Ancient World Review

Alexander The Great Pronounced Dead Prematurely?

This is the last of a 14-part lecture series by the historian Robin Lane Fox.

"While details differ, the general outline of Alexander’s death in the city of Babylon in 323 B.C., is roughly the same: Alexander spent a night drinking with the naval officer Nearchus, then hit the booze the following day with his buddy Medius of Larissa. Soon after, a fever struck and he complained of acute pain in his back as if being stabbed by a spear. The fever worsened and he slowly became unable to move and then unable to speak. When he drank wine, he only became thirstier. The paralysis grew, and eventually he could not raise his head." Source: The Smithsonian.

After Alexander's death, his body, according to Petrarch, didn't start decomposing for six days. Decomposition normally starts almost immediately, so if Plutarch is correct this suggests that Alexander didn't actually die when his companions thought he did. There's no way to know for sure, but one expert believes that he may have been paralyzed by a nasty disease known as Guillain-Barre Syndrome:

"... to Katherine Hall of the Dunedin School of Medicine at the University of Otago in New Zealand, Alexander’s symptoms resembled a case of a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves, leading to eventual paralysis. She suggests Alexander contracted a Campylobacter pylori infection, the 'most frequent cause for GBS world-wide,' which set off the autoimmune disorder, a theory she presents in The Ancient History Bulletin."

The question, I guess -- and I haven't been able to find an answer to this -- is whether someone stricken with GBS would end up so totally unresponsive that people might naturally assume that they were dead. Admittedly speculative, this grim scenario isn't totally implausible.

"Once [Alexander] was extensively paralyzed, that could have lowered his body’s demand for oxygen. His pupils would have been fixed and dilated, and his body may not have been able to regulate his temperature properly, making him cold. Because physicians in the ancient world relied on breath not pulse to determine death, Alexander’s death may have been announced prematurely." (Smithsonian)

Minoans & Mycenaeans Were Indo-Europeans (2017)

"The origins of the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean cultures have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. We have assembled genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia. Here we show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three-quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, and most of the remainder from ancient populations related to those of the Caucasus and Iran." Source: Nature (2017).

"The Minoan civilization flourished in the middle Bronze Age on the Mediterranean island of Crete from ca. 2000 BCE until ca. 1500 BCE and, with their unique art and architecture, the Minoans made a significant contribution to the development of Western European civilization as it is known today." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.

"The Mycenaeans [Bronze Age, 15th - 13th cent. BC]  were influenced by the earlier Minoan civilization which had spread from its origins at Knossos, Crete to include the wider Aegean. Architecture, art and religious practices were assimilated and adapted to better express the perhaps more militaristic and austere Mycenaean culture." (Ancient History Encyclopedia)

This new genetic study confirms that the Minoans and Mycenaeans were Indo-Europeans. Back in 2017 another DNA study showed that the ancient Egyptians were also Indo-European. All of these fantastic civilizations evolved from populations of Neolithic farmers who spread out of Anatolia and the regions around the Black Sea and settled along the coast of the Mediterranean. In other words, they spread west out of Eurasia, not north out of sub-Saharan Africa as the Afrocentrists claim.

Note: The next video (Feb. 2017) doesn't show the spread of the Indo-Europeans into Egypt, probably because this discovery is so recent.

The ancestors of the Minoans, Mycenaeans, and Egyptians were a race of people who lived in Eurasia and spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE) , "the ancestor of the Indo-European languages according to linguistic reconstruction." (Wikipedia) The widely accepted Kurgan Hypothesis  "puts the PIE homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 4000 BC," while an alternate theory, "the Anatolian hypothesis, [puts it] in Anatolia around 8000 BC," according to Wikipedia.

Modern humans are thought to have evolved in Africa a couple hundred thousand years ago. The Proto-Indo-Europeans date back to around 4000 - 8000 BC, depending on which theory you accept, while the Minoans and Mycenaeans flourished during the 2nd - 3rd millenniums BC. That's pretty recent by evolutionary standards, but the picture that's emerging here suggests that modern humans or at least one type of modern human may have first evolved somewhere in Asia rather than Africa. This is the Out of Asia theory, which has now been merged with the multiregional hypothesis of human origins.

