May 15, 2025 • 14 mins
George Noory and professor of Egyptian art Kara Cooney discuss how the pyramids of ancient Egypt may have been constructed.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Karen, When you look at the Giza Pyramids, what is
your best assumption on how they were made?
Speaker 3 (00:12):
This is hard because the Egyptians are building weapons of
the mind with these things, so they're not going to
lead blueprints. It's like if you're building a nuclear bomb,
you don't publish how you build it so that everyone
else can build one too.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
So it's something that you really keep close to the vest.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
They're not and there's not many pyramids that are built
of stone through and through of this size. You know,
the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau is fifty stories
high and it wasn't no building higher structurally was built
until the Eiffel Tower, right, So that still blows our mind.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
And I'm told we have cranes that can't even move
the blocks of stone today.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Yeah, So my best answer, and I haven't seen any
Egyptologists really work this out in a way that's satisfied
to me, is that they used hydraulics more than anything else.
If you're going to put a block in place every
two minutes, which is what you need to build the
pyramid of that size over a twenty year span of time,
which is the evidence that we have that it was
(01:14):
about twenty some years that they took to build these pyramids.
Speaker 4 (01:17):
Block in place every two minutes, you're going to need to.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Use water because nothing moves stone faster then floating it
and floating it into place, and then even up into place.
So the idea of using water to lift stones, I
think is a really interesting one to play with, and
it is going to be way easier than using ramps.
But I'm also one of those Egyptologists a little bit crazy,
(01:41):
who likes the Jean Pierre Houdin theory of the inside
out pyramid construction, where you put your outer stones on first,
and there's an internal ramp that's circular that you go
up with and then you finish it as you go
on down with your outer casing stones. That the idea
that you don't need a ramp on the outside. If
(02:02):
you had a single ramp going up the side of
the Great Pyramid, it would be more than a kilometer
long and people would fall off it and they would die.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
So it's kind of stupid. There's no evidence for that
amount of earth.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
If you had a ramp going up around the sides
of the pyramid, like spiraling up around it. We don't
have evidence for that amount of stone either. What if
you had a ramp on the inside of the pyramid
that's inside of the structure that we can't see unless
we dismantled this thing blocked by block, which you're not
going to do because it's a World Heritage Site, et cetera,
et cetera. So there could be a ramp on the
(02:33):
inside to move these stones once they started to get
higher into place. But I think for the base of
that pyramid, the bulk at the bottom where most of
those stones are, you're going to be lifting them into
place using as much water as you possibly can, and
then you're going to get a whole bunch of dudes
to come and labor is cheap in Egypt, it still is,
and it was in the ancient world, and then they
(02:54):
would use as many guys as possible to move those
blocks into place.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
What if they knew the secret of Shan resonance and
they kind of floated the blocks in the place.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
I haven't seen any evidence for this. I'm still waiting
for the floating car. So you know, I haven't seen
any floating blocks with sound, and I've heard of amazing
things happening with sound. I've seen squares cleared of protesters
using sound cannons.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
I haven't seen those kinds.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Of devices able to lift blocks of stone, destroy them, maybe,
but not lift them and levitate them carefully into place
so that they're put exactly where they need to be
towards true cardinal North.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
Haven't seen yet.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
You're working on a book on neffer td. Egypt may
have been one of the weird places. And I say
weird because no other countries were doing this, that gave
women so much power in those days.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Yeah, I have a book called When Women Ruled the World,
And in this book I talk about I talk about
six different women, five of whom became nothing less than king,
not queen. The ancient Egyptians use the word queen for
the sexual partner of the king. They use the word
king for these women when they reached that pinnacle of
power and were nothing less than monarch. And you can
(04:08):
look at their path to power and understand that this
was a place that allowed women to transcend the normal
patriarchal structures in a way that nowhere.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
Else on earth did.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
And I have a class that UCLA called women in
power in the ancient world. That compares Egypt to Greece,
to Rome, to Persia to the Levant to Mesopotamia. Trying
to figure out why Egypt, what was it that they
were doing. Do they have different DNA no, where they
were enlightened than other people in the ancient world. Maybe,
But there's a number of reasons why I think women
(04:42):
were able to rise to power there. One of them
is a bit of an uncomfortable truth, and that's unequal
power distribution, authoritarianism, kingship. The more unequal to power, the
more liable you will be to give it to a
woman if that keeps the power, or in the family,
if your close circle of elites gets to maintain that power,
(05:06):
you'll give it to a woman if it means you
get to maintain your power too. A place like Greece,
where you have a democratia, one man falls, another man's
going to take his place immediately, you don't have the
possibility for a woman to take power in that kind
of system. It's funny living in a democracy and seeing
how hard it is for women to make it to
the presidency of a directly elected office. In the United States,
(05:30):
and I would say the democracy is not helping. Whereas
you could be a general and you're appointed to that position,
their women can find their way ahead in the United
States in an easier fashion unless you get fired, like
the latest leader of the navy was just fire.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
What happened to lost knowledge in those days? I mean
where did it go? Did it?
