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33 Plays1 year ago
Josh regales M with the story of history's first historian, auto-biographer, and rhetorician, the Priestess Enheduanna...
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Transcript
Introduction to 2023 and Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dintus.
00:00:16
Speaker
Happy New Year! It is the first podcaster's guide to the conspiracy for 2023. I am your host, Josh Addison. They are your other host, Dr. M. R. Xtenteth. I need to come up with a new gimmick to introduce you this year. I suddenly realise I don't have one of those either. It's 2023. It's 2023. And we have no intro, you have no gimmick.
Recording Separately Due to Travel and COVID
00:00:36
Speaker
I'm recording from a completely different location in the world than I was previously. I mean, the world has gone topsy-turvy.
00:00:44
Speaker
A hundred percent topsy-turvy. Yes. Now, I guess the most important development is that Em and I are now actually in the same country. But not in the same room. Not in the same room, Josh. The reason why we're not in the same room today, even though we could technically have done that, is that I'm actually going overseas in just under a week's time. And given that we're... Covid's doing a bit of a comeback tour here in New Zealand, a bit of a victory lap.
00:01:12
Speaker
I've decided I should probably not leave my house at all unless I absolutely have to before I leave, just in case I contract some trip-ruining bug before I take off. And I second this because I recently returned to Auckland in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and probably got COVID en route whilst travelling because it doesn't matter whether you're insidious about masking.
00:01:37
Speaker
There are points in time where people need to check your ID and they require you to take your mask off and then they breathe in your face for five minutes as they verify your details. And it's just so easy for Covid to sneak through. It could be in the room with you right now, Josh. Well, it could be in the room with you right now.
00:01:55
Speaker
Yes, I mean, I'm taking all precautions now, but then I'm about to go and sit in an enclosed space with a bunch of strangers for 13 odd hours while I travel to another part of the world. So who knows?
Josh's Return to Auckland for Family
00:02:05
Speaker
We'll see. It'll all be good fun. I've returned back to Auckland because my mother has lymphona and I felt I should be in the country to help her deal with that.
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, so the plan is still that you'll be returning to Zhuhai at some stage? At some point in the first third half of this year, but we're waiting to see what kind of treatment plan my mother is going to have for her lymphona.
00:02:33
Speaker
and how long they're going to wait before they might declare some kind of remission. So we're playing it by ear at this stage. Yes, but for the next two weeks, I won't be in a position to record episodes. I don't know if the good doctor has something up their sleeve.
00:02:50
Speaker
for content to fill in, but who knows. But then once I am back, then basically we have no excuse for not going back to how we did things quite some time ago, actually recording in the same place at the same time. We can see the glistening sweat of our brows and Auckland summer heat as you reach out and touch them.
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, it'll be grand. I must say the Auckland humidity is doing things to your hair at the moment. It does things to mine as well, but I keep it tight. Yeah, also Auckland wind. I went out with our friends earlier today and just say a sea breeze and my hair do not go together well.
Cyclone Impact in New Zealand
00:03:33
Speaker
Now, yes, for those of you who don't live in New Zealand and haven't been paying much attention, New Zealand has just been brushed by ex-tropical cyclone hail, which flooded a decent part of the Coromandel Peninsula, as I understand it. And there's been a bit of death and destruction. Didn't, well, actually not death as far as I'm aware, but definitely destruction. Here in Auckland, we've had a bit of rain, but it hasn't been as torrential as it's been in other parts of the country. So that's nice.
00:03:58
Speaker
seems to be on its way out. But that's enough, I think. Enough, enough, enough pleasantries, enough updates and what have you. We do actually have an episode that we've prepared, sort of. I'd say you've prepared this, truth be told, because you found a rather interesting little topic, which isn't
00:04:18
Speaker
strictly conspiratorial although is it? Yes, I mean this is the sort of topic that I think at another time we probably just make a bonus episode for our patrons because it's a little more slight than some of the things we've talked about and it's another one of these ones that sort of involves kind of the arts and classics a little bit and the ones of those then in that area that we've done before
00:04:43
Speaker
tend to be sort of marginal as to whether or not they actually count as a conspiracy, but also tend to be more interesting than a lot of the stuff, and generally less depressing than the depressing stuff, so I say we just get on with it.
Who is Enheduana?
00:04:56
Speaker
Yeah, let's delve into history and sexism, a pairing that had been with us for quite some time.
