Posted: May 09, 2015 11:35 am
igorfrankensteen wrote: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.
Indeed. The person seeking the triumph to parade through Rome wearing his laurel crown, will always embellish the "truth" to the point of actually looting the homes of innocent bystanders to bring stolen wealth home with him.
The Geneva Convention prevents this now, but before that, the victors wrote the history and then stole whatever they could, and, as in the Bible, claim that the conquered "gave" them the jewels to bring with them.
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.
Yes, we'll never know what actually happened, not even if there were eye-witnesses.
Even Thuycidides said this when he reported the Peloponnesian War. He said that he wasn't always there to give an eye-witness account, so he relied on other people to tell him, which made the stories a little doubtful.
Christopher Hitchens once said that when he was a reporter and he read what other reporters wrote of the same event that he'd witnessed, he sometimes wondered if they were actually there, and whether they were reporting on the same story he was.
You can't go by personal accounts, or even eye-witness accounts. You have to weigh up what you're told, find what the stories have in common, then check those against other evidence. Which is why I read several websites, books, original reports etc. of the same story before I made conclusions about anything. My Goodreads book list seems like I spend an awful lot of time reading books about Ancient Rome, and nothing else. It's because Rome fascinates me, and every book, fictional or non-fiction, has different ways of looking at events in Rome, all of them interesting but sometimes the way the stories are embellished, makes me roll my eyes. If I had a time machine, I would love to have been there during the time of Caesar.
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.
I'm very doubtful about "truth" when it comes to history. Even if everything is accessible and easily examined, there are aspects to the people involved that even their closest friends, lovers, and family members don't know about them. Just look at the way we draw conclusions about people from what they say in a forum like this. Then look at their Facebook pages, meet them personally, talk to their family members, and everyone will have a different opinion about the subject being looked at. I often tell my kids that they don't know me, because they see me as their mother, there as aspects to me that they'll never see, and that I'll never tell them, but that other people know about me. So if it's that way for me, imagine how it is for people in the public eye. Take for example Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge. Last Saturday she gave birth. Within a few hours she appeared dressed to the nines, to show off the baby. What her husband knew, and the nurses, and hangers on who dressed her knew, was that she was probably falling off those high heels and could barely walk in them, and that she was also padded to the hilt to prevent a blood stain on that perfect dress. In history she'll go down as having looked "fabulous" after giving birth, when the real story is completely different.
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.
History is really only there for us to know the past, what happened, when, and where, and who was involved. Everything else is a bonus. As I said, I would love to have been able to talk to Julius Caesar to see what he was really thinking when he bedded Cleopatra, and how he felt when he was confronted with Pompey's head. We don't know. All we know is what the story tellers tell us.
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.
Yes. Most of it is deduction. Even when we are able to confirm that events happened, we can't say exactly what the people involved were thinking. A good example of this is Constantine's conversion.
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.
With instant imaging, recording devices and cameras on every phone now, we can be more accurate about recording history, but we're still dealing with people with feelings, biases, likes, dislikes, preferences and so on. Those are intangible, we can't know them.