13 Ways Genghis Khan and the Mongols Were Surprisingly Innovative

Spoiler alert: The Mongols weren’t just bloodthirsty barbarians. Here are some of their shockingly progressive practices, from gender equality to standardized currency. 

When you think of Genghis Khan, do you picture a ruthless conqueror who spent his days pillaging and plundering? Well, yes, that certainly was the case. But it turns out that Genghis, who lived from 1162-1227, was more of a forward-thinking innovator than your average medieval warlord. (By the way, most people mispronounce his name: It should be something more like Jen-gis or Ching-gis.)

One main reason why Genghis Khan has that reputation is the sheer size of the Mongol Empire at its height: “In 25 years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans had conquered in 400 years. Genghis Khan, together with his sons and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations of the 13th century. Whether measured by the total number of people defeated, the sum of the countries annexed or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any other man in history,” writes Jack Weatherford in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, published in 2004. “At its zenith, the empire covered between 11 and 12 million contiguous square miles.”

Most people today live in countries conquered by the Mongols, whose empire “stretched from the snowy tundra of Siberia to the hot plains of India, from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the wheat fields of Hungary, and from Korea to the Balkans,” Weatherford continues. 

“One of the Mongol law code’s greatest merits? No kidnapping women.

This might seem like a no-brainer today, but back then, it was a revolutionary step toward protecting individual rights. ”

The Mongols’ ability to conquer vast territories stemmed from their mastery of warfare, including feigned retreats, mobile cavalry, skilled archers, psychological tactics, advanced siege weapons, extensive spy networks and a remarkable ability to adapt. 

But it wasn’t all battles and bloodshed. Here are 13 ways Ghenghis Khan and the Mongols were surprisingly progressive. 

1. Meritocracy

In the traditional feudal system, your family name determined whether you’d be polishing armor or wearing it. Genghis Khan had a different idea. He believed that talent and skill should be the keys to power, not a fancy lineage.

In action: Under Genghis, promotions were based on ability, not aristocracy. This meant that even a “nobody” could rise to be a somebody if they had the chops. Subotai, for example, was born into a low-class blacksmith family and rose to become one of Genghis Khan’s most trusted generals through his strategic brilliance, orchestrating coordinated multi-front attacks that helped the Mongols conquer vast territories across Europe and Asia.

2. Religious tolerance

In a time when most leaders were busy burning heretics and smashing idols, the Mongols created a religious melting pot. Genghis Khan didn’t just tolerate different religions — he embraced them.

In action: Imagine a royal court where Buddhist monks, Muslim scholars, Christian missionaries and Taoist sages all hang out and exchange ideas over yak butter tea. Genghis Khan was smart enough to realize that forcing people to adopt one religion would only lead to unrest. Instead, he let them worship as they pleased, which, surprise surprise, led to a more stable and prosperous empire. 

3. Legal reforms

Ever heard of the Yassa code? No, it’s not Kanye’s newest name change — it’s the Mongol legal system. Genghis Khan’s Yassa laid down the law for everyone, from the highest nobles to the humblest herders. The rule of law applied equally, and it was strictly enforced.

In action: One of the Yassa’s greatest merits? No kidnapping women. This might seem like a no-brainer today, but back then, it was a revolutionary step toward protecting individual rights. Other notable inclusions: care for the elderly and disabled, and the prohibition of bodily mutilation as punishment. And no one was exempt: Even Genghis himself had to play by the rules. Now that’s what we call equal opportunity justice.

4. Female empowerment 

While medieval Europe was busy debating whether women had souls, the Mongols were giving them actual power and responsibilities. Mongolian women weren’t just seen but heard, holding positions of influence both at home and on the battlefield.

In action: Women in Mongol society could own property, initiate divorce and even fight alongside men. Genghis Khan’s daughters played key roles in governance and diplomacy, running entire regions of the empire. And to think it took 700 more years before women could even vote in America. 

5. Cultural fusion

The Mongol Empire was the ultimate cultural blender, mixing traditions, languages and customs from every corner of its vast territory. This wasn’t just coexistence — it was a dynamic, thriving fusion that enriched everyone involved.

In action: In the bustling cities of the Mongol Empire, you could hear a dozen languages in the marketplace, see architectural styles from Persia to China, and taste foods from across the continent. Genghis Khan encouraged this blending of cultures, which led to a vibrant, cosmopolitan society. 

6. Standardized currency

Before the Mongols, doing business across different regions involved a confusing mess of currencies and a purse heavy with coins. Enter Genghis Khan, who introduced a standardized currency system that made trade as smooth as a Mongolian silk scarf. The Mongols embraced paper money long before it became cool.

In action: Imagine traveling from Beijing to Baghdad and using the same currency along the way. It’s like having one universal credit card in a world full of barter systems. This wasn’t just convenient; it was revolutionary. The streamlined economy boosted trade and brought prosperity across the empire. Suddenly, Marco Polo’s tales of Mongol riches make a lot more sense. 

7. Distribution of wealth

After every successful raid or campaign, instead of building a giant gold statue of himself (which, let’s be honest, he totally could have), Genghis Khan divided the spoils — gold, silver, livestock, you name it — among his soldiers and the greater Mongol community via widows and orphans. This wasn’t just generosity; it was strategic brilliance. By ensuring that his troops and their families shared in the riches, Genghis Khan cultivated a fiercely loyal army and a population that was as invested in the empire’s success as he was. Talk about a profit-sharing plan!

In action: Take, for example, the aftermath of the Khwarezmian Empire’s collapse in 1221. After turning those Persian cities into a Mongol pillaging spree, Genghis didn’t keep the loot for himself. Instead, he divided it up among his troops and even sent a nice chunk back home to the families in Mongolia. This approach pleased his soldiers — turning them into recruitment posters on horseback. Who wouldn’t want to join an army where the bonus plan included a share of the spoils? It’s no wonder the Mongol Empire expanded so fast.

8. Tax reforms

Taxes might be as old as civilization itself, but the Mongols had a surprisingly modern take on them. Instead of bleeding their subjects dry, they implemented a fair and efficient tax system that encouraged growth and investment. Genghis Khan knew that happy traders meant a thriving economy. 

In action: Under the Mongols, taxes were based on wealth generated, not arbitrary demands. They even exempted religious leaders and certain professions — including doctors, priests and teachers — from taxes altogether. Think of it as a medieval version of tax breaks for small businesses. This approach not only fueled economic expansion but also kept the populace relatively content. 

9. Infrastructure development

The Mongols weren’t just tearing down walls — they were building up infrastructure. They constructed an extensive network of roads and bridges that connected the far reaches of their empire. These weren’t just any roads; they were superhighways of the medieval world, facilitating trade, communication and even mail delivery.

In action: The yam system, a kind of Mongol Pony Express, allowed messages to travel across the empire at lightning speed (well, for the 13th century). Waystations with fresh horses and supplies were set up along these routes, ensuring that couriers, traders, diplomats and soldiers could move quickly and efficiently. 

10. Promotion of trade

Before the age of globalization, there were the Mongols, creating an environment where trade could flourish, connecting East and West like never before.

In action: A world where goods, ideas and technologies flowed freely between continents: The Mongols made this possible by ensuring the safety of trade routes and establishing a network of waystations and caravanserais (inns for travelers). Traders could travel from China to Europe with relative ease, bringing silk, spices, and innovations like gunpowder and printing techniques. It was the medieval equivalent of Amazon Prime, but with more camels.

11. Knowledge transfer

The Mongols brought together the best minds from all over their vast empire. They didn’t just conquer; they collected knowledge, and boy, did they know how to network.

In action: When the Mongols captured scientists, engineers and scholars from different regions, they didn’t toss them in dungeons or hold them hostage. Nope, they put them to work sharing their expertise. Persian mathematicians, Chinese engineers and Arab astronomers all found themselves part of a massive, multicultural think tank. The result? A cross-pollination of ideas that accelerated advancements in science, medicine and technology. 

12. Agricultural techniques

While the rest of the world was figuring out crop rotation, the Mongols were busy revolutionizing agriculture. They introduced innovative farming methods and new crops that boosted food security and productivity across their empire.

In action: The Mongols were early adopters of techniques like irrigation and soil management. They also spread crops like sorghum and millet to new regions, ensuring diverse and resilient food supplies.

13. Military innovations

Okay, so maybe the Mongols did have a knack for warfare, but it wasn’t just brute force — they were tactical geniuses. Mongol military innovations didn’t just win battles; they changed the way wars were fought.

In action: The Mongol army’s use of composite bows, superior horsemanship and advanced siege tactics set new standards in military strategy. They also perfected the art of psychological warfare, using fear and surprise to their advantage. Their adaptability and innovation made them virtually unstoppable. 

The Mongolian Stamp on the Modern World

As the dust settled on the vast empire Genghis Khan and his descendants carved out, the world had irrevocably changed. The Mongols were more than conquerors — they were connectors, innovators, and, in a paradoxical way, civilizers. 

It’s time to shed light on the accomplishments of the Mongols, especially given how much we’ve misunderstood or even demonized them. For centuries, the term “Mongoloid” was cruelly applied to children with Down syndrome, falsely attributing to them the characteristics of an entirely different race — with the assumption that one of the baby’s ancestors must have been raped by a Mongol warrior.

The Mongols’ unyielding pursuit of dominance brought disparate cultures into dialogue, facilitated trade on an unprecedented scale, and spread ideas that would ignite revolutions in governance, warfare and even cuisine. From the Silk Road’s bustling caravans to the structured postal systems and the rise of paper money, the Mongols left a legacy far richer than their warrior reputation suggests. 

“Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol empire displayed a persistent universalism,” Weatherford writes. “Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries. They did not have to worry whether their astronomy agreed with the precepts of the Bible, that their standards of writing followed the classical principals taught by the mandarins of China, or that Muslim imams disapproved of their printing and painting. The Mongols had the power, at least temporarily, to impose new international systems of technology, agriculture and knowledge that superseded the predilections or prejudices of any single civilization; and in so doing, they broke the monopoly on thought exercised by local elites.”

“In conquering their empire, not only had the Mongols revolutionized warfare, they also created the nucleus of a universal culture and world system,” he continues. “This new global culture continued to grow long after the demise of the Mongol Empire, and through continued development over the coming centuries, it became the foundation for the modern world system with the original Mongol emphases on free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secular politics, religious coexistence, international law and diplomatic immunity.”

In a world that often frames history through the lens of East versus West, the Mongols remind us that our modern world isn’t a tale of isolated civilizations but a mosaic of influences, shaped by both conflict and collaboration. The very practices and beliefs we hold dear today — from the concept of religious tolerance to the mechanics of global commerce — owe a debt to a nomadic people whose empire once stretched from the steppes of Mongolia to the heart of Europe. 

In the Mongols, we find the origins of a truly interconnected world, one that continues to evolve, much like the riders who once galloped across the plains, forever altering the course of history. –Wally

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Literary Destinations: Books to Accompany Your Travels

What to read on vacation? From Paris to Tokyo, here are some recommendations to immerse yourself in foreign cultures. 

There’s nothing quite like diving into a book that takes you to the very place you're about to visit — or are currently exploring. Literature has a magical way of bringing locations to life, adding rich historical context, cultural nuances and captivating narratives that enhance your travel experience.

Whether you’re an avid reader or simply just looking to deepen your connection with your destination, creating a literary itinerary can be a delightful way to enrich your journey.

Let’s explore some of the most enchanting destinations and the books that would be your trusty companions along the way. 

Paris, France
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Ah, Paris — the City of Light, and an epicenter of art, culture and romance. Set in 1950s Paris, Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room explores themes of identity, love and societal expectations. The story follows David, an American expat who struggles with his sexual identity. While his fiancée, Hella, is away in Spain, David begins an intense romantic relationship with Giovanni, an Italian bartender. This deeply moving story is a poignant and powerful exploration of the complexities of human emotions and the struggle for self-acceptance in a world that often demands conformity.

Italy
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert 

Gilbert’s bestselling memoir, Eat Pray Love, is a captivating tale of self-discovery that takes you on a transformative journey through Italy, India and Indonesia. While in Italy, Gilbert immerses herself in the country’s gastronomy, savoring the flavors and traditions of cities like Rome and Naples. This book is sure to whet your appetite for the amazing food and cultural richness that Italy has to offer.

Florida
To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway 

If you’re planning a trip that includes, perhaps, a three-day cruise to Key West, consider packing a copy of To Have and Have Not by Hemingway. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression in the Florida Keys and Cuba, this gripping novel, written in the author’s simple and direct style, explores the economic struggles and moral dilemmas of its characters. And while you’re in Key West, be sure to visit the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum, where the legendary writer lived in the 1930s, or imbibe at Sloppy Joe’s, Papa’s favorite watering hole during his time on the island.

New York City
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 

Often included in American high school curricula, Salinger’s provocative novel The Catcher in the Rye explores universal themes such as alienation, identity, loss and the transition from adolescence to adulthood — all seen through the eyes of its angsty teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Nearly all the landmarks Holden mentions as he wanders around Manhattan — Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History and the Met — still attracting visitors more than half a century later, and they play significant roles in the story.

Tokyo, Japan
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Step into the world of 1960s Japan with Murakami’s coming-of-age novel, Norwegian Wood. This poignant tale of love, loss and self-discovery is narrated by 37-year-old Toru Watanabe, who finds himself transported back to his college days after hearing the Beatles’ song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” while on a business trip. For an author whose stories typically exist between the real and the surreal, Norwegian Wood takes a decidedly more subtle approach, yet still showcases Murakami’s characteristically delicate touch.

Cape Town, South Africa
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace focuses on the life of David Lurie, a disgraced university professor. After an affair with a student leads to his dismissal, Lurie retreats to his daughter Lucy's rural farm in the province of Eastern Cape. There, they experience a brutal attack that forces both of them to confront their vulnerabilities and the harsh realities of a changing society. The novel explores themes of power, redemption, racial tensions and the search for a new identity in a country grappling with its past.

Literary Wanderlust

These are just a few examples of the countless literary treasures that can enhance your travel experiences. By immersing yourself in the pages of a book set in your destination, you’ll gain a deeper appreciation for the local culture, history and stories that have unfolded within those very streets and landscapes.

But the allure of literary travel goes beyond mere reading. Many destinations offer opportunities to follow in the footsteps of your favorite authors, explore the places that inspired their works, or attend literary festivals and events.

So, as you plan your next adventure, be sure to pack a few literary companions — they’ll not only entertain you during your travels but also provide a perspective through which to explore the world around you. –Boris Dzhingarov

Artistic Depictions of the Virgin Mary: The Surprising Origins of Marian Iconography

The enigmatic allure of the Virgin Mary: From divine purity to unsettling symbolism, we explore the captivating myths and enduring appeal of the original Madonna. 

The Virgin Mary takes many guises in art over the centuries, from Queen of Heaven to the Sorrowful Mother whose tears have miraculous properities.

In art, God is often portrayed as an ancient, white-bearded man in flowing robes, a benevolent figure who watches over humanity from on high. Jesus, meanwhile, is typically depicted in various key moments from his life, such as his birth, crucifixion and resurrection. He walks on water and performs other miracles and has his Last Supper. 

But the Virgin Mary is a complex and enigmatic figure who wears many guises. Often cloaked in modesty, she’s seen as a symbol of hope, love and sacrifice. She’s portrayed as the ultimate role model for Christian women, the daughter of God, the bride of her own son and a regal queen. Her story is a richly woven tapestry of myths and symbols, each thread imbued with meanings that have been interpreted in countless ways throughout history.

As we delve into the realm of religious art and symbolism, we find her as a fertility goddess known as the Black Madonna, along with a loving mother whose tears and breast milk have magical healing powers. Amid the varied representations through the centuries, one thing remains certain: Mary’s enduring appeal as a divine figure. 

Mary, Queen of Heaven by the Master of the Saint Lucy Legend, circa 1495

Maria Regina: Queen of Heaven

Mary, the paragon of purity, couldn’t be left to rot in the grave like a mere mortal. So, the early Church fathers devised a bold solution: They declared that she had been taken up to Heaven in an event known as the Assumption, where she now reigns as a celestial queen. 

Popes viewed the Virgin Mary as a powerful propaganda tool. With their ties to the Queen of Heaven, they could legitimize their authority on earth and cemented the strong tie between Mary and Catholicism, centered in Rome: “The more the papacy gained control of the city, the more veneration of the mother of the emperor in heaven, by whose right the Church ruled, increased,” explains Marina Warner in her 1976 book Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. 

The Coronation of the Virgin by Diego Velázquez, 1636

John VII was the first pope to have himself painted in prostration at the feet of the Virgin, in the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome. 

Madonna della Clemenza icon from the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome, 8th century. It’s the first to show a pope, John VII, prostrating himself at her feet (though it’s hard to make out now).

The coronation of Mary was first depicted in the 12th century, from an apse mosaic at Santa Maria to niches of French cathedrals, and became a favorite theme of Christendom. Christ is shown crowning his mother, switching the moment of her triumph from the Incarnation (when she conceived the son of God) to the Assumption (when she was taken up to Heaven). 

Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico, 1435

The imagery of a divine queen worked well to legitimize not only popes but royalty and its system of inequality as well. “For by projecting the hierarchy of the world onto heaven, that hierarchy — be it ecclesiastical or lay — appears to be ratified by divinely reflected approval; and the lessons of the Gospel about the poor inheriting the earth are wholly ignored,” Warner writes. 

“It would be difficult to concoct a greater perversion of the Sermon on the Mount [Christ’s ethical code, focusing on compassion, selflessness, etc.] than the sovereignty of Mary and its cult, which has been used over the centuries by different princes to stake out their spheres of influence in the temporal realm,” Warner continues, “to fly a flag for their ambitions like any Maoist poster or political broadcast; and equally difficult to imagine a greater distortion of Christ’s idealism than this identification of the rich and powerful with the good.”

The Coronation of the Virgin With Angels and Four Saints by Neri di Bicci, circa 1470

The Bride of Christ: Incest Is Best?

As shocking as it may seem, the Virgin Mary was, for a while, depicted as the bride of her own son, Jesus. 

How could this have come about? Warner suggests the influence of Middle Eastern mystery religions, which played up males forming unions with females. The Canaanite god Baal coupled with his sister, Anat. In Syria, the shepherd Tammuz became the lover of the sky goddess Ishtar. The Phrygian cult featured Cybele and Attis, who died castrated under a tree. And Egyptian mythology tells the tale of Osiris, the god of the dead, who was chopped into pieces and put back together by his sister-wife, Isis. 

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The nuptials of these divine beings mirrored the joining of earth and sky at the dawn of creation.

You wouldn’t marry your mother, would you — even if she was the Virgin Mary?!

“Thus marriage was the pivotal symbol on which turned the cosmology of most of the religions that pressed on Jewish society, jeopardizing its unique monotheism,” Warner writes. “It is a symptom of their struggle to maintain their distinctiveness that the Jews, while absorbing this pagan symbol, reversed the ranks of the celestial pair to make the bride God’s servant and possession, from whom he ferociously exacts absolute submission.”

