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There Were Buddhists in the Roman Empire · Abide Meditation App

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  Speaker 1: Join me this January for our first religion for Breakfast
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  Speaker 1: toward Egypt. Link is in the description below. Here's a
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  Speaker 1: marble statue that's currently sitting in the Suez Canal Museum
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  Speaker 1: in Egypt. This is clearly the Buddha, but was discovered
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  Speaker 1: in the courtyard of a temple to the Egyptian goddess
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  Speaker 1: Isis and the port city of Baronice, located on the
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  Speaker 1: Red Sea. He's displayed in the museum as evidence of
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  Speaker 1: trade between Egypt and India, and there was a lot
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  Speaker 1: of trade between them. Ships came from mostly the west
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  Speaker 1: coast of India, across the Indian Ocean and up the
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  Speaker 1: Red Sea to Roman era ports like Baronice, hauling stuff
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  Speaker 1: like pepper, gemstones, cloth, ivory, you name it. But here's
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  Speaker 1: the thing. This Buddha did not come from India. Let's
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  Speaker 1: start with the stone. This was carved from marble from Peros,
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  Speaker 1: a Greek island in the Aegean. Paros had some of
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  Speaker 1: the best white marble in the ancient world. If you
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  Speaker 1: were a rich Roman who wanted the expensive stuff, the
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  Speaker 1: good material to make a luxury item, you got Perian marble.
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  Speaker 1: So someone took a block of Greek marble from Peros
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  Speaker 1: hauled it across the Mediterranean down the Red Sea to Baronice,
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  Speaker 1: where someone carved a Buddha out of it. Now, let's
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  Speaker 1: look at the hair. Usually, sculptures of the Buddha show
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  Speaker 1: him with tight little curls shaped kind of like snailshells,
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  Speaker 1: like this statue from Gondara, which was a modern day
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  Speaker 1: Pakistan in Afghanistan. The Baronice Buddha also has curls, but
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  Speaker 1: look at how they're carved. Each curl is a little
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  Speaker 1: ring with a hole drilled in the middle, and there's
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  Speaker 1: another tiny hole drilled into every gap between the curls.
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  Speaker 1: This is not how Indian sculptors made curls. This is
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  Speaker 1: a Roman technique. Roman carvers usually used it to render
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  Speaker 1: a women's hairstyle that was in fashion around the year
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  Speaker 1: one hundred. Those big, piled up masses of curls you
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  Speaker 1: may have seen on portrait busts of rich Roman women.
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  Speaker 1: So here's what we got. The Baronicue Buddha is a
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  Speaker 1: statue carved from Greek marble with hair, carved by a
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  Speaker 1: Roman trained sculptor, found in an ancient Egyptian temple, which
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  Speaker 1: leaves a lot of questions. But the question I want
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  Speaker 1: to ask is who was it made for? And the
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  Speaker 1: answer turns out to be the Buddhists who are living
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  Speaker 1: in ancient Roman Egypt. All right, so let's talk a
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  Speaker 1: little bit more about where we actually are. As I said,
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  Speaker 1: the port is called Bernice, and it sits way down
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  Speaker 1: on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. This is almost
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  Speaker 1: as far down south from Rome as you can get
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  Speaker 1: and still be technically in the Roman Empire. Now, if
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  Speaker 1: you're picturing Rome or even Alexandria, it's nothing like that.
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  Speaker 1: This was a dusty frontier port. But especially in the
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  Speaker 1: first and second century CE, Baronicue was still one of
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  Speaker 1: the main doors between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean,
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  Speaker 1: a port connecting Rome, Greece, and North Africa with India,
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  Speaker 1: Arabia and East Africa. If you wanted to move goods
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  Speaker 1: between those two worlds, baronic was one of the main
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  Speaker 1: ports you came through. And archaeologists have found artifacts of
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  Speaker 1: Bernice from all over, from the coast of Spain way
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  Speaker 1: out in the west, all the way to the island
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  Speaker 1: of Java in the east. That's basically the entire known
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  Speaker 1: world at the time showing up in one port. Now.
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  Speaker 1: For a long time, when people found Indian objects in
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  Speaker 1: the Roman Empire, they assumed it came from India or thereabouts.
