Speaker 1: You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
Speaker 1: and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will? What's that Mango? So you
Speaker 1: remember our pal Sam Keene?
Speaker 2: Of course I remember. Sammy was one of our first
Speaker 2: science writers at Mental Floss, And it's just.
Speaker 1: One of the best of the best, it really is.
Speaker 1: And he went on to write all these bestsellers like
Speaker 1: The Disappearing Spoon, The Violinist's Thumb, Caesar's Last Breath, and
Speaker 1: he's got a new one out.
Speaker 2: First of all, I love the names of all of
Speaker 2: his books, like they just sound so intriguing.
Speaker 1: So tell me what this one's about. It's called Dinner
Speaker 1: with King Tut and it's all about how this crazy
Speaker 1: world of rogue archaeologists are recreating the sites and sounds
Speaker 1: and smells and tastes of lost civilizations. Like instead of
Speaker 1: just being on a field site dusting off fragments of pottery,
Speaker 1: he's using evidence from the shards to make delicious Egyptian
Speaker 1: beers and breads and testing out theories about mummies by
Speaker 1: trying to actually mummify a piece of store bought fish.
Speaker 1: Oh really, Yeah, he did it with a piece of
Speaker 1: grocery store red Snapper. Oh wow. But it is an
Speaker 1: incredible book and it's so fun to read, and I
Speaker 1: honestly can't stop telling people about it. So I thought
Speaker 1: it'd be fun to invite him on the show and
Speaker 1: catch up about the book in person. So let's dive in. Sam.
Speaker 1: It is such a pleasure to have you on the show. Hi,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me. You know, I feel like I
Speaker 1: have known your name forever because back at Mental Flaws,
Speaker 1: Will and I used to run that like anytime we
Speaker 1: needed like a great science piece, it'd be like, oh,
Speaker 1: let's see what Sam Keene is up to. I really
Speaker 1: appreciate your voice and your writing and the topics you covered.
Speaker 1: But then I was blown away when I think it
Speaker 1: was your first book, The Disappearing Spoon came out right
Speaker 1: and it immediately rose to the top of the charts,
Speaker 1: and you've been cranking out bestsellers ever since. But I'm
Speaker 1: really excited to talk about this new one. Dinner Wick
Speaker 1: King tut how rogue archaeologists are recreating the sites, sound, smells,
Speaker 1: and tastes of lost civilizations. Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: being here.
Speaker 3: Well, I appreciate it. Thank you.
Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit about this because you
Speaker 1: have in your preface this little bit about how archaeology
Speaker 1: is fascinating in theory, but somehow when you got out
Speaker 1: into the field, working as an archaeologist isn't as exciting
Speaker 1: as you'd hope. Can you talk to me a little
Speaker 1: bit about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'd always just had a bit of a gripe
Speaker 3: with the field that I loved the big picture things
Speaker 3: that you learned from archaeology about humankind, where we came from,
Speaker 3: how we spread across the globe, all of these big,
Speaker 3: rich questions about humanity. But then I would get to
Speaker 3: actual archaeological digs where they're doing work, and it was
Speaker 3: just a bunch of people sitting around in the dirt
Speaker 3: brushing off little potshards with toothbrushes or dental picks or something.
Speaker 3: It just seemed like the most tedious work imaginable. Just
Speaker 3: day after day of that over and over, and I
Speaker 3: just could not imagine actually doing that work. And as
Speaker 3: a writer especially, there just wasn't much to say about
Speaker 3: the work that they were doing. Even though the conclusions
Speaker 3: were big and really interesting, the day by day work
Speaker 3: was just kind of tedious. And another thing that kind
Speaker 3: of frustrated me was that you know, they were talking
Speaker 3: about and investigating civilizations from vastly different places, everywhere, from
Speaker 3: the Arctic to to Peru, just all over the world.
Speaker 3: But every dig looked exactly the same. Again, just people
Speaker 3: sitting around in the dirt brushing things off and lattened
Speaker 3: it and sort of subtracted the differences and made every
Speaker 3: archaeological look the same, even though you were talking about
Speaker 3: much different groups and cultures and civilizations. So those two
Speaker 3: things kind of turned me off about traditional archaeology, which
Speaker 3: is why I wrote this book, which focuses on a
Speaker 3: different field called experimental archaeology, but they're actually doing and
Speaker 3: creating things. It was much more interesting and sensory rich.
Speaker 1: That's really really cool. And I feel, you know, similarly
Speaker 1: about science, and that I'm fascinated by science. I'm fascinated
Speaker 1: by the discoveries and the Eureka moments and all these things.
Speaker 1: And when I was in high school, I volunteered in
Speaker 1: a university lab where we studied moths and behavior, and
Speaker 1: just every day was so slow and so tedious, and i'
Speaker 1: thrilled other people who love that, but for me, it
Speaker 1: just wasn't quick enough. The stories didn't move fast enough.
Speaker 1: The conclusions didn't come fast enough. But tell me a
Speaker 1: little bit about how you found this field of experiential
Speaker 1: or experimental archaeology.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I first heard about someone who was
Speaker 3: throwing what's called an ad laddle. So it's essentially a spear,
Speaker 3: but instead of throwing with your hand, you have a
Speaker 3: little kind of stick that's an extension of your arm,
Speaker 3: and because it's longer than your arm, you get a
Speaker 3: little more leverage, a little more pop when you throw it,
Speaker 3: so it allows you to throw it faster and hit
Speaker 3: something harder when you're hunting. And I saw someone who
Speaker 3: had made an old fashioned at laddle, and they were
Speaker 3: very common in prehistory, probably the most common hunting weapon
Speaker 3: that people used all over the world, much more so
Speaker 3: than just regular spears. And I'd never heard of this,
Speaker 3: and I thought, wow, this is really cool. And I
Speaker 3: saw someone there's a video of them throwing it, and
Speaker 3: they were throwing it under these targets or these dummies
Speaker 3: or something, and I just thought, wow, now that's kind
Speaker 3: of fun archaeology. Someone doing needing something and you get
Speaker 3: to go out there and you know, actually experience it
Speaker 3: a little bit. And I sort of filed that away
Speaker 3: and thought, you know, if I ever want to write
Speaker 3: about archaeology, that could be sort of an entry to
Speaker 3: the field for me. It was probably almost a decade
Speaker 3: ago at this point, and once I sort of had
Speaker 3: that on my radar, I kept coming across little stories
Speaker 3: where even if the overall story was about a regular
Speaker 3: archaeology dig, there might have been a little experimental component
Speaker 3: with it, And so I just kept filing these stories away,
Speaker 3: sort of gathering string and eventually, when it came time to,
Speaker 3: you know, write another book, I thought, maybe I'm going
Speaker 3: to look into this and see And once I did,
Speaker 3: I found out there was a whole journal dedicated to this,
Speaker 3: and there's kind of this little subculture of people who
Speaker 3: enjoy running these types of experiments.
