Tales of Times Forgotten

How an Obscure Character in the ‘Iliad’ Gave Us the English Word ‘Pander’

In the Iliad, Pandaros, son of Lykaon, is a Lykian archer who is allied with the Trojans. In Book 4 of the epic, the goddess Athena tricks him into firing an arrow at the Akhaian king Menelaos, which breaks a truce between the Trojans and Akhaians and causes fighting to resume. Pandaros briefly shows up again in Book 5 when the Akhaian warrior Diomedes knocks him from his chariot, and he quietly disappears from the epic after that. He’s a fairly minor character, and most people have never heard of him. Even if you’ve read the Iliad, there’s a decent chance you don’t remember him.

Many people may, therefore, be surprised to learn that there is a common word in English derived from Pandaros’s name: the verb pander. The fact that Pandaros is the source of this word may be even more surprising to people because the word’s meaning—to appeal to the base desires or prejudices of a particular person or group—has nothing to do with anything Pandaros does in the Iliad or in any other ancient source. The story of how we got from Pandaros the Lykian archer in the Iliad to the English word pander is a very strange one, which involves Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and. . . pimps.

Ancient and Medieval People Believed that Unicorns Were Real—and Murderous

No one can deny that Death of a Unicorn, released in March of this year, is a very strange film. It is a horror comedy in which a man and his daughter driving their car through a remote forest accidentally hit and fatally injure a unicorn. Soon, the unicorn’s body ends up in the hands of Big Pharma executives, who discover its horn and blood can miraculously cure all ailments, and want to sell its ground-up horn and blood to wealthy customers for big profits—until the unicorn’s angry parents come to seek violent revenge for their child.

Readers may, however, be surprised to learn that this film, for all its surreal imagery, is actually much closer in important ways to how ancient and medieval sources describe unicorns than perhaps any other recent media depiction. While twenty-first-century popular culture generally portrays unicorns as friendly, docile creatures and associates them with plush toys and backpacks for young girls, in premodern traditions, the most consistent traits associated with unicorns are their fierceness, their impossibility to tame, their devotion to their foals, and their ability to kill humans who would seek to capture them in large numbers.

Scholars Have Discovered How to Pronounce the True Name of God

Today, most Jews, Christians, and Muslims simply call their god “God,” but it is fairly common knowledge that the texts of the Hebrew Bible refer to the God of Israel by his proper name, which, in Hebrew, is written as four letters: יהוה (YHWH), known as the tetragrammaton. At the time when the texts of the Hebrew Bible were written, the people of Israel and Judah regularly used this name to refer to their god. By the first century CE, however, a taboo forbade ordinary Jews from saying the proper name of God aloud. Instead, when a Jewish person was reading the Hebrew Bible and came across this name, they would substitute either the word אֲדֹנָי (ăḏonāi), which means “my Lord,” or הַשֵּׁם (ha-shem), which means “the name.” For this reason, English translations of the Hebrew Bible traditionally render the proper name of God as “the LORD.”

At the time of the Hebrew Bible’s composition, the written forms of the Hebrew and Aramaic languages recorded only consonants, not vowels. Much later, between the seventh and tenth centuries CE, the compilers of the standard text of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Masoretic Text, added symbols known as “vowel points” to indicate the vowels of most words, but, when the tetragrammaton occurred in the text, they gave it the vowel points of ăḏonāi, because that was the word a reader was supposed to substitute for it, and did not preserve the vowels of the name itself. For this reason, most Christian seminaries and Jewish rabbinical schools teach that no one today knows how the name of God was pronounced.

This makes for a good story, and it was actually true at one time. For roughly the past century now, though, scholars have actually had compelling evidence that the ancient peoples of Israel and Judah pronounced the proper name of their god Yahweh. There is slight ambiguity about the exact vowel qualities, but not much. In this post, I will explain the ancient evidence supporting this scholarly reconstruction. To do this, I will have to use some linguistics jargon, but I will do my best to explain the meanings of all the terms I use.

Is Athena Named After Athens, or Vice Versa?

In ancient times, the people of the Greek city-state of Athens regarded the goddess Athena as their patron. The special relationship between the goddess and the city is reflected in their shared name, and, naturally, many people have assumed that the Athenians named their city in honor of Athena. Startlingly, however, historical and linguistic evidence may support the opposite conclusion: that the goddess Athena derived her name from the city of Athens, rather than vice versa.

Update on My First Few Weeks of Law School, the Future of This Blog, and My Novel (September 2nd, 2025)

Hello everyone! I am about to begin my third week of law school classes. I have been gradually acclimating myself to this new field of study. So far, my classes are going well, and I’ve found that I’m actually kind of enjoying the material. My knowledge of Latin and premodern history have even proven useful on a few occasions! For instance, in my torts class last week, we read and discussed I de S et ux. v. W de S, a 1348 English Court of Assizes case that is preserved in the Liber Assisarum et Placitorum Corone (Book of Assizes and Appeals to the Crown). I had a lot of fun in class explaining the Year Books, late medieval English scribal practices, how to interpret medieval Latin shorthand, and the common law doctrine of coverture and how it limited married women’s ability to sue in court. (I also covered the facts, procedural history, reasoning, and holding of the case.)

I have been continuing to read and study history, literature, and philosophy for my own edification in the available time I have, and I do plan to continue making posts on this blog when I am able to do so. That being said, my available time for writing is limited because I have a lot of reading, studying, and writing for class to do and, inevitably, my schoolwork must take priority over this blog. I am hoping to make at least one post about actual historical content per month going forward, but we will see how well I hold to that.

