Dated History / Antiquity

Father Kiernan: Actually, scientists have discovered that in Roman times, people were crucified through the wrists, not the palms. There's no way that the hands could have supported the weight of body, so they did crucify them through the wrists.

Frankie Paige: No, wait, you're telling me that every painting, every statue of Christ, every single crucifix in the whole world is wrong?

— Stigmata

Examples of Dated History that reference events from the first civilizations to roughly 500 A.D.

General

• The Ancient Astronauts hypothesis popularized by Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved mysteries of the past has been thoroughly disproven. The idea was that early civilizations were too primitive—and for "primitive" read "stupid"—to build anything sophisticated. However, evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt to all but the most dedicated conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists that ancient monuments were built by human hands with the technology of their time. In the case of the Ancient Egyptian pyramids, for example, blueprints have been found, along with graffiti on the stones indicating that the builders treated their work as a team sport. Additionally, pyramids are not really that complex to build, being effectively just a big pile of stone, with most of the weight in the bottom half. As long as you have a central authority to direct the masses, pyramids are not at all beyond the means of any society capable of quarrying and cutting stone, and that's why they were not just built in Egypt but also Mesopotamia or the Yucatan (and not because aliens talked them into it or did it for them).
  • Though this trope goes as far back as the first extraterrestrial invasion story, The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (where it is said that the Sphinx and Pyramids were built by the Martians), critics have pointed that it is pretty much the older "theory" of ancient civilizations being influenced by advanced white "Aryans" (for example from Atlantis, like in the Kull and Conan the Barbarian stories), recycled for the post-World War II era when such discourse is only popular with neonazis. It is at least suspicious that non-white monuments dating just a few hundred years old like Easter Island's moais and Inca fortresses get this treatment, while in Europe only prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge get it, and suggesting that aliens helped build the Colosseum or Medieval cathedrals would be considered ridiculous.
• It's generally believed that the sizes of ancient military forces were frequently exaggerated. For example, The Histories say that the Second Persian invasion of Greece had more than 2.5 million troops, but modern estimates say they numbered a fifth of that at most. Similarly, the Commentaries on the Gallic War say that the Gallic relief force at the Battle of Alesia numbered a quarter million, but estimates of 50,000 to 100,000 are considered more reasonable.
  • The Bible appears to vastly exaggerate the population of Israel — it has been noted that the census of the tribes of Israel add up to a far greater number than the region could reasonably have sustained at the time and, for a small nation surrounded by regional superpowers of the day who also kept records, is suspiciously high compared to what we know about the populations of Egypt, Assyria, or Babylon. Israel is also assigned a total of battle-chariots far in excess of that held by Egypt at the same time. When evidence from all sources is gathered in, the Biblical estimates should be scaled back by a factor of ten.
• Most historians no longer take seriously the idea that the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the eastern Mediterranean was caused by a single factor. The prevailing theory is that it was the result of a "perfect storm" or "domino effect" of many different things: earthquakes, droughts, famine, disease, invasions (especially ones involving the mysterious "Sea Peoples"), and all the general instability each of them cause.
  • For a long time, it was accepted that the Bronze Age was brought to an end by the discovery of iron smelting by the Hittites in Asia Minor, who promptly sent their 4/3 Legions to curbstomp everybody else's 1/2 Phalanxes. The Egyptian has the titular people shocked by the new metal used by the Hittites and its strength, depicting an iron sword as being capable of breaking a parring bronze in two strikes. But later archaeological evidence led to a different narrative: iron metallurgy was actually developed concurrently with bronze in some places (including Egypt), and ended replacing bronze because it was cheaper to make, not better. Some copper ores also contain iron, and a furnace capable of melting copper is also at a temperature capable of reducing iron ore to metallic iron in the presence of carbon monoxide. Iron tools from bogs in Northern Europe have been dated to the middle Bronze Age, and bronze swords have been found with iron inlays in the handle. Bronze may have been preferred in the beginning because it's prettier, doesn't rust (which would have been a liability of early iron in non-arid regions), and doesn't require forging to produce good blades. However, bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, which are almost never found in the same areas, and its metallurgy depended upon a healthy trade network. Iron was the most abundant element that people could get and use. Early iron actually made softer, inferior tools and weapons compared to bronze; better bloomeries, higher smelting temperatures, and the ability to carburize wrought iron into steel would be discovered later and change the equation.
  • In a particular contrast to the usual Technology Levels, sub-Saharan Africa had no "Bronze Age", yet civilizations progressed directly from stone tools to iron, due to the lack of local copper and tin ores. This was long overlooked by European historians because of racist attitudes presuming black Africans to automatically be primitive and their history not even worth studying. Meanwhile, Japan had a "metal age" fairly late in the Yayoi Period (roughly 300 BCE to 300 CE, with some controversial takes putting it as early as 1000 BCE) where the Iron and Bronze Age effectively overlapped.
• The notion that Greco-Roman civilization was more "advanced and rational" than the "backward and superstitious" medieval Europe codified by The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is now considered a gross oversimplification. For example, the Greeks and Romans both prosecuted people for witchcraft, while the medieval Catholic Church taught that the practice was not real and professed that claims of belief in it were a mark of either ignorance or malice. See Middle Ages for more on this.
• All those marble pillars and facades in Greek and Roman ruins were once thought to have been as clean, white, and free of ornamentation when they were new as they are now. Tests on Roman ruins (and discovery of buried ruins at Pompeii, Palmyra, and Antioch) revealed that the Greeks and Romans painted almost all of their white marble in loud, garish colors using vegetable-based paints that decomposed and bleached out as the buildings fell to ruins. This trope affected not just fictional representations of the old days including Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus, The Fall of the Roman Empire, or I, Claudius, but also architecture (notice how gleaming white Washington, D.C. is?) and interior design. The evidence is more mixed when it comes to statues: some were fully painted, others only partially painted (or gilded), and others left white. The Greeks in particular favored bronze statues over marble (which would not have been painted) but many were lost in later centuries as they were melted to reutilize their metal.
  • Same mistake was made with other civilizations. The Egyptian, Land of the Pharaohs, The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra all were proudly shot on Ancient Egyptian locations or sets based on their presently ruined, sandy-colored condition instead of showing the brightly colored paintings they were covered in. For example, the Sphynx would have been mostly painted red.
  • The bare gray and black stone appearance of Mesoamerican buildings was also taken at face value, until it was discovered that they were originally covered in plaster and painted bright colors like red and white. Thus the Mayincatec building set of Age of Empires II, released in 2000 and based on Palenque, is fully made of bare stone and even has some vines growing on it despite representing inhabited and functional buildings. For the Definitive Edition remake in 2019, the makers kept the original appearance, but acknowledged the mistake by giving faded painted colors to the Aztec and Mayan Wonders and the new Fortified Towers. The Aztecs in Age of Empires III (2006), on the other hand, received a brightly colored set based on Aztec codices from the beginning.
• There was a similar notion about all Greeks and Romans wearing "noble" white clothes. While some people actually dressed in white (e.g., Romans conducting in the forum), most people preferred garish, bright colors. This is equivalent to assuming that the three-piece business suit or the full tuxedo is everyday casual wear for today. Romans actually hated the toga (they were hot in the Italian summers, cumbersome, and you can't use your left arm while wearing one), so much that there had to be a law stating that togas must be worn to enter a forum in part to discourage anyone from trying anything funny while there. Romans would normally wear the tunic, a linen clothing that could be worn with anything else necessary, such as underwear, trousers, or knee-breaches. Roman women normally wore the stola. Per Word of God, The Eagle (2011) showed its Roman characters using the toga only in official meetings and putting on more comfortable native clothes when not in them, but they reshot several scenes with the Romans wearing togas after test audiences had trouble telling the Roman and Britonnic characters apart.
• Another clothing misconception is the depiction of Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, etc. wearing leather or metal wristbands. This arose in The Renaissance when artists misunderstood Roman representations of segmented arm armor (manica) as wrist bands and put them in practically every depiction of Antiquity they made. Like in the above, the makers of Gladiator knew that the wristbands were inaccurate but included them because they thought it would meet audience expectations. Villagers in Age of Empires I (1997) wear a golden wristband, but not in the Definitive Edition remake from 2018.

