HISTORY’S GREATEST CONUNDRUMS AND MYSTERIES SOLVED
COMPILED BY JONNY WILKES AND DANNY BIRD
Was the Indiana Jones idol based on a real artefact?
SHORT ANSWER
This is less a case of ‘it belongs in a museum’, more ‘leave it to the movies’
LONG ANSWER
In arguably one of the great movie opening sequences of all time, at the start of Steven Spielberg’s 1981 romp Raiders of the Lost Ark, the fedora-wearing, whip-wielding, globe-trotting archaeologist Indiana Jones treks through the South American jungle in search of a secret temple. Inside is a golden fertility idol, protected by a series of booby traps... and a giant boulder, of course.
Though it may not even be the main MacGuffin of the movie – Indy has to race to find the Ark of the Covenant before it’s discovered by the Nazis – this gilt idol has gone down in cinema history. But not in real history – because the artefact is entirely fictitious.
An Indiana Jones comic, published later, claimed that the idol represented a goddess of the Chachapoyas, a pre-Columbian Andean culture of what’s now northwest Peru that fell to the Inca in the 15th century. The ‘artefact’ also looks similar to a sculpture carved from a gleaming mineral, held in the collections at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, depicting a woman in the throes of childbirth. However, that has been attributed to the Aztec people – based in Mexico, some 2,000 miles northwest of Peru – and may even have been made in the 19th century.
19
The number of women condemned to death for witchcraft on 17 July 1645 at the Chelmsford assizes – all of them ‘discovered’ by the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins.
The idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), though convincingly pre-Columbian, was entirely fictitious
Why did the gods of ancient Egypt have animal heads?
Answered by Joyce Tyldesley, professor of Egyptology at the University of Manchester
When travellers such as Herodotus visited Egypt in the classical age, they often described its religion as strange and primitive. In fact, the ancient Egyptians had refined an esoteric and rich belief system over 3,000 years.
Many Egyptian gods and goddesses had animal features: there was Sobek, with his crocodile-like appearance, and Hathor, often depicted with cow horns. However, the Egyptians probably did not actually envision their deities as animal-headed humanoids. Rather, artists depicted most of these gods as humans performing various functi
