Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and Beliefs about Race: A Visual Voyage through Ongoing Battles over History

 

This is Stonehenge. You're probably familiar with it! I've seen documentaries about it all my life. It's a henge--one of many circular structures built of stone, wood, and earth found in Northwestern Europe, especially in the British Isles. They were built by the ancient societies of the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages for ceremonial purposes, and people love to debate what those were. All we really know is that the sun rises over the Heel Stone on the summer solstice and sets over it on the winter solstice, as you see here:

 

Actually, you never get that peaceful view today, because the place is always crammed with visitors and worshippers on the solstices:

About those worshippers--many of them are neo-Druids. Now, the reality is that Stonehenge was built a couple thousand years before there's any evidence of Druids existing--they didn't emerge until the Iron Age. While it's true that the Britons of the Druidic era were preliterate, so of course they left no written records for us to discover, they did leave archaeological evidence, and we have written records of them from other literate groups, like the Romans. Neither of those sets of evidence indicate that the ancient Druids worshipped the sun or solstices. But British Victorians loved to make up stories about their past, full of Druids and King Arthur and Stonehenge all mashed together romantically. It was among the Victorians that modern Druidism took off as a new religion. Hence, today's neo-Druids of the UK gather at Stonehenge for solstice celebrations (some led by a Druid priest named King Arthur Uther Pendragon):

This all seems rather sweet! Sure, the Druids didn't actually build Stonehenge or worship there--they worshiped in groves of trees. But it's fun to see ancient monuments drawing folks wearing robes in a festival atmosphere, sort of like a Renaissance Faire, but for a much earlier era. Isn't it nice to see people celebrating nature and venerating their ancestors? What marvelous people those ancients were, to transport huge stones from as far as 150 miles away, and erect them! The staid site English Heritage rhapsodizes about Stonehenge: "Stonehenge’s builders raised the stones using joints normally found only in woodworking, and not seen at any other prehistoric monument. This makes it the most architecturally sophisticated surviving stone circle in the world."

The problem is that venerating one's ancestors can also manifest in ugly ways. The Victorians who fell in love with Stonehenge were living in an era of triumphant colonialism--Rule, Britannia!--and very overt racism. They claimed not to be subjugating those they colonized, but rather bringing them the gifts of civilization and Christianity, an onerous task they nobly took on, the "White Man's Burden." And their romantic vision of the past was one of an all-white England. Victorian Britain's vision of shining Avalon was an imagined isle of racial purity, where Arthur still sleeps, to return at the hour of Britain's greatest need, as illustrated by Burne-Jones:

Those are some extremely pale ladies serenading Arthur. . . 

We'll return to this vision in a bit. But first, something else about Stonehenge. While it is fascinating, and much-revered in the UK, it was not the only ancient monument being built around 2500 BCE. That was also the time of the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt--one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the only one still standing. Here it is, as seen from in front of the Sphynx:

The fact is that compared to the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge is, well, puny. The diameter of the stone circle is 97 feet. The sides of the Great Pyramid are each about 756 feet long. Here's a rough visual size comparison, with Stonehenge in red:

So much for the grand scale of the greatest stone circle of the British Isles! It's rather embarrassing. For the Victorians of the UK, it also posed a challenge to their imperial narrative of innate racial superiority--after all, the Great Pyramid was built in Africa, the so-called Dark Continent in need of civilizing. Thus was born a vast spiraling series of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience that seek to this day to explain how the Egyptians didn't actually build the pyramids. One Victorian claim was that the pyramids of Egypt and South America were built by the imagined blond, blue-eyed people of ancient Atlantis, forced to flee when their island sank into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean! This idea would much inspire the beliefs of the Nazis, who claimed that the residents of Atlantis were the Aryans from whom the Nordic, superior people of Germany descended. All the great monuments of the ancient world were said to have been built by these shining blond Aryans, whom the Nazis claimed then interbred with the local populations and degenerated as a race, fading into the local, inferior masses--a fate that the German Aryans would finally put an end to, saving the last of the superrace, and allowing it to grow and flourish once more. This asserted goal was used to justify genocide of those deemed racially inferior and wars to seize lands, a bloody birth that would supposedly produce a new earthly, blond paradise, like that depicted in Ludwig Dettman's Nazi-approved painting Water-lilies:

Yikes.

