The Ark Before Noah: Discover the Ancient Flood Myths That Came Before the Bible

in History, Religion | April 15th, 2025

The Lord said to Noah, there’s going to be a floody, floody; then to get those chil­dren out of the mud­dy, mud­dy; then to build him an arky, arky. This much we heard while toast­ing marsh­mal­lows around the camp­fire, at least if we grew up in a cer­tain mod­ern Protes­tant tra­di­tion. As adults, we may or may not believe that there ever lived a man called Noah who built an ark to save all the world’s inno­cent ani­mal species from a sin-cleans­ing flood. But unless we’ve tak­en a deep dive into ancient his­to­ry, we prob­a­bly don’t know that this espe­cial­ly famous Bible sto­ry was­n’t the first of its par­tic­u­lar sub­genre. As explained in the Hochela­ga video above, there are even old­er glob­al-del­uge tales to be reck­oned with.

In fact, one such myth appears in the old­est known work of lit­er­a­ture in human his­to­ry, the Epic of Gil­gamesh. “In it, the god Ea learns of this divine flood, and secret­ly warns the humans about this com­ing dis­as­ter,” says Hochela­ga cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny. Thus informed, the king Utnapish­tim builds a giant cor­a­cle, a kind of cir­cu­lar boat “used to nav­i­gate the rivers of Mesopotamia for cen­turies.”

Like Noah, Utnapish­tim brings his fam­i­ly and a host of ani­mals aboard, and after rid­ing out the worst of the storm, finds that his craft has come to rest on a moun­tain­top. Also like Noah, he then sends birds out to find dry land. But ulti­mate­ly, “the sto­ry takes a strange turn: instead of being pleased, the gods are angry,” though Ea does step in to take respon­si­bil­i­ty and make sure that Utnapish­tim is reward­ed.

There are oth­er ver­sions with oth­er gods, floods, and ark-builders as well. In the Reli­gion for Break­fast video just above, reli­gious stud­ies schol­ar Andrew Mark Hen­ry com­pares the Bib­li­cal sto­ry of Noah and the Utnapish­tim episode of the Epic of Gil­gamesh with the “Sumer­ian flood sto­ry” from the sec­ond mil­len­ni­um BC and the two-cen­turies-old­er “Atra­ha­sis epic.” All of these ver­sions have a good deal in com­mon, not least the exec­u­tive deci­sion by an exas­per­at­ed high­er being (or beings) to wipe out almost entire­ly the human­i­ty they them­selves cre­at­ed. Iron­i­cal­ly, we mod­erns are like­ly to have first encoun­tered this tale of god­ly wrath and sub­se­quent mass destruc­tion in light­heart­ed, even cheer­ful pre­sen­ta­tions. Whether ancient Sume­ri­ans also sang about it in youth groups, no clay tablet has yet revealed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Ver­sion of the Bible, and Read the Curi­ous Edi­tion Online

Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Northrop Frye Teach­es “The Bible and Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture”: All 25 Lec­tures Free Online

A Map of All the Coun­tries Men­tioned in the Bible: What The Coun­tries Were Called Then, and Now

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Wit­ty, Eru­dite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

Did the Tow­er of Babel Actu­al­ly Exist?: A Look at the Archae­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence

The Epic of Gil­gamesh, the Old­est-Known Work of Lit­er­a­ture in World His­to­ry

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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What Was Smoot-Hawley, and Why Are We Doing It Again? Anyone? Anyone?

in Economics, History | April 14th, 2025

When most Amer­i­cans think of the Smoot-Haw­ley Tar­iffs, they think of eco­nom­ic dis­as­ter. But if you ask why, most Amer­i­cans may need a short refresh­er course. Below, you will find just that. Appear­ing on Derek Thomp­son’s Plain His­to­ry pod­cast, Dou­glas Irwin (an econ­o­mist and his­to­ri­an at Dart­mouth) revis­its the 1930 Smoot-Haw­ley Tar­iff Act, which raised tar­iffs on over 20,000 prod­ucts import­ed into the Unit­ed States. The law was passed despite warn­ings from exec­u­tives like Hen­ry Ford (who called the tar­iff act “an eco­nom­ic stu­pid­i­ty”) and a peti­tion signed by 1,028 Amer­i­can econ­o­mists, who argued that the tar­iffs would raise prices and spark a trade war, leav­ing the Unit­ed States iso­lat­ed. Their con­cerns were ulti­mate­ly well-found­ed. The Smoot-Haw­ley Tar­iffs, sup­port­ed by a Repub­li­can pres­i­dent and Con­gress, had the unin­tend­ed con­se­quence of deep­en­ing, not end­ing, the Great Depres­sion.