00:05:07
Speaker
So yes, this week's topic was brought to me by a friend of the show, my wife. Your wife? Who pointed to me to an article in The New Yorker from a few weeks ago, end of last year. And the topic of it is Enheduana. Enheduana was the
00:05:25
Speaker
In Hidawana, what a wonderful phrase. In Hidawana, it ain't no passing phase. It means being a race from history for the rest of your days. It's a legacy free philosophy at Hidawana. Basically, yes. I mean, that's possibly a little, a little much. Now, we both did ancient history at university.
00:05:46
Speaker
And an insert joke here, we did ancient history back in the ancient past. We are old. We are so old. I'm 47 years old today. That's the other one. Of course, this will go out tomorrow. Well, exactly. But I'm getting teased. I'll be 47 when you hear it.
00:06:07
Speaker
which will be today for the people listening to it, if they listen to it on the day it gets released. Of course, if they're listening to it months afterwards, or even years afterwards, suddenly it gets very... Makes no sense. Anyway. Yes. Yes. Happy birthday, Joshua. Happy birthday. And you are now 117, I think? Something like that, yeah. And a pretty much equal amount of time ago, we both did ancient history. Now, I only did stage one Mesopotamia Near Eastern history.
00:06:37
Speaker
with Tony Salinger? Uh, no, I did it with Shirley Timm. Oh, yeah, I think they took, actually maybe only took stage two, maybe she only did stage one. Anyway, the point is, I do not recall the name in heduana from my stage one in Near Eastern history, I do recall the name Sargon though. King Sargon of Akkad, of the Hadean Empire. And in heduana was his daughter.
00:07:03
Speaker
is the point. So this was around the end of the 20th, beginning of the 23rd centuries BC. So we're talking over 400 years ago, in fact, getting close to 4,500 years ago, I think. The point, the significance of Enheduana, she was, I assume the term princess probably didn't actually exist back then, but she was daughter of the king.
00:07:28
Speaker
She was the priestess of the city-state of Ur in what is now Iraq, and she may well be the first named author currently known to human history. Now, I do remember from my stage one near Eastern history back in the mists of time,
00:07:46
Speaker
We have a bunch of, the oldest writing that's still preserved today, I believe, is Cuneiform writing on clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. Is it the one complaining about the cost of olives or dates or something that's like the earliest one we ever have? There's one famous one.
00:08:08
Speaker
Literally a shopping list, but yes, most of the early writing we have, which we thought was going to be really exciting historical texts or legal texts, turn out to be rather milk toast observations by someone who just really had to get down their complaints on a clay tablet before closing time.
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah, so they tended to be these just sort of anonymous documents that meant something at the time, but were never actually intended to be preserved for thousands of years, even though it turns out they were. The first time we have a piece of written work that has an identified author is this is the works of Enheduana.
00:08:46
Speaker
allegedly because as we can see in this discussion there's quite a bit of debate as to whether she is the author and as alluded to some of the resistance to the claim she is the author may just be sexism and not just ancient sexism contemporary sexism
00:09:07
Speaker
So I mean, yes, there is the claim that she is quite possibly the first known named author in human history, but she certainly doesn't have the profile of numerous other early authors, even ones from, you know, sort of a couple of thousand years later, like your ancient Greeks and what have you.
00:09:28
Speaker
Now she, as I said, she was the priestess of the moon god Nana in the city-state of Ur. Now Sargon, as you said, from Akkad, the Akkadian Empire, Akkad was in the north of
00:09:42
Speaker
that region of Mesopotamia. Ur was down in the south. It was quite distant. And so the fact that Sargon's daughter had this high position there suggests it wasn't just a religious posting. It was kind of a political one. I don't know if she was
00:09:59
Speaker
officially like the ruler of the city of Ur, but she definitely had a very high influential position there, being the daughter of the king. Now, the reason why we think she is history's first named author is that we've uncovered
00:10:16
Speaker
Archaeologists uncovered in the the ruins of Ur, several clay tablets, clay seals, some of which are carved with images of her and some of which are carved with various sort of hymns and poems, at least two of which identify her by name and are written in the first person.
00:10:38
Speaker
So the main one people talk about is a long, a narrative poem called The Exaltation of Inanna. It's a poem about a period in Inheduana's life. It's written in the first person. It says right near the start, I took up my place in the sanctuary dwelling, I was high priestess, I, Inheduana. So first person identifies themselves by this name.