Personally, I won't be surprised if the multiregional hypothesis turns out to be true.

Tattoos In The Ancient World

"Tattooing has been practiced across the globe since at least Neolithic times, as evidenced by mummified preserved skin, ancient art, and the archaeological record. Both ancient art and archaeological finds of possible tattoo tools suggest tattooing was practiced by the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe. However, direct evidence for tattooing on mummified human skin extends only to the 4th millennium BC." Source: "History of Tattooing," Wikipedia.

"... tattooed mummies have been recovered from at least 49 archaeological sites including locations in Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Mongolia, western China, Egypt, Sudan, the Philippines, and the Andes." In 2016, Nature reported the discovery of "[a] mummy from ancient Egypt ... heavily tattooed with sacred symbols, which may have served to advertise and enhance the religious powers of the woman who received them more than 3,000 years ago."

According to Smithsonian Magazine (2007), "... the earliest known examples [of tattoos] were for a long time Egyptian and were present on several female mummies dated to c. 2000 B.C. But following the more recent discovery of [Otzi the Iceman] from the area of the Italian-Austrian border in 1991 and his tattoo patterns, this date has been pushed back a further thousand years when he was carbon-dated at around 5,200 years old."

"Otzi had 61 tattoos across his body, including his left wrist, lower legs, lower back and torso." Smithsonian Insider (2015).

"Some tribal cultures traditionally created tattoos by cutting designs into the skin and rubbing the resulting wound with ink, ashes or other agents; some cultures continue this practice, which may be an adjunct to scarification. Some cultures create tattooed marks by hand-tapping the ink into the skin using sharpened sticks or animal bones (made like needles) with clay formed disks or, in modern times, needles." Source: Wikipedia.

Related: Ancient Tattoo Techniques.

Otzi the Iceman's tattoos may have been a form of acupuncture. According to the International Business Times (2015), "eighty per cent of [Otzi's] tattoos had been found along acupuncture meridians used to treat back pain and abdominal problems, which Otzi suffered from ... If correct, the tattoos would predate the first recorded use of acupuncture in China by 2,000 years."

"Pre-Christian Germanic, Celtic and other central and northern European tribes were often heavily tattooed, according to surviving accounts, but it may also have been normal paint. The Picts may have been tattooed (or scarified) with elaborate, war-inspired black or dark blue woad (or possibly copper for the blue tone) designs. Julius Caesar described these tattoos in Book V of his Gallic Wars (54 BC). Nevertheless, these may have been painted markings rather than tattoos." Source: Wikipedia.

Note: According to Caesar, "All the Britons dye their body with woad, which produces a blue color, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and upper lip." (The Conquest of Gaul, Book V.14)

In Greece and Rome, tattoos were mostly used for identification purposes -- much like brands on cattle -- but this changed over the centuries, at least among certain classes of society:

"... amongst the Greeks and Romans, the use of tattoos or 'stigmata' as they were then called, seems to have been largely used as a means to mark someone as 'belonging' either to a religious sect or to an owner in the case of slaves or even as a punitive measure to mark them as criminals. It is therefore quite intriguing that during Ptolemaic times when a dynasty of Macedonian Greek monarchs ruled Egypt, the pharaoh himself, Ptolemy IV (221-205 B.C.), was said to have been tattooed with ivy leaves to symbolize his devotion to Dionysus, Greek god of wine and the patron deity of the royal house at that time. The fashion was also adopted by Roman soldiers and spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity, when tattoos were felt to 'disfigure that made in God's image' and so were banned by the Emperor Constantine (A.D. 306-373)." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.

Comment: Tattoos, piercings and scarification are usually associated with barbarian tribes and the lower orders of society. In the classical Mediterranean world, tattooing as a decorative art seems to have been practiced mostly by the more primitive cultures of Europe, Asia and the Orient. In a way, the popularity of tattoos in any given culture could be seen as an indicator of that culture's social development. The more barbaric the culture, the more tattoos. There also seems to have been an inverse relationship between tattoos and social status. In Greece and Rome, for instance, soldiers, slaves, criminals and some priests and acolytes were frequently tattooed, but I'd be amazed to find out that someone like Tacitus had a tramp stamp.

