About History Hunters International

We are a small community sharing an interest in understanding history through the methodology of archaeology. We aim to let the facts speak for themselves as much as possible. Our posts are fully referenced and link to the external sources.

If we have a distinguishing characteristic, it is our determination to give primacy to primary sources, an approach which is more unusual in historiography than one might like to think:

The digital sources of information tend to rely on a specific type of ancient historical source and treat this genre as more or less primary when discussing ancient events. From a more historical critical approach, this is a tendentious practice and offers a major opportunity for the unwary reader to become misled: professional historians have in most cases very little knowledge on what sources ancient historians (we have to be careful even using this descriptive term and at HHI we are more comfortable referring to them as Chroniclers after a sort) used to prepare their works.

To put it another way, most of the ancient so-called histories are actually secondary sources describing events the author did not personally witness entirely, or in many cases, did not personally witness at all. The question of what genre these works belong to and the actual degree of historicity they contain, continue to be debated within the historical and archaeological disciplines. For our purposes, and it is the approach we at HHI will take, all ancient writing that we moderns place within the genre of history is suspect, along with the classification of these works as histories in the modern sense of the term.

In short, for most cases it is necessary to treat these ancient chronicles as secondary descriptions of events and therefore seek to cross-check these secondary sources against actual ancient primary source documents in the form of the vast number of non-literary papyri.

- The Gospels According to Hadrian, Part III: The Aelian Canon and the Main Hand of God by Lancelotto, 26 July 2010

Our focus is on the appearance of divine men in Classical Antiquity and these tend to be associated with bodies of texts often described as ‘sacred’. Our treatment of these sources – giving primacy to primary sources – has an important role, as does our archaeological methodology.

Christ Helios at the center of the zodiac, Bibliothéque Nationale

From a  communication between members here, discussing scholarly treatment of ‘sacred texts’:

The point is tricky: historians like to strip away the fantastic and fabulous from the chronicles and believe that what is left is “historical”; however, this approach gives a false sense of security to the historian and archaeologist. The historical chronologies, geneaologies, the human events, are perhaps of lesser importance in the narrative and were never intended by the original author(s) to stand alone. The “historical” events exist in chrestorical literature (and it is literature) in order to record a perceived reality wherein oracles of divine men and women are seen to be fulfilled.

The archaeology of SupermanThere is a Clark Kent (Superman’s adopted earthling name) born in Jefferson, Ohio, in the year 1907. The Clark Kent in the 1930 census would have been about 25 years of age when American writer Jerry Siegel and Canadian-born American artist Joe Shuster created the Superman character in 1932. When the Superman character made its first appearance in Action Comics #1 (June 1938), the American in the 1930 census would have been about 30-31 years of age. The U.S. 1930 census also records an American citizen born with the name Bruce Wayne born about 1909 in Calhoun, West Virginia, whose historical lifespan fits that of Bruce Wayne (Batman’s true identity in the comic series). Mr. Wayne would have been approximately 29-30 years of age when Batman first appeared in Detective Comics #27 in May 1939. One is left to ponder how the recovery of a few comic books from the sands of the Mojave desert, collated against the 1930 U.S. census record, might be interpreted by a future team of historians and archaeologists searching for the historical Superman or Batman some 2,000 years after our civilisation implodes. Context and understanding of cultural layers are everything.

What historians actually do is similar to taking a 1930s comic book of Superman and deducing historical realities about superman because there are picture panels and text that accurately depict 20th century material culture. There are Packards in that culture but Superman never lifted them with one hand. Bullets were fired from .38 calibre handguns, but never bounced off the hero’s chest. Skyscrapers dotted the urban landscape, just as we see in the comic, but Superman never jumped over them in a single bound. Take the Superman out of the narrative and any historical fact surrounding an event in the narrative falls away: only a record of the material culture may perhaps be said to remain. Historians, it seems, can make distinctions with comic books, but not Gospels.

Our empirical approach aims to produce an historical framework for divine men which is more reliable and allows whatever archaeology that may exist for them to be described in a proper context. The product can be quite radical in comparison with more traditional approaches.

This is leading us to define new terms and redefine old. For example:

Panhellenism

Different cultures called their sun god by different names, such as Helios, Sol, Sol Invicta, Mithras, Apollo, Bacchus and Dionysus. The founder of the panhellenic empire, Alexander III of Macedon, was worshipped as a divine man in the first centuries of the modern era and portrayed in the same manner as other divine men: the personification of the sun. The ‘history’ used for him today is no more than a romance, conjured up in Alexandria, Egypt, centuries after his death.

Haloed Apollo, from the Roman colony Hadrumentum.
The conventions of this representation, head tilted, lips slightly parted, large-eyed, curling hair cut in locks grazing the neck, were developed to depict Alexander the Great (Bieber 1964, Yalouris 1980). Some time after this mosaic was executed, the earliest depictions of Christ will be beardless and haloed.

This great city, with its Royal Library, became the centre of Greek magic, using the Egyptian ritual of ‘Opening the mouth’ to breathe the spirit of the dead into statues. This is ritualistic rebirth.