From this foundation, Cyprian of Carthage, in the 3rd century, accused virgins who flirted of committing adultery against their true husband, Christ.  

And then, of course, there are nuns, whose consecration ceremony includes getting a ring that designates them as a bride of Christ. Talk about polygamy on a mass scale!

But it wasn’t really until 1153, when Bernard of Clairvaux gave multiple sermons on the Old Testament’s Song of Songs — “that most languorous and amorous of poems,” as Warner calls it. In one of these, Bernard preached, speaking of Christ and the Virgin Mary:

But surely will we not deem much happier those kisses which in blessed greeting she receives today from the mouth of him who sits on the right hand of the Father, when she ascends to the throne of glory, singing a nuptial hymn and saying: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.”

Pagan influences aside, I’m puzzled as to how this incestuous idea ever caught on among Christians.

The Virgin and Child by Dirk Bouts, circa 1465

Maria Lactans: The Milk-Squirting Mary

While Mary was exempt from Eve’s punishment of bearing children in pain, there was one biological function allowed her: breastfeeding. “From her earliest images onwards, the mother of God has been represented as nursing her child,” Warner says. 

The Virgin Mary depicted with squirting breasts?! This is one iconography I’ve got to milk for all its worth.

Where did this idea come from? “The theme of the nursing Virgin, Maria Lactans, probably originated in Egypt, where the goddess Isis had been portrayed suckling the infant Horus for over a thousand years before Christ,” Warner explains. 

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RELATED: In the New Testament, Mary wasn’t mentioned as being a virgin. Find out why early Christians insisted upon Mary being pure.

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Madonna Nursing the Child (Maria Lactans) by Erasmus Quellinus the Younger, circa 1614

Part of this symbolism derives from a mother providing much-needed nourishment: “For milk was a crucial metaphor of the gift of life,” Warner continues. “Without it, a child had little or no chance of survival before the days of baby foods, and its almost miraculous appearance seemed as providential as the conception and birth of the child itself.”

And, not surprisingly, Mary’s milk was miraculous. A favorite medieval tale, including a version in French by Gautier de Coincy, tells how a faithful monk was dying of a putrid mouth filled with ulcers. He reproached the Madonna for neglecting him, and chastened, she appears at his bedside: 

With much sweetness and much delight,
From her sweet bosom she drew forth her breast, 
That is so sweet, so soft, so beautiful,
And placed it in his mouth, 
Gently touched him all about,
And sprinkled him with her sweet milk.

As Warner writes, “Needless to say, the monk was rendered whole again.”

According to a 14th century legend, Saint Bernard prayed before a statue of Mary. It came to life, and the Virgin placed her breast in Bernard’s mouth, nursing him as she did the baby Jesus.

The Madonna’s miracle milk became a nearly ubiquitous relic in Europe. “From the thirteenth century, phials in which her milk was preserved were venerated all over Christendom in shrines that attracted pilgrims by the thousands. Walsingham, Chartres, Genoa, Rome, Venice, Avignon, Padua, Aix-en-Provence, Toulon, Paris, Naples, all possessed the precious and efficacious substance,” Warner says.

John Calvin, the church reformer, had a scathing opinion about these claims. “There is no town so small, nor convent … so mean that it does not display some of the Virgin’s milk,” he wrote in his Treatise on Relics. “There is so much that if the holy Virgin had been a cow, or a wet nurse all her life she would have been hard put to it to yield such a great quantity.”

The idea of a breastfeeding mother of God waned in the Renaissance, when high-born women found it indecent to do the job themselves and outsourced the task to wetnurses. Plus, it was deemed indecorous to depict Mary with her breast exposed with the increasing idea that a woman’s body was shameful. Mary, with the Immaculate Conception, was born without original sin and therefore avoided Eve’s curse — and by the 16th century, that included being exempt from suckling the Christ child.

Madonna in Sorrow by Juan de Juni, 1571

Mater Dolorosa: The Sorrowful Mother

The caregiving image of Mary gave way to a mother mourning her dead son, what’s known as the Mater Dolorosa. The cult began in the 11th century, reaching full fruition in the 14th century in Italy, France, England, the Netherlands and Spain. The culmination of this iconography? Michelangelo’s La Pietà.

La Pietà by Michelangelo, 1499

Again, we have Ancient Egypt, and the surrounding region’s myths, to thank for this representation. The Egyptian goddess Isis sorrowfully wandered the land, collecting the pieces of her dismembered brother-husband, Osiris. When she finds his coffin, she caresses Osiris’ face and weeps. 

And she’s not the only weeping woman of the ancient Middle East. Dumuzi, the shepherd and “true son” of Sumerian myth, was sacrificed to the underworld, tortured by demons (much like Christ later, during his Passion and descent into Hell). The goddess Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, weeps for him.

It seems likely that Christians picked up this iconography — spurred on by the horrors of the Black Death, when the bubonic plague swept the continent, wiping out one-fifth of the entire population. “It aroused penitential fever in a way never seen before, and gave the image of the Mater Dolorosa weighty contemporary significance,” Warner points out. 

Madonna in Sorrow by Titian, 1554

Once again, Mary’s bodily fluids have healing properties. “The tears she sheds are charged with the magic of her precious, incorruptible, undying body and have the power to give life and make whole,” Warner explains. 

This cult has lasted to the present day. Many of us have heard stories of statues of the Virgin that miraculously weep. 

“Contemporary prudishness has tabooed the Virgin’s milk, but her tears have still escaped the category of forbidden symbols, and are collected as one of the most efficacious and holy relics of Christendom,” Warner says. “They course down her cheeks as a symbol of the purifying sacrifice of the Cross, which washes sinners of all stain and gives them new life, just as the tears of Inanna over Dumuzi fell on the parched Sumerian soil and quickened it into flower.” 

The Virgin of Greater Pain and Transfer of Great Power

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The Black Madonna of Monserrat

The Black Madonna: Our Lady of Montserrat

Most Western depictions of Mary present her skin as lily-white, untouched by corruption, despite the fact that she is undeniably Middle Eastern. So it’s all the more surprising to see the emergence of the Black Madonna, a dark-skinned version that became popular among the medieval Benedictine monks in Montserrat, Spain. 

The monks saw the lushness of their mountain as a mirror of Mary. As such, her icon took on aspects of a fertility goddess. 

But in a bizarre twist (or perhaps not, given that Mary was a Jew from Judea), the Virgin had dark skin, which led to her being known as the Black Madonna. In fact, she’s known locally as La Moreneta, the Little Dark One. The depiction spread to other places of worship, among them Chartres, Orléans, Rome and Poland. 

The Black Madonna of Częstochowa, Poland

“The Church often explains their blackness in allegorical terms from the Song of Songs: ‘I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem’ (Song of Solomon 1:5),” Warner writes. “[B]ut another theory about their color is even more prosaic: that the smoke of votive candles for centuries has blackened the wood or the pigment, and when artists restored the images, they repainted the robes and jewels that clothe the Madonna and Child but out of awe left their faces black.”

The shrine at Montserrat is one of the longest continuous cults of Mary, especially popular with newly married couples. Here she has dominion over marriage, sex, pregnancy and childbirth — odd for a virgin but not for a fertility goddess. 

The Black Madonna at St. Mary’s Church in Gdansk, Poland

A gruesome legend illustrates Mary’s power. A woman gives birth to a lump of dead flesh. But when she prays to Our Lady of Montserrat, it begins to move and is transformed into a beautiful baby boy. 

Madonna della Misericordia by Benedetto Bonfigli, circa 1470

Madonna della Misericordia: Our Lady of Mercy

In a merging of her roles as mother and queen, a new depiction of Mary emerged in Umbria, Italy at the end of the 13th century. The Virgin was given a massive cloak which she wrapped over the poor souls gathered at her feet. Towering over them and offering protection, this was the Madonna della Misericordia, Our Lady of Mercy. 

Madonna of Mercy by Sano di Pietro, circa 1440s

After the desolation of the Black Death in the late 1340s, this iconography of Mary became the most popular. Monks and laypeople alike would pray to this aspect of the Virgin, asking her to keep them safe from harm. 

The Virgin of the Caves by Francisco de Zurbarán, circa 1655

This Mary is often preternaturally large — and her son, Christ, isn’t anywhere to be found, “suggesting that her mercy, directly given, could save sinners,” Warner writes. But that cuts God and Jesus out of the equation and makes the Virgin a goddess in her own right. 

So while Our Lady of Mercy spread throughout Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, it was officially declared heterodox (not in accordance with the accepted Catholic doctrine) and banned by the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s.

Dormition of the Virgin fresco by Frangos Katelanos, 1548

Divine Dominion Over Death 

The Virgin Mary has worn many guises over the years, from a gentle breastfeeding mother to imperial queen to tutelary goddess. 

“If travelers from another planet were to enter churches, as far flung as the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., or the Catholic cathedral in Saigon, or the rococo phantasmagoria of New World churches, and see the Virgin’s image on the altar, it would be exceedingly difficult for them to understand that she was only an intercessor and not a divinity in her own right,” Warner points out. 

There are surely many factors that have led to Mary’s enduring appeal, starting with her co-opting of ancient mythology like the Egyptian goddess Isis. Many cultures find it fitting to worship the female spirit — something glaringly missing in the often-misogynistic views of Christianity. 

Detail from Assumption of Mary by Peter Paul Rubens, circa 1617

But Warner has a theory: “For although the Virgin is a healer, a midwife, a peacemaker, the protectress of virgins, and the patroness of monks and nuns in this world; although her polymorphous myth has myriad uses and functions for the living, it is the jurisdiction over her death accorded her in popular belief that gives her such widespread supremacy.”

