My in-box seems to be a magnet for myth debunking: Facts that I thought to be true regularly crumble into dust in the hard light of skepticism. Here are a few from the last few months.

The pharaoh let my people go

We have no historical records of Israelites being enslaved in Egypt, despite then Prime Minister of Israel Menahem Begin boasting, “We built the pyramids” during a visit to the National Museum in Cairo in 1977. The popular notion of two-to-three million people held in servitude by a barely larger Egyptian population and subsequently trekking across the parted Red Sea (yay Moses!) and trekking through the Sinai Desert just doesn’t compute. Eric Cline (history professor, author of the intriguing 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed) figured that the escapees would have needed 1,500 tons of food and 11 million gallons of water…every day for 40 years. Nope, didn’t happen.

Sappho was gay

The greatest Greek lyric poet, Sappho was a beauty by all (i.e. both) contemporary accounts: “Violet-hair, pure and honey-smiling,” according to one. Also, she was married, with a daughter. She wrote Hymn to Aphrodite, the only complete work we have of hers, in which (especially if you’re male with our usual fantasies) you can find kinda-sorta hints of homosexuality. But really, the myth only arose late in the 19th century — until then, “Sapphic” and “Lesbian” had no such connotation.

Sappho and her lyre (Charles Mengin Sappho, 1877. Public domain)

Bankers plunged to their deaths in the 1929 Crash

Newspapers had a field day following the Wall Street Crash of October 24, 1929 (Black Thursday). Daily reports had financiers and bankers jumping from their high offices overlooking Wall Street, where pedestrians wended their way through the tangle of flattened bodies, presumably thinking, “Serves ‘em right, the bastards!” Nope. According to the New York Medical Examiner’s office, just four (of 100) actual or attempted suicides in the city could be attributed to the Crash, and not a single banker or financier.

This pic comes with the caption, “A solemn crowd gathers outside the Stock Exchange after the crash.” (SSA poster/US government)

John Scopes was an unwilling defendant

Dayton, Ohio was in poor financial shape (sound familiar?) in the mid-1920s, so a couple of movers-and-shakers cooked up a scheme to put the city on the map: Let’s prosecute a teacher in a show-trial for illegally teaching evolution, a felony according to the new Tenessessean Butler Act*. First, find a teacher who would be willing to play the role of martyred educator. Football coach John Scopes (he never did teach biology) enthusiastically agreed, and the trial proceeded, pitting William Bryan (politician-fundamentalist) against Clarence Darrow (atheist, say no more). Scopes was duly found guilty, although he never took the stand, which was probably for the best, since he’d been home sick on the date he was supposed to have corrupted the kids’ vulnerable minds, and fined $100…before the verdict was overturned on a technicality. No matter, the 11-day trial put Dayton on the map and it’s been known ever since as the Monkey Trial City. And, of course, the whole drama spawned the hit play and movie Inherit the Wind.

* The 1925 Butler Act prohibited Tennessee public school teachers from denying the Bible’s version of mankind’s origin in Genesis. It was repealed in 1967.

Kindly old Martin Luther brought tolerance to Europe

Misogynist, anti-Semite, xenophobe, hater of the poor: yes. Kind: no. Martin Luther (1483-1546) probably didn’t even nail his “95 Theses” which condemned Roman Catholic indulgences (sin now, pay later) to a church door, per the myth, but sent them to the appropriate church authorities. He hated, among others: The poor (“Let all who are able, cut them down, slaughter and stab them,” he advised when the peasants demanded better working conditions); Jews (“First set fire to their synagogues…Second raze and destroy their homes…”); Women (“a mind weaker than man…she did not equal the glory of the male creature”); not to mention Muslims and, of course, Catholics. All in all, a perfect role model for Nazi Germany.

1528 portrait of Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder. (Public domain via Wikimedia)