Hadrian ordered to be founded a Roman panhellenic (panhellenic used here instead of the term pagan) civitas specifically dedicated to the cultus of the emperor as the worldly incarnation of Jupiter Capitolinus.
In weighing the interaction between Hadrianic religious policy and the subsequent development of both Christianity and Judaism, it may also come to light that our historical and archaeological lines of demarcation between Panhellenic religion, Judaism, and Christianity are far too rigidly framed and interpreted.
- The Gospels According to Hadrian (part one)

Hadrian’s imperial political and philosophical response was to bring the resources of the empire to bear on the single aim of syncretising Judaism into the panhellenic empire of the divine Augustus.
- The Gospels of Hadrian Part II: Death on the Nile

We suggest that the door be left open to view this event as a coherent component of Hadrianic religious policy seeking to revitalize panhellenic popular religion within the empire. Like Judaism, he gave the panhellenic world a religion arising out of Egypt. Importantly, it was also a religion that was centered on the creation of a divine man out of a mortal human offered up as a sacrifice. As the Antinous obelisk illustrates, this most concrete form of Hadrian’s Gospels was rooted in both the imperial cult and the syncretic panhellenic forms of ritual and magic current during the second century.
- The Gospels According to Hadrian, Part III: The Aelian Canon and the Main Hand of God

Apollo with a radiant halo in a Roman floor mosaic, El Djem, Tunisia, late 2nd century
At Delphi in Greece is a sanctuary that was dedicated to Apollo, who was said to have spoken to the oracles.

Another term we are working on is chresmologia: fortune-telling and divination, from which we are making chrestology and chrestorical.

We have two regular contributors, who set up a scholarly site some years ago within the Google Cloud to collate both raw data and draw in expert opinion on specialist aspects of panhellenism – a term we use to describe aspects of Greco-Roman culture across the world conquered by Macedonia and later, partly by Rome.

Over 1,200 follow us on Twitter, many of whom work in history, archaeology and cultural heritage.

Projects, insititutions and specialists consulted include:

• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: plants of Ein Gedi and those associated with the incense and spice trade
• Excavations at the Red Sea port of Berenike by a team from the University of Delaware led by Prof. Steven E. Sidebotham; with special reference to emeralds and trade with India.
• The Landscape, environment and ancient industry in Islamic al-Raqqa (Syria) project and the Institut für Sprachen und Kulturen des Vorderen Orients: glassmaking at Kallinikos.
• The Oriental Institute: The Theban Desert Road Survey
• The Three Hares Project: trade and cultural exchange of the Silk Road
• Professor John Anthony McGuckin: the historicity of Origen
• Dr. Jaap-Jan Flinterman: Apollonius of Tyana
• The British Library: Greek magical texts
• The British Museum: images and expert opinion on various artefacts
• Professor Geoff Wainwright: Roman archaeology at Stonehenge
• Department of Classics School of Arts and Sciences, New Brunswick Rutgers: Romano-British amulets
• Department of Archaeology, University of Reading: ivory bangle, Roman York
• School of Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester: fresco, Dura-Europos
• Aerial Archaeology of Jordan Project, University of Western Australia: Auxiliary Cohors XX Palmyrenorum
• Eugene Cruz-Uribe, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, NAU: Cartouche of Darius the Great
• The Vindolanda Trust: identification of Roman auxiliary officers in Britain
• The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and the Gujarat Department of Archaeology: excavation of  Buddhist monastery in Vadnagar
• The Quseir al-Qadim Project: excavation of Red Sea ports re Roman sea trade with India
• and many more – too many to mention here individually.

Leading scholars – Arputhrani Sengupta (Associate Professor, Dept. of History of Art, National Museum Institute, New Delhi, India) for example – are invited to post on an occasional basis.

John Bartram began his interest in field work with the Cambridge Archaeology Unit in the 1960s and before he began his international work in the 70s, had directed an exploratory dig for the Society of Antiquaries (London) of the Roman fort at Othona.Since then, he has studied sites across the Mediterranean  (Punic-Roman in Malta, Copper Age in the Balearic Islands, Mycenian in Corfu); pre-colonial, trans-Saharan trade routes and Sub-Saharan trading posts; Polynesian in the the South Pacific; Chinese in the South China Sea; and in the last few years, a wide spectrum of archaeology in both Britain and continental Europe. John has appeared on various radio and television shows, such as Mystery Hunters (with Christina Broccolini), and worked with leading journalists (Daniel Foggo, The Sunday Times; John Colapinto, The New Yorker; and Cahal Milmo, The Independent). John is a member of the Council for British Archaeology and various other history, archaeology and civic bodies.

While an undergraduate, David successfully completed graduate level work in the history of Early Christianity under the late Dr. Frank Daniel Gillard, a Fellow of the American Academy at Rome and, like David, a United States Navy veteran. Currently a graduate student at California State University East Bay studying history, David is in seminar on the subject of Early Medieval history and will lecture undergraduates on the Byzantine period. David worked as a researcher for Discovery Channel’s “Treasure Quest: Battle of the Black Swan.” David is a member of the American Historical Association, the Fort Ross Interpretive Society, Ft. Ross, California and the Board of Supervisor’s appointed representative for San Francisco’s District 8 Pedestrian Safety Committee (Second term).

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