archaeology Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Why Greece Hasn’t Rebuilt the Agora

Almost every tourist who has ever visited Athens has at some point thought about how amazing it would be if the city’s monuments were restored to how they looked when they were new in classical antiquity. A couple of months ago, the website UnHerd, which has right-wing and libertarian political leanings and specializes in what it calls “slow journalism,” published an essay by Nicholas Boys Smith titled “It’s time to rebuild ancient Athens,” in which Smith proposes that Greece should fully restore the Athenian agora (the ancient central market and meeting place of the city) to how it looked in antiquity. This is a fairly common sentiment, so I wanted to take this opportunity to address it.

In this post, I will discuss why restoring Athens’ ancient ruins to how they looked in antiquity hasn’t already happened in the way that many tourists like Smith have hoped and the problems that such a restoration would certainly entail. Most ancient historians and archaeologists do support the idea of restoration to some degree or another, but we also recognize that restoration must be balanced with other concerns.

The Ancient Greeks Invented the Fashion Doll Over 2,500 Years Before Barbie

In my characteristic fashion, I am behind on contemporary popular culture. The movie Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, came out in July of this year while I was in Greece. It attracted much discussion online and became both the highest-grossing film of this year and the highest-grossing comedy film of all time, but I only just recently watched it for the first time on HBO Max, over five months after it came out. Overall, I found it entertaining and surprisingly thoughtful for a comedy based on a brand of children’s toy.

The film begins with a parody documentary sequence in which the disembodied narrator (played by Helen Mirren) hyperbolically claims that, before Barbie, the only dolls that ever existed were baby dolls. I expect that most viewers will easily recognize this claim as satire, but, in case anyone takes it seriously, I thought I should point out that dolls of adult women with fully articulable joints who could be dressed in various outfits were actually all the rage among children in ancient Greece two thousand five hundred years ago. We know this because literally hundreds of dolls of this kind have survived to the present day and, today, they are held in museum collections all over the world.

Archaeologists Have Discovered the Oldest Known Writing in Basque

The overwhelming majority of all languages that are currently widely spoken in Europe, including nearly all the languages that are widely spoken specifically in western Europe, belong to the same language family: Indo-European. There is, however, one language that is spoken in one small region of western Europe that is not Indo-European: Basque, which is spoken in Basque Country, a small region in the western Pyrenees of northern Spain and southwestern France that is totally surrounded on all sides by predominantly-Indo-European-language-speaking lands.

The Basque language is highly unusual, not only because it is a non-Indo-European language spoken in the middle of western Europe, but also because it is a language isolate, meaning it is not related to any other known languages. In fact, it is the only language isolate that is currently natively spoken anywhere in Europe. Modern historical linguists agree that Basque is the only surviving language of a family that was once spoken more widely in the region before the arrival of Indo-European-language-speaking peoples and that has survived in the land where it is spoken today despite millennia of Indo-European-language-speaking peoples inhabiting the surrounding lands.

Despite this, until recently, very little direct evidence was known for the ancient language from which modern Basque is derived, which historical linguists refer to as “Proto-Basque.” Just recently, however, a team of archaeologists announced their discovery of what is now the oldest known writing in the Basque language, which dates to the early first century BCE.

The Baffling Ancient Unsolved Mystery of the Phaistos Disk

The Minoan civilization, which flourished on the Greek island of Krete in the southern Aegean Sea during the early Bronze Age, is one of the most fascinating cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. It saw its earliest beginnings in the second half of the fourth millennium BCE and reached its cultural apogee from around 2000 BCE onward. It flourished for over half a millennium after that until the Mycenaean civilization of mainland Greece conquered it sometime around 1450 BCE. It is finally considered to have died out sometime around 1100 BCE, over six hundred years before the time of Socrates.

Sadly, almost the only time the general public ever pays any attention to the Minoan civilization is when they are indulging in all sorts of completely unfounded pseudohistorical speculations about it supposedly being the historical Atlantis. (As I discuss in this post I wrote back in March 2019, Atlantis is a fictional place that Plato completely made up, his story of Atlantis is primarily inspired by events that happened in the Greek world in his own time, and it almost certainly has nothing to do with the Minoan civilization.)

This is a real shame, since the Minoan civilization poses all kinds of very real unsolved ancient mysteries. Particularly mysterious are the scripts that the Minoans wrote in, all of which remain undeciphered and impossible for anyone alive today to read. The majority of surviving Minoan documents are written in two scripts: Kretan hieroglyphs, which the Minoans developed around 2100 BCE, and Linear A, which they developed a few centuries later, around 1800 BCE. They continued to use both scripts until around the middle of the fifteenth century BCE. It is a third undeciphered script, however, that has proven most alluring to the general public. This script is securely attested only in one place: a single clay disk known colloquially as the “Phaistos disk,” which has captivated both scholars and amateurs for over a century.

Did Ancient People Really All Have Horrible, Crooked, Rotten Teeth?

A certain notion that frequently shows up in popular culture and online claims that everyone in the premodern world all had absolutely disgusting, crooked, and totally rotten teeth. There is some truth to this perception. Modern orthodontic practice did not exist in the premodern world, so the majority of people probably did not have perfectly straight teeth. Additionally, across the board, most people in the premodern world generally had poorer dental hygiene than what is considered normal in most western developed countries in the twenty-first century. Some premodern people did indeed have extremely disgusting, disease-ridden, and rotten teeth.

