Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  Conclusion

  The long and short of it is that there is no independent confirmation that Native Americans washed up in Holland around 60 BCE. We can’t rule out an accidental shipwreck of Native Americans, but the evidence from the brief ancient passages now extant argues against it. All of the extant texts (depending on the independence of Otto’s account) are derived from a single paragraph in Pomponius Mela that spoke of merchants in a ship sailing from the east across the Caspian to arrive in Germany. From this we simply cannot derive the exact number of two, uncontested proof they were Native Americans, proof that they sailed from the west across the Atlantic, or a clear indication they landed in what is now the Netherlands. All of these claims are interpretations, with varying degrees of evidence supporting them and many alternative explanations. Thus, on almost every point excepting the date of landfall, the claim as currently presented in alternative, Afrocentrist, and diffusionist literature is demonstrably false. Claimants would do well to make plain to their audiences the difference between fact and interpretation.

  48. Did Pagans Worship Noah’s Ark?

  Alternative theories of the ancient past date back pretty much to Antiquity itself. In the eighteenth century, the rough equivalent of our modern ancient astronaut theory was “Arkism,” the theory first proposed by Jacob Bryant that all ancient mythologies and religions were distortions and perversions of the story of Noah’s Ark and the rest of Genesis, the only revealed truth and accurate history. Just as ancient astronaut theorists interpreted (and misinterpreted) every shred of evidence through the lens of aliens, so too did Arkite believers force all of history into the shape of Noah’s Ark. However, in an important difference, Arkite worship was accepted by many scholars as a true interpretation of the ancient past for several decades surrounding 1800.

  In the introduction to my translation of The Orphic Argonautica, a Late Antique epic poem about the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, I describe one instance in which Bryant perverted a genuine ancient text to force it into his false system.[455] Here are the genuine lines from the opening of the Orphic Argonautica, in which Orpheus describes the formation of the cosmos according to Orphic theology, whereby chaos eventually gives rise to creation:

  Truly, above all I disclosed the stern inevitability of ancient Chaos, and Time, who in his boundless coils, produced Aether, and the twofold, beautiful, and noble Eros, whom the younger men call Phanes, celebrated parent of eternal Night, because he himself first manifested.[456]

  Contrast that with the way Jacob Bryant in his A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774-1776) intentionally mistranslated the passage to bring it in line with the Biblical narrative of the sins of the giants, the Flood, and God’s covenant with Noah:

  After the oath had been tendered to the Mustae [i.e. initiates], we commemorated the sad necessity, by which the earth was reduced to its chaotic state. We then celebrated Cronus, through whom, the world after a term of darkness enjoyed again αιθερα, a pure serene sky: through whom also was produced Eros, that twofold, conspicuous, and beautiful Being.[457]

  Bryant has transformed Orpheus’ discussion of the primeval formation of the cosmos from chaos into an allusion to the degradation and corruption of the antediluvian earth,[458] followed by a clear sky mirroring the rainbow that embodies God’s covenant with Noah after the Flood.[459] Since ancient Greek was not widely studied in the eighteenth century, Bryant’s falsified translation entered nineteenth century scholarship unchallenged and was repeated uncritically throughout that century. Christian apologists, who adopted some of Bryant’s ideas, sometimes even glossed “Eros” explicitly as “rainbow” in order to support the literal truth of Genesis as witnessed by pagan records.

  The Arkite theory that pagan myths, like the story of Jason and the Argonauts, were corruptions of the Genesis narrative emerged from scholars like Bryant reasoning backward from a pre-determined conclusion. In those days, it was widely accepted that the Biblical account of creation and the Flood was literally true. Since it was literally true, it must therefore be the case that all other religious beliefs were false. To the degree that they were similar to the Bible it could only be due to the pagans corrupting the Biblical truth, which, being God’s Word, was the first and most excellent history ever written.

