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
It was the movie Troy, it was the ancient biblical world, reading the Iliad and the Odyssey as a little kid, as little as I could comprehend of it. And so, you know, eventually this just started creeping back in as I got older. And my bachelor's degree is in anthropology. And what that is, is the study of ancient cultural anthropology. So it's the study of ancient people, right?
So my preference of study, what I like to dig into is not necessarily the hard artifacts of these vases or how are the pyramids made. For me, the interesting idea is, okay, what can I learn about people at the time that these vases were made and their relationship to the vases? What can I learn about the people at the time of the pyramids and their relationship to the pyramids?
So one of the things I find really interesting there is there's this little village that existed on the Mahdi outcrop. And during the construction of the Menkaure pyramid complex, that village was displaced and those people were moved out of the way to build the valley temple.
And you can see the archeological evidence, like the upheaval of this village and all their trash gets dumped in the desert. And you can go look rummage through that trash and learn things about those people. I find that really interesting. And that can go endlessly deep. And so that was one of the pulls to me for Greece because, you know, you can study Greece from so many different angles, right?
It's this deeply human civilization, right? And I think that's why I constantly say with the Americas, it's like we're studying aliens, right? Because they're so different from the Western mindset. And also, we don't have literature. And literature brings out the human aspect. Otherwise, you're dealing with public propaganda.
So the dilemma that we have with studying the Maya is the same dilemma that we have with studying the Egyptians in that we look at them the way they wanted to be looked at. Their propaganda worked and it worked for all of eternity. Because when you think about Egyptians, you think of the pharaohs, you think of the timeless pharaohs up on the walls.
we can only view them the way they wanted to be viewed as these semi-divine, more than human people, right? And so it gives this degree of separation and that's where you get this intense fascination with them because they're so different from us.
But then also, you know, as somebody who loves just daily life in the ancient world, the Greeks are compelling too because you can get so deep into learning about ancient people and what the visceral part of just normal life was like. And so I had been, that had been creeping in for maybe like five years now.
And I never talked about it in a public sphere because Greece is, it's so detailed, it's so nuanced, there's so much going on. I said this in a video recently that, you know, with Egypt, you're limited to, and there's lots of nuance in it, but you're limited to the study of bones, pottery, and other smaller artifacts and buildings, you know, whether it's the pyramids or temples or whatever.
But with Greece, you have this added element of literature and that is incredibly vast. And there's so many sources to bounce back and forth from. And also learning the language is such an intense part of being an expert in Greece. So I never talked about it publicly because it's too nuanced for me to talk about. But as a hobby, I had been looking into it.
And somewhere along the way, I was going through Google Earth, through a museum in Athens, and then another one in Crete. Now, so you have these, you have several different ages of Greek history. Two biggest ones are the classical period, the height of Athenian democracy, the war, the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and Athens.
But then you have this older age, the Age of Heroes, the end of the Bronze Age, which is where the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Trojan War takes place during this time. That's also a deep fascination of mine. Like probably so many people throughout the last 3,000 years, that's been most people's first fascination with history.
And so where this mainly takes place is in the Peloponnese and on the island of Crete. This is where the Minoan civilization existed. And the two major players in the late Bronze Age is you have two cultures. You have the Minoan culture and you have the Mycenaeans. And when was this? I mean, this is anywhere from, let's give it rough numbers, 2000 to 1000 BC.
More accurately, maybe like 1800 to 1200 BC. And then you have these frays at the beginning where it's building and where it's falling. And so, I mean, these are major players in the ancient world. But there are these lost civilizations, basically, that all we have left are the ruins. They didn't leave us literature. And the literature that they left us is very limited.
This is the mystery of linear A and B, which are basically just, they're like ledgers for keeping up with goods and things like that. But I find these civilizations very interesting. I find the Minoans really, really interesting. So you have the city of Mycenae. This is probably important to know. You have the city of Mycenae, which is in the Peloponnese.
And this is the major Bronze Age superpower in Greece, led by, if you've seen the movie Troy, you know the king Agamemnon? Well, he's the king of Mycenae. And he leads this huge campaign where he essentially, as the story goes, unites all the kingdoms of Greece into this empire, and they launch this war against Troy.
Now, Troy, you know, the famous reason behind this is that Helen of Sparta leaves with one of the princes of Troy and goes off to Troy, and so they launch this war to go get her back. But if there really is a Trojan War, which I think there probably really was one, it was probably actually for access to the Black Sea because Troy controlled the ports from the Aegean to the Black Sea.
And so if you get access to the Black Sea, you get all of the agriculture that's there. And of course, Crimea, like in Ukraine, that place has been, you know, that place has been like the Garden of Eden for producing grain in the ancient world for thousands of years and even all the way up to today. So that's probably what it's really about.
And so I was just fascinated with these civilizations and wanted to learn more about them. And what I always do is I will drop down into Google Earth Street View inside of a museum and I'll walk through the museum. And And at the museum in Athens in the Mycenaean section, there are these Egyptian vases that are there. And there's also vases that look like they're like pseudo-Egyptian vases.
You can tell it's Pretty similar, but it's weirdly different. Like some of them, I'm sure you've seen the ones that have a little spout coming out the end. Yeah, that's something that the Greeks are adding on to the vases. And sometimes it's literally just like a little stone addition that's tied to the vase and then wrapped around the rim.
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