PHOTO CREDIT: Above photo by John Rickman Photography, San Jose, California.

• Introduction
• How Can We Know That?
• Why Is "Wishtory" Bad?
• About Sources

• How to Tell Which "History" Is Well Researched
• Recommended Sources

The Internet is full of web sites boldly claiming that Oriental dance (belly dance) is "the oldest dance", "an ancient birth ritual", "a goddess dance", and "thousands of years old". There have also been a number of books published and videos released over the years that make similar claims. I refer to these claims as WISHful hisTORY, or "wishtory".

It's easy to understand why this belief in "the oldest dance" is so popular. From a feminist point of view, it's very appealing to imagine a time when the things women did were honored and respected by men, rather than being trivialized as they often are today. It's appealing to daydream of a time shrouded in the mists of history where women dance with hip drops and undulations all day, every day. It's appealing to imagine the idea of women being worshiped as goddesses, enthroned as queens who ruled in their own right, and empowered as decision-makers.

Ever since the rise of the three Abraham-based patriarchal religions, women in many cultures have been treated as "unclean", inferior to men, and subject to male-imposed rules about their sexuality. The concept of women being able to make their own decisions about their bodies, rather than being controlled by what men want them to do, fits very well with the feminist agenda of empowerment for women. I'm a feminist too. I get it.

However, it's time for us to grow up and realize that women of today can be empowered without making fanciful claims about the past that we are unable to confirm. Instead of repeating creative tales about the distant past spun by someone with more imagination than knowledge, we should be focusing on the factual knowledge on the real-life people who shaped the dance into what we know today.

Think about it - how can we truly know which style of dance is indeed the "oldest dance"? What is the evidence? How can we be sure that the very first human being to dance did so by shimmying the hips? Why isn't it equally plausible to imagine that the world's very first dance contained running steps and leaps?

Archaeologists have never discovered any sort of journal or other tangible record left by the very first person to move her or his body in time to music. Realistically, such a discovery seems very unlikely. There have been no discoveries announced in archaeology journals to proclaim the finding of a million-year-old video showing someone dancing.

Without any evidence, how can we claim we know what the "oldest dance" looked like? And why do we feel we need to make these claims? Why can't we accept that the earliest origins of Oriental dance are lost in time?

How can we claim that belly dance originated as a birth ritual? It's not as if the first women who ever did a hip drop left a journal for us to find that stated her reasons for doing it.

PHOTO CREDIT: Photo by Pixie Vision Productions, Glendale, California.

Here's why we need to move forward beyond our wishful thinking:

• Many organizations seek artists with respectable academic credentials. People who are perceived as being too uneducated, undisciplined, or lazy to work with standard research and analysis methodology need not apply.
• Projecting our own wishes onto the dance form of another culture creates a distorted view of that culture.
• "Wishtory" distracts people away from the provable facts about the history of the dance form. This is grossly disrespectful to the people who actually shaped the dance into the beautiful art form we love today.
• "Wishtory" deceives people into thinking they "know" something about Oriental dance, when in fact all it really reveals is the fantasy life of the person who made these claims.
• People with education in the social sciences recognize these tales for what they are - wishful thinking - and lose respect for our dance form when we repeat such stories as if they were fact.
• Oriental dance teachers who repeat such "wishtory" lose the respect of students who recognize this imaginative storytelling for what it is.
• Dancers who repeat "wishtory" consume other people's brain cells and time that could otherwise be spent on learning accurate information.
• People with an interest in Oriental dance history have limited amounts of money to spend. When that money is spent on books and classes spinning romantic tales about the past rather than on works containing factual research, it diverts funding away from supporting the work of those conducting and documenting the meaningful research.

Bad

Good

A book or web site states, "Belly dancing was done by priestesses to honor the goddess Isis."

It does not identify where this claim came from.

Page 21 of Sacred Woman Sacred Dance by Iris J. Stewart says, "The Homeric 'Hymn to Artemis' (c. 700 B.C.E.) spoke not of dances to Artemis but of Artemis as the dancer herself. 'And the sound of the lyre and dancing and joyful cries... there she arranges the lovely dance of the Muses and Graces.... adorned in elegant raiment, she takes command and leads in the dance."

[A footnote identifies the source of this quote as The Myth of the Goddess by Baring and Cashford.]

Bad

Good

Bad

Good

There are ancient depictions of movement on the walls of tombs at Saqqara, Egypt which scholars have identified as representing dance.

This is proof that belly dance is thousands of years old. [Without showing a copy of the image.]

