Ancient Mesopotamia Archives - Page 2 of 4

The Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis Is Racist and Harmful

The so-called “ancient astronaut hypothesis” is a popular genre of pseudohistory which centers around the claim that extraterrestrial beings visited earth in pre-modern times, leaving behind supposed evidence of their presence. The supposed “evidence” for this “hypothesis” is based entirely on flagrant misinterpretations and misrepresentations, tendentious reasoning, false assumptions, forged artifacts, and often outright lies. As a result, the “hypothesis” is universally rejected among professional academic scholars, historians, and archaeologists.

I have written about the ancient astronaut hypothesis before. For instance, I wrote an article back in January 2020 about how we actually know that the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids as tombs for their pharaohs, in which I debunked claims made on the show Ancient Aliens. I also posted an article a few days ago in which I debunk the popular ancient astronaut theorist claim that Alexander the Great saw flying saucers while on his campaigns. In this article, however, I am not going to try to debunk the ancient astronaut hypothesis. Instead, I want to explain the history of the ancient astronaut hypothesis, why it is not just a “harmless” conspiracy theory, and why it is actually harmful.

Tucker Carlson Is Using Controversy about Literature Classes to Promote Fascism

There is something of a culture war going on right now over which books students should be assigned to read in literature classes. I’ve been meaning to write an article on this subject for over six months now, but, until now, I haven’t had time. Sadly, I’ve been so insanely busy with the many other things going on in my life that I haven’t had much time for researching and writing articles lately. Now, however, recent events have compelled me to write an article about a different aspect of the controversy than I originally planned.

Many of my readers are probably already aware of Tucker Carlson. He is a far-right political commentator who has a long and well-documented history of promoting white supremacist, fascist, misogynist, and xenophobic ideas. He has his own show on Fox News called Tucker Carlson Tonight and, on 14 May 2021, he did an entire segment about the literature class controversy titled “Classic literature out. Sexual propaganda in.”

In this segment, Carlson first protests the removal of works that he considers “classic literature” from English syllabi and then pretends to be absolutely scandalized by the reading of explicit passages in young adult novels that have been approved for students to read in one public school in Loudoun County, Virginia. Carlson frames the controversy using a standard fascist narrative that misrepresents the issues and ignores many demonstrable facts, including the fact that many works of so-called “classic literature,” including many works that are often read in schools, are just as sexually explicit as the works he protests against—or, in some cases, even more explicit.

Jordan Peterson Does Not Understand Mythology

In case you’ve had the extraordinary good fortune of having never heard of him, Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He largely rose to fame in 2016 over his vocal opposition to an act passed by the Parliament of Canada to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression.” Since then, Peterson has developed an enormous cult following as a self-help author and YouTube personality. His followers generally tend to be young, heterosexual, cisgender men who come from middle-class backgrounds and have conservative political leanings.

Peterson calls himself a “classical British liberal” and a “traditionalist”—both terms that are commonly used as euphemistic self-descriptors by members of the far right. As we shall see shortly, he has publicly promoted various misogynistic, transphobic, and white supremacist claims. Much of what Peterson has written and said has already been thoroughly analyzed and debunked. In this article, however, I want to especially focus on an aspect of Peterson’s work and activism that I don’t think has been adequately addressed: his interpretation of mythology.

Peterson has made the psychoanalytic interpretation of myths into a major backbone of his work. Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which was first published in 1999, talks about mythology extensively, and he routinely uses mythical examples in his lecture videos and in his 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This is all in spite of the fact that he clearly does not understand mythology and much of what he says on the subject is incorrect.

Transgender People Exist—And That’s Ok

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the news over the past few years, you have almost certainly heard about how a lot of conservatives are really mad that transgender people exist. They routinely insist that acknowledging the existence of trans people is “gender ideology” and that it goes against both science and the Bible. They insist that there are only two genders—male and female—and that a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and can never, under any circumstances, truly be changed.

In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that these arguments are, in fact, incorrect and that the existence of more than two genders is totally compatible with both science and the Bible. This essay has taken me nearly a month to research and write, so it will be quite long and will incorporate evidence from a wide range of different fields, including biology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and religious studies.

Stolen Artworks in Museums

When most people today think of stolen artworks, they usually tend to think of artifacts being stolen from museums. There are many famous cases of this, such as the notorious theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in 1911, which generated international headlines. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the fact that many of the artifacts that are currently on display in museums in western Europe and North America were themselves stolen from the peoples of other countries all around the world.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, western Europeans and people of western European descent pillaged countries all over the world, taking their cultural artifacts and putting them in museums back in their home countries, where they could admire them, but the peoples of the countries to whom the artifacts rightfully belonged could not. There are so many stolen artworks on display in museums that it would be impossible for me to cover them all, but today I want to talk about just a few of the more famous examples.

