History Fix

Ep. 132 Lost Cities Part 2: How Ancient Metropolises Have Been Forgotten to Some and Rediscovered

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 132

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I'm back again this week with four more "lost cities" for you. First we'll explore the  Egyptian city of Thonis-Heracleion that literally sank beneath the Mediterranean Sea and was rediscovered some 1,200 years later. Next, we'll hop over to Jordan to discover the ancient Nabataean city of Petra with it's grand facades etched into the red rock landscape. After that it's off to Cambodia to learn about the not actually lost at all Khmer city of Angkor. And finally the mountains of Peru where majestic and little understood Machu Picchu looms among the picturesque peaks. But, while it's fun to think about "lost cities," the obvious lesson of this week's episode is: be careful what you call "lost" and be careful how easily you throw out the term "discovered." These words carry weight and they've already caused a lot of damage. Let's fix that. 

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Perched on the north coast of Egypt, along the Mediterranean Sea is the famed port city of Alexandria. Founded by and named for the Greek Alexander the Great, it has served as a major trading hub for almost 2,500 years, well known for its lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and its famed Library of Alexandria. But, did you know that while Alexandria still carries on, an active sea port and tourist destination, its predecessor lies forgotten just 20 miles away? The Egyptians called it Thonis (thaw-nis). The Greeks called it Heracleion and, in its day, a time before Alexandria, it sat like a beacon of prosperity, welcoming people from all over the ancient world into Egypt. Until it sank, literally and figuratively, out of sight, out of mind. Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I am back again this week with four more lost cities for you. If you missed last week’s episode, that was part one, we journeyed to the mythical but surprisingly quite real city of Troy in modern day Turkey, the completely unknown and somewhat baffling city of Mohenjo Daro in modern day Pakistan, El Mirador, surprisingly advanced lost city of the Maya in Guatemala, and we ended at Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. Go back and listen if you missed it, you don’t want to miss those. However, this episode, while technically a part two, does also stand alone. So no worries if you missed part one. 


At the end of last week’s episode, I called our first city today Heracleion and I need to clear up some confusion over that. So, for a long time, people thought there were two different cities close together. One of them, they thought, was called Heracleion and the other was called Thonis. Later, it became apparent, when this city was rediscovered, that it was just one city that went by two different names depending on who you asked. The Egyptians called it Thonis and the Greeks called it Heracleion. So I’m going to call it, as do most sources, I’m going to call it Thonis-Heracleion. Same place, two names. This city, Thonis-Heracleion was founded around 700 BC which puts it at predating Alexandria by about 400 years. So 400 years before Alexandria was built, around 20 miles north east of the future site of Alexandria, Thonis-Heracleion is built. Its location is majorly important. It was built along the north coast, the Mediterranean coast of Egypt just next to the mouth of the Nile River. And this poised it perfectly for trade. It was one of the major trading centers of the ancient world, welcoming people from all over into Egypt. 


Now, something you have to understand, ancient Egypt spanned an incredibly long time period. People first settled in that area, the Nile valley, over 13,000 years ago. Just over 5,000 years ago, upper and lower Egypt unified into a single empire. That happened in 3,100 BC. For context, construction on the Great Pyramid began, we think, around 2,500 BC. Thonis-Heracleion was not established until 700 BC. So you have to understand, to the people of Thonis-Heracleion, the Great Pyramid at Giza was almost 2,000 years old. It was as old to them as the colosseum in Rome is to us. It was ancient to them. 700 BC Egypt is a different Egypt than 2,500 BC Egypt because of ancient Greece. Ancient Greece, the ancient Greek world officially began in 800 BC and it fairly immediately became intertwined with Egypt because of trade. And so the purpose of Thonis-Heracleion there on the Mediterranean coast is to trade mostly with the Greeks but also with whoever. Jack Shenker writes for the Guardian quote “And yet if you were a European merchant in the fifth century BC – an importer of grain, perfume or papyrus perhaps, or an exporter of silver, copper, wine or oil – then Thonis-Heracleion loomed large on your horizon. The same was true if you were a Carian mercenary, an educated Greek, a professional sailor, or a member of the Pharaonic court. Scattered across a series of interlinked islands, sand and mudbanks, Thonis-Heracleion – part aquatic marshland, part urban sprawl – was ancient Egypt’s bustling, cosmopolitan gateway to the Mediterranean, and thus its nexus with the western world,” end quote. So part aquatic marshland, part urban sprawl, I’m getting New Orleans vibes, Venice vibes. This city was built on very low ground, essentially in the water in some places. Shenker describes its set up a little more quote “Criss-crossed by a network of canals and dotted with harbours, wharves, temples and tower-houses – all joined together by a network of ferries, bridges, and pontoons – the city controlled most of the maritime traffic coming into Egypt from the Mediterranean. Goods would be inspected and taxed at the customs administration centre, and then carried on for distribution further inland, either at Naukratis – another trading port that lay almost 50 miles further up the Nile – or via the Western Lake, which was connected by a water channel to the nearby town of CanOpus and offered access to many other parts of the country,” end quote. 


