Speaker 1: I want you to start with a compelling image. Imagine
the pure thrill of discovery, that moment you find something
truly ancient, meeting the soul crushing frustration of secrecy. Think
about a biblical treasure hunt, but it's not Indiana Jones's
commissioned by the CIA, a program that's been millions of
dollars hunting for the Ark of the Covenant using nothing
but psychic spies. Or what about a two thousand year
old script, a key to our history, locked away in
a safe by just eight people who refuse to share it?
Speaker 2: Sounds like fishion?
Speaker 1: It does what makes an ancient relic so important, so
powerful that entire institutions fight over who gets to see it,
or the people will literally risk their lives to hide it.
Welcome to thrilling Threads. We really appreciate you trusting us
with your sources for this. Today, we are diving into
this world of artifacts that well, they just refuse to
be fully understood. Sometimes they're guarded by physical vaults, sometimes
by institutional control, and sometimes just by sheer linguistic obscurity.
A listener wants to know the real stories behind these
highly classified, these really enigmatic relics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we're going to try to cut through some
of that classifications from the mystery. We want to uncover
not just what these objects are, but why why were
they so desperately concealed, and why in many cases do
they remain concealed even now.
Speaker 1: It's really an investigation into control itself, isn't it?
Speaker 2: It is because the real story here isn't just about
you know, how old the gold is or how fragile
the scrolls are. It's about the very human decisions that
were made to hoard knowledge, to restrict it, sometimes even
to destroy it.
Speaker 1: And those decisions, whether they were made by a pharaoh
forty five hundred years ago or handful of scholars in
the nineteen fifties, they have dictated what parts of history
we are allowed to read today.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, So we've structured this to follow the journey of
these secrets. We're going to explore four main categories of
these mysterious artifacts and the different ways that access to
them is blocked.
Speaker 1: Okay, laid out for us.
Speaker 2: So first we'll look at restricted texts. This is where
we get into the stunning academic scandal of the Dead
Sea Scrolls and the truly bizarre governmental classification around the
CIA's paranormal pursuit of the arc of the Covenant.
Speaker 1: Right institutional and political gatekeeping exactly.
Speaker 2: Then we transition into the high stakes world of hitting gold.
Here the classification is purely for preservation. We'll look at
national treasures that were physically saved from brutal conflicts in
Afghanistan and I rock by I mean sheer courage and
operational secrecy. After that, third we examine what we're calling
secret voids. This is the incredibly modern discovery of a
massive hidden structure inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. It's
a secret that was hiding in plain sight for millennia,
only revealed by cosmic rays.
Speaker 1: A secret inside the most studied monument on Earth. That's incredible.
Speaker 2: And finally, and finally, we confront lost languages. This is
where we'll examine the profound silence that's imposed by linguistic obscurity.
We'll look at the face dose disc and then the
just ear of Ciple tragedy of the Wrongo script from
Easter Island.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a journey that reveals just how fragile
human knowledge really is. Okay, let's unpack this, starting with
what has to be the ultimate academic scandal, the restriction
of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is a story of
a truly revolutionary find that, instead of immediately benefiting the
world of scholarship, was immediately strangled, just completely strangled by
a handful of intellectual gatekeepers. It created decades of needless secrecy.
Speaker 2: And the discovery itself, I mean, it has the perfect
cinematic start. It's nineteen forty seven. We're near the cliffs
above the Dead Sea, close to a place called Kumran.
A young Bedouin shepherd, probably looking for a stray goat.
He's just tossing rocks into cave openings to pass the time. Yeah, exactly,
And instead of silence from one cave, he hears the
distinct sound of pottery breaking. So he climbs in and
he finds these tall jars, some of them are holding
scrolls that have been carefully wrapped in linen. It was
a complete total accident, a stumble upon what became arguably
the most significant archaeological find of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: And the moment those scrolls were pulled out of that cave,
I mean, history changed. Their significance was immediate. It was profound.
We are talking about biblical manuscripts that were verified to
be over two thousand years old.
Speaker 2: Yeah, from the Second Temple period, which.
Speaker 1: Before this our oldest reliable texts were much much younger.
Suddenly scholars had access to documents that shone a completely
new light on early Judaism, on the very foundations of Christianity.
They found variant readings, They revealed the existence of Jewish
sects like the Esscenes in spectacular detail. It was a
massive historical inflection point.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. The documents included the oldest known copies of nearly
every single book of the Hebrew Bible, and along with
those there were apocryphal and sectarian texts that no one
had ever seen before. The implications were just staggering. It
was an almost perfectly preserved time capsule of religious thought
from two millenniago.
Speaker 1: But then then came to locke out, the profound, frustrating lockout.
