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