Let’s go back to the 1600’s. Stuff happened. How do we know this stuff happened – the way people dressed, ate, acted? Is it a collective of surviving evidence gathered from the time? How do we know that written statements from the time period weren’t bullshit? Do we just agree that we can form a general picture of what happened in the past from the surviving evidence?
(1600s used as an example, this applies to general history. I assume things get more questionable the further you go back)
Thank you for indulging a historically-challenged idiot who’s had a few whiskeys.
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We have lots of written records of things happening in the 1600s that we know are utterly bullshit and just made up for various reasons. This is a lot of what historical researchers have to dig through to find out what is real and what is made up or misinterpreted. It is very important to historians to not only look at what was written or what artifacts remains from something but also look at their history in the mean time. A lot of historical texts are just made up for one reason or another so you need to look at who the authors are, what their sources are and what their motives are. Even if you have multiple sources saying the same thing it might be that they are actually just quoting the same unreliable source. And it is a similar issue with artifacts. People made forgeries and repaired or embellished real artifacts.
This is why historical research takes so much time and effort. You can not just go to the library and read through a few old book and start writing your own book based on these. You need to actually do lots of research for every single piece of fact to try to find independent sources for them. One of the reasons why it is easier to study historical warfare then other aspects of life is because you often have records of the wars from both sides so you can compare them. When you get first hand records of people at a battle saying they saw the lord and savior himself come down from the skies to rain lighting bolt upon the enemy you might not want to take this quite so literally but rather look at how the enemy depict the battle scene.
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