The scrolls ended up largely under the control of the
Israeli Antiquities Authority, which makes sense, But the actual research,
the publication that was managed by a tiny self appointed
international editorial committee.
Speaker 2: And when you say tiny, you mean I.
Speaker 1: Mean we were talking about a microscopic council of maybe
eight scholars in total. For all of these hundreds of tech,
eight people. They were primarily Western, often Catholic scholars, and
they were the only ones who had the authority to
determine what was worthy of study, what could be published,
and crucially, what would remain sealed away from everyone else.
Speaker 2: And this is where the motivations get really complex. It
goes beyond just simple academic ego, though that was certainly
a part of it.
Speaker 1: Oh, for sure, they held this exclusive intellectual property.
Speaker 2: They did, But there was also a kind of institutional fear.
These eight scholars were acutely aware that some of these
newly discovered texts contains significant variance from the established authoritative
biblical canons, you know, the versions that people had been
reading for centuries.
Speaker 1: Right. Releasing that too quickly could be destabilizing, it.
Speaker 2: Could be so releasing this material without very careful interpretation
it risked, in their minds, upsetting traditional religious narratives held
by billions of people. So they moved incredibly slowly. Maybe
it was out of caution, but it was certainly out
of a desire for complete control over the narrative that
came out.
Speaker 1: And That is the core conflict, isn't it. This fear
of textual corruption or revealing politically uncomfortable truths meant that
the rest of the academic world, I mean, the vast
community of historians, theologians, linguists, they were all completely locked
out for decades.
Speaker 2: For decades, I mean to put this into perspective for you,
This wasn't a matter of a few months or a
few years. For nearly fifty years, this small select group
maintained a complete monopoly over this monumental material.
Speaker 1: It's unbelievable.
Speaker 2: By the late nineteen eighties, that's four decades after the find,
less than half of the estimated nine hundred manuscripts had
even been fully publish. Think about that, Think of the
collective intellectual opportunity that was just lost. Historians who requested
access were just denied, often with some vague excuse or
no explanation at all. It's just a breath taking betrayal
of scholarly responsibility. The frustration within the wider academic community,
it just became volcanic, I mean, you can imagine, and
it reached a boiling point. In the early nineteen nineties,
the Biblical Archaeology Review which was led by a man
named Herschel Shanks became the most vocal critic. They rightfully
started labeling the whole situation a scandal because it was.
It was. They argued that a handful of people were
holding the keys to global religious history hostage. And they
were right.
Speaker 1: And so the turning point it finally arrived in nineteen
ninety one, and it was driven by technology and really
institutional defiance. It wasn't driven by the grace of the
original gatekeepers. They didn't just decide to open up.
Speaker 2: No, their hand was forced.
Speaker 1: That's the beauty of it. The technological and ethical pressure
just became irresistible. So what happened first?
Speaker 2: Okay, so first a massive ethical statement was made by
the Huntington Library in California. They had received for their
own archive a full set of photographs of the scrolls.
They were intended for one of the original committee members.
They reviewed their mission and they decided that, you know what,
knowledge should be public, and so they opened full, unrestricted
public access to their entire photo archive of the scrolls.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: This completely shattered the control mechanism of the original committee.
Speaker 1: They essentially just said, we have the photocopies and we're
sharing them with the world. Yeah, that had to be
a massive blow to the control exerted by the Israeli
Antiquities Authority and that committee.
Speaker 2: It was huge. And at the same time, concurrent with that,
the scientific community, who were just tired of waiting for permission,
started leveraging new computer analysis techniques. They used software to
analyze the published fragments and the letter styles, which allowed
them to use frequency analysis and complex pattern recognition to
reconstruct the previously unpublished texts. They were essentially bypassing the
old guard entirely, so they.
Speaker 1: Were rebuilding the puzzle from the pieces that had been leaked.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and it proved that the texts were readable, even
if the photographs were poor quality.
Speaker 1: So the combination of a photographic leak and digital reconstruction
it just forced their hand. Once the material was out
there and independent researchers were proving they could reconstruct it anyway,
the Israeli Antiquity Authority had no moral or logistical basis
to keep up the restrictions.
Speaker 2: They had no choice. They were forced to lift the
restrictions and open the doors fully.
Speaker 1: It was a triumphant moment for open scholarship. But we
have to acknowledge the cost we do.
Speaker 2: When the scrolls were finally opened, an entire generation of
scholars I'm talking about those who had trained in the
nineteen sixties and seventies had effectively been sidelined. Their whole
careers could have been built on these central texts, but
the axis was classified for five decades. They aged out,
aged out, they moved to less restricted fields, or they
simply passed away. It's a tragic example of how knowledge
can be restricted, not by military or political classification, but
just by academic inertia and the desire for intellectual property control.
