Birthday Boy

Humans have a curious habit of making a big deal out of certain things. And the stories about those moments are always entertaining.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
I think everyone has that one friend who makes a
huge deal out of their birthday every year. They don't
just have a party or go out for a fancy dinner. Rather,
they throw a huge bash with a ton of food, drinks,
and music that rages on until the sun comes up,
and they expect all of their friends to join in
on the fun. It isn't just a celebration, it's a festival.

(00:57):
While back in eighteen ninety nine, one mother threw her
son a birthday shindig of his own, and it was
so opulent it made a royal coronation look like a
five year old's birthday party at Chuck E Cheese. Her
name was Sarah Goodrich and she had been an actress
on Broadway, where she eventually met a man named Edwin Knowles. Edwin,
if you're curious, had come from Rhode Island, finding his

(01:18):
way to the New York theater scene as an up
and coming actor. He had gotten his start performing with
The World Sisters, a trio of siblings who put on
a burlesque show in the mid nineteenth century. Then in
the eighteen seventies he met Sarah. The two were soon married,
and six years later Edwin took on the role of
managing places like Brooklyn's Grand Opera House and Manhattan's Fifth

(01:38):
Avenue Theater on West twenty eighth Street, and eventually he
transitioned from managing other people's theaters to opening his own,
such as the Amphion Theater in the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn.
The Amphion would go on to become the site of
a brutal animal attack in nineteen ten. A wolf being
kept in a cage there broke free during the performance
and bit a number of the audience members. A police

(02:00):
officer did his best to stop it, but the wolf
ended up just shredding his pants instead. The wolf was
eventually captured and handled, and the show resumed as normal. Sarah,
on the other hand, had her own responsibilities to tend to.
She had run for president of the Professional Women's League
of which she was a member. She sadly lost the race,
but did not lose her standing. She also took care

(02:21):
of the home that she and her husband lived in
on Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn, along with their son, Coco.
Sarah spoiled Coco usually on his birthday in early July,
but it was his thirteenth birthday party on July fifth
of eighteen ninety nine that made all of the headlines.
It started out as a breakfast one that counted among
its guests the Pash women who had supported Sarah's failed

(02:44):
presidential run. Coco had been sitting by himself in the
drawing room when they arrived with gifts in hand. They
placed at his feet all sorts of boxes filled with jewelry,
beads and framed engravings. He said nothing, simply letting them
drop their gifts off, as though they were making an
offering to a temperamental king or a watchful deity. The
one newspaper article referred to the event as a birthday

(03:06):
festival and compared it to the party that Empress Eugene
had thrown for Napoleon the Third. Once the gifts had
been delivered, Coco was escorted into the dining area. He
wore around his neck a string of pearls, and the
cushion of his seat was covered in green silk adorned
with embroidered lotus leaves. Coco has fed all kinds of
delicious foods, as you might expect from attending parties of

(03:28):
your own, including crackers, putting almonds, and milk. Since he
was still so young, though, he didn't partake in the
wine that his mother and the other friends were drinking.
After they had finished eating, the women rose from their
chairs and danced a quadrille to entertain the birthday boy,
and he sat there watching them perform just for him.
When the dance ended, they read him poetry in his honor.

(03:50):
It wasn't a normal birthday party for a thirteen year
old boy. I don't know a lot of teens who
would enjoy watching their mother's friends dance and read poetry,
but Coco seemed to enjoy, from what I can tell,
and as you'd imagine, Various news outlets reported on the
elaborate breakfast, writing things like he is faithful to his home,
he is affectionate without servility, he is charmingly decorative. The meanwhile,

(04:14):
an article in the New York Dramatic Mirror said, he
doesn't look a day over seven. That's kind of a
strange thing to write about a thirteen year old boy,
But the papers weren't writing about a boy, or a
girl or a person at all. Missus Knowle's beloved Coco,
you see, was her cat. It's important that we preserve

(04:47):
the legacies of culture's past, whether they're ruins of ancient buildings,
or tools used by people who lived thousands of years ago,
or the books written during their lifetimes, and when possible,
those artifacts should be available ethically, of course, for us
to study and learn from. That's where museums come in.
We visit these giant repositories of history so that we

(05:09):
can better understand those who came before us. But museums
are not a modern construct. In fact, the first museum
in history is over two thousand, five hundred years old,
and its original curator with someone you might not have expected.
Around five point thirty BCE, in an area of the
Middle East known as Mesopotamia, there was a king. His

(05:31):
name was Nabonitis, and he ruled over an empire known
as Babylon. Nabonitis also had several children his son Belshazzar
eventually became the last king of the Neo Babylonian Empire,
but it was one of Belshazzar's siblings who was responsible
for the earliest known museum in the world. You see,
Anni Galdinana was both a princess and a high priestess

(05:52):
of the empire, and she was also an archaeologist. She
had developed a love of antiques thanks to her father,
who was also an antiquarian. He taught her about the
past and its importance to the future of their dynasty,
and it was he who encouraged her to start a museum.
Any Galdi would explore the southern parts of Mesopotamia that
her father had already excavated and collect what she could

(06:15):
with guidance from Nabonitis. She would then bring these items
back to the palace and store them in a temple
next door. Much like today's museums, any Galdy's exhibits were
put on display to educate visitors about the history of
the region. She saved many artifacts too, including part of
a statue of King Shulgi, the second king of the
third dynasty of Er, as well as a kuduru, a

(06:36):
stone boundary marker carved by the Cassites between the sixteenth
and seventh centuries BCE. The objects stored in any Galdi's
museum could be traced back as far as two thousand BCE,
and most had actually been excavated by her, not her father.
Thousands of years later, a husband and wife team of
archaeologists discovered the museum during a dig. Their names were

(06:57):
Leonard and Catherine Woolley, and they had been uncovering sections
of the adjoining palace at Er when they stumbled on
Anegaldi's pet project. Although they knew the site they were
excavating dated back to the Neo Babylonian era, they had
no idea that their efforts would reveal such a startling find.
The ancient person of any Galdi had preserved a past
that was ancient to her, so that thousands of years later,

(07:20):
modern archaeologists would have access to and otherwise lost history.
In cataloging their collection, the Woolies discovered that Anygaldi had
gone to the trouble of arranging it in chronological order.
The goal was to convey the passage of time to
the museum's visitors. She had also carved symbols into clay cylinders,
which acted like the plaques or labels that you might

(07:41):
find on the wall of a modern museum to explain
each exhibit. These labels were written in three different languages too,
including Sumerian, and revealed all sorts of information about the
items that she had collected, including how old they were
and where she had found them. As the millennia passed
and the Sumerian dynasties died out, many are facts wound
up in private collections, you know, cabinets of curiosities. They

(08:04):
were often displayed without any accompanying information and indications of
their providence. Instead, collectors would arrange the various items in
a way that was esthetically pleasing to the eye. But
by the late seventeenth century, all of that started to change.
England's Oxford University took possession of John Tedescant the Elder's
collection after his death in sixteen thirty eight. He had

(08:25):
acquired all kinds of books, coins and strange objects over
his lifetime, which eventually became the Ashmolean Museum, opened in
sixteen eighty three. But museums like the Ashmolean, with their
clear labels and carefully mounted historical exhibits can all trace
their origins back thousands of years earlier to the woman
who started it all. She was a princess, a priestess,

(08:48):
a daughter, an archaeologist, and a historian, all wrapped up
into one. Her name was Ennigaldi Nana, the woman who
made history by saving it. I hope you've enjoyed today's
guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by

(09:10):
visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by
me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I
make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all
about it over at Theworldoflore dot com. And until next time,

(09:31):
stay curious.