Ancient World Review

Did The Chinese Reach Ancient America?

Video from 2016.

"Petroglyphs found across North America have suggested that ancient Chinese explorers made contact with Native Americans. Yaoliang Song, a professor at the East China Normal University in Shanghai who has studied petroglyphs as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, recently announced that he supports the interpretation that the petroglyphs are of ancient Chinese origin." Source: Ancient Origins. (This is the 2016 article reviewed in the video.)

"John A. Ruskamp Jr., Ed.D., has led the  research on the petroglyphs  over the past few years, enlisting the help of experts such as David N. Keightley, Ph.D., who is considered by many to be the leading analyst in America of early Chinese oracle-bone writings."

I have no idea what to make of this. The theory is controversial, naturally, and I'm not sure where it stands as of 2020. If prehistoric Chinese mariners did reach the Americas it would have required a long, dangerous voyage, but we know that ancient Austronesians were island-hopping across the Pacific back then so I suppose it's possible. The similarity of the petroglyphs found in Arizona and New Mexico with the written characters in China is a matter of interpretation, but they do look similar even if they're not exactly the same:

"These ancient scripts were not 100 percent uniform, some variance was employed by each artist. But Ruskamp has determined that the glyphs are close enough to known examples of ancient Chinese script that it is more than 95 percent likely the similarity is due to direct contact with the Chinese and not due to chance."

The petroglyphs in question here are a couple thousand years old. I'm not sure if anyone has dated them more precisely than that, but Ruskamp has said (according to Ancient Origins) that the Chinese oracle-bone writings they supposedly match are from the Shang Dynasty ( app. 1600-1050 BC).

Note: This theory shouldn't be confused with the 1421 Theory, which argues that a Chinese fleet reached the Americas around 70 years before Columbus. This idea, proposed by British author Gavin Menzies, has been widely dismissed as pseudo-history, but I can't comment on it because I haven't read Menzies' book.

Prehistoric Human Sacrifice In Wisconsin (2015)

Video from 2015.

Note: "Aztalan is the site of an ancient Mississippian culture settlement that flourished during the 10th to 13th centuries. The indigenous people constructed massive earthwork mounds for religious and political purposes. They were part of a widespread culture with important settlements throughout the Mississippi River valley and its tributaries. Their trading network extended from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, and into the southeast of the present-day United States." Source: Wikipedia.

Related: Aztalan: Wisconsin’s famous archaeology site (a podcast featuring Robert Birmingham, former Wisconsin State Archaeologist).

The Man-Eating Wendigo

"The Wendigo is a horrifying creature of Algonquian Native American legends that would devour human flesh to survive a harsh winter. But are they only myth, or are there really cannibalistic humanoids waiting in forests for their next victim?" Source: Ancient Origins.

"The Algonquians are some of the most extensive and numerous of the Native American groups in North America, and they once lived all along the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes Region. However, Wendigo-like creatures are also found in the legends of other Native American tribes, including the neighbors of the Algonquians, the Iroquois. Amongst these peoples, a creature known as the Stonecoat bears some similarities to the Wendigo.

"In some traditions, humans overpowered by greed could turn into wendigos; the myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation. Other sources say wendigos were created when a human resorted to cannibalism to survive. Humans could also turn into wendigos by being in contact with them for too long." (Wikipedia)

Comment: Wendigos are the kind of legendary beasts or cryptids studied by cryptozoologists. If you're interested in the general subject I can recommend the  Cryptozoology Anthology: Strange & Mysterious Creatures in Men's Adventure Magazines. This is an excellent book, described by one reviewer as the "Men's Mag Monster Motherlode."

Ancient Blanket Made With 11,500 Turkey Feathers

This news clip of a 1937 turkey-feather fashion show doesn't have anything to do with the story. I just thought it was kind of bizarre.

"The ancient inhabitants of the American Southwest used around 11,500 feathers to make a turkey feather blanket, according to a new paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The people who made such blankets were ancestors of present-day Pueblo Indians such as the Hopi, Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblos." Source: Science Daily.

Note: This blanket is around 800 years old. Apparently the researchers didn't actually count the feathers in the blanket but estimated the number after counting  the "body feathers from the pelts of wild turkeys purchased from ethically and legally compliant dealers in Idaho." Next video shows one method for making a blanket out of these feathers. No telling how warm this would have been.

Roman Satire And Hipponax, The Original Troll

"Although there were earlier Latin writers instrumental in developing the genre of satire, the official founder of this Roman genre is Lucilius, of whom we have only fragments. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal followed, leaving us many complete satires about the life, vice, and moral decay they saw around them." Source: Thought Company.

From a discussion of Horace's satirical poetry. Closed-captions helpful.