Speaker 1: And what I find so striking is that even today
the restriction isn't entirely gone. You mentioned that a few
specific scrolls from the famous Cave eleven, and this includes
perhaps the most significant texts, the Temple scroll. They're being
privately owned still still and are completely unavailable to researchers.
The knowledge is literally still locked away, but now it's
in a private collection vault. It's perpetuating the original sin
of restriction.
Speaker 2: It really underscores a critical point for this whole discussion.
The classification of ancient artifacts often outlasts the original geopolitical
or academic reasons for that classification.
Speaker 1: That sets a pretty sobering tone for how easily knowledge
can be bottlenecked. Okay, so let's pivot from academic restrictions
to something well far stranger, barmore governmental. Okay, the idea
of the US intelligence community trying to classify and locate
a biblical relic. Here's where it gets truly wild. We're
talking about the US intelligence community hiring psychics to hunt
for the Ark of the Covenant.
Speaker 2: This is a perfect bridge because it moves us from
institutional control to governmental control, and it's all driven by
Cold War paranoia. Many people have seen the movie Raiders
of the Lost Arc and they just dismissed the idea
of a government treasure hunt as pure Hollywood fiction, of course.
But the reality is the CIA and its predecessor agencies
absolutely tried to find the Arc of the Covenant, the
chest said to hold the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments,
using psychic spying.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't some one off, weird project. This was
part of a broader, sustained, and incredibly expensive program. In
December nineteen eighty eight, the CIA was running something called
Project sun.
Speaker 2: Streak, which later morphed into stargate.
Speaker 1: Right, and this involved remote viewing, which was defined by
its proponents as the ability to psychically pursued eve distant
or hidden targets. And the official reason for all this
the Soviet Union was supposedly investing heavily in psychic warfare.
Speaker 2: The psychic arms race exactly.
Speaker 1: The US felt it couldn't afford to fall behind.
Speaker 2: And that's the key. The millions spent on this type
of paranormal research, and it was millions sustained over decades.
It wasn't driven by some widespread belief in the supernatural,
not necessarily, it was driven by sheer Cold war desperation.
They were looking for any edge, any intelligence advantage over
the Soviets, no matter how outlandish the method seemed, even
if it.
Speaker 1: Meant consulting psychics about ancient biblical artifacts, whatever it took.
The specifics of the ARC mission are just fascinating, and
we know this from documents that were declassified years later.
A person designated Remote Viewer thirty two, who has since
been identified in some reports as Joe mcmull was activated
for an unknown target.
Speaker 2: He didn't know what he was looking for, no idea.
Speaker 1: It was later revealed to be the Arc and the
resulting I mean, it was surprisingly detailed.
Speaker 2: What did you see?
Speaker 1: Mcmull described finding a damp, underground chamber somewhere in the
Middle East. He specifically sends people nearby speaking Arabic and
noted domed buildings in the vicinity. The container itself was
described as wooden, covered in gold and silver, and decorated
with winged figures that were either men or angels. The
report even noted this this emotional intensity coming from the object.
Speaker 2: Which, if you compare that to the Book of Exodus,
is an almost perfect match to the traditional Biblical descriptions
of the ARC a gold covered, acacial wood chest topped
by two winged chairubim.
Speaker 1: It's an exact match.
Speaker 2: The level of details suggests either an incredibly accurate psychic
reading or a remote viewer who was very well versed
in Biblical history, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Speaker 1: The irony here is just so rich. This documentation detailing
a psychic search for one of the most famous Biblical artifacts,
was officially declassified back in two thousand, but as you
mentioned earlier, didn't really gain major public attention until much
more recently, around twenty twenty five, and that long delay
highlights something crucial about governmental classification. Often, the US government
classifies the method, in this case, remote viewing, not necessarily
the target itself. The fact that the US government was
funding psychic research was the real secret, not that they
were curious about a historical object.
Speaker 2: And that's the reality check we have to bring to
the forefront here. Despite this incredibly detailed description, the CIA
never actually moved forward. They never funded an archaeological expedition
or a military operation to go dig anything up based
on these readings. It just remained an intriguing piece of
data within a highly controversial program.
Speaker 1: It's the perfect logical loop, isn't it. As one of
the program's participants, Joe mcmull himself later said, claiming remote
viewing proves the arc exists, is well, it's meaningless without
the actual physical arc is proof, of course. It just
illustrates the limits of even a highest levels of government involvement.
They classify the methods, they spent millions on the hope
of a breakthrough, but ultimately the artifact remains classified not
by them, but by history and obscurity.
