"Proto-Elamite is the last undeciphered writing system from the Ancient Near East with a substantial number of sources (more than 1600 published texts). It was used for a relatively short period around 3000 BC across what is today Iran." Source: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CLDI, 2013).
Note: Wikipedia describes the Proto-Elamite script as "largely" undeciphered, so there may have been some progress in translation recently.
Reflectance Transformation Imaging, the technology Oxford used to study their proto-Elamite tablets (see video above), "...is a computational photographic method that captures a subject’s surface shape and color and enables the interactive re-lighting of the subject from any direction," according to Cultural Heritage Imaging.
"For a majority of the tablets the only available images are hand copies, drawn 80-100 years ago, but for a growing number of texts kept in the Louvre Museum high quality images are available," according to the CDLI.
Atlantis, also known in Greek mythology as the island of Atlas, was "the oldest surviving wonderland in Greek philosophy," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised):
"Plato is the earliest and chief source for the story, said to have been told to Solon by Egyptian priests, of a huge and wealthy island ... outside the Pillars of Hercules which once ruled 'Libya ... as far as Egypt' and 'Europe as far as Tyrrhenia [Etruria] until, in an expedition to conquer the rest, its rulers were defeated by the Athenians, the island shortly after sinking overnight beneath the Atlantic after 'violent earthquakes and floods'".
All of the legends about Atlantis can be traced back to two of Plato's dialogues: Timaeus and Critias. According to Wikipedia, "Some ancient writers viewed Atlantis as fictional or metaphorical myth; others believed it to be real. Aristotle believed that Plato, his teacher, had invented the island to teach philosophy. The philosopher Crantor, a student of Plato's student Xenocrates, is cited often as an example of a writer who thought the story to be historical fact. His work, a commentary on Timaeus, is lost, but Proclus, a Neoplatonist of the fifth century AD, reports on it."
"There is no neat physical description of Jesus in the Gospels or in ancient Christian literature. But there are incidental details. From the Bible (for example, Mark 6:56) you can discover that he wore a mantle – a large shawl ('himation' in Greek) – which had tassels, described as 'edges'; a distinctively Jewish tallith in a form it was in antiquity. Usually made of wool, a mantle could be large or small, thick or fine, coloured or natural, but for men there was a preference for undyed types." Source: The Conversation.
"He walked in sandals, as implied in multiple Biblical passages (see Matthew 3:11; Mark 1:7, 6:9; John 1:27), and we now know what ancient Judaean sandals were like as they have been preserved in dry caves by the Dead Sea.
"He wore a tunic (chitōn), which for men normally finished slightly below the knees, not at the ankles. Among men, only the very rich wore long tunics. Indeed, Jesus specifically identifies men who dress in long tunics ('stolai', Mark 12:38) as wrongly receiving honour from people who are impressed by their fine attire, when in fact they unjustly devour widows’ houses."
"Jesus’s tunic was also made of one piece of cloth only (John 19:23-24). That’s strange, because mostly tunics were made of two pieces sewn at the shoulders and sides. One-piece tunics in first-century Judaea were normally thin undergarments or children’s wear. We shouldn’t think of contemporary underwear, but wearing a one-piece on its own was probably not good form. It was extremely basic."
Comment: All of this assumes, of course, that Jesus actually existed.
"Alfred the Great, King of Wessex from 871 and King of the Anglo-Saxons from 886 to 899, is widely touted as establishing England's first Royal fleet but research led by Flinders Medieval Studies Ph.D. candidate Matt Firth has found evidence that the Anglo-Saxons' first recorded naval victory occurred 20 years before Alfred was crowned King of Wessex and 24 years before his first recorded naval victory." Source: Phys.org.
"...Using a combination of tenth-century historical texts and the growing archeological evidence for medieval ship design, the new research shows that Alfred was not the first English monarch to coordinate a fleet to defend the country against Viking attack.
"...The new research also sheds fresh light on the famous burial ships of medieval England and Scandinavia—a topical archeological issue because of new discoveries in Iceland and Norway in the past 18 months."
American Philosophical Society Annual Meeting, April 2017.