00:10:58
Speaker
Now, the poem concerns a bit of a tumultuous time in her life. After Sargon died, there was a bit of sort of factional violence as his various sons and younger relatives warred amongst themselves for control of the region. And of course, that sort of uncertainty there meant you get other rebellions and unpleasantness around the place. So apparently after she died,
00:11:21
Speaker
After he died, she got booted out of the temple into a position by a rebellious general called Lugalane.
00:11:31
Speaker
She talks about being forced out and forced to sort of wander in the wilderness. The lines are translated as, he has turned that temple into a house of ill repute, forcing his way in as if he were an equal. He dared approach me in his lust. Then later says, he made me walk a land of thorns. He took away the noble diadem of my holy office. He gave me a dagger. This is just right for you, he said.
00:11:56
Speaker
Now, according to the stuff I was reading, it loses a bit in translation and that the kind of language it's used suggests some sort of, some sexual component to it, as if there was a sort of an element of sexual violence in there as well. And then giving her a dagger is suggesting that he thinks you should go off and kill yourself because he's booted her out.
00:12:23
Speaker
Now, as well as being possibly the world's first known author, she does appear to also be the world's first autobiography, because she's writing about her own life in the first person. And the world's first recorded rhetorician as well, we tend to think of the ancient Greeks when it comes to
00:12:41
Speaker
sort of the early examples of rhetoric, but in this poem she talks about how a large part of her position was sweet-talking people, basically, was convincing others to do her way. Unfortunately, after losing her position, being booted out by this general, she tries to use her renowned rhetorical ability to sort of gather support for herself and does not have any luck.
00:13:08
Speaker
in this particular instance. She says, my once honeyed mouth has now become froth, my power to please hearts is turned to dust. So in this situation, she then turns to the goddess Inanna. And so this whole poem, the exaltation of Inanna, is basically her saying, she prays to Inanna, she says she will bring glory to Inanna if
00:13:28
Speaker
the goddess helps her out of her current situation. And so this poem, this exaltation of Anana, sort of is the work that she promised, bringing glory to the goddess in return for favor, I guess. She refers to the process of writing this work, gives an analogy with childbirth at one point saying,
00:13:50
Speaker
This fills me, this overflows from me, exalted lady, as I give birth for you. What I confided to you the dark of night, a singer shall perform for you in the bright of day.
00:14:00
Speaker
Now, obviously, from the fact that she prayed to Inanna for success, saying she'd write an exaltation to her if she helped out, and she ended up writing the exaltation, would suggest to you that things ended up... Yeah, everything came up in Hidwana. Her nephew, apparently, eventually succeeded Sargon, that various infighting between sons and nephews and what have you.
00:14:26
Speaker
Sort of itself, Ateneduana's nephew ended up taking the throne, restoring a bit of order, put down the rebellion in Ur, and restored Ateneduana to her former position. And so she credits Inanna with her good fortune and writes this whole big poem. So there's a lot of significance to this document.
00:14:43
Speaker
And it's not the only one. There is another one titled A Him to Inanna, which mentions in Hidwana by name. And then there are a bunch of other religious poems, which people who've studied these things all seem to have the same styles, the same patterns, as though they're all from the same author. So there are, I think, 42 religious poems altogether.
00:15:07
Speaker
which an auspicious number 42 it really is but in this particular case it's it's even more auspicious because once again it um mentions her by name that this whole whole sort of cycle there's a post script on one of them that apparently says the compiler of the tablet is in heduana my king something has been created that no one had ever created before because i said this seems to be quite a significant collection of documents and yet
00:15:35
Speaker
Like I say, I remember a few important names from my cursory studies in ancient Mesopotamian history. Cursory-Tertiary level studies in ancient Mesopotamian history, but still, neither cursory and tertiary.
00:15:54
Speaker
I don't remember hearing this name. No, it's not a name I recall from my time in the trenches of ancient history and classics. So why do we think that might be? Well, indeed. So the city of Ur was, yeah, obviously, we're talking about events from over 4000 years ago and the
00:16:15
Speaker
Akodi and other Mesopotamian civilizations did not last that long. The city of Ur eventually was abandoned and buried until it was discovered and excavated in the 1850s.
