Misconceptions Archives - Page 3 of 22 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Did Ancient People Really All Have Horrible, Crooked, Rotten Teeth?

A certain notion that frequently shows up in popular culture and online claims that everyone in the premodern world all had absolutely disgusting, crooked, and totally rotten teeth. There is some truth to this perception. Modern orthodontic practice did not exist in the premodern world, so the majority of people probably did not have perfectly straight teeth. Additionally, across the board, most people in the premodern world generally had poorer dental hygiene than what is considered normal in most western developed countries in the twenty-first century. Some premodern people did indeed have extremely disgusting, disease-ridden, and rotten teeth.

Nonetheless, the popular perception ignores a great deal of contravening evidence. Some premodern people had naturally straight teeth, just as some people do today, and perfectly straight teeth with no gaps haven’t necessarily always been seen as desirable in all cultures. Additionally, premodern people did have an interest in keeping their teeth clean and they had methods of cleaning their teeth, albeit ones that are not as effective as those in widespread use today.

Finally, most premodern people’s teeth were not all totally rotted and falling out due primarily to the fact that they rarely or never consumed simple sugars, which are the primary cause of most tooth decay today. People who lived in areas close to the sea also tended to eat lots of seafood, which is high in fluoride, which may have helped to protect their teeth. Consequently, some ancient and medieval people actually had relatively nice-looking, healthy teeth even by twenty-first-century standards.

Yes, Transgender People Should Be Allowed to Use the Public Restroom of Their Gender Identity

This year, multiple Republican-controlled U.S. states have either passed or considered various bills that would prohibit transgender people from using public restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms that align with our gender identities. Additionally, a YouGov poll released last year indicates that U.S. adults are more likely to say that trans people should be banned from using restrooms and changing rooms that align with our gender identities than they are to say that we should be allowed to use them.

As most of my readers at this point know, I am a trans woman. The main focus of this blog is and will remain ancient history. Nonetheless, when it comes to important issues of civil rights, especially ones like this that have a direct and immediate impact on my own everyday existence, I feel it is necessary to use what platform I have to speak out and hopefully maybe change a few people’s minds. In this post, therefore, I will explain why laws banning trans people from restrooms and changing rooms serve no legitimate purpose, are generally unenforceable, and actively harm trans people.

Yes, King David Raped Bathsheba

The legend of how King David saw Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, bathing naked, lusted after her, sent messengers to bring her to the royal palace, had sex with her, impregnated her, and then had her husband effectively murdered to prevent him from finding out is one of the most famous stories in the Hebrew Bible—but also one of the most routinely misunderstood.

Many Christian readers have interpreted Bathsheba as a depraved and nefarious seductress who deliberately bathed in a location where she knew David would be watching in order to seduce him, caused him to lust after her, and gleefully betrayed her husband to have sex with the king. There is, however, absolutely nothing in the Biblical text to support this interpretation. In fact, in the text itself, all the evidence strongly indicates that David spies on her without her knowledge or consent and then rapes her. Bathsheba, far from being a malicious temptress, is actually an innocent rape victim who has been wrongfully victim-blamed for far too long.

In Ancient Greece, Children Wearing Drag Was a Religious Obligation!

As I discuss in great detail in this recent post I wrote about the ongoing right-wing attack on LGBTQ+ people in the United States, in the past month, right-wingers have been having a full-on moral panic about the existence of child-friendly drag performances. These rightists perceive drag itself as inherently sexual and therefore inherently inappropriate for children. Many of them are claiming that allowing a child to view any form of drag is somehow “child abuse” or “grooming.” In the heat of this moral panic, neo-fascists have disrupted and even planned violent attacks on drag performances that are billed as child-friendly and Republican lawmakers in multiple red states have proposed bills that would make it a crime to allow any person under the age of eighteen to view any kind of performance involving drag.

As I have already explained at greater length in my previous post, drag is just a variety of costume; it’s a person dressing up as a different gender. There is nothing inherently sexual about it. Although many drag performances for adult audiences do make use of sexual humor and innuendo and are therefore inappropriate for young children, such innuendo is not integral to drag itself and some drag performances can be genuinely child-friendly. Moreover, laws banning drag performances in the presence of children, if they are vaguely worded enough, could be used to criminally prosecute trans and gender-nonconforming people for wearing clothes associated with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth in any public place where children could conceivably be present.

In this post, I thought I would mention, from an ancient historical angle, that the ancient Greeks would be absolutely baffled by twenty-first-century U.S. right-wingers’ paroxysms over child-friendly drag. All the female roles in Greek drama were originally portrayed by men in drag at religious festivals where at least older children were present, it was a religious custom for men to dress in drag for certain religious festivals and occasions where children could be present, and the ancient Athenians even had a festival at which two adolescent boys were religiously mandated to dress in drag themselves.

The Right Wing’s Ongoing Attack on LGBTQ+ People

This post is going to be a bit of a departure from my usual ancient history content. As some of my readers already know, I am a transgender woman. I am also bi/pansexual. Unfortunately, for roughly the past year and a half, but especially the past month, the political right wing in the United States has been increasingly making queer people, especially transgender people, into a primary target for vilification and attack. I can’t possibly cover everything the right has been doing in the past year and a half to attack us, but I feel it necessary to make my readers aware of just a tiny bit of some of what they have been doing and saying.

