Podcasts about Sea Peoples

Ancient Proxy Wars Precede Bronze CollapseEric H. Cline, Part Two: The Amarna archive exposes intense proxy warfare between Egypt and the Hittite Empireacross Canaanite city-states. King Rib-Hadda of Byblos writes over 60 desperate letters pleading for Egyptian archers against Hittite-backed rulers Abdi-Ashirta and Aziru of Amurru. Concurrently, Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem reports constant siege and regional conflict to the Pharaoh. Social network analysis highlights the critical role of royal messengers in maintaining international connections. Ultimately, this interconnected Late Bronze Age globalized network collapses around 1177 BCE due to mega-droughts, famines, earthquakes, and invasions by the mysterious Sea Peoples, initiating a 400-year Dark Age. (2)

In this week's episode, I take a look back at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Summer 2026 and rate them. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Armor series at my Payhip store: FALLARMOR The coupon code is valid through September 21, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this fall, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 319 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 4th, 2026, and today I'm looking back at the movies and streaming shows I watched over Summer 2026. We will also have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Armor series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is FALLARMOR. As always, you can get the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through September 21st, 2026, so if you need a new ebook for this fall, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report that the rough draft of Blade of Visions is done. It came to 99,000 words. It'd be kind of cool if it came to 100,000, but as I've learned in the 15 years I've been doing this, it's not a good idea to pad things for length. Editing is underway. I'm about 15% through the first pass of edits. I'm working on the cover design, so I'm on good track to have the book out before the end of the month. I also wrote a tie-in short story called Winter Crown and don't forget that [newsletter] subscribers will get a free ebook copy of that short story when Blade of Visions comes out later this month. So this makes a very excellent time to subscribe to my new release newsletter. I am also 12,000 words into Elven-Warlock, which will be the seventh book in the Half-Elven Thief series. Hopefully that will be out in October, if all goes well. In audiobook news, I think Blade of Thieves (as narrated by Brad Wills) and Cloak of Worlds (as narrated by Hollis McCarthy) are now finally available at all the usual audiobook stores, which includes Audible, Apple, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, Chirp, and all the others. So if you want to listen to those if you are going on a Labor Day road trip, you can check those out. A reminder that Stealth and Spells Online: The Complete LitRPG trilogy (narrated by C.J. McAllister) is also available on Audible, so check that out. That's 32 hours long and that would also cover all your Labor Day travels. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing and audiobook projects. 00:02:22 Main Topic of the Week: Summer 2026 Movie Roundup So let's move on to our main topic this week. Our main topic this week is the Summer 2026 Movie Roundup and I always enjoy doing those. These episodes are a little less serious than some of the other episodes and it's fun to talk about things I enjoyed and that you might enjoy as well. And I did see a lot of new movies this summer. In fact, I went to the actual theater four times for Masters of the Universe, The Odyssey, Spider-Man, and Coyote vs. Acme, which is probably more than I've gone in a single season since before COVID times. So as usual, here are the movies I saw this summer (rated from least favorite to most favorite). The grades are totally subjective and based on nothing but my own thoughts and opinions. First up is The Breadwinner, which came out in 2026. This is basically standup comedian Nate Bargatze's act come to life as a movie. If you've seen Bargatze's standup, his usual routine is to portray himself as the dumb husband and bumbling Girl Dad, which is actually quite clever from a comedic standpoint since you're unlikely to have outraged mobs calling for your head if all you're doing is making fun of yourself. Anyway, Bargatze portrays Nate Wilcox, the best Toyota salesman in Nashville. (Don't worry, this is the first of only many product placement moments.) He lets his wife Kate manage the household and do the bulk of the work with their three daughters. When Kate's invention takes off on Shark Tank, she has to go to South Korea for two weeks to oversee manufacturing, leaving Nate in charge of the kids. Comedic chaos ensues. On the positive side of this movie, I did approve how this movie showed a married couple trying to work through a rough patch and do what's right for their kids and each other in a semi-productive way rather than blowing up their lives over nonsensical trivialities in the style of Eat, Pray, Love. On the downside, there was a lot of product placement, to the point where it at times felt like an extended commercial with bits of plot jammed in between product endorsement. No doubt most of the production budget came from product placement money. Will Forte was funny as an eccentric roofing contractor and Martin Herlihy as a shifty DoorDash employee. Kumail Nanjiani was funny as Nate's rival salesman at the car dealership. So overall, I would say this was blandly amusing and inoffensive with some funny slapstick moments. Overall grade: C- Next up is Supergirl, which came out in 2026. This movie really was sort of a strange combination of John Wick and the human trafficking subplot from 2020's Black Widow. The end result wasn't quite as good as Superman from 2025, alas. I did like this movie's interpretation of Supergirl. Kara Zor-El's departure from Krypton was way more traumatic than Superman's, so she's dealing with her unresolved emotional issues by traveling from planet to planet with red suns and getting hammered since the same yellow sun that gives Kryptonians their superpowers on Earth also keeps them from getting drunk because their bodies process alcohol too efficiently. However, Kara comes to a planet where a girl named Ruthye lives. Ruthye's family has been slaughtered by ruthless brigands yet led by Krem of the Yellow Hills and she's going on a quest for revenge. When Ruthye tries to recruit Kara for the quest, she's not interested, but then Krem steals Kara's spaceship and poisons her dog Krypto. Krem carries the antidote on his person, so now Kara and Ruthye team up to get vengeance on Krem and to heal Krypto. Krem is a nasty piece of work and he and his space gang travel from planet to planet abducting women to be their wives. I think the problem was that Krem was kind of a boring but nasty villain, but he was still boring. He was basically a space thug with too many piercings. Lex Luthor from 2025 Superman, by contrast, was a really interesting villain, this malignant narcissist who knows that his obsession with Superman is over the top, but he's going to act on it anyway. Additionally, I don't think this version of Supergirl is quite capable of being a lead character on her own. She'd make a superb secondary character, but I don't think she could quite carry a movie on her own. And Jason Momoa was pretty good as Lobo. Overall grade: C- Next up is Troy, which came out in 2004. I wanted to see this either before or after I watched The Odyssey this summer and ended up watching it the day before I went to see The Odyssey. I would say this movie was slow and ponderous, but I did enjoy watching it. This is an adaption of The Iliad and has the sort of slow stateliness of epic films from the '60s. It had good performances and good battle scenes. Brian Cox was enjoyable as a scenery chewing Agamemnon and Brad Pitt worked as Achilles. Interestingly, his version of Achilles reminded me of the interpretation of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen from Dune 2 as sort of a violent psychopath with his own twisted sense of honor. Oddly, despite the fact that this was rather a long movie, the ending seems a bit rushed, like we needed to hurry up and get to the Trojan Horse. It was amusing how Achilles' relationship with Patroclus was changed to "cousin" for the modern audience, but Greek views on sexuality would definitely be unpalatable with both right-wing and left-wing versions of the modern mind, which is a good thing because while the Greeks contributed a great deal to the development of civilization, they were into a lot of unsavory stuff. So overall, I would say this was a fun, epic movie, but I think this walked so the 2026 version of The Odyssey could run. Amusing fact: Christopher Nolan was apparently supposed to direct this, but the deal fell through and he got Batman Begins as a consolation prize instead. Overall grade: B- Next up is The Dink, which came out in 2026. This is an Apple TV comedy movie about pickleball of all things. I feel like this was made because some Apple executive got made fun of by some tennis players for playing pickleball and then decided to take revenge through media. Jake Johnson plays Dustin Boyd, a washed up former child tennis star who now works at his father's tennis club. The club has difficulties because of a growing influx of pickleball players who the hardcore tennis players hate. Dustin's father decides to use the club's bylaws to force a duel match to decide the issue, in the grand tradition of wacky comedy stakes. Dustin really wants to play the duel match, but his wrist is injured in an accident. To get his wrist mobility back, the doctor suggested he play some pickleball and Dustin views this as beneath him, but he really wants to play again, so he signs up for pickleball. This ends up being a wacky sports company/buddy movie as Dustin gradually befriends an eccentric older pickleball player. Ed Harris should really do more comedic roles. He was great as Dustin's stern, yet unscrupulous father. I do admire Apple TV's dedication to making random stuff. Overall grade: B- Next up is Green and Gold, which came out in 2025, and this is a melodrama about a farmer and his granddaughter dealing with the grim economic realities of farming. This is set in 1992/1993 era Wisconsin. Buck refuses to modernize his dairy farm in Door County, Wisconsin. His granddaughter Jenny is a talented musician and also a skilled farmer, and Buck wants her to take over the farm one day, but Jenny's ambitions are looking elsewhere. Events come to a head when Jenny realizes that Buck is deeply in debt to the bank, which is about to foreclose on the farm. However, Buck and the chief banker have a personal animosity, so they settle on a bet. If the Green Bay Packers win a Super Bowl title in 1993, the banker will give Buck one more year to turn things around on the farm. Meanwhile, Jenny begins to wonder if her music ambitions might generate the money to save the farm. Of course, if you are familiar with the history of the Packers, you know that they won a Super Bowl in 1996, not 1993. The movie has carried on the back of the very strong performances of its actors. It also has an ambiguously happy ending, as is true with so many things in farming. I like this movie because I've spent a lot of my life in the American Midwest, [and] I did appreciate how it shows the difficulties of the farming life. Also, this is important: a fall from a ladder is a plot point. Ladder safety is important, people! If you are going up a ladder, for heaven's sake don't climb the ladder in high heels like the character in question does. Wear sensible, well-fitting shoes with good soles. A very long time ago, I used to work with a guy who would climb extension ladders in cowboy boots. It is nothing short of the mercy of God that he didn't fall off and shatter half the bones in his body. Overall grade: B Next up is Grumpy Old Men, which came out in 1993. Apparently this is set in Wabasha, Minnesota, which is amusing because filming actually took place in several areas in the Twin Cities in Eastern Minnesota, but not actually in Wabasha. I found that personally amusing because I'm quite familiar with the area and so I recognize several filming locations. Anyway, the movie is about two retirees, Max and John, who are enemies and have been enemies for years, but Max is lonely and wants to get married again, and John is about to lose his house to the IRS due to tax problems. Things come to a head when an attractive literature professor moves across the street and both Max and John take an interest in her and start competing for her affections. However, it turns out that Max and John are actually best friends whose love language happens to be hatred and practical jokes, kind of like Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, but more on them below. This was a good character comedy/drama. It was interesting that the professor was an early version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, albeit several decades before someone came up with the term. This is worth watching both as a character and comedy drama and a time capsule of the 1990s. Sometimes a movie ages a bit badly (Airplane and the Thomas Crown Affair from the Spring Movie Roundup come to mind), but this didn't. The sequel Grumpier Old Men from 1995 is basically the same movie, but with the characters acting about 20% dumber so a sitcom style plot can happen. Still entertaining, but not as good as the first one, so Grumpier Old Men only gets a B-, but Grumpy Old Men gets a B+. Next up is Masters of the Universe, which came out in 2026. It was amusing to read reviews of this movie because people thought way too hard about a movie that is essentially about battling action figures. Anyway, this was pretty good. It was nice to see a movie about a science fiction property that doesn't actually hate the source material. Basically it's a live action version of the cartoons from the '80s, albeit with somewhat more thoughtful moments. I heard someone suggest that it was close in tone to Thor: Ragnarok, and that seems accurate. The plot is that Skeletor conquers Eternia and 10-year-old Prince Adam is sent with the Sword of Power through a magical portal to Earth to keep him and the sword out of Skeletor's reach. However, Adam loses the sword while passing through the gate and 15 years later is working in human resources. He's still seeking for the sword despite his therapist trying to convince him that it was a trauma-induced fantasy. However, his persistence pays off and he does find the sword. Teela, who is one of the resistance leaders against Skeletor's rule, comes to Earth to find him and bring him back, but Skeletor's minions arrive to claim the sword as well. Adam and Teela escape back to Eternia and it's up to Adam to find a way to use the Sword of Power to become the hero that Eternia needs. Dolph Lundgren's cameo was great. Overall, I would say this is a fun movie to watch, especially if you're a Millennial or Gen Xer who saw the cartoons or the live action movie back in the '80s. Jared Leto has something of an increasingly questionable reputation these days, but he did a good job as Skeletor, played him halfway between the solemn gravitas of the 1987 version and the malevolent comedic cornball of the cartoons. Of course, in my opinion, the Frank Langella version from 1987 is the best version of Skeletor since he placed it with all the seriousness of a Shakespearean villain monologue at the Royal Shakespeare Company. In hindsight, it wasn't terribly surprising that this underperformed at the box office. It felt like it was made for guys my age, not for kids. I would've been comfortable bringing an eight-year-old to see The Mandalorian and Grogu or Super Mario Galaxy, but I would've been less certain bringing a kid that age to see Masters of the Universe. Additionally, it seemed very Marvel in tone, and I think the overall mood of the US these days is less "Marvel Cinematic Universe quips and banter" and more sort of the grimness of The Odyssey, which we'll talk about shortly. Overall grade: B+ Next up is Young Washington, which came out in 2026, a biopic of the early life of George Washington, covering how he more or less accidentally started the French and Indian War and how he recovered his reputation at the Battle of Braddock's Field. To be fair, the international situation at the time meant that someone was going to start the French and Indian War. It just happened to be Washington, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Overall, I liked this. It was reasonably historically accurate, though some of the emotional and family dialogue at times was a bit clunky. Additionally, Washington was portrayed as having revolutionary leanings much earlier in life than he actually did, since when he was a young man, he had no thoughts of being anything but a British subject and officer. That said, some of the most implausible stuff in the movie actually happened in real life. Like if I were to write in a novel that the future president of the United States personally rallied the army's rear guard to save as many men as possible from an ambush, and in the process had two horses shot out from under him and ended up with bullet holes in his hat and coat (all while fighting continuously), you would probably find that a bit implausible, but it actually happened that way. Washington's daring actions during that battle were one of the reasons he was appointed commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, that and there weren't many other colonials with as much experience of military command as Washington. In that vein, the battle scenes were the best part of the movie. They captured the brutality and messiness of 18th Century warfare without being especially graphic. Anyway, I'm glad this is getting a sequel. Maybe we'll end up with a Young Washington Cinematic Universe. Overall grade: B+ Next up is Meet the Parents, which came out in 2000, and this is probably one of the apex forms of cringe comedy. Ben Stiller plays Greg Focker, a nurse who's in love with schoolteacher Pam Burns. Greg wants to marry Pam, but overhears a phone call with her sister where she says her fiancé asked permission of her traditional father first. Greg decides that he's going to ask Pam's father's permission first to get off on the right foot, and so accompanies Pam to her sister's wedding and her parents' house to, as the title says, Meet the Parents. However, Pam's father is the former CIA counterintelligence officer Jack, and he and Greg immediately get on each other's nerves. To make things worse, the airline has lost Greg's luggage. From these two starting premises follow a cascading series of hilarious disasters that accumulate in a septic tank fire on the lawn. I'm not sure, but I think I saw this one in the theaters when it came out in 2000, and I thought it was funny then. With 26 years of additional life experience under the belt, I still think it's pretty funny, though you could still tell that this movie was filmed before 9/11 because if Greg had his airport meltdown seen today, the consequences would've been much worse. Overall grade: B+ Next up is O Brother Where Art Thou, which came out in 2000. This is a very, very, very specific adaptation of The Odyssey directed by the Coen brothers. George Clooney plays Everett, a convict who escapes from a chain gang in Mississippi during the Great Depression. He wants to find a treasure and he recruits fellow convicts Delmar and Peter to assist him. Along the way, Everett and his team encountered 1930s era versions of the Sirens, the cyclops, the blind prophet Tiresias, and other characters and foes from the original Odyssey myth. Everett and his friends end up running a scam where they pretend to be a Christian music group, but as it turns out, they're actually pretty good at singing, so this leads to unexpected hilarity and opportunities. This was also a very funny movie. Imagine The Odyssey is a comedy with a lot of singing set in the Deep South during the Depression, and you're there. If you're a fan of bluegrass music, this is worth watching. If you've seen Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, it's worth watching this just to ponder how the same source material can produce such wildly divergent interpretations. If you don't care about The Odyssey, then this is still a fun movie to watch. Proof: I mentioned to someone that I had seen this and she responded that she both loved the movie and was surprised to learn that he had in fact been inspired by The Odyssey. Overall grade: A- Next up is Hoppers, which came out in 2026. Like most Pixar movies, this was very high concept. Unlike many recent Pixar movies, it wasn't too depressing and didn't disappear up its own tailpipe. In the city of Beaverton, hot tempered girl Mabel bonds with her grandmother in their favorite place, a woodland grove favored by beavers. Years later, Mabel is a biology student under Dr. Fairfax, but is neglecting her studies to face off against her nemesis, the popular yet sketchy Mayor Jerry of Beaverton. Mayor Jerry wants to build an expressway that will wipe out the woodland grove, and he's perfectly within his rights to do it since no animals have been found living there. Since Mabel's grandmother has died, she's unwilling to give up the grove. However, Dr. Fairfax's research might give her a way. Dr. Fairfax has worked out a way to temporarily transfer human consciousness to a robotic beaver capable of speaking to real beavers, much like the plot of Avatar. In a funny scene, Fairfax angrily denies that it's just like Avatar. Mabel gets the idea to use this to convince real beavers to settle in the grove, thereby thwarting Mayor Jerry's plans. This touches off both a wacky yet poignant adventure. The plot was very well structured and it followed the proper rules of story structure, which I've talked about before. Mabel definitely is a protagonist who takes action, but experiences setbacks and problems of her own creation. It was pretty good. I say it was a return to form for Pixar after some of their weaker movies in the 2020s. Overall grade: A Now it's time for my three favorite movies of summer 2026, all of which I actually saw in the theater. First up is Coyote versus Acme, which came out in 2026. This movie had an extra surge of popularity from the fact that Warner Brothers canceled it as a tax write-off, but distributor Ketchup Entertainment revived it. That makes it a plucky underdog since Warner Brothers senior executives are kind of like the apex version of soulless corporate bug men. Like if I wrote characters in my books who acted like Warner Brothers senior executives, people would think I was being didactic and heavy-handed. Anyway, after decades of failures in efforts to capture the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote decides to sue Acme Corporation for its numerous defective products. Coyote teams up with a lazy strip mall lawyer named Kevin Avery, who specializes in getting small settlements from Acme. However, Avery and Coyote end up filing a massive lawsuit against Acme, which means they'll face the full wrath of Acme Corporation, including its ace lawyer Buddy Crane and its ruthless CEO, Foghorn Leghorn. What follows is a comedic courtroom battle as Coyote and Avery try to defeat Acme Corporation, defeat its sinister plans, and Coyote starts to realize that Road Runner might actually be his best friend. Both quite amusing and touching, and I'm glad this was rescued from the tax write-off vault. Overall grade: A Next up is The Odyssey, which came out in 2026. This wasn't quite as good as Oppenheimer in 2023 in my opinion, but it was still very good and very much worth seeing. It was weird that The Odyssey was briefly a football in the never-ending US culture war scrum because the movie isn't really political and doesn't really have a message beyond "war is destructive and bad", which every sensible person would agree with, and a lesser message of "violating the law of morality has unforeseen cascading bad consequences, including the destruction of civilization", which is also quite true and was one of the themes of Oppenheimer. Nolan himself dismissed the controversies as "irrelevant" and "part of the territory" since no one had actually seen the movie yet, and given that The Odyssey has made a billion and a half dollars as of this recording, I think that may have proved his point. I imagine the scrutiny from Batman fans back in the 2010s was way more intense since in the modern era, many people care more deeply about the accuracy of Batman than The Odyssey. I do think the debate over the historical accuracy in The Odyssey is pointless because the Odyssey is myth, not history. The Iliad and The Odyssey are a lot like Arthurian myth in terms of their actual historicity. Even when Arthurian legend was massively popular with English kings and nobles in the late medieval and early modern period (for example, Henry VIII's older brother was named Arthur in imitation of King Arthur), the version of Arthurian myth they celebrated and wished to emulate had virtually no connection to the reality of Britain in the 500s AD and was instead a sort of fantasy version of their own time in the 14th and 15th centuries. By the time The Odyssey was written down, no doubt a similar process was underway. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey and the Arthurian cycle probably have a kernel of historical truth buried underneath the tales of magic swords, sirens, cyclopses, and vengeful witches with magic islands. There likely was a Romano-British warlord who might have been named Arthur (or possibly Ambrosius Aurelianus) who held off the Saxons for a while before he was overwhelmed and killed. Likewise, Heinrich Schliemann was a highly eccentric and very sketchy crazy rich guy, but he did prove that there really was some version of the city of Troy that was destroyed at the end of the Bronze Age. But everything beyond those basic details came from thousands of years of embellishments and flourishes from later poets and writers. So arguing about the historical accuracy of The Odyssey is a bit like arguing if Star Wars portrays faster than light travel in an accurate way. That kind of argument is just missing the point entirely. It's also interesting to see how modern standards clashed with the ancient mindset. You know how I always say that everywhere in the United States is exactly the same right until it really, really isn't? I think ancient people are just like us until they really, really weren't. Like ancient people would have been superstitious to an extent that even the most credulous crystal and aura influencer on TikTok would find horrifying and frequently violent in a way that the most strident self-defense advocate would find shocking. The Odyssey's version of Odysseus feels guilt and remorse over his actions in a way an actual ancient Greek probably wouldn't have, but so what? This is The Odyssey viewed through the lens of the 21st century, just as those English nobles viewed the myth of King Arthur and his knights through the lens of their time. As I mentioned with Troy above, the ancient Greeks were often quite brutal and would celebrate sacking an enemy city. One side note before we get to the movie, I probably found it funnier than I should have how Nolan favorably cited classicist Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey as a source, and Wilson then had an extended and unintentionally comedic multi-article crashout about how much she hated the movie and of course how much she hated the commemorative Trojan Horse popcorn bucket. Apparently Wilson hated the movie so much she's going to do a new translation of The Odyssey, much to her publisher's baffled dismay. No one does offended huffy petulance quite like an academic. Anyway, back to the movie. It follows the familiar story of Odysseus through Christopher Nolan's preference for non-linear storytelling and practical effects. I did think it was interesting how in this interpretation, Odysseus explicitly connected the ruse of the Trojan Horse with the collapse of the Bronze Age and the rise of the Sea Peoples. It's also probably the most supernatural film Nolan has ever done with actual fantasy and supernatural elements as opposed to science fiction like Inception, Tenant, and Interstellar. Odysseus talks to Athena throughout the movie and it's left up to the viewer's interpretation whether or not he's actually talking to Athena or his own guilt-ridden hallucinations. That said, Odysseus encounters a witch with actual magic powers and travels to the underworld to speak with the shades of the dead, so it's entirely possible he's talking to the actual Athena. In this version, as I mentioned, Odysseus is guilt-ridden over the ruse of the Trojan Horse, which is shown as a violation of the sacred hospitality of Zeus's law and as great a crime as the creation of the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer, which of course is similar to Oppenheimer, where Oppenheimer's creation of the atomic bomb is treated similarly. There are also some genuinely scary sequences in the movie. The bit with the underworld is very spooky, the cyclops is actually quite frightening, and the character of Circe reaches the level of scary previously attained by Heath Ledger's version of The Joker in The Dark Knight. If Nolan ever decides he wants to do a horror movie, it will probably be one of the scariest ones ever made. To sum up, The Odyssey has great performances, great spectacle, great cinematography, and great action sequences. As an interesting interpretation of the original myth, definitely worth seeing. I think you can tell it was a great movie because of all the arguments on the Internet about "what does it really mean?" Great art often has that effect. Overall grade: A The final of my three favorite movies of [Summer] 2026 is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which came out in 2026. There's a rumor, and I don't know if it's true or not, that Tom Holland found the experience of working with Christopher Nolan on The Odyssey so eye-opening that he insisted that if they made another Spider-Man movie, it had to have a reason for existing other than "make a lot of money". If this story is true, it clearly worked. Previously, I though the two best Spider-Man movies were Spider-Man 2 from 2004 and Spider-Man: No Way Home from 2021. I must now amend that opinion to say that there are three best Spider-Man movies and Spider-Man: Brand New Day is one of the three. It is pretty good. I would've trimmed it here and there, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and is an excellent Spider-Man story that totally captures the essence of the character within a good story. It takes place four years after the events of No Way Home erased everyone's memory that Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Peter has now been crime fighting full time, but it is taking a severe toll on his emotions and personal life that he's deliberately ignoring. Meanwhile, Spider-Man has become the beloved crime fighter of New York, trusted by both the NYPD and the Federal Department of Damage Control, which is a reoccurring frenemy for superheroes from other movies. When someone launches an attack on the headquarters of Damage Control, the director recruits Peter to fight their new enemy, a mysterious figure who uses telepathy to possess people from a distance. Peter is the only one who can sense it thanks to his spider sense, and he's also the only one able to resist the telepath's possession abilities. But despite his resistance to possession, fighting a telepath is a dangerous proposition for someone with as many emotional issues as Peter, and things start to spiral out of control when the telepath starts digging into his life. But there's another lesson Peter has to learn. People (and especially superheroes) who take the federal government at its word tend to regret it. For that matter, ignoring his emotional issues is causing Peter's spider powers to start acting in strange ways. But of course, at the end of the day, Spider-Man always follows his conscience, no matter how high the cost to him personally. Definitely an enjoyable movie. All the scenes with Spider-Man and Punisher were great, and the two of them had a great dynamic together. A few other Marvel Cinematic Universe people show up, but this is probably one of the most standalone movies the MCU has done in a while. Of course, the risk of MCU Continuity Lockout is always there (which is one of the reasons I started writing Half-Eleven Thief in 2023). Overall grade: A So I would say it was a pretty good summer for movies. It's also valuable lessons in not taking the Internet too seriously, which too many people do nowadays. There are all these dedicated analyses on X, Threads, and Reddit in June and May explaining why The Odyssey was going to fail for whatever reason, and instead it made $1.5 billion. So I think that's a good lesson in not taking everything you read on the internet a little too seriously. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show enjoyable. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.  

