RE-AIR: Why Did Clytemnestra Kill Cassandra, Another Q&A

This episode originally aired in February 2025; the question about Clytemnestra and Cassandra is so relevant to the latest series on Aeschylus' Agamemnon, so if you're curious, here's the original question and ancswer... The seminar referenced is In the Ruins of History: A CAWS/#EOTalks Roundtable in Solidarity with Palestine https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2025/02/04/in-the-ruins-of-history-a-caws-eotalks-roundtable-in-solidarity-with-palestine/. Pre-order Liv's Odyssey adaptation (!!!), The Odyssey: a Modern Retelling. https://geni.us/TheOdysseyBook Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter ourpodcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:39Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with a lot of, some stuff, some stuff. Some of it is more of the Q and A that I started last Tuesday, and other things are stuff I learned the other day and want to share with you. But before I dive back into the question that I ended last week's somewhat cliffhanger of an episode on, why did Clytemnestra kill Cassandra? Before we get there, I have to tell you that I'm doing an event. I keep forgetting to say this into a microphone, and so I am sorry, especially because I've basically only done

• 2:23Liv Albert?

  it on Instagram and Instagram is like the devil now, but it's also kind of the only place where I have access to listeners more directly. But in any case, I'm doing an event in London. London, England, not London, Ontario. I'm sorry. If you, if we ever get to meet London, Ontario, you will have to come to Toronto almost certainly, but that's fine. But for now, for now, we are, we are looking across the pond, as they say, and I am doing an event in London. I have teamed up with my friend Cosi Carnegie of Cosi's Odyssey, who has become kind of the queen of putting on beautiful classics-related

• 3:04Liv Albert?

  events in London. And so we are getting together to do a live podcast recording, a conversation, basically an opportunity for me to just talk about Medusa in front of a crowd. It's going to be really fun. We're doing it at a bookstore, so it will also benefit a really nice bookstore, the name of which I have forgotten. I've never been to London. I'm trusting Cosi with all of this, but it's going to be lovely. Tickets are on sale now. They are not free, unfortunately. We do have to charge a bit in order to pay for the, the actual venue

• 3:42Liv Albert?

  itself, but essentially we're charging just what we have to in order to break even. But tickets are available now. I've linked in the episode's description, but you can also just go to cosi'sodyssey.com, that's C-O-S-I, odyssey.com, and find out more. And hopefully, honestly, if this goes well, the likelihood is that I will be able to do more things like this in, I don't want to say North America right now. Toronto, we'll start, we'll definitely start with Toronto, but i- if we sell, if those sell out soon enough, we might be able to put on another while I'm there. Either way, if you can come, amazing. Thank you

• 4:24Liv Albert?

  so much. If you can't and you need to wait for next time, that's also great. Thank you. If you don't want to come, that's also cool. Like, I don't, you know, I'm me, so I'm not offended if you don't want to come. But in any case, you can find more at the link in the episode's description.

• 4:43Liv Albert?

  That's me not forgetting to say, oh, it's April 15th. Did you need that information? Weird. I don't know. Um, take a look at the link in the episode's description. Gods, one day my brain will work again. Um, it's, you know, it's like, it's almost like it's really distracting. Watching everything just get worse every, with every passing day. I saw a video yesterday of Buffalo being returned to an indigenous

• 5:14Liv Albert?

  reservation plot of land, this indigenous culture, indigenous group in Saskatchewan. And it was the most beautiful thing. And I don't know, maybe go find a cool video of like a great thing happening to indigenous people because it's so rare that it feels really fucking great.

• 5:45Liv Albert?

  Why did Clytemnestra kill Cassandra? Another Q and A, part two.

• 6:07Liv Albert?