She could be on to something. Think of the final words of the Hail Mary, the best-loved prayer in Catholicism: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” –Wally

Why Did Christ Have to Be Born of the Virgin Mary?

Virgin births weren’t unusual in pagan times — just in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Here’s how sex got tangled up with the idea of sin, and by extension, chastity became the ultimate sign of virtue. 

Nativity, Birth of Jesus by Giotto, circa 1305

Early Christians needed their savior to have been born of a woman without sin, and that included the act of fornication. Greek myths could have influenced their theology.

Mary, the mother of Christ, is held up as one of a kind among humans for getting pregnant and giving birth without ever having sex. 

But believe it or not, so-called virgin births weren’t uncommon in the pagan world. Pythagorus, Plato and Alexander the Great were all said to have been born of virgins by the power of a holy spirit. 

Alexander the Great’s mom dreamed of a lightning bolt striking her vagina — and lo and behold! She became pregnant with the future king of Macedon. In antiquity, “virgin” births weren’t all that uncommon.

“Christians, aware of the antique pantheon, are still worried by the parallel between Christ’s story and the dozens of virgin births of classical mythology,” Maria Warner wrote in her 1976 work Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary.

So how exactly does one conceive without fornication? We can turn once again to paganism. In Greek mythology, the closest parallel seems to be when Zeus turned himself into a shower of gold and impregnated Danae, who gave birth to the hero Perseus.   

Danaë and the Golden Shower by Andrea Casali, circa 1750

The Greek myth of Zeus impregnating a woman in the form of a golden rain could have inspired the form the Holy Ghost took with the Virgin Mary.

The Greek god Zeus metamorphosed into a swan to couple with Leda. Did this bird imagery inspire the Holy Ghost’s representatoin as a dove?

Then again, the Holy Ghost is often depicted as a dove, and in another encounter, Zeus, that shapeshifting, lecherous cad, adopted the form a bird as well: He became a swan to seduce (or, perhaps, rape) Leda, mother of Helen of Troy, the twins Castor and Pollux, and another daughter, Clytemnestra.

The Annunciation by Fra Angelico, 1445

The shaft of light symbolizing the Holy Ghost isn’t too different from Danae’s shower of gold. Notice the contrast of the Virgin with Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden to the left.

Connecting Sex With Sin

Of course in these cases, Zeus is copulating with the women. It’s an act of lust, and, at least for the god, one of pleasure. That’s in stark contrast to the Christian idea of Mary’s conception of Jesus: She remains a virgin, her maidenhead unbroken, and there’s no animal-like rutting. 

This was an essential part of the Christ story. The fathers of the Christian church connected sex with sin early on, taking their cue from Genesis and the Garden of Eden: Fornication becomes necessary for reproduction, and the pain of childbirth a curse that Eve, and all women to follow, must bear. 

Sex was seen as the ultimate sin. Saint Augustine wrote in City of God, in 426, that the passion aroused by lovemaking was sinful — though the holy act of propagation was not. In a similar vein, he added, “We ought not to condemn marriage because of the evil of lust, nor must we praise lust because of the good of marriage.”

“[I]n this battle between the flesh and the spirit, the female sex was firmly placed on the side of the flesh,” Warner wrote. “For as childbirth was woman’s special function, and its pangs the special penalty decreed by God after the Fall, and as the child she bore in her womb was stained by sin from the moment of its conception, the evils of sex were particularly identified with the female. Woman was womb and womb was evil.”

The Annunciation from the Grabower Altar in St. Peter’s in Hamburg, Germany, 1383

Saint Ephrem the Syrian wrote, “Perfectly God, he entered the womb through her ear.” The idea was that by conceiving via her ear, Mary remained a virgin.

The Virgin Mary: Not Your Typical (Sinful) Woman

Mary’s impregnation is, in contrast, a serene, holy act. It’s possibly tied to the very words of the Angel Gabriel when he announces her role in bringing forth the Savior. In ancient times, some people actually believed pregnancy could come about through the ear. (It gives a whole new meaning to Iggy Pop’s lyric “Of course I’ve had it in the ear before.”)

A sixth century hymn that’s still sung today goes:

The centuries marvel therefore 
that the angel bore the seed,
the virgin conceived through her ear, 
and believing in her heart, became fruitful.

The son of God chose to be born of a virgin, according to Augustine, because it was the only way to enter the world without sin. So, “Let us love chastity above all things,” he wrote, “for it was to show that this was pleasing to Him that Christ chose the modesty of a virgin womb.”

Painful births were one of God’s punishments for Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But Jesus’ mother couldn’t be connected with anything so sinful, so she was said to be a virgin, pure and intact.

Slandering the Virgin Mary

The early Christian church had to defend itself against rumors that painted Mary in a negative light. Jews and pagans in Alexandria, for example, were saying that Jesus wasn’t conceived by God — instead, he was the bastard child of an incestuous union of Mary and her brother. 

It doesn’t seem far-fetched nowadays to question a scientific impossibility — but at the dawn of Christianity, virgin births wouldn’t have been too big of a surprise. For early Christians, anything to do with female bodily functions was dirty and sinful. So they would have insisted their savior had to have come from an inviolate womb. And, despite evidence to the contrary, Mary became a virgin. –Wally

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Daily Life in Ancient Egypt

How long did Ancient Egyptians live — and what did most people die of? What were the houses and schools like in Ancient Egypt? What did Ancient Egyptians eat and drink? Egyptologist and author Barbara Mertz unearths these secrets.

What was in an Ancient Egyptian’s diet? How long did they live? And, most importantly, were they cat or dog people?

While I love learning about world religions, mythology and history, not everyone can be a ruler or high priest. It’s nice to also think about the little people. As we explored the wonders of Egypt, I kept finding myself wondering what it was like for the average person. 

It was surprisingly difficult to find a book that covered this subject. There are tons of tomes covering the temples, tombs and pharaohs. But one that tells you how most Egyptians at the time kicked the bucket? Hard to come by. 

“Before we start feeling superior to our ‘primitive’ predecessors, we should bear in mind that a good many people in today’s ‘civilized’ world live under conditions that are as bad or worse than the ordinary ancient Egyptian endured.”

— Barbara Mertz, “Red Land, Black Land”

So thank Horus for Barbara Metz (who, incidentally is the author of the delightful murder mysteries of the proto-feminist archeologist detective, Amelia Peabody). Mertz’s book, Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt, written in her oh-so-distinctive voice, was just what I was looking for.

Barbara Mertz — perhaps the most entertaining author on Ancient Egypt out there

Dear Reader, a Caveat

Part of what I find so enjoyable about Mertz is that she tells it like it is. She’s not too full of her own self-importance to be self-deprecating about herself and fellow Egyptologists. One thing she’ll never be accused of is being stuffy; in fact, there’s a sassiness and wit to her writings that delights me.

Mertz warns that you can’t take anything you learn about Ancient Egypt as outright facts. What we know about that time period could be a misinterpretation of the evidence, and a new discovery can utterly uproot existing theories. 

“[T]he most reliable books on ancient Egypt are loaded with boring words like ‘probably’ and ‘perhaps’ and ‘possibly’; scholars avoid ‘maybe’ for stylistic reasons, but it should be prefixed to at least 50 percent of the statements made in any book on Egypt — including this one,” she writes.

That’s especially true since Mertz first published Red Land, Black Land in 1966, with an updated edition that came out in 1978.

Mummies reveal a lot about how Ancient Egyptians lived — and died.

How long did the average Ancient Egyptian live?

About 35 years — and no wonder, Mertz says. They toiled hard and had limited access to healthcare: “Studies of Egyptian mummies show that these people suffered from a number of diseases, most of which went untreated,” she writes. “Poor nutrition and the inability to cope with infection contributed to high infant mortality. The flour ground on stone querns contained large quantities of grit that wore away tooth surfaces. Cavities were fairly infrequent, since the Egyptians didn’t have refined sugar, but a number of mummies have hideous gum abscesses.”

Ancient Egyptian doctors didn’t do the best job at fighting off a host of diseases.

What diseases were the most common?

Studies of mummies from Ancient Egypt have revealed a host of illnesses, including malaria, tuberculosis and smallpox. “Black lung disease resulted from the smoke-filled, poorly ventilated houses, and desert lung disease from the constantly blowing sand,” Mertz writes. “Perhaps the worst and most common illness was parasitic infection, which still occurs in Egypt today. The most pervasive parasite goes by two names, bilharziasis or schistosomiasis. I won’t go into details, since they are really revolting, but if not treated, the infection produces calcification of the bladder, fibrosis of the intestine, scarring of the liver, serious anemia, chronic fatigue and possibly heart disease. It isn’t fatal except in rare cases, but the sufferer probably wishes it were.”

It all sounds pretty awful — but Mertz points out, “Before we start feeling superior to our ‘primitive’ predecessors, we should bear in mind that a good many people in today’s ‘civilized’ world live under conditions that are as bad or worse than the ordinary ancient Egyptian endured.”

Ancient Egyptian homes weren’t too shabby; they had four rooms, plus the rooftop.

What was an Ancient Egyptian house like? 

For the middle and upper classes, there were typically four rooms in their homes. The room facing the street had no windows, aside from grates near the roof. Beyond this was an all-purpose room with columns and a higher ceiling, where the family slept, ate and entertained. A raised platform was used for a couch, bed or possibly to give birth. And behind this were two more small chambers: a kitchen and a storeroom or extra bedroom. There was a basement for storage, and a flat roof that served as extra living space. 