Speaker 3 (05:52):
I mean, you know they didn't have computer hard drives,
but what happened to your floppy disc? You know you
have lost knowledge, right, you have lost knowledge, maybe in
a notebook that you've lost, or a floppy drive you
don't know how to turn on anymore, a computer that
doesn't work. Do you know what your emails look like
from nineteen ninety seven? I don't have my emails from
nineteen ninety seven. So that's just our simple technological loss knowledge.
(06:15):
If you're writing things down on papyrus, or if you're
a cuneiform expert from Mesopotamia, whatever your medium is, if
you're writing things down in that sort of impermanent or
permanent hopefully permanent, but impermanent on real materials kind of way,
you'll always lose something. And the hope is that you
copy and copy things again so that you can maintain
(06:38):
some knowledge. The more I study the ancient world, the
more I may amazed. I am that anything survives, that
I can write a book that's about Neffertiiti.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
As you say, I'm working on that book now. I'm
going to be able to.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Write a whole four hundred sum page book about a
woman who lived thirty five hundred years ago, and I'm
going to delve into the politics of the time, the
religion of the time, what bet she had, who she.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
Was married to.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
That's extraordinary that I can do that at all with
someone who lived almost four thousand years ago.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
How many female rulers has Egypt.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Had dozens, but only five of them became king, and
there are many of them who acted as queen regent.
Egypt did not trust the uncle or the brother of
the uncle of the new king or the brother of
the dead king to act for a young king in power.
But Egypt demanded that even if a boy came to
(07:32):
the throne, if the king died suddenly and you got
a twelve year old to put on the throne, the
Egyptians would do it any other place in the world,
likely that kid would be dead before the week was out,
and the guy holding the knife would be like, I'm king,
and everyone say, yes, you are. But in Egypt, where
they believed in divine kingship, that child was often more
often than not allowed to rule.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
But because they were so.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Young and you didn't want to give them all of
the keys of the kingdom, you had a wise decision
maker making the policy rules while the child learned the job.
A mother is the best person to act on in
the child's best interest, to step back when the child
is getting better at ruling on his own. And it's
in that capacity as queen regent that women were really
(08:18):
able to hold the reins of Egypt, sometimes informally just
as the mother of the king, and then they would
step back into the shadows when he.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
Grew into his power. But other times they were able
to use that position to gain nothing less than kingship.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Was there a royal bloodline in Egypt?
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Always lineage is everything.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
I was just talking about this with my class, that
there's this hidden institution called the harem where all of
these women are collected together, young beautiful women, to intensify
the sexual procreation of one man of the king. Because
that lineage was like the secret weapon par excellence.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
That was the way the elites kept their power. You
needed to.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Make sure that you had the air and the spare
and twenty more guys lined up so that you always
had a lineage to go towards. But it was a
double edged sword having a whole lot of sons. You
wanted to make sure that you had sons to carry
on your legacy. But when it comes time the king
dies and a new king takes his place, you only
(09:17):
need one. You don't need twenty, you don't need thirty,
you don't need fifty. And if you have too many
sons who have the opportunity for power, you get civil war.