Speaker 1: It's really incredible, and you talk about doing everything from
Speaker 1: like tattooing someone, firing someone out of a cap to
Speaker 1: making acorn bread. I mean, it really feels so joyful
Speaker 1: and exciting. But on the other hand, it feels like
Speaker 1: there are some incredible scientists involved with this, and also
Speaker 1: some enthusiasts and hobbyists and almost amateurs and involved as well.
Speaker 1: And so I'm curious, how do you figure out which
Speaker 1: are the experiments worth indulging in.
Speaker 3: It wasn't just archaeologists or the enthusiastic amateurs that we
Speaker 3: talked about, but in a lot of cases, there are
Speaker 3: also indigenous communities who have kept these traditions alive for
Speaker 3: a long time, and they are the ones who are
Speaker 3: turning around and teaching archaeologists about how these things work, so,
Speaker 3: you know, disabusing them of myths they had or correcting
Speaker 3: them when they were wrong. So one thing that was
Speaker 3: sort of interesting and heartening was that it really was
Speaker 3: a two way street with archaeologists talking to these communities
Speaker 3: about things that they knew, you know, wisdom that had
Speaker 3: been passed down in stories, poems, songs, things like that,
Speaker 3: and them kind of using this to advance our knowledge
Speaker 3: of what the past was like. But it's sort of
Speaker 3: just whatever stood out to me is interesting. You get
Speaker 3: you develop a nose for a story, and especially for
Speaker 3: this book, I wanted to go and do things that
Speaker 3: I thought would make good stories for the book. So
Speaker 3: I could have gone and like tried to grind my
Speaker 3: own grain or something like that, and that would have
Speaker 3: been okay. I mean, that's an important thing, and I
Speaker 3: did a little bit of that, but it just wasn't
Speaker 3: as rich as you know, spending a day with this
Speaker 3: guy who built this thirty foot tall catapult and spending
Speaker 3: an afternoon hurling these giant stones around. That just made
Speaker 3: for a much more lively experience being able to do
Speaker 3: things like that. I also kind of wanted to throw
Speaker 3: myself into some difficult situations, even though I knew I
Speaker 3: was probably gonna be floundering around, in part because that's
Speaker 3: just what people had to experience back then. Things were
Speaker 3: not easy. Even making food or making clothing or shelter
Speaker 3: was quite difficult back then, and me floundering around was
Speaker 3: part of the experience. And you know, I think it
Speaker 3: made for some more entertaining scenes, just me screwing things
Speaker 3: up over and over. But you know, one thing I
Speaker 3: liked about the field was that it was so sensory rich,
Speaker 3: all of the smells and tastes and the sounds, but
Speaker 3: a lot of it was me dealing with the emotions,
Speaker 3: the frustrations, the joy when I finally got something right
Speaker 3: after spending hours strewing it up over and over and again.
Speaker 3: That's just something I don't feel like you get as
Speaker 3: much of with traditional archaeology. Is the emotions that were
Speaker 3: involved in trying to do things the things that we
Speaker 3: take for granted nowadays, just making food and basic things
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really so fun. But the other thing that
Speaker 1: was interesting is you do something experimental with this book.
Speaker 1: You actually throw in fiction in between the segments of
Speaker 1: explaining about the archaeology and when you.
Speaker 3: Talk about why you chose to do that. Yeah, So
Speaker 3: the book it kind of does work on two tracks.
Speaker 3: Each chapter really immerses you in a specific time in
Speaker 3: a specific place. So you know, ancient Egypt when they
Speaker 3: were building the pyramids, or the Roman Empire, or the
Speaker 3: Viking Age, or Africa seventy five thousand years ago when
Speaker 3: modern humanity was just starting to emerge. And I really
Speaker 3: wanted it to be immersive because that's what experimental archaeology
Speaker 3: does really well, is it puts you in that time
Speaker 3: in that place. But me going around and doing these
Speaker 3: experiments could only get the reader I felt like part
Speaker 3: way there. And one thing that fiction does that's really
Speaker 3: nice is you're immersed in the character's mind. You're experiencing
Speaker 3: it as they experienced it. So the premise of the book,
Speaker 3: each chapter you live a day in the life of
Speaker 3: that person from the time they wake up to the
Speaker 3: time they go to bed that night, and strange, unusual
Speaker 3: things happened to them, just like they would have to
Speaker 3: people back then, and fiction was just a better way
Speaker 3: to get at that experience and make it as immersive
Speaker 3: as possible. So everything that happens to the characters could
Speaker 3: and did happen to people back then. It's based on
Speaker 3: archaeological research, but fiction was just a way to sort
Speaker 3: of enrich the experience.
Speaker 1: I just found it really compelling, these short stories interwoven
Speaker 1: with these nonfiction bits. I've got to say, it was
Speaker 1: a wonderful read. But were there any either fun or
Speaker 1: wild or bizarre experiments that you tried and they just
Speaker 1: got left on the cutting room floor.
Speaker 3: There were a few disasters in the book, things that
Speaker 3: just went sideways quickly anticipate maybe I should have. One
Speaker 3: of them was and you know, it sounds a little gross,
Speaker 3: but one material people would use to tan leather way
Speaker 3: back when was they would use urine. They would use
Speaker 3: it to kind of strip the fats off and to
Speaker 3: toughen up the skin. And so I tried that with
Speaker 3: a piece of salmon skin that I'd gotten from the store.
