Ask HN: Did people in the middle ages re-enact ancient times?

There's a lot of stuff that's attributed to "ritual" and "religion", but I believe a lot of that is simply entertainment. Aristotle wrote in Poetics of Greek epics being unnecessary spectacle, which makes The Odyssey sound like The Avengers of the era. 3000 years from now, people will talk of Batman worship. The animal headed deities of the ancient era could just be a furry thing.

Also take note that Ancient Greece and Egypt lasted for a very long time. By Cleopatra's time, the Pyramid of Giza had been around for over 2000 years. It could well be that they did reenactments back then too.

They believed that the older something was, the more "truthful" it must be. E.g., Hellenes mistakenly regarded Jews as a people with the most ancient books and religion[2], and therefore, as being true

I think it's somewhat similar to how Earthlings might react if we were to encounter an older alien civilization

This somewhat resembles the Lindy Effect on an intuitive level

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

[2] back then they didn't knew about Sumerians and Akkadians