Ancient Roman bathhouse in Egyptian temple // 275 artifacts saved from shipwreck // Oldest weapons in the Americas

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to By Amara. This is a weekly news show where I discuss contemporary events in the art and history fields.

I'm your host and personal curator, Amara Andrew. The format for the show that I typically follow, but I actually really like never follow, is one traditionally used by Western brides, something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. This week, though, as I said, I very rarely follow the format.

Everything is old. This is again going to be another oldies week. I do only have three new stories as well.

It's kind of been slow with the holidays and everything, but this is just what I've been able to find and what I thought was really interesting, so I'm going to share it with you. Without further do, let's just get to it.

I just realized I totally forgot to tell you what I was talking about. So, this week we're going to be talking about a Roman bathhouse found in an ancient Egyptian temple, 275 artifacts that have been saved from a ghost ship, and the oldest weapons in the Americas have been found. Now we can talk about things.

I think with the holidays I just got so thrown off. It's now January 2023, 2023 if you will. I get so thrown off with the holidays, and like I mentioned in the previous episode, I can't stand the holiday season.

I really don't like it. Not just because like I hate happiness, like I really love happiness, but the holidays for me are not happy. So I just, I'm I'm always very relieved when everything is over when it gets to this time of the year.

But I think I'm also so depleted from the holiday season, so I'm just like, I need a vacation from the holidays. So with that said, we're actually going to be going to Miami in a couple weeks. We're going to be there for Art Deco Weekend.

Funny enough, when I booked, okay. Whole little side tangent. So Jeff and I go to Miami at least once a year.

With COVID we actually stopped for a little bit, but recently we started going again, and every year we would go to the Art Deco Welcome Center, just because I love learning about history and everything and it's just so much beautiful architecture and history in Miami Beach. When we would go to the Art Deco Welcome Center, I would always see that they have Art Deco Weekend in January, and I was like, "Oh, that'd be so cool to go.

Blah, blah, blah. I'd love to go. One day, maybe we will." It was never at the front of my mind to like actually go.

I was just like, "Yeah, maybe. That'd be really cool." Well, when I booked our trip in a couple weeks, we are actually going to be there for Art Deco Weekend. So you can stay tuned into my Instagram and my TikTok because I will be talking about it and showing all of the fun festivities and everything.

I already have us booked for a bunch of different tours, so I'm very excited. I cannot wait. I am just so stoked.

I really wanted to get like a period-appropriate dress and everything. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure I was actually recording, and I am, so I'm okay. But I wanted to get a period-appropriate dress, like late '20s, early '30s, but then I was like, " that might be a little too much.

I don't know what to expect, really. I don't." I haven't seen too much actually online about Art Deco Weekend, so I want to like provide the resources for other people. I like to like plan everything out as much as possible ahead of time to like know what to expect, so I will do that for you if you give a shit.

If not, then don't go to my socials. So, I'm very excited for that, just going to Miami in general be really happy. You can see it's very dark and gray here in Chicago right now, which sucks.

I hate it. I can't stand it. But that is neither here nor there.

That is totally fine. Also, Happy New Year, by the way. I actually have giant balloons right over here that I really wanted to put in frame, but I'm not going to.

So, happy 2023. This is very exciting. It's our it's our Michael Jordan year, if you will.

It just hit me this morning when I was looking at these giant numbers, I was like, "Oh, my god! 23." and three is my lucky number, so that is just absolutely perfect. So, I hope you had a very fun and safe New Year's Eve.

If not, I hope you're recovering very well and you're doing all right. We just had a really chill celebration with our friends that we see every year for New Year's Eve. It's just kind of like our unspoken tradition in a way, which is kind of fun.

We went out to dinner. We had a little party here. And then I actually got Snoop Dogg's wine.

I was really excited for it. I don't really drink too much anymore, just trying to keep it. I actually feel so much better when I don't drink, or I feel so much better when I just have edibles or something like that.

I don't even know if I can say that legally, but I may or may not bleep that out, so we'll see. But yeah, I just don't feel super great with alcohol for like a couple days afterward, so I just typically totally abstain from alcohol for the most part. But we tried the wine.

It was really good. I could like taste and smell the alcohol as soon as we opened it, so I was like, "Oh, woah." it was really good. I have no complaints.

Yeah, so that was our New Year's Eve. I sorry, I keep looking at my nails. I don't have any nail polish on.

This is a total stupid side tangent. I normally always wear nail polish of some sort, and I just feel so nude. Like my toenails are totally nude, too.

