Also, African griots have a similar work ethic.

>The "problem" with objectively believing folklore or oral traditions without any other evidence is that they are folklore and oral traditions.

>Ancient written records will have this problem to a degree from all the copying, translating, recopying and retranslating (not to say anything about the biases of the storytellers either).

So it's clearly not about oral vs written. No history-keeping is positively objective. It just happen that our historiographic tradition emphasizes writing and has an elitist take on oral traditions (normally identified with the "other cultures", or the iliterate poor classes).