Speaker 3: Tried to soak it in urine and see what would happened,
Speaker 3: and it did not go well. Kind of mold that
Speaker 3: in there. It was so disgusting. I quickly jettisoned that project.
Speaker 3: Probably held on longer than I should have, but that
Speaker 3: that did.
Speaker 1: Not go well, I love it. So let's talk about Egypt.
Speaker 1: So you tosses into this incredible scene where they're building
Speaker 1: a pyramid, and the pyramid construction is almost over, and
Speaker 1: you decide to show it to us through the eyes
Speaker 1: of a baker. So I'm curious, like, why did you
Speaker 1: choose a cook or a baker for the perspective on
Speaker 1: this building of a paramid.
Speaker 3: One thing I wanted to do was to put the
Speaker 3: chapters in the perspective of kind of an everyday person,
Speaker 3: someone that we can relate to, kind of an everyday person,
Speaker 3: and a baker would have been one just a very
Speaker 3: typical classic job in ancient Egypt, and it was a
Speaker 3: very important job then because bread was the staple of
Speaker 3: the Egyptian diet, and I knew that there were people
Speaker 3: out there recreating Egyptian style breads and beers. And by
Speaker 3: making him the main character, I knew I could sort
Speaker 3: of get into those things and talk about some very
Speaker 3: important things in Egyptian life. So, in addition to sort
Speaker 3: of the fun dramatic plot things that happened, by making
Speaker 3: him a baker, you could actually deepen your understanding of
Speaker 3: just Egyptian culture in general.
Speaker 1: And I love it. His life does go sideways very quickly.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that I was curious about
Speaker 1: is I had never picked up on the fact that
Speaker 1: pyramids were also like the tallest monuments, that I took
Speaker 1: another four thousand years to build something taller, is all right?
Speaker 3: The biggest pyramid was built around the twenty seven hundred BC,
Speaker 3: twenties undred BC something like that, and not until I
Speaker 3: believe almost thirteen hundred eighty was there another structure in
Speaker 3: the world that was taller than that. It was a
Speaker 3: cathedral in England, I think. But yeah, so for roughly
Speaker 3: four thousand years that was the pyramids. There were the
Speaker 3: largest structures on Earth, which is unbelievable.
Speaker 1: You know, there are these things that you kind of
Speaker 1: take for granted, but that the scale of the achievement
Speaker 1: at that time is stunning. And also, I think you
Speaker 1: said something in the book like we are so much
Speaker 1: closer to when Jesus was born than when Jesus was
Speaker 1: to the pyramids, which which is also crazy to me,
Speaker 1: like I hadn't even put on perspective.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the gap of time between the pyramids being built
Speaker 3: and you know Jesus or Juliuses or anyone around that age,
Speaker 3: that's a longer gap of time by several centuries than
Speaker 3: the time from Jesus or Juliuses are to us.
Speaker 1: Now, that is just unimaginable. It's crazy, but fascinating for
Speaker 1: a perspective. So you start with this baker and one
Speaker 1: of the things that struck me was that there was
Speaker 1: a village basically created around the idea of building these pyramids.
Speaker 1: Can you talk me?
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were really labor intensive to build these pyramids,
Speaker 3: given how big they were, given how many blocks there were,
Speaker 3: and the fact that you just had to move these
Speaker 3: things up the up to the very top. Somehow. They
Speaker 3: didn't have pulleys back then. They didn't have wheels in
Speaker 3: Egypt at the time, and so you had a lot
Speaker 3: of people working on moving these stones. And when you
Speaker 3: had that many people, you need to provide things for them.
Speaker 3: They need tools to cut the blocks, they need to eat,
Speaker 3: you need to build homes for them. It was essentially
Speaker 3: an entire city around these pyramids just to get them built.
Speaker 3: It was a huge part of the Egyptian economy essentially
Speaker 3: was getting these pyramids built, everyone working on them. So yeah,
Speaker 3: there was a whole industry and then all the peripheral
Speaker 3: industries to build these pyramids.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's what struck me as so interesting was
Speaker 1: that the baker himself. I thought it was just like
Speaker 1: a royal baker who made bread for Kufu or whichever,
Speaker 1: a king or pharaoh. But instead the baker is actually
Speaker 1: responsible for making all the bread for all the workers
Speaker 1: working in this community. And that was crazy to me.
Speaker 1: Can you talk to me a little bit about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So when we think of a baker nowadays, or
Speaker 3: and probably especially back then, we'd probably think, you know,
Speaker 3: a little mud oven or something, and you're slipping in
Speaker 3: a loaf of bread here and there and making it.
Speaker 3: But this was much more of an industrial process where
Speaker 3: you had hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands of bread
Speaker 3: molds out there in a field. It would look like
Speaker 3: a giant giant egg carton with the molds that they use.
Speaker 3: They use these kind of conical molds to put the
Speaker 3: bread in, and if you'd gone outside the hut, it
Speaker 3: would have just been thousands of these molds, and they
Speaker 3: had people walking around dumping dough in them and moving
Speaker 3: from one to the other, just kind of working, working, working.
Speaker 3: So it wasn't really a kind of a bespoke artisanal process.
Speaker 3: It was about timing and workflow and managing people. So
Speaker 3: it really was kind of modern in some ways, and
Speaker 3: that you had to take all these things into account
Speaker 3: and as opposed to, you know, just baking something in
Speaker 3: an oven like you might expect, it was a whole
Speaker 3: industry involved in getting these people fed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it felt almost like a factory. I like this
Speaker 1: sense of producing this much food at these quantities for
Speaker 1: this immense number of people every single day. It was
Speaker 1: just crazy. But also, you know, from your own experiments,
Speaker 1: you found out that this bread is delicious.
Speaker 3: It was incredibly good. I talked to a guy out
Speaker 3: in la named Seamus Blackley. He in a previous life
Speaker 3: actually invented the Xbox gaming system that's sort of just
Speaker 3: called the Frame, and then he got out of that
Speaker 3: and he has his own company now. But one thing
Speaker 3: he does is he bakes heirloom bread. He started with
Speaker 3: medieval bread, and then decided he wanted to try Egyptian bread.