So it's a double edged sword. This haram economy of
creating a lot of children of the king, But it
shows the anxiety that the Egyptians had at keeping a
(09:38):
lineage strong. The Egyptians idealized a perfected lineage from father
to son to grandson forever. Nothing ever worked that way.
The longest dynasty from all of ancient Egypt is Thetolemaic
dynasty of the Macedonian Greeks, not Egyptian at all those
three hundred years. Other dynasties tend to last about two
(10:00):
hundred years. It's not bad for a ruling family to
maintain some sort of lineage, But these dynasties tried to
keep everything in the family through incests, and so you
have another tension between short term strategies keep it all
in the family. Let's do a brother sister marriage. The
eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom started with two full
brother sister marriages in succession, and that ended up creating
(10:23):
a king named Amenhotep the First, who couldn't, we think,
have any children because he was probably sterile from being
a product of that incest, and they had to bring
in another relative not indirect lineage, named tut Mosa. He's
known to us as Tutmos the First, and he's not
a son of Amenhotep the First, So sometimes they had
to get a little shady to keep that lineage going.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
When did the dynastes die out and why?
Speaker 3 (10:49):
It depends the end of the twelfth dynasty, I think
died out because of incests and because they couldn't have
an heir. The end of the sixth dynasty, he seems
to have died out because of a combination of climactic
problems drought and famine, and it seems to have fallen
(11:09):
into a decentralized kind of economic mess. And then the
end of the New Kingdom, the end of the twentieth
ninety see what we called the Bronze Age collapse is
also it's a period that I know, well, it's what
my book Recycling for Death is about. I am looking
at the Bronze Age collapse through coffins and it's a
(11:31):
perfect storm of economic problems, of environmental degradation, certainly in
the northern Mediterranean, such that people are leaving in mass
movements and moving around the Mediterranean as pirates or settlers
or migrants and coming into Egypt in multiple waves over
(11:52):
hundreds of years, destabilizing the region. And you're also dealing
with the kingship.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
That becomes too big for itself.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
You know, we talk about a company like IBM, is
IBM too big? Is Boeing too big?
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Right?
Speaker 3 (12:04):
How big is too big a company? But UCLA I
talked about how it's too big all the time. And
the more centralized it gets, the more inefficient it gets.
And there is such a thing that happens in ancient Egypt.
You have these institutions that are too big to fail,
so much so that they fail and things turn into
a decentralized mess, and you have a collapse that demands
(12:27):
that people start again.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Kara, at what point, what year did Rome take over?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Rome's going to be taken over with the death of Cleopatra,
and so that's going to be thirty BCE. Many people
think Cleopatra committed suicide to avoid being put into chains
and paraded by Octavian in the.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Streets of Rome in a triumph.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
I think that Octavian murdered Cleopatra and then spread this
rumor that served him and his propagandistic interest in having
complete authoritarian rule over the Roman Empire, which no senator
had ever taken before, and he demonized her and turned
her into this trope of a woman taking a man's
(13:13):
way out, committing suicide like a warrior and abandoning her people,
abandoning her children and her sons to be hunted down
by the Romian Roman warriors. But it was Egypt's loss,
It was the Ptolemaic loss, Cleopatra's death that allowed Rome
to settle its troops into Egypt and allowed Octavian to
(13:37):
take it. Every senator up to that point there had
been multiple civil wars fought by Romans. Roman senators, many
of them revolving around Egypt, like vulture circling around Egypt.
Who was going to take it? Julius Caesar tried to
take Egypt. He settled garrisons there, and he got killed
for it. They put a target on his back so
bright that they murdered it.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
Him on the steps of the senate in Rome.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Because if you get Egypt in the Roman mind and
in the material mind, you have control over all the
money in the world to build the best army that
you need to pay all of them their wages. And
it was Octavian who was able to finally take the
prize of Egypt. And it was Egypt that launched him
into that princept's position, the imperial position of being the
(14:22):
first among many. Even though they didn't call it a king,
he was a king. He created his own lineage and
passed it on to his adopted son. So yeah, Rome
took over when the last Ptolemaic ruler was killed.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Listen to more Coast to Coast am every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Karen, When you look at the Giza Pyramids, what is
your best assumption on how they were made?
