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It's fascinating that various Irish, Scottish and (I think, but not sure) Welsh legends make a similar eastern origin claim. Over the last generation, we've ha

It's fascinating that various Irish, Scottish and (I think, but not sure) Welsh legends make a similar eastern origin claim. Over the last generation, we've had a bunch of what was assumed to be fiction confirmed. Eric the red's voyage and viking visits to North America. All sorts of very old biblical narratives are being confirmed, the existence of early iron age kings and conflicts, for example, are being confirmed by archeology. Troy, and the possible historical conflict with the Greek aegeans... Also from the bronze)iron age transition period. It's like a swing. Modern historians worked hard to get rid of all the bible-based histories. A few generations later, the Bible (and lots of other old books and oral traditions) is a surprisingly reliable source... as are folk legends. Noah's flood is as legitimate as it has been for 100 years. Searching for Atlantis is as non-crazy as it has been for even longer. Some aboriginal Australian oral histories are now thought (by some) to be incomprehensibly, mind boggingly old... I'm still hoping for confirmation of at Brendan the voyager.

luckydata 8y ago
C'mon, the Bible is the book of grossly exaggerated stories for moralistic purposes to be charitable. Yeah the authors referred to things that might have happened but they are as reliable as my 4yo retelling his day.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Sounds like a well-read (in both the Bible and History) point /s
  - luckydata 8y ago
    What part of that sentence makes you think I don't know either? Would you say the Bible is particularly accurate or reliable as an historical source or are you accusing my son of being a reliable narrator?
SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
> Modern historians worked hard to get rid of all the bible-based histories. A few generations later, the Bible (and lots of other old books and oral traditions) is a surprisingly reliable source... as are folk legends. Do you have a source for that? My undergrad education is in history, and I am not aware of any attempt to get rid of bible-based histories. Are there attempts to look at the actual historicity of the events and to place them in their appropriate context? Absolutely, but there's no attempt to simply get rid of the histories.
- azimuth11 8y ago
  I can’t provide one, but maybe I can deduce what the author was trying to say. Religion obviously causes biases, and those biases could inhibit scientific process. In popular culture, most people think of scientists as atheists and that they try to disprove one side vs. comparing them in an unbiased fashion.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    That's making a lot of assumptions about the nature of historical research. I believe people are mistaking "trying to find other evidence for claims" as being synonymous with "trying to get rid of". When you put the authors of the bible in their historical context many are removed via proximity or time from the actual events described (for instance, Paul didn't know Jesus before his crucifixion, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all written 60-110 years later), and so there's is going to be a search for primary sources that corroborate what was said.
    - azimuth11 8y ago
      Correct. I mistakenly said author, and was referring dalbasal’s comment. My point was that people (on both sides of this issue) do mistake fact checking with agenda when it comes to religion because of the polarizing nature of the topic.
- iskander 8y ago
  I don't know about generalizations across all "modern historians" but Biblical Minimalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_minimalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_minimalism) was a big trend in near Eastern archaeology. They had/have legit criticism of how modern definitions/attitudes taint our interpretation of the archaeological record. But...ultimately, that view ignores that many of the places (and even some of the people) of the Biblical narrative from the 9th century BCE seem to roughly match the archeological record. And even before that the record is simply incomplete or mixed, rather than directly contradicting the Biblical era of prophets and early kings. For