I saw yet another news feed claiming to re-write history, crawl across my desktop:
Footprints discovered in New Mexico rewrite American history
I’m not disputing that article, and maybe it’s not the best example. However, I see these from time to time - Göbekli Tepe, etc.
I realize these are usually click-baity, but what are some discoveries that actually did “re-write” history as we had known it up until then?
I don’t know about “rewrites”, but the first thing that came to mind was the locating of Troy, which many mythtakingly thought Homer made up.
Well, it will- like about a line or two. They have found some other stuff that seems that humans in America go back way way more than 10000 years. Some discoveries suggest 30000 years. Of course these are being fought tooth and nail by some archaeologists.
But it puts another nail in the ridiculous “overkill hypothesis” that humans arrived and BANG they killed all the megafauna- with their little spears- in a matter of a century or two. Mind you- humans, along with the other invasive species which came over (which is of course what we were- invasive species)- do cause extinctions. I am sure that humans helped.
The way I hear it, the current thought’s on that subject are that it’s Homer himself who is thought to be fictional, while Odysseus and Troy are thought to have been a real person and real place.
Yeah I agree there is a lot of click bait bs “this discovery revolutionizes history by showing that X cannot be true!” But no serious historian has thought X was true since the Victorian era.
But the big one IMO that absolutely revolutionized our understanding of history was the discovery of the Sumerian civilization in modern day Iraq in the 1800s.
They invented everything and were completely lost to history
Click Bait Tv
CNN had the Balls to try to tell us how the Titanic REALLY sank a couple weeks ago.
Ah, filed with water after hitting an iceberg. Glad that’s cleared up.
Playing devil’s advocate here, but technically, every discovery rewrites history. Slightly, in most cases.
History is literally rewritten everyday. History isn’t the past. History is the study of the past based on what people have written. And most of what people write/wrote is self-serving bullshit.
In that regard the discovery of the Rosetta Stone gave modern historians access to an unbelievable amount of new bullshit to sift through for nuggets of insight into the past.
I was going to point this out. Not all of it is rewritten, but every new fact about the past discovered requires history to be edited, and new history is made every moment. Sometimes old info is shown to be invalid and removed, but mostly it’s more detail being added. Sometimes it’s something new to be added at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, but mostly it’s new stuff added to the end.
I mean this is technically true but it’s not what the OP was talking about. Sure technically knowing say a few more details about the grave goods found at a Scandinavian iron age burial site is “rewriting history” (and it is definitely worth knowing and is advancing the cause of human knowledge) but it’s not radically altering the wider understanding of history. That is much much rarer, not that you’d know that if you only rely on mass media for history news.
The classic example of this that bugs me is whenever you get some sophisticated cultural artifact or long distance trade good discovered at a Viking site, it allegedly “rewrites the history of the Vikings as no longer just violent raiders”. Which is bullshit no one has ever thought the Vikings were just raiders who had no cultural or economic activity that wasn’t raping and pillaging.
There are cases of finds that do actually rewrite history in the sense of radically alter the understanding of history we had before them. The rediscovery of Sumerian civilization is the most obvious example to me (and similarly for the great Mayan cities in Latin America, though the Mayan civilization was known, in fact there were and are still Mayan speakers around, but the extent of the civilization and it’s cities was not)
The thread title recalled the story of Kennewick Man, until advances in DNA analysis revealed he was related to the local natives after all.
Popular histories, OTOH, are full of re-writes for the non-reading. E.g. a certain YouTuber whose channel is “hey, did you know the state of Hawaii was forced into the US and its monarch dethroned?” (Is that a rhetorical question or do you think all grew up cosseted LDS Utah kids like you?). “I only read online comics and watch superhero shows and… Tulsa Race Riot? Who knew?
You could interpret incorporating every new unearthed find into the cultural record as history being “rewritten”, but in the larger context, to me, that’s just ‘adding to’ not rewriting. And I don’t think that is what the click-bait headers are hinting at.
I think those news stories are suggesting that the major assumptions we thought about a culture, for example, were wrong and now we need to re-think our understanding. For example, if we were to find a chair at a Clovis site, we would add that to our knowledge of the Clovis people but it would not upend our thinking of them in general. But if we found a site suggesting habitation from 40,000 years ago, that would radically change the way we think about the first peoples. (The above are just examples and not meant to represent actual facts)
My OP was geared more towards news feeds that claim a certain find will upend our understanding, not just add to it.
