Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (5 page)

This line of thinking about myths—that the gods were once humans—was later called “euhemerism” in honor of Euhemerus. It has continued into modern times, as people search for the historical foundations of many mythic characters and events, whether the historical reality of the Trojan War or the existence of the biblical Abraham or Moses. Even the greatest scientist of the Enlightenment, Isaac Newton (1642–1727), once attempted to document the myths as if they were actual events that could be identified. Universally recognized as a giant of science for his laws of physics, Newton was also a very devout Christian who devoted the last years of his life to an esoteric quest to bring his astronomical calculations in line with biblical history. Although it seems an odd activity for such an eminent man of science, Newton tried to base his chronology of world events on a mythical occurence—the famed voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, one of the great quest stories of ancient Greece. Like other Christians, Newton credited the doctrine of Euhemerus and, accordingly, thought that the mythical voyage of the Greek hero Jason aboard his ship, the
Argo
, must have been a fact. Using his own, carefully kept astronomical records, Newton believed he could fix this event to an actual date. Accomplishing this, Newton argued, would also lead to calculating an exact date of the fall of Troy and hence of the founding of Rome by Aeneas, a refugee from the destroyed city of Troy. Newton, who may have been going mad in his later years from mercury poisoning, was never successful in this endeavor.

But a century after Newton, the search for the history behind myths took another great leap. Major archaeological discoveries during the nineteenth century transformed the European view of ancient civilizations. With the power of church and kings weakened after the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment-era quest for rational explanations of natural events began to replace the orthodox Christian view of the ancient world as simply barbarous. One of the key events spurring this quest was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon’s army in 1799. Half-buried in the mud near Rosetta, a city not far from Alexandria, Egypt, the stone is made of black basalt. Measuring 11 inches (28 centimeters) thick, it is about 3 feet 9 inches (114 centimeters) high and 2 feet 4
¹
/2 inches (72 centimeters) across. This stone had been carved to commemorate the crowning of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, king of Egypt from 203 to 181 BCE. (The Ptolemies were the rulers of Egypt who were heirs to Alexander the Great after he conquered Egypt. The line of the Ptolemies ended with Cleopatra and her royal machinations and disastrous affair with Julius Caesar and marriage to Marc Antony.) The Rosetta Stone contained three separate inscriptions: the first inscription was in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics; the second was in demotic, the commonly spoken language of Egypt at that time; and, at the bottom, the message appeared again in Greek.

Until this time, the language of ancient Egypt had been a mystery to the world. But a French scholar named Jean François Champollion (1790–1832) was able to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics. With a knowledge of Coptic—a form of Egyptian that was written mainly with Greek letters—and using the Greek text as a guide, he was able to pick out the same names in the Egyptian text and learn the sounds of many of the Egyptian hieroglyphic characters, which enabled him to translate many Egyptian words in the inscription. In 1822, Champollion published a pamphlet that opened up the literature of ancient Egypt to scholars. Champollion, viewed as the “father of Egyptology,” died of a stroke at the age of forty-one. (Continuing its history as a spoils of war, the Rosetta Stone was later taken to England, where it remains in the British Museum.)

Discoveries such as the Rosetta Stone were keys to opening up the past at a time when more of the world was being opened up to Europe. As the British Empire spread into the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific, geographers, astronomers, and naturalists, including Charles Darwin, were routinely sent aboard British ships to map and study the natural world. Obviously done in the name of the empire, this unprecedented but deliberate combination of exploration and colonization, discovery and scholarship was having a profound impact on the academic world. As ancient worlds and civilizations were revealed by Great Britain’s explorers and mapmakers, archaeologists, linguists, and the first generation of anthropologists followed suit. The academic world was beginning to view myth as an essential ingredient in understanding the past, not simply as the superstitious beliefs of barbarous “heathens” who needed to be Christianized. Once purely the domain of “classicists” who used the Greek myths to teach Greek, the world of mythology was now a fertile field for scholars who wanted to “prove” that these myths were based in the realities of the ancient world.

