Ancient History

Ancient History

Page Contents:

8 Myths About Ancient History

The Lost Ark

Attila The Hun

Historical Myth: The 300 Who Held Thermopylae

Mesopotamia

Ancient Babylon

3 Mythic Mounts

8 Myths About Ancient History

by N. S. Gill

It's a little harder to prove that myths about ancient history are false than it is to disprove myths about more modern eras, but the prevailing opinion is that the following ideas are wrong.

The following ideas about ancient history might more properly be called "urban legends" to signify that they are mostly modern ideas about ancient history. In addition to the following, there are also plenty of myths, especially about origins, that were woven into the stories the ancients told as history.

1) Caesar Was Born by Caesarean Section

The idea that Julius Caesar was born by Caesarean Section is old, but since Caesar's mother, Aurelia, was involved in his upbringing, and the surgical techniques of the 1st (or 2nd) century B.C. should have left her dead, it is unlikely that the story about Caesar's birth by C-section is true.

2) Judaism Borrowed Monotheism From Akhenaten

Akhenatenwas an Egyptian pharaoh who put aside the traditional Egyptian pantheon of gods in favor of his own sun god, Aten. He did not deny the existence of other gods, as a monotheist would have, but held his god above the others, as a henotheist.

The date of Akhenaten may make it impossible for the Hebrews to have borrowed from him, since their monotheism could have preceded Akhenaten's birth or followed the return of traditional Egyptian religion.

3) Jesus Was Born on December 25th

We don't even know for sure what year Jesus was born, but references in the Gospels suggest Jesus was born in the spring. The god Mithras was born of a virgin on the winter solstice and was known as the light of the world. It is likely that aspects of the worship of Mithras were adopted by early Christians.

4) Latin is the Most Logical Language and Superior to Others

This is a hard one for me since I tend to buy into this myth, but Latin is not any more logical than any other language. However, our grammar rules were based on the grammar of Latin. Since English is, but should not be put into a Latinate mold, English comes out looking awkward. The specialized vocabularies we use in areas like law, medicine, and logic, tend to be Latin-based, too, which makes Latin seem superior.

5) Caesar Said "Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword."

The quote is anachronistic in detail and spirit. There were no drums and all swords were double-edged. The idea that citizenry needed to be persuaded of the value of war is not from the first century B.C.

6) Atlantis

Atlantis was used as a parable by Plato and possibly mentioned by Solon of Athens. Whether there might possibly have been a real lost continent of Atlantis or not remains open to debate, mostly among non-academics.

7) Thumbs Up! - End of a Fight Between Gladiators

It is believed that when the person in charge of a gladiatorial event wanted one of the gladiators to be finished off, he turned his thumb down and that when he wanted the gladiator to live, he pointed his thumb up. The editor's gesture signifying that a gladiator should be killed is not exactly thumbs down, but thumbs turned. This motion is thought to represent the movement of a sword.

8) Amazons

The Amazons were probably not the one-breasted man-haters we think of when we hear the word. They are more likely to have been fully-breasted Scythian horse-riding warriors, judging from artwork, although Strabo does write that their right breasts were seared off in infancy.

The Lost Ark

Hollywood's vision of the Ark wasn't that far off. The real Ark was said to be a very dangerous thing.

The Bible contains a detailed description of the Ark and its construction. It was a wooden chest covered inside and out with gold, roughly 50 inches (1.25 meters) long, 30 inches (0.75 meters) wide, and 30 inches high. The top of the Ark was adorned with two cherubim, facing each other, their wings stretched out over the top of the chest. The sides had rings through which gilded poles were threaded.

The Book of Exodus says that the Ark was constructed to hold the stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai--tablets inscribed with the commandments of God. Afterwards it remained a point of intersection with the divine. Tradition says that when Moses needed to speak with God, he entered the tabernacle, where the Ark was kept, and heard a voice issuing from a cloud between the cherubim.