Tattooing seems to become more widespread in civilizations on their way down.  For instance, "the decline of the Ptolemaic dynasty began under the reign of Ptolemy IV," the tattooed Egyptian pharaoh, according to Wikipedia. This is just a theory, but I'd say that the rising popularity of tattoos is a symptom of cultural decay. For example, I don't think it's an accident that the use of tattoos "spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity" or that tattoos are becoming a cultural norm in modern Europe and the United States. I guess you could call this the Tattoo Theory of Social Collapse. As a civilization declines into the Third World, more and more people start to cover themselves with body art. I have no idea why this would happen, but maybe the masses are responding in an unconscious way to the barbarism that is slowly engulfing them.

Sappho Of Lesbos, "The Most Iconic Lesbian Poet In History," Wasn't A Lesbian After All?

"Sappho of Lesbos (c. 620-570 BCE) was a lyric poet whose work was so popular in ancient Greece, and beyond, that she was  honored in statuary and praised by figures such as Solon and Plato. Very little is known of her life and of the nine volumes of her work which were widely read in antiquity only fragments survive. Contrary to popular opinion on the subject, her works were not destroyed by closed-minded Christians seeking to suppress lesbian love poetry but were lost simply through time and circumstance." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.

The popular image of Sappho as the "original lesbian" is relatively modern. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2rd ed. revised), "Her sexual inclinations have occasioned much speculation from antiquity to the present. From Attic comedy onward she was credited with an implausible selection of male lovers. [Emphasis added] She is described as a lover of women only in post-Classical times, and in later European tradition was often regarded as heterosexual." The truth is that hardly anything is known about her personal life or her work other than the fact that she was highly regarded during her time. As for her supposed lesbianism, the truth may have been far different:

"Even Sappho’s sexuality, which for modern readers is the most famous thing about her, has been controversial from the start. However exalted her reputation among the ancient literati, in Greek popular culture of the Classical period and afterward Sappho was known primarily as an oversexed predator—of men. This, in fact, was the ancient cliché about 'Lesbians': when we hear the word today we think of love between women, but when the ancient Greeks heard the word they thought of blow jobs. In classical Greek, the verb lesbiazein—'to act like someone from Lesbos'—meant performing fellatio, an activity for which inhabitants of the island were thought to have a particular penchant." Source: "Girl, Interrupted," Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker.

The strong possibility that Sappho, "the most iconic lesbian poet in history," may have actually been a notorious heterosexual man-eater famous for her knob jobs is absolutely hilarious and all too typical of the way real history so often turns out to be the exact opposite of what everybody thinks they know.

Roof Leak Causes Concern For Parthenon Marbles In The British Museum

"The glass roof of the Duveen Gallery in London’s British Museum, the room where the Parthenon Sculptures are exhibited, is leaking water following heavy rainfall in the UK capital." Source: Archaeology News Network (Dec. 22, 2018).

This doesn't sound like it was any big deal.

"...In a statement a spokesperson for the Museum said: 'There was a minor incident during recent very heavy rainfall when a small amount of water entered the gallery. None of the sculptures was damaged and the issue has been dealt with.'"

Note: Greece wants its artifacts back, but that's going to take some doing since they're scattered all over Europe. According to the British Museum, "[t]he majority of the [Parthenon] sculptures are roughly equally divided between Athens and London. Important pieces are also held by other major European museums, including the Musée du Louvre in Paris, Vatican Museums, the National Museum in Copenhagen, the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, the University Museum in Würzburg, and the Glyptothek in Munich."

The Joy Of Sexus: Lust, Love & Longing In The Ancient World (2013)

"'Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians had erotic preferences and sexual taboos we’ve seldom heard about,' says California author and historical detective Vicki León in her new book The Joy of Sexus: Lust, Love, & Longing in the Ancient World. Her book's topics range from orgasm to the long-ago fear of hermaphrodites, from circumcision to the wide acceptance of a variety of gay relationships. With Tip Sheet, she shared some carnal curiosities and extraordinary stories of sex and love, encountered while researching The Joy of Sexus." Source: Publisher's Weekly (2013)

Comment: I haven't read this book, but it sounds like it's pretty entertaining and based on original sources, for what they're worth. Nero, Caligula and Tiberius are described as "sexually twisted," of course, echoing the slanders of ancient historians looking to tarnish the emperors' reputations and portray them as monsters. Maybe they were that deranged, but I really doubt it.

