Recorded history is at variance with the legends elaborated in apocryphal texts. Historian Tudor Parfitt has declared that "the Lost Tribes are indeed nothing but a myth", and writes that, "...this myth is a vital feature of colonial discourse throughout the long period of European overseas empires, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, until the later half of the twentieth".[4] Zvi Ben-Dor Benite states: "The fascination with the tribes has generated, alongside ostensibly nonfictional scholarly studies, a massive body of fictional literature and folktale."[5] Anthropologist Shalva Weil has documented differing tribes and peoples claiming affiliation to the Lost Tribes throughout the world.[6]