Professor Edmund Richardson
speaker
621 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Professor Edmund Richardson’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's absolutely a game of chess.
And that's what makes the story of the Siege of Tyre so kind of fascinating and horrific.
Because the Tyrians are extremely competent opponents.
This is not a city that sort of is helpless in the face of Alexander's stratagems.
They give as good as they get.
But they're not so much engineers like deities.
What they are is chemists.
Now, the Tyrians, the great mainstay of Tyre's economy was a particular color, purple, the deepest, most incredible color in the ancient world, the color of dried blood.
It's the purple that later would dye the robes of Roman emperors and at the time would dye the robes of the great king of Persia.
This purple is only made in Tyre, and it is the most valuable substance by far in the world.
Like a tiny little vial of this purple dye would be worth far more than its weight in gold.
The Tyrians
And it is a disgusting process.
It truly is.
They distill it out of the shells of sea snails and these just giant fats along the shore with these snails decomposing and getting pounded down and just having horrible things done to them.
along the shore of Tyre.
But what this gives the Tyrians is skills in chemistry and skills in making horrible, horrible things, which they will put to work in the later stages of the siege against Alexander's army.
And when they're faced with Diades' siege towers, when they realize that just sending ships against the promontory just can't stop it advancing,
they put their chemists to work and they put their sailors to work and they come up with this kind of remarkable countermeasure which is unlike anything the greeks had ever faced before and it's a fire ship a fire ship okay right so is that as as as it sounds ed just loading up
transport ship or no something not as valuable as a warship something that they could that could be expendable and then just loading it up with the materials and then lighting it near the promontory exactly they take the biggest ugliest ship that they've got which is this old horse transport right it's low slung it is shoddily built but it's also this a big old thing because it's gotta gotta have like enough enough room for dozens of horses on board
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