Speaker 3: And then he got really really into it. He flew
Speaker 3: over to Egypt with microbiology equipment. He swabbed dormant yeast
Speaker 3: out of bread molds that they found from archaeological site,
Speaker 3: so he got authentic yeast. He built a fire pit
Speaker 3: in his backyard in Los Angeles. He sourced the type
Speaker 3: of wood that people in ancient Egypt would have used.
Speaker 3: He sourced heirloom grain that they would have used. He
Speaker 3: had someone make him a mold, and authentic mold. A
Speaker 3: potter friend made him the molds that they used, and
Speaker 3: he just kept baking bread until he got the recipe
Speaker 3: right and got a nice looking loaf for bread. And
Speaker 3: so I went up there, talked to him, and got
Speaker 3: to try some of this bread. It was bigger than
Speaker 3: I expected, and it was shaped like you know, the
Speaker 3: old NASA mercury space capsules that they would send astrona in,
Speaker 3: like those blunt cones, that's what it looked like. It
Speaker 3: was probably you know, a foot wide or so and
Speaker 3: maybe eight or nine inches tall. And this bread was
Speaker 3: two days old, and he warmed it up in the
Speaker 3: company microwave for me, and even then it was amazingly good.
Speaker 3: This was some of the best bread I've ever had
Speaker 3: in my life. And it was very, very simple. It
Speaker 3: was just a few ingredients. There was emmer grain, which
Speaker 3: is the type of wheat they used. There's coriander in it,
Speaker 3: some salt, some yeast, and some water and that was it.
Speaker 3: And I was blown away by how delicious this bread was,
Speaker 3: even though it wasn't quite fresh out of the mold.
Speaker 3: I mean, if it had been fresh, I would have
Speaker 3: been scun probably fallen over, it was that good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you said it compared with the best breads in
Speaker 1: like Parisian bakeries and things like that, and I was
Speaker 1: it made my mouth waters description. I really want to
Speaker 1: try some. But the other thing about it I was
Speaker 1: curious about is how do they know what the ingredients
Speaker 1: were in this bread? How do archaeologists and hobbyists figure
Speaker 1: out what goes into this bread.
Speaker 3: They have a lot of loaves actually from you find
Speaker 3: them in tunbes and pyramids and things like that, and
Speaker 3: you can analyze the starches and figure out what was
Speaker 3: in there. So you might find a little bit of coriander,
Speaker 3: and you can analyze the bread, the starches in there,
Speaker 3: and they can tell you know roughly how long they
Speaker 3: were baked, things like that. So because we have some
Speaker 3: examples of ancient basically petrified bread, they can get that
Speaker 3: microscopically and figure out sort of reverse engineer and figure
Speaker 3: out what would have gone in there. Also, you know,
Speaker 3: you're making bread. There's just not a whole lot of
Speaker 3: ways to make bread. So you're gonna have some yeast
Speaker 3: in there, you need some water in there, You're gonna
Speaker 3: have to grind the flowers. So just by the nature
Speaker 3: of bread, you're sort of constrained in how many ways
Speaker 3: you can do it. And we have found thousands of
Speaker 3: molds as well, so we know the basic way they
Speaker 3: baked the bread, and based on that they can kind
Speaker 3: of re sort of piece together how they must have
Speaker 3: baked the bread in the first place.
Speaker 1: That's so cool. And the other thing I really found
Speaker 1: delightful about the bread bit was that you point out
Speaker 1: that the bread had to be good, because if it wasn't,
Speaker 1: all these workers would have sort of revolted. They needed
Speaker 1: really good food to keep them happy. And you point
Speaker 1: out that these laborers were also paid in beer as well.
Speaker 1: About one third gallons daily, which I guess is roughly
Speaker 1: ten pints. I never would have figured out out on
Speaker 1: my own. But but can you talk to me a
Speaker 1: little bit about the beer and why that was so
Speaker 1: important to this community of Worcos.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so bread and beer were essentially the staple foods
Speaker 3: of the Egyptian diet, and so water sources were necessarily
Speaker 3: clean back then. The Nile was there, so plenty of
Speaker 3: water coming in, but people were using it to clean clothes.
Speaker 3: People were using it as literally in some cases, so
Speaker 3: not the safe as water to drink. Whereas if you
Speaker 3: ferment something, you know, make it into a beer, the
Speaker 3: alcohol in there can kill some microbes, so it's safer
Speaker 3: to drink that. And this probably was not as high
Speaker 3: ABV as beer we would drinking nowadays. It was probably
Speaker 3: fairly low level, maybe like you know, two to two
Speaker 3: and a half percent something like that, but still they
Speaker 3: were drinking in most of the day. And what I
Speaker 3: found I thought was really interesting was that we're sort
Speaker 3: of used to what beer tastes like, but a lot
Speaker 3: of that taste comes from the hops, which is a
Speaker 3: standard ingredient in most beers nowadays. But they didn't use
Speaker 3: hops in Egypt, and so other flavors really came forward.
Speaker 3: It tasted to me more like a sour beer or
Speaker 3: almost like a kambucha type drink. And it made sense
Speaker 3: when I thought about it, because on a hot day
Speaker 3: often you want something sour kind of gets the salivation,
Speaker 3: the juice is going in your mouth. So having this
Speaker 3: sour beer on a hot day moving pyramid blocks around
Speaker 3: would have made a lot of sense. And it wasn't
Speaker 3: like the beer were used to nowadays, but it was
Speaker 3: a pretty down good drink.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you think about that in other times in
Speaker 1: history too, right, like field workers drinking seasons as well,
Speaker 1: because they needed to they needed something to drink in
Speaker 1: these really hot conditions. But also the water wasn't clean,
Speaker 1: and so it's something that that sort of like follows
Speaker 1: this story along. I also had not clocked that the
Speaker 1: sands could reach one hundred and thirty degrees fahrenheit. And
Speaker 1: you point out that it took two hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: one million gallons of beer to build the largest pyramids,
Speaker 1: which it's incomprehensible. But there's this bit in the story
Speaker 1: that you tell where the baker is also producing beer
Speaker 1: and he brings over this cup of date beer and
Speaker 1: the person he hands it to realizes that they're like
Speaker 1: flies in it or something, and you would prefer it
Speaker 1: with a straw. And I had no idea that Egyptians
Speaker 1: were using straws.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was pretty common, not just in Egypt,
Speaker 3: but especially other places where they would use straws to
Speaker 3: drink beer because you would have flies landing on the top,
Speaker 3: and especially you would have a lot of chaff in
Speaker 3: the beer because they didn't have modern strainers and things
Speaker 3: like that, so you definitely had a lot of debris
Speaker 3: intotritis from the grains in the beer, and so a
Speaker 3: straw you dunk it under the surface and sort of
Speaker 3: avoid taking in a big mouthful of that dry, pulpingy
Speaker 3: chaff with your drink.
