Modern Stereotypes about Ancient Civilizations

I’ve been debunking popular misconceptions about ancient civilizations online for a while now. One thing I’ve noticed is that the vast majority of the misconceptions I’ve debunked tend to play into a some very specific stereotypes about what certain ancient civilizations were supposedly like.

It is clear that most people who haven’t studied ancient history think of ancient civilizations in terms of stereotypes. Thus, lots of people (and not always the same people) imagine the Egyptians as mystics with secret knowledge; the Greeks as intelligent, progressive, scientific-minded lovers of freedom; the Romans as perpetually debauched, horny, and violent; and early Christians as fanatical, ignorant, obscurantist destroyers of civilization.

All of these stereotypes are wrong to some extent. Most of them are wildly inaccurate. In this article I want to look at these stereotypes, where they come from, and some of the smaller misconceptions that feed into them.

Ancient Egypt

The ancient Egyptians are usually stereotyped in modern popular culture as mystics who possessed some kind of secret knowledge, especially secret knowledge specifically about lost ancient technologies, about extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, about magic, or about the true origins of religion. The idea of the ancient Egyptians as mystics stems partly from the intense interest their culture had in the afterlife, but it has much more greatly been shaped by cultural phenomena of the past two centuries.

The first modern cultural phenomenon that I think has influenced the idea of the Egyptians as mystics is Orientalism. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ancient Egypt was portrayed by many historians, novelists, and movie producers as a strange, exotic, and mystical “eastern” culture. In reality, of course, there is nothing inherently “mystical” about eastern cultures and the distinction between “eastern” and “western” cultures is not nearly as clear-cut as has traditionally been assumed, but this notion of eastern cultures being inherently mystical and strange unfortunately still pervades much of modern thought.

Meanwhile, Egypt was also of great fascination to many nineteenth and early twentieth-century esoteric thinkers, such as Helena Blavatsky (lived 1831 – 1891) and her Theosophist followers, Gerald Massey (lived 1828 – 1907), and Edgar Cayce (lived 1877 – 1945). These people really helped to cement the popular association of ancient Egypt with all things mystical.

While the Egyptians are often portrayed as “mystics” in a positive sense, this portrayal is also sometimes disparaging in ways that I think a lot of promoters of this view don’t even realize. For instance, a lot of people seriously believe that the “secret knowledge” the Egyptians had was knowledge of the supposed fact that the pyramids were really built by aliens. This notion is really quite disparaging because it rests on the assumption that the Egyptians were just too primitive to have built the pyramids themselves.

ABOVE: Depiction of the ancient Egyptian opening of the mouth ceremony from The Book of the Dead of Hunefer. The ancient Egyptians’ own interest in the afterlife is part of the reason why they are perceived as “mystical.”

Debunking some misconceptions that play into this stereotype

The Egyptians and electric lighting

As I wrote about in this article from the beginning of this year, the ancient Egyptians did not invent electric lighting. The reliefs from the southern crypt of the ancient Egyptian temple of Hathor at Dendera that have been interpreted by some people as lightbulbs are actually depictions of the god Harsomtus arising in the form of a serpent from the primordial lotus flower.

The reason why some lavishly decorated ancient Egyptian tombs don’t have much soot on their ceilings is partly because the Egyptian decorators most likely used castor oil lamps for lighting, which burn clean and don’t leave soot, and partly because the ceilings have in many cases been extensively cleaned by modern restorations.

The pyramids

As I discuss in depth in this article I wrote in January 2020, we have mountains of evidence that the Egyptian pyramids were built as tombs for the pharaohs—not as mystical energy generators, devices to slow time, devices to beam signals to alien spacecraft, or whatever else you might have thought they were built for.

Many pyramids have explicit funerary inscriptions on the insides. Meanwhile, mummies and parts of mummies have been found in the burial chambers of some pyramids. The pyramids that Egyptologists haven’t found mummies in don’t have mummies because they were repeatedly robbed in antiquity and the mummies were stolen. Even these pyramids, though, still contain funerary equipment such as sarcophagi and remnants of funerary goods.

Additionally, ancient Egyptian written sources explicitly refer to the pyramids as tombs and so do later sources written by Greek authors. Finally, although we don’t know all the exact details of how the pyramids were built, we do have a fairly good idea of how it happened and we know the Egyptians did it using relatively simple tools and techniques.

