Video from 2014. The tomb later disappeared from the news almost completely.
The 2012 discovery of the Amphipolis Tomb in Macedonia created a media sensation and led to all sorts of speculation that this fantastic tomb might be the burial place of Alexander the Great, a member of his family, or his close friend and general, Hephaestion. In 2014 - 2015, there was a period of feverish activity at the site with new finds being announced on an almost daily basis. The tomb was probably the biggest archaeology story in the world at the time, then, inexplicably, it just seemed to disappear from the news as if it had never existed.
With its overwrought narration, dramatic music and anachronistic moral judgements (Alexander was the boogeyman!), this is one of the most sensationalized Alexander documentaries I've ever seen, but it's still pretty entertaining if you can overlook its moronic attempts to yank Alexander out of his historical context and turn him into some kind of deranged mass-murderer.
I've always found it irritating when psychiatrists are brought in to "analyze" characters from the remote past. Psychoanalyzing historical figures is complete nonsense, especially when you're dealing with someone like Alexander the Great, but the main problem with this kind of psychological approach to history is that it ignores the fact that the world is built by killers.
Alexander's story is well known from the ancient sources, especially through writers like Arrian (the Anabasis Alexandri, aka "The Campaigns of Alexander," (I can highly recommend the Landmark edition), but the question here involves Alexander's mental state in particular and, by extension, the human mind and the nature of society in general.
Calling Alexander a "psychopath," which many modern analysts try to do, doesn't make any sense. It's a modern term, for one thing, a vague diagnosis based on modern "civilized" values and standards of morality which have never applied to ancient history and don't even apply in the modern world. Did Alexander have an "antisocial personality disorder" characterized by a "lack of empathy and remorse?" The question's ridiculous on the face of it.
Alexander was highly social. He wasn't some outsider; his entire life was spent at the center of society. In fact, his ambition was to create a new society, a new empire. There's no way to know if he had empathy and remorse for the people who died in his wars, but even if he did, since when did "empathy and remorse" keep soldiers (and politicians) from slaughtering entire populations?
The history suggests that Alexander was more of a "goal-oriented killer" than an outright psychopath, but what does that mean exactly? Calling a soldier a "goal-oriented killer" is technically true, I guess, but it's a trivial distinction, a tautology. Generals use lethal force to achieve political ends, so every general could be said to be a "goal-oriented killer." And the same thing could be said of most contemporary politicians.
This whole process of trying to psychoanalyze Alexander just reflects the current tendency to medicalize the human condition and categorize almost every aspect of human behavior as a "mental disorder" requiring some form of psycho-pharmaceutical treatment, the more expensive the better. If Alexander was born today, the school system would put him on Prozac to curb his "aggressive and hyperactive" tendencies. I don't see that as progress.
These diagnoses of Alexander's personality are completely irrelevant because they ignore the most basic facts about history and human nature. War has always been the engine of human history. This is why history is a long chronicle of wars fought by warlike leaders. The state is the monopoly of violence over a given territory. That's all it is and all it will ever be.
Alexander was a member of the elite ruling family of a warrior society in a world of predatory warrior societies. Call them what you will --the elite, the nobility, the aristocrats, the royalty, the "representatives of the people" -- this ruling class has always had a different morality from the herd-values of their subject peoples. Wilfred Trotter called rulers like Alexander "wolves" in his 1919 classic "Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War." The rest of us are sheep to be sheared or eaten and that's not a value judgement or a political opinion. It's an observation based on history.
The sheep see the wolves as psychopathic killers, but the harsh truth is that the world is built by killers. Empires are built through war and societies are machines for the exploitation of the populations and resources in the territory controlled by the killers. We like to think we're beyond all that now, but the only difference between the modern world and the ancient and medieval worlds is that things were more fundamental back then and the true nature of human civilization is easier to see when you look at the distant past.
Alexander's tactical genius and the scale of his ambition turned him into an almost mythological figure, but in a lot of ways he wasn't all that different from the Macedonian warrior kings who had come before him. The things that really set him apart from his predecessors were his bold and innovative military techniques and the fact that he was a brilliant politician and propagandist.
