Ammonites is the colloquial name for the members of Ammonoidea, a subclass of ancient cephalopods with shells resembling the curled horn of a ram that first appeared during the Devonian Period (lasted 419.2 million years ago – 358.9 million years ago) and flourished in the earth’s oceans until the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event wiped out their last species around 66 million years ago. Because ammonites were extremely widespread in oceans for over three hundred million years, their fossilized shells are extremely common in many areas all over the world.
Tens of millions of years later, in the much more recent past, the ancient Egyptians and Kushites worshipped the god Amun, whom they depicted as having either the head or sometimes just the horns of a ram. The Greeks and Romans later came to worship this god, calling him Ammon and identifying him with their god Zeus/Iupiter. They identified fossilized ammonite shells as resembling Ammon’s horns and consequently believed that they were a kind of sacred stone with the power to induce prophetic dreams. It is from the name Ammon that ammonites have received their modern common and scientific names. Read on to learn more about this fascinating ancient deity and his connection to prehistoric fossils!
The Egyptian god Amun
The ancient Egyptians worshipped the god Amun, who rose to increasingly greater preeminence over the course of Egyptian history. He is first attested in the Old Kingdom (lasted c. 2686 – c. 2181 BCE) in the Pyramid Texts, which, as I discuss in several previous posts, including this one from September 2022, consist of various spells that the Egyptians inscribed on the interior walls of royal pyramids in order to protect the pharaoh and members of the royal family in the afterlife.
Amun rose to greater importance during the First Intermediate Period (lasted c. 2181 – c. 2055 BCE). During the Eleventh Dynasty (lasted c. 2150 – c. 1991 BCE), he supplanted the god Montu as the divine patron of the city of Waset, which is commonly known in English by the Greek name Thebes. The later rulers of the Eleventh Dynasty united Egypt under their rule with Thebes as their capital, marking the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (lasted c. 2055 – c. 1650 BCE). The succeeding Twelfth Dynasty, however, moved the capital from Thebes to Itjtawy.
During the late Middle Kingdom, a people known as the Hyksos, who were probably of Levantine origin and spoke a West Semitic language, settled in the Nile Delta. As the power of the Egyptian state waned, the Hyksos seceded and established their own kingdom with their capital at Avaris. The Hyksos kingdom eventually came to rule much of Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (lasted c. 1677 – c. 1550 BCE).
In the sixteenth century BCE, however, the kings of Thebes successfully drove out the Hyksos and united all of Egypt under their rule, with Thebes as their capital. Ahmose I (ruled c. 1550 – c. 1525 BCE), who became the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, completed this conquest, marking the beginning of the New Kingdom (lasted c. 1550 – c. 1069 BCE).
With the kings of Thebes as the new rulers of Egypt and Thebes itself as Egypt’s capital, Amun, the patron god of Thebes, rose to the highest, most exalted status within the Egyptian pantheon. The Egyptians identified him with the sun god Ra as Amun-Ra and came to regard him as the supreme creator god.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a wall painting of the god Amun in the Mortuary Temple built under the order of Pharaoh Hatshepsut (ruled c. 1479 – c. 1458 BCE) at Deir el-Bahari
While all this was happening in Egypt, the people of the kingdom of Kush, which, as I discuss in much greater depth in this post I wrote in June 2020, ruled the land of Nubia to the south of Egypt in what is now Sudan, were worshipping a sun god who had the head of a ram with curved horns as their chief god. The Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose I (ruled c. 1506 – c. 1493 BCE) conquered Kush in around 1503 BCE or thereabouts and installed a man named Ahmose in the position of provincial governor of Kush under his authority.
From this time onward, probably at least partly in order reinforce Egyptian control over Kush, the Egyptian pharaohs promoted the identification of the ram-headed chief god of Kush with Amun-Ra and commissioned many artistic depictions of Amun-Ra with the head (or sometimes just the horns) of a ram.
ABOVE: Photograph posted by Joanna Penn to Flickr showing an Egyptian relief of the god Amun with the head and horns of a ram, photographed while on display in the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford
Egypt ruled Kush for the rest of the New Kingdom until around 1070 BCE when, with Egyptian power in decline, the Kushites were able to shake off Egyptian rule and establish a new independent kingdom of their own with the city of Napata, located near the modern city of Karima in central Sudan, as their capital.
