As an ongoing project I’ve selected three articles at random from among credible open-source journals in order to analyze their arguments in a way that makes clear their Bayesian structure, and what grasping this about them can tell us about sound historical methods. My only criteria were articles in English, in credible journals, that are open source (meaning, anyone can access their articles without a paywall, so my readers can read them to test my analysis themselves). I then randomized to the journal and issue, and then article, to select three articles from that set published over the course of the last year.

Which meant I made no choice as to what field of history they were in or what topics they explored. Because my idea is that it shouldn’t matter: any competent historian composing any competently peer-reviewed thesis should exhibit an argument that can be reduced to a Bayesian form—whether they are aware of that or not. Because all sound historical method cannot be other than Bayesian in its underlying logical structure (a point twice proved under peer review, so it is itself a corroborated thesis now: see my Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus and Aviezer Tucker’s Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography). Which has been done before (e.g. see A Test of Bayesian History: Efraim Wallach on Old Testament Studies). On the general principles I’ll be applying, see: Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning; and Bayesian Statistics vs. Bayesian Epistemology; and “What Did Josephus Mean by That?” A Case Study in the Relationship between Evidence and Probability.

For the purposes of this analysis I will reference the Odds Form of Bayes’ Theorem:

P(h | e.b) / P(¬h | e.b) = [ P(h | b) / P(¬h | b) ] x [ P(e | h.b) / P(e | ¬h.b) ]

Putting that in English: the odds on a theory being true equal the prior odds times the likelihood ratio. Or, the ratio between the probability of a theory or claim being true and the probability of its being false, given the evidence, e, and all human background knowledge, b, equals the ratio of those probabilities on background knowledge alone, times the ratio of the probability of the evidence, given that the theory or claim is true, and the probability of that same evidence, given that the theory or claim is false. As a logical formula, this describes all correct empirical reasoning, and hence all sound historical reasoning.

Today’s Paper: Ishtar and the Manosphere

My selection today is “Ishtar the Thot: The Appropriation of the Epic of Gilgamesh by the Manosphere” by Susannah Rees, published in Advances in Ancient, Biblical, and Near Eastern Research 2.1 (May 2022): 1–36. The journal AABNER has a proper ISSN and is published through a real university and is listed in the DOAJ. Curiously, all three of my random selections (as you’ll eventually notice) are in a social justice nexus (two works in feminist analysis and one study on racism). I took a quick look around them and noticed this was a common but not ubiquitous theme in my search-set, at-sight maybe a fifty-fifty split or better, so a random sample of three can be expected to land all slots in that theme by chance. Other historians have noted a rise in interest in social justice subjects in historical work today, which is also to be expected: just as in the Big Turn of the 1950s from military-political to socio-cultural history, history today is undergoing a revolution in focus and interests toward areas until now less explored, and yet increasingly relevant in our political moment.

Rees’s paper is the only one that happened by chance to be in fields I actually have particular expertise in (ancient history of religions, and modern feminist theory and manosphere studies). But it isn’t directly in my academic field: my formal specialization is the Greco-Roman era and I’m academically published in modern naturalist philosophy; Rees is doing cross-discipline work here in Sumerian studies and modern media studies. She’s an Oxford graduate, and a PhD student of Jewish Studies at King’s College London specializing in Hebrew and Old Testament, and comparative Ancient Near Eastern Studies, and she already has an impressive publication record. Her article “Ishtar the Thot” contains numerous historical and other factual assertions one could analyze, but I will focus on its central over-arching thesis: that (emphasis mine) “Shamhat and Ishtar…are viewed by [modern] manosphere communities as paradigmatic of women’s use of sexual capital to manipulate men” and that these interpretations are “insidious distortions of the myth.”

