HINTS ON DOING RESEARCH (online and off)

 Some bits of generic advice that a surprising number of folks don’t realize:

Bibliographies are your friends. But with a caveat…bibliographies list anything the author cites, even if that author disagrees with it. That’s good! It means you can find a variety of voices on a topic. So, once you find a (relatively recent) book or article on your topic of interest, always check the bibliography for more sources.

Indexes are your friends (as is the table of contents or TOC). If you want to hone in on highly specific topics (like, say, Hephaistion), check a book’s index. You can eliminate some just by looking at the TOC and index. BUT indexes work better with print books. Personally, I find them a pain in the ass for PDFs. So, this is a trick for a physical library, sitting in front of the shelves (DF200s for Alexander and Macedonia, btw. 😉) Unfortunately, and increasingly, libraries are ditching physical copies and only purchasing rights to ebooks. This fucks up an extremely useful analog way to research (see below).

Footnotes are your friends. I’m regularly surprised by how many students, even grad students, ignore the footnotes. DUDES AND DUDETTES...that’s where the juicy stuff is: the in-field drama, the subtle (or not-so-subtle) disses…etc. If you read footnotes, you learn a ton about the directions, and parameters, of current research. Is someone’s work cited a lot? Especially with respect to a topic or question that interests you? Go to the bibliography and tag that book or article, so you can run it down for yourself.

The cutting-edge research usually appears in article or book-chapter form first. So rushing to pull a bunch of biographies on Alexander (or Philip, or Macedonia) won’t tell you where research is right now. It’ll tell you where it was 10, 20, even 30 years ago. Check EDITED COLLECTIONS and JOURNALS.

Useful definition time! An edited collection is a set of papers on a topic, each written by a different scholar and then assembled by an editor (or two or three). This differs from a monograph (=solo writing) by a single author (or two). If/when you cite a chapter from an edited collection, cite it by its author, not the editor. The editor didn’t write it (probably). Editors do often (also) have a chapter in their edited collection, but they didn’t write the whole thing. Example: Graham and I edited Macedon and Its Influences. Please don’t credit us for, say, Monica’s chapter. Monica would be (understandably) angry. Students commit this error ALL the time, even when I explain edited collections and do a jig to get their attention. TBH, I think they just don’t care. But I suspect they would if somebody attributed their hard work to someone else.

Let’s begin with finding things online (bear with me through the intro);

On the face of it, search engines are a miracle for researchers, especially those of us who recall the days when “search engine” = a card catalogue and book index…and indexes were expensive to produce before electronic document searches, so some books just didn’t have one. ARGH!

This is also where PDFs can be great, and perhaps why indexes are less used, as you can just run a document search for what you want.

Yet internet search engines, with their monetization and, now, AI summaries, have become increasingly useless. AI pulls material from a gajillion sites with little/no critical evaluation of quality…or even sometimes of the right topic. I’ve had students write about Philip II of Spain instead of Philip II of Macedon, because search engines confused them and the student didn’t bother to engage the All-Important Critical Reasoning Facility to verify who’s who.

My issues with AI are two-fold. First, environmentally, it’s an existential threat to us all. IMO, this should be the #1 concern. Full stop.

Yet it’s also a problem for human creativity. There are things AI can’t do, and THINK is one of them. It can compile and analyze data faster than I can blink, but after that, it’s stymied. It seems to me that—as usual—at least some humans have rushed to lionize a tool, claiming for it all sorts of things it manifestly cannot do. AI Tech Bros are just sophisticated snake-oil salesmen.

That said, AI does have important uses in history and archaeology: reconstructions of sites and broken images/texts, analysis of large sets of epigraphic evidence (such as curse tablets) to find patterns, linguistic reconstructions (see how AI can help “read” the charred Pompeii scrolls), etc. All of that is exactly what AI is well-suited for, so let’s not toss the baby with the bathwater. But you don’t need it to eat up water just to entertain you with a dancing dog in a tutu.

As for websites, always find out who wrote it. Most respectable educational websites will provide that information somewhere (check for a byline or in the footers for “who am I/are we?” links). If they don’t tell you, that’s a red flag. For larger “encyclopedic” websites, check who authored the entry. Just because somebody got an MA in history doesn’t mean they’re any sort of expert on Alexander beyond reading a couple bios or (maybe) taking a class. Do you want an article on Hephaistion written by Joe Blow… or by me (or Sabine), or at least by somebody who publishes on Alexander?

