April 20, 2023 • 21 mins
Stanford University History professor Caroline Winterer tells host Steven Schragis what we do and don’t know about famous points in history, including the origins of Stonehenge, the beauty of Cleopatra, and the accents of America’s Founding Fathers.
One Day University is a co-production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. It is a Curiosity Podcast. You can sign up at the website OneDayU.com to become a member and access over 700 full length video lectures. You can also download their app. Once you’re a member, you can watch Professor Caroline Winterer’s lecture, “Unexplained History: What Historians Still Don’t Understand”
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
One explanation of the Salem witchcraft trials is that there
was this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined
that they saw witches and made their accusations based on that. So,
you know, maybe that's true.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Maybe they were all tripping up at Salem.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Welcome to one day University Talks with the world's most
engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This
podcast is your chance to discover some of our top
rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Steven Shregis, and
today's lesson is about historians' biggest challenge, the unknown. There's
(00:50):
a famous story about how Benjamin Franklin flew a kite
in a thunderstorm and discovered electricity. Did that actually happen Stanford?
His professor Carolyn Winterer says, we really have no idea
Franklin was interested in electricity, but there's no clear historical
evidence that he actually flew that famous kite. That's just
(01:12):
one example of the many stories from the past we've
embraced as fact when the truth is far more ambiguous.
So what do we really know when it comes to history?
Professor Winterer dug into this question for a one day
university lecture titled Unexplained History What Historians Still Don't Understand.
(01:33):
She's a professor of history and American Studies and department
chair at Stanford University and the author of quite a
few history books. The idea that our historical understanding may
have large gaps is quite unique, so I asked her
about the origins of the idea.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
This is how I remember it. We were chatting on
the phone about ideas for lectures and this sort of
popped out, like, how could we bring people into the
workshop of the historian, because usually we just go out
and present all these lovely polished findings, and we thought, Oh,
wouldn't it be fun if we could just let people
see how real historians actually work.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
You've said that before eighteen hundred, it gets a lot
harder to figure out what was going on.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Why is that, Yeah, Well, we think that before about
eighteen hundred, ninety percent of the world was illiterate. So
that means that most people in the world are neither
producing nor consuming print materials. So if they're not producing
them or consuming them, it means that we don't have
any record of what they're thinking. Before fourteen fifty. There's
(02:52):
no printing press, so there's very little broad dissemination of things,
and things tend to be in one copy in handwrits,
which historians called manuscript so if that one copy is lost,
then the whole thing is lost and we never even
know it happened. In some cases. There's also very little
in terms of what historians call eye documents or ego documents,
(03:15):
things like diaries that give you a sense of people's
interior landscape. So the only thing we have by the
time we get to about two or three thousand BC
are documents of trade receipts, like a grain receipt. You know,
you gave me three bushels of grain, and I have
a clay tablet that records that. But we have no
(03:36):
sense of how you're feeling about things, how you're thinking
about things. So by the time we get into the
deep archaeological record of ten thousand BC, we're really almost
in a no man's land in terms of what we
can know.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
You showed up with a number of examples. I've picked
a few of them that we'll talk about.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
We're going to.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Start with my favorite, and that is what Accent did.
The founding far have you want to tell us about that?
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, So just to set the stage, the founding fathers,
you know, the big ones, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, et cetera.