I feel so exposed and so vulnerable and just, I hate my hands without nail polish on them, so I might be hiding them under the table, but I'm not hiding anything from you. I'm just I hate my hands without anything on them, so. Okay, so that is enough about me just blabbing on and on.

I don't think I had anything else. If I did, whatever, and I'll just talk about it throughout the episode. So, oh!

My Patreon. I announced in, that's what I wanted to talk about. I announced in my last episode that I actually started a Patreon.

Woo-hoo! So, if you love the show, if you want to support it in any kind of way, there is a Patreon where you can do so. No pressure at all.

Do not feel like you have to. It's just something that is available now in the new year. I will also start having sponsors, which is really fun.

So, I'm very excited to start sharing things with you, I guess. So, anyway, without further ado, let's just get straight into the show.

So, like I said, this week is oldies week yet again. There was just a lot of old news, and I was trying to sift through all these different articles that I found. Sorry, my headphones keep popping out of my noodle.

So I finally found like three different stories that I wanted to talk about. They're all very brief for the most part. Apologies, this is going to be kind of a brief episode.

So, our first story for this week, an ancient Roman bathhouse was actually found in an ancient Egyptian temple. So, the Temple of Khnum, which is located in Esna, sits in Lower Egypt. It's about like, it's along the Nile River, and it's about an hour south of Luxor.

So, this temple is dedicated to the ancient Egyptian god, Khnum, so he was the god of the source of the Nile, as well as his consorts, Menhit and Nebtu. And again, apologies as always for mispronunciations. The town Esna actually has a lot of significance in ancient Egyptian society and culture from the New Kingdom, which began like 1550 BCE, to the Saite period, which ended around 525 BCE.

And there were a bunch of different structures that were built there, and they've been written about, and like captured in a very- various different formats. But the only one that actually still survives is this temple, the Temple of Khnum. So, archaeologists are excavating it and trying to like preserve it and see what's in there.

So, that's why they found this bathhouse. Before we get to the bathhouse, though, in the temple, there was revealed a Ptolemaic-era building, artifacts, and then the ancient Roman bathhouse. And these are all located behind the main temple building.

So, there are a bunch of different inscriptions in the temple that were made by a bunch of different ancient Egyptian rulers throughout the like lifetime of this temple. And these include a festival calendar, astronomical ceiling, and that sounds like a weird band name, Astronomical Ceiling, and then some religious hymns.

I re- I really wonder what the hymns would sound like, like what the music kind of would have been or something like that. I'm always fascinated by that. All, like I've said many, many times before, I'm not a religious person at all, but I find Byzantine chants and things like that, and like hymns, I find that absolutely fascinating.

I find them so cool, and I just love that it's like, there's like something the Seikilos epitaph or something like that. I'm pretty sure that's something, and that's like the oldest known hymn. Now, I need to look it up.

Give me a sec. Yeah, so the Seikilos Epitaph is the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, anywhere in the world. This is from like the first or sec- second century CE.

It is fascinating. Like, I find it so cool. You can listen on YouTube to it as well.

It's a really weird progression of the song, if you will. It just kind of goes like, I don't know, you just have to listen for yourself and make your own opinions. But anyway, so I always find those ancient hymns and things like that really fascinating.

So, back to this story, though. So, this ancient Roman bathhouse, it's believed to have been fed by water that flowed through channels into the basin. So, it's like right by the Nile, so probably some sort of engineering thing was figured out.

I don't know, I'm just going off of what I read in the in the articles that I read. Read in the articles I read. And so the water flowed through the channels into the basins.

Pretty cool, pretty low high tech, actually pretty high tech. And this structure also contained a hypocaust or a Roman central heating system that produces and circulates hot air from below the floor of a room. So, I just thought that was really cool.

I always find ancient engineering really fascinating, too, 'cause it's like, "Wow, how did they do all this?" I was just watching something about Göbekli Tepe yesterday, the Turkish settlement, if you will, or the Turkish like, I don't even know how to describe it, but this whole array of different things. It is fascinating.

So yeah, there wasn't a ton to this story, unfortunately. I just thought it was really fun that there was this

So, sorry, that was such an abrupt ending. So, for this next story, I want you to close your eyes. We're going to do sort of an ASMR thing.

This is going to get really weird really quick, because I'm going to get very awkward. Okay, so close your eyes just very briefly, I promise nothing bad will happen. Well, don't, if you're listening to this while you're driving, do not close your eyes, maybe like, just I don't know, just use your imagination.

