One of the most annoying and pervasive beliefs I have encountered in my time on the internet is the belief that there is a huge conspiracy among scholars or among government agents to “hide the truth” about ancient history. This strange conviction that many people seem to share forms the basis for countless conspiracy theories of all different varieties.
For instance, I’ve seen countless people online claiming that academics or the United States government are secretly hiding evidence that aliens really visited Earth in ancient times or evidence for the existence of unknown lost civilizations. Funnily enough, no one actually seems to agree on exactly what kind of “truth” that governments and scholars are hiding; the only thing they all agree on is that, somehow or another, they’re hiding something and its always something big.
Unfortunately, for the conspiracy theorists, I’m going to have to burst their bubble; not only are historians and governments not “hiding the truth” about ancient history, but they actually have every motivation to not hide it.
Raiders of the Lost Ark and governments hiding ancient artifacts
I think that the widespread belief that governments and academics are “hiding” information about ancient history has been significantly popularized by the 1981 action-adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark, directed by Steven Spielberg, with a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan based on story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman.
As most of my readers certainly already know, Raiders of the Lost Ark is about Indiana Jones and his quest to recover the lost Ark of the Covenant. In the end, he does recover the Ark, but it is confiscated by bureaucrats working for the United States government. In the very last scene of the movie, when the bureaucrats are asked where the Ark is, they simply reply that the Ark is “somewhere very safe” and that they have “top men working on it right now.”
The final scene of the film shows the Ark being nailed inside a wooden crate marked “Top Secret” and hidden away inside a massive warehouse filled with thousands upon thousands of identical wooden crates so that no one will ever find it. The film heavily implies that the United States government wants to keep the existence of the Ark a secret because it is “too dangerous” for the public to know about. It also implies that the government may be keeping millions of other ancient artifacts locked away without the public’s knowledge or consent.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a work of fiction, but, unfortunately, all too many people believe that, at least on some level, the movie reflects what actual archaeology is like. As I plan to address in a future article at some point, the film’s portrayal of archaeology is almost completely inaccurate in every way. This especially includes the film’s portrayal of the government hiding away ancient artifacts.
ABOVE: Screenshot of the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, showing the Ark of the Covenant being hidden away inside a massive warehouse where no one will ever find it
Why governments like to display artifacts, not hide them away
First of all, as I discuss in this article I published in September 2019, the Ark of the Covenant is almost certainly not sitting in a secret wooden crate in some government warehouse somewhere; it was almost certainly destroyed when the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar II (ruled c. 605 – c. 562 BC) sacked the city of Jerusalem in 587 or 586 BC. In other words, it was almost certainly destroyed millennia ago.
Second of all, governments in general and the United States government in particular have very little motivation to want to keep ancient artifacts secret. In the Indiana Jones world, ancient artifacts are objects that have been invested with tremendous mystical powers that can be used to shape the course of history; in the real world, ancient artifacts don’t have magic powers and there’s no danger in letting the public know about them.
In fact, governments actually have a huge incentive to put any exciting ancient artifacts they may have in their possession on public display in a national museum, since doing so would allow the national museum to aggressively advertise the artifact, attract lots of guests, and make lots of money.
ABOVE: That infamous Nazi face-melting shot from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Believe it or not, real ancient artifacts don’t actually melt faces.
Many national museums charge entry fees, meaning, in many cases, the government would actually directly financially profit off putting the artifact on display. Some national museums, such as the Smithsonian Institute, don’t charge entry fees, but putting an artifact in display in one of these museums would still make money for the government indirectly by attracting tourists.
Countries with extremely long, rich histories and lots of ancient ruins and artifacts, such as Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Italy, usually have extremely strict laws and regulations in place to keep their cultural heritage from leaving the country. They do this because they have strong cultural and economic motivations to ensure that all artifacts are kept safe within their borders and that the most precious artifacts are put on permanent public display.
