Category: Mythology

Review of "Odysseus Returns," a PBS Quest to Find the Tomb of Odysseus

8/31/2024

Promotional image for "Odysseus Returns" featuring Makis Metaxas (PBS)

This week, PBS presented Odysseus Returns, a documentary following the three-decade quest of “amateur historian” Makis Metaxas as he attempts to convince the world that Odysseus was real, that Homer’s island of Ithaca was in fact the neighboring island of Kefalonia in northwest Greece, and that he had seen both the tomb of Odysseus and the Greek hero’s bones. It’s a tall order for a ninety-minute film, and I was disappointed that the somewhat meandering documentary presents only one side of the argument, leaving the audience with the impression that not only is Metaxas right but that the Greek government and archaeologists are conspiring to prevent Odysseus’ tomb from being identified. So much does the film endorse Metaxas’s perspective that PBS affixed a disclaimer to the beginning of the documentary noting that the film’s claims are not the views of the Greek government. Typically, such as disclaimer says something like “not necessarily,” implying some wiggle room, but this one is simply “not.”

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Graham Hancock Defender Claims Proof of the Atlantis Myth's Egyptian Origin

7/18/2024

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In a posting on X today, Graham Hancock announced that “archaeologists aren't going to like” a new article Hancock posted to his website, implying that the argument convincingly challenges scholarly views. Written by Manu Seyfzadeh, a dermatologist who hunts for the Atlantean Hall of Records, the article seeks to prove that Plato drew on a genuine ancient Egyptian tradition of Atlantis when he ascribed the allegory of Atlantis to a story the Egyptians told his distant ancestor Solon in the sixth century BCE. However, Seyfzadeh admits to having no training in Classics or Egyptology, and his arguments are rather transparently ignorant of the broader context of Near Eastern cultures.

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New Academic Paper Challenges Adrienne Mayor's Griffin-Protoceratops Link

6/24/2024

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A new academic paper is challenging folklorist Adrienne Mayor’s identification of the dinosaur Protoceratops as the inspiration for the legendary griffin of mythology. Mayor’s claim, first made more than thirty years ago and most famously outlined in her turn-of-the-century book The First Fossil Hunters, posits that Central Asian merchants observed the exposed bones of Protoceratops, some with their nests, and passed these tales on. As they traveled westward, the creature turned into a winged lion with an eagle’s head, resembling the beaked skull of the Protoceratops.

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Discover Magazine Reports 110-Year-Old News about Fossil Origins of Greek Myths

1/30/2024

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Something that fascinates me is how ideas percolate through culture and either do or do not become common knowledge. This week, Discover magazine ran a piece exploring the question of whether mastodon, mammoth, or other extinct elephant fossils influenced the Greek myth of the cyclops. An extinct elephant skull’s nasal cavity resembles a gigantic eye socket in the middle of the skull, suggesting the shape of a cyclops skull. The article by Sean Mowbray presents the claim as news, but it’s really, really not.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E16: "The Gods of Greece"

8/11/2023

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This month, pseudohistory writer Graham Phillips has a new article on Graham Hancock’s website, based on his new book, claiming that Doggerland, the sunken territory that connected Britain to Northen Europe nine millennia ago, was the home to an advanced lost civilization (sigh) and that the memory of it persisted in Celtic memory for nine thousand years. His evidence, however, is misrepresented. In the article he uses the unusual spelling “Tu-lay” to obscure the fact that he bases his analysis on Classical and post-Classical references to the island of Thule. However, in Classical literature Thule is not a sunken island but instead is described as a real and still-extant land north of Britain. To make the texts match Doggerland, Phillips purposely conflates them with wholly separate Irish legends about an unnamed sunken island, for which there is no historical evidence that the story is particularly ancient or that it is true. Sunken islands are a dime a dozen in ancient literature after all. For Phillips to be right, we have to accept that the Greek and Romans were completely wrong about all the important facts but nevertheless preserved correct information, while the Irish remembered the sinking of the island but forgot everything else about it, including the fact that Doggerland wasn’t actually an island.

