Tales of Times Forgotten

Is It Ethical to Exhume Mummies and Display Them in Museums?

In October 2020, a team of Egyptian archaeologists working at the site of Saqqara, which is located about thirty kilometers south of the modern city of Cairo, excavated a total of at least fifty-nine sarcophagi containing the mummified corpses of Egyptian priests and officials from the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (lasted 664 – 525 BCE). The Egyptian government sought to publicize this discovery as part of a massive ongoing effort to encourage tourism, since Egypt’s tourism sector has still not fully recovered from the hit it took after the 25 January Revolution in 2011. Consequently, the Egyptian archaeologists made a big display of opening one of the sarcophagi in the presence of reporters. A video of the opening of this sarcophagus was widely shared on social media, where it spawned considerable controversy. Many people were criticizing the archaeologists for exhuming the sarcophagi, insisting that exhuming human remains is immoral and unethical.

I originally began writing this post as a response to this controversy shortly after it broke out, but, as I was writing, I found myself doubting my position. In my aporia, I gave up on the article and set it aside. Now, a year and a half later, I have come back to it. Alas, I will admit that, even now, after I have had a lot more time to think about it, I still don’t have a fully worked out sense of how I feel about all aspects of this issue. I am convinced that it is both moral and ethical for archaeologists to excavate human remains. Nonetheless, I do think that these complaints raise some very important questions about how ancient Egyptian human remains are usually treated.

Is Everyone Really Born an Atheist?

Those who have been reading my posts for a while may already know that I’ve been calling myself an agnostic since around mid-2019. In truth, though, I am functionally an atheist. The main reason why I’ve preferred to call myself an agnostic is because I don’t want to be affiliated with the sort of Richard Dawkins-style anti-theist activist atheists who acrimoniously denounce “religion” as inherently evil at every opportunity. I personally don’t think it is possible to assign any categorical moral value to “religion,” since “religion” is an imperfect western constructed category that can encompass various ideas and activities that may fall anywhere on a moral spectrum from “evil” to “good.” I have no particularly great interest in trying to convince people to stop believing in deities and I often find myself critiquing the claims and talking points of the anti-theist activist types.

One extremely common talking point among anti-theist activist atheists is that everyone is born an atheist. I think that this talking point is factually incorrect for two main reasons. The first is because it incorrectly conflates people who are not aware of the concept of a deity with people who have made a conscious choice not to believe in deities. The second reason is because it ignores certain innate tendencies in the human psyche that lead even very young children to assume the existence of supernatural personal agents, which may be very similar or functionally identical to deities. Moreover, I think that this talking point is useless at best and rhetorically counterproductive at worst, because it does nothing to support the argument that deities do not exist or the argument that atheists should be accepted by society.

Who Was the First God?

All the historical evidence that is currently available strongly suggests that humans have been believing in and worshipping deities for a very long time. The worship of deities almost certainly predates the advent of writing by tens of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands. Given this ancient history, it comes as no surprise that many people have wondered who the oldest deity or deities were.

In this post, I will explore some of the oldest deities that humans are known to have worshipped, starting with possible examples from the Upper Paleolithic and continuing through the Mesolithic and Neolithic. Finally, I will conclude with the very earliest deities whose names are directly attested in writing in ancient Sumer in the Late Uruk Period (lasted c. 3500 – c. 3100 BCE).

Update on My Graduate School Applications, 10 April 2022

As many of my readers are already aware, since I have mentioned it in various places, unless something goes horribly wrong at the last minute, I am going to graduate from Indiana University Bloomington with my BA in history and classical studies (Latin/Greek), with an honors thesis in history, on 7 May 2022. I am naturally very excited about my upcoming graduation and the completion of my degree that I have worked so hard for.

In December 2021, I applied to four PhD programs in ancient history: the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate Group in Ancient History (GGAH), the University of Michigan’s Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History (IPAH), the Princeton University classics department’s Program in the Ancient World (PAW), and the University of Chicago classics department’s graduate track in ancient history. Later, in February of this year, acting partly on the advice of one of my professors, I applied to Brandeis University’s terminal MA program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies as a backup plan in case I was not accepted to any of the PhD programs.

I have now officially heard back from all the graduate school programs to which I applied. I would therefore like to update my readers on how the process went and give some information about what I will most likely be doing this upcoming fall semester.

How Were Lesbians Regarded in Ancient Greece and Rome?

Within the past month, I have encountered at least three different people asking the question of how lesbians were perceived in ancient Greece and Rome. This is a topic that is rarely covered in ancient history and classics courses, so I decided that it was worth taking the time to write an in-depth article on the subject.

Unfortunately, while references to men’s homoerotic attraction and relationships are absolutely ubiquitous throughout the surviving ancient Greek and Roman sources, women’s homoerotic attraction and relationships are very poorly attested. To say that the primary sources on this subject are scant is an understatement. This paucity of evidence is mainly the result of the fact that nearly all the surviving ancient sources were written by men who were generally not interested in writing about anything women did among themselves when there were no men around.

Based on the admittedly very few sources that we have, though, homoerotic attraction and relationships seem to have been relatively common and not heavily stigmatized among Greek women in the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Eras. Attitudes toward women’s homoeroticism in the Roman world, by contrast, seem to have varied drastically. Roman-era sources variously portray women’s homoeroticism as a degenerate Greek perversion, as something that should amuse and titillate male audiences, as an absurd impossibility, as an allegation against which a woman’s reputation must be defended, and, finally, in some cases, something that should be accepted as normal.

