You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.

Welcome to Digging Up Ancient Aliens.

This is the podcast where we examine alternative history and ancient alien narratives in popular media.

Do these ideas hold water to an archaeologist or.

Or are there better explanations out there?

We are now on episode 81 and I am Fredrik, your guide into the world of Sudo archaeology.

And this episode will be a bit different from what we are usually doing due to a computer malfunctioning with a couple of, well, issues with a few drives, I don't really have access to the tools I usually have and trying to sort that out and is a bit short on time.

So if this one is not sounding like, well, the other episode, it is because, well, it's not produced with the same.

Same tools.

But don't worry, hopefully everything should be back to normal next episode.

But as I mentioned, this will be a couple of short stories and different topics kind of mixed together in, well, nice little Sudo archaeology soup.

But before we start to, well, eat this main course, I want to thank all of those who support the show.

Your support is truly, truly humbling and I'm super grateful for that.

And if you also want to become a donor, well, I will tell you how to do that at the end of the episode.

Now that we have finished our preparations, let's dig into the episode.

The site of Tiwanaco was in fact bombed.

Now give me a moment.

I will explain exactly what happened, happened to this archaeological site.

First of all, remember that Tiannaco and Puma Punku has a very long history.

The civilization that lived here was around for about thousand years before its collapse, and the site didn't look like it does today for a very long time.

You see, when the Spanish conquistadors arrived at Tiwanaco, they looked around and realized, well, this is a great, great place to take stone for our own building construction and start to tear it down and use these stones in other parts and cities they constructed.

So you can find many of the blocks that was used to build Tiwanaco and Puma Punku today in the modern city of Tiwanaco and in the church that's located there today.

And this is a fate that happened to a lot of archaeological sites through history.

For example, the white limestone that was covering the famous pyramids in Giza you can find in the mosque in modern Cairo.

And this is something that unfortunately has happened throughout history.

When people encounter a monument they no longer use, or some other people's monument that's not really in use, they reuse the stones because they're already quarried, they're standing close to where they want to build something else and you just tear it down, reuse this.

And this happens across the world, unfortunately.

And further havoc was brought by, well, looters later in history.

They tear down the structures trying to find imagined gold that they hoped would be inside these monuments.

And we see this for example, in the monument of a Capana where there's a deep hole, a deep gash into the monument itself.

And then that's leftovers from later treasure hunters and whatever looting and the conquistadors.

Did to the site.

It's in, well, no comparison to what the railroad barons did in the early 1900s with the expansion of the railroad in South America and Bolivia.

They came to the site and they actually used dynamite to blow blocks off to use as a ballast in the rail tracks.

So you find a lot of these amazing monuments in the old train tracks, unfortunately.

So yeah, to some extent Tiwanaku was bombed not by some ancient civilization or something like that, but by modern humans not caring about the history of the site.

And a further note here on what you see today at the site.

It's the result also of excavation, very heavy handed excavation in the 1900s and very poor reconstructions.

Reconstructions made at the site was not always necessarily made to, well, reconstruct what was.

It was reconstructing an imagined idea of how great this location was.

Those who reconstructed in, well, late 1900s even wanted to show the might of the site.

So it was a more focus on making it look more impressive rather than a historical reconstruction adding further damage to some extent to the site.

And when it comes to moving blocks depends a little bit.

Most of the Tivanaco and Puma Ponco is built with sandstone and we have a couple of locations located about 15km away.

But it was a bit difficult to find these quarries because the civilization of Tiwanaco didn't use quarries like the ancient Egyptians or the Greeks.

No, they were looking for already loose blocks.

We don't have these nice quarries that we can find, for example at the Giza plateau for the great pyramids we find there.

They went around, looked for blocks that fit their purpose in these fields of broken off stone blocks, just like the Inca did.

So it's a bit hard to locate the quarry since they are not a traditional quarry as we kind of imagine them today.

And in these quarries, when they found a stone block, they most likely dried it.

How do we know this?

Well, we find so called sleeping stones.

Abandoned stone is left on the side of the roads that they built.

And we have found few examples of these rows.

Just like the Incas used to move their stones.

And there's a question if they used like the Incas wood to move these or if they drag them.