Speaker 2: So if the Dead Sea Scrolls show us that academic
control can be a powerful bottleneck.
Speaker 1: And the CIA ARC hunt shows us the extremes of
governmental classification driven by paranoia.
Speaker 2: Then our next section reveals how knowledge and artifacts are
controlled by a far more primal force, the simple necessity
of surviving a war.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Moving from relics classified by scholarly or governmental restriction, we
now turn to objects classified by physical necessity. These are
hidden treasures, literally saved from the immediate ravages of war
and civil strife.
Speaker 1: And this speaks to the remarkable foresight, the planning, and
just the raw courage of museum staff and government officials
around the world who chose to risk everything to protect
their national heritage.
Speaker 2: These aren't just objects, they are entire national narratives, packed
into creates and moved under the cover of darkness. And
we have to begin with the till a Teepee treasure
or what translates to the Hill of Gold, a truly
massive discovery made in northern Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: Okay tell us about it.
Speaker 2: The discovery happened in nineteen seventy eight near a place
called Schebrigen by the Soviet archaeologist Victor Serenidi. He uncovered
six burial mounds. These were mounds of an ancient nomadic
people known as the Uezi or Kushan, and what he
found was absolutely staggering. Over twenty thousand golden objects.
Speaker 1: Twenty thousand. That's not just a collection, that's an entire treasury.
We're talking about elaborate crowns that can fold up, necklaces, belts,
tiny gold ornaments shaped like mythological figures, daggers, even golden slippers,
golden slippers. The cultural significance must be immense.
Speaker 2: It is. That's what elevates us from just being wealth
to being priceless heritage. The objects themselves were this breathtaking
fusion of designs. You see Hellenistic influence with coins that
bear Greek inscriptions. You see Roman elements, Persian metalworking, Chinese
silk remnants, and very strong Indian influences.
Speaker 1: So it's a crossroads.
Speaker 2: Crossroads of the world. For example, some pieces show the
Greek goddess Aphrodite standing on a gold medallion, but she's
wearing Central Asian robes. This treasure is tangible, brilliant evidence
that Afghanistan wasn't some cultural backwater, it was the absolute
geographic and cultural hub of ancient civilization. It proves the
vitality of the Silk Road, thousands of years before its
most famous era.
Speaker 1: But just like with the Dead Sea scrolls, the timing
was terrible, horrible.
Speaker 2: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan occurred just one year later
in nineteen seventy nine. The initial reaction was to move
the artifacts to the relative safety of Kabul's National Museum,
but as the civil war intensified throughout the nineteen eighties,
the museum itself became an active battleground and was looted repeatedly.
Speaker 1: I read that the reports in that time were just horrific.
It's estimated that during the civil war and the chaos
that followed, something like seventy percent of the museum's entire
general collection was lost. That's right, lost a thieves to
destruction or it was simply blome own up in the fighting.
That is an unimaginable cultural loss, a systematic erasure of history.
Speaker 2: It was an impending catastrophe for the Tilia Tepe Treasure specifically.
But this is where the quiet heroes of the story
step in recognizing this inevitable slide toward chaos. The president
at the time, Muhammed Najibula, in nineteen eighty nine, he
initiated a covert operation. Okay, he secretly moved the entirety
of the twenty two thousand tilia Teepe gold objects into
an underground, highly reinforced vault located beneath the Central Bank and.
Speaker 1: Kubool and the brilliance of the security system he implemented. Yeah,
it relies entirely on human trust, which you know is
often the most security measure of all.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, to open this vault, five separate keys were required.
Each key was entrusted to a different highly trusted individual,
often a director of the bank or a museum curator,
and their identity was kept completely secret, even from the
other keyholders, So.
Speaker 1: You couldn't just coerce one person.
Speaker 2: No, This operational security was designed to prevent that a
thief or a rival faction could kidnap one person and
get one key, but they would have no idea who
held the remaining four. It made the theft practically impossible, and.
Speaker 1: The extreme nature of this secrecy meant that for over
a decade, as the government fell and the war raged
and the Taliban took control, the treasure was widely thought
to be lost.
Speaker 2: Everyone assumed it was gone rumored to have been sold
off on the black market or melted down by various factions.
The secrecy was so profound that only a literal handful
of people alive knew the artifacts were safe and knew
exactly where they were. It's a stunning example of long
term planning and loyalty trumping greed.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine the enormous weight of responsibility on those
five people. They had to carry this potentially life ending secret,
knowing they possessed the key to their nation's greatest heritage,
all while pretending the treasure was gone.
Speaker 2: It's incredible bravery.
