As I think about this project of organizing “the” history of the world, I see that I face obstacles ahead. Namely, a particular challenge is that contemporary life has many more layers of details, making it much more difficult to fit it into a narrative.
Before Gutenberg unleashed the god-forsaken printing press on us, civilization was much more difficult to record, meaning much less was preserved and remembered. I wonder how many historical facts are even true — particularly when we’re talking about information related to clergy and royalty.
Up until the advent of the printing press, the transmission of information was a painstaking endeavor, which required much more effort and economy than it would today. Whereas now, the challenges relate to trustworthiness and distribution of information, if the only evidence were in the fossil record, humans would have much less incentive for trying to own it all and invent self-serving narratives.
Indeed, writing about “pre-history” is fairly straightforward in part because there’s essentially no story. There are a few fragments, but there is no constant narrative that binds it all together. This alone makes preservation simpler, as different political factions don’t seek to “own” the story (notwithstanding certain religious groups that struggle to find a binding narrative, as — again — the only evidence must be presented in a certain way to serve the argument, which essentially means the storyteller has to use concrete facts to signify nuance, which is tough).
The inevitable realization seems to be that “history as narrative” is only possible when it entails a single perspective and a narrow scope.