Things we know wrong

I just finished a book on dreams, reminding me of a different book on dreams, especially with the references to Freud.

One of the interesting things from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss is that Freud was largely influenced (especially regarding the Oedipal complex) by another book. I cannot remember its title, but the important thing about it is that one of the chapters had not been translated into a language Freud could read. If he had read it, he would have learned that some things were actually pretty common, and that could have changed his thinking.

That anecdote seems more timely because I recently saw this (though it's a few years old):

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-evidence-slaves-didnt-build-pyramids/

One thing I learned from this article is that the tradition of believing the laborers were slaves comes from the Greek historian Herodotus. He did travel, but he also recorded things that others told him. This includes a reference to a large furry ant living in the desert that was probably a marmot, caused by confusing the old Persian word for "marmot" with the word for "mountain ant". It could very easily be an understandable confusion on his part.

That in turn reminded me of something else I had seen recently:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/vikings-were-not-sex-mad-marauders-5358931

Apparently there had already been some people noticing that accounts of rape started about a hundred years after Viking raids had stopped, and the absence of Viking DNA among the descendants of those raided seems to confirm that raping does not always have to go with pillaging.

It's pretty sketchy when people refer back to history to justify or defend something immoral, because it's always been that way, but also, sometimes no, it wasn't that way. We only think it's that way because someone was confused, or lied, or assumed, and we kept it up unexamined.

Just some food for thought.