6.4.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome missus Marcia a Radio Eye. To day, I will
be reading National Geographic magazine dated May twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of

(00:22):
the article I began last time, entitled Rediscovering the Ancient
Empire that History Forgot. This article is by Andrew Currie,
inscribed on tablets of silver with copies made in clay.
The twelve fifty nine b c Accord promised mutual assistance

(00:44):
against invaders and a good piece and a good fraternity
between the Land of Egypt and the Land of Hati forever.
The agreement marked a pivotal shift in the annals of
state craft. Up until that moment, the rule was winner
take all. Peace treaties were the winner, dictating to the losers,

(01:04):
Shakner pointed out the Hittites and the Egyptians decided not
to continue that way. The Treaty of Kadesh describes the
two rulers as equals and peace as an end in itself.
It's the beginning of modern diplomacy, one reason. A copy
of the agreement hangs at the United Nations Headquarters in
New York City. A fragmented clay original found at Hitusha

(01:26):
in nineteen o six is on display at the Istanbul
Airport Museum. Diplomacy and religion were crucial tools for the Hittites,
who referred to their empire as the land of a
thousand Gods. When they conquered or took control of a
group of people, they permitted the subject subjugated to keep
their religious practices. Rather than wiping out local deities, they

(01:48):
folded them into the Hittite empire and pantheon. Holy statues
from temples thought to embody the gods themselves were transported
to Hittusha's temple district and worshiped there the way they
were at home. Temple archives record the problems with this approach,
like God's who didn't speak Hittite. In one example, after

(02:09):
a new god was brought from the island of Lesbo's,
Hittites realized that no one knew how to talk to it.
A sheep was sacrificed and its innards were examined to
determine if the new God could accept being worshiped Hittite's style. Yes,
was the answer discerned in the sheep's intestines. They didn't
want to anchor the gods. Villemin while, a hittitologist at

(02:31):
Leiden University in the Netherlands told me, but at the
same time, they're very pragmatic. It's kind of adorable. Was
also a key to their success. They were able to
bring people together not by brutal despotism, but by persuasion,
using religion and beliefs. Schachner said, that is unique. That
is what makes them so special. What we know about

(02:52):
the Hittites is, by the standards of ancient history, incredibly new.
Hittite writing wasn't unlocked until nineteen fifteen, when a linguist
in Prague named Bedrich Kirozhni realized that the unearthed tablets
were written in an Indo European language, the earliest known
example of a family that today includes everything from English

(03:13):
to Sanskrit. Over the past century, more than thirty thousand
remnants of clay tablets have been recovered from Hatusha and
other Hittite cities. More are found every year. That constant
flow of brand new information makes histitology one of the
most dynamic, fast moving fields of ancient history. Late one afternoon,
I found Daniel Schwemer, a researcher from Germany's University of Wurtzburg,

(03:38):
seated at a table in the German Archaeological Institute's dig
house in vojas Kala, the village next to Hittusha's ruins.
Schwemer is part of a small community of scholars who
specialized in reading and translating Hittite texts. Every autumny comes
to Hatusha to see what's been found during the summer's excavations.

(04:00):
Like unpacking Christmas presents, Schemer said, you really never know
what you'll get. Each new find has the potential to
change what we know about Bronze Age empires. It's an
area where history is still in the process of being written.
Schemer said. Documents are coming out of the ground nobody
has seen for thousands of years. Of course, answers to

(04:20):
a question that the heart of Hittite research remain elusive.
What happened to them? Theories abound, from political unrest to
climate change, but a lone explanation seems unlikely to be found.
There's no single reason why such a complex society disintegrates
and completely disappears from history. Schachner said instead, a perfect

(04:42):
storm of factors probably pushed Hittites to the limits and
then beyond. Raiders were a constant threat. For example, tribes
known as the Kaska living along the Black Sea coast
show up in tablets, destroying temples and desecrating statues before
dividing up the the priests, the holy priests, the priestesses,

(05:02):
the anointed ones, the musicians, the singers, the cooks, the bakers,
the plowmen, and the gardeners and making them their servants.
Natural disasters, too, strained the Hittite empire from time to time.
Recent finds from a site called Stepaneuva suggest powerful earthquakes
regularly rock the Hittite heartland about forty miles northeast of

(05:24):
Hatusha at the shop of Nuva's Palace and Tempel complex,
excavations rebuilt walls and floors that rippled like waves. Archaeologists
discovered buildings and storehouses consumed in a huge fire, all
clues the city was hit by a devastating quake. The
Hittite successfully handled these and different challenges for years until

