Very few people seem to be concerned with the library of alexandria, herodotus, julius ceasar, and other characters and stories that have very few if any primary source documentation. Of those that have supposed primary source documentation, it has been discovered within the last 200 years or so.
Without appealing to consensus or authority how would one go about verifying these tales? How do we know all of ancient history is not just an invention of the 1800s?
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> What is invented is not real
> Not recognizing that reality is perpetually being conjured
History itself is not to be trusted, user.
okay last thursdayism
The only reason you believe the French Revolution occured in 1789 is because there is an abundance of people who wrote that it did. And the more people believe in it, the more it will be written to be so.
How can you, like, verify anything, dude
what is archaeology?
I do think it's amusing that the Battle of Thermopylae is considered more likely to have happened than the Resurrection when both have roughly the same amount of documentation.
I don't know. Which is why I am asking.
What part of "within the last 200 years" did you not understand?
Is the french revolution no different than ancient history to you?
What peopke fail to reealize that this changed for a brief momnent in the 19th abd 20th century]ie with recorded photopgraphs, then audio and video. History then could be more or less objectively recorded. Now again this is changing again with fake news, AI video creating software, etc. But for a blip on the timeline we had it. Ah, c'est la vie.
Occam's razor.
Genuinely OP, what do you think is more likely, ancient history is for the most part pretty damn true or an invention of the 19th century?
We are Atlantis, disappearing beneath the waves for the misuse of magick. When future archaeologists try to reconstruct this timeline, perhaps so they can bring the dead back to life, they'll be bringing back monstrosities, amalgamates of sporadic facts and ridiculous fictions. It's probably you, reading this right now, are a parody of a human being, deformed beyond all recognition and virtue, and just haven't noticed yet.
Honestly i am having trouble believing, some recent historical stories too. Like the cease fire in 1914.... does anyone really believe men were killing eachother one day, stopped to have a meal, then went right back to killing each other the bext day?
So i take it you don't know how to verify these things?
Similar things have happened in more recent history. During the DC riots one of the few businesses that remained open was Ben's and you would find cops sitting next to rioters. Like an unspoken DMZ.
I am beginning to think that youre a fool if you truly believe anyone could sit next to someone who killed their friend or brother, realize that they aren't so bad after all and have a meal together, then go right back to killing each other the next day. It sounds like a fictional story.
You are also assuming that because the evidence or primary sources were only discovered within the last 200 years that they are untrustworthy. Asking questions like "why didn't we discover such and such much earlier given it's been around for over a thousand years". People in the past didn't care about such things (there are three different churches that claim to have the skull of John the Baptist. Henry VIII hung a piece of Jesus foreskin above his bed, and etc) and it's not till recently that we've had the technology to verify artifacts.
Maybe they were just happy they had one day where they didn't have to worry about being killed.
The time between when an event is purported to happen and when the evidence is found is of course a factor important enough to be considered. This is obvious.
And how convenient is it that all of this evidence just fell into our laps so recently. Can't translate egyptian hieroglyphs ?! No problem we just found the Rosetta Stone!
Ok. If it makes you happy to go on believing those stories i am not going to stop you.
They had to find it at some timepoint. You could get suspicious about ANY of them if you wanted.
>hmm, why THEN? Huh?
Grow up
I'm not interested in arguing the probability of stories. I am hoping someone knows if any of this can be trusted and how they know that.
Any of what? Any of history? That's a pretty whopping great umbrella to cast.
Why reply if you have nothing constructive to contribute?
Julius caesar doesn't have any primary source documentation? There aer primary sources for these times, amigo
Absolutely agree about the library of alexandria though, it's more of an idea, but as a place, it's a clear fabrication
Stating that the question is too vague and large to be useful IS a constructive contribution.
What documents are you referring to ? Also, when was this primary source documentation discovered?
The immense vastness of resources required to hide the false manufacturing of unique writing styles of thousands of individuals: Is pretty retarded.
>What is archeology and dating, such as carbon.
I think it's more like, what if everyone of the time period were lying or confused
I am referring to ancient history, I do apologize if I made that unclear.
...
heh, trust me, I've noticed. well put, user
I think he is referring to The Gallic War, and Other Writings by Julius Caesar. That is about as primary as primary can get.
Well, there are copies of De bello gallico in several european libraries that go back as far as the 9th century, which is as good as it gets, basically. Afaik the modern version was compiled from these sources
You can generally trust historians after about 1840-1850. The influence of Von Ranke and the decline of romanticism really did wonders for the historical science
From what i understand about dating methods they assume certain values about the environment that may or may not have always been the case.