They're all born in the seventeen thirties and seventeen forties,
so technically they're citizens of the British Empire, so perhaps
they have a British accent. But the American Revolution comes
along in seventeen seventy six and they become Americans. So
it's an interesting question what accent do they have. And
(04:23):
when we look at movies, the bad guys who are
the British have these British accents like Darth Vader, and
the Americans have these American accents like you and I
have Stephen today. So the way we often think about
it is that there is a thing called a timeless
British accent that sounds like BBC English Today or you
know whatever, Jane Austen movies people like to watch, and
(04:44):
that after seventeen seventy six, the American accent that you
and I have appears and we all start talking like
I'm talking now. But in fact, what happened is that
before about eighteen hundred, there was a common accent shared
by many British people and many people living in British America,
(05:07):
what we know is colonial America. And they actually sounded
a little bit like I do and you do. In
that they pronounced the r as in car, So we're
hearing the hard R. Why do we think that this happened. Well,
we don't have sound recordings, but we do have what
are called pronouncing dictionaries, and they show us that they
(05:27):
guide people about how to pronounce words, and they show
British people in the seventeen nineties being told to pronounce
words like car as call. So why did they do that? Well,
this is hard for US Americans to swallow because we
think we're at the center of the universe. But it
in fact has nothing to do with the American Revolution. Instead,
(05:49):
it has everything to do with the industrial revolution in England,
where wealthy capitalists wanted to now distinguish themselves in society
from the poor, and so they began to develop this
new accent. The non rhotic are to say things like cod,
whereas the poor would say things like card.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
It makes sense you're telling us that the English accent
is the fancier accent, so at least I'm comfortable with that.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah, what we suspected all along that the British are
in fact fancier than we are, and they sound better
than we do. So there it is.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Okay, let's move even further back in history, the sixteen
hundreds and the Salem witch Trials. It's a famous historical event,
but do we really know what happened?
Speaker 1 (06:35):
So, you know, we love the Salem witch Trials of
sixteen ninety two and sixteen ninety three up there in Salem, Massachusetts,
a little north of Boston. It's a big tourist destination today,
and we know that something really creepy happened that involved
young women and hysterics and bigot administers and various deaths
and hangings and whatnot. So it's exciting and everybody is
(06:59):
interesting said in this, So you know what do we know? Well,
we know that at Salem in sixteen ninety two there
were two hundred people accused of witchcraft, many of them
young women. Nineteen of them were executed. And we think
this sounds like a lot until we look at the
European context, where around the same time, over about a
(07:22):
two or three hundred year period, between fourteen hundred and
seventeen hundred, there were fifty thousand witchcraft executions. So you
take that European context, fifty thousand witchcraft executions over a
three hundred year period, and then you look at Salem
with its nineteen executions in one year, and you reverse
(07:45):
the question. It's not what happened at Salem, it's why
weren't there more witchcraft executions at Salem? What's wrong in
North America that they weren't hunting down which is more
so that's you know, that's an example of how knowing
the broader contexts of a historical event can really help
us to reframe it. So, you know, what are our
(08:07):
sources for the witchcraft trials? So a lot of it
is legal evidence that is written in Latin or in
English handwriting that is very hard to read. And from
that historians have come up with several hypotheses. So the
first hypothesis is what I call the rich hating hypothesis.
(08:27):
And historians mapped onto Salem where did the accusers live
and where did the accused witches live? And what they
found was that many of the accusers lived on the
poorer side of Salem, on the wrong side of the tracks.
Whereas the people who were more likely to be accused
lived on the wealthier side of Salem. So this is
(08:50):
an economic argument, and it basically says that the accusers
were envious of the wealth of the accused and they
lodged a witchcraft accusation based on that. So there's some
evidence to support that hypothesis, but it doesn't account for everything,
because there's a lot of economic envy in the world
in sixteen ninety two, but we only have one incidence
(09:12):
of an event like Salem, so it answers some questions,
doesn't answer all of them. During the nineteen sixties, there
was a second hypothesis, that is the ergot hypothesis. So
the biologists out there might know that Ergot's ergot is
a hallucinogenic rye fungus, so it grows on wheat and
(09:32):
rye and barley grains you might store, as they did
in the seventeenth century over a long winter, and that
if you ingest this fungus you basically get high. So
one explanation of Salem witchcraft trials is that there was
this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined that
(09:52):
they saw witches and made their accusations based on that,
