Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  But Freund was not the only one making fanciful claims about Atlantis and ancient Greece in early 2011, or even the only one to use such claims to further an agenda to prove the Bible true. Two books released within weeks of each other in early 2011 both tried to make the case for a lost, advanced civilization lurking behind the stately façade of ancient Greece.

  Atlantis and Catastrophism

  On February 25, 2011, Washington, D.C.’s conservative daily, The Washington Times, devoted an unusual amount of space to a work of pseudoscience from Algora Publishing, a small press that distributes a number of books on “alternative” archaeology. The paper is not known for its coverage of archaeology, nor as a champion of small press literature. This was a highly unusual review. Fox News columnist Martin Sieff guest-wrote a lengthy review of Emmett Sweeney’s newly-published Atlantis: The Evidence from Science (2010), praising the book for its evenhanded exploration of the science supporting claims that Atlantis really existed.[344] This review, however, seemed to reflect a hidden anti-science, perhaps even creationist, agenda.

  Sweeney is the author of a number of volumes defending the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, the twentieth century writer who claimed that the planet Venus was really a comet that swung by earth in prehistory, influencing the course of civilization when it parted the Red Sea, destroyed Minoan civilization, and what-have-you. According to Velikovsky and Sweeney, earth’s history has been grossly distorted by historians and must be set right. Velikovsky, whom Sweeney follows, claimed that the Dark Age between the Mycenaean era and Archaic Greece (the period from 1200 BCE to 800 BCE) did not exist and was the creation of close-minded scholars. By happy coincidence, if one accepts Velikovsky’s claims, the historical chronology given in the Bible could be reconciled with Egyptian king lists and records, thus proving that the Bible was literally true.

  None of this was discussed in Sieff’s Washington Times review, which instead attempted to give legitimacy to Sweeney’s catastrophism by giving a foothold to his work on Atlantis. At no time did Sieff discuss a troubling conflict of interest: Sieff was a founding member of the pro-Velikovsky group, the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, a former editor of its magazine, and an active proponent of catastrophism. He wrote more than two dozen articles in support of catastrophism, some as late as the 1990s.[345] By hiding Sweeney’s connection to Velikovsky, as well as his own, Sieff played the part of the disinterested journalist, legitimizing an ideological agenda in the guise of journalism.

  Sieff even went beyond Sweeney to argue that a “sophisticated global, seafaring civilization certainly existed in the geological conditions before the last ice age.”[346] He based this claim on the work of Charles Hapgood, a professor who misread ancient maps in the mid-twentieth century and imagined that they showed Antarctica, not officially discovered until 1818. These maps were supposedly so accurate only a sophisticated global culture could have made them; however, repeated debunkings over the past fifty years demonstrated conclusively that Hapgood was wrong, a fact even Hapgood seemed to acknowledge before his death.[347]

  That Sieff relies on discredited and false evidence to support a radical rewriting of ancient history is no surprise; everyone who supports “alternative” archaeology does so at some point. What is extremely surprising is that the Washington Times ran this bit of rank pseudoscience. Here, it seems that a hidden agenda was at work. As noted above, acceptance of Atlantis was seen as a stepping stone to legitimizing Velikovskian theories, or at the very least, delegitimizing secular archaeology. Once the accepted, secular story of cultural evolution has been questioned, creationist theories become that much easier to put on par with actual science.

  Given that the Washington Times is a known outlet for conservative attacks on science, as well as for the views of its owner, the Unification Church founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the entire affair seems to be of a piece—covertly attempting to subvert science in the name of dogma—catastrophist, religious, or otherwise.

  Ancient Greece and Advanced Technology

  A much more serious and supposedly scholarly claim about ancient Greece and its exotic mysteries came this time from modern Greece itself. Greek mechanical engineer S. A. Paipetis’s The Unknown Technology in Homer (2005) was translated into English and released in 2010. The book purported to be a mechanical engineer’s evaluation of extraordinary and precocious technological knowledge embedded in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, two of the foundational texts of the Western, tradition composed sometime around the eight century BCE. According to the author, this anomalous knowledge demonstrates that the Mycenaeans, the ancient people of whom Homer’s poems sang, had advanced modern technology c. 1600-1200 BCE.[348] The volume was published under the aegis of the academic publisher Springer’s History of Mechanism and Machine Science series, making it a somewhat higher grade of pseudoscience pretending toward legitimacy, but pseudoscience nonetheless.

