Comment by Amezarak
1 month ago
Uh-huh. Here's the problem. Here's the way this almost always works: "Author X would have been BIASED because he belonged to Culture X that fought these people - so this is all fictional propaganda!"
Nearly all the time this is the entirety of the evidence. That is, there is no actual evidence, just people churning out papers because we live in a publish-or-perish world that well, maybe he would have been hypothetically motivated to lie or embellish. So therefore, he totally did. It's all fake!
The most notorious examples of this sort of pointlessness are claims that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians did not practice human sacrifice and it was all made up by Roman propaganda, nevermind the third-party information we have and now the archeological evidence. Rarely, in ancient examples, are they exhibiting much outrage over it.
Same for the Aztecs, another frequent target - we have non-Spanish evidence, and we never had any reason to doubt them in the first place. Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.
You are making pretty bold and sweeping statements.
Do you have a specific example for such a paper that has "no actual evidence", in an actual scientific magazine?
Considering author bias is absolute standard baseline practice in historical research, and OF COURSE it is only a starting point for a comparison with alternative sources.
> Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.
Tertullian, Apologeticum, Chapter 9:
"Babes were sacrificed publicly to Saturn in Africa till the proconsulate of Tiberius, who exposed the same priests on the same trees that overshadow the crimes of their temple, on dedicated crosses, as is attested by the soldiery of my father, which performed that very service for that proconsul. But even now this accursed crime is in secret kept up."
Does that sould "numb" to you?
Do you think blood libel is a modern creation?