Fact, Fiction and Fancy

Question: How can we tell if ancient mythological texts are not just fiction? As in, someone ancient wrote some fiction and we took it to be an accurate myth?

It's impossible to ever be 100% sure since we weren't there, but most of the time those judgments are based on corroborating evidence and the sociological evolution of the written word. (Which are words I know you guys just love to hear me say.)

It's a very weird concept for us nowadays, surrounded by popular fiction that spawns massive franchises at the drop of a hat, but in previous centuries across large swaths of the world, there was no such thing as a fiction book. People didn't write them.

That's not because awesome fiction stories weren't being made up; on the contrary, they were, but they were almost always preserved, disseminated and retold orally. Most people in any given ancient society could neither read nor write, making trying to launch a career as an author pretty pointless, and those that could were almost always specially trained as a result of their careers: scribes, accountants, priests and other people who had to work with information that needed to be recorded in some concrete way. The written word wasn't thought of as a vehicle for entertainment, but rather as a way of preserving important records and information that couldn't just be remembered easily, which is why the vast majority of our ancient documents are laws, histories, religious texts or accounting lists, with a few poems or letters to and from scholars or administrators to give us a slice of everyday life. Nobody was writing down made-up stories; not only was there no reader audience for them, but it would have been seen as a strange and frivolous use of the written word, and anyway most of the people who could write were too busy for such a weird hobby anyway.

Of course, people are people, so mythological texts, even when written for religious purposes, probably all bear the marks of some long-forgotten scribe's embellishments. Kings ordered the changing of myths occasionally for official or political reasons, and individual scribes almost certainly added their own flair, which was then magnified by cases where a scholar from one culture retold a myth he had heard in his homeland with new touches meant to make it more comprehensible to the home audience (Plutarch does this all the freaking time, for example). Just like you usually won't get to the end of a game of Telephone with exactly the same words, let alone the same inflection and tone, so the giant historical game of Myth Telephone has probably presented us with things that are at least slightly mutated from their "original" forms. Which isn't always bad; sometimes those mutations become part of the religion itself, in which case they stop being mistakes and start being religious evolution.

At any rate, that's the main reason scholars never really have to sit around worrying that their papyri and tablets are actually just chronicling someone's ancient fantasy epic.

Beyond that, there's contextual and corroborating evidence, which are things every historical scholar learns to love and despair over. If your tablets were found in the remains of an ancient temple, it's likely they were religious texts, not romance novels, and if your account of the geneaology of the gods was labeled "BY ORDER OF HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY", it's probably an official government religion, not something some scribe whipped up in his free time on the side. Many sources repeating or referring to the same story, especially in different areas of the same culture, also help to make it clear that it's something that was widespread and religiously pervasive.

To wade into the murky and dangerous waters of religion versus sociology here for a minute, though, at the bottom of this question is really the question of whether or not you personally have any beliefs centered around these ancient religions. If you do, then myths are reality for you; they have particular purposes and matter in a religious sense, and in some way they really happened and affected the world. If you don't, pure sociology says that of course mythology is fiction - every mythological story started somewhere with someone making up a story to explain why the rain falls or the night is dark or their grandson's father isn't coming back after the most recent buffalo hunt. Mythology is fiction and all fiction has the theoretical potential to become mythology, as long as a people embrace it and make it into a religious truth instead of a pastime. A silly but accurate example of this is the evolution of Star Trek into several religions on the television show Futurama; once someone begins to believe and worship in something as a religion, it leaves the realm of fiction and becomes myth.

By the way, despite all the things I just said, there are a few examples of ancient fiction out there, and the most famous are probably China's Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Compared to a lot of other religions' texts, these are very young and bear all the hallmarks of being written as popular fiction treatments of their subjects, intended to entertain as well as educate. They were the forerunners of the modern wuxia novel and kung fu film. We still use them as a mythological source, however, because various other parts of Chinese folk mythology also mention or allude to the same characters and events, and because official Chinese histories of the time agreed with them. It's a bit like reading historical fiction, where the events and characters may be the same as the ones in history but the author puts her own spin on them or tweaks things slightly to play up certain ideas.

You guys are really spoiling me with all the book questions lately.