  The first third of the book is an incoherent set of digressions, most of which have no bearing on the subject of ancient technology. Instead, we are treated to works of Renaissance and modern art and discussions of the Greek-revival-style vacation house built by the Austro-Hungarian empress Elisabeth, whose nickname is embarrassingly mistranslated as “Sissy” instead of “Sisi.” What does the existence of a nineteenth century vacation house have to do with Mycenaean technology? Unfortunately, this tendency toward digression and irrelevancy mars an already short book (two hundred pages) with more than fifty pages of padding. Worse still, the translation from the author’s original (modern) Greek to English is stilted and awkward, with innumerable mistakes of grammar and spelling that are by turn humorous or obfuscating.

  The author demonstrates a clear ignorance of the ancient material he purports to analyze. In Chapter 11, he follows a long-disproved idea that the so-called Orphic Argonautica (c. 450 CE) predated the Odyssey (c. 700 BCE).[349] Earlier, the author assumes that the river Acheron in Epirus is the actual river Acheron flowing through Hades and to which Odysseus sails.[350] While later Greeks identified the two, the location of the physical Acheron in western Greece hardly matches the description of the infernal Acheron flowing at the ends of the Ocean. His discussions of Greek mythology are everywhere tinged with a non-specialist’s over-simplification and ignorance of contemporary work in the field, especially complications and controversies that would undermine his simple thesis.

  Relying on long-outdated studies of Greek myth and history (including the early twentieth-century work of Arthur Evans and the Depression-era studies of Martin Nilsson, largely to the exclusion of any modern work), Paipetis builds a house of cards whereby the presumption that the Mycenaeans had advanced technology leads him to interpret mythological events as technological descriptions, thus “proving” the existence of the technology. One example can stand for them all. In discussing Odysseus’ passage between Scylla and Charybdis, the author assumes that the description records a Greek discourse on the physics of vortexes. Thus, Homer’s phrase (in Paipetis’s translation) “drive ship by as fast as you can”[351] should, in the author’s words, be interpreted to mean “move fast, to account [for] speed loss due to friction and remain in course instead of diving to the bottom.”[352] This he compares to the “gravitational sling” used by NASA to launch spacecraft out of the solar system by utilizing Jupiter’s gravitational force. However, the “friction” is the author’s own interpolation (it’s not in the original), a scientific term hardly necessary for the Greeks to understand the concept of going fast to escape from a whirlpool.

  The author also believes that Homer’s descriptions of the automata built by the smith-god Hephaestus[353] represent descriptions of real robots with artificial intelligence. However, it has long been known that the ancients had mechanical or clockwork animals. The Byzantine emperors were particularly famous for their mechanical lions and birds. A poetic exaggeration of these real-life marvels is likely all that lies behind Hephaestus’s “robots,” with no naïvely literal reading of the
Odyssey or speculation about ancient electricity necessary. (The author backtracks some and does state that electricity and computing technology are not “known to be” available to run the robots.[354])

  The author’s claim that an invisible net used by the god Hephaestus in the Odyssey to capture Ares and Aphrodite[355] is evidence of manmade Kevlar or a related material is simply ridiculous:

  Such materials are rather modern technological achievements, e.g., glass and carbon fibres, or even organic fibres such as Kevlar. If such materials were available in Homer’s era, undoubtedly that civilization was marked by this highly developed technology.[356]

  His identification of the boats belonging to a people called the Phaecians as “probably a high speed jet hydrofoil” is laughable.[357] Homer sang that the Phaecians’ boats had no pilots but sailed according to projected thoughts.[358] There is no reason to imagine magical boats as a thousand-year memory of Mycenaean-era technology if the only evidence for their existence is Homer’s own poem, a poem filled with all sorts of magic that no appeal to technology could ever sufficiently explain.