Carthage and Phoenicia

• The worship of Moloch. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) mentions "Moloch" eight times: seven to ban sacrificing children to Moloch on pain of death, and once as an Ammonite god that had a temple in Jerusalem during the reign of Solomon. In the Middle Ages, Moloch was mixed with the Minotaur and Greco-Roman reports of Carthaginians sacrificing children to Chronus (more below), representing him as a bull-headed demon to whom children were sacrificed; he appears as such in Paradise Lost. From the Carthage reference, 19th century historians interpreted Moloch as a Punic god with a name derived from the Semitic root mlk ("to rule"), to whom children were sacrificed, and that this practice once extended into Israel from Phoenicia. Salammbô and Cabiria show Carthaginians sacrificing children in a temple to Moloch, while Metropolis and Howl (1955) use Moloch's temple as a metaphor for industrialization and capitalism, in which workers are sacrificed instead of children. However, extensive archaeological research, beginning with the ruins of Carthage in 1921, failed to find any reference to a Punic god named Moloch, not even as an epithet of their supreme god El (Baal). In 1935 an alternative theory, now hegemonic, proposed that Moloch was not a god but a type of sacrificing ritual (coincidentally called mlk by the Carthaginians), that was practiced by Canaanite peoples including the ancient Hebrews; the Ammonite Moloch would have been a mistaken transliteration of the main Ammonite god, Milcom.
• On the sacrifices themselves, Salammbô and Cabiria draw from the writings of Greco-Roman authors Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch to show mass, public sacrifices of children five-years-old and up, perpetrated by the Carthaginian priests, by burning them alive on a giant furnace inside a statue, while crowds play loud music and chants to drown out the cries of the victims and their families. However excavations at the Carthage tophet and elsewhere have found only remains of newborns that were burned and buried in individual shrines, suggesting that this was a private affair by the children's own parents. This in turn engendered a vivid, unsolved debate on the nature and meaning of the child sacrifices; a revisionist school beginning in The '70s and The '80s in Italy and Tunisia even argues that these aren't sacrifices at all, but tombs for stillbirths and young children dead from natural causes, and that claims of sacrifice are Roman propaganda. Other researchers who believe that children were sacrificed at Carthage concede that the most lurid, accusatory accounts like the above were written over a century after the fall of Carthage, while authors actually contemporary like Sophocles and Plato only mention the practice in passing or as something that was, at most, weird.
• Mainstream scholars once held that the Berbers adopted the trappings of civilization from Phoenician colonists, but later archaeological evidence indicates that at least some Berbers were civilized long before the Phoenicians existed as a distinct people. In fact, it's believed that the Phoenicians themselves adopted customs from the Berbers, including eating pork, which was previously taboo for the Phoenicians.
• In The Histories, Herodotus expresses his skepticism about a Phoenician expedition said to have been commissioned by Pharaoh Necho to sail around Africa, because the Phoenicians claimed that "as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya (Africa), they had the sun on their right". Today this detail is the strongest evidence for the story being real, as this is indeed what would happen if they were in the Southern Hemisphere.
• Hanno the Navigator's description of a tribe of "hairy savages" called Gorillai somewhere down the African coast was assumed to be a misunderstanding or xenophobic tall tale. After Europeans learned of the largest African apes in 1847, they named them gorillas from Hanno's account, and identified a large mountain mentioned by him with Mount Cameroon. However, the behavior described doesn't match that of gorillas, and the account would have very little descriptions of the Guinea Gulf coast compared to northwest Africa if Hanno really made it there. It is possible that Hanno met chimpanzees instead (which live as far west as Senegal, unlike gorillas).
• Carthage was not salted after the Third Punic War, as its fertile lands were something the Roman elite were eager to get, and neither was Milan by Frederick Barbarossa over a thousand years later. The idea appears to come from confusion over a Medieval order calling for the city of Palestrina to be ploughed over "like Carthage", and also salted. Carthage itself was certainly ploughed over, but the idea of it being salted doesn't turn up until the 19th century.
  • Historians and novelists have misunderstood what was meant by salting and ploughing a city. Ploughing and salting were merely symbolic gestures similar to running defeated soldiers under the yoke. There wasn't enough salt in the Republic to render barren the land underneath Carthage, nor enough manpower to completely flatten the city. Not to mention that salt was far too expensive to squander tons by dumping it on the ground. The Romans needed the infrastructure of Carthage intact and the land fertile, as Roman soldiers would be sent to live and farm there after they were demobilized.
  • The legend may be partly based on the Biblical story of the salting of Shechem. Being near the Dead Sea, this was actually practical.

Celtic Europe

• In the 19th century, historians called megaliths "druidic stones" and attributed their erection to Celtic peoples. This belief persisted into The 20th Century, explaining why, in Asterix (created in 1959), Obélix is a menhir carver and delivery man. Later it was established that European megaliths were older, dating from the Bronze Age, Neolithic, or even earlier in a few cases.
• Traditionally, it was believed that the Celts invaded the British Isles, conquering and displacing the previous inhabitants. However, DNA evidence indicates that the British Celts have lived on the British Isles for roughly 3,000 years. The current theory is that the Celts of Continental Europe traded with the British Isles, and the natives were so impressed by these rich traders and their goods that they adopted Celtic culture.
  • In Victorian Britain, a sub-theory of the aforementioned was that The Fair Folk had been inspired from tales of pre-Celtic people and their conquest/genocide, as Faeries are said to be shorter and darker than humans, live hidden in remote places, and fear Cold Iron. Common folk even referred to prehistoric flint arrowheads as "elfshot". This idea is the inspiration of the Little Dark People in Rosemary Sutcliff's books (made explicit in Sword at Sunset), and the Children of the Forest in A Song of Ice and Fire.
• British Celts were said to paint or tattoo themselves with a blue pigment (as mentioned in This Means Warpaint) which led to the naming of the Picts (from Latin Pictus, "painted one"). Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War refers to this paint as vitrum, which meant "glass" in Latin but was also a common term for the woad plant, leading to assumptions that the Celts used woad to paint or tattoo themselves. However, attempts to apply the plant for tattooing in 2004-2005 found that it is painfully caustic, causes scarring, and doesn't keep its color well; attempts to use it for body paint find that it dries up and flakes off too easily. This means that unless the Celts had a lost recipe for effective woad tattooing or body paint, woad was not used for their blue tattoos. Additionally, Caesar was writing about the southern Britons, not the Picts, who were a Northern British people and whose name is first attested about 350 years after his Commentaries. Direct references to woad as the pigment include Age of Empires II, where the Celtic unique unit is a fast infantry called "Woad Raider", and King Arthur, where the Briton rebels are called "Woads" by the Romans.
• It was once assumed that ancient and early medieval Irish farming concentrated almost entirely on livestock, especially cattle. While it's true that cattle were greatly prized (to the point where cattle raiding constituted a large part of Irish warfare at the time), pollen studies and other evidence show that grain farming was increasingly important from about 200 CE onward.

China

• The theory that Chinese civilization began at the Yellow River and radiated outwards from there was once prevalent. Modern Sinology generally considers it just one of three main centers of civilization (albeit the most important one), with the other two being the Yangtze and Liao rivers.
• Traditional Chinese historiography had the Xia dynasty as the first one, who were overthrown by the Shang dynasty. However, since there are no contemporaneous records of the Xia dynasty, its historicity is in doubt; one theory is that the Xia were an invention of the Zhou dynasty, who overthrew the Shang, in order to fabricate a precedent for their actions.
• While it was once a popular theory (mainly among Western historians, but some Chinese also adopted it) that the Shang dynasty was semi-legendary at best, the discovery and decipherment of oracle bones resulted in the development of a king list closely matching accounts of the dynasty collected in the Shiji, leading to modern acceptance of Shang historicity.
• Sun Tzu's The Art of War is considered the Big Book of War, but while the popular image is that its value was recognized from the start, evidence suggests it was just one of several military manuals and actually looked down upon as being for peasants ^note generals generally came from noble families and were expected to know how to lead and fight without any outside aid. Its popularity began during the waning days of the Han Dynasty, when the warlord Cao Cao (a noted admirer of Sun Tzu) made it required reading for his generals and even provided annotated versions that included examples from his many campaigns. Some scholars suggest that the modern version of The Art of War is actually based on Cao Cao's simplified and annotated version.
• Qin Shi Huangdi, the founder of the Qin dynasty, was undoubtedly a ruthless man who made some terrible mistakes. However, the traditional view of him as a corrupt, monstrous, tyrannical madman and the Qin dynasty as a crypto-totalitarian dystopia is now believed to have been the product of later exaggerations. Archaeological findings, such as the rediscovery of legal codes, show that the Qin were significantly more "mainstream" than previously thought.
• King's War: While Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian did indicate that Ziying was Fusu's son, modern historians have disputed this, arguing that if Ziying discussed with his sons the plan to assassinate Zhao Gao, him being Fusu's son would have made him too young for this scenario. Similarly, there is no consensus on whether Zhao Gao was truly a eunuch.
• Cao Cao, thanks to the cultural impact of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, was generally just accepted as a Dirty Coward Opportunistic Bastard. It wouldn't be until Mao Zedong (an admirer of Cao Cao) began ordering more positive depictions of Cao that there was a real attempt to study the historical Cao. However, even now there is pushback due to how ingrained the idea of "Cao Cao the villain" is in popular culture. For example, the 2012 drama Cao Cao, the hero wasn't released in China until 2015 (and even then renamed to simply Cao Cao) due to people refusing to see him as anything but a villainous figure. This is very notable because the series was explicitly based on historical records, rather than the Romance like most works.

