Socrates is the perfect example here.
Most of what we know about him comes from Plato, who also made up Atlantis.
I always thought the story of Lady Godiva was cool, but there’s no real evidence of anyone like her making that famous ride ever existing (i.e., there were Lady Godivas, but none are confirmed to have rode nude through town to save her tenants from taxation).
There’s also Xenophon and Aristophanes, and he’s mentioned by Aristotle. Aristophanes is the clincher. There’s no way Plato and Aristophanes would get together and make up a Socrates from angles that different.
He was apparently also made fun of by other comic poets.
Although it’s an open question to what extent Plato’s Socrates resembles the historical Socrates.
Being left with more questions is one of the great things about science. 
I wonder if there are people who think that Anthony Standen was fictitious.
For a relatively recent example, there’s John Frum, who’s pretty much the Jesus of various cargo cults in the Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu. He was most certainly a composite of the various American airmen that the natives encountered around WWII (there’s some disagreement on whether he’s black or white), and is probably influenced by earlier legends.
Water-filled footprints from both of them are all over Minnesota! Over ten thousand of them!
Again, ask Tom Smothers. He said Paul Bunyan had a big blue puma. A horny puma.
If this is true, it is highly embellished. The Egyptians themselves were obsessive bureaucrats and record keepers. Yet, they do not record having large numbers of Hebrew slaves, nor any massive exodus that would fit the narrative.
I’m not surprised, considering that Egyptian records were always positive; anything that would reflect negatively on the Pharaoh or Egyptian gods would not be mentioned at all in their historical records. The Nazis and the Soviets didn’t keep records of bad news, either.
Not true. It wouldn’t be carved on a temple or tomb wall, since those were religious inscriptions to the glory of the god/pharaoh, nor on a commemorative stele, since those were the glory of pharoah-as-general, but there are many other categories of Egyptian record. I’d have to poke around but there are definitely “bad news”/negative ones.
Depending on which end of the news you were on. The records from the death camps are meticulously kept.
My source is *The World History of the Jewish People, * 1964, Vol. I, pp. 338, 339:
“Egyptian records were always positive, emphasizing the successes of the Pharaoh or god, whereas failures and defeats are never mentioned, except in some context of the distant past.”-- Egyptologist J. A. Wilson.
As for the Nazis, I would be interested to know how you gained access to any of their records.
There’s at least one record of hebrew slaves and a battle or two. The issue is that of course the Egyptians didnt call them “Hebrews”* per se*. They often used the terms *Habiru *and Apiru which doesn’t really differentiate between several related people from that area.
However it’s a definite fact that Egypt took slaves from wars and warred in that area. So, claiming that for some reason they took every other people from that area as slaves but* not *the Hebrews would need some rigorous proof.
of course, the Exodus could not have occurred * as the OT says.* But if a few tens of thousands made a break for it, and brought back to their goatherd relatives "civilization "and modern war, there’s no objections and it fits the general known facts. It’s true the Israelites seems to have taken that area over fairly rapidly. Not quite as rapidly as the OT says, but pretty fast.
Which to them wasnt “bad news”.
Oh, of course it couldn’t. Because you said so. :rolleyes:
Exactly. Those are extraordinary elements of the Exodus, which I consider are unlikely to be historical. But it’s unremarkable that Egyptians had slaves from Canaan. And mundane that a few families of slaves escaped back to their ancestral lands.
Ned Ludd, or Ludlam, or Ludnam, or Laudanum (ok, I made that last one up), who inspired the Luddites.
I though John Henry was just another character in the Paul Bunyan Olde Tymie Power Hour show?
Take a tour of Auschwitz if you happen to visit Poland.
This presupposes the possibility that I could see something in more detail than was shown in the documentary films I saw in high school or in the Twilight Zone episode “Death’s Head Revisited.” 
Are you suggesting that because you haven’t personally bothered to look up the primary sources that they don’t exist?