Probably, Sort of, Kind of True Quiz

Answer: Jason

The story of Jason and his Argonauts is definitely a myth but the prize that he was seeking, the Golden Fleece, may well be steeped in truth. Jason left Greece in search of the Kingdom of Colchis, which is estimated to be in the Svaneti region of modern day Georgia. Avtandil Okrostsvaridze, a geologist of the Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia, advises that the mountain's streams here are known to carry small pieces of gold and gravel with gold specks. This has been known to the villagers in the region for thousands of years, and they have been laying sheepskins, tied down with ropes and held down with rocks, in the water as a means of capturing these small bits of riches. There is solid speculation that this may have laid the foundations for the story of Jason.

Archaeologists have not found any evidence of the Kingdom Colchis, which leads to many concluding that the kingdom was also a myth but, what they have discovered is really interesting. This may be coincidence but it does add weight to the above being a truth, and that is the discovery of the wrecks of two Mycenaean trading ships in the region. The significance of this is that the ship's traders were merchants in gold and other exotics but, closer to home, the Mycenaeans were the creators of the myth of Jason and his Argonauts.

Answer: The Kraken

Many cultures have myths that centre around giant sea creatures with massive tentacles that can rip ships apart and drag sailors to their doom. Apart from the Kraken there is the Scylla that appears in the Ancient Greek poem, "The Odyssey", New Zealand's Te Wheke-a-Muturangi, Japan's Akkorokamui and the Lusca, which appears in Caribbean folklore.

Norway's mythology about the Kraken is felt to have arisen from the washed up specimens of the giant squid and, depending on which side you were leaning toward, the devil's or God's, they were interpreted as being messages from sea-devils or sea-angels.

Whilst the giant squid was first classified (Architeuthis dux) in 1857, the first one to be photographed was in 1873. They live in temperate waters, anywhere between 200 metres to 1,400 metres below the surface and the females are estimated to grow up to 13 metres (46 feet) in length. A live giant squid was eventually photographed in 2004 by Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, a task they had been pursuing for almost three years. Whilst the Kraken that appears in the above named film and, possibly in the old Scandinavian myths, may well have been of a greater size, it does make it easier to accept that the sight of an actual giant squid may have been the inspiration for these stories... then exaggerated, like most fishing stories are.

Answer: Maori of New Zealand

Maori myths generally tell of the supernatural and many are built around what was observable. The Poukai (also spelled Pouakai) was said to be a monstrous bird blessed with savage talons. It had the power to grab humans and fly them away, tear them to shreds and devour them. The question that arises then is "what was it that was so observable that could give rise to such a tale"?

The answer probably lies with the Haarst eagle. This bird of prey is the world's largest known eagle species; it lived in the east and northwest ends of New Zealand's South Island and it became extinct nearly 200 years after the arrival of the Maori people. How big was this bird? Big enough that it could attack and kill an adult moa that would weigh up to 230 kilograms (510 lb). New Zealand had a lot of big, flightless birds. The main reason for this is that they no land predators, so larger birds evolved to become the dominant creatures on the earth. The bigger they got, the less they depended on flight, so they eventually lost that ability. The arrival of the Maoris changed all that. The large birds were hunted into extinction which, indirectly, meant the Haarst eagle lost its food source and it too disappeared.

It's doubtful the Haarst could have carried away an adult human, but highly possible that it could grab and haul away a smallish child. This sight would have been enough for some to create a myth that was aided a little by embellishing the truth.

Answer: Plato

In 375 BC, Plato's most recognizable work, "Republic", was published. It was a dialogue that spoke of justice and the character of both a just city and a just man. In doing so, he placed the city of ancient Athens onto a pedestal as the model of a "just" city. "Republic" remains one of the world's most influential pieces of writing in regard to political theory.

Fifteen years later, Plato released the dialogues of Timaeus and Critias. These are lesser known works of his, but it is here that the fable of Atlantis first rises (or is sunk if you're pun inclined). Plato describes Solon's journey to Egypt where he hears the story of Atlantis, a city full of hubris with the temerity to take on the city of Athens. This displeases the gods and they send a mighty wave to sink the city to the bottom of the sea. In recording this, Plato creates Atlantis as the complete antithesis of the Athens he describes in "Republic". This appears to be a means employed to underpin the theories of his previous work.

So where is the truth here? We know, or at least it hasn't been proven otherwise, that Atlantis is a fiction, so the truth may well be in the base where the story is rooted. In 373 BC, two years after "Republic" and thirteen years before Plato's creation of Atlantis, there was Helike, an ancient Greek city in northern Peloponnesos. The city was swamped by a giant tsunami that sank the site into the earth and beneath the waves. It took all of the city's residents and ten Spartan ships with it. Stories exist of Biblical like warnings preceding the disaster; immense columns of flames becoming visible and all the vermin and creatures fleeing the city five days before the flood. This may well have been the event that influenced Plato's creation.