If the Ark of the Covenant were found by an archaeologist in Egypt today, it would almost certainly be put on display in a national museum like the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, where it would attract thousands of guests and probably make lots of money for the Egyptian government. (The Israeli government would probably try to insist that the Ark rightfully belongs in Jerusalem, but the Egyptian government would no doubt refuse to give them the Ark, probably resulting in a decades-long international feud. That’s all beside the point, though.)
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the great gallery of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo. If the Ark of the Covenant were really found by an archaeologist somewhere in Egypt, it would almost certainly end up in a museum like this one.
That other place artifacts can end up: billionaires’ mansions
Of all governments, the United States government is one that has especially little interest in ancient history or ancient artifacts. This is partly because there are so few ancient ruins and artifacts in the United States. Unfortunately, partly as a result of this, the United States has some of the weakest laws pertaining to ancient artifacts out of all countries in the developed world and courts in the United States have a history of siding with people trying to sell or buy stolen artifacts rather than the original owners of said artifacts.
For instance, as I discuss in this article from November 2019, the Archimedes Palimpsest is a medieval Byzantine manuscript that is known for certain to have been stolen from the Metochion of the Holy Sepulcher, a library in Istanbul owned by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, in around 1920 during the Greco-Turkish War (lasted 1919 – 1922). In 1998, after having been missing for over half a century, the palimpsest came up for auction at Christie’s Auction House in New York City.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem immediately sued Christie’s for ownership of the manuscript, since it had been theirs before it was stolen, but a United States judge for the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of Christie’s, saying that the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem had not made substantial enough efforts to recover their stolen property in the seventy-eight years since it had been stolen and that they had therefore forfeited all right to ownership of it.
The manuscript was subsequently sold for two million dollars to an individual identified only as “Mr. B.” who was described by his representative as “a private American” who worked in “the high-tech industry” who was “not Bill Gates.” The anonymous “Mr. B.” is widely believed to be Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the current richest man in the world.
ABOVE: Photograph from the Encyclopedia Britannica of Jeff Bezos, who is currently the richest man in the world and probably the current owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest
Where ancient artifacts would really end up
If an amazing and unbelievable ancient artifact is discovered somewhere, where it ends up depends greatly on who finds it. If the artifact is found by archaeologists, then it will most likely be carefully catalogued and information about it will be published in an academic journal.
The artifact itself will most likely end up being put on permanent public display in a national museum, where it will most likely attract lots of guests from all over the world. For instance, the Antikythera mechanism, which I wrote about in this article from December 2019, is currently on public display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
If the artifact is discovered by looters, however, then chances are it will be sold around the black market for a few decades before eventually winding up at an auction house where it will probably be sold for millions of dollars. The object itself will most likely wind up as a decoration in some American billionaire’s private mansion or maybe locked away in a billionaire’s secret storage vault.
Thus, if anyone is hiding ancient artifacts from the public, it’s probably billionaires like Jeff Bezos, not scholars and not the United States government. The artifacts these people may be hiding are almost certainly not on the same scale of significance as the Ark of the Covenant, but they may be significant nonetheless.
Governments forcing scholars to hold specific views on ancient history?
Many people who believe that the government is hiding the truth about ancient history don’t just think that the government is hiding ancient artifacts, though; they often also believe that the government is suppressing scholars and making sure scholars don’t say anything that conflicts with what the government wants people to believe.
For the vast majority of countries on Earth, this belief is ridiculous. There are a few autocratic countries like North Korea where scholars aren’t allowed to disagree with the government’s orthodoxy, but, in the vast majority of countries, the government doesn’t really have any involvement at all in what scholars write about the ancient world.
The fact is, for better or worse, governments in general tend to have very little awareness of academic disputes pertaining to matters of ancient history. Indeed, governments and politicians generally don’t particularly care about ancient history much at all—except in very particular instances in which a specific aspect of ancient history pertains to a specific national concern. (The first example of this that comes to mind is the whole Macedonia naming controversy.)
Even if they wanted to, by their very nature, governments are pretty much incapable of completely subjecting scholars to their will, because there is such a thing as other countries. If the United States government mandated that all scholars must believe something that’s clearly wrong, you’d have all the scholars in, say, Russia or Greece or Australia insisting that it’s obviously ridiculous and vice versa.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing various “Macedonias”
Scholars themselves intentionally hiding the truth?
