Category: Mythology

The Forgotten Legend of How Semiramis Built the Egyptian Pyramids

7/11/2025

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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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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Goghgobon and the Hermetic History of Giants

5/10/2025

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Longtime readers will remember that back in 2018, I struggled my way through the Old Castilian of Alfonso X’s General Estoria—learning the language in order to read it—so that I could explore the Hermetic history of the Giants contained in it. As you may recall, this passage relates the story of Asclepius’s encounter with Goghgobon, the last surviving Giant, who tells him about the accomplishments of the Giants before the Flood and translates for him their book of star wisdom written in a forgotten alphabet. Very few scholars have analyzed this passage in any significant detail, likely because it had never been translated into English before I did so, and even the modern Spanish translation is very recent.

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Smithsonian Magazine Asks if Talos Was an Ancient A.I.-Powered Robot

4/22/2025

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Ancient myths and legends have a protean quality that makes them applicable to almost any current event, but that same quality has a downside: From the time of the euhemerists down to this very morning, there is a tendency to try to find the “real” story behind the myth by projecting today’s world back into the past. Earlier today, Smithsonian Magazine asked whether Talos, the bronze giant of the Argonautica, is in fact an early example of artificial intelligence. This question is, of course, patently absurd because Talos did not exist.

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A Christmas Mystery: Hancock, Bauval, and the "Three Kings of Orion"

12/20/2024

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An interesting little Christmas mystery, inspired by a recent post Graham Hancock made on social media praising his “great friend” Robert Bauval and his Orion Correlation Theory from the 1990s. Back in 1997, when Hancock and Bauval teamed up for The Message of the Sphinx (a.k.a. Keeper of Genesis), the two authors presented a variant version of the Christmas carol “We three kings” that replaced “Orient” with “Orion,” rendering the first line as “We three kings of Orion are.” They provided no source, and for a long time I wondered if they had just made it up.

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Review of "Karahan Tepe" by Andrew Collins

11/29/2024

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Karahan Tepe: Civilization of the Anunnaki and the Cosmic Origins of the Serpent of Eden
Andrew Collins | Bear & Company | October 2024 | ISBN: 9781591434788 | $26

I will confess that when I learned Andrew Collins had recently published a new book on Karahan Tepe, an ancient site of enclosures and statues similar to and coeval with those of nearby Göbekli Tepe (collectively, the Taş Tepeler peoples, after the region where the sites are located), I was not particularly excited about reviewing it. Collins’s books are never wild enough to be fun to discuss, but they also fall just enough outside of the scholarly consensus to make it a slog to work through his reams of information, mostly accurate but outstripping the evidence.

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

8/31/2024

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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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<<Previous

The Forgotten Legend of How Semiramis Built the Egyptian Pyramids

On the Doomed Lovers of Queen Semiramis

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

Goghgobon and the Hermetic History of Giants

Smithsonian Magazine Asks if Talos Was an Ancient A.I.-Powered Robot

A Christmas Mystery: Hancock, Bauval, and the "Three Kings of Orion"

Review of "Karahan Tepe" by Andrew Collins

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

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