Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
16 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“Like any great city, I find it has a vitality to it, which is quite energizing. It’s not a place that you go in search of the ancient past, I think.”
02 / belief
“Depended on where you lived, I think. If you were an urban dweller of Alexandria, you were living significantly above subsistence levels.”
03 / belief
“I think the understanding is there, but it’s shared amongst a fairly small group of experts.”
04 / belief
“I think when we look at the origins of these great civilizations, all within a few centuries of each other, there’s a combination of factors that each one individually perhaps wouldn’t have tipped the balance, but taken together they made a difference.”
05 / belief
“I think there are a lot more scholarly works, both surviving and lost, that were composed in ancient Alexandria that would be more surprising and more revelatory than those that you’ve just mentioned.”
06 / belief
“I think all of these ingredients just combined to make it the gift that kept on giving as far as the media were concerned.”
07 / evaluation
“When Alexander the Great, who himself was trying to overthrow Persia, arrived at the gates of Egypt, he was welcomed as a hero because he had thrown off the hated Persians.”
08 / disagreement
“I think that would be a misrepresentation. Alexandria under the Ptolemies didn’t produce a Socrates or a Plato.”
09 / evaluation
“If you look at, for example, some of the Psalms, you’ll find not just echoes, but entire chunks of ancient Egyptian literature that have been, as we would say today, cut and pasted from one to the other.”
10 / evaluation
“I think I would say that research in the humanities can be quite a solitary occupation, unlike in the sciences where scientists are working in labs and teams.”
11 / evaluation
“If I look back at some of the first things that I wrote as an academic, they were pretty esoteric, pretty dry and dusty, as a lot of academic journal articles tend to be.”
12 / preference
“For me, as an Egyptologist, I love getting into the rural parts of Egypt because there one can almost feel the past as still very much present.”
13 / evaluation
“Now, we think of a migraine as a relatively Western, modern phenomenon, a medical condition, but actually, the ancient Egyptians recognized it, described it.”
14 / evaluation
“This is interesting because the Ptolemaic kings not only wanted to be wealthy economically, but they wanted to be renowned throughout the ancient world as great scholar leaders.”
15 / evaluation
“I think because you had a strong and stable regime that was able to be a great patron of the arts.”
16 / prediction
“The fact that we can now read rolls of papyrus without unrolling them through X-rays and AI, we are poised really at the beginning of a revolution in the study of ancient texts because many of these papyrus rolls are too friable, too fragile to unroll.”