Speaker 1: And you point out that in other parts of the
Speaker 1: world that some of these straws have been mistaken for scepters.
Speaker 1: They're so beautiful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're really long, elaborate. They have you know, gold
Speaker 3: and silver inlaid in them, a couple feet long. You know,
Speaker 3: if a diplomat came or something, you would give them
Speaker 3: a very fancy straw for their beer to show the
Speaker 3: they were so Yeah, they found straws that were so
Speaker 3: ornate that the at the first glance archaeologist thought they
Speaker 3: were scepters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's amazing. I love that the beer came in
Speaker 1: hunty style and you need the straw for it. But
Speaker 1: there's so much more to talk about. I really want
Speaker 1: to get to mummies and the taxidermy sort of process
Speaker 1: that you uh engaged in, but we've got to take
Speaker 1: a quick break first. I am back with Sam Keene,
Speaker 1: author of Dinner with King Todd. How rogue archaeologists are
Speaker 1: recreating the site, sound, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations.
Speaker 1: It is a delightful book. Now now, Sam, the part
Speaker 1: that was both grossest and most fascinating to me was
Speaker 1: the part about mummification, and I wanted to hear a
Speaker 1: little bit about the story of how these two scientists
Speaker 1: decide to play with idea of mumifying bodies. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, one thing I was surprised to learn is that
Speaker 3: even though we have a lot of Egyptian mummies human mummies,
Speaker 3: we really don't know a lot about the process because
Speaker 3: they didn't write down a lot of information about it.
Speaker 3: I don't know if it was a secret or it
Speaker 3: was just something knowledge I got passed down orally, and
Speaker 3: so they didn't bother to write it down. But we
Speaker 3: just don't know a lot of the details about how
Speaker 3: they made mummies back then. So there were a few
Speaker 3: people few scientists in the nineteen nineties. One was an
Speaker 3: anatomist and one was an egyptologist. They decided that the
Speaker 3: best way to figure these mysteries out about how to
Speaker 3: mummify someone was to make an Egyptian style mummy in
Speaker 3: modern times. So someone had donated their body to science
Speaker 3: and they sort of diverted it from the medical school
Speaker 3: and they decided to mumify happened in Baltimore in the
Speaker 3: mid nineties, and they tried to be as authentic as
Speaker 3: possible with it. The Egyptologists actually flew over to Egypt,
Speaker 3: and they knew a few details, such as the mineral
Speaker 3: that they used to dry the body out. So he
Speaker 3: went over there and actually dug the mineral op himself
Speaker 3: and then had to bring it back into the United States.
Speaker 3: And he said that one of the more ticklish parts
Speaker 3: of the whole process was smuggling this unidentified white powder
Speaker 3: back in that he had to somehow get past customs,
Speaker 3: but he managed to do it, and they used that
Speaker 3: authentic Egyptian powdered minerals to dry the body out. He
Speaker 3: had obsidian tools made, so stone tools made, and copper
Speaker 3: tools made, and they essentially just went through the process
Speaker 3: of mummifying this body based on the few clues that
Speaker 3: we had. So they made a little slit in the abdomen,
Speaker 3: slid the organs out through the small slit. There, they
Speaker 3: washed the body with different wines and oils, and then
Speaker 3: they mummified it. They put the drying agent in and
Speaker 3: on the body and just try it and just solve
Speaker 3: what happened.
Speaker 1: I had this wonderful teacher in fifth grade, Thissus Leary
Speaker 1: algebro shout out. But she did this whole segment on Egyptology,
Speaker 1: and one of the things I remember is that all
Speaker 1: the organs were thought of as important, particularly the heart,
Speaker 1: but that the brain was considered useless, and that they
Speaker 1: went up through the nose and pulled out the brain.
Speaker 1: But in your telling, it's not as easy as just
Speaker 1: using sort of like a hook or tool to pull
Speaker 1: the brain.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is one of the things we knew, is that,
Speaker 3: like you said, they used a hook of some sort
Speaker 3: to draw the brain out through the nose. But they
Speaker 3: tried that on this body, and it just doesn't work.
Speaker 3: If you've ever seen the live brain, it's not what
Speaker 3: you might remember from, you know, dissecting a pig or
Speaker 3: a frog or something in biology class, because those were
Speaker 3: fixed in formulas that make the brain hard and rubbery.
Speaker 3: A real life brain is more like a pudding. It's
Speaker 3: very very gooey and kind of viscous. It just doesn't
Speaker 3: have that solid shape and feel that a fixed brain does.
Speaker 3: So when they were using the hook to try to
Speaker 3: get the brain out, I mean, you can imagine trying
Speaker 3: to get putting out with a hook. It's not going
Speaker 3: to work very So what they hit out is that
Speaker 3: there was another clue that maybe they were using a
Speaker 3: fluid of some sort. So they actually introduced water into
Speaker 3: the brain, into the cranial cavity, and they used the
Speaker 3: hook to stir it and to mix up the brain,
Speaker 3: and then they turned it over and the brain actually
Speaker 3: ran out this person's nose. It's quite a vehicle that
Speaker 3: you did it. The guy I talked to, the egyptologist,
Speaker 3: Bob Brier, said it was like a milkshake running out.
