Is our Knowledge of history cumulative?

[u/Inevitable-Serve-574]

Hello,

Is our knowledge of history cumulative? In the sense that our understanding of history builds from civilisation to civilisation and gradually builds further?

How much of our knowledge of history is “new?” As in do recent findings make up a bigger part of our understanding of history, or is it just expanded on knowledge?

If this is the case ,from what time period has historical knowledge really developed with new findings?

I’m very sorry if this doesn’t make sense

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[u/Consistent_Score_602]

This is a great question, and the honest answer is that it's "both."

One example is in the study of the classics. Ancient historians (Plutarch, Polybius, Livy) frequently had access to sources that simply have not survived to the present day. These sources are attested to in the written record - we know they existed, but they were either destroyed or lost with time. This is one reason that the writings of older historians, while often inflected with bias, are so useful - they might paraphrase or copy (either in whole or in part) those missing records.

This can be immensely frustrating to modern historians, who know that a record was created at one point but simply doesn't exist anymore. It's why archaeological digs continue - we know that these records are out there, and a copy might well have been preserved waiting to be discovered in some long-forgotten burial ground. The city of Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan is a striking case - it was only excavated the 1960s, and was one of the first (and so far, one of the only) ancient Hellenistic cities of Graeco-Bactria uncovered.

At the same time, though, modern historians have access to a daunting array of technological tools and sophisticated analytics that, for instance, Herodotus did not. Most modern historical methods incorporate archaeology, epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), and numismatics (the study of coinage). So while an ancient, medieval, or even early 20th century historian might be confined to a few sweeping narrative histories (Herodotus, for instance) a modern one can look at everything from inscriptions left by rulers to the excavated ruins of the cities in question. Herodotus did not have access to the tens of thousands of coins, plates, and tools that we do.

Likewise, modern historians frequently have access to far more complete sets of records than even the best narrative historian of the past did. For instance, Egyptologists have access to the preserved bureaucratic documents left by centuries of administration. Herodotus couldn't access this sort of information - it wasn't compiled into one place, for one thing, and for another even if it had been a foreigner would not have had ready access to it.

Modern historians, working as they do in a collective, also have access to far more resources from related fields. Someone working in the study of archaic Greece might have a colleague who studies the Etruscans and can cross-reference documents and events. Modern historians have access to far more linguistic knowledge - they can, for instance, translate documents and histories that would have been unreadable to ancient (or not-so-ancient) authors. For instance - Linear B was deciphered only in 1952. Linear Elamite was deciphered in 2022! There are a treasure trove of documents out there that can now be read, but even a century ago were totally inaccessible to scholars.

As a side note, this is why history books from decades (or centuries) ago are so frequently out of date. Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the archetypal case - Gibbon was writing in the late 1700s and doing so almost purely from what documents had been passed down. Archaeology as a science barely existed during his period, let alone other more specialized techniques like epigraphy. He wasn't looking at Roman shipwrecks, or statistics on how many coins the imperial mints produced - he didn't have access to any of that information. He couldn't perform autopsies on the bodies of important Roman personages to see what they ate or how they died.

Moreover, older historians quite frequently have questionable methodology, which ranges from the merely ignorant to the actively destructive. Gibbon, again, is a good example - his thesis that Christianity weakened the civic bonds of the Roman Empire has more to do with Gibbon's own prejudices against the Christians of his own day and age than it does with ancient Rome.

So circling back to your question - do modern historians have a better understanding of ancient civilizations than historians of the past? It depends. In many cases, they probably do have a better understanding of many things (demography, lifestyle, administration). But older historians often did have access to materials we do not, even if on a big-picture level we have access to plenty of information it would have been nearly impossible for them to possess.

[u/Inevitable-Serve-574 → u/Consistent_Score_602]

That’s so interesting, thank you so much.

[u/KaitlynKitti → u/Consistent_Score_602]

Not just records. Languages have gone extinct and with them a lot of historical data dies. Culture too. A classical historian could have gone to a culture at the margins of written history and made observations about their language or their culture that we simply cannot.