The theory that the people of Atlantis built the pyramids refuses to die, and persists today. But it has taken a back seat to the updated concoction that aliens from outer space built the pyramids, and the Nazca Lines, and whatever other grand ancient constructs exist outside of Europe. The racist impetus for these stories is still there, but is stated more quietly instead of being trumpeted. "How could the primitive peoples of that time and place have possibly accomplished this," ask the "experts" on the awful History Channel show Ancient Aliens. For $15 you can play along and build the Great Pyramid as an alien-human hybrid in Ancient Aliens: The Game, which is apparently popular with the television show's fandom. Note the marked absence of brown skin on the characters:

Now, as promised, let's return to considering Stonehenge. A couple of months before the writing of this post, there was a new scientific announcement. You can see it summarized in this article from The Times, a UK center-right mainstream newspaper:

 

 

All human beings--Homo sapiens like ourselves, and our cousins like the Neanderthals and Denisovans--originated in Africa. All were dark-skinned, as this was protective against the damaging UVA and UVB radiation of the equatorial sun. There were many waves of human migration out of Africa into the rest of the world, eventually reaching northern areas of cold climates and weak sunlight. In such northern zones, scientists had hypothesized, light skin evolved by natural selection over time, since the risks of skin cancer were lower, and because light skin better promotes the production of Vitamin D after UVA light exposure. In the weak northern sunlight, scientists surmised, dark-skinned people would become deficient in Vitamin D, causing evolutionary pressure for skin to become lighter, since the lightening of skin did not result in high rates of cancer far from the equator.

This theory caused little controversy. Modern humans migrated to Europe around 50,000 years ago, and it was presumed they had plenty of time to develop light-colored skin and hair and eyes in the deep past. But today, we have the ability to extract DNA from ancient bones and analyze it. And as this Times article reports, it turns out that the change toward more people being born with light skin in Britain and Europe was very slow. "Among [individuals] dating from the Paleolithic period of the Stone Age, who lived between 13,000 and 35,000 years ago, it was calculated that 92 per cent had dark skin, 8 per cent had “intermediate” skin and none had pale skin. By the Iron Age, between 1,700 and 3,000 years ago, 55 per cent still had dark skin, while 27 per cent had intermediate skin and 18 per cent had pale skin." To put this into a context the typical Times reader could be expected to understand, the article notes that at the time Stonehenge was built around 5000 years ago, most Britons would be black- or brown-skinned. This is illustrated with a reconstruction of Cheddar Man of Somerset, England, with his DNA-determined combination of dark skin and blue eyes that is highly unusual today, but appears to have been typical in his time and place. Here's a comparison of the recent reconstruction of Cheddar Man's face based on DNA analysis with an older, pre-DNA reconstruction based on people's presumptions about what a Briton would look like 10,000 years ago:

This scientific discovery of the late skin color shift by a team from Italy might have gotten little attention in the media were it not for the fact that the construction of Stonehenge was selected as the way to give historical context in UK reporting on the discovery. Remember: since the 1800s, a mythos has been popular envisioning the era of Stonehenge as one of a pure, primal whiteness--a time before colonized black and brown people began flowing into the white homeland of the Empire, supposedly sullying it. And now scientists were claiming the Stonehenge builders had black skin? 

Surprise! There was an outpouring of outrage at this intolerable "woke" claim. It got folded in with news about a report issued by the conservative British think tank Policy Exchange. This report claimed that school history books were now distorting the teaching of British history with false and harmful Leftist misinformation, such as the idea that Stonehenge was built by Black people. Here's a screenshot of the headline in the populist tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail:

The history book being presented as warped by Leftist lies states that Britons used to be a black people because they, like all humans, originally came from Africa. It says Britons remained a mostly dark-skinned people until migrants from Asia Minor with light skin moved into Britain. This is in fact scientifically correct! But the Policy Exchange report frames this as a history book telling British children that until pretty recently, Britain was occupied by Africans with a lovely culture, until terrible white invaders came in and slayed them, so that white British children should feel bad about themselves as the descendants of those murderous, conquering white people. This claim mimics American MAGA arguments that anti-racist pedagogy is in reality an abusive shaming of white children, and teaching that diversity, equity, and inclusion are worthy goals constitutes a terrible campaign of discrimination against people who are straight, white, Christian, cisgender, and/or men..

