WEBVTT

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This week we welcome back Professor Robert
Temple and discuss a book he wrote on

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ancient lenses that I had found to
be spectacular. We don't have a record

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of lenses, but he was able
to find over four hundred examples of ancient

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lenses that were used for optics,
for reflecting the sun, and for telescopic

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viewing of our neighboring planets. This
is unknown to archaeological science and was rejected

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by Egyptologists when it was first announced
over twenty three years ago. All this

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and more today on Earth Ancients,
or Saturday, December ninth, twenty twenty

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three. This is Earth Ancients.
I'm your host, Cliff Dunning. Hey,

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there they are. How are you
come on in and have a seat.

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I hope you're doing well today.
I discovered, really I discovered Robert

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Temple. A few years ago we
had him on to discuss the serious mystery.

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Prior to that, he came on
and wrote a book about plasma call

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the New Science of Heaven. And
he is a fascinating guy. And I

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discovered that he has written a number
of books on his interests. His focus

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on anomalies, which, as you
know, that's a lot of my interests

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as well. But this book we're
talking about today and the interview subsequent interview

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with Robert is on a book called
The Crystal Sun, rediscovering a lost technology

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of the ancient world. And Robert
and I are like minded, and his

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thinking is similar to Hancocks and a
lot of other people we have on the

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show. And one of the narratives
that you'll discover today is the fact that

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our history is written by a group
of people who have been trained in a

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way to observe and to compare.
And this is what are anthropology archaeology is

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all about. They compare what they
know, and anything that is questioning that

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knowledge is rejected. And what is
fascinating about our talk today is the discovery

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of lenses. These are lenses for
eyeglasses, These are lenses for telescopes.

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And I have been trying for years
to connect and find evidence for telescopic viewing

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of the heavens with lenses. And
I'm talking about the Maya, of course,

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And for years I've been traveling down
to Mexico and taking people down to

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see the various sites, and always
when I'm down there, I'm trying to

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get bits and pieces of data that
confirm my hypothesis that the Maya had lenses.

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Well, in this book today The
Crystal Sun, you'll discover and hear

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Robert describing his discovery of over four
hundred and fifty different lenses from antiquity,

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the oldest being almost six thousand years
old, which is found in Egypt.

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And you will never ever hear an
Egyptologist or an archaeologist describe these because it's

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not in their education. It's not
allowed in the university setting. And this

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is a phenomenon that we've crossed over
multiple times. If you are a funded

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archaeologist, and when I say funded, that means money from universities or private

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institutions, you have to follow their
guidelines for what is acceptable and what is

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not acceptable. And according to Robert, the discussion of ancient eyeglasses telescopic lenses

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is off. The is not a
discussed phenomenon. In fact, it's summarily

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rejected. Now, how can that
be. Someone were to discover a machine

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that cut granite in some cavern in
Egypt, would that be widely accepted.

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It looks like it probably would not
be because it would change our understanding of

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the historical notions of the ancient Egyptians, and this is what we are running

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into now with more and more archaeologist
and university funded search. If it does

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not follow within a certain narrative,
it's not validated and summarily rejected. This

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is scary. This is scary because
we have to wonder what is being covered

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up, what is being rejected because
it doesn't fit a paradigm, it doesn't

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fit a narrative of ancient people.
If we found a handheld computer in meso

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America, would that be covered up? Would it be rejected? Robert Temple

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tells me that when he was researching
the OMEC, he discovered that they had

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an understanding of magnetism that is off
the charts. They understood magnetic stone,

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magnetic rock, and they used it
in a way we don't understand. When

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he brought this up to the field
archaeologists that were around Leaventa and San Lorenzo,

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which is another OMEC site, they
rejected his consideration of this possibility of

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an ancient meso American culture understanding magnetism. It doesn't compute to them. And

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again, this is scary. If
you are closed off to new discoveries,

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to new possibilities, then we're screwed. How the hell can we conceive of

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a peep of a scientist rejecting a
discovery that disputes his education. Well,

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that's what's going on. If it
doesn't fall within their education, they do

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not allow it to exist. And
Robert mentions in his book Discussions with Archaeologists,

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by the way, the Crystal Sun
was written twenty in the year two

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thousand, that's twenty three years ago. And the other thing that's really sad

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is when he would ask various field
archaeologists about his discoveries, they would say

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that that's impossible, that they head
lenses. So this is scary. This

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is really scary. It's making me
wonder if we have a suppressed history,

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suppressed in the fact that our ancestors
had sophisticated tools, had sophisticated lenses,

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had sophisticated devices that cut granted,
had the ability to see the heavens with

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telescopic lenses that were very very sophisticated, that had convex and concave cut crystal

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lenses that could zero in on the
planet Mars, Venus, Saturn, in

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those other planetary bodies that are our
cosmos. Why would you reject it?

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Well, because it's not part of
the education that these anthropologists, archaeologists and

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Egyptologists have taken. They've gotten their
PhDs according to a certain book. Is

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is that education so restrictive that you
can't have an open mind? Well,

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I think what it is is it's
kind of a collective. The universities are

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funding digs and if you follow the
line of thinking about a certain people,

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certain ancient culture, you're in good
shape. If you go outside the box

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and begin questioning them, questioning their
science and bringing in new discoveries that do

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not fall within the parameters of the
known culture, then it's a problem.

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Then we're not going to give you
funding. Then we're not going to grant

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you a PhD. This is what
we're dealing with right now. And this

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is why I'm writing this book on
the Maya because can you believe that in

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the history of the Mayan culture,
in the decipherment of their life language,

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which we only have about seventy five
eighty percent of it the ciphered, we

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did not consult reference or acts,
which's the same as consult any of the

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daykeepers, any of the elders,
any of the shaman who were around the

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century tell us about your ancestors.
Our understanding of the Maya is based on

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university research without the consulting of the
people who live in the millions around these

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ancient sites. That is criminal in
many many ways. And what I've discovered

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is not only the language is very
very myopic, very centrally focused on European

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research. A lot of the other
discoveries are focused on comparative studies. In

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other words, who else built their
roads like that? Well, the Romans

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built very very sophisticated roads, but
they're not like the Maya roads. The

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Mayan roads were built to last for
hundreds of years. In fact, the

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engineer, the forensic engineer, Jim
o'conn wrote a whole section in his book

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on Maya Science on the sophistication and
the brilliance of not only the building construction,

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but the sockbes, the white roads
that the Maya built in the hundreds

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of miles. And that brings up
another point mayanists archaeology that studies Maya people

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do not believe they had the will, and yet throughout the museums in Mexico

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and Guatemala you can find toys that
have wheels, Mayan toys that have wheels

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attached to them. You also find
little wheelbarrows, You find little wagons and

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things that have wheels on them that
are attributed to Maya people. They didn't

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have the wheel, and yet they
built highways that run for hundreds and hundreds

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of miles. It's because we only
have excavated one percent of the Mayan culture,

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and yet we automatically discount the possibilities
they could have engineered the wheel.

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So this is why we have Earth
ancients. This is why we questioned history,

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and we questioned those who are the
historians of these ancient cultures, and

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why I love interviewing anomalists like myself
who are questioning the doctrines that have been

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handed down about ancient people. So
are Today continues our end of the year

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series, The best of the Best. Today's program is Lost Technology of the

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Ancient World, and my guest today
is Robert Temple God. I've been running

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around like a chicken with his head
cut off, trying to grab gifts and

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do my holiday shopping and trying to
figure out who gets what, and I

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tend to drink too much coffee.
And I have found a new product,

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You can get a discount of fifty
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I E N T S twenty. These

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are little two ounce shots of liquid
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Magicmind. Go to magicmind dot com,

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forward slash ancients, use the code
Ancients twenty and check it out. You'll

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love it. We have Robert Temple
with us again this week, and if

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you remember, we had him recently
to discuss a groundbreaking book, The Serious

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Mystery, and then initially we had
him talking about a new science of heaven

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which has to do with plasma,
which was my introduction to Robert's work.

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But I gotta tell you, Robert
is really the ultimate anomalist, and he

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is somebody who I believe has an
eye for history that is just very,

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very unique. And I discovered a
book that he wrote in two thousand called

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The Crystal Sun, Rediscovering a Lost
Technology of the Ancient World. And I

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got to tell you, as somebody
who's writing about ancient cultures, the Maya

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specifically, this book knocked me off
my feet and I had to have Robert

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back, and I wasn't sure if
he would remember because it was twenty three

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years ago he wrote this book.
I thought to myself, I might get

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an email from Robert thinking or saying, Cliff, you know what, that

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book's too long ago. I just
don't remember it. I can't interview with

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you. But thankfully Robert is lucid
enough on this to provide a detail.

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So Robert, welcome back to Earth. Ancients. It's great to have you.

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Thank you, Cliff, very good
to be back. And I enjoy

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talking to you because you've got a
great sense of humor and a deep source

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of knowledge. Thank you, I
appreciate it. I want to go as

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far back as we can on this
first of all the books over five hundred

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pages, which means that you may
have initially made a discovery and then it

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just cada kind of cascaded. Is
that how it started? Where you someone

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recommended something to you, or you
discovered something at the British Museum, and

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then it just cascaded into on and
on and on and on. Well,

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I tell at the near the beginning
of the book, or at the beginning

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of the book, I tell the
story of how this all began, because

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it became a thirty year search and
it started over lunch. Now. Ever,

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since nineteen sixty six when I first
met him, until his death,

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I was a great friend of Arthur
C. Clarke and the man who wrote

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two thousand and one. In fact, I watched two thousand and one being

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made for a couple of years and
got to know Stanley and so on,

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and that's how I met Arthur in
sixty six. And so in fact he

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wrote the introduction too. I noticed
that, Yeah, he introduces the book.

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Yeah, but he's the one responsible
for starting it all off in the

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first place, because he asked me
to lunch one day in London in a

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little Italian restaurant that he liked,
along with a friend of his whom I

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hadn't met before, who was the
Avalon Professor of the History of Science at

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Yale University, and his name was
Derek Price. Derek was a very interesting

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and fun guy, very open minded
and very brilliant. So there we were,

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the three of us, and what
did we talk about? Anomalies because

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we all love anomalies and oddities and
anything it's a bit weird, and trying

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to figure out what it might mean. So Derek had come to London to

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do some research, and because he
was based in New Haven, Connecticut,

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of course, and so I said, well, what are you researching?

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You said, well, I hope
that among the other things I'm doing,

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that I have time to go back
to the British Museum and look at the

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ancient lens again. I said the
what did you say, ancient lens?

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Yes, yes, there's a there's
an Assyrian lens in the British Museum that

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was excavated in the nineteenth century by
the famous excavator of Nimroud Layard. That's

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l A. Y Ar d anyone
who knows about the archaeology of that area

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will know Layard's name. And he
found this object in the throne room of

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Kings Are Gone the second and along
with all sorts of treasure and whatever.

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And so Derek said that it was
a lens made of rock crystal. I

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said, but I didn't know there
were any ancient lenses. He said,

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oh, yes, yes, well
there's this one. And that's why I

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want to learn more about it,
because they've got to try to figure it

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out. Now. I need to
point out that Derek was the man who

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personally discovered the Antikythera mechanism. Oh
my god. Really, he was in

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the Athens Museum one day studying all
sorts of strange things and there was this

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metallic ball I don't know the exact
size, and it is all sort of

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damaged by seawater. It had been
discovered in a shipwreck off the coast of

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the island called Anti Kythra, which
is the island which is opposite to Kithra,

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hence the Anti Kythera they call it. And there was this ancient sea

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wreck from I think the first century
BC, and they found this thing,

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and he was trying to figure out
what it was. It was a bit

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clunky, and it slipped out of
his hands and fell onto the hard floor

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and it cracked open. Not the
sort of guy you normally wanted the museum,

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but this thing cracked open and he
saw, good God, I see

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metallic gear wheels inside this, this
coruscated rusty metallic ball. It's a machine.

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And so he wrote the first book
about that wowk, which is now

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very famous because everybody's writing about it
and talking about it over the decades since

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he did that, which was back
in the sixties, And in fact,

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it was in the late sixties that
I met him and he told me all

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this. It was all fresh information. And I don't know if he'd even

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published his book yet. So he
was always doing that kind of thing and

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not breaking everything everything, And so
I said, but Derek, tell me

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more about this, this lens.
This, I would like to know more

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about this, because after all,
I was at that point I was living

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in London. I now go back
and forth between London and the countryside.

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But he told me it was in
the etherology department, et cetera. And

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so I went looking for it later, and it's called the Layard Lens.

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It's had many other names. And
to cut a long story short, because

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this went on and on. I've
given a history of the different information cards

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put in front of it when it
was on display. Then when it started

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attracting too much attention, the British
museum authorities got nervous and they removed it

213
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from display and put it back in
the basement so nobody could see it,

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and maybe everybody forget about it because
they were getting too many inquiries saying,

215
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what's this. Maybe it's a spaceman
because Eric Fandanakin had become interested, not

216
00:23:15.640 --> 00:23:18.240
that he knew anything about it,
but he did publish a photo of it

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00:23:18.359 --> 00:23:25.640
in Chariots of the Gods without actually
any explanation, because you know, he

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was collecting stuff like that to put
in his book. Yeah, and so

219
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everybody wanted to know about this.
You know, was it brought to earth

220
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buying flying saucer and that kind of
thing. Well, it certainly wasn't,

221
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but it was made on earth.
It might as well have come from a

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flying saucer, because it's the most
amazing object in the whole first chapter of

223
00:23:48.039 --> 00:23:55.759
my book. And here's the book, right the crystal sun, very thick,

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five hundred and thirty eight pages.
Now it has eleven appendices, ten

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00:24:00.240 --> 00:24:03.759
of which were removed from the paperback. But he wants the whole thing with

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all the real information. Get the
hard back, not the paperback, if

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you can. So. I I
finally managed to study this lens and I

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photographed it. It. It was
definitely a lens for aiding a vision,

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and I photographed it. I'm looking
for the correct picture now, Oh,

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I have to go to the black
and white photos. There. Can you

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00:24:34.599 --> 00:24:41.480
see? Yeah, in the ocular
cavity as it's called, in front of

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some guy's eye. It's a remarkable
piece of car of cutting too, isn't

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it. Yeah? I took that
picture, and so I learned how to

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measure lenses. I became an associate
of the College of Optometrists. I can

235
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use a spherometer and I measure with
my millimeter. I went to work on

236
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this. You you totally took it
in. I wrote the most definitive report

237
00:25:06.279 --> 00:25:11.039
on it. I had my eye
eye magnifire, and I was studying the

238
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scratching patterns on the surface, and
I was computing the diopters and doing the

239
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whole thing. In other words,
I became basically an opthalmologist for a while,

240
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and so call me an optician,
and so I hope the optics of

241
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this are okay. So what we
discovered was that it had been grown ground.

242
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This is raw crystal. There had
been a perfect lens at one point.

