Welcome to another episode of JiveTalk. Today, I've got a guest who needs a little introduction. Bronze Age pervert, a renowned author and internet troll and an admirer of ancient aesthetics. Welcome on the show, Bap. Thank you for having me on, Tom. It's a pleasure to talk to you again. And to you, yeah. I was a guest on your excellent podcast, Caribbean Rhythms, a couple of years ago, I think it was. And it's about time we get you on here on JiveTalk to have a talk about What I think is very central to your like ethos, including your first book, your first book, Bronze Age Mindset, obviously, the title reveals that there is a historical basis to the philosophy you espouse. But also, like your put on your podcast, Caribbean rhythms, you frequently go you talk about

areas of particularly ancient history, but sometimes more recent history as well. So, I'd like to know a bit just about what... Well, I remember even maybe 12, 13, maybe you also have similar memories from even your earliest boyhood. Maybe you've always believed more or less the things you believe now. For me, that's always been the case. And I look back history, examples of human greatness. I was amazed when I read ancient stories, especially from ancient Greece, Rome, then I read some of Viking sagas in my teens. But the amazing feats of the great men of antiquity, as told, for example, in Plutarch, Parallel Lives, it was just so awfully different from everyone I knew around me. everyone I knew around me, I don't know if people understand that before internet,

it's not even before internet whatever in the early 2000s, but before let's say 2010-2011, it was almost impossible at least in the United States to meet anyone who thought like me. I really never met anyone in real life who thought like me and it was only in reading historical, that I saw examples, I mean historical epics, stories, histories of antiquity from Herodotus to Cyndetes, Plutarch, etc., that I saw examples of human spirit and totally different way of seeing the world and it is in that that's been my primary inspiration and focus. I look at history as a way to take inspiration, how can, and I don't mean for myself or for you or for people we know, but in general going forward, how can possibilities of human greatness be reborn in our time? This is my primary

focus in looking at history, because in our time possibilities of action and as well freedom of thought, ideas increasingly constrained. Now it seems there is a change but I think the recent what happened on X or Twitter or the recent elevation of the recent liberation from censorship let's say is illusory and temporary and you still need to look to antiquity, to the Renaissance and such those two eras for me in particular were important to see a different type of man is possible a different type of life and that's been my primary interest in history. It's interesting you bring up the renaissance because that was a time although it's seen as a time of progress of progression and a change in western civilization's direction it's also a time of looking back of

of rediscovering the past through history. And I suppose that's sort of what you're advocating for. And when you talk about rediscovering great men, it's a cliche to say, you know, Caesar was inspired by Alexander and Napoleon was inspired by Caesar. So it's clear that great men are often drawn to the greatness of the past as an inspiration for how to go forwards. So when does that sort of looking to the past become a conservatism or a kind of inertia or static conservatism that prevents the dynamism of a vital civilization? Well I'm glad you bring up the Renaissance, it's a perfect example of what we're talking about because let's say you pick up Machiavelli at the beginning of his discourses he says something like

A lot of people are trying to revitalize, bring back ancient forms of seeing and thinking in the arts and trying to reproduce ancient sculptures, ancient visual arts and even improve upon them. But nobody's doing it in the realms of morality and politics. They're not trying to take lessons from the remote antiquity and apply it to our own time. our own time, and that's what I'm going to do in this book, The Discourses. I will study Livy's history of Rome, and I'll see what lessons we can take from it to our time, what inspiration we can take for not just how to live your own life as an individual. That's not, I think, primarily his concern. 21 lessons from Homer about how to improve your interior design

business. This is not Machiavelli's concern. It's more how can we found new modes and orders, a new foundation for a new type of state, a new type of life, and be inspired by what happened with Rome in that case, for example. So I think that is a right approach to history. On the other hand, there is what you just referred to, using the weight of the past, it bears down on you so much that you can't create anymore, which is why, since we talk about Italy now, you go to Italy, almost all the great new innovations of, let's say, since 1800-1900 happened in the north in Piedmont, in Turin. That was actually the place from which Italy, the Italian state, was created and united in the 1860s. And you go to Piedmont, you go to Turin, it feels in many ways very modern.

I was walking around the streets, Nietzsche loved this city. I was thinking he must love, if he sees Chicago or New York, it looks like a very prosperous 19th century industrial city. and an Italian friend describes this to me, says, in Turin and Piedmont is where the weight of the past was least felt. In the rest, you walk around, you see these things that were built 2,000 years ago or more, and you say, how can I ever equal this? And it crushes your spirit in some way, whereas all the innovations seem to come out of Piedmont. Of course, you could say they took inspiration from the past too, but it wasn't in this inertia sense. And if you'd like to talk about this some more, the problem of history in regards to conservatism versus, let's say, futurism,

I think Nietzsche has some quite profound thoughts on this. I don't know if you want to go on. Yes, I would like to. I think that's an interesting thing about the point about Piedmont and the fact that it's a source of innovation and it was modern. I think, I mean although I'm sure Piedmont has its share of historical marvels as well but the descent of Nietzsche into Turin reminds me a lot of his own description like of the character of Zarathustra descending from that mountain because he came he did come down out of the mountains right in a state of confusion. He wasn't in his best state by then breaking down and crying and hugging a horse, allegedly. We could talk about that neater thing, but I also wanted to

pick up on what you're saying about your second book and why that will focus on Livy's history of Rome. How is that going to be the starting point? So I'm sorry, I should clarify. I don't know if there was maybe the attack internet system. I love Livy, but I meant that Machiavelli's book, his discourses, and not the prince, but the prince too, but in the discourses, maybe I'm confusing the introductions of the two in one of them, but in the discourses he starts saying, you know, it's discourses on Livy's history of Rome, but if you read, he's not doing a book report or textual analysis, he has different short chapters, aphorisms really, in which he looks back at Livy's history and he combines it with recent Florentine and

Italian history and European history and he draws lessons from them. I'm very interested in this. My second book, that's a different matter. It will hopefully come out, I think will come out later this year, hopefully by end of summer, beginning of autumn, and it's different. It's not about this, but I was referring to Machiavelli's approach to history, which I very much agree with. And look, since we're talking about this, there is a famous Nietzsche passage. I will read a little bit of Nietzsche, if you don't mind, because it bears directly on what we're talking about. In his book, Twilight of the Idols, it's called Whispered to the Conservatives. He says, What was not known formally, what is known or might be known today,

a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite. They wanted to take mankind back, to screw it back to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of procrustes. Even the politicians have ate the preachers of virtue at this point. Today, too, there are still parties whose dream it is is that all things might walk backwards like crabs, but no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails. One must go forward step by step further into decadence. That is my definition of modern progress. One can check this development and thus dam up the generation, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden. One can do no more. I've always found this, and remember this is the thinker,

say what you will about the modern interpretations, I mean, contemporary interpretations of him, but no one denied that, let's say the European, what you'd call hard right, far right from 1900 to 1940 was almost entirely Nietzsche and a creation, a spiritual creation of Nietzsche. They constantly referred to him, went back to him. So that's a hard right thinker saying this. What does that mean? I agree with that. He was opposed somewhat to the, although sympathetic, He thought that conservatives, reactionaries really very much went the wrong way and his criticism actually of Plato and the Socratic moral schools in antiquity is similar to what I just read now. His main criticism of them is that they were kind of conservative, reactionary antiquarians

in their own time, and in an age of, let's say, coming apart of decadence and degeneration of the ancient Greek world, they were trying to re-establish or save an earlier version of virtue, and that didn't work. In fact, he thinks it had long-term catastrophic effects. But anyway, that passage I just read, I don't know what you think about that. It's interesting. I think there's a point to be made connected back to what we were talking about the Renaissance before that I can't remember who I was, which philosopher I was reading it, but they argued, and I think correctly, that a lot of the Western ideas of the ancient world, the classical world, the Greeks and Greek and Rome, is based on assumptions during the Renaissance, which underlie humanism and a lot of modern liberal ideas.

modern liberal ideas and it sort of like projects onto the ancient world a sort of kind of idealized version of them that wasn't really what they were about because it was more about like rejecting some of the prevailing like norms of medieval Europe and then going for the antithesis and assuming that the ancient world was this antithesis but I think it's it might be Guanano I'm thinking of who wrote this argument but I think it's true that the there there was much more continuity with the medieval and the classical than is generally assumed. And a lot of like the idea of, although there were like, you know, people say like this freedom free, like energetic sexuality depicted in artwork in the classical artwork, a sculpture is just not really present in the high middle ages as much.

