{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"<iframe src=\"https://embed.acast.com/$/6aebf9c014241cd977773daf/6aed2f9574a96cc5a4f457d6?\" frameBorder=\"0\" width=\"700\" height=\"250\"></iframe>","title":"Machu Picchu: The Royal Estate That Kept the Wrong Kind of Secrets","description":"An unfinished clay tablet was still baking in its kiln when the city of Ugarit burned around twelve hundred BCE, a message calling for urgent military help that was never sent and never answered. Within roughly fifty years, at least seven of the most sophisticated palace civilizations the ancient world had ever built vanished, taking their writing systems, their trade networks and three centuries of accumulated knowledge with them. I think this collapse is the most consequential catastrophe in recorded human history, the near-extinction of the very conditions that made literate civilization possible. Why did the grain storerooms at Ugarit burn full rather than empty? And if the Sea Peoples were destroyers, why did they arrive at the Nile delta with their families loaded into ox carts?\r\n\r\nThis episode was created with artificial intelligence: AI-assisted script and AI-generated (synthetic) voice.","author_name":"Creators Obomedia"}