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 the properties of that gray whack is it sparkles like a diamond does. And I can imagine in an environment like down in a tomb where the only light being cast on it is from a torch, the torch is flickering. It's flickering over the over like this sparkling, you know, glowing orange sarcophagus.
maybe the properties of it, like you're saying with Brescia, they may like that and not really put much of a difference to it other than they know if they work with Brescia, it's going to be easier than working with diarite. But then does that make, if you have something like that made out of diorite, is it a symbol as though you could afford to have that made? So there's that.
Then I put, is there a divinity to the vases or the type of stone? Is it supposed to be more difficult to work because in making the vase, you are bringing honor to the gods or performing some kind of holy thing? Does it have a divinity? Does it need to be perfect because it is holy or does it need to be perfect because it has a function? Those are some of the things that I juggle with.
Like we were talking earlier, we're dealing with at least what I see as a pious society that has not reached this Western Socratic conclusion that comes to us in fifth century Athens, where people start realizing that the gods don't really have much to do with our lives. You know, this... Further back in history, even further away, this is very far away.
Even at the youngest date, we're talking about 2,000 years before Athens. So we're deep into pious civilization at this point, people caring about honoring the gods. And I put, harder stones like granite and diorite. This is actually sort of my... This is my thought here.
Rather than there being a divinity to the purpose of the vases or why the vases are perfect or the stone, I say harder stones like granite and diorite are less porous than materials like alabaster, which would... make them preferred for storing valuable slash expensive liquids like imported Minoan question mark wine and other oils.
You can more effectively age and store wine in harder, less porous stone phases, which prevent the liquid from absorbing into the stone and the stone is less likely to fall away and chip away into the liquid.
And so I wonder, do wealthier people prefer, because they're storing something valuable like wine imported from Bronze Age, early, early Greece, it's so valuable and so expensive, they're going to infuse it with the lotus flower. It has this powerful, psychedelic, holy aspect to it. You don't want it diluted. You don't want it absorbing into the stone.
You want to age it so that it's more powerful. It's more, you know, it has a more profound effect. So, and you can afford to have it made in a nicer vessel. So you do that. But why is the vessel perfect? Well, I don't know. You know, that's the reason I say is like, what if it's a holy thing as well?
It needs to be perfect because you're putting some kind of perfect, expensive, imported compound from the other side of the Mediterranean. So then I say, why did the creation of hard stone vases end around 3100 BC, the beginning of Dynasty 1? I should really say around Dynasty 0.
Dynasty 1 to Dynasty 0, there's a controversy there over what exactly it is, but Dynasty 0 is the reign of the king Menes, but we don't know if Menes is the same king as Narmer. We don't know if he's the same person, like if he gives himself the pharaonic name, or if Menes is Narmer's father. So we have Dynasty Zero.
But at Dynasty Zero, the vases are not being made anymore, according to the archaeological record that we have. So David, what's his name? Mianna.
I've never seen, I've never seen a stone vase. Cause I've gone, you know, I've, I've gone to the museums and, that I know he's been to in Alexandria, where you're looking at the Ptolemaic dynasties, the end of Greek civilization. And I've looked for hard stone vases. There's hard stone statues being made. There's a granite bust of Alexander's head.
So this is a whole other thing we'll talk about one day is Alexandria. Oh my gosh, that's such a cool topic. Because I think the Greeks learned how to do a lot of things that were happening in the Old Kingdom. But a lot of things come back during that time period. But hard stone vase making does not come back during that period.
And it doesn't exist, as far as I'm aware, during the Persian era, during the invasion of the Assyrians to... 21st Dynasty, you know, towards the end of Egyptian civilization, the end of the New Kingdom, these hardstone vases aren't around anymore. From what I know, and archaeological data I've looked at, is that it's agreed upon by a lot of Egyptologists that
from dynasty one or dynasty zero, the vases are not being made anymore. They completely end. Now from there, it doesn't mean they disappear because we have Jojer who Egyptologists say he gathered thousands of these vases, anywhere from... I think the number is controversial, but it's anywhere from 10 to 40,000 vases of these hardstone vases that he stored underneath his pyramid.
And the traditional thought is that these were heirlooms from his ancestors, right? You've heard this before too. Now, Jozer's ancestors, I'll just read it off here. Because it's more concise the way I wrote it. So the overwhelming majority of pre-dynastic hardstone vases were discovered beneath Jozer's step pyramid complex. The overwhelming majority.
I mean, scant evidence of them found in other places, but the vast majority of them are found here. And then I should also say... We find them in burials, you know, it ends at 3100 BC, 3000, 29, 28, 27 is his. But everywhere in there, we're still finding them scarcely buried in other people's tombs.
People love these heirlooms and they want themselves buried with it to maybe take it with them into the next world. That continues all the way to 2100 BC. After 2100 BC, there's nobody being born in, there's nobody who's dying in 2000 BC that's burying themselves with these phases because they're not accessible anymore.
For one reason or another, they're not, and they never appear in tombs again after that, that they've marked. So the overwhelming majority of pre-dynastic hardstone vases were discovered beneath Djoser's step pyramid complex and are believed to have belonged to Djoser's ancestors who were likely from northern Egypt.
Showing 1081–1100 of 1,858 · page 55 of 93
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