Mark Twain alleged­ly said that “His­to­ry doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” But some­times his­to­ry may well repeat itself or come very close, and that’s where we seem to be head­ed right now. As in 1930, we have Repub­li­cans imple­ment­ing new tar­iffs, but this time with the hope of re-engi­neer­ing the world econ­o­my and bring­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing back to Amer­i­ca. Mean­while, econ­o­mists (even con­ser­v­a­tive ones) warn that these poli­cies risk repeat­ing the mis­takes of Smoot-Haw­ley.

Below you can hear the assess­ment of the eco­nom­ic his­to­ri­an Niall Fer­gu­son, who, in speak­ing with Bari Weiss, explains why Don­ald Trump’s tar­iffs will fail to re-indus­tri­al­ize Amer­i­ca. The gold­en age of man­u­fac­tur­ing in Amer­i­ca is long gone, and it’s not com­ing back, part­ly thanks to automa­tion. (Mor­gan Housel has more to say on that.) But even worse, the chaot­ic imple­men­ta­tion of these poli­cies risks trig­ger­ing a trade war, “a major finan­cial cri­sis com­pa­ra­ble in scale to 2008,” or even a mil­i­tary cri­sis that an iso­lat­ed Amer­i­ca would be ill-equipped to han­dle. Speak­ing on Meet the Press this week­end, investor Ray Dalio omi­nous­ly voiced very sim­i­lar con­cerns, say­ing “some­thing worse than reces­sion” may be on the hori­zon.

For anoth­er take, you can hear Preet Bharara’s con­ver­sa­tion with Justin Wolfers, where the Aus­tralian econ­o­mist warns that Trump’s tar­iffs may have few ben­e­fits and most­ly costs, some quite pro­found. By launch­ing a trade war, Amer­i­ca will trade less and find its glob­al influ­ence dimin­ished, leav­ing a void that Chi­na can fill. Echo­ing Niall Fer­gu­son, Wolfers also cau­tions that you can’t turn back the eco­nom­ic clock. He notes:

A hun­dred years ago, we had actu­al­ly the same debate, but it was because we were mov­ing from the land, from a pre­dom­i­nant­ly agri­cul­tur­al econ­o­my, to a man­u­fac­tur­ing-based econ­o­my. And we moved from an enor­mous share of the pop­u­la­tion work­ing in agri­cul­ture to work­ing in man­u­fac­tur­ing, and that raised the Amer­i­can mid­dle class.

There was a lot of nos­tal­gia. Why aren’t we back on the land? And the sub­se­quent stage of eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment is we move out of the fac­to­ries, and we move and become engi­neers and com­put­er sci­en­tists and soft­ware design­ers. And we’re in a much more cog­ni­tive econ­o­my.
And we are not inhal­ing black soot in our mines or in our fac­to­ries dur­ing the day. And that’s the future of the Amer­i­can econ­o­my. And it’s one that speaks well to the skills that Amer­i­cans have.

We’re the most edu­cat­ed work­force in the world. And so pre­sum­ably the jobs of the future are those, the jobs we want are those that cater to the extreme pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and edu­ca­tion of Amer­i­can work­ers.

How have we reached the point where we’re run­ning the same failed exper­i­ments again, all to reclaim an illu­so­ry bygone eco­nom­ic age? It’s a hard ques­tion to con­tem­plate, but I ask that ques­tion again. Any­one? Any­one? Any­one?

