Episode 10: Atlantis

 Episode Summary: It just wouldn't be a show like this without an Atlantis episode.

Bike summary: 2.4 miles, 121.6 calories.

The inevitable Atlantis episode is like every other Atlantis "documentary" I've ever seen (possibly it was even the prototype) as there are shots of a lot of different things and a voice over about how mysterious and ancient they are -- only this is In Search Of, so the voice over is given by Leonard Nimoy, which gives it a kind of gravitas. 

There's Easter Island (maybe the Easter Islanders made the statues?), the Olmec heads, a bunch petroglyphs or geoglyphs (including the Cerne Abbas Giant, which was recently dated to late Anglo-Saxon or early Norman times -- in other words, about when it's first mentioned in written sources. It also may have originally been Jesus, before being overgrown during the English Reformation and re-cut to mock Oliver Cromwell. It's complicated) and a "city older than the pyramids atop the Andes".

"Never have we been so close to finding Atlantis," Nimoy intones. 

There are some scenes of Akrotiri, which is described as "reminiscent of the Minoans" and the Antikythera Mechanism, which in chronological terms comes from closer to the time of Christ than to the Minoans. Nimoy also says something about how the first "modern" computer was invented in I'm not sure what it says in my notes, could be 1922, or maybe even 1940. Regardless, mechanical and analog computers predate even electromechanical computers (by some definitions, IBM is older than the computer, which is weird). 

The episode goes into the usual points, talking about Plato and his account, though relying on the shorter version in Timaeus. Nimoy talks about the wealthy land "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" and how there was once a great land mass in the Atlantic. 

Then we get our first interview -- Dr Maxine Asher, who says she started excavating an Atlantean shipwreak off the coast of Cadiz before the Spanish authorities revoked her permission to dive and so has no artifacts or photographs, other than an amphora. Asher was a fraudster who ran degree mills and believed the "Jews and Catholics" were trying to suppress her Atlantis discoveries. I guess this is something they get together to do on weekends, after the Jews are done with the week's Freemasonry, Communism and International Banking and the Catholics have subverted liberalism, taken over public schoolds, used convents as brothels for priests and the like. 

Interestingly the real lost city/civilization Tartessos is widely believed to be near Cadiz. 

Then there's a shot of the Piri Reis map, supposedly showing ice free Antarctica. This continues to annoy me, as it keeps being brought up in the Atlantis discourse to this day. In the first case, if it is a super advanced ancient map, it doesn't show Cape Horn and the Straights of Magellan! That's a big thing to miss for ancient astronauts. Moreover, according to translations of the map the information from the time of Alexander the Great pertains to the Near East, while the information about the coast of South America comes from captured Portugeuese ships. The origin, where zero degrees of longitude and zero degrees of latitude meet, is at Alexandria. I don't know what projection is used, but it's probably not the Mercator.    

And then we go to the Carribean for the Bimini Road. I think most of the episode is set here, which involves an archeologist, an Italian count/diver, a psychic and Peter Tompkins of the Bermuda Triangle  and talking plants episodes. The "road" was discovered by people looking for evidence of Edgar Caycee's prediction that Atlantis would start to rise again in the late 60s and I believe the psychic was from the Caycee Foundation. They claim to have found a 3,000 year old shipwreck beneath a 16th century one and suggest that Bimini was Atlantis' western port and Cadiz its eastern. 

One of the weird things is that everyone talks about Atlantis as having awe-inspiring advanced technology, but what we are shown as "Atlantean" are not very advanced -- especially since the producers don't have their dates right. The story in Timeaus is that it came down through Critias' family, his great-grandfather having heard the story from Solon, who died around 560 BC. It was set some 9,000 years before him, so call it 9500 BC. For context, this would make the destruction of Atlantis older than Gobekli Tepe and contemporaneous with the beginning of agriculture in the Ancient Near East. 

