Lost Graves and Lost Bones, with Sam Kean

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. In today's October episode of Stuff to You might recognize the name because he was previously on the show to discuss Dinner with King Tut, and now he's back to discuss his new book, The Museum of Lost Things.

And I'm going to ask him about some of the spookier topics in this excellent book, and then you can read the rest on your own. The book is out now. Let's go ahead and dive right into the interview. Hi, Sam. Welcome back to the show.

Hi. Thanks for having me back.

Yeah, the new book is, I'm going to hold it up for folks watching on Netflix, is the Museum of Lost Things. And I'm going to come back to the general aspects of the book. But since we're in October here, let's kick things off with a spooky question, something befitting, say, the Universal Horror franchise of films. How many royal tombs are out there in the world, just undiscovered and unknown?

A lot more than you might think. I mean, there have been so many kings throughout history and so many, you know, great warriors. And we just don't know where a lot of them are buried. You know, just over time, these important graves, however important they were to the people at the time, they just get lost. You know, civilizations collapse and even very important graves end up crumbling. So there's kings waiting out there to be discovered still.

Tell us about Genghis Khan, how he earned the name the Disturber of the Universe, and what we know and don't know about his tomb.

Yeah, he earned that name, Disturber of the Universe, essentially because he conquered most of the known world at the time, the people there. I mean, it was the largest empire in history. He essentially founded it. And he made an appearance in the book mostly because he has just this crazy elaborate funeral, or rumors at least, legends about the funeral, And we really don't know where he was buried because of the nature of that funeral. So essentially, he was a very private person and he didn't want his bones disturbed after his death. So he had instructions left and he had a thousand warriors take his body somewhere. We have some guesses about where it might be, but we don't know where they took it. And on the way

to the grave site, these thousand warriors essentially killed every single person that they met. They would, you know, run a sword through them and say, go to the other world to serve our Lord. According to some, they even killed every animal they saw on the way, just to make it extra secret. They got to the grave site.

They buried him. Some sources say they diverted a river over the grave to hide it. Some say they just ran the thousand horses over it to trample it down and hide it. And then the thousand warriors killed everyone they met on the way back as well to, again, ensure secrecy. And then when the warriors got back to the main army, they themselves were slaughtered in order to make doubly sure that no one would know where the grave is. Who knows how much of that exactly is true, but we do know, again, he wanted a lot of privacy in his death. So we don't know exactly where he is buried to this day. And I think of all the lost graves in history, if you asked archaeologists, what is the one grave you'd love to find? That

one would probably be near the top of the list.

Yeah, and you cover in the book how people continue to look for it. You're talking about satellite imagery and sort of a quest to find anything in the suspected area, these mountains that were kind of considered sacred to him. But nothing has quite turned up, right?

No, the satellite one was interesting because they found a lot of cool things. They found some Bronze Age megaliths. They found maybe a buried city. But no, the grave just never turned up.

And you write that it's likely to remain that way, right? Like, even if we found something that seemed likely, the chances of the government there being okay with it. digging up the grave. Certainly we could find it, but then the chances of actually unearthing it are maybe a little slim, right?

Yeah, there are some taboos around it today, and it's not unanimous, but there is a sense in Mongolia that, you know, just let him rest in peace, kind of let the grave go. Yeah, so even if we did find it, they might not allow anyone to actually go after it, because he is a big national hero there to this day still.

And I guess in that we can see parallels with like the first sovereign emperor of China, that tomb, like that's a tomb that we know exactly where it is, but we haven't opened it because it is considered a sacred place.

Yeah, yeah. Just the modern sensibility, you know, and I think there's something to be said for that. Just kind of let them, you know, grant their wishes, essentially, and let them rest in peace.

Now, the tomb of Alexander the Great, a different story entirely, right?

Yeah, so essentially with that, we don't know exactly where his body is. His body became kind of a pawn after his death because, again, he had a very large empire. And it kind of deteriorated where there were a bunch of people warring for control over the empire. Each one had a little slice. And eventually, Ptolemy, one of his generals...

The plan was to take the body back to his hometown or his home region to Macedonia. Ptolemy essentially stole it on the way. His men intercepted the funeral cortege, diverted to Alexandria in order to solidify his rule there. And unlike most of the other generals that were trying to take over the little little satraps that they had, he ended up having a very productive and very harmonious, peaceful reign. So they really did solidify his reign to have Alexander's body there. So it ended up working out for him, even though it was kind of a dirty trick.