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Steps a Pres­i­dent Would Take to Destroy His Nation, Accord­ing to Elon Musk’s AI Chat­bot, Grok

Free Online Eco­nom­ics & Finance Cours­es

Strik­ing Poster Col­lec­tion from the Great Depres­sion Shows That the US Gov­ern­ment Once Sup­port­ed the Arts in Amer­i­ca

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How Chinese Characters Work: The Evolution of a Three-Millennia-Old Writing System

in History, Language, Writing | April 11th, 2025

Con­trary to some­what pop­u­lar belief, Chi­nese char­ac­ters aren’t just lit­tle pic­tures. In fact, most of them aren’t pic­tures at all. The very old­est, whose evo­lu­tion can be traced back to the “ora­cle bone” script of thir­teenth cen­tu­ry BC etched direct­ly onto the remains of tur­tles and oxen, do bear traces of their pic­to­graph ances­tors. But most Chi­nese char­ac­ters, or hanzi, are logo­graph­ic, which means that each one rep­re­sents a dif­fer­ent mor­pheme, or dis­tinct unit of lan­guage: a word, or a sin­gle part of a word that has no inde­pen­dent mean­ing. Nobody knows for sure how many hanzi exist, but near­ly 100,000 have been doc­u­ment­ed so far.

Not that you need to learn all of them to attain lit­er­a­cy: for that, a mere 3,000 to 5,000 will do. While it’s tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble to mem­o­rize that many char­ac­ters by rote, you’d do bet­ter to begin by famil­iar­iz­ing your­self with their basic nature and struc­ture — and in so doing, you’ll nat­u­ral­ly learn more than a lit­tle about their long his­to­ry.

The TED-Ed les­son at the top of the post pro­vides a brief but illu­mi­nat­ing overview of “how Chi­nese char­ac­ters work,” using ani­ma­tion to show how ancient sym­bols for con­crete things like a per­son, a tree, the sun, and water became ver­sa­tile enough to be com­bined into rep­re­sen­ta­tions of every­thing else — includ­ing abstract con­cepts.

In the Man­darin Blue­print video just above, host Luke Neale goes deep­er into the struc­ture of the hanzi in use today. Whether they be sim­pli­fied ver­sions of main­land Chi­na or the tra­di­tion­al ones of Tai­wan, Hong Kong, and else­where, they’re for the most part con­struct­ed not out of whole cloth, he stress­es, but from a set of exist­ing com­po­nents. That may make a prospec­tive learn­er feel slight­ly less daunt­ed, as may the fact that rough­ly 80 per­cent of Chi­nese char­ac­ters are “seman­tic-pho­net­ic com­pounds”: one com­po­nent of the char­ac­ter pro­vides a clue to its mean­ing, and anoth­er a clue to its pro­nun­ci­a­tion. (Not that it nec­es­sar­i­ly makes deci­pher­ing them an effort­less task.)

In the dis­tant past, hanzi were also the only means of record­ing oth­er Asian lan­guages, like Viet­namese and Kore­an. Still today, they remain cen­tral to the Japan­ese writ­ing sys­tem, but like any oth­er cul­tur­al form trans­plant­ed to Japan, they’ve hard­ly gone unal­tered there: the NativLang video just above explains the trans­for­ma­tion they’ve under­gone over mil­len­nia of inter­ac­tion with the Japan­ese lan­guage. It was­n’t so very long ago that, even in their home­land, hanzi were threat­ened with the prospect of being scrapped in the dubi­ous name of mod­ern effi­cien­cy. Now, with those afore­men­tioned almost-100,000 char­ac­ters incor­po­rat­ed into Uni­code, mak­ing them usable through­out our 21st-cen­tu­ry dig­i­tal uni­verse, it seems they’ll stick around — even longer, per­haps, than the Latin alpha­bet you’re read­ing right now.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Chi­nese Lessons

What Ancient Chi­nese Sound­ed Like — and How We Know It: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Dis­cov­er Nüshu, a 19th-Cen­tu­ry Chi­nese Writ­ing Sys­tem That Only Women Knew How to Write

The Improb­a­ble Inven­tion of Chi­nese Type­writ­ers & Com­put­er Key­boards: Three Videos Tell the Tech­no-Cul­tur­al Sto­ry

The Writ­ing Sys­tems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alpha­bet to the Abugi­das of India

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Hear the World’s Oldest Known Song, “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” Written 3,400 Years Ago

in History, Music | April 11th, 2025

Do you like old timey music?