If Atlantis did exist at those dates, its pottery and architecture would be thousands of years in advance of everyone else. But the episode gives a date range of 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, or 3,000 BC to 1000 BC, which is roughly the Bronze Age. 

Then they talk about Tiwanaku, the "city atop the Andes older than the pyramids" as being 10,000 years old, but this is only a segue to talk about the Moche people, who apparently made statues of people of all the races, which somehow proves Atlantis. I guess the unspoken assumption is that they're pre-Columbian.

Podcast summary

Jeb and Blake were once again joined by Sharon Hill and they have a lot of fun with this one. I imagine Atlantis is one of those things that gets real archeologists all bent out of shape. As evidence, I give you how annoyed Jeb gets with the brief shots of different things. 

"Here are many things from around the world and now we're going to tell you things that aren't true about them," he says.

He's confused by opening oin Easter Island and notes that nothing Nimoy says in the first two minutes is correct, eventuially asking what any of it has to do with Atlantis. 

Blake calls it a "litany of mystery", which WBAGNFAB and Jeb calls it a myth parade. I like to think of it as a mythquerade -- there's some interesting real stuff hiding behind this crap. Not about Atlantis, but about the things they're trying to link together seemingly at random in and of themselves. For instance, I'm sure we know or suspect we know more about the Olmec than just the heads, but whenever they're brought up it's about the heads and how they "prove" Atlantis or some other Old World contact, as though an entire civilization did nothing else than exist to provide racists and tv producers with B-roll. 

Anyways, they bring up the idea of "flat antiquity" -- there's us, the recent past and everything else, which is genericly "ancient". This is, to an extent, part of the human condition (as one of those people who thinks that the mid-90s was 10 years ago, I know) and I wonder if it might be related to the modern trope of Medieval Stasis, where the author of a sci-fi or fantasy novel will have 10,000 years pass between stories, but next to nothing changes in the setting.  

Another concept is hyperdiffusionism, which tries to trace every cultural or technological advance back to a presumed "mother civilization." It's ancient aliens without the aliens and it relies on things like Elisha Gray inventing the telephone at the same time as Alexander Graham Bell as fantasy. It also falls apart when one considers that trying to find a common origin for Egyptian and Mayan pyramids is stupid since they had different purposes, designs and the Egyptians stopped building them some 3,000 years before the height of Mayan civilization. 

The result of hyperdiffusion, which still doesn't provide any proof of Atlantis, is that, as Blake says "Atlantis is everywhere and nowhere."

Maybe Atlantis is the friends we made along the way?

Sharon Hill gets to talk about the Minoan eruption and how it ejected 61 cubic kilometers of debris, forming the modern island of Santorini and may have caused typhoons in various places around the Med. Jeb notes people (read: Simcha Fisher and James Cameron)  have tried playing with the date to associate it with the Exodus. They note that no one ever goes looking for Plato's Cave and Jeb says "Ten thousand years ago, beyond the Pillars of Hercules? In other words it was a long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away."

Jeb sighs audibly when talking about the Antikythera mechanism. "It's first century BC, it's not Atlantis!"

Blake says it's "evidence" of lost knowledge. "They lived in stone buildings, how could they have had gears?"

"I live in a wooden house and I have microchips," Jeb counters. 

They talk about how fewer people today talk about the Bimini Road and discus Peter Tompkins as the voice on the radio in the Bermuda Triangle episode. I don't know if it is or not, it does kind of sound like him, but he has a Mid-Atlantic Accent, so he sounds like William F Buckley, Jr. Given the number of WASPs who moved the Miami area over the years, it's possible there were quite a few people with that accent in those days.

They talk about a lot more and Atlantis is one of my favorite subjects, so I will bring this to a close. One day I hope to launch a podcast of my home, talking about the transformation of Atlantis from allegory to a supposed place still being looked for. 

