Tag: King Arthur

2020-05-18

King Arthur: Felled by Archaeology and DNA

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Archaeology, Historical Methods and Historiography
Tags:

Another fascinating program, King Arthur’s Britain: Truth Unearthed

As a boy, I read in children’s books that after the Romans evacuated Britain early in the fifth century the indigenous peoples fell into warlike anarchy and only came together again under the leadership of King Arthur to confront the new invaders from Europe, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who had driven the Britons back to the western part of the isles.

Screenshot of statue of Arthur from King Arthur’s Britain doco. I find its hollowness appropriate.

Just like the biblical story of King David, I am almost certain that the literary legends are fantasy. Archaeology and DNA, in their current state, appear to leave no room for such scenarios of mass invasions, displacements or a heroic King Arthur rising to save such a day.

Evidence datapoint #1: of the thousands of human skeletons from the period of the fifth and sixth centuries, only 2% have signs of sharp cutting blows that indicate a violent end.

Evidence datapoint #2: widespread and extensive archaeological digs indicate open farming settlements, not fortresses.

Evidence datapoint #3: Jewellery of a Saxon cruciform with a skeleton was long assumed to have been an indicator the person was a Saxon; but new x-ray technology applied to such jewellery shows that it was overlaid with a glass-based enamel that was characteristic of the crafts of the Britons and nowhere found in Europe. It thus appears that such jewellery points to Saxon influence of the design upon the crafts of the native Britons. We cannot assume that the Saxons displaced the Britons in the east.

Evidence datapoint #4: Ancient DNA tests show that some skeletons of the period were the products of intermarriage of Saxons and Britons.

Evidence datapoint #5: Modern DNA tests show a homogeneity of DNA mix among the population of central and western England; this area experienced the most concentrated Roman settlement and was easily traversable through Roman roads here. Other parts of the British Isles show less integrated DNA, suggesting that over the centuries these areas (in the west and south-west) integrated less with European settlers. The thorough mix of DNA in the central and east parts of England demonstrate an integration of populations, of Angles and Saxons with the Britons, and not a replacement of one population by the other.

The red represents homogenized DNA of indigenous inhabitants and European arrivals in the period of 5th-6th centuries.

Evidence datapoint #6: Pottery finds point to Britons (who had a major centre at Tintagel) were trading extensively by sea with Spain, North Africa, through to Anatolia or where modern Turkey is, all through the Byzantine era; meanwhile the eastern part of Britain was trading most with northern and north-western Europe, the Scandinavian and north European areas from where they had originated.

Conclusion: There were no population displacements with the arrival of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Rather, these newcomers probably set up in their self-contained communities at first but over time came to integrate with the indigenous population. It was more like the settlement of America, Italian Americans, German Americans, Black Americans, each coming in in their own “waves”.

There is no evidence of breakdown into violent anarchy. The two sides of Britain, west and east, appear to have been quite prosperous regions. There is even evidence of literacy among them. There was no scenario that fits the glorious, superhuman tales of King Arthur, happily.

A monk, Gilgal, from the supposed time of King Arthur, writes diatribes against the sins of the Britons and how the Saxon invasions were God’s punishment on them, but he makes no mention of Arthur and we have no way of testing his image of the times. He appears more devoted to writing “godly polemics”.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, our first recorder of King Arthur’s exploits, wrote in the twelfth century. Our material evidence, clay, rock and DNA, suggests his history is fantasy.

The question to ask is what was it about Geoffrey’s day that led him to write about a saviour king in troubled times.

Screen capture from the doco of Tintagel, a “Dark Ages” impression of the site of royal and major commercial centre of Britons trading with Byzantine people as far away as modern Turkey.

Scott, Kenny. 2018. King Arthur’s Britain: Truth Unearthed. BBC. https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/1419920963667/king-arthurs-britain-truth-unearthed. [Presented by Dr Alice Roberts]

Callaway, Ewen. 2015. “Uk Mapped Out by Genetic Ancestry.” Nature News. Accessed May 18, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2015.17136.

Leslie, Stephen, Bruce Winney, Garrett Hellenthal, Dan Davison, Abdelhamid Boumertit, Tammy Day, Katarzyna Hutnik, et al. 2015. “The Fine-Scale Genetic Structure of the British Population.” Nature 519 (7543): 309–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14230.

2016-01-25

What Is Euhemerism?

