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 there are even some records of archaeologists writing to Hans Wunderlicht, who has this book called The Secret of Crete, And, uh, basically writing him with exactly the same sort of attitude that we're talking about now, this is like in the sixties, you know, saying there's absolutely no evidence of, you know, uh, cross-cultural contamination, you know, whatever.
And, um, but yet clearly there is. So when I was going around Greece or I'm sorry, when I was going around Egypt, um, in the last, last few months, there is, um, Some compelling ideas that I still need to look into in the future, but during the Amarna period, so this is at the end of the 18th dynasty, right, you know, probably let's call it roughly 1300 to 1400 BC.
During the Amarna period, you have this pharaoh who is formally born Amenhotep IV, changes his name to Akhenaten. You've probably heard of this guy before. He basically just cuts the legs out from under the Theban priests and just levels all of the priesthood and makes himself the high priest of the one true sun god. He's a conehead, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, the way he's depicted in statues and everything. And his family members as well, they have the elongated skulls.
Elongated skull guy.
Hopefully there's no Coneheads watching that are offensive. Right, right. But, you know, so during this time, there's like an artistic liberation happening. Now, it's only, you know, it's noticeable, but it's not like the artwork completely changes. But there are palatial floors that have these designs, which as far as we know, are completely foreign to the rest of Egyptian history.
And the Egyptologist that I was with when we were in the Cairo Museum, there's an Amarna period. Amarna period is Akhenaten's little kingdom that he establishes when he changes the whole Egyptian world and flips it on his head to worship the Aten. That's the Amarna period. And we call that because he moves the capital of Egypt from the...
the economic capital from Memphis and the religious capital from Thebes or Luxor to a place called Tell el-Amarna, which is, it's the modern name for it, but we just call it the Amarna period. One of his palace floors or one of his palatial floors is this completely foreign art style. And the Egyptologists that I were with, they were like, this is Minoan artwork. And there's this...
I was surprised to hear it. There's this commonly held idea, which I can't find anywhere online, but all the Egyptologists I spoke with in Egypt agreed that during Akhenaten's reign, maybe even before it, there were Minoan artists that were being pulled into Egypt. to create art pieces. And maybe they were doing other things as well.
And then I would tell them, well, you know, there's these really nice pre-dynastic vases that end up in Crete. And of course, you know, the Egyptologists, they weren't aware of this. But I was like, I was like, how do you think that they get there? And then they were like, I don't know, maybe a gift or maybe a part of, you know, maybe it's the Pharaoh showing appreciation back or whatever.
But clearly the Minoans are taking these things home with them. And they're fascinated by them. And there's so much more that I could go on with how Egyptian and Minoan culture can be connected. But I think everybody watching here thinks it's pretty obvious. Ryan, if you go to that lotus phase, this is something I found really interesting when I was going through them.
This is the most famous specimen, but I've seen at least four or five others of these Minoan bowls. This is made out of locally sourced serpentine stone from Crete. So this was not made in Egypt and brought back to Crete. They think anywhere from 1700 to 1450 B.C.,
Um, and what it is, is it's a, it's thought that this is a mortal mortar and pestle, um, bowl that has the Egyptian Lotus leaves on the side of it. And this was, this was the inception of my, of this fascination I've had with this Lotus flower. Like what, what, what is the purpose of this flower and why are they depicting it on this stone? Because it's very much a Greek thing to be. Okay.
So the Egyptians, let's look at these vases. This is like, This is like the apple of the ancient world, right? You know, apple is very sleek, very elegant, very minimalistic, very subtle. And the Egyptians are very subtle people. You look at, you go from pre-dynastic Egypt with these vases. You look at vases later on in Egyptian history. They're all very minimalistic and subtle.
You look at Egyptian tomb wall art. It's very stoic. It's very eternal. It's not overly flamboyant. They're just these subtle, minimalistic people who their whole purpose in life is reaching for eternity. Everything about Egypt is eternal. Look at their statues. They're standing like this. Sometimes they're striding forward. It's this eternity that they're evoking and reaching towards.
And even Greek philosophers identified – like they identified that as well, that that's what the Egyptian mindset was. But the Greeks, the Minoans as well, if you go look at – Minoan wall art or murals. It's very much them taking place, picking flowers or, um, participating in parties or jumping over bulls or hanging out together. It's very Greek.
And even the Greeks later on kind of go back and embrace this, uh, glorifying the beauty of their life in the now, if that makes sense. And so, when you look at Greek pottery later on during the classical period, the pottery, sometimes the pots will show you what is being used, like, you know, if they're drinking wine out of the...
out of this, you know, vase or whatever, they'll have a depiction of a symposium around the vase and people are hanging out and drinking wine. It's like, sometimes the Greeks will just display on a vessel what the vessel is used for, right? And so I looked at this and I was like, hmm,
okay, is that the Minoans literally showing us that this is a mortar and pestle bowl used for grinding up the lotus flower to be used in something? And this is where this fascination began for me. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized, how polarizing that area of research is. Because the big mystery here is that the ancient Egyptian lotus flower does not exist anymore.
They used them so much and they were so popular that they went completely extinct. Now we have modern... We have modern lotus flowers. The Maya had a blue lotus flower. Now, there's a difference between the blue water lily and the lotus flower. The water lily is a lily, the lotus flower is a lotus flower, and they're completely different, but they look so similar.
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