Beds tilted slightly downward, so instead of a headboard, there was a footboard to keep the sleeper from gently sliding down onto the floor, Mertz writes. And no down-filled pillows were to be found: “the item that would finish most of us was the pillow, which was not a pillow at all but a headrest of shoulder height, with a support curved to fit the neck,” she explains.

Dining tables were also unheard of. Even in royal palaces, every guest or pair of guests had their own little table to eat at.

In the kitchen, there weren’t any counters. While it doesn’t sound very sanitary, all cooking prep was performed on the floor, from grinding grain to kneading bread.

Egyptian homes didn’t have counter space, so meal prep was done on the ground. Consequently, a lot of food had grit in it that wore away at the teeth.

Privacy wasn’t really an option, as homes were filled with extended family members.

At Amarna, a city that briefly served as Egypt’s capital, the villas of chief courtiers even had bathrooms — a small, walled-off space with a brick-supported seat and a removable vessel beneath.

A model of an Ancient Egyptian home. Peasants’ homes were made of mud brick and would be reduced to nothing in a bad downpour.

What about the homes of the lower class?

Their huts would have been made of mud brick, containing a single room that everyone — including any domesticated animals — shared. And while it doesn’t rain often in Egypt, when it does, it’s a deluge. “A heavy downpour would reduce a peasant’s house to a pile of mud,” Mertz writes. “On the positive side, such domiciles were easy to build.”

Bread and beer were the two main staples of the Ancient Egyptian diet.

What did Ancient Egyptians eat and drink?

The key staple of the Ancient Egyptian diet was bread. In fact, some loaves have survived to the present day! 

They were also quite fond of beer. These two items top the list of the mortuary texts that list the food most desired in the afterlife. 

Early Egyptians ate a lot of fish — the River Nile offered a never-ending supply.

Milk, cheese, beans, lentils and chickpeas were also consumed. 

Vegetables played a large part in the Ancient Egyptian’s diet, primarily onions, garlic, radishes and lettuce (which was an aphrodisiac and features prominently in a bizarre myth about Horus and Seth). 

“Meat was probably scarce in poor households, but well-to-do families raised cattle and such exotic animals as oryxes and gazelles for food,” Mertz writes. 

They also domesticated pigs, sheep, geese and ducks.

Wealthy nobles, not surprisingly, ate better than the peasants. For one, they could sweeten their food with honey, and they ate carob, which is as close to chocolate as the ancients got.

They ate fruit, including dates, figs, melons and grapes, which were also dried into raisins or made into wine. 

More wine? Egyptians seemed to prefer beer, but as these amphoras attest, vino was popular, too.

“People ate with their fingers,” Mertz writes, “and when the meal was over a servant, or a daughter of the household, came around with water, which was poured over the hands.”

This carving shows what appears to be an Ancient Egyptian school.

Did Ancient Egyptians go to school?

We’re not sure, but we can presume that some of the upper class children, particularly the boys, were educated at a temple or in a room of a scribe’s house. 

The tools of the scribe’s trade

They were given the equivalent of pen and ink, and they wrote on ostraca, broken fragments of pottery or stone, because papyrus was too expensive for educational purposes. As you can imagine, they wrote in the hieroglyphic Egyptian script (“the most beautiful system of writing ever devised,” according to Mertz).

“Incidentally,” she continues, “the correct noun form for the little images is ‘hieroglyphs.’ Popular writers occasionally call them ‘hieroglyphics,’ and this small error scratches at the sensitivities of Egyptologists like a fingernail on a blackboard.”

Ancient Egyptians got a lot of things right — including a love of cats, which they domesticated.

How did they feel about cats?

It’s believed that Ancient Egypt was the first place cats were domesticated. 

They were also at the center of the worship of the feline-headed deity, Bastet: “Mummified cats have been found in large numbers,” Mertz writes. “I regret to say that the majority appear to have been deliberately done in, presumably as an offering to the goddess in question. (Don’t ask me to explain the logic of this.)”

The Egyptian word for cat might have been an onomatopoeia: It’s spelled miw. “How it was vocalized we may safely leave to the imagination of any cat-owning reader,” Mertz writes, cheeky as ever. –Wally

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KEEP READING: The Sex Lives of Ancient Egyptians

Learn their views on premarital sex, children born out of wedlock, homosexuality, women’s rights and more!

Alien-Human Hybrids: A Plot to Conquer Earth?

Yes, it sounds like science fiction. But a preeminent ufologist believes that for over 100 years alien abductees around the world have had their DNA harvested and manipulated by aliens.

Are alien-human hybrids living among us? And if so, what’s their nefarious endgame?

Dr. David M. Jacobs, in his research on UFOs and alien abductions, has come to a shocking conclusion: Extraterrestrials have been harvesting — and using — our DNA for over a century. The goal? Making alien-human hybrids. 

Now, I know what you’re thinking: That’s crazy. It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie. It can’t possibly be real. 

But I assure you that David struck me as an intelligent man. He taught history at Temple University for over 35 years. He’s spent the better part of his life interviewing hundreds of people who have recalled over 2,000 abduction events, and the details were so strikingly similar that he eventually became convinced of their truth. 

Dr. David M. Jacobs was skeptical at first. But after 35 years of interviewing hundreds of potential alien abductees, he’s convinced. And he says an alien invasion is escalating.

“They’re living here among us, just like everybody else.
It’s assimilation. It’s planetary acquisition. ”

— David M. Jacobs, author, "Walking Among Us"

“Almost every aspect of this phenomenon is astonishing,” David says. “It’s so amazingly bizarre and yet logical all the way through. It’s hard for anybody to imagine it ever happening. And yet we have millions of people who are saying the same thing.”

David was reluctant to believe in such an astounding claim as human-alien hybrids — but, as his latest book, Walking Among Us: The Alien Plan to Control Humanity, attests, he’s come around.

That book concluded his research on the subject, though a final book about abduction research methodology is in the works. Today, David can’t continue on with his research: The thought of alien hybrids living among us is a bit too much for him. 

“After learning that, I said, OK, I’ve done the best I can do,” he tells me. “I want to sit around and watch television for the rest of my life. I want to be happy.” –Wally

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DISCOVER THE EVIDENCE for alien abductions in the first part of our interview with David M. Jacobs

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An alien-human hybrid uses telepathic mind control on an abductee. These drawings were all done by people Jacobs interviewed.

What do the aliens look like? 

Here’s the problem: When people remember things without help, they can often get them wrong. The physical descriptions are largely very consistent, but there are still a few outliers. 

Almost every abductee reports interacting with small gray aliens and tall gray aliens. Both typically have four fingers and are slender, with smooth, hairless skin and huge black oval eyes. 

The small grays are usually 3 or 4 feet tall and do a lot of the grunt work, you could call it — like orderlies at a hospital.

The taller grays are 5 or 6 feet tall. They’re more complex and act as sort of bosses. I guess you could say they do the managerial roles on the ship. They’re the ones that come in and do the procedures, like doctors. One common procedure abductees report is called a “staring procedure,” where a tall gray will put their head about an inch away from the abductee’s face and stare directly into their eyes. Abductees report that it feels as though the alien is rifling around in their brain — as though it’s opening up cabinets to figure out the stuff that you’ve been up to and figure out what your motivations are and so forth.

There’s another distinct kind of alien that people report: the insectoid or mantid. They kind of look like a praying mantis. They are much taller, with even larger, more triangular heads and very thin bodies. They’re not seen very often, but abductees say that they get the sense these guys are the leaders, the ones who are in control. 

Are there any physical signs that someone has been abducted by aliens? 

People don’t quite understand that there are many physical signs of abduction: Abductees frequently report waking up to find dimple indentations or fully formed geometric scars on their bodies, as though they were branded and then have healed. Sometimes people will report pulling out little rods of metal from their skin. We have many photos and evidence jars to prove it.  

What percentage of abductees have physical marks like these?

A hundred percent. Everyone has some sort. Sometimes they last for a very short time. And some people have shown me stuff that they’ve had for years.

Are there other physical signs?

Sometimes women will return from an abduction event and say that they feel pregnant. So they’ll run out and get a pregnancy test — and it comes back positive. And then they’ll say to themselves, “How could this be? I had my uterus removed 10 years ago,” or, “My doctors have assured me that I’m infertile,” or, “I haven’t been intimate with anyone in years.”

Like anyone would do, they’ll panic and call their doctor immediately. They’ll make an appointment for the end of the week. And yet, by the time of the appointment, the fetus has already been taken out, leaving them and their doctors stunned. They never start showing. The thing is, that from everything we know, this all makes total sense. They’re an incubator. 

It’s unbelievable. It’s crazy. And yet all these people are saying the same things, all described in the same way.  

Are the aliens violent? 

It’s clear that the aliens put abductees into a kind of a fugue state and order them around. They want abductees to remain sedate and compliant.

But every once in a while an abductee might somehow slip loose from this twilight state and gain some consciousness, running down the hallway, screaming, “Where am I? What’s happening?” Next thing you know, the aliens run after them and calm them down. There’s no violence that happens onboard a ship. There’s no physical coercion, no threats.

What’s one of the most surprising things about alien abductions?

Although some aspects of this research have filtered into pop culture, most people still don’t understand that abductions always follow hereditary lines. So, if you are an abductee, your children will be abductees, and at least one of your parents was one as well. To our knowledge, no one has ever been purposefully abducted whose parents were not abductees. And again, there’s a reason for this, too. 

Over the past 20 years or so, people stopped talking about having their sperm or eggs collected, and instead started telling stories of hybrid babies.

What was the first clue that alien abductions had taken a scary new direction?

After interviewing abductees for about 20 years, people started to tell me something that I had never heard before — and these stories became more and more common. They’d say that when they’re abducted they weren’t just being taken onboard a craft, but they would be taken to someplace else in their town or city to meet another person — all while still under control of the aliens. 

