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00:00:04 Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim & Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Homer's Iliad is one of the oldest and most widely read literary works in the Western world. The epic poem tells the story of a ten-year war in the ancient city of Troy. For centuries, most modern readers assumed the poem was pure fiction, and the city of Troy was just as fantastical as the ancient Greek gods who populated the story. But in the 1860s, a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann believed the Iliad was more than just a legend. He thought that it actually referred to a historical war fought between real Bronze Age cities that simply hadn't been discovered yet by archaeologists. Now, Schliemann had no archaeological training, but he did have a lot of money and a lot of free time. So in 1870, he decided to find the proof himself. Schliemann had made an acquaintance of a British diplomat and amateur archaeologist named Frank Calvert, who had previously argued that the ruins of ancient Troy were were buried under a hill in Turkey known as Hisarlik. Calvert had never been able to secure funding for the excavation because no one believed his story. But Schliemann did, and with the help of Calvert's old crew, he set out for Hisarlik and started digging. Schliemann was so sure that the ruins of Troy lay deep beneath that hill, and so desperate to find them, that he didn't want to waste time by digging slowly and carefully through the many layers of earth. Instead, He used dynamite to blast a huge trench right down to the bedrock. And then, once that trench was open, Schliemann and his crew spent years excavating the site, searching through the dirt and rock for any sign of ancient civilization. It was slow to begin with, but in May of 1873, Schliemann finally stumbled upon what appeared to be a large piece of copper embedded in the ruins of a stone wall. As he brushed the dirt away, he realized that it wasn't actually copper at all. It was gold. He had discovered a trove of gold jewelry and other precious artifacts that he believed to be the wealth of King Priam, who ruled Troy during the Trojan War in Homer's poem. Schliemann was so excited he couldn't contain himself. He smuggled the treasure out of the country and presented it as confirmation of his theory. He was the first person to prove the existence of ancient Troy, or so he thought. Schliemann was, in fact, the first person to correctly identify where Troy was located. But unfortunately, his fantastical belief in his own theory proved to be his undoing. By blasting so many layers of dirt so recklessly, Schliemann had inadvertently destroyed thousands of years of artifacts from other settlements that had occupied this location over the centuries. This made it harder for later archaeologists to establish exactly how old the items that Schliemann found actually were. But modern studies eventually found that the treasures that Schliemann had uncovered were actually came from about a thousand years before the period associated with the Trojan War. They were artifacts from a much older settlement, what we now call Troy II. The ancient city described in Homer's Iliad, known today as Troy VI, was built on top of the ruins of this old settlement many centuries later. In almost every trace of Troy VI, the city that Schliemann had actually set out to find had been permanently destroyed by his own dynamite. In 1902, French colonizers in Hanoi found themselves at war. Their enemy was fast, clever, and multiplying. But the enemy wasn't the local population. It wasn't even human. It was rats. At the time, Vietnam was part of French Indochina. Governor-General Paul Dumère wanted Hanoi to become a monument to French superiority, and so he built imposing government buildings, wide boulevards, fancy villas, and miles of new sewers. But the improvements were not shared equally. The European Quarter received running water, toilets, and elaborate sewers. The densely populated Vietnamese neighborhoods, on the other hand, were left with basic drainage that could overflow during the rainy season. Unfortunately for the French, rats did not respect that segregation. The new sewers offered protection from predators and were filled with waste from above that served as food. It gave Hanoi's rats the perfect place to reproduce, along with a highway into the European Quarter. And soon, rats began emerging through the plumbing of French homes. And clearly, this was gross, but it would soon also become deadly. You see, scientists had recently established that infected fleas carried by rats helped spread bubonic plague. And in 1902, the disease reached Hanoi. A French military doctor, Vincent Ruffiandi's, later wrote that Hanoi's first confirmed case was a Vietnamese employee at a tailor shop. Investigators found numerous rats dead inside the business and suspected that infected animals had arrived in fabric imported from Hong Kong. All told, the plague caused 14 known cases and eight deaths in Hanoi that summer. And so the colonial government struck back. Beginning in the spring of 1902, it hired Vietnamese laborers to enter the sewers and kill as many rats as possible. Naturally, the French did not go into the sewers themselves. The workers were paid according to the number of rats that they killed, and the totals were absolutely wild. From April 26th through May 1st, they turned in 7,985 rats. But they were apparently just getting started. A few weeks later, on May 30th alone, they killed 15,041. And then just a couple of weeks after that, on June 12th, they reached an official single-day record of of 20,114. That's more than 20,000 rats killed underneath one city in one day. And it still wasn't enough. The sewers seemed to contain an