The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the many objects that went down with the ship during the sinking of the Titanic was a beautiful, jewel-encrusted edition of a poetry book called the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” The Rubaiyat was probably the most famous work of poetry in the English-speaking world at that time…which was somewhat unusual, as the book was written by a Persian mathematician 800 years before. For more information about Omar Khayyam and the Rubaiyat, check out the books “Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry” by Taher-Kermani Reza, “The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam” by Mehdi Aminrazavi, and the BBC documentary “The Genius of Omar Khayyam.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	I recently learned that you can find a lot of old computer games on Steam.
0:05.7	And when I say old, I mean old, like Windows 95 old.
0:11.9	So I started poking around looking for this game that I was obsessed with when I was a kid.
0:16.4	It's called Titanic Adventure Out of Time.
0:20.3	I think it's from like 1996.
0:22.0	Wandering the ship, if you notice a hat.
0:26.5	Oh, no, it crashed.
0:28.4	Shoot.
0:30.2	Oh, shoot.
0:33.9	Okay, let's load it again.
0:35.9	Oh, I didn't save it.
0:40.3	The story in the game was so good.
0:43.6	So you play as this British secret agent who's been fired.
0:48.6	And in the beginning of the game, you're just sitting in your apartment.
0:51.7	It's just like depressing 1940s wartime London apartment
0:55.1	and the radio is playing. But then suddenly there's this explosion that sends you
1:01.8	reeling back into time and back to the site of your very last failed mission, the reason why
1:09.3	you were fired, which was a mission on board, the Titanic.
1:14.0	For this mission, you were supposed to track down a very special artifact that was hidden
1:18.7	somewhere on board, which is a book covered in jewels called the Rubayat of Omer Hayam.
1:28.2	Listen, when you find the Rubayat, knock on my law.
1:32.8	Now, as a kid, I never finished this game.
	...

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