What Does the Genesis Creation Story Mean?

The first three chapters of the Book of Genesis have been studied, interpreted, reinterpreted, and misunderstood by people of diverse religious convictions for around 2,500 years. The stories recounted in these chapters have had an enormous impact on world religions, mythologies, literatures, and cultures. Most people think that they understand these stories. Nonetheless misconceptions abound—not just about what the text means, but also about who wrote it, what it actually says, what sources the text is based on, and how the text has historically been interpreted.

In this article, I want to take a deep dive into the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, debunk some popular misconceptions, and hopefully do my part to help others understand these stories that have become so influential. This is going to be a bit of a long read, but, by the end of it, hopefully, you’ll know pretty much everything you wanted to know about the Genesis creation stories.

Transgender and Intersex People in the Ancient World

It is popularly believed that transgender, intersex, and other gender-nonconforming people only started existing fairly recently and that they are an aberration of modern times. This could not possibly be further from the truth. It is true that the word “transgender” is fairly new, since it was first coined in 1965, but there have been people whom we might consider transgender ever since at least the beginning of recorded history.

In this article, I want to talk about some examples of figures from ancient history, mythology, and literature whom we might consider transgender, intersex, or otherwise gender-nonconforming. Some of these people are fictional; others of them are historical. Not all of them fit perfectly under our modern definition of “transgender,” but all of them are of interest to the discussion of transgender history.

Regarding pronoun use, in the following article, I will mostly be using the English equivalents of the pronouns that are actually used in the ancient sources, which may or may not be the pronouns that the individuals discussed here would have preferred to have been used. Unfortunately, the people I will be discussing in this article who actually existed have all been dead for thousands of years, so it is impossible for us to ask what their preferences are.

Were Mythical Creatures Inspired by Fossils?

It is popularly believed that stories about dragons and other mythical creatures must have arisen when ancient peoples discovered fossils of prehistoric animals, especially dinosaurs. As we shall see in a moment, there is definitely some evidence that ancient peoples did sometimes discover fossils of prehistoric creatures and interpret them as the remains of mythic beasts.

Fossils, however, seem to have only rarely been the source of belief in such mythic creatures to begin with; it seems to have been far more common for people to interpret fossils in light of mythic creatures they already believed in, rather than inventing entirely new mythic beasts to explain the fossils.

Furthermore, the vast majority of claims about specific mythical creatures being inspired by specific prehistoric creatures don’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny. There is almost no solid evidence to support the assumption that dragons, Cyclopes, or griffins were inspired by prehistoric fossils and there is actually quite substantial evidence against these assumptions.

The Strangest Books in the Bible

The Bible is a collection of various ancient texts that are considered by Christians to be the inspired Word of God. The number of books in the Bible varies depending on which branch of Christianity you happen to belong to. The standard Protestant Bible only has sixty-six books, the standard Roman Catholic Bible has seventy-three books, and the standard Eastern Orthodox Bible has seventy-eight books.

Many of the texts that are included in the Bible seem rather strange—at least when you read them for the first time. There are some books in the Bible that are a bit peculiar in the sense that they don’t fit in well with the other books in the Bible. Then there are other books in the Bible that just seem downright bizarre—at least until you decipher what they’re talking about.

In this article, I want to talk about five of the most unusual books in the Bible. These are books that are striking either because they are so different from the others or because they employ such bizarre imagery.

Who Was the Pharaoh of the Exodus Really?

In popular culture, Rameses II (ruled 1279 – 1213 BC) is almost always portrayed as the pharaoh of the Exodus. He is most famously portrayed as such in the 1956 epic film The Ten Commandments, but he has also appeared in this role more recently in the 1998 DreamWorks animated musical drama film The Prince of Egypt, in the 2013 History Channel miniseries The Bible, and in the 2014 epic film Exodus: Gods and Kings.

It may come as a surprise to many people, then, that the Book of Exodus never actually gives the name of the pharaoh who supposedly tried to keep the Israelites from leaving. Instead, throughout the book, the pharaoh is merely referred to by the Hebrew word פַּרְעֹה (par‘ōh), which is the source of our English word pharaoh. How, then, did we all come to think of Rameses II as the pharaoh of the Exodus? And, more importantly, who was the real pharaoh of the Exodus? Let’s delve back into the mists of antiquity and find out the truth.