Archaeological Findings at Ur
00:16:28
Speaker
So the first excavations were end of the 19th century. In the early 20th century, from 1922 to 1934, a bunch of excavations of Ur were funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.
00:16:42
Speaker
led by the archaeologist Sir Charles Leonard Woolley spectacularly old timey name there so he oversaw these excavations and then wrote about them afterwards in his work Ur of the Chaldees a record of seven years of excavation and he goes over all the stuff
00:16:57
Speaker
they found. According to the Bible, Ur is the home of Abraham and various other kings, so he was interested in it from a sort of biblical perspective. And they unearthed all sorts of stuff, tombs of kings and queens, all manner of jewelry, weapons, pottery, treasures, and so on and so forth, and of course documents, written records of the time. So they found a stone disk
00:17:26
Speaker
which is known to be a depiction of Vineduana. They found objects naming her. They found cylinder seals belonging to her servants, which named her, presumably, as the person they were servants of. But the way this was all characterized had quite a, how would you call it, quite a 1930s sort of a spin to it, I suppose.
00:17:51
Speaker
Yes, so they end this a record of seven years of excavation. It's these...
00:17:58
Speaker
Artifacts are mentioned, but she isn't mentioned. She's simply referred to as a daughter of Sargon. So it's one of those things of, oh yes, we've got a named woman here. Ah, but who's her father? We should really refer to her father. Or if she was married, we'd refer to her husband. We'd refer to her, her father or husband.
00:18:21
Speaker
Yeah, so they, he talks about now, I should say her, this body of work that's attributed to her was sort of, you know, a significant piece of writing of the time to the extent that was actually used to train scribes. So I believe the documents that
00:18:41
Speaker
survive to this day, not the original ones she would have written, assuming she was the actual author. Most of what we have are copies, and they were used for centuries from the looks of things, as just sort of, you know, a standard bit of writing that scribes were trained to copy out when they were learning to write, basically learning to scribe
00:19:05
Speaker
Which is probably true of most documents we have from the ancient world as well. They're not the originals, they are the copies that were made because the documents were considered important enough that copies would continually be made for all time.
00:19:20
Speaker
So they had the stock. There were there was a bunch of stuff like they they found I believe one of the images showed a woman sitting down like with the clay tablet as though she were writing. And the writing about the time was it was kind of like, huh, wonder, wonder what's going on here? What would a woman be doing with a writing tablet? That's a little odd, I guess. I guess I guess we'll never know.
00:19:50
Speaker
as he reminds me of a of a puzzle that Egyptologists still in some respects refuse to acknowledge and that there are a whole bunch of funereal statues and the funeral statues are often of a husband and wife sitting on a common chair holding hands
00:20:10
Speaker
and when you find a husband and wife pairing they go oh these two were a devoted couple who were in love and this is their funerals statue but every so often you find the same statue and it's a man in a man holding hands or a woman and a woman holding hands and they go oh
00:20:29
Speaker
aren't these people such good friends? Such an unusual statue, it's normally for a married couple, but it's a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, so obviously they can't be married, they were just really really good friends, because no one's willing to go,
00:20:47
Speaker
Maybe that was a recognised relationship. Yeah, so there's a lot of baggage, I guess, along with the reporting of this stuff. Now, I don't actually know... When was the Rosetta Stone found?
00:21:06
Speaker
completely different system of writing late. So late 19th century thing, or was it early 20th century? A similar time. So we sort of had that and I'm assuming we we had some understanding of sort of Sumerian cuneiform styles of writing.
00:21:24
Speaker
at the time from other excavations, I think. It's not like these tablets that were unearthed in these particular excavations were a completely unknown language, but nevertheless it did still take a while for them all to be translated.
00:21:41
Speaker
and the translations compiled. And it wasn't really until the 1960s, indeed 1968, that the first translation of these writings of Inheduana appeared in English.
00:21:54
Speaker
Now, if you happen to be a second-wave feminist, the name in Hidwala might be more familiar to you. Apparently, in the 60s and 70s, this book was published, and academics started talking about it, and also people doing women's studies or whatever it was called at the time, academics of a feminist bent.
00:22:18
Speaker
heard about this and so she was held up as a as a bit of a figure at the time as you know look at this here's this woman from 4000 years ago who appeared to be more or less in charge of a city and you know produced this massive body of work that's kind of significant but but but but but never really seemed to get any further than that and perhaps this leads us into the controversy is perhaps not the right word disagreement I suppose
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah, the historians who think that she did exist, and is the author, and the historians go, oh no no no, it's probably an attributed title, and we don't really know who wrote it, but it was probably a man.