So you know, maybe that's true, maybe they were all
tripping up at Salem. The trouble is that there was
a lot of Rye fungus throughout the colonies, throughout the
other parts of the world, and it didn't manifest necessarily
in witchcraft accusations. So, just like the economic explanation, it
(10:14):
has some things that it explains, some things that it
doesn't explain. You know, there's many more hypotheses, but you know,
at the end of the day, will never really understand
what happened at Salem because our evidence is pretty paltry
when you think about the kind of evidence we might
have today for such an event.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
After the break the mystery of Cleopatra's legendary beauty and
why some people believe aliens built Stonehenge, let's go back
(10:57):
another like sixteen hundred years, so it really gets are now,
to put it bluntly, what did Cleopatra look like? Why
do we think that she's so beautiful? What did she
actually look like? Why did you.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Tell us possibly the most famous woman who has ever lived,
trailing all kinds of legends about her beauty. But the
fact of the matter is that we really do not
know what Cleopatra looked like. So you know, when I
say Cleopatra, the members of your audience, who are perhaps
over the age of the half century mark, are going
(11:30):
to immediately think of Elizabeth Taylor with her great blue
eyeshadow looking like Cleopatra. So that's, you know, that's the
image in our mind, but we in fact don't know,
and that was kind of an invented image. So what
do we know, Well, we have very very little evidence
because we are around the decades right before the BC
(11:54):
era ends, right, so we're around thirty BC. And given
how much we think about that time period, you know,
the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and Romans, we imagine that
we have tons and tons of evidence, but we don't,
and a lot of it is very contradictory. So the
first thing we need to realize is that Cleopatra is
not in fact Egyptian. She is Cleopatra the Seventh. She
(12:16):
is from the Ptolemaic dynasty PTol e Naic, and the
Ptolemies are in fact Greek. They conquered the Egyptians during
the third century BC, and she's one of the later
queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty. So when you are in
the Ptolemaic world, you are in a world of what
(12:38):
we know as royal incest. So your listeners can take
away a new vocabulary term for today. Royal incest comes
from a time period when they believe that royal families
were in fact manifestations of gods on earth. So why
would you want to marry outside of the royal blood
and sully the royal blood with the blood of mere
(12:59):
common know, you want to marry within the royal family.
So we believe that her parents were brother and sister.
So she is not Egyptian at all. She is Greek,
extremely Greek. We have to get out of our heads
a kind of Egyptian appearance, whatever that might be at
this time, and imagine a Greek appearance again, whatever that
(13:19):
might be. Okay, So there's first of all, what is
her ethnicity. Second of all, we might be asking, well,
she's a queen. There's probably a ton of statues of
her that we can look at. But that's also a
problem because Ptolemaic and ancient Egyptian statuary is very formulaic.
They're not all about expressing individualism. So they have all
(13:43):
of these protocols for how you show a queen, so
you have a certain hairstyle, you have a certain way
of showing their lips and their neck and all of that.
What that means is that our images of what may
or may not be Cleopatra are very generic, and we
don't know if it's her or another queen. Same thing
with coinage that was issued during her reign. There is
(14:05):
a woman's head on coinage during Cleopatra's reign of Egypt,
but it's so formulaic and it's intended to express her power.
So she looks very masculine on the portraits on coins,
so we don't know if that's actually what she looked like.
So so much for statues, so much for coins. We
also know that eventually a further complication is that the
(14:29):
Romans conquered Egypt, and many people in Rome hated Cleopatra
because she was this outsider queen brought back to Rome
by Julia Caesar and then Mark Antony. So they had
this anti Cleopatra propaganda in which they called her a witch,
a whore, an animal worshiper, and of course very strange looking,
(14:51):
because they didn't want her around.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
They didn't like Cleopatra. Everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yes, everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor. People in Rome didn't like Cleopatra.
And so we come away from this with this astonishing
realization that for all that she's famous, we really don't
know what Cleopatra actually looked like.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
The next one I can almost sum up in one word, Stonehenge.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Stonehenge.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Aliens built that, right, that's the quick answer.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Aliens built it, and there it is, and they beamed
down and put up a bunch of stones, and you
can go there and communicate with the aliens.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
All right, Well, just in case that's not true. What
is true?
Speaker 1 (15:35):
What is true? So we're fascinated by Stonehenge. The first
thing we should know is it wasn't built by the Druids.
