Competing tribal and sectarian narratives have been history’s oldest partisan form
Evidence
From remote antiquity, feuding tribes had rival sagas sung by competing bards. Some thing of the sort continues to the present day. There is a parallel religious, or more precisely sectarian, historiography. The more old-fashioned approach to religion has been admirably summed up in three short phrases, “I’m right, you’re wrong, go to hell.” A good deal of religious, communal, and national histori ography is of this kind. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1825
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- CANDY: The ‘I’m right, you’re wrong, go to hell’ summation of sectarian historiography is a memorable, shareable line.