Since my latest post, I have been thinking about the nature of knowability. I apologize if I’m repeating myself, but I’m hopefully not. In the movie, “12 Monkeys,” there’s a scene where one guy says, “There’s no true, there’s no false; there’s only popular opinion.” I find that notion especially true regarding ancient history. When describing ancient civilizations, the only evidence tends to be very speculative and narratives are based on interpretations that are often made thousands of years later with only sparse evidence.
Regarding this site, I want to scrutinize the data. Me, I am not unreasonably skeptical — and I fully acknowledge that can certainly lead to inaccurate explanations and thus contribute to an inaccurate history. However, not all data is equal, and we must therefore conclude that not all historical narratives are equally true. In college, I took astronomy courses to fulfill my science requirement, and we learned about an astronomer who detected a novel wobble in a star. The implication of a wobble in a distant star is that it probably has an orbiting planet, because the wobble likely shows the presence of a large orbiting entity. Anyway, this astronomer (whose name I forget now… van something, maybe — or von? He was Dutch). In any case, he eventually discovered his telescope lenses were warped, so he died thinking the “planet” he discovered was just an artifact of warped lenses. But then! Lo and behold, other scientists later detected the same wobble, suggesting the star actually did have terrestrial planets orbiting it.
I mention that anecdote because that astronomer died assuming the planet he thought he discovered was a mirage, but later research validated his initial hypothesis. I suspect that throughout the study of history — particularly pre-history, as it’s called — this is a pretty common phenomenon.
Before I go any further with my timeline and understanding of prehistory, I really must learn more about the methodology. How does something become part of “history?” As in, how does the “canon” get made?