  

Episode Eight: The Mummy's Curse

 Episode summary: Say Akhenaten one more time, I dare you 

Bike summary: 2.2 miles, 112 calories 

We're back with the weirdness.

This episode opens with two women chanting "Akhenaten" in unison (and boy did I get tired of hearing it quickly) and saying things like "We call out the name, Akhenaten" before Nimoy tells us in voice over about the women were in a play and before opening night they had identical dreams, except that one was struck across the face and other across the chest. The next morning the first went partially blind and the second was suffering from life-threatening internal bleeding . . . so the legend says (I wonder if this was told to the actresses in the recreation?)

Having established the idea that Akhenaten was cursed by the priests of Amun-Re for his heresy, they then cut to a shot of the mask of Tutankhamun, a pharoh who is famous for not being Akhenaten. This isn't the last time that the pharoh who is cursed or cursing changes, either. 

Then, in a jump cut that can cause whiplash, we get b-roll of Downtown Abbey: Highclere Castle, where Henry Herbert, the Sixth Earl of Carnarvon, looks and sounds very much the part of the British lord: he's in tweed, he smokes a pipe and he speaks with that clipped Received Pronounciation accent you never hear any more. He talks about his father, the Fifth Earl, who financed the excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb and died shortly thereafter. Lord Carnarvon could tell a good story and he talks about how when his father died, all the electricity in Cairo went out and when he returned to Highclere, he was told how the exact moment the fifth Earl died his dog started howling and died. 

(I have Lone Star-ish relationship to the Earls of Carnarvon, by coincidence. One of my earliest ancestors in what's now the United States was Major Simon Willard, a soldier, explorer, politician, trader and land speculator who was born in Kent and immigrated to Massachusetts in 1634 and died in 1676. He had three wives and 18 children, of whom quite a few lived to adulthood and sired children themselves. One of his descendents was Joseph Clapp Willard, co-founder of what's now the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, DC. His son was Joseph E. Willard, a Democratic politician in Virginia who served as United States Ambassador to Spain. He had two daughters, Belle Wyatt Willard, who married Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Mary Elizabeth Willard, who married Mervyn Herbert, half brother of the fifth Earl. Mervyn's full brother, Aubrey Herbert, who was the mother of Laura Herbert, wife of Evelyn Waugh. Geneaology: it's like a boring game of Five Degrees of Kevin Bacon sometimes.)

According to Nimoy, a tablet was found in Tutankhamun's tomb, which has now disappeared, that said "Death will slay with his wings all who enter here." I think this has been traced to a 19th century novel called The Mummy. It's odd to worry about curses when excavating tombs, since virtually all Egyptian pharaonic tombs were robbed in Antiquity. In a gothic-sounding recitation, Nimoy quickly lists off the names of the people who died soon after opening Tutankhamun's tomb -- Carnarvon, Jay Gould (whom I thought was the "robber baron" involved in the Erie War and Black Friday, but it was his son) and a few others. 

Then, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, we get back to the story of the play from the opening narration, by a man Nimoy introduces as an historian: Henry Lincoln. I was completely blindsided by this appearance (and another great RP accent). Lincoln was a script-writer, who if not for one other thing, would be best known for the three Doctor Who scripts he wrote in the 60s that featured Yetis, the Great Intelligence and introduced long-running, beloved character Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart (played by the late Nicholas Courtney from 1968 until 2008). The other thing, unfortunately, was Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is Chariots of the Gods for people who think the Templars built the Pyramids. 

After yet more "Akhenaten Akhenaten" (Let's face it, you can't akhenaten anything), there's a mostly accurate description of the Aten heresy and how the priest of Amun-Re recovered their power after Akhenaten's death, explaining why they might want to curse him. Except we haven't been talking about the curse of Akhenaten, but of Tutankhamun, and the curse has been about vengeance for disturbing the king's tomb and the things inside he needs for the afterlife, not the revenge of reempowered clerics. 