Speaker 1: So the moment of rediscovery after two thousand and three,
in the fall of the Taliban, it must have been
truly cinematic. The new government faced this monumental challenge. How
do you find five anonymous heroes scattered across a war
torn country.
Speaker 2: They struggled. They struggled initially because the identities of those
five keyholders had been so successfully protected and dispersed. They
have to rely on institutional memory and some incredible detective work.
But eventually, one by one they were located, and then
on the officials brought them all together. The five keys
returned simultaneously, in the Central Bank vault, the heavy door
was opened and they found all twenty two thousand objects
completely intact and safe.
Speaker 1: That moment must have been just breathtaking, the realization that
an entire chunk of history had been successfully classified and
hidden by human will alone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and following that recovery, National Geographic stepped in. They
helped to catalog the collection and launched it on these
international tours, which cemented its safety and global recognition after
decades of obscurity and danger. It's a testament to the
power of human commitment.
Speaker 1: To culture, and that commitment to preservation is mirrored in
the story of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, although the
early reports from there were far more attracted. When US
forces entered Baghdad in two thousand and three, the initial
media reports were terrifying. Claims at the museum had been
completely looted, with one hundred and seventy thousand artifacts gone.
It was initially reported as one of the single greatest
catastrophes for world heritage in modern times, and.
Speaker 2: That initial panic highlights a key theme of this deep dive.
The initial classification, or the initial rumor, often sets the
historical record, even if it's completely wrong. In reality, the
museum staff, who knew the risk of conflict better than anyone,
had taken preemptive action.
Speaker 1: These weren't people who were new to this.
Speaker 2: No, many of the staff were highly experienced. They had
been through the chaos of the nineteen ninety one Gulf War.
They knew better than to leave their most valuable assets exposed.
So while the public gallery did suffer looting and damage,
which was horrific in its own right, the staff had
secretly moved their most priceless pieces o many. They packed
up about eight thousand key artifacts, some of which were
hidden as far back as nineteen ninety one, and stored
them in heavy duty boxes and various secret vaults. Many
were beneath the museum itself, and others were beneath key
government buildings like the Central Bank, so.
Speaker 1: They weren't waiting for external help. They took their fate
into their own hands years in advance, and this leads
us to the dramatic discovery of the Nimrod Treasures. In
June two thousand and three, US officials acting on intelligence
located one of these massive caches.
Speaker 2: But there was a problem. It was in a highly
secured vault under the Iraqi Central Bank. But the vault
was completely flooded. Oh no, the stress of that recovery
effort must have been immense. Water damage is catastrophic for
almost any ancient material. National geographic again played a crucial
logistical role, providing equipment and expertise to pump out the water,
just racing against the clock to save this fragile ancient
gold from permanent corrosion. What was inside the contents were
pure staggering history. The vault held the gold treasures of Nimrod,
six hundred and thirteen pieces of gold jewelry and ornaments
taken from Assyrian royal tombs that date back to the
eighth and ninth centuries BCE. This included massive amounts of
intricately worked gold Lapis, Lazuli.
Speaker 1: And Carnelian, and was it okay after the flood.
Speaker 2: Despite the flooding, which could have been fatal, the gold
objects were reportedly and surprisingly good condition thanks to the
quality of the ancient alloys and the fact that the
vault was well sealed. This recovery was a monumental wind
for a seriology and for Iraqi heritage. It proved that
foresight had preserved this priceless historical record.
Speaker 1: But the recovery also came with a tragic and frankly
violent PostScript that really brings the brutal reality of the
conflict into sharp focus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when the vault was finally secured and explored, the
bodies of looters were discovered inside. What it suggests that
during the chaos of the two thousand and three invasion,
rival criminal gangs had fought to the death, literally trying
to blast or steal their way into the Central Bank
to get to the national treasure.
Speaker 1: Shows the immense deadly value people plays on these relics,
whether for cultural reasons or criminal ones.
Speaker 2: Thankfully, due to the foresight of the museum staff and
the Central Bank employees, the final corrected lost count for
the entire museum was reduced from that catastrophic one hundred
and seventy thousand number that was initially reported down to
about fifteen thousand.
Speaker 1: Items, which is still a tragedy.
Speaker 2: It's still a huge tragedy, but it reveals the success
of the human effort to classify and protect these objects
from harm.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've discussed restriction by scholarship, classification by government
and protection by necessity in wartime. Now we move into
the realm of things that are hidden in plain sight,
structures that have literally defied thousands of years of human
study and only surrendered their secrets to physics.
Speaker 2: This is a remarkable intersection of the ancient and the
utterly modern. For millennia, the general consensus among Egyptologists was
that the Great Pyramid of Giza, which was built for
the pharaoh Cufu, had no significant secrets. It's left to reveal, right, It's.