But there were, I think you said on your podcast, like the average medieval person was pretty hyper sexual. There was a lot of sexuality in medieval Europe and people were probably fucking more than they are now, to be honest. So I think there's some misunderstandings there. One of my favorite things in regards to that, I knew some English friends who, maybe we talked about this with the idea of very old England that was actually done away with by the Puritan takeover of England. But before then, the English had a very different type of morality and life. And one of my favorite details is about the beer issue. You know about this, the fact that before the Puritans, the English drank ale, and it was flavored with gruyte. I don't know how you can pronounce that, with gruyte. Mix of herbs.

Yes, a mix of herbs, heather primarily, but other herbs. And beer was seen as a stimulant. people had, I won't say orgies, but they had kind of jolly medieval rollicking parties. And then the Puritans are the ones who introduced from the continent, the use of hops. Why? Because hops make beer bitter and unpleasant. And at the same time, they're a soporific. So beer now is associated with calming you and putting you to sleep or something. But before it was a stimulant, you know, so. I think in Germany, the hops came in from, it was a German foreign custom. England it was never a native thing until as you say it was like Protestant connections with Germany. I know it may be interesting to some there's a related tidbit when coffee was first

introduced some of the first coffee houses in Europe besides Vienna were in England and they were copying you know the Vienna, copied them from the Turks but the previous to coffee like the main drink had been ale that you would drink at breakfast or whatever it would invigorate you And that stage in history, ale brewing had been dominated by women actually. So the ale wives had cornered the market. And they released propaganda saying that coffee makes a man as barren as the deserts when it came. And implying that beer made you virile and it's quite the reverse. Yes, I think this may be true. Oh God, I'm completely addicted to coffee but I'd like to stop. But what you were saying earlier about the Renaissance, it made me think this man, Palladio,

the architect, very much today when you see people attack modern decadence, modern art, modern so on, and then they go and say, oh, we should be reproducing older classical styles which are beautiful, by which they mean really 19th century or late 19th century styles, which were new at the time, by the way, but Palladio didn't, he looked around, he saw, he was, let's say, displeased with a general run of architecture of his time and he took inspiration from antiquity, but if you look at his buildings, they're not just reproductions of ancient Roman or Greek buildings, he innovated, so this, I think, perfect use, you look back to the past, you see You see the beautiful ancient Greek, ancient Roman architecture, but you don't reproduce it. You reinterpret it for your own time.

You revitalize it. That is, to me, the wonderful looking back at history, the example of Palladio and the arts. The same can be done, of course, in politics and morality. It's not, oh, I'm going to roleplay and reenact and copy and be a slave to history, you know? Yeah, I think the Pre-Raphaelites are sort of like that, like the arts and crafts movement of Victorian times, which it was medieval-esque, but it wasn't like, I mean, the pre-Raphaelite painting doesn't look like a medieval painting. It's just inspired by it and it takes any direction. Some people will still say it's kitsch, but I think that's a bit too critical. I think it's, I don't think it's kitsch. I think it's a very interesting direction. And I mean, the neo-gothic in architecture, I really love it.

That is a bit more derivative, but like the houses of parliament in England, amazing building in Canada and North America, there was a lot of neo-Gothic. And it was basically just sort of building Gothic architecture from 800 years previously, but on a larger scale, which is a new interpretation. Like a skyscraper with Gothic elements is not purely medieval, but it has that link to the past as aesthetics, which I think would be natural. Would you agree? Yes, of course. There is a long line of cultural commentators from everyone knows about Spengler, but Paglia makes a similar point that the skyscrapers are a natural evolution of the medieval European Faustian spirit and they even look like this. Sure, that would be a wonderful

I will re-update an example of how history can revitalize and inspire new creation. But it is this, to go back to your initial question, it is this that concerns me. How can new modes of life be reintroduced in our time when, yes, you look around, everybody is a low man, everybody has petty desires. How do you escape that? And how can preconditions for the production of culture in the broadest sense, the arts, literary production and so on, how can it happen today? Not just as a preservation of the past, but how can history inspire new creation today? This has been my concern. And I need to emphasize that there is a way that you can use, unfortunately, examples of ancient greatness to smother and suffocate, actually, the possibility of new creation. And Nietzsche has a passage about this.

It's not too long, but maybe a couple of paragraphs. Can I read? And this is from his essay that I recommend for anyone interested in these questions on the use and abuse of history for life, where he talks about three approaches to history. He says, history is not really a science. It is something that is always in the service of some agenda or some use today. And he talks about three approaches, the critical, the antiquarian and the monumental. And we can get into these if you want, but the monumental is kind of what I've been referring to. You look to the past for inspirations of human greatness or artistic or philosophical greatness. And that can be great if it's used to inspire and spur on new things, but here he gives an example of how it can be used to smother and suffocate.

And it always depends on who uses it. Here, I will read now. Let us take the simplest and most frequent example. If we imagine to ourselves uncultured and weakly cultured natures, energized and armed by monumental cultural history, against whom will they now direct their weapons? Against their hereditary enemies, the strong cultural spirits, and thus against the only ones who are able to learn truly from that history, that is, for life, and to convert what they have learned into a higher practice. For them, the path would be blocked and the air darkened if people dance around a half-understood monument of some great past or other, like truly zealous idolaters, as if they wanted to state, see, this is the true and real culture. Why concern yourself with those

who are transforming themselves and wanting something new? Apparently, this dancing swarm possesses even the privilege of good taste, so-called. For the creative person always stands at a disadvantage with respect to someone who merely looks on and does not put his own hands to work. Just as, for example, the political know-it-all has always been wiser, more just, more considerate than the ruling statesman. But if we want to transfer into the realm of art, excuse me, but if we want to transfer into the realm of art the use of plebiscites and of numerical majority, and as it were, to require the artist to stand in his own defense before the forum of aesthetically inert types, that we can take an oath in advance that he will be condemned, not in spite of, but precisely because of the fact

that his judges have solemnly proclaimed the canon of monumental art, that is in accordance with the official explanation of art, which in all ages has had effects. Whereas for the judges, all art which is not yet monumental because it is contemporary is always first, unnecessary, second, without pure tendencies, and third, lacking that authority of history. On the other hand, their instinct tells them that art can be struck dead by art. The monumental is definitely not to rise up once more. And for that, their instinct uses precisely what is the authority of the monumental from the past. So they are connoisseurs of art because they generally like to get rid of art. They behave as if they were doctors while basically they are concerned with mixing poisons.

So they develop their languages and their taste in order to explain in their discriminating way why they so persistently disapprove of all the nourishing artistic food offered to them. For they do not want greatness to arise. Their method is to say, see, greatness is already there. In truth, this greatness that is already there is of as little concern to them as what is emerging. Of that, their life bears witness. Monumental history is the theatrical costume in which they pretend that their hate for the powerful and the great of their time is a fulfilling admiration the strong and the great of pastimes. In this, through this guise, they invert the real sense of that method of historical observation into its opposite. Whether they clearly know it or not,

they certainly act as if their motto were, let the dead bury the living. What do you think of that? Do you like that? Tom, your mic is muted. Sorry, which book is that from? That's from an early essay from the 1870s, I think, on the use and abuse of history for life. Yeah, I've not heard, I've not read that of Nietzsche's. It does sound, he's describing a kind of a cope where people project onto someone and achieving people like a fault by, you know, comparing them to an idealized past that's just a way of undermining the greatness of the present. That's quite interesting. In your work, you have used like a certain, you've used us like a representation of this like negative history certain civilizations including Neolithic Europe

and China. China you've been to several times. So this is you see as a danger to the philosopher or as a general threat to western culture or as the present this kind of this mode of longhoused civilization? Yes, I think history can be used in various ways with various excuses to retard the possibility of freedom, of human greatness, of progress, and certainly China in its desultory, mostly its desultory history, has represented this. That's my main objection. I don't care as much about the modern Chinese state and so on, but it's what it has been in history and so on. But yes, more than just a danger to the West or Western culture, which is not in a good condition right now, but it's a danger to this. It's the danger to possibility of human greatness and human action

when it's used in the way I just described now, which by the way, the Left has its other faults, which we can talk about in a moment, you know, they want to debunk the past examples of human greatness, also in order to say that it's not possible today. So they go to Napoleon or any other, again out of a sense of envy or spite over the possibility that a higher form of human life is possible. And through that means, you know, a critical history means they want to say that, he never really existed. The great men of the past were also crooks or wankers or didn't really exist and so on. But what I just described and read now is actually very common among a certain type of conservative, a certain type of traditionalist and it's extremely common, unfortunately, among the Philistines

who are promoted online now as so-called dissident populists and so on. on. It's people who, what he says, it's a theatrical costume. They put on the image of history, the weight. They don't really appreciate it. They only want to use it as a weapon against the possibility of any further modern innovation, you know? Because it makes them feel inferior to know that a man can become great. That phenomenon is also in Hollywood with the recent biography of Napoleon by that Scottish chap, Ridley Scott. Yes, the dominant mode of the West I think is still leftist and so they employ that different path. They say all great men of the past are secretly whatever, sexual perverts or crooks or thieves or yeah, in some cases they would even say didn't really exist or this kind kind of thing, you know.