Anyway, forums with responses from humans (like reddit) have different issues, especially if you’re not a specialist able to evaluate the quality of what you’re being told. I’ve only used reddit once for plumeria information when generic “How to grow plumeria” websites failed me. On reddit, I got an answer to a very specific question about a very specific problem. But I already knew enough about plumeria to recognize whether the help was correct or likely bunk.

By contrast, scholarly books and papers already have that necessary gate-keeping. That’s what “refereed” means. The paper or book was sent to (at least 2) reviewers who are also specialists in the field. They return it with one of 3 responses: publish with minor revisions, revise and resubmit (more substantial revisions), or do not publish. It doesn’t see print until the issues are resolved. That means you can trust that the resulting piece is not complete cockamamie crap. (Usually. Verify that the publisher is academic.)

So how do you find these more reliable papers and books?

Google Scholar, JSTOR, & academia.edu

That’s the Holy Trinity of online (academic) search engines, although there are others too.

Google Scholar may be the place to begin. Don’t confuse this with plain ol’ Google, however.

The upside is that it collects anything and everything with even marginal academic bonafides, including PhD dissertations and MA theses. Also, it’ll pull book chapters and other things, including academic conference poster displays and Power-points (useful if you’re looking at archaeology or art history).

The downside is that same breadth. It does pull anything and everything without culling or curating. It’s up to YOU to check what that journal is, who publishes it, and do you trust it? Or run down who that author is, and can you trust them? These should always be questions in your head, btw, but they’re more necessary in some venues. And this is one of those venues.

Still, Google Scholar can create a nice list of articles for you to chase down. Because while some things you find that way may be free, many won’t be. SO, at this point, don’t pay for anything, just collect title, author, and journal/ publisher. There are several other venues for you to check before you buy it.

First stop….

JSTOR: a database of scholarly articles. It requires a subscription, or you can pay ala carte for the article you want. If you happen to be a student with a college/university library, your tuition is already paying for access, so use it. And if that library’s JSTOR doesn’t have the article, then ILL it.

What the hell is ILL? Interlibrary loan. It’s an agreement between libraries to share books and other material requested by a patron, either free or for a (usually minimal) fee. It’s basically a “wider world” library for you. Many people are wholly unaware it exists! Yes, it means an extra step, but most libraries—even public libraries—are part of the system. You just fill out a form (often online), to request the material, and provide the upper amount you’re willing to pay, typically for postage. These days, many things, especially articles, come electronically so that fee may well be nothing. That said, reference material and specialty texts may not be shared on ILL or have limited check-out/ special rules. Paolo Moreno’s Alexander the Great (ginormous art-history book) was originally “read onsite only.” As UNO faculty, I was allowed to take it for a 4-hour chunk to scan pieces of it back at the history department.*

Anyway, if you can’t get something via ILL, before you pay JSTOR, go to the journal website itself, which may well sell you a copy for notably less. For instance, you can get old papers from The Ancient History Bulletin for between $1-5. Check their archives. (And you’re directly supporting the journal!)

The chief pitfall of JSTOR (other than price/access) is that it provides journal articles, not book chapters, etc. In this era of a continually contracting number of journals, more and more of us publish in edited collections. I’ve had only 2 articles (of the last 8?) in a journal—both in Karanos, but because Karanos is open access, I doubt they even show up in JSTOR. (And if you’re into Macedonian history, bookmark Karanos!)

Which brings me to JSTOR’s second pitfall…

It runs on subscriptions. So even if you have access through your college or university (or other school), they buy a pre-curated list of journals. So your JSTOR may have The Journal of Hellenic Studies (JHS) and TAPA (Transactions of the American Philological Association, but nobody calls it that because it’s a mouthful). Both are top tier, but your JSTOR may not have Arethusa or Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (GRBS) or The Classical Journal (CJ) or The Classical World (CW), much less The Ancient World (AncW, which had a ton of articles on Macedonia in the late ‘80s and ‘90s by important scholars, but is from a little publisher). Dozens of Classical/ ancient history journals exist, but unless you’re a Chicago or Berkeley or Princeton or Oxford, you probably can’t get some. And libraries no longer carry physical copies for you to browse, if the journal even publishes paper copies anymore.

