Quote:
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Originally Posted by ariel
Absence of evidence is the evidence of absence: somebody may still find a shred of old paper mentioning Assadulla by name. And recently,a very smart guy named Kamil Khaidakov from Moskow reported Shamshir blades with deep stamps of Assadulla on their tangs. Something to think about.
BTW, The Iliad was written not by Homer, but by another ancient blind Greek poet ( or a commune of them) :-)
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Hello Ariel,
As I am not a native speaker, I may have misunderstood your message.
However, absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.
I will illustrate my argument with a single example (albeit there are many) inspired by you.
For decades scholars argued there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of Troy, and that Homer's poems Iliad and Odyssey are purely fictional creations...
... until one individual with absolutely no theoretical background took the two poems for EVIDENCE and started digging. And he found Troy.
Now there is another issue I want to bring up. WHAT IS "EVIDENCE?" Is an inscription on a sword saying "Work of XXX" evidence for the existence of the respective swordsmith? And here, we can argue ad nausea because what is evidence for some, can be rejected by others. However, based on my own common sense, I believe that we can make a rationally valid assumption that there existed a certain swordsmith named XXX. Now, whether he made the respective sword himself or a later imitator, is another issue but the mere existence of immitators I see as a confirmation of the assumption that at a certain moment there existed a swordsmith XXX. If he had not existed, why would his signature be immitated?
My two cents...