Yes, it's interesting that the individual as a great man is so threatening. I wanted to also, talking of individuals who shape history, go to a point that you've made in the second to last podcast you uploaded, which echoes Nietzsche's criticisms of Plato. Because Plato is so important, such an extraordinarily important man for understanding all Western culture and many of the things that are happening all over the world and I think you can attribute to him everything from Christianity to communism and even fascism because some extent have their roots in his thoughts. You said Plato represents a new level on which the spiritual struggle for the future takes place, his introduction of his thoughts, Platonism by extension, and that this was the start of a new view of man

as an object of political moral contention and ambition which is kind of like the sort of transition some people would argue like the transition to the total war of the early 20th century was because of the death of god like Nietzsche would call death of god and like the sudden reframing of man is like the subject of like this like control of ideological control that you want to win over masses in this way but certainly I think it's reasonable to extend that further back to Christianity and from Christianity back to Plato. But maybe it's unfair to some extent to... I mean, when you said that, were you entirely against what Plato achieved? Do you think that this was an inevitability anyway, because Buddha and Zarathustra were

going to do the same kind of thing anyway, right? Yes, I think it's simply a biological historical event in the life of any intelligent species who doesn't, let's say, stay at the level of the grass hut. Obviously, even before, let's say, 500, 400, 300 BC, there had been empires. There had been empires in Mesopotamia and Asia going back well before then. But the mode by which they existed was very different. Their self-understanding and self-justification was very different. They conquered foreigners, and they sometimes said they were doing it in the name of their gods, but you get an image of this, I think it's in Herodotus, of how the Persians saw themselves with concentric, I mean, it's the ultimate example of what you could call

ethnocentrism. They saw the world in concentric circles. Anyone the farther away it got from Persia, The more inferior and irrelevant they thought such people and they saw themselves as entitled to rule. And the empire was formed on that basis. But when you look at what happened, the event I described with Plato, which was also based, I read on that show, a beautiful passage from Nietzsche's book, The Dawn, where he talks about how Plato made three attempts to go to Sicily. Why? Sicily and southern Italy were kind of like the America of the ancient Greek world. They had expanded a few hundred years before, let's say 700 BC, a bit before then. It was a big territorial expansion of the Greek peoples. It was enormously wealthy for its time and so on.

And the cities there, Syracuse being the biggest of them, were panhellenic. They were kind of cosmopolitan. It wasn't just anymore the Ionians, the Dorians, or separated by. A lot of different types of Greeks had settled there. And so it became a Panhellenic Mediterranean megalopolis, Syracuse. And Plato went there with the intention to found a political moral teaching that would apply to the entire Greek world. He makes the comparison to Muhammad, what Muhammad did for the Arabs, to kind of unite the Greeks under a new, I don't even want to say religion, because that word is misunderstood today, as you know. It's a new, complete vision of life that will regulate everyday behavior and state structure and everything else.

And so it could have been, he failed, but he only failed by a few historical accidents. It could have very well been that his disciple there die on. He could have become King Tyrant of Syracuse, and we would have seen the platonization of the European South several centuries before it actually happened under the form of Christianity. But it would have been a kind of universal religion, political structure for the Greek race, call it what you will. And that's what I meant. it's a new, the stakes are upped considerably from what had existed before, where it was always political structures, religious structures, even were very local. This is different, yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean. I think that the Platonism as a religion was something that

posts, what my knowledge of Platonism is, I wouldn't say I'm an expert, but it seems to develop were in the Platonic Academy after Plato over time. I know that the general view of like philosophers of Britain, like experts in philosophy in the 19th century, like in the English speaking world, was that the Neoplatonists were not real Plato. They weren't real disciples of Plato because they saw Plato at that time as like this absolute rational Anglo style thinker. Whereas the Neoplatonists were mystics who just lost their nerve and had to retreat to metaphysics. But I think that the metaphysics is in Plato, it's clear in the Timaeus. But I think that the astral fleshing out of it where it becomes a dogma is something that happened a long time later. Maybe that was not Plato's intention,

I'm not sure, because he does seem more like putting it out there, these are some ideas, whereas the Platonists are like, this is what the master, the divine Plato who was himself inspired by the gods has taught us. So they kind of made him into, I think you used the term, a Muhammad of the Hellenes, which is quite interesting. But I think there's some accurate that's that becomes true perhaps only during the roman period uh but i'm not sure exactly when when that picks off but yeah i also think that this kind of tendency was like as you say it's in the it's in it's in the persians since our astra and that like once you've got a kind of doctrine that you think is the the true the absolute universal truth then there's a tendency

then to see it as your duty to enforce it on everyone else who hasn't figured it out yet so maybe it would have happened anyway or would you have like if you could would you want to prevent that but you said you think it's a necessary stage of development. Yes I don't think it's preventable it's like saying yeah I don't and by the way it's not only Plato the Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans who by Plato's time were already an established school in southern Italy and Sicily they had a big hand in inviting Plato there to to start his mission they too I think both Pythagoras and Plato saw themselves as possible religious prophets. Again, I would agree with you, it's not a religion used as in the modern sense,

but I think they did think they would become kind of like what Muhammad later became to the Arabs, but the Greeks. And they couldn't because the Greek world, even by the 300s, was so multi-faceted in the variety of its individual types. They were so egotistical. that was both their strength and their weakness, that they would never accept the imposition of such a system on themselves. So if you look at Plato's laws, everyone read the Republic, but the laws, which by the way, the only modern state, in fact the only state I'm aware of that was, let's say the modern state that was founded on the laws is the Iranian Islamic Republic, quite self-consciously Khomeini based it on structures that are even institutions from from the laws that were reproduced in Islamic forum in Iran.

I think, you know... So the Greeks beat the Persians in the long run anyway. Yeah. By the medium of Islam, finally the Greeks beat the Persians. Well, it's very, yes. It's very compatible in the sense that the laws, it regulates aspects of daily life in the same way that if you look at Shiite clerics, go on any Shiite forum, it's always, Sir, can I go to the bathroom in this form or this other form? It reads very much like people throw the word Talmudic. That's what the rabbinic commentary is like, too. But it's already in the laws that type of minute regulation of everyday life in the service of something greater. And I don't think, by the way, that Plato or Pythagoras themselves thought that this political or religious posture

was the final truth, but they thought it would be in service to the final truth. They were trying to move towards, they believed that it was achievable to understand an absolute truth, including thereby an absolute morality, even if they didn't actually espouse one. Yes, it's not that they necessarily believed like someone like Muhammad, that God spoke to them and gave them this legal code that the Greeks and in some way mankind would then have to follow, it's more like they just thought this would be good, this moral code would be good for the Greeks or mankind to follow. A similar point, by the way, is made by Alexander Kojev when he says that something entirely new happened with Aristotle and Alexander, which again,

same provenance from Socrates and Plato, but saying that Alexander is the first one to actually found a true universal empire based on the idea of the biological unity of mankind, which prior to that had not been a thing, it was not even conceivable, but he forced the Greek aristocracy to marry Persian women and did many things that we today would consider at least proto-cosmopolitan, proto-globalist, but it was founded on this new idea from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle that the new arena of spiritual war would be the determination of what human is, what human is as such universally, not just for Greek or, you know. Yeah, well this idea of the human is certainly revolutionary and it causes all the, a lot of, I mean, I think it's a philosophical concept more than biological

