Historical Narratives and Should We Change Them to Fit our Modern Culture?

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.