Obviously no one is claiming that nothing happened before writing. Historians use “history” as a technical term for events recorded in written and other durable records. They use “prehistory” for events recorded in oral traditions and archaeology.
Even in written form, we have vague translations in ancient Buddhist texts that require cross referencing multiple sources to get at a meaning, and even then there is plenty of disagreement. Thich Nhat Hanh brought this up in his translation and commentary on the Heart Sutra [1], as he believed an early translation was not skillful enough. That's one of the reasons it's important to have a guru-shishya relationship with your teacher.
As we all know, writing is plenty capable of transmitting falsehoods. I'm married to a professional novelist and memoirist, and we often talk about how non-fiction often contains plenty of fictions.
Obviously none of this is to say that writing isn't great and important, it just doesn't pass the smell test for me to say that history is what is written when we have plenty of contrary examples. Maybe to assert that in an academic journal where language tends to have more technical meaning is fine, but this is lithub. I know plenty of writers that write for them personally, my wife included, and it's certainly a self-important claim they'd love to be able to make!
[1] https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-... -- the introduction in the published text is better than this one, but the gist is the same.
I mean, it is true. There are no oral traditions left of the Sumerians or the Assyrians that I know of. Meanwhile, you can find buildings and clay tablets and translate them.
no one said that
but there is a definitional issue here - to reiterate the previous poster's point:
> Historians use “history” as a technical term for events recorded in written and other durable records.
That's how the word is defined by historians. It's not a value judgement on oral traditions.
Your post is using the word "history" in a different way. You have some good points to make, but as long as you're using "history" in a different way to everyone else you're not going to get very far in conversation.
However, using the word "history" in a way different to historians is not going to uncover any blind spots.
'However, using the word "history" in a way different to historians is not going to uncover any blind spots.'
Yes it does. There are non-written, non-durable sources that would suggest a different story. A great example is the story of the Seven Sisters. Among oral traditions collected from around the world in different cultures, that story has remarkably high degree of agreement across variants of that story -- probably owing to the one of the Pleiades growing too dim to see with the naked eye, and witnessed around the world.
Even written sources can be overlooked because of narrative biases. I grew up with an Euro-centric world history only to find out that lands connected by the Silk Roads had a much longer history as the center of the old world.
they aren't really durable as they are heavily distorted as they are passed down (thus "legends"); whereas with writing you could, for the first time, read the events as they were originally described at the time (whether the description was truthful in another matter, but there is no distortion in the transmission, though there is the question of translation of course)