According to Wikipedia, "the first Roman to discuss satire critically was Quintilian, who invented the term to describe the writings of Gaius Lucilius. The two most prominent and influential ancient Roman satirists are Horace and Juvenal, who wrote during the early days of the Roman Empire. Other important satirists in ancient Latin are Gaius Lucilius and Persius. Satire in their work is much wider than in the modern sense of the word, including fantastic and highly coloured humorous writing with little or no real mocking intent. When Horace criticized Augustus, he used veiled ironic terms. In contrast, Pliny reports that the 6th-century-BC poet Hipponax wrote satirae that were so cruel that the offended hanged themselves."

Hipponax: The Original Troll

Horace's satire was relatively gentle. Juvenal, of course, was much harsher and Hipponax sounds like the ancient prototype of the modern cyberbully who occasionally drives unstable teenagers to suicide. Most of his work, unfortunately, has been lost, but here's a line from one of his poems:

"What navel-snipper [midwife] wiped and washed you as you squirmed about, you crack-brained creature?"

An early feminist, Hipponax said that "There are two days when a woman is a pleasure: the day one marries her and the day one carries out her dead body."

If Hipponax was alive today he would probably be a very popular speaker on university campuses. Strangely enough, his brand of progressive poetry seems to have evolved out of an earlier religious tradition:

"Hipponax composed within the Iambus tradition which, in the work of Archilochus, a hundred years earlier, appears to have functioned as ritualized abuse and obscenity associated with the religious cults of Demeter and Dionysus but which, in Hipponax's day, seems rather to have had the purpose of entertainment. In both cases, the genre featured scornful abuse, a bitter tone and sexual permissiveness. Unlike Archilochus, however, he frequently refers to himself by name, emerging as a highly self-conscious figure, and his poetry is more narrow and insistently vulgar in scope: 'with Hipponax, we are in an unheroic, in fact, a very sordid world', amounting to 'a new conception of the poet's function.'" (Wikipedia)

Hipponax was pretty popular in his day, but the Christians who came along later didn't like him for some reason and even the pagan emperor Julian told his priests not to read his stuff. In modern terms, Hipponax's poetry created so much butt-hurt than it was banned long before social media ever existed. That's probably why so little of it has survived.

The Structure Of A Medieval Manuscript

"Most medieval manuscripts were written on specially treated animal skins, called parchment or vellum (paper did not become common in Europe until around 1450)." Source: The Getty Museum.

"... After the surface had been prepared, the parchment was ruled, usually with leadpoint or colored ink ... The scribe wrote with a quill pen made from the feather of a goose or swan. The end of the feather was cut to form the writing nib. A slit cut into the middle of the nib allowed the ink to flow smoothly to the tip of the pen. The appearance of the script—whether rounded or angular, dense or open—was partly dependent upon the shape and the angle of the nib."

"... Once the writing and illuminating had been completed, the parchment sheets were folded and nested into groups called gatherings. The gatherings were ordered in their proper sequence and sewn together onto cords or leather thongs that served as supports. Once the sewing was finished, the ends of the supports were laced through channels carved into the wooden boards that formed the front and back covers of the book. The binding was usually then covered in leather or a decorative fabric."

The Ancient Art Of Parchment Making

Note: The use of parchment apparently dates all the way back to the time of Herodotus (5th cent BC) when books were called "skins" in some parts of Greece. Papyrus was a lot more common, though. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. rev., "[i]n the production of books parchment played only a minor role compared with papyrus, which remained the dominant writing material throughout Greek and Roman antiquity."

The Evolution Of The King James Bible

"The King James Bible is the most widely read work in English literature, a masterpiece of translation whose stately cadences and transcendent phrases have long been seen, even by secular readers, as having emerged from a kind of collective divine inspiration." Source: New York Times (2015).

"But now, in an unassuming notebook held in an archive at the University of Cambridge, an American scholar has found what he says is an important new clue to the earthly processes behind that masterpiece: the earliest known draft, and the only one definitively written in the hand of one of the roughly four dozen translators who worked on it."

Comment: This isn't exactly ancient or even late medieval history, but I love old books and this discovery provides an interesting insight into how the modern Bible evolved over the centuries. In this case, a 16th - 17th century scholar had to make decisions about how to translate and interpret older texts, a process that must have been repeated who knows how many times since the Bible first came into existence.

This translation process inevitably introduced errors into the "inerrant word of God." According to the Huffington Post, "[t]he mistakes stem from five flawed translation techniques: etymology, internal structure, cognates, old mistranslations, and misunderstood metaphor." The really interesting question is whether an original, accurate version of the Bible ever actually existed.

That question still hasn't been answered. "For centuries, Bible scholars examined two ancient texts to elucidate the original language of the Bible [Old Testament]: the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint," according to Bible History Daily. One of these, the Septuagint, is itself a translation (into Greek) of the Old Testament. Other manuscripts are used as well. As for the New Testament, it consists of an anthology of old texts thought to date back to the 1st or 2nd centuries AD and perhaps later. These manuscripts are probably copies themselves.