Who was the man who “found” Troy?

The most famous—and controversial—of this generation of archaeologists was Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), a successful German businessman who converted a boyhood fascination with Homer’s Troy into a lifelong study of ancient Greece. Schliemann’s life was the stuff of a wild, Dickensian novel. Born the son of a poor Protestant minister in northern Germany, Schliemann had been a cabin boy and was shipwrecked as a teenager. After returning to Europe, he taught himself to speak English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian while working as an office boy. He translated his linguistic talents into building an import-export business that made him extremely wealthy. He came to California in the Gold Rush era, started a bank, and by the time he was in his thirties, Schliemann was a bank director and wealthy merchant who could afford to start a second life as an amateur archaeologist with a single, obsessive goal. Guided by his love of the
Iliad
, he set out to find the actual ruins of Homer’s Troy. With his second wife, Sophia, a Greek girl thirty years his junior, he focused his efforts on a mound at what is now Hissarlik, in northwestern Turkey. Underwriting the costs of the digs with his considerable personal fortune, Schliemann began to excavate in September 1871.

Ignored or ridiculed by skeptical professionals, Schliemann had the last laugh. His faith paid off when he discovered the buried city of Troy—actually, the Schliemanns had discovered the
cities
of Troy. At the site where he had predicted he would find Troy, nine cities were uncovered, each successive layer built on the ruins of the one before it. Carelessly digging through these many levels in his frenzied search for Homer’s Troy, Schliemann probably destroyed many relics in which he had no interest. But near the bottom level, the Schliemanns found objects of bronze, gold, and silver, in the city they believed was the Troy of the
Iliad
.

Schliemann was clearly a bit of a P. T. Barnum, or a carnival huckster. Using his showman’s instincts, he had his beautiful young wife photographed wearing jewels they had discovered, as though she were a modern incarnation of Helen of Troy, and the two became internationally famed. After the triumph of finding Troy, the Schliemanns returned to Greece, where they explored the fabled site of Mycenae, an ancient Greek city where, in 1876, they unearthed five royal graves full of jewels and other treasures. Although the Schliemanns incorrectly believed that they had discovered the burial site of Homer’s King Agamemnon, their discoveries opened up the world to the possibility that the classical myths were all based on historical incidents. Even though their scholarship, methods, and personal use of the treasures they found would raise eyebrows for years to come, the Schliemanns had provoked new fascination with the “dead” world of ancient civilizations. As Daniel Boorstin wrote in
The Discoverers
, “The vast watching public came to believe that the earth held relics and messages from real people in the distant past.”

How did an ancient myth cast doubt on the divinity of the Bible?

Schliemann’s anstonishing finds stimulated a new popular appreciation and interest in mythology. As a flood of information about newly discovered cultures swept through Europe in the wake of nineteenth-century exploration and colonization, a wave of late nineteenth-century scholarship was revolutionizing long-held views of the ancient world. At nearly the same moment as Schliemann found Troy, another discovery had similarly dramatic and far-reaching consequences, although it did not garner the headlines that the beguiling Sophia Schliemann had in her “Helen-ish” jewels. In Nineveh, once the capital of the ancient Assyrian empire, and a city prominent in biblical history, a large number of clay tablets were discovered in the ruins of a temple. Nineveh was the “wicked city” where the Hebrew prophet Jonah of “large fish” (not a whale) fame was sent by God in the Bible. Needless to say, the discovery of writings from so important a site in biblical history attracted a significant amount of attention.