To add to this, the name of Atlantis has become a byword to signify lost civilizations which, in turn, has been boosted by a lot of pseudo-science and unsubstantiated speculation. However, it goes deeper; some scholars still consider Plato's Atlantis to be historic tradition, with the most notable of these being Ignatius L. Donnelly, who published "Atlantis: The Antediluvian World" in 1882.

Answer: Troy

Homer's "Iliad", which was written around the eighth century BC, details a supposed conflict that ran for ten years and was triggered by the abduction of Helen, the wife of the Spartan king, Menelaus, by Paris, the son of Priam, the last king of Troy. Scholars have agreed that some of the events that Homer describes did take place in the area known, today, as Hisarlik, in modern day Turkey. However, the veracity of the rest is cast in serious doubt, such as the existence of an immortal warrior who was only vulnerable in a small area below his ankles.

The reason for the agreement to some events is that there is now a belief that the fictional city of Troy did exist. In 1873, an amateur German archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann discovered a collection of ancient artifacts that he claimed were the treasure of Troy's defeated king. This, in turn, drove him to claim that the sites of Hisarlik and ancient Troy were one and the same. So, did Schliemann truly discover Homer's city of Troy? The answer to that is both yes and no... and if ever there was a tale befitting of the title of this quiz, this is it.

Schliemann had become obsessed with discovering the city of Troy and he was prepared to go to any lengths to do so. Add to this is that he was an amateur and his overexuberance led to not only the discovery of Troy, but quite possibly its destruction. Archaeologists have since discovered that there were as many as nine cities built on this site over the centuries. The treasures that Schliemann discovered were dated and found to be some 2,700 years older than the events that occurred in the "Iliad". Hence, they were not Priam's treasures. This also means that Schliemann had dug too far down. The belief is that he'd found what has been termed "Troy (level) II", whereas he should, most likely, have been looking at the level of what has been marked "Troy IV". The difficulty for today's archaeologists is that Schliemann's haste meant that so much along the way was destroyed and nothing was catalogued. The standing joke among scholars is that Schliemann was able to do what the Ancient Greeks could not... tear down the walls of Troy.

Answer: Trojan prisoners of war

The legend of Tenea dates back to approximately 1100 BC and it is rumoured that King Agamemnon provided the Trojan prisoners of war with a gift of land between Corinth and Argos in the northern Peloponnese. It is here that he allowed them to build their own town. The other tales that emanate from here are that it grew to be a city, that it was quite wealthy, having prospered under the rule of the Romans and that Oedipus is said to have been raised here. The city is also mentioned in Virgil's poem "Aeneid" (19BC).

The city and its inhabitants virtually disappeared without a trace, posing several questions:
- Did it really exist?
- Was it as prosperous as the legends claimed?
- Whatever happened to the city's inhabitants?

They're all good questions and, if we believe that the city of Troy existed, then there's more than a possibility that Tenea is more than just myth. Some of the answers to these questions surfaced in 2017 with an astounding discovery by Greek archaeologist Eleni Korka. In an interviewed for the BBC documentary series "Unearthed" in 2018, Korka described searches that had commenced in 1984 with the discovery of a sarcophagus that was of a woman of high social standing. Her (Korka's) lack of experience at the time meant that she didn't obtain permissions to commence digging until 2013. Four years later she located a dual-chambered tomb that contained 14 graves, each with a gold coin placed on their chest for their travels in the afterlife. This was not a Greek tradition, which would have seen a penny (not gold) used and that would have been placed on the tongue of the deceased.

Further diggings have found more rooms, ancient roads, and a welter of gold coins and other artifacts. In the future they're expecting to find a theatre, a forum, and a stadium. She is in no doubt that she has located the lost city of Tenea.

Korka's findings have, not only proven that Tenea existed but that it was also wealthy - the use of gold and the fact that they found lots of it attests to this. As to what happened to its citizens, that is still a mystery. The current theory is that when the Slavs invaded the country, the citizens fled rather than commit to the conflict. With the large number of streams and rivers that existed in the area, left unattended, the silt would have turned to earth quickly and buried the city.

Answer: The spirits of the dead

There is a great deal of misinformation out there about the Vikings. Yes, they were formidable warriors, but the idea that their deceased kin were able to instill steel in their blood and steel into their weapons (read on, you'll find that that pun is intended) has got to be far-fetched. Surprisingly, there is some truth in it.

Archaeologists have found evidence that Scandinavian blacksmiths, during the Iron Age, were placing the remains of their fallen within the fires when they were forging their weapons. Whether they knew it or not, these bones were loaded with carbon and the carbon became imbued within the iron, leading them into making a very rudimentary form of steel... a metal far superior to iron their adversaries were using.