  So last week I ended the episode on this question from, I have to scroll down because it's long. Tim from England. Thank you again, Tim from England for this question. I didn't get into it last week because there's just so much to say and it's worked really well because I've also learned a bunch of stuff over the past couple of days that I want to share, but we are going to begin with this very big question. Why does Clytemnestra kill Cassandra? The question itself goes on. It's helpful. So in a question and answer episode last year, Liv Albert was kind enough to give a very considered answer to a question from me about Helen of Troy, in which Liv first spent a few minutes convincingly explaining why it was impossible to answer the question and then another few minutes convincingly answering it anyway.

• 6:51Liv Albert?

  I don't know if she can do the same this time. I will do my best. That sounds like a me thing to do.

• 6:57Liv Albert?

  All right, continue on. As you know, while the versions of the story in Iscullus's play and in the Odyssey differ in many details, they agree that the Greek leader, King Agamemnon, came home from the Trojan War, having acquired the Trojan princess/propheta Cassandra as his slave. Soon after arriving home, Agamemnon and Cassandra were murdered by Clytemnestra, his wife and her lover Agisthus.

• 7:18Liv Albert?

  Now, Tim goes on, but we're gonna get into kind of, I'm gonna keep returning to the parts of the question because I think they're valuable in understanding this, but one of the things that is, well, and it's funny because it's going to be a really similar answer to last week's, or not last week's, but the one you're referring to when I answered. I don't remember the exact question about Helen of Troy/Sparta, but I know that my answer about Clytemnestra is going to be really similar because the biggest issue that we have with any of these characters and basically everything we have when it comes to, I mean, Greek mythology broadly, but really specifically these people who revolve around the Trojan War, the biggest

• 8:00Liv Albert?

  issue we have is the type of sourcing that we have, right? So, we have the Iliad and we have the Odyssey, you know, it's not going to be news to probably most of you, but those are the earliest surviving sources we have from Greek literature. They are from the, you know, late Iron Age in terms of when they were written down, but we understand that they were almost certainly these stories that had been told through the oral tradition for maybe hundreds of years. And eventually were put to quote-unquote "paper," it wasn't paper, and, you know, preserved in this way that now we can read them. But the thing is, is that like, you know, we're talking like hundreds of years of development of these stories, evolution, and like lots of different things that could happen before they were

• 8:43Liv Albert?

  recorded in any way that survives for us. And that's ignoring the fact that like the actual earliest version, like physical version that we have is probably like a thousand years later and we have to trust that somebody copied it correctly. It's wild to think about how this stuff survives because that's often completely lost that like, yeah, it was probably preserved in some way in, let's say Athens likelihood is probably in the archaic period, maybe really late iron age. That's the preservation. But then we don't have that version like that. It does not stand the test of time, whatever they were working with, you know, in terms of actually recording it. We don't have that version. What we often have is something from maybe a thousand years later,

• 9:25Liv Albert?

  when we know that these either Byzantine scholars in the general Byzantine empire, very large swath, but you can say, you know, Turkey into the Middle East. And also they obviously controlled Greece as well for a long time. And so, you know, we have these Byzantine scholars who were copying it, or, and this is really never talked about a lot. I wonder why. You'll never guess. But an enormous, enormous amount of what survives from the ancient world, from ancient Greece specifically survives not because the Greeks or anyone from the West actually managed to preserve it or even tried. So much, a huge amount of what survives today from that world survives because the Islamic people,

• 10:10Liv Albert?

  the Muslims that came in a couple centuries later, fucking loved it. They fucking loved what the Greeks were doing. They preserved it. They were interested in it. They were studying it and like developing universities and things around this content and preserved it for us. But they were Muslim and, you know, later Christians decided that they were enemy number one for the West. And so we kind of pretend that doesn't happen unless you're in really specific circles. But spoilers, that's the case. And wow, I've turned like eight minutes, you know, without even answering this question even slightly. But here's the thing about how that works, right? Is that so those, the Iliad and the Odyssey is what we have from that earliest time period. Now, as Tim very rightly pointed out, what happens

• 10:54Liv Albert?