Speaker 3: Then he specified a strawberry milkshake, just to make sure
Speaker 3: that well picture in my mind. So he was a
Speaker 3: hoo to talk. But there was just a little details
Speaker 3: like that that they we didn't know about, and until
Speaker 3: they had done this experiment, we would not have known
Speaker 3: these things. And it was a very controversial experiment. People
Speaker 3: were sort of upset that they had taken this body
Speaker 3: and mummified it. But we did learn some things about
Speaker 3: how mummification works. And for Brier one of the most
Speaker 3: exciting moments for him was he'd always had a question
Speaker 3: about you know, you see a mummy and you see
Speaker 3: it's got sort of this leathery skin, and the skin
Speaker 3: is retracted from the face. It's sort of shrunk, and
Speaker 3: he wanted to know was that from the mummification process
Speaker 3: or was that because these bodies are thousands of years
Speaker 3: old and they've been sitting around in this dry environment
Speaker 3: in Egypt. And he said that even after four or
Speaker 3: five weeks, they could look at this body that they
Speaker 3: had mummified and it looked exactly like Ramsey's the Great
Speaker 3: So it wasn't the thousands of years of being in
Speaker 3: Egypt in a dry air. It was actually the mummification
Speaker 3: process that produced the iconic look of mummies that we
Speaker 3: all know today, so little mysteries like that they were
Speaker 3: able to solve through experiment, and we wouldn't know these
Speaker 3: things without this experimental archaeology.
Speaker 1: You also talk about how they had brought all these
Speaker 1: copper tools and these obsidian tools, and the copper tools
Speaker 1: don't actually end up being that useful, so they dispense
Speaker 1: with those. And the fact that like through this process
Speaker 1: you can actually figure out which tools the Egyptians for
Speaker 1: using is really incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's exactly what he did, is he tried
Speaker 3: the copper tools and they just weren't working very well
Speaker 3: to open the body up or to get the organs out,
Speaker 3: things like that, so they had to switch to the
Speaker 3: stone tools, which in some way might seem a little
Speaker 3: more primitive or archaic, but stone tools actually can form
Speaker 3: a very nice sharp edge. There was another point in
Speaker 3: the book where I talk about the obsidian especially can
Speaker 3: form an edge that's sharper than a modern surgical scalpel
Speaker 3: made of steel. I actually cut myself at one point.
Speaker 3: I was working on a different project and I cut
Speaker 3: myself with some obsidian and it did not hurt at
Speaker 3: all because it was so sharp, but it was a
Speaker 3: much deeper cut than I realized, and it bled very
Speaker 3: very quickly, So I was surprised at how bad the
Speaker 3: wound got quickly, just because obsidian is so sharp.
Speaker 1: That's really fascinating. And the other thing that was interesting
Speaker 1: to me was the commitment to being authentic didn't just
Speaker 1: include the tools or various processes, but also keeping their
Speaker 1: office at one hundred and four degrees, which just sounds
Speaker 1: miserable but incredible that they went to that length.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: The other part I remember from this Egyptology stuff was
Speaker 1: that people used to massage these bodies with various oils,
Speaker 1: and I'd assumed it was just for the scent, but
Speaker 1: it sounds like there was another purpose to that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the oils probably did provide a cent. That
Speaker 3: was probably part of it. But one thing the oils
Speaker 3: did was it restored some flexibility and some pliability to
Speaker 3: the limbs. As the mummies were drying out, they got
Speaker 3: very stiff. It wasn't rigor mortis. It was just the
Speaker 3: fact that there's no water or fluid in the body anymore.
Speaker 3: And so you know, if you're preparing the pharaoh for
Speaker 3: the afterlife, you don't want to snap his arm off
Speaker 3: or something like that. So they would massage the oils
Speaker 3: in to restore some pliability so that they could fold
Speaker 3: the limbs together and kind of get the body in
Speaker 3: the right position for the afterlife.
Speaker 1: You mentioned that this was a really controversial experiment that
Speaker 1: these archaeologists did, and as I was reading this, I
Speaker 1: was thinking, Oh, my gosh, someone just decides to donate
Speaker 1: their body to science and suddenly they're being mommified. Is
Speaker 1: not really what they're intending and their defenses, well, we
Speaker 1: were treating him like a king, you know. I thought
Speaker 1: that was really powerful and interesting. But you actually decided
Speaker 1: to engage in your their own mummification.
Speaker 3: H there's a Diy mummy in the book. And another
Speaker 3: thing I didn't realize about mummification was the the Egyptians
Speaker 3: didn't just mummify humans. There were a couple of graveyards
Speaker 3: that we've uncovered in Egypt where there was something like
Speaker 3: four million dogs that they'd mummified, or like seven million
Speaker 3: birds or something like that. I mean, they really produced
Speaker 3: these mummies on a large scale, and most of the
Speaker 3: probably tinkering and trial and error they probably used on
Speaker 3: animals first, and they mummified them for various reasons, you know,
Speaker 3: religious reasons in their society. So I decided, you know,
Speaker 3: I can try to make a mummy myself. So I
Speaker 3: made a fish mummy with the common type of mummy
Speaker 3: that they made, just because I could get a whole
Speaker 3: fish at the store pretty easily. And it was sort
Speaker 3: of a challenge too, in that, you know, fish is
Speaker 3: kind of a proverbiably smelly animal. It's one that is
Speaker 3: going to go bad quickly, and you're going to know
Speaker 3: it's going bad quickly. So I wanted to see, you know,
Speaker 3: how well this mummification stuff worked. So I recreated the
Speaker 3: mineral essentially that they use to dry bodies out. It's
Speaker 3: very simple. It's essentially a mix of baking soda and
Speaker 3: table salt. So you can get it for pretty cheap,
Speaker 3: even at the grocery store. It's called natron, and there's
Speaker 3: not much to it. You just open the fish shop,
Speaker 3: you get the organs out of there, and you just
Speaker 3: packs that mix of natron in the fish, put it
Speaker 3: in a cast roll dish and just let it sit
Speaker 3: on my counter in a Washington DC heat during the summer,
Speaker 3: and the fish never win the fridge and nothing went wrong.