Now, if we look at some of the stone blocks, we can still see drag marks at the, at one side of them, meaning they most likely were dragged on the ground.

And the Incas built specific roads to make this easier.

And if we look on the abandoned stones that we found in the quarries and on, on the road from the quarries, we see notches made in the stones.

So we have notches at the back of the stones indicating rope was used to drag these stones.

A few of the stones at Pumapunka and Tihuanako are made out of andesite.

And there's no local quarry within a few kilometers.

The closest quarry of andesite that we think they used is cross the lake.

And here's the question.

Were they dragged around the lake to Tiwanaco or did they use boats?

Modern experiments back in 2006 indicates that, well, reef boats could have been used to transport stone blocks across the lake.

The question is how they manoeuvred the boats in this case.

So here we don't really know for sure what they might have used, but we know that they managed to get the stone blocks from one side to another.

And we have different explanations for how they could achieve this.

Nothing that require advanced lost technology or something like that, but human imagination and perseverance.

And if you're interested in learning more about Tiwanaco and especially about the stone blocks that we found there and the amazing architecture and all that, there are books that's been published.

For example, the Stones of Tiwanaco, written by Jean Pierre Procin and Stella Nairobi.

That's a very in depth exploration of the site itself.

And it's in English and not written really with an academic audience in mind.

And there's also a lot of information in Spanish if you speak that.

But saying that this is some sort of mystery or lost key to an ancient civilization, it's only somewhat correct.

It's a mystery.

If you haven't kept up reading the latest science and research on the site and don't want to look it up.

But for archaeology, sure, there's mysteries here and things we still need to uncover, but we still know a lot about the site itself and how it was constructed.

And it does not require any advanced technology or some lost civilization to explain the site itself.

It's just human ingenuity at Its finest.

We only started translating these tablets around 1975 when Zacharias Stitchen took interest into translating all of them.

Combined with his knowledge of Hebrew and ancient languages, we were able to discover fascinating stories that predate the Bible by thousands and thousands of years.

Zacharias Sitchin, he was a pseudoscientific author, maybe most known for his book The Twelfth Planet, published in 1976.

In this book he claimed that an alien race came here from Nairubu because they needed gold for their atmosphere.

And he basing this on what he says, Sumerian tablets and other old sources.

While Zachariah claims in his books and in interviews that he knows several of these ancient languages, the evidence for this is rather slim.

In his books and his other writing, in most cases he is wrong about translations and even on the simplest things, and he often contradicts the dictionaries.

Now, the Sumerians, they were quite sophisticated in their, well, writing skills, so they even had Sumerian lexical lists, basically dictionaries, and these have been preserved into our days and most scholars use them to better understand the Sumerian languages.

And one example of these claims where Sitchin is, well, for a lack of better word, wrong, is when we talk about the God Ea.

Sitchin claimed that Ea is the God of mining, making the section about Ea in the poem Enuma Elish a bit weird.

The Sumerians themselves associated this God with being the God of wisdom.

And again, you don't have to take our word for it.

It's very clear in their writings and the Sumerian lexical list.

Sitchin is maybe most famous for making the claims about the Anunnaki, which he claims in his books translates to people of the fiery rockets.

This is of course, well, contradicts the Sumerian lexical list and what the Sumerian themselves claim that this word means.

So if we go to the Sumerian dictionaries and look up Anunnaki, we get a translation that would be close to of royal seed.

If we make it a bit less poetic, it's basically the children of Anu and Zechariah Sitchin have made little to none whatsoever contribution to the understanding of the Sumerian languages.

The translation of the Sumerian languages came into full swing already back in 1838.

This is way before Sitchin started to publish his pseudo science books on this, but it came into full swing in part thanks to the Beshtun inscription.

The Beshtun inscription is located at the Beshtun Mountain in modern Iran.

And on this monument we have an Inscription from Darius I, where we get one of Darius speeches preserved.

And it's written in three languages.

So it's Babylonian, a form of old Akkadian and old Persian, and a language called Elamite.

So the process behind translating the Sumerian languages, and there are several of them, all with the different lexicons and dictionaries, they just use the cuneiform script.

But this has been a long road from the 18th century and even earlier up to even modern day.

Just last year, another version of these languages was successfully started to be translated.