Speaker 1: Been mapped, studied, measured, penetrated countless times since the Romans.
Speaker 2: And yet in twenty seventeen, that foundational assumption was completely overturned.
Speaker 1: The idea that we could find a new structure inside
the most famous building on Earth is just it's astonishing,
and it wasn't found by digging. Its found by using
cosmic rays.
Speaker 2: The discovery was the result of the Scan Pyramids project,
a massive international collaboration employing a technology that really does
sound like science fiction, cosmic ray detection, specifically using something
called muon tomography.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's dedicate some time here because our listener appreciates
the technical details. How does this even work? It's not
an X ray. It's not radar, you're saying, it's using
particles from outer space.
Speaker 2: That's right. Muons are sub atomic particles. They're essentially heavy,
unstable electrons, and they are generated when high energy cosmic
rays which originate far outside our solar systems, strike the
Earth's atmosphere.
Speaker 1: And they just rain down on us all.
Speaker 2: The time, constantly. They're passing through us right now. They
passed through almost everything. Now here is the critical distinction
for archaeology. Muons passed through empty spaces like air or
a chamber much more easily and quickly than they passed
through dense solid materials like thousands of tons of heavy
limestone and granite blocks.
Speaker 1: So by placing these sophisticated detectors, which are basically large
complex plates that track the paths of the muons inside
and around the pyramid, they could measure the flow exactly.
Speaker 2: Areas where fewer muons were detected meant solid rock. Areas
where a statistically significant number of more muons passed through
indicated a void or an air pocket. It's essentially a
density map. It's like a cosmic MRI scan of an
ancient structure.
Speaker 1: And what gives us finding immense credibility is the level
of rigor they used. The researchers didn't rely on just
one machine or one method, No.
Speaker 2: That's key. They use three separate teams deploying three different
types of detectors, nuclear moulsion films, scintillator telescopes, and gas detectors,
and they all picked up the identical signal. They confirmed
the existence of the void from three different vantage points
using three different techniques. That basically eliminates the possibility of
instrumental error.
Speaker 1: So what do they find?
Speaker 2: The finding, which they published in the journal Nature in
twenty seventeen, was enormous. The signal pointed to a massive,
previously unknown space located directly above the Grand Gallery, which
is a known sloping corridor that leads to the King's Chamber.
Speaker 1: And this new void, which they tentatively named the scan
pyramids Big Void. It's estimated to be at least thirty
meters long, so about one hundred feet, and its cross
section is remarkably similar to the Grand Gallery itself.
Speaker 2: We are not talking about a small fissure or some
minor irregularity. This is the first discovery of a major
planned internal structure in the Pyramid. Since the nineteenth century.
It fundamentally redefines the geometry of Cufu's construction.
Speaker 1: And the magnitude of the finding was immediately matched by
the fury of the official gatekeepers in Egypt. Just like
with the Dead Sea scrolls, access to information and interpretation
became this fierce political battleground.
Speaker 2: You're talking about the immediate and very strong reaction from
the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, specifically the former minister, the
highly influential Zahi Hawas, who had established a near monopoly
on high profile Egyptian archaeology for decades exactly. Haas immediately
went on the offensive. He publicly denied the significance of
the finding, claiming the published paper offered zero to Egyptology.
His counter argument was structural and well traditional.
Speaker 1: What was his argument.
Speaker 2: He argued that the scan Pyramids team, being physicists and
engineers rather than Egyptologists, simply misunderstood standard pyramid construction. The
core of his argument was that these voids are just
stress relief chambers. Pharaoh's built massive relieving chambers filled with
huge granite beams above the king's chamber to distribute the
immense weight of the overlying stone Hawas argued the Big
Void was simply a less defined, more extensive version of
these known architectural features, built to prevent the Grand Gallery
from collapsing under stress.
Speaker 1: Which is I mean, that's a reasonable construction argument, but
I find it hard to believe it entirely explains a
perfectly defined, thirty meter long, continuous void that mirrors the
angle and the size of the structure directly beneath it.
If it's just a gap left by sloppy construction, why
is it so geometrically coherent?
Speaker 2: And the researchers themselves are navigating this political tightrope with
extreme care. They are confident in their muon data. I mean,
physics is physics, but they are highly cautious about interpretation.
They acknowledge the uncertainty about the exact purpose of the void.
Speaker 1: They don't want to speculate about treasure.
Speaker 2: No, they refuse to speculate about potential contents, avoiding any
irresponsible pronouncements that would just feed a media frenzy, which
ironically often frustrates the public even more.