Speaker 3: It dried the fish out beautifully, and it's still sitting
Speaker 3: on my counter to this day. It is mummified fish.
Speaker 1: That is so crazy to be And it doesn't smell right.
Speaker 1: You said that it has a very weak smell. There's
Speaker 1: no rock, there's nothing. You can see its eyeballs perfectly everything.
Speaker 1: It's pretty impressive. I love that there's a red snapper
Speaker 1: in your kitchen. I'm just sitting there mammified. One of
Speaker 1: the other things that I hadn't sort of clocked was
Speaker 1: this idea of votive mummies. And in the fictional story,
Speaker 1: you know, the baker gets into this real bind. He
Speaker 1: ends up going to his brother, who is both a
Speaker 1: bit of a rogue and in the mummification business. But
Speaker 1: part of the reason he's as successful is he's creating
Speaker 1: all these votive mummies. Can you tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about those.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Voted mummies were essentially sort of like votive candles
Speaker 3: that you might see in Christian churches today. You buy one,
Speaker 3: you burn it, and you know it answers a prayer
Speaker 3: or you know it's accompanying, whatever the case may be.
Speaker 3: Egyptians used mummies like that, where they would buy a
Speaker 3: mummy and they would bury it or burn it, sacrifice,
Speaker 3: do something to it, and it was an offering to
Speaker 3: the god. So it was their way of making an
Speaker 3: offering to the gods. This was real, This did happen.
Speaker 3: There were some mummies that were worth more than others
Speaker 3: just because the animals were rarer. The animals had higher status,
Speaker 3: things like that, you know, a babboon or something might
Speaker 3: be worth more than a fish. But so these people
Speaker 3: were making the votive mummies realized that because the mummies
Speaker 3: were wrapped in bandages usually that people were gonna know
Speaker 3: what was inside. So they were often making fake mummies
Speaker 3: and you can see something that looked like a baboon
Speaker 3: that might just be sticks inside, or it might have
Speaker 3: bones of another animal or something like that. So it
Speaker 3: was sort of this crooked side to the business too
Speaker 3: that I did not expect. So these little bits of
Speaker 3: modernity would jump out. We're like, oh, they had scam
Speaker 3: artists back then. Too interesting.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, and we're going to talk about grave robbing
Speaker 1: and how the Pyramids were actually dealt in in just
Speaker 1: a minute. Before that, we've got to take a quick break.
Speaker 1: We are back with Sam Keene, author of Dinner with
Speaker 1: King Todd, how rogue archaeologists are recreating the site sound, smells,
Speaker 1: and tastes of lost civilizations. And one of the things
Speaker 1: you talked about in the book which kind of struck me,
Speaker 1: was that it wasn't just slaves who were working on
Speaker 1: these pyramids. I've always just assumed it was people who
Speaker 1: were enslaved and like forced labor, but you almost talk
Speaker 1: about it like a conscription. Can Can you tell me
Speaker 1: a little bit about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there was a general idea, especially among
Speaker 3: the lay public, that the people who built the pyramids
Speaker 3: they had been enslaved and this was forced labor that
Speaker 3: they had to undergo to build these pyramids. But there's
Speaker 3: some good evidence that they were not slaves. That these
Speaker 3: people were maybe not volunteering exactly, but they were citizen
Speaker 3: to be top who were conscripted to make these pyramids.
Speaker 3: So you know, maybe farmers who were in the off
Speaker 3: season and they were sort of hauled in to help
Speaker 3: build these pyramids. Because you can see graffiti of people
Speaker 3: chiseling into the walls in hieroglyphs, it says something like
Speaker 3: we're Cufu's gang, or we're the Vigorous Gang. Or something
Speaker 3: like that, so they sighted it. You can tell that
Speaker 3: people were proud that they were helping to build these
Speaker 3: giant monuments, you know, the biggest buildings on Earth to
Speaker 3: show off the glory of their culture. So there was
Speaker 3: certainly some pride in it. But there were you know,
Speaker 3: labor strikes that they record with building, maybe not the Pyramids,
Speaker 3: but different tombs, so there was probably some unrest. It
Speaker 3: maybe wasn't completely free. And yeah, in the book, I
Speaker 3: compared it to something like modern military conscription, which some
Speaker 3: countries have, where all eighteen to twenty year olds or
Speaker 3: something have to do a few years in the military.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you also get into how extraordinary the pyramids
Speaker 1: themselves are, right like that these are massive blocks that
Speaker 1: crews would have needed to slot a new block into
Speaker 1: place every five minutes day in night for two straight decades,
Speaker 1: with intense precision that you can't even slip a knife
Speaker 1: between these adjacent blocks. And I guess I hadn't realized. Obviously,
Speaker 1: you see these things that are incredible and stunning, but
Speaker 1: I didn't realize they were moving that fast. And for
Speaker 1: so many years people have been talking about how there
Speaker 1: were clearly ramps that these not volunteers, but pyramid builders
Speaker 1: were pushing these blocks up, and that theory seems to
Speaker 1: fall apart a little bit in the book can can
Speaker 1: you walk me through how some hobbyists have actually like
Speaker 1: changed the perspective on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so much like with mummies, we don't know how
Speaker 3: the Egyptians built the pyramids because they didn't leave a
Speaker 3: lot of detail about it. And again we know that
Speaker 3: they did not have wheels at the time in Egypt,
Speaker 3: they did not have pulleys, so that limits the kind
Speaker 3: of things that they could have used to build these
Speaker 3: pyramids to get something, you know, these giant blocks four
Speaker 3: hundred feet in the air and the few million blocks
Speaker 3: you need in place over a pretty short time span,
Speaker 3: just a couple of decades. The idea had always been
Speaker 3: that they had used ramps essentially, and they had pushed
Speaker 3: these giant blocks up the ramps, maybe on a sledge
Speaker 3: or maybe on log rollers something like that. But the
Speaker 3: experiments that archaeologists have done show that these ideas really
Speaker 3: aren't that workable. Log rollers sound good in theory, but
Speaker 3: they're really kind of crappy. They just don't work very well.
Speaker 3: The logs sort of get off kilter and they go
Speaker 3: all over the place. It's a pain to grab the
Speaker 3: one at the back bring it around at the front.