Nonetheless, Amun remained an extremely important god, if not the most important god of all, for both the Egyptians and the Kushites. In fact, in Egypt, the High Priests of Amun at Thebes became so powerful that they became the de facto rulers of all of Egypt from around 1080 to around 943 BCE.
Meanwhile, the Kushites, who knew Amun by the name Amani or Amane, continued to worship him as their chief god, give their children theophoric names that included his name (such as Amanirenas, Amanitore, etc.), and construct temples to him for well over a thousand years afterward.
One of the better-preserved ancient Kushite temples is the Temple of Amun at Naqa, which was built during the co-reign of King Natakamani and his wife or mother Kandake Amanitore (ruled c. 1 – c. 20 CE). This temple is decorated with six larger-than-life-sized statues of rams outside it, all which would have originally had curved horns. All the rams’ fleeces are additionally decorated with swirls resembling the curved horns of a ram.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Temple of Amun at Naqa
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing statues of rams in front of the Temple of Amun at Naqa
Growing contact between Greeks and Egyptians in the Greek Archaic Period
Greeks are attested to have been in contact with Egyptians from their very earliest recorded history onward. As I mention in this post I made back in September 2020, quintessentially Egyptian artifacts have been found in Mycenaean tombs in mainland Greece dating to around 1500 BCE, indicating that there was already trade between the two peoples at this very early date.
Nonetheless, from around the seventh century BCE onward, contact between Greeks and Egyptians significantly increased. From at least the reign of Psamtik I (ruled 664 – 610 BCE), who is also commonly known by his Greek name Psammetichos I, onward, Greek soldiers served the pharaohs in Egypt as mercenaries. The presence of Greek traders and merchants in Egypt also seems to have increased. There is even evidence that some upper-class Greeks began to visit Egypt as what we might describe as tourists to view impressive Egyptian cities, temples, and monuments.
Around this same time, Greek settlers also began establishing permanent colonies near Egypt and eventually in Egypt itself. Sometime around 631 BCE or thereabouts, Greek settlers from the island of Thera founded the colony of Kyrene on the northern coast of what is now Libya. Kyrene grew into a large and important city and many smaller Greek cities soon followed in the region around it, which became known as Kyrenaïke. Later, possibly around 570 BCE, Greeks established the permanent trading colony of Naukratis in the Nile River Delta in Egypt itself.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing an Egyptian statue of the pharaoh Psamtik I dating to the seventh century BCE, found at Kale in Asia Minor, currently held in the Hieropolis Archaeology Museum in Pamukkale, Turkey, bearing an inscription in Ionian Greek describing the generous rewards Psamtik bestowed upon a Greek mercenary named Pedon son of Amphimeos, who fought for him and who set up the statue in Asia Minor as a votive upon returning home
The cult of Ammon in the Greek world
Contact with Egyptian culture and religion introduced Greeks to the god Amun. Greeks, especially those who were living in the region of Kyrenaïke in modern-day Libya, began to worship him under the name Ἄμμων (Ámmōn) and identified him with Zeus, the chief god of their own pantheon. By the late fifth century BCE, the cult of Ammon had spread throughout much of the Greek world.
The depiction of Ammon with the full head of a ram does not seem to have appealed much to the Greeks, perhaps because they were accustomed to worshipping deities who were anthropomorphic. Thus, the Greeks usually depicted Ammon in their art using the standard iconography of Zeus, only with a pair of ram’s horns attached to the sides of his head.
ABOVE: Coin minted in the Greek city of Barke in the region of Kyrenaïke, located on the northern coast of what is now Libya, dating to between c. 475 and c. 435 BCE, depicting a silphion plant (of the kind I discuss in this post I made back in January 2020) on the obverse and a profile portrait of Zeus Ammon with ram’s horns on the reverse
The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) gives the following explanation in his Histories 2.42.3–6 for why depictions of Ammon have the horns of a ram. He writes, as translated by A. D. Godley, with some minor edits of my own:
“The Thebans, and those who by the Theban example will not touch sheep, give the following reason for their ordinance: they say that Herakles wanted very much to see Zeus and that Zeus did not want to be seen by him, but that finally, when Herakles prayed, Zeus contrived to show himself displaying the head and wearing the fleece of a ram which he had flayed and beheaded.”
