Debunking Archives - Page 5 of 26 - Tales of Times Forgotten

No, Cerberus’s Name Does Not Mean “Spot”

In Greek mythology, Cerberus—or, to use a spelling that is more faithful to the Greek pronunciation, Kerberos—is the ferocious, many-headed watchdog who guards the entrance to the underworld. Ancient Greek sources disagree on exactly how many heads he has. The Theogonia, a long narrative poem in dactylic hexameter composed by the poet Hesiodos of Askre in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, says (in lines 308–312) that Kerberos has fifty heads. The later poet Pindaros of Thebes (lived c. 518 – c. 438 BCE) says in a fragment (F249a/b SM) that he has no less than one hundred heads. In Greek vase paintings, he is usually portrayed with either two or three heads. He is often also depicted with a serpent for a tail. From the fourth century BCE onward, though, three heads seem to have become the standard.

There is a popular meme that has been circulating on the internet for a long time claiming that the name Κέρβερος (Kérberos) actually means “Spot.” This is a cute story. How deliciously ironic it would be for a literal Hellhound to have such a normal dog name like “Spot”! Unfortunately, the story probably isn’t true. Kerberos’s name certainly does not mean “Spot” in Ancient Greek, and it probably doesn’t mean this in any language at all.

Did Ancient People Really Think That Gods People Didn’t Believe in Would “Fade”?

The idea that gods derive their power from people believing in them and worshipping them and that gods whom people stop believing in and worshipping will “fade” or possibly even die out pops up fairly frequently in modern popular culture. Most notably, it forms a major part of the premise for Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods (originally published in 2001 by William Morrow in the United States and Headline the U.K.) and the television series of the same name based on it (originally released on the premium cable network Starz from 2017 through 2021).

Some people have wondered, though: Does this idea have any kind of basis in ancient sources? Did ancient people really believe that their deities drew their powers from people worshipping them? As it turns out, although the version of the idea that is best known today through American Gods and other works is utterly contrary to how ancient people normally thought about their deities, similar ideas about deities being, to some degree, dependent on worship, do crop up in ancient literature.

No, Santa Claus Is Not Inspired by Odin

I’ve spent a lot of time debunking the perennially popular misconception that modern Anglophone Christmas customs are of ancient “pagan” origin. My most thorough article on the subject remains this one I originally posted two years ago. One of the more popular claims associated with this misconception is that Santa Claus is actually somehow inspired by the “pagan” Norse god Óðinn, who is closely associated with wisdom, war, death, and the runic alphabet. I already debunked this claim in this article I posted two years ago about the history of Santa Claus, which I highly recommend reading, but I did so only briefly and I feel that this notion is so common that it deserves a more thorough rebuttal.

Jackson Crawford, who has a PhD in Old Norse studies, spent many years teaching the subject at various universities, and is now a professional public educator on the subject, posted a video on his YouTube channel last year explaining why Óðinn is not Santa Claus. Crawford’s video is excellent, but it is, for the most part, merely a simple comparison of Óðinn and Santa Claus and it does not take into account the history of Santa Claus. In this article, I intend to give this misconception the proper, in-depth refutation it deserves—one that fully takes into account Santa Claus’s complicated history.

Nabis, the Last King of Sparta, and His Torture Robot

The last king of Sparta to actually wield real political power was Nabis, who staged a coup d’état in 207 BCE, in which he seized the throne and murdered the reigning king Pelops. He claimed that he was a remote descendant of the Eurypontid king Demaratos of many centuries earlier and initiated sweeping social reforms that he designed to fortify his power.

Ever since antiquity, Nabis’s reputation has consistently been that of an extraordinarily cruel and sadistic tyrant. He is probably most notorious today for having supposedly constructed a horrifying torture robot modeled after his wife Apega that he could control and use to torture people into giving him large amounts of money and precious valuables. In this post, I will briefly look at who Nabis was, the events of his life, and, of course, the story of the evil torture robot.

The Real Reason Why the Attempted Suicide Rate Among Transgender People Is So High

I know I normally debunk misconceptions related to ancient history, but, in this post, I want to debunk a dangerous misconception that I’ve repeatedly seen floating around about transgender people. I think it is important to address this because it is a misconception that has an enormous, direct, negative impact on millions of real people’s lives in a way that other misconceptions I’ve addressed—like the one about modern Anglophone Christmas traditions being of ancient “pagan” origin, the one about a certain fresco from Pompeii being a portrait of Sappho, or the one about Thoukydides being a totally “objective” and “unbiased” historian—do not.

It is widely known that there is an extremely high rate of lifetime attempted suicide among transgender people. The most commonly cited statistic is that 41% of adult transgender people in the United States have attempted to kill themselves at some point in their life. Many conservatives believe that this statistic proves that being transgender itself is a mental illness that causes people to become depressed and suicidal, and that society therefore needs to do everything it possibly can to prevent people from “becoming” transgender for their own good.

In this post, I intend to present evidence to demonstrate that this view is false and that the high rate of lifetime attempted suicide among transgender people is, in fact, the result of widespread bigotry and stigma against trans people. Please be forewarned that the following post contains discussion of suicide, anxiety, depression, transphobia, anti-Black racism, antisemitism, misogyny, Neo-Nazis, online impersonation, and harassment. Some readers, especially those who have personally struggled with mental health issues, may find this discussion disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.

No, “Xmas” Was Not Invented to Advance a Secularist Agenda

We are now well into the month of December. This obviously means that there are already people going around promoting nonsense assertions that twenty-first-century Anglophone Christmas traditions are of ancient “pagan” origin. (I already wrote an article back in December 2019, in which I thoroughly refute the most common “Christmas-is-secretly-pagan” arguments and I’ve addressed some of the other arguments in various other articles.) The time of year also, however, means that there are tons of conservative Christians promoting absurd conspiracy theories that evil leftists are staging some kind of “War on Christmas.”