Academia.edu is an alternative (sorta) to finding articles on JSTOR, especially for those who aren’t students. This is a public (free) archive site where scholars (and others) post their work. So again, before you pay for anything, check academia.edu in case the author put it up there.

And scholars don’t just post articles, but also book-chapters and sometimes even abstracts and select content from books. (Rarely, however, will you find an entire book.)

There are, however, a few issues to be aware of.

Anyone can make an account and claim expertise in anything. The “gatekeeper” is YOU. So if you run random searches for papers about ___, and you don’t recognize the author as someone you’ve seen cited, check their bio to find out who they are. (Here’s mine, just so you can see what you’re looking for.) Then, to be safe, Google that person to verify. Most people don’t lie, and if they do and are caught, the site bars them… but it’s still on you to be sure you’re not reading some undergrad’s term paper. lol

Second, articles published before c. 2005 can only sometimes be found there. That’s around the time journals stopped sending offprints and began sending PDFs. An “offprint” is a paper copy of the article, just like later PDFs. We used to get anywhere from 10-30 to send to colleagues via snailmail. Back in the Dark Ages. 😉

Some older scholars (like me) have made PDFs of these (or acquired PDFs via JSTOR), which they’ve then uploaded to academia.edu. But that assumes a certain amount of internet literacy, and, of course, people who are now dead aren’t sharing their material, unless a family member or former student does it.

Second, most recent material likely isn’t there. Virtually all publishers have a contract clause forbidding the public posting of material for anywhere from 2-5 years. Some scholars ignore this (and publishers don’t usually police it), but most do honor it because academic publishers survive off library purchases and by the skin of their teeth. We don’t want them to go away, so we don’t undercut their measly royalties. And neither should you. So, patronize libraries folks. Libraries keep track of what gets requested. Everybody wins.

Also, because it’s an automated database, academia.edu sometimes adds multiple “copies” of the same paper to our profiles. I’ve had as many as 3 listings for the same damn article, two blank (because I didn’t upload them). We don’t have time to clear this shit out, if we remember at all. Ergo, the site is full of “ghost” papers: e.g., just the title, added by the site itself. But at least 1) you have the title (and publishing information) to request it via ILL. OR 2) you can message (or email) the author directly, to request it. Alas, not everyone with an account there checks it. And some profs are notorious for just not replying to email, regardless. So, you might never hear from them. But hey, it’s worth asking… including for anything recent that may not be uploaded yet. Privately, we can share those things for research purposes. (But don’t ask them for a whole book unless you know them personally. That’s far more of a faux pas.)

So…. those 3 databases/search engines should get you a fair way with online research.

Now, let me tell you the Joys of the Analog Research World

Libraries are a bloody gold mine. They allow you to do something online research doesn’t… find related material without trying to puzzle out how to enter it in a search engine. Or deal with the mountains of useless AI slop. You just plop yourself down in front of the relevant shelves and start looking at book titles. Oh, the joys of the Unexpected Discovery!

You (mostly) can’t do that online.

I’ve only rarely entered a library and walked out only with the books I went in to fetch. *grin*

In addition, for research, I prefer physical books. Yes, I realize PDFs make these available more widely (and often cheaper due to paper costs). Libraries are switching to them too, which creates all sorts of issues. You can be in a university library, but disallowed to access online books not held (physically) by the library. It has to do with subscription costs. I discovered this at PSU. Despite being an alumnus and sitting in the actual library in State College on a research trip, I could use only books from their stacks. So when I got home, I had to turn around and ILL 6 of the books I needed that Penn State had access to…but not access for me, non-student/non-faculty. This is going to turn academic research into a nightmare, going forward.

Anyway, PDF books don’t work for me because I don’t just read them, I mark (and sticky-tab) the holy hell out of them. 😊

I also find it much easier to flip back and forth in a physical book, looking for or comparing something. Even with articles and book chapters, I print them out. Yes, yes, “a waste of paper,” except I’m not wasting it. I’m using it. The one advantage of PDFs (at least for my research style) is that, when it comes to edited collections (especially if I need only 1-2 chapters), I can yank those via PDF, then print them without hauling home an entire book. This is also why I really dislike “combined bibliographies” in edited collections. Even if it means a lot of repeated books in each separate bibliography, I want the bibliography for that paper, not all the papers. Especially if I’m printing out that chapter only.

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Here’s the thing: online searches yield a different sort of results from analog ones. So, it really behooves you to do BOTH. That’s why I’m a bit sad to see the analog research angle falling out of favor.