(05:45):
suddenly they didn't. By about twelve fifty BC, the tablets
begin to show the strains of the empire's final century.
Pallas Infighting and royal assassination attempts grew rampant, making it
hard for Hatusha's leaders to maintain control over their subjects.
Epidemic diseases were a problem too. The tablets contained prayers

(06:07):
to ward off plagues and changes in language and writing styles.
In the empire's final decades, navy signs of social strife
or upheaval signs their multi ethnic state was under strain.
The latest findings suggest climate change in a series of
natural disasters helped accelerate the empire's decline. In a twenty

(06:29):
twenty three study, researchers analyzed preserved wood recovered from Gordian,
a city on the western outskirts of the Hittite Empire.
By measuring tree rings, they could tell nearby forests were
unusually stressed between eleven ninety eight and eleven ninety six BC,
evidence of a punishing three year drought right around the

(06:49):
time the Hittite Empire was ented. The drought may have
sparked famine. Archaeologists found empty grain depots at Hititusha, Chapineuva,
and other abandoned Hittite cities. Letters reflect the desperation of
Hittite kings who begged foreign leaders to send barley and
wheat as a matter of life and death, and invaders

(07:10):
referred to as sea peoples in Egyptian chronicles, caused chaos
that rippled all across the Mediterranean, weakening all alliances and
prompting mass migrations. That was the salt and pepper on
the Dish, says Ginch. Around eleven eighty b C. The
Hittites methodically abandoned their capital. There are no signs of

(07:30):
battle or conquest, no mass graves, no toppled towers or buildings, temples,
storehouses full of gold and silver vessels, gilded spears, and
booty from successful military campaigns elaborately described in festival instructions
and inventory lists but missing today must have been packed
up and evacuated. Afterward, the city burned, but in a

(07:54):
final irony, the flames that destroyed Hatusha preserved its history,
Too heavy to move from their archives, thousands of clay
tablets the Hittites amassed over the course of roughly four
centuries were left behind. Fire baked them into hard bricks,
helping them survive the ensuing centuries intact. The advantage for

(08:15):
us is that all these clay tablets were left behind
when everyone fled the capital. Schemer said, what remained was
the paperwork. Until a tablet emerges inscribed with an account
of Fatucia's last days, the mystery abides. The Hittites managed
to adapt to a harsh environment and grow into a
mighty empire despite their surroundings, until circumstances beyond their control

(08:38):
upset their delicate balancing act. The Hittites collapse and their
recent rediscovery as a testament to the importance of resilience
and good record keeping. Hittites clash with Egypt twelve seventy
four BC, turning point at Kadesh, a century before the
Hittite Empire vanished, its forces fought the Egyptians in what
is believed to be history's biggest East chariot battle. It

(09:01):
ended in a draw. Fifteen years after the conflict, the
empires settled their differences with one of the world's oldest
known peace treaties rivals of the Hittites in the early
thirteenth century BC. The Hittite Empire was just one of
the mighty powers that arose in the fertile lands of
the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Ancient records show that while

(09:23):
they were connected through regular diplomacy and trade, each had
its own distinct language and culture. City of the Gods. Today,
some thirty three hundred years after the peak of the
Hittite Empire, the realms grandeur can be clipsed in the
ruins of the capital Atusha, an ancient stronghold dotted with
temples that honored a litany of deities. The capital's Great Temple,

(09:46):
Hittite social, political, and religious life centered on its temples.
Annual festivals, and Hittusha's impressive architecture projected power and promoted
a common culture emanating from the empire's corp Next, how
visiting the Titanic got a lot simpler by Canille Bromley.
Fresh advances in three D scanning technology are making it

(10:09):
possible to explore some of the hardest to reach in
most fragile sites on Earth. Last year, Parks Stevenson stood
next to the Titanic and walked slowly around it, gazing
up at the massive ship. He paused to look inside
one of the boiler rooms and at the position of
the controls on the engines. He noticed the number four
O one the ship's id, etched on the propeller blades.