  in the Odyssey that gives us any kind of really early details about Clytemnestra and Agamemnon and their relationship is that Odysseus, when he is Traveling to the underworld meets Agamemnon and he talks about, he might talk to Clytemnestra too. I'm not remembering, but he talks to a lot of women. It's great. But he talks to Agamemnon for sure. And Agamemnon tells him what happened. He's like, my wife killed me. And then it basically though, Agamemnon, Agamemnon is telling Odysseus this in the underworld, very much in this way that is meant to glorify Penelope, Odysseus's wife, and make Clytemnestra look really bad. Like it's in reference to Odysseus going home to Penelope. Agamemnon is like, oh, you're so lucky. Penelope is like faithful to you.

• 11:38Liv Albert?

  My wife slept with my cousin and then killed me. And it's like, well, boy, like, why did she do that? Hmm, I wonder. It's almost like you killed your daughter. You sacrificed her in order to go to war with the people that didn't really deserve it. And then spent 10 years in, or 10 years away and came back with a woman on your arm. And so that's the original context that we get of this moment in Greek mythological history. And I'll call it that because when you're looking at something like the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is framed in a way as being cultural history. And in a way it is cultural history, not literal history, but it is what's coming. You know, what was understood as history at the time.

• 12:20Liv Albert?

  But that says very little about Clytemnestra, about Agamemnon, about the story itself. Obviously in the Iliad, we don't know that part of the story because it happened later. And so otherwise we have to rely on the plays. And as I've said a thousand times, the plays are in themselves reception, right? And so especially when you're looking between the Odyssey of this early reference to Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and the earliest and most famous play about their story, the Agamemnon by Aeschylus, we are talking. I mean, probab- at least like a couple hundred years, but more likely the story has been

• 13:01Liv Albert?

  developed for more like maybe 500 years. Uh, maybe that's a stretch. I don't know. But we're looking at centuries in between, right? Centuries in between this kind of cultural, historical moment as they saw it and, and uh, uh, essentially a movie, right? A creator of a film, right? It's the, the same equivalency of what we would have now of like a movie version of history, right? It's like the Oppenheimer of, of everything that a lot of other people did and Oppenheimer was kind of involved in, you know? Um, it's the movie version. The Agamemnon is the movie version. It is going to be, I don't want to say fictionalized,

• 13:46Liv Albert?

  but in a way, yes, fictionalized, like it's going to be expanded upon. It's going to be fleshed out in order to give people a really entertaining thing to watch, let alone stretch it out, you know, over a few acts of a play. They didn't see them as acts, epodes. Um, so obviously things are going to change. I've used this example 10,000 times, but it's so apt, right? The plays are like saying that Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, um, to the younger listeners, is that, do people still know that? Anyway, it was like Baby DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Um, that Baz Luhrmann's version of Romeo and Juliet from the late 90s is the, is like Romeo and Juliet. This is very poorly phrased because I, it is early

• 14:29Liv Albert?

  in the morning. I am trying to get this out. Um, but you know, like Romeo and Juliet Baz Luhrmann's is like a direct quote unquote translation of Shakespeare, but it is an incredibly different story, or rather just an incredibly different way of telling the story from the Shakespearean versions of Shakespeare's time. We're talking about a similar time period. We're talking about a similar number of centuries in between this content.

• 14:56Liv Albert?

  But really, it's probably more like a Shakespeare play about like one of the kings or something, right? Because they did see this as cultural history. But still, Iscalus is making it into entertainment. And so we have, there's just so many different things going on into this question of, again, God, I'm 13 minutes and I apologize, but I love you guys for listening. Um, why did Clytemnestra kill Cassandra? We do know that she kills Cassandra according to the Odyssey version, but it's very much this like fleeting reference. Like, we just know that happened. Um, but we never really get Clytemnestra's side of anything. We never get Cassandra's side of anything. Instead, we have these men interpreting that

• 15:36Liv Albert?

  how this cultural story played out in the Odyssey, right? Iscalus is working off of the Odyssey, and then he is turning it into his own version. But it is unlike mythology, unlike the Odyssey and the Iliad, and even like some of the more ancient mythological sources, this is very explicitly a man writing a woman, right? You can't say anything else. That's exactly what it is. It's not a cultural creation like mythology. It is a adaptation by a man of that cultural creation. And so that's why I think this question is still unanswerable, and yet why I am, as expected, trying to answer it.