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It has flaws in it now which
were caused by the pressure of having

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been buried for thousands of years with
things on top. But when it when

245
00:25:53.200 --> 00:25:56.440
it was cut and ground, it
was a perfect piece of crystal with no

246
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ghostly claws and totally transparent. It
still is transparent mostly, And it was

247
00:26:06.799 --> 00:26:12.839
a ground toruidally rather than in the
normal fashion. And to accommodate a case

248
00:26:12.880 --> 00:26:22.119
of individual astigmatism. Wow. Now
astigmatism means that you have very irregular and

249
00:26:22.240 --> 00:26:27.799
uneven focused and this lens is such
that you could go out in the street

250
00:26:27.880 --> 00:26:33.400
and if you found enough people with
a stigmatism, you would eventually find someone

251
00:26:33.839 --> 00:26:41.799
whose particular patternment of astigmatism perfectly matched
this lens. Now, the amount of

252
00:26:41.960 --> 00:26:45.640
trial and error to be able to
learn how to do that, and this

253
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is the eighth century b C.
We're talking about. It was such an

254
00:26:52.680 --> 00:26:59.400
amazing feat that it had to have
been done for a powerful potentate a king

255
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in other words, and because it
was left in Sargon's throne room, but

256
00:27:04.480 --> 00:27:11.119
he moved to another location and left
that behind, we believe that it belonged

257
00:27:11.160 --> 00:27:15.559
to one of the kings he conquered, and he took the booty, because

258
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there's a lot of booty in the
throne room, and so it could even

259
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have been an early king of Israel
whom he conquered. Whose lens it was,

260
00:27:26.640 --> 00:27:33.799
but whoever was using that lens had
to be very powerful because it would

261
00:27:33.839 --> 00:27:37.880
have taken months to grind this thing, and they would have had to do

262
00:27:37.000 --> 00:27:41.799
many dummies to correct for the astigmatism
by trial and error, over and over

263
00:27:41.839 --> 00:27:48.079
and over many many versions before they
got it perfect. And it's a fantastic

264
00:27:48.200 --> 00:27:52.799
technological feat. So this was the
lens that Derek Price told me about.

265
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He didn't know any of this,
He only knew that it looked like it

266
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might be a lens. So I
did this study and I wrote the whole

267
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history of everything that everybody had ever
said about it since it's discovered by Layard.

268
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So that was the That was a
paper that eventually became the Crystal Sun.

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Is that what your suggesting? No, I was already writing a book,

270
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but it's okay, chapter one,
chapter one, okay. So it

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starts out by saying how I did, how I came into this, that

272
00:28:23.480 --> 00:28:27.359
it was Arthur and Derek who got
me started. Then I went all the

273
00:28:27.400 --> 00:28:32.480
trouble I had getting access to the
lens, and about how the museum tried

274
00:28:32.480 --> 00:28:36.279
to hide it. They kept changing
the description, they would never admit that

275
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it was a lens. And if
you had asked any archaeologist then, and

276
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it's probably the case still today,
were there lenses magnifying lenses in antiquity?

277
00:28:47.599 --> 00:28:49.240
They say, oh, of course, not no, And then they start

278
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gabbling on about Galileo and his telescope
and and so what I did was I

279
00:28:56.799 --> 00:29:00.720
I thought, I'm going to look
and see if they're other lenses. And

280
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I went to museums all over many
countries, and I had to stop when

281
00:29:06.880 --> 00:29:11.759
I got to the point where I
had discovered more than four hundred and fifty

282
00:29:11.960 --> 00:29:18.279
of them. Amazing, just amazing, They're everywhere. There were forty eight

283
00:29:18.440 --> 00:29:25.799
crystal lenses excavated by Schliemann at Troy
alone, a huge number from Carthage.

284
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There are Egyptians ones, there are
Greek ones. In fact, I even

285
00:29:29.880 --> 00:29:36.160
own a sixth century BC Greek one. Is it possible that the layered lens

286
00:29:36.359 --> 00:29:40.319
was older than say three thousand years
old? See? I mean, what

287
00:29:40.359 --> 00:29:45.839
would you say, is the oldest
lens that you have recovered or is historically

288
00:29:45.839 --> 00:29:48.039
described, because we're going to get
into that in a minute about descriptions of

289
00:29:48.720 --> 00:29:55.720
optics. Well, the oldest lenses
that I found as lenses that you can

290
00:29:55.759 --> 00:30:03.920
still see and still work are the
Fifth Dynasty Egypt. Now we know that

291
00:30:03.920 --> 00:30:07.240
they had to have them in the
Fourth dynasty as well, and indeed I

292
00:30:07.680 --> 00:30:11.880
present proof in the book that they
had them at least by three thousand,

293
00:30:11.920 --> 00:30:23.640
three hundred BC as magnifiers to engrave
miniature carvings on pieces of ornamental ivory which

294
00:30:23.680 --> 00:30:32.440
were excavated by Gunta Dreyer at Abydos
also known as Abydos, in a predynastic

295
00:30:32.519 --> 00:30:38.160
Egyptian grave. So we have proof
that magnifying lenses existed at least by three

296
00:30:38.200 --> 00:30:44.759
thousand, three hundred BC, which
is five three hundred years ago. Yeah,

297
00:30:44.799 --> 00:30:51.200
five thousand, three hundred years ago. So what would you say.

298
00:30:52.440 --> 00:30:55.920
I mean, we're going to get
into burning lenses and telescopes here in a

299
00:30:55.960 --> 00:31:04.759
second. But is it your automatic
conclusion or that of we don't know why

300
00:31:04.839 --> 00:31:11.000
archaeologists are not accepting this because it's
in their face, but that they had

301
00:31:11.599 --> 00:31:18.799
uh physicians in antiquity who were specialists
in carving lenses for people that had myopic

302
00:31:19.400 --> 00:31:25.279
conditions or others like you say,
stigmatisms. Well, yes, speaking of

303
00:31:25.319 --> 00:31:32.599
myopia. Whereas most ancient lenses that
survive are convex, which of course are

304
00:31:32.640 --> 00:31:37.319
from longside pres biopia, myopia or
short sightedness has to be corrected by a

305
00:31:37.400 --> 00:31:45.359
concave lens, and there was an
industry of producing concave lenses on the coast

306
00:31:45.440 --> 00:31:53.960
of what's now Turkey and on certain
islands off the coast of Greece, and

307
00:31:55.039 --> 00:32:00.599
so there are a number of crystal
concave lenses magnified which caused the image to

308
00:32:00.640 --> 00:32:07.920
become smaller instead of larger. We
also have a type of lens which is

309
00:32:09.119 --> 00:32:15.279
convex on one side and curves inwards. That's called a concave on the other

310
00:32:15.400 --> 00:32:20.279
side. So it's like that,
that's called a meniscus lens. And the

311
00:32:20.960 --> 00:32:29.680
surviving eye of the bull's head righton
drinking vessel of the Minoans has a perfectly

312
00:32:29.720 --> 00:32:36.039
carved meniscous lens. So they had
convex ones with flat bottoms. That's called

313
00:32:36.079 --> 00:32:40.440
plano convex. They had convex on
both sides, that's called byconvex. Then

314
00:32:40.440 --> 00:32:47.039
they had concave, and then they
had the meniscus. And you can have

315
00:32:47.079 --> 00:32:52.920
a concave with a flat bottom as
well. And so these are the types

316
00:32:52.960 --> 00:32:57.319
of lenses. They do different things. And if you want to use them

317
00:32:57.319 --> 00:33:00.920
to start a fire with the sun's
rays, that needs to be come VECs.

318
00:33:00.599 --> 00:33:06.000
And they knew all about these different
types of lenses. Now that's not

319
00:33:06.039 --> 00:33:10.599
to say that they had textbooks like
we have today on optics, that any

320
00:33:10.640 --> 00:33:17.160
of this was necessarily written down.
The craftsmen were specialists who had spent their

321
00:33:17.160 --> 00:33:24.039
whole lives grinding crystal, and by
the time the Romans came along, they

322
00:33:24.079 --> 00:33:31.279
were mass producing lenses of glass.
In fact, there was one lens excavated

323
00:33:31.319 --> 00:33:37.160
in the city of London of Roman
day which I've inspected. It's in the

324
00:33:37.240 --> 00:33:45.440
Cooming Museum and it's known as the
Cooming Lens, which was not even carved

325
00:33:45.480 --> 00:33:52.720
out of glass, it was in
fact pressed. They were mass producing these

326
00:33:52.240 --> 00:33:59.640
lenses by pouring glass into molds.
Wow. And they also they had all

327
00:33:59.720 --> 00:34:04.480
kinds. The Romans had unbelievably fancy
things, so they would have a oz

328
00:34:05.119 --> 00:34:08.199
and then they might have a part
of it that would magnify what was in

329
00:34:08.239 --> 00:34:14.119
the oaz and the rest wouldn't.
And with glass trickery. A lot of

330
00:34:14.159 --> 00:34:21.599
these things are preserved in the museums
in Germany from Roman Gaul and also the

331
00:34:21.679 --> 00:34:25.679
Vikings. And this is much later
in date, this is only a thousand

332
00:34:25.719 --> 00:34:32.920
years ago. They had a huge
lens producing industry in Sweden and on the

333
00:34:32.920 --> 00:34:37.000
island of Gotland, which is Swedish, and I've been there and I spent

334
00:34:37.039 --> 00:34:45.800
weeks there studying gigantic numbers of Viking
lenses, and the people on the island

335
00:34:45.800 --> 00:34:49.400
of Gotland had this big collection of
them that were so thrilled because nobody had

336
00:34:49.400 --> 00:34:55.199
ever studied them and measured them before. And they actually translated my report on

337
00:34:55.280 --> 00:35:00.719
them into Swedish and published it in
a Swedish archaeological journal. And I can

338
00:35:00.760 --> 00:35:07.400
say that the only archaeologists in the
world regionally speaking who welcomed my research with

339
00:35:07.519 --> 00:35:14.920
open arms were all the Scandinavians and
the in Finland and in Sweden. Now

340
00:35:14.960 --> 00:35:21.199
this lens industry was the province.
It was a secret technology of the Eastern

341
00:35:21.280 --> 00:35:25.159
Vikings who were Swedish, and the
Norwegian Vikings who were round the other side.

342
00:35:25.199 --> 00:35:29.079
They were the western ones. They
didn't know how to do it,

343
00:35:29.559 --> 00:35:34.920
and the Swedish Vikings wouldn't tell them
how because it was their moneymaker. They

344
00:35:34.920 --> 00:35:39.440
were selling these lenses all over the
balltic see that you find them in Latvia

345
00:35:39.519 --> 00:35:44.400
and Estonia, and a lot in
Finland. And I went there and studied

346
00:35:44.480 --> 00:35:49.679
them at Helsinki and wrote a report. The report on the Finnish lenses is

347
00:35:49.719 --> 00:35:54.800
one of the appendices of the hardback
of the book. And so we have

348
00:35:55.000 --> 00:36:01.800
this this fantastic lens industry of the
Swedish Vikings. But I'll tell you one

349
00:36:01.800 --> 00:36:05.880
of the things they could do that
nobody else that I know of could do.

350
00:36:06.719 --> 00:36:12.480
They were able to make magnifying lenses
the size of water drops. These

351
00:36:12.480 --> 00:36:16.480
were excavated at a site called Sigtuna, which is one of the more famous

352
00:36:16.559 --> 00:36:22.320
Viking sites. And the Swedish archaeologists
are so incredibly careful that while sipping through

353
00:36:22.320 --> 00:36:27.920
all the soil and everything, if
they saw a rain drop sized bit of

354
00:36:27.920 --> 00:36:30.719
crystal, they saved it. A
lot of archaeologists wouldn't be bothered. They

355
00:36:30.719 --> 00:36:35.480
think it's well, it's just rubbish, But in fact they've collected some of

356
00:36:35.519 --> 00:36:40.360
these and they magnify up to three
times and the size of a rain drop.

357
00:36:42.440 --> 00:36:49.280
Now this can be valuable for if
you're carving miniature stuff. And the

358
00:36:52.119 --> 00:37:00.119
magnifying lenses used for craftsmen who are
ceiling graving and carving very fancy stuff for

359
00:37:00.719 --> 00:37:06.639
royal people and so on. They
had to have these magnifiers because you start

360
00:37:06.639 --> 00:37:09.280
to get alongsided when you're older,
and just as you're at the peak of

361
00:37:09.280 --> 00:37:16.760
your skills for engraving on crystal or
glass, you're starting to go funny with

362
00:37:16.800 --> 00:37:22.760
your eyes, your sight. They
needed their own lenses to do their work.

363
00:37:23.119 --> 00:37:30.159
And then they also the Romans discovered
that you could fill a glass sphere

364
00:37:30.320 --> 00:37:35.480
with water and it became a fantastic
magnifier, and they used to suspend them

365
00:37:35.519 --> 00:37:38.639
by ropes. And in the Middle
Ages the people were using these. They're

366
00:37:38.679 --> 00:37:46.480
called schuster kugel. A kugel is
a sphere in German. I don't know

367
00:37:46.480 --> 00:37:52.199
why they were called schuster, but
the shuster spheres which would be suspended by

368
00:37:52.440 --> 00:37:57.159
all the people doing a craftsmanship who
were losing their sight because they were middle

369
00:37:57.199 --> 00:38:05.199
aged and these are unbelievably common,
and telescopes were used in antiquity. I've

370
00:38:05.199 --> 00:38:07.639
got on the cover of the book. I'll show you once more. This

371
00:38:07.760 --> 00:38:15.719
guy here, his front is in
the museum. It happens. It's a

372
00:38:15.960 --> 00:38:22.880
It was excavated on the Acropolis,
a fragment of oz with a picture of

373
00:38:22.920 --> 00:38:27.800
a Greek guy looking through a telescope. And I've discovered what they used for

374
00:38:27.880 --> 00:38:31.480
the tube being it was a particular
type of giant Fennel stalk, which was

375
00:38:31.519 --> 00:38:37.320
perfect for having a telescope. Toube
because let me explain what a telescope is

376
00:38:37.360 --> 00:38:42.360
so that people aren't too shocked.
It doesn't sound too futuristic. If you

377
00:38:42.440 --> 00:38:45.840
have a magnifying lens in your one
hand and a magnifying lens in the other

378
00:38:45.880 --> 00:38:49.039
hand, and you think, no, wonder, what would happen if I

379
00:38:49.079 --> 00:38:53.559
look through them both at the same
time. Any went like that, that's

380
00:38:53.760 --> 00:39:01.360
a telescope, right, except you
haven't inverted in and if you if you

381
00:39:01.440 --> 00:39:06.639
had a third lens, then the
images turned upside down and becomes rectified to

382
00:39:06.679 --> 00:39:09.119
its right way up. But all
you have to if you're looking at the

383
00:39:09.159 --> 00:39:15.599
surface of the Moon or at the
Milky Way, as the Greek philosopher Democratist

384
00:39:15.360 --> 00:39:22.760
did, who was a contemporary of
Plato. We know that he said that

385
00:39:22.840 --> 00:39:29.239
the Milky Way consisted of lots of
stars which looked like a mass, but

386
00:39:29.360 --> 00:39:34.719
in fact they are separate stars close
together. And that was because he was

387
00:39:34.840 --> 00:39:37.800
using a telescope, a rulimentary telescope, and when you do that, you

388
00:39:37.840 --> 00:39:40.480
can see that, Oh, I
say, it's not just a sea of

389
00:39:40.559 --> 00:39:46.559
milk, it's separate stars. And
he also said that the Moon was covered

390
00:39:47.079 --> 00:39:52.119
in mountains and valleys, just like
the Earth. And we all thought that,

391
00:39:52.159 --> 00:39:55.320
we all thought he was making this
up and this was just a funny

392
00:39:55.320 --> 00:40:00.599
story. Before we get into telescopes, I want to I want to conclude

393
00:40:00.639 --> 00:40:07.880
a couple of thoughts that you describe
regarding optical lenses. If and you studied

394
00:40:07.719 --> 00:40:16.159
optics, if you have a condition, myopathy other problems with your vision to

395
00:40:16.239 --> 00:40:22.239
make a crystal, wouldn't the expert
have to study the eye itself if you

396
00:40:22.280 --> 00:40:25.679
were doing the astigmatism one, yet
you would you would have you would have

397
00:40:25.719 --> 00:40:31.159
to understand the anatomy of the eye. Well, I don't know, it

398
00:40:31.239 --> 00:40:36.480
could just be you. Is it
clear on the left but not on the

399
00:40:36.559 --> 00:40:38.039
right, you'd have to do it
by trial and errors. So there have

400
00:40:38.119 --> 00:40:45.079
to be some form of deduction to
get the lens to be a good correction.