Immediately, after that Nimoy starts talking about how the mummy of Ramesses II was flown to Paris to be examined (he was given an Egyptian passport with "Former King" written on the "Occupation" form, which considering that Fuad II was in exile and the other mummies on international tours, must have meant that Egypt was a net exporter of kings), even though not only was Ramesses not part of the same dynasty as Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, but his tomb was looted in antiquity and his mummy transferred out of the Valley of the Kings to Deir el-Bahri before being discovered in 1881 and put on display -- 1976 is a little late for that curse to manifest. 

Finally Nimoy casts doubt on the whole thing by pointing out that Howard Carter lived a long and happy life. He doesn't say it, but Lady Evelyn Beauchamp, the fifth earl's daughter and one of the first people in the tomb, was still alive when the episode broadcast. Stephen Fry said on QI that one of the excavators died in the 1970s in his 90s and the New York Times headline was "Mummy's curse strikes again".

All I know is that the word Akhenaten has lost all meaning for me.

Podcast summary:

Jeb said very early on what he thought of the whole thing: "A lot of this is crazy white people."

He explained that many French and British people involved in colonialism were seeking to validate the imperial project. They also had anxiety about their own civilization succombing to decadence and superstition like the ones they were busy subjugating. I get his point, but I guess I don't understand how civilizational anxiety leads to believing in curses. Jokes about how the United States' current political dysfunction is due to being built on an Indian burial ground aside, although it might not be too dissimilar, come to think of it -- Jay Anson claimed the house in The Amityville Horror was built on a field where the local Native American abandoned their elderly and mentally ill to die (spoiler: he was making it up). I guess believing in ghosts and curses (or ethnic or religious minorities) is easier than actually reading about political science. Or confronting political issues. 

A lot of the curse mythos, they note, seems to come from newspapers, most of which were locked out of the tomb opening and spread stories of a curse to make up for the fact that they didn't have an actual story. "I'm not saying the Titanic was cursed," Blake notes. "But everyone involved with her is now dead."

They talk a bit about the play, comparing it to the films of Kenneth Anger. It was written by Arthur Weigall, a journalist and archeologist who had a professional rivalry of sorts with Howard Carter. He helped introduce Akhenaten to a popular audience. They say Weigall "made Akehenaten famous", although I think Sigismund Freud is more deserving of that "honor". 

 

Episode Three: Ancient Aviators

Bike summary: 2.1 miles, also forgot to note calories. 

Episode summary: could ancient people fly?

This was an odd one. As they said in the podcast, it was like they were trying to do an ancient astronauts episode without talking about ancient astronauts. It was still odd considering one of the specials that preceeded the series (and which was hosted by Rod Serling) was all about that stuff. I guess they had the footage?

The episode has a lot of footage of the Nazca Lines, which they say can only be seen from the air. They don't spend a lot of time delving into the history or archeology of the lines, in favor of hopping around to different locations in Central America and even India. They make a lot of weird assumptions and the Indian observatory they visit is the seen of one of them: Nimoy says that it shows an "understanding of space and time" neccesarry for flight, as though the Wright Brothers were cosmologists. Another weird assumption is when they show an experiment in Death Valley speculating that Native Americans could have had hot air balloons, which they would use to direct the drawing of pictographs like the Nazca Lines.

(It's easy! You kill a deer, you tan the hide, you make an annodized aluminum frame and you learn how to extrude and weld, all in about five minutes.)

Of course, needing to be able to see a whole site from above in order to draw something on the surface like that is like saying that maps were impossible to make before the airplane. Since I'm on the topic, I've seen loads of these sorts of shows that do state the premise: that the Nazca Lines were part of a runway for ancient spaceships. However, if you look at Nazca on Google Maps, it turns out they're really hard to see from space, so I think we can discount the space ship idea. Also, nobody ever seems to talk about the chalk figures of England in these discussions -- some of them, like the White Horse of Uffington, are certainly old enough.