"The history of China before the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912 and the People’s Republic of China in 1949 generally is thought of in terms of a succession of dynasties, beginning with the legendary Xia dynasty (circa 2100 BCE - circa 1600 BCE) and the Shang dynasty (circa 1600 BCE - 1046 BCE), and ending with the Qing dynasty of 1644 - 1911. The oldest records of Chinese history date from around 1600 BCE. Presented on this timeline are manuscripts, books, and maps made in China and for the most part written in Chinese between circa 1199 BCE and 1931. These documents show the complexity and richness of Chinese civilization over a period of more than three millennia." Source: "Chinese Books, Manuscripts, Maps and Prints," World Digital Library (lots of images from ancient Chinese manuscripts can be found here).
This reading is from the great Voices of the Past channel. The excerpt is from the medieval Book of Tang, but I'm not sure if this is the old book or the new:
"The standard history of anatomy traces its roots back to classical Greece, but a new reading of a recently discovered Chinese text argues that the Chinese were also among the earliest anatomists." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"Writing in The Anatomical Record, Vivien Shaw and Isabelle Winder of Bangor University, UK and Rui Diogo of Howard University, U.S., interpret the Mawangdui medical manuscripts found in a Chinese tomb in the early 1970s, as the earliest surviving anatomical description of the human body."
Note: Mawangdui, an archaeological site in Changsa, China, contains the tombs of three people from the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 9 AD). These medical manuscripts were discovered in Tomb 3 along with "a wealth of classical texts," according to Wikipedia.
"At the start of the Tang dynasty, in the early 7th century, a young wandering monk embarked on a 16-year long voyage from the imperial capital Chang’an (today’s Xian) to India to collect Buddhist manuscripts. At the time Chang’an was six times bigger than Rome at its height, with a population of over one million – the epicenter of Asian civilization." Source: UNZ Review (2019).
3D animation of ancient Chang'an.
"History ended up converting Xuanzang into a legend and a national hero in China – although in the West he would never reach Marco Polo levels of popularity.
"Xuanzang had embarked on a quest that still resonates today. He wanted to know whether all men – or just an enlightened few – could attain Buddhahood. There was only one way to find out: ride all the way to India and bring back Sanskrit texts to China, especially from the Yogacara school of Buddhism, which professed that the outside world did not exist: it was merely a projection of one’s consciousness."
If immortality means that people remember your name, then the "mad Roman emperor" Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, more commonly known as Caligula, is definitely immortal. Everybody's heard of him even if they've never cracked a history book, which just goes to show that being a "good ruler" doesn't necessarily guarantee that your name will go down in posterity. Moral, competent leaders come and go, fading into obscurity, but villains like Caligula live on forever in movies, plays, novels and TV productions. The only problem is that most of what we think we know about Caligula -- the long litany of crimes that make him so famous -- probably isn't true.
Caligula is the most notorious Roman emperor, with a reputation for insanity, cruelty and sexual depravity based almost completely on his depiction in the media and in absurd sensationalized films like Bob Guccione's pornographic Caligula, one of the vilest, most degenerate and unhistorical movies I've ever seen. This image of Caligula as an insane emperor is so ingrained in popular culture that most people would automatically reject the idea that it's probably not accurate.
If you're interested in actual history instead of lurid Hollywood pseudo-history, you should read "Caligula: The Corruption of Power" by Anthony A. Barrett. One of the interesting things you'll learn from this fantastic revisionist biography is that everything we know about Caligula is based on just a few biased and generally unreliable ancient sources:
"The quintessential mad despot, Caligula had inspired plays, films, several series for television. Yet while the public at large seems to find him irresistible, academic biographers have tended to give him a wide berth. Nor is this surprising. The loss of the relevant books of the most important ancient commentator on the Julio-Claudian period, the historian Tacitus, means that we have to rely for our information on markedly inferior sources, in particular the late historian Dio and the biographer Suetonius." -- Caligula: The Corruption of Power, Barrett, 1989, p. xv, Forward.
In other words, we don't know nearly as much about Caligula as we think we do. Most of his image is a masturbatory Hollywood concoction based very loosely on a few unreliable ancient sources. If you read those sources, then read Barrett, a hazy but very different picture of who he actually was starts to emerge.
Image based on period portraits and sculpture.
I don't have the time or space to get into all the details here, but if Barrett is correct, it would appear that Caligula was the victim of an ancient smear campaign designed to justify his assassination to the masses and bolster the reputation of his successor, Claudius. (Note: that's my own conclusion, not Barrett's). For instance, Suetonius' admittedly entertaining biography of Caligula is an obvious hit piece accusing him of the most outlandish crimes and atrocities, including incest with his sister, but as far as that last charge goes, it was common in Roman politics to accuse your political enemies of all kinds of sexual degeneracy. Spreading malicious rumors for political purposes isn't a modern invention.
