Tales of Times Forgotten

The Dumbest Fictional Law in Ancient Literature

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I haven’t posted nearly as much in the past few months as I have previously. Part of the reason for this is because I’m taking several courses this semester with workloads that take up a large proportion of my time. One of these courses is NEJS 113a (“Biblical Aramaic in Context”). The first five weeks of the course were a fast-paced introduction to the grammar of Aramaic, a West Semitic language closely related to Hebrew that was the most widely spoken vernacular language in Mesopotamia and the Levant from around the seventh century BCE to around the third century CE and was also the primary language of administration and public life in the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Currently, we are reading the Book of Daniel chapters 3, 6, and 7 in the original Aramaic and, later in the semester, we will be reading Aramaic texts from inscriptions and papyri.

In doing my readings for this course, I’ve been reminded of what I have long thought is possibly the most poorly-conceived law in all of ancient literature: a supposed Achaemenid law that held that no one—not even the king himself—could ever revoke or alter any decree that had been made in his name for any reason under any circumstances. The law is definitely made up; there’s no attestation of it anywhere in any Persian or Greek sources. Nonetheless, it manages to cause all kinds of trouble as a plot device the Books of Esther and Daniel.

Have Been Accepted to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA)’s Summer Session for 2023!

Hello folks! I thought I should update you all that I found out about a week and a half ago that I have been accepted to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA)’s Summer Session for this summer, which is a six-week intensive study abroad program in Greece that is scheduled to last from June 12th to July 26th, 2023. The program is meant to give an intensive survey of Greek archaeology for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, secondary school teachers, and faculty who specialize in fields other than archaeology.

The program runs seven days a week from seven o’clock a.m. to seven o’clock p.m. Half of the program is spent in Athens, while the other half is spent traveling throughout Greece. Over the course of this time, participants visit basically every major museum, archaeological site, and monument in Greece, as well as many others that are not as well known, and recognized specialists give lectures and tours to them on site. Each participant is also required to research and deliver two on-site oral reports themself and participate in seminar-style discussions.

The program is both highly respected and highly selective. My understanding is that, each year, they receive an enormous number of applicants, but the total number of participants for each year is limited to only twenty people. I was therefore actually a little bit happily surprised when I learned that they were offering me direct admission without me even being waitlisted first.

At What Age Did Ancient Greek Women Typically Marry?

It is well and widely known that ancient Greek parents typically compelled their daughters to marry at a shockingly young age, one at which they would legally be considered minors in most countries in the twenty-first century. Greek men, by contrast, typically married much older, usually when they were in their late twenties or thirties. As a result, the groom at an ancient Greek wedding was usually at least a decade older than the bride he was marrying—and in many cases much older than that.

Unmarried girls were effectively considered their father’s property. Marriages were usually arranged primarily between a girl’s father and her male suitor. The extent to which a father allowed his daughter to decide which man she would marry probably varied significantly depending on factors such as time period, region, and the specific father in question’s personality and attitudes; in some cases, girls probably had significant say over which man they married, but it is likely that, in other cases, they had little or no say.

Exactly how young did ancient Greek women really marry, though? Popular histories and even many academics routinely assert as fact that Greek parents typically forced their daughters to marry as soon as they began puberty, before they even turned fifteen. In this post, however, I will argue that this is based mainly on one literary passage describing a bride who was probably unusually young and was not typical for most city-states. Instead, a more comprehensive view of the evidence suggests that Greek girls actually most commonly married when they were a bit older, broadly between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. The ages at which girls married also varied significantly across regions; ancient authors record that, in certain parts of the Greek world, girls typically married significantly younger or older than they did in other parts.

ChatGPT Is Impressive for a Bot, But Not for a Human

The academic humanities are facing a new challenge—and, this time, it’s robots. On 30 November 2022, the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI released as a prototype a chatbot called ChatGPT, which is extremely good at processing language input and producing coherent language output that seems like it could have been written by a human. As a result of this, for nearly the past three months, secondary school teachers and professors in the humanities have been panicking about the possibility that students may use this chatbot to cheat on assignments, noting that it consistently produces more coherent writing than many high school students and undergraduates.

