Debunking Archives - Page 13 of 26 - Tales of Times Forgotten

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.

Religious Freedom in the Islamic World

It is popularly believed that religious freedom does not exist in the Islamic world and that all people in all Islamic countries are strictly forbidden from practicing any religion other than Islam. This is not an entirely correct perception. It is true that, in many Islamic countries, religious freedom is greatly restricted. Nonetheless, religious freedom does exist to varying degrees in different Islamic countries around the world and there are a few Muslim-majority countries in which citizens have complete religious freedom.

The Dark Side of Alexander Hamilton

Today is Independence Day, the day when the United States annually celebrates the approval of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776. (The congress had actually voted to declare independence from Britain two days earlier on July 2nd.)

Coinciding with the occasion, yesterday, Disney released a recording of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton on their streaming service Disney+. My family and I watched it together. I had listened to the soundtrack previously, but this was the first time I had the opportunity to actually see the show in any form.

Hamilton accurately captures some of Alexander Hamilton’s more obvious personality faults: his arrogance, his impulsiveness, his temper, his womanizing, and his tactlessness. Unfortunately, the musical glosses over some of his more troubling faults, most notably his authoritarian political leanings. In this article, I want to explore some of the overlooked flaws of the real-life Alexander Hamilton.

Who Are the Illuminati Really?

When I was little, I would sometimes watch History Channel documentaries with my parents. These documentaries were often full of bizarre conspiracy theories about the Freemasons and the Illuminati. The History Channel claimed that these organizations were secretly controlling the world to bring about a totalitarian one-world government that they called “the New World Order.”

I think that most people who have a serious interest in history realize that you can’t trust anything you hear on the History Channel. I personally think that a more accurate name for it would be “the Conspiracy Channel,” since they talk a lot more about conspiracy theories than about actual history. Nonetheless, I think it is worthwhile to examine some of the ideas that are promoted on this channel and determine how much truth behind them there really is.

Believe it or not, the Illuminati was once a real organization and its history is surprisingly well-documented. In this article, I want to examine who the Illuminati were, what their goals were, what evidence there is for their alleged continued existence, and why so many people are afraid of them.

The Modern World Isn’t Even Remotely Secular

In his 1882 work Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (i.e. The Gay Science), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared:

“Gott is tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet! Wie trösten wir uns, die Mörder aller Mörder? Das Heiligste und Mächtigste, was die Welt bisher besaß, es ist unter unsern Messern verblutet—wer wischt dies Blut von uns ab? Mit welchem Wasser könnten wir uns reinigen?”

In English, this means:

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have murdered him! How do we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? The holiest and mightiest thing that the world so far has possessed, it has bled to death under our knives—who will wash this blood off from us? With what water could we purify ourselves?”

When he wrote this, Nietzsche did not mean that God had literally died, but rather that modern science had disproven his existence and human beings had entered into a new, secular age. Nietzsche believed that humans needed to find something to replace God to provide life with meaning.

Few academics today agree with everything Nietzsche believed, but they do generally seem to agree that, in the western industrialized world in the twenty-first century, religion is no longer important in most people’s lives and secularism and rationality now generally reign supreme. This notion, however, is entirely mistaken. Traditional religions of all kinds are, in fact, thriving in the western world, especially here in the United States, and belief in the supernatural remains widespread.

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.

Common English Words You Probably Didn’t Know Came From Ancient Greek

There is a popular perception that words derived from Greek are long, exotic-sounding, and mostly only used in discussion of science and philosophy. It’s true that there are a lot of Greek words that fit this description. For instance, very few people would use words like otorhinolaryngology, homoousian, ataraxia, or peripeteia in casual conversation.

There are, however, a lot of really simple Greek words that people use nearly every day. Some of these words don’t sound Greek at all because they have passed through so many languages that they no longer bear any of the distinctive sounds or spellings that we normally associate with Greek words, but they are still of Greek origin.

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.

Why Are the Byzantines Significant?

At the time I started writing this article, the most upvoted answer to the question “Why was the Byzantine Empire important in world history?” on Quora was an answer by Bryden Walsh that basically says that the Byzantines aren’t important in world history and that the only reason why anyone imagines that the Byzantines have any historical relevance is because people have overromanticized them due to their association with the old Roman Empire.

Walsh bitterly insists at one point in his answer, “But unlike the neighbouring Islamic civilisations, or the Catholic societies of the west, Byzantium did nothing to move human civilisation forward.” Near the end of the article, he says that the modern world doesn’t owe “anything to Byzantium” at all and that the modern world is “the opposite of everything the Byzantines believed in.”

This is, unfortunately, a reflection of the view towards the Byzantine Empire that has dominated the west for centuries. Despite its perennial appeal, this view is also totally inaccurate; the Byzantine Empire has affected the modern world in ways that few people even realize and there is much to be gained from studying it.