Greetings travelers,
What an exciting few weeks it has been! I have been hard at work discovering ancient mummy burials, and visiting famous monuments and museums. However, along my journey I have been confronted on more than one occasion with stories or myths as a means of explaining the history of civilizations and of geographical locations. It puzzled me the power these myths have, and how they are being taken for fact, and taught as such. So the question of how and why these stories are so powerful arose in my mind. Can a myth be responsible for the reconstruction of history, and will it continue to bear such importance with the technological advances that continue to arise in our world? Was the reason Chinese historians were able to write their own history using myths due to the fact that story telling was the peoples’ only source of communication and sustainability?
The idea of a myth bearing such importance seems to trouble me. I believe such is the case because I find it silly that a “story” can be accounted and believed as fact. However, if history and its roots are traced back far enough, isn’t it all accounted by the human tongue, or written by the human hand? What sets a myth apart from any other historical “fact”, and why does the term myth carry such a negative connotation?
At the end of it all, the questions at stake seem to wonder how closely someone’s culture is tied with their history, and therefore, what are the various impacts that a history can produce within a culture? Whether it be a reliable history or an unreliable one, how does it influence such culture?
Tune in next week as I continue my adventure along the Silk Road.
Yours truly,
~A.V
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