Alexander has frequently been called a megalomaniac for believing himself to be a god, but the divine nature of kings wasn't all that unusual in those days, especially in Persia. There's no doubt that Alexander encouraged the belief that he was a god or at least a semi-divine hero descended from the heroes of Homer, but a lot of this was probably done for political advantage. Maybe he started to believe his own propaganda later on. If so, it wouldn't be the first time that absolute power has corrupted absolutely.
Alexander has also been condemned for his violent tactics, but there's nothing in the history that shows him as being particularly bloodthirsty. Even his occasional slaughter of populations was a selective, calculated and routine method used to punish cities which refused to surrender and to terrorize his enemies into submission. In other words, it was a military strategy, not an expression of some kind of inner sadism or blood lust. When it comes to mass slaughter, Alexander was nothing compared to the Assyrians, for instance, or the Huns, not to mention our modern states which killed millions during the last century.
The truth is that Alexander, while unique in the scale of his success, was still a fairly typical representative of the ruling elite of his time. He inherited his army from his father and he was just continuing his father's plans to conquer Persia, but Alexander did it on such a grand scale that he became a legend in his own time. He wasn't a psychopath and he wasn't suffering from some kind of mental disorder. He was a Macedonian warrior king.
That's something modern psychologists can't seem to grasp.
"At a remarkable site in northwest Saudi Arabia, archaeologists have discovered camelid sculptures unlike any others in the region. They are thought to date back to the first centuries BC or AD. The find sheds new light on the evolution of rock art in the Arabian Peninsula." Source: Science Daily.
Note: Located near caravan routes in the desert, this site may have been a way station or place of worship.
"Humans and chimpanzees are the only primates known to frequently engage in warfare. If this type of aggressive behavior was common during their evolution, then the fight-or-flight response likely played a critical role in adapting to the threat of deadly conflicts." Source: Science Daily.
"Our analyses reveal that ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with Near Easterners than present-day Egyptians, who received additional sub-Saharan admixture in more recent times. This analysis establishes ancient Egyptian mummies as a genetic source to study ancient human history and offers the perspective of deciphering Egypt’s past at a genome-wide level." Source: Nature (2017).
Comment: This study tends to support recent research showing that the ancient Egyptians were closely related to the Indo-Europeans of the Near East and Europe. In the old days before political correctness invaded the universities, the original Egyptians would have been called Mediterraneans or Mediterranean Caucasoids. According to this particular DNA study, black sub-Saharan African populations spread into Egypt during the post-Roman period, changing the genetic makeup of modern Egyptians. The findings are still tentative though:
"... we note that all our genetic data were obtained from a single site in Middle Egypt and may not be representative for all of ancient Egypt. It is possible that populations in the south of Egypt were more closely related to those of Nubia and had a higher sub-Saharan genetic component, in which case the argument for an influx of sub-Saharan ancestries after the Roman Period might only be partially valid and have to be nuanced."
According to one version of the Jesus story, Jesus was called "Jesus of Nazareth" because he was born in the village of Nazareth, thus fulfilling a Jewish prophecy about the birthplace of the future messiah. As it turns out, however, there's some question as to whether Nazareth actually existed during Jesus' time (assuming that he was a real person who lived during the first part of the 1st century AD). Maybe Nazareth was a real place during his supposed lifetime; maybe it wasn't. There doesn't seem to be any way to get a definite answer to the question.
That's not very surprising, though. Like everything else having to do with the historical Jesus, the issue is obscured by a lack of evidence and a fog of conflicting claims that are almost impossible to sort out. As usual, what you end up believing boils down to a matter of which authorities you trust and most people will end up trusting whoever reinforces their preconceptions.
Did Nazareth exist? According to Bart Ehrman, the well-known New Testament scholar, "[t]here are numerous compelling pieces of archaeological evidence that in fact Nazareth did exist in Jesus’ day, and that like other villages and towns in that part of Galilee, it was built on the hillside, near where the later rock-cut kokh tombs were built. For one thing, archaeologists have excavated a farm connected with the village, and it dates to the time of Jesus."
Video from 2009. Personally, I'm not convinced that this discovery, even if the dating is correct, provides more evidence of the truth of Biblical tradition.