because right now I think a lot of archaeogenesis are starting getting in a bit of a tizzy about what exactly, I mean it's not so relevant in terms of the biology of existing hominids because there's only one, so that you can easily say we're humans, but if there was a biological definition of a human then it needs to exclude other hominids and that's why they're getting a bit worried because that would mean there were degrees of humanness and that that could even spill into the modern population and so they some people want to call Neanderthals a human for example and others would say no that doesn't make any sense because it undermines the entire basis of biological taxonomy that applies to other species like that's not how

we we would define a species in any other thing so anyway it is a philosophical like a potent philosophical idea of like that were that united together and things like the garden of you know the common descent from Adam and Eve couldn't really, I don't think they could really exist without that that previous philosophical development. I don't know what Semitic mythology was like prior to contact with Plato or whether they even had, whether Adam and Eve were just the ancestral, the racial ancestors of the Semites and then they were expanded to becoming the ancestors of all mankind later on. That's extremely interesting and gets into to a topic that we can discuss if you want. I know it's of high interest to you too, Tom, which is the history of what actually happened

with the Bible and Judaism and Christianity. And after that Islam, what is their origin? Just very briefly, I think the religion of the Bible, whatever it was called, by the time of the Bible coming about, it was already a universalist cosmopolitan religion. I think that's what you're hinting at maybe. Yes, I think Judaism was already heavily Hellenized, and Platonic influence had existed there prior to Christianity, quite a while before. And also Iranized or Persianized too, because the Jews of Persia were so influential, I think the concept of Satan is probably lifted from Zoroastrianism, due to the Jews in Iran. Well, this does sound interesting. So if you had something to say on the matter, I'd like to hear it. I have many things to say.

I am reluctant to, because this matter is so politicized now. And we all use the word astroturfed, but anything you say on the early history of Christianity and Judaism right now immediately gets plagiarized, taken over and co-opted and distorted by others. So I would like to write a longer thing on this to fully make the case so that it can't be distorted by others. But very briefly, I think the first time you really see something like a recognizably biblical monotheistic religion is in the Hasmonean dynasty and... When is the Hasmonean dynasty, for those who don't know? Well, let me go back to the beginning of it. I highly recommend for you and all of your listeners to read the Maccabees book of the Bible.

It reads, the beginning, the opening of it reads very, very different from the rest. It starts with saying, and Alexander had laid low the world at his feet and there was nothing left but Alexander and blah, blah, blah. It goes on from there. I think that that was the foundation of the Bible and of the Israelite religion as exists in the Bible. Before then, there had been a people, there had been tribes in that area, and probably King David had existed. He probably had a war god or something, but they were probably polytheistic. And around that time, I think there was a conscious attempt by the Maccabees and what came after them to found a people, to found a unified national religion based, yes, based on the teaching

of Plato, but inverted. And we can get into that if you want. It was an inversion of Greek Hellenism, which means just the Alexandrian world. And the Bible, I think, which probably various parts of it had existed before, were compiled into a scripture, a unified national scripture at that time, and reinterpreted with Genesis, the opening probably written around then or after. Everything reinterpreted, in my opinion, as an inversion of the Greek ideal and of the Greek way of life, but with similar universalistic cosmopolitan pretensions with the so-called Israelite or Jewish people, Hebrews, whatever you want, at the center. And it was a very proselytizing religion. People forget this. It was Christianity or God? Yes, the Roman Empire, the late Roman Empire it was.

Absolutely, it was, I think, a proselytizing religion even before 0 AD, and that's something that both Jews and Christians today try to sweep under the rug, you know? Yeah, Old Testament seems to me like it does have an obvious character of a genuine native mythology of a people, traditional mythology, including their past battles and the Genesis. I mean, parts of Genesis do seem to be like an authentic Bronze Age religious origin, but then rewritten and interpreted to a philosophical perspective, like, you know, due to Hellenic, specifically Platonic influence. And I know that there's kind of like a competing, in like the world of late antiquity, particularly, there's like a competition to see who was actually the source of this way of life. Because I know like the Hebrews wouldn't like

to attribute it to the Greek. So even like the Platonist, the Jewish Platonist Philo, he said that like Plato learned everything from Moses and it all came from Moses. But I know you said like Pythagoras, I think you speak 80 degrees. It wouldn't be Pythagoras to say it in the old way, but Pythagoras was, he was influenced by, some, I think it's Plutarch claimed that he was influenced by Zoroaster, even though they were like basically contemporaries. I don't see that that's very likely. Iamblichus says Pythagoras learned everything from the British Celts. And I'm inclined to think that's probably more true, yeah. That's 800 years after Pythagoras lived. So yeah, just take that with a pinch of salt. Well, I swear that all of these are possible.

I mean, look, Schopenhauer says Jesus must have surely lived in India and studied with the Hindus. But the Greeks always had this kind of inferiority complex with respect to the great Near Eastern culture. So Herodotus, I think, they thought that gods came from Egypt, which is obviously not true. And many other things that Thales must have studied Babylonian. They always thought this. It's very interesting. They thought of themselves as heirs and looked up in awe at the great civilizations of the Near East, primarily, I think, because those civilizations had much older written historical records, actually. And the Greeks had had the Dark Ages, and so they thought of themselves as newcomers. But it's amazing that they had this opinion and borrowed heavily from others,

but were also the creators of a radically new culture that was very unique. But yeah, to get to what you're saying, I don't think it's true or whatever or relevant that Pythagoras learned from this or that if Plato learns from Egyptians or whatever. Yes, well, I mean, to me, it does seem possible the doctrines of Pythagoras were influenced by Egypt, but yeah, I don't consider it like, I don't think that means that we blame Egypt or that Plato needs to be like, it's a plagiarizer of Egyptian thought or anything. It's not even certain that that is the case, but it just seems like a possible vector the doctrine of transmigration of souls. While it did exist among the British, the native Celts, but it also against among Slavs and Germans, but it's known to be a thing that is in Egypt

like quite early on and they have written records. So it's interesting what you're saying about the importance of written records and how it has basically like it undermined the Greek confidence in the in the antiquity of its civilization because there's a myth that the Egyptians had an argument with the Scythians about who was older and the Scythians were illiterate so they would have been they would have been confident in the antiquity of their culture just based on their oral traditions whereas at some point maybe because of the bronze age dark ages the Greeks having learned literacy become literate then become illiterate again and having to become literate a second time maybe they lost a continuity with their ancient history that

which made them feel somewhat inferior to some of the cultures to the east and south who had retained like written traditions for so long. In the same way that kind of like British historians in the 18th century started to claim they're descended from Phoenicians or whatever, just because they wanted to have, and even earlier they started to say they were from Trojan origins, because they wanted to have a connection to a culture with a written history in the deep distant past, which is just because once you become literate, once you're introduced to that technology, it's hard to see the value in the previous form of information retrieval, which was the ancient songs of your people. It was sung by bards and things like that.

Yes. And I think, by the way, that kind of... We need to put quotation marks about feeling inferior or that kind of inferiority complex when you look at, oh, that other civilization must be 10,000 years old because they have records that go back to Atlantis or whatever. But at the same time, the Greeks felt that they were the natural rulers of everyone else. So it was kind of, I think, a playful thing where they look back and they freely borrow from others. But it doesn't... it's a spur to them. It's a spur to creativity. And in this sense, I want to go back a bit to what we started to talk at the beginning of the show, if you don't mind. Because in this essay of Nietzsche, the use and abuse of life for history, he must have written it when he was 28 or something.

something. But again, he has three types of history, critical history, antiquarian history, monumental history. He says all three can be used for the benefit of life. They can improve things, you know, and all three can also be used for the opposite. And what you just described now, where you have a civilization that looks always to its past, and its thinkers, its scribes are always trying to preserve the past, to honor their past and so on. It's the ultimate example of traditionalism or conservatism. And if you don't mind, I would like to read another paragraph from Nietzsche, what he has to say about this, because it's at the same time an example of the use of history, of its great value and of its limitations. Can I read a paragraph? Please do.