We knew about Thonis-Heracleion a little bit. It had been mentioned by some Greek chroniclers. In Greek mythology it was also the location of Heracles AKA Hercules first journey into Africa. In Homer’s story from the Iliad, it’s the location where Helen of Troy and her abductor Paris hide out after she has been kidnapped. But that’s not actually in the poem, Homer didn’t write that. Both of these mythology references come from Herodotus (Hair-ah-dit-us) who was a Greek historian who I guess liked to dabble in mythology as well just to make things extra confusing for us now. Anyway, we knew about it from these scarce references but otherwise it mostly became lost to time. Because in around 700 AD, the once thriving port city of Thonis-Heracleion literally sank under the Mediterranean Sea, like Atlantis style sank, except in real life. How does this happen? Well it was a combination of factors that caused it. Earthquakes, soil liquefaction, rising sea levels, and the fact that the land they built it on was just already sinking into the sea to begin with. Shenker writes quote “By the second century BC, Thonis-Heracleion’s era of pomp and prestige was already fading. Further along the coast, the new metropolis of Alexandria was rapidly establishing itself as Egypt’s preeminent port, while the hybrid foundation of land and water upon which Thonis-Heracleion was built had begun to feel less secure. It wasn’t a single natural disaster – an earthquake, tsunami, rising sea levels, or subsidence – that doomed the city, but rather a combination of them all. At the end of the century, probably after a severe flood, the central island – already sagging under the weight of the main temple buildings – succumbed to liquefaction. In what must have been a terrifying experience, the hard clay soil turned to liquid in moments and the buildings atop it collapsed swiftly into the water. The supply of pottery and coins into Thonis-Heracleion appears to have ended at this point; a few hardy residents clung on to their homes throughout the Roman period and even into the beginning of Arab rule, but the last vestiges of the city sunk below the sea at the end of the eighth century,” end quote. 


Just literally sank and was mostly forgotten about. Alexandria had taken over anyway. Who cares about Thonis-Heracleion. It wasn’t until 1933 that a pilot flying over the area spotted ruins in the water. Sort of like with El Mirador, it took the invention of flight for us to gain enough of a vantage point to be able to spot what was left. But then, nothing. I don’t know if we just didn’t have the technology in 1933 to do anything about it or what but excavations at Thonis-Hercleion did not start until the year 2000. And even when they did start, headed by the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology, they weren’t even really interested in the ruins of Thonis-Heracleion at first, they came to check out some old French ships that had sunk in the late 1700s. But soon the focus shifted, of course, to the entire sunken ancient Egyptian city there. Excavations are still ongoing. According to Shenker, 95% of the area’s urban footprint has not yet been explored. So, so much left down there to find. But they have already made quite a few incredible discoveries: massive, colossal statues of kings and queens, carved steles, a huge granite statue of Hapy, god of fertility, who once stood at the entrance to Nile River. And a lot of smaller things as well: goblets, figurines, jewelry, coins, ritual objects, ceramics, animal sarcophagi. There’s a lot of evidence there of this sort of blending of Greek and Egyptian cultures which we know happened at this time: anchors from Greek ships, Greek helmets embedded in the sea floor, Greek coins, perfume bottles from Athens. And there’s a lot of evidence that Thonis Hercleion was a massive sea port at one point. They’ve discovered more than 700 ancient anchors and as many as 125 shipwrecks dating from the 6th to 2nd century BC. So if there are that many ships that wrecked there, imagine how many travelled there that didn’t wreck. Absolutely bustling. 


