Debunking Archives - Page 2 of 26 - Tales of Times Forgotten

The Shocking True Origin of Dionysos

The ancient Greeks from at least the fifth century BCE onward commonly believed that the worship of the god Dionysos originated in Asia and was introduced to the Greek world relatively late. For most of the twentieth century, scholars simply accepted this belief at face value and deemed the elements of Dionysos’s cult that they perceived as strange and exotic as definitive marks of his cult’s eastern origin. If you pick up any book about Greek religion that was published before around 1960, it will almost certainly claim that Dionysos was a late addition to the Greek pantheon. Even today, people online still commonly repeat this claim as though it were fact.

For at least the past thirty years, though, scholars of ancient Greek religion have known for certain that Dionysos was not, in fact, a late entry to the Greek pantheon from the east at all. Instead, extremely ancient clay tablets written in a very early form of Greek definitively attest that the Greeks were already worshipping Dionysos as early as the fourteenth century BCE—a thousand years before Plato was even born. In light of this fact, the fact that the ancient Greeks believed that Dionysos was a recent addition to their pantheon takes on new meaning and potentially reveals much about how the Greeks thought about foreignness.

At What Age Did Ancient Greek Women Typically Marry?

It is well and widely known that ancient Greek parents typically compelled their daughters to marry at a shockingly young age, one at which they would legally be considered minors in most countries in the twenty-first century. Greek men, by contrast, typically married much older, usually when they were in their late twenties or thirties. As a result, the groom at an ancient Greek wedding was usually at least a decade older than the bride he was marrying—and in many cases much older than that.

Unmarried girls were effectively considered their father’s property. Marriages were usually arranged primarily between a girl’s father and her male suitor. The extent to which a father allowed his daughter to decide which man she would marry probably varied significantly depending on factors such as time period, region, and the specific father in question’s personality and attitudes; in some cases, girls probably had significant say over which man they married, but it is likely that, in other cases, they had little or no say.

Exactly how young did ancient Greek women really marry, though? Popular histories and even many academics routinely assert as fact that Greek parents typically forced their daughters to marry as soon as they began puberty, before they even turned fifteen. In this post, however, I will argue that this is based mainly on one literary passage describing a bride who was probably unusually young and was not typical for most city-states. Instead, a more comprehensive view of the evidence suggests that Greek girls actually most commonly married when they were a bit older, broadly between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. The ages at which girls married also varied significantly across regions; ancient authors record that, in certain parts of the Greek world, girls typically married significantly younger or older than they did in other parts.

ChatGPT Is Impressive for a Bot, But Not for a Human

The academic humanities are facing a new challenge—and, this time, it’s robots. On 30 November 2022, the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI released as a prototype a chatbot called ChatGPT, which is extremely good at processing language input and producing coherent language output that seems like it could have been written by a human. As a result of this, for nearly the past three months, secondary school teachers and professors in the humanities have been panicking about the possibility that students may use this chatbot to cheat on assignments, noting that it consistently produces more coherent writing than many high school students and undergraduates.

I actually tried out ChatGPT to see what all the hype was about. I’ll admit that, knowing that it is an AI, not a human, I was surprised to find that its English is quite fluent (although it is still not exactly eloquent). Nonetheless, ChatGPT is still far from living up to human standards, at least when it comes to my particular field of classics and ancient history. It bungles translating ancient languages, it frequently makes serious factual errors, and it is incapable of any kind of original thought. When I gave it a prompt to write a historical essay, it completely failed to engage with any primary or secondary sources whatsoever, failed to display even the most basic level of historical analysis, and also made several outright factual errors that I was able to catch.

What Was the “Epic Cycle” Really?

If you’re at all familiar with early ancient Greek literature, there’s a very strong likelihood that you’ve heard at some point that some ancient authors considered the Iliad and the Odyssey to belong to something called the “Epic Cycle.” This term refers to a particular group of eight epic poems in dactylic hexameter verse that originated from oral tradition during the Greek Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 490 BCE) and that all tell stories about the Trojan War and the mortal heroes who are said to have fought in it.

The poems that are included in the Epic Cycle are, in narrative order of the events they describe: the Kypria, the Iliad, the Aithiopis, the Little Iliad, the Iliou Persis or Sack of Ilion, the Nostoi or Homecomings, the Odyssey, and the Telegoneia. Sadly, of these poems, only the Iliad and the Odyssey have survived to the present day complete. Only a few tiny fragments of the other epics, preserved through quotation by later authors, and prose summaries of their contents remain.

Unfortunately, very few explanations of the Epic Cycle for a general audience exist and the vast majority of the ones that do exist are misleading and written by non-classicists. As a result, most people who are not classics specialists aren’t aware that it existed and most of those who are aware have some serious misunderstandings about what it was. That is why, in this post, I am going to discuss what the Epic Cycle was and—just as importantly—what it wasn’t. For the purposes of this post, I will assume that my readers have some basic knowledge about Greek myths of the Trojan War and at least a vague awareness of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but I will not assume that they have any familiarity with Greek literature, philology, or history beyond this.

Jesus Had a Vagina (According to Medieval Christian Mysticism)

About a month ago, a whole host of right-wing media outlets, including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, NBC Montana, and Fox News, published a flurry of wildly sensationalist articles claiming that a dean at the University of Cambridge said that Jesus was transgender. As Candida Moss, a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity who is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, points out in this article she wrote for The Daily Beast, however, and as I will discuss further in the first section of this post, this claim is entirely false; the dean in question actually said no such thing.

