How much of past history has been warped and completely inaccurate? - George Orwell's fears have been realized.

Anyone who uses CE/BCE, as opposed to AD/BC, is a revisionist. That's some anti-Christ bullshit that came along in the 1990s. You can safely throw out whatever that channel says, alongside anything else that uses that notation.
The only videos I like from Trey the Explainer's channel are his videos debunking cryptids and his video on the Colossus of Rhodes. Everything else is horrible, and I'm pretty sure he's going to troon out soon anyway if you take one look at his Twitter.
There is plenty of archaeological evidence that the early Roman Republic and everything about the Roman Kingdom is self-serving myths. Almost all of Roman history before the Gauls sacked Rome in the 4th century BC is little more than legend since the Gauls destroyed whatever books existed. Whatever "happened" is oral history and is inherently unreliable. Hell, even the tradition of Roman historians isn't until after Brennus's Sack of Rome since the Roman style of history was imported from the Greeks.
Sadly, I don't think we'll ever know the full truth of what went on during the Greco-Roman period because of how much has been lost, how many legends have been accepted as true history (like Romulus and Remus and stuff like the details of the Trojan War being mentioned in Homer's poems), and how many of the surviving fragments of stuff have clear biases and agendas in them (like Tacitus's Annals praising Nero for burning Christians alive for fun; Tacitus was a pagan who hated Christianity, so I am not surprised he's never going to say nice things about them in his works and also praise Nero for engaging in what would be considered human rights abuses today).

The topic of this thread has been on my mind recently, and I couldn't help but be reminded of something more "recent": George Washington's party affiliation. In truth, Washington was an independent who spoke out against political parties, but only endorsed Federalist candidates after he retired. However, many people will list Washington's party affiliation when he was in office as "Federalist" when he never officially joined them. You will see a lot of people nowadays who think Washington was a Federalist when he never was. Now imagine in 2200, if we all haven't been wiped out by warfare or some super disease or a meteor or something, writing a biography on George Washington and trying to find out his party affiliation.

A more recent example of biases and agendas: earlier this year, I read Mark Leopold's biography on Idi Amin, and it is woke revisionist history hogwash that tries to make Amin out to be a poor abused victim who was only lashing out against those horrible Imperialist Europeans and wasn't THAT bad and didn't really kill THAT many of his own citizens. Like... Mark Leopold is a professor who admits to citing Wikipedia in his book. It doesn't help that he uses the book to take potshots at both Donald Trump and Winston Churchill early on for supposed "white supremacy" and "racism". I mean Idi Amin didn't get names like "Butcher of Uganda" and "Black Hitler" for no reason.

The lesson to be learned here? Never read a book written by a modern college professor unless you like Marxist/woke revisionist history. Especially if the book was published in 2014 or after.
 
The winners always write history. It's important to keep newspapers and printed Kiwifarms threads about DDos attacks as historic documents.
Imagine threads about a manchild raping his mom becoming part of a 21st century mythology in 200 years. In reality, only a bunch of equally autistic freaks cared about this. To people in the year 2223, this man was part of a pantheon that included an elderly orange man, an alcoholic midget, a bipolar rapper who may be part of a UFO cult, a gay British papist, and a gay Mexican papist.
 
There is plenty of archaeological evidence that the early Roman Republic and everything about the Roman Kingdom is self-serving myths. Almost all of Roman history before the Gauls sacked Rome in the 4th century BC is little more than legend since the Gauls destroyed whatever books existed. Whatever "happened" is oral history and is inherently unreliable. Hell, even the tradition of Roman historians isn't until after Brennus's Sack of Rome since the Roman style of history was imported from the Greeks.

The Roman kingdom and it's Kings were very much real, and inscriptions, archeological evidence and the like prove such:

The King’s cup

main-qimg-69b675f704a2ebc286c74f40f3b7bd50-lq.jpg

This is a fragment of an Etruscan-style bucchero blackware inscribed REX (king) that was found near the Regia— in historic times, the residence of the pontifex maximus but traditionally described as a one-time royal palace. It’s not a slam-dunk “proof,” since the office of rex sacrorum or “king of sacrifices” survived into historic times; the vessel might belong to a republican king-priest, not a real king. Still, the combination of the find site and the Etruscanate style is extremely suggestive. Bucchero style became prestigious in the seventh century BC: traditionally, the last century of the Roman kingdom, when the ruling house were ethnic Etruscans.