When the tribes of Israel were on the move, priests carried the Ark at the head of their procession. And when they went to war, they brought the Ark with them in the hope that God's power would come with it--as the Bible says it did when the Ark's carriers circled the walls of Jericho seven times to bring them crashing down.

But it didn't always work the way the Israelites hoped. In a war with the Philistines, they were beaten so badly that the Ark fell into enemy hands. The Bible then says that wherever the Philistines took the Ark, misfortune, disease, and plagues followed. After seven months of trouble, they sent it back.

Finally, King David brought the Ark to Jerusalem. And when his son Solomon built a temple there in the 10th century BC, the Ark of the Covenant was given a permanent home, inside the Holy of Holies. It stayed there for hundreds of years--perhaps until 586 BC, when Babylon's King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Solomon's Temple and looted its treasures.

Many experts think the Ark was carried away then, though it's not among the Bible's list of Babylonian plunder. Others argue that someone else had already stolen it. Still others believe it was hidden before Nebuchadnezzar's invasion. In any event, when Jerusalem's Second Temple was built seventy years later, there was no mention of the Ark of the Covenant. As far as we know, it has never reappeared, though some folks still seek it and others claim to keep it.

--Mark Diller

Attila The Hun

Attila the Hun's barbarian reputation lives on 1,500 years after Europeans first encountered him. Why? One reason is that the illiterate Huns left no records, so everything we know about them comes from Roman and Greek reports--and the settled Romans and Greeks despised the nomadic Huns, who ate and even slept in their saddles.

When Attila was born in what is now Hungary, around 406, his uncle Rugila ruled Hun territory stretching from Russia's Ural Mountains to the Rhone River in central Europe. After Rugila's death, Attila and his older brother, Bleda, took over. They ruled jointly for 11 years, until Attila killed Bleda in 445.

Historians assume Bleda's death followed a fraternal power struggle, though Attila and Bleda seem to have previously gotten along pretty well. Alone at the top, Attila consolidated power among his chieftains and came to inspire great loyalty. He was a canny general, often attacking when his targets were busy fighting other enemies.

By the 5th century, the Roman Empire was busy declining and falling. The empire had split into two parts--the eastern part headquartered at Constantinople, and the western one in Italy. Instead of maintaining an army of loyal Romans, the empire had outsourced its protection to tribes of mercenaries (including, in some places, Huns).

After witnessing Attila's military might, Roman leaders decided that it would be wisest just to pay him off. As part of a peace treaty, the Eastern Roman emperor agreed to pay hundreds of pounds of gold in tribute to the Huns every year. When the Romans failed to make their payments on time, Attila slapped them with penalties--cutting a swath through the empire and ravaging the towns in his path. Soon, the Romans agreed to more than double their tribute payments.

Attila wasn't just a fierce warrior. For a bow-legged little fellow with a scarred-up face and smashed-in nose, he did surprisingly well with the ladies--even if we assume that some of his 300 wives only tolerated him. One of the epic tales about the Hun leader grew out of a plea for help from a damsel in distress.

In 450, a Roman princess named Honoria sent a message to Attila, begging him for help. Honoria, sister of the Western Roman Emperor Valentian III, was desperate to avoid an arranged marriage. Along with a bag of gold, she included a ring with her plea to the barbarian king. Attila, who clearly took a "the-more-the-merrier" attitude toward wives, promptly informed the Romans that he had accepted Honoria's offer of marriage--and that for a dowry he wanted half of Valentian's empire.

When the Romans balked, Attila and his troops moved out. They laid waste to cities in Gaul (modern France) until the Romans finally stopped them at a place called Catalaunian Fields. It was the only defeat Attila ever suffered, and he quickly recovered from it. A few months later, he marched through Italy, ravaging northern cities, including Milan.