When an exhibit of these Assyrian objects—which had been taken to London’s British Museum—opened in 1850, Victorian London was astonished. Assyrians had been viewed as the “bad guys” of the Bible, cruel conquerors who had enslaved the Jews. But here, on display, were carvings and statuary that fascinated Londoners. Jewelers began to make replicas of the Assyrian ornaments, and they became the fashion rage. But even more significant was the impact of the Assyrian discoveries on biblical scholarship. George Smith, a young man when the Assyrian display opened, practically became obsessed with the exhibit—much the way America was fascinated by all things Egyptian when the King Tut exhibit toured museums around the country during the 1970s. With little formal training, Smith was able to win a job at the museum, and in 1872, delivered a paper before the Society of Biblical Archaeology with translations from these ancient tablets. Smith had translated portions of
Gilgamesh
, an ancient Babylonian epic poem that tells of an imperfect hero named Gilgamesh and his quest for immortality, a poem widely considered the world’s oldest known work of literature.

But its impact went far beyond exciting a few professors of literature and ancient languages. The contents of
Gilgamesh
that Smith revealed turned the accepted world of Christian biblical beliefs on its head. Smith’s translations of
Gilgamesh
included episodes of a great flood that contained clear parallels with the biblical accounts of Noah’s flood, along with many other elements shared with the Book of Genesis. His paper set off shockwaves, and a London newspaper commissioned Smith to head for Mesopotamia to do further research. On an expedition to Nineveh, Smith contracted a virulent strain of fever and died at the age of thirty-six.

But Smith’s translations had unleashed a flood of another sort. Reaction to the material was earthshaking in the world of biblical scholarship. When a leading German scholar delivered a lecture titled “Babel und Bible” in 1902, and stated that the Bible was not the world’s oldest book, as Christian and Jewish scholars had taught for centuries, there was complete outrage. Germany’s kaiser Wilhelm II heard the lecture and was neither impressed nor amused. “Religion has never been the result of science,” the kaiser wrote, “but the outpouring of the heart and being of man from his intercourse with God.”

Smith’s translations and the suggestion that the Bible was not the divine word of God came just as the foundations of religion were being shaken in the later nineteenth century by new scientific theories and discoveries. Darwin and the ideas about natural selection and evolution he introduced in
Origin of Species
in 1859 were rattling the foundations of orthodox science and religion. Archaeologists and linguists were now shaking up old ideas about the sources of the Bible and the ancient roots of Judaism and Christianity. With this extraordinary intellectual ferment in the background, a new approach to mythology began to focus on the spiritual and religious significance of myths and their connection to accepted Christian belief.

The translation of another ancient sacred text introduced still another approach to mythology. It came from German Sanskrit scholar Max Müller, who translated the Rig-Veda, the earliest Hindu scriptures, beginning in 1849. Müller believed that myths were expressions of ideas that could not be conveyed in language. According to Müller, “Where we speak of the sun following the dawn, the ancient poets could only speak and think of the Sun loving and embracing the Dawn. What is with us a sunset, was to them the Sun growing old, decaying or dying.” In Müller’s view, all of the gods and mythical heroes were simply representations of nature, especially the sun. While Müller’s ideas have been largely dismissed by modern scholars, his work was another example of the incredible ferment that was sweeping the academic world in this time of radical new assessment of ancient myths. And it was spilling over into the world of religion and politics.

Around this time, the serious study of cultural anthropology was also invented, and one of its chief proponents was Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), who would later become the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University in 1896. A young Quaker suffering from tuberculosis, in 1855 Tylor was sent to the Caribbean, where he became more interested in the ways of the newly discovered remote peoples in the Americas. As a Quaker and abolitionist, Tylor was interested in what was then called “ethnology,” and his fascination was more than just academic. He had a missionary zeal, believing studies of “primitive” people could help him document “human brotherhood.” Proving the connections between races, Tylor believed, would aid the antislavery cause. The goal of his journey was, as he put it, to “trace the course which the civilization of the world has actually followed.” Among the areas he pursued most vigorously was religion, and he coined the word “animism” to describe the most simple belief in spiritual beings and in everything having a soul. According to Tylor’s 1871 landmark book
Primitive Culture
, there appeared to be no tribes that “have no religious conceptions whatever.” Myths, he believed, were born in the attempt to explain natural phenomena but were rooted in fear and ignorance. Tylor’s theories transformed the field, even though his ideas have been largely dismissed, in part because of their somewhat racist overtones.