LOL. Yeah the Romans were known for never being corrupt and they would never ever be skimming some tax revenue! Therefore those tax numbers were 100% accurate all of the time.
And Julius Caesar defeated one zillion Gauls at the Battle of Alesia. He would never exaggerate, because people cared a lot about whether the things they were writing were true.
I think I’ll go on thinking that primary sources are all inherently flawed. The Viking sagas talk about their colony in Vinland along with fighting sea serpents. They’re mostly bullshit, but it’s the only written record of Vinland which is supported by archaeological evidence. Do you discard everything in the sagas because there’s some mythological stuff in them? Do you inherently trust Roman records about taxes because they they’re dry and boring?
Or maybe historians are correct to consider the context of any work written (and that includes religious texts) alongside archaeological evidence? Also consider that for most of history most people couldn’t read or write. There’s always oral history that’s written down centuries later. Many things were never written down, and many things that were written down were destroyed. We have a limited amount of information from historical texts and given how uncommon literacy was in past, it’s usually written by either a wealthy person, someone employed by a wealthy person, or a priest. It’s always going to be an incomplete picture, and it all has a lot of bullshit in it.
Less bullshit, not perfectly credible. Records on taxes and grain production are much more plausible than magic powers.
LOL. Yeah the Romans were known for never being corrupt and they would never ever be skimming some tax revenue! Therefore those tax numbers were 100% accurate all of the time.
And Julius Caesar defeated one zillion Gauls at the Battle of Alesia. He would never exaggerate, because people cared a lot about whether the things they were writing were true.
I think I’ll go on thinking that primary sources are all inherently flawed. The Viking sagas talk about their colony in Vinland along with fighting sea serpents. They’re mostly bullshit, but it’s the only written record of Vinland which is supported by archaeological evidence. Do you discard everything in the sagas because there’s some mythological stuff in them? Do you inherently trust Roman records about taxes because they they’re dry and boring?
Or maybe historians are correct to consider the context of any work written (and that includes religious texts) alongside archaeological evidence? Also consider that for most of history most people couldn’t read or write. There’s always oral history that’s written down centuries later. Many things were never written down, and many things that were written down were destroyed. We have a limited amount of information from historical texts and given how uncommon literacy was in past, it’s usually written by either a wealthy person, someone employed by a wealthy person, or a priest. It’s always going to be an incomplete picture, and it all has a lot of bullshit in it.