• 16:28Liv Albert?

  Now, back to the question itself. Tim goes on, says, "There are several obvious reasons for Cassandra, or for Clytemnestra to kill Agamemnon. She has crossed with him for using their daughter as a human sacrifice. She may have killed, she may, she may have liked ruling in the king's absence and want to continue doing so. And now she has another man in her life. However, why kill Cassandra, who from a modern perspective has done nothing wrong and might even be seen as a fellow victim of Agamemnon? And while alien to modern, modern values, from a Bronze Age perspective, as a young adult slave, Cassandra alive is a valuable piece of property who can be put to work or traded for oxen or something." Goes on, "One book I looked at suggested that it was due to Clytemnestra as Agamemnon's wife's jealousy of Cassandra as a slave concubine. However, to me, such possessiveness would

• 17:13Liv Albert?

  only really make sense if Clytemnestra loved Agamemnon and wanted him exclusively for herself, but she definitely does not." I have asked this on a non-professional internet forum, and someone suggested that Clytemnestra does not want to wait to see if Agamemnon has already made Cassandra pregnant with his child, and if that child might grow up wanting to avenge its father, or even claim the throne. However, the child of a slave would have less power and status than the children of Agamemnon's marriage, and in those days, however cruel it may seem to us, it would not, it would be permitted to expose the baby to die on a mountainside, but keep the mother. Another suggestion that, to me, is plausible is that Clytemnestra so much hates Agamemnon, she wants to destroy anything associated with him. So if he had a favorite dog, she

• 17:54Liv Albert?

  might kill it just because it was his. Likewise, by extension, any slave woman he may have been sleeping with, whether it was the slave woman's choice, might not matter to Clytemnestra." Okay, I wanted to read all of that because I think that all of these suggestions are really interesting, and they're a really way, interesting way of looking at what the answer really could be. To me, again, it's so similar to the Helen question, even though I can't remember the question, but I know, because to me, this is unanswerable because it is not mythology, I guess, is it? Like, yes, the Odyssey makes that reference, so we can arguably say that,

• 18:35Liv Albert?

  like, in the earliest versions of these stories, like, yes, she did kill Cassandra. But I still think that we are working off of this kind of flawed notion that, that we could ever understand why she did it. Because, to me, what we are looking at is a male representation of what a man thinks a woman would do in this situation, right? It remind, it's, it, to me, it's all of the, it's all the same stuff I grew up with in the 90s, this, like, girls against girls over a man, right? That, like, a girl will always fight another girl over a man, or just, like, utter nonsense like that. It's

• 19:16Liv Albert?

  this idea that women are so in need of a man that they would kill competition, or, again, like, yeah, you know, if, maybe she could be pregnant, maybe that's why, or just that, just straight jealousy. I honestly think it's not so deep. I think that Clytemnestra killed Cassandra because she was fucking mad. And Cassandra, even though she was completely innocent in the situation, represents what Agamemnon did. Where he was, what he was doing. It represents like, I think Clytemnestra,

• 19:57Liv Albert?

  I don't, I don't want to say that I think she felt like she needed to, but I think that this is just coming from this overall rage of Clytemnestra. I think that in terms of like, how I would see a human reaction in that time period, Cassandra or Cly- it's really hard that they both have C names. Clytemnestra is so furious with her husband and with the life that she has been forced into for that husband. And remember that like Clytemnestra didn't pick Agamemnon. There's no suggestion that they were in love. She was selected to marry him because Helen, her sister, married Menelaus, his brother.

• 20:36Liv Albert?

