historiography Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

No, Ancient Skythian Enarees Didn’t Drink Urine from Pregnant Mares as a Primitive Form of HRT

The Skythians were an ancient mostly nomadic people who inhabited the northern Eurasian steppes in what is now Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan. They were known in antiquity as a very warlike people and were especially known for their skills at horseback riding and archery. The ancient Greeks generally regarded them as archetypal barbarians and Greek ethnographers were deeply fascinated by their culture. They wore trousers, which the Greeks regarded as the most barbaric kind of garment, and they practiced tattooing.

As I discuss in this post I wrote in August 2020, various groups of people existed in ancient world who might fit the definition of the modern word transgender. The Enarees were one such kind of gender-variant people who existed among the ancient Skythians. Although they were assigned male at birth, they wore women’s clothing, took on roles traditionally assigned to women, and spoke in a feminine manner.

A story has become widely circulated online in recent years claiming that the Enarees drank estrogen-rich urine harvested from pregnant mares in order to feminize their bodies as a form of primitive gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Sadly, as awesome as it would be if this story were true, it has absolutely no basis in any kind of historical evidence and is entirely a piece of unfounded modern speculation.

The Surprisingly Long History of the Conspiracy Theory that Ancient Rome Didn’t Exist

Despite the fact that I am currently twenty-two years old, I do not have an account on TikTok and I have no intention to create one. It often feels like I’m the only person my age who doesn’t have one, but I don’t mind because I’ve never really been one to follow the crowd. I have, however, over the past week or so, encountered a large number of classicists and ancient historians online discussing a conspiracy theorist named Donna Dickens who uses the TikTok handle “momllennial_” who is apparently attracting an enormous amount of attention on that platform by making absolutely ridiculous claims about ancient history. Their most recent such claim is that the ancient Romans never existed and they were totally invented as “a figment of the Spanish Inquisition’s imagination.”

Right now, all the historians, classicists, and archaeologists who are on TikTok seem to be busy debunking Dickens’s claims. I, however, am not going to try to debunk their claims, because other people are already doing it and, frankly, anyone who knows anything at all about Roman history and literature, the Latin language, archaeology, scientific dating methods, or historical methods in general can easily spot the patent ridiculousness of the things they are claiming.

Instead, I want to do something very different from what I have seen anyone else doing; I want to talk about the history of the conspiracy theory that ancient Rome didn’t exist. Believe it or not, Dickens is not the first person to promote these assertions. In fact, they are actually peddling a conspiracy theory that originated with a reactionary Catholic Jesuit in the seventeenth century CE.

Was Thucydides Biased?

Thucydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE)—or, to use a transliteration of his name that is more faithful to the Greek spelling, Thoukydides—was an ancient Athenian general and historian. He is best known today as the author of the work Histories of the Peloponnesian War, a historical account of the famous war fought between the Delian League, led by the city-state of Athens, and the Peloponnesian League, led by the city-state of Sparta. The war lasted from 431 until 404 BCE, with an interlude of peace in the middle lasting from 421 to 415 BCE.

Since the late nineteenth century, Thoukydides has often been held up as a paragon of the “objective,” “unbiased,” “scientific” historian. Although this conception of Thoukydides is, at any rate, no longer as fashionable among scholars as it once was, it persists in popular descriptions of his work and has greatly influenced how the general public perceives him. In this essay, I intend to debunk this perception by pointing out five examples of how Thoukydides’s biases seem to influence his narrative.

Pamphile of Epidauros: A Female Ancient Greek Historian

Nearly all the historical writings that have survived from ancient Greece and Rome were written by men. Women’s voices in the historical record are few and far between. We do, however, know that there was, in fact, an extraordinarily prolific female ancient Greek historian named Pamphile of Epidauros, who lived in Greece in around the middle of the first century CE, when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire.

Pamphile is known to have written a lengthy compilation of interesting historical anecdotes derived from various sources titled Historical Commentaries, an epitome of the writings of the historian Ktesias of Knidos (fl. c. 400 BCE), a work titled On Controversies that seems to have been perhaps a collection of essays on controversial topics, and a work titled On Sexual Pleasures, which seems to have been a sex manual. Sadly, everything or almost everything she wrote has been lost.

Pamphile is a truly monumental figure in the history of Greek historiography, not only because she is the only female ancient Greek historian about whom we have any significant information, but also because she seems to have been an especially important author in the development of the genre of “miscellaneous history,” which focused on retelling interesting anecdotes from earlier authors and became very popular in the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries CE.