Egypt

• It was once assumed that the Ancient Egyptians must have learned writing from the Sumerians. However, the earliest Egyptian writing is so different from Sumerian cuneiform in structure and style that it was most likely developed independently; while it's possible that there was some stimulus diffusion from Mesopotamia, it's unlikely that it went further than the transmission of an idea.
• Since Herodotus, historians generally assumed that the pyramids were built by slaves, because they couldn't imagine so many people working such a massive, back-breaking job voluntarily. This was exploded when archaeologists discovered contracts and other evidence showing that the pyramid builders were almost all free men. The pyramids were not just tombs but also public works projects intended to give underemployed farmers something to do in the off season, when the Nile fields were underwater. Virtually every fiction showing Ancient Egypt (or a expy, like Stargate, 10,000 BC, Futurama, Recess...) gets this wrong.
  • This was partly backed up by the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt referenced in The Bible, although it doesn't say that said slaves built the Pyramids. There's little to no credible evidence of the entire population of Hebrews being enslaved in Egypt (or acting as corvee labor, or indentured, or otherwise doing work they didn't want to do, since chattel slavery really wasn't a thing in ancient Egypt). Later attempts to integrate this with the Book of Exodus involved smaller groups either as hostages or mercenaries, or groups of commoners escaping famine conditions. One current theory is that the whole story is political grandstanding; the earliest written accounts of the Exodus were found in the northern kingdom of Israel. While the southern kingdom of Judah was an Egyptian client state, Israel instead allied itself with Egypt's Mesopotamian rivals.
• Historical wisdom had it that Hatshepsut was a wicked stepmother who stole the Egyptian throne from Thutmose III, the legitimate heir (and her nephew, son-in-law, and stepson), and had herself crowned King of Egypt. She supposedly allowed Thutmose to control the army but otherwise ruled the country with an iron fist until her death despite Thutmose being a competent adult for most of her reign. The proof? After Hatshepsut's death, Thutmose walled up all her inscriptions, tore down her statues, and obliterated her name from the histories — clearly, a sign of someone who had finally had enough of a meddling mother-in-law. Putting aside for the moment how unlikely it would be for a woman to stage a successful palace coup in 1400s BC when her opponent had complete control of the military, it was discovered in the 1990s that Thutmose didn't even begin to obliterate Hatshepsut from the historical record until twenty years after she died. Historians now think that Hatshepsut and Thutmose were allies who ruled as co-monarchs, and that the elderly Thutmose or his son Amenhotep II walled up her inscriptions because even decades after her death the people saw her as a more legitimate ruler than Thutmose. This has also put a few thorns into the common belief that Thutmose was Egypt's most successful and best-loved ruler. The trope is the basis of Pauline Gedge's novel Child of the Morning.
  • The supposed conflict even had some historians theorizing that Thutmose had arranged Hatshepsut's murder. Tests on her mummy show that she likely died of cancer that either formed in the liver or spread there. There was also a flask of skin lotion found with her whose contents included benzopyrene, a potent carcinogen sometimes found in traditional eczema preparations.
• Paintings from the reign of Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) show the "heretic king" with a large, flabby belly, unusually wide hips, and other features not often seen on healthy adult men. Until 2007, it was assumed that these paintings portrayed Akhenaten accurately and that his unusual body shape was likely a result of either an intersex condition or birth defects caused by generations of Royal Inbreeding. CT scans of his mummy, though, reveal that he was neither intersex nor deformed in any way. Historians now think that the body differences shown on the paintings were totemic — in other words, that Akhenaten was portrayed that way for religious purposes.
  • Likewise, his disestablishment of the state religion and proclamation of Aten as the one and only true God has been portrayed as a New Age revelation just short of Crystal Spires and Togas, a beneficent proto-Christianity, the inspiration for monotheistic Judaism (as Sigmund Freud famously believed), a megalomaniac's delusions, or even something his mom put him up to for political reasons. The most popular theory among historians was that it was due more to a feeling that the traditional gods had deserted Egypt (not only had the country endured a massive earthquake and tsunami but also several epidemics) coupled with Akhenaten's desire to wrest power from the priests of Amun.
• X-ray evidence showing splinters of bone inside Tutankhamun's skull once led historians to believe that the pharaoh was murdered by his vizier, Ay, as part of a palace coup. Scans of the mummy using modern diagnostic imaging devices proved that the skull was splintered from the inside after death, probably as part of the mummification process, and that Tutankhamun likely died from a massive infection arising from a fractured leg (this does not disprove that Ay killed him, but it makes it less likely—broken bones were not necessarily fatal even then). This mistake is a plot point in The Egyptian, the Papyrus comic "Tutankhamun, the Assassinated Pharaoh", and Mummies Alive!
  • It was also assumed that Tutankhamun's reign couldn't possibly have been of any real significance, simply because he died at such a young age. That was before it was verified that he was Akhenaten's son, and thus took the throne during one of the most tumultuous periods of Egyptian history. The fact that his reign was the one in which worship of Amun was restored means, even if he personally did very little, his reign really had an impact.
• Blake and Mortimer: "The Mystery of the Great Pyramid" mentions future pharaoh Horemheb as being sympathetic to the cult of Aten. Modern historians believe that it was Horemheb who had Akhenaten's monuments destroyed and his name erased from the records.
• In 1994, Ramses II was discovered to be a redhead and in 2016, he was discovered to be fair-skinned. Portrayals of him where he is black haired (when not shaved bald and given a wig) and brown skinned like The Ten Commandments (1956) and The Prince of Egypt are thus dated. Since there have always been Egyptians of all skin and hair colors (some of Ramses' own hieroglyphic murals depict his subjects running the full gamut of skin colors), this shouldn't come across as surprising though.
  • Archaeology has also solidly settled the matter of Ancient Egyptians' "red" race as 'more or less the same as modern day Egyptians, with free but not game-changing influx of neighboring peoples like Nubians, Berbers, Semites, Greeks, etc'. No evidence that the Egyptians were once Nordic, West African, Native American, Atlantean, or genocided and replaced by Arabs in the Middle Ages (even though there is a difference between Muslim and Coptic Christian Egyptians, the former having more Arabic genetic traces than the latter) as different Author Appeal flavors of Pseudohistory have pretended. Our post-18th century notions of race were alien to Ancient Egypt, in any case.
• The Great Library of Alexandria attracts a number of myths:
  • For one, the Library was not destroyed by Christians or Muslims. The idea that the Muslims destroyed it (referenced in The Name of the Rose) was probably a garbling of their destroying the Great Library of Ctesiphon. The most reliable accounts point to the library being caught up in collateral damage when Julius Caesar burned Alexandria's harbor in 48 B.C., and most scholars now believe that the damage was limited to warehouses and annexes storing part of the library's collection rather than total destruction. In any case, the Great Library itself continued to operate in some capacity for at least another three centuries after the event.
  • The idea first sprang by Edward Gibbon and furthered by Carl Sagan that if it weren't for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, human civilization could have progressed much further than where we are today and the intervention of religion is what stopped the advancement, as all of the knowledge in the Library of Alexandria could've been used to achieve these scientific accomplishments. While many vocal atheists cling to this notion, historians see nothing but a fallacy conjuncture.
  • The Library of Alexandria wasn't all that different from other libraries of the time. Not every book that was stored in the Library focused on science. There was also knowledge about philosophy, history, poetry, etc.; and teachers who taught at Alexandria mostly focused on these fields and paid less attention to science.
  • Books were written in papyrus, a material that decays quickly over time. Even if one managed to save the books, they would need to be rewritten several times. Papyrus does not last long in Southern Europe's climate, but more so in Egypt's, and parchment was very expensive in the Middle Ages.
  • Christianity did not stop technological and scientific advancements in the Middle Ages (see examples and further explanations in the Middle Ages folder). Even if it had, Christianity and the destruction of the Library of Alexandria would not have stopped scientific and technological advances worldwide, as this idea excludes those in the Muslim World, China, India, and the Americas.
  • Archaeological evidence suggests that the Great Library's death blow wasn't even caused by a fire, but rather a combination of institutional decline and its collection simply being moved elsewhere. Its general decline might have started by a political disagreement in 145 BC resulting in several notable thinkers leaving the Museum (the often-forgotten proto-university that the Great Library was a part of). An earthquake that happened shortly after probably didn't help. Alexandria's importance as a center of commerce and scholarship suffered a gradual general decline after the Roman conquest of Egypt, and the Museum and the Great Library undoubtedly struggled along with the rest of the city. The library may have simply faded in importance until someone sold off its remaining contents.
• Cleopatra VII has had a lot of discredited ideas surrounding her.
  • She was once seen as a scheming, amoral Femme Fatale whose sins led to her death and to the destruction of Egypt as an independent nation. Evidence from Alexandria and a reappraisal of historical records led many historians to believe that Cleopatra saw seducing Caesar and Antony as a legitimate way of convincing them to help restore order in a country quickly approaching lawlessness while at the same time preventing Rome from invading and enslaving the populace. The discredited trope informs everything from William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar to the paintings of Alexandre Cabanel and Guido Cagnacci.
  • Historians were also divided over whether Cleopatra was the most beautiful woman to ever live or an outright gonk. There was no middle ground. Recently, they decided to look at the very coins Cleopatra minted, and concluded she was an average-looking young woman — no great beauty, but nothing to be embarrassed about either. Contemporary accounts said she had a bewitching voice and a strong, forceful personality, though. In any case, nobody is sure what classical standards of beauty were, so there's no reason to say that she wasn't beautiful.^note "She certainly never scared anybody when she was fixed up a bit." - Will Cuppy, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody
  • For the longest time, people assumed that Cleopatra had numerous slaves bitten by the asp she'd later kill herself with to make sure that its venom was potent. She didn't need to: the Egyptians had used snakes to kill upper-class prisoners for thousands of years, and they knew what breed to use and how. They were also aware that an asp that's already bitten numerous slaves isn't going to have enough venom left to kill a fly. Some now believe that the asp story is a cover-up, and that Cleopatra was killed on the orders of Octavian.
  • It has also been generally assumed that Cleopatra and Caesar were a political alliance and Cleopatra and Antony a genuine love affair. This theory has come into question. Caesar knew that the Roman people would never accept Cleopatra and that while he could bring her to Rome he couldn't marry her without losing the love of the common people, nor could he name their son his legal heir in Rome.^note They could, and intended to, make said son the next pharaoh of Egypt, tying Rome's most important client kingdom firmly to Caesar's family. Antony, who was nowhere near as wise to the game, seemed to believe that the opposite was true and that allying himself with Cleopatra would benefit him in Roman politics. Basically it appears that she had a love affair with Caesar and a political alliance with Antony. Or, she actually did have genuine romantic relationships with both... or neither.
• According to Voltaire, Cosmos, and Agora, Hypatia of Alexandria was a martyr of philosophy, a woman who was killed because of her Neoplatonic beliefs, being interested in science, or daring to be a free woman. It's now generally understood that her murder was not due to religion, philosophy or science; but the result of her involvement in a political dispute. She was an advisor to Orestes, the prefect of Alexandria, who was feuding with Cyril, the bishop; some accused her of preventing a reconciliation between the two, which led to her murder at the hands of an angry mob. That she was a Pagan and a woman didn't help endear her to the particular Christian faction that opposed her, but it wasn't the primary reason for her violent death.