Splen­did.

You can’t get more old timey than Hur­ri­an Hymn No. 6, which was dis­cov­ered on a clay tablet in the ancient Syr­i­an port city of Ugar­it in the 1950s, and is over 3400 years old.

Actu­al­ly, you can — a sim­i­lar tablet, which ref­er­ences a hymn glo­ri­fy­ing Lip­it-Ishtar, the 5th king of the First Dynasty of Isin (in what is now Iraq), is old­er by some 600 years. But as CMUSE reports, it “con­tains lit­tle more than tun­ing instruc­tions for the lyre.”

Hur­ri­an Hymn No. 6 offers meati­er con­tent, and unlike five oth­er tablets dis­cov­ered in the same loca­tion, is suf­fi­cient­ly well pre­served to allow archae­ol­o­gists, and oth­ers, to take a crack at recon­struct­ing its song, though it was by no means easy.

Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of Assyri­ol­o­gy, Anne Kilmer spent 15 years research­ing the tablet, before tran­scrib­ing it into mod­ern musi­cal nota­tion in 1972.

Hers is one of sev­er­al inter­pre­ta­tions YouTu­ber Hochela­ga sam­ples in the above video.

While the orig­i­nal tablet gives spe­cif­ic details on how the musi­cian should place their fin­gers on the lyre, oth­er ele­ments, like tun­ing or how long notes should be held, are absent, giv­ing mod­ern arrangers some room for cre­ativ­i­ty.

Below archaeo­mu­si­col­o­gist Richard Dum­b­rill explains his inter­pre­ta­tion from 1998, in which vocal­ist Lara Jokhad­er assumes the part of a young woman pri­vate­ly appeal­ing to the god­dess Nikkal to make her fer­tile:

Here’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly love­ly clas­si­cal gui­tar spin, cour­tesy of Syr­i­an musi­col­o­gist Raoul Vitale and com­pos­er Feras Rada…

And a haunt­ing piano ver­sion, by Syr­i­an-Amer­i­can com­pos­er Malek Jan­dali, founder of Pianos for Peace:

And who can resist a chance to hear Hur­ri­an Hymn No. 6 on a repli­ca of an ancient lyre by “new ances­tral” com­pos­er Michael Levy, who con­sid­ers it his musi­cal mis­sion to “open a por­tal to a time that has been all but for­got­ten:”

I dream to rekin­dle the very spir­it of our ancient ances­tors. To cap­ture, for just a few moments, a time when peo­ple imag­ined the fab­ric of the uni­verse was woven from har­monies and notes. To lux­u­ri­ate in a gen­tler time when the fragili­ty of life was tru­ly appre­ci­at­ed and its every action was per­formed in the almighty sense of awe felt for the ancient gods.

Samu­rai Gui­tarist Steve Onotera chan­nels the mys­tery of antiq­ui­ty too, by com­bin­ing Dr. Dumbrill’s melody with Dr. Kilmer’s, try­ing and dis­card­ing a num­ber of approach­es — syn­th­wave, lo-fi hip hop, reg­gae dub (“an absolute dis­as­ter”) — before decid­ing it was best ren­dered as a solo for his Fend­er elec­tric.

Ama­ranth Pub­lish­ing has sev­er­al MIDI files of Hur­ri­an Hymn No. 6, includ­ing Dr. Kilmer’s, that you can down­load for free here.