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  Speaker 1: And this assumption is built on real evidence of intense
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  Speaker 1: international trade between these two regions. For over one hundred years,
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  Speaker 1: archaeologists studying Rome and India have mostly seen objects moving
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  Speaker 1: one direct out of India to the West. Basically, India
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  Speaker 1: was selling stuff that the Romans really wanted to buy,
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  Speaker 1: and so you'll find stuff like this ivory figurine of
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  Speaker 1: an Indian tree spirit called a Yakshi, that turned up
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  Speaker 1: in the ruins of Pompeii buried by the volcano Vesuvius
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  Speaker 1: in the year seventy nine CE. It was carved in
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  Speaker 1: India and it ended up in a house in an
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  Speaker 1: Italian town, probably a luxury good for some rich Pompeian
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  Speaker 1: interested in foreign art. And the Romans themselves were very
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  Speaker 1: self aware that the money was mostly flowing east. The
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  Speaker 1: Roman geographer Plenty of the Elder riding around the year
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  Speaker 1: seventy seven complained about it. He said, at the very
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  Speaker 1: lowest computation, India, China, and the Arabian Peninsula withdrawal from
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  Speaker 1: our empire, one hundred million sistercies every year, So dearly
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  Speaker 1: do our luxuries and women cost us? He was, let's say,
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  Speaker 1: not a feminist, but to put one hundred million Systercians
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  Speaker 1: in perspective, a Roman soldier made about nine hundred to
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  Speaker 1: one thousand cistercies a year. So Plenty is claiming that
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  Speaker 1: the empire bled out enough money to pay one hundred
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  Speaker 1: thousands of soldiers per year just for luxury goods from
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  Speaker 1: the East, and archaeologists have found objects in Bernice that
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  Speaker 1: fit that story. Here's a good example. This is a
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  Speaker 1: little terra cotta figure of an armored soldier holding a
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  Speaker 1: small shield with a round, kind of chubby face. When
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  Speaker 1: it turned up back in two thousand and one, the
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  Speaker 1: archaeologist looked at the armor and figured this was a
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  Speaker 1: Roman soldier, which makes sense. You're digging in Roman Egypt.
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  Speaker 1: You find a guy in armor, he's probably a Roman.
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  Speaker 1: But then someone took a closer look and realized, wait
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  Speaker 1: a minute, this doesn't look Roman. It looks a lot
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  Speaker 1: like clay figurines from a couple of cities in the Decan,
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  Speaker 1: the Big Plateau in central India. Compare this soldier from
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  Speaker 1: this figurine that was found in central India. Same round cheeks,
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  Speaker 1: big white eyes, and thick lips. Also, look at his ear.
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  Speaker 1: It's a little hard to tell from this photo, but
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  Speaker 1: his ear lobe is elongated. In Indian art at this time,
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  Speaker 1: a stretched out ear lobe marked you as someone of
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  Speaker 1: the kshatria class or the warrior class. It's a small thing,
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  Speaker 1: but it's really really not a thing a Roman sculptor
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  Speaker 1: would think to add. Whoever made this knew exactly what
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  Speaker 1: they were saying, So this little clay soldier is genuinely
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  Speaker 1: from India. Scholars think he's dressed like a soldier of
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  Speaker 1: the Satavahana dynasty, who ruled the Deccan Plateau and the
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  Speaker 1: surrounding regions from around the second century BCE to the
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  Speaker 1: early third century CE, and somebody carried him across the
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  Speaker 1: Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea to Berenice. All this
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  Speaker 1: to say, when something Indian looking shows up in Roman territory,
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  Speaker 1: it's usually the safer bet to assume it got shipped here,
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  Speaker 1: which you'd think would include a Buddhist statue discovered in
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  Speaker 1: a Roman port. At first glance, the Baronque Buddha looks
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  Speaker 1: a lot like Buddhist statues coming out of workshops in
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  Speaker 1: a region called Gondara, which, as I mentioned, was up
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  Speaker 1: in what's now Pakistan and Afghanistan. This region was long
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  Speaker 1: ruled by Hellenistic kings after the conquests of Alexander the Great,
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  Speaker 1: and artists here produced Buddhist figures like the Buddha and
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  Speaker 1: the Bodhisanta Maitreya in a style that looks very Greek.