Greece

• The BBC docudrama Atlantis: End of a World, Birth of a Legend identifies the Thera eruption and the end of the Minoan civilization with the myth of the destruction of Atlantis, following an earlier theory that volcanic ash from the eruption choked off plant life in Crete, starving the local population and bringing down the old social order. However, later examinations revealed that no more than 5 millimeters of ash fell anywhere on the island, making it unlikely to have caused a famine. The idea that the eruption was what started the Minoan collapse has also been questioned, as there is some evidence that the civilization was already starting to exceed its environmental carrying capacity before then.
• Since Dionysus didn't initially seem to have a Mycenaean counterpart, it was thought by 19th century academics that he was a foreign deity who only started being worshipped in Greece at a relatively late date, an idea thought to be backed up by how many of his myths involve the theme of him traveling abroad and having difficulty being accepted back in Greece. This was disproven when inscriptions bearing his name in Linear B were discovered. It's now generally thought that worship of him went underground for a time. The rise and fall of this theory is touched upon by Red of Overly Sarcastic Productions in the Miscellaneous Myths episode on Dionysus.
• The Trojan War. Up to the Renaissance, The Trojan Cycle was treated as historical truth (excluding the machinations of the gods, of course). But as scientific archaeology was established, Troy was relegated to myth. Today, archaeologists agree that a Bronze Age city once existed at the site where Troy should have been based on clues in Homer, and that some sort of battle did occur there. It's safe to assume that Homer employed a generous helping of Artistic License, however.
  • As early as the first century, a man claimed that the battle did occur... but the Trojans won. There is indeed a theory that The Iliad and The Odyssey are in fact Alternate History, in which the real retreat after years of battle gets a twist ending tacked on. The Fridge Brilliance in this is that most of the interactions with gods and mythical creatures center on Odysseus, the man that also came up with the Twist Ending horse trick. It's like someone added the character for storytelling purposes. However, while the possibilities the Trojans won are interesting, they're still hypotheses. We know there was a Troy, a.k.a. Ilios, Wilusa in Hittite documents. Wilusa was a vassal state of the Hittite Empire, that before the dates given for the Trojan War was ruled by Mycenaean Greeks.
  • The heroes of the Iliad might have not been kings at all. In Linear B, they seemed to be names of shepherds and other working-class people (e.g. Achilles was mentioned as a shepherd). Some names, though, do appear in Hittite documents as kings; for example, Agamemnon is mentioned as Akagamunaš. His father Atreus might have been mentioned as Attarsiya. That said, we don't know if these names refer to the legendary kings.
  • Paris was Greek. Or maybe he was a mix of two people? In the Iliad, he was also called Alexandros and someone named Alaksandu ruled Wilusa. Pariya might have been his Luwian name. Whether he merged with another figure, or he took a Luwian name out of respect, we don't know.
  • There were problems between Ahhiyawans (Achaeans, a.k.a Mycenaean Greeks) and Hittites over Wilusa, according to Tawagalawan letter, where it's mentioned that they went to war for it. However, the Hittites were clearly the aggressors, not the Mycenaeans. Tawagalawa is the Hittite form of Ancient Greek name Eteocles, or rather a more archaic form *Etewoklewes with 'w' falling from use over time ('ϝ' or digamma is the Ancient Greek letter for W). In the same way, Wilusa became Ilios. Tawagalawa was the brother of the King of the Achaeans, whose name did not survive.
  • A renegade named Piyamaradu (piyama means "gift" in Luwian, "Radu" was one of their gods) was the main subject of the Tawagalawa letter. For 35 years he attacked Hittite vassal states (including Troy) causing trouble to not one but three kings, before just disappearing. It's generally agreed he was an ally and commander of Mycenaean Greeks, because whenever he was almost caught by Hittites, he would flee to his base in Millawanda (Miletus), which was controlled by the Greeks. What makes his story interesting is that it falls within the Trojan War chronology. It seems Achaeans were using a Hittite intern as a commander for their armies. It has been hypothesized that he claimed inheritance over Wilusa, which is why he might have been interested in siding with the Greeks, but it's still dubious. He is the most important person mentioned that has to do with the possible real Trojan War and we have no idea who he corresponds with in the Illiad. Priam has been mentioned as a possibility. Yes, Priam, the Trojan King.
  • The Hittites destroyed Miletus as revenge for Piyamaradu's raids, which prompted the Greeks to officially rise against the Hittites. Their objective was Wilusa, one of the most important cities. While the details aren't certain, the Greeks won, so the Hittite King had to send an apology letter for what he did to Miletus, where he asked for Piyamaradu, their biggest ally. We don't know what happened to him. The few details that remain mention a battle in Scamander.
  • Archaeology shows that there were a series of nine ancient cities built on the site of Troy, often separated by periods of devastation, and that the Troy of Homer was one (either the sixth or the seventh) or a combination of two: one which archaeologists call Troy VIh, when the city was rich and splendid and which was destroyed by an earthquake, not war, and another, Troy VIi (formerly VIIa), which was exactly like Homer described (the architecture, geology etc.) but wasn't rich, and was still suffering from the earthquake. That city was destroyed by war. Scholars have described it as a city under siege.
  • There is a hypothesis that the Trojan Horse is actually allegory for a timely earthquake. In the Epic Cycle, Odysseus' ruse is helped by Poseidon, who kills Laocoon before he can warn the Trojans. In Greek Mythology, Poseidon was the god of both horses and the depths (of sea and land), and earthquakes were one of his tricks. A Troy damaged by a big earthquake could have fallen easily to invading Mycenaeans who would not have a prayer of taking the city in its prime.
  • Troy continued to be lived on for some centuries after the supposed war. Not according to the Iliad.
  • The Hittites mention the Greeks were taking women and children and killing men in their western territories. This Greek habit only occurs in a war. The word they used to refer to the prisoners is the same Homer used. They were attacking three Hittite islands around Troy.
  • It's generally agreed Helen of Troy's myth was added later. Helen used to be revered as a full goddess, not a demi-goddess. The story of her being kidnapped in her youth by Theseus, and her brothers going to save her is what appears to be the original myth. We know this because Helen's story has other Indo-European parallels. Also, her Eidolon was a far more important part of her story, and Homer barely scraped this in the Iliad.
  • The appearance of warriors in the Trojan War is also subject to this. Ever since the Archaic period, they've been shown armed in either whatever was the current fashion of the day, or in an archaic manner usually harkening to Classical Greece. Since the 19th century, though, we've found that their styles of weapons and armor were completely different from anything that had yet been pictured. This shouldn't have been surprising if you consider that the Iliad contains a detailed description of a very real Mycenaean helmet made from the tusks of boars. Even within recent times, the depictions have evolved. A few decades ago it might have been claimed that warriors throughout the Late Helladic period carried tall tower or figure-8 shields. However, the Trojan War is purported to have occurred toward the end of the period, and it's now thought that tall shields were out of fashion by then, while round shields like Homer describes really were the most common style at the time.
• Starting in the Renaissance, it was believed that the writings of Greek poet Sappho were suppressed by church authorities who disapproved of their homoerotic content. However, it's now believed that her poetry began fading from popularity centuries before Jesus was even born, due to the Koine dialect of Greek becoming mainstream following the conquests of Alexander the Great; Koine speakers generally had a hard time understanding the Aeolic dialect Sappho wrote in, so her work wasn't widely reprinted or translated enough to carry it forward into the Medieval era. This shift in consensus was covered by Blue of Overly Sarcastic Productions in his History Makers video on Sappho.
• Macedonia's history has been subject to a number of re-examinations over the years.
  • N. G. L. Hammond's once popular theory that a distinct Macedonian ethnos had existed since the Greek Bronze Age is now seen as lacking in supporting evidence and widely criticized as a conjectural reconstruction based on sources written long after the events they describe. Starting in the early 2010s, an alternative model of Macedonian history that put the founding of the kingdom in the 6th century BC gained traction.
  • Similarly, the traditional accounts that Macedonia expanded by expelling and exterminating other peoples has been called into question due to the general continuity of material culture and settlement sites in the area. More likely, Macedonia grew early on the same way its neighbors (Epirus, Illyria, Thrace and Thessaly) did: by incorporating various tribes and settlements into a kind of political confederacy that was consolidated into something more solid and permanent over time. While fighting between various communities was hardly unheard of, the archaeological record contradicts ancient accounts of entire peoples being driven out and put to the sword.
• The so-called "Spartan Mirage." Historians for a long time held Sparta as an unstoppable military juggernaut, due to its core army of Proud Warrior Race Guys and badass warrior kings, ceasing warlike activities only to deliver dry witty phrases to philosophers for posterity's sake. Problem is, most historical sources can be divided into two categories: a) Athenian oligarchs such as Plato or Xenophon, who praised what little they knew of Sparta's system in order to address their own criticisms of Athenian democracy, and b) Roman sources such as Plutarch, writing long after the fact and trying to link Sparta's "martial spirit" to Rome's own (with Plutarch openly dismissing older sources in favor of personal sympathies). Sparta was something of the North Korea of its day, complete with secret police; contact with the outside was highly discouraged, and visitors to Sparta such as Xenophon were essentially treated to a Spartan Disneyland of all the things they wished to glorify about themselves. More modern assessments of Sparta, working from primary sources, generally show a more prosaic portrayal of their military might: Sparta was a regional power that essentially cannibalized all the non-military functions of its own state in order to continue a bitter war with the city-state of Argos, and was able to use the ensuing victory to bully its allies into fighting for them. At the time of Thermopylae, this victory had been within a generation, and the city-state was better known for the beauty of its women than its military prowess; the mythology of its heroic defeat is thought to have cast a long shadow and heavily influenced the city's culture. Spartan military supremacy lasted less than a hundred years, its hegemony over Greece only ten, the "invincible" Spartan army lost more battles than it won (and that's not counting the ones where the commanders were simply bribed away), and its central warrior caste was decimated by the city's own leaders to profit from their "inalienable" land holdings.
  • This even pertains to The Spartan Way. We have no sources that indicate Spartans, children or adults, performed any sort of combat training. Although Spartan children of both sexes were given a heavy emphasis on physical education including wrestling, and boys were taught to master hunger and extremes of temperature, there was no indication of weapons drills or formation training; the Spartans did perform basic formation drills, making them a first among Greek city-states, but this training was only done when the army marched to war, and included their allies. Greek warfare of the Classical period was that of committed amateurs, and it was felt that courage was more important than skill with weapons - which is actually more reasonable that it sounds, as a group of poorly trained soldiers who nonetheless hold up basic formations is infinitely more useful than a cadre of excellent warrios who then run away terrified at the first sight of the enemy. In addition, the agoge evolved over time, and was not considerably different than the training of leisure-class children in other city states.
  • In Sparta, BTW, it is stated that there was no military training for actual skill, because a warrior is supposed to win through strength and courage, not tricks. The result was that while they definitely had good warriors, whenever they encountered actual tactics, the results were jarring.
• Hoplites probably weren't a slow-moving formation of bronze armor, interlocked shields and bristling spears presented at the enemy for the vast majority of classical Greek history. Men that could afford only a spear and shield were accepted as hoplites, and since poorer fellows tend to outnumber richer ones, they were commonly represented in hoplites' ranks. Hoplites stood too far apart for even the second rank of men to be able to effectively stab at the first rank of enemies and the average Greek hoplite was poorly-disciplined, so they certainly fought as individuals and any time hoplites would have had their shields packed next to each other would also have rendered them entirely immobile. The aforementioned poor discipline likely led to their generally-used deep formation as a way to ensure units would stay in a coherent order without lines falling apart in movement (moving together in formation over a stretch of time is actually very difficult) and attacking hoplites charging in. The first appearances of true pike weapons in Greece is about the real point in time Greek troops armed with pole weapons fought in a close-order formation. Spartan hoplites' distinctions from other hoplites from Greece probably were being a tad closer to this popular image of a hoplite, though of course at this point there's a much lower bar to hurdle.
• Unfortunately for writers, historians seem to change their minds about Alexander the Great almost as often as the seasons change. Was he bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, asexual or omnisexual, and does it matter that he wouldn't have recognized the terms? Roxana: passionately desired wife or all-but-ignored political pawn? Bagoas: manipulative poisoner, victim of child molestation, or adult lover? Hephaestion: lover, colleague, rival, or all three? Alexander's death: poison, alcoholism, typhoid, meningitis secondary to scoliosis (the 2009 belief), West Nile disease (the 2010 belief), waterborne parasites (the 2012 belief), or accident? Did he really will his empire "to the strongest" on his deathbed, or to a specific person, or was he too sick to even speak at the time (the latter is the currently prevailing view)? Was he Too Good for This Sinful Earth or a Magnificent Bastard? Given the historical revolving door, it would be hard to fault a writer for making up his own mind about any of it.