  Like, it is very much this arrangement and an arrangement that has fucked Clytemnestra over at every possible turn, right? He, I mean, there are, there are versions, I wish I looked into this actually, but there are versions, I believe, where Clytemnestra has even more reason. I feel like there's maybe a version where he killed another child or there's like another, maybe like, there's, there's so much going, oh, now I want to dig more. I unfortunately don't have time to do more digging in this moment. But to me Clytemnestra is just so full of rage that Cassandra is just

• 21:15Liv Albert?

  an innocent victim of that rage. It's not right, it's not okay, but it is coming from this place where Clytemnestra has spent a decade, a decade, hating her husband and for killing their daughter, for sacrificing Ephraimaniah just for some wins. She has spent a decade hating her husband because she bonded with Agisthus, who also hated her husband because they were, Menelaus and Agamemnon were also terrible to Agisthus and Agisthus, like, Agisthus, remember,

• 21:49Liv Albert?

  Agystus is the son of Thyestes. And if anyone remembers my, you know, my telling of the play by Seneca of Thyestes, or just generally my longtime obsession with just how fucked up and cursed that family is, you'll remember that Thyestes is the brother of Atrius, who is the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. And Atrius, Atrius forces Thyestes to eat his own children. Atrius kills his nephews, his brother's sons, and feeds them to Thyestes. And then like flash forward sometime, Thyestes has another child after that level of trauma,

• 22:33Liv Albert?

  and that child is Agystus. Imagine growing up, Agystus, your cousins are the kings nearby, and they're the, the sons that lived when their father killed Agystus's lost brothers, brothers that he never got to meet because they were forced to be eaten by his father. So Clytemnestra has spent a decade bonding with that man over a hatred of Agamemnon. And so I think it's just one of those things that Cassandra, especially when you do look at it, like Cassandra was enslaved. Cassandra was an object. She was an object to Clytemnestra. I won't pretend that Clytemnestra as a woman would have been above that. Cassandra was an object.

• 23:17Liv Albert?

  She was an object brought back by Agamemnon as not only a symbol of where he'd been and what he was doing, but also probably a symbol of just generally how terrible he was. Because he brings back this woman, she's, you know, by, by everyone else's outside, you know, knowledge, Cassandra is mad, right? She is, I'm using that word intentionally, it's dark, but like, Cassandra is, has been driven mad by her visions of the future being always right and never listened to. So Cassandra just seems kind of like, uh, she seems like beyond, right? And so Clytemnestra is faced with Agamemnon returning with her being like, oh yeah, she's gonna live with us, like, the level of-

• 24:01Liv Albert?

  horror that's involved that I think that Clytemnestra is so far beyond. So I don't think she sees the value even as an object and enslaved person for Cassandra. The value of that does not outweigh the trauma that I think Clytemnestra has tied to Cassandra. It's not her fault, but that is what it seems to me would have happened.

• 24:36Liv Albert?

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• 25:18Liv Albert?

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• 26:01Liv Albert?

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• 26:28Speaker 01

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• 27:04Speaker 01

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• 27:51Liv Albert?

  So like, I can see how we can kind of understand it in that way. And, and all of that is based on the story being something that we can understand in that way, right? But ultimately, what we have to remember is that what we have in any kind of detail is only Aeschylus' Agamemnon, which was a play, a theatrical adaptation written by a man, written by an Athenian man. And so Aeschylus is bringing in all of his Athenian man-ness. And if you recall, Athenian men didn't love women.

• 28:35Liv Albert?

  They didn't love the idea that women could be free of men, that they had any kind of... Uh, like, external abilities, really, that they had any kind of freedom outside of their man's house? Um, that was very much not a thing. And I don't want to blame Aeschylus directly. I'm not saying that he was a misogynist, but Athens, the time in which he was writing this theatrical adaptation, was so fucking misogynist. And they were so afraid of children and illegitimate children that I think that, like, even if, you know, Cassandra had a baby and it would have been,

• 29:15Liv Albert?

  you know, a lower tier to Clytemnestra's children, like, all of this. Like, I just think that it was still just never going to be possible. Like, they were never going to let Cassandra live in that particular circumstance. But I do think in the story as we have it, we don't need to overthink too much about why she does it the way she does in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, because I think that, and I haven't returned to it, and I have been told that her character is really incredible and, like, you know, really in-depth, actually, this is the play that I want to return to soon, um, because I haven't gone that deep into that version, and I'm, I'm really interested in it.

