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by watwut 2339 days ago
Nitpick: "the winner writes the history" is an important part of studying history whether written or oral. People who write books or repeat old stories have biases, opions on how world works and open agendas. They leave out stuff they think dont matter or crosses taboos or does not make people look like as they are supposed to. Just as contemporary people lie, especially politicians and leadership, ancient civilizations discovered advantages of bending the truth or lying too.

Being aware of that and being aware of point of view is important part of historical work.
1 comments
whatshisface 2339 days ago
What are a few examples of when we've caught, instead of merely suspected, a lying ancient historian?
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watwut 2339 days ago
According to Plato, Socrates himself defended "noble lie" as in lie that "to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda".

Besides, "ancient historians" were not historians in our sense of the word at all, so I don't understand why are you asking for historian specifically. They wrote a lot of obvious myths (falus appearing out of fire) and there is no expectation for those texts to be accurate.

Ancient texts were written for purpose and with limited knowledge (just like any contemporary text) and it would be oddly naive to think anything else.

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whatshisface 2339 days ago
I'm asking if there are any instances where an ancient author is known to have lied about something that could be believed by a modern historian if they didn't know any better. For example maybe some Sumerian committed tax fraud on clay tablets, but we caught them thousands of years later. I'm wondering if any specific examples of that are out there.

Edit: to be clear, I'm asking for a specific example, not an argument that an example probably exists out there somewhere.

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d0mine 2339 days ago
Have you ever read in popular media about a topic that you understand well? (it is hard to get an unskewed picture even if the author has no agenda)

What do you think happens with truth tellers and their work if it is not aligned with the current elites version of the truth?

For example, who do you think has been worse for whistleblowers , Bush or Obama?

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