I can't fail to note that the Daily Mail piece also fulminates about the history book stating that Roman Emperor Nero married a trans woman. This is presented as impossible as nobody was called a trans person until the 20th century. While it's true that nobody called anyone "a trans woman" back then, it's also true that nobody called anyone "heterosexual" or "cisgender." But it was certainly common for Roman men to have partners of any gender. From our perspective, ancient Roman men would be framed as normatively bisexual (another term they didn't use--oh, and also, they didn't speak English!). As long as a Roman man was the penetrating partner, anything went, and those who were considered the inferiors of men who were Roman citizens--women, slaves, teenaged young men--were all fair game. What was unusual in Nero's case was that he kicked his second wife Poppaea Sabina to death, married a third wife but missed the second he'd murdered in rage, so took a beautiful teen who looked a lot like his second wife, ordered the teen castrated, renamed the youth Poppaea Sabina after wife number two, and married the teen as his fourth wife. The second Poppaea Sabina thenceforth wore women's dress and was addressed as Empress by all. In fact, after Nero died, she became Empress again by marrying a successor. This is a statue suspected of being that of the second Poppaea Sabina:

I fully agree with the Policy Exchange that this is hardly a model of gender transition that we'd want to emulate. The second Poppaea Sabina was given no choice about being castrated--a painful and dangerous surgery in an era before antibiotics or modern anesthesia--and may or may not have originally been a slave. But there's no historical doubt that Emperor Nero married the second Poppaea Sabina, and that she lived as a woman and was addressed by others as Lady. To acknowledge that Sabina's story shows how moving between gender categories is nothing new is not the same thing as celebrating slavery and forced surgeries.

OK, digression over. Back to Stonehenge! The reason I decided to write this post in the first place is because this week, a white supremacist individual stopped by to leave racist comments on a social media post of mine. I went to his profile to block him, and there I saw he had just posted and commented on the very story we're discussing! Here's his post:

This individual employs standard techniques for avoiding algorithmic screening of posts, which explains his comment about Orcs. He calls Black people Orcs and Jews goblins, as if his posts are fluff pieces about Middle Earth that should trouble no one, and he's cosplaying Aragorn, Man of the West, bravely fighting the evil subhuman monsters, not an actual white supremacist who posts "HH" and fantasizes about white conservatives uniting to commit genocide against everyone outside that group. 

Moving on from the Orc language, his main claim draws on and inverts attempts at anti-racist educational reform. The point made by such reformers is that history books for children often "whitewash" history by failing to mention historical figures who are not white. Appropriating this argument, when faced with scientists stating that the majority of Britons had black or brown skin through the Iron Age, he presents this finding as "blackwashing" history with lies, erasing the already endangered white populace. (And yes, in his posts, white men are alternately presented as the indomitable creators of civilization, superior to all others--and as the world's most endangered and stigmatized population.) It's your standard DARVO technique employed by abusers: deny and reverse victim and offender. Anti-racism is racist abuse! Marxist, somehow, too.

Beneath this "argument" is a clear vision that this man cannot tolerate seeing challenged. And that is the Stonehenge mythos. The nation's iconic monument is imagined as the astonishing, sacred creation of a pure original Briton people--noble, strong. . . and white.

You can see that this is the common cultural imagining by considering the output received when an illustration AI is asked to draw ancient worship at Stonehenge:

The bot seems unclear how many things work--birds, physics, shadows. What it does seem sure of is that the worshippers should have light skin and hair. And that priest is very Merlinesque. AIs are problematic in many ways, and not very reliable at showing you the truth--but they excel at showing you the patterns and biases and trends in all the content on the internet by spitting them back at you.

Like people's beliefs about race. These beliefs are constantly evolving, but also strongly shaped by bias and power, as revealed in the history of people's beloved misconceptions about Stonehenge and the Pyramids.