archaeology Archives - Page 5 of 6 - Tales of Times Forgotten

No, the Antikythera Mechanism Was Not Unique

If you have any interest in ancient science and technology, you have almost certainly heard of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek mechanical orrery that was discovered in 1901 in an ancient shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. It is a clockwork mechanism that was used to keep track of Olympiads and the movements of the celestial bodies. The wreck the device was recovered from dates to between c. 70 and c. 60 BC. The Antikythera mechanism itself was most likely originally created sometime in around the late second or early first century BC.

In popular science writings and in popular culture, the Antikythera mechanism is usually described as an “ancient Greek computer.” It is usually presented as an astonishing example of how incredibly advanced ancient Greek technology was and it is usually presented in such a way that makes it sound as though we had no idea that devices like it even existed before it was discovered.

The truth, though, is that devices like the Antikythera mechanism are actually well-attested in surviving ancient written sources and classical scholars already knew that these kinds of devices existed in antiquity long before the Antikythera mechanism was discovered. The Antikythera mechanism is not significant because it is the only device of its kind that ever existed, but rather because it is the only one of its kind that is known to have survived to the present day.

Did a Group of Lost Roman Soldiers Found a City in China?

There is a very popular story out there about how, supposedly, in the first century BC, a group of Roman soldiers inadvertently wound their way across the Asian continent, fighting as mercenaries for various peoples and being captured by others, before eventually settling in China. It is a truly fascinating story, but, unfortunately, there is probably no truth to it.

Why Is Tutankhamun So Famous?

Pharaoh Tutankhamun is undoubtedly the most famous of all ancient Egyptian pharaohs. He is one of the very few Egyptian pharaohs that most ordinary people are able to name. Most people have never heard of Hatshepsut and even fewer have heard of her nephew and successor Thutmose III, but everyone has heard of Tutankhamun. He even has a Batman villain named after him!

Things were not always the way they are today, though; up until the discovery of his tomb in 1922, Tutankhamun was utterly obscure. If you asked someone on the street in 1921 who Tutankhamun was, no one would have been able to tell you. Even if you asked an Egyptologist about him, many of them probably would not have known who he was. Ironically, it is precisely because of his former obscurity that Tutankhamun is so famous today.

Was Jesus Copied Off the Egyptian God Horus?

Every year, around this time, you start seeing memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” some pre-Christian deity. One of the most popular deities for people to claim Jesus is “a copy of” is Horus, a god who was worshipped in ancient Egypt from prehistoric times until after the rise of Christianity in around the fourth century AD. Horus was believed to have been the son of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis. He was closely associated with the pharaoh and he is usually depicted in ancient Egyptian art with the head of a falcon.

The truth is, all the memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” such-and-such deity are wrong. Historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure who lived in Galilee in the early first century AD and who was crucified in Jerusalem in either 30 or 33 AD under the orders of the Roman governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus. The stories about Jesus’s life recorded in the gospels are certainly heavily embellished with legend and fiction, but, ultimately, there was a real man who stands behind the mythological tradition. While the stories about Jesus recorded in the gospels have probably been influenced to varying extents by stories of various pagan deities, it is entirely wrong for anyone to claim that the whole story of Jesus is copied directly from any single pagan deity.

Of all the deities Jesus is often claimed to have been copied off of, Horus is one of the most commonly mentioned, but also one of the most absurd. I actually included an extremely brief debunking of the claim that Jesus is based on Horus in this article I published on my website in March 2018, but I received some flak over the fact that I did not quote any specific claims from proponents of the Jesus-Horus connection and respond to them. I suppose, then, it is about time that I wrote a more complete response to the alleged connections between Jesus and Horus.

Were Ancient People Conscious?

In 1976, the American psychologist Julian Jaynes (lived 1920 – 1997) published a controversial book titled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In this book, Jaynes claimed that human beings were not conscious of their own thoughts until around 1000 BC and that stories about gods speaking to people originated from people hearing their own inner voices and mistaking them for the voices of external deities telling them what to do.

Jaynes’s claims were regarded as fringe, baseless, and bizarre even when he first proposed them back in the 1970s and today they are almost universally regarded by psychologists as the debunked relic of an earlier, less scientific stage in the development of modern psychology. Nonetheless, Jaynes’s hypothesis of the bicameral mind has garnered something of a cult following among non-scholars and has had considerable influence in popular culture, so I suppose it is worth writing a lengthy rebuttal to it.

Were the Greeks Really Obsessed with the Golden Ratio?

