I've been suspecting for a while that what we are taught to think of the past is super skewed, and I started waking up to that when I learned how horribly anglophone "scholars" raped the pronunciation of Greek letters.

The Greek "gods" sound like parodies of elite assholes because that's exactly what they were. And the same infantile minds who take everything literally eventually won out over the people who remembered that Zeus, etc, were just characters in a soap opera, and people told stories to deliver a point, or a metaphor, to teach kids about morals or how to do stuff, or even just for fun, and that no one anywhere ever had any kind of magic powers. And so stories get passed down and changed from generation to generation.

Imagine archaeologists finding the popular art of our day, and thinking we worshipped little statues of Batman and Superman and other popular characters, their icons are ON EVERYTHING. So you use what survives to try to make sense of how these character-gods related to each other, and what their spheres of influence were ...

(Or take into consideration something like this statue of Al Waxman.)