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Did you know that our Sunday Times bestselling book, The Rest Is History Returns, is now out in paperback? From finding out who British history's biggest lad was to tracing the admittedly hazy ancient origins of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's filled cover to cover with more curious historical moments than you can crack a lasso at, plus puzzles and a pub quiz.
MUSIC
Three massive piles rose prominent before our view from an extensive and confused series of mounds, at once showing the importance of the ruins which we, their first European visitors, now rapidly approached. The whole was surrounded by a lofty and strong line of earthen ramparts, concealing from view all but the principal objects.
Beyond the walls were several conical mounds, one of which equalled in altitude the highest structure within the circumscribed area. Each step that we took after crossing the walls convinced me that Warka was a much more important place than had been hitherto supposed. and that its vast mounds, abounding in objects of the highest interest, deserved a thorough exploration.
I determined, therefore, on using every effort to make researches at Warka, which of all the ruins in Chaldea is alone worthy to rank with those of Babylon and Nineveh. So, Tom, that was Sir William Loftus, and he's writing in Travels and Researches in Chaldea or Chaldea and the Susiana, which is in 1857. He's a British geologist, isn't he?
And he's been working as part of an international commission drawing up the border between the empires of the Ottomans and the Persians. So tell us what he's, the place he's talking about here, because this is one of, we love a mystery story, and this is one of history's greatest mysteries.
So it's a very mysterious place. As he said in his book, it's called Warka, and it's in southern Mesopotamia. It had been a frontier post of the Persian Empire back in the age of Muhammad. But when the Arabs had conquered the Persian Empire, it had effectively been abandoned. And it's a site like Ozymandias, nothing beside remains. You know, you have the lone and level sands stretching far away.
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