The Lapis Niger

main-qimg-492bbd866676ed7aa28ddecb9541214f-lq.jpg

There’s also mentions of the King on the Lapis Niger, an enigmatic and very old stele which is carefully buried under the modern surface of the forum. It’s too fragmentary for a flowing translation but it looks like later formula for a taboo: we can see “whoever” (quoi ho) and “is liable to be sacrificed” (sakros es) and a few lines below we can see that something will be done “by the king” (regei). What makes it more interesting is that the Lapis Niger is mentiones by several writers of the early Imperial period: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, and Festus.

Jupiter Optimus Maximus

Traditionally, the king Priscus is said to have vowed the construction of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline hill. This was completed by Tarquinius Superbus (the seventh and last king) and dedicated in the first years of the republic. This temples was the largest in Rome for many centuries, and was regarded as the most visible symbol in the city: the Roman equivalent of the Parthenon. The temple itself is long since gone, overwhelmed by the later temple complexes which sprang up on the Capitoline. However the foundations of temple survive beneath today’s Capitoline Museum, along with the evidence of the ambitious geotechnical work needed to create a site capable of hosting such a large structure. The stone and the techniques resemble those of the Cloaca Maxima.

In the last 20 years we’ve found fragments of the original decorations; they fit well with the traditional account, that the temple was adorned by an Etruscan artist using Etruscan-style terra cotta.

main-qimg-e659e2a7f74c4b7637f55e96bb757c07-lq.jpg

Terracotta antefix (covering for the end of a row of roof tiles) found near the foundations of the temple of Jupiter. The Etruscan materials and tiles match the traditional assignment to Vulca of Velus.

A pair of less famous temples from the regal era lie about fifteen feet under the modern church of St. Omobono in the Forum Boarium, the ancient cattle market near the Tiber. Excavations in the area are extremely tricky since they are under the modern water table.

However we can see similar Etruscanate artifacts and construction techniques, which helps provide context for dating artifacts from the Forum, the Capitolium, and the Palatine. The finds here and on the Capitol show evidence of significant trade with Etruscan and Greek cities in archaic Rome.

The “Shrine of Romulus”

Not far from the Lapis Niger is the recently discovered underground shrine dubbed — a bit hyperbolically — the “Tomb of Romulus”.

In fact, this dates from right around the traditional date for the founding of the Republic (not from the time ascribed to Romulus, two and a half centuries before) and it might represent an early-Republican cultic center designed to symbolize the new state. While one version or Romulus’ death has him ascending into the heavens, a counter-tradition has him torn to pieces by Roman senators — perhaps, an attractive myth to commemorate in newly-republican Rome. The empty sarcophagus in the “tomb” might be a deliberate allusion to either version Romulus’s mythical disappearance.

The current Curia building (originally commissioned by Julius Caesar in 44 BC) is the third one on or near the spot. In front of its doors was the Comitium , the meeting place of the popular assembly. The location of the Romulus shrine — under the stairs of the Curia — was a place of prime religious-political importance for the Romans, which makes it a good candidate for a bit of early-republican nation-building. This area was clearly an important public center for at least a couple of centuries before the shrine was placed . It was deliberately and extensively regraded to make a firmer, better drained surface in what had been, before the 8th century or so, a marshy drainage area.

Another part of the geotechnical reworking of the forum is the cloaca maxima the “great drain” — traditionally attributed to Tarquinius Priscus (the fifth king, circa 616–578 BC). Today it is mostly underground, but when it was built it was an open waterway. The Cloaca was instrumental in stabilizing the marshy lowland that became the forum. It also divided the western, political side of the forum — where the Comitium and the Curia stood — from the residences of the kings and the Vestal virgins at the eastern end. Excavations have shown not only the stone block which lines the channel but even the post-holes and sockets that held railings and bridges around it. We don’t have an irreproachable way to date this project to the reign of Priscus but the work includes a new layer of cobbling above the seventh century pavement and is generally dated to the sixth century based on materials and techniques. The size and complexity of the work are certainly suggestive of the story told by Pliny (Natural History, 36.107 ) about grueling working conditions and mutinous workers.

