There& #39;s an odd blind spot you run into in anthropology and archeology, which is the unstated assumption that fiction is a modern invention, and everyone in ancient times took all their myths literally.

There& #39;s a lot of modern pushback against this, I don& #39;t want to paint too absolute a picture, since it& #39;s largely a holdover from the birth of the fields in good old days of Glorious Empire, but there& #39;s still a lot of it lying around, especially in the more pop-focused stuff.

But it& #39;s a bit like imagine 3000 years from now some cyberarcheologist saying "the ancient Namericans believed in the mythical city of Newyork, the home of Iron Man, Hulk, Spider-Man, and an entire pantheon of heroic figures and their foes."

It& #39;s not all or nothing. There& #39;s no real reason to believe that ancient cultures didn& #39;t have just as nuanced an understanding of story as we do, with a soupy mass of facts, poetic embellishments, and outright deliberate fiction.