Support us on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---Gladio Free Europe returns to the lofty walls of Troy for a continuing discussion of the Bronze Age background of the Greek epic tradition with Alexander Thatcher @ThatchEffendi.Calling in from Turkey, Alexander explores the Anatolian, Balkan, and Caucasian resonances of the works of Homer, from the parallel martial values of the heroes of the Iliad and those of the Ossetian Nart Sagas to the use of Albanian traditional music in Christopher Nolan's recent adaptation of The Odyssey. Later on, Liam and Russian Sam dig through the Hittite imperial archives to find scattered references of conflicts and characters on the western fringe of the Bronze Age world, that of Mycenaean Greece. These ancient aristocratic adventurers were clearly involved in Anatolian affairs, likely as both mercenaries and marauders. Of particular interest is the evidence of Greek or Ahhiyawan activity in the city of Troy or Wilusa, particularly under the rule of the enigmatic King Alaksandu — a figure of indeterminate origin who is both the earliest known bearer of the name Alexander and a possible historical analogue to the legendary prince Paris. Both archaeology and literature reveal strong similarities between the world of the Anatolian Bronze Age and the Mycenaean Greeks and Trojans as described by Homer. In addition to the notable physical similarities between Mycenaean palaces and Anatolian citadels such as Wilusa and Hattusa, we can identify clear parallels between the early Greek poetry of Homer and Hesiod with surviving Hittite religious texts.No discussion of the Bronze Age context of the Trojan War could be complete without wild speculation about the mysterious Sea Peoples, who Egyptian and Hittite records assert laid waste to ancient settlements all across the Eastern Mediterranean. Though the invocation of these Sea Peoples in Christopher Nolan's film has led to criticism by some scholars, it is now evident that the activities of these interlopers were both a cause and a symptom of the 12th-century collapse of the entire Bronze Age symptom. Mycenaean Greeks were found among the victims and the vultures of this chaotic time. While their network of palace economies would collapse, and their original writing system would be lost, Greek-speakers would also expand far across the sea in this period. These Sea Peoples would lay the foundation for later maritime dominance in the Iron Age and leave a fascinating footprint not only in the works of Homer, but also the Hebrew Bible.

While the "Sea People" existed in the ancient world, their role in the collapse of mighty empires has long been overstated.

As the Libu war wound down, Merneptah's troops took captives and plundered the bodies of fallen warriors. Along the way, we also hear of "foreign peoples of the Sea," who were involved in these events. Merneptah mentions Sherden, Lukka, Tursha, Ekwesh, and Shekelesh. Who were these "Sea Peoples" and why were they coming to Egypt? Music: Keith Zizza, Luke Chaos. We're on YouTube! Ancient history media @dominicperryae and the podcast (plus bonus lectures) @historyegyptpodcast Support the show and get bonus content at www.patreon.com/egyptpodcast Transcript and references at www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we discuss the film The Odyssey (2026), dir. Christopher Nolan. The movie of the summer! In this one, we talk production ethics, Tumblr literary theory, and Sea Peoples.   Content warnings: Profanity Discussions of racism and misogyny Mentions of sexual assault -- Music by Dark Fantasy Studios.