(10:32):
Rusticles hung from the steel shell, Twisted metal and personal
trinkets from those long dead littered the ground. Stevenson, a
retired naval officer and Titanic historian, wasn't twelve thousand, five
hundred feet below the surface of the North Atlantic, of course.
He was in London inspecting the ship's digital Twin, a

(10:52):
one for one computer model made possible by advances in
remote three D scanning and mapping technology. The model is
so densely detailed a video rendering of it can be
projected to life size in a warehouse where researchers can
walk alongside it and zoom in and out on individual features,
like a steam valve from the boiler room, which the

(11:14):
scan revealed was left open, possibly to keep an emergency
generator running as the ship sank. The Titanic Twin adds
to a growing list of similar models made of archaeological
and cultural sites around the world that both preserve these
fragile places and provide a new means of exploring them.
Stevenson has seen the actual Titanic wreck twice since his

(11:37):
first dive in two thousand and five, but he didn't
catch so many details on his trips. You can only
see what's immediately in front of you, he says, of
peering through a submersibles roughly six inch viewport and camera views.
It's like being in a dark room and you have
a flashlight that's not very powerful. The digital twin, on
the other hand, gave him an unobstructed three one hundred

(12:00):
and sixty degree view of every gnarled, nook and cranny.
The scan at the storage ship was carried out over
three weeks in twenty twenty two by Magellan, a deep
sea mapping company based in the Channel Islands. Titanic the
Digital Resurrection, a new national geographic documentary streaming on Disney Plus,
tells the story of the effort. It is the largest

(12:22):
underwater three D scan ever made, amounting to sixteen terabytes
of data equivalent to the hard drive footprint of six
million E books. To create it, two remote operated robots
romantically named Romeo and Juliet traveled down to the wreck
and systematically canvassed the site, taking some seven hundred fifteen

(12:43):
thousand photos and millions of laser measurements. For Stevenson, the
quality of detail in the scan opens new lines of
inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic. The ship lies
broken in two pieces, with a bow and stern about
twenty six hundred feet apart. The hull descended in a
straight line and as largely still intact, the scan shows

(13:04):
it neatly wedged into the ocean floor. The stern, on
the other hand, is shattered, and researchers have never been
able to definitively say how that happened. When Stephenson looked
at the scan, though, he could immediately envision the back
half of the ship's spiraling as it sank and disintegrated
into rubble. At a first glance, he says, it just

(13:26):
made sense. In the past, a full grand scale of
the wreck could be depicted only through artistic renditions or
photomosaics created by humans. Neither method conveyed conveyed precise verisimilitude.
The machine run three D model, however, is exact. As
soon as I saw the Titanic digital twid images, Stevenson says,

(13:47):
I could tell number one, I'd never seen Titanic like
this before, and number two it felt right. The quest
to create exact models for more accessible surveying started over
a century ago. The technology that makes digital twinning possible
dates back to at least eighteen fifty eight, when a
German engineer named Albrech Maidenbauer was tasked with surveying a

(14:11):
church and nearly fell to his death while measuring the facade.
To avoid another dangerous climb, he worked out a way
to mathematically calculate the measurements of large objects from photos,
a technique he called photo grammatry. Today, photo grammatry, combined
with lidar, which uses lasers to measure distances, as well

(14:31):
as advanced computing power, produces models that can accurately replicate
the most minute details of enormous structures like Mount Rushmore
or the esthetic proportions of Mclangelo's David. The Italian Renaissance
master's sculpture was one of the first major artifacts to
be digitally modeled in two thousand by Stanford University. Though

(14:53):
not as massive as the Titanic, the statue's relatively large
size seventeen feet tall and twelve thousand, a hundred pounds
and finely chiseled details make it a good test for
how accurately three D technology might reproduce objects on a
grand scale to day. The tech is so precise that
in twenty twenty a team at the University of Florence

(15:14):
produced a three D printed copy accurate down to David's
resolute expression and every defect of the original stone. People
travel to see masterpieces of human creativity because they want
to feel the presence of something awesome or genius, but
too much of our presence can destroy places that are irreplaceable.

(15:34):
Hundreds have visited the Titanic, most of them at enormous expense,
including five on the ill fated titan submersible. These explorers
are the source of significant damage suffered by the wreck.
Human piloted submersibles have in it burdenly, stripped a mast
and gashed the bow. Beyond tourism, sites may be unpredictably

(15:56):
damaged by natural disasters, climate change, or war. In twenty nineteen,
three D documentation company si ARC created models of Nigeria's
ousen Osogbo Sacred Grove just before the sculpture laden forest
shrines were destroyed in a flood. Chance Kaufner, a program

(16:18):
manager for Google Arts and Culture, which supported si ARC
in these efforts, and hosts these models online hopes the
shrines can be rebuilt from the scans. Kaufnauer's group supported
similar efforts to create digital twins of a cathedral and
a historic government landmark in Ukraine that are now damaged

(16:38):
by the war. On an even grander scale, digital twins
can be made of not only buildings, statues, and shipwrecks,
but also entire cities, living or dead. Alison Emerson, and
archaeologist at Tulane University, is making a digital twin of
parts of Pompeii, a famously fragile site where she spent
the past sixteen years digging through layers of soil to