Speaker 3 (00:12):
This is hard because the Egyptians are building weapons of
the mind with these things, so they're not going to
lead blueprints. It's like if you're building a nuclear bomb,
you don't publish how you build it so that everyone
else can build one too.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
So it's something that you really keep close to the vest.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
They're not and there's not many pyramids that are built
of stone through and through of this size. You know,
the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau is fifty stories
high and it wasn't no building higher structurally was built
until the Eiffel Tower, right, So that still blows our mind.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
And I'm told we have cranes that can't even move
the blocks of stone today.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Yeah, So my best answer, and I haven't seen any
Egyptologists really work this out in a way that's satisfied
to me, is that they used hydraulics more than anything else.
If you're going to put a block in place every
two minutes, which is what you need to build the
pyramid of that size over a twenty year span of time,
which is the evidence that we have that it was
(01:14):
about twenty some years that they took to build these pyramids.
Speaker 4 (01:17):
Block in place every two minutes, you're going to need to.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Use water because nothing moves stone faster then floating it
and floating it into place, and then even up into place.
So the idea of using water to lift stones, I
think is a really interesting one to play with, and
it is going to be way easier than using ramps.
But I'm also one of those Egyptologists a little bit crazy,
(01:41):
who likes the Jean Pierre Houdin theory of the inside
out pyramid construction, where you put your outer stones on first,
and there's an internal ramp that's circular that you go
up with and then you finish it as you go
on down with your outer casing stones. That the idea
that you don't need a ramp on the outside. If
(02:02):
you had a single ramp going up the side of
the Great Pyramid, it would be more than a kilometer
long and people would fall off it and they would die.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
So it's kind of stupid. There's no evidence for that
amount of earth.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
If you had a ramp going up around the sides
of the pyramid, like spiraling up around it. We don't
have evidence for that amount of stone either. What if
you had a ramp on the inside of the pyramid
that's inside of the structure that we can't see unless
we dismantled this thing blocked by block, which you're not
going to do because it's a World Heritage Site, et cetera,
et cetera. So there could be a ramp on the
(02:33):
inside to move these stones once they started to get
higher into place. But I think for the base of
that pyramid, the bulk at the bottom where most of
those stones are, you're going to be lifting them into
place using as much water as you possibly can, and
then you're going to get a whole bunch of dudes
to come and labor is cheap in Egypt, it still is,
and it was in the ancient world, and then they
(02:54):
would use as many guys as possible to move those
blocks into place.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
What if they knew the secret of Shan resonance and
they kind of floated the blocks in the place.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
I haven't seen any evidence for this. I'm still waiting
for the floating car. So you know, I haven't seen
any floating blocks with sound, and I've heard of amazing
things happening with sound. I've seen squares cleared of protesters
using sound cannons.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
I haven't seen those kinds.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Of devices able to lift blocks of stone, destroy them, maybe,
but not lift them and levitate them carefully into place
so that they're put exactly where they need to be
towards true cardinal North.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
Haven't seen yet.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
You're working on a book on neffer td. Egypt may
have been one of the weird places. And I say
weird because no other countries were doing this, that gave
women so much power in those days.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Yeah, I have a book called When Women Ruled the World,
And in this book I talk about I talk about
six different women, five of whom became nothing less than king,
not queen. The ancient Egyptians use the word queen for
the sexual partner of the king. They use the word
king for these women when they reached that pinnacle of
power and were nothing less than monarch. And you can
(04:08):
look at their path to power and understand that this
was a place that allowed women to transcend the normal
patriarchal structures in a way that nowhere.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
Else on earth did.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
And I have a class that UCLA called women in
power in the ancient world. That compares Egypt to Greece,
to Rome, to Persia to the Levant to Mesopotamia. Trying
to figure out why Egypt, what was it that they
were doing. Do they have different DNA no, where they
were enlightened than other people in the ancient world. Maybe,
But there's a number of reasons why I think women
(04:42):
were able to rise to power there. One of them
is a bit of an uncomfortable truth, and that's unequal
power distribution, authoritarianism, kingship. The more unequal to power, the
more liable you will be to give it to a
woman if that keeps the power, or in the family,
if your close circle of elites gets to maintain that power,
(05:06):
you'll give it to a woman if it means you
get to maintain your power too. A place like Greece,
where you have a democratia, one man falls, another man's
going to take his place immediately, you don't have the
possibility for a woman to take power in that kind
of system. It's funny living in a democracy and seeing
how hard it is for women to make it to
the presidency of a directly elected office. In the United States,
(05:30):
and I would say the democracy is not helping. Whereas
you could be a general and you're appointed to that position,
their women can find their way ahead in the United
States in an easier fashion unless you get fired, like
the latest leader of the navy was just fire.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
What happened to lost knowledge in those days? I mean
where did it go? Did it?
