Others have theorised that Plato's Atlantis is instead a folk memory of the biblical Great Flood, the one that sees Noah quickly googling the basics of maritime carpentry. Flood myths are indeed found in multiple ancient cultures, suggesting a shared trauma. I suppose it's possible that a low-lying city was suddenly swallowed by the seas.
And, to be fair, eager Atlantis-hunters point to the lost city of Troy, which had always been thought to be pure literary myth, until the amateur German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered its mighty walls in the 1870s.
So, there is precedent for poetry being the handmaiden of archaeological discovery.#4779•
Plato is often described as the 'founder of Western political philosophy'. His book the Republic was a landmark text on justice, happiness, and how to run the ideal city-state, focusing intensely on how society should be ruled, and how it should treat its rivals. Viewed in this light, Atlantis is clearly an allegory about what happens when a nation gets too arrogant, avaricious, and aggressive.
The story is not historical reportage, it's a fable; an imaginary case study in reverse utopianism, with the destruction of a superpower serving as a karmic warning from history.
Some scholars think it's a pointed dig at the rival Persian Empire, and others think it's an attack on Athenian democracy itself,* but the key thing is that the Atlanteans are defeated by the morally superior Athenians – and Plato just happened to be a morally righteous Athenian.#4766•
Following Donnelly came the occult philosopher Helena Blavatsky. As co-founder of the Theosophical Society she argued that Atlanteans were the originators of the Aryan race in India, whose superior wisdom and technology – plus their ability to communicate telepathically (sorry, what …?!) – inspired the great civilisations.
Of course, whenever the phrase 'Aryan supremacy' raises its head, an alarm should be ringing in your brain.
Soon came a generation of Germanic writers whose ideas became increasingly esoteric, leading to the birth of the so-called Thule Society which relocated Aryan Atlantis from India to the frozen lands of Scandinavia and the Arctic Circle, otherwise known as the ancestral home of blond, blue-eyed people#4758•
Hörbiger, who had no astronomy or geology qualifications, said this had come to him in a vision. It's tempting to laugh at this stuff for being so batshit weird, but his pseudoscientific ideas were deeply racist. In his theology, Nordic Aryans were a superior species to Jews, Slavs, and African-descended people, whose evolutionary descent from apes thus made them beastly sub-humans.
A keen champion of Hörbiger's warped science was Hitler's right-hand man, Heinrich Himmler, not least because World Ice Theory denied modern physics, which had been dominated by Jewish intellectuals.
A pseudoscientific theory that explained the cosmos without the need for Einstein was always going to be welcomed by an antisemitic regime.#4737•
So, when people claim ancient monuments were built by aliens, they're not only denying the engineering ingenuity of non-European civilisations – stripping these people of their own proud history – but they're also drawing ideas from a poisoned well; one polluted by the toxic ideology of the Third Reich.
And so, as naive as it may be, I really wish people would stop with all the Ancient Aliens bollocks, not least because the story of Atlantis was simply Plato trying to win an argument about why democracy is the absolute worst!#4741•
Plato had strong views on why getting the public to vote for things was a bad idea – a theory later proved by The X Factor and Donald Trump.#4727•
Chapter 2
This is the crucial thing about humour. You have to understand the context, and so many jokes operate within cultural frames of reference, which is why most historical jokes don't work for modern readers. Our world has moved on; we don't think the same, we don't fear the same things, we use different slang, the puns don't land any more, the technology changes.
Comedy is cultural commentary, but culture never sits still for long.#4736•
However, some topics are timeless. The oldest joke in the world is a fart gag dating back 3,900 years to ancient Sumer (modern Iraq) and it goes like this:
(Here's) something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman didn't fart in her husband's lap.#4724•
According to the ancient writer Athenaeus – whose Deipnosophistae described the witty dinner party chat of a gaggle of expert philosophers – the mighty King of Macedon, Philip II (father to Alexander the Great), was a big comedy nerd who learned that the funniest jokes were to be heard at The Sixty Club, which met regularly at the shrine of Heracles in an outdoor space called Cynosarges, just outside Athens.
The Sixty was a boozy philosophical gathering of sixty witty raconteurs whose material was clearly of such quality that even a rival king, several hundred miles away, felt envious to be missing out.
Athenaeus tells us Philip sent them a shipment of silver so they would jot down their best gags and post them back to him.
It was perhaps the first ever jokebook, written sometime before Philip's murder in 336 BCE.#4773•
Even though the planets were known to Babylonians at least 3,700 years ago, their famous planetary names – by which I mean Saturn's day, Sun's day, Moon's day, Mars' day, Mercury's day, Jupiter's day, and Venus' day – weren't attached to the days of the week until the fourth century BCE, when Greek learning intermingled with Egyptian and Persian knowledge, thanks to Alexander the Great's ruthless thirst for conquest.#4768•
In fact, English and French differ a fair bit on naming traditions because the old Germanic gods dominate the Anglophonic days of the week – Tiw gets Tuesday, Woden gets Wednesday, Thor gets Thursday, Freya gets Friday – but the French stick with the Roman tradition of Lundi (Lunar), Mardi (Mars), Mercredi (Mercury), Jeudi (Jupiter), Vendredi (Venus), and Samedi (Saturn).
It's only Sunday (Dimanche) where they abandon the pagan polytheism and embrace a Christian idea – Dimanche comes from Dies Domenica, meaning the 'Day of the Lord'.#4783•
No, the polytheistic Romans (with their eight-day weeks) actually started their week on a Saturday, and declared Monday to be the third day. Then Christianity arrived, and borrowed the Jewish idea of a Saturday Sabbath, but Christians shunted it to Sunday, which they said was the day that God rested after creating the Earth.