I think that’s quite enough on research. Happy reading!!!

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* Lending libraries make the ILL rules, not your own institution. The Moreno book is expensive and hard to find in the US (why I had to ILL it), but I’ve been allowed to take home books that cost twice as much. Some libraries are just stricter.

Clothing and Hairstyles of Ancient Greece & Macedonia

 

Clothing and Hairstyles in ancient Macedonia

(this is a repost of something from 2019 that disappeared) 

 

 Ancient Greek and Macedonian clothing was relatively simple, in terms of not requiring much stitching. It usually amounted to a large, rectangular piece of cloth that was then folded, pinned, and tied in various ways.

Women wore one of two primary garmets: the peplos (both left below) or the khiton (sometimes chiton, both right below, Ionic-style). The choice was more regional than one of personal preference. In Macedonia, most women would wear the peplos. A peplos was secured by long pins (with protective endpiece) while the khiton was secured by fibulai, which amounted to safety pins (bee fibula, left).

 

For men, there’s just the khiton really, either shorter (above knees, below left, Macedonian) or longer (mid-calf). In Macedonia, men may also have worn a long-sleeved version (below right).

 

Greeks also had “outer-wear.” First, the himation (not to be confused with a toga). It could be worn over a long men’s khiton, or alone (as below left); it’s sort of the ancient Greek version of a suit, more formal than a khiton. Women also wore the himation, especially outdoors. When raised over her head (below right), it was called “Aphrodite’s tortoise,” as she symbolically carried her “house” on her body (concealing her from the gaze of non-familial males).

 

Men might also wear a short cloak outdoors, the khlamys, especially associated with soldiers and men traveling . See the hunters below; the one on the left is identified as Alexander himself. And no, nobody really hunted naked; that’s “heroizing.” Notice also Alexander’s hat. That’s the petasos, a floppy, straw sunhat worn against the unforgiving solar glare of Greece.

 

Sandals came in a wide variety; there was even a “sandal boot” common to cavalrymen, et al. (See top left image below, or statue of man’s short khiton up above.) Additional sandal styles:

 

Finally, hair. Most of the men in the novel wear their hair short, following a style borrowed from soldiers and athletes. But Hephaistion wears his long, after a fashion among boys in Athens (see image on the pot below), but also among young men and even adults of the Archaic Age. I present you with … the ancient Greek mullet!

 

Despite what comic-book films would have you believe, fighting with long hair down may look lucious, but is pretty much impossible if you want to be able to see (and so, stay alive)—why most militaries insist that women (or men) with long hair keep it up. So also in ancient Greece. Hephaistion is described as wearing it braided in a crown around his head. Costume designer Ann Patricia demonstrates how that might work:

As for women’s styles, these varied a great deal. I’d like to point to the experimental archaeology of Janet Stephens, who pursues her love of figuring out hair designs in ancient statuary. Most of her work is not Greek, but of particular interest might be the Classical Greek chigon and Aphrodite’s Knot. Finally, the Sakkos, which Kleopatra is described as wearing once she’s old enough to be married off. The last video explains how ancient hair nets were made, and demonstrates weaving techniques on a small scale, for those interested. She then shows how to put the sakkos on the hair. (The model, incidentally, is wearing a peplos.)

 

 

Who Would Alexander the Great Be Today?

 

This post originally answered a query on my Tumblr account, not reproduced here as it was long. But the answer was fun, so I'm sharing it more widely on my blog. The query involved how Alexander [and Hephaistion] would manage if they time traveled to the modern world.

Yes, I think they’d be able to fit in…eventually. There would be a lot of future shock. And no, modern Greek is not that similar; they’d be able to read it before understanding it spoken. 2000 years is a long time in language development. And--depending on where he/they showed up--it could take some while for them to understand what had happened, or for the people around them to identify who they were.

Arriving in the future in the middle of, say, Thessaloniki would be pretty different from landing in modern Bagdad, or Mexico City, or Moscow, or Podunk Middle America. It could be fun to land them somewhere obscure: the middle of Siberia with one of the Samoyed peoples? Or Pine Ridge Indian Reservation? Or somewhere not at all Western: how about the city of Jieshou (界首市) in Anhui, east China? Can you imagine how hard it would be for the locals to figure out what language they were speaking?

