Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [266]
*There is a great variety among Egyptian dating systems, and many of the dates presented here are approximate or speculative, but are based on the widely accepted chronology found in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, edited by Ian Shaw.
*The Roman-era Jewish historian Josephus credited the Hyksos with the foundation of the city that later became Jerusalem.
*At 450 feet (138 meters) high, the Great Pyramid is taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and New York’s Statue of Liberty.
*This old chestnut of a conspiracy theory got fresh legs with the release of the movie National Treasure (2004), an otherwise amusing action-adventure story that combined Masonic conspiracies with a treasure map hidden on the back of the Declaration of Independence.
*A complete discussion of the history and chronology of the Israelites in Egypt, the Exodus, and the Ten Commandments can be found in my earlier book Don’t Know Much About the Bible.
*The nation of Iraq was formed in the aftermath of World War I, when the British, who then ruled it, called the area by its ancient name, Mesopotamia. But Iraq as it exists today has little to do with the ancient civilizations that rose and fell there. A British-installed, independent kingdom was established in 1923, and the British dominated the oil fields and politics of Iraq for the next quarter-century. In a military coup, King Faisal was killed in 1951. Successive military regimes were increasingly dominated by the Baath Party until Saddam Hussein ultimately seized power in 1979.
*This brief piece of a larger biblical tale is also a perfect example of how even Christians don’t always agree on their “holy” stories. While Catholics traditionally include “Bel and the Dragon” as part of the Book of Daniel, Protestants do not. In their Bibles, such as the King James and New Revised Standard Versions, the brief narrative is placed in the Apocrypha, a collection of writings that are not considered part of the divinely inspired “canon” of the Bible.
*The literal heirs of these people are Iraq’s so-called Marsh Arabs. During the 1990s, Saddam Hussein tried to destroy these people—who had rebelled at the urging of the first President Bush after the Gulf War in 1991—by systematically draining the marshes on which their way of life depended. The UN has described this as the “environmental crime of the century.”
*The widely misunderstood term “semite” is adapted from the biblical name of Shem, a son of Noah. Although the term is often equated exclusively with Jews—as in “anti-Semitic”—Shem was thought to be the ancestor of all the Semitic peoples, who included, in the ancient world, Babylonians, Canaanites, Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Arabs.
*A jenny is female donkey.
*The spread of Mithraism under the Roman Empire extended into Spain, and some authorities suggest that the killing of a bull was part of a Mithraist ritual that gradually evolved into the practice of bullfighting, whose conventions were formalized in Spain in the 1700s, and the famed “running of the bulls” each spring in Pamplona. However, others view the corrida de toros as a vestige of much older traditions of bull worship and sacrifice as evidenced in many cultures, including those in Crete, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, ancient India, and ancient Israel. These connections include the sacred Apis Bull of Egypt, the famed bull riders of Knossos discussed in chapter 4, and the hero Gilgamesh, whose conquest