History belongs secondly to the man who preserves and honors, to the person who with faith and love looks back in the direction from which he has come, where he has been. Through this reverence, he gives thanks for his existence. While he nurtures with a gentle hand what has stood from time immemorial, he wants to preserve the conditions under which he came into existence for those who are to come after him. And so he serves life. The possession of his ancestors' household goods changes the ideas in such a soul, for those goods are far more likely to take possession of his soul. The small, limited, crumbling and archaic keep their own worth and integrity because the conserving and honoring soul of the antiquarian person settles on these things and there prepare for itself a secret nest.

The history of his city becomes for him the history of his own self. He understands the walls, the turreted gate, the dictate of the city council and the folk festival, like an illustrated diary of his youth. And he discovers from himself in all this force, his purpose, his passion, his opinion, his foolishness, et cetera. And he keeps going like that and explains that in a very beautiful way, maybe more beautiful than a conservative or a traditionalist could explain the great use of this kind of history that you see today in traditionalists and conservatives and in a much more hieratic state form in the ancient oriental civilizations that we've just been talking about. But listen to what he says next about this, which is, okay, but how could history better serve life,

excuse me, how could history better serve living than by the fact that it does links the less favored races and populations to their home region and home traditions, keeps them settled there and prevents them from roaming around in foreign places, looking for something better and in search of that fighting competitive wars. So that sounds a bit condescending. And I think it's true. I mean, I think Nietzsche is saying history, even at its best, it's suited for unambitious, unremarkable races when it's a guide to life in this sense. Whereas the ancient Greeks were obviously very, very different from this. Yes, that is interesting. I mean, as far as I'm aware, the actual histories that the Greeks had of themselves, none of them really go that far back, like they can't really place,

they talk about, they don't have like a coherent narrative of the introduction of like the Indo-European languages, you know, like 4,000 years ago into that region of Greece. So they, but they, so they don't, they saw themselves as like being native indigenous to the region but they also saw the Pelasgians as predating them and so they had some notion that they weren't the original inhabitants of the land but yeah that is an interesting view I wonder if having the I wonder as an Englishman sometimes whether us having a national origin myth of us taking the land from coming from abroad and just seizing the land for ourselves contributed to a less static national character that was less inclined to be confined.

And so, under Eliezer, it was the first opportunity when we had the money and the means to do it. We started trying to reach our arms around the entire world. Yes. No, that's very interesting. I think it's probably true, yes. I think there was a similar spirit among the ancient Greeks, even if they didn't have an explicit myth like the arrival of Horst and Hengist or whatever. But they didn't have these ancient, huge national chronicles going back supposedly whatever 8,000 years like the Babylonians or Egyptians did. But they had something else. They had, of course, the story of the Trojan War told in Homer, but in other variations too. So this ancient raid was kind of the national story that kept getting told over and over. And there was another one, a special favorite of mine,

Jason's voyage, Jason and the Argonauts, and I don't remember if we talked about this when you came on my show, Tom, but one of my favorite theories, alternative theories, is that the story of Jason is the story of the arrival of the Greeks but told backwards. In other words, they remember their voyage over sea, actually, from the Caucasus, but in the story of Jason it's told backwards. you know. Interesting. Well, it does imply some kind of like connection, like knowledge and connection to the caucuses. But then again, there was a civilization that worth trading with. So it might just be contemporary, you know, knowledge of that. That's part of the, you know, the world. And they were a maritime people, the Greeks, so like, it isn't, it

isn't an especially difficult place to get to, although it is in the myth is an epic journey. But, you know, I don't think when you go through the Bosphorus that they actually start clashing together and smashing you or anything like that. Yes, well since we're on this connection to the Caucasus, the other myth that you know very popular, important to the Greeks, the myth of Prometheus is actually common I think not just to the Greeks but many Aryan whatever, Indo-European people also, and it's shared by some of the native peoples of the Caucasus. So in pre-Islamic Chechen culture they have a prometheus myth, you know. Interesting, I'm not aware of that, but I would also say that the problem with their caucuses for that mythic comparison is that there have been,

it's a region of, it's a term, a lot of turmoil, the Iranic, you know, Scythian tribes came into those regions and would have brought cultural elements into those regions and there could be, you know, there could be a Scythian origin rather than Chechen, the ancestor of the Chechens. But yeah, I mean, I totally agree prometheus has Indo-European origins because I think Loki is the same. Loki in Norse myth is the same being. Like it has a very similar end, you know, like he gets punished. He like challenges the gods in his disruptive behavior and then he is tied up in the underworld and punished by an animal and he's restrained there, you know, is his punishment. So it seems the same myth and he's not exactly the same character but yeah I definitely think that

you know there's been a long time for them to diverge but I've said a video about what I said like there's this Hermes and Prometheus has this relationship that parallels Loki and Odin so I think there's something going on there like the two sides of the same coin or something something like that but would you like to talk more because I know we have a disagreement about the caucuses and the origins of the proton europeans maybe we don't have time to go over it here but we can if you like sure well what what about it specifically I know we've talked about this before yes well I mean there's there's the the I guess it might be too much to go into now but because we'd have to go over each of our positions first and then and I haven't prepared

notes or anything but yeah I think that like personally I think the the role of the Caucasus is overstated by many because I really believe like Anthony that it's a step phenomenon that Proto-Indo-European is step phenomenon it has contacts with cultures to the south and it's absorbing DNA from it in from the Caucasus but that the like the cultural phenomenon of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the way that it disseminated is just not connected to the mountain people at all, really. I think it's a step phenomenon. It comes from step warrior people and not from the Caucasus. I would actually agree with that, Tom. It's only a matter of, there would have been different staging areas. So, very quickly on what we just spoke about with the Greeks, if you look at the southern Caucasus culture

called Trioleti, I think. Although it was located by, let's say, 2000 BC or something in the southern Caucasus, but its origins were, I think, it was part of the catacombs culture or something like that. So it was a steppe culture that had moved there in relatively recent times. It was extreme war-like. Some of the earliest examples of organized combat warfare are from that region. And the case can be made, which I can try to say quickly if you want to get into it, the evidence for why I think that culture is probably the immediate predecessor of the Greeks. I'm not saying it's of the other Indo-European peoples, but I do think they went across the Black Sea and settled or rather took over Greece starting in about 1800 BC or then. There are many

archaeological, I think, arguments that can be made for this including the use of cyclopean architecture there right before it comes to Greece and so on, the Mycenaean age. But I'm not saying that all the Indo-European peoples came from there. Similarly, I remember we had an argument about the role of the Carpathians. This isn't my argument, I'm taking it from Robert Drewes, and he's not saying that the Carpathian basin is the upper Danube when it kind of curves and it moves into the Carpathian mountains. And he says that was one of the landing grounds of some people from the Caucasus or the steppe who arrived, who thereafter spread to the rest of Europe. And he says they founded the Italic and Celtic branches of Indo-European. But he's not saying that that is their origin.

He's saying that was one of their staging grounds into Europe, whether they came from the steppe or from the Caucasus. And his evidence has to do with the spread of weaponry. And if I can, since, you know, I hope I'm not getting too detailed, if you don't mind. It's not a quote, it's just very briefly, the argument that he's making, the innovation is a lot of people look how do you trace where the Indo-Europeans are from and how they went. Or they look at pottery before, now they're looking at genetics some or they look at this. He's saying this is very obviously conspicuously a warrior culture. Why don't you look at the spread of weapons? And so that's what he does. And if you look at the spread of the sword and its development, the earliest samples are from there

and you can see it develop into Northern Europe, Northern Germany and Italy and so on, Northern Italy. Say what you will. It's a novel way of thinking about this. I can see your Skype. I have some points to make. I mean, the last person I interviewed for Drive Talk before you was a Bronze Age swordsman that we specifically talked about the development of the sword and to what extent the different swords like, cause you could see like first daggers, that Copper Age dagger start and then they get bigger and bigger to Dirks and Rapiers and then finally swords when, and once one smith has figured out a way to make the bronze longer, then it spreads because other smiths will take it up cause that's their craft. So you don't need to have racial, like because blacksmithing at the time,

the Bronze Age would necessitated large distance trade networks because of the nature of the alloys. To make this alloy, you need a Cornish tin and copper from the mountains elsewhere, whatever. But that meant that bronze, bronze smiths were like having to know about what the latest techniques are and how to get longer blades, stronger blades, et cetera. So it's not a very good way of measuring weapons in general, in any time, I don't think are the greatest way for measuring the arrival of migratory peoples and cultures because of the fact that although they can try to stop their enemies getting hold of that weaponry and will try, they won't be successful forever. It's only a matter of time before your enemy takes up the weapon too, for their survival.