Radiocarbon dating isn't effected by environment, temp, and etc.
Even if we don't have primary sources, we can assume the people who lived at the time our sources were written had better sources than us. Of course some stuff could just be made up and gradually become accepted, but anything/anyone as big as Julius Caesar is hard to make up unless it's far back in a mythical past where no records existed.
>1. The immense vastness of resources required to manufacture unique writing styles of thousands of individuals
or,
2. To imply that all these accurately dated documents were written by a huge cabal, that lasted for thousands of years, whom destroyed all legit documentation, then they did #1. (And nothing at all is known of this massive conspiracy.)
Is retarded.
You are telling me that there are books that are several hundred years old in certain european libraries? Which ones? How do you know this?
Ah.
>How do we know all of ancient history is not just an invention of the 1800s?
Cross-checking dating methods and anthropological data, which have large margins of error.
>Without appealing to consensus or authority how would one go about verifying these tales?
You can't, you need faith in the scientific authority behind anthropological and dating evidence.
This seems basic, and from other responses in this thread it seems like you knew it. What more do you think there is?
Please have patience with me here i am just a guy looking for answers: how can you know the writing style of X person if you don't even know if x person wrote Y document? If you dont even know if X person exists?
Oh, now I get what you mean. Well, I'm a student of history, so I've seen some myself, although those may be fabrications as well and as an insider, I might be part of the lie, so why trust what I say?
I think the conspiracy you suggest is a tad too large to be feasible. You might be interested in things like this : en.wikipedia.org
>anthropological data,
What anthropological data? If i am throwing into question the existance of many of these societies and documents what would you go about comparing to legitimize them?
Whether descriptions of places and societies match anthropological records of such societies in roughly similar time periods, for example.
You claim that you have seen with your own eyes documents that are several hundred years old and yet you are unable to give evidence of this which is fine. Though, I question how exactly you know the age of these documents.
> library of alexandria though, it's more of an idea, but as a place, it's a clear fabrication
The fuck are you on? All our extant Homer texts came from Egipt. It's Ptolemeans that organised and selected most of we have from Greek literature. Library of Alexandria is a fact.
I don't see how comparing two documents that both refer to a fictional place legitimizes that fictional place as a real place.
Sorry, comparing the documents to archaeological data (i.e., dig sites, dated records of those actual cities and societies etc.) rocks, houses, etc.
Ok thanks i think we are getting some where, can you provide any examples? Or at least links for me to research further on my own?
Sounds like you don't trust anything OP. This thread has devolved into
"How can you know thing happened?"
"Well OP we have these sources and dig sites, and etc."
"How do we know those are legit"
"Carbon dating and what not"
"How do we know carbon dating is accurate?
How do we know the sources we have aren't just retelling myths/legends and presenting them as fact"
If you don't believe in any of the sources/tools we have that shed light on what happened in the past then there is nothing anyone in this thread can do to convince you otherwise. You should just assume anything you haven't personally witnessed never happened.
Lmao. Name three primary sources mentioning the library of alexandria 300 years within its construction. The first source even mentioning such a place is the Letter of Aristeas which is considered untrustworthy and a fabrication, and even that is from ~150 years after the library's supposed founding. Some of the travelling historians and learned men that wrote about the roman empire like Strabo and Plutarch mention the Museion in Passing, but not the library, and not many of them mention it at all (keep in mind we're already talking about the 1st century AD here).
There was probably a sizeable royal library at the ptolemaic court, but that's it.
The Library of Alexandria as it's commonly seen is an invention of John Tzetzes, who lived more than 1300 years after the fact and a romantic myth perpetrated by early modern and modern historians. There never was such a thing as a huge library. There's not even a ruin in Alexandria for it.
I don't know their age for certain. I'm told their age and the knowledge I have about the historical periods they're from give me further context. But I can't know for certain, of course not.
Your doubt is so fundamental that I think nothnig would really hold up to it.
None that you are talking about here, but I have lately been going through some of Brian Fagans work on prehistory, which coveres information on dating techniques and the evidence we have supporting the earliest known human societies and civilisations.
X person that calls themselves Z in Y document, also wrote 10 other documents.
Similarly how we can know the author of a historical work where they've used pseudonyms.
babby needs to see to believe
Original Library of Alexandria is viewed the same way we view Troy, or colossus of Rhodes, or Roland, or Beowulf.
>And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth.
- Galadriel. Opening of first LOTR movie
I am not so much concerned with finding out who the authors are so much as i am trying to figure out if the authors ever existed at all. There may be a lot of inter connected references between thousands of books...but what holds everything up in the first place?