Even Suetonius' biography isn't completely negative, however. Caligula is described as a fairly competent, though inexperienced, ruler who later turned into a "monster" for some unknown reason. The impression I get from reading Barrett and Suetonius is that Caligula wasn't really interested in running the empire; like Nero, he was much more interested in the arts, especially acting, music and singing, tastes which would have made him appear effeminate and decadent in the eyes of the elite. Early in his reign, he became seriously ill and Suetonius implies that his sickness may have unhinged his mind. Even if that's true, however, many of the crimes he is accused of are unbelievable and almost certainly never happened.
Caligula had his vices, no doubt, but even if they were exaggerated (or concocted) by ancient propagandists like Suetonius, that doesn't mean that he was actually a good emperor living a chaste and moral life. He wasn't, but it's doubtful if he would have been smeared so viciously if something else hadn't been going on. The fact that he was brutally assassinated by his own Praetorians after a few short years in power shows that he had made powerful enemies among the ruling elites.
A coin depicting Gaius Caligula.
Caligula was the victim of a political conspiracy. That's a historical fact. We'll never know for sure because of the scarcity and anecdotal nature of the sources, but it appears that he was murdered because he tried to eliminate the political enemies he suspected (with justification) were trying to get rid of him. In other words, they killed him before he could kill them, a common scenario in ancient and medieval monarchies. If Caligula was paranoid, he probably had good reason.
After his murder, his enemies had to justify his assassination to the people, who apparently had a great deal of affection for this "cruel tyrant:"
"Caligula began his reign as the darling of the masses--Suetonius speaks of the immensus civium amor ('the massive affection of his fellow-citizens'). It also seems clear that he stayed popular with the ordinary people right up to the end, and indeed their reaction to the news of his death seems to have caused the sources some embarrassment." -- Caligula: The Corruption Of Power, Barrett, p. 229
Caligula was popular with the masses (1). This is critical. His murder -- and the murder of his family -- had to be justified to the people and the best way to do that was to portray him as an insane monster who had to be put down like any mad dog. Politics back then wasn't so different than it is now. For example, look at the way Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi were demonized or the way the Germans were portrayed as inhuman baby killers during World War I. These days, the mass media handles the propaganda. Back in ancient Rome, they didn't have television or radio, but that's the only real difference.
(1) "Gaius' accession was greeted with widespread joy and relief, and his civility promised well." (Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. revised).
The popular image of Caligula isn't historical. His reputation as an insane monster was first created by ancient writers with a murder to justify and a talent for pandering to the decadent tastes of the mob, tastes that apparently haven't changed at all since the days of ancient Rome. The real Caligula, whoever he was, has been transformed into a sensationalized tabloid demon by the modern media and the mob laps it up, just like it did two thousand years ago.
The ironic thing is that if it weren't for this sensationalized image, most people wouldn't even know Caligula's name. It's one of those bizarre twists of history that his enemies, the very people who worked so hard to destroy him, ended up making him immortal.
The Germania by the great Roman historian Tacitus is "a most dangerous book," according to the thought police in the Lugenpresse. Tacitus' description of the history and culture of the ancient Germanic tribes living outside the control of the Roman empire has become a kind of ethnologic bible in Germany and everybody knows that the Germans can't be allowed to have a sense of national pride and identity. For instance, the Harvard Gazette (2008) said that Tacitus "helped to fuel Nazi propaganda" and the New York Times (2011) claimed that the book "was exactly what nationalists had been waiting for." And many other "journalists" agree:
"Perhaps the most fateful decision in all of European history was made by Augustus Caesar, when he chose to fix the border of the Roman Empire at the Rhine. As a result, the region known to the Romans as Germania would go without the products of Roman civilization (1) —good roads and big cities and the Latin language and Christianity (2). But it would also remain vigorous and untamed enough to threaten Roman power, and finally destroy it in the fifth century A.D." Source: "Ideas Are Viruses - How Tacitus' Germania Became the Bible of German Nationalism," Slate.com (2011)
Comment: This is all crap, of course, not to mention the fact that it's obvious anti-German propaganda. The paranoia about Tacitus' history of Germania is the kind of stuff you would expect from these particular sources, however. (See the footnotes below for some of the problems with the argument in the Slate article.)
Tacitus was the greatest historian ancient Rome ever produced. His primary concern in all of his writings was to analyze and expose the corruption of the Roman state under the emperors.