But to repeat, Zacharias Sitchin seems to have no basic understanding of the Sumerian languages from a translation perspective.

He does not give any sources for his claims, he doesn't give what tablets he is talking about.

And he's often contradicting the Sumerian themselves.

Cite your source.

Cite my source.

Okay, my source is.

And you need to go to Lichtenstein to the museum where they hold the moorhen collection and then you can translate this Acadian tablet MC2894A.

I'm the source.

I am your source.

Don't worry about where I get my stuff.

Right.

I don't really get why these people get so defensive when they are asked to, you know, show their work, show their sources.

And I think that the well behavior that Cray to display here is a little bit cultish for sure.

But let's look into her claims about this source.

Set your source.

Set your source.

Does it exist or how does it look like?

And I will actually teach you how.

You yourself can look up cuneiform tablets.

And we will also learn a little bit what we should look out for in a source.

What are the red flags so to say.

And even if the creator claimed to give us a source, they don't really do it.

They don't give us the name of the museum, they just state its source somewhere in Liechtenstein.

And I did try to find this Moheen collection that they are refereing in the video.

From the information online, there is no museum within Liechtenstein who claim to have a Maureen collection or a variation of the spelling of Maureen.

The creator also gave us a number, but it's without specifying.

Is it the artifact ID exhibition ID or is it the CDLI number?

We will get back to that in just a moment.

But why is the creator so vague?

Cite your source.

Cite your source here.

Well, as with most of these pseudoscience promoters, they cite each other without really telling it.

They find a claim in a book online or wherever, and they just repeat it without giving its source.

And in this case the creator seems to have gotten these claims from anonymous AI generated YouTube channel.

Some are partly in the Moorhen collection.

In Liechtenstein and the other half in Switzerland, also in a private museum, both.

Of which contain Enki's own writings known.

To researchers as the Eridu Genesis and.

Which relate various aspects of his participation in later developments.

And I believe that Whoever created this YouTube clip got the name of the Maureen Correction from another anonymous author pseudonym Ryan Morheen.

And this author has published, well, several books on ancient languages.

But all web pages related to the well author and publicist has mysteriously disappeared from the online record.

But if we go back to this YouTube video, they do mention the name of the document.

They call it the Eridu Genesis, showing they don't really understand the Sumerian literature here.

The Eridu Genesis is not a book per se, but another name for the Sumerian flood myth.

Cite your source.

Cite your source.

So there is no tablet that's named Eridu Genesis, but we find this story incorporated in different tablets such as King List VB62, the Epic of Gilgamesh, maybe the most famous example here, or in instructions of Shurabak.

Alright, let's say that we want to look up one of these Sumerian tablets to see if it's the real deal.

How can we do it?

Well, if we have some information, this is not as complicated as one might think.

Take for example one of the documents we mentioned earlier.

We go with instruction of Shurupak and we can online learn that this tablet is currently located over at the University of Chicago.

And we can confirm this on the University's webpage.

And here we can grab either the object or CDLI numbers.

And with this we can head over to the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative or cdli and we can then search for either object number.

But as you notice, we get some additional result as you see here.

So the best option is to have the CD LI number, but here we can see more info about the tablet and different publications that have been writing about it.

So let's Instead search for MA2894A and we get nothing.

In fact we get nothing online either on this information.

And since as we noticed before, the collection does not exist, I think we can fairly assume that the tablet does not exist either.

So as I touched on in earlier episodes and videos, if a source is anonymous, stay away from it.

And if they don't want to give you the references again, stay away from it.

If they don't want to show their work.

Well, we don't need it.

There's better resources out there if they use terminology or numbers or whatever without properly seeming to understand how they are used and what they are for.

Again, stay away from it.

And if they claim that you don't need other sources, then this person or individual definitely stay away from it.

I'm the source.

I am your source.

Don't worry about where I get my stuff.

We need to be careful.

While the pseudo scientific crowd isn't a cult per se, they do incorporate a bit of cult like behavior, especially cult of personalities.

And this is why we need to educate and help improve skeptical thinking in, well, the society in general.

And not necessarily make fun of these people.

Remember that many of these people, people and believers are victims to people who want to sell them stuff, sell them books, education, a sense of being special, have knowledge that nobody else has.

