Quote:what do we know about history outside documents? what you say is saying we can't know history because we can't trust historical documents.
Another of your gems that I missed, chippy.
Try this and see if you can understand it ( which I doubt.) People LIE. They lie for a lot of reasons. When they are not deliberately lying they are frequently wrong. If they are wrong sometimes it is because they are misled by sources and sometimes they simply do not know WTF they are talking about. Sometimes, they just made shit up to advance the story.
Julius Caesar, in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War) claims that 250,000 Gauls came as a reinforcement to relieve the siege of Alesia. According to you, chippy, the simple fact that Caesar wrote this down makes it true. We should not question it. The number is fucking absurd. But it makes great propaganda which is what The Gallic War was all about. Caesar wasn't writing for his own troops. Most of them were illiterate. He wasn't writing for the Gauls who did not speak Latin. Caesar was writing to energize his supporters in Rome and scare the shit out of the senatorial party.
Herodotus, writing about the Persian invasion of Greece under Xerxes gave a figure of 2.1 million Persians. The number is preposterous. But the audience ( Greeks ) ate it up because it made their subsequent victory look even better.
Your fucking bible claims that 185,000 Assyrians died outside Jerusalem in a plague sent by your fucking god to save the city. 185,000 men to attack a town of perhaps 10,000 people? It would take a xtian fool to believe such nonsense.
So here we have examples of lying for propaganda. With Herodotus we also have the story of how 100,000 slaves labored for 20 years to build the pyramids. This story was told by his Egyptian guide who had no idea how the pyramids were built. Herodotus was simply misled.
Livy recounts the tale of Trojans escaping Troy and fleeing to Italy. Is that true because Livy wrote it? He also wrote about Romulus and Remus being shoved in a basket and put into a river( sound familiar????) and saved by a wolf. I guess you believe that too because, WTF, its written down?
I'm hoping by this point you have gotten the hint. Virtually everything written by ancient historians must be taken cum grano salis. As the noted British scholar, Philip Davies has noted, literacy in the ancient world was so rare that one must not only consider the agenda of the author but also the point of view of the intended audience. I fully expect that someone like you who is so invested in a book of fairy tales will be unable to grasp the significance of what Davies is talking about.