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  Speaker 1: They've got wavy hair, calm, classical faces, robes that fall
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  Speaker 1: in heavy folds, just like the drapery on a Greek
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  Speaker 1: or Roman statue. Our historians have called the style Greco Buddhism,
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  Speaker 1: though some now argue they were produced with the help
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  Speaker 1: of Roman artists who were in imitating Greek styles. So
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  Speaker 1: it would make a lot of sense that if you
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  Speaker 1: discover a Greco Buddhist looking statue in Bernice, to assume
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  Speaker 1: it made a similar journey as that terracotta soldier shipped
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  Speaker 1: from a Gondran workshop. But as we saw at the start,
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  Speaker 1: that's not the case. It was made from Perigan marble
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  Speaker 1: from Greece, and on top of that, sculptors in Gondra
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  Speaker 1: and India usually didn't carve Buddhas out of marble, it
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  Speaker 1: was not their material of choice. Plus, as we saw,
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  Speaker 1: the hair reflects a Roman sculpting trick to depict curled hair.
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  Speaker 1: Roman sculptors only use this technique for about fifty years,
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  Speaker 1: from roughly ninety se to one FORTYCEE. So the hair
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  Speaker 1: points to a Roman trained artist working in a specific
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  Speaker 1: window of time. So already the ship from Gondra story
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  Speaker 1: is unlikely. But there's one more detail that really settles it.
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  Speaker 1: See on a standard Gondaran Buddhist statue, the Buddha is
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  Speaker 1: shown wearing a big outer robe called the sangati, and
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  Speaker 1: with his left hand he grabs the hem of that
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  Speaker 1: robe and lifts it up to about wasste height. You
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  Speaker 1: can see here there's a bunch of cloth poking up
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  Speaker 1: out of the top of his fist. This is absolutely
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  Speaker 1: everywhere in Gondaran sculptures. The Buddha lifts up the edge
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  Speaker 1: of his robe and a little bit of fabric sticks out.
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  Speaker 1: The Barnique sculptor tried to copy that gesture, but he
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  Speaker 1: messed up, or at least took a shortcut. The sculptor
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  Speaker 1: basically gave the hand a separate little cloth to hold,
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  Speaker 1: almost like a handkerchief. Rather than a fold of the
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  Speaker 1: main robe. I know this seems like a minor thing,
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  Speaker 1: but for you art historians, you know this is a
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  Speaker 1: big flashing sign that the artist was not from Gondra.
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  Speaker 1: The best explanation is that the sculpture was copying from
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  Speaker 1: a model of some kind, but it wasn't a good
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  Speaker 1: enough model to show how the hand was actually working
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  Speaker 1: in space. Maybe he was copying from a flat image
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  Speaker 1: like a drawing or a painting, which would explain a
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  Speaker 1: lot since a flat picture can't really show you how
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  Speaker 1: a hand wraps around the cloth in three dimensions. Or
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  Speaker 1: maybe the model was in three dimensions, but it was
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  Speaker 1: a rough one that didn't show the details of how
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  Speaker 1: that hand wrapped around the cloth, or the motif was
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  Speaker 1: very difficult to understand for a non Indian artist unfamiliar
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  Speaker 1: with a gesture or the sungati in general. Also, there's
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  Speaker 1: one thing on the bar Nique Buddha that the sculptor
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  Speaker 1: could not have copied. Down by the Buddhist foot next
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  Speaker 1: to his supporting leg, there's a lotus plant growing up
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  Speaker 1: out of the base. Again, this does not look like
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  Speaker 1: a Gondarin Buddha and Gondarin art. The Buddha might stand
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  Speaker 1: on top of a lotus, or you might see a
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  Speaker 1: lotus in the hands of another figure, but you never
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  Speaker 1: get a lotus planted next to a standing Buddha as
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  Speaker 1: a little attribute of its own. That's just not something
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  Speaker 1: Gondran sculptures did. So the sculpture probably didn't get this
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  Speaker 1: from a model, and Scolas think somebody added it on purpose,
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  Speaker 1: because the lotus means something specific in Buddhism. The lotus
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  Speaker 1: grows up out of muddy water, but the flower comes
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  Speaker 1: up clean and pure. It's an old Buddhist metaphor for
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  Speaker 1: an enlightened mind, one that rises out of the muck
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  Speaker 1: of the world without getting stained by it. The Buddha
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  Speaker 1: himself uses this metaphor in one early text, the Donusuta
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  Speaker 1: from the Polycanon. He says, more or less, just as
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  Speaker 1: a lotus isn't soiled by the water it grows out of,
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  Speaker 1: I'm not soiled by the world. So here's the puzzle.