Nonetheless, the popular perception ignores a great deal of contravening evidence. Some premodern people had naturally straight teeth, just as some people do today, and perfectly straight teeth with no gaps haven’t necessarily always been seen as desirable in all cultures. Additionally, premodern people did have an interest in keeping their teeth clean and they had methods of cleaning their teeth, albeit ones that are not as effective as those in widespread use today.

Finally, most premodern people’s teeth were not all totally rotted and falling out due primarily to the fact that they rarely or never consumed simple sugars, which are the primary cause of most tooth decay today. People who lived in areas close to the sea also tended to eat lots of seafood, which is high in fluoride, which may have helped to protect their teeth. Consequently, some ancient and medieval people actually had relatively nice-looking, healthy teeth even by twenty-first-century standards.

Is It Ethical to Exhume Mummies and Display Them in Museums?

In October 2020, a team of Egyptian archaeologists working at the site of Saqqara, which is located about thirty kilometers south of the modern city of Cairo, excavated a total of at least fifty-nine sarcophagi containing the mummified corpses of Egyptian priests and officials from the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (lasted 664 – 525 BCE). The Egyptian government sought to publicize this discovery as part of a massive ongoing effort to encourage tourism, since Egypt’s tourism sector has still not fully recovered from the hit it took after the 25 January Revolution in 2011. Consequently, the Egyptian archaeologists made a big display of opening one of the sarcophagi in the presence of reporters. A video of the opening of this sarcophagus was widely shared on social media, where it spawned considerable controversy. Many people were criticizing the archaeologists for exhuming the sarcophagi, insisting that exhuming human remains is immoral and unethical.

I originally began writing this post as a response to this controversy shortly after it broke out, but, as I was writing, I found myself doubting my position. In my aporia, I gave up on the article and set it aside. Now, a year and a half later, I have come back to it. Alas, I will admit that, even now, after I have had a lot more time to think about it, I still don’t have a fully worked out sense of how I feel about all aspects of this issue. I am convinced that it is both moral and ethical for archaeologists to excavate human remains. Nonetheless, I do think that these complaints raise some very important questions about how ancient Egyptian human remains are usually treated.

Who Was the First God?

All the historical evidence that is currently available strongly suggests that humans have been believing in and worshipping deities for a very long time. The worship of deities almost certainly predates the advent of writing by tens of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands. Given this ancient history, it comes as no surprise that many people have wondered who the oldest deity or deities were.

In this post, I will explore some of the oldest deities that humans are known to have worshipped, starting with possible examples from the Upper Paleolithic and continuing through the Mesolithic and Neolithic. Finally, I will conclude with the very earliest deities whose names are directly attested in writing in ancient Sumer in the Late Uruk Period (lasted c. 3500 – c. 3100 BCE).

Did Archaeologists Really Discover a Hebrew Curse Tablet from Mount Ebal Bearing the Name YHWH?

At a press conference at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas, on 24 March 2022, Scott Stripling (the Director of Excavations for the Associates for Biblical Research, a fundamentalist Christian apologetics ministry), Pieter van der Veen (a professor of the Old Testament and Biblical archaeology at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz), and Gershon Galil (a professor of Biblical studies and ancient history at the University of Haifa) announced that they have (supposedly) discovered an inscription written in the Hebrew language using the Proto-Canaanite script inside of a 2 cm x 2 cm folded lead tablet that a team led by Stripling found in December 2019 while wet-sifting through the detritus of an earlier excavation that a team led by the late Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal conducted at Mount Ebal near the Palestinian city of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from 1982 to 1986.

Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil claim that the inscription on the inside of the tablet is not visible to the naked eye and that they were only able to find it by examining thousands of tomographic scans made at the Czech Academy of Sciences. They claim that the inscription dates to between 1400 and 1200 BCE. They say that the text of the inscription reads as follows when translated into English: “Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.” Despite these claims, they still have not shown any of the scans they allegedly made, instead only showing photographs of the outside of the tablet and one drawing made by Galil of one supposed instance of the divine name.

If all the team’s claims are true, this would be the earliest known attestation of writing in the Hebrew language and the earliest known attestation of the divine name YHWH by hundreds of years. Naturally, dozens of news outlets have reported this supposed inscription as though it really were the most astounding discovery in Biblical archaeology of this century. There are, however, very good reasons to be very suspicious of Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil’s claims and it is highly irresponsible for news outlets to report these claims as though they were settled fact. The reasons I am about to highlight are already well known to scholars, but I thought I would share them here for members of the general public who may have read about the supposed Mount Ebal curse tablet in the news.

Can Archaeologists Really “Disprove” a Transgender Person’s Gender Using Their Skeleton?

People who oppose the idea that transgender people should be allowed to exist and have rights often promote the claim that archaeologists can determine a person’s “true sex” based solely on their skeleton. They claim that, by examining a trans woman’s skeleton, archaeologists in the future will be able to prove that she was “really” a man and that, by examining a trans man’s skeleton, these archaeologists will be able to prove that he was “really” a woman. They claim that this proves that trans people are delusional and their genders are invalid.

In this post, I will show that the argument I have just described is hopelessly wrong on many levels. First, I will show that sex and gender are two different things and that a person’s skeletal structure says absolutely nothing about their gender. Second, I will show that guessing a person’s sex from their skeleton is actually much more complicated than opponents of trans rights regularly portray it. Third, I will show that, at least in some cases, a transgender person’s skeleton may actually be noticeably different from the skeleton of a cisgender person of the sex the trans person was assigned at birth.

Fourth and finally, I will show that reducing a person’s biological sex to their skeletal structure is extremely reductive and misleading, especially since gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy (HRT) can cause drastic, scientifically observable, physical changes to many other aspects of a person’s body, including their brain.

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.