As the Huns approached Rome in 452, an aging Pope Leo went to meet with Attila. Legend has it that the pope asked Attila for mercy. Then, while the barbarian was pondering the pope's request, St. Peter and St. Paul appeared and threatened Attila with death. Spooked, the barbarian ordered an immediate retreat.

Modern scholars have suggested that the pope more likely arrived for the meeting with sacks of cash and persuaded Attila to take the loot and go home. Others argue that the meeting with the pope never really happened, and that low supplies and an outbreak of malaria forced Attila's retreat.

In any case, Attila really did retreat from Italy in 452, and the story of the pope who saved the empire was cited for centuries--in part to emphasize papal power. Throughout the Middle Ages, Attila (a.k.a. "the Scourge of God") lived on in legends as a vicious barbarian tyrant vanquished by Christian saints. His reputation grew blacker over the years.

In 453, Attila died on his (umpteenth) wedding night, apparently of natural causes. After an elaborate funeral, he was buried with the weapons of the people he had overcome. Those who dug the grave were slain so they could never reveal its location. His tomb has never been found.

--Colleen Kelly

Historical Myth: The 300 Who Held Thermopylae

by Robert Wilde

The Myth:
The narrow pass of Thermopylae was held for three days against a vast Persian army by just 300 Spartans, 299 of which perished.

The Truth:
Although there were 300 Spartans present at the defence of Thermopylae, there were at least 4000 allies involved on the first two days and 1500 men involved in the fatal last stand. Still a tiny figure compared to the forces against them, but more than the legend which forgets some contributors.

The Background:
Having raised a vast army operating on the limits of supply and command √ perhaps 100,000 strong √ the Persian King Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 BCE intent on adding the city states to an Empire which already spanned three continents. The Greeks responded by putting aside traditionally enmity, allying and identifying a place to check the Persian advance: the land pass of Thermopylae, already fortified, was just forty miles away from a narrow sea strait between Euboea and the mainland.

Here smaller Greek forces could block the armies and fleet of the Persians at the same time and hopefully protect Greece itself.

The Spartans, a brutal people with arguably the most militaristic culture in history (Spartans could only reach manhood once they'd killed a slave) agreed to defend Thermopylae. However, this agreement was given in the first half of 480 and, as the Persians advanced proceeded inorexibly but leisurely, months passed. By the time Xerxes had reached Mount Olympus it was August.

This was a bad time for the Spartans, for they were to hold both their Olympics and Carneia. To miss either was to offend the Gods, something the Spartans cared passionately about. A compromise was needed between sending a full army and keeping their divine favour: an advance guard of 300 Spartans, led by King Leonidas would go. Instead of taking the Hippeis, his 300 strong bodyguard of the best young men, Leonidas departed with 300 veterans.

The (4)300:
There was a little more to the compromise. The Spartan 300 weren't supposed to be holding the pass by themselves; instead their absent army would be replaced by troops from other states. 700 came from Thespiae, 400 from Thebes. The Spartans themselves brought 300 Helots, basically slaves, to assist. At least 4300 men occupied the pass of Thermopylae to fight.

Thermopylae:
The Persian army did indeed arrive at Thermopylae and, after their offer of free passage to the Greek defenders was refused, they attacked on the fifth day. For forty-eight hours the defenders of Thermopylae held out, defeating not just the poorly trained levies sent to dull them, but the Immortals, the Persian elite. Unfortunately for the Greeks, Thermopylae held a secret: a small pass by which the main defences could be outflanked. On the sixth night, the second of the battle, the Immortals followed this path, brushed aside the small guard and prepared to catch the Greeks in a pincer.

The 1500:
King Leonidas, undisputed head of the Greek defenders, was made aware of this pincer by a runner. Unwilling to sacrifice the entire army, but determined to keep the Spartan promise to defend Thermopylae, or perhaps just act as a rearguard, he ordered everyone bar his Spartans and their Helots to retreat. Many did, but the Thebans and Thespians stayed (the former possibly because Leonidas insisted they stay as hostages). When battle commenced the next day there were 1500 Greeks left, including 298 Spartans (two having been sent on missions). Caught between the main Persian army and 10,000 men to their rear, all were involved in fighting and wiped out. Only Thebans who surrendered remained.