India

• It was widely held that the Indo-Aryans were more advanced than the natives of India. When archaeological excavations of the Indus Valley Civilization proved there was already a sophisticated culture in Northern India when the Indo-Aryans migrated there, a new theory was adopted of a hostile invasion of nomads into an advanced urban civilization. The idea of an "Aryan invasion" was itself discredited, however, when no evidence was found of a conflict. The current model is that fairly small numbers of Aryans migrated into Sapta Sindhu region at a time when the Indus Valley Civilization was already in steep decline from internal factors.
• Tradition holds that the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka was a spectacularly cruel man before his redeeming conversion to Buddhism, a man who did things like build a torture chamber disguised as a beautiful palace where he inflicted torments inspired by Naraka. Modern scholars believe that, while Ashoka was a significantly more merciless and ruthless man before he had an epiphany that may or may not have been related to him becoming a Buddhist (there are hints that he was already a Buddhist and simply started taking it much more seriously), his misdeeds were most likely exaggerated to give him a reputation for bloodlust and sadism, thereby making his transformation even more remarkable.

Near East

• Scholars once generally believed that all writing originated in Sumer and spread across the world via a process of cultural diffusion. Today, the most popular theory is that writing was independently developed at least four times in the form of Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese characters and the earliest script of lowland Mesoamerica.
• Ancient Elam was first known from references by their Sumerian rivals (when not from ancient historians after they were gone, like Strabo), and assumed to have occupied a similar sized territory around the city of Susa in modern Khuzestan Province. The discovery of Anshan showed that they actually extended all the way to southern Iran, and that Mesopotamian-like urbanization existed along the Persian Gulf earlier than previously thought.
• It was believed that the Gutians (a people who overran Sumer and Elam as the Akkadian Empire went into decline) were Indo-Europeans, due to tablets seemingly describing them as having light skin and hair and the names of their kings having apparent links to Indo-European languages. Both are now believed to be the result of flawed translations, and it's generally accepted that there is no evidence linking Gutians to any modern group.
• The late 19th century saw the emergence of a popular historical school of thought called Panbabylonism. Adherents considered the various cultures and religions of the Middle East to be derived from Babylonian myths, which were in turn based on Babylonian astronomy. After World War I, however, the school's claims were discredited by the astronomical and chronological studies of a Jesuit priest named Franz Xaver Kugler.
• Some 19th-century archaeologists promoted a theory that the Amorites were Indo-Europeans who dominated the Israelites, and that the House of David (and therefore Jesus) were actually Amorites. It was proven in the 20th century that the Amorites were a Semitic people, but the idea was and is popular among some racialists even after its debunking in the mainstream.
• Assyrian claims that they perpetrated acts of brutality against noncombatants are no longer taken at face value by archaeologists and historians. Nowadays, they're generally viewed as propaganda pieces designed to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies and discourage revolts, not true accounts.
• The existence of the Median Empire mentioned in The Histories was called into question in the late 20th century, when it was pointed that its historiography had almost entirely relied on Greek authors like Herodotus, Middle Eastern sources make no mention of it, and its alleged imperial system of government would have been unique in its neighborhood.
• David and Goliath were rejected as myth, but scholars now see the armor Goliath wore as plausible for the Mycenaean civilization. His Greek name was probably Kalliades. His story might have a Greek origin, and certain hard-to-translate phrases from The Bible seem to be loan translations from Ancient Greek. The current scholarly consensus is that the Philistines, who Goliath is said to have been the champion of, were descended from Greeks.
  • The Bible mentions once that Goliath's killer was Elhanan son of Jair, not David. The Targum Jonathan solved this Canon Discontinuity by claiming that Elhanan was another name of David, and the King James Version saying that Elhanan killed Goliath's brother while David killed Goliath. Modern scholars presume that Elhanan was the killer in an older version of the story and that the deed was attributed to David when he became more popular and Elhanan was forgotten. So if Goliath was real, he probably didn't live in the time of David.
  • At least some historians now doubt that Judah and Israel were ever a single united kingdom under the House of David (or Saul, or a confederation under the loose rule of the Judges).
• The final redaction date for the Torah has continually moved forward, from earlier than 1000 B.C. (the alleged time of Moses, and the rise of the Kohanim priests), to the Deuteronomical revival of king Josiah of Judah circa 600 B.C.. Some historians even believe that the Torah didn't reach its final form until the Babylonian captivity (beginning some 20 years after Josiah's death, and lasting about 50-60 years). Similarly, the prominence of Jerusalem^note Nearly a thousand years ago, some renowned Jewish scholar already speculated that Moria mountain — the place where the Temple was eventually built — being used by Abraham in his attempt to sacrifice Isaac is a later addition or mistake; the distances and the need to bring wood don't quite match. It is speculated that it was added as a Take That! to the Samaritans to reduce the importance of their temple. and the preeminence of monotheism over henotheism^note In which many gods exist, but only one is worshiped. have been moved to later and later points in history to square them with archaeological and documentary evidence.
• Reports of the demise of the Ten Lost Tribes are now believed to have been greatly exaggerated. According to The Bible, the Neo-Assyrian Empire forced these tribes into exile after their conquest of the Samarian Kingdom of Israel, with Jewish historian Josephus writing centuries after the fact that "there are but two tribes in Asia and Europe subject to the Romans, while the ten tribes are beyond Euphrates till now, and are an immense multitude, and not to be estimated by numbers". Countless different ethnic groups have claimed or been speculated to be descended from one or more of these tribes, even non-Jewish ones like the Pashtuns of South Asia and the Lemba people of Southern Africa. However, while DNA evidence has a backed up some of these claims (proving that some of these groups have a certain amount of Semitic origin), it's now believed that the deportations of the Jews weren't as significant as the Biblical narrative claims, and the majority of those who survived the Assyrian invasion probably remained in the area. Research indicates that the Samaritans are probably descended from some of those Jews who stayed, which contradicts Talmudic claims that they originated from the city of Kutha in what is now Iraq. Most of the Jews who were deported, meanwhile, were probably assimilated into the local population rather than maintaining a distinct identity.
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, supposedly built by Nebuchadnezzar II as a gift for his wife Amytis of Media (said to have missed the green hills and valleys of her homeland), were long considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World. However, their historicity is considered dubious due to a lack of archaeological evidence or references in contemporary records (along with Amytis herself), and many historians think that they were either purely mythical or a garbled account of a garden built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in Nineveh.
• Historians thought that King Belshazzar from the Book of Daniel was made up, until research unearthed that he was King Nabonidus' son and co-regent in Babylon. While his father went out to face Cyrus' army, Belshazzar stayed behind to fortify the city. Cue the writing on the wall.
• The Persian emperor from the Book of Esther is usually identified as Xerxes I. There is no historical record or other evidence of a "beauty contest" held during his reign to find a replacement queen after he divorced his primary queen for disobeying him. He had a Royal Harem full of wives and concubines, but he acquired them in the same way most kings did: Altar Diplomacy. And his primary queen wasn't named Vashti. Her name was Amestris, and she was never divorced by Xerxes I or deposed from her position as primary queen.
• The Nabataeans were initially thought to be an Aramaic people. Modern scholars reject this idea due to historical, linguistic, and religious evidence pointing to them being a Bedouin tribe from pre-Islamic Arabia, though they did adopt some Aramaic cultural features.
• It was once universally accepted that all of ancient Armenian king Tigranes the Great's children were mothered by Cleopatra of Pontus, the daughter of Pontic king Mithridates VI Eupator. Gagik Sargsyan cast doubt on this, however, suggesting that she was only mother to two of his children, and that he had a previous marriage before becoming king. His reasoning was that if Tigranes the Younger was able to lead a campaign in 82 BCE, he and his elder siblings would've been too old to be Cleopatra's children. Sargsyan also pointed out that since his daughter Ariazate was probably the mother of Parthian emperor Orodes I (whose reign began in 80 BCE), she couldn't have been the daughter of Cleopatra, who only married him in 94 BCE.
