How Ancient Empires Sent Complex Messages With Fire [20:21]

YouTube ^ | November 5, 2025 | The Rise of Civilization (with Lance Geiger)

[SunkenCiv]

Before WiFi or Morse code, ancient civilizations used fire to send messages across empires. From China’s Great Wall to Byzantium’s time-coded relays, each era made the system faster and smarter. Featuring Lance Geiger of The History Guy, The Rise of Civilization is a documentary series that combines expert interviews with cutting-edge photorealistic AI recreations to reveal how the inventions, systems, and ideas of the ancient world shaped the foundations of our modern one. 

The Rise of Civilization | 12,413 views | November 5, 2025

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TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: godsgravesglyphs; lancegeiger; thehistoryguy; thg

[SunkenCiv]

The other GGG topics added since the previous digest ping, alpha:

• Alexander the Great held this coin (maybe) [4:14] [12/03/2025]
• Ancient Egyptian pharaoh moved another ruler's body and stole his tomb, hundreds of funerary figurines suggest [12/06/2025]
• 'Breathtaking' 6,000-year-old Texas murals overturn myth of random rock art [12/03/2025]
• A Dentist Discovered a Hidden Code in Leonardo da Vinci's Most Famous Drawing [11/30/2025]
• Family auctions off cache of gold coins from the reign of King Henry VIII found in their backyard [11/30/2025]
• Listening In: JFK on Getting to the Moon (November 21, 1962) [4:04] [12/05/2025]
• Mystery Foot From 3.4 Million Years Ago Likely Belonged To Tree-Climbing Human Ancestor [11/30/2025]
• Old Copper Culture [12/01/2025]
• Recovering Lost Artifacts From An Ancient Roman Mass Grave [52:13] [12/06/2025]
• Vanished in the Flood: The Story of Doggerland | Full Documentary [50:07] [12/05/2025]

[SunkenCiv]

The weekly digest list of topics is up top.

• from the FRchives:
  The Ancient Greeks Built the World's First Telegraph System
  -- 1,600 Years Before Morse Code [11/02/2025]

[Alas Babylon!]

[fidelis]

[SunkenCiv]

“Horns, horns in the morning. Rohan had come at last.” — J.R.R. Tolkien

[SunkenCiv]

Imagine Mordor’s Systane budget...

[Magnum44]

[Lurker]

THG does some really good work.

L

[BradyLS]

That’s why the Romans invented Palantirs. To keep tabs on happenings in the Empire from the Levant to Londonium. The last one was lost when the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453. It is unknown which other(s) it may have been in contact with. One was rumored to have been recovered in Berlin in 1945. /🤪

[KarlInOhio]

If only we had some magic stones that could be used to talk to each other.

The video discussed the Chinese using multiple fires to provide more info, Greeks using duration and water clocks to pick a message based on fire duration, the Greeks having a multiple fire coding system and the Byzantines having remotely synchronized water clocks with message tied to time it is sent.

[SunkenCiv]

Even in works of fiction, beacons get the job done.

https://rsd2-alert-durden-reading-room.weebly.com/uploads/6/7/1/6/6716949/03-the-return-of-the-king.pdf

...The drums rolled and rattled. With a vast rush, Grond was hurled forward by huge hands. It reached the Gate. It swung. A deep boom rumbled through the City like thunder running in the clouds. But the doors of iron and posts of steel withstood the stroke.

Then the Black Captain rose in his stirrups and cried aloud in a dreadful voice, speaking in some forgotten tongue words of power and terror to rend both heart and stone.

Thrice he cried. Thrice the great ram boomed. And suddenly, upon the last stroke, the Gate of Gondor broke. As if stricken by some blasting spell, it burst asunder: there was a flash of searing lightning, and the doors tumbled in riven fragments to the ground.

In rode the Lord of the Nazgul. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgul, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.

All save one. There, waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dinen. ‘You cannot enter here,’ said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. ‘Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!’

The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter. ‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!’ And with that, he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.

Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

https://textformatter.ai/app

[SunkenCiv]

I’d GGG his stuff more often, but I’d probably use it way too much because I like it so much. He plugged this new channel in one of his recent THG channel vids (the one about goats I think), and linked to this one.

[DouglasKC]

Cool video thanks.

[SunkenCiv]

😁

[SunkenCiv]

😄

[SunkenCiv]

My pleasure.

[Red Badger]

Text and data rates will apply..............

[SunkenCiv]

“Tall ships and tall kings Three times Three, What brought they from the foundered land Over the flowing sea? Seven stars and seven stones and one white tree.”

[Buttons12]

I wonder if they ever used rainbow lights at Pharos, honoring Sodom.

[ClearCase_guy]

I think that may be Tolkien’s best passage.