The ancients, especially the Greeks and Romans, are usually described in the mass media as a bunch of perverts, but even if all the stories about orgies and weird sex practices are true it's hard to know how widespread this type of stuff was back then. I don't know if the Romans really thought that "wandering wombs" caused hysteria or if Romans in Spain washed their teeth with urine, but when it comes to the human animal nothing surprises me anymore.

The ancients were probably just as sex-crazed as people have always been throughout history. They had prostitution and adultery and buggery and so on, just like we do today, but if you ask me they were nowhere near as depraved as modern societies. They didn't have a multi-billion sesterce porn industry, for instance, and the Roman masses probably weren't bombarded on a daily basis with stories about bugchasers,  52-year-old men who abandoned their families to live their lives as a 6-year-old girl, men who have sex with their cars, and how a baby was born to a man who used to be a woman and got impregnated by a man who is now a woman.

The modern world is not only a million times more deranged than the ancient world; it's also a lot more ridiculous.

Himera: One Of The Greatest Archaeological Discoveries Of Recent Decades Emerges From Oblivion

Video from 2011.

"A necropolis with more than 12,000 almost untouched burials from the Archaic and Classical periods, many of which are rich in grave goods, was discovered between 2008 and 2011, during work on the expansion of the railway line at the site of the ancient Greek city of Himera, the remains of which lie within the borders of the modern Sicilian comune of Termini Imerese." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"Many of these burials are associated with an infamous page in the history of the ancient city, located on the strategic border between Hellenic Sicily and the area controlled by the Phoenicians: a vicious battle fought between the Greeks and Carthaginians in 480 BC."

The Battle Of Himera: First Sicilian War (480 BC)

Audio not that great. Closed captions useful.

"The Battle of Himera (480 BC), supposedly fought on the same day as the more famous Battle of Salamis, or at the same time as the Battle of Thermopylae, saw the Greek forces of Gelon, King of Syracuse, and Theron, tyrant of Agrigentum, defeat the Carthaginian force of Hamilcar the Magonid, ending a Carthaginian bid to restore the deposed tyrant of Himera ... Scholars ... agree that the battle led to the crippling of Carthage's power in Sicily for many decades. It was one of the most important battles of the Sicilian Wars." Source: Wikipedia.

Note: The battle of Himera was one of the first major events in a struggle for power in the region that lasted for hundreds of years. Sicily is located about midway between the coast of northern Africa and the boot of Italy (see map). This made the island a central conflict zone between the forces of Carthage, Greece and later Rome.

Around two centuries after the Battle of Himera, the Punic Wars began and much of the action in the beginning took place on Sicily. By that time, Carthage had grown into an empire dominating the Mediterranean and was threatening to invade Italy itself. The land and sea battles that took place between Carthage and the emerging Roman Republic were later described by the Greek historian Polybius in his Histories, available in an excellent Penguin edition titled The Rise Of The Roman Empire.

"The Punic Wars were a series of three wars fought between Rome and Carthage from 264 BC to 146 BC. At the time, they were some of the largest wars that had ever taken place." (Wikipedia) The story of the back-and-forth struggle between the two major powers is complex and exotic and full of wild scenes of fleets destroyed by storms, land battles fought with elephants, sieges, calamitous reversals of fortune, spectacular exploits like Hannibal's crossing of the Alps, and major battles like Cannae.  Carthage came very close to defeating Rome, something that would have changed the future course of history completely.

Related: The Battle of Himera (409 BC. Second Sicilian War.

Snakes In Ancient Biological Warfare

"Scientists in Italy have rediscovered a type of snake that the ancient Greeks used to hurl at their enemies to create panic and confusion during sea battles." Source: The Telegraph (2015).

"The Javelin Sand Boa had not been officially recorded in Italy for 80 years, but sightings by locals suggested that it might still survive in a region of Sicily."

Note: Description of the Javelin Sand Boa starts at 4:24 in the video.