• 29:56Liv Albert?

  So I don't want to say, you know, that, that this is how the play runs with it in, in that kind of level of misogyny, but I still think it's important to say that this play is not only a dramatic, uh, adaptation, and thus needs to be as dramatic as possible, but it is also being written in this world where women are not, it, women are not meant to be like Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra needs to be as scary as possible. She needs to represent, like, the biggest threat to men and the male power structure. And so while I think that she also often, like, comes off as, like, really amazing and badass because of that, she is meant to be scary because of that,

• 30:37Liv Albert?

  right? So much of Greek mythology and that realm entirely is based on this fear of women gaining power. And you can see it now, like, now that I have sort of recognized that, like, I can see it in everything, because these stories were all written down by men, and- They were all, what the versions that we have were developed by men. We know women were talking. Women were telling stories. We don't have them. I love to think about where, what, what could have happened, what they could have been talking about, but we don't have these stories by women. And so instead, we are relying on how men write women. And if anyone has read, you know,

• 31:19Liv Albert?

  they're like, oh, go on, just do a nice Google search of like men writing women, because there's a lot of good examples of it being utter nonsense. And I think that there is a little bit of that. And again, I say that knowing that I need to go back to the Agamemnon and that Clytemnestra is going to be amazing in that. But I still think that there is this tie to her committing some of the most horrible acts that like, it's necessary to, you know, it, it, she was, she needed to be kind of as like scary terrible as possible. Not only because it made the play more entertaining and more dramatic and scary, but like, just because she did represent this like, worst case scenario wife.

• 31:59Liv Albert?

  Worst case scenario wife. Maybe I'm making up the title now, honestly, like she, she represents the biggest fear of a man coming home from war, right? That she has found a new man, that she has gained independence, that she has like ruled in your stead essentially, and freed your most hated enemy. Like she represents the biggest bad to a man. And so I think that Cassandra is just an unfortunate side effect of that. And that's fucked up to say, but like, it is, I think, what we're looking at. She needed to be as scary as possible, but at the same time too, because we know that Cassandra did die in the Odyssey, like,

• 32:42Liv Albert?

  she needed to die in the Agamemnon? Um, and I, I would never turn to how she is in the Odyssey as well, because it's just really, there's so much going on, but it is, I think it still all comes down to the fact that like, the sources that we have for this, while they seem detailed because one is a play, like are really disparate and really, really contextually important. Like it's, you can't really look at this question or examine it at all without understanding the context. Because it's really easy to think of the plays as mythology, just like the rest of the sources, just like the Iliad and the Odyssey, but that is so not it, right?

• 33:24Liv Albert?

  They they are not mythology in that way. They are adaptations of mythology and there's so much going on in there. And again, oh, my God, this is why I clearly can and cannot answer that question. Um, I hope that was helpful and not just 25 minutes of me rambling.

• 33:44Liv Albert?

  But now I want to end this episode with some things I learned. Um, I might say them again in another episode because I think it's really important. But yesterday I attended the online seminar. Um, it I I'm going to link to it because I'm going to in this moment recording, forget exactly what it was called. Um, but it was put on in part by Everyday Orientalism, um, which is run in part by, um, a wonderful woman that I know, Catherine Blouet. Uh, she's a professor at U of T. And they put on a seminar, uh, about solidarity with the Palestinians and they had archaeologists in Gaza talking about archaeology. Um, and

• 34:29Liv Albert?

  of course, that comes with the loss of archaeology because, uh, all of the universities in Gaza have been destroyed. There has been, you know, mass destruction of of any kind of record. Um, records and and archaeology are being intentionally targeted because they represent a Palestine before 1948, right? They represent an ancient Palestine that, as you hopefully heard in my episode from a couple of weeks ago, was real and was called Palestine before the Romans ever fucked it all up. And that stuff is being intentionally intentionally targeted. And so I just need to tell you some things about that. Um, firstly,

• 35:14Liv Albert?

