The Museum of Lost Things

The Museum of Lost Things

0:00Hey there. Here is a special bonus episode of the podcast. It's an excerpt from my new book from National Geographic. The book is called The Museum of Lost Things, about the greatest lost treasures in history. It comes out September 15th, but you can pre-order a copy now. You can get the audiobook on Audible.com, or you can get a physical copy online or at your favorite local bookstore. There's an electronic version, too.

0:32I have never written a book with such a wide scope. As you might know, the book industry is struggling right now in a world of algorithm-driven videos and AI slop. So I hope you can support books and pick up a copy of The Museum of Lost Things today.

Giovanni Dathanassi and Egyptian Archaeology

0:54In 1809, a wide-eyed 11-year-old named Giovanni Dathanassi arrived in Cairo to begin apprenticing in his father's shop. Raised on a modest Greek island, the boy had never seen such a bustling metropolis, much less the likes of the pyramids. The soaring monuments awed him, and he soon ditched his father's shop to become an interpreter for a British consul who funded archaeological treasure hunts on the side.

1:24Dathanassi also led sightseeing expeditions for foreign visitors. His nom de dol was Yanni, and he wore a sort of genie costume with a dark waistcoat, oversized fez, and ballooning pants tucked into stirrups. He had an ample belly and a thick mustache and eyebrows. He proved quite popular, and became a fixture of Egyptian archaeology. The British consul's main treasure hunter was a 6'6'' former circus strongman who could hoist 11 people into the air at once.

1:58The strongman was Giovanni Belzoni. He discovered the giant Ramses the Great Head, now in the British museum that inspired the poem Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. The carny proved equally headstrong, however, and the consul fired him after a dispute over some artifacts. Yanni leaped at the chance to take his place and hunt treasures himself. He soon scored a coup by finding the first ever intact tomb of a pharaoh, Nubkepore Inteph of the 1500s BC.

The Tomb of Nebomun

2:36Yanni made his most important discovery in 1820, the tomb of Nebomun, who lived in the 1300s BC. If you've never heard of Nebomun, don't fret. No one back then had either. Nebomun worked in a temple in Thebes, modern Luxor, dedicated to the god Emun. Egypt was thriving at that time, wealthy and robust, and Emun was the preferred god of the ruling dynasty. The Temple of Emun was therefore a powerful institution, with scores of employees.

3:10Nebomun served as an accountant for the grains deposited there as taxes. A boring-ass middle manager. He'd be entirely forgotten today, if not for his exquisite taste in art. Sometime in middle age, Nebomun began constructing his mausoleum. Nowadays, we think of mausoleums as somber structures, even a bit cold or forbidding. Not the Egyptians. People of Nebomun's class typically carved their final resting place into a hillside.

3:41At the far end, they'd sink a shaft and seal off the deceased's mummy. But out front, the tombs often had a cheery courtyard. And the walls inside were adorned with paintings. Rather than trudge through solemnly, families gathered there to feast, almost a picnic atmosphere. It was a place of joy meant to celebrate the person's life. To decorate his mausoleum, Nebomun hired a local painter. Archaeologists conjecture that the painter worked at the Temple of Amun, where Nebomun bumped into him.

4:16Regardless of how they met, Nebomun decided the man's art was just the thing for his tomb and hired him, possibly under the table. To prepare a painting surface inside the tomb, the artist spread a paste of mud and chopped straw on the rough rock walls. He concealed that with smooth white plaster. He painted while the surface was still wet, fresco style. For pigments, he used black soot, red and yellow ochre, and finely ground blue and green minerals mixed with binders.

4:49He made brushes by chewing on rushes to fray the ends. Given the times, there was less of a cult of personality around artists then. No one today knows the painter's name or anything about him. Instead, he's simply known as the Michelangelo of the Nile. Nebomun's tomb was his Sistine Chapel. The artist divided the tomb's walls into panels with separate scenes. Each one shows Nebomun participating in a different activity in the afterlife.

5:19And apparently the accountant planned to be busy. He's shown spearing fish, hunting waterfowl, raising cattle, hosting wine-soaked banquets with musicians and dancing girls, plus tending an estate with a pool and walled garden full of dates. The scenes paint an evocative picture of heaven. But what raises them to the level of Michelangelo is the little artistic flourishes. You can see the shimmering scales on the tilapia in the marsh.

5:49In the garden, you can pick out which dates are ripest by their color and texture. A shirtless old man in one scene has flyaway hair and an outy belly button. Another scene shows a servant clutching a dwarf gazelle, and you can practically see it trembling in the man's arms. Tiger butterflies flip by, and a tawny cat flashes its whiskers as it snatches birds. Each vignette is a masterpiece of realism in an age when realism hadn't even been invented yet.