The Druids are kind of manifest in England right around
the time of the Romans, which is around first century
BC for century AD. It's not a Druid temple. It's way, way,
way way older than that. What we do know about
(15:58):
Stonehenge is that, first of all, we don't know a
lot about it because it's about three thousand years old.
And the way to think about Stonehenge is not as Stonehenge,
but as stone Henges, like many of the monuments that
are scattered around Stone Age England and the continent. So
we think that an outer ditch started to be constructed
around three thousand BC that was made of wood, so
(16:21):
it's actually it starts life as Woodhenge, and then over
time they started to bring in all of these sarcins
and bluestones those are the big rocks, and that those
stones got moved around a lot over the next hundred years,
and that finally the site was abandoned. What we need
to do to kind of retrain our consciousness is to
(16:42):
constantly imagine that this is not one thing that's locked
in time. It is used by multiple people at multiple
different moments. What we imagine today, based on new archaeological research,
is that Stonehenge is actually part of a much wider
ceremonial landscape that we weren't paying attention to before. We
(17:04):
were just focused on the stones themselves. But our chaeologists
have started to look much more broadly, several kilometers outside
of Stonehenge, and they think that it's part of what
they call a ritual landscape, so that a couple kilometers
away you would have had a ceremony to mark let's
say my death, right, So my death, we start ceremony
(17:25):
a couple kilometers away, and that we then marched towards Stonehenge,
which moves us from the world of the living into
the world of the dead, and that Stonehenge functions as
a kind of portal into the afterlife. But you know,
at the end of the day, the trouble with anything
that before about two thousand BC is that we just
(17:48):
don't have any writing from that time period. When we
don't have writing, we really have a hard time getting
into people's mindsets, into what they are actually thinking. So
I fear that the Stonehenge stones are going to live
mutely forever more, just as they do today.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Okay, one last question. Then we've gone back now a
few thousand years, just for the fun of it, let's
go forward maybe a thousand years or so. Imagine we're
there and historians like you are looking back saying, we
don't quite get what went on in twenty twenty three.
We can't piece it together. We have some ideas, what
(18:27):
is it you think historians won't be able to figure out?
Speaker 1 (18:29):
I thought a lot about this question. I think they're
going to really ponder the fate of democracy and why
we weren't thinking in the right directions about how to
save democracy. So, you know, democracy is a new idea.
It's only been on the earth for about two hundred
and fifty years, and we're at a moment of reckoning
(18:51):
right now. Does democracy or autocracy rule of the day?
And I don't really think that they're going to wonder
about the rule that informative podcasts played in saving democracy.
And you know, this has been a huge revolution, unexpected
in the last couple of years, and the pandemic probably
had something to do with it. But everybody's listening to podcasts.
(19:14):
Some of them are listening to murder podcasts. I'm one
of those true crime junkies, I admit it, But a
lot of us are also listening to podcasts like this one,
where you have people talking about certain topics of their expertise.
And John Adams actually said during the American Revolution that
(19:35):
knowledge is power. And I think that historians in the
future may wonder about the role that informative podcasts played
in helping Americans to think through the problem of democracy
and how we get an informed citizenship. And they're going
to try to measure the role that podcasts played in that.
(19:55):
I honestly believe this. I'm not just saying this.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Well, thank you to John Adams then, and even bigger
thank you to Professor Carolyn Winter. Thank you so much
for doing this all right, Thank you. Thanks for joining
us here at One Day University. Sign up at our
website one dayu dot com to become a member and
access over seven hundred full length video lectures from the
(20:20):
world's finest professors. You can also download our app. There
you can learn more about today's episode and watch Stanford
Professor Carolyn Winterer's lecture on Unexplained History, as well as
her talks on Benjamin Franklin, the Roman Empire, and more.
Join us next time when we talk about the literature
that shaped our presidents.