Initial Observations

Apparently the word “thot” is becoming popular slang. I had never heard it before until when recently a member of the Donald Trump camp used it to disparagingly (and quite illogically) describe the women daring to testify against Trump before Congress, prompting me to go on an unhappy five minute Google dive into WTF that word meant. Apparently it’s an acronym for “that hoe over there,” or similar lines of that nature, and it derives from a certain wing of Black rap culture. Its rising popularity soon reared its ugly head as I randomly ran into it in my article selection process. But its appearance there is on point: the cultural ideas surrounding “thot” are not only exactly the misogynistic ideas Rees finds in her modern subjects of study, but they even outright use it themselves to describe the goddess Ishtar. Repeatedly. (Which I could confirm myself, at least as of today.)

Correcting modern misinterpretations of ancient culture and myth is one of the jobs historians exist to perform. We and our work-product are the accuracy-seeking memory-cells of our society (see “The Function of the Historian in Society,” originally published in an academic journal, The History Teacher, and now available in my collection of papers in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). For example, when conservatives try to “reinterpret” Jesus as an economically conservative, immigrant-hating Libertarian (or when Nazis reinterpreted him as an Aryan paragon of their mission to destroy the Jews: see my article No, Hitler Wasn’t a Pantheist), it’s our job to correct them. We are the ones who forestall efforts to alter reality and manipulate society by rewriting history; and promulgate a more accurate understanding of ancient thought and culture—and what has actually happened in the past—in the process (for example, see my many examples of this undertaking in “That Jordan Peterson Is a Crank: A Handy Guide”). But a more formal term for what Rees is doing is “reception history,” the study of how (for example in this case) an ancient text or idea is received and interpreted by later societies (like, today).

Rees’s article is thoroughly cited—in fact, a veritable gold mine of fascinating rabbit holes, all on point in reinforcing each general assertion of her article, which is a sign of high-value scholarship. There is a ton of useful stuff in here, even apart from its thesis. For example, she remarks explicitly on the importance of reception history, particularly in light of growing right-wing hate movements within Western civilization, and gives numerous examples of her field encouraging scholars “not only” to “document instances where Greco-Roman culture has been co-opted by various hate groups but also to expose the errors within these hate groups’ readings” and other “appropriation of artefacts, texts, and historic figures from ancient Greece and Rome to validate alt-Right and anti-feminist ideologies.” The same can be said of Ancient Near Eastern texts and figures, as in the case of Ishtar. And she cites several models for her own project. What she’s doing is a done thing in history as an academic field.

After her introduction, covering her goals and methods, Rees tackles the question of her modern subjects: she defines and contextualizes the “manosphere,” again with extensive citations of existing scholarship and particular examples, presents their version of the Ishtar mythology (in their own words; and, I can confirm, without distortion), and analyzes its abstract features. This is all the same way we would study an ancient myth, and an ancient cultural group. Amusingly, one of her key texts is a lecture on the Epic of Gilgamesh by none other than Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin), whom some of you might recall I once debated in Milwaukee (or tried to—he hardly engaged with anything I said, lost his cool, and took a hit to his rep for it). My only criticism here is that scholars need to make more use of the timestamp feature on YouTube to designate specific sections of a lengthy video in its URL; or at least just reference the time where a particular feature, statement, or discussion occurs.

Pros and Cons

I have only two other criticisms of Rees’s paper as a whole (and had I been a peer reviewer I’d have required these to be addressed). First of those is more technically specific, regarding her section attempting to link the separate storylines of the brothers Shukaletuda and Ishullanu together, to color what the authors of the Gilgamesh epic might have intended to be the subtext of Gilgamesh’s insulting rant in rejection of Ishtar’s advances—all in Rees’s effort to repurpose the narrative against manosphere distortions. Gilgamesh never explicitly refers to Shukaletuda, only Ishullanu. And it is not entirely clear how we are to construct a parallel being meant. Rees points out that Ishtar was raped by Shukaletuda (and duly killed him), while Ishtar pursued Ishullanu, creating the undisputedly intended parallel: after her advances, both he and Gilgamesh ultimately insult her, resulting ultimately in a poor fate for Ishullanu, which is Gilgamesh’s actual point. I am not convinced that Gilgamesh is meant to be understood as making light of the rape or conflating these two brothers in any way. When “Ishullanu is cast” by Gilgamesh “not as sexual predator but as an unwilling victim,” that’s actually correct. Had Gilgamesh been going on like this about Shukaletuda, accounting him the victim and Ishtar the predator, that would indeed have been a deeply insulting perversion of (the in-myth) reality, one that could even justify Ishtar’s lashing out. But that’s not what happens in the text. So although Rees can cite another scholar taking this position, and competently admits most scholars don’t, she needs to do more to justify her point here than name drop.