  That this study was published by Springer (albeit in the mechanics rather than classics arena) has given it a false legitimacy that may deceive the unwary into assuming that this is a scholarly work on Greek history. Instead, it is a work of rank speculation masquerading as science, using false analogies and wishful thinking to recreate a lost world that never was. In our next chapter, we will look at another work of pseudoscience that since the 1970s has used the trappings of academic scholarship to give a false legitimacy to claims that Greek mythology records encounters with extraterrestrial beings.

  42. Golden Fleeced

  Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (1976) is one of the most important works in the ancient astronaut genre. It has been fairly well-established that Temple’s thesis about extraterrestrial visitation has little basis in fact. Temple had claimed that an African tribe called the Dogon had sophisticated knowledge of the invisible companion to the star Sirius, known to modern astronomers as Sirius B, and that this knowledge derived from amphibious aliens that descended to earth in ancient Sumeria thousands of years ago and were worshipped as gods. Their possession of esoteric knowledge of deep space unknown in the West until the nineteenth century is taken as proof of extraterrestrial contact.

  Though anthropologists failed to find a genuine Sirius B tradition among the Dogon outside what they had gleaned from recent contact with Europeans,[359] and skeptics refuted Temple’s extraterrestrial conclusions, The Sirius Mystery continues to serve as a standard reference work in the New Age and alternative archaeology movements. In recent years alone, works such as Christopher Penczak’s Ascension Magick (2007), R. M. Decker’s 35 Minutes to Mars (2004), and Stephen S. Mehler’s The Land of Osiris (2002) utilize Temple’s book to a greater or lesser extent to support their alternative and New Age claims.[360] The internet, too, is a hotbed of Temple-derived Sirius theories. And, of course, Temple continues to publish books of alternative archaeology, including The Sphinx Mystery (2009).[361] Therefore, renewed study of The Sirius Mystery is no moot point but an inquiry into an active and important touchstone for the alternative movement.

  It is not my intention to review the case against Temple’s space-faring fish-men and their watery revelations. Such work has already been done, exhaustively, and, to most skeptics’ minds, conclusively.[362] Instead, I would like to explore Robert Temple’s misuse of Greek mythology, specifically the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, to refute frequently repeated claims that, even if one doubts his most outrageous conclusions, Temple is “scholarly, careful, and scientifically honest.”[363] Temple is frequently described as a “recognized scholar”[364] or even as a “preeminent scholar of mathematics, astronomy and mythology”[365] by proponents of alternative claims, and Temple himself cites his membership in the Royal Astronomical Society[366] and several classicist organizations to bolster Sirius’s claims to scholarship. An examination of the case of Temple v. Jason will demonstrate that claims for Temple’s Sirius scholarship are less solid than the case for the alleged aliens themselves.

  Of Aliens and Argonauts

  In Sirius, Temple makes a number of claims about Greek mythology in general and the story of Jason in particular, which he sees as a governing myth tying together all the threads of his Sirius mystery. Temple uses Jason’s legendary journey as a starting point for his forays into Greek, Egyptian, and Near Eastern mythology, and there is the strong impression that he views Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece as parallel to his own search for the extraterrestrial secrets of the flying space frogs. For him, the Jason story is the one Greek myth most closely related to an esoteric tradition of alien-derived knowledge of the true nature of the binary Sirius star system—and he even views the Argonauts as the biological ancestors of the Dogon. In order to understand the scaffolding on which Temple builds his mythological claims, let us briefly review Jason’s story as it has come down to us.

  Jason was the son of Aeson, deposed king of Iolcus and rightful heir to the throne held by his usurping uncle Pelias. Pelias promised to restore the kingdom to Jason on condition that Jason bring the Golden Fleece from the kingdom of Colchis back to Iolcus, a quest Pelias is sure will end in Jason’s death. Jason therefore assembles fifty companions (originally unnamed but later associated with the greatest Greek heroes) on the ship Argo and sails to Colchis, experiencing many adventures. In Colchis, Jason fails to persuade its king to give him the fleece, and he instead steals it from the dragon that guards it with the help of the king’s daughter, the sorceress Medea, on condition that Jason marry her. Jason has many more adventures on the way back to Iolcus, where he presents the fleece and deposes his uncle. He then betrays Medea’s love, loses the favor of the gods, and dies when a piece of the dry-docked Argo falls on his head.