The so-called “curse of the pharaohs”

As I plan to address in a future article, the “Curse of the Pharaohs” is totally made up. The first three people to enter the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922 were the archaeologist Howard Carter; Carter’s financial sponsor George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon; and Lord Carnarvon’s daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert.

Lord Carnarvon died on 5 April 1923 of pneumonia resulting from an infected mosquito bite. The press went wild, claiming that the tomb was cursed. Interestingly, the two people most responsible for promoting stories about a curse were the English journalist Arthur Weigall and the Scottish novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Of the first three people to enter the tomb, though, Lord Carnarvon was the only one who died shortly thereafter. Howard Carter died of lymphoma at the age of sixty-four on 2 March 1939—a full sixteen years after entering the tomb of Tutankhamun. Lord Evelyn Herbert died at the age of seventy-eight on 31 January 1980—a full fifty-seven years after entering the tomb of Tutankhamun. Clearly, if one of the first people to enter the tomb died fifty-seven years later at a ripe old age, the curse wasn’t very effective.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the death mask of Tutankhamun

Ancient Greece

The ancient Greeks bear the unique distinction of being members of the only ancient civilization that is consistently stereotyped positively in modern popular culture. They are stereotyped as intelligent, scientific-minded, progressive, and freedom-loving—all of which are traits that most modern western audiences usually tend to consider positive.

This remarkably positive reception of the ancient Greeks in modern popular culture is due in a large part to the fact that the Greeks produced a lot of things that modern people appreciate the value of. It is also, however, partly the result of nineteenth and twentieth-century romanticism. For the past two hundred years, the classical Greeks have been idealized (and even perhaps idolized) to such an extent that many of the problems and complexities that were present within their society have been, in a sense, brushed under the rug.

While the Greeks are stereotyped as intelligent, the reality is more complicated. The ancient Greeks were no more or less intelligent on average than people alive today. There were certainly many people in the ancient Greeks world who were very intelligent, but not everyone who lived back then was a genius. The reason why the Greeks seem so brilliant to us is because the particularly intelligent ones are the ones who are still remembered today.

Likewise, while it is true that the ancient Greeks produced a large number of noteworthy scientific developments, there were some ideas that were prevalent within their society that were wildly unscientific. For instance, a lot of the ideas that were prevalent in ancient Greek medicine seem laughable today. The Greek doctor Galenos of Pergamon (lived c. 129 – c. 210 AD) correctly recognized the brain as the seat of consciousness, but he also believed in humorism, the medical system which held that most medical problems were caused by imbalances of bodily fluids, namely blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile.

Meanwhile, while the ancient Greeks certainly did place great value in the idea of ἐλευθερία (eleuthería), or “freedom,” it is important to point out that their idea of freedom differed quite considerably from our idea of freedom. For the ancient Greeks, freedom was only for those who deserved it. That’s why even democratic Athens had such a large slave population; it was thought that only free people deserved freedom and slaves did not.

ABOVE: The Funerary Oration of Perikles, painted in 1852 by the German historical painter Philipp Foltz

Debunking some misconceptions that play into this stereotype

Pythagoras and his theorem

Everyone is taught in school that the Pythagorean theorem was discovered by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos (lived c. 570 – c. 495 BC), but, as I explain in this article from March 2018, that is certainly incorrect. The Pythagorean theorem was known to the ancient Babylonians around 1,200 years before Pythagoras was even born. Furthermore, the popular legend about Pythagoras discovering the Pythagorean theorem is not attested in any source until centuries after Pythagoras’s death.

Archimedes and his death ray

There is a popular story that the brilliant Greek inventor and mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BC) invented a death ray using mirrors which he used to defend his home city from invaders. Archimedes really was a brilliant mathematician, but, as I explain in this article from April 2019, the story about him inventing a death ray is certainly just a legend.

The earliest attested versions of the death ray story come from roughly four hundred years after Archimedes’s death and they mention nothing about him using mirrors. The idea of Archimedes using mirrors to burn enemy ships is a tidbit of pure speculation by the Greek architect mathematician Anthemios of Tralles (lived c. 474 – 533 x 558 AD), who lived around seven hundred years after Archimedes.

ABOVE: Fresco from c. 1599 by the Italian painter Giulio Parigi of Archimedes using a mirror to burn the Roman ships. This certainly never really happened.