Open them in the music nota­tion soft­ware pro­gram of your choice, and should it please the god­dess, per­haps yours will be the next inter­pre­ta­tion of Hur­ri­an Hymn No. 6 to be fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture…

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

The Evo­lu­tion of Music: 40,000 Years of Music His­to­ry Cov­ered in 8 Min­utes

Watch an Archae­ol­o­gist Play the “Litho­phone,” a Pre­his­toric Instru­ment That Let Ancient Musi­cians Play Real Clas­sic Rock

A Mod­ern Drum­mer Plays a Rock Gong, a Per­cus­sion Instru­ment from Pre­his­toric Times

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Medieval Manuscript That Features “Yoda”, Killer Snails, Savage Rabbits & More: Discover The Smithfield Decretals

in Art, Books, History | April 9th, 2025

As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eager­ly for­ward to it if that book com­prised 314 folios of 1,971 papal let­ters and oth­er doc­u­ments relat­ing to eccle­si­as­ti­cal law, all from the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry. Indeed, even many spe­cial­ists in the field would hes­i­tate to take on the chal­lenge of such a man­u­script in full. But what if we told you it comes with illus­tra­tions of demons run­ning amok, knights bat­tling snails, killer rab­bits and oth­er ani­mals tak­ing their revenge on human­i­ty, a dead ringer for Yoda, and the pen­i­tent har­lot Thäis?

These are just a few of the char­ac­ters that grace the pages of the Smith­field Dec­re­tals, the most visu­al­ly notable of all extant copies of the Dec­re­tales of Pope Gre­go­ry IX. When it was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished as an already-illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script in the 1230s, writes Spencer McDaniel at Tales of Times For­got­ten, “the mar­gins of the text were delib­er­ate­ly left blank by the orig­i­nal French scribes so that future own­ers of the text could add their own notes and anno­ta­tions.” Thus “the man­u­script would have orig­i­nal­ly had a lot of blank space in it, espe­cial­ly in the mar­gins.”

“At some point before around 1340, how­ev­er, the Smith­field Dec­re­tals fell into the pos­ses­sion of some­one in east­ern Eng­land, prob­a­bly in Lon­don, who paid a group of illus­tra­tors to add even more exten­sive illus­tra­tions to the text.”

They “drew elab­o­rate bor­ders and illus­tra­tions on every page of the man­u­script, near­ly com­plete­ly fill­ing up all the mar­gins,” adher­ing to the con­tem­po­rary “trend among man­u­script illus­tra­tors in east­ern Eng­land for draw­ing ‘drol­leries,’ which are bizarre, absurd, and humor­ous mar­gin­al illus­tra­tions.”

Bear­ing no direct rela­tion to the text of the Dec­re­tals, some of these elab­o­rate works of four­teenth-cen­tu­ry mar­gin­a­lia appear to tell sto­ries of their own. “These tales have ana­logues in a dizzy­ing vari­ety of tex­tu­al and visu­al sources, includ­ing the bible, hagiog­ra­phy, romance, preach­ers’ exem­pla, and fabli­au” (a humor­ous and risqué form of ear­ly French poet­ry), writes Alixe Bovey at the British Library’s medieval man­u­scripts blog. “Some of the nar­ra­tives have no sur­viv­ing lit­er­ary ana­logues; oth­ers con­sti­tute iso­lat­ed visu­al ren­di­tions of once-pop­u­lar tales.”

If you view the Smith­field Dec­re­tals’ illus­tra­tions here or in the British Library’s dig­i­ti­za­tion at the Inter­net Archive, you’ll also see the medieval satir­i­cal impulse at work. Take the afore­men­tioned, by now much-cir­cu­lat­ed “Yoda,” who, as McDaniel writes, “is prob­a­bly sup­posed to be a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Dev­il as a pro­fes­sor of canon law.” It seems that “legal schol­ars in Mid­dle Ages had a sim­i­lar rep­u­ta­tion to lawyers today; they were seen as slimy, dis­hon­est, and more inter­est­ed in per­son­al gain than in jus­tice.” They might have been good for a cryp­tic turn of phrase, but those in need of benev­o­lent­ly dis­pensed wis­dom would have done bet­ter to ask else­where.

