Ancient Egypt Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Indiana Jones Is Actually a Villain

It may come as a surprise to some of my readers, given my interest in ancient history, that I never watched any of the Indiana Jones movies when I was a child. I was, of course, vaguely aware of them. I remember seeing advertisements for the VHS sets at the beginnings of some of the old VHS tapes of Disney films that my sister and I watched when we were growing up. I also remember watching the MythBusters “Indiana Jones Special” at one point. The first time I ever watched any of the actual films, though, was earlier this year.

Thus, even though Raiders of the Lost Ark came out eighteen years before I was born, by the time I actually watched the movie, I was already in college studying ancient history and had already taken multiple courses in real-life archaeology. The film is definitely entertaining if you’re looking for a cheesy, old-school adventure story and I appreciate how it has helped get people excited about archaeology. Unfortunately, it also promotes a lot of racist stereotypes and consistently fails to problematize the atrocious crimes committed by the protagonist.

You see, Indiana Jones is not just a terrible archaeologist; he’s also a despicable human being. He’s a criminal sociopath, a statutory rapist, a grave robber, a murderer, a destroyer of cultural heritage, and an enforcer of European colonialism. The only reason why anyone sees him as the hero is because his adversaries are literally insane Nazis who want to steal an ancient artifact and use it as a superweapon to commit genocide against the vast majority of the human race. Under any other circumstances, he would be the villain.

Did Cleopatra Really Dissolve a Pearl in Vinegar?

There are a lot of famous stories about the Greek-Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator that are probably not historically true. For instance, as I discuss in this article from August 2019, while it is highly probable that Cleopatra killed herself, it is highly unlikely that she really did so by allowing an asp to bite her on the breast. Similarly, as I discuss in this article from October 2020, it is virtually certain that she never owned any sort of vibrator powered by angry bees.

One of the most famous stories about her that I have not yet addressed, though, is the story that she once dissolved an ancient pearl that was worth tens of millions of sesterces in vinegar as a party trick to impress her lover Marcus Antonius. Unlike the bizarre vibrator story, the story about the pearl is actually found in the ancient sources. Nevertheless, it is almost certainly a fabrication invented by Roman propagandists to portray Cleopatra in the worst possible light.

Stolen Artworks in Museums

When most people today think of stolen artworks, they usually tend to think of artifacts being stolen from museums. There are many famous cases of this, such as the notorious theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in 1911, which generated international headlines. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the fact that many of the artifacts that are currently on display in museums in western Europe and North America were themselves stolen from the peoples of other countries all around the world.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, western Europeans and people of western European descent pillaged countries all over the world, taking their cultural artifacts and putting them in museums back in their home countries, where they could admire them, but the peoples of the countries to whom the artifacts rightfully belonged could not. There are so many stolen artworks on display in museums that it would be impossible for me to cover them all, but today I want to talk about just a few of the more famous examples.

Was Cleopatra Really Hypersexual?

In popular culture, the Ptolemaic Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator is routinely portrayed as wildly hypersexual. If you’ve been on the internet lately, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a lot of crazy stories about how she supposedly threw wild sex orgies, had sex with over a hundred men in one night, had a vibrator that was powered by angry bees, and once offered to have sex with anyone who wanted it under the condition that they would be executed the next morning.

None of these stories have any kind of basis in the ancient sources, however. In fact, historically speaking, Cleopatra is only known for certain to have had sex with two men in her entire life: Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius. The popular image of Cleopatra as an insatiable nymphomaniac is ultimately rooted in a vicious Roman propaganda campaign to discredit her, but modern authors, filmmakers, video game developers, and internet factoid-mongers have taken it to a whole new level.

Why Is Hollywood So Fixated on Cleopatra Anyway?

On 11 October 2020, it was officially announced that Gal Gadot, a white Israeli actress, had been cast to play the Hellenistic Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator in an upcoming epic period drama titled Cleopatra, which will be directed by Patty Jenkins and scripted by Laeta Kalogridis. This casting predictably set off outrage on social media over the fact that Cleopatra will not be portrayed by a Black actress.

I’ve already written an entire article in which I discuss Cleopatra’s ancestry and her appearance in great detail. In short, her ancestry was almost entirely Greek and her only known ancestor with non-Greek ancestry was her three times great-grandmother Kleopatra I of Syra, who was of mixed Greek, Persian, and Sogdian ancestry. There is one argument that people have tried to make that Cleopatra’s mother may have been a native Egyptian woman, but it is founded on multiple layers of wishful thinking and dubious assumptions and it is far more likely that her mother was Cleopatra V Tryphaina, her father’s only known wife, who was also his sister or his cousin.

In this article, though, I want to answer a different question: Why Cleopatra? Why is it that, out of three thousand some years of ancient Egyptian history, the only Egyptian queen that Hollywood is interested in making movies about is the one who was definitely of European ancestry? It’s clear that a very large section of the general public wants a movie about a native Egyptian queen portrayed by an actress of color. I say that, if that’s what people want, Hollywood should give that to them. Thankfully, there are plenty of native Egyptian queens and goddesses that Hollywood could potentially make movies about.

