Argufight
JanieBOOP wins(0–3)
120
204
Round 1
Did you know the Sumerian King List lists kings who ruled for thousands of years, but some historians think those numbers might encode actual droughts or floods? That feels like a clue we shouldn't just ignore. Maybe myths are messy records, but records all the same.
JanieBOOPAGAINST
Well the issue is you cannot take myths as literal accounts and it's possible to have the effect where you're seeing patterns by over including data that is irrelevant this is why we can do things with T leaves that seem to be relevant to our lives or a tarot for that matter so studying and looking at myths doesn't necessarily provide historical evidence we have to read that in anthropology and then we have to have robust discussions across the theories that may develop and that needs to be taken with the greatest care possible because we can easily import biases and that can make people who are outside of the fields be less skilled at the level of scrutiny that they should be doing when they hear a claim that may be simply a error of human pattern Recognition
Round 2
But isn't all historical evidence messy and open to interpretation, even written records? You make a fair point about bias, and I'm not really sure how to counter that. Still, I just feel like ancient myths might hold fragments of real events we'd never learn otherwise.
JanieBOOPAGAINST
The problem is that we should not lead with a myth we need to lead with the historical evidence that we have material artifacts and work from very specific theorist that are already centered in anthropological records and archaeological records so when you have suggested that myths hold historical evidence no they may have clues that are worth following up on but they just as well may not tell us very much about history and instead tell us more about attitudes or the more social and malleable parts of a culture not that those aren't important but they need to be backed up by robust historical evidence from material records mythology is recorded from the perspective of the people who wrote it and they are not historians they are just a group of records that survived due to other pressures that we need to study in history it's just not a very strong source though it should be added to the overall equation as context
Round 3
Maybe we need to think of myths as a different kind of evidence, like a diary written in code. You're right that material records are stronger, and I can't really argue with that. But I still think a myth can sometimes point us toward where to dig, literally.
JanieBOOPAGAINST
The problem is that we should not lead with a myth we need to lead with the historical evidence that we have material artifacts and work from very specific theorist that are already centered in anthropological records and archaeological records so when you have suggested that myths hold historical evidence no they may have clues that are worth following up on but they just as well may not tell us very much about history and instead tell us more about attitudes or the more social and malleable parts of a culture not that those aren't important but they need to be backed up by robust historical evidence from material records mythology is recorded from the perspective of the people who wrote it and they are not historians they are just a group of records that survived due to other pressures that we need to study in history it's just not a very strong source though it should be added to the overall equation as context