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Adrienne Mayor Claims Talos as a Greek Myth of Artificial Intelligence

5/24/2023

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In Engelsberg Ideas, folklorist Adrienne Mayor has a new piece discussing the Greek myth of Talos as the original version of the “A.I. dilemma,” expanding on ideas from here 2018 book Gods and Robots. Artificial intelligence is all the rage this year thanks to the rapid emergence of A.I.-powered chatbots and image generators. I’ve always had a little bit of a problem with the effort to find in the story of Talos a precedent for robotics and A.I., mostly because the idea of Talos as a robot probably wasn’t original to the myth and likely developed gradually and incidentally.

There were, of course, ancient myths are were explicitly about androids and robots, such as the Chinese story of Yen Shih and his artificial human, which dates back at least to the fourth century BCE. I do not disagree with the concept that the ancients thought about robots. I disagree, though, with the idea that Talos was originally or primarily conceptualized as a robot in the modern sense.

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Author Claims Ancient Sites and Myths Connect to Global Bird Cult

4/6/2023

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Two centuries ago, the clergyman and antiquary John Bathurst Deane published The Worship of the Serpent (1830), which attempted to explain the entirety of non-Abrahamic religions worldwide as a unified, prehistoric serpent cult descended from the first idolaters, who worshiped the Serpent from the Garden of Eden, i.e. Satan. To make the claim, Deane took an exceedingly common motif—serpents, after all, can be found everywhere and appear regularly in myths and art as a result—and abstracted from it a unified faith that didn’t exist.

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The Jerusalem Post Recycles Old Claims about Goliath's Skull at Golgotha

11/2/2022

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The Jerusalem Post ran a story this week claiming that the Bible giant Goliath’s skull is located under the land occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre because its biblical name, Golgotha, sort of sounds like “Goliath of Gath.” The Post did not clearly explain to readers that its article was a near-verbatim copy of a 2017 tabloid story from Britain’s Daily Star, itself recycling Evangelical chatter from the early 2000s, nor did the Post disclose that the “author” of their story, “Walla! Tourism,” had apparently produced the piece to draw Christian tourists to Israel.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E19: "Secrets of Inner Earth"

9/9/2022

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The idea of a subterranean realm is an ancient one, a mixture of real-life experiences of caverns and caves and ancient mythological ideas about planes layered above the flat earth and below it. The Zohar, an ancient Jewish mystical text, follows this old idea, positing seven planes of existence and claiming that some of the creatures below the surface have such bizarre traits as lacking noses or having two heads. In 1692 Edmund Halley—who also invented the claim that a comet strike destroyed the antediluvian world—proposed that the interior of the Earth featured concentric spheres moving at different speeds, an early scientific version of Hollow Earth theory that soon merged with stories colonial explorers brought back about various peoples’ belief in subterranean ancestors. A great deal of nineteenth century nonsense and twentieth century exploitation eventually gave rise to this episode of Ancient Aliens, culmination and refutation of Hollow Earth Theory.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E09: "Decoding the Dragon Gods"

3/11/2022

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The classic dragon is a bit of a late invention, a case where a range of previously unrelated creatures got thrown into the same category and started influencing one another. In the European tradition, dragons were originally envisioned as large snakes, as ancient Greek art attests, and Indo-European linguistic studies find that the most ancient Indo-European speakers thought of them as being in the category of worm, not reptile. Only much later did medieval Europeans start to assign the wings and feet. By contrast, the dragons of East Asian lore originated in fantasy combinations of a variety of animals, and may have originated in stories of extinct types of crocodile. The point is that there is no universal “dragon” myth, nor any consistency to dragon stories.

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<<Previous

Review of "Odysseus Returns," a PBS Quest to Find the Tomb of Odysseus

Graham Hancock Defender Claims Proof of the Atlantis Myth's Egyptian Origin

New Academic Paper Challenges Adrienne Mayor's Griffin-Protoceratops Link

Discover Magazine Reports 110-Year-Old News about Fossil Origins of Greek Myths

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E16: "The Gods of Greece"

Adrienne Mayor Claims Talos as a Greek Myth of Artificial Intelligence

Author Claims Ancient Sites and Myths Connect to Global Bird Cult

The Jerusalem Post Recycles Old Claims about Goliath's Skull at Golgotha

Review of Ancient Aliens S18E19: "Secrets of Inner Earth"

Review of Ancient Aliens S18E09: "Decoding the Dragon Gods"

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