Nevertheless, it remains true, as Rees says, that “Manosphere outlets frequently amplify stories of female perpetrators of sexual violence while simultaneously dismissing allegations against male perpetrators as false allegations in order to claim erroneously that it is men who are the real victims of sexual violence” and “This aggrieved and deluded sense of victimhood is, in turn, used as a justification for targeted online campaigns of harassment against women.” All very true (and adequately documented by the scholars she cites). And Rees does document these platforms using the Ishtar narrative to support the same kind of thinking. But the specific example she attempts to build, of some alleged hidden conflation of the brothers Shukaletuda and Ishullanu in Gilgamesh’s rhetoric, just doesn’t hold water as presented. Maybe there is a case for it; but it’s not included, so I can’t assess it. In Bayesian terms, she needs to present evidence that is very improbable unless this interpretation were correct—for example, if Gilgamesh had even specifically said Shukaletuda rather than Ishullanu, or had otherwise mixed up actual specific details between them in a way that’s otherwise hard to explain—because otherwise the evidence is the other way around: that Gilgamesh does neither, or anything the like, is very improbable on Rees’s interpretation. The likelihoods flip the other way around. And there is no case to be made for a prior probability that can rescue her idea here from that inevitable fate of logic.

My second complaint is more broadly one of style: across the entire paper there is a slight over-use of hyperbole that should be carefully used even in popular writing, but even more so in academic. For example, Rees cites a paper supporting a conclusion of false accusations of sexual assault occurring at a rate of around 6% (which in turn concludes this supports other research placing the rate at “between 2% and 10%”) and she describes this as “extremely rare.” But if even as few as 1 in 20 of the 60,000 or so annually reported rapes in the UK are false accusations, that’s 3,000 falsely accused men—every year. That’s not “extremely rare.” It would more correctly be described as “not the norm,” but it’s still a serious problem one should not dismiss as trivial, or make light of. And in reality, the numbers must be higher: such studies as Rees cites only measure claims proven false—but most false accusations won’t conveniently be found out, so the rate of actual false accusations must be considerably higher. The thing these men she writes about fear is real. Unlike Ishtar unleashing zombies from the underworld.

This does not logically undermine any point Rees makes—if we corrected her discourse, replacing hyperbole with accuracy, all her conclusions still follow: as in this case, actors in the manosphere do in fact exaggerate the phenomenon of false accusations, and falsely attribute it to genetically inherent characteristics of all women (when clearly this sort of thing is, in fact, an exceptional, not a typical, behavior among women), so as to justify dehumanizing women collectively and bolster their own violent, hateful, irrational thoughts about them—all while ignoring the fact that most accusations by far are real, and even more incidents go unreported or even unpunished than are falsely reported. That all remains true, even correcting for any connected hyperbole.

That almost no women are actually like that is indeed one of Rees’s own points about Ishtar: it is ridiculous to read her as a cypher for all womankind (as Rees fully documents the manosphere doing) when in fact she is peculiarly exceptional in every conceivable way, even to the authors who invented her. Not “every woman” is Patrizia Gucci. In statistical fact, almost none are. But Rees’s over-frequent resort to hyperbole does rhetorically undermine her work, precisely because it is the sort of error hostile readers will latch onto to irrationally dismiss every point she then makes. In effect she inadvertently becomes another example reinforcing the misogynist’s narrative that women are all liars who don’t care about any of the very real suffering among men. That’s a false narrative (Rees’s choices of wording are subjective and miscalibrated, not dishonest or callous). But you would still do better not to reinforce it among those you already know are poor and disingenuous reasoners. Better chosen words are in order, to ensure an unimpeachable accuracy, and not material for building a straw man.

