ancient sculptures Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Why Is the Parthenon So Famous?

The most famous building in Greece today is almost certainly the Parthenon, a spectacular temple to the Greek goddess Athena that towers atop the Athenian Akropolis and is almost universally admired for being supposedly the most “perfect” and “timeless” work of ancient Greek architecture. Some people may be surprised to learn, though, that this was not always the case.

The Parthenon did not immediately become the most famous and admired Greek temple as soon as it was built. It was certainly seen as an important temple in antiquity—one especially notable for its size, its prominent location, and its extraordinary chryselephantine cult statue of Athena, crafted by the master sculptor Pheidias. Its present-day status as the most famous of all Greek buildings, though, is the result of the events and ideological movements of the past 2,400 years of history. If post-classical history had gone differently, the Parthenon’s status might have gone to a different temple.

How Accurate Are “Photorealistic” Portraits of Roman Emperors?

In 2020, the digital artist Daniel Voshart used a neural net called Artbreeder to create a series of “photorealistic” portraits of fifty-four Roman emperors spanning from Augustus (ruled 27 BCE – 14 CE) to Carinus (who died in 285 CE). As the term “photorealistic” suggests, his portraits look almost like photographs. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not realize that these portraits are modern artistic impressions, not scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really historically looked like.

I’ve seen many people over the past year cite Voshart’s portraits and others like them as though they were authoritative, scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really looked like. In particular, I’ve noticed a worrying number of white supremacists trying to cite these kinds of portraits as “evidence” that the ancient Romans were all white. In this article I would like to discuss why Voshart’s portraits—and others like them—should be taken with several grains of salt.

Ancient Greek Men Were Not All Buff

One of the most common misconceptions I have encountered about the ancient Greeks is the notion that ancient Greek men were all incredibly buff, muscle-bound bodybuilders. This misconception seems to arise from the naïve assumption that ancient Greek statues depict how average ancient Greek men really looked, perhaps also influenced by the similarly naïve assumption that the 2007 epic fantasy action film 300, written and directed by Zack Snyder, is a historically accurate depiction of ancient Greece.

The reality is that there was never a time when the majority of Greek men really looked like the physical specimens portrayed in Archaic and Classical Greek sculptures. These sculptures represent what upper-class Greek people regarded as physically ideal, not what the average Greek person actually looked like.

Here’s the Meaning of the Symbolism in Lil Nas X’s Controversial New Music Video

Until last Sunday, I honestly had no idea who Lil Nas X was. I don’t really follow music in general and I honestly know especially little about rap in particular. Then, while we were driving back to Bloomington after visiting our parents for Easter, my sister mentioned to me that Lil Nas X is a rapper, that he wrote a song about being gay—which I later learned is titled “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)”—and that the music video for it includes a scene of him riding a stripper pole down to Hell and giving Satan a lap dance. She explained that religious conservatives were having a huge moral panic over this music video because they think it glorifies homosexuality and Satanism.

Having heard this, I naturally decided to look up the music video for myself to see what all the fuss was about. I have to say that, for a three-minute clip that involves the main character riding a stripper pole to Hell and giving Satan a lap dance, the music video is remarkably intellectually sophisticated. The people who worked on this video clearly did a ton of research. As soon as I watched it, I was genuinely impressed by the sheer number of classical and Biblical allusions that they managed to cram in.

It incorporates specific references to works of ancient Greek and Roman art, the Bible, Greek mythology, works of Greek philosophy, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. They even managed to include an exact, direct quote from Plato’s Symposion in the original Classical Attic Greek! Here’s a detailed explanation of the music video’s classical and Biblical symbolism.

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.

Why Is Hollywood So Fixated on Cleopatra Anyway?

On 11 October 2020, it was officially announced that Gal Gadot, a white Israeli actress, had been cast to play the Hellenistic Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator in an upcoming epic period drama titled Cleopatra, which will be directed by Patty Jenkins and scripted by Laeta Kalogridis. This casting predictably set off outrage on social media over the fact that Cleopatra will not be portrayed by a Black actress.