  I want to point out something that some people have, I I've seen a lot of of videos about this. And so maybe you have too. But in case I'm the first one to tell you, I want to say. That the official, quote unquote, official death toll for the people in Gaza is still hovering around 45,000, if I recall. It's been that way for over a year because they killed everyone who kept the records. And even when there were people keeping the records, everyone would always say they were the Hamas records anyway, and therefore suggested that they didn't matter. And so we, as a people and the media, have just continued to keep this death toll at 45,000,

• 35:53Liv Albert?

  even as so many of us have watched on social media as hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of more people die, right? Ever, like, when that, that 45, ever since that, that death toll came out, like, I mean, I can't tell you the number of dead bodies that I have seen on social media just by paying attention and listening to what these people are trying to tell us and bearing witness, because the powers of the world aren't helping them. But at the very least, we can help them know that they're not alone. And so I have been watching. And so this is a very rambly way of saying that the official death toll is 45

• 36:32Liv Albert?

  or so thousand. And yet, when Donald Trump sat down, sat down with Netanyahu recently to talk very openly about committing more war crimes and ethnic cleansing Gaza, because that's literally what he described doing. He, he described something that is illegal under international law, but I think we've all seen that they don't care about international law unless it's against the, unless it's them prosecuting people who are against the West, certainly not the West themselves. But those two leaders then gave up the, they gave up the game, right? They sat down together and they talked about intentionally displacing the people of Gaza. And they said the number, it was 1.4 million or something. Essentially,

• 37:16Liv Albert?

  the math, the math came out. The number of, the population of Gaza before?

• 37:24Liv Albert?

  Before the genocide, uh, and then when they were talking about ethnic cleansing, the people left, they gave another number. And I'm going to forget the exact numbers. I think it was that the population of Gaza before the current, the current genus, part of the genocide, because it has been ongoing since 1948. Um, but the population was something like 2.3 million. And now the population is 1.5 or something. Essentially in those numbers, they revealed that actually is more like 700 to 800,000 people that have died.

• 37:58Liv Albert?

  And, and the media is not, they're not actually, you know, saying that, right? They're not updating the death toll. Why would they? It's not an official death toll. It's just these leaders talking about ethnic cleansing and accidentally giving up the death toll, just through math. And I think that not enough people have recognized the math that came out of that conversation. And so I'm telling it to you now. But I'm also going to tell you that the largest statue of Zeus found up to that point in the late 19th century was found in Gaza. It, the largest Zeus statue up until I think it was something like 1890

• 38:41Liv Albert?

  or something was found in Gaza. It's now on display in Istanbul. In

• 38:50Liv Albert?

  some time, uh, since 1948, I believe it was somewhere in the 60s or 70s. No, maybe it was much later. I wish I'd written, written down the dates. Um, and J R L Ba was, there was illegal, uh, excavations done by Israel. They were illegal as per the Hag, the Hague Convention. Um, and those illegal exhibition, excavations resulted in the finding of a number of ancient artifacts that were found in Gaza, were illegally excavated in Gaza. Because spoilers, even though they like to believe that

• 39:31Liv Albert?

  In any case, Israel completely controls everything about Gaza, even though that is also illegal. These illegal excavations resulted in the key exhibition in the Israeli museum in Jerusalem. These items were stolen from Gaza illegally excavated, but illegal doesn't matter when it comes to Israel. And they are still now the key exhibit in the museum in Jerusalem, stolen from Gaza. In 2006, researchers from a university in Geneva, Switzerland, worked with people in Gaza to train them in order to, so that they could build a museum to house all of the artifacts.