6:21From the moment he broke into Nebemun's tomb in 1820, Yanni felt certain the paintings would fetch top dollar. Thanks partly to the Rosetta Stone, Egyptian goods were hot commodities at the time, and Yanni's boss, the council, had good connections at the British Museum. Unfortunately, gangs of rival treasure hunters were prowling the hills around Luxor. Fist fights sometimes erupted over prime sites. Yanni's team, therefore, had to work quickly to remove the Nebemun paintings.

6:54Too quickly. They selected a dozen of the best panels and pried them off the walls with hacksaws and crowbars. Several cracked and suffered damage. In a short-sighted move, the British Museum then lowballed the council, acquiring the paintings for just £2,000, $150,000 today. It wasn't even enough to cover expenses. After the council died, Yanni offered his services directly to the museum. The directors haughtily declined.

7:26The rejection insulted Yanni, who eventually cut ties with the museum. And no matter how much they begged, he refused to reveal the location of Nebemun's tomb to scholars who wanted to study the remaining paintings there. They could all go hang. Although he built a decent career for himself, Yanni never made the big score he hoped for. Feeling his age, he quit Egypt in 1850 and moved to England to open a gallery, where he planned to cash in on his connections in the antiquities trade.

7:59Alas, the same British nobles who happily chatted with him on camel tours in distant Luxor, wouldn't be caught dead with the swarthy Greek in a London drawing room, and the shop went belly up. Yanni died in a poorhouse in 1854. He left no record of where to find the Sistine Chapel of the Nile. A clue did emerge in 1890. That year, someone found a fragment of a Nebemun panel on the ground near a rugged, hilly necropolis called Dra'abu el-Naga.

8:32It showed men netting quail. Yanni or a crewmate presumably dropped it while sneaking the panels away, in which case the tomb probably lies nearby. Unfortunately, a new village was erected over much of Dra'abu el-Naga in the later 1800s. So there's no way to search for Nebemun without tearing down people's homes. Overall, two centuries of scouring the remaining hills has turned up no further trace of the unlikely connoisseur accountant

9:02and his unknown masterpiece painter.

Akhenaten and King Tut

9:06Around the time Nebemun was laid to rest, a new pharaoh took over, Akhenaten, who presided over one of the most tumultuous reigns in Egypt's history. Akhenaten was a fascinating figure, the husband of Queen Nefertiti, the likely father of the future King Tut, perhaps the first monotheist in history. But his religious zeal doomed him. Dozens of gods had comfortably coexisted in Egypt for centuries,

9:37even if some, for example, Amun, enjoyed more prominence. Suddenly, Akhenaten banned the worship of every other god except his favorite, the sun-deity Aten. This decree shocked and angered his subjects. Rather than listen to them, Akhenaten doubled down and tried to eradicate all mention of other gods throughout his kingdom. He even sent his guards into tombs and temples to smash other gods' names. One victim of this vandalism was Nebemun.

10:11Wherever his name appears on the panels in the British Museum, the hieroglyphs for NEB have survived. But the letters AMUN have been destroyed. Imagine you're Nebemun's family and you visit his mausoleum one morning with a picnic, only to find those brilliant paintings defaced. No wonder people hated Akhenaten. Akhenaten's volatile reign caused an economic slump, and borderland provinces rebelled and broke away from Egypt.

10:41People naturally blamed this chaos on Akhenaten's heresies, and he left the kingdom in near shambles when he died around 1335 BC. The line of succession gets fuzzy at this point, but within a few years, the nine-year-old King Tut assumed the throne. For all his renown today, Tut was a nobody pharaoh, the Millard Fillmore of Egypt. He did reinstate religious freedom and restore the worship of the old gods.

11:12But the gods failed to reward him with a long, prosperous life, probably because Tut's parents were brother and sister, and he himself was sickly and weak. He died around age 19, having accomplished little of note. And here's where things get interesting. Tut was interred in a puny underground tomb, hardly worthy of a pharaoh, even a minor one. The murals inside are also discolored with mysterious, coin-size blobs of brown mold.

11:44Apparently, Tut was buried in such a rush that there wasn't time to let the paint dry on the walls before sealing him up. All of which has led some archaeologists to make a radical suggestion that Tut's tomb was originally meant for someone else. The thinking is that Tut died so young and so unexpectedly that no mausoleum was ready for him. Scrambling to make do, his advisors took over some unknown person's tomb instead. Instead, even more radically,

12:16a few archaeologists have floated the idea that Tut's body was laid to rest in Queen Nefertiti's tomb, and that Nefertiti's body is still down there, sealed off behind a false wall. In support of this idea, the archaeologists claim they can make out faint doorways etched into the walls of Tut's burial chamber. To be clear, few archaeologists by the Nefertiti theory, and recent studies using radar to probe the walls for hidden chambers, have uncovered nothing.

