3:25:00Why We Can’t Explain the Missing 432,000 Years | History for Sleep
A three hour and twenty five minute night narration built around the Sumerian King List and its claim that eight kings ruled five cities for a combined 432,000 years before a great flood. Arthur traces the number through the precession of the equinoxes, base 60 mathematics, and its strange recurrence in Hindu, Norse, and Babylonian sources, then grounds the flood in the real sea level rise at the end of the last ice age and the drowned valley of the Persian Gulf. Along the way he walks through the kings and gods, the worldwide family of flood myths, the scholars who deciphered the tablets, and what human memory can carry across ten thousand years. He reads the impossible reigns as possibly measuring cosmic rather than human time and the list itself as an act of preservation, while staying scrupulous about the line between what the evidence supports and what remains open.