Kelly's Picks: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

The episode explores the historical journey of the 'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,' from its origins with a medieval Persian polymath to its unexpec

Key takeaways

• Omar Khayyam was a Persian mathematician who developed the Jalali calendar, which is still used in Iran today.
• Edward Carroll discovered a 16th-century manuscript at Oxford that served as the basis for English translations.

Main topics

• Omar Khayyam
• The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Notable quotes

A book of verses underneath the bough, a jug of wonderful wine, a loaf of bread, and thou beside me singing in the wilderness.

Conclusion

The episode provides a beautiful look at how ancient scientific achiev

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) you Speaker 2 (0:03) Hey, this is Kelly McEvers, host of Atlas Obscura. One thing I love about making this show is going back and listening to all the amazing places we have gone to over the years. So this week, I picked some of my favorite episodes that really take you there. Places you maybe never heard of, or that you might have heard of, but you don't know the full story behind the place. Or a place that you might have thought was one thing, but it isn't. The first episode is actually about an object that tells not one story, but two stories about place. I don't want to give too much away, so let's just get right into it. Before we do, I want to say, if you have favorite episodes, we want to hear about them. Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and your favorite place we have gone to on the show and why. Our mailbox will cut you off after three minutes, so please call back if you get disconnected. Or better, you can record a voice memo and send it to us at hello at atlasobscura.com. Okay, get ready to hear some incredible stories. Here is today's episode. Speaker 2 (1:13) I recently learned that you can Speaker 3 (1:14) find a lot of old computer games on Steam. And when I say old, I mean old, like Windows 95 old. So I started poking around looking for this game that I was obsessed with when I was a kid. It's called Titanic Adventure Out of Time. I think it's from like 1996. Speaker 1 (1:34) Wandering the ship, if you notice a hat. Speaker 3 (1:39) Oh no, it crashed. Shoot. Oh, shoot. Okay, let's load it Speaker 1 (1:48) again. Speaker 3 (1:48) Oh, I didn't save it. Speaker 3 (1:53) The story in the game was so good. So you play as this British secret agent who's been fired. And in the beginning of the game, you're just sitting in your apartment. It's this like depressing 1940s wartime London apartment. And the radio is playing. But then suddenly there's this explosion that sends you... reeling back into time and back to the site of your very last failed mission, the reason why you were fired, which was a mission on board the Titanic. For this mission, you were supposed to track down a very special artifact that was hidden somewhere on board, which is a book covered in jewels called the Rubaiyat of Omar Hayyam. Speaker 1 (2:45) Now, Speaker 3 (2:45) as a kid, I never finished this game. It was just like a little too complicated for me to comprehend. And I think I just spent a lot of time clicking through all the different rooms of the Titanic. Honestly, still a great experience. But I will tell you something else that I did not know back then, which is that the Rubaiyat of Omar Hayyam is a real book. There really was this fabulous jewel-encrusted edition of the Rubaiyat that went down with the ship. But the more that I learned about this book and how it came about, the more I became convinced that the Titanic connection might actually be the least interesting thing about it. Speaker 3 (3:24) I'm Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today we are looking for the Rubaiyat of Omar Hayyam. It's a story about how a medieval Persian mathematician became one of the most famous writers in the English-speaking world. And how his most famous work wound up at the bottom of the ocean, both in real life and in this old video game that I'm