And I think we need to be.

Sympathetic against the believers and help them on a road where they can explore and learn and, well, come into the world of reality in a sense.

But as you learned here, if you have evidence on your side, it's not hard to really show your sources and it's not scary to show people how to double check you.

Because if you're right, you're right, the evidence is there.

If it's not there, well, it's understandable that you're a bit nervous about giving them out.

Recent evidence suggests the possibility of a nuclear war in ancient times.

The discovery of a layer of radioactive ash in the body of the city's inhabitants with signs of radiation sickness in Mohenjo Daro.

So was there really a nuclear war taking place in Moheno Daro?

Well, first let's address the skeletons.

That's usually referred in videos or retellings.

About Mohenjo Daro in alternative history circles.

Now, these skeletons that has been discovered in Mohenjudaro wasn't really as much found in the street, maybe a bit more found in the cemetery of Mohenjo Daro.

And these skeletons seem to have died, well, sometimes centuries between each other.

Not really something we would expect if we were looking at the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.

But where do these claims originate from then?

And that turns out to be a little bit harder than one might actually expect from the start.

While nuclear war in ancient times came about in the alternative history scene or ancient astronaut idea quite early.

It's for example, mentioned in Morning of the Magicians, Cherish of the Gods or Zechariah Sitchin's 12th planet Mohenhudaru is never mentioned in these books.

He's not.

Not until 1972.

And Charles Blitz book Mysteries of the Forgotten World where we first encounter a.

Mention of Mahenjo Daro.

But Blitz never claimed it was the victim of a nuclear attack.

He just say that the people living there died suddenly as of invasion.

It's not until 1974 where another author named Peter Collissimo suggests that there might be some futuristic weapon at play here.

But he never claim it's a nuclear weapon.

But he is the source that there is no graves, which is inherently incorrect, as we just noticed here.

But he also suggests that it's more likely that it was abandoned due to drought.

But Beryllitz seems to have picked up on this idea.

And in his book Doomsday in 1999 A.D.

he goes on and suggesting that the skeletons found within the city are more radioactive than Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

While Berlisnever say that it was an atomic bomb responsible for this.

We're supposed to fill in this by yourself?

Of course, it's not until David childress book in 1988 we see actually a source for this claim.

And Childress claims that there is a Russian archaeologist named Korbovsky who publicized this claim.

Now there is a Russian scientist who was active in the USSR who did publish, well, strange novels.

But Korbowski is not an archaeologist, he was a linguist.

And in 1966 he published a book called Mysteries of Ancient History.

And in this book he quote a British scientist that he claimed mention radioactive skeletons.

Well, not in Pakistan and Mohenjudara, but in India.

And this British scientist was a man named William Valentine Maynard.

And what's interesting is that Maynard never claimed that there was radioactive skeletons in India.

In his paper Naturally Occurring Alpha Activity, he speak about a skeleton in Egypt that lived 4,000 years ago and contain less radioactive material than compared to other skeletons later in history that he compared these remains to.

And David Childress probably picked up this idea from Gorbovsky from a, well, Soviet propaganda magazine named Sputnik.

But that's the whole story of the radioactive skeletons in Mohenjo Daro.

They never existed from the start and just build on different ideas and authors building and expanding on a fantasy.

They never worked with any material.

They were just basically making things up.

A shocking artifact discovered in the Valley of the Kings within the tomb of King Tut was a bust of the great pharaoh.

What makes this discovery so shocking is the pharaoh is portrayed on an elongated skull.

Even more disturbing, it's not just King Tut, but The bust of Nefertiti and her daughter.

They're also portrayed with elongated skulls.

So did Egypt practice artificial cranial deformation or acd, or did they have a weirdly elongated skull?

Let's look a bit closer at this claim.

When it comes to ACD or artificial cranial deformation, the answer is kinda yes.

But the oldest case of artificial cranial deformation in ancient Egypt or in Egypt is dated to around 600 BCE.

So this is way after Tutankhamun and his life, and same with Nefertiti and all that.

So Tutankhamun died around 1323 BCE, which is a little bit before the first confirmed case of ACD in Egypt.

