Posted: May 07, 2015 1:09 pm
Sendraks wrote:My experience with historians is that information gets broken down into two sections when being disseminated.
1 - what the evidence tells us.
2 - what we might conjecture from that to fill in any blanks in the evidence.
It's usually pretty clear where the line between 1 and 2 is.
It seems to me to get less clear the further you go back in time. That is, almost inevitably, there is less and more ambiguous evidence with ancient history, and so quite often conjecture is needed to conclude almost anything. But maybe I'm thinking here of those TV programmes that 'fill in the blanks' almost to the exclusion of everything else in order to tell us startling new conclusions. Perhaps the academic papers are far more circumspect?