Myth as History

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Michael Button thinks (@MichaelButtonX )

At the end of the last Ice Age, sea levels rose by more than 120 metres. That's a drastic shift. An area of land *larger* than the United States disappeared beneath the ocean. But for the people living there, it must have felt like the world was slowly ending. Today, around 40% of humanity lives within 100 km of a coastline. Imagine London underwater. New York underwater. Shanghai underwater. If your homeland vanished beneath the ocean, what story would you tell your children? And what story would they tell theirs? Would it become a legend? A flood myth? A warning? One of the strangest possibilities in history is that some ancient myths may not be inventions at all. They may be memories.

If that is what this ancient-history-educated YouTuber believes, then it would advance discussion of his idea if he would write a proper book setting out a METHODOLOGY of using "the Greek Myths"(first he should define that term) recorded by say Apollodorus and Hesiod as a historiographical source. Not a video, a book with references.

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No doubt Button would start off with his favourite example of how Schliemann used Homer to find the real city of Troy(though in fact it was never lost). He might mention the examples of indigenous Australian myths that purportedly accurately describe coastlines from 10,000 years ago, or perhaps break down how Hesiod's Ages of Man compare to actual archaeological ages.

It is difficult to see how one could go much further with this. As I said a methodologist must strictly define what "The Greek Myths" means. Myth is not a single holy book. It is a messy, shifting web of oral tales. Myths mix real memories (though potentially selecdtive or biased retellings of them) with symbolic storytelling, religious lessons, and creative imagination. To use stories like those referring to the hackneyed topic of a Golden Age or global divinely-ordained catatrophes as history. Scholars cannot just take them at face value, especially by picking-and-mixing the bits of what must be treated as an internally coherent whole just because certain fragments seem to relate to extra-source evidence. First the discarded fragments need to be taken into account - by what methodology?

Using mythology as a straight historical record creates several major issues. Myths lack precise dates, there may be timeline distortion, various symbolic numbers may be assigned to events, how can a methodology separate these from actual dates derived from some kind of record if that record itself is neither explicit or extant? There may be exaggeration introduced for narrative or symbolic resons. Natural events get grander over time; a large local river flood becomes a global ocean flood that "covers the highest mountains". The story may have been symbolic, a parable, with characters and events often standing for ideas. A "Golden Age" might not be a real time period, but a literary tool to contrast a difficult present with a perfect, imagined past. Myths also may involve political rewriting. Rulers and priests often changed myths. They rewrote stories to prove they had a divine right to rule or to make their enemies look bad.

What kind of toolkit would be involved in trying to use myth as a historical source? In some cases they are the same that are in use for any written source first of all, establish the authentic text then apply the usual analystical tools (e.g., comparative mythology, textual criticism and source stratigraphy) followed by some form of cross-verification.

So how far would that get you? Let Mr Button show us. In the course of trhat, he may well discover why two centuries of study of these texts has pretty definitively already decided that they are not actually usable in the way he proposes. I wonder just how much of that debate (for example on the compilation of the first five books of the Old Testament and their relation to other Near Eastern - for exmple mesopotamian or Egyptian - documents) he is aware of? If he writes the book, we will find out.