12:47But the less radical idea that the tomb wasn't meant for Tut does seem plausible, albeit unproven. Tut's restoration of the old gods did nothing to ease the hatred toward his father, and after his dynasty ended, the new ruling clan carried out a damnatio memoriae, damnation of memory, campaign, defacing statues and smashing any wall texts that mentioned Akhenaten. They aimed to wipe out

13:17all trace of the heretical pharaoh from the annals of history. This attempt failed, obviously, but there is some justice in Akhenaten suffering the same treatment that Nebamon did. Tut got damned by association with his father, and within a century of his death, his pitiful burial site was forgotten. When flood debris swallowed the entrance, people let it remain there as punishment. Then workers, excavating a grander tomb nearby,

13:47dumped more debris on top. In fact, Tut's tomb got buried so thoroughly that even looters struggled to find it. As a result, while the more conspicuous monuments of other pharaohs got stripped bare over the next few millennia, Tut's tomb remained forgotten until 1922, when the intact treasures inside made him a worldwide sensation. By trying to erase Tut from history, his enemies ensured that this minor figure became the most famous pharaoh of all.

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The Rise and Burial of Genghis Khan

17:59If archaeologists could vote on which lost grave they'd most like to find, Genghis Khan's would likely appear near the top of the list. In part, to fact-check the gruesome legends surrounding his burial. He was born in Mongolia around 1162 and, supposedly, emerged from the womb clutching a clot of blood in his fist. By all rights, the boy, whose original name was Temujin, should have died young. His father, a nobleman in their tribe,

18:30was poisoned by a rival tribe when Temujin was nine. And greedy schemers within his own clan banished the boy's family to the empty steps expecting them to starve. Historical accounts describe Temujin as overly sensitive, terrified of dogs, and prone to crying. But he grew up fast. Even before adolescence, he'd already been enslaved. He engineered his own escape and killed his older half-brother. As a young man, he discovered that

19:02soldiering suited him and he ruthlessly eliminated all potential rivals among other nomadic tribes until he was crowned Genghis Khan, Universal Ruler, in 1206. His other nickname was the Disturber of the Universe. His warriors were bold and battle-tested, and when they stopped murdering each other and turned their attention outward, they proved unstoppable. They favored blitzkrieg tactics, sweeping in on horses and bombarding the enemy

19:33with arrows. But they could be surprisingly patient, too, and perfected the art of siege warfare. One notorious siege involved the city of Merv, in what's now Turkmenistan. Merv was the Alexandria of its day, a desert oasis teeming with gardens and libraries, famous for its silks and refreshing melons. The Mongols couldn't resist it, and when the terrified artists and merchants inside surrendered, after just six days of siege, a massacre ensued.

20:05It was a memorable day for shrieking and weeping, lamented one chronicle. After burning Merv, for good measure, Genghis Khan ordered his troops to count the corpses. There were 700,000. Yet however crazy it sounds, life under Genghis Khan had its benefits. He allowed the conquered to worship whatever gods they liked, a rare example of religious tolerance. He introduced the idea of diplomatic immunity to facilitate negotiations, and outlawed torture

20:36during interrogations. He promoted free trade and founded history's first international mail system. Over time, his empire also spread key technologies like the compass, abacus, printing press, and paper currency, as well as key social programs like universal education for children, no one was more ruthless when conquering, ask Merv. But, if the vanquished people picked up the pieces and swore fealty afterward, life generally improved

21:08under Mongol rule. Genghis Khan's realm stretched from Korea to the Caspian Sea, an area twice the size of the Roman Empire. Under his successors, it grew to the size of Africa, and he accomplished all this with an army of just 100,000 warriors, fewer people than some modern stadiums hold. Historian Jack Weatherford summed up his achievements thus, Imagine if the United States had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves,

21:38who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the Constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, and marched an army from Canada to Brazil. Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, they weren't fit to carry Genghis Khan's saddle. If anyone in history deserved a grand mausoleum, it was him.

22:09Genghis Khan wanted the opposite. Despite all the blood they shed, the Mongols were oddly squeamish about discussing D-E-A-T-H. So beyond the year, 1227, contemporary sources say little about how Genghis Khan died. As a result, rumors multiplied. One story claims he died after tumbling off a horse. Others have him struck down by lightning, or an arrow to the knee during battle, at age 65 no less. One source swears

22:39he was trying to ravish a conquered queen who, anticipating the crime, concealed a blade inside her vagina that sliced lil' Genghis wide open. Regardless of the truth, his long-time wife, Yeswe, dressed his body in a white robe, wrapped it in white felt with sticks of fragrant sandalwood, and clasped the shroud shut with golden straps. What happened next is impossible to say for certain, but according to lore, Genghis Khan received

23:10probably the most outrageous funeral in history. After his wife bound him in white, a thousand soldiers took off on horseback to bury him atop a mountain. This cortege quickly turned into a rampage. To conceal their destination, the troops reportedly slaughtered every person they encountered on the 40-day journey, often with the cry, Go to the other world to serve our lord. In some accounts, the soldiers killed every animal, too. Based on other