The ancient Greeks and misogyny

As I discuss in this article from June 2019, although we tend to think of the ancient Greeks as progressive, in general, their attitudes towards women were not progressive at all. In fact, misogyny of the bitterest and most toxic kind was widespread throughout the ancient Greek world. Certainly not everyone in ancient Greece was a misogynist, but many people back then were. Even many of those who were not outright misogynists still held profoundly sexist attitudes towards women.

The ancient Greeks and homosexuality

As I talk about in this other article from June 2019, the popular idea that the ancient Greeks were super tolerant of homosexuality is an oversimplification. Homosexual activities were normal and accepted in ancient Greece, but only within certain relatively strict social constraints. Homosexual activities that did not fall within those constraints were widely considered shameful and immoral.

The Antikythera mechanism

As I talk about in this article from December 2019, even though the Antikythera mechanism is widely described in popular science writings as an “ancient Greek computer,” it was not a computer in the modern sense of the word. It was about as technologically advanced as a mechanical analogue clock. That’s still impressive considering the time when it was created, but this thing wasn’t anything like a modern laptop computer. Additionally, contrary to what popular science writers have repeatedly claimed, devices similar to the Antikythera mechanism are mentioned in surviving ancient texts. For instance, the Roman orator Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BC) gives a detailed description of a similar device in his treatise De Re Publica.

Greek democracy

As I plan to address in depth in a future article, the ancient Greeks in general weren’t nearly as socially and politically progressive as people today would like to believe. Many Greek city-states were democratic, but ancient Greek democracies were also critically flawed in a number of ways. Only adult male citizens were allowed to participate in the democracy. Women, resident foreigners, and slaves were totally excluded. Greek democracies were also prone to the same violent tendencies as other city-states (as, for instance, the Athenians’ decision to brutally massacre the people of the island of Melos in winter of 416 BC demonstrates).

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 480 BC depicting an erastes and an eromenos kissing

Ancient Rome

The ancient Romans are stereotyped as excessively violent, hedonistic, and perpetually horny. There is some degree of truth to this stereotype. The ancient Romans certainly could be violent at times and some individual Romans were indeed very horny. The Romans in general, though, weren’t really more violent than most other ancient civilizations and they were no more likely to be horny than people of any other nation.

The modern image of the Romans as violent, hedonistic, and horny draws on a number of disparate influences, but it has been promoted in modern times primarily through movies and television shows such as the Italian fantasy drama film Fellini Satyricon (originally released 1969), the American historical pornographic film Caligula (originally released 1979), and the HBO historical drama television series Rome (originally aired 2005 – 2007).

Movies and television, of course, naturally like to emphasize the violent and sexual aspects of the ancient Roman world because these are the things that attract modern audiences to come see their movies. In doing this, however, they have a tendency to create a rather distorted impression of what the Roman world was like.

ABOVE: The Roses of Heliogabalus, painted in 1888 by the English Academic painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, one of the most iconic modern representations of (alleged) ancient Roman decadence

Debunking some misconceptions that play into this stereotype

That thing about the vomitoria

As I talk about in this article from January 2017, vomitoria were not places for vomiting. They were actually passages in theaters through which spectators passed when exiting the theater. Also, the use of the word vomitorium to describe such places is only attested in one very late Roman source. There’s no good evidence that vomiting was ever a regular part of Roman dining customs either. There are a few ancient Roman accounts of people vomiting in association with eating, but none of these can be taken as evidence that it was ever normal for people to intentionally vomit so they could gorge themselves further.

Gladiators

As I talk about in this article from February 2019, not every Roman gladiator match necessarily ended in a death and there were actually measures in place to minimize casualties, since gladiators were huge investments for their owners and, when one died, it represented a huge financial loss for the gladiator’s owner. Most deaths in the arena were actually deaths of convicted criminals and prisoners of war who had been sentenced to death in the arena.

Roman orgies

As I talk about in this article from February 2019, there is very little reliable evidence to support the popular idea that the ancient Romans were having orgies all the time. The Romans were, in general, somewhat more open about sexuality than people today, but the idea of ancient Rome as a “pervert’s paradise” is largely shaped by uncritical readings of fictional texts like Petronius’s Satyrica, uncritical readings of unreliable historical texts, and—above all—modern Hollywood films.

