The lost temple

The history of ancient Rome is replete with strange characters, but one of the strangest is the ultimately pathetic figure of Elagabalus, who reigned for only four years (May 218 to March 222 C. E.) before being assassinated at the age of eighteen by the Praetorian Guard on the instigation of his own grandmother, the formidable and ruthless Julia Maesa.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carole Raddato, Marble bust of Roman emperor Elagabalus, ca. 221 AD, Capitoline Museums (20814003112), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Elagabalus, born Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus (so you can see why he's usually known by his single sobriquet), has been the subject of dubiously accurate lauds by the LGBTQ+ community because he was clearly queer; contemporaneous records describe his penchant for dressing as a woman and taking male lovers.  The problem is, his sexual orientation notwithstanding, he was a dreadful choice for ruler, preferring to throw lavish festivities than to pay any attention to affairs of state.  Perhaps unsurprising given that he landed on the throne at the age of fourteen; I don't know many fourteen-year-old boys who, given a choice between unlimited parties and sex and dealing with the responsibilities of governing an empire, would choose the latter.

In any case, if you want a queer Roman icon to admire, a much better choice is the Emperor Hadrian, who fell headlong in love with a Greek man named Antinous, but was also a pretty decent ruler.

And actually, given the (many) stunningly beautiful depictions of Antinous Hadrian had commissioned, I can understand why the emperor went goggle-eyed over him.  I would have, too.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Marie-Lan Nguyen, Antinous Farnese MAN Napoli Inv6030 n02, CC BY 2.5]

Poor Elagabalus, on the other hand, shouldn't have been on the throne in the first place, which would still have been true if he were one hundred percent straight.  Not only was he a completely incompetent ruler, he also made the cardinal error of trying to change Roman religious beliefs by decree, tossing out Jupiter and Juno and Vesta and all the rest in favor of a Sun-god called Elagabal he'd swiped from a Middle Eastern cult (thus his nickname of "Elagabalus").  This went over about as well as the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten's similar attempt fifteen hundred years earlier.  People were pissed, and he quickly made himself a number of powerful enemies amongst the Senate, aristocracy, and Praetorian Guard, which in ancient Rome was generally a short road toward a messy demise.  Elagabalus got wind of what was coming, and his mother, Julia Soaemias, hid him inside a chest, but the Praetorians found them and killed them both, cut off their heads, stripped the corpses naked, dragged them around Rome, and threw what was left into the Tiber River.

So much for Elagabalus.  But the story doesn't end there, because -- according to writings from shortly after his death -- the unfortunate young Emperor had during his short reign built an enormous temple to Elagabal that was demolished following his fall from power.  Modern archaeologists tried to locate the site without success.  Even after hints that it had been somewhere in Syria, archaeological investigations didn't identify for certain where it had once stood -- or if, perhaps, it never existed, and was a post-assassination fabrication.

The search was complicated by the fact that (1) "somewhere in Syria" is a big place, and (2) until very recently, Syria hasn't exactly been a safe region wherein to conduct archaeological research.  But now that things have settled down (a little), a team from the University of Sharjah started investigating a site that was long rumored to have been the location of Elagabal's temple -- the Great Mosque of Homs.  Homs, originally Emesa, is a city of immense antiquity, ruled by the Seleucids, Romans, Byzantine Greeks, Arabs, and Ottoman Turks in succession, each culture leaving its stamp on the buildings and the people.  It was known as a site for the worship of Elagabal, so the idea that Elagabalus's grand temple was somewhere in the vicinity was a decent guess.  And given that people all over the world have the habit of building and rebuilding places of worship on the same sacred sites, the Great Mosque was a good starting point.

And they found what they were looking for -- a Greek inscription that talks about a being associated with the Sun, likening him to the wind, storms, and the power of the leopard, all descriptors known to have been used by Elagabalus to honor his favorite deity (and, by reflected glory, himself).

It's not proof, of course.  That this was a site where Elagabal was worshiped doesn't mean this was the site that Elagabalus himself commissioned.  But it does at least lend credence to the claim, and gives the archaeologists a reason to keep looking for more clues.

So now we have at least a little more in the way of hard evidence about the short, pitiful reign of an inept teenager who is yet another in the long list of examples illustrating why "royal blood" is a completely fucked-up concept.  I can't help but feel sorry for the kid, and it brings back to mind an earlier musing about why the hell people were so eager to be on the throne in the first place, given how few emperors died of old age.  Doesn't seem like four years of partying and sex were worth the end result, frankly.

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The non-mystery of the Dendera Light

One of the things that has always struck me about woo-woo types is how little it takes to get them going.  I suppose when you've already decided what you believe, the amount of evidence you require to support that belief can asymptotically approach zero without changing your stance one iota.

I ran into a particularly good example of that yesterday -- the Dendera Light.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Olaf Tausch, Dendera Krypta 48 (cropped), CC BY 3.0]

The Dendera Light is a motif found in the carvings in the Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt.  The design is of a giant snake emerging from a lotus flower.  It appears in at least six different places, accompanied by texts that are all rather similar -- so its meaning is fairly well understood.  It is part of the creation myth, showing the god Harsomtus (an incarnation of Horus, in the form of a snake) being born and going out into the world.  This is supported by the inscriptions, one version of which reads:

Speaking the words of Harsomtus, the great God, who dwells in Dendera, who is in the arms of the first in the night-barge, sublime snake, whose Chentj-statue carries Heh [the personification of eternity], whose crew carries in holiness his perfection, whose Ba [spirit] caused Hathor to appear in the sky, whose figure is revered by his followers, who is unique, encircled by his forehead-snake, with countless names on the top of Chui-en-hesen, the symbol of power of Ra in the land of Atum, the father of the Gods, who created everything.