“It is from this that the Egyptian images of Zeus have a ram’s head; and in this, the Egyptians are imitated by the Ammonians, who are colonists from Egypt and Aithiopia [i.e., Kush] and speak a language compounded of the tongues of both countries. It was from this, I think, that the Ammonians got their name, too; for the Egyptians call Zeus ‘Amon.’”
“The Thebans, then, consider rams sacred for this reason, and do not sacrifice them. But one day a year, at the festival of Zeus, they cut in pieces and flay a single ram and put the fleece on the image of Zeus, as in the story; then they bring an image of Heracles near it. Having done this, all that are at the temple mourn for the ram, and then bury it in a sacred coffin.”
The worship of Ammon became more widespread among Greeks during the Hellenistic Era (lasted c. 323 – c. 30 BCE). Meanwhile, as the Roman state expanded through the conquest and annexation of new territories over the course of this same period, the Romans became exposed to the cult of Ammon through the Greeks. Thus, the Romans began to worship Ammon as well, identifying him with Iupiter, the chief god of their own pantheon, whom they also identified with Zeus.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble head of the god Zeus Ammon, based on a Greek original of the late fifth century BCE, currently held in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich
.jpg){kind=link}
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Roman terracotta relief dating to the first century CE, currently held in the Museo Barraco in Rome, depicting Iupiter Ammon with curling ram’s horns
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a different Roman marble head of Iupiter Ammon dating to between c. 120 and c. 160 CE, currently held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City
Pliny the Elder on ammonite fossils
When the ancient Greeks and Romans encountered fossilized ammonites, they interpreted them as a type of sacred stone with special powers because they resembled the horns of Ammon. The ancient Roman writer Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 CE) references ammonite fossils in his encyclopedic work Natural History 37.40.167. He calls them by the name Hammonis cornua, which means “horns of Ammon,” and describes them as a sacred stone found in Aethiopia (i.e., Kush) that is said to cause people to experience prophetic dreams. His full description reads as follows in the original Latin:
“Hammonis cornu inter sacratissimas Aethiopiae, aureo colore arietini cornus effigiem reddens, promittitur praedivina somnia repraesentare.”
This means, in my own translation:
“Hammonis cornu [‘horn of Ammon’], which is among the most sacred gems of Aethiopia, is of golden color, returning the image of a ram’s horn; it is said to bring prophetic dreams.”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a pyritic fossil of the ammonite species Pleuroceras solare, dating to the Pliensbachian age of the Lower Jurassic, found in Little Switzerland, Bavaria, Germany
How ammonites received their modern name
Pliny the Elder’s Natural History became possibly the most influential text on early modern geology, botany, zoology, and taxonomy. Consequently, during the Renaissance, intellectual writers such as the German humanist scholar and mineralogist Georgius Agricola (lived 1494 – 1555) and the Swiss physician and naturalist Conrad Gessner (lived 1516 – 1565) adopted Pliny the Elder’s name Hammonis cornua to describe fossilized ammonites.
Later naturalists realized that what Pliny had understood as rocks were already the fossilized remains of a primordial subclass of cephalopods. The German naturalist Johann Philipp Breyne applied the Latin name Ammonites to this subclass in his Dissertatio Physica de Polythalamiis (Physical Dissertation on Polythalamians [Many-Chambered Mollusks]), published in 1732, in chapter four on page 20.
The French taxonomer Jean Guillaume Bruguière (lived 1749 – 1798) popularized this name and, in 1884, the German paleontologist Karl Alfred von Zittel coined the scientific name Ammonoidea for the subclass to which ammonites belong.
ABOVE: Portrait of the French taxonomer Jean Guillaume Bruguière who helped to popularize the name ammonites (left) and the German paleontologist Karl Alfred von Zittel who coined the subclass name Ammonoidea (right)
I read in old alchemical texts such as Glauber or Rulandus that sal ammoniac was made from the horse urine soaked earth at the Temple of Ammon. From this we get the word ammonia.