And there have been several studies on both Tutankhamuns and his, what's probably his father, King Akhenathans, the heretic pharaoh that we believe that we have found, or it is Akhenaten's brother.

That part is a little bit unclear currently.

But none of these studies have so far showed that they have any weird DNA or seem to have signs of artificial cranial deformation.

And if we look at Tutankhamun's cephalic index, and if you listen to the podcast, I go into details of the problems of the cephalic index, but when we want to look at the general shape of a cranium, it could be useful.

So in this case, Tutankhamun has a cephalic Index of 83.9, meaning that he barely qualifies into the brachycephalic category, which means that it's short and broad.

And in a study from 2010, Ancestry and Pathology in Kiktankarman's Family, they did a quite in depth study of the family members of Tutankhamun's family.

And during these ancient DNA analysis, they noticed that there is no signs of the medical conditions that would cause natural elongated skulls among different populations.

So where do these elongated skulls come from within the ancient Egyptian artwork if it's not a real thing that the people did to themselves there, or a condition that they suffered from?

Well, it seems to be a pure artistic reason for it.

But recent excavation in Amarna have revealed another piece of this puzzle.

So for the Akhenathens family and Tutankhamuns, if we look at this time in history, it seems to have been an artistic choice to different the royal family from the subjects.

Akhenaten did do a lot of changes, and several to them was in the artistic, giving the artist more freedom to explore.

And he changed the quite traditional Egyptian art style to something new and Different.

But to set the royal family aside from the rest of society, we start to see them with these elongated skulls, which doesn't have to be a alien connection to it.

But in the excavation in Amarna, they did find cones on top of skeleton's head.

Now these cones we can also see in the artwork.

And these combs that makes your head look a bit taller, contained perfume fragrances so you would smell good.

So it seems to be a case where art and functionality kind of meets.

So of course you want to be depicted with a showing off that you participate in the latest fashion and all of that.

So you would have a higher skull so you can fit your more fragments cup under your wig.

So you will show to the world and show that in the afterlife you will still smell great and look fabulous.

So there we have it.

We don't have alien evidence for these elongated skulls in ancient Egypt.

And the practice seems to be more artistic and practical.

It makes you smooth, smell a little bit better.

So we only been scratching the surface this entire time.

Archaeologists are constantly finding new chambers in the pyramids that go far deeper than the outer ground level of the base.

And they still haven't been able to find the bottom yet.

So exactly how deep does it go?

So were the pyramids built by giants or aliens or anything else?

Hi, I'm Frederik, I'm a dealing with misinformation and pseudoscience online.

I'm going to pull off this band aid quite quickly.

No, the pyramids were not built by giants.

In fact, we actually know quite a lot more about the pyramids than these alternative historians like you to know.

And while scans do show that there are some hollow areas within the pyramids, it's been long speculated by Egyptologists and archaeologists that the pyramid of Cheops, the Great Pyramid, would have these hollows to save time in the construction effort.

We know that part of the pyramid is filled with sand, rubble and other filling material, not solid stone blocks.

For example, there's this huge massive, this little stone hill inside the pyramid to save construction time.

And since the pyramid rests on solid bedrock, it's quite impossible that it goes further down into bedrock itself.

And since the foundation platform is very visible and actually well understood, it's thanks to the foundation platform, not the bedrock itself, that the pyramid managed to have this level surface that it actually have.

And we can quite certainly say that the Great Pyramid was built during the reign of Hu First.

And how do we know this?

Well, we have several different types of evidence suggesting this.

We have carbon 14 samples as things Turns out the ancient Egyptians used ash and other organic materials in their mortar and their cement.

So we can actually use these organic materials to carbon 14 date the pyramid itself.

And these dates all come back to being around the time of the reign of Khufu.

And with the advancements of technology, we also have surface luminescence dating, so we can actually date when the stone was cut.

And these dates again goes back to the reign of Khufu.

And then we have the two sunships of Khufu.

And the carbon 14 dating of these ships again shows that they are made during the reign of Khufu.

And then we have the queen pyramids in the area.

All of them is tied to the reign of Khufu and especially the burial of Hepherus, that was Khufu's mother and the wife of Sneferu, the previous Pharaoh Khufu's father.

And within Hetheparus burial, we actually found both he's name and Sneferu's name and Khufu's name.