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  Speaker 1: In Gondarin sculptures, you don't see a lotus tacked on
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  Speaker 1: beside a standing Buddha like this, and a Roman sculptor
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  Speaker 1: in an Egyptian port wouldn't know the lotus meant anything
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  Speaker 1: at all, So where did it come from? The best
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  Speaker 1: answer scholars have is that somebody told the sculptor to
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  Speaker 1: add it. Presumably an India Buddhist who can mission the
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  Speaker 1: statue would have known exactly what the lotus meant and
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  Speaker 1: asked for it on the statue he was paying for.
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  Speaker 1: So who might that customer be. While excavating in twenty
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  Speaker 1: twenty two, right next to the marble Buddha's head in
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  Speaker 1: the exact same courtyard of that templed Isis, the excavators
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  Speaker 1: found a flat stone panel with five lines of text.
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  Speaker 1: Three of the lines are in Sanskrit written in an
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  Speaker 1: Indian script called Brahmi. The other two lines are in Greek.
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  Speaker 1: Here's the translation. It opens with the Greek good fortune
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  Speaker 1: and the Sanskrit success, standard ways to start a dedication,
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  Speaker 1: both in the Greco Roman world and in India. Then
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  Speaker 1: in Sanskrit, the inscription gives the date in the sixth
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  Speaker 1: year of King Philip, on the fifth day of the
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  Speaker 1: bright half of the month Ashfayuja. This is a reference
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  Speaker 1: to Emperor Philip the Arab, the Roman emperor ruling in
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  Speaker 1: the two forties, and the date is so precise we
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  Speaker 1: can pinpoint this to September ninth, in the year two
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  Speaker 1: forty eight CE. Then the stone tells us who set
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  Speaker 1: up the dedication, and this part is also in Sanskrit.
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  Speaker 1: On this day the kashatri of Asula had established an
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  Speaker 1: image of that a breaks off for the benefit and
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  Speaker 1: pleasure of all beings. Then at the end he signs
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  Speaker 1: his name in Greek. Vasulas set it up, so we
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  Speaker 1: have a name. A guy named Vasula standing in a
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  Speaker 1: temple to Isis on September ninth, two forty eight tells
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  Speaker 1: us in Sanskrit that he set up a divine image
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  Speaker 1: in this temple for the benefit of all beings. The
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  Speaker 1: inscription very sadly breaks off, but presumably he's referencing an
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  Speaker 1: image of the Buddha, maybe even the same statue we've
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  Speaker 1: been analyzing this whole time, but we can't know that
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  Speaker 1: for sure. In Sanskrit, he calls himself a Kashatriya, the
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  Speaker 1: warrior class in the old Indian social system called the
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  Speaker 1: Varna system, which sorted people into ranked groups you were
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  Speaker 1: born into, with kashatriyas near the top as the rulers
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  Speaker 1: and warriors. And it's the same class marked by that
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  Speaker 1: stretched out ear lobe on the terracotta soldier from before,
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  Speaker 1: so Vasula is telling us that he's a man of
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  Speaker 1: some relatively high rank in society. His name, Vasula comes
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  Speaker 1: from Vasudeva, a name tied to a god who gets
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  Speaker 1: identified with Vishnu, so his family background was probably Hindu
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  Speaker 1: and worshippers of Vishnu, though that name doesn't necessarily contradict
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  Speaker 1: his likely identity as a Buddhist. First of all, people
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  Speaker 1: back then didn't necessarily sort their religious identities into tidy
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  Speaker 1: isms like Hinduism and Buddhism as we do today. Secondly,
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  Speaker 1: Vasula set up a dedication quote for the benefit and
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  Speaker 1: pleasure of all beings, which is a standard Buddhist blessing.
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  Speaker 1: We see similar formulas on Buddhist dedication inscriptions from Western
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  Speaker 1: India dating to the late one EIGHTYCEE and another example
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  Speaker 1: from two forty CE a few years before Vasula set
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  Speaker 1: up this inscription. So just to be clear here, what
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  Speaker 1: we have is a man with a name tied to
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  Speaker 1: Vishnu dedicating a Buddhist image inside an Egyptian temple, dated
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  Speaker 1: by a Roman emperor, signed in Greek. This is among
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  Speaker 1: the most cosmopolitan artifacts in the entire ancient world, carved
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  Speaker 1: by one Indian trader in a desert port, and it's
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  Speaker 1: a first in a couple of ways. This is the
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  Speaker 1: first inscription in Sanskrit ever found in Egypt. It's also
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  Speaker 1: the only Sanskrit inscription in the entire world that mentions
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  Speaker 1: a Roman emperor by name. But the biggest thing it
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  Speaker 1: does is give us the ritual context of the baronique Buddha.