Thonis Heracleion was taken down by natural forces, the land upon which it was built literally sank into the sea. Shenker writes quote “At a time of looming ecological catastrophe, it is perhaps unsurprising that we should find the tale of Thonis-Heracleion so fascinating. Its rediscovery is a testament to advanced technology and human ingenuity, but the city’s fate – and the eerily inanimate memories of a long-forgotten urban life left behind – are a reminder of how fragile many of our own contemporary cities are,” end quote. It disappeared literally because it sank but I think it disappeared figuratively, from our collective memory, because of something else. Because of the Greeks. Because of Alexandria. Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC which is also around the time he built Alexandria. And here we see a major shift happen in Egypt. We see a fusion of Greek and Egyptian cultures, religion, customs. By the time Thonis-Heracleion sank, they didn’t need it anymore. They had Alexandria. Alexandria was better anyway, more Greek, so they just moved on and put it behind them where it remained until those excavations began in 2000. And there’s still so much more to uncover and learn there. 95% untouched. Fascinating. 









For our next city we have to go to Jordan. Where the heck is Jordan right? Jordan is in the Middle East, right next to Israel and Syria and Iraq. So, not a great tourist destination really at the moment. But this is the cradle of civilization. My husband Joey actually brought this up the other night randomly. He was like “why are the places where human civilizations literally began, also the places where modern human civilizations are struggling the hardest, like Africa and the middle east it’s just constant chaos over there.” And I think that’s a very complicated question with a very complicated answer that mostly has to do with foreign invaders and conquest but  I don’t have time to dive into it right now, but something to think about. Anyway, in Jordan, we have the ancient not really all that lost city of Petra. This is one we’ll call only lost to white people. That’s probably offensive. Only lost to the western world, then. Western world is like the PC term for white people, all the white people countries, so we’ll go with that. I mean there are non white people living in those countries too so yeah it’s a more inclusive term. This one was only lost to the western world. 


Petra was the capital city of the Nabataean (NOB-a-tee-un) people, an Arab tribe, who lived in this area and started building Petra around 300 BC but they really flourished around the turn of the millennium, what do you call that? They really flourished around the time BC turned into AD, Jesus times, right. Now, Petra, what’s left of Petra today is all of these facades carved into the sandstone. Like just the fronts of buildings. They’re amazing, they have columns and stuff. They are very intricately carved into the sandstone rock faces and they have interior spaces too, these rooms carved into the rock. There are a lot of tombs like this, carved out of the rock too. That’s all that really left, some 600 stone facades. But at one point there would have been a lot of free standing buildings as well, houses and whatnot. These are gone now, these were mostly destroyed by an earthquake in 363 AD. But at one point, before that earthquake, it’s believed that Petra was home to some 30,000 people. The earthquake leveled the houses which is why only the stuff carved into the rock faces remains. But researchers also believe that it destroyed the cities water related infrastructure. Okay, so Petra is in the desert big time. And so to get water there, the Nabataean (NOB-a-tee-un) people had set up this water harvesting system. They piped water from springs outside the city and they carved channels into the rock to collect rainwater. But this system, like the houses, was destroyed by earthquakes and the city was gradually abandoned. People moved to areas closer to those springs, closer to those water sources. The city was also taken over by the Romans in 106 AD so by the time it was abandoned it was technically a Roman city. Foreign invaders and conquest, I told you. Also natural disasters seem to be a running theme here.


Anyway, Petra is one of those that local people continued to always know about because there it is this huge carved stone facade with full on columns in the middle of the desert, how can you not know about that? But the western world mostly ceased to realize it existed. According to Carolyn Wilke writing for National Geographic quote “The ancient trade center once housed tens of thousands of people. But the city’s population had long dwindled by 1812 when the Swiss adventurer Johann Burckhardt pretended to be a Muslim pilgrim looking for the tomb of the prophet Aaron and convinced a Bedouin guide to bring him to the city, which many Westerners had come to believe was a myth,” end quote. Good ol fashioned ignorance and trickery. And so Petra was discovered by the western world in 1812 which is of course why we know about it, why I know about it, I should say. Now, like Thonis-Heracleion, most of Petra remains unexcavated and there are few surviving documents describing the people who lived there, the Nabataean (NOB-a-tee-un) people. Which means that Petra remains sort of mysterious and illusive. Most of the archaeological remains in Petra are tombs, because, you know, they were built to last, cut into the rock and all. They actually just discovered a tomb with 12 bodies in it in 2024 in the treasury building which is the main facade, like if you google Petra, it’s one of the main images you’ll see. So new discoveries yet but for the most part, Petra is very untapped because of reasons that have to do with like preservation and whatnot. 