401
00:40:45.360 --> 00:40:52.320
Is that yeah, okay, yes, But they did do ophthalmological operations

402
00:40:52.320 --> 00:40:57.239
and things in antiquity. I didn't
discuss that side of things in the book,

403
00:40:57.599 --> 00:41:00.840
which has quite enough in it as
it is. There's a lot of

404
00:41:00.880 --> 00:41:07.320
evidence for the fact that in ancient
times they knew a fair amount about the

405
00:41:07.400 --> 00:41:17.239
eye and it's anatomy. And of
course Aristotle is very important in this because

406
00:41:20.400 --> 00:41:28.880
he was the great dissector. He
wrote a book called Dissections, So he

407
00:41:29.039 --> 00:41:35.719
was an anatomist, absolutely dissecting human
bodies in four hundred and fifty types of

408
00:41:35.719 --> 00:41:38.599
animals. Okay, that's before they
outlauded in the Middle Ages, of course.

409
00:41:38.920 --> 00:41:45.280
Yeah. Well, what he did
was he was a very unusual man.

410
00:41:45.800 --> 00:41:54.199
He befriended the prostitutes because he was
very interested in pregnancy and generation,

411
00:41:54.360 --> 00:41:57.960
as he called it, in other
words, how you can get pregnant,

412
00:41:58.039 --> 00:42:01.199
the seed in the egg and all
that, how did it all work?

413
00:42:01.480 --> 00:42:07.639
Was he was the probably the world's
first embryologist, you might say, and

414
00:42:07.800 --> 00:42:10.199
he befriended the prostitutes, which of
course no other decent person would do,

415
00:42:10.280 --> 00:42:14.519
because you know, they're only prostitutes. But he he made friends with them,

416
00:42:14.559 --> 00:42:16.719
because he'd make friends with anybody.
When he was studying fish, he'd

417
00:42:16.800 --> 00:42:21.199
go out with the ordinary fishermen and
they'd say, look, we see what

418
00:42:21.199 --> 00:42:23.840
that octopus doesn't. And he wrote
this all up me. But the thing

419
00:42:23.960 --> 00:42:30.559
is that with the prostitutes he would
be able. They would give him their

420
00:42:30.719 --> 00:42:37.119
aborted or still born babies to study, and he would be He would pay

421
00:42:37.159 --> 00:42:45.679
them, and he could study their
anatomy and in ways which might become might

422
00:42:45.760 --> 00:42:52.760
be considered slightly improper. But a
Fault was a scientist, and anyway,

423
00:42:52.800 --> 00:43:00.159
nothing was improper in ancient Greece,
and so he he there was no way

424
00:43:00.320 --> 00:43:06.280
he could be stopped from trying to
get the answers to the mysteries of nature.

425
00:43:07.119 --> 00:43:09.800
And so we did this giant book
called the Dissections, which was like

426
00:43:10.039 --> 00:43:15.920
a huge thing that high you can
imagine, with very detailed illustrations. And

427
00:43:15.960 --> 00:43:22.320
he gave the original copy to Alexander
the Great, who had been his student,

428
00:43:24.199 --> 00:43:30.119
But of course he kept another one, and the only account of this

429
00:43:30.199 --> 00:43:37.280
lost book of four hundred and fifty
autopsy reports on every kind of animal,

430
00:43:37.320 --> 00:43:44.159
including elephants and crocodiles, and everything
that Alexander's men would send to him.

431
00:43:44.400 --> 00:43:52.880
The only one that survived is the
very careful description of the chameleon, not

432
00:43:52.000 --> 00:43:55.519
with the illustration, but the very
detailed description of the comeleon. And that's

433
00:43:55.519 --> 00:44:02.119
an example. It survives in his
very lengthy zoological works, which of which

434
00:44:02.119 --> 00:44:07.239
I've read every word. And not
many people consider that because they got on,

435
00:44:08.159 --> 00:44:12.719
but I see, I had to
review them for Nature magazine, and

436
00:44:12.800 --> 00:44:16.480
so I had to read every word
in every footnote, and and check the

437
00:44:16.480 --> 00:44:22.639
the vocabulary, and go into all
the detail. And so the I realized

438
00:44:22.840 --> 00:44:28.280
that the description of the chameleon,
which occurs in there, which has been

439
00:44:28.320 --> 00:44:31.800
excerpted from his main text of Dissections, was a piece of that book.

440
00:44:32.639 --> 00:44:40.159
And I even wrote an article about
that separately. But he was interested in

441
00:44:40.199 --> 00:44:44.280
these two he was. He talked
about tubes you can look through and see

442
00:44:44.320 --> 00:44:49.199
things better, but he didn't mention
the lenses. But lenses are mentioned by

443
00:44:49.239 --> 00:44:55.400
Aristophanes, the playwright who was a
generation before Aristotle, in his play called

444
00:44:55.400 --> 00:45:01.920
the Clouds. He was he wrote
farces, and and so he wrote one

445
00:45:01.960 --> 00:45:06.400
in which he made fun of Socrates. In fact, he was two generations

446
00:45:06.400 --> 00:45:10.679
before Aristotle, because he was one
generation earlier than Playtime. He was making

447
00:45:10.719 --> 00:45:20.280
fun of Socrates. And he has
Socrates talking to another chap called Stripsid's,

448
00:45:21.679 --> 00:45:25.880
and the other guy is worried about
the fact that he owes money to somebody

449
00:45:25.920 --> 00:45:35.599
and he's got he's got documents which
show the debts that he ows. And

450
00:45:35.960 --> 00:45:38.760
Socrates says, well, there's one
way you can get out of trouble.

451
00:45:39.559 --> 00:45:46.679
Go down to the local shop where
they's apparently sold these to anybody for for

452
00:45:46.960 --> 00:45:54.719
a small sum by a lens,
and hold it in the sun and burn

453
00:45:55.639 --> 00:45:59.920
burn up the documents at a distance, and then he won't have the evidence.

454
00:46:00.599 --> 00:46:04.039
This is all meant to be a
big joke, but what it reveals

455
00:46:04.199 --> 00:46:07.639
is that lenses were so common you
could go buy them at the corner shop.

456
00:46:07.119 --> 00:46:12.400
Yeah, and start a file with
them. Yeah. This is what's

457
00:46:12.440 --> 00:46:17.800
so important about your book is that
you give references in various commentaries and various

458
00:46:19.559 --> 00:46:24.760
letter writing that different different people exposing
this technology and exposing the lens. I

459
00:46:24.760 --> 00:46:30.800
want to talk real briefly about a
portion of your early book that reveals the

460
00:46:30.960 --> 00:46:40.679
Cairo lenses and I'm curious because you're
telling us that optical technology is in place

461
00:46:40.920 --> 00:46:45.800
in antiquity. But if the Egyptians, I think you say, in the

462
00:46:45.920 --> 00:46:52.440
in the Old Kingdom that you found, is it possible that the Egyptians inherited

463
00:46:52.480 --> 00:47:00.000
from an earlier civilization, pre dynastic
civilization. Does that feel right to you?

464
00:47:00.360 --> 00:47:04.679
Well, we don't know the answer
to that, but what I can

465
00:47:04.760 --> 00:47:09.920
say is that it would have been
impossible for anybody, no matter how clever

466
00:47:10.000 --> 00:47:15.159
they were, even if they came
down from outer space, as some people

467
00:47:15.199 --> 00:47:22.400
say, you couldn't do it without
optical surveying instruments. Now, if you

468
00:47:22.480 --> 00:47:29.119
have a surveying instrument and stick a
little miniature telescope on it for your sighting

469
00:47:29.199 --> 00:47:32.519
of the exact angles and so on, that's known as a theodolite. That's

470
00:47:32.559 --> 00:47:37.360
the name of the instrument which has
the little telescope on top, and then

471
00:47:37.400 --> 00:47:42.719
it shows the angles and you do
your sighting with that. The precision of

472
00:47:42.800 --> 00:47:49.800
alignment of those gigantic pyramids is so
perfect that it is physically impossible for it

473
00:47:49.800 --> 00:47:55.159
to have been accomplished by any means
other than optical surveying, which meant that

474
00:47:55.280 --> 00:48:01.440
they could not have been built without
the existence of lenses, and that's conventionally

475
00:48:01.440 --> 00:48:06.320
thought to be the Fourth dynasty,
the oldest lenses. I've actually seen a

476
00:48:06.400 --> 00:48:12.960
Fifth dynasty and they are in the
museum, and I had the photographs of

477
00:48:13.000 --> 00:48:19.800
them, which I took in color. But the the lenses certainly existed before

478
00:48:19.800 --> 00:48:25.199
that, because the Fifth Dynasty lenses
are so perfect. They're they're perfect.

479
00:48:25.440 --> 00:48:30.679
I mean you had to be really
on top of lens technology to produce them.

480
00:48:31.440 --> 00:48:37.199
And uh, and so they certainly
existed by whoever built the pyramids,

481
00:48:37.280 --> 00:48:45.000
let us say that it really was
kep Brin and Cufu and Cofre. I

482
00:48:45.039 --> 00:48:51.719
personally think that they usurped them and
that they were actually older. But yeah,

483
00:48:51.840 --> 00:48:59.199
that's a separate subject, and we
don't in my view, we don't

484
00:48:59.360 --> 00:49:05.679
know who built the pyramids or exactly
when. But in my book Egyptian Dawn,

485
00:49:06.440 --> 00:49:13.880
I report the results of dating study
that my Greek colleague and my wife

486
00:49:13.880 --> 00:49:17.360
and I did as an archaeometric team
going around Egypt with official permission, I

487
00:49:17.440 --> 00:49:23.719
might say, redating everything. We
found a date for the pyramids that was

488
00:49:24.000 --> 00:49:31.280
much earlier than the Fourth Dynasty according
to the conventional chronology. But if you

489
00:49:31.360 --> 00:49:36.320
change your chronology. It could still
be fourth dynasty, but they can't both

490
00:49:36.360 --> 00:49:39.679
be true. But that's a separate
issue discussed in a separate book, another

491
00:49:39.760 --> 00:49:45.320
big fat book called Egyptians. We'll
have to have you back for that one.

492
00:49:46.400 --> 00:49:52.079
We're going to take a commercial break
to allow our sponsors to identify themselves,

493
00:49:52.599 --> 00:49:57.280
and we will return with my guest
today, Robert Temple, discussing his

494
00:49:57.400 --> 00:50:46.880
book on ancient lenses. We'll be
right back. My guest today is Robert

495
00:50:46.920 --> 00:50:52.880
Temple, who wrote a fabulous book
in two thousand called The Crystal Sun,

496
00:50:52.559 --> 00:50:59.519
Rediscovering a Lost technology of the ancient
world. This is all about ancient lenses

497
00:50:59.639 --> 00:51:12.400
used for glasses reflecting the sun and
telescopes. I'm thinking and visualizing SETI,

498
00:51:12.480 --> 00:51:19.880
the first wearing glasses. And you
know, if this technology was around,

499
00:51:21.039 --> 00:51:24.039
why doesn't anybody talk about it?
Why don't the egyptologists, Why don't the

500
00:51:24.119 --> 00:51:30.199
archaeologists? What are they? Him
and haw and basically say, and you

501
00:51:30.239 --> 00:51:36.320
write about this, no lizards existed
in ancient times. Well, let me

502
00:51:36.360 --> 00:51:42.000
tell you what happened to my book
after it was published in Oxford. Now

503
00:51:42.039 --> 00:51:47.199
you probably you know that Galileo was
threatened with being burnt at the Stake,

504
00:51:47.440 --> 00:51:54.519
like his predecessor Giordano Bruno by the
Captulic inquisition, because he was a magician.

505
00:51:54.760 --> 00:51:59.199
He claimed to be looking through a
tube to see the stars, and

506
00:51:59.320 --> 00:52:02.599
he maintain change that the Earth was
going round the Sun, and the Catholics

507
00:52:04.079 --> 00:52:07.599
didn't like that a bit. So
what he did was he decided he didn't

508
00:52:07.639 --> 00:52:13.880
want to be burnt at stake.
That he sort of apologized and fudged.

509
00:52:14.639 --> 00:52:21.000
But so when the Catholic inquisitors came
to see him, at first he tried

510
00:52:21.800 --> 00:52:23.320
to talk his way out of it
by showing them. So he said,

511
00:52:23.960 --> 00:52:29.079
just look through my telescope and you
can see for yourselves, and they all

512
00:52:29.119 --> 00:52:34.840
refused, they wouldn't look through Galileo's
telescope. Oh my god, the same

513
00:52:34.880 --> 00:52:37.480
thing has happened with my book,
and I'll tell you the story. Well

514
00:52:37.519 --> 00:52:43.480
what happened in Oxford. So the
professor of archaeology at Oxford is a very

515
00:52:43.559 --> 00:52:50.119
enlightened chap He was, in fact
an expert on the Kulkian civilization, which

516
00:52:50.199 --> 00:52:52.159
is where Jason went to find the
Golden Fleece, and it's the far end

517
00:52:52.159 --> 00:52:57.679
of the Black Sea in the country
now called Georgia. So that was his

518
00:52:57.880 --> 00:53:01.320
special field. But he got hold
of The Crystal Sun, this is before

519
00:53:01.360 --> 00:53:07.559
I ever met him, and decided
that it was wonderful. And he's the

520
00:53:07.599 --> 00:53:09.960
professor of archaeology at Oxford. So
he said to all his students, you

521
00:53:10.079 --> 00:53:15.800
have to read this book by Robert
Temple called The Crystal Sun. But his

522
00:53:15.840 --> 00:53:19.280
students started coming back to him and
saying, well, we can't find it

523
00:53:19.360 --> 00:53:23.679
in the Oxford Library. I should
say that the main library for Oxford University

524
00:53:24.480 --> 00:53:30.119
isn't called the Oxford University Library.
It's called the Bodleyan Library because it was

525
00:53:30.159 --> 00:53:36.000
founded by a man called Bodley and
it's named after him, the Bodileyan Library.

526
00:53:36.079 --> 00:53:37.800
So they would come back and say, well, we can't find that

527
00:53:37.840 --> 00:53:44.840
book in the Bodileyand so the professor
went along to the head of the Bodleyan

528
00:53:44.920 --> 00:53:46.800
and he said, look, I've
brought you a copy of a book called

529
00:53:46.800 --> 00:53:51.760
The Crystal Sun, which you don't
seem to have here, and I'm sending

530
00:53:51.800 --> 00:53:55.760
my students to read it because it's
part of their studies. And I'm giving

531
00:53:55.760 --> 00:54:00.440
you a copy for you to deposit
to save you the trouble of ordering one.