Speaker 4 (20:41):
George Washington loved to read etiquette books. These books that
teach us how to gracefully accept or decline a dinner
invitation or I imagine the updated version of Emily post
would Feeley how to gently unfriend someone on Facebook.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
One Day University is a production of iHeart Power and
School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a
review in your favorite podcast app You can also check
out other Curiosity podcasts to learn about history, pop culture,
true crime, and more.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
School of Humans,
One explanation of the Salem witchcraft trials is that there
was this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined
that they saw witches and made their accusations based on that. So,
you know, maybe that's true.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Maybe they were all tripping up at Salem.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Welcome to one day University Talks with the world's most
engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This
podcast is your chance to discover some of our top
rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Steven Shregis, and
today's lesson is about historians' biggest challenge, the unknown. There's
(00:50):
a famous story about how Benjamin Franklin flew a kite
in a thunderstorm and discovered electricity. Did that actually happen Stanford?
His professor Carolyn Winterer says, we really have no idea
Franklin was interested in electricity, but there's no clear historical
evidence that he actually flew that famous kite. That's just
(01:12):
one example of the many stories from the past we've
embraced as fact when the truth is far more ambiguous.
So what do we really know when it comes to history?
Professor Winterer dug into this question for a one day
university lecture titled Unexplained History What Historians Still Don't Understand.
(01:33):
She's a professor of history and American Studies and department
chair at Stanford University and the author of quite a
few history books. The idea that our historical understanding may
have large gaps is quite unique, so I asked her
about the origins of the idea.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
This is how I remember it. We were chatting on
the phone about ideas for lectures and this sort of
popped out, like, how could we bring people into the
workshop of the historian, because usually we just go out
and present all these lovely polished findings, and we thought, Oh,
wouldn't it be fun if we could just let people
see how real historians actually work.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
You've said that before eighteen hundred, it gets a lot
harder to figure out what was going on.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Why is that, Yeah, Well, we think that before about
eighteen hundred, ninety percent of the world was illiterate. So
that means that most people in the world are neither
producing nor consuming print materials. So if they're not producing
them or consuming them, it means that we don't have
any record of what they're thinking. Before fourteen fifty. There's
(02:52):
no printing press, so there's very little broad dissemination of things,
and things tend to be in one copy in handwrits,
which historians called manuscript so if that one copy is lost,
then the whole thing is lost and we never even
know it happened. In some cases. There's also very little
in terms of what historians call eye documents or ego documents,
(03:15):
things like diaries that give you a sense of people's
interior landscape. So the only thing we have by the
time we get to about two or three thousand BC
are documents of trade receipts, like a grain receipt. You know,
you gave me three bushels of grain, and I have
a clay tablet that records that. But we have no
(03:36):
sense of how you're feeling about things, how you're thinking
about things. So by the time we get into the
deep archaeological record of ten thousand BC, we're really almost
in a no man's land in terms of what we
can know.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
You showed up with a number of examples. I've picked
a few of them that we'll talk about.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
We're going to.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Start with my favorite, and that is what Accent did.
The founding far have you want to tell us about that?
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, So just to set the stage, the founding fathers,
you know, the big ones, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, et cetera.
They're all born in the seventeen thirties and seventeen forties,
so technically they're citizens of the British Empire, so perhaps
they have a British accent. But the American Revolution comes
along in seventeen seventy six and they become Americans. So
it's an interesting question what accent do they have. And
(04:23):
when we look at movies, the bad guys who are
the British have these British accents like Darth Vader, and
the Americans have these American accents like you and I
have Stephen today. So the way we often think about
it is that there is a thing called a timeless
British accent that sounds like BBC English Today or you
know whatever, Jane Austen movies people like to watch, and
(04:44):
that after seventeen seventy six, the American accent that you
and I have appears and we all start talking like
I'm talking now. But in fact, what happened is that
before about eighteen hundred, there was a common accent shared
by many British people and many people living in British America,
(05:07):
what we know is colonial America. And they actually sounded
a little bit like I do and you do. In
that they pronounced the r as in car, So we're
hearing the hard R. Why do we think that this happened. Well,
we don't have sound recordings, but we do have what
are called pronouncing dictionaries, and they show us that they
(05:27):
guide people about how to pronounce words, and they show
British people in the seventeen nineties being told to pronounce
words like car as call. So why did they do that? Well,
this is hard for US Americans to swallow because we
think we're at the center of the universe. But it
in fact has nothing to do with the American Revolution. Instead,
(05:49):
it has everything to do with the industrial revolution in England,
where wealthy capitalists wanted to now distinguish themselves in society
from the poor, and so they began to develop this
new accent. The non rhotic are to say things like cod,
whereas the poor would say things like card.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
It makes sense you're telling us that the English accent
is the fancier accent, so at least I'm comfortable with that.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah, what we suspected all along that the British are
in fact fancier than we are, and they sound better
than we do. So there it is.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Okay, let's move even further back in history, the sixteen
hundreds and the Salem witch Trials. It's a famous historical event,
but do we really know what happened?
