rationalskepticism.org

Agrippina wrote:Here is an example of evidence from a genuine ancient source, c8th century BCE.

Sennacharib's Prism

What I find amazing about this thing, and the stele with Hammurabi's Code is the amount of time and patience it must have taken to carve these words into the stone. Serious tenacity there.

The content might be as questionable as the Bible, and as Herodotus's Histories, but the fact that this thing exists, and can be dated to the period it refers to makes it more valid than the Bible which was gone through three millennia of writing, rewriting, chopping and changing, and which can be shown to have faulty history.

So we take Isaiah's account of the siege of Jerusalem, compare it with this stone, and somewhere in the middle, with the help of archaeology, we find something that may resemble the truth.

Again, a suggestion to expand on your thinking here...

I would agree that a document which can be dated to the time of the occurrence that it describes, might suffer less from the various "evolutions" which can distort descriptions handed down over many years. But one must be cautious about using the words "more valid," or of THINKING along those lines. As it mentions in the link you provide, this kind of carefully made and preserved by those who created them, not out of any special love for truth, but in order to proclaim the great glory of the Assyrians. A propaganda treatis, tends to be LESS accurate, the closer it is to the time of the events it describes.

The comparison of Biblical sources to this three-sided clay tablet is best considered, for the insight each provide into the goals and psyche of those doing the telling. The Biblical sources want to glorify the authority of their god, just as the Prism sources want to glorify the power of the Assyrian ruler. It would be nice if Archaeological sources could sort out the truth, though particularly in the well and thoroughly trod lands of the M.E., discerning hard proof that this particular battle took place at all, is dicey.

And of primary importance in a given version of History, are the goals and ideals of the Historian themselves. We may like to think that capital T Truth is our goal here in the US, and in these times, but what we are willing to believe is Truth, may be colored and shaded by what we secondarily believe is Important. And that may not be what was Important at the time of the actual occurrences.

In the end, the study of the past may or may not provide us with exact and accurate descriptions of detailed events. But the primary reason why History is valuable to study, to provide us with useful knowledge of ourselves and our own lives. Therefore, recognizing that we are looking at the contrasted viewpoints of the various players, and not necessarily at the exact real occurrences, is actually more valuable to us than a basic recitation of deaths and wounds. The ways that each peoples lie, or at least ELABORATE about the past, tells us much more about them, than the real facts themselves do.

Many people died. Why were their deaths accepted by each side? Why were some hidden, if they were? The better Historians don't GUESS the answers to these kinds of questions, they DEDUCE them, based on all manner of additional knowledge, gained from many sources, including direct personal experiences.

And because this mix of observations and deductions is critical to coming to an understanding which might be considered to be close to True, it is actually imperative that we do NOT get hung up on trying to make History into the sort of "hard science" which comes to permanent decisions, since this tends to put an end to further collection of knowledge, particularly that which gives us the most important insights.