| ▲ | alexpotato 2 days ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This reminds me of Herodotus [0]. For those that don't know about him: - he was an ancient historian - he made a lot of "wild claims" e.g. there was a tribe that made clothes out of human skin - historians assumed these were myths or exaggerated - recent research has shown that many of his wild claims were true (even the one above) [1] 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus 1 - https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-scythians-us... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | kromem 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Part of the issue was that Herodotus reported what his sources said. So rather than it being 'Herodotus' as a single reliable or unreliable source, it was more like a collection of unvetted sources. As a result, you got stories about dog sized ants that were nonsense but then also stories that were legit. People tend to be rather binary with how they process information, so when there's things that are wrong they group everything in the 'wrong' category. Definitely a lot of false negatives with how Herodotus was regarded. Much like how the prevailing consensus was that Troy was a fictional city until it was discovered. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | science4sail 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I think that there is often a desire to downplay the ancients as liars and/or fools where their claims conflict with modern political sensitivities (even Thucydides just a few decades after Herodotus called him a tall tale teller). I've been re-reading Herodotus and his work is actually pretty good for its time. You just have to remember that he, just like a modern day travel blogger, both sees the world through the lens of an upper class Greek and also has to keep his audience engaged with cool trivia and clickbait. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | monocasa 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
To be fair, Herodotus also didn't believe everything he wrote down. Both implicitly such as recording blatantly mutually exclusive accounts, as well just just explicitly stating that he didn't believe everything on several occasions such as "it is my business to record what people say, but I am by no means obliged to believe it." He was pretty open about the fact that he basically wrote down any interesting stories, and was not attempting to find some historical truth, but instead transition as much as possible from oral tradition to written. He mostly gets called the father of history for this semi-novel take. That you can (and in most cases, should) strive for recorder and interpreter to be separate tasks. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||