Stupidest things you have ever seen written (about ancient history)

[vartan]

I don't know about you guys but if I'm getting paid to work as a history consultant, and my advice isn't taken seriously but rather twisted, I could care less. Puts the bread on the table, so to speak. Peoples should grow their critical analytical skills in order not to take silly exhibitions at face value.

[jirisys]

I don't know about you guys but if I'm getting paid to work as a history consultant, and my advice isn't taken seriously but rather twisted, I could care less. Puts the bread on the table, so to speak. Peoples should grow their critical analytical skills in order not to take silly exhibitions at face value.

You're welcome for the idea.

Problem is when things are not supposed to be silly... Oh the madness/sparta

~Jirisys ()

[Lazy O]

I dont think you can put 300(the parody) in this category,it was purely fictional and meant for entertainment. The 300 Spartans however was utter bt.

[Andronikos]

Many of those myths, like those that were created sometimes in romanticism which connect modern nations to absolutely unrelated ancient cultures and claim to be their descendants. Yes, perhaps these myths had some use in that era, but nowadays we need more critical approach to history. For example, some of the top are: as I come from Slavic country, I have read many claims that Slavs lived in antiquity where they live today, that they were by far the most developed people in the world (they had everything from advanced metallurgy, wireless communication - because no cables have been excavated to warp powered spaceships , come on, yes we Slavs are awesome and so we don't need this crap), that migrations are false theory, because whole nations simply can't migrate, that men do not originate from Africa, but from Eurasia, that history is some kind of manipulated western (Anglo-Saxon) propaganda and so on. Unbelievable what you can find on the internet.

[Lazy O]

Or in government published schoolbooks in my case

[anubis88]

Let's drop the 300 discussion, since it has been done to death, but i was thinking on focusing on examples like the one i put as an example.

If we are already mentining Slavs, there's a book in my country, the tiltle being; The Etruscans were Slavs . I mean wth.... The guy tries to prove using ancient Etruscan texts, that they can be paraprhased as ancient slovenian and slavic (which doesnt exist as a written languge). He uses his translations as proof, which end up sometimes like this;

Holding a horse, you can drink wine.

Absurd. Pseudo-science sucks

[DeathFinger]

There's a lot - a lot of stupid things written about history.
Some wikipedia articles are really bad, like some internet articles are too, but knowing the guys who posts them it cannot really be took into consideration. What's worse is when they are specialists. I took some weeks ago a book of the ancient marxists' universities, you know when they wanted to show that Parthians vs Romans was a classes war (and I better not to speak about Germanian invasions on this subject). Shame that I don't remember the book's title btw.

But to me the worse is the "New Chronology" thing. See the wikipedia article on this, it's enough. for example, a certain Dr. Ranajit Pal had argues that Diodotos of Bactria and Ašoka were the same.... There was a thread on this btw ^^

[Randal]

At my university's ancient history faculty, a decade or so back, we had this rather... spirited debate between two of the more eminent professors. (One from a rival university.)

It was about This book. I think this is the full text, I haven't read so I can't be sure.

Anyway, the book claims that Flavius Josephus invented christianity and the person of Jesus, and that he's actually based on Julius, i.e. Julius Caesar. And Galilee was Gaul, Judas was Brutus, etc.

Now taken by itself it seems like pretty ordinary crackpot-ism. What made it truly stupid is that when the thing got picked up by the media, even one ancient history professor started defending it. When the flames started coming in (This debate took place in newspaper editorials and letters and opinion pieces, but those are really just the precursors of internet fora) he quickly back-tracked and the argument was about whether it was scientifically permissible to dismiss this book as arrant nonsense -before- reading it or whether you had to actually read it first.

I didn't read it and am convinced it's nonsense, so I guess you all know which side I was on. ;-)

EDIT: Deathfinger posted while I was checking some facts for this, so I didn't see his post before. But that New Chronology stuff is very similar to this.