532
00:54:01.960 --> 00:54:07.280
And the man said, we would
not stop that book in this library.

533
00:54:09.119 --> 00:54:12.440
He said, what do you mean. I'm the professor of archaeology and

534
00:54:12.880 --> 00:54:15.840
I'm telling you that I needed for
my students, and I want you to

535
00:54:15.880 --> 00:54:22.239
stock it in the library at the
university's library. We refuse. So they

536
00:54:22.280 --> 00:54:27.119
refused to take the book, and
it's still not there, and they didn't

537
00:54:27.119 --> 00:54:30.960
want anybody to read it or see
it. So he went down the road

538
00:54:30.960 --> 00:54:36.800
to the Ashmoleum Museum, which is
an archaeological museum in Oxford, with which

539
00:54:36.800 --> 00:54:42.960
he was obviously connected, and he
deposited that copy in the library of the

540
00:54:43.000 --> 00:54:46.519
Ashmolean Museum. And he said to
me, Robert, I wanted to make

541
00:54:46.559 --> 00:54:52.039
sure that it was at least one
copy of your book somewhere in Oxford in

542
00:54:52.039 --> 00:54:55.239
case anybody really needed to see it, that they could at least go there,

543
00:54:55.239 --> 00:55:00.480
and I will be sending my students
there. But you we have here

544
00:55:00.639 --> 00:55:07.039
an example of the head of the
Bodily and Library refusing to take my book

545
00:55:07.800 --> 00:55:12.159
and put it on the shelves.
What's the reason that they have to rewrite

546
00:55:12.320 --> 00:55:16.679
history or it's such an anomaly that
it frightens people. What is the what

547
00:55:16.800 --> 00:55:22.000
is the reason for not carrying the
book for students? He refused to give

548
00:55:22.000 --> 00:55:24.760
a reason to the professor. But
what do you do? You what's your

549
00:55:24.800 --> 00:55:29.920
suggest what's your feeling on why he
would refuse to keep the book in his

550
00:55:30.400 --> 00:55:35.599
library. You see, if you
read The Crystal Sun and you realize and

551
00:55:35.639 --> 00:55:38.119
see the photographs and all the evidence
that I've found over four hundred and fifty

552
00:55:38.360 --> 00:55:45.960
examples of what all the world's archaeologists
said could not and did not exist,

553
00:55:45.880 --> 00:55:52.119
and I proved all of them wrong
at one stroke. They've all been wrong,

554
00:55:52.400 --> 00:55:58.280
apart from the Oxford man. Well, it's too embarrassing, isn't it,

555
00:55:58.760 --> 00:56:02.880
And so the only thing to do
is to pretend it doesn't exist,

556
00:56:04.039 --> 00:56:07.360
to conceal it, and to try
to prevent anybody ever seeing it. But

557
00:56:07.360 --> 00:56:12.119
wait, let me just stop you
for a minute. You're not naming names

558
00:56:12.119 --> 00:56:14.480
in the book, like this guy's
an idiot, this guy, You're not.

559
00:56:15.000 --> 00:56:21.639
You're not rudely claiming that all of
archaeology is blind for not finding these

560
00:56:21.719 --> 00:56:27.880
lenses. You're just revealing new data. Well, they don't want they don't

561
00:56:27.880 --> 00:56:32.760
want new data. Okay, I
don't want to have to change. They've

562
00:56:32.800 --> 00:56:40.639
been saying that that this kind of
technology was impossible in antiquity and many books

563
00:56:40.519 --> 00:56:47.599
a state that lenses began in the
Middle Ages, and and and they simply

564
00:56:47.679 --> 00:56:55.199
don't want to have to admit that
things are different than what all these rather

565
00:56:55.280 --> 00:57:01.119
pompous people have been preaching to the
public all these years. Now, it

566
00:57:01.159 --> 00:57:06.880
wasn't always like that, because I
record two hundred and fifty years worth of

567
00:57:06.920 --> 00:57:12.840
comments by scholars in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries where it was freely admitted that

568
00:57:12.840 --> 00:57:16.920
there were ancient lenses. But of
course those comments are also concealed and never

569
00:57:17.000 --> 00:57:22.960
quoted. And that the famous historian
of art called Vinckelmann, who created the

570
00:57:23.000 --> 00:57:27.400
history of art as a discipline,
he admitted that there were ancient lenses.

571
00:57:27.920 --> 00:57:32.400
Many people did. But in the
modern era, I think it goes against

572
00:57:32.400 --> 00:57:38.079
the myth of progress. You see, we live in a society now where

573
00:57:38.199 --> 00:57:42.840
every day of every year things get
better and better, and they go up

574
00:57:42.840 --> 00:57:45.920
and up and up and up and
up, and there's a sort of steady

575
00:57:45.000 --> 00:57:50.440
progress upwards because we're so modern and
we're so clever, and we have all

576
00:57:50.440 --> 00:57:55.320
this fabulous technology, and aren't we
brilliant and we're superior to people in the

577
00:57:55.320 --> 00:58:00.000
past, you see, according to
this myth, and if you come up

578
00:58:00.039 --> 00:58:07.000
with evidence that people in the past
weren't as stupid as the pompous experts of

579
00:58:07.039 --> 00:58:13.039
today claim to hold on to their
myth. That blows the myth. And

580
00:58:13.079 --> 00:58:17.159
then you might have people asking awkward
questions like, well, if they were

581
00:58:17.159 --> 00:58:23.280
so good it lenses in threey three
hundred BC, and then after the collapse

582
00:58:23.280 --> 00:58:29.639
of the Roman Empire they kind of
disappeared, you know, all this business

583
00:58:29.639 --> 00:58:34.119
about People would start asking about the
Dark Ages and why was it caused?

584
00:58:34.719 --> 00:58:39.760
And why did technology vanish? And
what about the myth of steady progress upwards,

585
00:58:39.760 --> 00:58:45.440
that that humankind is going up up
every year, getting better and better

586
00:58:45.480 --> 00:58:47.760
and better and better. But we're
not in fact at the moment. We

587
00:58:47.800 --> 00:58:55.760
live in a society of utter decodence
and collapse of knowledge, and the universities

588
00:58:55.800 --> 00:59:01.599
are more concerned with pronouns than knowledge
and what. We live in an era

589
00:59:02.199 --> 00:59:09.960
where disciplines like Egyptology, for instance, are being cut. I know some

590
00:59:10.320 --> 00:59:15.559
lovely people who've got their PhDs in
egyptology and cannot find a job, cannot

591
00:59:15.599 --> 00:59:21.760
find a job anywhere in the world
because those departments are being shut down.

592
00:59:22.239 --> 00:59:28.679
There's no grant money. Nobody cares
who's in authority about knowledge anymore. Everything's

593
00:59:28.719 --> 00:59:35.199
become politicized, and everything's geared for
social engineering, and knowledge has looked upon

594
00:59:35.239 --> 00:59:43.559
as a useless pastime for fools.
And so the whole edifice of what we've

595
00:59:43.760 --> 00:59:49.039
all been trying to build for thousands
of years by research and thought and works

596
00:59:49.039 --> 00:59:53.719
of philosophy and science and art and
culture and so on, it's all looked

597
00:59:53.800 --> 01:00:02.639
upon as valueless today, and so
we have a complete collapse of learning,

598
01:00:04.559 --> 01:00:10.679
and there aren't any great scholars anymore. When I was younger, I knew

599
01:00:10.719 --> 01:00:19.440
many, and I worked very closely
with the greatest scholar of our times,

600
01:00:19.840 --> 01:00:23.880
Joseph Needham. He was fantastic,
and I worked within few years. And

601
01:00:24.400 --> 01:00:29.199
let me just ask you real quickly, Robert, that in some ways I

602
01:00:29.280 --> 01:00:34.719
understand what you're saying about progress perhaps
being different. Things are shifting in the

603
01:00:34.800 --> 01:00:38.880
old systems of study are different,
and learning and so forth. But if

604
01:00:38.960 --> 01:00:47.760
you have a base of evidence that
telescopes were used by the ancient Egyptians,

605
01:00:47.840 --> 01:00:52.079
Babylonians and so forth, we're going
to talk about this in a minute,

606
01:00:52.440 --> 01:00:59.599
this would help us understand how we
have clarity of a planetary study by these

607
01:00:59.639 --> 01:01:04.719
ancient people who wrote about this.
My big problem right now, and I

608
01:01:04.760 --> 01:01:08.639
want to ask you later A point
is I'm a mayanist. They're telling us

609
01:01:08.639 --> 01:01:15.239
that they were able to see the
planets with the naked eye. It's nearly

610
01:01:15.360 --> 01:01:24.199
impossible. In the Dresden Codex they
have details of Venus that are not visible

611
01:01:24.280 --> 01:01:31.679
by the naked eye. They had
observatories that I believe included telescopic viewing.

612
01:01:32.480 --> 01:01:38.440
Yes, at Chichen for instance.
Yeah, yeah, at the observatory.

613
01:01:38.519 --> 01:01:45.079
They must have had lenses. They
must have had telescopic lenses to see these

614
01:01:45.079 --> 01:01:49.480
things because they wrote about it.
Now in your case, in your case

615
01:01:49.480 --> 01:01:57.519
where you're describing European Middle Eastern optics, there's a number of people we can

616
01:01:57.639 --> 01:02:02.960
quote who wrote about the celestial bodies
with such a great degree of detail that

617
01:02:04.039 --> 01:02:09.280
they had to have telescopes. Wouldn't
the scientific community go yes, now,

618
01:02:09.360 --> 01:02:19.679
I can see how these ancient people
came about this knowledge. Well, of

619
01:02:19.719 --> 01:02:23.960
course, what you've said makes perfect
sense. That's the trouble with it.

620
01:02:24.400 --> 01:02:30.679
Okay, you're a troublemaker, Cliff. Well, I'm an anomalist like you

621
01:02:30.760 --> 01:02:37.360
are. You look for these these
bits of information that kind of fitted all

622
01:02:37.400 --> 01:02:42.119
together, you know, I mean, this entire book is such an anomaly

623
01:02:42.440 --> 01:02:46.079
that, I mean, I'm not
sure what What was the reaction when it

624
01:02:46.119 --> 01:02:51.360
came out by the scientific community was
some of them are just you know,

625
01:02:52.159 --> 01:02:59.239
avoiding it. I'm sure in total
silence. Really it didn't exist. It

626
01:02:59.280 --> 01:03:04.000
couldn't be critical size because everything's referenced
another You can't criticize the book. There's

627
01:03:04.039 --> 01:03:07.119
nothing wrong with it. The fact
is that the only way they could defeat

628
01:03:07.159 --> 01:03:13.440
it was to completely and totally ignore
its existence. So what were the reviews?

629
01:03:13.599 --> 01:03:17.639
You must have had one single review? You're kidding me? Well,

630
01:03:17.679 --> 01:03:22.920
on the back of the book that
you have Sunday Times writing the focus is

631
01:03:22.960 --> 01:03:29.760
as wide and as deep as civilization
itself. And then it says the reviewer

632
01:03:29.840 --> 01:03:37.599
says frighteningly clever. Yes, that's
on the back of the paperback, because

633
01:03:37.880 --> 01:03:40.400
there was an article in the Sunday
Times magazine that said that it was an

634
01:03:40.480 --> 01:03:46.280
article, not a review, and
the other quote, maybe there was a

635
01:03:46.320 --> 01:03:51.440
review in the press, but no, no archeologists ever reviewed the book.

636
01:03:52.239 --> 01:03:55.599
But was it? I mean,
what did Nature magazine review it? Did?

637
01:03:57.559 --> 01:04:00.800
Oh no, they would never no, how about it? Tipic America

638
01:04:00.920 --> 01:04:06.119
was around then? How about them? Well, now I was myself a

639
01:04:06.159 --> 01:04:12.760
reviewer for Nature magazine for many years
for history of science books before this came

640
01:04:12.800 --> 01:04:18.480
out. But you see, not
that many years ago, twenty years ago

641
01:04:18.559 --> 01:04:25.679
or whatever it was, everything started
to change. I used to write science

642
01:04:25.800 --> 01:04:30.480
articles for the London Sunday Times every
Sunday because they had a whole page of

643
01:04:30.519 --> 01:04:34.800
science, and that's long gone.
They don't have science articles anymore ever.

644
01:04:35.440 --> 01:04:45.119
And I was involved in the journalistic
world when I was younger. I co

645
01:04:45.280 --> 01:04:48.840
edited a magazine, and I was
a science report for Time Life for six

646
01:04:48.960 --> 01:04:58.159
years out of the London Bureau.
And I wrote for old papers and all

647
01:04:58.159 --> 01:05:04.960
the magazines and for the Sunday Times, and everybody wanted to do things.

648
01:05:04.960 --> 01:05:12.559
Then. The public was full of
curious people. Maybe they were self taught,

649
01:05:12.559 --> 01:05:15.719
maybe they were intellectuals who had actually
been to university, doesn't matter.

650
01:05:15.119 --> 01:05:20.239
The fact is people had curiosity then, and curiosity was still encouraged. But

651
01:05:20.519 --> 01:05:27.920
in the past twenty twenty five years, cur curiosity has become something that you're

652
01:05:27.960 --> 01:05:32.880
not supposed to have, and you're
supposed to believe what you're told and never

653
01:05:33.000 --> 01:05:39.840
question anything. The media, all
the publisher's been bought up, and all

654
01:05:39.840 --> 01:05:45.920
the newspapers have been bought up by
four or five major international multinational cooperations,

655
01:05:47.079 --> 01:05:50.760
and everything's homoginized, and you see
there are no differences anymore. You get

656
01:05:50.800 --> 01:05:56.440
all these different names of publishers appearing
on books, but those are all lists

657
01:05:56.599 --> 01:06:00.760
owned by big companies. So,
for instance, if you go to Random

658
01:06:00.760 --> 01:06:04.320
House, they own about and The
Crystal Sun was published by an imprint of

659
01:06:04.360 --> 01:06:12.079
Random House called Century. I used
to go there all the time and you

660
01:06:12.119 --> 01:06:17.840
would see the list of about fifteen
famous publishers' names on the board at the

661
01:06:17.880 --> 01:06:24.440
reception, all of which had been
bought by Random House. The smaller publishing

662
01:06:24.480 --> 01:06:28.679
houses they've all been bought up,
and so they don't have independent views anymore.

663
01:06:29.119 --> 01:06:31.199
And it's just a pretense to put
a different name on a book to

664
01:06:31.239 --> 01:06:38.320
make it look diverse. And then
after I left Random House there they merged

665
01:06:38.320 --> 01:06:44.400
with Penguin, so Penguin Random House. And see everything's getting giant and run

666
01:06:44.440 --> 01:06:50.400
by accountants and salesmen, so the
editors don't have any authority anymore. If

667
01:06:50.400 --> 01:06:54.360
they want to publish a book,
they have to go on bended knee before

668
01:06:54.360 --> 01:07:00.880
a conference of salesmen to say I
want to publish this book. And then

669
01:07:00.920 --> 01:07:03.199
the salesmen growl at them because they
know their power, and they say,

670
01:07:03.239 --> 01:07:08.119
Oh, nobody's gonna buy that.
That would that wouldn't make us enough money.