The OED says this:
“sal ammoniac (L. sal ammoniacus, Fr. sel ammoniac) i.e. Salt of Ammon, a hard white opaque crystalline salt, supposed to have been originally prepared from the dung of camels near the temple of Jupiter Ammon, as it still is in Egypt; chemically Ammonium Chloride NH4Cl, formerly called muriate of ammonia; used in tinning iron, in pharmacy, and for the manufacture of Ammonium Alum for the dyer. ”
In duplicating some old processes, I have boiled down gallons of human urine into a thick paste which can be dry distilled to give a pungent white salt, which crystallizes in a net like pattern in the glass receiver. The ammonia smell of the reducing urine is powerfully sharp and will take the top of your head off! The neighbors are not very fond of this process I might add!
Just as interesting as usual!
I thought about a few things when reading this: firstly, those ram statues with swirly fleece look really impressive! Are the sculptures of “criocephali” or “criosphinxes” in some way related? I also wonder about the Ammonians, have they been identified with any historical people or is it just another of Herodotus’ misinterpretations?
By the way, did you see all the praise you got a few days ago for your reddit thread on lesbianism in Antiquity?
Can you link to that thread?
Spencer’s thread was nearly identical with her blog post “How Were Lesbians Regarded in Ancient Greece and Rome?”. I could link specifically to the thread where hers was reposted if you wish to see what people thought bout
Actually, I have greatly revised and expanded my blog post that you mention here so it now includes much more detailed information than the Reddit thread it was originally based on. In particular, I’ve added a lot of new info about the Roman reception of Sappho and about evidence for women using erotic binding spells on other women in Roman Egypt.
I’ve just reread your post. Thank you very much for the reference to the Magical Papyri. I saw a Spanish translation in a second-hand bookshop possibly 9 or 10 years ago, when I didn’t know what it was, and now I deeply regret not having bought it, since it is a very rare item and was never reissued.
Regarding Anakreon’s Fragment 358, I had read it before in a Spanish prose version (by F. Rodríguez Adrados, 1980), but its meaning was very different in that translation. The second half of the poem is given as: “Pero ella, como es de la bella isla de Lesbos, desprecia mis cabellos porque son blancos y abre su boca en busca de otros,” which literally translates to English as “But, since she comes from the fair island of Lesbos, she scorns my hair for being white and opens her mouth in search of other [hairs].”
In a footnote to this passage, the translator comments: “The Lesbian woman is a fellatrix, it is pubic hair what catches her attention. This obscene interpretation, based on the grammar of the passage and in parallels from the comedy-writers, seems certain.” Then he mentions four papers by four different scholars on the subject. But since those papers are from the seventies, I guess that interpretation has been mostly superseded among current scholars by the one you gave in your post. Am I right?
The interpretation you have quoted here is one of two related interpretations that were popular back in the 1970s and ’80s that tried to reinterpret the fragment as not alluding to female homoerotic attraction. There are a whole host of problems with it, though. The first problem is that the earliest unambiguous evidence for the association of women from Lesbos with fellatio is Aristophanes’s Wasps, which dates to at least seventy years (and probably much more than that) after Anakreon’s fragment, so it is not clear whether the association existed at all at the time when Anakreon composed the fragment.
Furthermore, even if the association did exist, it most likely would not be the first thing on the mind of Anakreon’s original audience when he has his speaker say that the woman is from Lesbos. We know from a passage in the Iliad 9.129–130 and from the surviving poems of Sappho that Lesbian women were known in the Archaic Period for being exceptionally beautiful and refined in their dress and manners. This association, not the one with fellatio, is most likely the first one that Anakreon’s poem evokes, especially since he specifically describes the woman as wearing intricately embroidered sandals.
The second problem is that scholarship since the ’80s has effectively ruled out the suggestion that the verb “χάσκει” in the final line of the poem implies any association with fellatio. Thus, if neither the mention that the woman is from Lesbos nor the word “χάσκει” implies fellatio, there is no reason to think that the woman in the poem is a fellatrix.
The third problem for this interpretation is that, in the final line, Anakreon has the phrase “ἄλλην τινὰ” instead of simply “ἄλλην,” which seems to disambiguate that “ἄλλην” is referring to a new object (i.e., a woman who has not already been mentioned) rather than referring back to the noun “κόμην” (“hair”) two lines earlier.
The fourth and final problem is that Athenaios of Naukratis, the ancient author who preserves the fragment through quotation, expressly describes it as a literary riposte to Sappho. If this interpretation is correct, then the poem only really makes sense if we interpret the woman as erotically interested in another woman.