Relat­ed con­tent:

8th Cen­tu­ry Eng­lish­woman Scrib­bled Her Name & Drew Fun­ny Pic­tures in a Medieval Man­u­script, Accord­ing to New Cut­ting-Edge Tech­nol­o­gy

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

Medieval Doo­dler Draws a “Rock­star Lady” in a Man­u­script of Boethius’ The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy (Cir­ca 1500)

Why Butt Trum­pets & Oth­er Bizarre Images Appeared in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Make Your Own Medieval Memes with a New Tool from the Dutch Nation­al Library

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Who Really Built the Egyptian Pyramids—And How Did They Do It?

in History, Technology | April 5th, 2025

Although it’s cer­tain­ly more plau­si­ble than hypothe­ses like ancient aliens or lizard peo­ple, the idea that slaves built the Egypt­ian pyra­mids is no more true. It derives from cre­ative read­ings of Old Tes­ta­ment sto­ries and tech­ni­col­or Cecil B. Demille spec­ta­cles, and was a clas­sic whataboutism used by slav­ery apol­o­gists. The notion has “plagued Egypt­ian schol­ars for cen­turies,” writes Eric Betz at Dis­cov­er. But, he adds emphat­i­cal­ly, “Slaves did not build the pyra­mids.” Who did?

The evi­dence sug­gests they were built by a force of skilled labor­ers, as the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above explains. These were cadres of elite con­struc­tion work­ers who were well-fed and housed dur­ing their stint. “Many Egyp­tol­o­gists,” includ­ing archae­ol­o­gist Mark Lehn­er, who has exca­vat­ed a city of work­ers in Giza, “sub­scribe to the hypothe­ses that the pyra­mids were… built by a rotat­ing labor force in a mod­u­lar, team-based kind of orga­ni­za­tion,” Jonathan Shaw writes at Har­vard Mag­a­zine. Graf­fi­ti dis­cov­ered at the site iden­ti­fies team names like “Friends of Khu­fu” and “Drunk­ards of Menkau­re.”

The exca­va­tion also uncov­ered “tremen­dous quan­ti­ties of cat­tle, sheep, and goat bone, ‘enough to feed sev­er­al thou­sand peo­ple, even if they ate meat every day,’ adds Lehn­er,” sug­gest­ing that work­ers were “fed like roy­al­ty.” Anoth­er exca­va­tion by Lehner’s friend Zahi Hawass, famed Egypt­ian archae­ol­o­gist and expert on the Great Pyra­mid, has found work­er ceme­ter­ies at the foot of the pyra­mids, mean­ing that those who per­ished were buried in a place of hon­or. This was incred­i­bly haz­ardous work, and the peo­ple who under­took it were cel­e­brat­ed and rec­og­nized for their achieve­ment.

Labor­ers were also work­ing off an oblig­a­tion, some­thing every Egypt­ian owed to those above them and, ulti­mate­ly, to their pharaoh. But it was not a mon­e­tary debt. Lehn­er describes what ancient Egyp­tians called bak, a kind of feu­dal duty. While there were slaves in Egypt, the builders of the pyra­mids were maybe more like the Amish, he says, per­form­ing the same kind of oblig­a­tory com­mu­nal labor as a barn rais­ing. In that con­text, when we look at the Great Pyra­mid, “you have to say ‘This is a hell of a barn!’’’

The evi­dence unearthed by Lehn­er, Hawass, and oth­ers has “dealt a seri­ous blow to the Hol­ly­wood ver­sion of a pyra­mid build­ing,” writes Shaw, “with Charl­ton Hes­ton as Moses inton­ing, ‘Pharaoh, let my peo­ple go!’” Recent arche­ol­o­gy has also dealt a blow to extrater­res­tri­al or time-trav­el expla­na­tions, which begin with the assump­tion that ancient Egyp­tians could not have pos­sessed the know-how and skill to build such struc­tures over 4,000 years ago. Not so. Ver­i­ta­si­um explains the incred­i­ble feats of mov­ing the out­er stones with­out wheels and trans­port­ing the gran­ite core of the pyra­mids 620 miles from its quar­ry to Giza.