There are lots of people who believe that scholars themselves are intentionally hiding the truth about ancient history. These people think that scholars have some kind of evidence that “proves” the traditional historical narrative is wrong in some way, but they’re intentionally suppressing it because they don’t think the public will understand or they think it’s too dangerous to reveal. This is the most untenable thesis of all, however, and it shows a complete lack of awareness of what academic culture is really like.
Academics are under constant pressure to publish new ideas and arguments pertaining to the field they study. Typically, it is expected that an academic needs to publish at least one research article a year to maintain their reputation. Scholars are also under pressure to make their new ideas as innovative and original as possible while still keeping them well-supported.
If any real-world academic found genuine, compelling evidence that totally overturned everything we thought we knew about ancient history, they wouldn’t hide that evidence away out of fear that it was “too radical for the public to handle.” No! Of course not! They would publish their evidence in the best peer-reviewed journal that would accept it. In other words, scholars would be all over that stuff in minutes.
Some of the conspiracy theorists will doubtlessly insist that the journals would surely all reject it because they’re afraid of new ideas, but this is, of course, a false assumption. Academic journals are just as desperate for new ideas and materials as scholars are. The only reason why they would reject a new and original argument would if it is clearly unsupported by the evidence. That’s why articles about ancient aliens and Atlantis and so forth tend to not end up in academic journals; it’s because arguments for those sorts of things have so little evidence to support them that they’re impossible to take seriously.
It’s worth noting that poorly-supported arguments do get published in peer-reviewed academic journals all the time—just not usually ones pertaining to aliens and so forth. For instance, in this article from last month, I debunked a claim made by researchers that they had reconstructed the actual voice of the 3,000-year-old Egyptian priest Nesyamun based on his surviving mummy.
As common sense probably tells most people, accurately reconstructing the voice of a person who has been dead for 3,000 years based only on his mummified and damaged vocal tract is impossible. Despite this, the researchers’ claim to have reconstructed the priest’s voice somehow made it into the reputable British academic journal Scientific Reports.
That’s just one of the literally countless examples of speculative and poorly-supported arguments that have wormed their way into peer-reviewed journals. Part of the reason why this stuff makes it into journals is because academic journals aren’t nearly as afraid of new and controversial ideas as the conspiracy theorists think.
ABOVE: Top of the page for the article about the researchers who claimed to have reconstructed the voice of the 3,000-year-old mummy. Even really weird, wildly speculative stuff can wind up in peer-reviewed journals.
Conclusion
There isn’t a conspiracy among scholars or government agents to “hide the truth” about ancient history. Government agents generally aren’t particularly interested in matters of ancient history—certainly not interested enough to hide evidence that totally undermines everything we think we know. When governments do come into possession of extremely rare and astounding artifacts, it’s to their advantage to put them on display.
Finally, scholars themselves aren’t engaging in a conspiracy to cover up evidence, because it is actually to scholars’ advantage to be open about the evidence. Presenting new evidence and new arguments is good for a scholar’s career. The idea that there is a huge conspiracy to hide evidence from the public is just totally unsupported by evidence.
These claims are akin to those occurring in science right now (climate change is a hoax, etc.). The people making these claims are completely unaware, I suspect, of the ego of scientists many of whom would throw their grandmothers under a bus to be able to prove their colleagues wrong. Having witnessed a few “scholarly” debates I suspect scholars the the ancient world to be made out of the same cloth.
Were someone trying to hide something quite monumental (no pun intended) they would be excoriated by colleagues if their logic were at all flawed in their cover up.
I think that a lot of the beliefs I address in this article are born of a general ignorance of what academics themselves are like, what academic culture is like, and what academics actually care about, combined with a naïve desire for fantasy to be reality. People want to believe in ancient aliens and Atlantis because they think those things are cool. Then, when scholars come along and tell them there is no evidence for any of those things, their only recourse is to insist that the scholars know about evidence for those things and they’re just hiding it for some reason.