Thanks i will google that.
You may be right, it may be the case that my questions are silly. But the fact that there is any room for this kinda bothers me, the fact that a bit of faith is required for history bothers me.
Does anyone else sometimes get paranoid and feel like you cannot know if anything is true at all? How do I even know the war of 1812 happened?
I mostly just find so many exceptions to everything and find everyone else so unsympathetic to the recognition of these exceptions that I get stuck in a kind of isolated epistemic paranoia in which I can't even discuss the matter with others because they're useless to me.
>There may be a lot of interconnected references between thousands of books...but what holds everything up in the first place?
Archeology. . . And the thousands of documents.
Here you go:
>archive.org
Sometimes it feels a bit like if you go back too far the simulation breaks down. Kinda like in a video game that has invisible walls... then i ask myself 'if we cant trust the past, how did we get here? What is this place? What are we? ' i may be losing my ming who knows.
Archeology proves Archeology? Im having troubles with that
No faith is required for the existence of Caesar, or Cicero. The war with Gaul happened. Kaisar was assassinated. Kikeroh died, RIP.
Sure the Romans didn't fight hundreds of thousands of Celts regularly.
Wow thats accurate. Honestly i just feel like these questions stem from an ignorance of history-study disciplines like textual criticism or archeology. Who knows..
>Archeology proves Archeology
where is this implied?
and, it does?
>Math proves math
>Im havin trobles wit dat
I think the problem here is that 95IQ OP believes historians thinl all historical things are 100% certain; and not just holistically true.
Alexander the Great did conquer the the Persian Empire, whether he ever lost a battle is not 100% certain.
How many exceptions are there though? Do we really believe millions died under the rule of these various dictators? During these wars? Where are all their bodies?
Sure, but I would prefer if people talked about the Alexandrine School rather than conjuring up the image of a vast storage of ancient texts lost to time when they talk about it.
The "burning of the library" is of course symbolic, but not enough people understand that, even within the historical sciences
How many exceptions are there though?
The exceptions are numbers not whether X did or did not happen. Caesar got stabbed to death, how many times and by how many senators is vague AND IRRELEVANT.
logic isnt exactly the main fuel of war. weird shiet happens on battlefields.
woogie boogie
They rewrite history
I don't believe in yesterday
ITT:
>shitposting
>misunderstanding of archaeology
>misunderstanding of radiation dating
>misunderstanding of what primary source means
>misunderstanding of what secondary source means
>genuinely asinine behavior and opinions
>more shitposting
My work here is done
You need some idealism in your life
>ancient history
>as if the philosemitic, muh /pol/, Harry Potter soyboys of Veeky Forums could handle it.
We do, however, know more about it now than we ever have thanks to the white man's ability to use the internet to synthesize information.
You think the jews are fucking shit up now? Wait until you learn they've been doing the same shit everywhere they've gone for millennia.
Humans make no sense. People will whack their kids for purely ideological shit like religion, etc. but will cower when given an opportunity to shoot an enemy actually employed to kill back.
>Believing in the modern view that "true = factual" and "fictional = false"
Grow up.
You're even more of a retard than OP if you think correspondence theory of truth is a modern invention.
no. even canonical history of 100 years ago cannot.
You do realize this shit is way weaker than what the wewuz people dredge up. I mean don't get me wrong, any semi-educated person could not accept their "evidence." But your shit is way dumber still.
there's no reason for these stories to be made up.
> t. Harry Potter soyboy
ITT: Solipsistic drivel.
>realize they aren't so bad
Do you actually think they were fighting each other over ideological differences? And you tell others they believe in foolish things. People don't sit in a wet filthy trench for 3 months for the wonderful opportunity of killing their opponents. They get drafted and told that if you don't sit in the damn trench we'll throw you in some miserable prison where you can starve, if you don't charge across to the other trench and kill them we'll throw you in a prison just the same, and if you don't want to die you better shoot whoever comes out of the enemy trench because their commanders are motivating them with a swift bullet to the head if it's so much as rumored you're thinking of running away.
wouldn't put it past white people to do something like that
aliens could have made the pyramids tho
Are you all really that unfamiliar with fundie tit for tat apologetics?
Fugg white people for creating the modern world n sheeeeeet
>a battle is considered more likely to have happened than a supernatural event without precedent
damn........... this seems pretty dubious...........
>MS paint picture of cherry-picked pictures of ancient art as ultimate proof for worldview
so this is the power of the white race...
Julius Caesar? Are you sure?
Not the way it's taught
>cletus thinks he's an ancient egyptian