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Jim in Alaska's avatar

Passing thought upon reading your excellent essay: The winners write history. The whiners re-write it. Among the fiction writers interpretations perhaps lies the truth.

Hey, as I say, just a passing thought. ;-)

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Mary Catelli's avatar

Some fiction writers.

The ones who do not even realize that the past can't be like what they are used to -- they tend to stick in memory.

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Eugine Nier's avatar

> The winners write history.

Not always. Especially not if the winners are illiterate.

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Mary Catelli's avatar

There was a Pharoah whose great triumph over some people was recorded in inscriptions, and how he married one of their princesses after.

Then they dug up the battle site and concluded he had been defeated. But no one else left records.

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Eloris's avatar

Right, or the winners are Spartans that speak in one-word sentences, and the losers are the Athens of Thucydides.

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Eugine Nier's avatar

Thucydides was even the loser in Athenian politics, which is why he had the free time to write his history.

https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/

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Eric Hinkle's avatar

One problem with getting the sources for an obscure era is when you can't find any. Years ago (back before I had steady Internet access) I tried to make a rather odd swords-and-sorcery series up set in a world based on pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia. I could find a ton of works on Achaemenid Persia, but almost nothing on the Sassanids and or the early Turks. Heck, I found more books on the early Indo-Europeans than on the Sassanids! That sort of thing can get frustrating. You did point this out but I felt it should be emphasized. If you want to get off the beaten trail with your settings, make sure you can either find the information you need or fake it really well.

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Mary Catelli's avatar

Oh, it can be very frustrating. All the more in the days before the Internet. The local libraries were really spotty for medieval information on different countries in Europe.

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Eric Hinkle's avatar

In my experience with local libraries, if it wasn't England or the Crusades and/or Byzantium, forget it. I was left with the impression that absolutely nothing had happened in Europe between the fall of Rome and the coming of Napoleon.

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Mary Catelli's avatar

Ours had some French stuff.

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Eric Hinkle's avatar

Yours was better than mine, then.

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Mary Catelli's avatar

Lucky me.

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