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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You’ve gotten some good answers.
Wanted to give you two terms to look up. The first is Stratigraphy. This is basically dirt that was laid down by different eras. As we dig down into the earth, each deeper layer represents further back in time. Each deeper layer has older and older stuff in it. For instance, pottery shards from older people’s are deeper down. We know it is from an older society because the pictures on the pottery match up with older societies. The technology they used is known from examining the broken pieces. We can tell what clay they used, how they hardened the clay, and how hot the fire was they used to harden it. All this tells us how good they were at making pottery. These techniques tend to follow a predictable pattern as we go down further in the earth. If we dig up two towns from long ago that existed next to each other in the past, they usually follow the same pattern the further we dig down. If we dig up a third town, it had better follow the same pattern or we have to examine why.
Second, look up the Toba Line. About 70,000 years ago a volcano erupted in a massive explosion that threw ash in the air. The ash cloud was so big it threw ash everywhere around the world. It settled and was buried just like the pots. We can look for that layer most everywhere. Events like this are predictable. If a bone from an animal is found above the line it is younger than 70,000 years. If it is found below, it is older than 70,000 years. These natural events allow us markers to date the age of the layers we dig up as well.
I find this question especially pertinent now, when people struggle to believe stories about what happened yesterday.
Historians rarely actually write that they “know” things happened a certain way, their investigations and their conclusions are usually turned into something more certain than they intended when it gets reported by others. Sciences, including Historical Sciences always suffer from this sort of “telephone effect”. So, you are correct that it’s often the case that what Historians “know” gets taught a little differently to everyone else. That’s why it’s important to rely on multiple sources of information and to get good at recognizing what makes a good source of information. Text books from religious organizations, for example, tend to be terrible sources of information because they have a bias that tends to warp what Historians say into what their religious ideals want them to be. Text books from “cheap” educational sources also tend to be bad, this is because they often include information that hasn’t been verified with actual Historians, so they might include things like “Dinosaurs all had feathers” because it was said once by someone and they didn’t really bother to check it out. It costs money to verify facts, and so the more expensive encyclopedias are /generally/ more reliable because they spend more to verify their facts. Encyclopedia Britannica is expensive, and has a great reputation for accuracy. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is generally not considered a trustworthy source because verification of what it says doesn’t always happen. If Wikipedia says something, you should always cross-check with other sources before you believe it 100%.
In any case, where Historians themselves are very confident that they know something for sure, it is because they have lots of different sets of clues and evidences that all point to the same conclusion. For example, we know how many of the early Roman battles were fought and what strategies were employed and how the battles played out because many historians in that time period wrote about it. If only one historian had written about it, then it would be less certain because that historian might be biased. If only the winners wrote about it, that would also be less certain. However, if both the winners, the losers and several third parties wrote about it then you could compare all these sources and figure out how the battle actually happened. The Roman battles were fought in a time period when writing about big battles was fairly common, so there’s a good number of sources to work with and so we know pretty accurately what happened.
Another kind of clue involves physical evidence. The evidence of battles is pretty obvious, bones, weapons and such can stay in the ground for hundreds and even thousands of years, marking the spot where the battle happened. Historians can date the physical evidence through chemistry and by how it “looks”. Weapons and items can be dated by how they were forged or whether they look like other items from a certain period.
It does get harder to be certain when you go back further into history. Written history is pretty accurate going back about 2 or 3 thousand years because writing was wide-spread enough for multiple sources to exist. We know, for example, that the Torah (the Old Testament in the Bible), is at least 2700 years old because we have small scraps of ~~paper~~ clay with fragments of sentences from the Torah written on them and these have been dated to 2700 years ago. This does not, however, provide evidence that anything written in the Torah actually did happen because there are no other sources to compare with.
History going back to a time before writing is much, much harder to be certain about. The best evidences are physical items made of bone, metal or stone. Other sorts of things will have broken down over time and been lost, although we do have some mummies and samples of cloth from > 10k years ago that were preserved in ice and other “special” locations where such things get preserved naturally. Physical evidence like this can at least tell us if Humans have been in an area, and can even tell us a general time period through chemical dating. If we find physical evidences of a Human settlement, then we can find out the time period when it existed and using this information we can trace when people arrived in different regions and that can tell us how people spread out over time. We know, for example, that it is very likely that the first Humans came out of Africa and up through what it is now called Egypt until they came to the region we now call Iraq. We know this is fairly certain because *all* of the bone fragments older than 2 million years old come from places in Africa. All the bone fragments found outside Africa are all less than 2 million years old. If a bone fragment more than 2m years old were found outside Africa, it would change everything we know about Human history, but this hasn’t happened and we are constantly looking for them so we’re pretty confident that we’re right about Humans coming from Africa.