There are a lot of skeptics who disagree with Ehrman, however. For example, Kenneth Humphreys, author of Jesus Never Existed, says that "[t]he world has been blessed by the fact that excavation at Nazareth has been conducted by Catholic archaeologists. In an earlier age they may well have 'found' sandals neatly inscribed with 'property of Jesus Christ'. As it is, they diligently extract every last drop of sanctity from some pretty meager findings. Yet for all their creative interpretations even the Franciscans cannot disguise the fact that the lack of evidence for a pre-Jesus village at the Nazareth site is virtually total."
Humphreys would say that Ehrman, a former Evangelical Christian who once studied at the Moody Bible Institute, is still hanging onto parts of his cherished, though long discarded, faith. Ehrman, on the other hand, would dismiss Humphreys as an unreliable and unscholarly internet writer not to be trusted. Maybe they're both right. Who knows? Whatever the case, Ehrman and Humphreys' opposing viewpoints basically summarize the controversy.
Neither of them really answer the question in any conclusive way, however, and after trying to research it for myself, I'm starting to think that it probably can't be settled one way or another. I'm also starting to think that it's not worth the effort.
Researching the historical Nazareth leads into the usual swamp of speculation, conflicting authorities, secular vs religious agendas, and migraine-inducing textual and archaeological interpretations.The linguistic analyses alone are particularly mind-numbing.
For instance, it's possible that Jesus was actually called "Jesus the Nazarene" and that the word "Nazarene" may have been (among other things) a title or a name for the early Christians rather than a place name. The Nazarenes were also an early Jewish sect, but it's hard to tell what that means in this context, assuming that it means anything at all.
The Greek word "Nazara" may be an early form of "Nazareth," but this depends on etymologies of Greek versions of ancient Aramaic words and other issues so murky they're impossible to decipher by a plebeian like myself. "The form Nazara is also found in the earliest [?] non-scriptural reference to the town, a citation by Sextus Julius Africanus dated about 221 CE," according to Wikipedia, Whether any of this is relevant or not is hard to say. It's all very confusing and puts a major strain on my tiny brain cells.
Ancient Nazareth wasn't a fictional place, at least during certain periods. According to Dr. Richard Carrier, we have solid documentary evidence that the village existed after 70 AD, so it's quite possible that it existed during Jesus' time, assuming that he actually lived during the first part of the 1st century AD. It's also possible that gospel writers working after 70 AD simply made the village Jesus' birthplace in order to conform to Jewish prophecies about the messiah. No one really knows one way or another.
Archaeological excavations in the area of modern Nazareth have produced some interesting results that don't have anything to do with Christianity. For instance, "a funerary and cult center at Kfar HaHoresh, about two miles from current Nazareth, dates back roughly 9000 years to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B era, leading archaeologists to identify Kfar HaHoresh as a major cult centre in that era." (Wikipedia). Relics of Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements have also been found in the area, but they were apparently destroyed by the Assyrians around 720 BC.
This ancient history is a lot more interesting than the question of whether Nazareth existed during Jesus' day. When you get right down to it, the issue is basically irrelevant. Even if the archaeological evidence proves that there was a village called Nazareth during the early part of the first century AD, that still doesn't tell us anything about when Jesus lived or if he was born there or even if he actually existed. For all we know, the whole argument centers around the birthplace of an entirely fictional character.
"The old city of Shechem dates back to about an estimated four thousand years. Shechem is mentioned in the third-millennium Ebla tablets found at Tell Mardikh in the context of a city of which Rasap (Resheph) is the patron deity. Shechem was a commercial center due to its position in the middle of vital trade routes through the region. It traded in local grapes, olives, wheat, livestock and pottery between the middle Bronze Age and the late Hellenic Period (1900-100 BC)." (Wikipedia)
"After the conquest of Canaan, Shechem became an important religious center. The two mountains, Gerizim and Ebal, between which the city was situated, had been previously designated as the places where the Levites should recite their blessings; and under Joshua this arrangement was carried into effect (Deut. xxvii. 11; Josh. viii. 32-35). It was at Shechem that Joshua drew up the statutes of the Mosaic religion and set up a stone as a monument in the temple of Yhwh under the oak-tree (Josh. xxiv. 1-28). Shortly before his death Joshua assembled at Shechem the elders and judges of Israel, giving them his last recommendations and exhorting them to adhere to the cult of Yhwh." Source: Jewish Encyclopedia.
