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Our Knowledge of History Decays Over Time

palladiummag.com · 2,541 words · saved by 3 readers

As time passes, does our understanding of a historical event get better or worse? It seems intuitive that something is harder to understand the longer ago it was. You probably have a relatively easy time understanding events from the presidency of Barack Obama, while contextualizing events and tracking down sources from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson will require more work. Events from the reign of Henry VIII will be even more foreign, and they often suffer from large gaps in the historical record. This isn’t just a problem for individual researchers—entire societies can forget history. The march of entropy destroys witnesses, artifacts, scholarly records, and all other evidence of the past. Entire civilizations are lost. For thousands of years, scholars assumed the Hittites mentioned in the Old Testament were a minor power at best, until nineteenth-century archaeology revealed them as one of the great Bronze Age empires, who were nevertheless forgotten by Late Antiquity. Sometimes k

Vyacheslav Argenberg/The Colossi of Memnon As time passes, does our understanding of a historical event get better or worse? It seems intuitive that something is harder to understand the longer ago it was. You probably have a relatively easy time understanding events from the presidency of Barack Obama, while contextualizing events and tracking down sources from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson will require more work. Events from the reign of Henry VIII will be even more foreign, and they often suffer from large gaps in the historical record. This isn’t just a problem for individual researcher

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