The Dendera Light motif almost always appears on lists with names like "Ten Unexplained Mysteries From Ancient Egypt" despite the fact that except insofar as we still have a fairly fragmentary understanding of Egyptian mythology, beliefs, and practices, it's not very mysterious at all.

Why?

First, someone noticed that the oval container (or halo) surrounding the snake was the same basic shape as a Crookes tube, an early version of the cathode-ray tube invented by British physicist William Crookes in 1870:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons D-Kuru, Crookes tube two views, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT]

The second thing was a passing comment by British astronomer and polymath Joseph Norman Lockyer, who had gone to Egypt to investigate the alignment of ancient temples and monuments with astronomical objects.  He and a colleague noticed the absence of soot deposits in the interior of some of the temples -- something you'd expect with the use of torches or oil lamps -- and the colleague jokingly said that this could be explained if the ancient Egyptians had electric lights.  Lockyer, clearly recognizing that it was a joke, mentioned it to a friend, and that was all it took.

In a classic example of adding two and two and getting 318, we have "vaguely oval shape in a religious motif" plus "humorous comment about the lack of soot in Egyptian temples" equaling "the ancient Egyptians had high technology, including electricity and who-the-hell-knows what else."

Therefore, of course, you-know-who had to be involved:

Needless to say, this claim has actual archaeologists tearing their hair out.  Kenneth Feder, professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University, who is a vocal debunker of ancient aliens claims and the like (he is the author of The Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology) points out correctly that if the ancient Egyptians had electricity and light bulbs, it's a little odd that we've never found a single trace of a wire, socket, filament, generator, or battery -- not so much as a glass shard from a broken bulb.

I get that the ancient Egyptian culture is fascinating and, in one sense, mysterious.  As I mentioned earlier, our understanding of how these people lived and what they believed is incomplete at best.  The monuments and temples and relics we still have today are beautiful and evocative.

But none of that is an excuse for making shit up.

So let's keep a sense of perspective, here.  The inscriptions and designs we don't yet understand do not imply that ancient aliens had anything to do with it.  "We don't yet understand" means only one thing; "we don't yet understand."

And as far as the Dendera Light, I'm afraid that's where we have to leave it.

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Under the ancient skies

I find it fascinating how long humans have been curious about the nature of the universe.  Our drive to understand the world and its workings certainly goes back a very long way.  Some of it can be explained purely pragmatically -- a commonly-cited example is the development of accurate sidereal calendars by the ancient Egyptians to get the timing right for the annual Nile floods, critical not only from a safety standpoint but because figuring out a way to manage all that water was essential for agriculture in what was then a rapidly-growing population.  But it goes far beyond that.  It seems like as far back as we have any kind of records at all, we've wanted to know what makes the cosmos tick.

A particularly fascinating example of this came my way via my friend, the brilliant writer Gil Miller, who seems to have an uncanny knack for finding stuff that (1) I will find really interesting, and (2) I haven't heard about before.  Yesterday he sent me a link from the site New Scientist about an archaeological find in Turkey that -- if the researchers' conclusions are borne out, will provide another example of how early we developed our compulsion to understand what was going on up there in the night skies.

The site is called Yazılıkaya, and it was built by the Hittites 3,200 years ago near their capital city of Ḫattuša.  (The nearest modern town is Boğazkale, in central Turkey.)  It has hundreds of images carved into the rock surfaces, and according to this new study, they represent not only solar, lunar, and sidereal calendars, they are a representation of their concept of the structure of the universe.

The shrine at Yazılıkaya

The current study was the product of a tremendous amount of work.  "There are many connotations with the names of the deities and the arrangements and groups, and so in retrospect it’s pretty easy to figure it out," said Eberhard Zangger, one of the researchers who investigated the site.  "But we worked on it for seven years...  [The Hittites] had a certain image of how creation happened.  They imagined that the world began in chaos, which became organized into three levels: the underworld, and then the earth on which we walk, and then the sky.  The second aspect of Hittite cosmology was a recurrent renewal of life – for instance, day following night, the dark moon turning into a full moon and winter becoming summer.  The calendar-like carvings reflect this cyclical view of nature."

Of course, back then, there was no particularly accurate way to measure stellar and planetary positions, and anything like a telescope was still two millennia in the future.  But even so, they did pretty damn well with what they had access to, especially given how long ago this was.  The Hittites controlled most of what is now modern Turkey from 1,700 to 1,100 B.C.E., at which point attacks from the Phrygians and Assyrians pretty much smashed the power structure and subsumed the culture.

From our modern knowledge of cosmology, the Big Bang and stellar evolution and astrophysics, their conclusions seem pretty rudimentary.  They, like most of the contemporaneous societies, put the whole thing in the hands of gods and sub-gods and so on, giving the whole thing a religious rather than scientific veneer.  "Obviously that makes sense, because that’s exactly what religion does," said archaeologist Efrosyni Boutsikas, of the University of Kent, who was not involved in the current research.  "It addresses universal concerns and the place of the people in the world."  She added that she's not 100% sold on the conclusions of Zangger and his colleagues, but that the site and others near it are deserving of further study.

I'm certainly not qualified to judge the quality of the research nor the legitimacy of the team's conclusions, but I am fascinated with how long we've been trying to figure out how everything works.  As Boutsikas said, religion is a common first-order approximation, and although in many cases it became solidified into a compulsory belief system that then became a hindrance to scientific advancement, it does represent our drive to reach beyond our day-to-day concerns and glimpse the mechanisms controlling not only the movements of things here on Earth, but of those unreachably distant points of light we see gliding through the night skies.  Awe-inspiring, isn't it, to think that our ancestors 3,200 years ago were looking at those ancient skies, and trying to make sense of it all -- just as we're still doing today.

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In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]