It's just the same story of war today, it's how everyone wants nukes. So, but yeah, I can answer that. Or should we get into a mini debate, Tom, or no? Yeah, well, let's go ahead if you'd like to, but yeah. Well, my answer to that is, again, I'm repeating the evidence from Drew's. It isn't just that it spread, you are absolutely right. For example, the horse technology, when it appears the bits and later the stirrup, they appear in one place in the step and then just a few hundred years later, that used everywhere from China to the Near East. Of course, people copy that. But in this particular case, Europe before, let's say, 1500 BC, there is no evidence of combat weapons used. And then when they appear, it's not just like, oh, a sword model appears. When they appear in these areas,

so let's say the Carpathians around 1400 BC or so, 1500 BC, or so 1500 BC the proto sword that was later used everywhere and probably did spread the way of saying eventually everywhere but it appears there and then other models appear in North Germany and North Italy and so on but they don't appear by themselves they appear with a whole toolkit of other things including chariots, armor, long spears, like a whole thing and evidence of occasionally destruction of local sites and so he's making the point that they couldn't just have appeared on their own, they appeared as obviously part of a class that knew how to use them and that took over the local population and yeah. Well there's no doubt that there were major technological developments in the

second century BC, and like chariots, dissemination of tarots and swords, a part of that. But I think that like, weapons of war saying that I don't know that you're quoting him verbatim, but to say weapons of war begin with a sword, like they're already made abroad, like about 4000 year old, like, early British weapon, which is, it's not a sword, because it's too short, but it's a it's a very long dagger, like bigger than my head, but no, but having people to death. It's a it's a It's not really anything else, but yeah. You disagree with that. There are such things from before made of copper, but they're not really- And bronze, and bronze, but they're just not there. It's not long enough to be swords, but- Some of them are too long, some of these darks and rapiers,

and they would have been ceremonial, but you are right that the sword isn't the first one. It's the spear. Yes. But combat spears don't really exist before 2100, 2200 BC or so anyway, so- But as you know, as well, even going back to before metal, like there were, there are like massacre sites and stuff. So there was, there was some like, there was like the way that the Papuan tribes today, like they sometimes get together and have a bit of a war, kill a few of each other. Some of it is like not proper combat because they just sort of shake their weapons around and look aggressive rather than actually killing each other. But a few people die. And I think war is much older than the, the, middle Bronx. There is, well, violence is, but what we understand by combat of military groups,

of young men fighting, that I don't think is. And I'm willing to change my views if further archaeology comes about. But I was just talking today with a friend. The earliest very clear evidence of organized warfare is only about 2200 BC in Abashevo, in the north steppe, and there you actually have for the first time a burial ground of several hundred young men who had combat spears, I don't know of shields, but armor and so on. It is obviously a very warlike place. Before that, of course, you have always had violence, no doubt, but it was massacres, like skirmishes, massacres of unarmed villagers and so on. It wasn't the same thing that we have in mind when we talk about a warrior class. I just want to give some context for the listeners

who aren't like up to scratch on all the things we're talking about. Abbeševo is a derivative of Yamnaya and earlier we were talking about catacomb culture near the Caucasus, that's also a derivative of Yamnaya. And the Yamnaya, for those who aren't aware, is the archaeological culture that's most popularly associated with the Proto-Indo-European language at the moment. But the Yabnaya themselves had limited weaponry and they had, there's a debate about the extent to which they employed equestrianism. Some people think not at all and others, and I think Druze is in that camp, but I'm in the camp that thinks that the Yabnaya did have equestrianism.

There's some evidence for that. But maybe we should not dwell on it too much because without everyone being familiar with the papers we're talking about it isn't very easy for them to follow our arguments. It's very interesting. I don't know if you want to get into this. The bigger question of what you touched on, and I don't mean to derail conversation, feel free to change subject if this doesn't interest you, but you mentioned migration of peoples. And I am very concerned by what's happening in genetic studies with people like Joseph Lazaridis and these others who are basically ethnic activists. And I think I will write longer on this and try to make the case. I think they're perpetrating a fraud. For example, they recently had a paper that in the Mediterranean Phoenician cities

don't have noticeable, or maybe very small, but don't have noticeable Levantine ancestry. And they just presented that kind of without explanation. And I think what's been going on in the Reichlabs, especially, which I'll get to, they have a commitment to, if somebody happened to live in the port of Carthage, whoever it may have been, and they find the bones, they say that person is as much a Carthaginian as, let's say, one of the founding families that ruled the city. And a lot of the time, these bones are collected. And when you read the studies, you cannot find the provenance of the bones. In other words, they may know them, but sometimes I think they even delete the provenance. They don't talk about that. You as a reader, even with access to the raw data,

cannot find sometimes where the bones are from. Are they from one of the ruling families? Were they found in a mass grave by the port? Were they, let's say, local migrant laborers from nearby regions. You don't know. And my model, Tom, for how ancient history happened is that full-scale migration of peoples was extremely rare and that almost all historical change that you see was done by small, mobile, highly organized groups. And so what's going on with these studies, especially in the Mediterranean, where you have people like Nassim Taleb and Lazaridis, who aren't necessarily, let's say, Lebanese or Greek nationalists, but more like Mediterranean nationalists. Pan-Mediterranean chauvinists, I call them.

Yes, exactly. And they're finding evidence of a kind of homogeneity and continuity among the bones of the Mediterranean, which I never denied this. But they're basically taking bones of local Mediterranean peoples, but they're not what we know today from studying history. The Greek upper class, the Punic upper class, and so forth are the ones who did the history that we're studying today. And that study about them being unable by modern methods to find Punic or Levantine ancestry to the known Phoenician cities should be a big red flag to people that there's something seriously wrong with how genetic studies about antiquity are done today. So it makes a good point, but, and I have my own criticisms of Lazaridis as well, which

I, I mean, I go, you know, very against his Southern arc theory and things like that. But to steel man their case, what about that? I mean, that paper, I didn't read it in detail, but usually the papers themselves don't like talk about the context of the samples a lot, but then if you read the supplements, they'll have in there a detailed description of the archeological context of the samples that are used in the study. So you can find them out, but they usually don't always get put in the articles that Scientific American do on the findings or whatever. They don't have access to the raw and they don't. I'm telling you, sometimes they do. Sometimes they say this is from a Royal grave and so on. And when the samples don't fit their expectations, they sweep them under the rug,

but many times you can't find that information. And it's unbelievable to me that they talk about Greek burials and mass graves, when we know that they practice cremation, which you can't do studies on, the upper class did. So that's just one small example. Look, my main point, since we're talking about history in the broad terms, without boring your audience about these details we can debate later, Why are the conquests of the, I call them the Aryans, I call them Indo-Europeans, whatever you want, why are they so interesting? Similarly, why is the settlement of the Phoenicians around the Mediterranean so interesting? It shows history in action. It's done in a planned way by small groups who know exactly where they're going.

have the latest technology, the latest military tactics, and so on. They have a plan, and I think that is how a lot of these things happen. The Norman conquests are, or the conquests of South America by the Spanish, I think are a good parallel. I think that's how these ancient, what we see now. You're talking about an elite dominance model. Yes, the Norman model is an elite dominance, so you have a small number of men taking over a large civilization and then implanting themselves as the rulers of it. Yes, I believe this is how ancient history took place overall, including, well we can get into what happened in the Levant and so on, but I think this is how it happened and if you don't at least have this, like you know about

this model, if you don't at least have this model to be able to argue against it and these genetic slabs rule it out completely. They do not want to consider this possibility at all, you know. They want to talk about migration of peoples for which there's often almost no archaeological evidence, for example, that the Philistines migrated to Canaan and so on. There's no evidence. To counter that, I'd say that in the case of Anglo-Saxon England, for example, Among leftists and general academics of the last few decades, the elite dominance model was by far preferred as being more politically correct than a racial replacement, because they hoped they would like to have thought of the Anglo-Saxon invasion as being like the Norman invasion, where a few

Germanic-speaking elites took over it and forced their language on a Brythonic population, but because that to them is less problematic than that an entire people came and just replaced and other people and they even denied that that sort of thing happened but I think that thing did happen. I think both of those two models happened so that's why I don't think you can say whether in any individual circumstance in history whether it was an Anglo-Saxon or a Norman style takeover but both are possibilities in each case so you have to go and look at the details of each specific event. I think that like the Indo-European languages spread in diverse ways in different places and some of those involve Anglo-Saxon style replacements and others only involve Norman style

elite takeovers but yeah you'd have to look at the details. But yeah going back to the Phoenicians I'm just curious like your objection to it because that what they found is that they say that a lot of the people in this Phoenician context were actually genetically more like Sicilians or like other Mediterranean peoples with whom you would expect them there to be lots of Phoenician contact anyway because Sicily had Phoenician colonies on it and it's a boat trip away and people were on their boats a lot in those days. So do you think it's just like a gradual absorption of other Mediterranean people into the Phoenician colonies of Carthage that would not make them just sort of look like southern Europeans over time? I think that's perfectly plausible.