At the center of this controversy, however, stands a very strange and fascinating fact, which is well known to scholars and students of medieval western European art and mysticism, but which is not well known to the general public. As bizarre and improbable as it may sound, medieval western European Christians frequently depicted the wound that Jesus is said to have received in his side on the cross in a manner closely resembling a vulva. Although scholars disagree about what exactly these depictions indicate, most agree that the medieval people who made them and venerated them were conscious of this resemblance. In this post, I will explore the history of these depictions and what they may tell us about late medieval gender and sexuality.

What Do Angels Really Look Like According to the Bible?

There is a popular meme that has been going around on the internet for several years now claiming that “Biblically accurate angels” are actually terrifying, Lovecraftian, otherworldly beings who have all kinds of body parts from different animals and are covered all over in eyes. It’s a fun meme. Unfortunately, as an ancient historian, I’m the sort of person who ruins everything fun, so I’m here to tell you that the “Biblically accurate angel” meme isn’t really “Biblically accurate.”

In both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, beings who are described as angels are always either expressly described as looking like male humans or assumed to look like male humans. Although some texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament do indeed describe a variety of heavenly beings with bizarre and frightening appearances, these beings are only described in a few places, were not originally viewed as angels, and are never described as angels in any canonical Biblical text.

Zwarte Piet Is a Racist Abomination

Zwarte Piet (whose name means “Black Pete” in Dutch) is a figure in the folklore of the Low Countries (i.e., the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) who is said to accompany Saint Nicholas or Sinterklaas. In the weeks leading up to the feast day of Saint Nicholas, which is celebrated in the Netherlands on 5th December, he is traditionally portrayed by white actors or volunteers wearing blackface, along with thick red lipstick, a black wig of afro-textured hair, a large gold earring, and colorful faux-Renaissance-style clothing. These “Zwarte Pieten” traditionally take part in parades, entertain young children, and pass out cookie-like confectionaries known as pepernoten and kruidnoten.

Zwarte Piet has been a widely beloved figure among white people in the Low Countries for generations, but, for decades, some people (mostly people of color) have criticized the character as racist (because he is). Over the course of the past decade, and the past few years in particular, there has been something of a sea change, as a deracialized version of the character named Roetveegpiet (“Sooty Pete”), who wears light soot makeup instead of blackface, has eclipsed the traditional blackface version of the character in popularity.

Some white people have tried to defend the traditional Zwarte Piet by claiming that the character can’t be racist because he (supposedly) has no connection to the U.S. tradition of blackface minstrel shows. In this post, I intend to explore the real history of Zwarte Piet and demonstrate that the character does, in fact, owe very much to blackface minstrel shows and is, in fact, racist. Needless to say, readers should be forewarned that this post will discuss some truly deplorably racist material, including both historical and contemporary derogatory visual portrayals of Black people.

The Decline of Cursive Isn’t Historically as Big of a Deal as Most People Think

On 16 September 2022, Drew Gilpin Faust, a scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. history who specializes in the Antebellum South and who served as the president of Harvard University from 2007 until 2018, published an essay in The Atlantic titled “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive,” in which she conveys her shock, consternation, and sorrow at having recently discovered that the majority of undergraduate students nowadays cannot read cursive and that, of those few who can read it, even fewer can write it. She expresses worry that, as a result of not being able to read cursive, students will not be able to read historical documents written in it and will be cut off from the historical past. This piece set off many conversations about cursive instruction in the U.S.

I am currently a twenty-three-year-old first-semester master’s student who just received my bachelor’s degree in May of this year, so I am very close in age to present-day undergraduates. Contrary to the sweeping declaration in the title of Faust’s article, I did receive full instruction in how to read and write cursive from third through fifth grades. Nonetheless, I think that the ongoing decline of cursive instruction in the U.S. is both less of a tragedy and less historically significant than many people (including Faust) are making it out to be. In this post, I intend to clear up a few popular misconceptions about the history of cursive writing.

No, the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ Is Not the Oldest Surviving Work of Literature

If you think you know one thing about the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, then, chances are, you probably think that the epic is the oldest surviving work of literature in the whole world. This claim pervades basically all non-academic discussion of the epic. I was taught it in my history and literature classes all throughout my K-12 education, it is endlessly repeated on the internet, and, whenever I happen to talk to someone about the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is usually one of the first claims to come up.

The truth, however, is that the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh (which is what most people mean when they talk about the Epic of Gilgamesh) is not even close to being the oldest surviving work of literature. In fact, it’s not even the oldest surviving poem about Gilgamesh.

No, Athena Didn’t Turn Medusa into a Monster to Protect Her

One of the most famous stories in all of ancient Greek and Roman mythology and literature is the tale of the origin of the Gorgon Medusa that the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE), who is better known in English simply as “Ovid,” tells in his long narrative poem Metamorphoses, which he composed in the Latin language in dactylic hexameter verse in around the year 8 CE or thereabouts.

According to Ovid, Medusa was originally an extraordinarily beautiful mortal woman who was known for her gorgeous hair. Then, however, the god Neptunus (whom the Romans equated with the Greek god Poseidon) raped her in the temple of the goddess Minerva (whom the Romans equated with the Greek goddess Athena) and Minerva punished her by turning her into a hideous monster with snakes entwined in her hair and making it so that any mortal who saw her would instantly turn to stone.

A claim has circulated online for years now claiming that modern people have misunderstood this myth and that, actually, Minerva turned Medusa into a monster and made it so that anyone who saw her would instantly turn to stone in order to protect her so that men would never prey on her again. This claim, however, is not supported by any evidence in any ancient source and, in fact, Ovid’s account expressly says that Minerva cursed Medusa in order to punish her for her involvement in desecrating her temple, even though her involvement was totally nonconsensual. Furthermore, the context in which Ovid tells the story strongly suggests that he intended his readers to sympathize with Medusa and question the justice of Minerva’s punishment.