Ancient Rome, violence, and the movies

As I talk about in this article from December 2019, although the Roman world was certainly a violent place by contemporary standards, modern films and television shows have given many people a wildly inflated notion of just how violent the Roman world—and the pre-modern world in general—really was. Contrary to what some people have apparently been led to think, the ancient Romans did not resolve all their conflicts through cage fights to the death.

The ancient Romans and silphium

As I talk about in this article from January 2020, the popular story that the ancient Romans were so horny that they overharvested silphium, a plant that was used as a highly effective birth control, to extinction is also false. First of all, the evidence that silphium was even effective at all as a form of birth control is extremely shaky to say the best. Second of all, although some Roman medical texts recommend silphium as a birth control, it was primarily desired because it was seen as a culinary delicacy and its primary use was never as a form of birth control. Finally, there is evidence to suggest that silphium never really went extinct and that people really just forgot which plant it was.

ABOVE: Pollice Verso, painted in 1872 by the French Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the most famous modern depictions of gladiatorial combat. It is by no means an accurate depiction, but it has been influential.

Early Christians

Early Christians are stereotyped as fanatical, ignorant, obscurantist fundamentalists who virulently hated all forms of science and learning and intentionally destroyed classical civilization, bringing about the Dark Ages. This stereotype originated during the Enlightenment, when anti-Christian writers such as John Toland (lived 1670 – 1722), Voltaire (lived 1694 – 1778), and Edward Gibbon (lived 1737 – 1794) wrote influential accounts characterizing early Christianity in this manner.

The stereotype, however, has been vigorously promoted in recent years by works such as Carl Sagan’s 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, the 2009 feature film Agora, the 2012 popular history book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, and the 2018 popular history book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catharine Nixey.

I’m not going to deny that there is some limited degree of truth to this stereotype. We do have surviving ancient accounts of groups of Christians destroying ancient temples and statues and there were a few early Christian authors, such as Tertullian (lived c. 155 – c. 240 AD), who regarded Greek philosophy and literature with a considerable degree of disdain.

The vast majority of pre-Christian temples, however, seem to have either been converted into Christian churches or simply abandoned. Many early Christians don’t even seem to have been opposed to pagan statues, as long as they were not being worshipped; as I note in this article from last month, large numbers of Greek cult statues were used to decorate the city of Constantinople and were only destroyed centuries later in 1204 during the sack of the city by the western European armies of the Fourth Crusade.

Meanwhile, the majority of early Christian writers seem to have not really had a problem with the study of classical philosophy and literature. Many of them studied classical writings extensively themselves. Klemes of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 AD) even went so far as to treat Greek philosophy as almost a kind of a secondary revelation. The Church Father Jerome (lived c. 347 – 420 AD), the translator of the Latin Vulgate, loved the writings of Cicero so much that he feared he would be seen as a follower of Cicero and not of Christ.

ABOVE: Portrait of the English historical writer Edward Gibbon, who influentially portrayed early Christians as ignorant obscurantists in his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Debunking some misconceptions that play into this stereotype

The murder of Hypatia

As I discuss in both this article from August 2018 and this article from February 2020, the circumstances surrounding the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria are widely misrepresented. Hypatia was actually widely beloved and every single Christian writer from within a hundred years of her life who mentions her speaks highly of her.

She was murdered by supporters of the bishop Cyril of Alexandria in March 415 AD not because they hated her because she was an intellectual, but rather because she was entangled in a bitter political feud between Cyril and Orestes, the governor of Alexandria. Her murder is really most accurately characterized as a political assassination.

Furthermore, every single surviving contemporary account we have of her murder portrays it as an unbelievably heinous atrocity. The contemporary Christian historian Sokrates Scholastikos (lived c. 380 – after c. 439), for instance, utterly condemns Hypatia’s murder, writing in his Ecclesiastical History 7.15, as translated by A. C. Zenos: “This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.”

The Library of Alexandria

As I discuss in both this article from July 2019 and this article February 2020, the Great Library of Alexandria was certainly not destroyed by fanatical, ignorant, obscurantist Christians. The Great Library of Alexandria disappears from the historical record in the middle of the third century AD. If it still existed in 272 AD, it certainly would have been utterly destroyed when the emperor Aurelian’s forces inadvertently utterly demolished the entire Brouchion quarter of Alexandria where the Library was located.