Most scholars today generally agree that the poem describes a woman who is erotically interested in another woman. For more information on the interpretation of this poem, I recommend this paper: Pfeijffer, Ilja Leonard. “Playing Ball with Homer. An Interpretation of Anacreon 358 PMG.” Mnemosyne 53, no. 2 (2000): 164–84. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4433084.
Super interesting. Thank you very much for your answer!
You’re welcome! And thank you so much for sharing the material you have here and for asking the excellent question! It always makes me feel so happy to know that I have readers who already know and have read so much about topics that I write about!
I think that the people Herodotos calls “Ammonians” are most likely the people of the ancient kingdom of Ammon, which is better known from the many references to it in the Hebrew Bible.
I had not seen any of the praise that I received in that thread until last night, after I first received email notification of your comment here, which led me to look up the thread and read through it. I really appreciate you letting me know about that!
I see, my knowledge of the Bible is not that great so I did not recognise that.
I am glad you appreciate it!
And I’m sorry for not noticing you had updated your article! Especially the section on magical papyri is rather interesting.
That’s interesting that Herodotus refers to Ammonites (if that is indeed who he’s referring to) as “colonists from Egypt and Aethiopia”. Could this reflect an actual Egyptian, or even Ammonite, tradition that the Ammonites were in some way descended from migrants from Egypt (similar to the neighboring Israelite tradition of the exodus from Egypt)? Or is Herodotus just trying to give an ad hoc explanation for the Ammonites’ name and religious practices?
It’s hard to say, but there’s a fairly good chance that Herodotos is just making up an ad hoc explanation for their name and religious practices. Ancient Greek authors make speculative/spurious claims about other ancient peoples’ origins all the time. In general, anything an ancient author says about the distant past (i.e., over a century or so before their own time) without citing specific written sources to support it should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Fascinating as usual. I didn’t know the history behind the name. Pliny’s work is marvelous indeed. I hope we will see more posts about it here!
Your comments about the early relationship between Greeks and Egyptians made me think about the possibility of the philosopher Plato travelling to Egypt. I know that some much later authors, such as Plutarch, claimed that he visited Naukratis (and Kyrene as well), but do we have any strong reasons to believe this? Can we know if Egyptian culture could have influenced him in some way or another, especially about the myths he tells in Phaidros and Timaios? Did he travel to any other cities further east?
Wow, never know about this. Usually most pages and portals on the web doesn’t show up this details.
I am not speaking only about the ammonites, but also the origin of that deities and their conections/similitudes with the ones from other differents cultures.
A wonderful job Spencer.
Just thought you might like to see this if nobody has commented on it yet, but Silphium/Silphion is probably not extinct! Your article was right on the nose.
https://www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/10/1/102/htm : Next Chapter in the Legend of Silphion: Preliminary Morphological, Chemical, Biological and Pharmacological Evaluations, Initial Conservation Studies, and Reassessment of the Regional Extinction Event
Hi Spencer, excellent article.
There is also a cornu ammonis inside the human brain. The hippocampus region of the brain, when cross-sectioned, resembles a ram’s horn and thus was named ‘cornu ammonis’.
For any curious, Ammonite shells come in diverse shapes, not just the typical ram horn shape. Some shapes are so weird looking that it makes you wonder how these creatures maneuvered when alive.
Yeah. Even if they lived in the seas, their shells need it to have some design that help them move effective when they hunt, escape or just simple move against currents and surges.
Maybe their soft-invertebrate body could have some very different shape or anatomy that we never know.
Hi Spencer,
Thank you for another very well-written post. I am curious as to whether there is any actual, historical connection between this history involving the god Amun (and its diverse incorporation into Kush, Egypt, Greece, and Rome) and the people group labeled Ammonites. I realize that it might not be a direct line to the point that you were making about the etymology of these fossils and their relationship to depictions of Zeus, but I (and apparently, Herodotus) are curious.
I also would like to leave a comment here about two older posts that I read yesterday. The comment sections for both articles (“Yes, there were ancient African civilizations” and “Were the ancient Egyptians Black?”) are closed. And… wow, you get a lot of comments when you tread such controversial waters. I applaud you for your boldness to get into these discussions and for the fact that you make careful assertions based on qualifying the problems with others’ generalizations, bringing forth translations of primary sources, and showing pictures of material culture.
