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Chapter 1: Why are there no megastructures in North America?
what's up guys today we are joined by a real life explorer archaeologist historian youtuber as well and possibly my long lost twin lou caverns is on the pod and we are talking about lost cities of gold ancient jaguar people the greatest city that's ever existed in my opinion, New York City, but in Luke's opinion, the city of Alexandria and much more. Sit back, relax, and indulge.
Why is it that we see all these massive structures in Mexico and South? Why are there none of these in the northern parts?
That is a good question. Well... Pyramids? Yeah, yeah. So... This is something I've thought about, and I don't know that there is a perfect answer for it.
Why don't you see any pyramids in California? Why don't you see any pyramids on the way? And then all of a sudden they sprout up in... Where's the first...
Probably the most northern is going to be about right here at a place called Teotihuacan. I went there. Yeah, so you've been there. Okay, yeah. So that's probably your first notable... There may be some pyramids north of that, but that's like your first... That's your northernmost stone pyramid. But that said...
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Machu Picchu in ancient architecture?
You know, about right here in Ohio, if I'm pointing out Ohio, nobody really knows where Ohio is.
I know what you're going to point out here.
Yeah, but you've got like the Adena mounds and stuff that come from 500 BC, but they're all made out of earth, right? And so, yeah, so much here you have earth and timber, not as much bedrock. So you don't have as much stone to work with.
They just didn't have access to stone. That's why we don't see it. There's plenty of stone on the West Coast.
And that's true. And like in the Appalachian Mountains, man, you've got so much granite and limestone that's poking out, but they're not using it. Not most of the time. There actually is somewhere in the Mississippian world, there is one stone pyramid that I've seen. It might be in Ohio itself.
Here in the Southwest, you have lots of stone and they're building like pueblos and, you know, the huge cities and stuff like that. Cliff dwellings, you know, so they're making stuff out of stone, but not pyramids.
But in California, you had the highest, California, Oregon, Washington, you had some of the highest densities of Native Americans in North America, and they didn't build anything like that. Why? I have no idea. Well, this is something we need to understand.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm sure that people in your position have asked these questions tons of times. It's like, why all of a sudden does this modern technology, and modern for the time, right, like pop up in these regions and kind of only in those regions?
I'll give you an idea why I think. Why? So when you're in the Maya world, the jungle is straight up hell. Give me the Mayan empire, like more or less. So the Maya world is going to be the Yucatan Peninsula, about right through here, like that south central Mexico.
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Chapter 3: How did the Library of Alexandria contribute to ancient knowledge?
So the jungle out there sucks. Like, just walking through it is hell. And it floods all the time. There are, you know, the world, some of the, well, definitely the America's most venomous snakes live in the highest concentrations right here. of anywhere you're going to find them in America. It's the Fertilance snakes. And you've got eyelash vipers and all kinds of other stuff.
And so there's a lot that exists on the forest floor that can kill you and your children, especially like kids, just like that. And it floods all the time.
So it incentivizes you to build structures.
Yeah. So what they want to do is they want to build platforms and And so you wanna get up off of the forest floor and then other people are gonna want that. So you make the platform bigger and then it becomes bigger and then it becomes bigger, but you do it out of earth, but the earth erodes. So then you gotta do it with something strong or you gotta do it with stone.
So you're trying just to survive in this hellish jungle environment. And they have a lot of stone bedrock, which is why like in the Amazon, it's all clay. So they don't have anything there. Well, when you get halfway through the Amazon, you got more granite bedrock that sits out here, but a lot of here it's just clay swamps.
And so in the Maya world, that is where we see the first stone pyramids pop up. There's one in a place called Coelho, Belize. I was just in Belize maybe a month ago or so. And it's just a little pyramid, like maybe the size of this room. And that dates beyond 1000 BC. Wow. And then it kind of spreads out from there into the Paten jungle in Guatemala.
There's a site there called El Mirador in Nakbe. And those sites go back to... Yeah, so that's Coelho. That's a little bitty site that most people don't know about. If you look up El Mirador pyramid... So these pyramids are absolutely massive.