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Tim Widowfield

Filed under: Biblical Scholars, Biblical Studies
Tags: , , , , , ,

chromolithograph Caricature of Thomas Henry Hu...
Chromolithograph Caricature of Thomas Henry Huxley. Caption read “A great Med’cine-Man among the Inquiring Redskins”. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

[Note: This post reflects my perspective. Neil is not responsible for any of the following content. –Tim]

We have Thomas Huxley to thank for the word Darwinism, which he coined in 1860 in a review of On the Origin of Species. In modern times, of course, creationists have misused the term, applying it to any theory of natural evolution, and even to the study of abiogenesis. They continue to embrace the “ism” since bolsters their assertion that evolution is a kind of belief system, just as irrational as religion.

What is Darwinism? 

Simply stated, Darwinism is the theory of biological evolution by means of natural selection. Technically, the terms Darwinism and biological evolution are not entirely synonymous, since theories of evolution existed before Charles Darwin. I recall being taken aback when I first read that Charles’ grandfather Erasmus had written a poem suggesting all forms of life were interrelated and had evolved to their present state. And well before Charles published his book, Jean-Baptiste Larmarck had proposed a theory of evolution based on the idea that organisms acquire traits during their lives, and later pass them on (somehow) to their offspring.

Darwinism differs from other competing theories of evolution in its mechanism for change. It makes no sense, then, to apply the term to other theories that posit some process other than gradual modification through natural selection.

Nor is it technically correct to call today’s modern synthesis “Darwinism,” since it embraces two other important foundational concepts, namely mutation theory and Mendelian genetics. So those who would today call an evolutionary biologist a Darwinist betray their ignorance of evolution, Darwin, and biology in general.

A less familiar term, euhemerism, from time to time suffers similar misuse. How should we define this word? We might explain it, following Dr. Richard Carrier, as “doing what Euhemerus did.”

But then we have to ask, “Well, what was that?”

Continue reading “What Is Euhemerism?”

2010-04-30

What King Arthur might teach us about Jesus and Christian Origins

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Scholars, Biblical Studies, Historical Methods and Historiography, New Testament
Tags: , , ,

King Arthur as one of the Nine Worthies, detai...
Image via Wikipedia

There is nothing unfeasible about the idea of a rich body of literature that reads as if it were real history, filled with details of names and places, yet being entirely fictitious, appearing suddenly and “out of whole cloth” from the mind of a single author. This is how the Arthurian literature was created in the twelfth century. It was very likely created for the purpose of establishing a national identity and assisting the Norman conquerors of England establishing a continuity with their subjects.

The Primary History of Israel contains a detailed history of Kings David and Solomon that archaeology has demonstrated is entirely fanciful. This contains many names and places and administrative lists (though not so rich as those found in the Arthurian literature) that give the story verisimilitude. This story, too, was quite arguably created for the purpose of establishing a new “national” identity and sense of continuity for newly arrived inhabitants in the land of Canaan at the behest of yet another Persian imperial mass deportation. (It was the dismal custom of Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians to repopulate imperial lands via mass deportations for a variety of reasons — economic, strategic, punitive — while promising “liberty” and “restoration” to those they were relocating. Part of the package could include happy servitude to the “original gods of the land”.)

I sometimes wonder if the meagre evidence we have for the emergence of the Gospels is best explained by a similar process, maybe late first century but quite likely early to mid second century. Not that they are the products of a new nation or occupation, of course. But thousands of Jews were displaced, and a central focus of religious and cultural identity was shattered — twice, 70 and 135 ce. It might be interesting to explore the relationships between such presumably traumatic events and their cultural and ideological impacts. Such a possibility is suggested by the several metaphors in the Gospel narratives of a destroyed temple (e.g. the rock-carved tomb of Jesus deriving from Isaiah 22:16’s depiction of an earlier destroyed Temple being a rock-carved tomb) and a “new Israel” (e.g. the twelve disciples echoing the twelve tribes of Israel). They are documents that do potentially offer a new identity for a displaced people. They reassure those who leave their families and homes — even their former racial and cultural group still adhering to a revised Mosaic set of regulations — that they have a new place in the successor of Moses and Elijah. Their story of Jesus as the cast-out, the rejected, the persecuted, yet the one who would in the end conquer; their image of an alternative “new Israel” with which to identify; these surely would answer the needs of such peoples.

But could such gospel narratives arise seemingly from nowhere?

They certainly could. Compare the literature of King Arthur. (The following notes are for most part from a discussion by Hector Avalos in his The End of Biblical Studies.) Continue reading “What King Arthur might teach us about Jesus and Christian Origins”