  Thus, when scholars like Jacob Bryant read the fragments of the Berossus, the Babylonian priest of Marduk, that described the Great Flood in detail similar to that of the Bible,[460] it proved that the Babylonians had recorded a corrupt tradition of Noah’s Flood. (We know today, of course, that the Babylonian and Sumerian flood myths predate their biblical counterpart.) From there, it was a short hop to identifying Jason and the Argonauts as Noah and the Ark (for Argo=Ark, they thought, assuming English to be a universal language), and seeing the Babylonian fish-god Oannes as Noah himself, Oannes being a corrupt form of Noah’s name.

  This belief was taken to absurd levels of spurious detail, seeing in every random word syllables related to “Noah” and the “Ark” (in English, of course) and in every boat or floating container the ship of Noah. Henry Lee outlined the theory, which he took very seriously, in his Sea Fables Explained in 1883, and it is laughable reading today. He first outlines the story of Oannes, half-fish and half-man, who rose up from the sea to teach the Babylonians civilization (See Chapter 25):

  In this tale we have a distorted account of the life and occupation of Noah after his escape from the deluge which destroyed his home and drowned his neighbours. Oannes was one of the names under which he was worshipped in Chaldea, at Erech (“the place of the ark”), as the sacred and intelligent fish-god, the teacher of mankind, the god of science and knowledge. There he was also called Oes, Hoa, Ea, Ana, Anu, Aun, and Oan. Noah was worshipped, also, in Syria and Mesopotamia, and in Egypt, at “populous No,” or Thebes—so named from “Theba,” “the ark.”

  The history of the coffin of Osiris is another version of Noah's ark, and the period during which that Egyptian divinity is said to have been shut up in it, after it was set afloat upon the waters, was precisely the same as that during which Noah remained in the ark.

  Dagon, also—sometimes called Odacon—the great fish-god of the Philistines and Babylonians, was another phase of Oannes. “Dag,” in Hebrew, signifies “a male fish,” and “Aun” and “Oan” were two of the names of Noah. “Dag-aun” or “Dag-oan” therefore means “the fish Noah.”[461]

  None of this was true; it was nothing more than a figment of a scholarly imagination that had forced evidence to a predetermined conclusion in service of religious ideology. Dagon was never a fish god; his name derives from dagan, a Canaanite word for grain, of which he was the god. The legend of Dagon as a fish-god derives from a misinterpretation of 1 Samuel 5:4, in which the top half of a statue of Dagon breaks off and falls before the Ark of the Covenant, “and only the stump of Dagon was left to him.” The phrase translated as “the stump” in the King James Version and literally reading “only Dagon” was wrongly glossed as “his fishy part” in the eleventh century on analogy with the Hebrew word for fish, dag, and associated in biblical commentary with the Roman poet Horace’s description of the Sirens in as human above the waist and fish below it.[462] The best answer is that the Hebrew text of 1 Samuel 5:4 is corrupt and missing a word; other texts such as the Septuagint and the Syriac translation interpolate “the trunk” into the phrase. Nevertheless, from this, the myth of Dagon as the fish god (conflating him with Oannes) was born. It was from this that Lovecraft took his Dagon for the aquatic story of the same name. From a few scraps of dubious philology, false analogies, and assumed conclusions an elaborate mythology of universal Noah worship was created.

  Since I think the Arkite worship theory (the “ancient ark-onaut theory,” if you will) is an interesting parallel to the ancient astronaut theory, I’d like to take a look at one more case of Arkist silliness that has very close parallels in today’s ancient astronaut nonsense. In Bryant’s New Syst
em, the eighteenth-century scholar attempted to make the case that both the Argo of the Greek Jason myth and the chest in which the Egyptian god Osiris had been entombed were corruptions of Noah’s Ark. In order to understand this, let’s examine Bryant’s claim point by point.

  The Argo, however, that sacred ship, which was said to have been framed by divine wisdom, is to be found there; and was certainly no other than the ark. The Grecians supposed it to have been built at Pagasæ in Thessaly, and thence navigated to Colchis. I shall hereafter shew the improbability of this story: and it is to be observed, that this very harbour, where it was supposed to have been constructed, was called the port of Deucalion. This alone would be a strong presumption, that in the history of the place there was a reference to the Deluge.[463]

  Deucalion was the Greek flood hero, often thought of as the Greek Noah. He and his wife survived a Flood sent by Zeus in an ark. Bryant here sees the similarities, but he attributes them to the Greeks stealing the story from the Jews, and reporting on a real Flood, rather than what we know today: the Hebrew and Greek stories both descend from an even more ancient Mesopotamian original. This is almost exactly how modern ancient astronaut theorists work with ancient myths, imagining them to all report corrupt versions of real alien encounters, without consideration for the established connections between cultures and peoples. Bryant, at least, had an excuse: The Mesopotamian Flood myth wasn’t discovered until after he was dead.