example, at the Elah Fortress site (10th century BC), there were no pig bones (unlike Philistine sites) and a fragmentary inscription that at least resembles the Israelite culture depicted by the Bible: 1 you shall not do [it], but worship (the god) [El] 2 Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an] 3 [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and] 4 the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king 5 Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger. This isn't evidence for the Bible (which makes lots of other unprovable magical claims) but rather evidence that parts of the Bible do accurately convey information about an ancient society.
Bithisarea 8y ago
The franks also held to be descendants of the trojans, who lived in modern-day turkey: https://www.academia.edu/1720062/The_Common_Trojan_Origin_of_Franks_and_Turks_in_the_Chronicle_of_Fredegar https://www.academia.edu/1720062/The_Common_Trojan_Origin_of...
senorjazz 8y ago
> the Bible (and lots of other old books and oral traditions) is a surprisingly reliable source... Going to need a source for that. > Noah's flood is as legitimate as it has been for 100 years To an extent. 95%+ of the story is false, apart from there (probably) was a big flood. But the majority if the story is false. As with most of the stories in the bible, they tied them into some real events to ground them to the people, to myths of the age, then wove into them a fantasy story perhaps with enough grounding to reality to state "based on a true story", but probably not even that
- 4ntonius8lock 8y ago
  I personally wouldn't have used the Bible as an example, but... I too am impressed that so many old folk tales/myths/legends have recently been found to have a basis of reality. I mean, the way I see it: There are stories from a decade ago 'based on a true story' and if you look at our modern 'myths', like a movie based on a true story, generally they are very loosely based on the true story. And that is with our modern ability to document and review what happened in the past. These stories were oral tradition for hundreds of years before being written. The fact that they have any basis left is amazing and a testament to the powerful events that resonated through history. It's a testament to the ability of humans to pass on information in a uni directional time dimension. * I'm completely non-religious.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    > I too am impressed that so many old folk tales/myths/legends have recently been found to have a basis of reality. Why wouldn't they? You're going to want to pass on interesting stories. And what other means would they have had to transfer knowledge if not through oral tradition? It would have been the only available medium. The stories deemed interesting or important would have been the way people would have entertained each other. The other thing to keep in mind is that with these stories we can suffer from historical pareidolia - where if the parts of the story fit the truth just enough we assume that must be the basis. I don't know if that's always the case.
    - 8y ago
pcmaffey 8y ago
Was reading recently about viking trips to North America (c 1100 AD?), which they surprising called Vinland. Grapes are not viable in north eastern Canada, which indicates that they traveled quite far south. Unless of course, like Greenland and Iceland, the naming was a marketing ploy.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  It's my impression that the vikings were operating some logging camps in North America, so a marketing ploy to get more laborers seems plausible.
- singularity2001 8y ago
  vine grape apple melon where/are all just words for 'fruit' at some stage / in some dialect.
btilly 8y ago
Searching for Atlantis is as non-crazy as it has been for even longer. I'm pretty sure that Atlantis was found a long time ago. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_hypotheses_of_Atlantis#Thera_(Santorini) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_hypotheses_of_Atlanti... summarizes, the historical evidence of Atlantis is in Plato. And if we assume an easy to make factor of 10 misreading of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Plato's description fits the known destruction of Minoan civilization by the Theran volcano. Yeah, not as glamorous as space aliens. But it fits all known evidence, including archeological.