Ancient Egyp­tians could plot direc­tions on the com­pass, though they had no com­pass­es. They could make right angles and lev­els and thus had the tech­nol­o­gy required to design the pyra­mids. What about dig­ging up the Great Pyramid’s 2 mil­lion blocks of yel­low lime­stone? As we know, this was done by a skilled work­force, who quar­ried an “Olympic swimming-pool’s worth of stone every eight days” for 23 years to build the Great Pyra­mid, notes Joe Han­son in the PBS It’s Okay to Be Smart video above. They did so using the only met­al avail­able to them, cop­per.

This may sound incred­i­ble, but mod­ern exper­i­ments have shown that this amount of stone could be quar­ried and moved, using the tech­nol­o­gy avail­able, by a team of 1,200 to 1,500 work­ers, around the same num­ber of peo­ple archae­ol­o­gists believe to have been on-site dur­ing con­struc­tion. The lime­stone was quar­ried direct­ly at the site (in fact the Sphinx was most­ly dug out of the earth, rather than built atop it). How was the stone moved? Egyp­tol­o­gists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liv­er­pool think they may have found the answer, a ramp with stairs and a series of holes which may have been used as a pul­ley sys­tem.

Learn more about the myths and the real­i­ties of the builders of Egypt’s pyra­mids in the It’s Okay to Be Smart “Who Built the Pyra­mids, Part 1″ video above.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What the Great Pyra­mids of Giza Orig­i­nal­ly Looked Like

A Walk­ing Tour Around the Pyra­mids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

Take a 360° Inter­ac­tive Tour Inside the Great Pyra­mid of Giza

Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Includ­ing the Great Pyra­mids, the Sphinx & More

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

The Grate­ful Dead Play at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Italy Became the Most Divided Country in Europe: Understanding the Great Divide Between North & South

in Economics, History, Politics | April 4th, 2025

Pra­da, Alfa Romeo, Pel­le­gri­no, Fer­rari, Illy, Lam­borgh­i­ni, Guc­ci: these are a few Ital­ian cor­po­ra­tions we all know, though we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know that they’re all from the north of Italy. The same is true, in fact, of most Ital­ian brands that now enjoy glob­al recog­ni­tion, and accord­ing to the analy­sis pre­sent­ed in the Real­LifeLore video above, that’s not a coin­ci­dence. More than 160 years after the uni­fi­ca­tion of Italy, the south remains an eco­nom­ic and social under-per­former com­pared to the north, reflect­ed in mea­sures like the Human Devel­op­ment Index, GDP per capi­ta, and even vot­er turnout. At this point, the dis­par­i­ty between the two halves of the coun­try looks stark­er than that between the for­mer East and West Ger­many.

The rea­sons begin with geog­ra­phy: besides its obvi­ous prox­im­i­ty to the rest of Europe, north­ern Italy is home to the high­ly nav­i­ga­ble Po Riv­er and its sur­round­ing val­ley, the fresh­wa­ter (and hydro­elec­tric pow­er) sources of the Alps, and the deep-water ports at Tri­este and Genoa. What’s more, it does­n’t much over­lap with the fault zone under the Apen­nine Moun­tains of cen­tral and south­ern Italy, and thus isn’t as exposed to the earth­quakes that have tak­en such a toll over the cen­turies. Nor are any of the coun­try’s active vol­ca­noes — includ­ing Mt. Vesu­vius, which destroyed Pom­peii in the year 79 and killed thou­sands of Neapoli­tans in 1631 — locat­ed in the north.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the polit­i­cal fates of what would become north­ern and south­ern Italy also diverged. Large parts of the south expe­ri­enced rule by Greeks, Arabs, Nor­mans, Spaniards, and Aus­tri­an Hab­s­burgs. As the video’s nar­ra­tion tells the sto­ry, “The long reign of for­eign pow­ers through­out south­ern Italy estab­lished a cul­ture of absen­tee land­lords, large land hold­ings worked by peas­ants, and feu­dal­ism that per­sist­ed for much longer than it did in the north, which for cen­turies after the Mid­dle Ages was con­trolled by var­i­ous thriv­ing, inde­pen­dent­ly gov­erned com­munes and city-states that built up large amounts of trust, or social cap­i­tal, between the peo­ple who lived there and the insti­tu­tions they built.”