23:41Mongol burials, they likely interred him twenty yards deep, with the body oriented north-south and the head facing east. They probably tossed some treasures in, gilded saddles, gold rings, pearls wrapped in silk, along with slaves, concubines, and horses. One tail has the soldiers burying a live baby camel with him, either so its bleeding would serve as a funeral dirge, or so the grieving mother could lead them back to the site if necessary. After filling the grave,

24:11Genghis's soldiers either diverted a river to conceal it, or trampled the ground with a thousand horses to obliterate all trace. Then they resumed the merry rampage on the return trip, butchering every unlucky hunter or merchant who wandered across their path. To their surprise, the thousand soldiers were themselves slaughtered when they reached home, as a further guarantee of secrecy, and then those slaughterers were also slaughtered to make doubly sure. Genghis Khan took privacy seriously.

24:44We have no idea how much of that is true, but it hasn't deterred the hunt for the grave.

The Hunt for the Lost Grave

24:50To the contrary, the elaborate concealment has made the pursuit all the more enticing. Four nations, Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan, and Russia, have claimed that Genghis Khan's bones lie within their borders. The strongest claim points to Barkan Khaldun, god mountain in northeast Mongolia. Genghis Khan was born nearby, hunted there regularly, and worshipped the sky god Tengri there. He also once took refuge there while fleeing his enemies

25:21and miraculously escaped. The mountain seemed charm to him, and he'd mused during his life that it would make an ideal final resting place. Strengthening the case for Barkan Khaldun is the fact that later Mongol rulers proclaimed the land around the peak a forbidden zone and stationed a clan of ferocious guards there, the Darkhad, who murdered anyone who dared approach. In exchange, the Darkhad paid no taxes and avoided compulsory military service.

25:51Incredibly, the Darkhad kept this watch for 700 years until the founding of the communist Mongolian People's Republic in 1924. The Republic was a puppet state of the USSR, and Soviet leaders had a schizoid attitude toward the disturber of the universe. On the one hand, they admired his ruthlessness and gazed longingly at all the territory he'd gobbled up. On the other, they feared his memory, would stir up nationalist sentiments

26:22in Mongolia, and spur a revolt against the hated communists. To forestall this, the Mongolian government banned the very mention of Genghis Khan's name. And to prevent Burkhan Khaldun from becoming a rallying point, officials fenced off a highly restricted area around the peak of 3,900 square miles, twice the size of Delaware, and parked a tank base at the site's entrance. The ban thawed somewhat after Joseph Stalin died in 1953,

26:53and one Mongolian official decided to celebrate the disturber's 800th birthday in 1962 by putting him on a stamp. He overreached. Moscow ordered the man arrested, and he was chopped to bits with an axe. After the republic collapsed in 1992, the restricted area devolved into a nature reserve with some public access. But the land near Burkhan Khaldun remains daunting to explore. It's one of the most

27:23desolate places on Earth, with few roads and a population density down there with Greenlands. Centuries of vegetation growth have choked off many areas, and the clear parts are prone to flash floods. Temperatures can swing from 100 degrees in the summer to 50 below in the winter, so cold that even yaks drop dead. None of this has stopped Genghis Khan obsessives from searching out his grave. They've suffered snakebites and frostbite,

27:54and been left stranded when their vehicles tumbled off cliffs. One man spent 40 years crossing and crisscrossing and re-crisscrossing the slopes, and died without finding a thing. In 2010, a few archaeologists tried a new approach. They posted satellite images of the Burkhan Khaldun region online, and recruited volunteers to scour them for bumps, depressions, and other features that might indicate graves. 10,000 people spent

28:25approximately 30,000 hours, 3.4 collective years, pouring over 2,300 square miles. They flagged over 100 spots worth checking out. While several proved inaccessible due to challenging terrain, 55 legitimate archaeological sites turned up among the rest, including megaliths, Bronze Age burial mounds, and an ancient city. But there was zero trace of Genghis Khan. One archaeologist lamented that it was like looking

28:56for a needle in a haystack, except you don't know what the needle looks like. Call it Genghis Khan's final victory. The diverted river and trampling horses, and the slaughter of all potential witnesses, have succeeded in hiding him for most of a millennium now. His victims lay scattered across Eurasia, their skeletons long since ground to dust. But the bones of history's greatest warrior remain at peace.

29:27Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Museum of Lost Things. There is so much more in the book about lost languages, lost masterpiece paintings, lost species, and pirate treasures, and on and on. So please, support books and pick up a copy at audible.com or wherever you get your titles. Pass the word along to friends and family, too. Word of mouth is so important to books.

29:58The fall season of the podcast starts in a few weeks, so I will see you soon.