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eternalmunchies t1_ixk3sjr wrote

Reply to comment by Pornalt190425 in Lost islands cited in Welsh folklore and poetry are plausible, new evidence on the evolution of the coastline of west Wales has revealed by marketrent

>The "problem" with objectively believing folklore or oral traditions without any other evidence is that they are folklore and oral traditions.

>Ancient written records will have this problem to a degree from all the copying, translating, recopying and retranslating (not to say anything about the biases of the storytellers either).

So it's clearly not about oral vs written. No history-keeping is positively objective. It just happen that our historiographic tradition emphasizes writing and has an elitist take on oral traditions (normally identified with the "other cultures", or the iliterate poor classes).

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Pornalt190425 t1_ixkcjx8 wrote

I dont wont discount cultural elitism taking play to some degree in the general perception between the two

But that being said written records do allow the records to survive and be examined a bit easier. For exame you could start checking the historicity of something by seeing if someone else wrote about it. If say the Babylonian, Egyptian and Asyrian records all agree that an event went a certain way (especially when those areas were independent from each other. Seperate kingdoms dont have as much of a vested interest in telling the same story) all record an event the same way from roughly the same time period there's more credence to the telling. 3 seperate oral records are less likely (in general) to have come down through the ages than cuneiform tablets.

You could also potentially trace translations and versions of the story through time to see how it morphed and evolved in the retellings or when being translated. That would be something like comparing the dead sea scolls to a modern old testament/Torah. How much it varies overtime and what varies over time can give hints and clues.

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