For example, a woman knows she’s been instructed to go to a certain corner and meet someone. So, under their telepathic influence, she heads over to the corner and waits. Sure enough, a man approaches. He looks just like a regular guy — but he isn’t. He takes her to a nearby apartment. Inside, she encounters several other normal-looking people, ostensibly living together. And then she notices that all of the apartment’s furniture is pushed off into a heap on one side of the living room. The man asks her, “How do we make this look normal?” Of course, these are all hybrids. 

The first thing she says to him is, “No, no, no, you can’t do that. The couch has to be over here, and then you put a little table in front of it, and then put a television over here,” and so on.

Then, a few days later, she’s with him and another hybrid in a supermarket and it's the same deal. “What is this?” “When do you eat it?” She’s teaching them what a loaf of bread is, what an egg is, how you eat them, etc. 

Abductees remember meeting hybrids living among us and teaching them the basics of their culture, from placing furniture to cooking.

Events like these weren’t just some strange reports — everyone I was working with, from new relationships to those I’d spent years with, were all reporting this.

The aliens were doing this for a reason. The whole thing, from sperm and egg collection to implanting fetuses and growing hybrids, was all about one thing: They’re living here among us, just like everybody else. It’s assimilation. It’s planetary acquisition. 

An alien holds a hybrid infant onboard a UFO, as recalled by an abductee. Those babies have now grown into adults, they say.

What can we do to address this threat? 

I just know something’s going to happen in the future. And that’s the key thing: If I get the word out, everybody will think I’m nuts — well, they already do. But if I don’t get the word out, none of it matters anyway. Based on where we are today, we can’t control it. We’re not sophisticated enough and we don’t have the kind of legitimacy and resources needed to actually find a way to solve the problem. The scientific community has no interest in it whatsoever. So how do you stop a global threat when no one believes it’s real, it’s global or that it’s a threat at all?  

One of the scariest things about hybrids (besides their powers of mind control) is that they look just like us.

So does that mean anyone could be a hybrid?

It’s important to know that while these human-alien hybrids look nearly identical to humans, they were not raised on Earth and they have certain abilities that we lack — specifically telepathy. So, though you have a being who is 90% or 99% human (whatever it may be), they will always be different. They know what you’re thinking. They can communicate telepathically with you, abductees and each other. And they can influence your thoughts and actions like a Jedi mind trick.

For example, one abductee met with her assigned hybrid while she was on the way to a sporting event. The hybrid wanted to join along, so she explained that he needed to root for a team if he wanted to fit in. So they went into a nearby store, and the hybrid walked out wearing a jersey. She stopped him, explaining that he had to pay it. He said that he had “spoken” with the store manager and was told he could just take the jersey. The lesson here is that whether or not the hybrid had intended it, he had been able to telepathically influence the store owner and walk away without paying. You don’t need money, or a job, or a social security number, if you can simply make every person you meet forget your face. 

Here’s another example of how hybrids work. There was this one situation where an abductee was onboard a UFO. She had been interacting with a group of teenage hybrids that she was told were about to come down to Earth. She noticed that one of the hybrids was talking quite boisterously and was informed, telepathically, by the hybrid in charge, that this individual was going to be culled from the herd — the point being that his behavior would have brought too much attention to himself and would jeopardize the secrecy of the program.

Some skeptics suggest that alien abductions might actually be sleep paralysis or some other psychological condition. What do you say to this?

This is a common debunking argument. Sleep paralysis is a real phenomenon, where your mind kind of wakes up before your body does. So you can feel like you’re trapped in bed, and it can feel like there’s a presence in the room. It can be very terrifying for people. 

But this kind of paralysis describes roughly 10 minutes of any given abduction event. It doesn’t describe working with hybrids, meeting them at Walmart, seeing the babies in jars onboard a ship or the strange scars that people have on their bodies. And don’t forget, the majority of abductions happen while people are awake.

Some say that abduction reports are just repressed trauma or sexual abuse trauma, and these people have mapped it onto this sci-fi narrative. But of course many of these people are not abuse victims of any kind. Many have seen or were referred to me by therapists and trained psychologists — after all, my colleague, the late John Mack, was chair of the psychology department at Harvard Medical School. 

And, like sleep paralysis, the repressed trauma argument can’t account for the litany of details, the accounts of missing time, or the fact that when I started this research no one knew anything about it. There wasn’t a book or sci-fi narrative anywhere they could’ve accidentally internalized.

Why do you think people have such a hard time believing in alien abductions?

Ghosts have been popular for thousands of years and fit, in some ways, into people’s religious and spiritual worldviews. Aliens, however, don’t. The phenomenon hasn’t had the benefit of centuries of folklore. And, of course, the aliens aren’t offering something as nice as talking with a dead relative. Everything about the subject is disturbing and fantastic. And there’s really no good incentive for someone to want to believe it — especially considering the social and professional stigma attached to it.

“How do you stop a global threat when no one believes it’s real, it’s global or that it’s a threat at all?”

— David M. Jacobs

Did you ever try to document the abductions?

For many years, I would give abductees home video cameras to see if they could get something on video. We knew this would be unlikely, and we didn’t get any aliens. But what did get is a ton of video of someone waking up at 4 in the morning, walking over to the camera and turning it off or walking into another room. And that was a little odd because they had set up the camera themselves, to capture an abduction. The next morning, they’d report having been abducted and race to the camera to find that they had inexplicably turned it off. 

Here’s the best one: This woman wanted to catch them. She was sleeping and then she woke up, got out of bed, walked over to the corner of the room and turned the camera off. Next thing you know, the video shows her asleep in bed — as though it had been edited. But it hadn’t been touched. And the question is: Who turned the camera on? If she had done it, we should have seen her walk back to the bed and get under the covers.

Alien hybrid children like to play, just like humans. Is your neighbor’s kid really part-alien?!

What other evidence do you have of alien abductions?

Years ago, my fellow researchers and I put together a nationally representative survey of the American population put out by the Roper Center at Cornell. It was a 10-question survey, and we had thousands of respondents. When we got the results, we were shocked. So we only looked at the people who answered yes to all 10 questions (when answering yes to even one might indicate you’re an abductee), just to be ultraconservative. It came down to 2% of the American population in 1992. 

If the U.S. population was 257 million back then, that would mean 5.1 million people were alien abductees!

And that’s with us being super conservative. And of course that’s just in the United States. This is a global phenomenon. And it also might be the most important thing that’s ever happened in the history of humankind.

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If you want to learn more, read David M. Jacobs’ books: 

• Secret Life: Firsthand, Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions

• The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda

• Walking Among Us: The Alien Plan to Control Humanity

The Evidence Behind Alien Abductions and UFOs

Ufologist Dr. David M. Jacobs has worked with  hundreds of people around the world who say they’ve been abducted by aliens — and in case after case, the details are uncannily similar.

Dr. David M. Jacobs has interviewed hundreds of people from around the world who have memories of being abducted by aliens. (Spoiler alert: It’s not quite like Mexican pulp fiction novels depict it.)

Like Fox Mulder on The X-Files, I want to believe. 

The universe is infinite — though physicists now believe that it somehow has an edge and is still expanding. These concepts hurt my brain and offer no clarity. But if homo sapiens developed due to a series of just-right conditions, surely we can’t be the only planet that developed life in a nearly limitless universe. Heck, perhaps there’s not even just one universe and we should actually call it the multiverse. 

See, there I go again, hurting my brain. 

“Eggs are taken from women and sperm is taken from men. There’s an instrument that takes sperm away. We have very detailed drawings of this device from across decades around the world. It looks kind of like a flashlight connected to a hose that hooks up to the genitals.

This is all typical stuff. I’ve heard this a hundred times.”

— Dr. David M. Jacobs

Imagine how excited I got when Alex, one of my best buds at work, told me his father, a retired history professor from Temple University, is also a preeminent researcher of UFOs and alien abduction! 

I’m an open-minded guy, always willing to alter my worldview if you present a convincing enough argument. It was time to look at the evidence. 

Alex, with his dad, David Jacobs, one of the top alien abductee researchers. (And no, neither believes they’ve ever been abducted.)

Alex invited me over to interview his father, Dr. David M. Jacobs, on his back porch over beers amidst the lingering COVID-19 pandemic. 

After a fascinating couple of hours in conversation with two extremely intelligent men, I came away convinced there’s something to this phenomenon, as crazy as it seems at first. –Wally

A report of a mystery airship in The Chicago Times-Herald, back in April 1897

What’s the evidence for alien abductions? 

It’s massive. It’s mind boggling. And I have to say this a thousand times now: It’s global. It is not an American phenomenon. The first and most important thing is that people around the world, in China and all through Europe and India and Latin America, all say the same things, thinking nobody else has ever said them before. The second thing that’s very obvious is that abduction reports follow hereditary lines: So if you’re an abductee, your children will be and at least one of your parents will have been an abductee as well.

How did you get started researching UFOs and alien abductions?

I’ve been looking at this subject since about 1966 when I went to a UFO conference at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

The big event was a relatively close-up film of a UFO spinning in the air. It was astonishing! If you squinted your eyes hard enough, you could avoid seeing the string the model was hanging on. 

But for some reason or another, I stuck with it and began to read books about the subject. 

I went off to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for a doctorate in history. There, I joined a UFO organization called the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization in Tucson, Arizona. When there were UFO reports, I would investigate them as part of this group. I eventually wrote my dissertation on the subject of unidentified flying objects in the United States.

I had to convince my advisor that this was a subject that wasn’t crazy, that the Air Force had been involved with it for decades already by that time. 