Speaker 1: And this brings us back to the theme of restriction,
but in a completely modern way. We know the void exists,
but access to the data is now restricted. The raw
scan data and the exact technical specifications used in the
three different Nuon experiments have not been fully released to
the public or to rival.
Speaker 2: Egyptologists, and this non disclosure is part of their operational strategy.
They are prioritizing non invasive investigation over immediate satisfaction. They
want to continue scanning from different angles and perhaps use
different non invasive technologies to triangulate the void's exact shape
of potential connectivity before they even start to discuss the
possibility of physical access like drilling or setting in a camera.
Speaker 1: It's a completely modern dilemma. We have the technology to
confirm the existence of a massive ancient secret, but the
researchers and the Egyptian government are jointly classifying the complete
evidence and physical access, essentially sealing the secret for its
own protection. We know the secret is there, but the gatekeepers,
both scientific and governmental, are compelling us to wait for
permission to look more closely.
Speaker 2: A perfect example of the conflict between scientific transparency and
preservation ethics exactly. Final section deals with the ultimate form
of classification, the profound, often irreversible silence imposed by a
lost language. This is a barrier created by a linguistic obscurity, or,
in the case of Rongo Wrongo, the tragic eradication of
the knowledge holders themselves.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the epitome of the unreadable enigma, the
Feasto's disc. This is an object that should, by all rights,
be a window into an ancient civilization, but instead it's
just a mirror reflecting our own ignorance.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: It was discovered on July third, nineteen oh eight, by
an Italian archaeologist Luigi Prenier while he was excavating the
ancient palace of Festos on the island of Crete.
Speaker 2: Physically it is deceptively simple. It's a baked clay disc
about six inches in diameter and an inch thick. Experts
date it to the Minoan period, possibly around seventeen hundred BCE,
and it's covered on both sides with symbols arranged in
this neat continuous spiral pattern, winding from the rim towards
the center.
Speaker 1: But the technological marvel here is genuinely stackeduring for the
Bronze Age. The disc contains two hundred and forty two symbols,
which are composed of forty five distinct signs, and critically,
these symbols weren't carved or scratched into the clay with
the stylus like every other document found from that period.
Speaker 2: They were stamped, and that's the crucial detail we have
to emphasize. Someone meticulously created forty five individual stamps, think
of them as tiny, detailed ceramic or wooden seals, and
use them to press the symbols into the soft clay
before the disc was fired. This makes the face Dos
disk potentially the earliest known example of a principle related
to movable type printing in human.
Speaker 1: History, predating Gutenberg by thousands of years thousands. That is extraordinary.
Imagine the conceptual leap required to create a library of
stamps rather than just writing directly. The symbols themselves are intricate.
They depict recognizable objects, human figures, animals like birds and fish, plants, tools,
geometric shapes. It's almost pictographic. Yet it's clearly formalized as
a script.
Speaker 2: But the sheer frustration comes back to the linguistic barrier,
and this is the definition of classified by obscurity. The
fundamental problem for cracking any unknown script is you need
a large corpus of text. You need repetition, you need context,
you need no names, or ideally you need a bilingual
example like the Rosetta stone, which had the same text
and three languages.
Speaker 1: And this is the crux of the problem with the disk,
isn't it?
Speaker 2: Precisely this is the only object ever found bearing these
specific forty five symbols. They share some vague similarities with
other Minoan scripts, like linear A, but the differences are vast,
and this absolute isolation has led to a wild proliferation
of competing, often irreconcilable theories.
Speaker 1: The attempts to decode it are like watching intellectual desperation
play out. The interpretations reigns wildly. Some scholars claim it's
a simple hymn, maybe to the Minoan Earth goddess, based
on the repetitive placement of certain symbols. Others argue it's
a complex calendar for agricultural cycles or even a specialized
game board.
Speaker 2: And then you have the completely radical theories thatch leung
the artifact's very existence. There was a highly controversial claim
made by one archaeologist in two thousand and eight that Pernier,
the discoverer, actually faked the disc entirely why the motivation
was supposedly to compete with famous discoveries being made by
his rivals at the time, a bit of academic jealousy.
Speaker 1: I personally find that theory difficult to swallow, simply because
creating a fake with that level of technological sophistication, prefiguring
movable type just to win an academic rivalry seems almost
as difficult as deciphering it. It requires too much foresight
on the part of the supposed.
Speaker 2: Forture, I agree, But whether it's fake or genuine, the
current reality is the same profound silence. The immense frustration
for historians and linguists is the inability to unlock what
the text says until this script is read, a critical
piece of the puzzle regarding Minno and civilization. One of
the great early Mediterranean cultures that slourish before classical Greece,
remains perpetually classified by its own singularity. It is a
locked box of information with no known combination, and every
attempt to guess is just speculation.