The idea of Christians destroying the Library of Alexandria comes from the fact that, in 391 AD, a group of Christians led by the bishop Theophilos destroyed the Serapeion, a temple to the god Serapis that had at one time housed scrolls from the Library of Alexandria’s collection. None of the accounts of the Serapeion’s destruction mention it having contained any scrolls at the time, however, and at least one account from before its destruction speaks of its library in the past tense.

The Archimedes Palimpsest

The Archimedes Palimpsest is often cited as an example of Christians supposedly destroying classical knowledge, but, as I point out in this article from November 2019, the codex containing the writings of Archimedes that was used to make the palimpsest was itself originally copied by Christian Byzantine scribes.

Furthermore, we don’t know the context in which the palimpsest was made; it’s entirely possible the priest who had the pages from the Archimedes Codex removed and reused to make a prayer book did this because he already had another copy of the treatises contained in the codex and that other copy simply hasn’t survived.

It is also worth noting that the ancient Greeks and Romans made palimpsests using material from old books just like medieval Christians did. It is therefore deeply disingenuous for people to claim the Archimedes Palimpsest as an example of obscurantist Christians destroying Greek learning, since the ancient Greeks themselves did the same thing.

Christians allegedly burning Sappho’s poems

As I address in this article from December 2019, the popular story that Christians deliberately destroyed Sappho’s poems is a totally unsubstantiated legend that arose among classics scholars in western Europe during the Renaissance, who were writing centuries after the events they describe allegedly happened and who couldn’t even agree on which Christians were responsible.

It is far more likely that the reason why so many of Sappho’s poems have been lost is because she wrote in the Aeolic dialect, which many later readers regarded as obscure, archaic, and hard to understand. Thus, her works were not copied as much as other works and were eventually mostly lost to time. It is worth noting that we actually have more surviving poems by Sappho than we do for the vast majority of early Greek lyric poets—a testament to her enduring popularity.

Greek texts allegedly being totally lost in Europe

As I address in this article from January 2020, it was actually the Christian Byzantines who are primarily responsible for the preservation of the majority of classical Greek texts. For some reason, though, the Byzantines are almost never mentioned in the context of the copying of classical texts and instead popular culture often portrays it as though the majority of ancient Greek texts have survived only through Arabic translations. In reality, a few Greek texts have survived only through Arabic translations, but these are far from even a plurality of the total surviving texts.

ABOVE: Portrayal of the Neoplatonic philosopher Hypatia being murdered by a group of Christians dressed in black robes from the 2009 movie Agora. The murder really did happen, but the film takes a lot of creative liberties in its portrayal of the events leading up to it and it fails to portray the fact that the overwhelming majority of Christians at the time saw it as a shocking and horrific act of deranged fanaticism.

A deeply entrenched stereotype

Unfortunately, the stereotype of early Christians as fanatical destroyers seems to be by far the most deeply entrenched. The reason for this entrenchment is because, while there is no real ideological reason why people today should care about, say, how horny the ancient Romans were, a lot of people have a very strong ideological motivation to see all Christians as uniformly dangerous fanatics.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article debunking all sorts of popular misconceptions about history that have been promoted through Carl Sagan’s 1980 PBS miniseries Cosmos. I corrected a wide array of errors made by Carl Sagan about all sorts of different aspects of ancient history using historical evidence.

What is fascinating, though, is how some people reacted to this article. One person left a comment under the version of the article I published on Quora, saying this:

“Oh you must be a Christian. It’s a major major flaw. This is an apologetic.”

In other words, it seems that anyone who says that early Christians weren’t all fanatical, ignorant, obscurantist fundamentalists who intentionally destroyed classical civilization gets automatically labeled a “Christian apologist” and dismissed as unworthy of being taken seriously.

Conclusion

People in the ancient world were complicated, just like people today. We should stop reducing ancient history to stereotypes and recognize, first and foremost, that all ancient civilizations were made up of individual people. Additionally, we need to realize that ancient cultures were not uniformly one thing or another, but rather amorphous in many ways with a lot of inconsistencies.

People in ancient Egypt were capable of being non-mystical, people in ancient Greece were capable of being dumb and traditionalist, people in ancient Rome were capable of being sober and peaceful, and early Christians were capable of being rational and tolerant. We must always remember that there is always much greater diversity of people within any given culture than between cultures.