"My father, behold, the enemy's ships came here. My cities were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots are in the land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the land of Lukka? The country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us."Around the year 1185 BCE, Ammurapi, the last king of the ancient city Ugarit, urged the king of nearby Alashiya to send help. His city, which had stood for thousands of years, was one of the great commercial capitals of the eastern Mediterranean. But help would never arrive. Ugarit fell and was never rebuilt. And it was not alone.Up and down the coastline, from Greece to Anatolia to the Levant, an entire interconnected world of Bronze Age superpowers essentially stopped existing within the span of a few decades. Cities that had thrived for centuries were reduced to ash. Writing systems disappeared so completely that entire regions went functionally illiterate for centuries. And at the center of almost every ancient account of what happened, you find the same phrase showing up in Egyptian temple walls and Syrian palace archives alike, describing a coalition of raiders. People who made a “conspiracy in their islands” and came from the sea…Check out the podcast store at unresolved.dashery.comIf you would like to support this podcast, consider heading to https://www.patreon.com/unresolvedpod to become a Patron or ProducerBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unresolved-a-true-crime-mystery-podcast--3266604/support.

Oil is a psychological event, and nobody experienced it as one. For ten thousand years, every household chose nightly between eating its oil and burning it for light. Petroleum ended the choice, and this episode is about what winning did to us. Part two of the Parachute Problem finishes Nolan's Odyssey first: the Sea Peoples as the empire's own veterans, Odysseus bringing Troy's tactics home, Athena's amnesia as national dissociation, the war with no ledger. Then the substance: what crude oil actually is, why America has not built a major refinery since 1977, oil and light as interchangeable words in scripture, Christ as an oil word, the 1973 embargo and the inward turn, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as an unconscious dug into salt, Carbon Democracy, and the question nobody will ask: are we going into a dark age. The Bronze Age left the answer baked into clay, and the only thing that crossed the last dark age was a poem carried between people. Free resources: gettherapybirmingham.com. Support the show with code TAPROOT at Hardy Nutritionals.   oil psychology, petroculture, peak oil, why no new refineries, oil refinery shortage, US refinery 1977, crude oil explained, sweet vs sour crude, 1973 oil embargo, Strategic Petroleum Reserve salt caverns, Carbon Democracy Timothy Mitchell, Bronze Age collapse, Sea Peoples, Odyssey ending explained, Christopher Nolan Odyssey analysis, xenia law of Zeus, Linear B, dark age, Great Endarkenment, energy unconscious, Bataille expenditure, empty self psychology, Jungian psychology, oil and light Bible, Taproot Therapy  

Merneptah vs the Libyans. In 1221 BCE, Egypt faced a crisis. Tribal coalitions from the west, and some "Peoples of the Sea" were marching on the Nile Valley. They came in their thousands, armed and ready to settle. Caught by surprise, King Merneptah and his warriors hastened to the defence... Support the show and get early releases, ad-free episodes, bonus video content, and pictures/videos of animals I meet in Egypt and travelling www.patreon.com/egyptpodcast Music by Bettina Joy de Guzman; Luke Chaos; and Keith Zizza. Bibliography Cline, E. H. (2021). 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed (Revised edn). Princeton University Press. D'Amato, R., & Salimbeti, Andrea. (2015). Sea Peoples of the Bronze Age Mediterranean c.1400 BC–1000 BC. Osprey. Darnell, J. C., & Manassa, C. M. (2007). Tutankhamun's armies: Battle and conquest during ancient Egypt's late eighteenth dynasty. John Wiley & Sons. Davies, B. G. (1997). Egyptian Historical Inscriptions of the Nineteenth Dynasty. Paul Aströms förlag. Dean, R. (2017). Warfare & Weaponry in Dynastic Egypt. Pen & Sword. Finné, M., Woodbridge, J., Labuhn, I., & Roberts, N. (2019). Holocene hydro-climatic variability in the Mediterranean: A synthetic multi-proxy reconstruction. The Holocene, 29, 847--863. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959683619826634 Heagren, B. (2010). The Art of War in Pharaonic Egypt [Unpublished PhD. Thesis, The University of Auckland]. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49463150_The_art_of_war_in_pharaonic_Egypt_an_analysis_of_the_tactical_logistic_and_operational_capabilities_of_the_Egyptian_army Healy, M. (1992). New Kingdom Egypt. Osprey Publishing. Kaniewski, D., Campo, E. V., Guiot, J., Burel, S. L., Otto, T., & Baeteman, C. (2013). Environmental Roots of the Late Bronze Age Crisis. PLOS ONE, 8(8), e71004. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0071004 Kaniewski, D., Marriner, N., Bretschneider, J., Jans, G., Morhange, C., Cheddadi, R., Otto, T., Luce, F., & Van Campo, E. (2019). 300-year drought frames Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age transition in the Near East: New palaeoecological data from Cyprus and Syria. Regional Environmental Change, 19, 2287--2297. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-018-01460-w Kitchen, K. A. (1975). Ramesside Inscriptions Historical and Biographical (Vols. 1–8). Blackwell. https://archive.org/details/KennethA.KitchenRamessideInscriptionsVol1 Kitchen, K. A. (1993a). Ramesside Inscriptions Translated and Annotated: Notes and Comments (Vols. 1–2). Blackwell. Kitchen, K. A. (1993b). Ramesside Inscriptions Translated and Annotated: Translations (Vols. 1–7). Blackwell. Kopanias, K. (2017). Mercenaries or refugees? The evidence from the inscriptions of Merenptah on the “Sea Peoples.” Journal of Greek Archaeology, 2, 119--133. https://www.ancientportsantiques.com/wp-content/uploads/Documents/AUTHORS/SeaPeoples/SeaPeoples-Kopanias2017.pdf Manassa, C. (2003). The Great Karnak Inscription of Merneptah: Grand Strategy in the 13th Century BC. The Yale Egyptological Seminar. Pollastrini, A. M. (2024). Helmets and Body Armour in New Kingdom Egypt. Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350323520 Sabbahy, L. (2013). Depictional Study of Chariot Use in New Kingdom Egypt. In A. Veldmeijer & S. Ikram (Eds.), Chasing Chariots: Proceedings of the First International Chariot Conference (Cairo 2012) (pp. 191--202). Sidestone Press. Shaw, G. J. (2017). War and Trade with the Pharaohs: An Archaeological Study of Ancient Egypt's Foreign Relations. Pen & Sword. Shaw, I. (2019). Ancient Egyptian Warfare. Casemate. Snape, S. (2003a). The Emergence of Libya on the Horizon of Egypt. In D. O'Connor & S. Quirke (Eds.), Mysterious Lands (pp. 93--106). UCL Press. Snape, S. (2003b). Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham and Egyptian Foreign Trade in the Thirteenth Century BC. Sea Routes: Interconnections in the Mediterranean 16th-6th c. BC. https://www.academia.edu/107251529/Snape_ZUR_and_Egyptian_Foreign_Trade_Zawiyet_Umm_el_Rakham_and_Egyptian_foreign_trade_in_the_thirteenth_century_BC_ Snape, S. (2023). What was Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham for? Early Ramesside Strategy in the Libyan West. In F. Hoffmann & M. R. Abbas (Eds.), Perspectives on the Ramesside Military System (pp. 143--155). Zaphon. Spalinger, A. J. (2004). Review: Manassa, Colleen 2003. The Great Karnak inscription of Merneptah: Grand strategy in the 13th century BC. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 90(reviews supplement), 45--47. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3822286 Zutterman, C. (2003). The bow in the Ancient Near East, a re-evaluation of archery from the late 2nd millennium to the end of the Achaemenid empire. IrAnt, 38, 119--165. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey actually a masterpiece or just empty spectacle? Two military history experts dive deep into Nolan's most polarizing film yet, breaking down what critics are missing and what the director actually achieved in adapting one of literature's greatest epics. In this episode of Echoes of War from the Pacific War channel, hosts Craig and Gaurav tackle Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey—a film that's become surprisingly political and divisive across the internet. They discuss the movie's historical portrayal, stunning cinematic elements, and the clever ways Nolan adapted Homer's timeless narrative for a modern audience. More importantly, they separate the legitimate criticism from the noise surrounding this film. From the terrifying presence of the Sea People to Nolan's exploration of trauma-stricken war veterans returning home, Craig and Gaurav analyze what works brilliantly in the film and what missed the mark. They examine the deeper themes of memory, history, and the psychological toll of war—elements that many critics claim are absent but the hosts argue are woven throughout the story. One thing becomes clear: Nolan made bold creative choices that opened him up to significant criticism, but perhaps for reasons worth exploring. Whether you're a Christopher Nolan fan, a history buff, or someone interested in thoughtful film analysis, this episode offers a nuanced take on what The Odyssey actually accomplishes as both a war epic and an intimate character study. You'll hear perspectives you haven't seen elsewhere, backed by genuine expertise in both military history and cinema. Don't forget I have a Youtube Membership: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbp8JMZizR4zak9wpM3Fvrw/join or my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pacificwarchannel where you can get exclusive content like "What if Japan invaded the USSR during WW2?"

Our recent guests, Dr. Eric Cline and Dr. Jesse Millek have wildly different takes on the Bronze Age Collapse, and the picture that comes clear when you lay them side by side is not the one the textbooks handed down. The Sea Peoples did not come off the water and burn the world; the world was already coming apart from the inside, empires overreaching, trade thinning rather than snapping, cities emptying without a single sword raised against them. We walk the whole arc here, from the Minoans and their lost writing to the Hittites at each other's throats to the slow bleed of belief that hollows a civilization long before anything falls, and we ask the question that keeps this three-thousand-year-old story pulling millions of views. Why does the end of the Bronze Age feel so much like a mirror, and what does it know about us that we would rather not know about ourselves?TEXTS REFERENCED: The Mycenaean World: https://www.scribd.com/document/670938930/The-Mycenaean-World-Chadwick-PressLife & Society in The Hittite World: https://www.academia.edu/2231393/Life_and_Society_in_The_Hitite_World_by_Trevor_BryceVillage Life in Ancient Egypt: file:///Users/michaeldelay/Documents/SCIENCE/books/village-life-in-ancient-egypt-laundry-lists-and-love-songs-new-ed-0199247536-9780199247530_compress.pdfPATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADOX LOST PRE-SALE: https://buy.stripe.com/7sY7sKdoN5d29eUdYddEs0bHOMEBREW MUSIC - Check out our new album!Hard Copies (Vinyl): FREE SHIPPING https://demystifysci-shop.fourthwall.com/products/vinyl-lp-secretary-of-nature-everything-is-so-good-hereStreaming:https://secretaryofnature.bandcamp.com/album/everything-is-so-good-herePARADIGM DRIFThttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-show00:00 Go! Synthesizing Cline and Millek00:06:26 Why This Collapse Still Haunts Us00:10:07 Cities That Ran Without Rulers00:12:24 What the Sea Peoples Story Gets Wrong00:18:05 Empires That Broke Themselves00:24:35 What Rose From the Ashes00:28:25 Records We Can't Read00:38:28 Why People Stay Loyal to Empires00:43:35 When Belief Runs Out00:51:17 Wars That Lost Their Meaning00:59:22 What Survives When Government Doesn't01:08:34 Who Gets the Wealth After Collapse01:15:24 Was Empire Ever Necessary01:22:11 What Can and Can't Be Rebuilt01:36:43 Repair It or Let It Burn#bronzeage #ancienthistory #bronzeagecollapse #seapeoples #archaeology #ancientcivilizations #history #minoans #hittites #collapse MERCH: Rock some DemystifySci gear : https://demystifysci-shop.fourthwall.com/AMAZON: Do your shopping through this link: https://amzn.to/3YyoT98DONATE: https://bit.ly/3wkPqaDSUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@UCqV4_7i9h1_V7hY48eZZSLw@demystifysci RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/2be66934/podcast/rssMAILING LIST: https://bit.ly/3v3kz2S SOCIAL: - Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DemystifySci- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DemystifySci/- Twitter: https://twitter.com/DemystifySciMUSIC: -Shilo Delay: https://g.co/kgs/oty671

The Odyssey (2026) Directed by: Christopher Nolan Written by: Christopher Nolan Starring: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong'o, Elliot Page, John Leguizamo, Benny Safdie, Jon Bernthal, Himesh Patel, Mia Goth, Bill Irwin, Travis Scott IMDB: [IMDB LINK] Episode Summary In this episode of Mindframes, Michael and Dave discuss The Odyssey (2026), Christopher Nolan's three-hour adaptation of Homer — a $250 million epic and the first narrative feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm. The discussion covers Nolan as an auteur and whether the "never made a bad movie" claim holds up, the practical-effects approach to the Cyclops and Circe, the deliberately cold Northern palette imposed on the Mediterranean, Ludwig Göransson's score, and an ensemble so large the hosts concede they can't get to everyone. After the ratings, the spoiler section turns to the film's central choice: the Olympian gods have been removed while the monsters remain, and what that does to Odysseus' moral agency. Comparisons range across Nolan's own filmography, Troy, The Northman, and the sword-and-sandal epics of the 1950s and '60s. Reviews Michael: 4.5 / 5 — came out thinking four, and it has only grown in his esteem since. Praises the baseline of visual and musical quality, Damon working better as a lead than expected, and a supporting cast that carries every stop on the journey. Docks it for a cast so crowded it distracts, and for an ending too in love with its own moralism. Dave: 4.5 / 5 — would watch it again in a heartbeat. Calls it a film that grabs hold of empire, heroism, reverence, and humility all at once, and rates the separation of gods from monsters as pitch perfect. His one dent in the fender: the film plays a little episodic, a series of very large encounters rather than a single build. Thematic Discussion The Odyssey removes the Olympians but keeps the monsters. Circe, the Sirens, and the Cyclops are all simply part of the natural world here; it's Athena and Zeus who stay shadowy and inferred. Michael's reading is that this absence exists to hand moral agency back to Odysseus — if the gods were visibly steering, his guilt over the Trojan Horse wouldn't be his to carry. That guilt is framed through xenia, the Greek code of hospitality. Odysseus offered a gift that turned out to be murder, and comes to believe that breaking that norm is what set his civilization's collapse in motion. The hosts draw the parallel to the erosion of political and social norms in contemporary America, and to the film's closing turn — the Bronze Age is ending because of the Sea Peoples, and the Greeks realize they are the Sea Peoples. The episode's central disagreement is over Athena. Dave reads her as constructed: she wears the face of a priestess Odysseus watched his own men murder in her temple, and the film is showing how humans build gods out of guilt and the sense that something is sacred. Michael pushes back that the film sustains a genuine ambiguity — the idea that gods appear in human form is planted repeatedly, and the priestess is decapitated at the exact moment Athena's statue is, which leaves open that Odysseus may believe they killed a god. He points to the same ambiguity in the Cyclops' cry to Poseidon, which some of the crew claim to hear and neither Odysseus nor the audience does. Neither host resolves it, and both prefer it that way. Michael's position is that the ambiguity is the answer rather than the absence of one — something underpins their world that they don't fully see and are damaging anyway, whether that's Zeus and Poseidon or simply decency and the value of human life. Dave, arriving from a position of religious faith, says he likes that Odysseus has to live in the same uncertain world the rest of us do. The structural evidence they land on: Homer ends with a deus ex machina, Athena descending to stop the cycle of revenge. Nolan cuts it. Nobody intervenes, so Odysseus abdicates, gives the throne to Telemachus, and sails west with Penelope — a change that hands the ending's moral weight entirely to the man. Timestamps Time Segment 00:00 Intro & setup 05:08 Nolan's filmography — is he an auteur? 08:51 Practical filmmaking and visual style 09:37 IMAX 70mm and the limits of the format 14:40 Hoyte van Hoytema 17:16 Why the Mediterranean looks cold 19:39 Ludwig Göransson's score 25:20 Travis Scott, the bard, and the casting discourse 28:56 The ensemble 39:39 Reviews & ratings 49:56 Spoiler section begins 52:18 Xenia and the collapse of norms 54:50 The gods and moral agency 56:12 The Athena reveal 1:01:46 The case for ambiguity 1:05:03 "We're the Sea Peoples" 1:09:02 The ending Nolan changed 1:19:36 Final interpretation debate — are the gods there? 1:26:49 Closing thoughts Films & Directors Mentioned Memento — Christopher Nolan Inception — Christopher Nolan The Prestige — Christopher Nolan Interstellar — Christopher Nolan Dunkirk — Christopher Nolan Tenet — Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer — Christopher Nolan Troy The Northman Dune Saving Private Ryan Fruitvale Station — Ryan Coogler Creed — Ryan Coogler Black Panther — Ryan Coogler Sinners — Ryan Coogler Minority Report The Whale Anemone Disclosure Day — Steven Spielberg Barbie Michael John Ford and Monument Valley Hans Zimmer The sword-and-sandal epics of the 1950s and '60s Contact Web: https://mindframesfilm.com Facebook: Mindframes Network: Now Playing Network Email: info@mindframesfilm.com