There's a funny moment where Nimoy suggests that Inca roads could have been runways, while they show a shot of a road curving over and around a hill, because you don't want a runway to be smooth and straight. 

They also show some Maya ruins and suggest that the Maya, whom they imply ceased to exist, used aircraft to get from city to city. Or maybe their roads have been swallowed by the jungle. Also, the Maya last rebelled against European rule in the 1920s.

Also, in a show that mostly talks about ancient things, without really dating anything, Leonardo Da Vinci shows up (fresh from Quest of the Delta Knights, I guess) with his helicopter. For this I must invoke SF Debris and award this episode of In Search Of an "Ancient Chinese secret, huh".

We also get some images of Cape Canaveral, which Nimoy describes as "forlorn and abandoned" and another Mesoamerican site, comparing the two. If you squint they kind of look similar, but only just. They are also apparently filming both from highly specific angles. 

Podcast summary:

It turns out Jeb Card specializes in Mayan archeology and so we get a very informative discussion of their history, the fact that of course they built roads and, in fact, road metaphors are very common in Mayan speech. 

We also got to learn more about the people of the Nazca Desert. Basically, it's in the rain shadow of the Andes, like the Atacama in Chile, and it gets next to no rain at all. But there are snow-fed rivers that come down from the mountains and in the river valleys people settled and formed civilizations. They buried their dead with grave goods in the desert and it's so dry the burials are often very well preserved and we know that textiles were very important, including cotton (which I thought cotton was an old world plant). I wonder if cotton's high water demand played a roll in its value. 

They also brought up the Ica stones, which I had never heard of. These are fakes, made by a farmer in a different valley, that purported to be ancient depictions of humans coexisting with dinosaurs. They also showed dinosaurs with udders, which maybe should have been a clue they were fakes. 

So, Professor, you made this entirely out of bamboo?  

   

Episode Two: Strange Visitors

 Bike summary: 2.5 miles, didn't record calories

Episode summary: Is a stone structure in New Hampshire proof that ancient Phonecians visited North America thousands of years before Columbus? No, but that won't ever stop us!

This is one of my favorite episodes, since I'm a New Englander and this site is only about 30 miles north of me. 

We get a lot of shots of the Palace of Knossos and some other ancient ruins while Leonard Nimoy talks astronomical alignments and then we see the focus of the episode: Mystery Hill, America's Stonehenge, in North Salem, NH. To my untrained eyes, Mystery Hill doesn't look much like any ancient site. It looks like a root cellar or the foundation of a barn.

There's a section on an analysis of charcoal from the site, which was apparently carbon dated to 2000 BC or something like that. It came from between the stones and I'm not sure how that would work to date the site. If it came from something that could plausibly be identified as a cooking or other human-made fire, that could, in the right context, give you a range of dates for human use of the site. But it seems to me that charcoal from between stones that are exposed to the elements a) doesn't tell you if the charcoal is man-made or the result of a forest fire or b) if the charcoal is even part of the site -- if the people living next door to Stonehenge have a cookout today, or burn a police officer in a wicker man, and the smoke blows on to Stonehenge, the logic of this episode suggests we could date Stonehenge to contemporary times because of this contemporary material. 

We also get to hear from Dr Barry Fell, a marine biologist who convvinced himself he could read ancient Phonecian and Ogham and suddenly found Phonecian and Ogham inscriptions everywhere in random rocks in New England that no one else could see. 

One thing that's not really talked about is why the Phoenicians would have come to New England in the first place. European fishermen may have reached the Canadian maritimes (and their huge supply of cod) before Columbus, although I don't think there's any hard evidence for it and I'm not sure there was enough demand would have made such a voyage profitable. Most other trade goods from North America would have been found in the archeology of the ancient Mediterranean and recognized -- the historical Columbian exchange totally changed the European diet and culture -- paprika, tomatoes and potatoes are just three North American plants that assumed paramount roles in old world cuisine. Tobacco reached some very remote places in the Old World very quickly and things like furs of North American animals would have been found in Europe and the Near East and artifacts from there would have been definitively found here. There's no tin or copper in New England and certainly no evidence of the mining or smelting operations Bronze Age civilizations practiced. The Sinai Desert, for example, is littered with holes where copper-bearing ores were dug, as well as slag heaps where the ores were processed for the pure metal. 

