Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (80 page)

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This might be a good place to distinguish more precisely between myths and mythology. Many people use the words interchangeably—as the title of this book does. But to be specific, myths are the stories themselves, while mythology is actually the study of those myths. Even though the words have come to mean the same thing in common usage, there is a distinction. This book discusses the myths in great detail and, in chapter 1, offers a brief history of mythology—what people have thought about myths over the course of thousands of years.

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When Achilles was born, his mother was told that he would be impervious to harm if bathed in a sacred pool. His mother dipped him in the water, but held him by the heel, which was the only place a wound would kill him. So, an Achilles’ heel has come to mean a person’s most vulnerable spot.

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Easter’s place on the calendar is itself probably a vestige of mythic beliefs related to the moon. It’s one of the movable feasts of the Christian religion, and the date of Easter varies each year, but for most Christians it usually falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21.

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The word “kamikaze” means “divine wind” and referred to a typhoon that saved Japan by preventing a Mongol invasion in 1281. In 1945, the young Japanese pilots were supposedly going to be the equivalent of that divine wind and turn away the American invading forces. While they killed many American sailors and destroyed numerous American ships, the kamikaze attacks ultimately did not affect the war’s outcome.

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It is important to remember that we “discover” new things all the time. As this book was being written, researchers announced the discovery of a previously unknown group of three-foot-tall “dwarf” humans who lived in a remote section of Indonesia within the time span of “modern” humans. Interestingly, the existence of such “little people” was part of the local mythology.

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The word “pagan,” which has come to broadly mean anyone who is not Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, was originally coined by early Christians in Rome and meant “country dweller” and “civilian,” in the sense that pagans were not members of the so-called army of God.

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In recent years, some scholars have interpreted that phrase as evidence that the ancient Egyptians were actually black Africans who then inspired the Greeks and other Western civilizations—a hot topic in the academic world, also called “Afrocentrism.” Largely dismissed by most “Egyptologists,” Afrocentrism has still made inroads into the American educational system, where it has flourished as a controversial means of endowing primarily African-American schoolchildren with a sense of pride in an African past that was ignored by traditional historians. Unfortunately, for the most part, this approach has replaced one set of simplistic, flawed, and romanticized ideas with another.

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There is a great variety among Egyptian dating systems, and many of the dates presented here are approximate or speculative, but are based on the widely accepted chronology found in
The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt
, edited by Ian Shaw.

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The Roman-era Jewish historian Josephus credited the Hyksos with the foundation of the city that later became Jerusalem.

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At 450 feet (138 meters) high, the Great Pyramid is taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and New York’s Statue of Liberty.

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This old chestnut of a conspiracy theory got fresh legs with the release of the movie
National Treasure
(2004), an otherwise amusing action-adventure story that combined Masonic conspiracies with a treasure map hidden on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

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A complete discussion of the history and chronology of the Israelites in Egypt, the Exodus, and the Ten Commandments can be found in my earlier book
Don’t Know Much About the Bible
.

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The nation of Iraq was formed in the aftermath of World War I, when the British, who then ruled it, called the area by its ancient name, Mesopotamia. But Iraq as it exists today has little to do with the ancient civilizations that rose and fell there. A British-installed, independent kingdom was established in 1923, and the British dominated the oil fields and politics of Iraq for the next quarter-century. In a military coup, King Faisal was killed in 1951. Successive military regimes were increasingly dominated by the Baath Party until Saddam Hussein ultimately seized power in 1979.

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This brief piece of a larger biblical tale is also a perfect example of how even Christians don’t always agree on their “holy” stories. While Catholics traditionally include “Bel and the Dragon” as part of the Book of Daniel, Protestants do not. In their Bibles, such as the King James and New Revised Standard Versions, the brief narrative is placed in the Apocrypha, a collection of writings that are not considered part of the divinely inspired “canon” of the Bible.

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The literal heirs of these people are Iraq’s so-called Marsh Arabs. During the 1990s, Saddam Hussein tried to destroy these people—who had rebelled at the urging of the first President Bush after the Gulf War in 1991—by systematically draining the marshes on which their way of life depended. The UN has described this as the “environmental crime of the century.”

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The widely misunderstood term “semite” is adapted from the biblical name of Shem, a son of Noah. Although the term is often equated exclusively with Jews—as in “anti-Semitic”—Shem was thought to be the ancestor of all the Semitic peoples, who included, in the ancient world, Babylonians, Canaanites, Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Arabs.

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A jenny is female donkey.

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The spread of Mithraism under the Roman Empire extended into Spain, and some authorities suggest that the killing of a bull was part of a Mithraist ritual that gradually evolved into the practice of bullfighting, whose conventions were formalized in Spain in the 1700s, and the famed “running of the bulls” each spring in Pamplona. However, others view the
corrida de toros
as a vestige of much older traditions of bull worship and sacrifice as evidenced in many cultures, including those in Crete, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, ancient India, and ancient Israel. These connections include the sacred Apis Bull of Egypt, the famed bull riders of Knossos discussed in chapter 4, and the hero Gilgamesh, whose conquest of the Bull of Heaven was discussed earlier in this chapter. In either case, men have been taking the bull by the horns, literally, for a very long time.

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In the first Persian invasion of Greece, in 490 BCE, the Greeks defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon, inspiration for the race of the same name. The second Persian invasion, led by Xerxes, came in 480 BCE. The Persians won at Thermopylae, and Athens was sacked. But the Persians were then defeated in the naval Battle of Salamis; Persian troops withdrew after their loss at Plataea in 479.

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Again, not such a “foreign” or primitive idea. Just think of a small-town, Main Street Memorial Day parade or a St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York, in which every political party, civic group, association, and union usually marches together. And men burning sacrificial meat on open fires? That’s called a “tailgate party” or a July 4th backyard barbecue. Just modern vestiges of an ancient rite.

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These are not the same as the more famous literary Cyclops who appears in Homer’s
Odyssey
, a one-eyed giant named Polyphemus, a son of the sea god Poseidon, who is discussed on page 250.

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In Greek myths, the cornucopia, or “horn of plenty,” was one of the horns of Amalthaea, the goat who nursed Zeus. The horn produced ambrosia and nectar, the food and drink of the gods. But in Roman stories, the cornucopia was the horn of a river god, which Hercules broke off. Water nymphs filled the horn with flowers and fruit and offered it to Copia, the goddess of plenty.

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A taste of first-century CE Corinth can be found in two of the most famous biblical letters, or “Epistles,” of St. Paul—written to the early Christian Church there. In the first, he writes, “It is actually reported that there is a sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans; for a man is living with his father’s wife.” (I Corinthians 5:1)