By contrast, one thing Rees does very well is illustrate how the actual text of Gilgamesh becomes converted into support for manosphere ideology by their not even correctly describing what happens in it: the goddess Ishtar never falsely accuses anyone of anything. There are no false accusations in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Her complaint to her father, the god Anu, is entirely true: Gilgamesh was insulting to her. Rees also points out that Anu is not impressed by this complaint, deeming her to probably have deserved it (forcing her to resort to sociopathic coercion; persuasion having failed)—and Anu arrives at that conclusion based not on his blanket judgments “about women” (or even lady goddesses for that matter), but based on his particular knowledge of Ishtar as an individual: she is not deserving of proxied revenge for being insulted by a mortal not “because she’s a woman,” but because she’s Ishtar, someone who has in the past demonstrated by her own idiomatic behavior to be a certain kind of person, not “a typical woman.” The text thus in no way supports anything the manosphere claims of it. Although missing this point, and mistaking a single woman being treated as an individual as evidence of the genetically inherent attributes of all women, is a typical irrational mode of reasoning among that group.

Another really good example Rees brings out is the fact that everything the manosphere tries to use in the Gilgamesh epic to support their misogynistic ideology, they actually have the wrong way around: Enkidu before being “civilized” was not then better off—a fact the gods even have to rebuke him with, explicitly in the story (a detail Rees documents manosphere accounts conveniently leaving out); and Gilgamesh is not a model hero—he has to make a ton of mistakes to learn how to act like a more rational, competent man. His handling of Ishtar is explicitly used in the epic as a part of that story. Ishtar is not represented as heroic—she is most definitely a villain (albeit as just noted, not “because she’s a woman”)—but she is still a problem the hero is supposed to handle, and he handles it in exactly the worst way. The narrative is thus being deliberately critical of Gilgamesh here, not praising. Yet the manosphere will react as if Gilgamesh is the one they should be looking up to in this narrative, when in fact he’s the one they should be learning the opposite lesson from: this is a narrative about Gilgamesh’s failure as a hero. That was the original epic’s point. Not some nonsense about “bitches all be liars” so sticking it to them is righteous. No such gendered thoughts exist anywhere in the epic. Its authors would be deeply perplexed that anyone got that out of their story.

I’m reminded of an example of this perplexing failure to grasp the point of a work of art I discussed from my childhood in Sexy Sex Sex!! (for Cash on the Barrel!):

I remember someone I knew back in middle school who idolized a character in the film Apocalypse Now: Lt. Colonel Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall, who utters the famous line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”). That student modeled himself after him, dressed like him, talked like him, spoke of him reverently as a kick-ass soldier, his ideal hero. The disturbing thing about that (for those who haven’t seen the movie) is that Kilgore is a grotesque character, he is meant to horrify the viewer. He was specifically written as a metaphor for exactly the kind of stiff-backed war-idolizing lunatic who causes and perpetuates unjust wars like that in Vietnam, men who are never touched by any sense of danger or loss, who puff their chest with exaggerated superiority, who utter such absurd racist patriotisms as “Charlie don’t surf!” This kid didn’t get the joke. He was inspired by that movie to become the very thing it was criticizing.

Rees documents men on manosphere platforms doing exactly this with the Epic of Gilgamesh: mistaking what it intended to be criticism as praise (taking behaviors it actually means to denounce, as what it meant to promote); extracting generalizations it never imagined (like that a particular individual woman “represents” every woman; when no such rationale exists anywhere in the text, but quite the reverse: Ishtar is criticized for her own individual behavior, and never for being “a typical woman”); and completely overlooking its actual point. Enkidu’s perspective that he was diminished by losing his animal nature is false, and his cursing of the woman responsible for it is wrong, and thus is explicitly denounced and corrected in the story; Gilgamesh’s treatment of Inanna is immature and stupid, and he later comes around to being a man of humbler wisdom who would know better next time; the “harlot” Shamhat is not trying to mooch off Enkidu or steal his glory or control him: she is literally just paid to teach him some stuff (a lot of which involving sex) and she does what she is hired to do.