And inside the pyramid we have, well, graffiti from workers who have carved the name of the pyramid deep inside the layers of the pyramid.

This is not something that would be added later.

And of course we have the Red Sea Scrolls, also known as Inspector Mer's journals.

And these Red Sea scrolls are, well, a part of ledges of the, well federal government, so to say.

It kept track of delivery of different items, different things they needed to break stone.

It logs, mirrors, travels with the barges, delivering stone to the horizon of Khufu.

The horizon of Khufu was the name of the pyramid.

And all of these documents, all of this evidence combined shows us quite clearly that this was built for Pharaoh Khufu as his burial.

And while the pyramid has its potential origin from the Benben stone, the origin of the obelisk is a little bit different.

It probably go back to the sun temples built during the old kingdom.

But the obelisk's primary function was more of a way to, well, distribute propaganda information that the pharaohs wanted people to know about because they were an impressive way to brag about your achievements to the people there.

We have the quick and summarized version on how we know that the pyramids were built by ancient Egyptians and that the great Pyramid was built for Pharaoh Khufu during his reign.

Women here want to get married, have to cut off your own fingers, give it to the man as a dowry.

If a woman wants a divorce, the husband will cut off all the remaining five fingers.

This is the custom of amputation of Fingers in marriage of Lada tribe in Indonesia.

It is also a process that every woman must go through before getting married because there are more women than men here.

Women have no dignity.

So I stumbled upon this video and it felt quite odd from the start.

So I kind of had to look into it because there's a lot of videos out there, especially on this app, that deals with indigenous people and portraying them in very strange and problematic ways.

So what we see in the video is the Dani people that lives in modern Indonesia, but the tradition they spoke about is not connected at all to marriage or divorce or anything like that.

It originates from mourning.

The practice is called ikki paleg and it is a form of deep sorrow among the Dani people.

It's not just enough to mourn and weep.

They want to have a physical connection too, to this sorrow that they feel.

Therefore, when a family member dies, there are some who practice cutting off a finger.

And within the tradition of ikipalegi is mostly the woman who is expected to cut off one finger for remembering the dead relative.

And it's only done for what's perceived as a close relative.

And while the tradition is slowly getting phased out, it's still around to this day.

And some scholars have pointed out that refusing to participate in this practice might not always be optional and that social sanctions and ostracation could be the result if you refuse participate in ikki palek.

So while there was some truth to the original video, a lot of it was made up.

I'm not really sure where it originates from.

I've tried to find that source, the original claim for this, and it seems to be posted on Facebook around 2022.

But other than that, I've not really been able to narrow down the real origin of this claim.

But I also seen it applied to.

But I also seen some post claiming it's from Africa, which is incorrect, or other regions.

And often it seems to be used to show how barbaric or primitive these people are, which is not necessarily the case, even if the practice is so there seems to be a gand on how they want you to perceive these people, which is worth remembering when you encounter this out in the real world.

So we have on this channel spent some time looking for ancient pyramids in Europe and we got our first lead in Bosnia.

But those so called pyramids turn out to be just hills.

So, well, we have to cross out Bosnia as a location for ancient pyramids.

And then I got a lead that took me to Greece, close to the city of Argos.

They were supposed to be be ancient Greek pyramids.

So I went there and I noticed that this was just towers.

So we kind of have to scratch Greece from this list too.

So could it be that Europe just doesn't have any ancient pyramids?

That's a possibility.

But I actually got an idea on.

Where we can find find some ancient pyramids.

I think we need to head over to the airport.

So I have made my way all the way here to Rome where we find Europe's only ancient pyramid.

So behind me you can see the pyramid of Gaius Cestius.

As you might suspect, he's quite the important character within the ancient Romans society.

He was a praetor, a tribune of the plebs.

He was also an important member in one of Rome's religious corporations.

He served for some time as a septimir for the Apollonius, the religious corporation or one of four religious corporations operating in ancient Rome.

The pyramid was not built by Caesius himself, but it was upon his order.

In his time testament Cestius state that he wants this pyramid to be built outside of Rome and it was supposed to be built in 330 days.

And this was an important number for Cestius and he left this construction project to his heir that we can find out the name of if we read on the side of the pyramid.

