How can hundreds and even thousands of years of history, which includes entire civilizations, discoveries and characters, so confidently be explained? Not all of it could have happened the way it’s being taught to modern society, right?
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They don’t, really. Like with any other science, we make up a story that fits the evidence we find.
In an epistemological sense, we can’t *actually* know anything.
To cut to the chase: They look at different written accounts from the period and see how well the accounts match with each other. The more reputable the writers are and consistent the more so it’s historicity is likely to be true.
To answer this question you need to consider types of sources for information:
Primary sources would be from the time period itself. These can be people writing about it (ex. Pliny the Younger writing letters to Tacitus about the eruption of Vesuvius), objects/art (vases, mosaics, etc) from the period, architecture, and even bones.
Secondary sources are people from later time periods (anywhere from 100 years later to now) writing about the time period based on their own research.
By combining these two things with an emphasis on primary sources historians can come to an ever-evolving understanding of what historical periods were like. This knowledge is always being added to whenever a new study/artefact comes to light.
Much in the same way as the police can find out the murderer by looking at the crime scene. You look at whatever evidence is available to you and construct the best possible picture of what happened. Sometimes you have strong evidence, sometimes some pieces are missing but you can still get a rough idea of what happened. Sometimes you just don’t have enough to work with and the case will never be solved.
The best case scenario is that completely unrelated avenues of investigation converge on the same result. For example, we can say with confidence that Pompei was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted, because there are mentions of this in historical records, and we can also see the traces of a volcano eruption in the little air bubbles that were trapped in the Arctic permafrost at a point in time which fits the timeline. That also then gives you a fixed point in history against which you can check and validate other events and place them in the timeline.
Dust, like the dust that accumulates on furniture, falls at a rate that doesn’t vary too much for each location. When someone drops an object, dust starts to accumulate over time. Over a very long time the dust turns into dirt and the object gets buried. Historians can measure how deeply an object is buried and tell at what time period it was dropped. Not all locations have dust build up at the same rate. They figure out what the rate of build up is by comparing how deeply the object was buried compared to how deeply similar objects in other locations were buried.
[Stratigraphy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratigraphy), for one thing. Event A happened before Event B because evidence of Event A lie below evidence of Event B in the earth. You see no evidence of tools being used in Layer A, for example, and suddenly in Layer B you see evidence of stone and bone having been manually worked.
And you correlate evidence (using [dendrochronology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology), for just one example out of [many](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dating_methods)) to discover that stuff in a certain layer can be dated to a certain time.
If you’re asking how we can know that some written record is truthful. we can similarly look for corroborating evidence (physical evidence and other written records).
If someone says Rome burned, you can dig down and look for actual evidence of a great fire in Rome and you can use various dating methods to determine when and where within Rome that fire occurred. Likewise, you can look for evidence of flood, drought, famine, high or low temperatures, and so on.
No, we cannot be 100 percent certain that every historical claim is true. We cannot be sure everything in the news today actually happened the way people said it happened. People get things wrong and people lie for their own purposes. You judge the reliability of each claim accordingly, you look for corroborating evidence, and you try to determine the way things most likely happened.
We dont know, we make “reasonable guesses”.
Lets say I want to know your name. I can ask you, and it is probably reasonable to assume this is your name. Now, I could be skeptical of it and ask for ID. But if I keep on being skeptical, I could think it was forged and check it is legit. But then of course, someone in the administration could have tampered with the records. And so forth, and so forth.
Much simpler to assume you told me your real name the first time, and just adjust my guess later if a proof of the contrary comes forward. Those “reasonable guesses” are the basis for interpretations and that is what historians usually argue about.
There’s a bit of just survivor bias when you think about these things.
When you hear detailed historical accounts its usually because its something that would have been recorded many times and we found a lot of things about it. So we know about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and Xerxes and the Three Kingdoms in China and the Kahn Mogolian empire etc…
But pick some random place or person and its very unlikely we know much about it.
Naram-Sin was the 37th King of Assyria… should be an important person, we know his name because he’s on a list of kings. We know he was the former king’s son…and that’s about it, we don’t even know when he reigned or anything he did.
When we do know its usually a case of preserved documents and contemporary kingdoms around the area also making note of it.
When there’s a new Roman Emperor, you’ll probably find records mentioning it from Persia to Portugal.
You only hear about the parts we know, we don’t know the vast majority of it.
Keep in mind that the further back we go, the less detail we *tend* to know and that there are often all kinds of gaps in our knowledge.
– Many cultures started keeping written records fairly early on. Although these aren’t always 100% accurate, historians can look at how different records compare to each other and try to figure out what is true. Even before there were written records, pretty much every culture had an oral tradition of some sort that got passed on (and sometimes written down eventually).
– Even if there is no written record (or there are contradictory records), there is physical evidence that can be used to help figure it out. If you find a lot of skeletons in one area that are all from the same time and most show signs of injuries, maybe there was a battle nearby. A trained archaeologist can look at a skeleton and often tell the person’s age and sex – sometimes they can also recognize ethnic groups, diet, and what types of physical work they did when they were alive.
By putting huge effort into it actually. History is an effort of a giant amount of scientists who are working every day on little puzzle pieces which they put together slowly. Some parts of history are well documented, others have almost no written record. Many things can be explained with objects like tools from the time, pieces of everyday life and even feces (do we say poo in eli5?). Lots and lots of very clever people are piecing history together. Even then authors of popular books and movies have to guess a lot of things because for many topics we don’t know enough to really reconstruct a whole society.
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