There are no burials at Mystery Hill, no midden heaps, no drinking water and strangely for a site supposedly settled by people who sailed across the ocean, it's inland. It's over six miles from the Merrimack River and at least 20 from the sea. Ancient people were not suburbanites living in subdivisions with pre-existing utility hookups, they didn't build cities in places with no resources, with no access to transportation. 

Podcast summary.

This episode of the podcast featured Ken Feder, an archeologist in Connecticut, who had a lot of interesting facts about Mystery Hill. He said that it's still unclear who built it, although the site was substantially changed by a man called William Goodwin, who bought it in the 30s and decided it was the work of Irish monks in the Middle Ages. It wasn't until the 70s that it was promoted as Bronze Age. 

They spend a lot of time talking about HP Lovecraft this episode and I don't know why, other than the coincidence that Mystery Hill started being promoted as a tourist attraction the same year Lovecraft died. They mention that he wrote some pastiches of Arthur Machen transposing Machen's Celtic-inspired fantasy to New England, but Lovecraft was neither a major literary figure in his lifetime nor was he the first person to imagine a more ancient, non-Native American past for the region. 

It was super popular in the 19th century to find evidence of Vikings everywhere. The sagas of Leif Eriksson had been popularized and, probably as a reaction to Irish and Italian Catholic immigration (the Catholic fraternal society the Knight of Columbus was founded in New Haven, CT in 1882), New England WASP elite embraced the blond-haired, blue-eyed Leif from what would become Protestant Scandinavia as discoverer over the swarthy, dark-haired Italian working for those Spaniards with their Inquisition and popery and hostility to free thought.  

Longfellow wrote a poem called "The Skeleton in Armor" reimaging an indigenous grave that was discovered of a man with a copper breastplate in the New Bedford area as that of a European in late medieval plate armor; a windmill in Newport, RI that was probably built in the 1650s was decided to be Viking and a millionaire chemistry professor claimed to have discovered Leif Eriksson's city on the Charles River, conveniently close to his home in Wellesley. 

Eben Norton Horsford was a professor at Wellesley College who invented a popular baking powder, becoming very wealthy. He used his money to promote his theory that the Vikings colonized New England, building a city called Norumbega. Horsford even claimed to find evidence of the Norse language in Native American languages. With his own money he errected a tower in Weston, Mass, where he believed they settled. His daughter later installed a tablet on a site in Cambridge (today sadly overrun by highway) where she believed Eriksson had a country house, she also donated a statue of Leif Eriksson to the City of Boston and it's on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall to this day. This was also the era of the Book of Mormon, the Prince Madoc legends and endless ideas about Native Americans as the lost tribes of Israel. 

They also talk about Native erasure in this episode, which is certainly a thing, but some of the specific imagery I don't remember seeing (maybe they got confused and it was from a different episode, maybe I just wasn't paying attention?)

Ken Feder brought up Dudleytown, a ghost town in Connecticut, that I've never heard of, but people also assume it's much older than it really is. The woods have grown back in many places and you can totally find old stone walls, old foundations and root cellars in the middle of what feels like virgin forest. However, I believe that 90 percent of Vermont was clear cut by 1920, for lumber and paper. They floated huge log rafts down the Connecticut River to the mills at Holyoke and Chicopee. Things weren't allowed to grow back, however, until the Hurricane of 1927, which caused mudslides and major floods and people realized that the trees helped protect river banks and subsequent storms haven't been as destructive, although Irene came close.