Yeah, you do a great job condensing and discussing the fracturing of Alexander's empire and how these various generals that had served under him are kind of just sort of grasping for some piece of his legacy. You mentioned that some would claim to be blood relatives of him, or to even take a hairstyle that was associated with him. Right, yeah.

He had curly hair, kind of famously curly hair, so they would do their hair like him. They would claim to have dreams where he was speaking to them and stuff like that. Basically any little thing they could do to make themselves seem like the legitimate heir they were doing.

Now, you also discuss one of the most famous examples of a lost-then-found tomb, and that being the tomb of Tutankhamen. So much has been written about King Tut. How did you approach covering him in the book? And what do you hope readers take home regarding the story of his remains?

It's kind of strange because he really is the most, or one of the most famous pharaohs. If you ask someone to name a pharaoh, you know, they might say Ramses, but the top would probably be right at the top of the list. And the story behind why he is so famous is a little strange in that he really wasn't that important during his lifetime. He took over when he was only nine years old. So he's not capable of doing much. And he died about a decade later.

So he's pretty young when he died. And it wasn't a great time for the kingdom in that it was kind of chaotic. Egypt really wasn't asserting its power in the same way that it had before or would later. He was pretty much a middling king. And his father, another famous pharaoh named Akhenaten, instituted a bunch of religious reforms that were very unpopular. And a lot of people really hated Akhenaten. And that hatred sort of carried down to his son, Tut, as well. So when Tut died, eventually Ramses took over, and Ramses' people wanted to obscure Akhenaten and Tut. With Akhenaten, they would go around, you know, smashing any statues of him, smashing hieroglyphs that mentioned his name, things like that. With Tut, what they tried to do

essentially is bury his tomb. So they took a bunch of rubble, poured it over it, and, yeah, tried to bury it for history. And they did such a good job of it that even looters could not find the tomb. And all of the big monuments, you know, the obvious monuments were looted over the centuries and all of the treasures in there were taken. Whereas Tut's tomb, because it was hidden, all the treasures stayed intact. So essentially, Ramsey's plan, that plot backfired and made Tut a lot more famous than he really deserved simply because the treasures were intact.

Wow, yeah, it's such an amazing story. And you mentioned several different angles on it, one of which I don't know if I'd heard of this before. And you do stress that this is not considered the primary theory by experts, but the Nefertiti theory regarding the tomb.

Yeah, so essentially, Tutte has a very small and... I mean, if you go there and look at it, it's just a tiny little space. And it really... It doesn't call to mind what you would expect for a king, especially a powerful pharaoh to have. And part of that might have been, you know, his his family again was disliked, but he died fairly quickly, we think, probably of malaria or something like that. And there are questions about where he is, whether that tomb was intended for him or not.

It could have been that he died so quickly, they just had to do something with the body, and he ended up getting someone else's tomb. And there is a theory out there that it was Nefertiti's tomb, that she... was buried deeper inside there. And they sort of put in a false wall and then just put Tut in like the antechamber, essentially, and just let him rest there. Again, that's not what most scholars think, but that theory is out there. And it's not implausible that it was meant for, you know, a lesser lord or something, but they just had to use it because they had to put Tut's body somewhere.

I guess it's just a very almost romantic idea that certainly appeals to Egyptomania and And maybe a fascination with fictional tales of different tombs, the idea that there could be this next layer of undiscovered tomb beyond what we've discovered.

Yeah, yeah. It really is, like you said, a romantic tale where we want to believe it's there. And, you know, any little bit of evidence people are trying to interpret and squeeze into that box. So it would be wonderful if it were true. It's just, you know, most scholars don't believe it.

Now, maybe this is a good time to ask a little bit about Richard III. Tell us about the surprisingly, I guess you could say sort of happy ending for the subject of Shakespeare's famous tragedy.

Yeah. So he was someone who was kind of overthrown famously. I believe he was the last English monarch to die on the battlefield. And afterward, a new line took over. The Tudors took over. And Henry VII, who had dethroned him, he and his men abused the body, you know, tossed it in a very small grave. And over the years, people didn't quite know what happened to it. There were theories that people, because again, they started putting out propaganda.