Rees does not make note of this, but IMO, Shamhat, “the voluptuous one,” the embodiment of “luxuriant lust,” is a metaphor for civilization itself: the message meant by her encounter with Enkidu is surely that it is civilization, and its comforts and benefits—including companionship, sexual and platonic—that seduces the wild man, and makes him a stranger to the animals. There is nothing here about “women ruin everything,” unless by “women” you mean “civilization” and not any actual person; and even then the text does not convey the idea that “civilization ruins everything,” but quite the contrary. The Epic conveys the idea by the end that Enkidu’s friendship with the animals was childish and isolating. It is not the better state of man. He’s actually better off having been seduced by civilization. There is certainly nothing here about gender commentary. Shamhat isn’t even a woman, much less all women; she’s a metaphor for a complex abstraction that has nothing really to do with gender or sex at all.

But even without making that point, Rees clearly establishes that “Elements of the Epic of Gilgamesh have been blended with tenets of the manosphere ideology in order to produce a mythmeme that has evolved independently of textual controls.” And the most effective way to disarm this misappropriation of the original story is to “return to the text of the Epic.” Just as with Lt. Kilgore: the way to correct the completely false interpretation of his character, from a villain into a hero, is to go back to the original movie and the context of its creation and of the scenes involving Kilgore, to see what the writers (and director) were actually trying to say. And as with art generally, it won’t be literal. Kilgore is not a paragon of men. He is a symbol, and metaphor, for a whole system—yes, then predominately run by men, and he represents a certain kind of man, but he does not represent “men” or “masculinity,” and certainly not in any way intended to be revered and emulated. When we go back to what the authors of the Epic of Gilgamesh must surely be doing, their actual intentions as can be discerned by the way they structure and contextualize their story, and by what we can know of the context in which it was created, we can learn a great deal of what they were actually thinking, hoping, teaching—and in the process discover that it is miles away from what its misogynistic cultural appropriators imagine.

At the same time, “we cannot claim the myth as proto-feminist,” Rees says, for “Indeed, many elements of the Epic are convivial to a misogynistic outlook and within the Epic itself ‘male spheres of power are created by the violent exclusion of women’.” But, she points out, this is not a reason to follow the Epic as a guide to life. This was a story written by far more ignorant and un-self-reflective people, trapped in a narrow and idiosyncratic cultural moment. We have learned far more since then, and thus rightly see the world very differently than they did. Just like the Bible, insofar as there is any timeless wisdom to be had from it, it still has to be cherry-picked out of it from among its many bad or outdated ideas; and one still has to defend that wisdom with modern, reliable evidence—not just declare it wise because it was written a long time ago. Being written a long time ago is a strike against it being a reliable source of knowledge, not the other way around.

“There is,” Rees points out, “a certain irony that the two episodes that the manosphere has opted to retell most frequently are also the junctures at which the Epic of Gilgamesh displays a metanarrative awareness about the ethics and the consequences of storytelling.” Gilgamesh’s mishandling of the narrative of Ishtar’s history of behavior is meant to teach us caution—tact and diplomacy, more specifically, and a deeper reading of what’s going on and how to manage it maturely—the very lesson modern manosphere interpreters of this story fail to learn. And Enkidu’s mistelling of the story of his civilizing as a fall from grace, which is quickly corrected in the story itself as an erroneous version of events, and replaced with a more accurate one: he’s actually better off now, and more mature and accomplished. This is precisely the one detail modern manosphere interpreters completely overlook. Ironically indeed, as they are still praising the very thing the story itself denounces: Enkidu’s false narrative of what his relationship with Shamhat really meant. The way the Epic itself teaches its readers how one is to responsibly handle a narrative is precisely the one lesson that modern manosphere interpreters need most to learn. Just like my childhood friend and his false reading of Kilgore.