It could be quite interesting, putting him/them with a people who were conquered or oppressed. Alexander goes from King of (almost) his known world to living with a Rohingya family from Myanmar forced to flee to Bangladesh, or a Kurdish family in Turkey, or a Darfurian family in West Sudan, or among the Yanomami people of Brazil. Etc., etc.

Hmmm. What lessons…what lessons he could learn....

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the man who conquered so many came back to defend the oppressed?

Aside from where he landed, Alexander’s reaction would probably depend on whether he was alone or with Hephaistion. If he were alone, he’d still be grieving Hephaistion, and now grieving for the loss of everything familiar too. I could see his initial reaction being to retreat and make good on his supposed, “If I weren’t Alexander, I’d be Diogenes” line. How long that would last, I don’t know. But I can’t see Alexander able to become a renunciate permanently. Eventually, he’d return to public life, although it might take a while. Something concrete would drag him back into public spaces.

If he had Hephaistion with him, much of the grief would be mitigated, and he’d be more inclined to try to find a place in modern public life sooner, although obviously…adjustment period.

I really can’t see him content to sail on prior fame, although he very well could decide to write his own history to “correct” what survived. He might even try to be fairly honest about it, although of course, he’d have his own biases. Historians and others would almost surely pester the hell out of him for all the other history he could provide, and even any texts he had memorized, or knew about that we don’t…but I don’t see him putting up with that for long. He’d be willing to help—I do think Aristotle engendered in him a concern for such things—but only as a side-gig. “When I have time for it."

Alexander is not an “expert on call” type of person. (That’s for academics like me, ha.) He’s not going to advise presidents and prime ministers, even if they initially try to shove him into that slot. He’d want to LEAD, do something productive and grand—something nobody had done before.

Yet that wouldn’t be to conquer the world—or not in the way one might assume. After the initial future-shock wore off, he’d cotton on to the fact “world conquest” was so last century.

Even if we ignore Tarn-esque romanticism, Alexander wasn’t motivated by desire for wealth or power. He WAS motivated by desire for fame—kleos. He wanted to outdo the heroes, even the most famous hero of all, Herakles. In his day, that meant fighting monsters, or at least battle and conquest. Leave his mark on the world and be spoken of forever.

He pretty much succeeded. Believe me, the fact his name still shows up in history books and grand stories would convince him his goal was worthy.

BUT…

There are people more famous than him in the West, dammit! Who is this “Julius Caesar”? Even if Caesar wanted to be Alexander, it would piss off Alexander that Caesar is better known today, and Rome became bigger and lasted longer. King Arthur? He was just king of some rinky-dink island. How is that equal to Alexander’s accomplishments? Then this Jesus guy! He was crucified, for pity’s sake and now he’s at the center of a ginormous world religion? At least Muhammad ruled some cities, but he didn’t do the conquering; that was his kalifs.

(Genghis Khan gets a pass.)

How are all these people now more famous than Alexander?

He has some catching up to do. 😉

Modern autocrats wouldn’t impress him. They think too small and too nationally. And presidents and prime ministers have to get elected, then answer to other parts of their government. He never liked the “governing” part of being king anyway. Business tycoons and tech bros would bore him. He’s not about making money, except insofar as money allows him to do other things. He’d rather woo those with money unless he could figure out a way to make money without having to keep track of anything (like having treasurers to collect taxes for him). He did like being rich enough to be fabulously generous. But money is very much a tool, for him.

He’d be MUCH more intrigued by the global fame of mega-celebrities, although not the likes of the Kardashians. Sports legends, artists…he was interested in such people in his own day: they had an intrinsic talent/gift that made them beloved of the gods.

Yet none of these are heroes with that special aura of respect and admiration. The people I think would fascinate him most are globally recognized religious and civil rights leaders such as Ghandi or Mother Teresa or MLK. Or, more recently, Bishop Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Liu Xiaobo, or Malala Yousafzai. Or the Dalai Lama. He would bend over backwards to meet the Dalai Lama—the man would be total catnip to Alexander. World leader and “philosopher.”

Alexander would recognize that if he wanted to be a world leader again, it couldn’t be through political channels, except insofar as those might offer a stepping stone. Similarly, he’d use his prior fame. But he wouldn’t expect—or want—it to be easy. In fact, the great struggle, including mortal danger, faced by those figures I named is what would set them apart for Alexander. He’d think nothing of putting his life on the line for whatever he chose to do.