The biggest... I think... Is this the newest one that they just discovered? And they say it's like the biggest... The largest amount of rock.
So that one, that's El Mirador. So get this. That's just the little tiny top section of the pyramid. The rest of it is covered up by the jungle. Oh, wow, wow, wow. And get this. The bottom level, yeah, so that's El Mirador, the one that's looming over everything. Yep, yep. So that's roughly how big it is versus the pyramids in Egypt and everything. Holy shit.
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Chapter 4: What happened to the Lighthouse of Alexandria?
But if you were an Alexandrian and you went and visited Rome, you'd be like, man, this place is a freaking dump. And what happened to the lighthouse? The lighthouse, I believe that in like 1490 or 1491, it's very, very close to that year. There was an earthquake and the whole thing came down. Right.
Well, maybe there were earthquakes over time, but at some point there was a decision made to quarry and level the entire thing and turn it into, it's now like a castle. It's like a port castle now. I forget exactly what it's called today. Can we see the stones in the water? Yeah, you may be able to find... Yeah, so that's what it was turned into today. Oh, it was built on an island?
Yeah, so it was built on the island of Pharos. Oh, great. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So you're getting all that stone from a quarry somewhere into the water. You're getting it from Aswan, which is like southern Egypt.
Yeah, it's about 700-some miles away.
Bringing it up the Nile, bringing it... Across the water, right? Because there's a, what is the distance?
A kilometer or something like that? Yeah, you would have to bring it all the way up the Nile, up into the Delta, following the rivers out of the Delta. Into the Mediterranean? Into the Mediterranean and kind of sail around the city, pull up to the island and then unload the blocks.
And the idea was the first thing a ship is going to see as they approach the greatest city in modern civilization at the time is this massive megalithic structure on an island.
It's awe-inspiring. You're like, how could you do this? It's the world's first lighthouse, right? It's just this beacon that you could see that showed you where this calm water port was. And I believe it was a giant bronze mirror with like a statue of Poseidon in it. And I think it would spin, but it would stay constantly burning.
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Chapter 5: How did Cleopatra rise to power in Egypt?
There isn't anything else like that in their world. I mean, there is amazing architecture, but that is something completely different, this massive tower with this burning flame on top of it. Exactly. So he's going to come in this port. A little bit, let's say, up to where you see that dock kind of coming down the middle. That might, of course, they draw these in all different types of ways.
The dock that he's on right now?
To the right, far to the right. up a little bit. Oh, just go to the middle of the image. Up in the center, I'm sorry.
Center of the image.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that might be the main dock. Diagrams of Alexandria are drawn in so many different ways, but you would pull up to that dock, you'd walk down it, you may or may not enter the library, but you might walk around it, and then you would be on Soma Road or Canopic Way, but it's the main two streets that go down the center of the city. Now, on your right side,
you would have, let's say theoretically, on your right side, you would have the Library of Alexandria. Right next to that would be a place called the Museon, which was, so the library is a library, but the Museon is a university. So that's where all of your scholars would be getting other people who want to study. They get together, they run experiments, they're teaching things.
And then connected to that would be like lecture hall after lecture hall after lecture hall. There's a place in modern day, if you go to Egypt, you can go to Alexandria and see a portion of the library still there. It's called Komeldika. How do you spell it? K-O-M-E-L-D-I-K-A. And you can see some of the lecture halls.
These are from later periods, but these would have connected to the overall campus of Alexandria. So you'd walk down these alleyways that are covered up. So you see these little pillars that are standing? There were huge... Sort of half circular awnings that would... Stone awnings and wood awnings that would sit over that. So everywhere you would go would be fully shaded.
This was not out in the open. There was a whole roof over this that would allow natural light in. So you can walk around the whole city... And the campus itself kind of spread across a large part of the central city. But in Alexandria itself, you'd see scholars coming and going and people learning.
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of the Aztec wedding story?
