How much do we really know about history? How much of it is fabricated

File: herodotus.jpg (72KB, 485x687px) Image search: [Google]

72KB, 485x687px

That is the beauty of history. A lot of it is manufactured/propaganda. The art is the story, the science is using our best tools to decipher it through all the bullshit.

This is why anthropological-archaeology is so important in order to help us contextualize where the writings have disappeared.

Consider the following, Herodotus the guy stickied too the board is perhaps one of the biggest bullshitters of the Roman story/history, yet we have to use most of his writings to help put the time period into perspective.

It is actually quite fitting to have him as a mascot on this board as a lot of anons ascribe to a lot of "conspiracy" theories and historical propaganda that has made it through the ages (myself included at times)

File: 1440557746494.png (192KB, 501x445px) Image search: [Google]

192KB, 501x445px

>>3321747
>Herodotus
>Roman
the absolute state of this board

>>3321819
I know he is from Halicarnassus. I meant to say Greek my nigga. Thanks

File: Jean_Hardouin.gif (32KB, 185x269px) Image search: [Google]

32KB, 185x269px

I would say a truly reliable history begins only in the 19th century. This is when you have the beginning of mass literacy, photography, the beginning of telecommunication (telegraph) and a much larger number of records. Before this period, it is at least theoretically possible that the handful of literate people could have faked records to a large extent and invented history without many realizing or caring about it. Most people didn't even know what country they were living in, who their ruler actually was and how did they look like, how big the world actually was...

Also,a huge amount of knowledge about the past was lost simply because materials like the paper in manuscripts and books, clothing, building materials, wood carvings simply decay with time. Many "old" books are copies of copies of copies. Most "medieval" castles were build or rebuild in the 18-19th centuries. Most armors you see in museums are replicas and Victorian era interpretations. What we have is only a poor reconstruction of the past and entire chunks could be missing and be almost impossible to recover. And it only gets worse the more you go into the past.

I think that talking about "ancient" and "medieval" periods aside from the very general points becomes no different than discussing video game lore. You even have kids larping as one side or the other in both cases.