“Rewriting History” Is Not Inherently a Bad Thing

There seems to be something of a trend going on right now in politics where people have developed a habit of accusing their opponents of wanting to “rewrite history.” I’ve mostly seen conservatives accusing progressives of this, but I’ve also seen a few cases of progressives accusing conservatives of it without further clarification. In all cases, people who accuse other people of wanting to “rewrite history” portray this as something unambiguously bad.

The problem is that “rewriting history” is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, “rewriting history” is literally a historian’s job description. It is inevitable that each generation will rewrite history and there is really nothing anyone can do to stop it. It is, however, extremely important that the people who rewrite history do so honestly, using correct evidence and correct methods of interpretation. When we talk about “rewriting history,” what matters is not whether people are doing it, but how they are doing it.

No, History Doesn’t Need to be “Mathematized”

On 12 November 2020, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse.” This article, written by a staff writer named Graeme Wood, is primarily a profile piece about Peter Turchin, a Russian American entomologist-turned-pseudohistorian. It is also, however, to a large extent a full-on polemic against real historians, whom Wood portrays as obsolete curmudgeons who don’t really understand the past and are allergic to science.

As can only be expected, the entire article displays an absolutely flagrant ignorance of what the historical discipline is and what historians actually do. Indeed, it is full of all kinds of outlandish howlers, bordering on outright silliness. Unfortunately, many of the misconceptions that the article promotes are becoming more and more common as our society continues to devalue the study of history.

How Do We Know Ancient Texts Are Really Ancient?

There seems to be a lot of people who think that, because we do not have the original manuscripts of ancient texts, that is somehow deeply suspicious. While it is certainly true that there are some places in some texts where we are not completely sure what the original text said, in the vast majority of cases, it is possible to reconstruct exactly or at least almost exactly what the original text said. Even when the exact original wording of a text is unclear, we usually have a pretty good idea of what the original author wrote.

Should We Judge Historical Figures by Contemporary Standards?

There has been a lot of political controversy in recent years about the question of whether it is appropriate to judge historical figures by “contemporary standards.” This controversy often particularly flares up surrounding figures who are traditionally seen as “heroes” of United States history and yet actually committed horrific crimes, such Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.

I think that the issue is a lot more complicated than most people realize and I think that, in most cases, it is extremely misleading to frame the debate in terms of judging historical figures by “contemporary standards” because this implies that people during the period in question had no way of knowing that the things they were doing were wrong, when, in fact, we know there were people at the time who did know that these things were wrong.

When Was Jesus Really Born?

Most people assume that Jesus of Nazareth was born on 25 December 1 AD. Superficially speaking, this assumption makes a great deal of sense. After all, Christians today celebrate Jesus’s birth every year on December 25th and our modern Anno Domini dating system, which is ostensibly based on the year when Jesus was born, begins with the year 1 AD.

Unfortunately, things are never quite so simple. The truth is, we genuinely have very little idea when Jesus was born. There is no mention of the exact date of Jesus’s birth anywhere in any of the earliest surviving Christian writings and it was not until around the fourth century AD that December 25th was settled on as the day on which Christians would celebrate Jesus’s birth. Even the year of Jesus’s birth is uncertain; all we can say is that he was probably born sometime between c. 10 BC and c. 4 AD.

Was Jesus Married to Mary Magdalene?

The notion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married is one that has received a great deal of attention in popular culture. For instance, the idea of a conjugal union between Jesus and Mary Magdalene was a central plot point of the 2003 mystery thriller novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Meanwhile, you can find all kinds of articles online, many of them influenced by The Da Vinci Code, contending that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. It seems to be a very popular idea.

I have debunked claims from The Da Vinci Code before; for instance, in this article I published in August 2019, I debunk the misconception popularized by The Da Vinci Code that the books of the New Testament were chosen by Constantine I, when, in reality, the New Testament canon was mostly agreed upon long before Constantine I was born and what issues there were with the canon in Constantine I’s day were not resolved until long after his death. In this article, however, I will be tackling the most fundamental contention of the novel: the contention that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had offspring.

Historically speaking, it is highly, highly improbable that Jesus ever married or ever had any offspring. None of the canonical gospels ever even remotely imply that Jesus had a sexual relationship with anyone or that he ever had any offspring, nor do even the later apocryphal gospels imply either of these things. Furthermore, there are some very good reasons to believe that Jesus did not marry or have a sexual partner and that he did not have any offspring.