I Do Not Agree...

...with many archaeologists' ideas about the past.

I am going to just quote one idea for this as there are too many different ideas about the past floating around out there.

Eventually the lights of the Milky Way were thought by the Greeks to be the souls of the departed, an idea they may have borrowed from Egypt, where the Greeks got quite a few of their ideas. Most ancient myths about the heavens and the gods attempted to set the universe into a human framework. many of those legendary explanations were closely tied to life and death as well as fertility rites and human sexuality.

The simplistic primitive explanations for why the Sun rose, or the Moon made its regular course in the night sky, or why the seasons changed or why the rains came and the Nile River flooded are shared by every human group. (pg. 9 Don't Know Much About the Universe by Kenneth Davis)

Now I am not going to say that no one believed such things but I will disagree with the idea that EVERY Greek or ancient person accepted such tales as factual or even religious explanations.

Even in this country, South Korea, where many of the tombs are shaped like a pregnant ladies womb because SOME Koreans believe that the departed soul goes back to the womb when the body dies. BUT that doesn't mean every Korean believes (ed) such things because all sorts of tombs are found throughout Korea from all eras of Korean history. We have jar tombs, dolmens, regular tombs, cremated remains and so on. Not every Korean believes that they need to build a dome tomb nor accept the myth behind them.

The idea that all people of one ancient society believed what their ancient myths claimed makes them out to be mindless robots with no ability to think for themselves and that is just not possible. This idea comes from those modern people who remove God from the picture or decide that God did not lead ancient people to the truth.

This type of thinking originally comes from the idea that all humans evolved from animals and were clueless for millennia about anything concerning life and the universe. These people remove vital facts from history and create their own even though their own theories are just ridiculous.

Let's put it this way, if a future archaeologist is lucky enough to excavate the remains of the American White House and comes across a set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They could, and probably would, conclude that the American people believed in elves, hobbits and orcs, along with wizards, talking trees and magical powers.

In most cases, modern archaeologists (from the beginning of archaeology till now) have found very few copies of these myths in any ancient civilization yet they feel they can extrapolate one copy of a myth into a whole 'religious' belief amongst the ancients.

The problem is

archaeologists have only discovered one side of the story--the myth. They have not uncovered, to the best of my knowledge, any work that details how those myths were treated, accepted or what place in ancient society they held. Everything we know about those myths comes from the archaeologists' imagination.

In comparison, we know of the popularity of the Harry Potter series in modern times, yet that popularity does not translate into a religious belief about the universe or life on earth by all Americans. We should not make the same mistake with the ancient world.

Just because we have a story carved in stone by an ancient society does it mean it even enjoyed popularity. It means it escaped the dangers that befalls ancient artifacts and texts.

The same attitude I have about ancient myths applies to the idea that ancient Egyptians thought their Pharaoh was a god. North Korea considers their recent leaders from the Kim family as gods but those people are brainwashed and forced (under penalty of death) into thinking that. We have no textual records saying that the Egyptians were forced or brainwashed into thinking the same thing.

They could have been but I have not seen one book on Egypt, so far and I have another one to read soon, that makes this claim. It is always referred to as a willing attitude but I find that far-fetched. Some ancient authors may have written about the pharaoh being a god but that doesn't translate into a nationwide cult, where too many people would be able to question the idea.

I say these things

because of discoveries made by different archaeologists that do not get a lot of press anymore. The late S. Marinatos, the man who discovered the buried city on Thera, made a discovery that allows for glass cutting technology to have taken place 4,000 years ago approx.

When he first viewed the ruins, Marinatos thought Arvantis had led him to a Minoan palace, but further excavation revealed great works of art, comfortable furnishings, hanging gardens and advanced hydrotechnology in every house and the houses had belonged not to kings but to shipping merchants ,jewelers, bakers and fishermen......Marinatos himself could not avoid such thoughts, as he turned a rarely talked about but much prized sliver of cut and polished quartz between thumb and forefinger. When reconstructed, the crystal, convex on both sides,hinted that someone on ancient Thera possessed a knowledge of lens cutting....Lens-cutting technology was not beyond Minoan reach, and the idea of ancient telescopes only seemed strange when modern uses were assumed for them. (Return to Sodom And Gomorrah by C. Pellegrino, pgs. 204-5)

There are more such discoveries around the world but since many archaeologists have their own ideas about the past, and want to construct their own version of historical life, it is difficult to read about them.

The ancients were not glorified animals suddenly bestowed with intelligence by an evolving mind. God gave them intelligence and like today, ancient man used it for whatever purpose they had in mind.

Some Final Words

This is why I disagree with many archaeologists, they ignore God and remove the truth from the picture and provide the world with a distorted and biased view of the past. The ancients were not mindless robots who ate, slept, worked and prayed. They had intelligence, hopes and dreams just like everyday modern people and our discoveries prove this true.