Debunking Archives - Page 12 of 26 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Are Hoplites Named After Their Shields?

It is commonly stated that ancient Greek hoplites are named after the kind of large, round, wooden shield they carried, which was supposedly known as a hoplon. This is not correct, however. In reality, the word hoplon refers not only to the hoplite’s shield, but to all his equipment collectively.

Did Medieval Christians Really Crucify Heretics?

There seems to be a very popular misconception that, in Europe during the Middle Ages, fanatical Christians went around crucifying anyone they suspected of heresy. This trope of medieval Christian crucifixions seems to be especially common in television shows with anti-religious agendas, where the writers are eager to portray medieval Christians in the worst possible light.

It’s easy to see how this misconception might have arisen. After all, medieval Christians did talk a lot about crucifixion because of the crucifixion of Jesus and they do have a well-earned reputation for dealing harshly with those accused of heresy. In historical reality, though, crucifixion was never used as a form of punishment by Christians in Europe during the Middle Ages.

Was Caligula Really Insane?

The Roman emperor Caligula, who ruled from 16 March 37 AD until his assassination on 24 January 41 AD, is undoubtedly one of the most notorious Roman emperors. Unfortunately, over the centuries, a tremendous mythology has grown up around him and many of the things that are popularly believed about him are simply not true.

Caligula is best known to the general public as an insane, sexually depraved emperor who thought he was a living god, murdered a little boy for coughing too much, had sex with all three of his sisters, murdered his sister who was pregnant with his child and ate the fetus, turned his palace into a brothel, drank expensive pearls dissolved in vinegar, made his horse a senator, and waged war against Neptune to collect seashells as “loot.”

These are all stories that have accumulated over the years. Most of them are definitely or probably false; others are based on historical facts but have been greatly misrepresented. Caligula was many things—including a jerk, a narcissist, a sadist, and a tyrant—but he probably wasn’t really insane.

Sean Hannity Still Doesn’t Know Latin—But Does He Read My Blog?

Those who have been reading my articles for a while may recall that I published an article on 16 May 2020 titled “Sean Hannity Does Not Know Latin” in which I extensively made fun of Sean Hannity’s book Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink, for the fact that the pre-released cover image had the thoroughly garbled and unintelligible Latin motto “Vivamus vel libero perit Americae” emblazoned across the bottom.

In my article, I noted that it was evident that whoever came up with that motto had simply typed the phrase “Live free or America dies” into Google Translate and slapped the garbled nonsense that spewed out straight onto the front cover of the book. (Apparently no one told them that Google Translate is absolutely terrible when it comes to dead languages.)

Now, as it happens, the very book whose Latin motto I criticized is set to be released in two days. Curiously, the unintelligible Latin word salad has vanished from the front cover and been replaced with the grammatically correct motto “Vivamus liberi ne America pereat,” which neatly translates into English to mean, “Let us live free so that America will not die.” This makes me wonder: Did someone at Threshold Editions read my blog post and realize they needed to fix the bad Latin?

Things That Did Not Cause the Fall of the Roman Empire

People have a lot of theories about what caused the downfall of the Roman Empire. In particular, many American conservatives seem to really love talking about the parallels that supposedly exist between the current situation in the United States and the fall of the Roman Empire. Usually, they try to argue that we need to reject liberal ideas and return to good old-fashioned traditional values and that, if we do this, we will be able to save our empire from its impending doom.

Unfortunately, the people who make these comparisons generally know nothing at all about what really caused the fall of the Roman Empire. They basically just impute things they don’t like about our current situation and claim that these things are what led to the Roman Empire’s downfall. (They also invariably seem to forget that only the western portion of the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century AD; the eastern portion managed to survive for a thousand years after that until the conquest of the city of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.)

Today, I’m going to talk about some things that definitely were not significant factors in the decline of the western Roman Empire, but that people—especially American conservatives—like to pretend were.

Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” Debunked

In our society we revere scientists far more than we revere historians. Consequently, people are often more willing to listen to what scientists say about history than what historians say about history. Unfortunately, often times, when scientists try to speak or write about history, they make glaring mistakes.

For instance, I have already written extensively about how the 1980 television miniseries Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, written and presented by the astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, promoted all sorts of egregious misconceptions about the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia and about the supposed destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

The book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, written by the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker is one that has been bothering me for a long time. I promised that I would write an article about it in this article I wrote last year about violence in the pre-modern world, but I have been holding back until now because I am aware of how popular the book is and what an impact it has had on so many people’s lives.

Bill Gates, for instance, described it in a review as “one of the most important books I’ve read – not just this year, but ever.” Unfortunately, this book is filled with all kinds of historical inaccuracies and I think it promotes some ideas that, while they may seem comforting in the short-term, are actually deleterious in the long-run.

Did the Mongols Really Intentionally Spread the Black Death?

A popular story claims that, during the siege of the city of Caffa in Crimea in 1346, the Mongol besiegers catapulted the bodies of plague victims into the walled city, thus causing an outbreak of plague in the city. Supposedly, Genoese traders who were in the city tried to flee in ships and thereby inadvertently introduced the plague to Sicily. Thus, according to the story, the Mongols are ultimately responsible for the introduction of the plague to western Europe.

How much truth is there to this story, though? Is it just made up? Did the Mongols really try to spread the plague intentionally? If so, are they really responsible for the introduction of the Black Death to western Europe? Let’s investigate the sources to find out.

Was Giordano Bruno Really a “Martyr for Science”?

There are two main historical figures that are often cited as supposed “martyrs for science.” The first is the Neoplatonic philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, who was murdered in March 415 AD by a mob of Christians who supported Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria. The second is the Italian mystic Giordano Bruno, who was burned alive on 17 February 1600 by the Roman Inquisition.

Hypatia was a real scientist (or at least proto-scientist), but she was murdered for reasons entirely unrelated to her scientific work. As I discuss in this article I published in August 2018, all the surviving contemporary sources indicate that Hypatia was murdered due to her involvement in a bitter political feud between Orestes, the Christian Roman governor of Egypt, and Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria. Hypatia was one of Orestes’s major allies. Her murder was basically a political assassination.

Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, was not a scientist at all and he was executed for reasons entirely unrelated to science. Ironically, by insisting on calling him a “martyr for science,” Bruno’s admirers are kind of shooting themselves in the foot by destroying their own credibility.

No, the Christian Cross Is Not Based on the Egyptian Ankh

The ankh is a hieroglyphic symbol composed of a T-shape with a loop on top that was used in ancient Egypt to represent the consonant sequence Ꜥ-n-ḫ. The Egyptian word for “life” was composed of this exact sequence of consonants. As a result of this, the ankh became widely used as a symbol for life. People would often wear the symbol on amulets for protection and it was used to decorate shrines, temples, and tombs.

In recent years, a claim has arisen that the Christian cross is, in fact, plagiarized off the Egyptian ankh. Despite its popularity, this claim is almost entirely false, for reasons that I shall explain shortly. Nonetheless, there is a very interesting kernel of truth behind this claim that many of its proponents are not even aware of.

Debunking the Supposed Lincoln-Kennedy Connection

When I was in AP US History during my sophomore year of high school, my teacher had a poster on her wall at the back of the classroom that listed “astonishing” similarities between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Similar claims about the alleged similarities between the two presidents are widely circulated on the internet, where they are often presented as evidence of some kind of mystical connection.

At the time when I first read that poster, I was astonished and a bit creeped out by the similarities. Now, though, I realize that many of the alleged similarities between Lincoln and Kennedy are entirely fabricated and that even the genuine similarities between them are extremely superficial.

Here is a thorough debunking of the supposed Lincoln-Kennedy connection. Popular claims associated with the urban legend are written in blockquotes and are followed by in-depth replies. Claims are organized loosely in chronological order of the events they pertain to.