Servian Walls

One of the great debates in archaic Roman archaeology was the long argument about the existence of a city wall dating back to the Roman kingdom. Most of the literary sources attribute a wall to Servius Tullius (the sixth king, 578–535 BC) though a few attribute it to other kings. The first two centuries of modern archaeology consistently found fortifications which were clearly much later: the clincher was the identification the prime building material for this wall as tufo giallo from the quarries of Veii - not conquered by Rome until 396 BC. The archaeological evidence coincided with a high-water mark in skeptical approaches to ancient texts, leading many 20th century studies to dismiss the regal-era “Servian Walls” as a later myth.

However, in the last generation the picture has been complicated considerably. The discovery of a substantial 8th century wall at the foot of the Palatine in 1988 undermined the argument that archaic Rome was too small or too poor for substantial fortifications. Since the mid 90’s Italian archaeologists have identified what they see as several fragments of mid-sixth century fortifications interspersed among the more visible, later walls. Their date would be roughly correct for Servius Tullius. The archaic wall sections use a different stone, different construction techniques, and a different standard of measurement. This remains a hotly debated topic among archaeologists, but there seems to be at least some physical reality to the traditional idea of a Servian wall. A recent (2012) survey of the debate here suggests a middle ground, positing discontinuous regal-era fortifications on the city hilltops, perhaps connected by earthworks.

Finally:

This are just some of the recent archeological discoveries that seem to support many of Roman historians claims and stories about the Roman Kingdom and the transition to the Republic, i have not mentioned all of them in here. There are also other archeological findings and discoveries that are more controversial and debated that if verified can lend much more credence to tradicional roman accounts of their history. Such are discussed in this article:

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Technology/story?id=4253203&page=1
 
Last edited:
Anyone who uses CE/BCE, as opposed to AD/BC, is a revisionist. That's some anti-Christ bullshit that came along in the 1990s. You can safely throw out whatever that channel says, alongside anything else that uses that notation.
Of course he'll get more shit for this than if he said the holocaust was fake or nuclear energy was invented by the Tartarian Empire
 
  • Like
Reactions: Flan Handler
One of the most important things to remember is history is oft determined by the politics and issues of the present. Take recent civil war historiography-Lee is not only an evil slaver, but also incompetent, and so on.

This makes sense given the post 65 era of race politics and animus against any sort of White American heritage or identity(or their existence).

In more ancient times-it becomes even fuzzier-we have plenty of evidence of various Roman writers, but how much and how accurate it is has often been questioned-was it created or curated by medieval monks? How real were a lot of classical writers?

Context often becomes lost.

One thing you can do in an orwellian sense is simply remove books from any sort of catalogue or reference-a book that isn't listed in any index or library, even the most obscure may have never existed. In this way it becomes very easy to "memory hole" things certain individuals desire forgotten.

Even now-we see attempts at controlled forgetting of what happened with the lockdowns and the 2020 riots-a lot of tweets and footage are lost, and many have been gaslit or are doing the gaslighting.

Ultimately history is extremely malleable-perceptions can be false, or they can be true, records deleted or altered. The fact we humans don't have perfect memories, and that people lie mean things become foggy very quickly.

So yeah I'd say it happens-stuff is memory holed all the time, and you can never trust that what history you do hear about isn't being discussed in terms of its affect on the present.
 
One of the most important things to remember is history is oft determined by the politics and issues of the present. Take recent civil war historiography-Lee is not only an evil slaver, but also incompetent, and so on.

This makes sense given the post 65 era of race politics and animus against any sort of White American heritage or identity(or their existence).

In more ancient times-it becomes even fuzzier-we have plenty of evidence of various Roman writers, but how much and how accurate it is has often been questioned-was it created or curated by medieval monks? How real were a lot of classical writers?

Context often becomes lost.

One thing you can do in an orwellian sense is simply remove books from any sort of catalogue or reference-a book that isn't listed in any index or library, even the most obscure may have never existed. In this way it becomes very easy to "memory hole" things certain individuals desire forgotten.

Even now-we see attempts at controlled forgetting of what happened with the lockdowns and the 2020 riots-a lot of tweets and footage are lost, and many have been gaslit or are doing the gaslighting.

Ultimately history is extremely malleable-perceptions can be false, or they can be true, records deleted or altered. The fact we humans don't have perfect memories, and that people lie mean things become foggy very quickly.

So yeah I'd say it happens-stuff is memory holed all the time, and you can never trust that what history you do hear about isn't being discussed in terms of its affect on the present.
The way out is to archive everything.

Easier said than done, though.
 
Back