My dissertation was soon published by Indiana University Press in 1975 as The UFO Controversy in America.

Eventually I went on to teach at Temple University in Philadelphia, where I taught the only accredited university course on alien abductions for about 30 years. It was hugely popular — and extremely frightening for many students.

I’ve had students break down, start weeping, say they gotta get out of there. Many students had prior experiences with alien abductions but didn’t realize it until they started talking about the subject in the classroom. 

The 1958 photo of a possible UFO taken over Trinidade Island in the South Atlantic is thought by many to be a hoax.

When did abductions start taking place?

Our best guess is that the phenomenon began around 1896, when people across Europe and North America began to see strange craft in the sky — called the “Mystery Airship” wave at the time. One person mentioned in a newspaper article that he spotted an airship from a train and that it flew faster than he was moving. But at the time, no airships could fly that fast and controlled. The Wright Brothers didn’t launch their flyer until 1903. So these sightings were a big deal at the time.

Why are you so sure that was the beginning?

I don’t care how many people say, “Well, back in Ancient Egypt…” If it started in the 18th century, say, stories would be written about these odd things in the sky. But that didn’t happen until the 1890s. Skeptics like to say these reports are simply hoaxes, or UFO mania at the time—but, of course, these are the kinds of narrow arguments they’ve made about almost all facets of the abduction phenomenon.

Alex: In addition to the global sightings of mystery airships, stats might prove it also. Back in 1992, polling was done through my dad and the Roper Center at Cornell University to look at the potential prevalence of UFO abductees in the United States. Based on those numbers, if you work back, knowing what we do about how the phenomenon spreads, the origin date would be somewhere in the late 19th century. Because if abductions started at the time of the Ancient Egyptians, everyone would be an abductee by now.

Reports of aliens have been alarmingly similar for decades from all over the world. Most recently, abductees talk of alien-human hybrids.

What made you switch from studying UFO sightings to alien abductions? 

At first I wasn’t interested in the craziness of the abduction phenomenon. I couldn’t go there. 

I had a friend, Tracy Tormé, son of the famous singer, Mel Tormé. 

I met him in Central Park one afternoon, and Tracy said, “Let’s go see my friend, Budd Hopkins, a UFO and abduction researcher.” I told him I had better things to do, like stare into space or eat my dinner.

But he pushed me into a cab, and we rode downtown to Chelsea. When we were finally with Budd in his living room, he stood up and said, “Wait a minute. I’ll be right back.” He ran and brought back my first book for me to autograph. That’s when I knew he was a good person [laughs]. 

I began to come up to New York City to visit Budd and meet some of the abductees that he was working with. The evidence he had was just too strange and too disturbing for me to just totally dismiss. He let me sit in on the interview sessions he’d conduct with abductees. I sat in on dozens over four years. Then, in 1986, I started to conduct these hypnotic regression sessions myself.

When did you start doing your own sessions with abductees?

After 35 years, I’ve probably worked with over 200 abductees and conducted over 2,000 individual interviews — always free of charge and always confidential. 

One of the things that became clear after seeing Budd work with his abductees, is that someone’s initial memories can be really untrustworthy. That’s why Budd developed a technique called hypnotic regression with a psychologist.

To be clear, hypnosis is about 95% B.S. and another 5% B.S. It’s nothing but talking to somebody and saying, “I want you to relax.” People are always conscious and alert the whole time — it’s just some simple mindfulness exercises to get people focused.

You have to get the person relaxed and focused because they are about to remember something that they’ve never remembered. You have to be careful about how you question people, and how you find people too. 

Before anything else, when someone would come to me, I’d have people fill out a screener form and then, if I knew they were honest, I had them call me so I could assess things. I would usually tell them, “Don’t do it. You’ll ruin your life.”

What many people don’t understand is that the realization that you’re an abductee can be so incredibly traumatic and life-changing it can drive someone over the edge — especially if you’re young. That’s why I was extremely careful with who I interviewed. You had to be at least 21 years old and settled in life. 

Another thing I made sure to do was warn each abductee that your husband or wife may not like this at all. Even though you may want to investigate your experiences with aliens, your spouse or family might be completely terrified — so much so that things could result in divorce or terrible family tensions.

Some of them didn’t call me back. Some did. 

Given how unbelievable this phenomenon is, I preferred to work with well-educated people. Doctors, psychologists, psychotherapists — all of whom were telling me this stuff, saying the same things. 

These drawings were done by Dr. Jacobs’ interviewees. In this one, a woman recalled a procedure aboard a UFO where her eggs were extracted.

What are the sessions with alien abductees like? 

People know that indescribable things have happened to them. Here’s a common scenario: A guy goes to bed late at night, then wakes up. He’s standing in his backyard. “What the hell? What am I doing here?” The doors to his house are locked — the keys are in the lock on the inside. He finds a baseball bat and has to break open a window just to get back in, wondering, “How could this possibly happen?” Then he says to himself, mysteriously, “Well, I just won’t think about this anymore.” This is typical. 

These kinds of stories were what first got me interested in the abduction phenomenon. 

What’s a typical alien abduction like?

Adults are taken at night or in the daytime when nobody is around. If it’s at night, a person wakes up while their husband or wife is sleeping next to them. 

In our session, they’ll say to me, “There’s a light in the room.” 

I say, “You mean it’s a regular light? Where is it?”

They’d say, “The light is coming through the window.”

“OK. So what happens next?”

“Well, there’s some people around me.”

I say, “People around your bed, you mean?”

“Yes. One is next to me, and two are at the foot of my bed.” 

I say, “OK. And what are they doing?”

“Well, they’re looking at me.”

“What happens next?”

“I’m getting out of bed.”

“Wait a minute. Why are you getting out of bed?”

“I don’t know. I have to. They’re telling me to get out of bed.”

“What happens next?”

“They’re walking me to the light in the window. I’m out the window.”

I say, “Whoa, wait a minute. You opened the window first?”

“Yes, yes, yes, no, I don’t know.”

“One of the beings opened the window?”

“No, no, no, not at all.”

“Does the window open by itself in some way?”

“No,” they say. “I’m going right through the glass window.”

It would be easier for people to say, “Of course I opened the window.” But how many people ever said that? The answer is zero.

Alex: The point my dad’s making is that in hypnosis, some of the skeptics like to claim that he’s asking questions to try to script the narrative, when actually he spends most of his time trying to ask purposefully misleading ones.

David: Exactly. 

I say, “What happens next?

“I’m flying. I’m going up there.”

“Where are these beings?”

“One’s in front of me. We’re all going up.”

“Straight up?”

“No, no, it’s an angle, about 45 degrees.”

I say, “What do you see?” and one guy tells me, “I can see all the leaves and stuff in the gutters.”

Abductees have spotted missing toys or roof damage while being abducted and, of course, the next day or so after the event, they’ll go to their roof and, sure enough, it’s exactly as they saw it. 

An abductee recalls a small gray alien carrying a baby.

Do abductees get taken more than once?

This is not a phenomenon that happens to people by chance. It starts in early childhood and goes on over and over again all the way until…we don’t really know, but maybe until an abductee turns about 80. 

All they know is they wake up in the morning and they’re tired. Sometimes people are abducted overnight and the whole next day because nobody else is home. I’ve had people who were gone for three, seven, eight days. But nobody’s around looking for them. So here’s the question: How do the aliens know that this person can be unaccounted for for a week? I don’t know the answer to that. 

It’s the same thing if a person decides that they’re going to go deer hunting. They’re out in the woods, and then they’re abducted. But how do the aliens know what they’re doing? We are dealing here with extremely advanced not only technologies but physiologies as well.

Abductees have described incubatoriums where the small gray aliens are grown.

What are the spaceships and aliens like?

The abductees are taken on board a circular ship. They describe gray aliens, slender, big heads and eyes, four fingers. There are two kinds of grays, actually. One type is smaller, about 3 feet tall, and they do the menial tasks. The taller gray aliens seem to be their bosses, and perform more of the medical procedures. 

What is the probability of the gray aliens being from another planet? It’s low — because we know they grow them on board. I would never come up with anything like that. But a whole bunch of people have described incubators where grays are being grown. It’s so crazy, off the wall, who could imagine something like that, even if he had a great imagination?! But this is common, whether it’s someone born and raised in rural India or Brazil. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same.

So the small gray aliens will lead the abductee down a curved hallway and into a room. Abductees always say the hallway is curved.

And then I say, “What happens next?”

They say, “I’m getting on a table.” 

I say, “The table has four legs?” Not a single person has ever said yes. The way the tables are described is they come right out of the floor. That’s a good example of one of the incredibly consistent details. Everything has this metallic sort of rounded surface. 

While they’re laying there, their clothes have already been taken off. Then they have a series of procedures done to them.

A male abductee has his sperm collected via a strange device, while an alien performs “the staring procedure,” in which they rifle through a person’s brain.

What are these procedures like?

Eggs are taken from women and sperm is taken from men. There’s an instrument that takes sperm away. It was not a sexual thing. We have very detailed drawings of this device from across decades around the world. It looks kind of like a flashlight connected to a hose that hooks up to the genitals.

This is all typical stuff. I’ve heard this a hundred times.

Are the aliens conducting other procedures on humans?

The reproductive procedures are really the first part. The point of them is for something much bigger: The aliens are creating other beings with this human DNA. And, obviously, they’re doing that for a reason.

What are the stakes?

There’s never been anything like this in human history. And if it’s not happening, it’s one of the most important brain malfunctions ever found.