671
01:07:08.639 --> 01:07:13.800
And so the sales department makes all
the editorial decisions. Now wow,

672
01:07:14.440 --> 01:07:19.639
and then if there's a if there's
a company attitude and you don't follow it,

673
01:07:19.719 --> 01:07:26.079
you lose your job. So if
they're not interested in archaeology books,

674
01:07:26.119 --> 01:07:30.199
you wouldn't dare commission one because you'd
be fired. Yeah, I hear you.

675
01:07:30.760 --> 01:07:36.119
Let's jump back into this wonderful book. I you have a full chapter.

676
01:07:36.760 --> 01:07:45.119
And you hinted on this on the
miniature carvings, and this is so

677
01:07:45.480 --> 01:07:58.440
fascinating because it's been described as a
whole industry of artisans who created these bits

678
01:07:58.480 --> 01:08:06.760
of jewelry. Talk about the it's
a vessel in the Cairo Museum dated three

679
01:08:06.760 --> 01:08:14.800
thousand BC that has been carved with
such fine intricacy that they had to have

680
01:08:15.079 --> 01:08:17.880
used lenses of some kind to see
the work. Yes, those were the

681
01:08:19.079 --> 01:08:24.680
ivory pieces that I mentioned earlier that
were excavated by a dryer at a Bidos

682
01:08:25.119 --> 01:08:27.960
from a tomb of that date.
We know the date because we know the

683
01:08:28.039 --> 01:08:31.760
date of the tomb and three thy
three hundred pc. Strangely enough, there

684
01:08:32.279 --> 01:08:40.479
there a lot of the carvings consist
of pictures of people who whom Egyptologist is

685
01:08:40.560 --> 01:08:45.399
simply called by the name of Canaanites, not that anybody knows what a Canaanite

686
01:08:45.479 --> 01:08:51.079
really was, and they weren't official
Canaanites in existence that early. But because

687
01:08:51.119 --> 01:08:54.520
they don't know what to call them, because they don't know who they were,

688
01:08:54.920 --> 01:08:59.720
they only know they came from the
area of Palestine, they call them

689
01:08:59.760 --> 01:09:04.319
cane Nights. And they were so
ministry you can't even see them without a

690
01:09:04.359 --> 01:09:11.199
magnifying glass, and you certainly couldn't
colve them without a magnifying glass. And

691
01:09:11.359 --> 01:09:15.439
Dryer himself, who was the head
of the German Institute in Cairo, and

692
01:09:15.600 --> 01:09:19.159
we did dating work with him.
He was a very nice man, but

693
01:09:19.479 --> 01:09:26.720
very very dull and dreary. And
to give an example of what he was

694
01:09:26.880 --> 01:09:30.880
like, he's been by the time
I knowually he'd been thirty five years at

695
01:09:30.920 --> 01:09:35.199
about us, which was this great
burial site and just down the road from

696
01:09:35.359 --> 01:09:41.960
an hour's drive from the fantastic temple
of Denderra. Well you mean the Hathorp

697
01:09:42.000 --> 01:09:46.159
Temple. Yeah, okay, so
I said to him at one point,

698
01:09:47.399 --> 01:09:54.960
I didn't call him Gunter because he
was a bit formald doctor dryer. It

699
01:09:55.079 --> 01:09:58.960
must be so wonderful, but you'd
have been living here for thirty five years.

700
01:09:59.359 --> 01:10:01.479
You must. It's so near to
the temple of Dender. You must

701
01:10:01.520 --> 01:10:04.239
have gone there all the time to
look at it. How wonderful it is.

702
01:10:05.039 --> 01:10:08.880
And he said to me in a
dreary voice, he said, I

703
01:10:09.000 --> 01:10:14.159
went to once or twice in thirty
five years. So then I said to

704
01:10:14.239 --> 01:10:17.079
another friend who was the head of
the Swiss Institute. A friend then called

705
01:10:17.079 --> 01:10:24.239
a horse Yaritz. I said,
Horst, what's wrong with Gunter? I

706
01:10:24.760 --> 01:10:29.359
told him it's wonderful that he spent
thirty five years one hour's drive away from

707
01:10:29.399 --> 01:10:31.119
Dendra and he could go and see
it all the time. And he said,

708
01:10:31.119 --> 01:10:34.920
you only been there once or twice. Of course laughed, and he

709
01:10:34.960 --> 01:10:39.880
said, Robert, you have to
understand about Gunter. He does tombs,

710
01:10:39.880 --> 01:10:45.880
he does not do temples. Okay, this is what they're like. And

711
01:10:45.920 --> 01:10:47.760
if you don't focus narrowly, you
don't get a grant, you don't get

712
01:10:47.800 --> 01:10:53.920
a promotion. Egyptologists, through whom
they are not enough jobs, live in

713
01:10:53.960 --> 01:10:59.800
a state of perpetual terror because if
they can't get the grant for the next

714
01:10:59.880 --> 01:11:02.279
year year's work there, they're finished. Their careers are over. Yeah,

715
01:11:02.840 --> 01:11:09.000
any of them have had career collapse. There's no money. I know this

716
01:11:09.199 --> 01:11:15.520
because my wife and I run the
Ancient ecpt Foundation and we have personally funded

717
01:11:15.880 --> 01:11:21.399
through that foundation a five year project
at the Temple of Esna to clean the

718
01:11:21.479 --> 01:11:28.600
astronomical ceiling, because there are only
two astronomical ceilings in Egyptian temples, and

719
01:11:28.680 --> 01:11:30.640
the one at the ones at Dendra, and the other one was at Esna,

720
01:11:30.680 --> 01:11:35.640
which was covered in black sook from
centuries of fodd cities. And what

721
01:11:36.840 --> 01:11:41.479
Isna is is a very large town
on the bank of the River Nile,

722
01:11:42.039 --> 01:11:45.600
one hour south of Luxor. Well, I haven't been there. It must

723
01:11:45.640 --> 01:11:51.840
be, it must not be on
the tour it wasn't it is now there's

724
01:11:51.840 --> 01:11:56.199
so many tourists are flocking there now
to see the results of this work that

725
01:11:56.279 --> 01:12:00.520
the Egyptians are going to have to
build a hotel to hold. Yeah,

726
01:12:01.000 --> 01:12:04.720
you want to see. It has
now been declared to prestige project because the

727
01:12:04.920 --> 01:12:12.000
fantastic revelations of the ceiling or the
astronomical ceiling with the Zodiac and everything of

728
01:12:12.079 --> 01:12:16.680
the Temple of Esna are so fantastic, and the colors had been so perfectly

729
01:12:16.720 --> 01:12:24.680
preserved by centuries of soot that they
are the best preserved colors in any ancient

730
01:12:24.880 --> 01:12:29.720
Egyptian temple or monument anywhere in Egypt, except perhaps for the inside the tombs.

731
01:12:30.279 --> 01:12:38.560
And it's absolutely spectacular. So it's
now on the tours, all the

732
01:12:38.600 --> 01:12:42.720
tours going there suddenly, and of
course the Ana people aren't ready for this.

733
01:12:42.800 --> 01:12:49.720
That's ees Na Esna sometimes yeah Esna, sometimes spelt I s Na because

734
01:12:49.760 --> 01:12:54.800
you can you can write Arabic in
different ways in English letters, but generally

735
01:12:55.039 --> 01:13:00.439
e s Na Esna. So anybody
going to Egypt, they all go to

736
01:13:00.560 --> 01:13:05.079
Luks or get a taxi it's an
hour's ride, doesn't cost a thing,

737
01:13:05.600 --> 01:13:11.640
and go for a day or half
a day to see the temple at Esna

738
01:13:12.359 --> 01:13:15.079
and look up at the ceiling and
the columns and the walls. Now,

739
01:13:15.479 --> 01:13:21.079
as we were the funders for this
project for five years, it was the

740
01:13:21.119 --> 01:13:26.119
work was done by the Germans and
the Egyptians. We didn't actually clean the

741
01:13:26.159 --> 01:13:32.319
ceilings ourselves, my god, it
takes forever to do that. The fact

742
01:13:32.479 --> 01:13:39.159
is that I heard that they were
doing some work at ESNA, and I

743
01:13:39.239 --> 01:13:44.279
contacted Professor Christian Lights at the University
of Tubingen in Germany, and I said,

744
01:13:44.319 --> 01:13:46.039
I understand you're going to go to
ESNA to do something. And he

745
01:13:46.079 --> 01:13:48.880
said, yes, we've been giving
some money to clean a column or two

746
01:13:48.960 --> 01:13:54.119
or something like that, just to
so that there was something that the here

747
01:13:54.239 --> 01:13:58.079
tourists could see. And I knew
that he was the world's leading expert on

748
01:13:58.119 --> 01:14:01.840
ancient Egyptian astronomy because I know those
things. And I said, well,

749
01:14:02.199 --> 01:14:06.800
Professor Lights, I hope you're going
to clean the ceiling, because i'd first

750
01:14:06.880 --> 01:14:12.239
seen it in nineteen ninety nine and
vowed then that I would clean that ceiling.

751
01:14:12.960 --> 01:14:16.279
It's just I tried to raise some
money and it didn't work at that

752
01:14:16.399 --> 01:14:23.239
time because there was no foundation then. And he said, oh no,

753
01:14:23.319 --> 01:14:27.039
I'm afraid there's no money to pay
for us to clean the ceiling. We

754
01:14:27.079 --> 01:14:30.399
won't be doing the ceiling. It's
what I really want to do because it's

755
01:14:30.439 --> 01:14:34.279
an astronomical ceiling, and I'm an
expert in Egyptian astronomy. Obviously I want

756
01:14:34.319 --> 01:14:38.520
to clean the ceiling, but there's
no way we can do it because we

757
01:14:38.560 --> 01:14:42.119
can't find the money anywhere from anybody. I said, well you have,

758
01:14:42.279 --> 01:14:48.159
now I'm giving it to you for
as long as it takes. And I

759
01:14:48.159 --> 01:14:51.119
couldn't believe it. But every year
he was nervous as the year came to

760
01:14:51.159 --> 01:14:57.000
an end, would I pay for
the next year because we didn't have an

761
01:14:57.000 --> 01:15:00.039
agreement written out or anything. I
I had dropped dead, that would be

762
01:15:00.039 --> 01:15:03.640
the end of it, you know, And it's all uncertainty. But he

763
01:15:03.640 --> 01:15:06.119
would do his years work and hope
that it would be renewed. And of

764
01:15:06.119 --> 01:15:12.880
course it always was, but he
didn't know that for sure. And can

765
01:15:12.920 --> 01:15:16.239
you imagine you've cleaned one fifth of
a fantastic ceiling, and what if I

766
01:15:16.279 --> 01:15:25.159
didn't renew the grand And so we
know how perilous it is for Egyptologists if

767
01:15:25.159 --> 01:15:28.199
they're doing a project or want to
do a project, if there's no funding,

768
01:15:28.880 --> 01:15:33.720
they're powerless because they can't raise any
money. And I know, I

769
01:15:33.760 --> 01:15:41.800
know a brilliant Egyptologist who's been struck
down by an illness and can't get a

770
01:15:41.840 --> 01:15:47.840
job because of lesson to mobility,
can't go into classrooms, and you've got

771
01:15:47.880 --> 01:15:55.079
no idea. But this is true
in most scholarly disciplines, not just archaeology

772
01:15:55.079 --> 01:16:01.359
and egyptology. Certain aspects of science
and technology are well funded because they're useful

773
01:16:01.399 --> 01:16:06.159
to companies and governments and make they
make money. And if you want to

774
01:16:09.000 --> 01:16:12.119
try to build a quantum computer,
well you can get as much money as

775
01:16:12.159 --> 01:16:15.920
you like if you if you can
prove that you've got an idea. But

776
01:16:15.039 --> 01:16:20.000
if you want to study an ancient
Egyptian ruin, forget it. There's no

777
01:16:20.079 --> 01:16:27.000
money. And the Egyptian government doesn't
have much money because you know they were

778
01:16:27.399 --> 01:16:30.560
they lost all that money for three
years during the pandemic from the tourism industry,

779
01:16:31.479 --> 01:16:40.920
and they're always short of change.
We're going to take a short commercial

780
01:16:40.960 --> 01:16:45.319
break to allow our sponsors to identify
themselves, and we will be right back

781
01:16:45.359 --> 01:16:50.640
with my guest today, Robert Temple, discussing his book from the year two

782
01:16:50.720 --> 01:17:34.800
thousand, The Crystal Sun. Will
be right back. My guest today is

783
01:17:34.880 --> 01:17:41.920
author Robert Temple, who has written
a book on ancient lenses called The Crystal

784
01:17:42.199 --> 01:17:46.960
Sun. And this is a fascinating
look at optics in antiquity as well as

785
01:17:47.119 --> 01:17:56.920
telescopic lenses. Let's talk a bit
about fire making. Now you write that

786
01:17:57.279 --> 01:18:03.560
at a time, I think this
is in that you could buy a crystal

787
01:18:05.079 --> 01:18:12.279
to burn things with Athens. Yeah, talk about about that, because this

788
01:18:12.399 --> 01:18:15.600
is something that I have never heard
of before. And you say there was

789
01:18:15.640 --> 01:18:21.039
an industry of making these kind of
like a kind of a cool little item

790
01:18:21.079 --> 01:18:27.479
that you kept in your tunic.
Talk a little bit about these crystals.

791
01:18:28.239 --> 01:18:34.520
Well, you see, using these
lenses to concentrate the rays of the sun

792
01:18:34.680 --> 01:18:40.239
and start a fire well of extreme
importance. And we've traced that back to

793
01:18:40.359 --> 01:18:46.119
Monoan times among the Greek part of
the world. Are you talking about survival

794
01:18:46.239 --> 01:18:50.720
a fire for survival kind of a
situation. No, I'm talking about sacred

795
01:18:50.760 --> 01:18:56.720
offerings on the old offerings. Okay. You see, the fire from the

796
01:18:56.760 --> 01:19:02.000
sun was called fire from heaven.
Looked upon his pure fire, the only

797
01:19:02.079 --> 01:19:06.319
fire that wasn't earthly, it was
pure heavenly fire. And you had to

798
01:19:06.439 --> 01:19:15.159
use heavenly fire to ignite the kindling
on your offer to burn your offering because

799
01:19:15.479 --> 01:19:20.239
to the gods, and you can't
just use an ordinary flint or something like

800
01:19:20.279 --> 01:19:23.840
that to start a fire. If
you're burning an offering into the gods,

801
01:19:23.920 --> 01:19:30.079
it's got to be heavenly fire that
you bring down from heaven through a lens.

802
01:19:30.760 --> 01:19:36.920
And there was an entire mythology built
around this, which I decoded because

803
01:19:36.920 --> 01:19:43.439
it's an enormous amount about mythology.
In the book and in the Manan Times,

804
01:19:44.960 --> 01:19:54.199
the pattern that the condensed rays of
the sun made when passing through a

805
01:19:54.279 --> 01:19:58.359
lens was carved into the stone,
so that I have a photograph in the

806
01:19:58.359 --> 01:20:06.039
book of an offering from in fact
from Lerner, which is before the Minoans,

807
01:20:08.960 --> 01:20:13.479
where the exact pattern of the rays
of the sun is carved into the

808
01:20:13.479 --> 01:20:18.760
stone so that none of it would
fall outside the area carved in the shape

809
01:20:18.800 --> 01:20:25.039
of the condensed rays that held the
ignition, so it's like not wasting any

810
01:20:25.079 --> 01:20:29.239
heavenly rays, so you could get
a perfect beam to start a fire.