• The census leading to Joseph's journey to Bethlehem (and the birth of Jesus in that city) has no documentation in Roman records. Nor does it make sense by Roman standards (requiring Jews to travel to the city of a distant ancestor would have involved separating them from every quantifiable source of income, making such a census useless for tax purposes; the Roman censuses we know involved census takers traveling from city to city instead of the reverse, just like today). The earliest known Gospel, the Book of Mark (Matthew's Gospel was once considered older, but that is itself dated history), begins with Jesus' baptism and ministry and completely ignores his life before that. In the modern day, the Nativity story is often thought of as a literary device to ensure Jesus' birth in Bethlehem (the city of David, ancient king of Israel and presumed ancestor of the Jewish Messiah) despite his lifelong association with the city of Nazareth in Galilee, fulfilling a prophecy which said the Messiah would be born there.
  • Archaeology casts doubt on whether Bethlehem even existed at the time of Jesus' birth, leading some to argue that he might have been born in Bethlehem of Galilee, which would have made slightly more sense since that village is closer to Nazareth than Bethlehem of Judea.
• Jesus is only ever described as a tekton — a Greek word meaning "worker". The idea that he was a carpenter arose largely because Joseph was a woodworker and people assumed he taught Jesus his trade. "Our Savior the Carpenter" also sounds more noble than "Our Savior the Itinerant Worker", which is what many believe the historical Jesus was. Other theologians argue that considering Jesus never made any references to carpentry in his teachings but did talk quite a bit about stones, he may have been a stonemason instead.
• There is almost no non-religious based historical consensus on the Crucifixion besides the fact that it happened:
  • Though common, crucifixion was not standardized. The Latin word Crux and the Greek Staurós could be applied to any vertical wooden structure where someone was nailed to, like a stake, wall, frame, even a tree. In other words, our very notion of 'cross-shaped' is inspired by religious representations of the Crucifixion, rather than the other way around. Those were likely based on the text saying Jesus was nailed with his arms extended and the legend "Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews" fixed above his head.
  • Even accepting the common definition of cross, some historians have questioned that Jesus would have been forced to carry the whole cross to Golgotha as impractical, proposing that the condemned were forced to carry the horizontal section only while the post remained in place to be reused. Others favor that the real cross was T-shaped rather than a conventional Latin cross, as that would have been easier to assemble.
  • Practical experiments (including by the Nazis at Dachau concentration camp) showed that if a man was nailed through his palms as Jesus is usually represented, the hands would rip completely under his weight. Because of this, it's been proposed that the condemned's arms were also tied to the cross, or that the nails were inserted through the wrists, or even the forearms. This is a plot point in Stigmata, where the main character (an Atheist) tries to reason that she doesn't have stigmata because her wounds are on her wrists rather than her palms, only to be told by a priest that Jesus probably was nailed by his wrists in reality.
  • Even then, Jesus' own weight would have likely suffocated him long before he's said to have succumbed. Some have suggested that the cross' post had some kind of footrest to 'help' the condemned resist for longer and prolong his agony.
  • The number of nails involved is unknown, with some churches claiming up to 14 nails. The commonly depicted three nails (one through each palm and another through both feet) were codified in the Renaissance; four nails (one per hand and foot) was the preferred version in the European Middle Ages. In The '70s, Israeli archaeologists found the tomb of Jehohanan, a 1st century crucified, and claimed that his injuries supported a crucifixion with three nails, one through each forearm and the third through the heels, with the feet placed laterally on the post. However, a review questioned most of their findings and only admitted evidence of one nail through one heel, adding that such a nail wasn't long enough to perforate both.^note A later find of the remains of a crucified man, in England, has added weight to the idea that nails were indeed used — in this case some of the largest possible carpentry nails, those used by the Roman Army to hold fortifications together. It was pointed that these are large valuable items and would have been continually retrieved for reuse — the only reason why they were still in the body was because they were embedded so successfully in the bone that they could not be removed again.
  • The Last Temptation of Christ references nearly all of these points in some way. He is shown carrying only the horizontal beam, where he is nailed (by his wrists) and also tied. His cross is brand new, but the thieves are nailed to dead trees, and Golgotha is full of other older, 'occupied' crosses. His cross would have looked like a T, but the INRI sign at the top is wooden and makes it look like a Latin cross. The third nail is not through the heels and crosses both feet, but still allows him to turn his legs to the side (and acts as Scenery Censor, since unlike in most other depictions, Jesus is naked here).
• The Synoptic Problem, as briefly mentioned above. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (the "synoptic" gospels, meaning "same eye"), all agree on the basic structure of Jesus' life, and contain much material (the Triple Tradition, almost all of which is the "biographical" portion of the three Gospels) that is the same word-for-word. In addition, there is a considerable amount of other material that is shared between Matthew and Luke, but not Mark (the "Double Tradition"; this is mostly "sayings", among them the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes). The problem is attempting to determine which Gospel came first, and whether the other two knew of each other. In the 5th century, St. Augustine of Hippo proposed that Matthew was the first written, Mark was an edited version, and Luke copied from both. This the official position of the Catholic Church (due to the tradition of the Book of Matthew being written by one of the Apostles), and the ordering of the Gospels in The Bible comes from this hypothesis. Many scholars later rejected this theory citing Mark's overall shortness, relatively crude Greek, and the fact that Matthew and Luke don't really seem to agree on anything outside of the common material, and often interpret the common material in different ways. Several other theories about the order have been proposed, with the majority behind the "two source" hypothesis: the book of Mark came first, and Matthew and Luke copied independently from Mark and a hypothetical "sayings" source, often referred to as "Q."^note  The Q is Gratuitous German as it comes from the German word "Quelle" for "source" — Germans were among the leading scholars in that field during the time this theory was developed and the name stuck even outside the German language.
• The discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library in the late 1940s shook up the world's image of the early history of Christianity, as they contained the scriptures of a long-extinct sect of Christianity called the Gnostics, who had a radically different view of God and Jesus. These sources also contained several Apocryphal texts—gospels that failed to make the final cut and weren't included in The Bible. Gnostic views were known long before, but references came from second-hand sources like Orthodox writers bashing Gnosticism.
  • Conversely, the notion of "Pauline" Christianity coming into prominence very late after Jesus' death and squashing differing accounts is also considered apocryphal by most historians. While Gnosticism, Nestorianism, Arianism, and other alternative approaches to Christianity existed, they only gained prominence outside of the Roman Empire, and were swallowed up by orthodox movements (or later, Islam). In a similar vein, the Gospel of John (and the linked Epistles I, II, and III John) was often thought to have supported a dualist Gnostic worldview; discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls - which, contrary to Common Knowledge, contain no New Testament works, only the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible - had been codified early and hadn't been substantially altered by the rise of Christianity) suggests that John was instead using rhetorical devices similar to those used by the Essenes.
• The once prevailing theory that "adoptionist" or "low" Christology (which claims that Jesus was born only human and became divine after being "adopted" by God) predated the "incarnationist" or "high" Christology (which claims that the Son was a divine being who became human) and was the mainstream view until replaced by the other. Scholarly work since The '70s is that high Christology was developed very early on and coexisted with low Christology, eventually winning out and relegating low Christology to heresy (some modern churches teach adoptionism, including certain Unitarian and Mormon sects).