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, so there's a lot of question around the authorship of Eniduana's poems. Now, there's no denying that there are at least some of them. I don't know actually if this is true of all of them, but at least some of them are written in first person. And we do have that one where the author of the poem refers to themselves as I, Eniduana.
00:23:23
Speaker
and refers to themselves as a priestess. So some people have suggested, well, there are 42 of them. Maybe they're not all written, you know, they're part of a collection, but maybe they weren't all written by the same person. Other people have said, well, they just seem to have the same sort of writing style, so quite possibly they are. But some people have pointed out that at the time, some royals did get scribes to come
00:23:49
Speaker
composed texts for them. So some people have said, well, we don't know. It could have been that this priest has said, hey, it's the ancient Mesopotamian equivalent of chat GPT. You said, hey, write a bunch of stories about me as though in first person as though it was me writing them. And as I said before, we don't have the original tablets. We only have the copies made by the scribes.
00:24:14
Speaker
And some of these copies mention places and use words that didn't exist at the time she would have been around. Now, of course, that's probably quite easily explained by the fact that this was a standard piece of writing.
00:24:32
Speaker
going down through the ages for people to be trained on, so it's entirely possible that people made mistakes or people decided, ah, maybe I'll update this with a bit more contemporary vocabulary. Yeah, you can imagine a situation where a city-state changes name and you're rewriting the hymn of Inanna and going, well,
00:24:52
Speaker
modern readers won't know what that city state is so we'll just replace the old name with the new name and you might have a situation where you know
00:25:04
Speaker
language seems a little bit old-fashioned, we don't refer to hods by that term anymore, there's a more modern one, so maybe we'll just change the references and make it seem a bit more hip and groovy. Now other people have suggested that in Hidwana might not be an individual's name, that it might be a position perhaps, in certainly in in sort of Sumerian
00:25:30
Speaker
is a word that's a position, it means lord or priest or something like that, and you see it in words like, it was Enki, was the name of a god, or Enlil, there are various Enzu, how various gods have names that start with En.
00:25:47
Speaker
So some people have put forward the argument that perhaps it's more like a position in Hidwana is more like the position of high priestess, which could have been multiple people over a longer time period. And so therefore, maybe these documents are actually all sort of just attributed to the position by various people over time or something. But
00:26:14
Speaker
Other people say, like, this is all just speculation. This is, well, yeah, I mean, you could, you know, we're 4,000 years removed from it. There are a hell of a lot of what-ifs you could put in there, but we don't really have reason apart from hypotheticals to doubt it. And some people have sort of said, you know, why, if she didn't really write it and people were just sort of writing it as though it were her, why 500 years later,
00:26:45
Speaker
Why would they have just picked this person who happened to hold the position of High Priestess of Ur 500 years ago and be attributing this person as the author of the things that they're writing when they're writing it? It doesn't make a lot of sense.
00:27:01
Speaker
unless she really was the author, and this is the knowledge that's been passed down over time. Certainly people have pointed to those passages I mentioned previously where they sort of bring up the idea of sexual violence against a woman, talk about, use the metaphor of childbirth, certainly makes it sound that at the very least it does appear to have been written
00:27:22
Speaker
by a woman, or certainly from the perspective of a woman. And I guess the question that comes up sort of in the stuff in this article that I was reading about, the main sort of question is, would we even be having this debate if it was a man? Yeah, yeah. If it were attributed to the high priest, and I don't know what the male form of the name in Hejuana would be. Let's say it's in Head Harry.
00:27:48
Speaker
If it had been attributed to an Enhead Harry, people would go, oh yes, you know, famous writer, probably the first historian, probably the first autobiographer, definitely the first repetition, yes. Enhead Harry, great figure in history. But the fact is attributed to a woman, and due to the time period that these discoveries were made,
00:28:13
Speaker
have to bring in the possibility that people are dismissing her role in history just due to systemic sexism in our society.