The Late Bronze Age, when the Trojan War supposedly took place, was way more modern than Homer made it seem. But around 1177 BCE, a vast network of interconnected societies suddenly collapsed. What caused arguably the greatest societal collapse in the history of the world? Hint: It's a lot more complicated than the "Sea Peoples." Guest: Eric Cline, professor at George Washington University and author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠unexplainable@vox.com⁠⁠⁠We read every email.Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is more than an epic adventure—it's a story about what happens when you finally make it home and realize the world kept moving without you. Alex explores how a film rooted in ancient myth becomes a powerful meditation on memory, regret, and the passage of time while examining the Sea Peoples, the Bronze Age collapse, Nolan's casting choices, and why the film's emotional final act resonated so deeply with his own experience of returning to America after years living abroad.

Dave & Cody are joined by film professor Paul to review Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which just posted the biggest live-action opening of 2026 and the best reviews of Nolan's career. The table digs into Ludwig Göransson's score, the IMAX cinematography, the 60-foot Cyclops puppet, Robert Pattinson's genuinely repulsive heel turn, and John Leguizamo's surprise best-in-career performance. Dave makes the case that softening Odysseus's hubris costs the third act its humility, and lays out a Pastor's Corner connecting the film's Sea Peoples references to the real Bronze Age collapse and what happens to a civilization that loses its faith. Plus a recast, an Argos tribute, and a spirited defense of Taco Bell.SPOILER WARNING: Full spoilers for The Odyssey after the news segment.Movie reviewed: The Odyssey (2026) — Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Elliot Page, Jon Bernthal, and John Leguizamo. In theaters now.

For a hundred and fifty years we were told the same story, that the Sea Peoples came in off the water around 1200 BC and burned the Late Bronze Age to the ground, city by city, until nothing was left but ash for centuries. Netherlands Institute for the Near East Archaeologist Jesse Millek walks back into that rubble with a lantern and finds most of it was never there, that more than half the destructions inked onto our maps of the eastern Mediterranean simply did not happen. From Ugarit to Cyprus to the Levantine coast he traces the trade routes that kept breathing and the Canaanite cities that quietly turned Phoenician, the slow honest truth of a world that transformed instead of falling.PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADOX LOST PRE-SALE: https://buy.stripe.com/7sY7sKdoN5d29eUdYddEs0bHOMEBREW MUSIC - Check out our new album!Hard Copies (Vinyl): FREE SHIPPING https://demystifysci-shop.fourthwall.com/products/vinyl-lp-secretary-of-nature-everything-is-so-good-hereStreaming:https://secretaryofnature.bandcamp.com/album/everything-is-so-good-herePARADIGM DRIFThttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-show00:00 Go! 00:01:52 Sea Peoples as a Modern Invention00:10:02 Tel Batash and Transition Without Destruction00:16:34 Why We Crave a Catastrophe00:24:13 How Canaanites Became Phoenicians00:35:13 Who the Golden Age Belonged To00:48:17 Sixty Percent of Destructions Never Happened01:04:33 Where the Copper Went After 1200 BC#BronzeAgeCollapse #SeaPeoples #Archaeology #AncientHistory #AncientEgypt #BronzeAge #Mycenae #Troy #AncientCivilizationsMERCH: Rock some DemystifySci gear : https://demystifysci-shop.fourthwall.com/AMAZON: Do your shopping through this link: https://amzn.to/3YyoT98DONATE: https://bit.ly/3wkPqaDSUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@UCqV4_7i9h1_V7hY48eZZSLw@demystifysci RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/2be66934/podcast/rssMAILING LIST: https://bit.ly/3v3kz2S SOCIAL: - Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DemystifySci- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DemystifySci/- Twitter: https://twitter.com/DemystifySciMUSIC: -Shilo Delay: https://g.co/kgs/oty671

“I want someone who has regrets. I want someone who's learned the hard way. I want someone who understands that life is made of those messy compromises.” — Joel Christensen on the Odysseus he hopes to see in Matt Damon Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is out — the controversial movie of the year, much of the controversy raging before anyone had seen a frame. So, before either of us had seen the epic, I talked to the CUNY classicist Joel Christensen, author of the timely Why Odysseus? Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero. What, I asked Christensen, did he most dread about Hollywood's treatment of his beloved Odyssey? His answer: a hero too noble to be interesting. The Odysseus of the epic is a survivor, a scoundrel, an antihero — the master sergeant who does what needs to be done, from engineering the Trojan Horse to making sure Hector's infant son doesn't survive it. Christensen's worry about Matt Damon came down to one word: too likeable. What he wanted instead was a man with regrets — De Niro in Raging Bull rather than anybody noble. So did Christensen get the Odysseus he wanted? Below is his review, written after seeing the film when it came out. Postscript: Joel Christensen's Verdict on the Film Nolan's Odyssey is not Homer's Odyssey. This should be clear to anyone. Nolan faced an almost impossible task well: ancient audiences knew the story already. Modern audiences do not, so he created a ring structure with the beginning union of Penelope and Odysseus anticipating the reunion at the end, also introducing plot elements like the dog Argos and the pin by which Penelope will recognize Odysseus. The film is not Homer. Homer's power is poetry; the film's is image. Some of the images are striking: the scene when Circe turns his men into animals is the most arresting in the whole movie, showing everything that can be done with visceral imagery and a slight adaptation (Circe here is a survivor of sexual assault). The changes made to the plot such as omitting the Phaeacians, Nestor, Laertes, the bed and more are not as jarring as some of the general decisions. Calling “Zeus' Law” “do unto others…” makes an understandable translation to a Christian context, but it is somewhat nonsensical for Homer. Depicting a mutilated Helen is a strange decision that I am struggling with. What the movie gets right is making humans responsible for their own suffering. In a novel take on Odysseus as a traumatized warrior, the hero spends seven years with Calypso eating Lotus to forget the loss of his men. Damon, too likeable, regrets the trick of the Trojan Horse after witnessing the slaughter during the sack of Troy. We find out as well that the “sea people” from history, bringing an end to the “civilization” are actually the Greeks returning from the Trojan War and suffering for the transgressions they committed there. Is this ending an echo of Zeus' plan to end the race of heroes in the Trojan War? Is it an allegory for our civilizational collapse in the future thanks to technology, environmental catastrophe, and fascism? Any potential social critique dissipates with the movie's end. The traumatized veteran turns out to be merciful and kills only some of the suitors, showing many mercy. Then, guilty of violating “Zeus' Law”, Odysseus happily goes into exile with Penelope, leaving Telemachus to be king. There's no way to make Homer's Odyssey into a film and convey all its ambiguity and depth. That would be an unfair expectation. Nolan's film is a compelling spectacle and it makes me wonder more about how it reflects who we are as an audience. Do we need the hero to be ultimately good, even if he messed up? Are we so simple that we need to hear about Zeus' Law and the Sea People so repetitively? I fear that in this age where fiction and fact are so hard to disentangle, that we long for narratives that are just simpler. We don't get the Odyssey we want; we get the one we deserve. Five Takeaways •       A Complicated Man: The Translation Problem. Every word of Homer carries echoes no English can hold, and the fights over Nolan's dialogue replay the fights over translation. Emily Wilson detonated a controversy by rendering polytropos — poly, many; tropos, turn — as “a complicated man,” alluding at once to Odysseus's travels and the many forms of his character; Daniel Mendelsohn's “man of roundabout ways” does the work too, if you can stop thinking about rotaries. Even the objection to Tom Holland's Telemachus saying “dad” collapses on inspection: Telemachus uses the colloquial form in Homer. And the “authentic” dialect purists want was an artificial amalgam that no ancient Greek ever spoke. •       The Culture Wars Come for Homer. Nobody remembers a brouhaha over Wolfgang Petersen's Troy — a pretty bad movie, Christensen notes — but Nolan's Odyssey generates more controversy than a scholar can track daily. Lupita Nyong'o's Helen is attacked as inauthentic by one side and as cultural appropriation by the other; since 2015, classicists have watched the Western tradition weaponized by the alt-right while their own field argues about who owns it. Christensen's advice channels the epic itself: between Scylla and Charybdis, take Scylla. You'll lose six men. The alternative is losing the ship — and if the story doesn't persuade in three hours, nobody will remember the armor anyway. •       The Valence of Violence. Modern audiences are more accustomed to represented violence than any in history — you don't need Natural Born Killers when Twitter serves unverifiable clips from Gaza and Iran. The question Christensen brings to the film is what the violence is for. Uberto Pasolini's The Return gave Ralph Fiennes's Odysseus a steady, untroubled thump of arrows; the epic's own slaughter of the suitors, read closely, approaches Tarantino-adjacent parody. And the hardest tests are the atrocities the adaptations always cut: the mutilation of the goatherd Melanthius, and Telemachus hanging the enslaved women. Does the violence glorify the hero — or show what even the best of us are capable of? •       Keep Penelope Ambiguous. The great interpretive question of the Odyssey is when Penelope knows the beggar is her husband — the suitors, dead in the underworld, are convinced she was in on it all along. The epic grants her remarkable intelligence and agency, then reins it in: Agamemnon's ghost praises her by way of insulting all women, and she vanishes from the text. Christensen's advice to Nolan wouldn't be Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, which centers the women's voices; it would be more screen time and total ambiguity — no access to her mind, a wife who matches her husband in wits and may even have outwitted him. Though based on Nolan's arc, he doubts we'll get a woman at the center. •       Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero. Christensen's worry about Matt Damon was simple: too likable. Odysseus is the master sergeant — the one who takes the hard orders, tricks Achilles into the war, engineers the Horse, and makes sure Hector's infant son doesn't survive to rebuild Troy. The ancient hero is neither good nor ...

In the early 11th century BCE, the Egyptian official Wen-Amun was dispatched on a diplomatic mission to Byblos to acquire timber for the sacred barque of Amun-Ra. His journey quickly unraveled -- pursued by the Tjekker, one of the Sea Peoples active in the region -- Wen-Amun was blown off course and landed in Alashiya (Cyprus). There, he faced a hostile reception, as the locals approached seemingly intent on violence. Brought before Princess Hatiba, Wen-Amun, desperate and stranded, called out to see if anyone could understand Egyptian. Remarkably, one man stepped forward to translate his plea. At this pivotal moment, the narrative breaks off, leaving Wen-Amun's fate unknown. Yet his misadventure offers a striking glimpse into Egypt's waning influence abroad and the diplomatic uncertainty of the time. At the same time, the presence of an Egyptian speaker in Cyprus points to the deep interconnectivity of the Late Bronze Age world -- an idea we'll explore further in our next episode with Dr. Louise Steel, as we examine the ties between Cyprus and Egypt during this formative period.  

In the early 11th century BCE, the Egyptian official Wen-Amun was dispatched on a diplomatic mission to Byblos to acquire timber for the sacred barque of Amun-Ra. His journey quickly unraveled -- pursued by the Tjekker, one of the Sea Peoples active in the region -- Wen-Amun was blown off course and landed in Alashiya (Cyprus). There, he faced a hostile reception, as the locals approached seemingly intent on violence. Brought before Princess Hatiba, Wen-Amun, desperate and stranded, called out to see if anyone could understand Egyptian. Remarkably, one man stepped forward to translate his plea. At this pivotal moment, the narrative breaks off, leaving Wen-Amun's fate unknown. Yet his misadventure offers a striking glimpse into Egypt's waning influence abroad and the diplomatic uncertainty of the time. At the same time, the presence of an Egyptian speaker in Cyprus points to the deep interconnectivity of the Late Bronze Age world -- an idea we'll explore further in our next episode with Dr. Louise Steel, as we examine the ties between Cyprus and Egypt during this formative period.  

