Ancient Intelligence

Greg Lucas

Elias and Clara investigate the intelligence of the ancient world: mechanical computers, prediction engines, and knowledge systems built on a technological path we never went down, and ask whether reaching artificial intelligence is what ends civilizations. Evidence-anchored: what we know, what is claimed, what we wonder. Follow along on Instagram: @anci.entintelligence

Episodes

  1. 1d ago

    The Library of Ashurbanipal: The Knowledge That Burned

    Elias and Clara on the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh: more than thirty thousand clay tablets gathered by a literate king, the royal letter ordering Borsippa to hold nothing back, colophons and catalogues as ancient metadata, the omen series Enuma Anu Enlil, George Smith reading the Flood Tablet in eighteen seventy two, and the fire of six hundred and twelve before the common era that destroyed the boards and scrolls but baked the clay. Follow along on Instagram: @anci.entintelligence AI Generated

  2. 5d ago

    Oracles: The Original AI

    Elias and Clara on the oracles of the ancient world: the Pythia in the unseen adyton at Delphi, the four thousand lead tablets folded shut at Dodona, Alexander crossing the desert to Siwa in three hundred and thirty one before the common era, Croesus and his blind test of the oracles, the wooden walls debate that saved Athens at Salamis, the de Boer and Hale ethylene claim and its critics, Delphi as an information centre, and answers from a system no one fully understood. Follow along on Instagram: @anci.entintelligence AI Generated

  3. Oct 24

    The Baghdad Battery and the Technology of the Temple

    Elias and Clara on the Baghdad Battery: the fourteen centimetre terracotta jar from Khujut Rabu with its copper cylinder, iron rod and bitumen seal, Wilhelm König and the electroplating claim, Paul Keyser and the pain relief case, the Seleucia scroll vessels and the foundation ritual reading, and the looting of the Iraq Museum in two thousand and three that took the original with it. Follow along on Instagram: @anci.entintelligence AI Generated

  4. Oct 21

    Puma Punku: Machining Stone Before the Machine Age

    Elias and Clara at Puma Punku in Bolivia: the interlocking H blocks, the one hundred and thirty one ton red sandstone slab, the bronze cramps cast in place, Protzen and Nair on the finishing tools archaeology has never found, Posnansky and the seventeen thousand year claim, and the modular design system that died when Tiwanaku fell. Follow along on Instagram: @anci.entintelligence AI Generated

  5. Oct 17

    Göbekli Tepe: The Temple That Rewrote the Timeline

    Hunter-gatherers raised sixteen-ton carved pillars in southeastern Turkey eleven and a half thousand years ago, before farming, pottery, or writing, and then deliberately buried the place. Klaus Schmidt's discovery, his temple-first thesis, and what it does to the story of civilization. AI Generated Follow along on Instagram: @anci.entintelligence

  6. Oct 17

    The Antikythera Mechanism: The Computer That Should Not Exist

    A hand-cranked bronze computer from a Greek shipwreck: more than thirty gears predicting eclipses and tracking the Moon, a user manual in Greek, Cicero's accounts of similar machines, and the fourteen hundred years before anything like it existed again. AI Generated Follow along on Instagram: @anci.entintelligence

  7. Oct 17

    The Pattern of the Fall

    The thesis episode: Atlantis as Plato actually told it, the Santorini eruption, Göbekli Tepe, the pyramid age, Puma Punku, and the Antikythera mechanism, and the question of whether reaching artificial intelligence is what ends civilizations. AI Generated Follow along on Instagram: @anci.entintelligence

  • 7 Episodes

About

Elias and Clara investigate the intelligence of the ancient world: mechanical computers, prediction engines, and knowledge systems built on a technological path we never went down, and ask whether reaching artificial intelligence is what ends civilizations. Evidence-anchored: what we know, what is claimed, what we wonder. Follow along on Instagram: @anci.entintelligence

Information