Did Archaeologists Really Discover a Hebrew Curse Tablet from Mount Ebal Bearing the Name YHWH?

At a press conference at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas, on 24 March 2022, Scott Stripling (the Director of Excavations for the Associates for Biblical Research, a fundamentalist Christian apologetics ministry), Pieter van der Veen (a professor of the Old Testament and Biblical archaeology at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz), and Gershon Galil (a professor of Biblical studies and ancient history at the University of Haifa) announced that they have (supposedly) discovered an inscription written in the Hebrew language using the Proto-Canaanite script inside of a 2 cm x 2 cm folded lead tablet that a team led by Stripling found in December 2019 while wet-sifting through the detritus of an earlier excavation that a team led by the late Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal conducted at Mount Ebal near the Palestinian city of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from 1982 to 1986.

Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil claim that the inscription on the inside of the tablet is not visible to the naked eye and that they were only able to find it by examining thousands of tomographic scans made at the Czech Academy of Sciences. They claim that the inscription dates to between 1400 and 1200 BCE. They say that the text of the inscription reads as follows when translated into English: “Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.” Despite these claims, they still have not shown any of the scans they allegedly made, instead only showing photographs of the outside of the tablet and one drawing made by Galil of one supposed instance of the divine name.

If all the team’s claims are true, this would be the earliest known attestation of writing in the Hebrew language and the earliest known attestation of the divine name YHWH by hundreds of years. Naturally, dozens of news outlets have reported this supposed inscription as though it really were the most astounding discovery in Biblical archaeology of this century. There are, however, very good reasons to be very suspicious of Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil’s claims and it is highly irresponsible for news outlets to report these claims as though they were settled fact. The reasons I am about to highlight are already well known to scholars, but I thought I would share them here for members of the general public who may have read about the supposed Mount Ebal curse tablet in the news.

Why Are Some Names Used in the ‘Iliad’ Used in English Today While Others Are Not?

If you have ever read the Iliad, you have probably noticed that there are many characters in it who have names that are not commonly used as given names in countries that are predominantly English-speaking today. I’m talking about names like Agamemnon, Menelaos, Patroklos, Idomeneus, Hekabe, Andromache, and so forth. Meanwhile, there are also names like Alexandros, Helene, Hektor, and Kassandra that are still used today in Anglicized forms like Alexander, Helen, Hector, and Cassandra. Many people have wondered why some of these names are commonly used today in English, while others of them are not.

As it turns out, the vast majority of the names that are used in the Iliad have never been widely used in English, but a handful of these names have passed into English through various channels, mostly not through the Iliad itself. Of all the names of characters in the Iliad, the two that have been in continuous use as names for people in English the longest are Alexander and Helen, which passed from Greek into Latin and from Latin into English very early due to both of these names having been held by particularly famous and revered ancient figures. The names Hector and Cassandra first passed into English a bit later via the medieval “Matter of Rome” (i.e., the corpus of romances based on ancient Greek and Roman stories), but they didn’t become popular until the eighteenth century.

Can Archaeologists Really “Disprove” a Transgender Person’s Gender Using Their Skeleton?

People who oppose the idea that transgender people should be allowed to exist and have rights often promote the claim that archaeologists can determine a person’s “true sex” based solely on their skeleton. They claim that, by examining a trans woman’s skeleton, archaeologists in the future will be able to prove that she was “really” a man and that, by examining a trans man’s skeleton, these archaeologists will be able to prove that he was “really” a woman. They claim that this proves that trans people are delusional and their genders are invalid.

In this post, I will show that the argument I have just described is hopelessly wrong on many levels. First, I will show that sex and gender are two different things and that a person’s skeletal structure says absolutely nothing about their gender. Second, I will show that guessing a person’s sex from their skeleton is actually much more complicated than opponents of trans rights regularly portray it. Third, I will show that, at least in some cases, a transgender person’s skeleton may actually be noticeably different from the skeleton of a cisgender person of the sex the trans person was assigned at birth.

Fourth and finally, I will show that reducing a person’s biological sex to their skeletal structure is extremely reductive and misleading, especially since gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy (HRT) can cause drastic, scientifically observable, physical changes to many other aspects of a person’s body, including their brain.

Proselytism in the Ancient Mediterranean Before Christianity

Today, in the twenty-first century, Judaism is usually thought of as an ethnic religion and Jewish people are not generally known for their proselytizing. At least in the second and first centuries BCE and the first century CE, though, Jewish people in the Mediterranean world were far from totally disinterested in trying to convert other people to their religious practices and way of life. In fact, among ancient Greek and Roman authors in this period, one of the main things Jewish people became known for was their supposed habit of aggressively proselytizing.

Early Christianity’s strong emphasis on proselytism is best understood not as a completely sudden new development or an example of early Christians doing something that no Jewish people had ever done before, but rather an example of Christians taking something that some Jewish people had already been doing and making it a major focus for their movement.

Does the Bible Really Say You Should Beat Your Children?

The Book of Proverbs, a work of wisdom literature that is included in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (i.e., what Christians call the “Old Testament”), contains several verses that explicitly tell parents that they should punish their children for their misbehavior by beating them with a wooden rod. Some amateur hermeneuticists have tried to explain away these verses by inventing some rather ingenious new interpretations for them, but, philologically speaking, these interpretations all fall flat. The Book of Proverbs very clearly supports beating children.

Just because these verses advise parents to beat their children, though, does not mean that Jewish and Christian parents today who regard the Book of Proverbs as scripture should beat their children. It is important to consider the historical and cultural context in which the Book of Proverbs was written and recognize that that context was very different from the context that exists in the world today.