Alexander in any era needs a MISSION, something BIG and GLOBAL where he could be the savior, or at least the leader of whatever group ultimately did the saving. Again, depending on where he landed, he might take up a local cause. But he might also find himself facing charges for war crimes. Would Iran try to put him on trial for burning Persepolis? That’s just a start. He did many, many, many horrible things from what is today Uzbekistan to Pakistan and the Gujarat province of India. Countries might line up to take him down, either legitimately for revulsion at historical acts, or as political theatre “against the West” (or both).

How would he deal with accusations of being a monster if he’d decided to recast himself as a savior?

I noted climate change before as a possible interest for the ATG analog, but that’d work equally well for Alexander himself. “I don’t want to conquer the world this time, I want to save it!” Totally be his line. And he’d mean it. He might wake up in the 2020s and be completely appalled at the physical state of the world. But the “I” remains big as part of the “saving.” 😉 The Great White Hero, even if he wouldn't frame it in racial terms. Another thing that might interest him would be world hunger, or gang violence, or the international drug trade….

Supposedly “unconquerable” problems.

He'd still want to be a hero. Yet heroes look different today, so he’d change his spots to match.

(The above sidesteps the fact that if he did come forward to claim he was THE Alexander, he’d be called crazy and challenged to prove it. So he’d have a lot of hoops to jump through before he could do anything. And in our post-truth society, there would still be a large chunk of people who’d never believe he was Alexander, no matter what proof he offered. This would no doubt annoy the ever-loving fuck out of him.)

WHY YOUR MORALITY IS MY PROBLEM: modern holdovers from ancient theology

James Dobson, founder of the ultra-conservative Focus on the Family organization, reputedly said of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting, “I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think He has allowed judgment to fall upon us.”

As heartless as that sentiment sounds today when addressing the murder of 20 first-graders (and 6 adults) at an elementary school, it reflects a once-common theology that emerged about four thousand years ago in the ancient near east (ANE*), then bled into the Mediterranean basin and developed an astonishingly long half-life. It’s why some Christians (et al.) are so, so concerned with what their neighbors are doing behind closed doors. Or on their front lawns with all those Pride flags.

In some ways, ANE and Mediterranean religion had a lot in common, being traditional and focused largely on sacrifice/action (orthopraxic). Over time, some orthodoxic religions also arose in that area. So, first, let’s do some quick defining.

Orthopraxic religions focus on what one DOES, not what one believes. Performing the sacrifice correctly, honoring the gods/ancestors appropriately…that’s how one shows piety. Infringing against purity laws or other affronts to the gods (impious actions) can result in expulsion from the community. Fights over correct practice can lead to schism in a community.

Orthodoxic religions focus on what one BELIEVES. Thus, they need some form of authoritative text to determine what IS right belief, resulting in the emergence of a canon (e.g., Zoroastrian Avesta, Jewish Tanakh, Christian New Testament, or Muslim Qur’an). In Orthodoxic religions, wrong beliefs (heresy) can result in expulsion from the community. Fights over correct belief can lead to schism in a community.

(There’s yet a third focus, orthopathic, but that largely doesn’t apply here. “Orthopraxic” can also apply to ethics-based religions, but in this article, it applies to ritual/cultic behavior.)

Most religions have elements of all three, but it matters where the weight falls. Yes, religions can emphasize two sides of the triangle more heavily, less on the third, but even then, one point will be the chief measurement of devoutness among followers. This also help us understand why two religions might not understand each other very well sometimes. They’re trying to impose one set of “What religion is for” ideas on another, with entirely different assumptions.

The religions of the ANE and Mediterranean had much in common in terms of the purpose of religion: to maintain the health of a community. This depended on the piety of that communities’ members. Their gods weren’t moral in the modern sense, but could be jealous, fickly, and petty.

Why were they gods then?

Because they were immortal and more powerful.

Yet an important difference between (many) ANE and Mediterranean religions were the concepts of sin and “mesharum” (divine justice/equilibrium). If the latter existed (sorta) in Mediterranean society, “sin” really didn’t. Impiety differs as it can include ritual matters too. So, if murder (especially kin murder) created uncleanness anywhere and is a moral/civil matter, menstruation and sex also created uncleanness, but were not moral/civil matters defined as “bad.” So “unclean” ≠ “sin.”