In the past month, Republican lawmakers have continued to push increasingly restrictive legislation and policies to take away or drastically curtail the existing rights of queer people, especially transgender people. Right-wing pundits have dedicated much time and attention to propagating a false, bigoted, and dangerous narrative that LGBTQ+ people are “grooming” children for sexual molestation. Meanwhile, neo-fascist and right-wing extremist groups have relentlessly targeted, harassed, and even tried to violently attack events associated with Pride and the LGBTQ+ community all across the United States. Sadly, all signs strongly indicate that things are only going to get much, much worse from here over the next few years, especially for those living in Republican-controlled states.

This post will be a very long one and it will discuss many deeply depressing topics. Nonetheless, I urge you, if you are a straight, cisgender person who genuinely cares about the wellbeing of any queer person, please read this post to the very end, since it will cover some very important information about the ongoing evisceration of queer rights in the U.S.

No, You Can’t Buy One Square Foot of Land in Scotland and Become a “Scottish Lord”

If you’ve been on the internet much, you’ve probably encountered an advertisement at some point claiming that, if you own any amount of land in Scotland, even if it is only one square foot, then you legally qualify for the title of “lord” or “lady.” Numerous companies have promoted this assertion, purporting that, if you buy one square foot of land from them, then you can call yourself a Scottish lord or lady and they will send you a certificate to indicate your new title. A few of the companies of this sort that you may have heard of include Highland Titles, Scotland Title, Scotland Titles (which is apparently a different company), Established Titles, Laird Title, The Scottish Gift, and so on.

All the titles these companies are selling are fake and they are not worth the paper they are printed on. For one thing, under current Scots law, it is not actually possible to transfer legal ownership rights to a single square foot of land in the first place. Furthermore, even if it were possible, merely owning one square foot of land would not make anyone a “lord” or “lady” in any sense.

Did Ancient Poetry Rhyme in the Original Languages?

A lot of people who have never studied any ancient language have a tendency to assume that works of ancient poetry must rhyme in the original language. It’s fairly easy to see why some people might think this, since many old poems written in English rhyme and it’s easy for people to assume that this is how all poetry—or at least all “traditional” poetry—is just supposed to be. The reality, though, is that rhyming lines of the kind that most twenty-first-century western readers would recognize are virtually absent from ancient poetry altogether.

Poems in ancient languages operate on different rules from traditional modern English poetry. In this post, I will attempt to survey some of these rules for poetry in various ancient languages. Be forewarned that I am not a poetry specialist, of the various ancient languages I will be discussing Ancient Greek and Latin are the only ones I can personally read, and this post is by no means meant to be comprehensive. Nonetheless, I hope it will serve as a rough guide to help interested members of the general public to understand at least some forms of ancient poetry.

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.

Why Is Justice Personified as a Woman Holding a Set of Scales?

Chances are at some point you’ve seen a statue or painting depicting the personification of the concept of justice as a woman holding a set of scales in one hand (usually her left) and an unsheathed sword in her other hand (usually her right), often wearing a blindfold over her eyes. Statues depicting Justice in this manner often stand outside courthouses across Europe and the Americas. Many people have wondered why she is personified as a woman and some have tried to attribute great allegorical or symbolic significance to her gender. Some have imagined, for instance, that maybe men find women desirable and men created the personification of Justice, so they made her a woman to show that Justice is desirable. This may sound like a compelling and common-sense answer, but it is still wrong.

In reality, Justice is personified as a woman not for any profound allegorical or symbolic reason, but rather simply because the respective nouns denoting the concept of “justice” in the Ancient Greek and Latin languages happen to be grammatically feminine. In this post, I will discuss the origin of the personification Justice and the history of how she came to have the standard iconography that she has today.

What Powers Do Demigods Really Have in Greek Mythology?

The most prominent portrayal of demigods in recent years occurs in the American author Rick Riordan’s mythology-based middle-grade children’s books, which include the series Percy Jackson & the Olympians (published 2005 – 2009), The Heroes of Olympus (published 2010 – 2014), Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard (published 2015 – 2017), and The Trials of Apollo (published 2016 – 2020). Since Riordan’s books have an enormous fanbase and Percy Jackson & the Olympians is currently being developed into a new series for Disney+, I thought I would write this post in which I will explore how the portrayal of demigods and their powers in ancient Greek mythology and literature differs from the portrayal in Riordan’s novels.

Riordan’s novels portray demigods as having supernatural powers that correspond to specific aspects of the domains their divine parents preside over. The reality, though, is that, in actual ancient Greek and Roman sources, demigods do not typically possess any special powers or abilities that correspond in any way to the specific domain of their divine parent. Instead, what they typically inherit from their divine parent are more general exceptional qualities that correspond to the demigod in question’s gender more than their divine parentage.

Demigod men are typically said to display exceptional qualities that the Greeks and Romans considered inherently masculine, such as extraordinary physical strength and skill at fighting. Meanwhile, demigod women are typically said to display exceptional qualities that the Greeks and Romans considered inherently feminine. Notably, although both demigod men and women in general are said to possess extraordinary physical beauty, the sources tend to emphasize this aspect more for women than for men. Both demigod men and women are said in some cases to possess extraordinary cunning. By far the most important thing that makes demigods in the Greek tradition special, though, is that their divine parents look out for them and are willing to give them things they ask for.