Answer: St. Francis

The place in question was the Friary of Follini, located near Montella (Naples) and, in the year 1224, it was cut off from the rest of the world by a severe snow-storm. The friary, which had run out of food, was also surrounded by hungry wolves. There was no way in and no way out. They prayed to God for salvation and, the next morning, they had a knock on the door. When they opened the door all they found was a sack, bearing the fleur-de-lis, the mark of the French crown, full of bread. There was no one there and there was no evidence, in the snow, of their approach or departure.

The story goes that St. Francis (of Assisi) was in the court of King Louis VIII, when he heard of friary's plight and begged the king for a sack of bread to deliver to them.

Proving that an angel delivered the bread is not possible, without some divine intervention, but proving the existence of the sack may be. A paper published by Cambridge University Press in October 2017 details tests carried out on remnants of the sack still retained by the Order. Radiocarbon dating (14C) calibrated the age range of the material to be 1220 to 1295, within the time frame of the story. Further, a gas-chromotography revealed the presence of ergosterol, a biomarker in bread making, indicating that this sack may have contained bread. Once again, whilst not definitive proof, it probably, kind of, could be true.

Answer: Indra

Mahabalipuram (more commonly referred to as Mamallapuram) is a town in the south of India and it possesses one of the country's most significant tourist attractions, the Shore Temple. There are other monuments here and bas reliefs, all carved out of the rock, but the Temple is both the most impressive and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Dedicated to the god Shiva, this spectacular site sits on the shores of the Bay of Bengal.

The Temple was built around 700 AD and it is rumoured that it was not alone... there were six other temples, equally as stunning, stretched out alongside of it. They were all so divinely beautiful that it stirred jealousy within Indra, to the point that he generated a monstrous wave and buried six of those temples beneath the waves, leaving the Shore Temple to stand alone.

The tales of the drowned temples were held by the locals but to outsiders, who had never seen them, they presented as pure myth. That all changed in 2004, ironically, thanks to another monstrous wave - the Boxing Day tsunami. Before this great wave struck, the seas receded some 500 metres. A number of people, mainly fishermen and tourists, reported seeing a straight row of large rocks, which may (or may not) have been the remnants of those six temples. Once the tsunami struck, those rocks were, once again, buried beneath the sea. However, the tsunami would also change the coastline and, in doing so, left the vestiges of a giant lion's head (carving) exposed.

The Indian navy commenced conducting sonar searches along the coastline in 2005 which has led to the discovery of two (underwater) temples and a cave temple. Not quite the magical six but, suddenly, those local anecdotes are starting to sound like they have more substance than mere myth.

Answer: The Amazons

The first mention of the Amazons, in written form, appears in the works of Homer in the eighth century BC. He describes them in such a way that they are the equals of men in battle and, as such, are worthy of his male heroes to be able to boast about killing them. Later still, poets will describe Achilles as the slayer of the Amazon queen, Penthesilea, and then falling in love with her beauty after her helmet falls from her head. Others describe these female warriors with their breasts cut out to improve their efficiency with the use of the bow. Hercules' ninth labour was a quest to wrest the magic girdle from Hippolyta, the then queen of the Amazons, and then there's the tale of Theseus defying the horde of Amazons, in the closely fought battles of the Attic War, to save Athens. The latter is generally seen as the link between the rise of democracy in Greece and the subjugation of women.

The question, though, is "did the Amazon warriors really exist"? The Swiss scholar Johann Bachefon certainly thought so and he published a paper in 1861 expounding that they were a fact rather than a myth. The problem with his theory is that he had no proof to supplement this. Greek ceramics, from around the sixth century BC, depicted the Amazonian warriors, scantily clad, but, unlike their poets before them, they sought perfection and revealed them as fully breasted women. Yet again, this did not represent truth.

Next in line is the Greek "Father of History", Herodotus, who is said to have identified Themiscrya, a city near the Black Sea, as the capital of the Amazons. These were a group of women who spent their days pillaging the areas through Persia and establishing settlements that would become the cities of Smyrna and Sinope, among others. Once a year they would conduct a procreation event with a nearby tribe. Any boys born would be returned to the tribe while the girls were kept to be trained as warriors. This worked well until the Battle of Thermodon where the Amazonians were soundly defeated and the fleeing women found themselves in Scythia where they intermarried. This, in turn, gave rise to a new race, the Sauromatians. This group would become nomads, with men and women warring and hunting together, to the point where their marriage law decreed that no girl would be allowed to wed until she'd killed her first man in battle.

After Herodotus, there's nothing... until 1990. In this year, a group of archaeologists, a joint venture between the US and Russia, uncovered a burial mound in the Ural steppes near Kazakhstan. Here they found the graves of 150 warrior women, buried with either their weapons or the metal that caused their death embedded within them. Many were bow-legged from hours of horse riding but, the most significant feature was that they were all at least five foot and six inches tall...an extraordinary height for women of that era.

Whilst this is not definitive proof of the existence of the Amazons, it does provide evidence that there were races of female warriors that could have inspired those Greek myths.