I actually tried out ChatGPT to see what all the hype was about. I’ll admit that, knowing that it is an AI, not a human, I was surprised to find that its English is quite fluent (although it is still not exactly eloquent). Nonetheless, ChatGPT is still far from living up to human standards, at least when it comes to my particular field of classics and ancient history. It bungles translating ancient languages, it frequently makes serious factual errors, and it is incapable of any kind of original thought. When I gave it a prompt to write a historical essay, it completely failed to engage with any primary or secondary sources whatsoever, failed to display even the most basic level of historical analysis, and also made several outright factual errors that I was able to catch.

What Was the “Epic Cycle” Really?

If you’re at all familiar with early ancient Greek literature, there’s a very strong likelihood that you’ve heard at some point that some ancient authors considered the Iliad and the Odyssey to belong to something called the “Epic Cycle.” This term refers to a particular group of eight epic poems in dactylic hexameter verse that originated from oral tradition during the Greek Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 490 BCE) and that all tell stories about the Trojan War and the mortal heroes who are said to have fought in it.

The poems that are included in the Epic Cycle are, in narrative order of the events they describe: the Kypria, the Iliad, the Aithiopis, the Little Iliad, the Iliou Persis or Sack of Ilion, the Nostoi or Homecomings, the Odyssey, and the Telegoneia. Sadly, of these poems, only the Iliad and the Odyssey have survived to the present day complete. Only a few tiny fragments of the other epics, preserved through quotation by later authors, and prose summaries of their contents remain.

Unfortunately, very few explanations of the Epic Cycle for a general audience exist and the vast majority of the ones that do exist are misleading and written by non-classicists. As a result, most people who are not classics specialists aren’t aware that it existed and most of those who are aware have some serious misunderstandings about what it was. That is why, in this post, I am going to discuss what the Epic Cycle was and—just as importantly—what it wasn’t. For the purposes of this post, I will assume that my readers have some basic knowledge about Greek myths of the Trojan War and at least a vague awareness of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but I will not assume that they have any familiarity with Greek literature, philology, or history beyond this.

How Likely Is It That Scholars Will Find More of Sappho’s Lost Poems?

Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was a female early Greek lyric poet who flourished on the island of Lesbos, located just off the west coast of Asia Minor, and composed many poems in the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language. Her output was so prolific that the standard edition of her work in antiquity, which literary scholars working at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt produced in around the third century BCE, is thought to have spanned nine “books” or rolls of papyrus. Ancient audiences esteemed her as one of the greatest of all lyric poets, if not the greatest. She was known as the “Tenth Muse” and some even regarded her work as on par with that of Homer (the putative author of the Iliad and the Odyssey and most revered of all ancient Greek poets).

Sadly, nearly all of her poems have been lost. Only one poem, Fragment 1 (the “Ode to Aphrodite”) has survived to the present day totally complete. Only a handful of others—including Fragment 16 (the “Anaktoria Poem”), Fragment 31 (“Phainetai Moi”), Fragment 58 (the “Tithonos Poem”), and the “Brothers Poem”—are nearly complete. Most of what survives are tiny fragments of only a few lines or less. Nonetheless, today, many scholars of ancient literature regard Sappho’s more complete poems as among the greatest that have survived from antiquity. The fact that she is one of the very few female ancient Greek or Roman authors who have any works that have survived to the present day and the fact that she composed poems in which her female speaker openly discusses her erotic desire for other women have both further magnified contemporary interest in her work.

As a result of this, many people have wondered: How likely is it that more of Sappho’s poems will be recovered? To answer this question, in this post, I will discuss the history of how her work was transmitted in antiquity, how most of it became lost, how the parts that have survived have managed to survive, and, finally, how likely it is that someone will discover and publish any substantial material by her that is not currently known anytime in the next half century.

How Did Ammonites Receive Their Name?