luckydata 8y ago

C'mon, the Bible is the book of grossly exaggerated stories for moralistic purposes to be charitable. Yeah the authors referred to things that might have happened but they are as reliable as my 4yo retelling his day.

coldtea 8y ago
Sounds like a well-read (in both the Bible and History) point /s
- luckydata 8y ago
  What part of that sentence makes you think I don't know either? Would you say the Bible is particularly accurate or reliable as an historical source or are you accusing my son of being a reliable narrator?

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago

> Modern historians worked hard to get rid of all the bible-based histories. A few generations later, the Bible (and lots of other old books and oral traditions) is a surprisingly reliable source... as are folk legends. Do you have a source for that? My undergrad education is in history, and I am not aware of any attempt to get rid of bible-based histories. Are there attempts to look at the actual historicity of the events and to place them in their appropriate context? Absolutely, but there's no attempt to simply get rid of the histories.

azimuth11 8y ago
I can’t provide one, but maybe I can deduce what the author was trying to say. Religion obviously causes biases, and those biases could inhibit scientific process. In popular culture, most people think of scientists as atheists and that they try to disprove one side vs. comparing them in an unbiased fashion.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  That's making a lot of assumptions about the nature of historical research. I believe people are mistaking "trying to find other evidence for claims" as being synonymous with "trying to get rid of". When you put the authors of the bible in their historical context many are removed via proximity or time from the actual events described (for instance, Paul didn't know Jesus before his crucifixion, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all written 60-110 years later), and so there's is going to be a search for primary sources that corroborate what was said.
  - azimuth11 8y ago
    Correct. I mistakenly said author, and was referring dalbasal’s comment. My point was that people (on both sides of this issue) do mistake fact checking with agenda when it comes to religion because of the polarizing nature of the topic.
iskander 8y ago
I don't know about generalizations across all "modern historians" but Biblical Minimalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_minimalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_minimalism) was a big trend in near Eastern archaeology. They had/have legit criticism of how modern definitions/attitudes taint our interpretation of the archaeological record. But...ultimately, that view ignores that many of the places (and even some of the people) of the Biblical narrative from the 9th century BCE seem to roughly match the archeological record. And even before that the record is simply incomplete or mixed, rather than directly contradicting the Biblical era of prophets and early kings. For example, at the Elah Fortress site (10th century BC), there were no pig bones (unlike Philistine sites) and a fragmentary inscription that at least resembles the Israelite culture depicted by the Bible: 1 you shall not do [it], but worship (the god) [El] 2 Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an] 3 [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and] 4 the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king 5 Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger. This isn't evidence for the Bible (which makes lots of other unprovable magical claims) but rather evidence that parts of the Bible do accurately convey information about an ancient society.

Bithisarea 8y ago

The franks also held to be descendants of the trojans, who lived in modern-day turkey: https://www.academia.edu/1720062/The_Common_Trojan_Origin_of_Franks_and_Turks_in_the_Chronicle_of_Fredegar https://www.academia.edu/1720062/The_Common_Trojan_Origin_of...

senorjazz 8y ago

> the Bible (and lots of other old books and oral traditions) is a surprisingly reliable source... Going to need a source for that. > Noah's flood is as legitimate as it has been for 100 years To an extent. 95%+ of the story is false, apart from there (probably) was a big flood. But the majority if the story is false. As with most of the stories in the bible, they tied them into some real events to ground them to the people, to myths of the age, then wove into them a fantasy story perhaps with enough grounding to reality to state "based on a true story", but probably not even that

4ntonius8lock 8y ago
I personally wouldn't have used the Bible as an example, but... I too am impressed that so many old folk tales/myths/legends have recently been found to have a basis of reality. I mean, the way I see it: There are stories from a decade ago 'based on a true story' and if you look at our modern 'myths', like a movie based on a true story, generally they are very loosely based on the true story. And that is with our modern ability to document and review what happened in the past. These stories were oral tradition for hundreds of years before being written. The fact that they have any basis left is amazing and a testament to the powerful events that resonated through history. It's a testament to the ability of humans to pass on information in a uni directional time dimension. * I'm completely non-religious.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  > I too am impressed that so many old folk tales/myths/legends have recently been found to have a basis of reality. Why wouldn't they? You're going to want to pass on interesting stories. And what other means would they have had to transfer knowledge if not through oral tradition? It would have been the only available medium. The stories deemed interesting or important would have been the way people would have entertained each other. The other thing to keep in mind is that with these stories we can suffer from historical pareidolia - where if the parts of the story fit the truth just enough we assume that must be the basis. I don't know if that's always the case.
  - 8y ago

pcmaffey 8y ago

Was reading recently about viking trips to North America (c 1100 AD?), which they surprising called Vinland. Grapes are not viable in north eastern Canada, which indicates that they traveled quite far south. Unless of course, like Greenland and Iceland, the naming was a marketing ploy.

darkpuma 8y ago
It's my impression that the vikings were operating some logging camps in North America, so a marketing ploy to get more laborers seems plausible.
singularity2001 8y ago
vine grape apple melon where/are all just words for 'fruit' at some stage / in some dialect.

btilly 8y ago

Searching for Atlantis is as non-crazy as it has been for even longer. I'm pretty sure that Atlantis was found a long time ago. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_hypotheses_of_Atlantis#Thera_(Santorini) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_hypotheses_of_Atlanti... summarizes, the historical evidence of Atlantis is in Plato. And if we assume an easy to make factor of 10 misreading of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Plato's description fits the known destruction of Minoan civilization by the Theran volcano. Yeah, not as glamorous as space aliens. But it fits all known evidence, including archeological.