(17:01):
uncover the city's earliest history. Emerson says digital twinning is
the biggest leap forward for archaeology since photography our process
is inherently destructive. She says, of excavating a site, we
can never redo it. We can dig the site once,
and so the focus in modern archaeology has been on
recording as well as we possibly can. Her team's twin

(17:26):
of a block in the southeast of the city was
made with just a few hand held cameras. The model
allows them to visualize the site with the walls of
a room taken away, or a roof added, or how
the land looked before the building was constructed. They can
call up the model back in the lab and continue
conversations that previously would happen only in the field. Emerson's

(17:48):
work has revealed how one building at the site was
both a restaurant and a workshop for people manufactured read
baskets and mats, details that help her understand the city's
economy and the daily life of its working class. For
her part, Emerson plans to make her model of POMPEII
and the coompanying findings available to the public, avoiding a

(18:09):
common outcome for these projects. Because digital twins are expensive
to create, many ambitious projects end uplocked way in the
private archives of universities or governments. I did not want
the model to live on a team member's laptop, she says.
While Magellan has not announced any plans to make its
Titanic scans free to the public, the documentary itself shows

(18:32):
what's possible. Much of the existing research on the shipwreck
has been conducted by private expeditions that guard bindings, an
ongoing source of concern for scientists and citizen enthusiasts. Alike,
Stevenson remains concerned the wreck is not being treated as
an archaeological site. It's one of the most famous sites
in the world, and we don't even have the basic

(18:55):
baseline information needed to establish what's there at any particulegular time,
because you've had different explorers who don't share information. He says,
the digital twin has the potential to allow more visitors
to experience it in a less destructive and more collaborative way.
It's unlikely people will stop going to the Titanic wreck site.

(19:17):
Its draw has proven irresistible for those with enough money
and motivation. In two thousand and one, for example, a
couple exchanged vows crouched in a submersible perched on the bow.
A digital twin certainly doesn't replace sitting on the deck
of the Titanic, says Robert Ballard, an oceanographer and National
Geographic Explorer who discovered the wreck in nineteen eighty five

(19:39):
along with Jean Louis Michael, but he thinks it will
help preserve the wreck for those who cannot resist going themselves.
He offers two warnings, don't touch it, don't get married
on it. Next Australia's Great Big Camel Conundrum by Sean Williams.
Imported from the Middle East and Asia in the nineteenth century,
caials now thrive in Australia's air and out back, but

(20:04):
drought and climate change are raising tough questions about whether
they belong. Jack Carmody has built a sizeable YouTube following
by showing his viewers what it takes to run a
cattle station in the Australian outback. The rugged work of
mending troughs, reinforcing fences and shooting trespassers feral horses and donkeys,

(20:25):
that is, and one particularly destructive invasive species, camels, introduced
in the nineteenth century to help colonists survey the country's
vast interior. The creatures are now wrecking havoc across the
outback and decimating the Carmody family's ranch property, or what
Australians call a cattle station. At more than fifteen hundred

(20:46):
square miles, the property Prenty Downs is the size of
Rhode Island. So there's plenty of work to be done,
and in this modern Internet age, there's plenty of content
to be created on Carbony's channel, Jack out the Back
no videos are more popular than those focused on in
Spite against the camels, which the straight talking father of
three culls with his rifle, taking out nearly eight hundred

(21:10):
each year. The approach might seem alarming, but to Carmody
and other cattle farmers, it's simply the most rational solution
to a dire problem, like weeding the veggie patch, as
he puts it, and in a twist that is perhaps
good for YouTube and bad for cattle farming, the camels,
like stubborn weeds, keep coming back. Australia is now home

(21:30):
to the large world's largest feral camel population, with estimates
from several hundred thousand to as many as a million.
Females can give birth every two years and live up
to forty years in the wild, meaning the number of
camels can double every nine years. Weighing on average one
thousand pounds, they roam in herds from fewer than ten

(21:52):
to several hundred, trampling ecosystems and destroying infrastructure. Creatures are
voracious consumers of plants, eating with other wildlife and live stock,
and limiting food sources for aboriginal communities. They destabilize sand dunes,
which can lead to erosion. Camels also foulw water holes

(22:12):
with their droppings or by mobbing them, only to die
of thirst. Their carcasses poisoning what little water is left. Water,
in fact, is the source of the biggest problem. When
enough moisture rich plants are available, camels famously can subsist
for weeks on end without a drink, but when they
do go thirsty, they're insatiable. An adult camel can consume