I’m sure you’ve heard the famous description of the British Museum as “the greatest collection of stolen merchandise in the world.”
My husband, who teaches history, frequently hears from students about something that “historians are covering up.” He usually replies that he’s a historian, too, and nobody has told him about any of these conspiracies.
I don’t know if you saw it, but I wrote an article about the Elgin Marbles in June 2019 in which I presented my argument in favor of why I believe Britain should return them to Greece. If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend it. In it, I talk in depth about the history of the marbles and the circumstances surrounding their removal from the Akropolis by Lord Elgin.
The reason why I don’t like Richard Spencer isn’t because of “media smears”; the reason why I don’t like him is because of the things he himself has said and done. Everything I have said about him above is simply a description of things that have come right from his own mouth. Richard Spencer may tell the public that he is not a Nazi, but the positions he has expressed support for say otherwise. The views a person expresses tell you more about their true character than the labels they prefer to be called by. Even the original Nazis didn’t call themselves “Nazis”; instead, they called themselves “National Socialists.”
I don’t generally listen to political pundits. In fact, I tend to be very cautious towards political punditry in general, since I think many political pundits either don’t really know what they are talking about or misrepresent the evidence to make their positions look more appetizing than they really are. As far as my own political views are concerned, I am a fairly conventional liberal.
You say, “it’s very important for a healthy individual to read people who go with the truth, not conventional wisdom,” but I must object that, just because something someone says is seen as radical or subversive, that doesn’t necessarily make it true. Indeed, radical ideas are the ones that should be viewed with the greatest skepticism. As Aristotle notes in his Nikomacheian Ethics, all people possess some degree of wisdom and, although many people may be ignorant or foolish on their own, there is wisdom in the collective. This does not mean that the views of the masses are always correct, but it does mean that any view that challenges the consensus should be subjected to scrutiny and not just accepted merely for the sake of its own subversiveness.
The fact that you have encountered fewer women on the forums that you visit doesn’t in any way indicate that women “lack a will to outside the box thinking.” On the contrary, there are probably two major reasons why you have encountered fewer women visiting the forums that you visit. One reason is because, if the opinions you have expressed here are anything to judge by, you are a misogynist and you are therefore most likely to visit forums where other people share misogynistic views similar to your own. Obviously, women are less likely to visit forums where the people are openly hostile to women. Instead, they are more likely to visit other forums where their opinions are more welcome. Part of your problem, then, is probably that you are visiting forums that are generally hostile to women’s voices.
The second reason is because there may be women out there expressing similar views to yours, but you just haven’t come across them, either because they are less popular because the audience that shares their views is made up of sexist people like you who don’t think women’s opinions are worth listening to, or because you personally ignore women expressing their opinions because you personally don’t like listening to them.
You comment about how you don’t like “loose women” and how you don’t think they should be in charge, but this is a rather hypocritical attitude; men are hardly ever blamed for being sexually promiscuous, but, for some reason, people always blame women for being sexually promiscuous, even though men report having had more sexual partners on average than women. If you were being morally consistent, you would say that men like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump shouldn’t be in charge of anything because they are “loose men.”
It is true that misogynistic views were all too common among men in ancient Greece, but that does not mean that such views should be regarded as correct. The ancient Greeks were wrong about a lot of things. For instance, as I discuss in this article from December 2019, it was widely believed among ancient Greek intellectuals that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the Sun revolved around the Earth. When Aristarchos of Samos (lived c. 310 – c. 230 BC) challenged this view, his theory of heliocentrism was widely dismissed. Today, we know for certain that the Earth revolves around the Sun. In other words, the ancient Greek intellectuals were definitely wrong about heliocentrism. One of the many other things they were wrong about is women’s rights.
Finally, there is nothing inherently “Islamic” about not drinking alcohol. For instance, I never drink alcohol, but I am not a Muslim and my decision not to drink is not motivated by any conscious desire to imitate Muslims. Furthermore, even if not drinking alcohol was a strictly Islamic thing, that wouldn’t automatically make it wrong; good ideas can come from all different sources.