Legends:
It is entirely possible the above account contains other myths. Historians have suggested the full force of Greeks may have been as high as 8000 to begin with or that the 1500 only stayed put on the third day after being trapped by the Immortals. The Spartans may have only sent 300, not because of the Olympics or Carneia, but because they didn't wish to defend so far north, although it does seem unusual they would have sent a King, if so.

Mesopotamia

There was a time when Iraq made history, not news--when Mesopotamia actually helped get civilization on its feet. Today, let's take the long view and look at the "old news."

Some people say Iraq is democracy's greatest test. Others say it's a violent mess. But a historian will say Iraq's the cradle of civilization.

It's true. Ancient Iraq--Mesopotamia--was likely home to the first agriculture, the first cities, the first laws. It was home to the first wheel and the first writing, too. It was where humans grew out of cultural diapers and into toddler training pants. Here's the story, step by toddler step.

The days of "cavemen" hunting mammoths in the snow really weren't that long ago. The last Ice Age didn't end until around 10,000 BC, and mammoth meatloaf stayed on man's menu for centuries after that. Lunch came largely where you found it--find a berry, eat a berry. Archaeological evidence suggests that a few crafty cowboys (or bad hunters) domesticated cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats and started tending to their food. But nobody grew crops.

People gathered wild grains where they could, of course. Eventually, someone was bound to notice that a few scattered grains of wheat or barley had sprouted beside the grinding place. Archaeologists think this "a-ha!"--perhaps the most important "a-ha!" in human history--happened around 8000 BC, with the first farmers donning seed-corn caps in the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They've identified other contenders for the "first farmer" title, too, in Asia and the Americas. One thing is for sure. With a surplus of food like never before, the people of Mesopotamia (Greek for "land between the rivers") flourished.

As long as lunch was on the hoof, nobody had much incentive to stay in one place. Farming, for the first time, gave people roots, and semi-permanent villages sprang up with the crops. Still, successive plantings sucked the life out of the soil, and people eventually had to pick up and move to a new garden spot. The farmers of Mesopotamia had an advantage here: river water, and plenty of it, fed the alluvial land. The trick was controlling it, both to water the crops and to keep it from flooding the village. So people learned the art of irrigation, dikes, and dams. Add in crop rotation, and you've got villages built to last throughout Mesopotamia.

You've got one more thing, too: government. Maintaining complex irrigation and flood control systems took organization and specialization. You grow the food, and I'll dig the ditches. And Uncle Gilgamesh will collect the taxes to pay my salary and maintain the public works. By 3500 BC, the world's first city-dwellers lived in Mesopotamian burgs where thousands of people did dozens of different jobs--and where anyone would have recognized the old joke about death and taxes.

Fred Flintstone aside, the wheel was not a Stone Age tool. As Mesopotamian villages gradually morphed into cities between 5000 and 3500 BC, the people closest to the Persian Gulf, called the Sumerians, achieved particular prominence. By 3500 BC, some Sumerian Sam (or Samantha) had figured out how to make a wheel. A Sumerian pictograph from around 3500 BC actually features the wheel in an infomercial-style before-and-after shot, showing a wooden sled side-by-side with a virtually identical wheeled "sled."

Inspiration seems to have come from the potter's wheel, which appeared in Mesopotamia around the same time. All early models of the wheel consisted of three planks of wood clamped together with two crosspieces and carved to roundness. By 2000 BC, deluxe models had spokes. Oxen were sold separately.

