I dont wont discount cultural elitism taking play to some degree in the general perception between the two

But that being said written records do allow the records to survive and be examined a bit easier. For exame you could start checking the historicity of something by seeing if someone else wrote about it. If say the Babylonian, Egyptian and Asyrian records all agree that an event went a certain way (especially when those areas were independent from each other. Seperate kingdoms dont have as much of a vested interest in telling the same story) all record an event the same way from roughly the same time period there's more credence to the telling. 3 seperate oral records are less likely (in general) to have come down through the ages than cuneiform tablets.

You could also potentially trace translations and versions of the story through time to see how it morphed and evolved in the retellings or when being translated. That would be something like comparing the dead sea scolls to a modern old testament/Torah. How much it varies overtime and what varies over time can give hints and clues.

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Thanks for sharing that it was an interesting read! I guess with the right cultural carrots and sticks you could trust the story is being more accurately carried down the generations

Most human lives near flood plain/valley/ water banks. I would say it's more of coincidence more than anything. They are the best place to farm, but also the place that got wrecked by flood (although the flood, or rather the sediment left by it is the reason they're a fertile farming ground to begin with).

There is evidence for rapid filling of the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Persian Gulf

Of course “rapid” can mean “walking pace”

Technically I think they both may have been part of the same country under Charles V?

Caesars were emperors, just of a lower, junior grade to Augustuses. And, during the third century there were many emperors that only controlled a small amount of territory. In fact, barely any had control over the full empire

If you're referring to the convergence of the Tigris and Eurphrates themselves, they convergence at Al-Qurnah in Iraq, which is north of Kuwait. Of course, that's the modern convergence. Rivers change course and path over long periods of time.

All ancient lore pretty much has the story of a great flood, which probably go back to the end of the last ice ago about 11,000 years ago.

Mythology is generally defined as stories central to a culture or religion that don't always fit neatly into the historical record. Mythology very often holds clues to actual history (and sometimes it's just straightforwardly the most accurate oral history that could plausibly be retained through the generations), which is my point here: the mythology holds a clue to the existence of a place other disciplines of science have recently rediscovered.

Good job to you, and good job to East Bay. Beautiful exchange.

Also, African griots have a similar work ethic.

>The "problem" with objectively believing folklore or oral traditions without any other evidence is that they are folklore and oral traditions.

>Ancient written records will have this problem to a degree from all the copying, translating, recopying and retranslating (not to say anything about the biases of the storytellers either).

So it's clearly not about oral vs written. No history-keeping is positively objective. It just happen that our historiographic tradition emphasizes writing and has an elitist take on oral traditions (normally identified with the "other cultures", or the iliterate poor classes).

I did not know that. I apologize for any offense.

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Europe is still debating over where Columbus was born, even going as far as to exhume a clerics body. Meanwhile America is like “who cares let’s scrub his name from the continent”.

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You keep using the term “Americas” when Columbus didn’t discover or rediscover The Americas. They were named after Amerigo Vespucci who was the first European to spot them in 1501. As far as Columbus knew he just found some new islands “West Indies”.

Not sure why they would want to claim a mass murderer... He is not a person anyone should be proud to be associated with.

Hi!

It seems like you are talking about the popular but ultimately flawed and false "winners write history" trope!

While the expression is sometimes true in one sense (we'll get to that in a bit), it is rarely if ever an absolute truth, and particularly not in the way that the concept has found itself commonly expressed in popular history discourse. When discussing history, and why some events have found their way into the history books when others have not, simply dismissing those events as the imposed narrative of 'victors' actually harms our ability to understand history.

You could say that is in fact a somewhat "lazy" way to introduce the concept of bias which this is ultimately about. Because whoever writes history is the one introducing their biases to history.

A somewhat better, but absolutely not perfect, approach that works better than 'winners writing history' is to say 'writers write history'.

This is more useful than it initially seems. Until fairly recently the literate were a minority, and those with enough literary training to actually write historical narratives formed an even smaller and more distinct class within that.

To give a few examples, Genghis Khan must surely go down as one of the great victors in all history, but he is generally viewed quite unfavorably in practically all sources, because his conquests tended to harm the literary classes.
Similarly the Norsemen historically have been portrayed as uncivilized barbarians as the people that wrote about them were the "losers" whose monasteries got burned down.

Of course, writers are a diverse set, and so this is far from a magical solution to solving the problems of bias. The painful truth is, each source simply needs to be evaluated on its own merits.
This evaluation is something that is done by historians and part of what makes history and why insights about historical events can shift over time.

This is possibly best exemplified by those examples where victors did unambiguously write the historical sources.

The Spanish absolutely wrote the history of the conquest of Central America from 1532, and the reports and diaries of various conquistadores and priests are still important primary documents for researchers of the period.

But 'victors write the history' presupposes that we still use those histories as they intended, which is simply not the case. It both overlooks the fundamental nature of modern historical methodology, and ignores the fact that, while victors have often proven to be predominant voices, they have rarely proven to be the only voices.

Archaeology, numismatics, works in translation, and other records all allow us at least some insight into the 'losers' viewpoint, as does careful analysis of the 'winner's' records.
We know far more about Rome than we do about Phoenician Carthage. There is still vital research into Carthage, as its being a daily topic of conversation on this subreddit testifies to.

So while it's true that the balance between the voices can be disparate that doesn't mean that the winners are the only voice or even the most interesting.
Which is why stating that history is 'written by the victors' and leaving it at that is harmful to the understanding of history and the process of studying history.

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I guess that depends on what you consider to be rapid. 20m/year is quite quick.

A glacial damn breaking would take a while to clear fron the region. We can see this today when hurricanes cause inland flooding that takes days to subside.

There’s even known sunken islands around Britain already, Dogger Bank would have been Dogger Island 10,000 years ago, we’ve found evidence for human habitation in samples taken from the sea floor in the area.