Lately I've been seeing a growing number of memes pointing out the "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" references to the Sea Peoples in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. It's encouraging to see one of the ancient Mediterranean's most enduring mysteries finding its way into popular culture. In light of that renewed interest, I thought this would be a good opportunity to publish a dramatized reading of one of the most remarkable collections of texts from the end of the Bronze Age: the correspondence between the kings of Ugarit and Alashiya (ancient Cyprus). These exchanges are preserved in the Ugaritica, the published corpus of cuneiform tablets excavated at the ancient city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria). Discovered beginning in 1928, these archives comprise thousands of administrative, literary, diplomatic, and economic texts dating primarily to the 14th and 13th centuries BCE. Among them are letters exchanged between rulers across the eastern Mediterranean, offering an extraordinarily intimate glimpse into the political world immediately preceding the Bronze Age Collapse. The particular correspondence dramatized here* belongs to the final decades of the 13th century BCE, when the great palace kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean were under increasing pressure. Trade networks were breaking down, kingdoms were falling, and the groups later known collectively as the "Sea Peoples" were beginning to appear in the historical record. These letters capture that world at the very moment it was beginning to unravel. I chose these exchanges because they reveal something important about the international standing of Alashiya. One of the most striking features is the diplomatic language employed by the king of Ugarit. He repeatedly addresses the king of Alashiya as "my father." This is not merely a polite turn of phrase. In the carefully calibrated language of Late Bronze Age diplomacy, such terms reflected perceived status and hierarchy. Contrast this with the famous correspondence between the kings of Alashiya and the Egyptian pharaohs, in which both rulers consistently address one another as "my brother." That title denoted equality among the so-called "Great Kings" of the Late Bronze Age. The differing forms of address suggest that, at least from Ugarit's perspective, the king of Alashiya occupied a position of exceptional prestige. That prestige was no accident. Cyprus possessed the eastern Mediterranean's richest copper resources, and copper was one of the indispensable commodities of the Bronze Age. Combined with tin, it produced bronze--the metal upon which armies, agriculture, tools, trade, and prestige depended. To command Cyprus was to command one of the ancient world's most strategically important resources, making Alashiya a kingdom whose influence extended far beyond the island itself. If these dramatizations spark your curiosity about Cyprus' central role in the Bronze Age, you may also enjoy these episodes of the History of Cyprus Podcast: Episode 7: Gripped by the Hand of Nergal: Cyprus in the Bronze Age — with Louise Hitchcock (2 October 2022) Episode 8: A Cyprocentric Perspective: Cyprus' History of Research — with Maria Iacovou (2 November 2022) Episode 14: The Copper Island: Copper Production in Ancient Cyprus — with Lina Kassianidou (2 May 2023) Episode 24: King Kinyras and the Cypria: Cyprus in the Homeric World — with John Franklin (2 March 2024) Episode 25: 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed — with Eric Cline Bonus Episode: Surfaces, Surveys and Spatiotemporal Dynamics: The Hala Sultan Tekke Hinterland Project — with Jan Coenaerts and Polte De Weirdt (10 May 2025) Episode 47: Signs, Scripts & Silence: Cypro-Minoan — with Cassandra Donnelly (2 February 2026) And, coming next month (2 August): Episode 53: Fragments of Faience, Glints of Gold: Cyprus and Egypt in Contact — with Louise Steel Taken together, these conversations paint a picture of Cyprus not as a peripheral island, but as one of the principal actors in the political, economic, and cultural networks of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean. The correspondence you'll hear in this dramatization offers a rare opportunity to listen to that world in its own words--voices exchanged across the sea just before one of history's greatest civilizational upheavals. *A brief note on the production: I've taken a few creative liberties to help bring these ancient letters to life. For example, the scratching sound you'll hear isn't entirely authentic. A more accurate soundscape would have been the impression of a stylus pressed into wet clay rather than the scratching of pen on paper. Unfortunately, convincingly recreating the sound of cuneiform being inscribed proved rather difficult, so I've opted for an approximation that hopefully conveys the spirit of the act, even if not its precise reality.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Dr. Cyd Ropp and Bishop Nathan Wilson Today's episode is the last installment of my interview with Bishop Nathan Wilson of The Gnostic Union. Brother Nathan continues with his illustration of how correct translation of the original Koine Greek of the New Testament changes the way we may interpret Biblical scripture more precisely. The translations he shares come from his freely available Gnostic Christian Truth Bible that you can find online in PDF form, with side by side comparisons of the original Koine with English. I'm including the link here in the transcript of the episode, so if you are listening to this in podcast form, you may wish to go to Gnostic Insights dot com to read the transcript. His Bible and other Gnostic scriptures could use another round of editorial polishing, in my opinion, to insert an indexed table of contents, so it may be a bit difficult to make your way through it. And in next week’s episode, I’ll take a long look at what we’ve been hearing for the last four weeks. If you have anything you would like me to discuss or any questions coming off of Bishop Wilson’s discussion, bring them up and we can talk about them on next week's episode. I know I’m going to want to talk about the role of Sophia and the Divine Feminine and the concept of gender on the ethereal plane. I would also like to talk to you about how the study of history and philology differs from theology and philosophy and how they are not necessarily gnosis. And here at Gnostic Insights, of course, and on the Gnostic Reformation, I avoid talking about gnosis and only share gnosis itself. So I’d like to explain that to you about that as well. So please drop me some comments here at the end of this episode and I can address them in next week’s episode. Bishop Nathan Wilson: So Mark 8:17. All right. So this would be Jesus here. “And having gnosis, he said to them, why reason because you have no bread or do you not understand that the heart of you has been hardened?” So this is among disciples arguing that they have no bread. Jesus having spiritual gnosis, understanding what’s going on, says, “What are you arguing about?” Which is kind of interesting that he mentioned, but I’ll mention something that’s a real kick in the can. So this is in Mark 15:42. And this is a text that no theology want to give you because it would make them feel uncomfortable. And it’s regarding Pontius Pilate having gnosis regarding Jesus crucifixion. So this is a note they definitely do not want. I was kind of thinking about what does this mean? And I figured out what it’s regarding to. Mark 15:45. Okay, so this is Pontius Pilate. I’ll read 15:44 first. “But Pilate wondered if he had already died, having called to him the centurion and questioned him if he had already died. And with gnosis from the centurion, he granted the body to Joseph.” AI generated image of Pilate questioning the Centurian. The three crucified men were inserted by the AI to symbolically represent the crucifixition of Jesus and the two thieves. Golgotha is actually not that close to the palace window. So that meaning inside knowledge from the centurion has been given to him about Jesus. So that could imply that he was still alive and that Pontius might have been involved in this plot. That’s what that text would imply; it doesn’t necessarily have to mean that. It can just mean that within a knowledge he’s been told by the centurion Jesus is dead, so it can apply that too. So however you want to read that text is up to you. But I found that quite fascinating and I had to really look at that. I’m like, well, I'm sorry, we can’t have that in there. That’s why that’s been censored. But that’s fascinating. So we even have Jesus having a gnosis and leaving an area and that’s in Matthew 12:15. I’ll jump into that too. So there’s a couple of scenes that Jesus has gnosis. There’s even times he has gnosis in regarding what other people were thinking. So having to understand them mentally. So that’s cool. So gnosis appears quite often. It’s just it doesn’t appear in the English text. But in the Old Testament it’s even more. Cyd:That's interesting. Bishop Nathan Wilson:Yes, it is. Very. Okay. So “withdrew from the area” Matthew 12:15 I want. Right. “And Jesus having gnosis, withdrew from there and many great multitudes followed him and he healed them.” Or it can translate to took care of them or cured them all. So that word here we have can be for a therapeia or a therapeo. And this word meaning to heal someone or to spend time with them, to heal them with God’s word or with medicine, to heal them with medical substance, so narcotics. It can be just simply curing them or just spending time with someone so say talking to someone, healing them and their emotions. So healing their emotions. So that’s beautiful. Not just simply Jesus hocus pocus and and leaving. It’s he’s spending time with people. And this word has been used in ancient Greek medical texts for implying medical substances or therapy. So the word therapeia is where our word therapy comes from. So this can be Jesus the therapist. So that’s beautiful. Absolutely fantastic. I like that. So it gives more power to the text. Shows that one person can make a difference. So any one of us can do this and heal multitudes through spiritual touch, through spiritual messaging, through the simple act of love. So that’s powerful. That’s useful. Cyd:And this is something that only people can do. Well, no, actually dogs are very good therapists as well. But I wouldn’t think that an AI therapist or an AI Jesus has any gnosis truly. Bishop Nathan Wilson:I’m not really one big for AI because I think AI is basically just all secondhand information. It’s just built from all our information that we’ve already got. So we have here something else. This is something pretty interesting too. Matthew 16:8. And it’s Jesus having gnosis: “Why do you argue amongst yourselves? You of little faith because you have no bread” [or meaning food.] But say, regarding to the word for artos being bread. So when you have the Jesus prayer, Give us this daily bread, this could translate to give us our daily necessaries of life. That’s much more. So daily maintenance, so being maintained spiritually, being maintained by God, for God giving us the means to live spiritually as well as physically. So it’s much more powerful than just simple, just bread and food. So Jesus speaking a lot of times symbolically. So the symbolic teachings are meant to be useful to all of us. So something that we can practically take on, not simply does something that’s outside of ourselves. So that’s within ourselves that we can actually use. So gnosis. And I’ll go into Matthew 22:18. And that’s with Jesus about having gnosis on the wickedness of the Pharisees. So this doesn’t mean that all Pharisees are bad though. Jesus had Pharisees that followed him. This just means a select few of them. So basically the rich corrupted ones of them. So he was also against the Sadducees too. Mostly Sadducees probably because they were the richer lots. But he was not really a friend to those who were corrupt and using the money that they were given to further subject the people to more condemnation, which Jesus was very much pro-life, was equality where the Pharisees and Sadducees in large numbers were not. Which is a shame. Okay, so 22, I think it was I’m looking for. Matthew 22:18. Okay. Cyd:You know that Old Testament God of the Sadducees and Pharisees doesn’t have love. So they are not getting any gnosis from that Jehovah level. Bishop Nathan Wilson:No. And it goes back to where it’s first worshipped. The first to worship this God, Yahweh, were very violent. They were the Shasu. They were known to force marry the Egyptian and Ethiopian young girls they raided. So when we look at the depictions of the Shasu, they are mixed in colour—they're black, they’re white, they’re copper skinned. They didn’t care what colour you were, they just took. They were looking for sex slaves, basically wives. So what’s interesting is the same river that they used, the Euphrates River, not all of them were river-based pirates. Some were just tent dwelling nomads. But some of them did have the funds or means to use ships. So we certainly had sea people. So some of those sea people were Canaanite raiders. So they’ll use the Euphrates River to go out raiding, to go out to the main street or elsewhere to raid outside of their own lands. Muslim pirates would use the same river to do the same thing. So that’s interesting.[Editor’s note: The speaker appears to be connecting several groups—nomadic Shasu, Sea Peoples, and later Muslim-era raiders. While the Euphrates served as an important transportation corridor, the specific claim that the Shasu or Sea Peoples used it as river-pirates is not clear from the sources consulted by the CoPilot AI and may reflect an interpretation rather than an established historical consensus. Of course, the AIs are relaying to us approved, conventional data, so their data bases would not contain the types of stories Bishop Wilson speaks of.]All in the name of this Jehovah, in the name of Yahweh, in the name of the demiurge, this evil gets done. And it’s always the poor that suffer, the poor and women. And who are the ones that Jesus is speaking to? The poor and to women. So it’s shocking. So most Christians don’t look at this either. A lot of Muslims don’t either, because they will be following Jesus [Isa]. So who they call Isa, they clearly don’t. So the message contradicts. So Muhammad called himself a man of war. Moses as well. But it depends on what version of Moses you’re looking at as well. So during the time of Jesus, as I mentioned, there were different versions of Judaism. There were different Torahs and different Jewish Bibles. So some believed in a peaceful Moses and even a peaceful Abraham. Others believed in Abraham the Pirat. So Abraham the Pirate. And some didn’t take this view. So others believed in Abraham ready to sacrifice his son. And others believed that he was hearing a fallen angel, mistook it for God, and God had to intervene. And we see this sort of in the Essene story somewhat. So that’s more of a Gnostic take. Some Essenes view, because they’re Dead Sea Scrolls, which is a Qumran Essene sect, they believe that it was Belial that was behind the scenes doing this. And God was basically aware that Belial was doing it and would interfere. So he would do this in order for Belial to expose himself and then be shamed. So a very different story. So the story of Job we read is the Pharisee story, which is Satan being in the angelic courts. So being asked by God, so not acting outside of God. So he was only there to test human beings. So Satan’s not the bad guy in that story. It’s Yahweh. But when we look at other stories, it’s different. Even the Ethiopian version is different. They have two stories. One with Belial and the other one with a figure called Mastema, who is the opponent against God trying to cause the sacrifice of Abraham’s son. So, trippy. So this is regarding to the Pharisees as well. “So Jesus, having gnosis of the wickedness of them, said, Why do you test me, you hypocrites?” So this is in reference to the coin, when he showed them the icon. So what’s interesting about that scene is Judas, who was a Zealot, basically, I think it was Judas of Galilee, who rebelled against Rome, he also said the same thing. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.”[Matthew 22:21] So when Jesus is speaking in the scene, he doesn’t touch the coin. The icon on there in question is the emperor who is stating, you know, son of Caesar, son of God. Jesus is saying, no, basically give this back to Caesar and give to Israel, God, what is God’s, which is the land. So Israel. But I don’t think it’s more from the land—I think that’s a zealot opinion. I think when he’s talking about this, when he says Israel, I’m thinking he’s looking at the word context and he’s meaning El preserved so those who belong to El. So when he says those who belong to Israel, he’s not saying just anything, he’s talking about the lost sheep of El Elyon. So those were in other lands, lead them back here. So ones who have gone astray, which is interesting. So ones who are worshipping pagan gods or worshipping Yahweh. So he’s saying, bring them back to El, bring them back to God, repentance. This is why the Pharisees and Sadducees disliked him. He had a different God. Some that liked him as well, but they had trouble understanding it. Cyd:Right. Well, and that is still the case. Hey, we’re going to have to wrap this up in just a few minutes. So is there any scripture you would like to make sure that you share before we wrap it up? Bishop Nathan Wilson:Okay. Well, if you like, I can share either the temple scene, which is a Matthew 21:12, or I can share the little, the short scene of the Pharisees being condemned by Jesus for basically dressing up like prostitutes. You might have a, you might have a lot of that. Cyd:Yeah. Okay. That, that looks to be the one you want to share the most. Papyrus Oxyconocus 840 Bishop Nathan Wilson:So I’ll share that one. It’s very short. So this is the text in general. Just this little bit. Okay. The Greek side is on here. [Nathan displays his fragment facsimile.] So I have the Greek side by side. So this is side one and side two. So side two is even shorter. “So before committing injustice, he carefully plans it all.” So this is Jesus speaking about the evil. “Be on guard, lest you suffer the same things as they.” So this is the Pharisees and Sadducees he’s talking about. “For the evil doers among people do not receive punishment only in this life, but also suffer judgment and great torment. And having received them, he brought them into the purification area. And as he was walking in the temple, a certain Pharisee, a high priest named Soreb [conventional translation is Levi; editorial note],” Which is kind of interesting. That word Zoar/Tzoar [uncertain], is Tsa'ar, [uncertain] which is a city condemned by God [but ultimately spared by God; editorial note]. So this is kind of like a pun on the Pharisee leader being punished by God. So like, possibly, maybe a Pharisee Messiah figure. So meaning they’re rejecting Jesus because they already have their Messiah they believe. So that’s something to be taken into a note. So this Soreb [Levi ?] approaches, met them and said, “Zoar, who gave you permission to walk in the purification area and to look upon these holy vessels, not having washed, nor your disciples having their feet baptized, but having being unclean, you have trampled upon this holy place, which is pure, which no one may enter unless you have bathed and changed into the garments of those baptized. Nor does anyone dare to touch these holy vessels.” So they’re in the temple right now in the inner sanctuary, touching the holy relics and not wearing the same baptism clothing as them. They’re not liking this. So this is what Jesus says. “The Savior answered and said to him, Woe to you blind ones who do not see. You wash in these poured out waters in which dogs and pigs have been thrown into day and night. And after washing your outer skin, you wipe it. And just like the prostitutes and flute players anoint themselves and wash and wipe and adorn themselves to cause the desires of men. But from within, they are full of scorpions and all evil. But I and my disciples who you say are not baptized have been baptized in the waters of eternal Zoe. That has come from God. But woe to those…” And the ending is missing. That’s why side two has not been given. [referring to side two of the fragment which is partially destroyed and not in the public domain] Cyd:Right. Now that’s a fragment. Where was that fragment found? Bishop Nathan Wilson:I forgot. The fragment is called Papyrus Oxyconocus 840. But you can just type in P. Oxy 840. I would say that was probably if I’d gone by memory, that might have been discovered maybe in Alexandria, if not maybe in Thrace, but I believe it was Alexandria, Egypt that might have been discovered. There was one, I believe, that was discovered in the Middle East, maybe Jerusalem. But I believe that one there was discovered in Alexandria. I might be wrong about that. I have to relook where that was discovered. But it is important. So a text that has not been given to public domain yet, which is quite a shame. Cyd:Yeah. Well, it’s been delightful talking to you. And you certainly have an encyclopedic knowledge of these ancient texts. It’s very beautiful. It’s very nice being around you. You have the good vibe. Bishop Nathan Wilson:It’s been a pleasure speaking to you as well, Dr. Cyd Ropp. It’s been an absolute pleasure. So I’m stoked. So sorry if I get excited and all that sort of stuff as well. I love meeting new people, especially fellow spiritual people. Always lovely to see, especially Gnostics. Cyd:Yeah. Well, I recommend The Gnostic Union. Go check out the Facebook site. That’s where all the action is, right? It’s the Facebook site. Bishop Nathan Wilson:And on the YouTube, yeah. We can all get together. Cyd:On the YouTube. Bishop Nathan Wilson:I’ve got a few old videos as well. So you can see the difference in my theology, how it’s changed. My whole belief system changed when I start translating, so I found out I was wrong about a couple of other things. So I still keep some old videos because some people might want to hang on to some of those beliefs as well. I have no problems with that. I’m very open-minded and whichever people want to believe, they can believe, as long as we’re loving to each other and kind. It’s all that matters. Being good humans. Cyd:Right. Well, since we’re going to be putting this on your site as well as mine, let me tell people that I have a Substack called The Gnostic Reformation. And my homepage is GnosticInsights.com. Well, it’s just been a blessing. Thank you very much. Bishop Nathan Wilson:You’re welcome. And feel free to share your stuff on The Gnostic Union Facebook page too. If you ever want to share stuff, feel free to. We accept other people’s work too. So feel free to share it. Cyd:How often? I mean, I post weekly. You don’t want me cross-posting weekly. Bishop Nathan Wilson:Oh, that’s fine. We don’t mind. You can post there weekly. We won’t mind. Anything that’s Gnostic, we’ll gladly accept. So we want to encourage all Gnostic schools of thought and everyone that wants to seek it, we want to encourage that. Cyd:Oh that’s excellent. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being with me today, Bishop Nathan Wilson. God bless us all. Bishop Nathan Wilson:God bless as well. Thank you for having me. Cyd:Okay. Bye-bye. Thank you. Well, that’s the conclusion of that long interview with Bishop Nathan Wilson of The Gnostic Union. These episodes have been running long, a half hour and more, so I think we’ll keep this one short, and give you a break. Until then, drop some comments and questions that I can address in next week's episode.This interview was recorded via Zoom, and so I have the video of the interview as well as these audios, and I’ve left it as one long video to post to YouTube. So I’m putting it up on YouTube now that we’re done with the audio podcast versions, and you can go to YouTube if you’d like to watch Brother Nathan talking about these things. He does have a few visual aids. His papyrus facsimiles and whatnot are pretty cool to look at. So I encourage you to go to my YouTube channel, Cyd Ropp, and it’s under the Gnostic Insights playlist, and leave a thumbs up. I’m going to try to grow the Gnostic Insights presence there on YouTube. It’s going to take a lot of effort and a lot of support on your part. So please give me a hand here, and let’s kick it off with this Bishop Wilson. The other YouTube video that’s already there is that animated version of my children’s book, Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth. So if you haven’t watched that yet, you could catch it as well. Until then, God bless us all, and Onward and Upward. Until then, drop some comments and questions I can address in next week's episode. God bless us all and onward and upward. Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth is the first gnostic book written for young children. Click here to go to amazon.com

