Misconceptions Archives - Page 6 of 22 - Tales of Times Forgotten

The Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis Is Racist and Harmful

The so-called “ancient astronaut hypothesis” is a popular genre of pseudohistory which centers around the claim that extraterrestrial beings visited earth in pre-modern times, leaving behind supposed evidence of their presence. The supposed “evidence” for this “hypothesis” is based entirely on flagrant misinterpretations and misrepresentations, tendentious reasoning, false assumptions, forged artifacts, and often outright lies. As a result, the “hypothesis” is universally rejected among professional academic scholars, historians, and archaeologists.

I have written about the ancient astronaut hypothesis before. For instance, I wrote an article back in January 2020 about how we actually know that the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids as tombs for their pharaohs, in which I debunked claims made on the show Ancient Aliens. I also posted an article a few days ago in which I debunk the popular ancient astronaut theorist claim that Alexander the Great saw flying saucers while on his campaigns. In this article, however, I am not going to try to debunk the ancient astronaut hypothesis. Instead, I want to explain the history of the ancient astronaut hypothesis, why it is not just a “harmless” conspiracy theory, and why it is actually harmful.

No, Alexander the Great Didn’t See Flying Saucers

If you’ve ever been on the internet or happened to turn on virtually any show that has aired on the History Channel within the past ten years, you’re probably aware that there are tons of people who are, shall we say, highly enthusiastic about so-called “unidentified flying objects” or “UFOs.” These UFO enthusiasts love to repeat a story which claims that the ancient Makedonian king Alexander the Great and his soldiers saw UFOs in the sky that looked like giant silvery shields at some point while he was on his campaigns.

The story that UFO enthusiasts keep repeating, however, is demonstrably entirely fictional. No version of the story ever appears in any ancient or medieval source. In fact, the earliest known mention of the story dates to the year 1959. Other people have debunked this story before, but I am going to debunk it again because UFO enthusiasts keep repeating it.

The Shocking Truth about Ancient Greek Makeup

There are tons of articles, blog posts, and YouTube videos online about ancient Greek makeup. Unfortunately, I have found that all of them are of utterly abysmal quality. None of the articles that I could find contained any citations to specific passages in ancient sources and all of them contained wildly egregious errors of fact and misconceptions seemingly derived from earlier online sources that, in turn, did not cite any ancient sources.

I have decided to remedy this situation by writing my own article about ancient Greek makeup. Everything I am about to say in this article will be concretely supported by specific passages from actual ancient Greek texts. If you’ve ever wanted to make yourself look like an ancient Greek beauty, or simply wondered what Greek women would look like in movies if they were portrayed historically accurately, then this is exactly the article for you!

Was Jesus a Communist?

People have been claiming that Jesus of Nazareth was actually a communist or socialist for a very long time. Notably, Francis Bellamy (lived 1855 – 1931), who is best known today as the author of the United States Pledge of Allegiance, was a Baptist minister and self-proclaimed “Christian Socialist” who attracted a great deal of negative attention during his lifetime for frequently claiming that Jesus was a socialist. In more recent years, various pro-communist memes about Jesus being a communist have gone viral on the internet.

I’ve seen so many different expressions of the idea that Jesus was a communist over the years that I’ve decided to write an in-depth article examining whether this is an accurate characterization of Jesus’s teachings. There are indeed some genuine similarities between the views that are attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and communism. There are, however, a number of enormous differences between Jesus and contemporary revolutionary communists that make the claim that Jesus was a communist a profound mischaracterization of his teachings.

Ancient Roman Masturbation

For the past four years, a photograph of a plaster cast of an ancient Roman man who died in the city of Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE has been circulating online with the claim that he died while masturbating, since his right hand happens to be positioned near his groin in a masturbation-like pose. Historically speaking, it is highly unlikely that this particular man really died while masturbating. The position of his hand is most likely a result of the muscle contractions resulting from the excruciating heat shock that killed him, rather than the result of anything he was doing before he was killed.

Nonetheless, there is a wealth of fascinating historical and archaeological evidence for both male and female masturbation in ancient Rome, including in the city of Pompeii. Needless to say, the following article contains discussion of evidence that is not suitable for children.

Ancient Greek Men Were Not All Buff

One of the most common misconceptions I have encountered about the ancient Greeks is the notion that ancient Greek men were all incredibly buff, muscle-bound bodybuilders. This misconception seems to arise from the naïve assumption that ancient Greek statues depict how average ancient Greek men really looked, perhaps also influenced by the similarly naïve assumption that the 2007 epic fantasy action film 300, written and directed by Zack Snyder, is a historically accurate depiction of ancient Greece.