Around the time the wheel became something to write home about, Sumerians learned how to write home. Thank the accountants, not the English majors. City life had gotten complicated, and merchants and tax collectors could no longer just remember who paid how much for what. So they started keeping simple accounts--tallies and tokens designed more to jog the memory than anything else. Soon, would-be writers started using pictographs to represent objects, and the pictographs, in turn, evolved into linear marks denoting not only objects but the sounds of spoken syllables as well.

Scholars today call the Sumerian symbols cuneiform--from the Latin cuneus, or wedge--because scribes made wedge-shaped characters by pressing the slanted end of a reed stylus into wet clay. When finished, they fired the clay to harden it. Thousands of these clay tablets survive today. The earliest tablets simply list commodities in various amounts next to people's names.

By 2100 BC, people were writing more than receipts. They were recording the law, allowing legal precedent to pass more easily from one generation to the next. Tribal rules surely existed for thousands of years. But the communal complexity of city life expanded both the need for rules and the number of situations calling for a rule in the first place. The law simply outgrew oral pronouncements.

The first known legal code comes from the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu, who founded a dynasty at the city of Ur in 2112 BC. The most famous comes from Hammurabi, who started his rule in Babylon in 1792 BC, after the Sumerians gave way to the Akkadians upriver. Hammurabi didn't look kindly on criminals. Bad guys were as likely to die as face a fine. But he did apparently try hard for social justice. Those captured in the king's wars were guaranteed ransom, farmers hurt by drought or flood could ignore their debts, and wives abandoned by husbands got alimony and child support. True to writing's original purpose, many of the laws regulated commerce. Rule #105: Always get a receipt!

Michael Himick

Ancient Babylon

Step into your time machine and set the date way, way back. Our destination is the ancient city of Babylon, whose origins lie in the 23rd century BC.

Babylon lay along the banks of the Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, a Greek word meaning "between rivers." As water made the name, so water defined the region. Mesopotamia does not receive enough rainfall to support crops, so civilization in the area couldn't start until its people discovered irrigation around 6000 BC. From then on, things really began to grow.

The Sumerians built the first great Mesopotamian civilization. While Babylon was still just a village, the Sumerians were busy inventing writing (a script known as cuneiform), establishing the first known code of law, and building the first potter's wheel, sailboat, and seed plow.

Eventually, a Semitic tribe called the Amorites overthrew the Sumerians. Under the Amorite king Hammurabi (reigned circa 1792-1750 BC), Babylon became the center of a new empire, known as Babylonia. Today Hammurabi is best known for his famous code of laws, a list of 280 precedent-setting judgments on questions ranging from the correct punishment for murder to contractual issues surrounding wet-nursing.

After Hammurabi died, the Babylonian empire declined until it was overthrown by a new set of invaders: first the Hittites in 1595 BC, then the Kassites. Kassite rule, which lasted for 400 years, was in many ways the high point of Babylonian culture. Babylon's priests even felt confident enough to declare Babylon's hometown god, Marduk, top dog in the Mesopotamian pantheon.

In the late 12th century BC, however, the center of Mesopotamian political power passed out of Babylon, first to the Elamites in the east and then, a few centuries later, to the Assyrians in the north. For 200 years, Babylon was part of the Assyrian empire. In 689 BC, the Assyrian king destroyed Babylon, plundered and leveled its temples, and diverted the waters of a nearby canal over its ruins.

But it's hard to keep a good city down. A new tribe, the Chaldeans, reoccupied Babylon and made it their capital. Under the leadership of their second king, Nebuchadnezzar II (reigned circa 605-561 BC), the city became the largest in the world, covering 2,500 acres and occupying both sides of the Euphrates River.

Nebuchadnezzar built the famous hanging gardens--one of the seven wonders of the ancient world--and rebuilt the temple of Marduk and its associated ziggurat (a temple style resembling a step pyramid). The massive ziggurat was 300 feet long on every side and 300 feet tall at its peak and may have served as inspiration for the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel.