811
01:20:30.000 --> 01:20:36.359
Excellent, amazing. And this,
this fire from heaven motif was referred to

812
01:20:36.399 --> 01:20:42.600
over and over again. And oh, you get into all kinds of strange

813
01:20:42.680 --> 01:20:46.359
myths, like the Prometheus legend,
because you know he was punished because he

814
01:20:46.439 --> 01:20:54.439
brought fire from heaven to humans.
Well, he didn't go up to heaven

815
01:20:54.479 --> 01:20:59.720
and come back with fire in his
pocket. This refers to him bringing using

816
01:21:00.000 --> 01:21:04.880
lenses. And I have an ancient
Greek lens that I bought from a collective

817
01:21:04.920 --> 01:21:13.319
friend long ago who which has a
carving on it of Prometheus carrying fire from

818
01:21:13.319 --> 01:21:17.920
heaven, which was It's archaic,
and so it can't be any more recent

819
01:21:17.960 --> 01:21:24.800
than the sixth century BC. The
lens itself is probably much earlier. Strangely

820
01:21:24.880 --> 01:21:28.479
enough, the fact that the carving
is it is a transparent carving, it's

821
01:21:28.640 --> 01:21:32.439
on the surface of the lens,
does not an interfere with its I can

822
01:21:32.560 --> 01:21:38.399
find properties any more than a dust
on your camera lens can be seen on

823
01:21:38.439 --> 01:21:43.640
your photograph. And so I've got
a lot of material in the book about

824
01:21:43.680 --> 01:21:45.520
all this kind of stuff. As
you know, I mean, the book

825
01:21:45.600 --> 01:21:51.079
is so packed with information that it's
totally mind boggling. It's like you you

826
01:21:51.840 --> 01:22:00.239
felt compelled to deliver bits and pieces
of referencing so your reference. I've seen

827
01:22:00.319 --> 01:22:03.359
every chapter, and it's like even
the editors are like, Okay, we're

828
01:22:03.359 --> 01:22:05.960
going to leave this guy alone.
We're not going to try to edit it.

829
01:22:06.199 --> 01:22:11.239
We're gonna say Temple can unload it
whatever he was, and we'll publish

830
01:22:11.319 --> 01:22:16.279
it. Well. I do have
very long footnotes, and a lot of

831
01:22:16.319 --> 01:22:23.279
the stuff I moved to the footnotes
to take it out of me make it

832
01:22:23.319 --> 01:22:27.520
easier for the reader, and then
a huge amount of material was put into

833
01:22:27.520 --> 01:22:31.479
the appendices to get it out of
the way of the reader's path through the

834
01:22:31.520 --> 01:22:38.880
book. And I constantly tell personal
stories. So, for instance, in

835
01:22:38.920 --> 01:22:44.439
Appendix one, the only one that
survived into the paperback, I discussed the

836
01:22:44.479 --> 01:22:48.640
first time I saw the skull of
Doom, which is now the most famous

837
01:22:48.640 --> 01:22:55.359
of the crystal skulls from Central America. This is the Mitchell Hedges skull.

838
01:22:56.000 --> 01:23:02.000
Yes, I was a teenager in
nineteen sixty three, and I was taken

839
01:23:02.159 --> 01:23:06.920
to the house of Sammy Mitchell Hedges, the daughter. She's the one who

840
01:23:06.960 --> 01:23:10.640
found the skull, and she told
me all about how she found it.

841
01:23:10.640 --> 01:23:16.520
It was in Belize at a site
called Lubon Tun, which she and her

842
01:23:16.520 --> 01:23:19.840
father were excavating. They discovered it, in fact, in the jungle,

843
01:23:20.239 --> 01:23:25.119
and they cleared all the vines off
the Did he do actually believe that they

844
01:23:25.319 --> 01:23:30.079
that because there's a lot of discontent
about this skull that it was it's fake,

845
01:23:30.199 --> 01:23:35.359
it's not real, it wasn't cut
by ancient people, so forth and

846
01:23:35.439 --> 01:23:42.439
so on. Go ahead. I'm
sorry, Well, I can't say definitely,

847
01:23:42.840 --> 01:23:49.159
I'm inclined to believe that it's real. There have been suggestions that that

848
01:23:49.159 --> 01:23:59.840
that her father, Mitchell Hedges,
had it made by somebody in the eighteen

849
01:24:00.079 --> 01:24:02.359
and he's or something. He was
a strange character. There's a whole book,

850
01:24:03.039 --> 01:24:10.600
an autobiography that wrote called Danger Mai
Ally. He befriended this starving Russian

851
01:24:10.640 --> 01:24:14.560
guy and fed him and clothed him
for the ages. Who was a refugee

852
01:24:14.840 --> 01:24:20.800
who turned out to be Trotsky?
Who's Trotsky? He was one of the

853
01:24:20.800 --> 01:24:29.640
revolutionaries in Russia. Oh oh,
okay, learned you know? And then

854
01:24:30.640 --> 01:24:34.720
his book is absolutely astonishing. He
he also owned one of the most precious

855
01:24:34.760 --> 01:24:40.560
objects in the world, called the
Black Virgin of Kazan icon, which was

856
01:24:40.600 --> 01:24:45.640
credited with having turned Napoleon back when
he was in its magic power. The

857
01:24:45.159 --> 01:24:50.520
Orthodox Russian Orthodox believed the Black Virgin
turned back Napoleon when he was invading Russia.

858
01:24:51.159 --> 01:24:56.279
Now it was covered with something called
a reza, that's ri i z

859
01:24:57.000 --> 01:25:03.279
a, which is a gold covering
studied in emeralds, and the world's largest

860
01:25:03.359 --> 01:25:11.880
emerald was on that reza over that
icon. And he owned that he was

861
01:25:11.960 --> 01:25:15.960
friends of all the main well,
he was a friend of JP Morgan and

862
01:25:16.000 --> 01:25:23.520
all those kind of people of Douven
and and all the big dealers and all

863
01:25:23.560 --> 01:25:29.880
the multimillionaires. And he was a
very strange man. And he bought a

864
01:25:29.880 --> 01:25:34.800
castle that he lived in called Farley
Castle. Sammy took me to see it,

865
01:25:35.640 --> 01:25:42.680
and she said to me, we
won't tell them we're coming, because

866
01:25:42.720 --> 01:25:47.279
when I sold it, she said
it was bought by Simon the Red,

867
01:25:47.319 --> 01:25:54.319
the king of the Gypsies. So
we sneaked around and she showed me all

868
01:25:54.359 --> 01:25:57.239
the garden in the castle and everything, but not on the inside, because

869
01:25:59.359 --> 01:26:03.159
you don't just walk into the King
of the Gypsy's house like that. And

870
01:26:04.880 --> 01:26:11.159
she picked a camellia for me and
said, press it and keep it forever.

871
01:26:11.680 --> 01:26:16.239
She was very romantic and very interesting, lovely woman, and she talked

872
01:26:16.239 --> 01:26:24.039
about her childhood because she was adopted, you see, and he didn't have

873
01:26:24.119 --> 01:26:26.119
any children, in fact, I
don't think he was ever married, but

874
01:26:26.159 --> 01:26:30.800
he adopted this waife who was a
French Canadian origin. And later on she

875
01:26:30.920 --> 01:26:38.960
left Readying the town of Reading in
England, which is where I met her,

876
01:26:39.520 --> 01:26:43.880
and moved back to Canada, where
she did have some relatives that she

877
01:26:43.920 --> 01:26:47.560
had traced, and she lived the
rest of her days out in Canada.

878
01:26:47.600 --> 01:26:50.279
So I didn't see her then,
because I've actually never been to Canada,

879
01:26:50.840 --> 01:26:58.000
and she was a fascinating woman,
and she told me in very great detail

880
01:26:58.039 --> 01:27:02.520
about how she discovered the skull.
She did she she found it under an

881
01:27:02.600 --> 01:27:08.840
altar, right. No, she
said that she was busy cutting the vines

882
01:27:08.880 --> 01:27:14.600
off of pyramid, which was what
they spent most of their time doing,

883
01:27:15.159 --> 01:27:19.720
and as she was pulling the vines
away, she noticed something sparkle from between

884
01:27:19.840 --> 01:27:26.640
some of the stones, and she
removed the stones and concealed behind the stones

885
01:27:26.680 --> 01:27:31.000
in the side of the pyramid,
which normally nobody could ever have known or

886
01:27:31.039 --> 01:27:34.560
found. It's just that the light
was in the right angle or something,

887
01:27:35.119 --> 01:27:42.600
and she was pulling the vines off, she pulled some glassy looking thing out

888
01:27:42.640 --> 01:27:45.880
and it was the skull of Doom
And as it came to be named,

889
01:27:46.479 --> 01:27:53.920
and it was in perfect condition.
It had been concealed there. I would

890
01:27:53.960 --> 01:28:00.079
say that it was never archaeologically lost, it was never buried anything. Okay,

891
01:28:00.800 --> 01:28:06.640
it was kept by some surviving priest
or secret society of the descendants of

892
01:28:06.680 --> 01:28:11.560
the Maya, something like that,
and that they kept it hidden there where

893
01:28:11.600 --> 01:28:14.720
no one could ever find it unless
they knew how many steps up the pyramid

894
01:28:14.760 --> 01:28:17.520
to go and exactly where to look. But she found it by chance,

895
01:28:19.439 --> 01:28:25.079
and it was very cleverly concealed but
accessible. It wasn't too difficult for her

896
01:28:25.079 --> 01:28:29.880
to pull it out once she removed
the stone that was blocking it, and

897
01:28:29.960 --> 01:28:32.079
that that was where it was,
and that it was in perfect condition.

898
01:28:33.600 --> 01:28:39.479
It had never been buried or anything
like that, and it had always been

899
01:28:39.640 --> 01:28:47.600
a very priceless, sacred not to
mention mystical or magical object for those local

900
01:28:47.680 --> 01:28:54.079
people ever since the collapse of the
Maya. That they had kept that because

901
01:28:54.119 --> 01:28:59.720
it was considered to have magical powers, and she believed it did, and

902
01:29:00.520 --> 01:29:04.920
so she was very casual. She
handed it to me. She kept in

903
01:29:04.920 --> 01:29:11.520
an velvet mind box, and I
said, well can I Can I touch

904
01:29:11.560 --> 01:29:15.079
it? Oh? Yes? And
she I was allowed to pick it up

905
01:29:15.119 --> 01:29:18.640
and rested on my shoulder. And
a friend who was with me said,

906
01:29:18.720 --> 01:29:24.359
it is something very strange here,
because that skull was exactly a replica of

907
01:29:24.399 --> 01:29:29.920
your own skull, Robert. Yes, yeah, I'm sure you didn't pose

908
01:29:30.000 --> 01:29:39.479
for it. And it has a
detachable jawa and so it was also cold.

909
01:29:40.199 --> 01:29:45.359
You know, rock crystal can be
quite cold and or it can be

910
01:29:45.399 --> 01:29:49.479
quite warm. Rock crystal is a
very strange material, and so I described

911
01:29:49.520 --> 01:29:56.000
this and I talked about her and
how this all came about. But I

912
01:29:56.000 --> 01:29:59.479
took that out of the main part
of the book, and it's Appendix one.

913
01:30:00.720 --> 01:30:02.000
I call it the Skull of Doom, which was the name that they

914
01:30:02.000 --> 01:30:10.479
adopted for this skull. And so
all the people who are into crystal skulls,

915
01:30:10.520 --> 01:30:13.760
of whom there are now a lot, at that time in nineteen sixty

916
01:30:13.760 --> 01:30:16.399
three, nobody had ever heard of
it. I was going to ask you,

917
01:30:16.399 --> 01:30:21.159
you don't get into any detail regarding
an analysis in the early sixties,

918
01:30:21.239 --> 01:30:29.359
because no one really thought about that. But at any point any people that

919
01:30:29.399 --> 01:30:34.079
you were connected with who had seen
the skull, did they make any comments

920
01:30:34.079 --> 01:30:39.760
about the sophistication of the carving?
Oh? No, nobody had really studied

921
01:30:39.760 --> 01:30:42.800
it. In fact, I'm the
one who told Arthur C. Clarke about

922
01:30:42.800 --> 01:30:46.920
it, and he became so obsessed
by it that he used the image of

923
01:30:46.960 --> 01:30:55.840
that skull as the initial image of
his many episodes of his television series Okay,

924
01:30:56.760 --> 01:30:59.880
which were I forget what he called
the television series, and then there

925
01:30:59.920 --> 01:31:06.239
was a sequel series something about strange
whatever. I can't remember what he called

926
01:31:06.239 --> 01:31:11.680
the series, but he used the
image of that skull as his main theme

927
01:31:11.960 --> 01:31:15.079
image, the motif. Every program
started with the picture of the skull.

928
01:31:16.199 --> 01:31:20.479
And that's because I told him about
it. Okay, interesting, Yeah,

929
01:31:20.560 --> 01:31:26.000
I had years ago. I'm not
that long ago. In the mid nineties

930
01:31:26.079 --> 01:31:36.159
nineteen nineties, IBM scientists took it
here in Santase, California and actually studied

931
01:31:36.159 --> 01:31:42.640
it. He was an expert on
lenses and he believes that whoever cut it

932
01:31:43.039 --> 01:31:49.159
had unknown technology. Because of the
level of the cutting, they don't understand

933
01:31:49.159 --> 01:31:54.039
what it was cut with, which
makes it quite unique. Well, I

934
01:31:54.079 --> 01:31:59.359
remember Sammy saying to me that she
had consulted a couple of experts and that

935
01:31:59.439 --> 01:32:02.640
they had said and that this is
something that would have had to be ground

936
01:32:04.279 --> 01:32:10.239
over the course of many, many
years, two or three human lifetimes by

937
01:32:10.399 --> 01:32:15.880
sand. The polish is perfect.
Yeah, To get a huge piece of

938
01:32:15.920 --> 01:32:20.520
crystal that size with not a single
flaw in itself was an amazing accomplishment,

939
01:32:21.239 --> 01:32:26.079
and that it would have taken me
as much as three lifetimes to grind it

940
01:32:26.720 --> 01:32:32.920
by using sand. Sand. Yeah, and they couldn't understand how it was

941
01:32:32.960 --> 01:32:39.319
possible. Frankly, I don't think
anybody using any technology, including our most

942
01:32:39.359 --> 01:32:44.880
advanced today, could really do it. I don't get it. I don't

943
01:32:44.960 --> 01:32:47.920
understand. She didn't understand. Yeah, I think anybody understands, although some

944
01:32:48.039 --> 01:32:53.079
pretend they do it. Well,
that's what the whole curiosity of it is

945
01:32:53.199 --> 01:33:01.119
is like it actually transition transitions time. It's beyond I understanding of. As

946
01:33:01.159 --> 01:33:09.560
we conclude, I want to talk
about the highlights that you describe on telescopes.