I would argue that there are a fair number of finds that can fundamentally change your view on the history of the Bible.
As just one example, there’s the Gospel of Mary detailing how St Peter objected to the idea that Mary (a WOMAN) had been told special learnings, directly by Jesus, that none of the others had ever heard. Clearly, she was lying about it!
From the Bible, we know that Peter abandoned the Jerusalem church for Paul’s. We also see some evidence that the rule that women not speak in church, given in First Corinthians, floated around between different positions in the ancient versions of the text, implying that it may have been a later addendum.
We might infer, from this and other things, that one of the reasons that Peter decided to shift sides was because he was sexist and Paul traded to get one of the OG’s to vouch for his interpretations.
But of course, we might not. There are a lot of tendrils of evidence that could but don’t necessarily change your interpretation of events.
History is not math. It’s a court case of arguments pro- and con- of everything. We don’t arrive at a correct and provable answer, just some interpretation that you can get larger and smaller groups to agree to. Maybe you will encounter such an argument that completely redefines your mental image of the past. Maybe you won’t. It depends on what you’ve heard before and how you choose to interpret the information put before you.
The “gospel of Mary” is not really a Gospel. It was written long after the 4 canonical Gospels. That doesnt mean it is not interesting in seeing how the Gnostics interpreted the 4 Gospels, but it is clearly fictional. The Decretum Gelasianum doesnt even bother to mention it- which is a rather bad sign, meaning that either is was fairly unknown or not taken seriously .
At the latest it was written in the early 3rd century (e.g. 200-233) since we have physical copies from that time. At the earliest, portions of it were written shortly after the Gospel of John (e.g. 90-100), since they allude to it, but we could posit that other portions were based on earlier texts or testimony. My personal copy of Shakespeare’s works comes from the 20th century; that’s not when Shakey wrote it. Likewise, we know that the works of Roald Dahl with non-African Oompa Loompas date to a particular time, but that doesn’t mean that all of the work was written at that time. Things can be adjusted retroactively.
In general, there’s a wide time frame for the work and that whole timeframe should be considered, not some preferred one. It is plausibly mostly or wholly a 1st century work. It’s also plausibly not.
We also have redundant testimony from the Gospel of Thomas, which is also a plausibly complete or partial 1st century work:
Which is- long after. Every Disciple or even anyone who ever met Jesus was long dead by then, with John likely dying around AD90 having well outlived the others.
Sure, it could allude to the Gospel of John and still be written 2000 years later. All that tell us is that it was certainly written after John died.
But the fact that the Decretum Gelasianum doesnt even mention it, means that is was not common or known by 500 AD- even in the list of distrusted and rejected works. Nor was it mentioned or discussed anywhere I could find until 1896. So, it could not have been important. That doesnt mean it isnt interesting.
Likewise, my 20th century compendium of Shakespeare. Repeating this doesn’t make it a better argument for late dating.
This, likewise, doesn’t argue for late dating. I’m not sure that it argues for anything?
But the fact that the Decretum Gelasianum doesnt even mention it, means that is was not common or known by 500 AD- that is what it argues for.
Note that there was no hint this book even existed until 1896. No ancient Christian or other writer even mention it.
Okay, well the Bible doesn’t mention the Americas. That argues for the New World not being popular among the Hebrews and Romans during the 500 BC to 400 AD time period.
And while, yes, that is a true fact, what salient point might that have in a discussion of when the continents split off from one another? That the Americas secretly don’t exist? That they split off from Pangaea during the earlier edge of the estimated time range that science has indicated? During the later edge of it?
What message am I supposed to take from this that has any relevance to the topic at hand? Are we meant to suppose that the Decretum Gelasianum is the only one divinely created work in history, and the lack of reference in it trumps the actual existence of the documents? The Gospel of Mary and scholarly estimate ranges of its compositional date are just imaginary because some particular list of books, created by some dude that lived in a building with no electricity compiled during an era of poor scholarship, centuries after the work was written, living far from the countries in which it was available, was able to miss the item?
Does the lack of an entry say that it was written closer to 100 AD or closer to 250 AD? Or is that all just a non-sequitor?
This
is really weak sauce. Or source, even.
Having never heard of this, which you hang your entire argument on, I decided to check it out. The rabbit hole wasn’t very deep and I finally decided to check the Vatican. I mean, The Holy See should mention it, if it has any relevance,
Nope.
Not a single reference when searching site: vatican.va
I