Rome

• Some Ancient Greek historians were fond of the idea that the Etruscans migrated to Italy from overseas. Herodotus thought they were originally from Lydia in Anatolia, others that they were Pelasgians from Thessaly. Archaeological evidence favors an indigenous Italian origin.
• Like Troy, Pompeii faded into obscurity to the point of being considered a myth by the time of its rediscovery in the 18th century. This despite the fact that it disappeared in a much more recent time, with extensive written records including those of first-hand witnesses, and one of the most read Roman scientists and authors of all time, Pliny the Elder, had died when attempting to rescue two friends from the eruption (Pliny was the local naval commander).
  • The account of the eruption by his nephew, Pliny the Younger, was still considered bogus well into the 19th century, when other volcanoes erupted in the exact same way as he described the Vesuvius in AD 79. Because of it, this kind of eruption (pyroclastic explosions with a tall column of ash and pumice but little liquid lava) is commonly known to vulcanologists as a Vesuvian or Plinian eruption.
  • Changes in sensibilities have allowed the publication of explicit images that were on display on the city, which changed popular perception of the Romans from a genteel, prim, proper, and moral people to a debauched, hedonistic people. Archaeologists and historians believe that Roman sexual taboos existed, but were completely different in nature from most today.
  • Archaeological opinion about Pompeii's nature has gone back and forth as well, as it's alternately been regarded as a red-light pleasure resort (thanks to all the whorehouses) or just a typical city from an era that wasn't prudish about such things.^note It definitely was a resort, or in a resort area—the Roman aristocracy had been retreating to Campania for centuries, because it's very pretty and has nicer weather than Rome and most of Latium. The part under debate is the "red-light" thing: Was it like Atlantic City, or Long Beach Island?)
• In the 18th and 19th centuries, as religion further faded in academia and it became clearer that much "contemporary" writing about early Christians was Medieval interpolation, many historians, including Edward Gibbon, came to believe that all references to the persecution of Christians were fabricated, and the Romans paragons of religious tolerance. Ultimately, due to archaeological findings and textual analysis, this belief has only a very few holdouts.
• It's a trope of Medieval-to-modern Christian historical fiction that the Romans persecuted Christians because they didn't understand Christianity and misinterpreted acts performed by Christians, or because they were a religion that catered to the poor and were seen as dangerous to the aristocratic establishment. Later historians, both secular and Christian, have nuanced this.
  • The Roman persecution of Judaism and Christianity had to do with its laws: they would tolerate a faith only if it accepted the Emperor and was inclusive. If Jews and Christians accepted those who also believed in, prayed to, and accepted other gods, then it was A-OK. However, to be Christian or Jewish was to accept one belief and reject all others. Romans, on the other hand, enjoyed erecting temples to all kinds of distant gods (like the Egyptian Isis and the Persian Mithras) while still praying to Jupiter and participating in Saturnalia, so they didn't see why people couldn't do that and still stop at a church or synagogue from time to time. This was a policy of enforced syncretism, and faiths which tended to assert their own independence in doctrine and membership aroused the suspicion of the government, the same way the Eleusinian and Dionysian Mysteries did in earlier eras in the Republic and in Ancient Greece. The very term Mystery Cult signifies the state's suspicion that these faiths were underground movements that could agitate against them.^note Some scholars have postulated that some of these mystery cults actually influenced early Christianity, though it's hardly a settled topic.
  • Roman persecution of Christians was in part due to their refusal to worship the Emperor. Later Romans, after dialogue with Christians, simply imposed a requirement to pray for rulers, which is repeated many times in Christian scripture and is still maintained today. Likewise, for those seeing Christianity as revolutionary in origin, there is no historical evidence of any anti-state revolt led by Christians. Historians note that peasant-led Christian revolts happened in The Middle Ages (against corrupt church officials and oppressive secular elites). But in the Roman era, the dangerous revolts like Spartacus, Boudica, Zenobia, and the Jewish Revolts were all non-Christian. It is true that Christianity attracted followers among women and the lower classes, but they did not promote revolution against the state, at most calling for economic and social reform. Christians also tolerated slavery in the Roman era, though they advocated for better treatment of slaves and included them in gatherings. However, Stoicism and Epicureanism took the same position. So the opening narration of Spartacus, which claims that slaves were freed only with the rise of Christianity and the end of pagan tyranny, is a little too generous to the former and not entirely fair to the latter.
  • The notion of living emperors being worshipped as gods is more or less a modern invention. While some of the more unbalanced emperors, like Caligula, may have claimed divinity, and many claimed descent from one god or another, there's little evidence that the average Roman citizen played along. The genius, or spirit, of deceased emperors was often given divine honors, but this itself was an extension of contemporary Roman religious practice; the pater familias of a Roman family was given the same honors by his gens, and the Emperor was considered to be a "father" to the entire city. The only two rulers who were officially deified were Romulus and Julius Caesar, and both were only deified posthumously.
  • Another reason the Romans saw Christianity as destabilizing was because rival Christian sects often fought each other violently, and because Christians persecuted pagans and deliberately won over converts by subverting other cults. Julian the Philosopher, the last pagan emperor, complained in his missives about how Christians were anti-syncretic while at the same time blatantly co-opting pagan motifs, getting jobs teaching Homeric classics, and using their classical training to better sell their faith. Julian, as an ex-Christian, was clearly biased, but historians think he had a point. Furthermore, once Christians found active patronage under Constantine and Theodosius I, the Church drifted away from the flock that had supported and built it (women, slaves, the poor) and became subsidized and catered by Rome's aristocratic elite. The Christian aristocracy of Late Antiquity Rome also created the system of serfdom, by which peasants who formerly had rights and freedom of movement were tied to the land — something the Church did not lift a finger to hinder.
• The Christian shrine in the Roman Colosseum has tripped up many writers and readers. The ruins of the Colosseum were consecrated in 1749 by Pope Benedict XIV, supposedly in memory of the many early Christians martyred in that location. But there's no evidence that Christians were ever martyred at the Colosseum; even the editors of the Catholic Encyclopedia found none, with most records saying that martyrdoms took place at other locations in Rome like the Circus Maximus. There's a possibility that Nero's massacre of Christians after the Great Fire took place on the land on which the Colosseum was later built, but it's more likely that Benedict XIV invented the story to justify protecting the building from property developers looking to turn it into a wool factory.
• There's also a popular conception portraying Roman paganism and Christianity as the main rivalry, with the assumption that the latter was the most popular religion in the Roman Empire. This ignores that Christianity was just another sect along with hundreds of other religions (ex. Cult of Iris, Gnosticism, the Imperial Cult, Bacchic Rites, Dionysus Mysteries, Manichaeism, etc). Likewise, the persecution and treatment of Christians also extended to other religious groups that were rarely mentioned in history like the Celtic druids and the Bacchaes.
• It's now generally dismissed that Christianity was the primary cause of the fall of Rome, and no serious historian entertains the idea that it did so by making people too stupid to run an empire. Rather, the Roman Empire had a number of problems before the spread of Christianity, and its rise happened in a big part because of the gradually failing social order. It's also accepted that there is no single cause of the breakup of the Roman Empire.
  • The idea that Rome collapsed because of its own decadence and luxury (popular in the 19th century) is not well-supported either. For one thing, we see Roman records complaining about how hedonistic and lacking in virtue their society was getting... pretty much every single generation. It's really no different than your parents complaining about The New Rock & Roll corrupting the kids these days, as though kids of their generation weren't up to all kinds of mischief.
• For centuries people believed that orgies in Ancient Rome were nothing more than sex parties. Modern research has debunked this. In reality, orgia were secret rites. Decadent activities could be a part of them, but it was all in the style of a ceremony, perhaps closer to the Wiccan "Great Rite". Accusations of sexual orgies were lodged by Christians later on, but pagans had also accused the Christians of engaging in sex parties, and such slanders have been made against virtually every religious group where it's unpopular. Similarly, the supposed rite at such events of stuffing yourself with food until you want to throw up, going to a special room to do so, and then returning to continue eating is also an example of this trope. The myth is based on a misunderstanding of the word "vomitorium", which refers to the exit of an amphitheater and has nothing to do with actual vomit (they share a etymology meaning "to spew forth"). If you have ever been to an event at a major arena and walked through a corridor to get to the seats, you have been in a vomitorium.
  • It was a common belief from the Victorian era that Ancient Rome was sexually decadent, hedonistic, and open-minded to sex compared to other periods. This is both true and not. This belief started when Pompeii was discovered and made open to the public. The people were shocked by the discovery of Roman sexual imagery and activities exposed (as before then, Rome had for a long time been perceived as a cultivation of glorious culture and art, with Greco-Roman sculptures and copies of Roman texts being their only sources on what Rome was like). It's easy to see the Romans as licentious when compared to the prudish Victorians; however, the Romans also had strict gender roles and expectations on sexual roles. For example, a man was expected to perform missionary on his wife and treat her as a "woman of higher status" only and not a "woman of pleasure". It was taboo to have her on top, as it was a sign that he was "effeminate". Many Roman poets loved to satirize things that were taboo, like women's sexuality and anal sex: Hence anecdotes like Tiberius owning a sex circus, Caligula committing incest, Messalina having a sex marathon behind her husband's back, and Elagabalus prostituting himself before men and women, which were likely slander, or at the very least exaggerations by later writers.
• The common view of Roman history, since at least the Enlightenment, is that of the "idle plebs", in which the Roman citizenry was freed from most physical labor by the large number of slaves, and spent their time eating free grain and watching state-sponsored gladiator games. In reality, while the grain dole was real, it was seldom if ever distributed to the very needy, and in any case never provided enough for a family to survive on. Urban slaves and freedmen dominated the skilled trades, leaving most of the city's free population to eke out a meager living as semi-itinerant day laborers, and malnutrition and disease were rife. Even in rural areas, while large farms had a core labor force of slaves, the labor-intensive nature of planting and harvesting meant that these would require large numbers of free laborers as well. The construction of Roman monuments and mining was also presumed to have relied entirely on slave labor, but historical accounts and archaeological evidence (like remains of luxury meats found in the working area of gypsum mines) show that at least some jobs employed free workers with a high salary.
• Negative views of Domitian prevailed for a long time, with the standard view being that he was a cruel and paranoid tyrant, as portrayed in Marcus Didius Falco. Starting in the 1890s, a revisionist characterization as a ruthless but efficient autocrat who laid the foundations for the glory days of the Five Good Emperors began to take greater prominence and eventually became the mainstream opinion. While he was no saint and his rule had some negative aspects (like curtailing of civil liberties and prosecuting people on false charges for political reasons), his harshness was limited to a Vocal Minority and his policies generally supported during his reign.
  • Though it was once believed that Domitian was willing to leave Dacia after negotiating peace with Decebalus and had no plans for further wars, the discovery that he ordered more troops brought to Upper Moesia from Pannonia and Syria suggests that he was actually gearing up for a rematch (from his own end or the Dacians') when he was assassinated.
• The Eagle of the Ninth has two main inspirations: the lack of historical references on the Legio IX Hispana after AD 117, when it was stationed on the Caledonian border, and speculation that it had been wiped out during an invasion of what is now Scotland; and a Roman eagle that was found buried under a British house in the 19th century (and is attributed to the main characters at the end of the book). Later historians found evidence that the Legion had been moved to the German border, and later, to Asia. This caused speculation that it was destroyed in AD 161 during a battle in Armenia, though latest thinking has veered back to some kind of disaster north of Hadrian's Wall; the IXth does disappear from the records and a new Legion was imported to Britain at about the same time. The Romans knew perfectly well what had happened to the IXth, but the information didn't survive to our time. As for the buried eagle, it turned to have been decoration from a temple to Jupiter, not a military standard as initially assumed.
  • Codex Alera: Word of God is that the Lost Roman Legion that the Alerans are descended from is the Legio IX Hispana - though perhaps after they disappeared the second time.
  • Centurion, which begins with the destruction of the IXth in 117, ends with the hilarious disclaimer, "This movie is based on a Roman Urban Legend".
• The Fall of the Roman Empire takes as its thesis that Marcus Aurelius was the last great emperor and that the Empire after his passing was a long decay. While this was a popular opinion for a long period of time, historians have since corrected and modified this.
  • As seen in the unofficial remake Gladiator, it was once accepted that Commodus left the Danubian front immediately after becoming sole emperor, but now it's largely believed that he stayed for months and only left after negotiating peace with the Danubian tribes. The "he left right after his father died" story is a suspected exaggeration based on his irresponsible and hedonistic behavior later on.
• Frontier Wolf (1980) is set at the Cramond Roman Fort in Edinburgh, but makes no mention of its most notable artifact, the Cramond Lioness, as it was not discovered until 1997.
• During the Middle Ages, the papacy supported and justified its claims to political authority with the Donation of Constantine, a supposed decree authored by Constantine the Great that transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I and his successors. While the degree's authenticity was generally regarded as valid during the Medieval period, investigations in the mid-15th century revealed that it could not possibly be genuine, due to various anachronisms and the use of later forms of Latin. It's now known that the Donation was a forgery written long after Constantine's death, probably in the 8th century.
• Many post-Nicene historians claimed that Helena Augusta, Constantine the Great's mother, discovered the True Cross and other relics of Jesus while visiting Jerusalem. Modern scholars view these stories with skepticism, since the earliest sources on the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, including Eusebius' Life of Constantine, make no mention of this.
• Sir Charles Oman's claim that the Battle of Adrianople represented a turning point in military history, with Gothic and Alan heavy cavalry triumphing over Roman infantry and ushering in the era of knights and cataphracts dominating battlefields in Europe and the Middle East, was repeated by many 20th century writers. The idea was overturned by T. S. Burns in 1973, when he pointed out that the Romans actually had more cavalry than the Goths, the battle was mainly fought by infantry on both sides, the increasing importance of cavalry in the Late Roman Army had already begun before the battle, and the rise of the medieval knight was still centuries away.
• Outcast: The only quasi-historical event in the novel, the supposed Roman founding of the Rhee Wall of Romney Marsh in south-east England, is no longer credited but rather placed on the 13th century.