One aspect of this whole conspiracy theory about the supposed “War on Christmas” is the misconception that the name Xmas was invented by atheists as part of a secularist attempt to remove Christ from Christmas and turn it into a secular holiday. The assumption is that the “X” represents an attempt to literally x-out the word “Christ.” Because of this misconception, some Christians regard the name “Xmas” as downright blasphemous. In reality, the name Xmas was not invented by atheists at all; it is, in fact, merely a harmless abbreviation that was originally invented by Christians and has been in continuous use in various forms for nearly five hundred years.

Were Ancient Civilizations Conservative or Liberal?

I have repeatedly encountered questions on Quora asking whether ancient civilizations were “liberal” or “conservative,” so I thought I would write an in-depth response to those sorts of questions here. I think these questions arise from people perceiving what seems like a fundamental paradox: we revere ancient civilizations for things people generally see as progressive, such as technological advancements and the invention of democracy, while, at the same time, it is widely known that basically all ancient societies had slavery, oppressed women to some degree or another, and were often imperialistic, xenophobic, and culturally chauvinistic.

It’s true that ancient civilizations were generally very conservative in the sense that they tended to value traditions very highly, they were usually culturally resistant to change, and people in those civilizations rarely challenged long-established cultural assumptions and social institutions. For instance, as far as we have evidence, few people in the ancient world ever challenged the idea that men are naturally superior to women or the idea that slavery is normal and morally acceptable.

At the same time, though, it would be misleading to describe ancient civilizations as “conservative” or “liberal” without careful clarification because, among individual people in the ancient world, there was tremendous ideological diversity. Furthermore, the normative values of ancient civilizations were often very different from the values of both contemporary people who call themselves conservatives and contemporary people who call themselves liberals.

A History of the “Common Era” (BCE/CE) Dating System

I functionally stopped believing in the existence of God sometime around late 2018 or early 2019. It’s difficult to say exactly when it happened, since it was a gradual process of realizing that all the theological arguments to which I had clung to support my belief in the existence of God were fundamentally flawed. Long after I became an agnostic, though, I still clung to many of the cultural trappings of Christianity. One of these trappings was the BC/AD dating system, which numbers the years from the supposed year of Jesus’s birth, with “BC” standing for “before Christ” and “AD” standing for “anno Domini,” which is Latin for “in the year of the Lord,” referring to Jesus.

For nearly two years after becoming an agnostic, I continued to use this dating system in all my articles. I felt that the alternative BCE/CE dating system (which uses the exact same numbers for the years, but with “BCE” standing for “before the Common Era” and “CE” standing for “Common Era”) was a relatively recent invention of atheists seeking to advance a secularist agenda by taking the Christian dating system and making it superficially “secular” by removing the explicit Christian references while retaining the years numbered from the supposed date of Jesus’s birth. I wondered why secularists didn’t just create a dating system that was actually secular and not based on the supposed date of Jesus’s birth.

Well, it turns out that the history of the “Common Era” dating notation is a lot more complicated and fascinating than I realized. In fact, it is not a recent invention of atheist secularists in any way; it is both quite old and originally Christian. Christians first began using the “Common Era” notation in the early seventeenth century and they have been using it continuously ever since. Jewish people widely adopted the notation in the nineteenth century so that they could use the Christian dating system that everyone around them was using while still upholding their religion by not applying the titles “Christ” and “Lord” to Jesus. The notation is now widely used among scholars and academics, primarily out of respect for followers of religions that don’t regard Jesus as Lord or Christ.

Did Spartan Shields Really Bear the Letter Lambda?

In popular culture, ancient Spartan hoplites are virtually always portrayed as fighting with shields decorated with the Greek letter lambda (Λ). This letter, of course, stands for Λακεδαίμων (Lakedaímōn), which was the most common name in antiquity for the Greek polis (i.e., “city-state”) that included that settlement of Sparta.

In historical reality, Greek hoplites, including Spartan hoplites, were expected to provide their own equipment and they could decorate their shields however they wished. Although there is evidence to suggest that a few Spartans probably did choose to decorate their shields with the letter lambda, the vast majority seem to have decorated their shields with other symbols, geometric designs, and images.

Did the Phoenicians Circumnavigate Africa?

The Phoenicians were an ancient Levantine people. Their original homeland was mostly located in what is now Lebanon and they spoke a Canaanite language closely related to Hebrew. They were known in antiquity for their expert sailors, who conducted extensive maritime trade with many different cultures throughout the Mediterranean world. From the ninth century BCE onwards, Phoenician settlers founded many colonies in the western Mediterranean. The most famous Phoenician colony was the city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia, which later grew into an empire that rivalled the fledgling Roman Republic. The Phoenicians also invented the very first abjad, which is the direct ancestor to both the Greek alphabet and the Latin alphabet that we still use to write the English language today.

One ancient account suggests that a group of Phoenician sailors may have circumnavigated the African continent sometime around 600 BCE—over two thousand years before the Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The ancient Greek historian and traveler Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) records in his Histories 4.42 that Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt (ruled 610 – 595 BCE) sponsored a group of Phoenician sailors who managed to successfully complete a clockwise circumnavigation of Africa by sailing south from the Red Sea and returning to Egypt through the Strait of Gibraltar between two and three years later.

The communis opinio among classicists, ancient historians, and online history buffs alike is that, although we cannot be 100% certain, the Phoenician voyage around Africa most likely really took place as Herodotos describes. Some skeptics, however, have raised what I think are serious objections to the story. In this article, I will review the arguments both in favor and against Herodotos’s story and come to a conclusion of what I think really happened.