Tales of Times Forgotten

Help Support Nick Barksdale’s Family

Those who have been reading my blog for a while are probably aware that I did three interviews last year for Nick Barksdale’s YouTube channel The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. At the time Nick and I recorded my last interview with him for his channel in late July 2021, he was only thirty years old and he seemed completely healthy. Then, on 4 August, he suddenly fell gravely ill with what turned out to be a septic heart infection. He has been in and out of emergency care for nearly the past year. Sadly, on 2 June 2022, Nick passed away. His wife and two very young daughters, one of whom was born in the past year while he was in the hospital fighting for his own life, survive.

In my experience of him, Nick was an extraordinarily caring, generous, and charismatic person. I share some personal stories about my experiences with him and his kindness below, but, more urgently, there is a GoFundMe page to raise money to help support Nick’s surviving family in this trying time. If you are able, please consider donating money to support Nick’s family, who will (I presume) need to pay his medical and funeral costs and somehow support themselves in the meantime. I’ve already donated $125 of my own money, but I’m sure that any amount you can donate will help, even if it is just a few dollars.

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.

Quora Moderation and Holocaust Deniers

Nearly everyone who has ever written anything on the question-and-answer site Quora harbors a seething disdain for Quora Moderation, which is notorious for collapsing and deleting answers and comments that are completely in line with Quora’s stated official policies for improper and seemingly arbitrary reasons while simultaneously leaving answers and comments that clearly violate Quora’s official policies completely untouched.

I previously discussed Quora Moderation’s arbitrariness in a post I wrote back in February of this year. In this post, however, I want to talk about some more events that have happened since then that have greatly furthered my disliking for Quora Moderation. In particular, I want to bring to attention a recent incident in which, for unclear reasons, Quora Moderation seems to have effectively taken the side of Holocaust deniers.

How Did People in the Ancient Mediterranean World View Abortion?

The United States Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the landmark abortion case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health at some point before the end of the present term, which will most likely end sometime in June or early July of this year. An initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that has been obtained by Politico indicates that the majority of the justices have already privately decided to completely overturn the previous Supreme Court rulings in the cases of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which held that the U.S. Constitution protects the inherent right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion until the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, which is generally agreed to occur at around twenty-three or twenty-four weeks gestational age.

In this new case, the court is expected to rule that the U.S. Constitution does not protect any right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion at any point during pregnancy. Although the verdict is not final and the justices still have time to change their minds, it is unlikely at this point that they will do so. This will be the first (although possibly not the last) time in living memory that the Supreme Court has completely revoked something that it previously deemed a major fundamental right.

Given the current situation, I thought it would be useful to write a post about attitudes toward abortion in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. This post will cover attitudes among peoples of the ancient Near East, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians and will give some insight about how and why ancient Christians came to disapprove of abortion in the first place.

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.