6 Things From History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly: Classic

6 The Pyramids Were Smooth, White and Shiny

The Perception:

We get so busy being amazed by the Pyramids, with their massive, meticulously layered sandy golden bricks, that we forget that what we're seeing are the broken-down remnants. If you could see them new, you'd barely recognize them. They were much more awesome back then.

The Reality:

What we think of today as the Pyramids are really just the exposed layers of the structural base. The original pyramids lit up like the Times Square of ancient Egypt. Egyptians were all about having the maximum amount of glittery goodness, especially when it came to death.

And since the Pyramids were the tombs of the pharaohs, they made sure they were the biggest, most sparkly things of all. The original outside consisted of smooth, white limestone that hid the layers of brick, giving the effect that a pyramid was one giant solid piece. Don't take our word for it; you can still see bits of that decorative layer on some of them:

That outer crunchy candy shell was then polished until it was on the verge of blinding from all the light it would reflect from the sun or moon. It was said that they could be seen from miles away, even during the night.

Of course that wasn't enough, so the capstone was then plated in gold or electrum. Had the technology existed, we're sure the pharaohs would have stuck 24-inch chrome rims on them, too.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

What we're looking at today are the equivalent of sports cars that have been long forgotten in some junkyard.

Weather and time have been beating down the pyramids for four and a half thousand years. Well, partly it was time, but mostly it was assholes. Those shiny layers of white and gold? They were stripped off and used in the construction of Medieval Cairo, and there are cracks and holes where 19th century treasure hunters tried to get in with pickaxes and in one unfortunate case, dynamite.

Oh don't worry about it looters, those were only the greatest architectural accomplishments of the Ancient World. We're sure what you needed the stuff for was way more important.

5 Velociraptors Had Feathers

The Perception:

Sure, the T-Rex may be the go-to killer dinosaur, but everyone who's anyone knows that Velociraptors were the real baddest asses of prehistoric times. Cracked Paleontologists theorize that if it wasn't for a giant boulder shot from outer space wiping them all out, Velociraptors would be ruling the planet today, only keeping humans around for food and sport.

These deadly beasts of yore looked like miniaturized Tyrannosaurs, but sleeker, quicker and more dangerous. The dinosaur Kobe to the T-Rex's Shaq, if you will. Anyone who's seen Jurassic Park has a pretty good idea of what Raptors looked like. Well... except for one minor detail.

The Reality:

They had feathers. Not just a few here and there either. But a full on, honest to goodness coat of teeth-to-tail FEATHERS.

Now, it would be awesome if this meant they could fly, but obviously if they could do that, you'd already damned well know about it. No, it turns out Velociraptors were just big fluffy looking lizards, who most likely used the feathers to show off to other raptors, or in mating rituals. Apparently Raptor ladies were impressed if you looked like the bastard offspring of a komodo dragon and Big Bird.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

We actually didn't know about this until 1998, when a bone proving the extent of quill knobs on Velociraptors was discovered, and many a childhood ruined.

Here's to hoping they do a Star Wars-style special edition for Jurassic Park, with updated, more accurate CGI dinosaurs. That should be goddamned hilarious.

4 Greek Statues Were Brightly Painted and Kind of Stupid Looking

The Perception:

Quick, what do you picture in your head when we say, "Ancient Greece"? If you're like most people you either picture lots of dudes standing around in togas, or white marble statues with no pupils in their eyes:

Those ornate statues made of pure white marble, depicting the austere beauty and power of epic gods and heroes, have made quite an impression on history. Renaissance sculptors carved their own marble statues based on the belief that that's how the ever wise Greeks did things.

The Reality:

Ancient Greece looked more like someone crashed their LGBT pride parade into a Mardi Gras Festival.

Recent studies using the awesome powers of lasers and shit (no, seriously!) have found that once completing the iconic marble statues and buildings we know today, the Greeks covered them head to toe in bright primary colors. Greek sculptors worked together with painters to come up with psychedelic patterns and colors to make their statues and buildings pop.

So in the midst of all that theorizing and philosophizing, the Greeks were also really focused on making sure their day to day life looked like the album cover of Magical Mystery Tour. Oh, and you know the iconic Parthenon? Based on the way buildings were painted back then, it was most likely an eye-searing mash of bright yellow, red and blue.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

As years passed, like with the Pyramids, the primitive paint used on the statues chipped and wore off, so when they were rediscovered by later civilizations, they appeared in their all white form. And frankly people just liked the idea of the all white marble look.

Even so, archaeologists knew that the statues used to be painted, since there were ancient records showing people painting the damned things. However, people simply preferred to display the plain white statues, since they looked more like something made by the founders of Western civilization should look like, in the minds of many scholars. Pure, clean, capturing the shape and essence of scientific accuracy and artistic beauty--whereas the painted versions kinda looked like something you might have made during middle school art class.

3 Nobody Dressed How You Think They Dressed

The Perception:

So already it's pretty clear that if we don't have photos laying around of the historical period in question, we're basically just guessing. And that's interesting considering how many figures from the distant past we think we have a perfectly clear image of. For instance, ninjas looked like this:

Vikings looked like this:

And as anyone who's ever attended a Thanksgiving event at an American grade school knows, pilgrims looked like this:

The Reality:

The ninja outfit is ridiculous, if you think about it. If you're an assassin and your job is to blend in, you don't do that by dressing in a black bodysuit that screams "ninja" from a mile away. So, they dressed like normal people--workers, monks, merchants, basically anything that looked as un-ninja as humanly possible was the perfect disguise. This way, they could sneak around unnoticed, day or night.