I’ve already written an entire article in which I discuss Cleopatra’s ancestry and her appearance in great detail. In short, her ancestry was almost entirely Greek and her only known ancestor with non-Greek ancestry was her three times great-grandmother Kleopatra I of Syra, who was of mixed Greek, Persian, and Sogdian ancestry. There is one argument that people have tried to make that Cleopatra’s mother may have been a native Egyptian woman, but it is founded on multiple layers of wishful thinking and dubious assumptions and it is far more likely that her mother was Cleopatra V Tryphaina, her father’s only known wife, who was also his sister or his cousin.

In this article, though, I want to answer a different question: Why Cleopatra? Why is it that, out of three thousand some years of ancient Egyptian history, the only Egyptian queen that Hollywood is interested in making movies about is the one who was definitely of European ancestry? It’s clear that a very large section of the general public wants a movie about a native Egyptian queen portrayed by an actress of color. I say that, if that’s what people want, Hollywood should give that to them. Thankfully, there are plenty of native Egyptian queens and goddesses that Hollywood could potentially make movies about.

Were Achilles and Zeus Black in Greek Mythology?

The miniseries Troy: Fall of a City, which originally aired on BBC One in the United Kingdom in spring 2018 and was thereafter distributed internationally on Netflix, created quite a stir of controversy due to the fact that, in the series, the characters Zeus and Achilles are portrayed by black actors. Many people attacked the series, accusing it of “blackwashing.”

It is true that, in ancient Greece, Achilles and Zeus were both consistently portrayed as what most people today would generally consider “white.” That being said, I think that most of the outrage over the fact that Troy: Fall of a City portrays Achilles and Zeus as black is motivated more by racial prejudice than by actual concern for faithfulness to traditional portrayals.

Yes, There Were Ancient African Civilizations!

Most people in the United States and Europe imagine that, prior to European colonialism, all of Africa south of the Sahara was nothing but a jungle full of simple, illiterate savages living in straw huts with only Stone Age technology. They imagine that there were no civilizations there of any kind.

This stereotype couldn’t be more inaccurate. Contrary to what most people have been led to believe, there were peoples in sub-Saharan Africa in ancient times who had systems of writing. They had cities. They had iron tools and weapons. They minted coins. They established empires and built colossal monuments. At least by the standards of the ancient world, they were civilized.

The main reason why you probably haven’t heard of any ancient civilizations in sub-Saharan Africa is because, for centuries, racist white people—including many racist white historians—have chosen to ignore and dismiss all evidence for their existence and to instead falsely portray pre-modern Africa as a civilizationless void.

Thankfully, the old racism that once pervaded the historical discipline is slowly starting to go away and historians are beginning to recognize that ancient Africa was actually just as civilized as Europe and Asia. Today, I want to talk about some of the civilizations that we know existed in Africa in ancient times.

How Difficult Is It to Determine If an Ancient Artwork Is Authentic?

Fake ancient artifacts are all over the antiquities market. For a layperson with no expertise in ancient art, telling the difference between a bust created by a forger to look like an ancient bust and a real ancient bust is virtually impossible. For a trained expert, it is easy to spot certain obvious forgeries, but there are still many forgeries out there that are good enough to fool even the best experts.

The antiquities market, though, is incredibly sketchy at the best of times and downright illegal at the worst of times. If you’re trying to buy ancient artifacts, forgeries should be the least of your worries.

What Really Happened to the Athena Parthenos?

The Athena Parthenos, a colossal gold and ivory statue of the goddess Athena created between 447 and 438 BC by the renowned ancient Athenian sculptor Pheidias (lived c. 480 – c. 430 BC) that originally stood in the naos of the Parthenon on the Athenian Akropolis, is one of the most famous of all ancient Greek statues.

Unlike the Venus de Milo, which, as I talk about in this article from September 2019, wasn’t famous in antiquity and is mostly only famous today because of a French propaganda campaign in the nineteenth century, the Athena Parthenos really was famous in antiquity. In fact, it is only famous today because of its ancient reputation, since the statue itself has not survived.

Many people have wondered what happened to the Athena Parthenos, but its ultimate fate is actually far less mysterious than many people have been led to believe. The story of how the Athena Parthenos was destroyed, recreated, and destroyed again is as fascinating as any story from the ancient world.