Speaker 3 (05:52):
I mean, you know they didn't have computer hard drives,
but what happened to your floppy disc? You know you
have lost knowledge, right, you have lost knowledge, maybe in
a notebook that you've lost, or a floppy drive you
don't know how to turn on anymore, a computer that
doesn't work. Do you know what your emails look like
from nineteen ninety seven? I don't have my emails from
nineteen ninety seven. So that's just our simple technological loss knowledge.
(06:15):
If you're writing things down on papyrus, or if you're
a cuneiform expert from Mesopotamia, whatever your medium is, if
you're writing things down in that sort of impermanent or
permanent hopefully permanent, but impermanent on real materials kind of way,
you'll always lose something. And the hope is that you
copy and copy things again so that you can maintain
(06:38):
some knowledge. The more I study the ancient world, the
more I may amazed. I am that anything survives, that
I can write a book that's about Neffertiiti.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
As you say, I'm working on that book now. I'm
going to be able to.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Write a whole four hundred sum page book about a
woman who lived thirty five hundred years ago, and I'm
going to delve into the politics of the time, the
religion of the time, what bet she had, who she.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
Was married to.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
That's extraordinary that I can do that at all with
someone who lived almost four thousand years ago.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
How many female rulers has Egypt.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Had dozens, but only five of them became king, and
there are many of them who acted as queen regent.
Egypt did not trust the uncle or the brother of
the uncle of the new king or the brother of
the dead king to act for a young king in power.
But Egypt demanded that even if a boy came to
(07:32):
the throne, if the king died suddenly and you got
a twelve year old to put on the throne, the
Egyptians would do it any other place in the world,
likely that kid would be dead before the week was out,
and the guy holding the knife would be like, I'm king,
and everyone say, yes, you are. But in Egypt, where
they believed in divine kingship, that child was often more
often than not allowed to rule.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
But because they were so.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Young and you didn't want to give them all of
the keys of the kingdom, you had a wise decision
maker making the policy rules while the child learned the job.
A mother is the best person to act on in
the child's best interest, to step back when the child
is getting better at ruling on his own. And it's
in that capacity as queen regent that women were really
(08:18):
able to hold the reins of Egypt, sometimes informally just
as the mother of the king, and then they would
step back into the shadows when he.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
Grew into his power. But other times they were able
to use that position to gain nothing less than kingship.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Was there a royal bloodline in Egypt?
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Always lineage is everything.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
I was just talking about this with my class, that
there's this hidden institution called the harem where all of
these women are collected together, young beautiful women, to intensify
the sexual procreation of one man of the king. Because
that lineage was like the secret weapon par excellence.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
That was the way the elites kept their power. You
needed to.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Make sure that you had the air and the spare
and twenty more guys lined up so that you always
had a lineage to go towards. But it was a
double edged sword having a whole lot of sons. You
wanted to make sure that you had sons to carry
on your legacy. But when it comes time the king
dies and a new king takes his place, you only
(09:17):
need one. You don't need twenty, you don't need thirty,
you don't need fifty. And if you have too many
sons who have the opportunity for power, you get civil war.