• 40:12Liv Albert?

  Because again, spoilers, Gaza has been there since before the Bronze Age collapse. They have a lot of fucking artifacts because it's such an ancient place. They were trained by people in Geneva to build a museum to care for their artifacts. And in, in, in line with that, they gave artifacts to Geneva to display in Switzerland so that they could simultaneously have that happening alongside an actual museum in Gaza. Eighteen people died in order to get that.

• 40:57Liv Albert?

  Eighteen people, eighteen innocent Palestinians died in order to get the pieces through the Rafa Crossing and out into Switzerland. They are still on display in Switzerland. And then in 2008, the people of Gaza opened up a museum purely because they wanted to display their artifacts, their history. They wanted to create this place of culture where people could learn the history of Gaza. It had a beautiful restaurant. It was a beautiful museum built by love of land and history. And last year, Israel bulldozed it.

• 41:41Liv Albert?

  They bulldozed this museum that housed Bronze Age artifacts, let alone everything since, because Gaza has been populated since the Bronze Age.

• 42:00Liv Albert?

  I don't, I learned these things at that seminar and I wanted, it would be great if I could have done more research on my own and not just whatever notes I scribbled down while watching, but the notes that I scribbled down while watching are what I have to tell you. I, I still want to do more when it comes to looking at this history because I cannot fathom that the West continues to lead us to believe that these people don't belong on the land that they haven't inhabited since the Bronze Age. And I'm also just so furious that there are people that say that that statement somehow negates Jewish history in that place.

• 42:46Liv Albert?

  They're not mutually exclusive.

• 42:50Liv Albert?

  The place, the ancient Levant, ancient Palestine, the ancient Kingdom of Israel. They were never mutually exclusive. They shared that land. And it is only the Zionist entity, the modern state of Israel and the Zionist creation that, by the way, is only a couple hundred years old and based on the idea of colonization. It is only that mentality, that 150-year-old mentality that forces us to navigate this idea that there was only ever one people on that land.

• 43:31Liv Albert?

  If I've taught you anything about the ancient Mediterranean, I want it to be that people shared, that people moved, that, that multiple groups and cultures and religions existed in the same places together harmoniously. And they went to war with each other. They did, obviously. We know what Rome did. But the people, the actual people, lived together happily.

• 44:04Liv Albert?

  I don't, it's so wild. It's just so wild. Um, thank you all so much for listening to this slightly unhinged episode. Again, I am working on so many big things for the show, but also just expanding my reach well beyond the show. Um, that yeah, sometimes I need to do these rambly episodes, but also I just like, I just feel like I live on another planet.

• 44:37Liv Albert?

  That, that saying that these people who have such a deep connection to their land, who so clearly worship their olive trees and love them, that they don't deserve to stay there?

• 44:53Liv Albert?

  They lived through a genocide and they don't want to leave. They went home and started putting things back together as soon as they had the chance. They don't want to leave. I mean, sure, I'm sure some do, and that's their right. But by and large, the Palestinians, that is their land. You can tell because they tend to their olive trees when the settlers burn them. You can tell because they pick their, they, they, I don't, they farm their land. I guess that's the best way of saying it. They farm their land even with a gun pointed to their head, because it is their land. And Judaism existed alongside that, alongside them, with them.

• 45:41Liv Albert?

  No, no, no group should be more, no group should have more rights than another in a country. And I just don't, I feel like I live on another planet. I'm going to stop now. Thank you all so much for listening. Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangwisch is the Hermes to my Olympians.

• 46:02Liv Albert?

  The, listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Select music in this episode was by Luke Chaos. Sign up for the newsletter at missdavid.com/newsletter so you can keep in touch even as Instagram slowly declines into just another fascist propagandized bastion of the empire. Ah, I am Liv and I love this shit. And gods, if you're still listening, thank you because I am trying not to destroy my career one episode at a time.

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