300. Yeah, where the Greeks repel the Persians. And then that causes this explosion of Greek identity and thought and imagination and philosophy. There's so much. It's the birth of comedy itself happens right after that. The first stand-up comics in the world are in Athens, in the theater of Athens in Greece. And it was such a separation from the ancient world that existed before that.
It was the only time where you had these people who were not ruled over by a king. They're ruled over by politicians who are elected, or maybe they assassinate all their political rivals and they become elected. But they could...
everyone you would announce when there would be a show there'd be some you know you'd go watch plays like all day long some of them would be an actual theatrical play some of them would be like a comedy stand-up thing this was big in alexandria they would have they would have comics like stand up and just rip on the emperor of rome like all day long and people get together and just say the most heinous jokes about the emperor of rome and the word would get back to the emperor and he'd come down and just slaughter like 20 000 people
Yeah, because of, you know... Cancel culture, bro. Cancel culture. We're doing all right. In Athens, you could stand out in the theater and you could wear... Everybody would wear a mask and a robe so you wouldn't quite know who is saying what.
And so you could stand out there and you could make jokes criticizing your own politicians to their face as they're sitting in the crowd and have the whole crowd erupt. And it was like... It was just a... It's just this revolutionary way of thought in the ancient world that happens in Greece. And it spreads through there.
So Alexandria is like the most powerful, wealthy culmination of all of that where you have, you know, it's gone from just like naturalistic philosophy of what is nature itself to categorizing philosophy to coming up with different genres of study and they're organized and then, you know, it becomes like similar to a modern day university. And so Alexandria is like...
If you can have a university on this scale where this many people are literate and this intelligent, the separation between your power and even like the intellectual – And psychological effect that it has on your contemporary neighbors, like people who are outside of Egypt, the effect that it has on their perception of you is immense, right?
Like they see you as an intellectual giant compared to them.
So there's an intimidation factor that comes with it.
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Chapter 7: What insights do we gain about the Olmec civilization?
Wow. And then the Aztec warriors just come out of nowhere, ambush the Calicon royalty.
What do all the Aztec people that don't know that's going to happen, what are they thinking? Are they like, damn, you want to marry this ugly bitch?
Yeah.
They're like, don't do it, Prince. You deserve better.
Like, that's crazy. Okay, go, go. And so after they basically horrify, you know, I think that there was an element of shock, right? Yeah. Do you think? Well, of course. But I think that shock and fear made the sacrifice more... Fervent. Exactly, right? So that fear, if you could cause a mass amount of chaos and really scare somebody and just...
petrify them and then you sacrifice them well that means more to the gods right and so all these asic warriors come in and they just ambush the cowacan uh army slaughter all of them they capture they capture the king and the whole royal procession and then it doesn't say but you can imagine they march them to the top of the pyramid and sacrifice them to huistapoli and then
move the army across the bridge, and invade the city of Caloacan, basically burn the whole thing to the ground, capture everyone, sacrifice a lot of them, I'm sure. And then all of a sudden, the Aztecs are sitting out fortified in this massive city in the middle of this lake with this huge moat around it, and they just conquered the whole Mexican valley over the course of like 200 years or so.
How crazy is that? Yeah, yeah.
And they all sit around at dinner after the wedding, and they're just like, holy shit. They're dapping each other up. He's taking the skin off.
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Chapter 8: How does the were-jaguar figure relate to Olmec culture?
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Throughout all of that, as scary as that sounds, when the Spaniards arrived and... they would go into the marketplaces of Tenochtitlan. And, you know, the Spaniards are pulling out their steel swords and just slicing people up. I mean, you know, you can, with those blades, I mean, you can cut somebody in half. You can cut their head off. You can cut their arm off so easily.
And it was the brutality of how swiftly and mercilessly and without a thought... the Spaniards would slaughter people and then just leave their bodies to rot in the streets. That actually horrified the Aztecs because the Aztecs at least saw the value in your soul. They actually really saw the value in your soul.
So even if they hated you... I'm killing you without a sacrifice. For no reason. Yeah, for no reason at all.
So the Spaniards would just slice this person's head off, slice this guy's arm and leg off, just leaving people rolling around in pain on the sides of the streets.
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