So it's a double edged sword. This haram economy of
creating a lot of children of the king, But it
shows the anxiety that the Egyptians had at keeping a
(09:38):
lineage strong. The Egyptians idealized a perfected lineage from father
to son to grandson forever. Nothing ever worked that way.
The longest dynasty from all of ancient Egypt is Thetolemaic
dynasty of the Macedonian Greeks, not Egyptian at all those
three hundred years. Other dynasties tend to last about two
(10:00):
hundred years. It's not bad for a ruling family to
maintain some sort of lineage, But these dynasties tried to
keep everything in the family through incests, and so you
have another tension between short term strategies keep it all
in the family. Let's do a brother sister marriage. The
eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom started with two full
brother sister marriages in succession, and that ended up creating
(10:23):
a king named Amenhotep the First, who couldn't, we think,
have any children because he was probably sterile from being
a product of that incest, and they had to bring
in another relative not indirect lineage, named tut Mosa. He's
known to us as Tutmos the First, and he's not
a son of Amenhotep the First, So sometimes they had
to get a little shady to keep that lineage going.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
When did the dynastes die out and why?
Speaker 3 (10:49):
It depends the end of the twelfth dynasty, I think
died out because of incests and because they couldn't have
an heir. The end of the sixth dynasty, he seems
to have died out because of a combination of climactic
problems drought and famine, and it seems to have fallen
(11:09):
into a decentralized kind of economic mess. And then the
end of the New Kingdom, the end of the twentieth
ninety see what we called the Bronze Age collapse is
also it's a period that I know, well, it's what
my book Recycling for Death is about. I am looking
at the Bronze Age collapse through coffins and it's a
(11:31):
perfect storm of economic problems, of environmental degradation, certainly in
the northern Mediterranean, such that people are leaving in mass
movements and moving around the Mediterranean as pirates or settlers
or migrants and coming into Egypt in multiple waves over
(11:52):
hundreds of years, destabilizing the region. And you're also dealing
with the kingship.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
That becomes too big for itself.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
You know, we talk about a company like IBM, is
IBM too big? Is Boeing too big?
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Right?
Speaker 3 (12:04):
How big is too big a company? But UCLA I
talked about how it's too big all the time. And
the more centralized it gets, the more inefficient it gets.
And there is such a thing that happens in ancient Egypt.
You have these institutions that are too big to fail,
so much so that they fail and things turn into
a decentralized mess, and you have a collapse that demands
(12:27):
that people start again.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Kara, at what point, what year did Rome take over?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Rome's going to be taken over with the death of Cleopatra,
and so that's going to be thirty BCE. Many people
think Cleopatra committed suicide to avoid being put into chains
and paraded by Octavian in the.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Streets of Rome in a triumph.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
I think that Octavian murdered Cleopatra and then spread this
rumor that served him and his propagandistic interest in having
complete authoritarian rule over the Roman Empire, which no senator
had ever taken before, and he demonized her and turned
her into this trope of a woman taking a man's
(13:13):
way out, committing suicide like a warrior and abandoning her people,
abandoning her children and her sons to be hunted down
by the Romian Roman warriors. But it was Egypt's loss,
It was the Ptolemaic loss, Cleopatra's death that allowed Rome
to settle its troops into Egypt and allowed Octavian to
(13:37):
take it. Every senator up to that point there had
been multiple civil wars fought by Romans. Roman senators, many
of them revolving around Egypt, like vulture circling around Egypt.
Who was going to take it? Julius Caesar tried to
take Egypt. He settled garrisons there, and he got killed
for it. They put a target on his back so
bright that they murdered it.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
Him on the steps of the senate in Rome.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Because if you get Egypt in the Roman mind and
in the material mind, you have control over all the
money in the world to build the best army that
you need to pay all of them their wages. And
it was Octavian who was able to finally take the
prize of Egypt. And it was Egypt that launched him
into that princept's position, the imperial position of being the
(14:22):
first among many. Even though they didn't call it a king,
he was a king. He created his own lineage and
passed it on to his adopted son. So yeah, Rome
took over when the last Ptolemaic ruler was killed.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Listen to more Coast to Coast am every weeknight at
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