To be unclean is a matter of cultic purity, different from moral purity. Yes, ANE religions also had ritual uncleanness, to be sure. And yes, some things that make one unclean also have intimations of “badness” without being so extreme as murdering someone. Yet I want to underscore the difference because it’s very real and too often ignored/misunderstood/unfairly conflated.

Many Mediterranean religions did not have “sin,” just unclean and impious. MORAL/ETHICAL matters were dictated by civil law and later, philosophic discussion. Not religion. Yet in the ANE, moral infractions were affronts to mesharum (divine order) and were therefore a religious matter. This oversimplifies, but smash-and-grab works for now. We find actions (like iconoclasm) in the ANE that didn’t often apply in the Mediterranean. (Iconoclasm is the deliberate theft, or in extreme cases, destruction of religious icons or structures.)

Yet what both groups shared was a sense that the gods had, well, “bad aim.” If people in a community were impious and/or sinful, that might draw the ire of the gods. Plagues were often seen as divine retribution for the impiety and/or sin of one or more members of that community, but not necessarily all of them. This led to the exile of impious individuals, as well as the ANE “scapegoat” ritual, et al. (If you’re familiar with the plot of the Iliad, Apollo punished the entire Greek army for the impious actions of Agamemnon.)

I could DIE from your impiety/sin committed in my town/community.

That makes your morality my business.

In addition, especially in the ANE, war on earth was believed to reflect war in heaven. Gods had cities and peoples, not the other way around. They chose you, you didn’t god-shop—hence Israel as a “chosen people.” Well, yeah, pretty much every ethnic group was chosen by some god(s). But as a result, if your side lost in a war, then—theoretically—your gods were weaker. Maybe you should go over and start worshiping their gods. Yet that didn’t sit well with most groups, so by the Middle/Late Bronze Age, we see an emerging idea that my god isn’t “weaker” than yours, rather my general “set forth without the gods’ consent,” or my god permitted the other god(s) to win for whatever reason…usually due to sin or a lack of piety among his (or her) people. Of course we find this in the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible, but it’s in a lot of other ANE literature too. Nabû or Marduk didn’t lose, they “went to live with” Ashur for however many years—although the winning side will portray the victory as Nabû and Marduk traveling to Nineveh to bow before (e.g., submit to) Assur.

Again, this is simplified, but we don’t see this sort of language used in Greece. Hera would not bow to Athena because the city-state of Athens defeated Argos, even if, as promachos (foremost in battle), Athena might be expected to win in any conflict between the two (as in Euripides’ Children of Herakles). Hera is still queen of the gods, and—even more—these are shared deities. We also don’t see it because notions of “sin” don’t apply and only a handful of wars were ever called “sacred”—all of them concerning Delphi and cultic purity. At least one of those is mythical, the second probably didn’t happen, and the third (which certainly did happen) was labeled “sacred” only by one side. Greek gods just weren’t seen to uphold justice the same way. Roman gods were more concerned with such things, but still not as we find in the ANE.

Ergo, the ANE faced the problem of theodicy: if god/the gods are good/just, why does tragedy happen?

Early explanations for tragedy were simple: those who suffer must have earned their suffering, sometimes referred to as Deuteronomic Theology: “good things happen to good people”/“bad things happen to bad people” (and maybe their neighbors too, by chance).

Pushback against this notion emerged around the same time a more nuanced view of loss in war emerged. People began to ask the corollary: “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

The (c. 1700 BCE) Mesopotamian Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer) attempted an answer. About a thousand years later (600s-500s BCE), the Jewish Book of Job took it on as well. In both, the protagonist asks, “Why does Marduk/Yahweh punish me when I’ve been a faithful servant?” Both protagonists were previously wealthy/powerful, which was seen as divine approval. Losing that wealth/health suggested they had offended their god (and are being punished). Yet each one claims he did not sin—so why?

The answer in both works is similar: there’s not really an answer. Marduk restores Šubši-mašrâ-Šakkan, who ends the poem with a prayer of thanksgiving. Job has a chat with Yahweh, who essentially tells him, “You’re a measly mortal, don’t question me.”

The KEY element in both, however, isn’t the answer, but the assertion that a good person can suffer. They didn’t earn it; it just happened. They remained good and, eventually, their god restored them to their prior station, and then some.

Ergo, if you’re suffering, just be patient. Don’t curse God and die. (As Job is advised to do.)

Today, we may find such an answer wanting but need to recognize it for an advancement on the theology of tragedy.