Bayesian Analysis

One thing I find I have to keep doing whenever someone asks me to give them a “Bayesian analysis” of this or that theory or claim is explain to them that we can’t do that until we’ve arrayed all the data. Because it’s the data we have to analyze. Every term in any Bayesian equation is conditional on b, “background knowledge,” so we have to array what background knowledge there is that will inform what we deem more or less likely, and by how much. And as the differential probability of evidence is fundamental to any Bayesian analysis, we have to lay out all the pertinent evidence—we can’t cherry-pick, leave key evidence out. That would be the method of apologetics, not of any actually reliable epistemology (see Bayesian Counter-Apologetics). So that was the role of the preceding. I haven’t described every single item, but in general terms, through my description of Rees’s paper and its pros and cons, I’ve referenced most of the pertinent background knowledge and evidence.

So now we can analyze her thesis. Which I identified as two-part: that “Shamhat and Ishtar…are viewed by [modern] manosphere communities as paradigmatic of women’s use of sexual capital to manipulate men” and that these interpretations are “insidious distortions of the myth.” Over half of Rees’s paper is devoted to cataloguing primary evidence (as well as supporting scholarship) for the first part. Her conclusion as to what the majority “manosphere view” is with respect to those characters (the “harlot” Shamhat who “civilized” the wild man Enkidu; and the “goddess” Ishtar who antagonizes Gilgamesh) has a probability as near to 100% as makes all odds, because the evidence she lists is simply not at all probable on any other interpretation. Not only in specific cases (where she provides direct quotes), but in cumulative effect (with diverse examples across numerous platforms, without exceptions).

The probability that all those statements would exist across all those platforms specifically, and without any substantial pushback (they all appear predominately well-received or unchallenged in their respective audiences), is simply vanishingly small unless it indicates just what Rees concludes: when considered at all, Shamhat and Ishtar are in that subculture regarded as a timeless mythic paradigm of womanhood—as parasitic, dishonest, selfish, and destructive of men’s dreams and welfare. And they regard this even as the intentional point of that Epic’s authors, and further hold that up as evidence that this wisdom can only be timeless because it is genetically, biologically, unalterably true. One of the great advantages of modern history is our access to evidence is so extensive as to be epistemically conclusive. If we were trying to make Rees’s point with ancient evidence, it would be so scattered, scarce, and problematic as to make certainty harder to obtain. But in this case, there can be no doubt; because the evidence is so extensive, and the platforms for it so thoroughly searchable: Rees was able to use internet search engines to locate every reference to these characters across all major venues for her target subculture. Can you imagine if we could have done that for, say, the first generation of Christianity: locate every discussion every church congregation had about any specific topic?

This is why I point out that one reason we don’t have expressly Bayesian work so much in history is because usually the evidence is so vast as to overwhelmingly establish a point. You literally don’t need to do the math. With the kind of evidence Rees had access to here, we know its beyond millions to one against her being wrong. And there is nothing in the priors that can change that. To the contrary, Rees spends many pages establishing, with particular evidence but even more citations of many other studies, the prior probability in this case: by surveying all the sites and assertions and studies about manosphere ideology generally, the prior probability that they would think things like her conclusion asserts is already high. This is the effect of all the pertinent background knowledge, b. The odds from that are still not high enough to be conclusive; if all you had were that, you’d agree it’s still possible they wouldn’t think anything about the characters of Shamhat and Ishtar, or not think specifically those things. You might say it’s more like 2 to 1 or 5 to 1, where the probability is high but not so high as to be certain. So to get the odds through the roof, you need to go and check and find out if they actually do think those things. And that’s the role of all the specific evidence, e. Which Rees accumulates in more than adequate abundance. As I noted, the likelihood ratio here is easily beyond millions to one.