Next video shows the oldest known surviving copy of the Christian Bible, the Greek Codex Sinaiticus, which dates back to the 4th century AD.

Considering all the claims that are made about the Bible's literal truth, its actual history is mind-boggling. There was no "original Bible" as such since it was assembled from dozens of existing manuscripts, and who knows where they came from or how many times they had been copied. Politicized church conferences decided which manuscripts to include and which to leave out. Translators made errors in translating the works of other translators, and copyists made errors and deliberate changes when they copied the texts of the translators.

Another thing: If you go looking for the original version of the Bible, you have to decide which Bible you're talking about. There are literally hundreds of different English versions and translations in use today, and there are a lot of differences between modern Bibles and various medieval versions. The search for the "authentic" Bible is futile, though. It will only lead you into a morass of ancient Biblical manuscripts and paleography. Good luck trying to figure out if the 10th commandment prohibits taking, not coveting, or if the pregnant woman in Isaiah 7:14 was actually a virgin.

Related: What kind of text is the King James Bible? (Bart Ehrman)

The Trinity Is Pagan

Comment: I don't believe in God myself, so the nature of the god I don't believe in has always been more or less irrelevant. Now that I think about it, though, this three-faced Christian deity seems to be completely pagan.

The Christian god has three aspects or personalities, just like the pagan gods had different manifestations. Take Zeus, for instance. Zeus Olympios was the king of the gods, Zeus Georgos the god of crops and harvests in Athens, Zeus Tallaios a solar deity worshiped in Crete, and so on.

Another example of a polymorphous deity would be the Hindu god Brahma, usually pictured as having four faces signifying different aspects of his underlying nature. (Image: Probably Nurpur, Punjab Hills, Northern India [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.)

As it turns out, the Christian god we're all so familiar with has deeper pagan roots than I would have thought.

The concept of the Trinity as such isn't found in the Bible, apparently, but there are references to "the Father, Son and Holy Ghost." The idea of a three-in-one god was basically invented by the church, which borrowed heavily from pagan philosophy when it came up with the doctrine. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he doctrine of the trinity . . . is not a product of the earliest Christian period, and we do not find it carefully expressed before the end of the second century."

The Trinity doctrine was influenced by Greek metaphysical philosophy and created a split in the early church:

"Such metaphysical thinking was common among the intelligentsia of the Greek world and carried over into the thinking of the Roman world of the New Testament period and succeeding centuries." Source: United Church of God. The so-called "true" church "resisted such infiltration" and "... [t]wo distinct threads of Christianity split and developed separately—one true to the plain and simple teachings of the Bible and the other increasingly compromised with pagan thought and practices adopted from the Greco-Roman world."

Apparently the doctrine of the Trinity wasn't formally accepted until the fourth century when Christianity became the official state religion of what was left of the Roman empire:

"Nontrinitarianism (or antitrinitarianism) refers to Christian belief systems that reject the doctrine of the Trinity as found in the Nicene Creed as not having a scriptural origin. Nontrinitarian views differ widely on the nature of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Various nontrinitarian views, such as Adoptionism, Monarchianism, and Arianism existed prior to the formal definition of the Trinity doctrine in AD 325, 360, and 431, at the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus, respectively. Following the final victory of orthodoxy at Constantinople in 381, Arianism was driven from the Empire, retaining a foothold amongst the Teutonic tribes. When the Franks converted to Catholicism in 496, however, it gradually faded out. Nontrinitarianism was later renewed in the Gnosticism of the Cathars in the 11th through 13th centuries, in the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, and in some groups arising during the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century." (Wikipedia)

It's ironic that some of the so-called heretical Christian movements, at least in this one aspect, were more scripturally "pure" than the official church.

Vaguely related: Duterte calls trinity doctrine "silly."

The Mysterious Ancient Monoliths Of Asuka Nara

"Asuka (飛鳥) was the Imperial capital of Japan during the Asuka period (538 – 710 AD), which takes its name from this place. It is located in the present-day village of Asuka, Nara Prefecture." (Wikipedia)

Ancient shrines, tombs, temples (some still in use) and other buildings can be found in Asuka. Archaeologists "continue to uncover relics from these ruins. Recent discoveries in the area include Wado coins, believed to be some of the oldest coins in Japan, and paintings in the Kitora [next video] and Takamatsuzuka Kofun, or tombs.

"The Ishibutai Kofun is also located in Asuka. On March 12, 2004, the discovery of the remains of a residence's main building adjacent to the kofun was announced. It is likely that the residence belonged to Soga no Umako [551? - 626 AD], who is believed to have been entombed in the kofun."