947
01:33:10.439 --> 01:33:19.000
And there is a writer that you
describe that lived about sixty four BC

948
01:33:20.239 --> 01:33:31.319
that talks about telescopes Strabo Strabo,
and this is a very rare piece of

949
01:33:31.479 --> 01:33:36.640
writing that you were able to find
because we have such a little documentation from

950
01:33:36.680 --> 01:33:43.880
that earlier period. Talk about him
if he would, and let's introduce the

951
01:33:44.000 --> 01:33:50.600
earliest telescopes that we know about well. Strabo was a man who was independently

952
01:33:50.640 --> 01:34:00.680
wealthy. He was left a large
fortune by his father, and he decided

953
01:34:00.239 --> 01:34:10.199
to spend all the money traveling across
the entire known world and very detailed books

954
01:34:10.279 --> 01:34:18.279
of very detailed geographies. He was
basically the founding father of modern geography.

955
01:34:18.880 --> 01:34:24.439
It was largely topographical. That is, he would describe all the temples and

956
01:34:24.479 --> 01:34:29.199
the shrines and the sacred groves and
everything as he went. It wasn't purely

957
01:34:29.199 --> 01:34:35.960
geographical, but he wrote these fantastically
detailed accounts of all these weird places that

958
01:34:36.000 --> 01:34:42.479
he visited. And along the way
he would say, oh, and I

959
01:34:42.520 --> 01:34:45.359
found this object and that object,
and I was told this story and that

960
01:34:45.479 --> 01:34:49.640
story. But he's rather dry.
He's not what you'd call lively writer.

961
01:34:50.520 --> 01:34:57.319
He's rather dry, but it's totally
spellbinding because of the information, and he

962
01:34:57.960 --> 01:35:01.920
describes the cults and the religions,
ceremonies and things within the limits of what

963
01:35:02.119 --> 01:35:08.000
was proper. All ancient writers get
to a certain point when they're talking about

964
01:35:08.079 --> 01:35:13.439
religious ceremonies and they stop because they
say it would be impious, it would

965
01:35:13.479 --> 01:35:17.640
be against piety to tell the real
central secrets. But they give the outside

966
01:35:17.680 --> 01:35:23.479
story. It's very hard to get
the real full counts of like the ceremonies

967
01:35:23.479 --> 01:35:26.840
at Eleusis and that kind of thing. I've done a huge amount of research

968
01:35:26.920 --> 01:35:32.399
on that. I've written books about
all that sort of thing and talk about

969
01:35:32.439 --> 01:35:40.960
anomalies. In fact, I have
discovered the original site of Delphi, actually,

970
01:35:41.199 --> 01:35:45.399
yes, Delphi, with the one
that's visited today by the Churich buses.

971
01:35:46.000 --> 01:35:53.680
It's classic Delphi and it was founded
about eight hundred BC, and there

972
01:35:53.800 --> 01:35:59.239
was an earlier Delphi much higher up
the mountain, eight miles further up,

973
01:35:59.399 --> 01:36:04.760
in fact, the big mountain mountain
Parnassis and and I have found that site

974
01:36:05.319 --> 01:36:13.039
and it's prehistoric. It goes back
to twenty two hundred BC. And as

975
01:36:13.039 --> 01:36:16.119
you, I mean, you're crunching
on prehistoric pottery as you walk on the

976
01:36:16.199 --> 01:36:19.279
site. Actually you have to be
careful where you put your feet. And

977
01:36:20.439 --> 01:36:29.399
I paid for some Greek archaeologists to
do a trial pit excavations there to verify

978
01:36:29.439 --> 01:36:35.000
the site, and they they did. There's some stone building foundations there and

979
01:36:35.079 --> 01:36:43.159
they found an ivory comb and we
we verified the fact that it is the

980
01:36:43.199 --> 01:36:47.359
original Dealthy. So I'm always doing
that kind of thing, but unfortunately there's

981
01:36:47.359 --> 01:36:56.239
a limited what one person can do. And and it's financially challenging as well.

982
01:36:56.319 --> 01:37:02.239
I'm sure, yes, it's it's
also a bit exhausting when you're climbing

983
01:37:02.359 --> 01:37:10.800
up huge mountains. Yeah. Uh
So what's the earliest telescope that we know

984
01:37:10.920 --> 01:37:16.920
about? What is the I mean, I think you write that the Old

985
01:37:17.039 --> 01:37:23.560
Kingdom had telescopes, the Egyptian had
telescopes, yet because they had to have

986
01:37:23.640 --> 01:37:28.399
them in order to do the optical
surveying to the pyramids. That's the first

987
01:37:28.560 --> 01:37:34.399
bit. But do we do we
have known writing where they are describing the

988
01:37:34.439 --> 01:37:41.920
moon or perhaps Mars, or like
the Maya were very big on Venus and

989
01:37:42.079 --> 01:37:45.000
some of the slow, slow moving
plants that we can see at night.

990
01:37:46.119 --> 01:37:50.880
Well, the trouble with Egyptian writings
is that they had no public at least

991
01:37:50.880 --> 01:37:56.439
certainly not in the Old Kingdom period, and anything that was written down was

992
01:37:56.479 --> 01:38:00.079
written for themselves, you know,
the priests would would it carved things on

993
01:38:00.159 --> 01:38:05.000
the walls only from the fifth dynasty
onwards, mind you, before that in

994
01:38:05.000 --> 01:38:11.159
the Old Kingdom there was never any
inscription on any wall. I was absolutely

995
01:38:11.239 --> 01:38:15.880
not done, which is one thing
that helps you date things. And I've

996
01:38:15.880 --> 01:38:21.000
done a lot of work on Old
Kingdom sites. Actually I've made some discoveries

997
01:38:21.880 --> 01:38:29.920
with Old Kingdom sites, but not
as an excavator. I don't have excavated

998
01:38:30.760 --> 01:38:33.239
because you have to have a special
excavation permit to do anything of that kind.

999
01:38:33.920 --> 01:38:41.239
But you don't have to be an
excavator to find things. And I've

1000
01:38:41.279 --> 01:38:45.239
made some very very important discoveries and
of course a lot of it's not published.

1001
01:38:45.720 --> 01:38:53.439
I've just got too much stuff to
write. And I've done a very,

1002
01:38:53.560 --> 01:38:57.119
very extensive and detailed study of the
Temple of Seti the first and the

1003
01:38:57.159 --> 01:39:00.680
Assarian it abide Us, which is
on published. I discovered a lot of

1004
01:39:00.960 --> 01:39:08.319
important things which eventually, if I
can just hang on and not go to

1005
01:39:08.359 --> 01:39:13.439
meet the ancestors anytime too soon,
and if I have the energy to keep

1006
01:39:13.479 --> 01:39:16.399
going, I will have to publish
all that. I'm bringing out a book,

1007
01:39:18.399 --> 01:39:23.439
my Search for the Palace of Odysseus. You know, Odysseus of the

1008
01:39:23.680 --> 01:39:30.560
Odyssey, also in Latin as Ulysses, came from the island of Ithaca,

1009
01:39:30.680 --> 01:39:33.560
and he was the king of those
islands there, of which Ipica is one.

1010
01:39:34.159 --> 01:39:41.640
And I've found the site of his
palace, and I've got a book

1011
01:39:41.680 --> 01:39:45.880
about that that's coming out soon.
But I've got a lot of stuff like

1012
01:39:45.920 --> 01:39:50.039
that. It's just a matter of
getting it all into print while I'm still

1013
01:39:50.039 --> 01:39:54.479
alive, because there's nobody else who
could ever do well. You've spent a

1014
01:39:54.520 --> 01:40:00.880
lot of time in those places.
Talk about the you mentioned a at Karnak

1015
01:40:00.960 --> 01:40:08.079
Temple, a telescope that is six
hundred yards long. I don't understand that.

1016
01:40:08.159 --> 01:40:11.960
Oh, yes, yes, well
that's very interesting. That was Sir

1017
01:40:12.000 --> 01:40:17.279
Norman Locker, a very famous astronomer, became interested in the Egyptian temples for

1018
01:40:17.359 --> 01:40:25.199
astronomical reasons because of the astronomical observations
not so much up in the sky as

1019
01:40:25.239 --> 01:40:30.319
at the horizons. And so he
went to Egypt and he studied all these

1020
01:40:30.560 --> 01:40:34.279
places, especially the Great Temple at
Karnak. Yes, and he was able

1021
01:40:34.359 --> 01:40:42.760
to demonstrate that basically the Temple of
Karnak was a six hundred foot long horizontal

1022
01:40:42.840 --> 01:40:46.880
telescope to study what happens at the
horizon. So that's more of an observational

1023
01:40:48.880 --> 01:40:57.520
site survey rather than optics embedded in
stone or in tubes. But as far

1024
01:40:57.520 --> 01:41:00.840
as we know, there were there. They didn't need to the lenses there

1025
01:41:00.880 --> 01:41:05.960
they they're interested in them. The
rising of the sun of a solstice,

1026
01:41:06.159 --> 01:41:13.640
and it would go down that long
term which had buffers the the the the

1027
01:41:13.680 --> 01:41:16.560
columns were arranged in such a way, and then they had curtains and so

1028
01:41:16.640 --> 01:41:23.560
on to narrow the beam so that
when it finally came to the inner sanctum

1029
01:41:24.600 --> 01:41:30.960
and struck the wall behind the altar, it would be a disc the and

1030
01:41:30.960 --> 01:41:35.439
and the texts described the either the
pharaoh or the high priest, or both

1031
01:41:36.640 --> 01:41:41.600
depended. If the pharaoh was there, that year would be in the inner

1032
01:41:41.680 --> 01:41:47.760
sanctum and they would be alone with
raw. But it only lasted two minutes

1033
01:41:48.000 --> 01:41:54.920
once a year wow, and it
was considered a magical moment of union with

1034
01:41:55.039 --> 01:42:00.800
the sun. The pharaoh and the
sun would become one. Now they built

1035
01:42:00.880 --> 01:42:06.760
a six hundred foot long temple to
have this happen. This shows the fanatical

1036
01:42:06.920 --> 01:42:12.800
determination of the Egyptians to get the
calendar right, because this is all to

1037
01:42:12.880 --> 01:42:16.279
do with measuring the precise moments of
the solstice, to get the calendar precise,

1038
01:42:16.960 --> 01:42:21.159
because the calendar was sacred, because
the year was sacred, because it

1039
01:42:21.279 --> 01:42:26.920
was ordered by the gods. And
there was a tremendous deal about the fact

1040
01:42:26.960 --> 01:42:31.479
that it's not an even number of
days. It's three hundred and sixty five

1041
01:42:31.560 --> 01:42:40.319
days plus affraction, and this really
really bothered them. And in fact,

1042
01:42:41.279 --> 01:42:46.640
what they discovered is a slight digression, but it's very important. They discovered

1043
01:42:46.640 --> 01:42:53.640
that that fraction was a number,
which was a sacred number, which is

1044
01:42:53.680 --> 01:43:00.239
the same number that you get if
you're involved in music theory, and we

1045
01:43:00.319 --> 01:43:06.960
know from archaeological evidence that the heptatonic
diatonic scale existed at least two thousand,

1046
01:43:08.039 --> 01:43:14.119
five hundred BC among the Sumerians and
certainly among the Egyptians as well. There's

1047
01:43:14.159 --> 01:43:18.800
a if you have octaves in fifths, and you keep going up the keyboard

1048
01:43:18.840 --> 01:43:23.800
of the piano, let's say,
and playing by octaves, you get to

1049
01:43:23.800 --> 01:43:27.479
a certain number of a frequency number, and if you go up by fits,

1050
01:43:27.520 --> 01:43:30.359
you get to a slightly different one. And the tiny gap between those

1051
01:43:30.359 --> 01:43:39.760
two numbers, because they're not commensurable, is the same as the number of

1052
01:43:39.000 --> 01:43:45.680
the fraction of the year that they
were able to measure. And the Egyptians,

1053
01:43:45.399 --> 01:43:50.800
I've brought written this in some book. Maybe this one knew that they'd

1054
01:43:50.800 --> 01:43:56.399
found the same sacred number in music
and in astronomy. Therefore it must be

1055
01:43:56.399 --> 01:44:03.039
the ultimate secret of the universe.
And this knowledge was passed on eventually to

1056
01:44:03.079 --> 01:44:08.560
the Greeks, which I discussed a
great length. And of course that fraction

1057
01:44:08.760 --> 01:44:14.800
came later to be known as the
Comma of Patagoras, because he built it.

1058
01:44:14.880 --> 01:44:18.359
Goes on and on cliff. The
stuff within the crystal sun is simply

1059
01:44:18.399 --> 01:44:23.159
overwhelmed me. I mean, it
is overwhelming and That's why I had to

1060
01:44:23.159 --> 01:44:27.920
have you on the program before you
leave the planet, because it's amazing.

1061
01:44:28.279 --> 01:44:32.720
The books called The Crystal Sun Rediscovering
a Lost Technology of the Ancient World.

1062
01:44:32.760 --> 01:44:39.359
And my guest today has been Robert
Temple, and we could talk for another

1063
01:44:40.079 --> 01:44:46.239
day on the material in this book. I as we conclude, Robert,

1064
01:44:46.239 --> 01:44:56.800
I'd like to get your sense of
which cultures first of all, of the

1065
01:44:56.840 --> 01:45:02.520
four hundred plus lenses you found,
any would you say are for telescopes versus

1066
01:45:02.640 --> 01:45:10.319
optical correction? Well, simple magnifying
lenses were extremely common because they had to

1067
01:45:10.359 --> 01:45:13.680
be used by the craftsmen, so
they were all over the place. I

1068
01:45:13.680 --> 01:45:15.880
mean there must be thousands I have. The easiest to find, is what

1069
01:45:15.920 --> 01:45:20.479
you're saying. Oh, yes,
because they were in constant use. Okay,

1070
01:45:20.279 --> 01:45:26.600
the the ones used for starting sacred
fires of course by the priests.

1071
01:45:26.960 --> 01:45:30.199
Okay. And they had these in
China too. I haven't mentioned China,

1072
01:45:30.239 --> 01:45:32.840
but that's that's also in the book, because you know, I wrote a

1073
01:45:32.880 --> 01:45:38.920
whole book about Chinese technology, right
and called The Genius of China. Did

1074
01:45:38.960 --> 01:45:42.439
you go to any Did you go
to the National Museum in Mexico City and

1075
01:45:42.960 --> 01:45:46.880
find lenses there? No but I
know that there are lenses in Mesoamerica.

1076
01:45:47.520 --> 01:45:51.800
What museums are they? Are they
in or did you have somebody contact you

1077
01:45:51.880 --> 01:45:58.439
that was finding them? In field
study, I came across evidence of them,

1078
01:45:58.439 --> 01:46:00.359
and I spoke to people who knew
about them, but I was never

1079
01:46:00.399 --> 01:46:05.600
able to go there myself. And
I wrote this book before there was an

1080
01:46:05.600 --> 01:46:13.159
enginet and two thousand your two thousand
really nineteen ninety nined was published in two

1081
01:46:13.239 --> 01:46:21.039
thousand. Oh, you can find
out distant things more easily now. So

1082
01:46:21.199 --> 01:46:28.159
again, of the four hundred lenses
you're saying, quantity were used for starting

1083
01:46:28.239 --> 01:46:33.199
fire and then there was ultimately for
magnification manification. All you need to do

1084
01:46:33.279 --> 01:46:36.680
is take too magnifying lenses and hould
them up together and you've got your telescope

1085
01:46:36.720 --> 01:46:41.800
and stick them in a tube so
you don't know they could have doubled up.