"Until very recently, there was no evidence outside the Bible for the existence of King David. There are no references to him in Egyptian, Syrian or Assyrian documents of the time, and the many archaeological digs in the City of David [ancient Jerusalem] failed to turn up so much as a mention of his name." Source: Jewish Virtual Library. Recent finds, however, suggest that David and his kingdom might have existed after all:
"The Tel Dan Stele, an inscribed stone erected by a king of Damascus in the late 9th/early 8th centuries BCE to commemorate his victory over two enemy kings, contains the phrase ביתדוד, bytdwd, which most scholars translate as 'House of David'. Other scholars, such as Anson Rainey have challenged this reading, but it is likely that this is a reference to a dynasty of the Kingdom of Judah which traced its ancestry to a founder named David. The Mesha Stele from Moab, dating from approximately the same period, may also contain the name David in two places, although this is less certain than the mention in the Tel Dan inscription." (Wikipedia)
As far as I can tell, the Tel Dan and Meshe stellae are the only archaeological artifacts supporting the historicity of King David. I could be wrong about that, however. In any case, there's a lot of debate about how to interpret these monuments:
"Since 1993–1994, when the first fragment was discovered and published, the Tel Dan stele has been the object of great interest and debate among epigraphers and biblical scholars along the whole range of views from those who find little of historical value in the biblical version of Israel's ancient past to those who are unconcerned about the biblical version, to those who wish to defend it." (Wikipedia)
As for the Meshe stela, most scholars seem to believe it's genuine, but a few have questioned its authenticity. The interpretation of its inscriptions is also a matter of dispute.
So did King David and his empire exist? Who knows? As usual with questions like this, researching the issue is a waste of time because after a certain point you just end up digging yourself into a hopeless quagmire of recondite arguments and counter-arguments clouded with religious bias and national sentiments. Was the Mesha stele translated correctly? I have no idea. And for all I know the inscription on the Tel Dan Stele actually refers to the Great Cthulhu (praise be his name).
Personally, I suspect that the figure of David presented in the Bible is more mythical than real. Even if there was a historical David who ruled over some kind of kingdom or tribal confederation, his power and the scale of his kingdom have probably been blown way out of proportion by thousands of years of accumulated legends.
Assuming there was a real David, it's possible that he had nothing in common with the Biblical David at all. For instance, arch-sceptic Kenneth Humphreys, author of Jesus Never Existed, argues that "King David" was probably just a bandit in real life:
"If a historical 'Dawid' inspired tales of a legendary king, the original was an inconsequential bandit chieftain in the Judaean hills, nothing more. Possibly the only element of truth in the biblical story is the episode of David as renegade and outlaw leader, living from theft." Source: Jesus Never Existed.
Humphreys also speculates that the first Israelite kingdom didn't begin with this David character at all:
"An Israelite 'empire' did eventually emerge – but in Samaria not Judah, and in the 9th, not the 10th century BC. Its founder was Omri [the sixth king of Israel according to the Bible, not David], a soldier/king who built himself the impressive palace-city of Samaria on the Syrian model. His dynasty – son Ahab, grandsons Ahaziah and Jehoram – raised a powerful army, built the cities of Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor, and ruled a successful state until defeated by Hazael of Aram-Damascus in 842 BC." (Ibid)
I have no idea if Humphreys is right or not, but when it comes to religion in general and the Bible in particular, it's safe to assume that we're dealing with legend, not reality.
Next video shows several examples of the Apocynaceae or Dogbane family. The audio's terrible, the narration almost incomprehensible, but this is one of the best Apocynaceae videos I could find. For some reason, most of the YouTube videos about these plants were made in India. I'm not sure how many of the plants shown here actually contain Ibogaine, but at least the video shows what they look like.
"The psychoactivity of the root barks of [the] Iboga tree, from which Ibogaine is extracted, was first discovered by the Pygmy tribe of Central Africa who passed the knowledge to the Bwiti tribe of Gabon [see below] ... Ibogaine-containing preparations are used for medicinal and ritual purposes within African spiritual traditions of the Bwiti, who claim to have learned it from the Pygmy peoples."
Video from 2015.
