Aliens, Atlantis, Aryan Myths: who really built the past?

Photo of by Pyramids by Jiří Zeman with One Special Day image, both at Pexels

Sophie Winch examines how myths reinforce racist ideas, from Nazi writings to viral AI content

Close your eyes for a moment (wait – no, at the end of this sentence) and picture an Ancient Egyptian builder. Whatever springs to mind first. Right, now you’ve got their face in your mind, look at it closely. This next bit should be easy – are they an alien?

If the answer to that is yes, you may share the view held by 41% of Americans (according to a 2018 Chapman University survey) that aliens visited Earth in the ancient past. It’s a tantalising thought. Not only might there be life out there; it might have come here, and helped to shape our society…

Except that isn’t how the theory goes. In these narratives, aliens didn’t help build western societies; they built other ones. Apart from Stonehenge, all our western achievements seem honourably ours. It is the more distant cultures, Egyptian, Peruvian, Mesoamerican, and Polynesian, whose monuments are called into question.

In the buzzing mass of AI ‘ancient aliens’ videos, for example, you’d be hard pressed to find more than a couple about England or Germany, showing how these racially biased assumptions about human capability continue. Pseudoarchaeology (the study of the past based on speculation rather than evidence) very often focuses on non-Western cultures.

In the West, we are far from Egyptian, Peruvian, Mesoamerican, and Polynesian cultures, so we invent wonders

This, to me, isn’t the alarming bit. We are culturally and geographically far from these places, so we misunderstand them; they become mysterious and we invent preternatural wonders from our own lack of knowledge. You can’t blame us for it, people have been doing this since the beginning of recorded history. Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, even told stories to the world about ants the size of foxes roaming Persia.

What we can and should reconsider, though, is where the ancient aliens idea comes from, and why we so readily buy into this one in particular. If, for example, you went on holiday for three months and came back to find a surprisingly shaped building had materialised unexpectedly on your street corner, I doubt your first thought would be aliens. Unless it would, in which case I have to applaud the indiscriminate wonder with which you approach life. But for the rest of us, why, when this building is 2000 miles away and 4000 years old, is it so much more suspicious?

There’s a school of thought in archaeology called evolutionist archaeology, which I learnt about in my first year of university and have spent the next two being generally horrified by.

It’s the theory that every society, at every time, is working its way up to becoming as sophisticated as the Western world. An Evolutionist would see a South African mud-hut and reason that it looks a bit like the wattle-and-daub shelters of the English Iron Age, and that the society it came from is creeping, very, very slowly, towards that ultimate pinnacle of human achievement: being a modern Brit.

Non-Western societies are often overlooked and racist attempts have suggested their achievements were never fully human

Britain is not safe from the idiotic misfires of this theory. In trying to prove that things move on a scale of “primitiveness” (inferior) to “modern Western-ness” (superior), not only are the developments of non-Western societies gravely overlooked, but we assume that the deep past of our society was primitive, and now everyone keeps being shocked whenever we find something that shows it wasn’t.

The capacity of people to create things should not be so surprising: we are, and have always been, humans. Time and distance do not change that. Occasionally, overtly racist attempts have been made to suggest this isn’t the case.

Even before hieroglyphs were deciphered, scholars could see that ancient Egypt was, by evolutionist-archaeological standards, an Advanced Civilisation. Instead of wondering about this, they set about trying to prove that the ancient Egyptians were genetically white. The Nazis used principles of social Darwinism (the idea of the inherent inferiority of certain races and the ‘survival of the fittest’) to justify genocide and eugenics.

The Nazis were captivated by these ideas. Herman Wirth and Heinrich Himmler spent some time trying to find Atlantis, the legendary lost civilisation and considering that it was clearly an Advanced Civilisation, trying to prove that its occupants were Nordic, and not Mediterranean.

Photo by Karlos Denta, Night sky, Easter Island, 24 Feb 2021, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Erich von Däniken’s book, Chariot of the Gods? famous for popularising the ‘ancient aliens’ theory in the 1960s, was heavily edited and rewritten by a ‘William Roggersdorf’. William Roggersdorf is a pseudonym for Wilhelm Utermann, who also edited the Nazi Party’s newspaper. Racism is fundamentally and inexorably woven into the fabric of pseudoarchaeology. It is the ground upon which its monuments have been built.

A world without human imagination would be bleak, horrible and static. We have always been enthralled by the deep past and we should continue to be. But we can be enthralled in better ways.

Many of these distant and ancient ‘lost’ civilisations aren’t distant, ancient, or lost. Saying, for example, that the Easter Island statues on Rapa Nui, a remote island in the Pacific, were not the work of humans, though a romantic idea, would not be well received by the current Rapa Nui people. Their culture places (and has always placed) so much importance on ancestor veneration. The sculptures were likely created as a way to honour their forebears.

Believing that aliens built the pyramids is not the same as believing in Area 51 conspiracies, the modern myths that a U.S. military base hides aliens. Belief in the paranormal is not in itself racist – but the ‘ancient aliens’ theories often are, because of the implicit assumption that ancient peoples were not competent enough to create sophisticated monuments.

So, think back to your Ancient Egyptian worker. Why couldn’t they have been Egyptian? What makes us so fixated on Atlantis? And why is the prospect of foreign ancient people building impressive monuments less plausible than aliens?