The reality is that there was never a time when the majority of Greek men really looked like the physical specimens portrayed in Archaic and Classical Greek sculptures. These sculptures represent what upper-class Greek people regarded as physically ideal, not what the average Greek person actually looked like.

The Real Origin of the Nazi Salute

In the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the National Fascist Party (i.e., the PNF) in Italy and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (i.e., the NSDAP or Nazi Party) in Germany both used a salute that consisted of a straight, rigid arm raised into the air above the shoulders with the hand parallel to the rest of the arm and the palm facing toward the ground. The Italian Fascists and the German Nazis both believed that this salute originated with the ancient Romans and tried to use the salute’s supposed Roman origins in order to bolster their own prestige and portray themselves as continuing the Roman legacy. Various modern-day fascists and Neo-Nazis have tried to do the same thing.

There is, however, no evidence that anyone in ancient Rome ever used the form of the straight-arm salute that was used by the Italian Fascists and German Nazis. The true origins of the Nazi salute are far more strange. The salute’s traceable history begins with a late eighteenth-century French Neoclassical painter. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became incorporated into numerous stage plays and films set in ancient Rome, leading the Italian Fascists to adopt it, believing that it was Roman. The Nazis, in turn, adopted it from the Italian Fascists.

Sparta Was Not a Paradise for Women

It is extremely common for people who write about ancient history on the internet to claim that ancient Sparta was, by ancient Greek standards, a paradise for women. I’m frankly sick and tired of this narrative because it is, in many ways, deeply misinformed. It is, of course, dangerous to overgeneralize, but I would argue that a randomly selected woman of unspecified social status in Athens would actually be far more likely to be happy than a similarly selected woman in Sparta.

It’s true that Spartiate women (i.e., women who belonged to the Spartan citizen class) generally had more freedom and privileges than women of the citizen class in most other Greek poleis (i.e., city-states). Nonetheless, life for Spartiate women wasn’t nearly as good as it is often made to sound. Their rights were still severely limited and the rights that Spartiate women had that women in other Greek poleis lacked were actually fairly normal for women in other ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and Rome.

Furthermore, the popular discourse around Sparta almost always completely omits mention of the fact that the overwhelming majority of all women in Sparta were enslaved helots, for whom life was almost certainly an absolute living Hell. While all Greek poleis had enslaved people, in Sparta, they made up a vastly larger share of the overall population than in any other polis and they were notoriously ill-treated, even by ancient Greek standards. Helot women were forced to do an overwhelming amount of manual labor, they lived in constant fear of being whipped or murdered by the krypteia, they were kept perpetually starving and malnourished, people they loved were constantly dying, and many of them were regularly being raped.

Yes, Young Women in the Nineteenth Century Knew What Sex Was

It seems that, when people think about sex in the historical past, they have a tendency to think in terms of extremes. For instance, the popular perception of the ancient Romans seems to be that they were all having wild sex orgies all the time. (This perception is usually coupled with the idea that this sexual “degeneracy” somehow led the Roman Empire to collapse, which, as I address in this article from July 2020, is complete nonsense.)

By sharp contrast, the popular perception of nineteenth-century British people is that they were so prudish and sexually repressed that young women had no idea that sex even existed. This idea that nineteenth-century women had no idea how a woman becomes pregnant is notably a major part of the Netflix historical drama series Bridgerton, which is set in London in the year 1813.

In reality, however, nineteenth-century mothers generally saw it as their responsibility to tell their daughters what sex was so that they could know to avoid having it before marriage. Moreover, a parent of any social rank in any society in any time period would have to go to truly extraordinary lengths to shelter their daughter in order to prevent her from finding out what sex is until she reached young adulthood. Trying to shelter a daughter to this degree in the nineteenth century would have been at least as difficult as trying to do such a thing today.

Is Yoga Really Ancient?

Yoga has become quite an international cultural phenomenon in the past few decades. It is now estimated that somewhere around three hundred million people practice yoga worldwide, which is nearly the same number of people who live in the entire United States. Yoga is consistently advertised—both by the yoga industry and by the current government of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi—as an extremely ancient Indian spiritual and physical practice that dates back thousands of years in more-or-less its present form.

This narrative, however, is not entirely accurate. It is true that there was an ancient Āstika philosophical school called yoga and that modern yoga has been influenced by traditions that ultimately grew out of this school. Nonetheless, nothing closely resembling modern āsana-centered yoga-as-exercise ever actually existed in the Indian subcontinent in ancient times. Haṭhayoga, the immediate precursor to modern postural yoga, only first started to emerge around a thousand years ago during the medieval period and did not start to develop into modern yoga until the nineteenth century, under the heavy influence of European “physical culture” exercise regimes.