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Filmmaker Claims "New Evidence" of Egyptian Atlantis Knowledge, But It's Just Plato

11/5/2025

Giorgio Tsoukalos recently started referring to the December 2017 New York Times story that launched the current wave of Congressional UFO interest as “the Pentagon Papers,” and that wasn’t even the dumbest thing a fringe pseudo-historian said this past week. When I saw the Daily Mail headline promising “Astonishing New Evidence of Atlantis Reveals Advanced Civilization Preserved by Ancient Egypt’s Priests,” I will admit that I did not have terribly high hopes. It is the Daily Mail after all. But, truly, the article, available only to premium subscribers (a free version is archived here), boggles the mind. You will never believe that the Mail considers “new”—or pretends to, since it’s obvious that reporter Stacy Liberatore understands that it’s bullshit but had to write it anyway.

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Review of History’s Greatest Mysteries S06E20 “Lost Places of the Old Testament”

8/20/2025

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I’m not much of a fan of History’s Greatest Mysteries, Laurence Fishburne’s History Channel series that rather pompously recycles stories familiar from History Channel series going back to History’s Mysteries (which launched in 1998) and sister channel A+E’s earlier versions like Ancient Mysteries—all the way back, indeed, to In Search of… from the 1980s. I tuned in to S06E20, which aired Monday, because it promised to explore whether locations found in the Hebrew Bible have archaeological evidence of their existence. It was, let’s say, a bit of rough going that left me feeling like I just watched a commercial trying to sell me on converting to a kind of fundamentalist Christianity that somehow dispensed with all that God-and-Jesus stuff.

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Rabbi Who "Proved" God Wrote the Bible Says He Found Moses's Autograph ... Maybe

7/29/2025

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A new paper claims that some 3,000-year-old inscriptions found in Sinai not only make reference to the Biblical character of Moses but may have been written by him. The claim comes from a draft thesis by retired rabbi Michael S. Bar-Ron, now studying biblical archaeology at Ariel University in Israel. Bar-Ron, who is no stranger to self-promotion, published his draft thesis on Academia.edu before it was submitted to his university, and he took to the Patterns of Evidence podcast to publicize his claims. The Daily Mail reported on the claim this week.

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Movses Khorenatsi and the Sibyl of Berossus

7/15/2025

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In researching the legends of Semiramis and Ninus recently, I encountered an unusual academic dispute that emerged due to a quirk of grammar. As you will recall, last week I wrote a bit about the legend that the medieval Armenian historian Movses Kohrenatsi recorded about Semiramis and Arai. Well, this prompted me to read a bit more of his History of Armenia, which is where I discovered a strange ambiguity. The problem revolves around a passage (Book 1, chapter 6) discussing what happened when the first kings divided the world after the Flood. Movses cites a source, but scholars can’t agree on who it is.

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The Forgotten Legend of How Semiramis Built the Egyptian Pyramids

7/11/2025

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In my reading this week on the myths of Ninus and Semiramis, I encountered an unusual reference in a footnote claiming that there was a Greek story to the effect that the Assyrian queen was believed to be the builder of the Egyptian pyramids. I had never heard this claim before, and it is missing from every book about pyramid legends I could find. The story occurs, as best I can tell, in only three places. In chronological order, these are a papyrus fragment from Egypt dating to around 300 CE, the tenth-century Byzantine Suda, and the eleventh-century Synopsis historion of George Cedrenus. None of the accounts is complete enough by itself to say much about the story, and the papyrus was only published in 2016, and attracted little attention at the time.

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On the Doomed Lovers of Queen Semiramis

7/10/2025

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The new book Graham Hancock is writing is based on the history and mythology of Mesopotamia and the Levant, so I have been brushing up on my knowledge of Near Eastern literature. I recently read through the fragments of Ctesias’ Persica, the early fourth-century BCE account of Assyrian, Median, and Persian history that was more or less the defining version of Mesopotamian history for the Greeks, overshadowing Berossus’ more accurate work, which was written in response to Greek romances like those of Ctesias.