Ammonites is the colloquial name for the members of Ammonoidea, a subclass of ancient cephalopods with shells resembling the curled horn of a ram that first appeared during the Devonian Period (lasted 419.2 million years ago – 358.9 million years ago) and flourished in the earth’s oceans until the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event wiped out their last species around 66 million years ago. Because ammonites were extremely widespread in oceans for over three hundred million years, their fossilized shells are extremely common in many areas all over the world.

Tens of millions of years later, in the much more recent past, the ancient Egyptians and Kushites worshipped the god Amun, whom they depicted as having either the head or sometimes just the horns of a ram. The Greeks and Romans later came to worship this god, calling him Ammon and identifying him with their god Zeus/Iupiter. They identified fossilized ammonite shells as resembling Ammon’s horns and consequently believed that they were a kind of sacred stone with the power to induce prophetic dreams. It is from the name Ammon that ammonites have received their modern common and scientific names. Read on to learn more about this fascinating ancient deity and his connection to prehistoric fossils!

Jesus Had a Vagina (According to Medieval Christian Mysticism)

About a month ago, a whole host of right-wing media outlets, including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, NBC Montana, and Fox News, published a flurry of wildly sensationalist articles claiming that a dean at the University of Cambridge said that Jesus was transgender. As Candida Moss, a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity who is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, points out in this article she wrote for The Daily Beast, however, and as I will discuss further in the first section of this post, this claim is entirely false; the dean in question actually said no such thing.

At the center of this controversy, however, stands a very strange and fascinating fact, which is well known to scholars and students of medieval western European art and mysticism, but which is not well known to the general public. As bizarre and improbable as it may sound, medieval western European Christians frequently depicted the wound that Jesus is said to have received in his side on the cross in a manner closely resembling a vulva. Although scholars disagree about what exactly these depictions indicate, most agree that the medieval people who made them and venerated them were conscious of this resemblance. In this post, I will explore the history of these depictions and what they may tell us about late medieval gender and sexuality.

What Do Angels Really Look Like According to the Bible?

There is a popular meme that has been going around on the internet for several years now claiming that “Biblically accurate angels” are actually terrifying, Lovecraftian, otherworldly beings who have all kinds of body parts from different animals and are covered all over in eyes. It’s a fun meme. Unfortunately, as an ancient historian, I’m the sort of person who ruins everything fun, so I’m here to tell you that the “Biblically accurate angel” meme isn’t really “Biblically accurate.”

In both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, beings who are described as angels are always either expressly described as looking like male humans or assumed to look like male humans. Although some texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament do indeed describe a variety of heavenly beings with bizarre and frightening appearances, these beings are only described in a few places, were not originally viewed as angels, and are never described as angels in any canonical Biblical text.

Zwarte Piet Is a Racist Abomination

Zwarte Piet (whose name means “Black Pete” in Dutch) is a figure in the folklore of the Low Countries (i.e., the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) who is said to accompany Saint Nicholas or Sinterklaas. In the weeks leading up to the feast day of Saint Nicholas, which is celebrated in the Netherlands on 5th December, he is traditionally portrayed by white actors or volunteers wearing blackface, along with thick red lipstick, a black wig of afro-textured hair, a large gold earring, and colorful faux-Renaissance-style clothing. These “Zwarte Pieten” traditionally take part in parades, entertain young children, and pass out cookie-like confectionaries known as pepernoten and kruidnoten.

Zwarte Piet has been a widely beloved figure among white people in the Low Countries for generations, but, for decades, some people (mostly people of color) have criticized the character as racist (because he is). Over the course of the past decade, and the past few years in particular, there has been something of a sea change, as a deracialized version of the character named Roetveegpiet (“Sooty Pete”), who wears light soot makeup instead of blackface, has eclipsed the traditional blackface version of the character in popularity.

Some white people have tried to defend the traditional Zwarte Piet by claiming that the character can’t be racist because he (supposedly) has no connection to the U.S. tradition of blackface minstrel shows. In this post, I intend to explore the real history of Zwarte Piet and demonstrate that the character does, in fact, owe very much to blackface minstrel shows and is, in fact, racist. Needless to say, readers should be forewarned that this post will discuss some truly deplorably racist material, including both historical and contemporary derogatory visual portrayals of Black people.