The origins of the pygmies is a mystery. "A commonly held belief is that African Pygmies are the direct descendants of Late Stone Agehunter-gatherer peoples of the central African rainforest, who were partially absorbed or displaced by later immigration of agricultural peoples, and adopted their Central Sudanic, Ubangian, and Bantu languages. This view has no archaeological support, and ambiguous support from genetics and linguistics." (Wikipedia)
Considering the fact that these are hunter-gatherers living in the African rainforest, the lack of archaeological evidence isn't surprising. The prehistory of Ibogaine is just as obscure, but it seems plausible, even likely, that the Stone Age ancestors of the pygmies used the plant for ritualistic and healing purposes. According to the Crossroads Treatment Center, "The Iboga plant — found in West Africa’s Gabon and Cameroon — has existed, most likely, for thousands of years. As a psychoactive guide, traditionally, the root bark of the plant was eaten to induce visions and heal an assortment of ailments."
Next video shows a traditional Bwiti ritual in Gabon which makes use of the Iboga plant.
"Bwiti practitioners use the psychedelic, dissociative root bark of the Tabernanthe iboga plant, specially cultivated for the religion, to promote radical spiritual growth, to stabilize community and family structure, to meet religious requirements, and to resolve pathological problems. The root bark has been consumed for hundreds of years in a Bwiti rite of passage ceremony, as well as in initiation rites and acts of healing. The experience yields complex visions and insights anticipated to be valuable to the initiate and the chapel."
The Bwiti were apparently introduced to Ibogaine by the pygmies and the plant's ritualistic use probably dates back all the way to the Paleolithic.
Item: "A young backpacker has died in Peru after taking hallucinogens in an ancient Amazonian 'cleansing ceremony'." Source: Daily Mail (2015).
"24-year-old Matthew Dawson-Clarke consumed ayahuasca [also known as yage], a hallucinogenic drink made from vines, as part of a seven-day retreat to foster a spiritual awakening."
Comment: This kid was another victim of "yage tourism" by westerners looking for enlightenment in the jungles of South America. Like the rise in interest in neopaganism and eastern religions, yage tourism is yet another example of the spiritual malaise that has spread through the West as a direct result of the decline of Christianity. It's also an example of what has been called commercial shamanism, the selling of ancient traditions to desperate or curious westerners.
Note: The use of ayahuasca by Amazonian shamans is commonly referred to as "ancient," but it's hard to tell just how far back it goes. According to the Erowid Ayahuasca Vault, the "earliest known western record of the psychoactive effects of ayahuasca ... in the Brazilian Amazon" appeared in 1852 when the "English ethnobotanist Richard Spruce [described] the use of the ayahuasca vine ... by the Tukanoan Indian tribes in Brazil and Colombia." Apparently, Jesuit priests first observed the use of ayahuasca in the 1700s, but Spruce was the first scientist to actually conduct any kind of study of its properties.
There has been speculation that ayahuasca may have originated with the Incas. "Quechua is best known as the 'language of the Incas,' so the association of Quechua with Ayahuasca has, not surprisingly, given rise to speculation that Ayahuasca may have originated with the Incas or been spread by the Incas."
According to Highpine, "Evidence strongly suggests that the [region along the Rio Napo river] is the place of origin both of the ... cultural complex that is now known as 'Ayahuasca shamanism.' From the north, indigenous shamans and researchers alike point to the Napo as the place of origin. Brabec de Mori (2011:24) says, 'Among most researchers, there is a consensus that an ‘origin’ of ayahuasca, however remote it may be, should be located in the western Amazonian lowlands around the Rio Napo.'"
Alexander The Great: The World Is Built By Killers
With its overwrought narration, dramatic music and anachronistic moral judgements (Alexander was the boogeyman!), this is one of the most sensationalized Alexander documentaries I've ever seen, but it's still pretty entertaining if you can overlook its moronic attempts to yank Alexander out of his historical context and turn him into some kind of deranged mass-murderer.
I've always found it irritating when psychiatrists are brought in to "analyze" characters from the remote past. Psychoanalyzing historical figures is complete nonsense, especially when you're dealing with someone like Alexander the Great, but the main problem with this kind of psychological approach to history is that it ignores the fact that the world is built by killers.
