Episode 238: The Crypt of Thornwell Jacobs

the memory palace

Nate DiMeo

Natedimeo, History, Publicradio, Radiotopia

4.8 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Order The Memory Palace book now, dear listener. On Bookshop.org, on Amazon.com, on Barnes & Noble, or directly from Random House. Or order the audiobook at places like Libro.fm.

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Radiotopia is a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts that’s a part of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you’d like to directly support this show, you can make a donation at Radiotopia.fm/donate.

Music

Kara-Lis Coverdale's A480
Palimpsest from Will Bate's score to The Sound of Silence
Harriett Smith and Robert Martin Meet in the Rain from Isobel Waller Bridge's score to Emma.
The Play from Dan Romer's score to (the terrific) Station Eleven.
Cutting Branches from a Temporary Shelter from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
Sustainable from H. Takahashi.

Notes

There's a particularly good article by Colin Dickey about Jacobs and The Crypt in American Scholar.
You can read all 1100 pages of Jacobs' autobiography here, if you haven't already.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate Tomeo.
0:03.0	How could it be that everything, literally everything people knew about ancient Egypt, knew about that culture?
0:11.0	It was clearly so advanced, clearly so substantive, literally clearly, you couldn't miss it.
0:16.0	The pyramids, you've seen them, they're enormous, and the sphinx and the statues and temples.
0:22.7	And in the 1920s, everyone was seeing pictures in the newspapers of the treasures from the newly
0:28.0	discovered tomb of Tutankhamun.
0:30.0	That there was a civilization, with a run that lasted thousands of years.
0:35.9	So how could it be?
0:37.5	Thornwell Jacobs really couldn't get his head around it.
0:40.1	How could it be that everything anyone knew about that entire civilization came from fragments,
0:46.4	a few structures, a paltry handful of surviving objects, and from literal fragments,
0:51.5	from symbols written on crumbling papyrus found in pharaonic
0:55.2	tombs or just a handful of tablets found in Egypt or carved into stones at this one site, one place.
1:02.0	That was all that survived.
1:04.0	The sum total of all human knowledge about this extraordinary civilization came from just those few fragments.
1:11.6	It was incredible to think about.
1:13.6	Thornwell Jacobs would say that he felt like he was living inside a submarine.
1:19.6	Up would go to the periscope and he'd look around for a bid and take in what he could about the world.
1:25.6	But the view was always limited.
1:30.3	He could read books, but only so many. He could visit a new city, but only get to so many museums or churches,
1:34.3	only walk so many of its streets.
1:37.3	And he would know more about the world.
	...

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