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Dr. Cyd Ropp and Bishop Nathan Wilson Today's episode is the last installment of my interview with Bishop Nathan Wilson of The Gnostic Union. Brother Nathan continues with his illustration of how correct translation of the original Koine Greek of the New Testament changes the way we may interpret Biblical scripture more precisely. The translations he shares come from his freely available Gnostic Christian Truth Bible that you can find online in PDF form, with side by side comparisons of the original Koine with English. I'm including the link here in the transcript of the episode, so if you are listening to this in podcast form, you may wish to go to Gnostic Insights dot com to read the transcript. His Bible and other Gnostic scriptures could use another round of editorial polishing, in my opinion, to insert an indexed table of contents, so it may be a bit difficult to make your way through it. And in next week’s episode, I’ll take a long look at what we’ve been hearing for the last four weeks. If you have anything you would like me to discuss or any questions coming off of Bishop Wilson’s discussion, bring them up and we can talk about them on next week's episode. I know I’m going to want to talk about the role of Sophia and the Divine Feminine and the concept of gender on the ethereal plane. I would also like to talk to you about how the study of history and philology differs from theology and philosophy and how they are not necessarily gnosis. And here at Gnostic Insights, of course, and on the Gnostic Reformation, I avoid talking about gnosis and only share gnosis itself. So I’d like to explain that to you about that as well. So please drop me some comments here at the end of this episode and I can address them in next week’s episode. Bishop Nathan Wilson: So Mark 8:17. All right. So this would be Jesus here. “And having gnosis, he said to them, why reason because you have no bread or do you not understand that the heart of you has been hardened?” So this is among disciples arguing that they have no bread. Jesus having spiritual gnosis, understanding what’s going on, says, “What are you arguing about?” Which is kind of interesting that he mentioned, but I’ll mention something that’s a real kick in the can. So this is in Mark 15:42. And this is a text that no theology want to give you because it would make them feel uncomfortable. And it’s regarding Pontius Pilate having gnosis regarding Jesus crucifixion. So this is a note they definitely do not want. I was kind of thinking about what does this mean? And I figured out what it’s regarding to. Mark 15:45. Okay, so this is Pontius Pilate. I’ll read 15:44 first. “But Pilate wondered if he had already died, having called to him the centurion and questioned him if he had already died. And with gnosis from the centurion, he granted the body to Joseph.” AI generated image of Pilate questioning the Centurian. The three crucified men were inserted by the AI to symbolically represent the crucifixition of Jesus and the two thieves. Golgotha is actually not that close to the palace window. So that meaning inside knowledge from the centurion has been given to him about Jesus. So that could imply that he was still alive and that Pontius might have been involved in this plot. That’s what that text would imply; it doesn’t necessarily have to mean that. It can just mean that within a knowledge he’s been told by the centurion Jesus is dead, so it can apply that too. So however you want to read that text is up to you. But I found that quite fascinating and I had to really look at that. I’m like, well, I'm sorry, we can’t have that in there. That’s why that’s been censored. But that’s fascinating. So we even have Jesus having a gnosis and leaving an area and that’s in Matthew 12:15. I’ll jump into that too. So there’s a couple of scenes that Jesus has gnosis. There’s even times he has gnosis in regarding what other people were thinking. So having to understand them mentally. So that’s cool. So gnosis appears quite often. It’s just it doesn’t appear in the English text. But in the Old Testament it’s even more. Cyd:That's interesting. Bishop Nathan Wilson:Yes, it is. Very. Okay. So “withdrew from the area” Matthew 12:15 I want. Right. “And Jesus having gnosis, withdrew from there and many great multitudes followed him and he healed them.” Or it can translate to took care of them or cured them all. So that word here we have can be for a therapeia or a therapeo. And this word meaning to heal someone or to spend time with them, to heal them with God’s word or with medicine, to heal them with medical substance, so narcotics. It can be just simply curing them or just spending time with someone so say talking to someone, healing them and their emotions. So healing their emotions. So that’s beautiful. Not just simply Jesus hocus pocus and and leaving. It’s he’s spending time with people. And this word has been used in ancient Greek medical texts for implying medical substances or therapy. So the word therapeia is where our word therapy comes from. So this can be Jesus the therapist. So that’s beautiful. Absolutely fantastic. I like that. So it gives more power to the text. Shows that one person can make a difference. So any one of us can do this and heal multitudes through spiritual touch, through spiritual messaging, through the simple act of love. So that’s powerful. That’s useful. Cyd:And this is something that only people can do. Well, no, actually dogs are very good therapists as well. But I wouldn’t think that an AI therapist or an AI Jesus has any gnosis truly. Bishop Nathan Wilson:I’m not really one big for AI because I think AI is basically just all secondhand information. It’s just built from all our information that we’ve already got. So we have here something else. This is something pretty interesting too. Matthew 16:8. And it’s Jesus having gnosis: “Why do you argue amongst yourselves? You of little faith because you have no bread” [or meaning food.] But say, regarding to the word for artos being bread. So when you have the Jesus prayer, Give us this daily bread, this could translate to give us our daily necessaries of life. That’s much more. So daily maintenance, so being maintained spiritually, being maintained by God, for God giving us the means to live spiritually as well as physically. So it’s much more powerful than just simple, just bread and food. So Jesus speaking a lot of times symbolically. So the symbolic teachings are meant to be useful to all of us. So something that we can practically take on, not simply does something that’s outside of ourselves. So that’s within ourselves that we can actually use. So gnosis. And I’ll go into Matthew 22:18. And that’s with Jesus about having gnosis on the wickedness of the Pharisees. So this doesn’t mean that all Pharisees are bad though. Jesus had Pharisees that followed him. This just means a select few of them. So basically the rich corrupted ones of them. So he was also against the Sadducees too. Mostly Sadducees probably because they were the richer lots. But he was not really a friend to those who were corrupt and using the money that they were given to further subject the people to more condemnation, which Jesus was very much pro-life, was equality where the Pharisees and Sadducees in large numbers were not. Which is a shame. Okay, so 22, I think it was I’m looking for. Matthew 22:18. Okay. Cyd:You know that Old Testament God of the Sadducees and Pharisees doesn’t have love. So they are not getting any gnosis from that Jehovah level. Bishop Nathan Wilson:No. And it goes back to where it’s first worshipped. The first to worship this God, Yahweh, were very violent. They were the Shasu. They were known to force marry the Egyptian and Ethiopian young girls they raided. So when we look at the depictions of the Shasu, they are mixed in colour—they're black, they’re white, they’re copper skinned. They didn’t care what colour you were, they just took. They were looking for sex slaves, basically wives. So what’s interesting is the same river that they used, the Euphrates River, not all of them were river-based pirates. Some were just tent dwelling nomads. But some of them did have the funds or means to use ships. So we certainly had sea people. So some of those sea people were Canaanite raiders. So they’ll use the Euphrates River to go out raiding, to go out to the main street or elsewhere to raid outside of their own lands. Muslim pirates would use the same river to do the same thing. So that’s interesting.[Editor’s note: The speaker appears to be connecting several groups—nomadic Shasu, Sea Peoples, and later Muslim-era raiders. While the Euphrates served as an important transportation corridor, the specific claim that the Shasu or Sea Peoples used it as river-pirates is not clear from the sources consulted by the CoPilot AI and may reflect an interpretation rather than an established historical consensus. Of course, the AIs are relaying to us approved, conventional data, so their data bases would not contain the types of stories Bishop Wilson speaks of.]All in the name of this Jehovah, in the name of Yahweh, in the name of the demiurge, this evil gets done. And it’s always the poor that suffer, the poor and women. And who are the ones that Jesus is speaking to? The poor and to women. So it’s shocking. So most Christians don’t look at this either. A lot of Muslims don’t either, because they will be following Jesus [Isa]. So who they call Isa, they clearly don’t. So the message contradicts. So Muhammad called himself a man of war. Moses as well. But it depends on what version of Moses you’re looking at as well. So during the time of Jesus, as I mentioned, there were different versions of Judaism. There were different Torahs and different Jewish Bibles. So some believed in a peaceful Moses and even a peaceful Abraham. Others believed in Abraham the Pirat. So Abraham the Pirate. And some didn’t take this view. So others believed in Abraham ready to sacrifice his son. And others believed that he was hearing a fallen angel, mistook it for God, and God had to intervene. And we see this sort of in the Essene story somewhat. So that’s more of a Gnostic take. Some Essenes view, because they’re Dead Sea Scrolls, which is a Qumran Essene sect, they believe that it was Belial that was behind the scenes doing this. And God was basically aware that Belial was doing it and would interfere. So he would do this in order for Belial to expose himself and then be shamed. So a very different story. So the story of Job we read is the Pharisee story, which is Satan being in the angelic courts. So being asked by God, so not acting outside of God. So he was only there to test human beings. So Satan’s not the bad guy in that story. It’s Yahweh. But when we look at other stories, it’s different. Even the Ethiopian version is different. They have two stories. One with Belial and the other one with a figure called Mastema, who is the opponent against God trying to cause the sacrifice of Abraham’s son. So, trippy. So this is regarding to the Pharisees as well. “So Jesus, having gnosis of the wickedness of them, said, Why do you test me, you hypocrites?” So this is in reference to the coin, when he showed them the icon. So what’s interesting about that scene is Judas, who was a Zealot, basically, I think it was Judas of Galilee, who rebelled against Rome, he also said the same thing. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.”[Matthew 22:21] So when Jesus is speaking in the scene, he doesn’t touch the coin. The icon on there in question is the emperor who is stating, you know, son of Caesar, son of God. Jesus is saying, no, basically give this back to Caesar and give to Israel, God, what is God’s, which is the land. So Israel. But I don’t think it’s more from the land—I think that’s a zealot opinion. I think when he’s talking about this, when he says Israel, I’m thinking he’s looking at the word context and he’s meaning El preserved so those who belong to El. So when he says those who belong to Israel, he’s not saying just anything, he’s talking about the lost sheep of El Elyon. So those were in other lands, lead them back here. So ones who have gone astray, which is interesting. So ones who are worshipping pagan gods or worshipping Yahweh. So he’s saying, bring them back to El, bring them back to God, repentance. This is why the Pharisees and Sadducees disliked him. He had a different God. Some that liked him as well, but they had trouble understanding it. Cyd:Right. Well, and that is still the case. Hey, we’re going to have to wrap this up in just a few minutes. So is there any scripture you would like to make sure that you share before we wrap it up? Bishop Nathan Wilson:Okay. Well, if you like, I can share either the temple scene, which is a Matthew 21:12, or I can share the little, the short scene of the Pharisees being condemned by Jesus for basically dressing up like prostitutes. You might have a, you might have a lot of that. Cyd:Yeah. Okay. That, that looks to be the one you want to share the most. Papyrus Oxyconocus 840 Bishop Nathan Wilson:So I’ll share that one. It’s very short. So this is the text in general. Just this little bit. Okay. The Greek side is on here. [Nathan displays his fragment facsimile.] So I have the Greek side by side. So this is side one and side two. So side two is even shorter. “So before committing injustice, he carefully plans it all.” So this is Jesus speaking about the evil. “Be on guard, lest you suffer the same things as they.” So this is the Pharisees and Sadducees he’s talking about. “For the evil doers among people do not receive punishment only in this life, but also suffer judgment and great torment. And having received them, he brought them into the purification area. And as he was walking in the temple, a certain Pharisee, a high priest named Soreb [conventional translation is Levi; editorial note],” Which is kind of interesting. That word Zoar/Tzoar [uncertain], is Tsa'ar, [uncertain] which is a city condemned by God [but ultimately spared by God; editorial note]. So this is kind of like a pun on the Pharisee leader being punished by God. So like, possibly, maybe a Pharisee Messiah figure. So meaning they’re rejecting Jesus because they already have their Messiah they believe. So that’s something to be taken into a note. So this Soreb [Levi ?] approaches, met them and said, “Zoar, who gave you permission to walk in the purification area and to look upon these holy vessels, not having washed, nor your disciples having their feet baptized, but having being unclean, you have trampled upon this holy place, which is pure, which no one may enter unless you have bathed and changed into the garments of those baptized. Nor does anyone dare to touch these holy vessels.” So they’re in the temple right now in the inner sanctuary, touching the holy relics and not wearing the same baptism clothing as them. They’re not liking this. So this is what Jesus says. “The Savior answered and said to him, Woe to you blind ones who do not see. You wash in these poured out waters in which dogs and pigs have been thrown into day and night. And after washing your outer skin, you wipe it. And just like the prostitutes and flute players anoint themselves and wash and wipe and adorn themselves to cause the desires of men. But from within, they are full of scorpions and all evil. But I and my disciples who you say are not baptized have been baptized in the waters of eternal Zoe. That has come from God. But woe to those…” And the ending is missing. That’s why side two has not been given. [referring to side two of the fragment which is partially destroyed and not in the public domain] Cyd:Right. Now that’s a fragment. Where was that fragment found? Bishop Nathan Wilson:I forgot. The fragment is called Papyrus Oxyconocus 840. But you can just type in P. Oxy 840. I would say that was probably if I’d gone by memory, that might have been discovered maybe in Alexandria, if not maybe in Thrace, but I believe it was Alexandria, Egypt that might have been discovered. There was one, I believe, that was discovered in the Middle East, maybe Jerusalem. But I believe that one there was discovered in Alexandria. I might be wrong about that. I have to relook where that was discovered. But it is important. So a text that has not been given to public domain yet, which is quite a shame. Cyd:Yeah. Well, it’s been delightful talking to you. And you certainly have an encyclopedic knowledge of these ancient texts. It’s very beautiful. It’s very nice being around you. You have the good vibe. Bishop Nathan Wilson:It’s been a pleasure speaking to you as well, Dr. Cyd Ropp. It’s been an absolute pleasure. So I’m stoked. So sorry if I get excited and all that sort of stuff as well. I love meeting new people, especially fellow spiritual people. Always lovely to see, especially Gnostics. Cyd:Yeah. Well, I recommend The Gnostic Union. Go check out the Facebook site. That’s where all the action is, right? It’s the Facebook site. Bishop Nathan Wilson:And on the YouTube, yeah. We can all get together. Cyd:On the YouTube. Bishop Nathan Wilson:I’ve got a few old videos as well. So you can see the difference in my theology, how it’s changed. My whole belief system changed when I start translating, so I found out I was wrong about a couple of other things. So I still keep some old videos because some people might want to hang on to some of those beliefs as well. I have no problems with that. I’m very open-minded and whichever people want to believe, they can believe, as long as we’re loving to each other and kind. It’s all that matters. Being good humans. Cyd:Right. Well, since we’re going to be putting this on your site as well as mine, let me tell people that I have a Substack called The Gnostic Reformation. And my homepage is GnosticInsights.com. Well, it’s just been a blessing. Thank you very much. Bishop Nathan Wilson:You’re welcome. And feel free to share your stuff on The Gnostic Union Facebook page too. If you ever want to share stuff, feel free to. We accept other people’s work too. So feel free to share it. Cyd:How often? I mean, I post weekly. You don’t want me cross-posting weekly. Bishop Nathan Wilson:Oh, that’s fine. We don’t mind. You can post there weekly. We won’t mind. Anything that’s Gnostic, we’ll gladly accept. So we want to encourage all Gnostic schools of thought and everyone that wants to seek it, we want to encourage that. Cyd:Oh that’s excellent. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being with me today, Bishop Nathan Wilson. God bless us all. Bishop Nathan Wilson:God bless as well. Thank you for having me. Cyd:Okay. Bye-bye. Thank you. Well, that’s the conclusion of that long interview with Bishop Nathan Wilson of The Gnostic Union. These episodes have been running long, a half hour and more, so I think we’ll keep this one short, and give you a break. Until then, drop some comments and questions that I can address in next week's episode.This interview was recorded via Zoom, and so I have the video of the interview as well as these audios, and I’ve left it as one long video to post to YouTube. So I’m putting it up on YouTube now that we’re done with the audio podcast versions, and you can go to YouTube if you’d like to watch Brother Nathan talking about these things. He does have a few visual aids. His papyrus facsimiles and whatnot are pretty cool to look at. So I encourage you to go to my YouTube channel, Cyd Ropp, and it’s under the Gnostic Insights playlist, and leave a thumbs up. I’m going to try to grow the Gnostic Insights presence there on YouTube. It’s going to take a lot of effort and a lot of support on your part. So please give me a hand here, and let’s kick it off with this Bishop Wilson. The other YouTube video that’s already there is that animated version of my children’s book, Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth. So if you haven’t watched that yet, you could catch it as well. Until then, God bless us all, and Onward and Upward. Until then, drop some comments and questions I can address in next week's episode. God bless us all and onward and upward. Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth is the first gnostic book written for young children. Click here to go to amazon.com