Speaker 3: And because these blocks are so heavy, they can often
Speaker 3: crush the wood over time or even right away, so
Speaker 3: that leaves you trying to slide things up a ramp.
Speaker 3: And again, a ramp is something that looks good on paper,
Speaker 3: but given how tall these pyramids were, the ramps have
Speaker 3: needed to be over a mile long to get to
Speaker 3: the very top of these pyramids. The volume of material
Speaker 3: that you would need is astronomical, and not using modern materials.
Speaker 3: You're using dirt or sand, So this ramp has to
Speaker 3: be not only incredibly long, but incredibly wide as well,
Speaker 3: because sand and dirt just don't form nice steep walls.
Speaker 3: So I ran an experiment on a scale model pyramid
Speaker 3: with this enthusiastic amateur out in Mississippi, and it turned
Speaker 3: out that the volume of the ramp we would have
Speaker 3: needed was something like four times as much as the
Speaker 3: volume of the pyramid itself, So you'd have to essentially
Speaker 3: build four or five pyramids in order to get one
Speaker 3: stone pyramid erected. That's how much dirt and sand it
Speaker 3: took to build these ramps and at some point it
Speaker 3: just becomes unworkable. So it really calls into question the
Speaker 3: idea of whether they used ramps at all. It seems
Speaker 3: kind of unlikely, especially for the very top of the pyramids.
Speaker 1: I think you think about these civilizations and you know,
Speaker 1: they're advanced in a sense, right, Like they come up
Speaker 1: with like papyrus, they come up with like various things,
Speaker 1: and yet they still seem so primitive that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: imagine that there are these massive mysteries about things we
Speaker 1: take for granted. And that's kind of what I loved
Speaker 1: about this is that like all this living archaeology like
Speaker 1: actually does end up clarifying or poking holes in really
Speaker 1: big theories about how the world has been constructed. Is incredible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there's a lot of theorizing in archaeology
Speaker 3: and sort of necessarily you know, people taking leaps and
Speaker 3: trying to come up with, you know, new ideas and
Speaker 3: theories for how things work. Then there's some really ingenious
Speaker 3: theories out there. People have come up with incredible, incredible things,
Speaker 3: but every so often the theories just don't hold up.
Speaker 3: If you talk to someone who's a professional baker or
Speaker 3: a professional leather Tanner or something. Some of the theories that
Speaker 3: arise in archaeology, those people who are experts say that
Speaker 3: just doesn't make sense. And I think this is a
Speaker 3: case where building a ramp looks good on paper, but
Speaker 3: in practice it just doesn't work.
Speaker 1: And so in your story, which is really fun, the
Speaker 1: baker ends up in this pickle and he realizes he
Speaker 1: needs to perform a heist the pyramid. And you go
Speaker 1: on to talk about how actually there was a lot
Speaker 1: stolen from the pyramids, both at the time but also later,
Speaker 1: and how actually thievery might have been good for the economy.
Speaker 1: Can can you tell us about some of that?
Speaker 3: Do you do see a lot of evidence of robbery,
Speaker 3: because we know that they buried them with treasures, and
Speaker 3: the treasures just aren't there, so we know something happened
Speaker 3: to them. There are even cases where they built these
Speaker 3: were sort of like early versions of a peer, not
Speaker 3: as big, and they were sort of truncated, but they
Speaker 3: were tombs for wealthy, important people. And there have been
Speaker 3: times in modern modern day when archaeologists found one of
Speaker 3: these things buried in sand or whatever, and they got
Speaker 3: down to the sarcophagus room and they thought, oh my god,
Speaker 3: the sarcopic is intact. This is going to be incredible.
Speaker 3: They'd pry the lid off and all they see is
Speaker 3: a hole in the bottom of the sarcophagust where an
Speaker 3: agent robber they'd come in and taken all the treasure.
Speaker 3: So there's been some disappointments like that. But there was
Speaker 3: an economist who put forward an idea that this was
Speaker 3: actually good for the economy, because if you're taking you know,
Speaker 3: gold or something that's often used as a currency and
Speaker 3: just burying it underground, that doesn't no one any good.
Speaker 3: So you rob a tomb, you start selling it. It
Speaker 3: starts circulating again, stimulates the economy.
Speaker 1: Definitely not something I had considered before. I've read this book.
Speaker 1: Now we're gonna get We're gonna let you go in
Speaker 1: a second. But if people are excited to perform their
Speaker 1: own living archaeology experiments, where would you have them start.
Speaker 3: I think the Mummy is fairly easy to do. It's
Speaker 3: sort of dramatic and interesting, and you can find the
Speaker 3: ingredients at your local grocery store.
Speaker 1: I love it well. The book is Dinner with King
Speaker 1: tut How rogue archaeologists are recreating the site, sound, smells,
Speaker 1: and Tastes of Lost Civilizations. I can't recommend it enough.
Speaker 1: It is really, really, such a delight to read and
Speaker 1: made me want to go to the Pyramids. So thank
Speaker 1: you so much for being here. Sam, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: That was so much fun.
Speaker 2: You know, I can't believe the guy who invented the
Speaker 2: xbox figured out how to make bread like an ancient Egyptian.
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of super talented. And it sounds so delicious,
Speaker 1: Like you know, Sam said, it tastes better than the
Speaker 1: bread at Parisian bakeries, which is amazing. So the book
Speaker 1: is Dinner with King tut how rogue archaeologists are recreating
Speaker 1: the site, sounds, smells, and tastes of Las Civilizations. I
Speaker 1: want to thank Sam Keenes so much for coming on
Speaker 1: the program. Do yourself a favor. Go pick this book up.
Speaker 1: It is so good. You can get it wherever you
Speaker 1: get your books. And as for us, we'll be back
Speaker 1: very soon with a brand new episode from Gabe, Mary Dylan,
Speaker 1: Will and myself. Thank you so much for listening. Part
Speaker 1: Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This
Speaker 1: show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongaishatikler, and
Speaker 1: research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with
Speaker 1: support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for
Speaker 1: iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media
Speaker 1: support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey.
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