On rare occasions when they needed to move through the dark undetected, they still didn't wear black. Dark blue is the color you want if you want to blend in at night; someone in all black would stand out like a silhouette.

As for the Vikings, the one single thing we know them for--wearing huge horns on their helmets--isn't true. They just wore regular helmets, not anything fancy. Here's some advice: If you want a career in something that requires a lot of hand-to-hand combat, don't wear anything that's easy for people to grab onto. This is why when cops wear ties, they wear clip-ons. It's also why you don't want something on your hat that is essentially a giant set of handlebars.

As for the pilgrims, they were simple, farming folk, and as such wore clothes that made sense for the job. Do you really think someone would toil in the field or chop wood for hours on end dressed in a heavy coat and shiny shoes? If you're gonna have a long, hard day of stealing Indian land, you gotta at least have a shirt that breathes.

Therefore, it was more common to see guys in baggy shirts and pants, and gals in simple dresses. Hats were floppy and buckle-free, and boots were made of beat up leather and tied with bows. On top of that, the image of the demure, black and white puritan is also a myth, as people owned clothes in a range of colors including bright yellows, blues, reds and greens.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

The ninjas can thank the theater. In Edo period theater (which came about one hundred years after ninjas were around), playwrights needed a trick to show how sneaky ninjas were on stage, as well as a way to make them into "invisible" assassins. The stage hands already dressed in all black, so the audience had long been used to ignoring them since they weren't "part of the play." So, actors playing ninjas started dressing up in all black, too. Then the whole audience would jump when one of them would leap out of nowhere and kill a dude. Also, it looks totally badass.

As for the Vikings, Greek and Roman historians wrote about warriors from the North with horned helmets, which in and of itself was just an exaggeration used to make them sound like scarier bad guys for their stories. Also, it looks totally badass.

And the pilgrims, with their black hats and brass buckles on everything? Well, in the early 1600s, there were people who dressed that way, but those were the urban puritans back in England --precisely the people who decided not to become pilgrims and instead stay home in the first place. The reason we have the image of pilgrims dressing the same is because all the existing portraits of people from the era come from England. Also, it looks totally badass.

2 Jesus Looked Nothing Like the Paintings

The Perception:

Occasionally someone will come forward having seen the face of Christ in, say, a hunk of wood, or a toasted sandwich.

And always you can immediately recognize the face because of the trademark long hair and beard. It's maybe the most recognizable face in the world.

White guy, usually even with light hair and eyes. It's not just some pop culture invention; check out this image of Jesus found in the Room of The Segnatura at the Vatican:

The Reality:

As you can probably guess, Yeshua of Nazareth, the man Christians think of as "Jesus Christ" today, actually looked a lot more Middle Eastern seeing as he was... well... actually Middle Eastern.

That's just an artist rendering based on what the average person of the time and place Jesus actually came from looked like, but you get the idea.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

For the dominant image of Jesus as a whitey, we have artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo to thank. A lot of the paintings of Jesus they made during the Renaissance became the "definitive" versions of his image, and they were just portraying him as a handsome Italian man, like everyone else in their paintings.

But the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aren't the only ones to blame; European paintings from the Medieval ages did the same whitewashing, most likely because, in the age of the Crusades, the Church was better off not reminding people they were praying to a little, brown Jew.

Of course, this racial artistic license isn't exclusive to white people, either--Jesus has been portrayed as Black, Hispanic and Asian, depending on who painted the picture.

1 The Big Bang Wasn't a Bang

The Perception:

You don't need an extensive education in astrophysics to guess what the Big Bang looked like. It's called the freaking Big Bang. It must have been some kind of big ass explosion, right? Hell, even Carl Sagan agrees--after all, that's how he shows it in one of his highly respected documentaries.

The Reality:

Since nobody was around to observe it, there is still debate surrounding the exact details of the origins of the cosmos, but it most certainly did not look like an explosion as presented in the above freeze-frame. There are some who say the origin of the universe came in a moment of extremely rapid matter expansion, aka the "Big Bang Theory." But the other, most common, camp is the "steady state" theory, wherein the universe has been expanding at the same rate since day one, and continues to expand at the same pace even now. Either way, though, both sides agree there was no "explosion." Instead the universe expanded like a balloon full of dark matter and other cool sci-fi sounding sciencey stuff.

The main argument between the groups of physicists is basically how fast the balloon inflated, not whether the balloon inflated or exploded in a ball of fire.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

The whole problem comes back to that really misleading name. So, what kind of jerk would come up with the name "Big Bang" if they were a smart enough scientist to know it was more of a "gradual swelling"?

Turns out it was one more opposed to the idea of a Big Bang than most. Fred Hoyle was an astrophysicist firmly on the "steady state" side of the great debate of the birth of life, the universe, and everything. He came up with the phrase "Big Bang" as a way to simply explain the viewpoint he disagreed with, intending people to hear the name and think the idea of a giant explosion giving birth to existence was ridiculous.

This was a gross misjudgment of human nature. As soon as he suggested there was a huge explosion at the birth of the universe, we latched onto that idea and never let it go. Hoyle simply failed to grasp how profoundly our species loves big-ass explosions.

When not ruining dinosaurs for everybody else, Alexander L. Hoffman writes sketchy comedy for First, The TRANYA! and Ritchie Redd. You can contact Alexander here.

Find out what other lies you've been tricked into believing, in 6 Bullshit Facts About Psychology That Everyone Believes and 6 Subtle Ways The News Media Disguises Bullshit As Fact.