So on the side of the pyramid we find two texts.

Technically there's three texts.

Two of them are from the original construction of the pyramid.

And then we have a third text that was written in the 1600s when an excavation around the pyramid took place trying to determine whose pyramid this was really because the Pope got a bit tired of the speculations of this being Romulus tomb or any other fantastic figure.

And he wanted to get to the bottom of this and he then inscribed that the excavations took place at the bottom of the pyramid.

So if we go and read what's written on the pyramid we can learn the Gaius Cestius, son of Lucius of the Pulia, member of the college of Apollonius, praetor, tribune of the plebs, Septemvir of the Apollonius.

The work was completed in accordance with a will in 330 days by the decision of the heir, Lucius Pontus Mela, son of Publius of the Claudia and Pothus Freedman.

And the most interesting thing about that face was that a freedman was mentioned on it.

And Freedman, that's a Roman slave and he seems to gain quite of importance for the family.

So he was even mentioned in the text as one of those constructed these monuments as Cestius wanted them to.

And while this today is a very busy well, intersection with a lot of traffic, this would not have been the case when the pyramid was construction back then.

This would have been the countryside, nice, quiet.

And the reason for why this was located in the countryside was due to Roman burial practice you were not allowed to be buried in inside the city.

Therefore he chose to build his pyramid outside on the countryside.

But the city grew and quickly the city had well eaten up its pyramid.

And that's one reason why we actually have this pyramid preserved.

You see, there were actually two pyramids in ancient Rome, but only this one survives to this day.

And this is because it was incorporated into the city wall we see behind us, constructed between 271 and 274 CE in attempt to defend the city of Rome itself.

And this became a sort of well, tower and part of the city wall and therefore preserved to our days.

We're not entirely sure when the pyramid was construction, but most likely somewhere between 18 BC and 12 BCE.

It's not specified on the pyramid, but these are the most likely dates of the construction.

And if we look a bit closer at the pyramid, we notice is that it's not really, it's not really that tall.

It's only some 29 meters, not too shabby.

And we also have to remember that in ancient Rome there were different laws regarding how pompous you can make your monuments and the, your graves.

And this is a rather pompous steel would be classified as modest, but it's probably why it's not taller than this.

And if we look closer, we're noticing that it has a bit of a different shape than the pyramids we see in ancient Egypt.

And that's most likely because it's not modeled after the Egyptian pyramids.

Now you see, during Cestius lifetime, Rome incorporated Nubia into their empire.

And the Nubian pyramid have these very steep angles that we see in this picture, for example.

And worth mentioning is that if we go to Alexandria, this would have been the preferred building style too.

The Greeks living and ruling from Alexandria prefer the Nubian pyramid style over the traditional construction style of the pyramids.

And if we look even closer at the stones and construction method used in this pyramid, we're noticing there's more difference between this pyramid and the Egyptian pyramids and even the Nubian pyramids in the construction style we see a lot of large, smaller stones has been used.

They use a different material of course here, but these smaller stones are built in an intricate pattern that we can recognize that we can recognize when we look closer at the pyramid.

And I can't show you this today, but you can actually go inside the pyramid.

It does require a bit of planning though, and make sure that you actually can count the days.

The inside of the pyramids are open the second and fourth Saturday each month.

So if you want to go inside, these are the dates you should visit Rome.

But if you go inside side, we see frescoes and a quite modest burial chamber.

We don't see the corbel roof that we can spot in some pyramids in this pyramid, but it can be due to the, well, smaller size of this burial.

So that's it.

This is Europe's only ancient pyramid that still stands.

As you remember, there were two of these.

Only one is left.

But it's only here in Rome we find Europe's only ancient pyramids.

Not in Bosnia, not in Greece.

It's right here.

And I highly recommend coming here if you have the opportunity.

If you're in Rome, just go to the subway and you take the B line and you go to the station called Pyramidi.

And there you will just go out of the station and basically encounter this.

The first thing you do when you come out.

And that's it for me.

And that's it.

I hope to see you next time.

And that is the end of the episode Next time.

We are back with Graham Hancock's season two, Chapter two of the ancient Apocalypse series.

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Until next time, if my computer come back to life with all those files, keep shoveling that science.