Historical Sexism and Recognition of Women
00:28:21
Speaker
And this is one of these kind of frustrating things that comes up a lot in talking about ancient history and talking about the way that cultures which are not Western cultures may have operated. Because
00:28:35
Speaker
particularly in the late 19th and early 20th century and unfortunately still up to this present day but hopefully not to the same extent, people assumed that cultures in the past resembled cultures today and we live in a highly stratified
00:28:55
Speaker
highly sexist society, and it was just assumed that that must have been true in a card as well, at which point the notion a woman could be an author, well that's a fairly modern conceit, I mean really, that stuff only became acceptable in the middle of the 19th century, and even then
00:29:16
Speaker
Even then we thought those women should be doing proper work like scouring ovens and making dishes of fried meats for their menfolk. So the idea of a woman 4,000 years ago was writing history. Makes no sense. Makes no sense to my feeble male brain. And unfortunately, that kind of assumption that cultures must resemble how cultures work now
00:29:43
Speaker
has permeated so much anthropology and early sociology to the point where we actually have a big problem when looking at historical works, particularly from the early 20th century, and going the assumptions they bring to the table.
00:30:04
Speaker
are very questionable. And it's, I mean, it's a particular problem for the anthropology of the Pacific because there's a certain kind of racist who goes, oh, look, we should be referring to the works of people like Elston Best and early anthropologists come sociologists from the early 20th century because they were closer in time to the kind of point of contact with Pacific people. And so they must have a much better idea
00:30:34
Speaker
of their history because they were talking to those folk at the point or just after the point of colonization so their works must be much more accurate than the revisionist histories we got in the 1950s and onwards but once again
00:30:50
Speaker
There's that spectre of, yeah, but what assumptions were these people bringing to the table when they were writing those works? There's a reason why we have revisionist histories in the middle of the 20th century, because it took us almost 4,000 years to go, oh,
00:31:10
Speaker
people write history with ideological biases, and sometimes they don't front them. And as we've said in the past when we've talked about similar things, it's a bit of a stretch to call this a conspiracy, but it has things in common, I guess. It may be sort of unconscious actions, unconscious biases, but it still does cause people to act as a group.
00:31:38
Speaker
to further a particular paradigm, a particular mindset. Referring back to the original, the New Yorker article that I first read this in, the reason the article was written is that if you happen to be listening to this from New York, there is apparently an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York called She Who Wrote in Hidwana and the Woman of Mesopotamia.
00:32:03
Speaker
And they talk, the article talks to Sydney Babcock, the curator of the show, who, among other things, talks about, I said before, they have an image of a woman, sorry, so it's not an image, an actual statue of a woman with a tablet in her lap. Now, as she says,
00:32:24
Speaker
as she puts it, if this was a man with a tablet in his lap, there'd be 20 articles about it. You'd have all sorts of academic commentary on, oh, look at this man. What do you think he was writing? What could have his position of being? What does this say about the literacy and so on? And yet the reaction to it at the time seemed to be pretty much, huh.
00:32:45
Speaker
It's a bit weird. One with a tablet. One with what she's up to. Anyway. I mean, is she holding it upside down? I mean, it's a really, really tiny engraving, but I'm fairly sure she's holding it upside down. Would be the kind of reaction people would have. The German scholar Otto Weber, when the statue was first discovered, said of it, our specimen carries a tablet on her knees. Its meaning is not clear to me. That's basically it.
00:33:10
Speaker
Maybe, maybe they thought they were trying to cover baking tray. Oh no, it's not a tablet, it's obviously a baking tray. So yes, an interesting figure, and possibly one who deserves to be a little better known. Indeed.
Bonus Content for Patrons
00:33:24
Speaker
So that, perhaps, perhaps, if we were really canny about our self-promotion, we could at this point say, now if you liked
00:33:33
Speaker
this sort of this the topic of this episode and found this subject matter kind of interesting. You might be interested to know that this sort of stuff has formed the basis of some of our patron bonus episodes that we do specifically for our patrons as a bonus. And a bonus indeed.
00:33:50
Speaker
And that if you wanted to hear and have access to our previous patron bonus episode, some of which contain stuff that's a little bit like this, you can sign up to be a patron for us at patreon.com. Just go there and search for the podcasters guide to the conspiracy and you'll find it. And then that, of course, gives us a natural segue into this week's patron bonus episode. What do we have this week?
00:34:13
Speaker
Well, Joshua, this week in our discussion we have a little bit of Trump news and some news from the Vatican. News from the Vatican? What dispatch from the Vatican?
