Alternative History and Bad Etymologies: Making Too Much of Coincidences

Bad etymologies have been a mainstay of alternative history for centuries. In The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple based much of his analysis on a series of unsupported etymologies tracing Greek terms back to what he called Egyptian “sacred puns,” none of which is supported by modern scholars. His most important “sacred pun” involves the earth-born men who arise from the serpent’s teeth in the Argonaut myth, best remembered as the skeleton warriors from the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts movie. According to Temple, the warriors arose as a pun on Sirius since “earth,” “tooth,” and “Sirius” are all represented by triangles in Egyptian hieroglyphics, triangles that differ only in the direction the apex points:

It may well be that all these puns on the determinative hieroglyphic sign for Sirius came, in the usual way with the pun-loving Egyptian priests, to form a complicated body of Sirius doctrine involving teeth, Earth-borne, ring-shaped, falcon or hawk (Circe), etc., etc. It should therefore not surprise us in the least to learn that the ancient Egyptian word for ‘tooth’, abeh, has exactly the same hieroglyphic as the word for Earth. Hence the origin, almost without question, of the connection between teeth and the Earth: in ancient Egypt they were written by the identical sign, which were tilted forms of the same sign used to represent Sirius! (p. 236, 1998 ed.)

Temple drew on the work of Robert Graves, the midcentury poet who also liked to seek out speculative (and unsupported) etymologies to “explain” ancient history and myth. I discussed this in my article “Golden Fleeced.”

But all of this has precedent in “alternative” scholars dating back pretty much as far back as we can look. The “Ark-ist” theorist Jacob Bryant proposed that Egypt was descended from Noah’s son Ham because they worshiped the god Amon, whom he chose to see as (H)am-on, the deified Ham, who in turn was also the sun god and thus the sun god of most European mythologies.

Before this, the ancient Greek rationalist writers tried to seek out the “truth” behind ancient myths by looking into the words used in them and proposing fanciful explanations based on look-alike or sound-alike words. Euhemerus was the most famous of these scholars, though Dionysus Schytobrachion offered some of the most entertaining "explanations."

As reported in Diodorus Siculus, Dionysus thought the story of the fire-breathing bulls (tauroi) of Colchis resulted from etymological confusion of bulls with the land of Taurica:

[Aeëtes] built a wall likewise round the temple, and placed a strung guard of Taurican soldiers to keep it, which has afforded matter for prodigious stories among the Grecians; as how that bulls which breathed out fire at their nostrils guarded the temple, and that a dragon kept the fleece. For by reason of the ambiguity of the word Taurus, it was strained to signify the fierceness and violence of bulls; and the cruel murdering of strangers, gave rise to the fiction of the bulls breathing out fire.

The point, of course, is that mere coincidence of sounds does not equal a connection of fact in the absence of any supporting evidence for such a connection.