Let’s get out of the desert, out of the middle east, and head to the jungle once again, this time in Cambodia. Another, probably the most classic example, of an only lost to the western world lost city is the city of Angkor. Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire. If you’ve heard the word Khmer before, you probably listened to episode 72 about hte Khmer Rouge which was a violent communist revolutionary group that rose to power in Cambodia in the 1970s. It is actually one of my most listened to episodes if you missed it. It is probably also one of the heaviest and most shocking content wise so, you’ve been warned. Anyway, the Khmer Rouge was called that, Rouge because of red because of the communism, but Khmer as a reference to the Khmer empire which once flourished in Cambodia from around the 800s to around the 1400s. So in that window, the Khmer empire built the city of Angkor as their capital city. 


According to Grant Olson writing for the Natural History Museum of Utah quote “The vast metropolis of Angkor served as the center of a mighty Khmer Empire from the 9th to the 15th centuries. It covers 154 square miles and is home to 72 major temples and hundreds of smaller temple sites. The most famous is Angkor Wat, which was constructed to represent the Hindu universe. Spanning 400 acres, this awe-inspiring site is considered the world’s largest religious monument,” end quote. But it might actually be even larger than that. In 2007, an international team of researchers clocked Angkor, including its urban sprawl at around 390 square miles. This made it the largest, by surface area, the largest pre-industrial city in the world. This size alone meant that it had to have an elaborate and advanced infrastructure, with a complicated water management network that allowed for irrigation in order to sustain an estimated 750,000 to one million people. Kind of like with El Mirador, you wouldn’t think it now because it’s been sort of reclaimed by the jungle. Angkor in particular has these massive vines and tree roots and tree trunks and things growing through and on top of the buildings like the jungle is actually grabbing on and trying to swallow the ruins of the city whole. So that gives it this sort of primitive long forgotten vibe but, in its prime, Angkor was this extremely advanced, sprawling metropolis. It was eventually abandoned in the 1400s because of a number of factors including climate change and invasion from outsiders pressing in. 


Now here’s the thing about Angkor though, and Grant Olson is quick to point this out. Angkor was never actually lost. The people of Cambodia always knew it was there and they visited it frequently to connect with their Khmer ancestors. Olson writes quote “As with other supposedly lost ancient cities, Angkor was “discovered” by a Westerner who received guidance from locals. In other words, [Henri] Mouhot (moo-ho), the French explorer who sometimes receives credit for finding Angkor, could more accurately be described as one of its first tourists. But the fact that people in the Western world were unaware of an ancient city’s existence has traditionally been an adequate reason for them to dub modern visitors as “discoverers.” And it discredits the knowledge and traditions passed down by indigenous peoples. All that matters in the common yet inaccurate Western narrative is that a great civilization once existed, and an explorer was intrepid enough to bring it to the world. Searching the phrase “lost city of Angkor” in Google serves up more than two million results, many of which perpetuate the myth of a city that vanished from the face of the earth until it was discovered in the 1800s. Whereas, Angkor is both a window into a rich past and a living space where people carry out a way of life directly related to their Khmer ancestors,” end quote. 


So the story goes that this French explorer and naturalist, a guy named Henri Mouhot, air quotes discovered Angkor in the mid 1800s. What actually happened was, in January of 1860, Mouhot made his way to Angkor while exploring Cambodia. Angkor was already in charted territory. It was already on Cambodian maps. Mouhot goes there. He records in his journal over a period of three weeks detailed observations about the city, now in ruins, its palaces and temples, pools and moats and terraces. He records all of this with illustrations and this later gets published back in the western world and people are like “What??? What is this amazing place no one even knew about in the jungles of Cambodia that Henri Mouhot totally discovered?” And they have to be eye rolling hard in Cambodia because they all already knew about it they just didn’t bother to tell the white people. But, so, because of that, there is this misconception that the French, specifically Henri Mouhot, discovered Angkor in the 1860s. Nope. Mouhot just happened to write about it and draw nice pictures to go with it which captured peoples attention for the first time ever and made them realize that it existed. 