1086
01:46:41.880 --> 01:46:45.079
You see, it's that man really
meant your telescope. So the other

1087
01:46:45.199 --> 01:46:48.920
question I have is obviously, if
they're in the museums, they are missed,

1088
01:46:50.159 --> 01:46:57.279
you know, identifying them as whatever, crystal or whatever, so you're

1089
01:46:57.439 --> 01:47:01.239
you have to reinterpret them. Yes, these were all hidden in the basements.

1090
01:47:01.920 --> 01:47:04.600
None of them are called lenses.
Nobody would admit they were lenses.

1091
01:47:04.680 --> 01:47:13.279
What do they call them? Objects? Oh? Or or like a raw

1092
01:47:13.359 --> 01:47:18.680
crystal stones or something? There still
objects medallion or they don't know. And

1093
01:47:18.720 --> 01:47:23.880
they make out that totally transparent piece
of crystal was an item of jewelry.

1094
01:47:23.920 --> 01:47:27.920
But you can see it's not gonna
be much of a jewelry. You can

1095
01:47:27.960 --> 01:47:32.319
see the clothing behind it, and
it's completely ridiculous. On occasions they would

1096
01:47:32.479 --> 01:47:36.720
they would say that it's it looks
rather like it's in the shape of a

1097
01:47:36.800 --> 01:47:42.359
lens, and so we'll call it
a lenoid shape. But they would never

1098
01:47:42.439 --> 01:47:46.720
admit that it's a lens, never, because they're convinced that they could not

1099
01:47:46.840 --> 01:47:51.199
be lenses. And I found over
and I had I had to stop.

1100
01:47:51.720 --> 01:47:55.520
I mean, you could spend your
life on New thousands. They're everywhere,

1101
01:47:55.920 --> 01:48:01.640
They're everywhere. That's amazing. I
for those of you listening, it's always

1102
01:48:01.640 --> 01:48:05.000
a pleasure to speak to Robert.
But he is going to help me put

1103
01:48:05.000 --> 01:48:10.319
together a small gallery. And I'm
going to use the photos that are in

1104
01:48:10.399 --> 01:48:14.199
this book. You can see them
on our Facebook page. Quote to Earth

1105
01:48:14.239 --> 01:48:18.159
Ancients on Facebook either that, I'll
have them both on the group page as

1106
01:48:18.159 --> 01:48:26.000
well as the fan page, and
this will include the black and white as

1107
01:48:26.000 --> 01:48:30.720
well as the color photographs, which
are phenomenal. And you can see exactly

1108
01:48:30.760 --> 01:48:36.640
what we've been talking about because in
some cases Robert's being very specific about concave

1109
01:48:38.319 --> 01:48:44.560
versus convex and the cuts, and
there's actually a diagram in here on actually

1110
01:48:44.640 --> 01:48:48.039
how they are cut. Right.
Yes, at the beginning of the book,

1111
01:48:48.119 --> 01:48:53.760
I show drawing of the five types
of lenses and give them so that

1112
01:48:54.079 --> 01:48:58.319
before people even really get into the
book, they know that basic information.

1113
01:48:58.399 --> 01:49:00.920
You have to know the types,
You have to know what convex is and

1114
01:49:00.960 --> 01:49:06.439
what concave is. There are many
people who actually don't know the means of

1115
01:49:06.479 --> 01:49:12.520
those words, and why would they. Yeah, so I say, this

1116
01:49:12.600 --> 01:49:15.039
is a convex lens. This is
plano convex, buts flat on one side

1117
01:49:15.079 --> 01:49:19.439
and curved outwards on the other.
That's plano convex. Plano means plat.

1118
01:49:20.239 --> 01:49:25.000
And then then you have a by
convex, which means it's it's contact on

1119
01:49:25.039 --> 01:49:30.399
both sides. Then you have a
concave lens which dips, and then you

1120
01:49:30.479 --> 01:49:33.600
have like a concave lens convex lens
on one side and concave on the other

1121
01:49:33.680 --> 01:49:40.760
to it. It goes along like
that like that, and that's called a

1122
01:49:40.840 --> 01:49:45.800
meniscus lens. But they're very rare. There is a Minoan one, a

1123
01:49:45.840 --> 01:49:50.359
famous Manoan one, or the eye
of the bull's head right on. Okay,

1124
01:49:50.760 --> 01:49:59.920
excavated by the guy who excavated the
Manan ruins. And would you say

1125
01:50:00.119 --> 01:50:05.920
that for the telescope you have to
have a convex and concave lenses to magnify

1126
01:50:06.119 --> 01:50:12.079
the stars, or you have to
have two convex lenses. Two convex lenses.

1127
01:50:12.880 --> 01:50:15.960
Okay, so one brings it in
and then the other one magnifies it.

1128
01:50:16.640 --> 01:50:21.600
Well, it's for some reason it
works if you look through the two

1129
01:50:21.600 --> 01:50:26.399
at once. You don't have to
be a stone age genius. If you've

1130
01:50:26.439 --> 01:50:29.159
got a lens in one hand on
a stone and a lens in the other

1131
01:50:29.199 --> 01:50:31.520
hand to say, I wonder,
okay, I can see all these things

1132
01:50:31.520 --> 01:50:34.520
magnified. I wonder what would happen
if I tried looking through them both at

1133
01:50:34.520 --> 01:50:40.760
the same time. That's a stick
them in a tube, get them at

1134
01:50:40.800 --> 01:50:45.000
the right distance from each other for
the leg right, and you've got your

1135
01:50:45.000 --> 01:50:50.000
evential telescope. Now your image will
be upside down, but you can rectify

1136
01:50:50.079 --> 01:50:54.199
that with a third lens, which
flips the image back to the right way

1137
01:50:54.279 --> 01:51:00.399
up. That's called a rectifying lens
because it flips the image back in the

1138
01:51:00.399 --> 01:51:03.840
way that you're used to seeing it, right Robert, how can people get

1139
01:51:03.840 --> 01:51:06.640
a hold of you? I don't
have your website in front of me.

1140
01:51:06.680 --> 01:51:13.479
What's what was your web? Well? I have a website. It's Robert

1141
01:51:14.520 --> 01:51:21.479
Dash Temple hyphen dash. You can't
run them together, Robert dash Temple dot

1142
01:51:21.560 --> 01:51:28.920
com. Okay, and that's my
personal website. Two of my books have

1143
01:51:29.119 --> 01:51:33.880
dedicated websites of their own. The
one called Egyptian Down is Egyptian Dawn dot

1144
01:51:33.920 --> 01:51:40.359
com. And the one called The
Sphinx Mystery is the Sphinxmistery dot com.

1145
01:51:41.079 --> 01:51:45.840
And all the color photos are there
for those. Robert, it's been a

1146
01:51:45.880 --> 01:51:50.760
real pleasure and we're gonna definitely have
to have you back Egyptian Don. I

1147
01:51:50.760 --> 01:51:55.720
haven't looked at yet, but I
looks like a real great piece of work.

1148
01:51:56.359 --> 01:52:00.880
Thank you very much for your your
book The Crystal Sun, and I'm

1149
01:52:00.880 --> 01:52:05.039
looking forward to really digging into it
a little deeper when I have more time.

1150
01:52:05.079 --> 01:52:09.880
But thanks for joining me today.
Well, Claire's a great pleasure,

1151
01:52:09.920 --> 01:52:14.520
and I wanted to say to all
your listeners and all your viewers, all

1152
01:52:14.560 --> 01:52:16.600
your admirers, of whom they must
be a great many, that you are

1153
01:52:16.600 --> 01:52:34.600
a wonderful God. Thanks appreciate it. You know, it's curious. I

1154
01:52:34.640 --> 01:52:39.159
have this intuition that there's a lot
of gems out there like the Crystal Sun

1155
01:52:40.000 --> 01:52:45.600
and authors like Robert Temple that are
just kind of under the wavelength or under

1156
01:52:45.640 --> 01:52:49.520
the radar. I've mentioned in the
past, people like Charles Ford who wrote

1157
01:52:49.520 --> 01:52:55.760
at the turn of the century about
strange discoveries he had made and strange rumors

1158
01:52:55.800 --> 01:53:00.920
and did their best to kind of
find the evidence behind him. But Robert

1159
01:53:00.960 --> 01:53:06.880
Temple is unique, and I keep
finding bits and pieces that not only helped

1160
01:53:06.880 --> 01:53:12.760
me in understanding my questions, but
I find that a lot of other people

1161
01:53:13.800 --> 01:53:18.119
are having their questions answered as well. This book, Crystal Sun is out

1162
01:53:18.199 --> 01:53:25.760
of print. I did find it
on Amazon. I think I paid twelve

1163
01:53:25.880 --> 01:53:30.680
dollars for it, and you can
get on Amazon. It's a used book,

1164
01:53:31.600 --> 01:53:35.520
but I am sure you can get
it in other book resources if you

1165
01:53:35.560 --> 01:53:41.720
go online. If you're not a
fan of Amazon, there's used bookstores everywhere.

1166
01:53:42.439 --> 01:53:47.000
It's a definite book for your library. It is huge, it's over

1167
01:53:47.079 --> 01:53:51.279
five hundred pages, and you know, you just got to take it one

1168
01:53:51.279 --> 01:53:55.840
step at a time. When I
first looked at it, I was jumping

1169
01:53:55.880 --> 01:53:59.720
all over the place. The photographs
are excellent. And by the way,

1170
01:53:59.800 --> 01:54:05.479
I will be reproducing entire pages from
this book of the ills of the actual

1171
01:54:05.520 --> 01:54:13.800
photos for you to review because they're
outstanding. And as I mentioned at the

1172
01:54:13.840 --> 01:54:18.039
beginning of the program, this is
stuff that is being edited out of our

1173
01:54:19.000 --> 01:54:27.439
consciousness because the historians don't believe it's
important. But if you are digging a

1174
01:54:27.439 --> 01:54:31.039
little deeper into history and you want
to know more, and you want to

1175
01:54:31.119 --> 01:54:38.000
know if they had telescopes, And
by the way, how did the Maya,

1176
01:54:38.119 --> 01:54:44.640
how did the Chinese? How did
the Egyptians know so much about the

1177
01:54:44.640 --> 01:54:48.800
planets that are in our solar system? This is the obvious reason they had

1178
01:54:48.840 --> 01:54:56.560
telescopes. God, so you have
solved a mystery. And by the way,

1179
01:54:57.239 --> 01:55:00.479
there is a lot more in this
book that did not come up in

1180
01:55:00.560 --> 01:55:06.199
our interview. He mentioned crystal skulls, but there's also highly polished plates for

1181
01:55:06.279 --> 01:55:15.439
reflecting. There's a hint at reflecting
telescopes. The burning crystals to light fires

1182
01:55:15.560 --> 01:55:20.279
ceremonially is another area. There's just
a lot more that we didn't have time

1183
01:55:20.319 --> 01:55:29.039
to cover that is featured in this
book. So I highly encourage you to

1184
01:55:29.079 --> 01:55:32.199
go out and get a copy because
there's so much more to cover in there.

1185
01:55:32.279 --> 01:55:35.880
So great they have Robert Temple on
the program. We will have him

1186
01:55:35.960 --> 01:55:41.079
back. I also want to mention
that Robert sent me an article that he

1187
01:55:41.119 --> 01:55:48.960
wrote in nineteen seventy nine on magnetism
in Mesoamerica, specifically Omec culture magnetism.

1188
01:55:49.000 --> 01:55:56.479
Apparently they had discovered a number of
magnetic bars and other what looks like tools

1189
01:55:56.520 --> 01:56:01.000
that were used that were magnetized,
and there's questions about that, and he

1190
01:56:01.079 --> 01:56:06.439
tries to answer that. You can
find that article on Facebook on Earth Ancients

1191
01:56:06.880 --> 01:56:15.359
on the fan page, the Facebook
fan page. It's a challenge when you're

1192
01:56:15.399 --> 01:56:17.279
out getting everybody gifts and you're wondering, you know, what about me,

1193
01:56:17.760 --> 01:56:21.159
what's going on? I deserve a
gift, and one of the best gifts

1194
01:56:21.159 --> 01:56:28.720
you can give yourself is a trip
with Earth Ancients to Egypt or Turkey or

1195
01:56:28.760 --> 01:56:32.479
in the fall of twenty twenty four, we will be in Mexico. It's

1196
01:56:32.479 --> 01:56:35.800
gonna be the Yucatan tour. I
just finished the fine tuning on it.

1197
01:56:36.760 --> 01:56:42.520
We've had information about our tours for
years. We started doing tours in twenty

1198
01:56:42.560 --> 01:56:47.720
seventeen, and I've been touring before
that with different organizations. Our tours are

1199
01:56:48.359 --> 01:56:56.720
wonderful and I don't see that lightly. The food, the experience, the

1200
01:56:56.800 --> 01:57:02.439
itinerary is excellent, and I'm really
excited to mention that our Egyptian tour will

1201
01:57:02.439 --> 01:57:06.039
be uh will have some other additions
that we're not going to mention right now,

1202
01:57:06.079 --> 01:57:12.279
but they are fabulous temples that have
never been seen by the general public

1203
01:57:12.319 --> 01:57:15.880
will be on the tour. We
also go to Memphis, which has the

1204
01:57:16.159 --> 01:57:21.359
one of the only outdoor museums that
is filled with relics that will just blow

1205
01:57:21.399 --> 01:57:27.439
your mind. For the full itinerary
on either Egypt, Turkey which is in

1206
01:57:27.479 --> 01:57:32.239
August, or Mexico, go to
Earth Ancients dot Com forward Slash Tours get

1207
01:57:32.279 --> 01:57:35.039
on board before the end of the
year. You get a few hundred bucks

1208
01:57:35.039 --> 01:57:43.760
off if you use the code get
Grant Egyptian Tour twenty twenty four. Again,

1209
01:57:44.359 --> 01:57:50.600
these are world class tours, extremely
reasonably reprised. These are wonderful tours.

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You will have a blast. If
you go to our Facebook page or

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01:57:57.399 --> 01:58:00.760
Facebook can go to Earth Ancients you
will see examples of the various places we

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01:58:00.840 --> 01:58:09.479
go and you can see Muhammad is
our tour guide and he is a pleasure

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01:58:10.159 --> 01:58:15.920
to travel with. His team will
make sure if you travel to Egypt or

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01:58:15.039 --> 01:58:24.239
Turkey that you are treated and experience
world class tour. And that means the

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01:58:24.359 --> 01:58:30.720
minute you jump into Cairo or you
fly into Istanbul for Turkey, your tour

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01:58:30.039 --> 01:58:35.359
begins and everything's handled for you.
It's a fantastic organization to work with at

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01:58:35.439 --> 01:58:41.159
Salad Tours and I've been using them
for years. You'll love the tour.

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01:58:41.199 --> 01:58:46.680
I hope you can join us Earthancients
dot com, forward Slash Tours. All

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01:58:46.760 --> 01:58:48.840
right, that's it for this week. I want to thank my guest today

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01:58:48.960 --> 01:58:58.000
Robert Temple, Gail Tour and in
London, Mark Foster. You guys rock

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all right, take care, we
will and we will talk to you next time.