So much for Part 1 of her overall thesis. What about Part 2? We can expect that to be harder, because we have a far more limited access to pertinent evidence. Unlike the modern manosphere, we can’t go listen in on every table conversation every reader of this Epic back then had about the text; we can’t read its authors’ blogs or twitter feeds. We have no ancient commentaries on it at all. So we are limited to just the text itself. Rees points out that we have in our background knowledge, b, the fact that there have survived a large number of “manuscripts” (versions of the story recorded on clay), many quite ancient; so establishing the original text of the Epic, though not secure in every way, is secure enough to work from a modern critical edition, drawing conclusions about the intentions of the authors from the preservation of what they wrote. And this is the evidence Rees works from to establish the second part of her thesis: that these manosphere interpretations of the Epic of Gilgamesh are simply wrong. They do not reflect what the text says or what its authors could possibly or likely have meant.

As to whether this distortion is “insidious,” that would constitute a third part of her thesis, which is more of a moral or value judgment, but it, too, depends on historical evidence, of which she supplies quite a great deal too. Again, that there are ideological connections between manosphere interpretations of this text and that community’s problematic behavior is well-established as probable here, because Rees supplies abundant evidence of the fact, such that it is highly improbable all that evidence would exist, unless there was an ideological connection between the manosphere’s thoughts about Shamhat and Ishtar (and Gilgamesh and Enkidu), and their endorsement or even engagement in those related behaviors (from harassment to violence; from a sexist regard of women to a callous disregard of their concerns; and further attitudes of toxic masculinity, though Rees never uses that term).

But even more secure than that is her conclusion that what the manosphere has said about this Epic and those characters in it is most definitely a distortion, insidious or not. And here in some cases the evidence is overwhelming. For example, the probability that the text lacks any mention of any false accusation against Gilgamesh from Ishtar is effectively 100% (we’d have to resort to claims of hallucination or lost redactions to get a different result, and these things have probabilities easily hundreds to one against, if not thousands or millions). We can plainly see, as clearly as that the sky is blue and grass is green, that there is simply no such thing anywhere in the text. The only accusation she levels is that Gilgamesh insulted her; which, thanks to the tale’s omniscient narrator, we can tell he plainly did. So when manosphere commentators assert that Ishtar is a false accuser (as again evidence plainly shows; short of non-credible improbabilities like hallucination or a malevolent AI’s doctoring The Matrix), the probability that the text would omit such a thing is effectively zero if they were right; whereas the probability that the text would omit such a thing if they are wrong (and thus distorting the text) is as near to 100% as makes all odds. We’re looking at a likelihood ratio well beyond millions to one again.

The odds might narrow for more subjective assessments—for example, that the text is criticizing Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s use of narratives, whereas manosphere writers take it as endorsing it, is less certain, but still fairly certain. It takes more accumulation of context (such as Rees lays out) to see this, but in the end it’s still hundreds to one, or at worst tens to one, in favor of Rees’s reading—not only because in b, our background knowledge, pretty much all other actual experts in Sumerian studies concur with Rees and not the manosphere, which fact Rees also documents; but also because the evidence from the text that Rees presents makes complete sense of that fact. Rees doesn’t just say “the consensus of scholars says so, therefore it’s true.” She documents that it is the consensus. And then she lays out the key reasons why that is the consensus, so we can independently evaluate whether the consensus is well-founded or not. And at a look, we can tell that it is. Given that evidence, the probability the consensus is wrong on those things is no better than tens to one against, and more probably well beyond.