But, although it was never really lost, there is still a lot to learn about Angkor, a lot to discover in the true sense of the word. Olson concludes quote “While there may not have been a true “discovery” of Angkor in the 1800s, there are still countless mysteries being uncovered as experts from Cambodia and around the world study the site and seek the knowledge of the modern Khmer people,” end quote. Seek the knowledge of the modern Khmer people. Yes. Thank you. These people are still here. They did not get abducted by aliens or vanish into some mysterious green mist. They still live there. They know things. Ask them. It’s just like with the Maya in Guatemala. They aren’t this mysterious group of people no one knows anything about. They still exist. Go ask them. Stop trying to turn everything you don’t personally understand into some big mystery. It’s okay to not know. It’s okay to ask people who don’t look like you to share their knowledge with you. Because they have knowledge. They have valuable knowledge and all of this comes from a historical disregard for their intelligence and a devaluing of that knowledge that they hold, because they don’t look like you. We gotta move past it. 


Our final lost city, also not really lost at all of course, is Machu Picchu in the mountains of Peru. Machu Picchu is the newest of our lost cities by a lot. It was built in the 1420s which means it’s really not that old at all. But it has this sort of ancient mysterious air about it, not because it’s actually all that ancient, but because it was built by a people that we neglected to get to know once again. And those people of course were the Inca. So there’s the Aztec, the Inca, and the Maya right? These are the three big, major civilizations of the Americas, of central and south America at least. The Maya were much older than the other two. Remember, El Mirador was built in like 1000 BC. The Aztec and the Inca were much more recent. The Aztec Empire emerged in the 1400s, basically just by conquering and combining a bunch of smaller groups in the are of Mexico. And the Inca empire down in South America started unofficially in the 1200s but officially in the 1400s as well. So these guys popped up like right before the Spanish conquistadors came over. They hadn’t been there long, not on that scale, not as major organized empires. I don’t think many people realize that. I think people assume the Aztec and the Inca were like these ancient civilizations. No. Nope. They were up and coming during the Renaissance in Europe. This is, they’re not that old. 


Machu Picchu is seen as rather mysterious. It’s often referred to as the “Lost City of the Incas” because we don’t know a whole lot about it. It’s believed to have been built as an estate for the Inca emperor, Pachacuti but we aren’t sure because there aren’t any contemporary records to confirm that. The Inca did not have a written language in the traditional sense. They used a system of knotted strings called quipu to convey mostly numerical information. Narrative information was likely passed down through storytelling. So we don’t have the Inca writing down that Machu Picchu was built for this emperor Pachacuti. That doesn’t exist. We do know that it was abandoned only about a century after it was built in the 1500s, radio carbon dating confirms that. We don’t know for a fact why it was abandoned but the circumstantial evidence is screaming that it was because of conquest by the Spanish. I mean, it’s pretty obvious. Spain conquered the Inca empire starting in 1532 which lines up perfectly with evidence from radio carbon dating that says Machu Picchu was occupied between 1420 and 1530. It’s likely most of the people at Machu Picchu left because of Spanish conquest in other parts of the empire and because of most of them dying of smallpox brought by the Spanish. And the crazy thing to me is that now we’re like “We don’t know why they left. Who did they build the city for and why did they leave it? It’s such a mystery.” Umm, guys, why didn’t you ask them? Why didn’t you just ask them? This wasn’t that long ago. The Inca didn’t have written records for the most part but the Spanish sure as heck did. They didn’t write it down? Why didn’t they write it down? Oh cause they never bothered to care enough to ask them anything about their way of life. Got it. 


So now we have this mystery yet again. This mysterious “Lost City of the Incas” that no one knows anything about. Once again, the local people of the area knew about Machu Picchu already, always knew about it. Knew it was there. But it was discovered by the western world in the early 1900s, first in 1902 by a Peruvian explorer and farmer named Agustin LizAragga and then again in 1911 by an American historian from Yale University named Hiram Bingham III. And Bingham is the one, of course, who brought the ruins to international attention, who air quotes “discovered” them. It’s believed that Machu Picchu was originally called Huayna Picchu or even just Picchu. It straddles two mountain peaks, Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu, those are the names of the two mountains. Calling it Machu Picchu after the larger of the two mountains, that was Bingham. He just picked that one and wrote it in his field notes. It probably wasn’t even called that. 