(22:34):
fifty gallons in the day. When natural sources of water
dry up on Aboriginal land, pastoral territory, and cattle stations,
camels go looking for a drink wherever they can find it.
In the process, they often rip up pipes, destroy toilet blocks,
and knock air conditioners out of windows. What's even more
concerning is that a rising number of droughts is pushing

(22:58):
the animals into ever closer in frequent contact with humans.
One of the most damashing of these conflicts occurred in
twenty thirteen on a Northern Territory cattle station named Curtain Springs.
Six years earlier, feral camels, desperate for a drink, erect
one hundred miles of the station's fencing and i mean

(23:18):
just totally destroyed, says Lindy Severand, who runs the farm
with her family gone. Replacing the fencing cost about half
a million dollars. Ranchers have a legal obligation to remove
feral animals on their property. When she saw the camels
were back, Sovereign called the Australian Feral Camel Management Project,
which had called twenty seven thousand camels from the region

(23:40):
the previous year. Within forty eight hours, snipers arrived at
the property and over the next four days they shot
seventeen hundred camels dead from their helicopters. But the feral
camel calling program, budgeted for four years, ended in twenty
thirteen with little political will in cities to keep the
distant out project going, and feral camel numbers have only

(24:04):
gone up. According to biologist Tim Lowe, co founder of
Australia's Invasive Species Council, a private nonprofit, the current impact
of feral camels on farmers and rural Aboriginal Australians is
very substantial. Costs and damage and control less estimated at
twelve million dollars in twenty thirteen, are unknown today. Low

(24:27):
and other experts say if they can't get the population
under control, the country's next droughts will lead to more crises.
There are plenty of ideas, both practical and fanciful, for
what to do with the feral camels, but it's helpful
to understand why they were brought to Australia in the
first place. In the eighteen thirties, British colonists struggling to

(24:47):
survey the outback on horses that tired easily caught word
of camel's extraordinary endurance. The first camel to enter the
country arrived in eighteen forty from the Canary Islands, and
others followed from a rape via Afghanistan, British India, and
the Persian and Ottoman Empires. Colonists also brought in more
than two thousand camel operators or kamaliers, whom they collectively

(25:11):
called Afghans. Despite their disparate origins, camels helped open the
remote interior, transporting food and supplies, as well as gold
prospectors and workers building railway and telegraph systems. Then, the
White Australia Policy, enacted in nineteen oh one to prevent
non Europeans from immigrating, began to thin the number of

(25:33):
kamaliers as wood technology. By the nineteen thirties, cars and
railroads had rendered Australia's camel industry all but obsolete. Many
foreign kamaliers returned to their homelands and their camels, up
to ten thousand of them. Suddenly, jablists were set free
to Rome when traditional use for these wayward animals is

(25:53):
to enlist them in the camel trekking industry, which offers
a ruggedly authentic way for travelers to see most of
the remote parts of Australia's interior. Camel trekking was made
famous by Robin Davidson's nineteen eighty memoir Tracks about her
solo seventeen hundred mile journey by camel across the deserts
of Western Australia, and the industry now comprises a dozen operators.

(26:18):
One of the longest running is the Outback Camel Company.
Andrew Harper, who has owned the outfit since two thousand
and has twenty one camels, estimates that fewer than one
hundred camels around the country are being used for trekking.
We are governed by the seasons, says Harper, and with
limited numbers of people wanting to make desert treks. It's
not like your normal business model focused on exponential growth.

(26:42):
But there's also a more dramatic way to ride feral camels,
one that, like the animals themselves, has been imported from abroad.
Each year, more than four thousand people visit the Queensland
village of Boulia, population under five hundred, which hosts one
of Australia's most famous cat camel racing tournaments, a competition

(27:03):
where the purse totals some thirty thousand dollars. The animals
are temperamental, few heats pass without a buck or a bite,
and any jockeys worth their salt to have the scars
to prove it. Every single camel has got a different personality,
says jockey Bretlin beaver Neil. You hope you get a
good start and yeah, hold on. Camel treker Paddy mc

(27:25):
hugh founded the Bouliah Camel Races in nineteen ninety seven.
It remains a modest enterprise, as does the entire domestic
racing circuit, which has only about a hundred camels in competition,
but mc kew thinks that figure could grow tenfold. A
Formula one style circuit could connect Australian races with contests
in North Africa and in the Persian Gulf, where racing

(27:48):
camels can be worth over a million dollars. This concludes
readings from National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has
been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and
have a great j