Bad Ancient

Owen is the founder of Bad Ancient, a fact checking website made in collaboration with the great team behind Ancient World Magazine. The website examines claims made about the ancient world and determines whether these are true, false, or somewhere in between.

The project began as a Twitter hashtag, #badancient, that Owen uses as a teaching tool for his students. He noticed that his students often struggled to see the relevance of the ancient world in the modern day, and no matter how many poorly chosen modern pop-references he used, the problem could not be solved. So he began to collect examples from newspapers, magazines, memes, and so on, to begin the conversation in the classroom about how incorrect ‘facts’ were being used to manipulate us and our behaviours. How successful this was is . . . debatable, but it became a firm favourite for many online, and has given birth to this new website.