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If you want to learn more, read David M. Jacobs’ books: 

• Secret Life: Firsthand, Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions

• The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda

• Walking Among Us: The Alien Plan to Control Humanity

AND READ PART TWO of our interview with Dr. Jacobs:

Alien-Human Hybrids: A Plot to Conquer Earth?

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The Fall of Israel in the Old Testament Explained

The Bible states that the kings of Israel sinned greatly. But Israel fell because it was just too attractive to the Assyrians. 

At first the Assyrians ignored Samaria, then the capital of Israel, thinking it was too isolated. But eventually they attacked it and conquered the city, along with rest of the kingdom.

If you believe the Old Testament, the kingdom of Israel suffered and ultimately fell because its rulers and people just couldn’t be monogamous with the god Yahweh. (They also supposedly burned their sons and daughters as offerings and practiced divination and sorcery, among other sins.) 

But, looking at the archaeological record, “Israel’s greatest misfortune — and the cause of its destruction and the exile of many of its people — was that as an independent kingdom living in the shadow of a great empire, it succeeded too well,” write Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts.

Yes, Israel fell because of jealousy — not God’s but the Assyrians’. 

“Israel — with its rich resources and productive population — was an incomparably more attractive target than poor and inaccessible Judah,” the authors explain. 

Israel’s prosperity sparked Assyria’s envy. The minute the Israelites considered a revolt, the Assyrians launched an attack.

Assyria’s Bitch: The Complaints of the Prophets Amos and Hosea

For a time, Israel was a subservient vassal to Assyria, paying tribute to maintain peace. 

This age of prosperity began around 800 BCE and greatly upset two biblical prophets, Amos and Hosea. They abhorred Israel’s dependence upon Assyria and its economic disparity between the ruling elite and the poor. Amos railed against those who slept on beds of ivory, chilled out on couches, ate lamb and calves, sang songs while playing the harp, drank wine from bowls, anointed themselves with fine oils and built houses of hewn stone, amongst other egregious transgressions. 

The prophet Amos railed against the rich and their exploitation of the poor.

His contemporary Hosea didn’t appreciate deals made with Assyria or the export of oil to Egypt. 

Hosea, another prophet, ridiculed allegiances with Assyria and Egypt.

This condemnation of a wealthy lifestyle and foreign influence on the Israelite way of life would greatly influence the Old Testament’s stodgy philosophy.

The Assyrian monarch Tiglath-pileser III, who conquered Israel

The Decline and Fall of the Israelite Kingdom

A new Assyrian king, Tiglath-pileser III, also known as Pul in the Bible, began a campaign to conquer and annex the region, deporting its residents at his whim.

Israel at this time had been subject to the assassinations of four kings in 15 years. A military officer named Pekah joined with King Rezin of Damascus to attempt a united resistance against Assyria. 

The plan backfired. Tiglath-pileser III conquered and/or destroyed city after city, executing Rezin and bringing Israel to its knees. Ironically, the one city that was spared Assyria’s wrath was Samaria, which happened to be the capital of Israel. Why? Tiglath-pileser felt it was too “isolated,” as he boasted on a monumental inscription. 

A man named Hoshea assassinated Pehkah, becoming what would be the last king of Israel. In the time between the death of Tiglath-pileser and the succession of Shalmaneser V to the Assyrian throne, Hoshea devised a plan. He asked the lords of the Egyptian delta for help and, in the meantime, stopped paying tribute to Assyria. It didn’t turn out well.

Shalmaneser instantly marched upon Samaria, laying siege to the city. Either he or his successor, Sargon II, who came to the throne in 722 BCE, finally bested Samaria’s defenses. Many Israelites, possibly the aristocracy and artisans, were deported deep into Assyrian territory, while people from other conquered countries were brought to repopulate Samaria. 

The kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians, its cities conquered and its people deported.

“It was all over,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. “Two stormy centuries had come to a catastrophic end. The proud northern kingdom and a significant part of its population were lost to history.” –Wally

Did the Exodus Really Happen?

Evidence reveals that the Hyksos were Canaanites — and their story later morphed into the Exodus to serve as a rallying cry against Egypt. 

Could over 600,000 Hebrew slaves revolt and escape their captors in Egypt? Spoiler alert: The Exodus is more folk tale than actual history.

Egyptian pharaohs steadily ruled their empire for thousands of years — except during a foreign occupation that lasted over a century.

An Egyptian historian named Mantheno, who wrote in the 3rd century BCE, “described a massive, brutal invasion of Egypt by foreigners from the east, whom he called Hyksos, an enigmatic Greek form of an Egyptian word that he translated as ‘shepherd kings’ but that actually means ‘rulers of foreign lands,’” write Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. Inscriptions and seals from the time of the invasion have names that are West Semitic, or Canaanite.

“If a great mass of fleeing Israelites had passed through the border fortifications of the pharaonic regime, a record should exist.”

— Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, “The Bible Unearthed”

The Hyksos in this Egyptian painting are depicted as wearing brightly patterned clothes, which Wally much prefers to plain old white skirts.

Were the Hyksos Actually the Hebrews?!

Archaeological excavations in the eastern Nile delta “indicate that the Hyksos ‘invasion’ was a gradual process of immigration from Canaan to Egypt, rather than a lightning military campaign,” the authors write. “The fact that Manetho, writing almost fifteen hundred years later, describes a brutal invasion rather than a gradual, peaceful immigration should probably be understood on the background of his own times, when memories of the invasions of Egypt by the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE were still painfully fresh in the Egyptian consciousness.”

The biggest clue that the Hyksos were none other than the Hebrews is something else Manetho wrote: He suggests that after the usurpers were driven from Egypt, they founded the city of Jerusalem and built — you guessed it — an important temple there.

Israel gets a brief mention on the Merneptah Stele in a long list of conquered kingdoms.

When Did the Exodus Happen? The Merneptah Stele

If we take the story of the Exodus at face value for now, what evidence is there to provide a date for it? The Ancient Egyptians kept quite a written record, and, when paired with archaeological digs, the expulsion of the Hyksos is typically placed around 1570 BCE. If we go by the Old Testament account that this occurred 480 years after the construction of the Temple, that means the Exodus happened in 1440 BCE. 

But the Bible mentions the Hebrew slaves helping to construct the city of Raames (Exodus 1:11) — a name that’s inconceivable at that time, according to Finkelstein and Silberman. “The first pharaoh named Ramesses came to the throne only in 1320 BCE — more than a century after the traditional biblical date,” they write. “As a result, many scholars have tended to dismiss the literal value of the biblical dating, suggesting that the figure 480 was little more than a symbolic length of time, representing the life spans of twelve generations, each lasting the traditional 40 years.”

The Battle of Kadesh, in which Ramesses II battled the Hittites, as shown on a wall of the Ramesseum, the pharaoh’s mortuary temple

A city named Pi-Ramesses, or the House of Ramesses, was built with the help of Semites in the delta during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses II, who ruled from 1279-1213 BCE. 

What’s more, though, is the famous stele of Merneptah, Ramesses’ son. The inscription is the sole mention of Israel in all of the artifacts from Ancient Egypt. The tribe is part of a list of people who were decimated during a Canaan campaign. Merneptah went so far to exclaim that Israel’s “seed is not!” 

This would mean that if a historical Exodus did indeed take place, it would have occurred in the late 13th century. The evidence doesn’t match up, though.

The Israelites Leaving Egypt by David Roberts, 1828

The Exodus: A Lack of Evidence

It’s highly unlikely that a large group of slaves could have made it out of Egypt at the time, given the guard posts all along its borders, argue Finkelstein and Silberman. “If a great mass of fleeing Israelites had passed through the border fortifications of the pharaonic regime, a record should exist,” they insist.

And if the slaves did somehow get out, there would be archaeological records of the Hebrews as they wandered in the desert. “However, except for the Egyptian forts along the northern coast, not a single campsite or sign of occupation from the time of Ramesses II and his immediate predecessors and successors has ever been identified in Sinai,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. “And it has not been for a lack of trying.”

Numerous excavations haven’t turned up anything: “not even a single sherd, no structure, not a single house, no trace of an ancient encampment,” they continue. “One may argue that a relatively small band of wandering Israelites cannot be expected to leave material remains behind. But modern archaeological techniques are quite capable of tracing even the very meager remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world.”

Whether it actually happened or not, the Exodus makes for a great story — especially the dramatic parting of the Red Sea and the drowning of the pursuing Egyptians.

Dating Exodus — a Great Piece of Propaganda?

All of the archeological evidence, including a reference to the kingdom of Edom, which refuses to help Moses, indicates that the Exodus narrative was completed during Ancient Egypt’s Twenty-sixth Dynasty — that is, during the 7th and 6th centuries BCE (shortly after, one would imagine, the stories of Abraham and the other patriarchs told of in Genesis). That’s 600 years after the events were supposed to have taken place!

What was the purpose of the Exodus story, if we put it in context of that time in history? “The great saga of a new beginning and second chance must have resonated in the consciousness of the seventh century’s readers, reminding them of their own difficulties and giving them hope for the future,” Finkelstein and Silberman write. 

Was Exodus written to bolster the agenda of King Josiah of Judah?

Josiah, the young ruler of Judah, sought to escape from the yoke of the newly crowned Pharaoh Necho II, who reigned Ancient Egypt from 610-595 BCE. 

Connecting Josiah’s confrontation with the Egyptian empire to that of Moses and the pharaoh of Exodus, complete with miracle after miracle to demonstrate the Hebrews as Yahweh’s Chosen People, would have been a powerful piece of propaganda. 

“[A]ncient traditions from many different sources were crafted into a single sweeping epic that bolstered Josiah’s political aims,” the authors conclude.

There simply is no evidence that a mass Exodus as described in the Old Testament ever happened. –Wally