There are ancient depictions of movement on the walls of tombs at Saqqara, Egypt which scholars have identified as representing dance. Because of the age of the Saqqara necropolis, these are considered to be the world's oldest images depicting dance known so far.

This is an example of one of those images. It appears in the tomb of Mehu, which is believed to date back to 3,000 B.C.E.:

As this illustration shows, the oldest images of dance that we have been able to discover so far are frequently quite acrobatic in nature, and do not resemble Oriental dance as we know it.

Bad

Good

A book states, "The Hopi for example perform dances to the Corn Goddess as corn is their staple food."

Considering that the Hopi are in North America and that Oriental dance originated in Africa and the Middle East, it seems peculiar and unfocused to be talking about the Hopi in a document about the history of belly dance.

The book offers no explanation of why a reference to the Hopi, who live on an entirely different continent and have no tradition of dance movement resembling belly dance, would be relevant to Middle Eastern dance history.

The researcher begins with a definition of "belly dancing" as "a torso-focused women's solo dance", perhaps quoting Andrea Deagon's SITA (solo improvised torso articulated).

The writer then proceeds to present evidence which suggests specific historical times and places in which such a dance was done.

Bad

Good

A dancer who performs with snakes writes a book about the history of belly dance. She includes a chapter with extensive information about the "snake goddess" figurines found among Minoan ruins at archaeological sites in Crete.

The book provides no explanation of why statues found among Minoan ruins would be relevant to belly dance.

If there actually was reason to believe Minoan snake figurines were linked to the ancient torso-focused women's dance found in the Levant and Africa, then this book should have explained the link. It should have presented evidence demonstrating cultural exchange, such as the discovery of Minoan artifacts in the Levant or Africa.

In the absence of any such evidence, the book should omit the chapter on snake-oriented religious cults.

This ancient statue of a woman was found in Austria. It is known as the Venus of Willendorf.

Many such statues have been found throughout Europe.

Bad

Good

This statue, with its exaggerated depictions of a female body, is an artifact once used in the worship of a great fertility goddess.

No one knows for certain why these statues were originally created.

The most widely accepted theory is that they may have been used in worship of a mother goddess figure, in a fertility cult.

Other possibilities could be that people carved them to honor loved ones who had died, or perhaps for use as an ancient type of pornography.

In my own research, I have come to believe the most likely reason people created these statues is ___ because ___.

Consider this photo that Shira took when attending a show at a nightclub in Egypt in 2004.

Bad

Good

This photo shows a nightclub performer in Egypt.

This photo was taken of a performance that opened the show at the Parisiana nightclub on Pyramid Street in Giza, Egypt in July 2004.

At the time this photo was taken, there was a trend in Egypt for performers from Eastern Europe to present ensemble dances as part of a nightclub's evening entertainment wearing costumes that covered as little as legally permitted. Their purpose was to titillate the mostly-male patrons. This style of dance show is known in Egypt as "a Russian show".

This particular performance, dubbed "The Golden Show", was intended to evoke a 19th-century French burlesque flavor of dancing, in keeping with the theme suggested by the name of the club. This was not an "Oriental dance" show, and the Arab tourists who represented the primary customers of this club would have understood this.

Bad

Good

The only information provided by the caption and/or accompanying text is this:

Jean-Léon Gerôme. Dance of the Almeh. Oil painting. Dayton Art Institute, Ohio.

Jean-Léon Gerôme, the artist who created this painting, was a leader in the 19th-century art movement known as Orientalism. He personally spent some time in Egypt, and built a reputation of realistically portraying what he actually saw, although some art historians dispute these claims of realism.

This oil painting, "Dance of the Almeh", is believed to have been created around 1875. The dancer's garments resemble what women of the time wore in the privacy of the women's quarters of their homes, but the transparency of the blouse over the breasts and belly was probably added by the artist to make his painting more titillating and attract buyers. Orientalist paintings frequently served as the pornography of their day.

Bad

Good

A writer states, "Sadly, this beautiful dance was corrupted by nightclub owners who dressed the performers in skimpy costumes and paraded them on a cabaret stage for the pleasure of men."

In her book When the Drummers Were Women, Layne Redmond refers to an ancient drawing in which a circular object is being held on its edge. According to Redmond, archaeologists captioned that picture as "woman holding a cake".

Redmond then states an opinion whose purpose is to show her differing interpretation of the primary source:

"Most people know you wouldn't hold a cake that way, so it's more reasonable to conclude that the round object is a frame drum."

• Fact or Fiction: Which Dance History Claims Should You Believe?