I teach medieval literature, and a lot of my work is history adjacent, though I am not myself a historian. One thing that you will quickly see the more you read history is that the confidence with which something is asserted is often inversely proportional to the expertise of the speaker and the audience. Pick up virtually any book by an academic historian whose target audience is other historians and you will quickly see that there are often multiple competing hypotheses around how to interpret historical events that will be discussed with consistent reference to primary historical sources and (in my field increasingly) archaeological finds. In early medieval history, the first chapter of many books begins with frank confessions of the paucity of evidence and the inherent uncertainty of what we do know, and historians often question whether we actually can know basic facts for sure. If the medieval writer Bede asserts that something happened one hundred years before he was writing, and he is the only source for that claim, can we be confident in knowing it? Historians will then look for competing claims, investigate how Bede’s historical position might have led to biases (conscious or unconscious), look for other kinds of support, etc.
In books aimed at popular audiences, there is often very little of this. Part of this is that these kinds of books will often focus on areas of broad agreement or point out interesting details. In terms of the history of the English language, books by Bill Bryson have probably been read more widely than most books by experts in the field (with the possible exception of David Crystal) because they are accessible and also pretty good. But I would never teach a class using one of Bryson’s books as a textbook because he just doesn’t give the kind of detail that I would want. Telling a good story is his first concern, and he does it very well.
But the other part of it is that writers of popular history often ignore the competing hypotheses and detailed work that is the life blood of historians. To judge by the popular press and number of copies sold, three of the most influential books of history would include Jared Diamond’s *Guns, Germs, and Steel*, Reza Aslan’s *Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth*, and Steven Pinker’s *The Better Angels of Our Nature*. All three authors have advanced graduate degrees, but also, their degrees are quite different than the topics of those books. Jared Diamond has advanced degrees in physiology, Reza Aslan in creative writing and sociology, and Steven Pinker in cognitive psychology. But these books, which have shaped how the public thinks about anthropology, religious history, and the history of violence, have had approximately zero impact within each of those fields, and arguably have had a negative impact because scholars have had to spend their time arguing against the misconceptions promoted by the books.
The long and short – They guess.
They may be well educated guesses based on things they dig up, documents they read, historical records – Photos, rock carvings, cave paintings etc, and other factors like the configuration of ruins etc. and a big factor would also be human nature – People aren’t all that different from years ago – We still eat, poop and sleep and usually do those things in separate places (usually).
Combine them all together… Educated guess. When more info becomes available, The image can be made clearer.
The amount of written sources out there is amazing. Absolutely amazing. I studied european history and spent quite some time in archives. The amount of records that exist is insane.
You just need to be able to read medieval(or other) in whatever language was prominent in that area at the time, and that is really hard. I could only barely decipher some texts in an ancient version of my language and even then the grammatical structures are completely different.
So most people never see any of the REAL real sources, of which only snippets of translation or interpretation can be find in books and artices.
But the sources are insanely massive in number, finding them is the trouble.
They are making their best guess based on what other historians wrote down and other historical documentation. Modern history is easier because we have better documentation, but it is based on people’s accounts, which are sometimes inaccurate and biased. It is an informed guess, but it is still a guess.
A great example is Mario Antoinette, she is often portrayed as callous and uncaring. She was arguably extremely sheltered and unaware how bad things really were. She ended up serving as a symbol for all the evils the French revolution fought against and her history is colored by that.
Big events are usually well documented as easy to know happened. The exact roles and judgments placed on everyone in those events is a lot murkier.
Simple: “government” Bureaucracy
The more a civilisation used bureaucracy to keep things in order, the more we know about them.
It could be a religious scholars writing down and recording major events in their area, to a local tax collector keeping notes on who owes the local ruler what and when it needs to be paid. (especially if they paid in crops/cattle rather than gold.)
in other cases it’s mainly deductive investigation, filling in the blanks between what we know of a culture by what they left behind (pottery, wall paintings, remains)
History is not an empirical science. What that means is that historians can’t confirm their beliefs about the past but they still do their best to argue that they represent reality gone by by citing sources. One way to think about it is that there is no historian with a knowledge of the past, only reasonable beliefs. And then they contest each other’s views all the time, searching for meaningful lessons in each other’s writings.
Once you back far enough this is true. If all that we have to off of are Herodotus we can suspect that he embellished his writings because they were meant to be performed. People make careers out of deciphering what parts of these texts are true and what parts aren’t. Still, historians Will acknowledge that they don’t know something. Another thing historians use is real artifacts. We suspected that Homer’s stories of troy were mythical until the city of troy was discovered by archeologists. We can’t be certain what we teach is all true, but all the major events certainly are. If you dig into ancient history you will find that the vast majority of things are unknown.
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