Speaker 1: So if the face does disc is a silence enforced
by uniqueness. The Wrongo Rado script of Rapanui or Easter
Island is a tragedy enforced by the deliberate destruction of
the human element. Yes, we know Easter Island primarily for
its incredible, iconic Mawaii statues, but the Rapanui people also
developed a sophisticated, unique writing system, and.
Speaker 2: The core issue of scarcity reappears here, but for heartbreaking
reasons related to colonization and disease. Today, fewer than thirty
fragile wooden tablets containing the Wrongo Rango script survive. They
are scattered across major museums globally, from Santiago to Berlin.
But crucially, not a single authentic original tablet remains on
the island itself, and.
Speaker 1: The mechanism of loss here is just agonizingly specific. It
wasn't just gradual decay. In the eighteen sixties, Peruvian slave
raids descended upon the island. They systematically targeted and kidnapped
most of the island's priests, leaders in chiefs, the precise
Maori class, who held the specialized generational knowledge required to read, memorize,
and interpret the wrong Go Rongo script.
Speaker 2: It was a systematic, deliberate intellectual purge. By removing the
learned class, they destroyed the living key to the language.
Speaker 1: The people who could read it were gone.
Speaker 2: Gone, and this loss was immediately compounded by smallpox, which
decimated the few remaining islanders and shattered the traditional culture
that might have preserved the memory of the script. By
the eighteen seventies, the specialized knowledge of how to read
Rongo Rongo was completely extinct. The script exists, but its
readers were wiped out by human cruelty and subsequent disease.
Speaker 1: That is an irretrievable loss, and it raises these profound
ethical questions about the classification of knowledge. The tablets themselves
weren't entirely destroyed, but the entire interpretative framework the human
software needed run the program was systematically removed from.
Speaker 2: The earth, and the surviving artifacts are barely holding on.
Take the example of the Berlin tablet, one of the
longest ones. It's over three feet long, but the wood
is so so deeply eroded that more than half of
the text is now completely unreadable.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: The script is also highly complex. It reads in a
system called reverse bustrophiton, where you read one line from
left to right and you have to flip the tablet
one hundred and eighty degrees to read the next line,
which is written upside down.
Speaker 1: That level of complexity requires intimate, specialized knowledge, and the
knowledge holders are gone. So researchers today are relying on
highly advanced tools like three D scans, spectral imaging, and
high resolution photographs just to study the eroded remains of
a language whose last fluent speakers died more than one
hundred and fifty years ago, purely because of colonization and disease.
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, wrong Goorongo
is a perfect tragic example of knowledge lost due to
the destruction of the knowledge holders themselves, not just the artifacts.
With the face does disc the knowledge is hidden by singularity,
we just don't have enough material. With Wrongorongo, the knowledge
is permanently silent because the human connection was irrevocably severed.
Speaker 1: In both cases, the ancient artifact is classified by an
impenetrable barrier, and.
Speaker 2: It reminds us that knowledge is a conversation between the
present and the past, and that conversation can be violently interrupted.
So today we've traveled across millennia in continence from secretive
scholars denying access to the Dead Sea scrolls to physicists
detecting hidden chambers in the Great Pyramid, and from gold
saved by anonymous heroes in Afghanistan to languages silenced by
slave raiders in the Pacific. The central tension of this
deep dive it just remains constant. It's the battle between
discovering and accessing ancient knowledge and the very human impulses,
whether they are political, institutional, destructive, or even well meaning,
that seek to classify, hide, or race it.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us? I think
it fundamentally changes the way we should view historical artifacts.
They're not passive objects resting in the dust of history.
They're key players in ongoing historical dramas. The meticulous, risky
act of concealing the Tilia tipa treasure with five secret keys,
was as crucial to Afghan history as the eventual trif
an act of finding it was.
Speaker 2: And the knowledge is always waiting, whether it's in the
mesavoid or the dead Sea caves. But the deepest, most
difficult barriers we face to reach it are almost always
human made. They're driven by fear, by greed, or by
the desire for control over truth and legacy. We've seen
treasures saved by anonymous keyholders and We've seen scripts lost
forever because their readers were enslaved, and.
Speaker 1: This raises an important question for you, our listener, to consider.
When an ancient relic of global importance is discovered, who
should ultimately be the gatekeeper. Should it be the country
of origin which has the territorial claim, the scholarly community
who possessed the expertise, or the global public whose collective
history is contained within that object and who often funds
its discovery. What is the ethical responsibility of those who
possess the only key, whether it's physical or intellectual, to
a lost piece of human history. Let us know what
you think.