Speaker 1 (06:35):
So, you know, we love the Salem witch Trials of
sixteen ninety two and sixteen ninety three up there in Salem, Massachusetts,
a little north of Boston. It's a big tourist destination today,
and we know that something really creepy happened that involved
young women and hysterics and bigot administers and various deaths
and hangings and whatnot. So it's exciting and everybody is
(06:59):
interesting said in this, So you know what do we know? Well,
we know that at Salem in sixteen ninety two there
were two hundred people accused of witchcraft, many of them
young women. Nineteen of them were executed. And we think
this sounds like a lot until we look at the
European context, where around the same time, over about a
(07:22):
two or three hundred year period, between fourteen hundred and
seventeen hundred, there were fifty thousand witchcraft executions. So you
take that European context, fifty thousand witchcraft executions over a
three hundred year period, and then you look at Salem
with its nineteen executions in one year, and you reverse
(07:45):
the question. It's not what happened at Salem, it's why
weren't there more witchcraft executions at Salem? What's wrong in
North America that they weren't hunting down which is more
so that's you know, that's an example of how knowing
the broader contexts of a historical event can really help
us to reframe it. So, you know, what are our
(08:07):
sources for the witchcraft trials? So a lot of it
is legal evidence that is written in Latin or in
English handwriting that is very hard to read. And from
that historians have come up with several hypotheses. So the
first hypothesis is what I call the rich hating hypothesis.
(08:27):
And historians mapped onto Salem where did the accusers live
and where did the accused witches live? And what they
found was that many of the accusers lived on the
poorer side of Salem, on the wrong side of the tracks.
Whereas the people who were more likely to be accused
lived on the wealthier side of Salem. So this is
(08:50):
an economic argument, and it basically says that the accusers
were envious of the wealth of the accused and they
lodged a witchcraft accusation based on that. So there's some
evidence to support that hypothesis, but it doesn't account for everything,
because there's a lot of economic envy in the world
in sixteen ninety two, but we only have one incidence
(09:12):
of an event like Salem, so it answers some questions,
doesn't answer all of them. During the nineteen sixties, there
was a second hypothesis, that is the ergot hypothesis. So
the biologists out there might know that Ergot's ergot is
a hallucinogenic rye fungus, so it grows on wheat and
(09:32):
rye and barley grains you might store, as they did
in the seventeenth century over a long winter, and that
if you ingest this fungus you basically get high. So
one explanation of Salem witchcraft trials is that there was
this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined that
(09:52):
they saw witches and made their accusations based on that,
So you know, maybe that's true, maybe they were all
tripping up at Salem. The trouble is that there was
a lot of Rye fungus throughout the colonies, throughout the
other parts of the world, and it didn't manifest necessarily
in witchcraft accusations. So, just like the economic explanation, it
(10:14):
has some things that it explains, some things that it
doesn't explain. You know, there's many more hypotheses, but you know,
at the end of the day, will never really understand
what happened at Salem because our evidence is pretty paltry
when you think about the kind of evidence we might
have today for such an event.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
After the break the mystery of Cleopatra's legendary beauty and
why some people believe aliens built Stonehenge, let's go back
(10:57):
another like sixteen hundred years, so it really gets are now,
to put it bluntly, what did Cleopatra look like? Why
do we think that she's so beautiful? What did she
actually look like? Why did you.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Tell us possibly the most famous woman who has ever lived,
trailing all kinds of legends about her beauty. But the
fact of the matter is that we really do not
know what Cleopatra looked like. So you know, when I
say Cleopatra, the members of your audience, who are perhaps
over the age of the half century mark, are going
(11:30):
to immediately think of Elizabeth Taylor with her great blue
