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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It depends on how far back you’re asking about.
Mostly, for eras preceding the written word we have to make a lot of guesses using what we know about modern humans, paired with artifacts found around human remains. These artifacts include things like tools, buildings, and personal objects. These things give us clues about the people and time period, and anthropologists sort of piece the rest together into a cohesive story. But they’ll be the first to tell you that it’s a lot of guesswork.
Once we start getting into the time of the written word, though, it starts to get a little more clear. Now, not only do we have artifacts, landmarks, etc, but we also have written records. And anthropologists will take things like laws, religious texts, diaries, tax documents, etc and they use all of these clues to put together a story of the time.
In addition, when combining the work that anthropologists and historians do with the hard sciences (like biology, chemistry, and geology) we can explore the relationship between people and their environments and get even more “proof” of things that happened.
Historians tend to look for confirmation of the facts in as many sources as they can find, but sometimes it’s still a bit of a guessing game. And it’s made muddier when you consider the phrase “history is written by the victors”. But that plays into social and racial issues that is a whole other can of worms when we question the veracity of historical “facts”.
They mostly rely on what the people themselves wrote down. Their day to day lives in diaries can give us insight into how people lived, important occasions recorded on engravings and art on things like palaces can show us what might have happened and how (and then we can use things like carbon dating to know roughly when), and other engravings and art on things like temples can tell us about their beliefs.
Because the winners said it was so and wrote it down.
For the most part I’d say we have little idea what the actual truth is.
I think about this sometimes. As a young person we have no way of knowing if WW2 and earlier even happened.
There is a really great podcast called “Our Fake History” where this and other questions are tackled. Essentially the host takes historical record and researches the truth! Check it out!
I know the ancient and classical era are quite hit and miss because we weren’t documenting history for the most part but the historians we did have were also more so storytellers than historians.
The human capacity to theorize is profound, but its important to never accept something at face value. This will give you the wide definition of accepted history without ascribing you blindly to warped or misguided theories.
Take everything with a grain of salt.
If you are speaking of the actual study of history, historians study mainly in written documents, oral accounts, and art. Technically, things taking place before writing are considered Prehistory. At least that is the way it was explained to me in college when I got my worthless B.A. in history. I know this is not your question just wanted to clarify what history is.
It depends on how much evidence they find and show in their research, but for the most part they will make up the holes
The short answer is they look for clues and make the rest of the shit up. History is written by victors is another, most of these clues left behind are biased making one party look better than others. None of which can be proven. it’s harder for future generations to look back, should they ever want to, because we have so much fake news. It’s history means it’s gone, done and dusted.
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