Welcome to the History of the World Podcast. My name is Chris Hasler.

And you're listening to volume 2, The Ancient World

This is episode 3 or Oh, Leonard Woolley was a British archaeologist born in London in the United Kingdom in 1880. From a young age, Woolley knew that he was interested in archaeology and worked at British

sites of Roman occupation before travelling abroad to work on sites along the Nile Valley and the Levant.

Woolley would ultimately end up working at a site which he is most well known for working at and that site is in

Mesopotamia. From the 1920s onwards, Woolley would utilize hundreds of workmen to exume thousands of bodies

and discovered tens of thousands of artifacts. It was thanks to the work of a man called

William Loftus that Woolley was posted to this site in Mesopodamia. Some 70 years previously, Loftis had

shown a keen interest in the site that had been known to have been the home of some very old bricks with some very strange symbols on them.

So when Willie was asked to go there, he jumped at the opportunity.

One of the things that he identified at the site

was a flood stratum which is a layer of sedimentary material which demonstrates that a flood had occurred in the past, and this

flood stratum was huge.

Such was the size of it that Woolley would compare it to the Genesis flood narrative of the Tanach,

also known as the Hebrew Bible.

This is not the first time that we have spoken of the flood from the biblical book of Genesis,

as we mentioned it before when speaking of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic story written in ancient times about ancient Mesopotamia.

The Epic of Gilgamesh also makes note of a significant and catastrophic flood.

Now this is all quite significant in the story of the history of the world. Certainly biblical writings were to some degree unquestionable

right up until the 19th century

when all these scientists stopped

and made people think about whether

...