For example when wars happened hundreds of years ago , how do we know certain events happened when written documents could have been destroyed or people keeping records could have been killed.
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Besides documents, there are a lot of inscriptions that survive to this day. I.e. a state would be unlikely to erect a statue or monument for something that didn’t happen.
Also archeology can date events, with methods like carbon dating.
But we don’t know for certain exactly how many events played out, surviving sources have biases that historians try to compensate for. E.g. the Roman emperor Nero was said to have played music while Rome burned in texts from the period, but modern historians aren’t so sure this happened since those texts were written by people hostile to Nero.
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