Questions About History
We don't know what we don't know 27/02/2026
Today, I woke up at 7 am, much later than what I usually would. I prepped my coffee, I drank it. That first sip? A thought came in right after.
What did the demography of the Romans look like?
Then I realized something. I had never thought of the question before. Probably because I was just blindly assuming that all of history had high death rates before modern medicine.
Is that really true, though? How do we know? With the Romans, for example. We can infer that they may have had high death rates due to the inscriptions on tombs we find from that time.
However, the Romans ruled for a really long time, and, if we can only infer based on tombs and some ancient text, do we really know? Sure, the Romans had a census, but most of those texts are gone to history. So we are still merely speculating.
Then, you have claims that the life expectancy was 30 throughout the time period that the Romans ruled. How can you run an empire if you keep losing your population?
My point is not to claim otherwise, but rather to question, how do we know what we don't know?
update: I guess someone replied without referral. I would like to say, I must clarify. I found articles explaining that the Roman lifespan was only 30. That is incredibly low. It is actually skewed by childhood mortality rates, not by how long people who survived past childhood actually lived. I forgot to mention it in my mid coffee fervor. I believe that the majority lived to at least 55. Even the laborers. Actually, throughout history, those in the rural outskirts fared better off than those in cities for a variety of different reasons. What strikes me is that we don't know, we can only infer by what we see. What remains is mostly upper class objects and literature. We can infer very little I think. Anyway, hope my point makes more sense now.
Historical Ignorance: Is it really true? 25/02/2026
Whenever I read a modern retelling of history, I get annoyed.
Ultimately, it feels overtly summarized and simplified. I don't believe that the people of the past were as dumb as we say they were. We see buildings built prior to the 1600s in pure wood and stone that do more than rival; they supersede our own abilities in architecture. Many are still around! There are paved roads in Europe that highlight incredible accuracy and precision upon the time that they were made. They still exist now, thousands of years later.
So what happened? Where does our historical knowledge come from? Why do we believe that prior to the industrial revolution, nothing else matters as a whole because it is all cave man dribble?