Richard III was very disliked. The stories about the princes in the tower, there were always rumors about these nefarious things that he'd done. So there were rumors out there that they had dug up Richard's body and tossed it in a river, you know, years and decades later, even to kind of humiliate him more. But, you know, there were rumors that it didn't happen too. And no one quite knew where the grave was until this filmmaker in England kind of got the idea in her head that she was going to find Richard. And she started looking through maps, you know, putting together old maps, trying to figure out where it might be. And eventually she decided where she was going to dig. She was able to raise some money from the Richard III Society, which is

trying to kind of rehabilitate him from the monster that we get from Shakespeare's plays. Got some money from them and held a dig. And it was in a parking lot in a town in England. And the filmmaker had some kind of woo-woo ideas about it. You know, there was a space there that had an R on it, which stood for reserved. But she sort of had this premonition that it might have stood for Richard. And there was a sign to her to dig in this spot.

Even though it wasn't the most promising spot that they had found on the map, she kind of insisted that they dig there. You know, they were digging all around this parking lot. And eventually they did find the body underneath that R. So as strange as it sounds, you know, she ended up being right at the end, which I guess is the important thing. And then they removed the body.

You know, they did some testing on it, confirmed that it was Richard. And then he got reburied in a nice sort of courtly official funeral in Westminster Abbey. So it was really a nice ending, I think, to what had been sort of a sordid tale for a long time.

Yeah, because to your point in the book, this is what he would have wanted. Certainly with Genghis Khan, he doesn't want to be found. But Richard III arguably would have wanted his body to be found and properly buried.

Yeah, with all the pomp and circumstance due with King of England. To have an official mass, he's a pious person. So this is a much happier outcome for him.

Yeah, and also as you were pointing out, this just sounds like a story that should not have had this successful outcome. It just sounds, you know, especially with the idea of like seeing the R and thinking, well, this is a sign. Like it just doesn't, even reading the chapter, it's like, oh, this isn't going to work. Surely this isn't going to get us there. And it does.

Yeah. A lot of the archaeologists she consulted were rolling their eyes. You know, archaeology is kind of shifted away from the idea of we're looking for big treasures and we're looking for, you know, King's bodies. It's much more about everyday people. And they just didn't really want to be involved in this hunt or what seemed like a wild goose chase, a small chance of success.

But, you know, she she was right. Were there any lost tombs that didn't make the book because they're just simply too lost, like things that were just just more legend than anything else?

I think I hit the big ones in there. Like I said, I think a lot of them, we don't even know that they're lost, you know, lists of kings and things that we just don't know about, or we would have no idea where even to look for them nowadays. So there it would, yeah, it would be hard to even know where to look for a lot of them.

Now you also get into lost bones in a later chapter concerning the so-called Peking man. What exactly was this fossil specimen and where do we think he walked off to?

So the Peking Man is kind of a strange name. Peking is the old name for Beijing in previous times. And even though it's the Peking Man fossils, it's a group of about 40 men, women and children. It's just that Peking Man was the traditional name for it. So that's what we kind of use today. It was a set of Homo erectus fossils, which are... We don't know exactly human ancestor or not, but they were very widespread throughout the ancient world. So common there. But the Peking man fossils were a very well-preserved set of them that were found in China in the 1920s. And they disappeared during the chaos of World War II. And we just don't know what happened. Some people think that the invading Japanese army got a hold of them. There are hints

that they were shipped off to the coast and they were going to get shipped out on an American ship. But then, you know, the U.S. got drawn into the war and Japan attacked the ship that was coming to get it. And we just don't know exactly what happened to them. And then there was an even more intriguing story with the Chinese Civil War that happened right after World War II. There were some Marines that were in China and they were being surrounded by the communist army.

And one of them was digging a foxhole to kind of put up guns to protect themselves. And he came across a buried wooden box. And he thought, well, what the heck is this? Why is there a box here? Opened it up and saw a bunch of human-ish bones in there. and thought to himself, like, that is the last thing I want to think of right now is a bunch of bones while I'm about to die possibly.

So he just slammed the lid down, moved over a few feet, dug the foxhole. He was too busy. But then years later, he was watching a television program about the lost Peking man bones. And he sort of sat up in his chair and said, oh, my God, that I was there. That might have been them. He got in touch with an anthropologist in South Africa, very famous anthropologist Lieberger. wrote to him about this and Lee Berger went to China to look for him. And unfortunately they found an industrial area where the old camp had been, where they were digging this foxhole. But in a way I kind of mentioned in the book, you know, we don't know. It could be that they were digging a building there. They dug deep a foundation and they destroyed

the bones or got rid of them for some reason. Or it could be, you know, maybe there's another parking lot in China and they They might look and find those bones beneath the parking lot, just like they did with Richard. So it's a possibility that they'll be able to find them one day. We just don't know. Oh, wow.

