Perhaps even more interesting than the history we know is the history we don’t know.
It seems like the history most talked-about is the history that no one really knows the truth about. Lots of people have theories but no one really knows what happened.
Assassinations are a popular genre of history for this reason. People often try and make it seem that there’s a lot behind the story that we don’t know and because of this it makes the whole thing more interesting to us. Did Lee Harvey Oswald shoot John F. Kennedy by himself, or were there other gunmen? Even if all the evidence is in favor of the fact that there was only one gunman, people would still try to make it seem like there were more because it’s something that can’t be proved.
People seem obsessed with things they can’t control. They want to not be able to understand. Even with the CoronaVirus happening now. It’s clear that it’s not nearly as deadly as many of the other normal flu’s or other viruses that have gone before, but with the rise of social media, it’s almost as if people want something to freak out about. People want there to be some kind of disaster.
As I write this, I think about more and more analogies that prove this. When I was watching the UFC fight the other night, the crowd made it clear that they wanted to see action in the ring. They wanted there to be fighting.
Just like in personal life, people gravitate toward drama, we do this also on a large scale. We blame the media, but in the end, it’s us who populate that. The media does it because it knows how much better the bad, crazy, and un-understandable news will do in making them a profit.
What I was actually thinking about writing this though is the interesting history that we don’t have. For instance, many people have images in their head of how the fighting 2,500 years ago might have looked. Fighting between people like the Persians and the Babylonians. More likely than not, we have an image in our head of two armies with maybe some archers, but the main part of the battle coming when the two lines of armies run full speed ahead and crash into each other.
What’s crazy though is that we have no history that proves this is how the battles went. Many historians now think that maybe they would run up to each other, but both armies would stop a good 5-10 ft before they got to each other and would fight from there. If you think about it, you wonder how you could fight the first way anyway. The people in the front of the lines would simply be squished by all the people running full speed ahead behind them and there could hardly be any room for sword or spear fighting.
But maybe they did it that way, no one knows! And that’s what’s crazy. Here’s a picture in our mind of what happened and it may not even be true.
It’s likely that those who recorded history at this time didn’t even think to include details about how the battles were fought because it was so obvious and second nature to them that they thought it unnecessary. But here we are 2,500 years later, genuinely not knowing one way or the other on seemingly huge things like “how were wars fought?”
There’s a whole genre of unknown history that is completely fascinating, and if we aren’t careful, it will become an obsession that no one will ever be able to quench.