According to Moses Hadas, in his introduction to the 1942 Modern Library edition of the complete works of Tacitus (p. xii), "[i]t is a temptation to which many have succumbed to look upon the Germania as a sort of Utopia, a conscious idealization of a primitive and unspoiled people calculated to chasten and reform the decadent Romans. This view is justified in the degree that a strong moralizing strain runs through all Tacitus' work. It has been wittily remarked that no one in Tacitus is good except Agricola [his father-in-law] and the Germans."
Concerning the problems with the Slate article:
(1) The writer seems to think that the savage Germans would have become more civilized if they had been conquered by the Romans. It's hard to understand how the warlike Germans would have become less warlike by exposure to the warlike Roman culture, but it hardly matters because the author of this Slate article has his facts all wrong. In reality, the Germans were exposed to Roman civilization and learned Roman methods of warfare from them, among other things.
Many Germans served in the legions. In one notable example, Arminius, the commander of the German tribes who wiped out three Roman legions in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD, had served in the Roman military and was apparently a Roman citizen. The Romans needed mercenary forces and, like modern Americans, they ended up providing weapons and training to some of their worst enemies.
(2) - The author of the Slate piece also got it wrong when he said that Germania wasn't exposed to Christianity. The Germans described by Tacitus were still pagans, but by the time of the invasions, many of the invading tribes were Christians, though of a "heretical" variety. The Visigoths who sacked Rome, for instance, were Arian Christians:
"Being Arian Christians, the Visigoths respected Christian sites and treasures. According to one story, a group of them refused to steal rich gold and silver vessels when told that they belonged to St Peter and on Alaric’s orders the sacred objects were carried safely through the streets to St Peter’s Church, respectfully accompanied by a throng of Christian citizens who were only too glad to find sanctuary there themselves. St Augustine told this story in City of God to help rebut allegations by pagans that the sack of Rome was the fault of the Christians, who had enraged the city’s pagan gods." Source: History Today (2010)
I have no idea how true these stories are, but I really doubt if Christians in Rome ever "respectfully" marched through the city with the invading Visigoths or that the invaders "refused to steal rich gold and silver vessels." St. Augustine is a suspect source, to say the least, and he obviously had an agenda in presenting the Visigoths as being respectful of Christian fetishes.
The "barbarians" were Christians, but their religion didn't have any effect on their warlike behavior. That's not too surprising, however. Even if they had been completely "orthodox," there is absolutely no evidence in history that Christianity has ever made people more gentle or nations more peaceful.
Getting back to Tacitus, it's disingenuous for modern writers to blame him in any way for the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Ethnic nationalism - a sense of common tribal identity - has been a common feature of all countries throughout history. Besides, even if Tacitus did idealize his pagan subjects to a certain extent in order to contrast them with the decadent Romans there's no evidence that I'm aware of that his information on the Germanic tribes is intentionally inaccurate.
According to Moses Hadas again, "More than six hundred items of information are recorded [in the Germania], of a credibility, to be sure, varying with that of Tacitus' sources. The sources were undoubtedly the best available, and included eye-witness accounts as well as written material, and Tacitus was a conscientious workman."
Modern Germans have every right to be proud of their ancestors.
Was Caligula A Victim Of Ancient Propaganda?
If immortality means that people remember your name, then the "mad Roman emperor" Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, more commonly known as Caligula, is definitely immortal. Everybody's heard of him even if they've never cracked a history book, which just goes to show that being a "good ruler" doesn't necessarily guarantee that your name will go down in posterity. Moral, competent leaders come and go, fading into obscurity, but villains like Caligula live on forever in movies, plays, novels and TV productions. The only problem is that most of what we think we know about Caligula -- the long litany of crimes that make him so famous -- probably isn't true.
Caligula is the most notorious Roman emperor, with a reputation for insanity, cruelty and sexual depravity based almost completely on his depiction in the media and in absurd sensationalized films like Bob Guccione's pornographic Caligula, one of the vilest, most degenerate and unhistorical movies I've ever seen. This image of Caligula as an insane emperor is so ingrained in popular culture that most people would automatically reject the idea that it's probably not accurate.
