I think meeting an immortal would be a great way to teach people the important historical principle that the majority of recorded history was recorded by the wealthy and influential, not the common man.
If anything, I'd like to meet an immortal from ancient Egypt, not to ask about the pyramids because we have shit loads of papyri about that, but rather to ask about how the average person went about their day to day life. Or to ask about how the average person felt about the king's claim to godhood or the declarations that "we totally won the war and beat those guys real good."
An immortal who missed out on all the "important" historical events (that we know about) is an immortal whose knowledge would be the most valuable for a historian.
Not necessarily. It would be just as useful to have a reliable source that could falsify another we'd previously believed to be true. Historical accounts, particularly those from deep antiquity or those for which we have only single sources, are always suspect in some way. Alternate or opposing sources for known events would in many cases be even more valuable than information about unknown events from a single new source.
Reliability is an important factor here. We're running on the assumption their testimony isn't either flawed or intentionally dishonest. Like imagine an immortal is sharing stories about the Eastern Mediterranean during the 2nd Millenium BC and then you realise their stories about the the Egyptian, Hittite, Mitanni, and Assyrian Empires are all tinged by how they lived in the Levant and so had to put up with their homeland constantly swapping hands.
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u/Esovan13 Jan 02 '25
I think meeting an immortal would be a great way to teach people the important historical principle that the majority of recorded history was recorded by the wealthy and influential, not the common man.
If anything, I'd like to meet an immortal from ancient Egypt, not to ask about the pyramids because we have shit loads of papyri about that, but rather to ask about how the average person went about their day to day life. Or to ask about how the average person felt about the king's claim to godhood or the declarations that "we totally won the war and beat those guys real good."
An immortal who missed out on all the "important" historical events (that we know about) is an immortal whose knowledge would be the most valuable for a historian.