This week on One More Game, Jerica finally rolls credits on Dave the Diver, while Josh experiences the game for the very first time—and neither of us can stop talking about it.We break down what makes Dave the Diver one of the most surprising games we've ever played, why its progression constantly keeps you hooked, our favorite characters, gameplay systems, music, and the few criticisms we have after spending dozens of hours with it.We also share our early impressions of Into the Jungle, discussing why it already feels like one of the best examples of meaningful DLC and why it might be the perfect reason to jump back into one of the best indie games ever made.If you've been waiting for an excuse to play Dave the Diver... this is it.00:00 Start01:29 Why We're Revisiting Dave the Diver04:08 Housekeeping06:24 First Impressions08:14 What Is Dave the Diver?16:26 Why the Characters Work So Well22:07 The Sea People & World Building28:14 Gameplay That Never Stops Evolving42:26 Restaurant Management & Building Your Staff52:02 Music & Sound Design57:52 Our Biggest Criticisms01:04:10 The Surprisingly Great Photo Mode01:08:32 Into the Jungle DLC Impressions01:21:57 Could This Become Dave the Diver 2?01:27:08 Final ScoresSupport the showJK! Games! is a weekly gaming podcast where we bring you the news and reviews we actually care about.Our recurring play-along series — One More Game — is our version of a video game book club. We choose one title, set checkpoints, and break it down over multiple episodes. Currently Dave the Diver!You can:• Play at your own pace• Stay spoiler-light• Or dive deep with usWhether you're Easy Mode or Expert, you belong in the conversation.Join our Discord to play along and share your theories each week.Want to show us some love? Click Me!DiscordTwitch YoutubeInstaBsky

The books of Samuel begin during one of the most dramatic periods in ancient history. Long before Samuel anointed Israel's first kings, the ancient world experienced the Bronze Age Collapse—a period marked by drought, famine, earthquakes, invasions, population migrations, and the fall of great empires. In this episode, we explore the rise and fall of the Bronze Age world, the interconnected trade networks that united Egypt, the Hittites, Babylonia, and other great powers, and the events that led to their decline. We examine the archaeological evidence for prolonged drought in the eastern Mediterranean, the role of the Sea Peoples, the collapse of trade, and the emergence of the Iron Age. Finally, we connect these world-changing events to the biblical period of the Judges and consider how the collapse of the old world may have created the conditions for Israel's rise as a kingdom under Samuel, Saul, and David. If you'd like to support The History of the Bible, visit our Patreon Page. Your feedback is valuable to us! Share your thoughts and insights via our feedback form. Let us know how our podcast has impacted you or someone you know by filling out our impact form. If you have concerns about any information presented, please inform us via our correction form. #HistoryOfTheBible #BibleHistory #BookOfSamuel #Samuel #Saul #KingDavid #Judges #BronzeAge #BronzeAgeCollapse #IronAge #AncientIsrael #BiblicalHistory #BiblicalArchaeology #AncientNearEast #SeaPeoples #Philistines #Archaeology #OldTestament #BibleStudy #AncientWorld #AncientHistory #KingdomOfIsrael #DavidAndGoliath #AncientCivilizations #HistoryPodcast Sources The Holy Bible (ESV) ESV Study Bible ESV Archaeology Study Bible Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (NIV) Rose Book of Bible Charts, Maps, and Timelines Satellite Bible Atlas by William Schlegel The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History Biblical Archaeology Society – Bronze Age Collapse: Pollen Study Highlights Late Bronze Age Drought Biblical Archaeology Society Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology World History Encyclopedia – Bronze Age Collapse

Armageddon is more than just a biblical prophecy hailing the end of days. It is a real place: Megiddo, an ancient city that for thousands of years stood at the crossroads of empires, trade routes and wars in the ancient Near East.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by friend of the show Eric Cline to uncover the true story of the real Armageddon. Why did Megiddo become associated with the world's final battle? What made this city so strategically important for millennia? From Bronze Age kingdoms to biblical tradition and modern archaeology, discover the remarkable history behind one of the most famous names in history and myth.MOREBronze Age Collapse:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify The Sea Peoples:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1. Eric Cline discusses the Late Bronze Age through the lens of the Uluburun shipwreck, which represents the era's globalized trade network. The ship's cargo, including copper from Cyprus and tin from Afghanistan, highlights the interconnectedness of civilizations like the Egyptians, Hittites, and Mycenaeans. Cline explains that the collapse around 1177 BC was not caused by a single event but a "perfect storm" of factors, including drought, famine, earthquakes, and the Sea Peoples' migrations. This catastrophic sequence occurred so rapidly that societies lacked the time to recover, leading to a systemic failure of the ancient world's trade routes. (1)

3. Cline examines the varying fates of Egypt and emerging Levantine groups after the collapse. Egypt is described as "merely coping," struggling with internal anarchy and a delayed reaction to regional droughts while retreating from its previous international prominence. Conversely, the power vacuum allowed smaller entities like the Israelites and Philistines to flourish. Cline discusses the archaeological debate regarding whether the Israelites were local highland dwellers who transformed or external migrants. He also identifies the Philistines as part of the Sea Peoples, noting recent DNA evidence from Ashkelon that confirms their mixed ancestry and Mediterranean origins. (3)

5. The conversation details the collapse of the Hittite Empire in central Anatolia. Despite once being equal to Egypt, the Hittites suffered from poor leadership and internal rot, exacerbated by plagues and famine. Their capital, Hattusa, was eventually burned, possibly by local enemies rather than the Sea Peoples. While the main empire disappeared, "rump states" survived in northern Syria, becoming the Neo-Hittites mentioned in the Bible. Additionally, Cline mentions recent computer modeling that suggests the simultaneous collapse of the Hittites and the port city of Ugarit was sufficient to bring down the entire global trade network. (5)

What if some of history's greatest civilizations didn't fall in spectacular wars… but stopped?Tonight on Juxtaposition, we explore four ancient mysteries in which entire systems of human organization faded, fractured, or vanished — leaving behind monuments, cities, and ruins… but with almost no explanation.We begin with the urban giants of the Indus Valley Civilization, whose meticulously planned cities suddenly lost cohesion after six centuries of stability.We travel back even further to Göbekli Tepe, where hunter-gatherers built massive stone temples thousands of years before agriculture — and then deliberately buried them.From there, we examine the mysterious maritime raiders known as the Sea Peoples, recorded in Egyptian reliefs during the reign of Ramesses III, whose sudden appearance coincides with the collapse of Bronze Age powers across the Mediterranean.Finally, we confront the larger puzzle historians still struggle to explain: the Late Bronze Age collapse, when interconnected kingdoms, trade networks, and writing systems disappeared within a generation.These civilizations built cities, monuments, and international systems that lasted centuries.Then something changed.Not all collapses come with conquering armies or burning cities. Sometimes the structures remain… but the system that gave them meaning dissolves.Tonight we explore the ruins — and the silence they left behind.

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Ramesses II reigned as Egypt's unchallenged champion for more than sixty years. But within decades the dynasty of Egypt's greatest pharaoh had fallen apart. Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Campbell Price to chart how the reign of Ramesses the Great descended into slow collapse. From monumental building projects that once proclaimed eternal power to the advent of instability to the looming threat of the Sea Peoples, discover how Egypt's New Kingdom began to fracture under the weight of its own success. This is the dramatic final chapter in the story of the House of Ramesses.MOREThe House of Ramesses II: Egypt's Greatest Pharaoh?Listen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Legend of Osiris: King of the DeadListen on AppleListen on Spotify Watch this episode on our YouTube channel: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who were the ‘Sea Peoples'? Was the Bronze Age Collapse caused by a single catastrophic event? How did the Egyptians try to adapt to the changing climate? From the scientific evidence hidden in ancient pollen to the first historical mention of "Israel" and the rise of the Philistines, this episode uncovers how a global systemic collapse redrew the map of the ancient world. William and Anita are joined by Professor Eric Cline, author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, and After 1177 B.C.: The Survival Of Civilizations, to explore how a series of catastrophes shattered the interconnected superpowers of the Pharaohs, Hittites, and Mycenaeans…  Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: empire@goalhanger.com Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editors: Bruno Di Castri and Jack Meek Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Henrique Agostinho joins us LIVE to explore cyclopean walls, megalithic architecture, polygonal stonework, and the mysteries of ancient construction. Lost technology, global anomalies, and the architecture that shouldn't exist. This Sunday we're joined by Henrique Agostinho, creator of the One-Eyed Giant Building Walls channel, for a deep dive into the world of cyclopean architecture, polygonal stonework, and the mysteries of megalithic construction across the globe. Henrique's research spans ancient sites in Peru, Greece, Italy, Japan, and beyond — places where polygonal walls appear and disappear with no clear origin, no known builders, and no modern explanation. These structures defy conventional archaeology and raise profound questions about lost technology, global contact, and the possibility of a forgotten civilisation. Areas to explore: The paradox of impossible stonework — how were these walls built, and by whom? The theory of a global megalithic blueprint — recurring patterns across continents The mystery of abandoned know-how — why was this construction method lost? What caused the Bronze Age Collapse and who are the enigmatic Sea Peoples? What Baalbek can tell us about our forgotten ancestors The 44th Parallel and how it shaped human history (Dragons vs Cyclopeans) The real purpose of the ‘High Places', from The Temple Mount to the Acropolis of Athens  If you're fascinated by ancient engineering, forbidden archaeology, or the idea that our history may be far older — and stranger — than we're told, this episode is for you.