Were the Ancient Greeks and Romans White?

Most people assume that everyone who lived in ancient Greece and Rome was white. This is a notion that has been continually reinforced through modern films and television shows. This is especially obvious in the egregiously historically inaccurate film 300, which portrays all the Greek characters as white and all the Persian characters as people of color. How accurate is this idea really, though? Were the Greeks and Romans really white? What does “whiteness” actually mean anyway?

I won’t deny that the majority of people who lived in Greece and Italy in ancient times would probably be considered white by most Americans if they were alive today. Nonetheless, the ancient Greeks and Romans certainly did not think of themselves as white and modern Greeks and Italians haven’t always been considered white either.

Furthermore, there were undoubtedly people whom we would consider Brown and Black present in ancient Greece and Rome from a very early date. These people almost certainly included famous ancient philosophers, writers, theologians, and even Roman emperors. In fact, people whom we would consider people of color probably made up a significant proportion of the total population of the Roman Empire, if not the majority.

No, the Christian Cross Is Not Based on the Egyptian Ankh

The ankh is a hieroglyphic symbol composed of a T-shape with a loop on top that was used in ancient Egypt to represent the consonant sequence Ꜥ-n-ḫ. The Egyptian word for “life” was composed of this exact sequence of consonants. As a result of this, the ankh became widely used as a symbol for life. People would often wear the symbol on amulets for protection and it was used to decorate shrines, temples, and tombs.

In recent years, a claim has arisen that the Christian cross is, in fact, plagiarized off the Egyptian ankh. Despite its popularity, this claim is almost entirely false, for reasons that I shall explain shortly. Nonetheless, there is a very interesting kernel of truth behind this claim that many of its proponents are not even aware of.

Yes, There Were Ancient African Civilizations!

Most people in the United States and Europe imagine that, prior to European colonialism, all of Africa south of the Sahara was nothing but a jungle full of simple, illiterate savages living in straw huts with only Stone Age technology. They imagine that there were no civilizations there of any kind.

This stereotype couldn’t be more inaccurate. Contrary to what most people have been led to believe, there were peoples in sub-Saharan Africa in ancient times who had systems of writing. They had cities. They had iron tools and weapons. They minted coins. They established empires and built colossal monuments. At least by the standards of the ancient world, they were civilized.

The main reason why you probably haven’t heard of any ancient civilizations in sub-Saharan Africa is because, for centuries, racist white people—including many racist white historians—have chosen to ignore and dismiss all evidence for their existence and to instead falsely portray pre-modern Africa as a civilizationless void.

Thankfully, the old racism that once pervaded the historical discipline is slowly starting to go away and historians are beginning to recognize that ancient Africa was actually just as civilized as Europe and Asia. Today, I want to talk about some of the civilizations that we know existed in Africa in ancient times.

Could Countries Today Restore the Religions They Had in Antiquity?

Most people have heard about the religions that were practiced in ancient times in places like Greece, Rome, Egypt, Persia, and Scandinavia. Some people have wondered things like, “What happened to those religions? Would it be possible to revive them today in the countries where they were once practiced? What would it be like if someone did?”

Not all ancient religions completely died out. Most notably, Zoroastrianism, the religion of ancient Iran, never completely died out and is still practiced by some people in Iran today. Other ancient religions, such as ancient Greek polytheism, did die out, but have been revived by small groups of worshippers in the modern age.

None of these ancient religions, however, are the dominant religion in the countries where they were once practiced today and it is highly unlikely that any of them will become dominant in those countries again anytime in the near future.

Were the Ancient Egyptians Black?

There is a lot of public controversy over which “race” the ancient Egyptians belonged to. Western media has traditionally portrayed nearly all ancient Egyptians as having white skin. Unfortunately, some films are still portraying the Egyptians this way; the 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings and the 2016 film Gods of Egypt both received widespread criticism for the fact that nearly all the lead roles were played by white actors.

Nevertheless, I think that, with a few exceptions, nowadays, most people realize that the idea of the ancient Egyptians as almost entirely what we consider “white” is nothing but a racist fantasy. A great deal of controversy still rages, though, over whether the ancient Egyptians were what we consider “black.” A number of authors have tried to argue that ancient Egypt was exclusively or primarily a “black civilization” and that the ancient Egyptians defined themselves as “black people.”

Since the skin color of the ancient Egyptians is a matter of such great controversy, in this article, I want to take a thorough and honest look at the evidence. In this article, we will examine evidence from Egyptian iconography, from Egyptian mummies, from ancient Greek descriptions of the Egyptians, from genetics, and from the conquests and migrations of recorded history. We will discover that Egypt has always been a very ethnically diverse place and that the ancient Egyptians cannot be uniformly classified as belonging to any particular “race.”