Other

• The theory of the Bantu expansion as a singular migration is no longer considered credible. Now it is thought that it took place in at least two distinct waves.
• While virtually everyone agrees that the Land of Punt existed and was somewhere near the Horn of Africa, the exact location and how much territory it controlled is constantly changing. Was it in Somalia, Somaliland, Eritrea, Djibouti, northeast Ethiopia, northeast Sudan? Did it control only part of the Horn of Africa or all of it? Did it have a foothold on the Arabian peninsula or not? How far did its influence extend into the Indian Ocean?
• Nilotic peoples are now considered to have entered Kenya earlier than previously thought. Once thought to have only arrived in around 1000 AD, new archaeological evidence suggests they may have reached western Kenya as early as 1000 BC.
• The Habesha peoples of the Horn of Africa were once thought to descend from South Arabian tribes who migrated across the Red Sea, partly because the Geʽez language appeared to descend from Sabaean or another Old South Arabian language. It was later discovered that Geʽez evolved from earlier Ethiopian Semitic languages.
• Starting in the Meiji era, Japanese scholars promoted the idea that the Ryukyuans were a sub-group of the Yamato people, partly to justify the Japanese annexation of the Ryukyu Islands. 21st century genetic studies proved that the Ryukuans were more closely related to southern Jōmon hunter-gatherers.
• While it was once believed that the Austronesian peoples had their roots in Malaysia, the current prevailing theory is that their origins lie in Taiwan.
• A once popular theory had it that the Cimmerians related to the Thracians somehow, or possibly even a Thracian tribe. However, this was just unjustified extrapolation from Strabo's mention of a Thracian-Cimmerian alliance. The dominant theory today is that Cimmerians were an Iranian people who originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and conquered part of the people that made up the Catacomb culture.
• In the early 20th century, it was suggested that the Illyrians of the western Balkans were The Remnant of a very large area that reached into Central Europe, and that they migrated south during the transition between the Bronze and Iron ages. The evidence was alleged Illyrian toponymy in parts of Europe outside their known territory. However, archaeological evidence in the 1950s pointed to an unbroken continuity of culture in the area during that time, and the onomastic once dubbed "Illyrian" is now believed to be Old European.
• With archaeology in its infancy, 19th-century reconstructions of ancient Germanic tribes tended to confiscate their trousers and tunic sleeves, arm them with weapons from the wrong time period, and attach horns or wings to their helmets regardless of era and culture. The Migration Period wasn't the only thus affected; the ancient Near East often wound up looking like a jumble of Assyro-Babylonian and then-modern Ottoman influences.
• The Romans recorded the Huns as appearing suddenly to the east of the Goths' territory in Ukraine. In the 18th century, Joseph de Guignes proposed that the Huns and the Xiongnu, a steppe people that invaded China between the 3rd century BC and the 2nd century AD, were one and the same — hence why Mulan's enemies are Huns. However this theory rested on linguistics only, and was rejected by Otto Maenchen-Helfen in the early 20th century after archaeological findings — which were themselves challenged later, as well. The origin of the Huns, along with their relation to the Xiongnu, Xionites, Hephtalites, and Huna peoples that invaded Persia and India in the same broad time, continue to be contested.
• One popular theory of early Korean history was that Korean pottery gradually becoming more standard before turning essentially uniform by the end of the 4th century CE reflected either more minor cultures being assimilated out of existence or the creation of a unifed Korean culture through fusion. However it is now believed that the standardization of pottery was reflective of an economic change, not cultural. The prevailing theory is that the production of pottery became increasingly centralized and standardized.