In the meantime, I am also continuing to work on my novel in progress, Mother of the Gods. Progress on the novel has been slow recently due to my limited available time, but I do not intend to abandon it, and I did spend a few hours working on it just last week.

Why Do Ancient Egyptian Gods Have Animal Heads???

Modern people have often found ancient Egyptian depictions of their gods perplexing and strange, since many of them bear the heads or other features of animals. If you’ve ever wondered why the Egyptians did this, you’re certainly not the first. Even in ancient times, Greek, Roman, and early Christian writers mocked their Egyptian contemporaries for their animal-headed gods (even while some Greeks and Romans adopted them). Later, nineteenth and early twentieth-century western writers claimed the Egyptians’ animal-headed gods as evidence of their culture’s supposed primitivity and inferiority to Greece and Rome.

In reality, Egypt is far from the only ancient culture in which people depicted deities with mixed human and animal features. Therianthropomorphic (i.e., human-animal hybrid) deities are fairly common in the ancient Middle East, North Africa, and southern Europe, including even in ancient Greece and Rome. The Egyptians were no strangers to fully anthropomorphic deities either. By exploring the context and history of Egypt’s animal-headed deities, this post will show that, far from indicating lack of cultural sophistication, they actually display ancient Egypt’s creativity and cultural dynamism.

What Was the First Conlang?

A constructed language or “conlang” is a language that an individual or group has deliberately created with a purpose in mind, as opposed to languages that have arisen naturally. Today, when most people today hear this term, they think immediately of languages used in works of fiction, such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Elvish language Quenya (which he created long before he used it in his novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), Klingon from the television series Star Trek, or Dothraki and High Valyrian from Game of Thrones.

Many people may be surprised to learn that the oldest examples of what we might call constructed languages were not created for fictional worldbuilding at all, but rather as a philosophical or theological exercise. Such examples are also far older than many readers may realize, dating all the way back to the Middle Ages.

Well, I’m Going to Law School

Hello everyone, I’m sorry that I haven’t written much the past few months. I have been seriously rethinking my career plans ever since I did not get into a PhD program last year and have been doing so even more since I learned that I will not be admitted to a classics PhD program with funding this year either. For at least a decade now, I’ve known that it was extraordinarily unlikely that I would ever land a tenure-track professorship in ancient history, but I was just so stubbornly, stupidly committed to it that I was unwilling to give it up and pursue an actually realistically viable career path.

At this point, though, my thinking has changed. I’ve realized that I can’t keep wasting my life on something that has virtually no chance of ever turning into a stable living. The odds of landing long-term employment as an academic ancient historian are so low and so random that pursuing a PhD with that goal is like betting one’s future prospects of employability on rolling sixes on a die six times in a row. Under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t call that a career plan; we’d call it a gambling addiction.

Instead of going into a PhD program, I’ve decided to go to law school and become a lawyer. This was not an easy decision to make. Before I made it, I spoke to a professional career counselor, I reached out to three different practicing attorneys who work in different areas of law and a current law student at IU Bloomington, all of whom very generously agreed to speak to me, and had long conservations with them about what law school and legal practice are like. I did a lot of reading and research on my own, I had many conversations with my parents, and I spent many weeks thinking it over.

The truth is that I’ve been interested in the law for a long time and it is a career that is well suited to my skills and interests. Even back when I was in high school, my father and several of my teachers encouraged me to become a lawyer, but, at the time, I just couldn’t see myself as one, mostly because I was already certain that I wanted to be an ancient history professor.

I made the decision to apply to law school in April of this year. By that time, the deadlines for this year for most programs were already passed and the next offering of the LSAT was not until June 7th (after even the latest of all the deadlines), but I managed to find a way around this, since the IU Bloomington Maurer School of Law has recently started accepting the GRE as a substitute for the LSAT and had a late application deadline this year of June 1st. As it happens, I took the GRE one time without studying four years ago when I was preparing to apply to PhD programs the first time and got a perfect score (170 out of 170, 99th percentile) on the verbal reasoning section. My scores are still valid, so I sent them in and submitted my application to Maurer in May. On Thursday of last week, I received official notice that I have been admitted and that I have also received a merit-based scholarship covering part of the tuition for the program. I have now accepted my offer of admission and signed a lease for an apartment in Bloomington. Orientation is on August 13th.

Why Are Oxbridge Professors, Catholic Priests, and Crime Bosses All Called ‘Don’?

Generally speaking, a professor at the English universities of Oxford or Cambridge, a Catholic priest or abbot, and a crime boss don’t have much in common—but they do at least share one thing: the title don or dom (which has one etymological root). To some, it may seem confusing why people from such radically different walks of life share the same honorific. How did this happen? As is often the case with etymological quandaries such as this, the answer goes back over two thousand years to the ancient Romans.

Lost Ancient Cities That No One Has Ever Found

When most people hear the words “lost ancient cities,” their first thought is of Atlantis, which, as I discuss in this post I made back in 2019, is definitely fictional and never really existed. There are, however, many very real and highly significant ancient cities whose exact locations are still unknown or disputed. Perhaps the most famous example is the ancient city of Akkad; most people have heard at some point of the ancient Akkadian Empire and its founding king Sargon of Akkad (ruled c. 2334 – c. 2279 BCE), but not everyone knows that archaeologists still aren’t sure exactly where this famous ancient city was. Strong evidence suggests that it was somewhere in the area of modern Baghdad, but no one has ever conclusively identified its ruins.

Akkad is far from the only ancient city that has so far eluded modern archaeology. In this post, I will discuss other major ancient cities that are still “lost” and where archaeologists currently hypothesize they may have been.