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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerakSpielman" data-source="post: 1156717" data-attributes="member: 7464">The more history I learn, the more I realize how little I know. Scholars have discovered an incredible amount. We have to define, though, what we mean by "history." Traditionally, history is distinguished from pre-history by the development of writing. Everything we have from before the written word is vague at best. Think of how incredibly complicated Roman history is, or Chinese history. These people were some of the best record keepers on the planet! Yet there is still a considerable amount that remains unknown. There were complicated civilizations in the Americas before the Europeans showed up. Most of them lacked writing, and so the complications and intracacies of their history are almost certainly lost forever. There's a lot we can deduce from archiology, but a lot we can't.  Can you imagine how much less we'd understand the Romans if they hadn't bothered writing anything down? How much of what we currently know could we have reconstruced based on archiology alone? A lot, perhaps, but still nowhere near all of it. There were civilzations that didn't record their history in written form up to very recent times. A lot of their history has been lost. Of couse, it's impossible to know how much is unknown about any particular subject. Some aspects of history are SO lost that it will never occur to us that they ever existed. Perhaps things that were totally lost can be argued to be unimportant, since if they were important they would have been remembered and recorded by somebody, but there's no way of knowing if this is true or not. From 221-206 BC the Chin dynasty united and ruled China. They decided that a unified nation required unified thought, and set about destroying all writings they could. Philosophy, religion, science, history - they were all burned indiscriminately. It is unknown how much was lost in those fifteen years, because by default, if every copy of a work was burned, we would never have heard of it and we would not miss its absence. We probably know more about the 20th century than any other century of history, just because there are still people alive who remember it. And still, so soon after the fact, we are capable of debating things that you would think should be obvious. The whole Holocaust thing debated above is a prime example. What about what really happened "behind the scenes" during the Cold War (including Vietnam and Korea)? Who really shot JFK? The laughable (but somehow gaining acceptance) notion that the moon landings were a hoax? Why did we bomb Nagasaki when the Japanese were ready to surrender after the Bomb in Hiroshima(this one has political science classes debating non-stop)? So many questions, and we'll never really know the answers. Do you really think for a moment that any era of history is any more clear? The only reason we lack penetrating questions is because we lack the context of having been there ourselves. We are reduced to reading what historians of the time wrote, under behest of their sponsors (not much money in "freelance" historianism). Archiology can tell us that the Greeks sacked Troy, but can't actually dispute much of the fantastic mythology of the Iliad. Archiology tells us only what happened, but rarely why, and that's where the juicy bits of history really are.</blockquote>

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