After this period, Babylon's best days were past. The great Persian emperor Cyrus conquered Babylonia in 539 BC, and two centuries later a Greek army under Alexander the Great grabbed Mesopotamia. Alexander intended to make Babylon the capital of his empire, but he died before that could happen. After Alexander's death, the city's Greek rulers abandoned it, and Babylon more or less closed up shop. Today it's a heap of ruins, its glories all broken and buried in the sand.

--Mark Diller

"3 Mythic Mounts" would probably be best captioned under "Mythology", but since this site does not include a "Mythology" page, I included it under "Ancient History" for now.

3 Mythic Mounts

Every now and then, a horse comes along that captures the imagination. Take 2008's Triple-Crown threat, Big Brown. Sure, he came up short in the 2008 Belmont Stakes. But he still captured millions of hearts by winning both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes.

Better yet, take the majestic mounts of ancient mythology--heroic horses whose achievements are literally legendary. Some could fly. Others ran impossibly fast. Some even talked. Such mythical mounts have been capturing imaginations since time immemorial. But three--Pegasus, Sleipnir, and Rakhsh--were the greatest of them all.

Pegasus was a beautiful horse born in an ugly way. His father was the sea god Poseidon, his mother the monster Medusa, and he was born when the hero Perseus lopped off his mother's head. Pegasus flew out of her severed neck. He retained his father's connection with water. A spring gushed forth everywhere his hoofs touched down.

As a winged horse, Pegasus could be a valuable friend. Riding on him, the hero Bellerophon vanquished the fire-breathing Chimera--a monster with a lion's front, a goat's middle, and a dragon's rear. Bellerophon got cocky, though, and tried to ride Pegasus to the top of Mount Olympus, to crash the gods' party. Zeus sent a fly to sting Pegasus, causing him to rear. Bellerophon tumbled to the ground, while Pegasus continued on to Olympus to serve the gods.

When it comes to strange births, Pegasus has nothing on Sleipnir. According to Norse mythology, the gods had just finished building Asgard, their heavenly abode, when a giant offered to build a wall around it. The price was high: if the giant finished the wall before spring, the gods would have to give him the sun and the moon, plus the hand of the goddess Freyja in marriage. Never believing the giant could finish the job in time, the gods agreed to the bargain.

But the giant got help from a magical stallion, and soon it was clear he would make his deadline. So Loki, the trickster god, turned himself into a mare and lured the stallion away. Bereft of his workhorse, the giant couldn't finish the wall in time. Meanwhile, Loki and the stallion got better acquainted, and Loki gave birth to a gray colt named Sleipnir.

Sleipnir was no ordinary horse. He had eight legs and magical runes carved on his teeth. Odin, king of the gods, took the colt as his mount, and Sleipnir became the greatest of all horses, able to fly through the heavens and carry his rider to places no one else could go--even to the land of the dead.

Rakhsh couldn't fly, and he never traveled to the land of the dead, but there was never a better horse to have in a fight. In Persian mythology, Rakhsh was the mount of the hero Rostam, who grew so big and so strong that no ordinary horse could carry him. He tested many, but none could.

One day Rostam found a colt who was strong enough to hold him. He asked the herdsman who owned the horse, and the herdsman said he didn't know who the owner was--he had always heard the colt referred to as "Rostam's Rakhsh." It was fate. Man and horse were inseparable from then on.

Once, when a lion was about to attack a sleeping Rostam, Rakhsh killed it by himself. Rostam woke up and scolded his horse for hogging all the glory. Another time, Rakhsh saved Rostam from a dragon, and then helped him kill the monster. In the end, the two heroes died together, when Rostam's half-brother tricked them into riding into a pit bristling with sharp stakes. Rostam's last act was to kill his brother with an arrow, before following his famous horse into the afterlife.

--Mark Diller KnowledgeNews is brought to you by Every Learner, Inc., an independent small business dedicated to supporting lifelong learners. Copyright © 2008, Every Learner, Inc. All rights reserved.

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