Okay, don't close your eyes, I'm changing my mind. Don't close your eyes, keep your eyes open, and just use your imagination. So, imagine you're a scuba diver.

You are going underwater, you're going to investigate this shipwreck. You have been dying to learn what is within this shipwreck for years. Like, years and years, it has been this fable, this mythology.

You finally found the shipwreck, you get to go underwater and explore it. So, as you're preparing your dive, you're going deeper, and deeper, and deeper. Finally, you see the shipwreck.

Inside the shipwreck, you're kind of swimming around, you're finding different things. You see an elaborate table setting, a lieutenant's epaulets, still in their case, a lens from someone's eyeglasses. But then you turn to a pantry, and you see something even more amazing.

You see a black leather, folio, notebook-looking thing. There's even a quill pen stuck in it as if somebody just set it down, even though this wreck has been underwater for hundreds of years. Well, that is exactly Sorry to pull you right out of that.

That is exactly what a diver, who was part of the team investigating the wreckage of the Franklin shipwreck, found. So, the Franklin shipwreck story is really fascinating. I am going to give you such a brief version of what happened.

So you should really check it out. There are tons of different podcasts, too. I think Stuff You Missed in History Class has a podcast about it.

It's a really fascinating story. But I'm just doing very, very minimal just to for the sake of time and everything. So, the Franklin shipwreck, it happened in the 1800s.

So, basically, what happened was the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror both set out from England in 1845. And Commander Sir John Franklin and his 120-man crew and a bunch of cows and stuff like that, they set off. They were headed toward the Northwest Passage, and they never returned.

So, everyone was like, well, what the fuck, where did they go? They just kind of like, disappeared, in a way. Franklin's wife was super upset, obviously well, you would hope so.

And so, she just kept asking like the Admiralty and the government and like all these different people like, "Hey, go fucking look for them. Why'd you just give up?" And there were a bunch of different setbacks. It's a huge story, so go check it out.

It's really fascinating. But eventually, the Admiralty was like, "Okay, fine. We'll go look for them." I think the first search and rescue happened like three years after everybody went missing, so that's a really long time.

Like, just imagine 3 years ago. It was 2020. Well, I guess that feels different because of COVID and everything, but just imagine 3 years ago, that is a very long amount of time to try to find anybody who survived a shipwreck.

And this was before they actually knew it was a shipwreck. So, 1848, I think about, was the first search and rescue effort. And throughout the next few years, a bunch of artifacts were found, or like a few of them.

And then also stories of cannibalism from the local Inuit tribes. It was looking pretty bleak that they were going to find any survivors. So, nobody was ever found.

No ship was ever found, either, neither of the ships, until 2014. And that is where we are joining up with our story today. So, the Erebus, like I said, there was the Erebus and the Terror.

The Erebus was found just off the northwest coast of King William Island in Nunavut. And the Terror was found shortly after. Both of these submerged underwater shipwrecks.

That's where you get the shipwreck from. So, they were identified in 2014 and '16, but the way that everything works, it takes forever for like an expedition to actually be able to like go out and explore things. Right before COVID, the excavations were like, "Okay, cool.

You can start like your dives and everything." But with COVID, things were like postponed and blah, blah, blah, like a bunch of different reasons. But then in 2022, divers were able to ramp up their search a lot more within like the Erebus and everything. I think they had something like 56 different dives, which is really cool.

So, that's like almost two dives a week, which is a lot, because they're a couple hours each, as well. One of the divers said that the Erebus, the ship itself, looks like it's in really good shape. Drawers and doors were even all closed, which is fun, cuz then it's kind of like, oh, everything is like nice and neat and tidy.

So far, 275 artifacts have been removed from the Erebus and brought up to land. And these include stoneware plates, platters, serving dishes, drafting implements, and the notebook that I talked about earlier, where I was having you imagine being a scuba diver. According to researchers, there's still much to be excavated throughout the ship, like especially in the officers' cabins, the sailors' chests, and then the bottom deck and everything.

Also, not to mention, they have an entire other ship, the Terror, which is further down. So, I think the divers actually said that the Terror looked like it was in pretty good shape as well, so they didn't have to do like an emergency thing where they go down there immediately and try to salvage whatever they can. So, that can kind of be like pushed off into the future.

This is going to be a huge, huge thing. I mean, this is going to go on for tons and tons of years. So, they everybody has a long career ahead of them who's going to be exploring this.

I think it's really fun. I realized when I was looking at photos of this, though, I actually have a deep-seated fear of shipwrecks. Don't ask me why.