  The Jason story is cited elliptically in Homer (usually dated to c. 8th century BCE), briefly in Hesiod’s Theogony (c. 700 BCE), and is most fully developed in Pindar’s Fourth Pythian Ode (462 BCE) and Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica (c. 245 BCE). Jason also appears in some early Greek and Etruscan art, but, intriguingly, some of these images show a different version of the legend, unrecorded in the surviving poems, in which Jason apparently descends into the dragon’s stomach and reemerges, aided by the goddess Athena rather than Medea.[367] Informed scholarly conjecture is that the primal Jason legend dates to Mycenaean times (c. 1500 BCE) and originally featured a voyage to the end of the world (rather than specifically Colchis) to retrieve the fleece via a descent into the guardian dragon’s stomach and a triumph over death. It is possible Jason was dismembered and resurrected through Athena’s ministrations or his own supernatural healing powers.[368] Medea may be a later addition to the original quest tale, though she must have appeared before 700 BCE, as she is in Hesiod. Such history is not considered in Sirius, despite at least two centuries of scholarly discussion about it.

  For Temple, the Jason myth is much more than an adventure. His views on Jason are somewhat difficult to follow, scattered as they are through Sirius, but the abridged version runs like this:

  Jason and the fifty Argonauts represent Sirius A (the main star we see in the sky) and the fifty-year period it takes Sirius B (the hidden companion star) to travel around Sirius A. The Argo, their boat, is the system taken as a whole with its fifty oars representing each year of Sirius B’s orbit.[369] In this, the Argonauts are therefore the equivalent of the Annunaki, the fifty anonymous gods of Sumer (remember the Argonauts were originally unnamed), who therefore are also symbols for Sirius B’s fifty-year orbit.[370] Jason, whose name Temple believes means “appeaser,” is a feckless wimp who usurped his position in a myth-cycle that originally centered on the epic voyage of Herakles (Hercules),[371] who in turn is a later remolding of a still-earlier mythological figure, Briareus, one of the hundred-handed, fifty-headed monsters who assaulted Olympus and were imprisoned in Tartarus. Therefore, Temple concludes, Briareus was the original capt
ain of the Argo.[372] Confusingly, and perhaps in partial contradiction, Jason is also identified as a version of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, primarily on the basis of both having fifty companions and many adventures.[373]

  From this framework, Temple then branches out into increasingly fanciful excursions that are beyond the scope of this article.

  Since Temple’s defenders frequently cite his deep scholarship and thorough understanding of mythology and ancient history, it is only fair to ask how scholarly Temple’s mythological framework is. We can begin by dispensing with one point easily enough. The “feckless” Jason was the creation of Apollonius of Rhodes, who was writing in the Hellenistic period, five or six hundred years after the Homeric age of epic poetry, and a full millennium after the Jason tale may have originated in Mycenaean Greece. Apollonius purposely recast the hero as a vulnerable but brave human in keeping with the tastes and values of the era.[374] Since this is a late development, it can have no bearing on the original myth or its supposed extraterrestrial antecedents. Similarly, I can find no support for Temple’s view that Jason’s name means “appeaser,” as nearly every scholarly source derives his name from the Greek word “to heal.”[375] Temple provides no citation beyond his own assertion, and I am unable to determine his reasoning for his claim.

  Jason and the Secrets of the Space Frogs

  These minor points safely dispensed with, we can move on to the meat of Temple’s Jason argument. Let us begin by asking on what grounds Temple identifies Jason as Herakles and Herakles as Briareus and/or Gilgamesh. Here, fortunately, Temple has made our job easy. In all these cases, the source of his identifications (and, indeed, it appears the entirety of his knowledge of Greek myth) is Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths (1955), which he explicitly cites. Graves identifies Jason and Herakles thus: “Jason and Herakles are, in fact, the same character so far as the marriage-task myth is concerned … Jason was, of course, a title of Herakles.”[376] Here Graves argues that both stories reflect tasks associated with sacred kingship, and that Herakles at one point bore the title of a Jason (i.e., “healer,” a meaning Temple previously rejected). This is not exactly the same as saying that Herakles captained the Argo, and Temple appears to go farther than Graves on this point.