Memphis, Egypt

Because scholars could read ancient Greek, they immediately unlocked the context.

It was a royal decree issued in 196 B.C. by a council of priests at Memphis celebrating the coronation of 13-year-old King Ptolemy V Epiphanes.

That's right.

1500 years of dead silence and the key that unlocked it was basically an ancient Egyptian press release bragging about a teenage king's tax cuts.

So the Rosetta Stone wasn't just an ancient slab or granite created for a teenage king's political propaganda.

It became the ultimate bridge between human civilizations across time, proving that language is never just marks on a wall, but a living connection that binds minds across millennia.

Actually, in fact, Cox Go ahead and pull up the newly translated section of the Memphis Decree that we pulled.

It's the ancient table that ruled Champollion's historians.

A second option points to his priestly role.

University College London's Digital Egypt resource notes that sets of stone versions of the ritual tools were made as parts of burial equipment for officials, priests and their families in the late Old Kingdom, at the cemeteries of Memphis.

Those tools serve the opening of the mouth, a ritual in which a Sem priest is a key participant, so instruments that look surgical to modern eyes might be ritual kit.

Several other possibilities also remain open at this early stage.

Hello, Libration Nation.

In Night Train to Memphis by Elizabeth Peters, Vicki Bliss, an assistant curator at Munich's National Museum, may not be an Egypt expert, but her PhD in crime solving comes in handy when an intelligence agency recruits her for a luxurious Nile cruise.

Amidst the backdrop of the majestic Sphinx, Vicki must navigate her personal frustrations and the deadly charms of a cunning criminal hiding in plain sight.

All right, my guest this week is Colleen Gleason, who also writes as Colleen Cambridge, an award-winning USA Today and New York Times bestselling author.

Okay, perfect.

All right.

Colleen, I'm so excited to be with you here today, and we are going to be discussing the book Night Train to Memphis by Elizabeth Peters.

And I have to tell you, I was like, we are sadly the week of Dolly Parton's passing, and Is there a tie in to that at all? Because I was listening to her sing Night Train to Memphis, like prepping for this a little bit and crying, of course.

That was an awesome story.

I wonder, you know, like when I was in Egypt, like Elephantine Island or, you know, there's so many other ones that you're kind of going like, yeah, it looked like, or, you know, what is that other one? Like somewhere in Memphis or...

There's a couple of them.

There's a couple of them that it looks like literally like a nuke went off.

And we'll get to her later.

Initially, after residing in Memphis, Alexander's body was transferred to Alexandria, where a grand royal mausoleum was created.

And we're talking massive, like a giant mausoleum.

honorary structure with a gold sarcophagus it is in the records as julius caesar visiting it uh i believe his augustus the first emperor of rome visited it it was this so it was around it was around it's this place people were like ah yes that's alexander's you know burial chamber that's sarcophagus is golden sarcophagus however in the ancient world alexandra did not fare very well There were riots.

This is the word that the Lord spoke to the prophet Jeremiah about the military offensive of Babylon's king Nebuchadnezzar against the land of Egypt.

Tell Egypt, warn Migdal, alert Memphis and Tappanese.

Say, brace yourselves for what's coming.

War is breaking out from every side.

One is coming, just as surely as Tabor is in the mountains, and Carmel is by the sea.

Get what you need for deportation, you inhabitants of Egypt.

Memphis will be reduced to a wasteland, a ruin with no one left.

Egypt is a beautiful, yes, beautiful heifer.

The Egyptians couldn't fire arrows or charge back at the enemy without risking harming the cats, so they had to wait for the enemy to reach them, which let the Persians easily take the city.

The Egyptians lost 50,000 men and subsequently retreated to the city of Memphis.

But later, the Persians sieged Memphis too, captured the Egyptian pharaoh and ruled Egypt for the next 150 years, all because the Egyptians at Pelusium refused to risk hurting a group of kitty cats.

Never underestimate the love of a furry friend.

Winning a fight is impressive, but slipping away from one unnoticed takes its own kind of cunning, something a trapped allied army pulled off with a very strange invention.