Even at the time of uni­fi­ca­tion, south­ern Italy had less infra­struc­ture than north­ern Italy, a dif­fer­ence that remains painful­ly obvi­ous to any trav­el­ers attempt­ing to make their way across the coun­try today. It also had quite a lot of catch­ing up to do with regard to indus­tri­al out­put and lit­er­a­cy rates. Though cer­tain gaps have nar­rowed, the north-south divide has actu­al­ly become more pro­nounced in cer­tain ways since, not least due to the recrude­s­cence of Mafia influ­ence since the Sec­ond World War (a major fac­tor in the per­sis­tent lack of a bridge to Sici­ly, as recent­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture). Not to say that each half is homo­ge­neous with­in itself: spend enough time in any of the regions that con­sti­tute either one, and it will come to feel like a dis­tinct nation unto itself. Even­tu­al­ly, you may also find your­self in agree­ment with the Ital­ians who insist that Italy nev­er real­ly uni­fied in the first place.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why There Isn’t a Bridge from Italy to Sici­ly – and Why the 2,000-Year-Old Dream of Build­ing the Bridge May Soon Be Real­ized

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books

in Books, History | April 3rd, 2025

Nobody reads books any­more. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve prob­a­bly heard it expressed fair­ly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiq­ui­ty. Dur­ing that time, as ancient-his­to­ry YouTu­ber Gar­rett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, the “book trade declined with the edu­cat­ed elite that had sup­port­ed it. The copy­ing of sec­u­lar texts slowed, and final­ly ceased. The books in Roman libraries, pub­lic and pri­vate, crum­bled on their shelves. Only a small con­tin­gent of sur­vivors found their way into monas­ter­ies.” As went the read­ing cul­ture of the empire, so went the empire itself.

Some may be tempt­ed to draw par­al­lels with cer­tain coun­tries in exis­tence today. But what may be more sur­pris­ing is the extent of Roman read­ing at its height. Though only about one in ten Romans could read, Ryan explains, “the Roman elite defined them­selves by a sophis­ti­cat­ed lit­er­ary edu­ca­tion, and filled their cities with texts.”

Those includ­ed the Acta Diur­na, a kind of pro­to-news­pa­per carved into stone or met­al and dis­played in pub­lic places. But from the reign of Augus­tus onward, “the city of Rome boast­ed an impres­sive array of pub­lic libraries,” filled with texts writ­ten on papyrus scrolls, and lat­er — espe­cial­ly in the third and fourth cen­turies — on codices, whose for­mat close­ly resem­bles books as we know them today.

Rome even had taber­nae librari­ae, which we’d rec­og­nize as book­stores, whose tech­niques includ­ed paint­ing the titles of best­sellers on their exte­ri­or columns. Some of them also pub­lished the books they sold, set­ting an ear­ly exam­ple of what we’d call “ver­ti­cal inte­gra­tion.” Roman read­ers of the first cen­tu­ry would all have had at least some famil­iar­i­ty with Mar­tial’s Epi­grams, but even such a big con­tem­po­rary hit would have been out­sold by a clas­sic like the Aeneid, “the one book that any fam­i­ly with a library owned.” With 99 per­cent of its lit­er­a­ture lost to us, we’re unlike­ly ever to deter­mine if, like mod­ern-day Amer­i­ca, ancient Rome was real­ly sat­u­rat­ed with less-respectable works, its own equiv­a­lents of self help, busi­ness mem­oir, and genre fic­tion. Who knows? Per­haps Rome, too, had roman­ta­sy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Was Actu­al­ly Lost When the Library of Alexan­dria Burned?

How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Par­ti­cle Accel­er­a­tors, 3D Mod­el­ing & Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Explore the Roman Cook­book, De Re Coquinar­ia, the Old­est Known Cook­book in Exis­tence

Is Amer­i­ca Declin­ing Like Ancient Rome?

The First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion: Read Lucian’s 2nd-Cen­tu­ry Space Trav­el­ogue A True Sto­ry

How 99% of Ancient Lit­er­a­ture Was Lost

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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