eyeshadow looking like Cleopatra. So that's, you know, that's the
image in our mind, but we in fact don't know,
and that was kind of an invented image. So what
do we know, Well, we have very very little evidence
because we are around the decades right before the BC
(11:54):
era ends, right, so we're around thirty BC. And given
how much we think about that time period, you know,
the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and Romans, we imagine that
we have tons and tons of evidence, but we don't,
and a lot of it is very contradictory. So the
first thing we need to realize is that Cleopatra is
not in fact Egyptian. She is Cleopatra the Seventh. She
(12:16):
is from the Ptolemaic dynasty PTol e Naic, and the
Ptolemies are in fact Greek. They conquered the Egyptians during
the third century BC, and she's one of the later
queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty. So when you are in
the Ptolemaic world, you are in a world of what
(12:38):
we know as royal incest. So your listeners can take
away a new vocabulary term for today. Royal incest comes
from a time period when they believe that royal families
were in fact manifestations of gods on earth. So why
would you want to marry outside of the royal blood
and sully the royal blood with the blood of mere
(12:59):
common know, you want to marry within the royal family.
So we believe that her parents were brother and sister.
So she is not Egyptian at all. She is Greek,
extremely Greek. We have to get out of our heads
a kind of Egyptian appearance, whatever that might be at
this time, and imagine a Greek appearance again, whatever that
(13:19):
might be. Okay, So there's first of all, what is
her ethnicity. Second of all, we might be asking, well,
she's a queen. There's probably a ton of statues of
her that we can look at. But that's also a
problem because Ptolemaic and ancient Egyptian statuary is very formulaic.
They're not all about expressing individualism. So they have all
(13:43):
of these protocols for how you show a queen, so
you have a certain hairstyle, you have a certain way
of showing their lips and their neck and all of that.
What that means is that our images of what may
or may not be Cleopatra are very generic, and we
don't know if it's her or another queen. Same thing
with coinage that was issued during her reign. There is
(14:05):
a woman's head on coinage during Cleopatra's reign of Egypt,
but it's so formulaic and it's intended to express her power.
So she looks very masculine on the portraits on coins,
so we don't know if that's actually what she looked like.
So so much for statues, so much for coins. We
also know that eventually a further complication is that the
(14:29):
Romans conquered Egypt, and many people in Rome hated Cleopatra
because she was this outsider queen brought back to Rome
by Julia Caesar and then Mark Antony. So they had
this anti Cleopatra propaganda in which they called her a witch,
a whore, an animal worshiper, and of course very strange looking,
(14:51):
because they didn't want her around.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
They didn't like Cleopatra. Everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yes, everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor. People in Rome didn't like Cleopatra.
And so we come away from this with this astonishing
realization that for all that she's famous, we really don't
know what Cleopatra actually looked like.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
The next one I can almost sum up in one word, Stonehenge.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Stonehenge.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Aliens built that, right, that's the quick answer.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Aliens built it, and there it is, and they beamed
down and put up a bunch of stones, and you
can go there and communicate with the aliens.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
All right, Well, just in case that's not true. What
is true?
Speaker 1 (15:35):
What is true? So we're fascinated by Stonehenge. The first
thing we should know is it wasn't built by the Druids.
The Druids are kind of manifest in England right around
the time of the Romans, which is around first century
BC for century AD. It's not a Druid temple. It's way, way,
way way older than that. What we do know about
(15:58):
Stonehenge is that, first of all, we don't know a
lot about it because it's about three thousand years old.