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What Richard Dolan Got Wrong about the Spanish "USO" of 939 CE

7/1/2025

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This is a bit of a fun one since it casts everyone in an unusual role. Jeff Knox posted on social media a medieval so-called “USO” incident I wasn’t familiar with, along with an excerpt from ufologist Richard Dolan’s new book A History of USOs: Unidentified Submerged Objects, Vol. 1, released earlier this year. In it, Dolan gives the story and then offers a skeptical (or, rather, rationalized) version of the story that goes in an unexpected direction for a talking head from Ancient Aliens. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that Dolan, unfamiliar with the source texts or prior literature, actually went too skeptical in his analysis.

Here's how he gives the story:

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Graham Hancock Asks If "Gilgamesh" Dates Back to the Neolithic

6/27/2025

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In a new article this week, Graham Hancock speculates that the Epic of Gilgamesh may date back more than 10,000 years. His speculation is based on carvings at Sayburç in Turkey which date back to 8,500 BCE, one of which depicts a man engaging with a bull and another shows a man standing between two lions. In Gilgamesh, the hero fights the Bull of Heaven and kills lions, among other adventures. “There is,” Hancock writes, “no a priori reason why the Epic of Gilgamesh shouldn’t be much older than its oldest-surviving written recensions, no reason why it shouldn’t have begun life around 8500 BC, the date of the Sayburç reliefs, no reason why it shouldn’t already have been ancient when the reliefs were made, and no reason why the story behind the reliefs should have been confined to the Sayburç area.”

Hancock’s speculation is a mix of somewhat plausible and obviously incorrect, seemingly built without a deep understanding of either the epic or the academic study of mythology. If he knew more about academic studies of myth, he would realize he has stumbled upon an academic proposal that dates back decades.

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On the Names of Sesostris, Vesozes, and Vezosis

6/17/2025

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Last week, I wrote a bit about the origins of the name of the first pharaoh in medieval Arabic traditions, Naqrāūs. Well, that led me to the first pharaoh in the Greek tradition, which is a bit of a confusing mess. Herodotus, of course, famously named the first (human) king of Egypt as Menes, but in later Greek traditions, from roughly the fourth century BCE onward, the story changed and Sesostris took that position, establishing a kingship in Egypt after the first king in history, Ninus, did the same in Assyria. Sesostris, in the Greek tradition, was a world-conquering hero whose dominion stretched from Europe to Scythia and whose power was unrivaled.

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On the Origins of Naqraus, the Legendary First Antediluvian King of Egypt

6/11/2025

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For well over a decade now, I’ve had a special interest in the medieval Arabic-language legends of ancient Egypt, particularly their mysterious origins. While the particular story of Sūrīd and his building of the Great Pyramid has received more scholarly attention than the rest, for the most part, it is not a subject that attracts a lot of deep analysis. I was surprised to discover an old 1903 analysis that provided me with an interesting insight into one of the odder parts of the story, at least in a somewhat roundabout way.

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<<Previous

Filmmaker Claims "New Evidence" of Egyptian Atlantis Knowledge, But It's Just Plato

Review of History’s Greatest Mysteries S06E20 “Lost Places of the Old Testament”

Rabbi Who "Proved" God Wrote the Bible Says He Found Moses's Autograph ... Maybe

Movses Khorenatsi and the Sibyl of Berossus

The Forgotten Legend of How Semiramis Built the Egyptian Pyramids

On the Doomed Lovers of Queen Semiramis

What Richard Dolan Got Wrong about the Spanish "USO" of 939 CE

Graham Hancock Asks If "Gilgamesh" Dates Back to the Neolithic

On the Names of Sesostris, Vesozes, and Vezosis

On the Origins of Naqraus, the Legendary First Antediluvian King of Egypt

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