  The Grecians placed every antient record to their own account: their country was the scene of every action. The people of Thessaly maintained that Deucalion was exposed to a flood in their district, and saved upon mount Athos: the people of Phocis make him to be driven to Parnassus: the Dorians in Sicily say he landed upon mount Aetna. Lastly, the natives of Epirus suppose him to have been of their country, and to have founded the antient temple of Dodona. In consequence of this they likewise have laid claim to his history.[464]

  Bryant is correct that the Greeks often localized myths to their location, but he has taken this fact as evidence that Greek mythology can be divorced from Greece and reassigned to the Holy Land. This is actually quite similar to what Robert Temple did in The Sirius Mystery (1976), arguing that the myths of the Dogon of Africa were “really” Greek and, in turn, therefore Egyptian and Sumerian (see Chapters 34 and 42). Before him, Ignatius Donnelly, in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) used the same technique to revamp Arkism as survivals of the history of Atlantis rather than the Ark!

  In respect to the Argo, it was the same as the ship of Noah, of which the Baris of Egypt was a representation. It is called by Plutarch the ship of Osiris, who as I have mentioned, was exposed in an ark to avoid the fury of Typhon: “Having therefore privately taken the measure of Osiris’s body, and framed a curious ark, very finely beautified and just of the size of his body, he brought it to a certain banquet.”[465] The vessel in the celestial sphere, which the Grecians call the Argo, is a representation of the ship of Osiris, which out of reverence has been placed in the heavens. The original therefore of it must be looked for in Egypt. The very name of the Argo shews, what it alluded to; for Argus, as it should be truly expressed, signified precisely an ark, and was synonymous to Theba.[466]

  Now we get to the meat of the zaniness. Bryant claims that Noah’s Ark, Jason’s Argo, and the ship of Osiris are all the same boat because all three are the constellation Argo Navis in the night sky. (Argo Navis was once the largest constellation in the heavens, representing the back two-thirds of a boat, but it was broken up in the eighteenth century into four separate clusters.) This issue is a bit complex, but the main point is that we have no idea what the earliest peoples saw when they looked up in the night sky. The most generous modern estimate places Argo Navis’ invention prior to 2800 BCE (though this is highly speculative), but we have no evidence of what early Egyptians saw in the sky, and the suggestion that Argo Navis was known to the Egyptians before the coming of the Greeks is speculative at best.

  The question of the homology of “Argo” and “Ark” is another case of silliness. The word “ark” derives from the Old English earc, from the Latin arca, a box or chest. It has no direct connection to argos, the Greek word meaning “swift” or “shining” or “bright.” But even if it did, it is irrelevant: Noah’s “ark” is the English term for a boat that was known in Hebrew as teyvat, a word with no connection to either term whatsoever. This is the same type of linguistic word game modern ancient astronaut writers and alternative historians have used to create false connections between ancient cultures, such as the claim that Jesus spoke Quiché Mayan while dying on the cross.[467] Nevertheless, all of this “evidence” for an Argo-Ark-Argo Navis connection reappears uncritically in Temple’s Sirius Mystery, unchanged from when Bryant made it up 200 years earlier.[468] But back to Bryant:

  It is made use of in that sense by the priests and diviners of the Philistim; who, when the ark of God was to be restored to the Israelites, put the presents of atonement, which were to accompany it, into an Argus, אֲר֣וֹן, or sacred receptacle.[469]

  Here Bryant has joined yet another “ark” to his theory based on the coincidence of two English uses of the word Ark. The “Ark” of Noah was the teyvat Noah, but the Ark of the Covenant was the ʾĀrôn Hābərît; it is only the Vulgate’s use of the Latin word for box to describe both that led to the coincidence of the English terms.