And the way to think about Stonehenge is not as Stonehenge,
but as stone Henges, like many of the monuments that
are scattered around Stone Age England and the continent. So
we think that an outer ditch started to be constructed
around three thousand BC that was made of wood, so
(16:21):
it's actually it starts life as Woodhenge, and then over
time they started to bring in all of these sarcins
and bluestones those are the big rocks, and that those
stones got moved around a lot over the next hundred years,
and that finally the site was abandoned. What we need
to do to kind of retrain our consciousness is to
(16:42):
constantly imagine that this is not one thing that's locked
in time. It is used by multiple people at multiple
different moments. What we imagine today, based on new archaeological research,
is that Stonehenge is actually part of a much wider
ceremonial landscape that we weren't paying attention to before. We
(17:04):
were just focused on the stones themselves. But our chaeologists
have started to look much more broadly, several kilometers outside
of Stonehenge, and they think that it's part of what
they call a ritual landscape, so that a couple kilometers
away you would have had a ceremony to mark let's
say my death, right, So my death, we start ceremony
(17:25):
a couple kilometers away, and that we then marched towards Stonehenge,
which moves us from the world of the living into
the world of the dead, and that Stonehenge functions as
a kind of portal into the afterlife. But you know,
at the end of the day, the trouble with anything
that before about two thousand BC is that we just
(17:48):
don't have any writing from that time period. When we
don't have writing, we really have a hard time getting
into people's mindsets, into what they are actually thinking. So
I fear that the Stonehenge stones are going to live
mutely forever more, just as they do today.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Okay, one last question. Then we've gone back now a
few thousand years, just for the fun of it, let's
go forward maybe a thousand years or so. Imagine we're
there and historians like you are looking back saying, we
don't quite get what went on in twenty twenty three.
We can't piece it together. We have some ideas, what
(18:27):
is it you think historians won't be able to figure out?
Speaker 1 (18:29):
I thought a lot about this question. I think they're
going to really ponder the fate of democracy and why
we weren't thinking in the right directions about how to
save democracy. So, you know, democracy is a new idea.
It's only been on the earth for about two hundred
and fifty years, and we're at a moment of reckoning
(18:51):
right now. Does democracy or autocracy rule of the day?
And I don't really think that they're going to wonder
about the rule that informative podcasts played in saving democracy.
And you know, this has been a huge revolution, unexpected
in the last couple of years, and the pandemic probably
had something to do with it. But everybody's listening to podcasts.
(19:14):
Some of them are listening to murder podcasts. I'm one
of those true crime junkies, I admit it, But a
lot of us are also listening to podcasts like this one,
where you have people talking about certain topics of their expertise.
And John Adams actually said during the American Revolution that
(19:35):
knowledge is power. And I think that historians in the
future may wonder about the role that informative podcasts played
in helping Americans to think through the problem of democracy
and how we get an informed citizenship. And they're going
to try to measure the role that podcasts played in that.
(19:55):
I honestly believe this. I'm not just saying this.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Well, thank you to John Adams then, and even bigger
thank you to Professor Carolyn Winter. Thank you so much
for doing this all right, Thank you. Thanks for joining
us here at One Day University. Sign up at our
website one dayu dot com to become a member and
access over seven hundred full length video lectures from the
(20:20):
world's finest professors. You can also download our app. There
you can learn more about today's episode and watch Stanford
Professor Carolyn Winterer's lecture on Unexplained History, as well as
her talks on Benjamin Franklin, the Roman Empire, and more.
Join us next time when we talk about the literature
that shaped our presidents.
Speaker 4 (20:41):
George Washington loved to read etiquette books. These books that
teach us how to gracefully accept or decline a dinner
invitation or I imagine the updated version of Emily post
would Feeley how to gently unfriend someone on Facebook.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
One Day University is a production of iHeart Power and
School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a
review in your favorite podcast app You can also check
out other Curiosity podcasts to learn about history, pop culture,
true crime, and more.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
School of Humans,
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