If you're interested in actual history instead of lurid Hollywood pseudo-history, you should read "Caligula: The Corruption of Power" by Anthony A. Barrett. One of the interesting things you'll learn from this fantastic revisionist biography is that everything we know about Caligula is based on just a few biased and generally unreliable ancient sources:
"The quintessential mad despot, Caligula had inspired plays, films, several series for television. Yet while the public at large seems to find him irresistible, academic biographers have tended to give him a wide berth. Nor is this surprising. The loss of the relevant books of the most important ancient commentator on the Julio-Claudian period, the historian Tacitus, means that we have to rely for our information on markedly inferior sources, in particular the late historian Dio and the biographer Suetonius." -- Caligula: The Corruption of Power, Barrett, 1989, p. xv, Forward.
In other words, we don't know nearly as much about Caligula as we think we do. Most of his image is a masturbatory Hollywood concoction based very loosely on a few unreliable ancient sources. If you read those sources, then read Barrett, a hazy but very different picture of who he actually was starts to emerge.
Image based on period portraits and sculpture.
I don't have the time or space to get into all the details here, but if Barrett is correct, it would appear that Caligula was the victim of an ancient smear campaign designed to justify his assassination to the masses and bolster the reputation of his successor, Claudius. (Note: that's my own conclusion, not Barrett's). For instance, Suetonius' admittedly entertaining biography of Caligula is an obvious hit piece accusing him of the most outlandish crimes and atrocities, including incest with his sister, but as far as that last charge goes, it was common in Roman politics to accuse your political enemies of all kinds of sexual degeneracy. Spreading malicious rumors for political purposes isn't a modern invention.
Even Suetonius' biography isn't completely negative, however. Caligula is described as a fairly competent, though inexperienced, ruler who later turned into a "monster" for some unknown reason. The impression I get from reading Barrett and Suetonius is that Caligula wasn't really interested in running the empire; like Nero, he was much more interested in the arts, especially acting, music and singing, tastes which would have made him appear effeminate and decadent in the eyes of the elite. Early in his reign, he became seriously ill and Suetonius implies that his sickness may have unhinged his mind. Even if that's true, however, many of the crimes he is accused of are unbelievable and almost certainly never happened.
Caligula had his vices, no doubt, but even if they were exaggerated (or concocted) by ancient propagandists like Suetonius, that doesn't mean that he was actually a good emperor living a chaste and moral life. He wasn't, but it's doubtful if he would have been smeared so viciously if something else hadn't been going on. The fact that he was brutally assassinated by his own Praetorians after a few short years in power shows that he had made powerful enemies among the ruling elites.
A coin depicting Gaius Caligula.
Caligula was the victim of a political conspiracy. That's a historical fact. We'll never know for sure because of the scarcity and anecdotal nature of the sources, but it appears that he was murdered because he tried to eliminate the political enemies he suspected (with justification) were trying to get rid of him. In other words, they killed him before he could kill them, a common scenario in ancient and medieval monarchies. If Caligula was paranoid, he probably had good reason.
After his murder, his enemies had to justify his assassination to the people, who apparently had a great deal of affection for this "cruel tyrant:"
"Caligula began his reign as the darling of the masses--Suetonius speaks of the immensus civium amor ('the massive affection of his fellow-citizens'). It also seems clear that he stayed popular with the ordinary people right up to the end, and indeed their reaction to the news of his death seems to have caused the sources some embarrassment." -- Caligula: The Corruption Of Power, Barrett, p. 229
Caligula was popular with the masses (1). This is critical. His murder -- and the murder of his family -- had to be justified to the people and the best way to do that was to portray him as an insane monster who had to be put down like any mad dog. Politics back then wasn't so different than it is now. For example, look at the way Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi were demonized or the way the Germans were portrayed as inhuman baby killers during World War I. These days, the mass media handles the propaganda. Back in ancient Rome, they didn't have television or radio, but that's the only real difference.
(1) "Gaius' accession was greeted with widespread joy and relief, and his civility promised well." (Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. revised).
The popular image of Caligula isn't historical. His reputation as an insane monster was first created by ancient writers with a murder to justify and a talent for pandering to the decadent tastes of the mob, tastes that apparently haven't changed at all since the days of ancient Rome. The real Caligula, whoever he was, has been transformed into a sensationalized tabloid demon by the modern media and the mob laps it up, just like it did two thousand years ago.
The ironic thing is that if it weren't for this sensationalized image, most people wouldn't even know Caligula's name. It's one of those bizarre twists of history that his enemies, the very people who worked so hard to destroy him, ended up making him immortal.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient Literature, Caligula, Commentary, Culture, Rome, Videos | Permalink