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  Speaker 1: Though we can't be sure Vasula dedicated this specific statue,
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  Speaker 1: this dedicatory inscription demonstrates that a man set up an
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  Speaker 1: image in the sanctuary to earn merit when he says
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  Speaker 1: he offered the dedication for the benefit and pleasure of
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  Speaker 1: all beings. Merit is a specific idea in Buddhism in
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  Speaker 1: which your good deeds build up a kind of credit
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  Speaker 1: that carries forward into your next life, and there are
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  Speaker 1: a lot of merit making rituals in Buddhism. You can
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  Speaker 1: give food and robes to monks, or copy out a
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  Speaker 1: sacred text. You can pay to help build a shrine
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  Speaker 1: or plant a tree, or set up a statue of
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  Speaker 1: the Buddha, which is exactly what Vasula did, which makes
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  Speaker 1: this the first solid archaeological evidence we have of practicing
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  Speaker 1: Buddhists living in the Roman Empire. Now we're not talking
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  Speaker 1: about Buddhist institutions here. The fact that these Buddhists were
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  Speaker 1: worshiping in the courtyard of a temple to Isis probably
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  Speaker 1: tells us they didn't have anywhere better to go. But
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  Speaker 1: this is evidence of Buddhism in Egypt. Nonetheless, inscription also
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  Speaker 1: tells us something about the social context of Asula. See
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  Speaker 1: like the Buddhist statue found near it, this inscription was
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  Speaker 1: made right here in Barnice with local stone, which means,
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  Speaker 1: in order to cut three lines of grammatically correct Sanskrit
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  Speaker 1: into local stones in the Brahmi script, you need to
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  Speaker 1: know somebody locally who actually can read and write Sanskrit. Now,
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  Speaker 1: I'm sure a local Greek or Egyptian stone mason could
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  Speaker 1: have feasibly picked that up on the side, they were
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  Speaker 1: smart people, but it's more likely we're dealing with an
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  Speaker 1: Indian community here in Barnike with Stonemasons who had that
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  Speaker 1: training or knew someone with that fluency. And we do
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  Speaker 1: have evidence of that Indian community, and they were not
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  Speaker 1: all Buddhists. The same Isis temple held another carved stone.
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  Speaker 1: This one shows three figures standing in a row. These
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  Speaker 1: are the Rishni heroes. They came out of a movement
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  Speaker 1: in Hinduism called Pancharatra, which worshiped the heroes of the
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  Speaker 1: Vrishni clan as forms of a god named Narayana, who
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  Speaker 1: was identified with Vishnu. This whole tradition eventually got absorbed
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  Speaker 1: into Vaishnavism, the major branch of Hinduism that worships Vishnu
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  Speaker 1: as the supreme god, often through his avatars like Krishna
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  Speaker 1: and Rama. And in fact, two of these heroes, sam
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  Speaker 1: Karshana and Vasudeva, get folded into the Vishnu tradition, directly
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  Speaker 1: identified with Balarama and Krishna. So apparently both Indian Hindus
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  Speaker 1: and Buddhists were in Baronic, both sharing the same Egyptian temple,
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  Speaker 1: and once you know to look for them, Indians turn
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  Speaker 1: up all over Roman Egypt. Go up the coast to
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  Speaker 1: another red sea port called Myos Hormos, and archaeologists found
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  Speaker 1: a pottery shard with writing on it in an Indian
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  Speaker 1: language called procrit. It's just a list of food, oil, meat, wine,
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  Speaker 1: and the names of the people that belonged to but
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  Speaker 1: it seems like it came from Indian merchants living at
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  Speaker 1: the port in the second or third century CE. At
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  Speaker 1: these same ports, archaeologists have also found bits of pottery
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  Speaker 1: scratched with names in Tamil, which is a language from
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  Speaker 1: the far south of India, a completely different part of
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  Speaker 1: the subcontinent. So Vasula is one man in a much
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  Speaker 1: bigger community, Indians from the north and the South, Buddhist
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  Speaker 1: and Hindu, moving back and forth from India and the
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  Speaker 1: Roman Empire for centuries. So let's go back to the
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  Speaker 1: Barnice Buddha in the Suez Canal Museum. He's labeled as
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  Speaker 1: evidence of trade between Egypt and India. And for a
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  Speaker 1: long time, the story of India and the Roman Empire
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  Speaker 1: has been a story about trade, pepper, ivory, gold coins,
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  Speaker 1: and a little figurine luxury good that ends up buried
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  Speaker 1: at POMPEII. It's a story of stuff, but the vernique
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  Speaker 1: Buddha and the Vesula inscription really bringing to focus the
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  Speaker 1: people and their religious lives. These objects were made in
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  Speaker 1: Egypt by or four an Indian community living there, still
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  Speaker 1: living out their rituals. Vesula is the clearest example we
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  Speaker 1: have for that. A Buddhist far from home in a
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  Speaker 1: port at the edge of an empire, setting up a
