There'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's a lot of modern pushback against this, I don't want to paint too absolute a picture, since it's largely a holdover from the birth of the fields in good old days of Glorious Empire, but there's still a lot of it lying around, especially in the more pop-focused stuff.

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