Machu Picchu wasn’t a huge city like Angkor, it was more of a royal estate, as theorized but not confirmed. It was built in the classical Inca style with big stones fitted together perfectly without using mortar. Buildings were also engineered to be earthquake resistant. This very specific style of building is something we see repeated somewhat on Easter Island, Rapanui over 2,500 miles away which serves as evidence that the two groups of people likely came in contact with one another. But that’s episode 110. So Machu Picchu was small. It’s estimated that around 750 people lived there and they mostly worked for the emperor Pachacuti who we think the estate was built for, because he was emperor at the time it was built not because anyone bothered to ask. In later excavations, we have found the remains of some of these people of course. And studying the chemical composition of their skeletons has yielded some interesting results. We’ve learned that they didn’t live in that area for very long. They were brought to Machu Picchu to work from elsewhere, from all different regions. Many of them were from the coast. A lot of the remains show bone damage caused by a species of water parasites not found anywhere near Machu Picchu. Chemical analysis also shows changes in their diets. Many of them went from eating fish to eating corn. So this all suggests that these were immigrants from coastal areas who moved to Machu Picchu, possibly to work as support staff for the emperor whom the estate probably belonged to. This might have also been seasonal work. Evidence suggest that, while as many as 750 people may have lived there in the summer months, that may have dropped down to just a few hundred in the winter. So it’s possible they even came to work for the summer, for the season, and then went back to their homes on the coast. They also seem to have brought animals to Machu Piccue, llamas and alpacas which are not naturally found at that high of an altitude, as well as guinea pigs which are often found in tombs and so thought to have been a common ritual sacrifice offering at burials. They also found the remains of 6 dogs which were buried along with humans suggesting that they served as companions. 


But, let’s go back a little bit because there was a lot of controversy surrounding excavations at Machu Picchu. Bingham air quotes discovered it and starts excavating. He is sending all sorts of artifacts back to Yale University, but then this starts to cause problems with the Peruvian people who claim that the Americans are coming in and destroying this historic site and preventing the people of Peru from being able to get in there and learn about their own history, which yeah, yeah I agree that’s totally what was happening. So all this sort of comes to a grinding halt. The locals basically kick Bingham out of Machu Picchu at a certain point and by 1981 the government of Peru had declared Machu Picchu a historic sanctuary. It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1983. Today, Machu Picchu is Peru’s most visited tourist attraction and it brings in a lot of revenue to the country but tourists traipsing through all the time, of course, causes issues with preservation of the site. 


You know, in every single one of these eight lost cities I’ve talked about between last week and this week they all fell to ruin because of one of two reasons I’m realizing. Some of them had both reasons going on at the same time. It was either because of conquest by outside invaders or because of climate change or like natural disasters, environmental stuff. In the four lost cities that we talked about this week, every single one of them experienced some sort of invasion, some sort of conquest by outside forces. So we have Thonis, an Egyptian city that was taken over by the Greeks becoming Heracleion. We have Petra, which was a Nabataean (NOB-a-tee-un), Arab city that was taken over by the Romans. We have Angkor, which was a Khmer city that was taken over by neighboring groups in Cambodia, and then we have Machu Picchu, which was an Inca city, or royal estate probably, and the Inca empire was, of course, taken over by the Spanish. So I find myself coming back to Joey‘s question from a few nights ago. Why are these oldest cradles of civilization, these places that humans were literally birthed out of as a species, why are these also the places that are struggling the most now. Why are they so riddled with controversy and violence and chaos at all times if they were at one point so conducive to human life? I think the answer to that becomes obvious when you study the reasons for the downfalls of these air quotes lost cities. Conquest. No one wants to conquer places that aren’t conducive to human life. These places flourished for reasons and the same reasons that caused them to flourish also caused them to be invaded by others who wanted to flourish and ultimately lead in many cases to their demise.


But the real lesson I think is, just because something is gone does not mean that it’s lost. And just because you didn’t know about it, doesn’t mean no one else did either. We have to stop throwing the word discovered out so haphazardly. Claiming to have discovered something that whole civilizations of people have already known about for millennia speaks volumes. And continuing to retell the stories as if they were actual discoveries, heralding guys like Christopher Columbus, Hiram Bingham, and Henri Mouhot as heroic discoverers of untold wonders only serves to perpetuate the Eurocentric cesspool they climbed out of. And wow I was not planning to take it there this week. Guess I got a little lost.


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 


Information used in this episode was sourced from the Guardian, The British Museum, franckgoddio.org, National Geographic, the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Wikipedia.  As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.