The Greeks weren't the only ones to use snakes and especially snake venom as weapons. "The ancients particularly dreaded encounters with poisonous snakes, a problem that plagued Alexander the Great and his army in India," according to Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World, by Adrienne Mayor (p. 63). "Things only got worse when the Greeks learned that Indian archers dipped their arrows with snake venom..."

Hannibal apparently used a kind of snake bomb "during a decisive naval battle against King Eumenes of Pergamum (Asia Minor) sometime between 190 and 184 BC." (Ibid) "Hannibal sent his men ashore to 'capture the greatest possible number of venomous snakes' and stuff them into earthenware jars ... When the clash came and Eumenes' ships bore down on Hannibal's fleet, the marines let fly the jars, catapulting them onto the enemy decks." This unexpected attack caused widespread confusion and panic, leading to the defeat of Eumenes' forces.

"The Scythians and some other steppe people are believed to have collaborated a mixture of decaying/decomposing [adder and snake] bodies, human blood and various animal faeces into large vats, where they would be left to combine and become a feral disgusting bacteria-ridden load of sludgy liquid. This mixture would then be applied to arrow tips of the Horse Archers." Source: "Unconventional Animals in the History of Warfare," Alexander J. Knights, All Empires

The use of live snakes as weapons in ancient warfare was relatively rare, as far as I can tell. The use of their venom, on the other hand, was very common:

"Despite the perils of handling deadly snakes, arrows steeped in snake venom were the most popular—and the most feared—biological weapons in the ancient world. The deep antiquity of the concept of envenomed projectiles is revealed in Greek mythology, when Heracles dipped his arrows in venom leaking from the dead Hydra Monster." Source: Wonders & Marvels.

The Hallucinogenic Honey That Poisoned A Greek Army

"When bees feed on the pollen of rhododendron flowers, the resulting honey can pack a hallucinogenic punch." Source: Atlas Obscura.

"It’s called mad honey, and it has a slightly bitter taste and a reddish color. More notably, a few types of rhododendrons ... contain grayanotoxin, which can cause dramatic physiological reactions in humans and animals. Depending on how much a person consumes, reactions can range from hallucinations and a slower heartbeat to temporary paralysis and unconsciousness."

"The intoxicating effects of mad honey have been known for thousands of years. Not surprisingly, there have been many famous episodes of human inebriation caused by its consumption. Xenophon, Aristotle, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Columella all document the results of eating this 'maddening' honey, believed to be from the pollen and nectar of Rhododendron luteum and Rhododendron ponticum. According to Xenophon, an invading Greek army was accidentally poisoned by harvesting and eating the local Asia Minor honey, but they all made a quick recovery with no fatalities. Having heard of this incident, and realizing that foreign invaders would be ignorant of the dangers of the local honey, King Mithridates later used the honey as a deliberate poison when Pompey's army attacked the Heptakometes [1] in Asia Minor in 69 BCE. The Roman soldiers became delirious and nauseated after being tricked into eating the toxic honey, at which point Mithridates's army attacked." Source: Wikipedia.

[1] "In about 65 BCE, Pompey's army was approaching Colchis.  Mithridates' allies there, the Heptakometes, were described by Strabo as 'utterly savage' mountain barbarians, dwelling in tree forts and living on 'the flesh of wild animals and nuts.'  The tribe was feared for attacking wayfarers - suddenly leaping down on them like leopards from their tree houses.  The Heptakometes may have received specific orders from Mithridates on how to ambush the Roman army.  What we do know for a fact is that they gathered up great numbers of wild honeycombs dripping with toxic honey and placed them all along Pompey's route.  The Roman soldiers stopped to enjoy the sweets and immediately lost their senses.  Reeling and babbling, the men collapsed with vomiting and diarrhea and lay on the ground unable to move.  The Heptakometes easily wiped out about one thousand of Pompey's men." - Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor. (Source: Roman Times)

Taking mad honey sounds like a dangerous way to get loaded. According to the Drug Classroom, "[t]he core symptoms of mad honey poisoning include nausea, vomiting, salivation, headache, blurred vision, sweating, weakness, circumoral paresthesia, tongue numbing, fainting, drowsiness, drunkenness, tingling, and seizures." The toxins in the honey can also cause "1st to 3rd degree heart block, asystole, and myocardial infarction."