Why are we so convinced that our scientifically superior analysis of a very few remaining texts is superior to the ancient knowledge of their own past based on many texts and oral recollection?

Source criticism is a particularly German legacy. French scholars like the great Fustel de Coulanges had a counter-critique and tended to trust ancient sources more. Just for this reason they gave more priority to unreduced religious factors.

Is our disbelief of ancient and tribal reports of their own past often to do with an a priori dismissal of supernatural and preternatural realities?

Metacritical classical scholars are now suggesting that gods, demons, angels etc have to be treated as just as real as the impersonal social and economic ‘forces’ we recognise today. This approach could transform Biblical and Patristic studies?

We need to face the possibility raised by people like Levy-Bruhl and Barfield (more strongly) that our assumption of a duality of objective nature and subjective mind may be either just relative or outright deluded.

Maybe far more of what our ancestors claimed had happened really did? Early Christians mostly believed pagan myths and histories but tended to ascribe them to the work of deceiving demons not gods. Irish and Icelanders were a bit kinder here.

Thus we accept way too easily that somehow pre-modern people were as brilliant as we are at logic, maths, astronomy, philosophy etc but totally credulous about the natural and human past. Supposing something here just does not add up?

Written history is inherently biased towards public witness to the ‘objective’. Oral history is more adapted to recognising the equal reality of the private and subjective (as not necessarily removed from the objective).