 Some, however, get stuck in these time-locked answers because they can’t allow their religion to grow. Or rather, they can’t acknowledge that their religion/theology evolves over time, because if it evolves, it wasn’t perfect from the beginning. And that challenges their understanding of their god.

Yet the real fly in the ointment is the notion of a perfect and infallible canon.

This brings me back around to what a canon is. It just means “an authoritative text,” but how that text is understood has nuances. INSPIRED ≠ INFALLIBLE. Most all followers of a canonical text believe it’s inspired by God, but not all (or even most) believe it’s infallible. (Islam is its own category here, note.) That creates some problematic GRAYS.

If it’s only inspired, written by humans with human foibles and history-locked understandings, interpreting it becomes complicated and can lead to disagreements. Taking a literalist view sweeps away the messiness. “God said it; I believe it; that settles it!” Black-and-white.

Those who believe in Biblical literalism/inerrancy (which includes a good chunk of conservative Christian Evangelicals and all Fundamentalists**) will argue the WHOLE Bible is true. If it’s written by God, it must be perfect from the get-go. Thus, a clash is created between simpler versus more nuanced views: Deuteronomy vs. Job. If an earlier view must be as true as any later one, that reduces everything to the most elementary version. It can’t evolve/grow up, yielding what feels to most like a very archaic (and often harsh) worldview.

In any case, both the traditional orthopraxic and orthodoxic religions of the ANE/Med Basin believed God/gods punished people who offended them. AND these punishments might “spill over” onto family and neighbors.

Ancient divine collateral damage.

Ironically, this is WHY early Christians were prosecuted by the pagan (e.g., traditional) Roman and Greek religious establishments. Christian failure to participate in common civic religious cult could earn divine ire. For their first two/two-and-a-half centuries, Christianity was labeled a religio illicta (illegal religion)—in part for “failure to play well with others.” E.g., make sacrifices to the appropriate Greco-Roman deities. Thus, when disaster struck, a scapegoat was sought. Those antisocial Christians are to blame! They don’t sacrifice to the gods and so, offended XXX god, who is now punishing ALL of us with YYY.

Classic ancient religious thinking, but it’s one reason I find current conservative Christian opposition to Teh Gays, trans folks, etc., enormously ironic. The persecuted have become the persecuting.

I want to emphasize that large sub-groups of Jews, Christians, and Muslims have evolved past such theologies. Yet others have not and stubbornly cling to ancient mindsets. That’s why they argue the mere presence of LGBTQI+ people will bring down the wrath of God on ALL.

Talk of “grooming” and “protecting children” is just an attempt to make palatable a belief they know won’t fly with most people, who they consider deluded by The World (e.g., the devil). Trickery is therefore required. As they’re deeply afraid themselves, they understand fear and use it to motivate others. Many are perfectly happy to make their beds with “unbelievers” long enough to get their agendas passed. God will forgive them.

This, too, is rooted in ancient ideas (discussed above) whereby a people’s own god might employ the enemy to punish them (or others). Thus, a sinful person can be utilized on the way to righteous ends because the victory of God wipes away all else. Using the enemy to effect God’s will just proves that God is in final charge of everything after all. It’s the ultimate PWN.

So if you wonder how Christian conservatives can tolerate Trump...that's why. For instance, the Hebrew Bible makes it very plain that the Persian King Cyrus (a non-Jew) is used by Yahweh to defeat Babylon and avenge the destruction of the Temple, then to release the Jews in exile there back to their homeland.

So, while some might honestly believe Trump is some sort of Jesus, many more simply don't care if he's a good person as long as he forwards what they believe to be God's Plan (e.g. ending abortion, or, more extreme: Christian Nationalism). God can use even a sinner like Trump. The ends justify the means.

I hope this helps to explain where these ideas come from, how they originally emerged, and why a subgroup of people still cling to them.

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* While Egypt influenced the ANE, as well as Greece and Rome, and is often shoehorned into the ANE, I consider Egypt as NE Africa. It deserves to be treated on its own, or in relation to neighbors such as Kush.

** Fundamentalists and Evangelicals tend to be equated but are not the same. Also, not all Evangelicals are conservatives (although all Fundamentalists are, by definition). Enormous variation exists between Christian denominations, which range from ultra-conservative to (surprise!) ultra-liberal. There is as much of a hard Christian Left as there is a hard Christian Right. We just tend to hear far less about them.