So this is all just a taste of the overall subject of the lost in your new book, The Museum of Lost Things. And I was wondering, did this one spring directly from your work on Dinner with King Tut, or did something else send you in this direction for this latest book?

Yeah, Dinner with King Tut was also an archaeology book. So I'd been thinking about archaeology, wanting to do things like that. And I guess I was thinking about sort of things that are lost. With Dinner with King Tut, it was about experimental archaeology. So scientists recreating things from the past. And that had to do with lost sensory information.

So lost tastes, lost food, lost sounds and things like that. Whereas this one is a bit more tangible and, you know, actual lost objects, things like that, or even some lost languages, deciphering lost languages and stuff. I guess what really inspired me was that, you know, I love going to museums and just any type of museum, whether it's natural history or, you know, historical artifacts. I could spend hours just wandering around almost any museum. But the more I did read about history, the more I realized kind of how precarious it is and how lucky we are to have found the things that we have. A lot of the stuff you know, it was just sheer luck that we found it.

So I started wondering about the flip side of that and thinking, you know, what about the things we haven't found, the things that didn't make it into the museums? What are the greatest treasures that did not make it into the museums because we've lost them? And so I just decided to kind of put a book together about those amazing lost things.

I'm always curious about the road from idea to completion with a project like this. Were there certain lost things you knew you were going to go out and research and discuss? And then were there any that just kind of emerged out of the research itself?

Yeah, lost languages was what I definitely wanted to cover. So Egyptian hieroglyphs, linear B. I just think the whole process is just fascinating, how they can read lost languages. So definitely wanted to include that. Um, Peking man, I wanted to get into that. Um, the Indus Valley civilization, uh, which is a very, uh, it was a very prominent civilization in India and what's now India and Pakistan, um, in, in BC. So very thousands of years ago. Um, that's a really fascinating one because it combines aspects of a lost civilization with a lost language. So I wanted to cover that one. One kind of surprising one that didn't make much, I didn't have much material on it, was the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I thought I

was going to have maybe a whole chapter about those, but I just couldn't dig up enough story about them. They're kind of interesting as a list, or to get a little information about them, but it just didn't rise to the level of a chapter, because in some cases we just don't know a lot about them, or there's no real... I guess, human element to it. It's just we're talking about a building, which is interesting, but maybe not fully interesting for a for a full chapter like that.

So that was one that kind of surprised me that didn't play as big a role in the book.

Now, is there anything in the book that you cover that that's currently lost that if you were a betting man, you might bet on being found the next couple of years?

Oh, boy, which one would it be?

And we're not going to hold you to this. Okay.

Not going on Polymarket for this. You know, there are people looking for Genghis Khan grape. If we did find something like that, I would not be surprised about that. Oh, another one I think is almost certainly going to happen. There's a lot of people nowadays looking in the Amazon and they're using a technology called LiDAR. So essentially you fly a plane or a drone over and use lasers to shoot the beam down and it can essentially read what's beneath the canopy in the jump. So they're finding a lot of earthworks in the Amazon right now and realizing just how extensive the extensive buildings and things people had there. There's a long standing idea, I think, that It was people just kind of living in huts and

kind of going about more of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But we're realizing there were a lot of building, a lot of kind of civilization, what we would call a quote-unquote civilization there. They were building giant things and had roads and earthworks and temples and things like that that we just didn't know about before. So that is one I think that's going to be pretty prominent. And there's a lot of exciting work coming out of there about a potential lost civilization in the Amazon.

Awesome. Well, yeah, I'm excited to see what develops there.

Yeah.

Well, Sam, thanks again for coming back on the show. The book, again, for everyone out there, is The Museum of Lost Things, out now in all formats. And I believe folks can listen to a sample in your podcast feed, right?

They can. The podcast is called Disappearing Spoon, like the name of my first book. And there's an audio excerpt on there about the lost graves chapter.

Excellent. All right, well, yeah, thanks again for coming on the show. Hope the book is a big success and I hope the rest of your October is fun and appropriately spooky.

Okay, thanks for having me.

All right, thanks again to Sam for coming on the show. That book's title, again, is The Museum of Lost Things. You can get it now, however you get your books, however you consume your books. And check out his website as well at samkeen.com. Thanks, as always, to the excellent J.J. Possway for producing the show. And if you want to reach out with any questions, suggestions, or recommendations, you can do so by emailing us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Lost Graves and Lost Bones, with Sam Kean

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