I've never been to one. Even just like the thought of when people go on their holidays, and they go to like the Bahamas or something, and they go snorkeling off the reef, and they have all these like things underwater, that freaks me out. I don't know why.

I was looking at the photos, and I actually couldn't look at them, which was really bizarre. I think the older I'm getting, the fucking like weirder I'm getting. But when I saw like a door down there, that freaked me out.

When I see statues underwater, that scares me. There's like a whole I think like a mall or something underwater in Dubai or Saudi Arabia. I don't remember where, exactly.

I remember seeing it on TikTok, and I was like, "Fucking nope. Nope, nope, nope. I am so out." I love the water.

I love going to the beach. I love the ocean. Like, I love being in it, but I don't think I can like look underwater anymore.

I don't know what that means. Maybe I have like a past life something. I don't know.

I don't really believe in that, but I don't know. Maybe I have some trauma I need to get through. Maybe I was in a shipwreck in another life.

Maybe I was on the Franklin. Woah. But yeah, anyway, so kudos to them for being able to do all this research, cuz I think that's absolutely fascinating.

And I think that's super amazing and very important. But I would not be able to do it, so kudos to you.

And our final something old is really fascinating. This one is also going to be very, very short. There wasn't a ton about it.

There was like a whole long-ass research thing that I just could not comprehend with my little peanut brain, so I can link it in the description if you want to read it. It's really interesting, but I just I don't have all the vocabulary, nor the time to really like sit down and be like, "Okay, what does this mean?" anyway, so this past week, 14 stemmed projectile points were discovered at the Cooper's Ferry excavation site in western Idaho.

So, when I say stemmed projectile points, it's like almost like an arrowhead in a way. It's just like a thing like that. I'm going to describe it a lot more, so don't worry, if you're listening to this.

I was just holding my finger up about like 3 in or so in length. So it's just like a little point, like something that might be on the end of a like it would be like a spear or something like that. So these points range in size from 0.5 in to 2 in long.

So, I actually held my fingers two far, so sorry. And these were allegedly created sometime between 13,200 and 16,000 years ago. And this makes these 2,300 years older than stem points previously found at the site.

And these tools are made of It looked like charcoal, bone, and mussel shell from what I was able to tell. So, not only are these the oldest weapons that have been found in the Americas, but what's also amazing about these is that these are apparently similar to different points that were found in Hokkaido, Japan, that date back to 16,000 to 20,000 years ago.

So, this is so fascinating because of this discovery that presence So, the presence of these points in western Idaho and Hokkaido, Japan, and they look very similar, and they're kind of around a similar time period, as well. This further like signi- adds significance to the hypothesis that people from the Ice Age period located in northeast Asia and North America actually shared early genetic and cultural connections.

I think that is so fucking cool. And it also shows we are just one big family, so stop being racist. I think that's so cool.

Like, that's just amazing. Also, having evidence that people lived in North America 16,000 years ago is really spectacular, especially when you look at like the Bering Strait and all this kind of stuff. Like, everything's kind of piecing together, which is so cool.

So, this is absolutely necessary. I know people are like, "Why do you need to know any of this?" It's cool. It shows you that we are all just connected.

I'm getting so hippy dippy right now. But it's just it's interesting, and it just shows like, yeah, we actually had a lot more connection as a group and as a culture and like just worldwide than we ever thought we did, which is really fascinating. We weren't all just these separate groups of people.

We actually had connection. I don't know, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. Anyway, so getting back to the story.

So, in total on the site, Davis, who is the like lead researcher on this site, and his team have found over 65,000 items at Cooper's Ferry, with some of these being a 14,200 year old fire pit, and then a food processing area containing the remains of a horse. So, a horse was being turned into food, so no shade. You do you.

Whatever you got to do 16,000 years ago, that is totally up to you. Again, very, very, very short story. I just thought that was really fun and fascinating, and having this connection of these areas, like we weren't just totally separated like we previously have thought.

Like, I don't know. It's just really fun. It's like globalization now is very different than what it was back in the day, but it also like isn't.

Like, we can still have connections, and we are all really did, so I don't know. There's your there's your love for the day. So, anywho, super brief episode.

Like I said, Oldies week, just a couple stories. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you for watching as well, if you're watching this on YouTube.

Like and subscribe to my channel or to my podcast, whatever you want to do. Like I said, there's also a Patreon. No pressure, just want to put it out there, I guess, so it's there.

So yeah, I really appreciate you, and thank you so much for listening to me blab every week. I love you, and I appreciate you. So, I'm Amara Andrew, and never stop creating.