I have no desire to actually get into the weeds of what ancient people looked like physically. But I do want to add to how you write about race, which you correctly understand as a social construct. You helpfully caution against the anachronism of bringing racial thinking from modern times and assuming it is operative in ancient interactions. But there is another nuance that I hope you will attend to. Often, you note that someone’s features make them “what we would consider black” or another person’s make them “what we would consider white.” I think it would be helpful for people to understand how diverse and contingent racial categorization is. What a person in the United States considers Black is not the same as what a person in Brazil considers Black or what a person in South Africa considers Black (although all three countries have that category). I literally could travel from one country to the next today and “change” my race. Within the same country, one’s race also changes based on the context and rubric. For example, all people of Egyptian descent are “considered White” according to the geographic parameters of that race in the US census even though some of them are “considered Black” in all the social interactions that they engage in. (I am not Egyptian, but I have several friends for whom the previous statement is true.) And the diversity of racial categorization also changes across time such that a person from a specific place (like India for example) would literally have their official race “change” on the US census if they lived from 1900 – 1980. All of this is to say that “what we consider black” or “what we consider white” is actually very diverse across space, socio/political context, and time. This diversity is such that it is a over generalization to assume “we” would consider someone the same race based on the same physical descriptors.
And that brings me to the more important point. The debates about the race of ancient Africans have included people seeing the exact same physical evidence and interpreting it such that the people that you (Spencer) or I might consider Black are actually, scientifically Caucasian/White. Here is an article (https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090712) where I show examples from some of the most prominent scholars in different fields who make the claim that ancient Egyptians are technically part of the White race even though a novice might consider them to be Black. (Although I focus on Egypt in the article, the main issue I discuss relates to the racialization of other African peoples, including those who built Great Zimbabwe like you mention.) The most important part of the discussion that I want to get across is that the racial categorization of ancient people has never been about merely discerning their physical features. Racial categorization of ancient people originally served the material and psychological interests of (certain) Europeans by supporting the ideology that civilization has always been the unique heritage of the White race; and the “scientific” rubrics that were developed to analyze race were tools to fit that metanarrative. In order to protect the social, political, and psychological “property” that comes with being White, the US government and top-notch anthropologists have even provided opposite definitions of race at the same time. Consider the example of the 1923 Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. He was ethnically Aryan, which scientists considered to be Caucasian, but the Supreme Court said he can’t be white according to common knowledge because he is Indian (they said a Hindoo [sic]… although he was Sikh). The consequence was that Thind’s naturalization as a US citizenship was revoked. In other words, racial categorization was understood in opposite ways in the same moment and country, and it was used as a tool to guard the benefits of being White.
In conclusion, I do think that it is helpful to debunk some of the false racial claims about Africans and their civilizations. But I also think that it is important for you to contextualize these claims by showing how our modern understanding of race is not static, self-evident, or universal. Racial categorization of ancient people has always been contingent and political. With race being the social construct that it is, we can (and do) pick different variables and ascribe different value to them when categorizing race; and we do it because we either have a intentional reason for including or excluding people groups in order to fit our ideological frameworks OR, more often, because we have unwittingly inherited the legacy of previous categorizations that were ideologically motivated.
I hope you take this as constructive feedback. I really love what you write.
Thank you so much for the constructive feedback! I think that this is the most thoughtful and best-informed response that anyone has ever given me in response to the articles you have mentioned here.
I wrote both of those articles nearly three years ago at this point and I have learned a lot in the time since I wrote them. I would not write those articles the same if I were to rewrite them today.
I think you are absolutely right that a major flaw with those articles is that I incorrectly assume that twenty-first-century conceptions of racial boundaries are fixed and universally or almost universally agreed upon, when, in reality, people routinely adjust those boundaries and decide who counts as what based on what suits their particular agenda or ideology. I’ve noticed for a long time that one of the many problems with those articles is that I frequently use phrases like “what we would consider Black” without clarifying who I mean by “we.”
Do you know of any ancient Greek writers who correctly identified fossils of any sort as what they really were, long-dead animals? Was this an influence on Plato’s story of there being an endless cycle of great floods (for instance, seeing fish fossils on top of mountains)?