As most of my readers know, one of my interests is the origins of mythology, which was one of the reasons I initially began investigating the ancient astronaut theory. I’m especially interested in the claims that fossil remains of extinct animals gave rise to particular myths and legends. That’s why the following claim was so interesting.
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Yesterday I discussed the Devil’s Wall of Germany, a Roman era ruin later attributed to supernatural sources, as a counterargument to the claim of ancient astronaut theorists that ancient legends of supernatural construction indicate alien intervention. Today I’d like to share another example of how supernatural construction legends spring up whenever long-ago builders have been forgotten.
Ancient astronaut theorists look at the monuments of the ancient past, suggest that they are too large and too well-built to be the work of human beings, and attribute them to semi-supernatural extraterrestrial beings. This process is as old as civilization. I have frequently mentioned how the Greeks attributed Mycenaean ruins to the Cyclopes since they could not conceive of any humans who could build such monumental centers as Mycenae and Tiryns. Sadly, however, ancient astronaut theorists still attribute to Mycenae and other pre-Greek centers an extraterrestrial influence on account of their cyclopean architecture. (See, for example, Erich von Däniken’s Odyssey of the Gods pp. 66-68, where he suggests that the aliens fabricated the site from concrete.)
So, today, I’d like to offer a different case study, one that doesn’t rely on any archaeological site that has been attributed to alien influence. The other day I wrote about a passage from Sanchuniathon, the questionably historical Phoenician author, that discussed the sacrifice of the chief god's "only begotten" son to save the people from ruin. The similarity of this passage to the sacrifice of Jesus, God's only begotten son, led the Bible-oriented mythologist Jacob Bryant to imagine that the passage prefigured Christ by a thousand years, one of those random events of ancient pagan life that was supposed to pave the way for the acceptance of the Christian message. What I didn't do was explain why this was not exactly the case. That story is almost as interesting as Sanchuniathon's material itself.
Last night, on the season finale of SyFy’s Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files (S03E12), the team of mostly competent (though often inexplicably credulous) investigators broke from their stated purpose of examining paranormal videos to take on instead the “mystery” of Stonehenge. Things started out badly but gradually got better as the episode wore on.
I've received some feedback and criticism for some of my recent blog posts, so today I'm going to go over some corrections and clarifications.
When George Smith uncovered the remains of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Babylon in the nineteenth century, it caused a sensation because the ancient tablets revealed a pagan account of Noah's Ark, complete in all its details. Some wondered whether this was independent confirmation of the truth of the Bible, while the more perceptive among the Victorians feared that the ancient cuneiform tablets contained an account that predated the Bible and undermined Scripture's claim to primacy.
The funny thing is, this never should have happened. As I discussed yesterday, the Hebrew Bible contains many stories and passages that are clearly parallel to and most likely derived from pagan Near Eastern mythology. Although these parallels are well-reported in academic literature, they remain unfamiliar to most non-academics because of the popular media’s reluctance to discuss issues that call into question the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. One of the most interesting parallels is the story of the creation of humanity from clay, which appears in both Genesis and in Babylonian myth.
Out of deference to religious sensibilities, it's relatively uncommon even today to find much discussion in popular media of the parallels between Near Eastern mythology and the Hebrew Bible. It's not surprising, for example, to see credulous discussions of Noah's Flood without mention of the fact that the Mesopotamian peoples had the same flood myth, right down to the Ark, at least 1,500 years before Biblical version was constructed. Similarly, the most prominent person to discuss in popular literature the clear linkage between the stories of the birth of Moses and that of Sargon of Akkad, who was born sometime around 2300 BCE, was Helena Blavatsky, the Theosophical fraud, who at least did the service of bringing to a wider audience the academic work of George Smith and others on the Mesopotamian origins of Genesis.
As my faithful readers know, one of the areas that most interests me is the intersection of fact and fantasy, which is why I am intrigued by the hypothesis that many of the monsters of world mythologies can trace their origins back to the discovery of fossil remains that ancient people misunderstood as the bones of gigantic humans, dragons, and sundry other creatures. The best-known advocate of this theory is Adrienne Mayor, the folklorist, whose books The First Fossil Hunters (2001) and Fossil Legends of the First Americans (2005) present this idea in great detail. I don't agree with Mayor on every detail presented in her books, and I think she has in some places over-interpreted the evidence. For example, John Boardman, while agreeing in broad outline, made a compelling case in The Archaeology of Nostalgia (2002) that Mayor over-interpreted a skull on a vase as a fossil giraffe, mistaking a rock tossed at the skull for an anatomical feature. However, in general she made a clear and compelling case that fossils provided the skeleton (forgive the pun) on which the monsters of myth grew from generic conceptions to their specific details preserved in art and the later stages of Greco-Roman mythology. I'm not sure I agree that fossils were a prerequisite for myth; myth has always been with us. I think the fossils helped give shape to generalized, preexisting stories by providing physical proof of their reality for believers. Mayor interprets the skull at right as a fossil giraffe, but the presence of a pile of black and white stones at Hesione's feet (center) proves some of the black spots on the skull are meant to be tossed rocks, not openings in the skull. It is thus at best a generalized skull, not a specific record of a particular fossil. In The First Fossil Hunters Mayor mentions some of the other scholars who had worked to develop the theory that fossils inspired myth, especially Georges Cuvier and Othenio Abel. Unfortunately, the trail sort of stops there since Abel's discussion of the fossil origins of the Cyclops myth is in German and has never been translated. Cuvier's discussion of how elephant bones inspired the myth of giant humans is in French and according to Mayor had never been translated.
Well, do I have a treat for you. I've added to my site's Library both of these famous pieces. I found a rare 1806 translation of Cuvier from The Philosophical Magazine, and I have myself translated Abel from the German. Then, to round things out, I've also posted a fun little chapter from William D. Matthew about the close relationship between zoology and mythology in the pre-modern world. [Click here for a correction of mistakes in this post.] |
AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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