I have no problem with that but when you look at the abstract of that study and the way people are interpreting it and also some of their conclusions. For example, the model you just spoke of right now, I would agree with. At some point in antiquity, Phoenician men, probably small groups, started to form trade emporia. It developed into cities. Probably they kept up with the home cities in the Levant. Maybe they brought wives. You know this happens. I know you know about this in Spain. There are English families who make wine in Spain and Portugal. They get their education in England. They get their wives back in England. I think certainly Greek colonization took place this way. For example, Mother City was overpopulated, so they sent a lot of young men.

But at their core, there were families. There were Greek families. The families formed the local aristocracy, whereas the many young men married local women, let's say Sicilian women, and that ended up forming the people of the city. And over time, you'd expect that to be interbreeding among the aristocracy and the middle classes and so on. So the original stock would get diluted. I have no problem with that. That's probably the way this colonization took place. But that isn't what they're saying in this paper, they're just presenting it as if, you know, and so it's basically that Phoenician was a vibe rather than a people. Yes, what's being forgotten is that there was a core population that was foundational at least at some point, you know.

Well I think that if they're denying that, that's outrageous because of course they couldn't possibly be a Phoenician, like, you know, a Semitic language spoken by these people unless there had been a Semitic people founding that colony initially, but I didn't do a detailed reading of the paper, but my understanding was it was just showing that they had absorbed the people who they colonized to the extent that there wasn't a discernibly notable amount of the original stock in the samples that they had. Well, take the Greek or Roman case of that, because their intentions become clearer when you look at what they say about that. I think the Greek or Roman case is very much like this. There was an Indo-European court which we spoke

about this before. It's not exactly what the Nordices claimed. They were not like modern North Germans or whatever. It's rather they had more of a component that was also a third component that was also later foundational to that you know so but yeah but but it was different the point it was different from the mass of the local population and that's what these people are denying um they look and they say oh no there's a perfect continuity between mycenaean greeks and modern greeks don't don't even think about whether there was a core that was foundational that was different from that you know and in rome the same it's absurd yes i get I get very strange comments with someone saying it's nordicists for me to point out that the

steppe signal in Greece comes from the people with higher amounts of steppe than it is in the Greek samples. That's obvious because it has to be introduced by that component of their ancestry must have been introduced by the source of that component. I don't know how that's nordicism. But yeah, certainly. The bell beakers... Sorry, go on. I was saying, in Italy as well, with the bell beakers, I often see people reluctant to talk about, well, the bell beakers would have just been Central Europeans. If the bell beaker source of Indo-European languages in the Italian peninsula, and we know bell beakers were just coming from Central Europe, that means that the source of Italic languages was a Central European people. So you're talking like Austrian-like or South German-like people.

But is that Nordices to say that? It's just, it's a fact. It has to be a fact, but it's a fact that, of course, it's not Nordices because, I mean, we spoke about this before, the Nordic peoples as they exist now are also from that, but in a different way. But just, I was going to go on, I was getting excited about this, the stupidity of the these Mediterranean nationalists. It's the pettiest kind of example of what we've been talking about on this show with the reverence for history and kind of petty ethnic nationalism. I just want to give you what I think is kind of the context of this. It's the same kind of people who say that modern Greek is pronounced exactly the same way that ancient Greek was. And they chimp out at you if you try to reconstruct ancient

Greek pronunciation. It's obviously absurd. There is no evidence. All the evidence is preponderantly in the other direction. But no, no, no. We have perfect continuity. There's nothing changed. And it's the same people who, sensitive subject, but but there's one of these Greek nationalists that recently wrote the book about how, no, no, no, the ancient Greeks never practiced anything that looks like homosexuality. It's all made up by the evil German and English modern historians, who have an agenda and absolutely, they were just like modern Greeks and they were, you know. He gets an idea of Lazaridis' headspace, how he thinks, if I tell you, he recently posted a sort of imaginary dialogue fanfic between Athena and Lord Elgin about the marbles. And like, she's trying to convince him

to return them or something, it's, yes. What do you make of that, the Elgin marbles debate? I am, I have Greek friends, I like Greek, I like, I understand the argument that they should be returned there and on the basis of just like, that's the original home of the creations And people made that argument in the 18th century as well. And it's not a bad argument. They're not actually intending to return them to the path, they're not gonna put them in a museum at the bottom of the Acropolis. So they still won't be in the original context in Greece. But like the point, my objection is that there's any kind of indication that Britain stole them or that Britain owes them to anyone because Britain did Greece and the world a service like looking after them.

And we ought to be thanked for the start. And if they wanted to buy them back, should come humbly and request to do so that would be fine and i wouldn't object to them being given being sold to the greeks even if it was at a loss it's not about the money it's about you know being respectful but the the accusation that they were stolen is a lie and that that we have any duty to give them back that's not that's not just not true so i think it's all been framed in this post-colonial like a leftist way which is just a fiction that's my main objection to it. And it starts with Maria Mercuri, the feminist, 1970s feminist socialist politician who started all this in Greece. And that's why I think it's got that association, really.

Well, it's disgusting. It's the same thing with the Rosetta Stone, right? The only way we have decipherment of hieroglyphs is because of work done by someone who tagged along with Napoleon and so on. And it's the work of English, French, Dutch, German, West European archaeologists, estates, appreciators of art and antiquity, that things like the Elgin Marbles and so on were saved from possible destruction or defilement. I have no sympathy to this. We call it Third Worldism now, but it's exactly this intersection of leftism, anti-colonialism, plus petty ethnic nationalism of these marginal peoples who themselves really, until recent times, had no appreciation or or knowledge or interest in their own history, there's a wonderful aside in Schopenhauer where,

he says it's often the case that a masterwork, a painting is found in the servant's quarters, just neglected with no, and some aesthete finds it. And most people would not respect it if they were not told that it's important or beautiful. And overall, that's just the history of beautiful ancient artifacts in the world. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's not impossible for others to come to appreciate it, but at least until recent times, you're totally right. The world owes so much to... I'm an Anglophile on this, as on so many other things. The world owes so much to English and French archaeologists and explorers for this kind of thing. And German too, those three. There was something similar, Stone Age herbalists when he was active was talking about the African,

like the bronzes and sculptures from West Africa where they were just going to get melted down a lot of them. They didn't have any, they weren't valued. British people put them in museums, then when Africans figured out that they were actually valuable, then they wanted them back again. Some of them were given back and then they were immediately lost because they were sold off again to get money. So they don't have the same sense of custodianism, like this this idea that the Anglos developed and other Western European nations had that like, we're looking after the heritage of mankind. It comes from that thing we were talking about earlier, like the idea that like the English weren't like hoarding these just for national chauvinism, like we've got this stuff cause we're English.

They kind of sense themselves as being like the, you know, the shepherds of like of mankind or like inheriting this like duty to look, you know, the white man's burden as Kipling called it, which is sort of absent now it's seen as problematic. But it was an interesting thing, and I think that sense of self-worth and purpose is what enabled the English to achieve what they had. They did, but they don't have it anymore, so it's not possible now. Can I give another especially disgusting example of this attitude that touches on so many things we've just spoken about. In Australia, I think in Kimberley region. There's the Bradshaw figures, I think they're called. Some are dated back to 60,000 years ago. That's disputed. That's incredibly old.

