(Laughter) "Did you see him on 60 Minutes, racing Michael Phelps in a pool -- nothing but swim trunks on -- diving in the water, determined to beat this swimming champion?
Two years ago, we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site, a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda, the Royal Kasubi Tombs.
And that night, Daniel tells us, at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall, "You are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and the Persians."
Cyrus, king of the Persians, has entered Babylon without a fight -- the great empire of Babylon, which ran from central southern Iraq to the Mediterranean, falls to Cyrus.
He goes on to say that, having conquered Babylon, he will at once let all the peoples that the Babylonians -- Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar -- have captured and enslaved go free.
"Thus said Cyrus, king of Persia, 'All the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given thee, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem.
And that change, that great historic moment, was made possible by Cyrus, the king of Persia, reported for us in Hebrew in scripture and in Babylonian in clay.
When he has his great celebrations in Persepolis, he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the British Museum, goes to Tehran, and is part of those great celebrations of the Pahlavi dynasty.
The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important, because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion.
Egyptologists have always known the site of Itjtawy was located somewhere near the pyramids of the two kings who built it, indicated within the red circles here, but somewhere within this massive flood plain.
What this shows is that at this possible location of Itjtawy, five meters down, we have a layer of occupation for several hundred years, dating to the Middle Kingdom, dating to the exact period of time we think Itjtawy is.
These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used.
Outside the jail, the whole country went into a frenzy, some attacking me badly, and others supportive and even collecting signatures in a petition to be sent to the king to release me.
There was this official study that was presented to the Shura Council -- it's the consultative council appointed by the king in Saudi Arabia — and it was done by a local professor, a university professor.
RB: Yeah, well, 25 years earlier, we'd launched the Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen, " and I'd certainly never expected that 25 years later -- that she'd actually knight us.
So I wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when I was writing my new book, and it's a story of something that happened 3, 000 years ago, when the Kingdom of Israel was in its infancy.
And they may start to make their way through one of the valleys of the Shephelah up into the mountains, because what they want to do is occupy the highland area right by Bethlehem and split the Kingdom of Israel in two.
And the Kingdom of Israel, which is headed by King Saul, obviously catches wind of this, and Saul brings his army down from the mountains and he confronts the Philistines in the Valley of Elah, one of the most beautiful of the valleys of the Shephelah.
David says, "I want to fight Goliath, " and Saul tries to give him his armor, because Saul is thinking, "Oh, when you say 'fight Goliath, ' you mean 'fight him in hand-to-hand combat, ' infantry on infantry."
They approached the most powerful judge, Lord Mansfield, who was chief judge of the court of King's Bench, and they demanded that he issue a common law writ of habeas corpus on behalf of James Somerset.
And the kinds of generalizations babies have to make about ducks and balls they have to make about almost everything: shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings.
Now, at the time I hadn't met Stacey, and I thought this was some sort of wealthy oil tycoon and I'd struck it rich, but it was only later that I found out she'd actually taken out a loan to make this happen.
I read, for example, about the Southern African king Ngungunhane, who led the resistance against the Portuguese in the 19th century; and about marriage rituals in a remote village on the shores of the Caspian sea in Turkmenistan.
Poem 2: We can feel / Activist through your life's / morning / Pauses to see, pope I hate the / Non all the night to start a / great otherwise (...) Alright, time's up.
This skipping of an entire generation left lingering claims to the throne among their various offspring, particularly the Lancasters, descended from Edward's third son, and the Yorks, descended from his fourth son.
Though he was unable to directly seize the throne, he managed to be reinstated as Protector and have himself and his heirs designated to succeed Henry.
But the newly crowned King made a tragic political mistake by backing out of his arranged marriage with a French Princess to secretly marry the widow of a minor Noble.
Warwick allied with the Lancasters, turned Edward's jealous younger brother, George, against him, and even briefly managed to restore Henry as King, but it didn't last.
And by marrying Elizabeth of York, elder sister of the disappeared Princes, the newly crowned Henry VII joined the two roses, finally ending nearly a century of war.
But the Wars of the Roses, like the fiction they inspired, show us that victories can be uncertain, alliances unstable, and even the power of Kings as fleeting as the seasons.
They didn't know that I published architecture and design journals, that I was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, that I wore black -- still do -- that I smoked cigarillos.
(Laughter) And then my favorite -- they really do have a kind of genius of their own, these guys -- my favorite is Sophocles' Oedipus the King: "Sex With Mum Was Blinding."
And he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with secret instructions not to guard it very well.
So, according to Herodotus, they invented dice games, and they set up a kingdom-wide policy: On one day, everybody would eat, and on the next day, everybody would play games.
I don't know if Pope Benedict watches TEDTalks online, but if you do, I've got news for you Benedict -- I carry condoms all the time and I never get laid.
0.87498998641968s
Download our Word Games app for free!
Connect letters, discover words, and challenge your mind at every new level. Ready for the adventure?
I respected him as an adversary. I respect him now as my ally. Hector, Paris, young princes, come. 