As to how we can arrive at such estimates of magnitude (tens to one, hundreds to one, millions to one), if one wanted a formal demonstration it would be accomplished with benchmarking. For example, how many times does it turn out that a whole section of a Sumerian text has been scribally excised thereby radically altering its entire meaning? Has that happened once out of every hundred texts? Once every thousand? It certainly isn’t once every ten texts, or else we’d have heard of such remarkably frequent distorting of Sumerian texts. So we can safely say it’s at least as low as 100 to 1. We don’t even have any evidence to point to that it is as frequent as that. So a fortiori, we can say it’s “no more frequent” than that and go from there. But it’s not enough to have “just any” detail excised; the manosphere reading requires a bizarrely specific thing to have been excised—like, conveniently, some rant about how Shamhat and Ishtar are “just like all other chicks,” and this perspective never scolded as inaccurate (as Enkidu’s rant about Shamhat actually is). How many different things could have been excised from this text? There are easily thousands; millions even. Let’s say it’s 1 in 10,000. So without any specific evidence (and remember, we have none), the probability that we would have lost exactly specifically this kind of material from the Epic (and not some other, or none at all) must now be 10,000 x 100 = 1,000,000. So we’re at a million to one against the manosphere interpretation explaining the existing text of the Epic. And that was being generous at every turn. The actual odds we know must be worse. Ergo, it’s millions to one against our having the text we do, if the manosphere interpretation of it were correct. Whereas if Rees and the consensus of Sumerian experts were correct, that the text would have the content we observe it to is effectively 100%. So the likelihood ratio supports that conclusion by, in turn, millions to one. That’s the mathematical effect of having the text such as we do.

This is how a proper historical argument should look. The prior probabilities are correctly attended to without vagueness or obfuscation (pertinent background knowledge is surveyed; nothing critical is left out; and it all does trend toward or not against the thesis being argued). And a strong likelihood ratio is secured by abundant provision (and no damning omissions) of evidence, both in the form of primary evidence directly provided (from quotations of major sources of manosphere thought to identifying pertinent contents and omissions in the Epic of Gilgamesh itself) and in citing abundant examples of other reliable studies establishing conclusions on evidence in a similar procedure. Though tremendous hard work was required to pull this together, epistemically hers was an easy thesis to prove, owing to very copious access to the evidence (in modern sources of manosphere thought; and in the well-attested and widely studied text of the Epic in question).

Often in ancient history, and sometimes in modern, we aren’t so lucky and have to arrive at less certain conclusions on much more compromised bodies of evidence. But there can be a tendency of historians (particularly when they have an agenda, as usually in Biblical Studies) to “act like” their conclusions can be declared as certain as other historians’ (because “aren’t we doing the same thing?”) when in fact this is not the case because there is an enormous gap between them in the scope and quality of the evidence they have available, which logically should be reflected as a corresponding gap in confidence. Bayesian analysis can reveal this fact. Often there is a poor attendance to prior probabilities (a historian fails to situate their thesis properly in its actual context); and often a mishandling of likelihoods: a historian will under-perform in providing evidence, which suffers either in quantity or quality; or even not grasp what it takes for a thing to be evidence in the first place, such as by ignoring competing explanations of the same evidence, which is easier to do when the scenario is not binary. In Rees’s case, her manosphere sources either say what she claims, or they do not, and their interpretations either match the content of the Epic of Gilgamesh, or they do not. Hers are very straightforward claims that are easily tested; the best thesis to have. But in Biblical Studies, for example, when we are dealing with attempting to extract history from myth, there is a plethora of alternative explanations of the contents of a chapter or verse, making it too easy to ignore competing hypotheses (see my most recent example in Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3).

Conclusion

Susannah Rees’s paper isn’t flawless. But it’s pretty damned good. It is thorough in its citations; it relies on a lot of competent, quality research; and it backs all its core claims with primary evidence and secondary scholarship. It builds a solid case for the prior probability of her core thesis being in her favor, or at least not against, by showing us all the pertinent background knowledge: of manosphere ideological trends generally; and of expert interpretations of the Gilgamesh Epic generally. And then it knocks that ball out of the park with an extensive array of solid evidence: specific examples of things said (and never substantially gainsaid) on major manosphere internet haunts, whose probability of existing, and existing in that unchallenged state, is near to zero unless it is indeed what the thought-trend there really was; and specific examples of features of the original text (what it does say, what it doesn’t say; and the context of it all within the text, and outside the text, in Sumerian culture generally) whose probability of existing, and existing in that state, is near to zero unless the manosphere interpretation of it is entirely incorrect. The likelihood ratios supporting Rees’s overall thesis are at least thousands to one, if not millions. This is what a well-argued, well-demonstrated conclusion in history looks like.