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  Speaker 1: Buddha in a borrowed temple and writing his name on
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  Speaker 1: it so it would last for the benefit of all beings.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Borrow temples are kind of Egypt' specialty. Consider the temple
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: complex at Karnak. Construction started around nineteen hundred BCE, and
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: then Pharaoh's just kept adding to it with new halls
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: and temples for the next two thousand years, including Christians
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: in a back corner on one of the columns as
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: a painting of the Virgin Mary. A Christian put her
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: there in the late Roman period, in the same place
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: where priests made offerings to Amunray two thousand years before.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: Egypt is a multi layered religious landscape, and I mean
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: that kind of literally, in the same way a landscape
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: gets shaped by thousands of years of geological processes. Egypt's
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: religious landscape got stacked up in la traditional Egyptian polytheism,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: then Greek and Roman religion, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Somebody
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: was always there first, and somebody else always came after,
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: and you see both change and continuity. Sometimes the old
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: thing got painted over and sometimes the old thing continued
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: under a different name or god. I used to live
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: in Egypt studying this exact thing as a postdoctoral researcher
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: at the American Research Center in Egypt, and I'm very
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: excited to share my knowledge and experience with you all
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: with our very first Religion for Breakfast tour to Egypt,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: The Religious Landscapes of Egypt, twenty twenty seven. It'll be
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: from January nineteenth through the twenty sixth A lot of
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: tours to Egypt are basically a monument checklist, Pyramids, Czech
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: temple check now off to the airport. Every site is
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: treated like its own isolated thing. But I've designed this
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: tour to examine Egypt's different layers of religious history. For example,
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: Luxwor Temple was not only an Egyptian temple. Hundreds of
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: years later, it was also a Roman Imperial cultic site,
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: a church, and now also a mosque which you can
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: still go to today. I will be exploring that multi
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: layered landscape. Visit Sakara and go inside the Pyramid of Unas.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: There will see the pyramid texts, among the oldest surviving
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: religious texts in the entire world. Will also explore both
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: ancient and modern Coptic Christianity with a visit to the
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: monastic complex of Skidis. We'll spend the day at dear Alsurian,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: a monastery that's been running since the three hundred CE.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Will meet the Coptic monks who live there, see their
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: manuscript library, and learn what the discipline actually looks like
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: day to day. Down in Luxur will see a lot
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: of sites, including my favorite, the mortuary Temple of Ramses
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: the Third. The outer walls are covered in battle scenes
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: showing Ramses fighting off a coalition of invaders the Egyptians
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: called the Sea Peoples. One of the group's carved on
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: that wall are almost certainly the Philistines, the famous enemies
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: of the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible. And of course
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: we'll see the Pyramids of Giza, though with private access
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: without the public crowds, So that's Old Kingdom, pyramid texts,
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: the desert monks, and Ramses fighting off an enemy from
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew Bible. All in eight days. And that's only
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: a partial list. There's a full itinerary link below that
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: walks you through the whole trip day by day. Now,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: as I mentioned, I lived in Cairo for two years,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: and I traveled extensively throughout the country. I know these
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: sites well, and I'll be teaching on site the whole time.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: We're keeping the group small on purpose so we can
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: actually learn together. I run a few tours like this
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: in Turkey now, and they end up feeling like a study,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: a broad trip. Everybody's a nerd, everybody wants to be there,
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: and you get people asking each other questions over dinner
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: about something we saw that morning, and you just don't
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: get that experience with fifty people on a coach. If
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: you like to register, registration is linked in the description below.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: I'm also hosting a live Q and A session on
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: Wednesday at two thirty pm US Eastern, so if you're
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: on the fence and you want to ask questions about
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: the itinerary or anything else, you can sign up for
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: that too. A couple of dates to keep in mind.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: There's an early bird discount that expires August first, which
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: is this Saturday, and registration closes for good on August
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: twenty second, and we're already about half fool, so I
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: expect this to sell out. Thanks everyone, and I hope
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: to see you in Egypt.