The so-called “Golden Ratio,” or φ, occurs when the ratio of the greater of two quantities to the lesser of two quantities is equivalent to the ratio of the sum of the two quantities to the greater of the two quantities. Expressed using incomprehensible math symbols, it looks like this:

Many people believe that the “Golden Ratio” is the pinnacle of aesthetic perfection and that, the closer something is to the Golden Ratio, the more beautiful it is automatically. Many people also believe that the ancient Greeks were obsessed with the Golden Ratio and that they incorporated it into all their buildings and works of art. Unfortunately for those who love a good math story, we have no good evidence to support either of these conclusions.

In fact, the Golden Ratio is not even mentioned in any Greek text until as late as the early third century BC. The Greeks were arguably fascinated with the idea of using mathematical proportions in art to a certain extent, but they were by no means obsessed with the Golden Ratio in particular. The story of how we came to believe that the Greeks were obsessed with the Golden Ratio, though, is as fascinating as it is bizarre. It involves a friend of Leonardo da Vinci, an eccentric nineteenth-century German psychologist, and Donald Duck.

What Did People in the Paleolithic Really Eat?

The so-called “Paleolithic diet” is a fad diet, which advocates that people can lose weight and live healthier by eating the same foods our distant ancestors ate thousands of years ago during the Paleolithic Era, which lasted from the invention of stone tools roughly 3.3 million years ago until the Agricultural Revolution around 12,000 years ago. This diet originated in the 1970s and was popularized in the 2000s, primarily by the bestselling American writer Loren Cordain.

The Paleolithic diet is predicated on what is known as the “genetic discordance hypothesis,” which holds that, while the environment in which human beings live and the foods human beings eat have drastically changed since the end of the Paleolithic Era, the human genome has hardly changed at all. Therefore, proponents of the diet insist that human beings are not adapted to eat the foods we are now eating and we must return to eating the foods our ancestors ate over 12,000 years ago.

This diet claims that people should eat a diet that consists of meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and roots. People on the diet are usually prohibited from eating any grains, dairy products, sugars, legumes, salts, oils, alcohol, or caffeine, since, according to proponents of the diet, these are foods that did not exist during the Paleolithic Era. Unfortunately for practitioners of the diet, it actually bears very little resemblance to what people during the Paleolithic Era actually ate.

What Did Ancient Greek Music Sound Like?

Nearly everyone loves music and the ancient Greeks loved music as much as anyone. Many of the poems that have survived to us from ancient Greece are actually song lyrics that were originally meant to be sung. Unfortunately, nearly all ancient Greek music has been irretrievably lost; no one alive will ever hear the original choruses of Aischylos, Sophokles, or Euripides sung with their original melodies.

Remarkably, though, a number of ancient Greek musical compositions have survived to the present day with musical notation, allowing us to reconstruct their original melodies—or at least something reasonably close to their original melodies. These few surviving compositions offer us a tiny window into a world of music that has been gone for well over a thousand years.

Were There Any Female Rulers in Ancient Greece?

We are often accustomed to hearing how utterly oppressed women were in ancient Greece. To a large extent, it is true that the rights of women in ancient Greece were extremely restricted. Nonetheless, the picture we have of women in ancient Greece being totally excluded from any semblance of power is not completely accurate. Although female rulers were certainly very rare in ancient Greece compared to the number of male rulers, there were, in fact, surprisingly many of them overall.

Several of the ancient Greek female rulers on this list, such as Artemisia I and Artemisia II of Karia, are still relatively famous today. Many of the others on this list, such as Kratesipolis of Makedonia, are fairly obscure, but deserve more attention. For the main part of this list, I am confining myself strictly to Greek female rulers who ruled in their own names in Greece or western Asia Minor during the Classical and Hellenistic Periods, although there will be section at the end briefly listing some others who ruled outside of Greece. I am sure there are probably a few others that I have missed as well.

Was Hypatia of Alexandria Black?

A lot of people today seem to have quite a fascination with the subject of race in the ancient world. I frequently encounter questions on Quora asking whether various historical figures from ancient times were “Black” or “white.” Elsewhere online, I often encounter claims about the racial identities of people from ancient times.

Back in September 2019, I wrote an article in response to various articles I had encountered claiming that the Roman emperor Septimius Severus was Black. In that article, I concluded that, while you could certainly describe Septimius Severus as what we today would call a “person of color,” it would be misleading to describe him as Black without any kind of careful qualification.

Another historical figure from ancient times whose racial identity seems to provoke a great deal of controversy is the early fifth-century AD Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, who is often cited (quite anachronistically) as an example of a Black woman who excelled in STEM. In this article, I will answer the question: “Was Hypatia of Alexandria really Black?”