Re: Irony and Understanding

You seem to take my scepticism about historical evidence as an inability to believe anything from historical sources.

They seem to be identical in effect. If they are not, sorry for the mix up but it's also your fault because that's what you've transmitted.

I particularly do not trust religious sources since there appears to be much revision and there is no evidence that bias did not play a large role in what was written.

Everything is biased. Just look at conservative and liberal accounts on the Reagan presidency and you'll never know you're reading about the same country, time and people. But historians have known for a long time that everything is biased, too. Even some of the oldest written documents we have both in the West and in China recognize the bias. At least, the bias in others.

But that still doesn't answer my simple question, and argument.

Even in the complete absence (or untrustworthiness) of written accounts, we can know things like whether a town of which we only have buried remains was Muslim. Same applies to a lot more things that are not written or cannot be relied upon in writing. You seem to think that all we have is written: books and documents. That is entirely false. Sure, they tend to help more than hinder, even when they aren't perfectly reliable. But there are a lot more things used to learn things about the past than books and written documents.