Posted: Jul 01, 2015 12:42 am
MS2 wrote:iskander wrote:Every historian is a collector of facts, wrote a well known historian of our ancient past.
Which facts are there to collect about precisely what? We will choose a very famous king, the great Alexander, conqueror of Persia.
Robin Lane Fox, in his book , Alexander the Great , writes.General notes on sources.
For convenience throughout the book, I write many quotations or opinions in the name of Alexander's historians ...
I cannot stress too strongly that all these quotations and opinions are only known at second or third hand, as rephrased by other classical writers often four hundred years later,...
No word or phrase can be assumed to have been retained from the original...
The sources mentioned by Lane Fox have reached us because dedicated copyists made new copies from the perishing exiting ones, otherwise we would know very little about Alexander. This repeated effort to preserve the history of Alexander may be of no use to anybody since we cannot rule out forgery, interpolations and so on.
Paperback: 576 pages
Publisher: Penguin; Film Tie-in with Oliver Stone's "ALEXANDER" Ed edition (4 Nov. 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0141020768
ISBN-13: 978-0141020761
Page 499
It seems we love to have stories and good historians tell us stories that are consonant with as many of the 'facts' as possible. Some of the 'facts' will turn out not to be facts, either because some new evidence turns up or reexamination of the old 'fact' shows it to be something else. In that case a new story has to be told. And the process is always going to be more tentative than (hard) science (a) because there is a higher level of subjectivity, and (b) because some (most!) facts are simply irrecoverable. Beyond that is the problem that some subjects become politicised for whatever reason, and on these the subjective desire to tell a story supporting a particular viewpoint becomes paramount.
Yes that is also my understanding of ancient history based on the comments of Lane Fox .
The problem is made worse because it is very difficult to be aware of the facts to be investigated. All what we have is the written word of some writer preserved for us by some people who over the centuries kept making a fresh copy of something.
All what it takes for a historical event to disappear for ever is to stop replicating the narrative that informs of its existence.
Let us choose another ancient event. We will choose the Muslim invasion of Spain in 711 CE.
What do we know about that?