This made Sunday both Day 7 in the Creation story and the first day of the new week, which is a bit confusing …#4753•
Monday thus went from being the third day of the week to becoming the second, after Sunday, and this has remained a common cultural tradition in several countries, including America. However, the rise of nineteenth-century industrialisation and the changing rhythms of mass labour helped to bring about the creation of a new temporal concept – the weekend – in the early 1900s.
This created a newly secular, more economic meaning for Mondays – one which is now officially upheld by the International Organization for Standardization – and so it is now Mondays, not Sundays, which signal the start of the week.#4755•
Chapter 3
Since ancient days, and around the world, some humans have eaten each other not just because they're hungry, but in order to heal themselves by absorbing another's life-force. The Romans were certainly keen; they treated epilepsy by drinking dead gladiator blood (they believed blood from someone who had died young, and suddenly, was especially powerful), and they thought eating the liver also gave other medical benefits#4747•
The same logic also applied in the 1500s, when poor people hovered near the chopping block in the hope of catching a cupful of blood from a beheaded criminal. Whether they drank it is hard to know, but there was presumably some potent reason to collect it.#4723•
Indeed, as Dr Richard Suggs describes in his fascinating book Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, pretty much every part of the body could be considered medicinal at various stages in European history, including a person's: 'hair, brain, heart, liver, urine, menstrual blood, placenta, earwax, saliva and faeces'.#4740•
We might understandably gag at the grossness of chowing down on ancient (or not-so-ancient) corpses. But Christianity had already embraced holy cannibalism in its theology; it was there in the Catholic Eucharist, where transubstantiation was believed to turn the communion wine and wafer into the actual flesh and blood of the Messiah.
So, perhaps it wasn't any stranger to gulp down dried-up bits of some 3,000-year-old Egyptian?#4729•
Any historical society wanting to fight off a zombie apocalypse would probably have needed to tick all of these boxes:
Population distribution much more rural than urban
Widespread availability of sharp-bladed weapons for maximum head-lopping potential
Widespread military training and functional fitness among the population
Easy access to large bodies of water and plenty of boats (I'm assuming zombies can't swim!)
A good supply of bite-proof protective clothing
An ability to understand that zombie bites are how the disease spreads
Pre-existing myths/literature that speak of the undead, so people aren't too freaked out by the concept
Good communication networks to warn others#4743•
So, what's my answer? Well, perhaps it's because I was once a medievalist, but my mind immediately conjured up an image of zombies getting their arses kicked in the picturesque fjords of Scandinavia. Yes, if you want to cancel the zombie apocalypse, I think you're safest with the Vikings.#4751•
Chapter 6
In 1802, an English naturalist and churchman named Rev. William Bingley published a popular guide to wildlife entitled Animal Biography. It sold so well, he updated it through several editions. Among its most startling paragraphs is this one, dedicated to a ferocious, idiotically brave creature which, with minimal provocation, would charge towards dogs, horses, and humans, and would fight to the death rather than admit defeat:
… it seems to have no other passion than that of rage; which induces him to attack every animal that comes his way, without in the least attending to the strength of the enemy. Ignorant of the art of saving himself by flight, rather than yield he will allow himself to be beaten to pieces with a stick.
If he seizes a man's hand, he must be killed before he will quit his hold … He even makes war against his own species.
When two … meet, they never fail to attack each other and the stronger always devours the weaker.#4750•
Everett was soon supplying the American Midwest, despite still being a schoolboy, and by 1961 he'd landed a very notable customer in the form of President John F. Kennedy, who received two hamsters named Jackie and Billie to amuse his daughter, Caroline. Just as Jackie Kennedy became First Lady, Jackie and Billie became the First Hamsters of America.
In time-honoured tradition, they promptly escaped their cage, and were found scurrying around JFK's bathroom.
Classic#4777•
It's a cute story, although the White House kennel keeper, Traphes Bryant, who looked after all the presidential pets, later recalled: 'There was a family of hamsters, like something out of a Greek tragedy. First, one hamster drowned itself in the president's tub. Then the others were eaten by their father.
But the final act beat all – the mother hamster killed the father and then died herself, probably of indigestion.' It says a lot about the curse of the Kennedy family that even their pets were doomed to suffer violent deaths.#4754•
As Professor Edwards clarifies, the 'gentell hors' was an expensive thoroughbred; the palfrey was a small, nimble-footed, smooth strider ideal for a woman to ride; the hobbies and nags were small, less powerful warhorses; the 'chariott horse' and 'gret trotting horsys' were muscular cart-pulling horses; the 'trottynge gambaldyn' horse was basically a fancy dressage horse famed for its high knee action, making it perfect for showing off in public; and the 'cloth sek' and 'male hors' were bred to carry luggage and armour across bumpy terrain.#4748•
Chapter 7
The simplest explanation for this is that ancient aesthetics valued small penises as being more beautiful – priapic whoppers destabilised the elegant symmetry of a statue – but a small package was also a sign of intellectual distinction. Animals, barbarians, and idiots were thought to have big dicks, because they were ruled by their stupid passions and base instincts; but the civilised Greek or Roman was rational, sophisticated, and cultured.
His greatness resided in his brain, not in his underpants.#4731•
In Greek thought, sex was about procreation and size mattered in the opposite way we might expect; Aristotle said a smaller penis was better for conceiving because the sperm didn't cool down too much on its journey to the egg.#4759•
Chapter 12
50. Which people from history would you hire for an Ocean's Eleven-style heist?#4749•