That's disputed, but some people say that they're in any case tens of thousands of years old. They show humanoid figures that do not look anything like the Aborigines who live there now. And prior to European, let's say, it's well known that until very recently, the local Aborigines said these are from before our time. They are made by birds, actually, and we're going to scratch them out. And they tried to scratch them out all the time previously. Now, however, because attention has come on this, they've been taught to say, oh no, we made these, we made these. And when you look up what the scratching out means, they say, oh no, we were improving them. It's like me going to an ancient painting and like

chipping at it. And then when I'm asked what I'm doing with this vandalism, I'm improving on, you know, I'm adding heritage to it. But they were obviously trying to scratch out, I think, evidence of a previous people that had been there who they didn't understand and hated, and now they said, no, it is ours and this was ours. The worst kind of third-worldist ethnic nationalism, anti-colonialism, used simply to clobber the heads of of West Europeans who are the only preservers of the rich heritage of mankind in recent centuries. Yeah, it's very clear to me from the examples we just discussed how ethnocentrism and ethnic feeling can actually become an obstruction to the learning about and preserving the heritage of even your own ethnicity, let alone like mankind in general.

But I think also, and this is an argument I have to make against like mainstream academics. I think it can be a good thing as well because the audience I find like is mostly laymen and they want to, they connect with history through a sense of pride. So I do think that harnessing like the general sense of pride in one's history and the dignity that a knowledge of your history affords you is a good way for generating the general public interest in history that can help to generate revenue as well. So what do you think about ethnos? Cause you have like mixed feelings about ethnocentrism. Do you think it could be helpful as well? Yes, I think it can obviously be helpful, but in a lot of these third world cases, it's a very recent creation, right?

I mean, what the hell is Pakistani nationalism? It's a completely made up country. I think the name comes from an acronym. The only thing holding together those ethnicities is Islam, which is why they are so adamant about that. And their whole self-conception is oppositional to the West. And that's, I think, even the case in countries with genuine ancient histories like India and China. And so, yeah, it's whose ethnocentrism? I obviously think West Europeans could use a healthy dose of extra-ethnic feeling. Yeah, it's interesting. It's still quite strong in Greece, but it also hasn't stopped there being a very leftist sort of culture in Greece. And also, you see these tourists go home and refugees welcome graffiti and stuff in Greece.

So if any kind of ethnocentrism is not explicitly attached or detached from third-worldism, then it doesn't really have much positive influence. Well, I have a lot of contempt for that kind of petty thing where the Greeks say you cannot call Turkish coffee Turkish and Turks have their own stupid arguments about the Armenians say you can't. So you should go to the, the joke is like the Quora board, the Quora forums, where you get an Albanian, a Bulgarian arguing for 20,000 pages about who owns some valley. I mean, you know. I enjoy Balkan arguments on the internet.

Yes. I want to go back on the subject of the internet to sort of wrap up our conversation to what you said at the beginning that you made a comment that I thought was quite interesting. I'd like you to elaborate on you said that before 2010, that there wasn't such this interest in ancient history, you couldn't find it, or you wouldn't encounter people talking about it. What do you think is it about the world since 2010, and the online culture that's developed that has renewed this fascination for the deep past? Yes. Well, I ought to clarify, I meant specifically what today would be recognized as hard right or far right. I don't like these words or dissident, whatever. Let's just call it the faction of truth, which includes an appreciation, a vital interest in antiquity and so on.

That before 2010, in real life, for me, I couldn't meet people in real life. I could talk to... So I met some online on forums before 2010, but something started to change around 2010 to 2012. And I think it was the acceleration of the leftist program, maybe. Now, leftism, wokeism, call it whatever you want, had been around at least since the early 90s, but even before, but it really accelerated, especially with the start of Obama's second term. They went so crazy, and then in Europe it went so crazy, especially around then with what Merkel did in 2015, busting open the borders and everything going insane. Before that, there were the protests in France around gay marriage in 2013, which, yes, and really those turned into protests against mass migration by the youth involved in that,

which was a wonderful development. Dominique Venner, the great historian, committed suicide around 2013, excuse me. So around that time, something happened, which I think was the overreach by the left maybe, where young people around the world went online. Some, many had already been partly on forums like 4chan, but other things to discuss forbidden knowledge, which includes this fascination with aspects of antiquity. That would be my guess of what changed this acceleration of spread since then. Yeah, because also in a way like in Britain and I think other parts of the West, there's like a focus, a very deep focus on the Second World War as a year zero. So even just like having an active interest in anything before that, whether it was the French Revolution or the fall of Rome,

had become sort of right-wing coded, even though academia for all these new subjects was still left-wing. Yes, I don't know what will happen next, but things have certainly accelerated change since 2015. I like to give the example of authors like Celine and Ernst Junger and Mishima. I didn't know anybody who was reading them before then. I remember mentioning it to some professor that I like them and you know yeah Arab men touch your thigh he leaned over put his hand on my thighs he said he whispered I noticed you like some of the more reactionary authors and then he patted my back he's like that's okay that's fine it wasn't seen as especially harmful but it was seen as extremely odd that you'd be reading them now so many young people are reading them I

think the same reasons you just spoke about yeah I remember in my during my postgraduate degree in history. I had the course in English, because I was studying Middle English and stuff, we had a lecture on like modern influences from Old and Middle English, which we had shared with English literature graduates and their undergrads. And they did a lecture on Ezra Pound. And they asked like a room full of like 50 students like, who here reads Ezra Pound? And I'm the only hand it went up. That was it, 2011. I don't know if it would be any different now if they went into the room because I think most of the people who go and study literature at university are still quite clueless about that. I would imagine it would be the same in a university

libtard setting. Unfortunately, Tom, I think it would be the same broadly online too. The people who actually read Ezra Pound, Celine, have a vital interest in ancient history are about the same number maybe as in 2015-16. I am very skeptical of the recent popularization of these kinds of ideas on x and such. Everyone knows that right-wing people on the internet like to pretend to have read books they haven't read. I read Celine myself in the noughties when I was in my early early 20s. I think that's the time to read him. Maybe I should re-read him now, I'm middle-aged, but I think it was like that energy and vitality of it was very appealing to me as a young man. I highly recommend, if you read, don't just read Journey to End of the Night, read his book

Death on Credit and ask your audience to read it too. It's one of the most cynical, darkest books, again by a man widely recognized as hard right or whatever, but he is completely cynical about all modern ideas, all modern pieties. He thinks all modern pieties have to be thrown into the trash and only those that make the gauntlet of humor and cynicism and come out the other side deserve to survive, you know? Yes, I believe I compared you to him in the first review I get of your book because it's not what people might think right-wing literature, because I wouldn't call Salim right-wing in the sense that he, I think he was a fascist sympathizer, but his literature doesn't feel like what people might think right wing literature would be like, it's

coarse and vulgar at times. And yeah, I mean, he, you know, dregs up the muddy bottoms to find gems, if you will, like sort of thing that you kind of do, like you don't shy away from like, the popular vulgarity of the time and use the internet slang to sort of get your point across. But yeah, I definitely think especially younger audience members who, who likes, you know, you know, something a little bit rough and that kind of thing. Definitely read Talin, Death on Credit or Journey to the End of the Night. I read both but I can't remember which one's which in my memory because they're so long ago. One of them, he goes on a boat to New York and he comments that they talk to each other while pissing and he finds that strange. Yes, well, all kinds of... Sorry, go on.

Is that Death on Credit or Journey to the End of the Night? he can be a doctor in America. I don't, I think that maybe Germany, he start to be doctor in Africa, but it's bizarre. Yes, it's kind of the plot is loose and not especially engaging, but the general story reads like a whirlwind, reads very fast, so yeah. He reminds me of the beats in that sense, but I prefer him. But yeah, this has been an interesting discussion and I thank you very much for joining me today, Bap, It's a pleasure. I'd like to continue our conversation another time on my podcast. Anytime, Tom. Please come on Caribbeanism soon. I will do. That'd be great. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks for listening, everyone. Goodbye. Are you interested in worshipping the gods of ancient England and Scandinavia,

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