Alexander's story is well known from the ancient sources, especially through writers like Arrian (the Anabasis Alexandri, aka "The Campaigns of Alexander," (I can highly recommend the Landmark edition), but the question here involves Alexander's mental state in particular and, by extension, the human mind and the nature of society in general.
Calling Alexander a "psychopath," which many modern analysts try to do, doesn't make any sense. It's a modern term, for one thing, a vague diagnosis based on modern "civilized" values and standards of morality which have never applied to ancient history and don't even apply in the modern world. Did Alexander have an "antisocial personality disorder" characterized by a "lack of empathy and remorse?" The question's ridiculous on the face of it.
Alexander was highly social. He wasn't some outsider; his entire life was spent at the center of society. In fact, his ambition was to create a new society, a new empire. There's no way to know if he had empathy and remorse for the people who died in his wars, but even if he did, since when did "empathy and remorse" keep soldiers (and politicians) from slaughtering entire populations?
The history suggests that Alexander was more of a "goal-oriented killer" than an outright psychopath, but what does that mean exactly? Calling a soldier a "goal-oriented killer" is technically true, I guess, but it's a trivial distinction, a tautology. Generals use lethal force to achieve political ends, so every general could be said to be a "goal-oriented killer." And the same thing could be said of most contemporary politicians.
This whole process of trying to psychoanalyze Alexander just reflects the current tendency to medicalize the human condition and categorize almost every aspect of human behavior as a "mental disorder" requiring some form of psycho-pharmaceutical treatment, the more expensive the better. If Alexander was born today, the school system would put him on Prozac to curb his "aggressive and hyperactive" tendencies. I don't see that as progress.
These diagnoses of Alexander's personality are completely irrelevant because they ignore the most basic facts about history and human nature. War has always been the engine of human history. This is why history is a long chronicle of wars fought by warlike leaders. The state is the monopoly of violence over a given territory. That's all it is and all it will ever be.
Alexander was a member of the elite ruling family of a warrior society in a world of predatory warrior societies. Call them what you will --the elite, the nobility, the aristocrats, the royalty, the "representatives of the people" -- this ruling class has always had a different morality from the herd-values of their subject peoples. Wilfred Trotter called rulers like Alexander "wolves" in his 1919 classic "Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War." The rest of us are sheep to be sheared or eaten and that's not a value judgement or a political opinion. It's an observation based on history.
The sheep see the wolves as psychopathic killers, but the harsh truth is that the world is built by killers. Empires are built through war and societies are machines for the exploitation of the populations and resources in the territory controlled by the killers. We like to think we're beyond all that now, but the only difference between the modern world and the ancient and medieval worlds is that things were more fundamental back then and the true nature of human civilization is easier to see when you look at the distant past.
Alexander's tactical genius and the scale of his ambition turned him into an almost mythological figure, but in a lot of ways he wasn't all that different from the Macedonian warrior kings who had come before him. The things that really set him apart from his predecessors were his bold and innovative military techniques and the fact that he was a brilliant politician and propagandist.
Alexander has frequently been called a megalomaniac for believing himself to be a god, but the divine nature of kings wasn't all that unusual in those days, especially in Persia. There's no doubt that Alexander encouraged the belief that he was a god or at least a semi-divine hero descended from the heroes of Homer, but a lot of this was probably done for political advantage. Maybe he started to believe his own propaganda later on. If so, it wouldn't be the first time that absolute power has corrupted absolutely.
Alexander has also been condemned for his violent tactics, but there's nothing in the history that shows him as being particularly bloodthirsty. Even his occasional slaughter of populations was a selective, calculated and routine method used to punish cities which refused to surrender and to terrorize his enemies into submission. In other words, it was a military strategy, not an expression of some kind of inner sadism or blood lust. When it comes to mass slaughter, Alexander was nothing compared to the Assyrians, for instance, or the Huns, not to mention our modern states which killed millions during the last century.
The truth is that Alexander, while unique in the scale of his success, was still a fairly typical representative of the ruling elite of his time. He inherited his army from his father and he was just continuing his father's plans to conquer Persia, but Alexander did it on such a grand scale that he became a legend in his own time. He wasn't a psychopath and he wasn't suffering from some kind of mental disorder. He was a Macedonian warrior king.
That's something modern psychologists can't seem to grasp.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Alexander, Commentary, Culture, Videos | Permalink