00:34:25
Speaker
It's a dispatch from 1983. And yet something that resonates to this very day. But perhaps we should say no more. Perhaps if you want to know more, you should be one of our patrons. And if you are one of our patrons, well, I mean, as we've said in this podcast previously, that's scientific proof that you're actually the best of human beings, the wisest to the sweetest smelling, the best at table tennis.
00:34:50
Speaker
You know how many, many moons ago when we refreshed the branding for the podcast and we actually considered doing things like t-shirts and mugs with our branding associated with it, we should make little badges for our patrons. We are the shiniest people, something of the best people.
00:35:09
Speaker
of that particular thing. We should investigate. We should add it to the list of things we're definitely going to do, such as using merchandise. Yes, yes. But that's something for the future. For the distant future, for the immediate future, we're going to go off and record a bonus episode. And the slightly less distant, slightly more distant future, I'm going to swan off overseas for a couple of weeks. And who knows what will happen then.
00:35:35
Speaker
And then I'm going to come back and then we're going to start making more episodes as per usual. As per old usual. As per old usual. Yes, the new normal will be the old normal. But until the not future at all in the immediate present, I think we're done with this episode. I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out that it's a somewhat slight episode.
00:35:58
Speaker
But it's the first one of the year. We're just easing back into things. It's just, you know, getting our groove back. Something like that.
00:36:09
Speaker
Now, as you know, we've got conspiracy theory masterpiece theater episodes to come. We've got back to the conspiracy episodes to come. There'll be a lot of classic content. So much. So if we want to pepper that content with the occasional conspiracy adjacent story, I think our audience is there for us. In fact, if it's a patron or even just a normal listener,
00:36:36
Speaker
You know, not as shiny as Patreon, but still a perfectly normal person. Our listeners are perfectly normal people. No one ever says our listeners are weird or strange. Everybody recognises it. If they do, they listen to the podcast.
00:36:52
Speaker
yeah conspiracy you are a perfectly normal person if you've liked this perfectly normal dive into a perfectly normal bit of ancient history and you want us to do more of these conspiracy adjacent episodes let us know now if you want to let us know via twitter you'll have to do it to josh because i've deactivated my account i've left i've left twitter done no more elon musk twitter for me no i'm on the
00:37:21
Speaker
slightly more boring mastodon experience at the moment, but I'm not even really there. I think I might be over social media. Disengaging entirely.
Social Media Engagement
00:37:31
Speaker
Whereas I'm just throwing myself into everything. I've got a mastodon, I've got a hive account, I've got a post account. Anytime someone said, oh, look, this thing might be the new Twitter, I've just jumped onto it. It's turned out to not be true. But who knows? It's sort of I've got a whole lot of just in case accounts.
00:37:49
Speaker
so that if Twitter does indeed go off a cliff and something else genuinely becomes its replacement, although I notice even Parler, like even Twitter, but specifically aimed at a specific section of society, has just laid off a whole bunch of people and doesn't seem to be doing very well. So it seems like being a competitor to Twitter is just bad for your health.
00:38:14
Speaker
Although Matadon's doing quite well for increasing subnumbers, but as it's a federated service, essentially what you're seeing is just more servers coming online. And the question is actually, how long will that last? Because leaving Twitter and migrating to a new social space is something people do. But whether they stay in that social space is another matter entirely. Yes.
00:38:41
Speaker
Yes, and I think some people seem to be a little frustrated from the fact that Mestodon isn't really Twitter. It's similar to Twitter, but it is a different kind of thing. And so I think some people have come there expecting it to be just a carbon copy of Twitter.
00:38:55
Speaker
and then getting a little frustrated to find out that it's not actually that. So yes, I mean, I've said like, I saw a thing the other day saying, oh, look, a whole lot of people who joined Mastodon have abandoned it fairly quickly. But the graph of users they showed showed it going up a hell of a lot, and then dropping back down a bit. So there still does seem to have been quite a decent migration. But anyway,
00:39:16
Speaker
Enough talk of social media and where it's going. Where I'm going right now is, well, actually nowhere, but metaphorically, sort of spiritually, I'm going to a different place to record a bonus episode. But this episode is over. And when an episode's over, the only responsible thing to do is say goodbye. Lasseter to you, Josh. Lasseter to it. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M.R.X. Denton.
00:39:45
Speaker
Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, nothing is real. Everything is permitted, but conditions apply.