  And as they were the Caphtorim, who made use of this term, to signify an holy vessel; we may presume that it was not unknown in Egypt, the region from whence they came. For this people were the children of Mizraim, as well as the native Egyptians, and their language must necessarily have been a dialect of that country. I have mentioned that many colonies went abroad under the title of Thebeans, or Arkites; and in consequence of this built cities called Theba.[470]

  Just as modern ancient astronaut writers and alternative historians look for spurious connections based on similarities of language, coincidences of art, etc., so earlier did Bryant create false correlations based on shared names. For him, Egyptian Thebes and Greek Thebes had to be cult centers of Ark worship. We know today that Greek Thebes had been Mycenaean TE-QA-DE (Thebasde), while Egyptian Thebes acquired its conventional name from the Greeks, who tried to transliterate the indigenous Egyptian term Ta-opet, the name of the Karnak temple complex. There is no need to postulate an Ark cult of Theban priests to explain it.

  In like manner there were many cities built of the name of Argos; particularly in Thessaly, Boeotia, Epirus, and Sicily: whence it is that in all these places there is some tradition of Deucalion, and the ark; however it may have been misapplied. The whole Peloponnesus was once called both Apia, and Argos. As there were many temples called both Theba and Argus in memory of the ark, they had priests, which were denominated accordingly.[471]

  The “misapplied” ark tradition involves Bryant projecting one wherever he needs it. As noted before, the Greek word argos has nothing to do with the English word for ark, and neither with the Hebrew word for Noah’s ship. The connection is entirely spurious, crafted out of sound-alike words, misread history, and plain ignorance. But when Bryant wrote most of this was forgivable because he did not have access to modern archaeological findings, current linguistic etymologies, or any ancient texts outside the Hebraic and Greco-Roman traditions.

  Bryant had accidentally struck upon the fact that Mesopotamian and Indo-European mythologies share motifs, but lacking a sound theory to explain them, he ended up constructing a towering edifice of speculation built on foundations of quicksand. His assumption of Biblical primacy is no different than the assumption of alien intervention or of origins in Atlantis, and all these theories are equally unsound. Modern ancient astronaut theorists have access to the full range of modern scholarly findings and yet they choose to rely on the same methods and techniques that have failed so spectacularly for more than three hundred years.

  49. Forks: The Devil’s Flatware

  How often have we heard people say that anc
ient history is boring, and that Atlantis, ancient astronauts, or wandering Phoenicians help to spice up the subject? Eighty years ago Lord Raglan complained that “Many educated people, however, continue to believe in [Great Zimbabwe’s] fabled construction by King Solomon, merely because they like to do so, and because the truth is ‘so dull,’ an expression that I have often heard applied to it.”[472] Many ask, what’s the harm in believing something romantic and irrational? The following example is perhaps not the most important, but it is certainly a fascinating look at how a false belief can snowball and significantly impact cultural practices. Our example is the humble fork.

  Our story begins with the rise of Christianity. Because Christianity is monotheistic, the early Church Fathers had to find some way to account for the pagan gods. Were they fictional? Or were they something evil? St. Augustine, drawing on Psalm 96:5, settled on declaring them “most impure demons, who desire to be thought gods.”[473] Therefore, the pagan gods were actually agents of the devil. The early Christians endowed the Devil of scripture with the symbols of Pluto, the Roman ruler of the Underworld. In late Hellenistic and Roman iconography, Pluto sported a “bident,” a two-pronged weapon similar to Poseidon’s trident. (This was perhaps inspired by, or maybe reflected in, Seneca’s Hercules Furens, in which Pluto uses a trident to drive Hercules from the Underworld.[474]) A Byzantine scholiast writing on Euripides’ Phoenician Women suggests that bidents and tridents had become interchangeable in Late Antiquity. By the Middle Ages, Pluto’s bident/trident had become the property of Satan, who succeeded him as imaginary ruler of the Underworld (Hades), which, as demonstrated by Dante, had become identified with the Christian Hell.