Yeah, but even if we go back to antiquity, reputable historians always acknowledge that sources on military history of that time were often full of shit with things like “yeah, there were 100k of us versus millions of Persians”.
And in political history there’s a lot of discrediting one’s predecessors, and retroactively paitining some personalities as crazies.
And part of modern historian’s job is to point out all the possible conflicts of interest in historical sources, so that we can know that we’re presented specific perspective of events or if it was written hundreds of years after events.
PugJesus@piefed.social 1 day ago
Man, I could give you examples for literal days. The history of the Mongols, by and large, was not written by the victorious Mongol Empire. The history of the Jews was not written by their occupiers and subjugators. The history of Norse conquerors were largely not written by the Norse. The history of unifying pagan Slavic kings was largely not written by pagan Slavs. The history of the Roman Emperor Augustus was not written by his partisans, despite his massive investment in propaganda and trimming ‘inconvenient’ narratives during his (highly successful) life.
History is written neither by winners nor losers; history is written by those who intend to write history. Smart rulers can get a head-start on this during their rule, but can never control it completely, and the longer they’ve passed, the more feeble their efforts at control become.
“I am Ozymandias, King of Kings…”
_fryerDan@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
you’re just splitting hairs at this point, semantics for the sake of semantics
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
A great poem, but there remains quite a bit more than level sands of what Ramses II made. Hes probably in the top 3 of famous pharaohs.
Doesn’t detract from the rest of your point though.