As history is being modified in front of our eyes, to match the narrative of the ruling political class and of the billionaire elites running the tech industry and other crony capitalist empires, one wonders what parts of our history that we believed to be true and accurate have been embellishments of writers from long ago, with their own agendas, or perhaps writing years, decades, and centuries after the fact?
Are historical events based on fact,
are they part of surviving records, or have they been orally transmitted, or mis-translated
unintentionally from an obscure language and text by a scribe or scholar with
good or nefarious intentions?
Pictograms on cave walls, on exterior rocks,
before writing had been invented, hieroglyphs on pharaonic tombs, cuneiform
writing on tablets, recorded important events in the lives of those who existed
thousands of years before us.
Was writing invented to record major
events in people’s lives, such as wars, conquests, tribal leaders, life under
rulers, births, marriages, disasters? Did people attempt to give more meaning
to their lives, to prove that they had existed?
People across the centuries left
behind poems and books, epic poems, works of art, their autobiographies,
biographies of others, built fancy mausoleums, pyramids, cathedrals, churches, monuments,
arches, aqueducts, ancient roads like the Roman Via Appia, still existing in
some parts of Italy today, and statues that commemorated their existence,
moments in time, significant achievements, defeat, and victories in their
lives.
Their efforts, if they survived the
ravages of time and of robbers, and the destruction of those who disagreed with
them or fought them in wars, became sources for historical record, including
famous epic poems in various cultures such as the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh
from Mesopotamia, the earliest surviving literary text and the second oldest
religious text.
Another epic poem, the Iliad, attributed
to Homer, although not a historical work, was used at times as a building block
for our collective history. But it was not written until the sixth century B.C.
in Homeric Greek.
The world’s recorded history probably
started with Herodotus when the Roman orator Cicero called him “the parent of
history” two thousand years ago. He began writing history the way we understand
history today, not the will of some gods from the Roman or Greek Pantheon, but history
with real and specific causes, a systemic investigation of geography, geology, politics,
and economics.
Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) wrote his Histories,
a detailed account of the Greco-Persian wars, the lives of important kings, and
famous battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and
Mycale. He also provided a cultural background to the battles from the standpoint
of geography, ethnography (the scientific
description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures), and
historiography (the study of
historical writing).
His contemporaries accused him of
providing “legends and fanciful accounts” in his Histories. Herodotus
defended himself that he wrote what he “saw and [what was] told to him.” But a
large portion of his accounts have been confirmed by modern historians and
archeologists.
Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus,
part of the Persian Empire at that time; although a Persian subject, he spoke
Greek in its Ionian dialect. He was likely schooled in this dialect and studied
the works of the Greek poets Homer, Hesiod, and Sappho. The writing gift ran in
the family – his uncle Panyassis was a famous poet.
Herodotus traveled extensively,
collecting materials and impressions for his book. On this journey of
historical discovery, Herodotus, not a rich man, was probably a sailor and
merchant, the preferred trade of most adventurers of those times.
It is evident from his book that he
admired Athens very much and it stands out in his writings. While in Athens, he
met a lot of influential people, i.e., Pericles, a politician and general,
dubbed “the first citizen of Athens,” and Sophocles, the Greek playwright.
In 446 B.C. Herodotus read his Histories
in Athens publicly - he was so admired that he was rewarded with ten talents,
a considerable sum of money in antiquity, with specific weights in gold and
silver.
Traveling as a citizen without a
country, Herodotus wandered until he established himself in the city-state of Thurii
(the modern Calabria in Italy) where he became a citizen, and it is believed
that he wrote his Histories in this town, in Ionian dialect, and it is
here that he died at the age of 55.
History (from the Greek word,
historia, inquiry) studies and documents the past. But history is not just
documents, it records in writing the memory of others, the discovery and
collection of facts, and how they are interpreted by using written documents,
oral accounts (skewed perhaps on purpose, or lost by the passage of time),
artifacts, and studying new or old materials such as dirt strata, fauna, flora,
tattoos, utensils, pottery, weapons, etc.
Modern historians debate
constructively or not, how to interpret new evidence and sources. Should we
judge history and change it based on our modern standards of morality and
culture that may differ from the past?
Searching for the past allows us to better
understand the present. But we should not alter the past to appease those who
are offended by historical facts that they deem unacceptable in our cultures today.
No matter what historical sources we reference and consider, whether we agree
with them or not, all comprise the history of humanity, a history we can learn a
myriad of lessons from, a history which is evidence of our collective existence
across the millennia.
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