardest stone in Egypt.
the hardest stone in Egypt and it's this busy black diorite gleaming polished statues and the lintels that go above would have allowed when the Sun you know reaches its like zenith in the sky in the day in the middle of the day it would have shot through these holes in the ceiling and so it would have illuminated the white floor and you would have had the solid black statues that are that are shining in this in the Sun's light and so you're walking in and it's like glowing inside of the temple and
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