In this episode, we dive deep into the mysterious people known as the Philistines — one of Israel's greatest and most persistent rivals. Where did they come from? Were they truly the crude warriors we often imagine, or was there more to their story? We'll uncover their origins, their connection to the Sea Peoples, and how they built one of the most advanced and artistic cultures along the Mediterranean coast. From iron weapons to fortified cities, their influence reshaped the ancient world — and forever changed Israel's history.   If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and follow The History of the Bible on your favorite podcast platform. Your ratings and reviews help others discover the show and support the creation of future episodes. If you'd like to support The History of the Bible, visit our Patreon Page. Follow us on Facebook for updates, discussions, and behind-the-scenes content. Your feedback is valuable to us! Share your thoughts and insights via our feedback form. Let us know how our podcast has impacted you or someone you know by filling out our impact form. If you have concerns about any information presented, please inform us via our correction form.   #Philistines #BibleHistory #AncientIsrael #OldTestament #BiblicalArchaeology #SeaPeoples #BiblePodcast #Archaeology #AncientWorld #Gath #Gaza #Ashdod #Ashkelon #Ekron #HebrewBible #HistoryOfTheBible #Canaan #BiblicalStudies #AncientNearEast #ArchaeologyPodcast   Episode's Sources https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-israel/plants-and-the-philistine-cult-at-gath/ https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/philistine-religion https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dagan https://biblearchaeology.org/research/judges-united-monarchy/3850-dagon-the-philistine-fish-god https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Beelzebub https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-philistines-ancient-records-archaeological-remains-and-biblical-traditions

Workers involved in tomb construction in the Valley of the Kings staged the earliest recorded strike in history on 14th November, 1157 B.C. Having not been paid their ration of food for 18 days, they set about disrupting temple life and rituals, to the shock of Pharaoh Ramses III's administration. The workers' struggle wasn't solely about wages; it reflected broader discontent, too, as they voiced concerns about alleged corruption, such as barley being replaced with dirt in payments. And the strike indicated a shift in the workers' perceptions, as they realised they couldn't rely solely on the divine authority of the Pharaoh to meet their basic needs. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly reveal how Ancient Egypt was financially decimated by the suppression of the ‘Sea Peoples'; explain how an offer of cake was (unsurprisingly) not enough to pacify the protests; and consider whether the workers' picket-line slogans needed a little workshopping…  Further Reading: • ‘When Was The First Strike In History?' (HistoryExtra, 2016): https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-egypt/when-first-strike-history/ • ‘Red Traces, Part 4: Strikers and Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt' (Counterfire, 2023): https://www.counterfire.org/article/red-traces-part-4-strikers-and-pharaohs-in-ancient-egypt/ • 'Rameses III Describes Invasion Of Sea Peoples' (Voices of the Past, 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01eyTLfFJqQ This episode first aired in 2023 Love the show? Support us!  Join 

Send us a text Ever heard of a graveyard where the coffins are shaped like humans—some lifelike, others downright bizarre? In this episode, we dig into the secrets of the Philistines at Beit Shean: a crossroads of kings, conquerors, and cultures. It's biblical drama, ancient mysteries, and archaeological surprises—buried, literally, in the dirt of the Holy Land. Support the show

We're obsessed with apocalypses, big and small. We fantasize about what the future might look like after the fall of society and fear the coming tribulation. Rome fretted about decline until its end. Stories of the Sea Peoples terrified the monarchs of the Late Bronze Age. During the 30 Years' War, Europeans imagined Armageddon had finally begun.But a funny thing happens after the collapse: things tend to get a little better for everyone.Luke Kemp is here to hold our hands through the end of the world as we know it. Kemp is a researcher at Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the author of the book Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse.Beauty in collapseMatthew's AI testThe Doctor Doom mask“Collapse was good for most people.”Sea People's mentionedWhy a Goliath and not a Leviathan?Down with Thomas HobbesFear of a mass panic driving collapse“Emergency powers have a very funny tendency to stick around”The problem with guns, germs, and steelThe Tree of EvilOn the purpose of human sacrificeDoctor Doom is the belle of the ballAre we ending on a high note?Buy Goliath's CurseCentre for the Study of Existential RiskThe rewards of ruinSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we dive deep into the mysterious people known as the Philistines — one of Israel's greatest and most persistent rivals. Where did they come from? Were they truly the crude warriors we often imagine, or was there more to their story? We'll uncover their origins, their connection to the Sea Peoples, and how they built one of the most advanced and artistic cultures along the Mediterranean coast. From iron weapons to fortified cities, their influence reshaped the ancient world — and forever changed Israel's history.   If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and follow The History of the Bible on your favorite podcast platform. Your ratings and reviews help others discover the show and support the creation of future episodes. If you'd like to support The History of the Bible, visit our Patreon Page. Follow us on Facebook for updates, discussions, and behind-the-scenes content. Your feedback is valuable to us! Share your thoughts and insights via our feedback form. Let us know how our podcast has impacted you or someone you know by filling out our impact form. If you have concerns about any information presented, please inform us via our correction form. Highlights The Origin of the Philistines The Connection to the Sea Peoples Iron Weapons and the Fall of the Bronze Age The Five Cities of Philistia Art, Architecture, and Aegean Influence #Philistines #BibleHistory #AncientIsrael #OldTestament #BiblicalArchaeology #SeaPeoples #BiblePodcast #Archaeology #AncientWorld #Gath #Gaza #Ashdod #Ashkelon #Ekron #HebrewBible #HistoryOfTheBible #Canaan #BiblicalStudies #AncientNearEast #ArchaeologyPodcast   Episode's Sources https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Philistine https://armstronginstitute.org/30-uncovering-the-bibles-buried-civilizations-the-philistines https://biblehub.com/exodus/13-17.htm https://www.worldhistory.org/Sea_Peoples/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-dna-sheds-new-light-biblical-philistines-180972561/ https://thewitness.org/who-were-the-philistines/ https://armstronginstitute.org/1015-israels-philistine-foes  

On this episode we pull a bit of a Time Travelling Dad and jump way back thousands of years to learn the stories of some Wakanda’s famous War Dogs. From the Sea Peoples to the 20th century each episode takes a slice of history and explores through the eyes of a Wakandan agent out to keep the secret and power of vibranium from falling into the wrong hands. Dan Moren, John Moltz and Guy English.

On this episode we pull a bit of a Time Travelling Dad and jump way back thousands of years to learn the stories of some Wakanda’s famous War Dogs. From the Sea Peoples to the 20th century each episode takes a slice of history and explores through the eyes of a Wakandan agent out to keep the secret and power of vibranium from falling into the wrong hands. Dan Moren, John Moltz and Guy English.

Egypt's Retreat and the Emergence of New Kingdoms in the Early Iron Age AUTHOR NAME: Eric Cline BOOK TITLE: 1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed; After 1177 BC, The Survival of Civilizations Following the collapse, Egypt, despite surviving, merely coped and retreated from the international stage, entering the chaotic Third Intermediate Period. The resulting power vacuum allowed the emergence of smaller kingdoms like Israel, Judah, and Moab. Archaeology uses Old Testament texts as guideposts for the First Millennium BC. The Philistines are identified as the Sea Peoples group called the Peleset, evidenced by DNA extracted from Ashkelon burials.

: 1. Professor Eric Cline's books, 1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed and After 1177 BC, The Survival of Civilizations, highlight Late Bronze Age globalization through the Uluburun shipwreck (c. 1300 BC), revealing diverse cargo like copper from Cyprus and tin from Afghanistan . The 1177 BC collapse resulted from a "perfect storm" of drought, famine, Sea Peoples, disease, and earthquakes. New computer modeling suggests the simultaneous fall of the Hittites and Ugarit was  . . . . . .

2/8. Professor Eric Cline's work explains that the 1177 BC collapse resulted from a "perfect storm" of drought, famine, Sea Peoples (invaders/migrants), disease, and earthquakes. New computer modeling, detailed in his research, concluded that the simultaneous fall of the Hittites and the port city of Ugarit was critical and sufficient to bring down the entire globalized network. Ugarit, a key trading nexus, faced an earthquake, drought, famine, and an unnamed invader, making it a "poster child" for the collapse.

5/8. As discussed by Professor Eric Cline, the Philistines are definitively identified as part of the Sea Peoples, likely the "Pleset" mentioned by the Egyptians. They settled in five key cities, including Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Gaza. Archaeological and recent DNA evidence from children in Ashkelon shows a mix of local Canaanite and "other" (possibly Aegean/Sardinian/Spanish) ancestry, indicating their descendants were from the original Sea Peoples, confirming their identity and origins. 1ST CE, NAPLES

Tristan Hughes sits down with Professor Eric Cline to explore the enigmatic Sea Peoples, often blamed for the catastrophic Bronze Age collapse over 3,000 years ago.Together they explore surviving sources from ancient Egypt to find out who the Sea Peoples were, and how they swept into Egypt. They discuss the diverse groups that comprised these invaders, and question whether they were truly the primary cause of this ancient civilisation's downfall.From revelations from the latest archaeological evidence, DNA findings from Tel Dor and other sites, Tristan and Eric unlock one of ancient history's greatest puzzles.MOREThe Bronze Age CollapseRameses the GreatPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.LIVE SHOW: Buy tickets for The Ancients at the London Podcast Festival here: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients-2/Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Founders of SeaPeople, Logan and Caroline Rowell take us through the motivation behind creating an all-encompassing app for cruiser connectivity. It's basically a "Welcome to 2025" to the next generation of cruisers. Much of offshore communications are quite frankly, decades behind tech. SeaPeople is embracing techs ability to create community in the most remote corners of the earth. In this engaging conversation, we discuss the fine balancing act of staying connected versus unplugging, things we miss about the dinosaur days of sailing and things we love about instant access to data, like-minds and community. Thanks for listening and go check out SeaPeople!  -- Support the podcast & become a member of The Quarterdeck, where Andy, August & Mia dive deep on the art of seam'nship. Nerd out with us on our members-only forum and talk boats, gear, safety-at-sea, meet like-minded sailors, find crew, and more. Check it out on quarterdeck.59-north.com. See you there! -- This episode is sponsored by Orca. Visit getorca.com to modernize your onboard navigation with the Orca Display and Orca Core. We've got them on SPICA & ISBJØRN and so far are LOVING the experience of proper tablet navigation, waterproof wireless charging, logged passages and slick charts and instruments. 

PREVIEW: BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE MEDITERRANEAN BASIN: Author Eric Cline, "After 1177 BC," underlines the unknown of the invaders called Sea Peoples. More to come. SEPTEMBER 1941

Heart of Darkness at Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham. Far from the Nile Valley, on Egypt's northern coastline, Ramessid soldiers and civilians constructed a significant fortress to control the maritime roads. This remote garrison faced off against Libyan tribes coming from the far west (e.g. the Meshwesh of Cyrenaica), traded with Mediterranean merchants, possibly dealt with marauding pirates and Sea Peoples, and built a life for themselves on the western frontier. Alas, it wasn't all beaches and bonhomie, as soldiers like Nebra, the commander, would learn… Prof. Steven Snape is the author of many books and articles including The Complete Cities of Ancient Egypt (2014); Ancient Egyptian Tombs: The Culture of Life and Death (2011); Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham I: The Temple and the Chapels (with Penny Wilson, 2007); Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham II: The Monuments of Neb-Re (with Glenn Godenho, forthcoming). Learn more about excavations and discoveries at this site in a free lecture, “ Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham and the Ramesside Defence System on the Maryut Coast,” on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ1QelBxYiU& Steven Snape papers and publications at Academia.edu https://liverpool.academia.edu/StevenSnape Steven Snape at The University of Liverpool: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/steven-snape; Research Profile https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/steven-snape/research Prof. Snape is currently reading The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin (1983). Wikipedia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Delta raiders. Decades before their famous migrations, the "Sea Peoples" were already active and visible in the eastern Mediterranean; and Ramesses II had his own dealings with these groups. In year 2 of his reign, Ramesses II (Usir-Ma'at-Ra) dealt with a coastal raid by the Sherden, who came from the "islands in the midst" of the sea (which the Egyptians called the "Great Green"). The battle, and its aftermath, is referenced in several of Ramesses' inscriptions. We explore this curious first chapter in the Sea Peoples' story... Music: Michael Levy "Odysseus and the Sirens” www.ancientlyre.com Website: www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com Support the show via Patreon www.patreon.com/egyptpodcast Make a one-time donation via PayPal payments https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/BHC6MGDBC6SXU We have merch! Browse our designs at Dashery by TeePublic https://egyptpodcast.dashery.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"PREVIEW: Conversation with Eric Cline, author of 'After 1177 BC,' regarding the mysterious Sea Peoples who invaded and undermined the order of seven collaborating cultures in the Bronze Age. More later." 1715 DEATH OF PATROCLUS

The new bestselling book “The Dragon's Prophecy” opens up an entire other realm of the unseen forces determining the events of our times. Cahn uncovers mysteries never before revealed including the return of the Sea Peoples, the Dark Resurrection, the Black Sabbath, the Prince of Persia, the Countdown of Days and much more, and how it all converges into “End of Days” and end-time prophecy and much more.Jonathan's Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@jonathancahn.officialTo sow into this stream Monthly/ONE time/ https://bit.ly/2NRIBcM PAYPAL https://shorturl.at/eJY57www.Isaiahsaldivar.comwww.Instagram.com/Isaiahsaldivarwww.Facebook.com/Isaiahsaldivarwww.youtube.com/IsaiahsaldivarOrder My New Book, "How To Cast Out Demons," Here! https://a.co/d/87NYEfcTo sow www.Isaiahsaldivar.com/partner