Hello everybody,
Few if any of you may remember me; I was active on the original Stolen History forum back in late 2019 up until the temporary disappearance of KD.
I dip in and out of the Stolen History milieu every now and again, but my own work has largely taken me to original sources (wherever we might reliably find them), so I have had less time for contemporary theories.
Anyway, I was looking for Piranesi today (I wrote this originally some days ago, only posting it now) and found him again in part thanks to this forum - much appreciated - and saw this thread at the top of the "most recent" list. Having read the first post, I felt inspired to provide some commentary. Apologies if anything I am to say has already been raised, but I am "a man on a mission" and sadly lack the time to read through everyone's posts.
I apologise in advance for the length of this one - if it is not to your taste, you will drop off quickly. Ignore it if so.
I doubt the majority of fans of this and related sites will appreciate what I have to say or where I am coming from; since I have made it a great part of my work for some years to investigate the ancient world seriously, and have, in the process, overturned many of (at least what used to be) the heroes of some Stolen History members, incl. e.g. Fomenko, Heinsohn, Wilson & Blackett etc.
My outlook has become decidedly sober, since I have been faced with irreconcilable dilemmas regarding e.g. the demonstrable development of coinage over the past ~2,500 years, which supports the accepted narrative unflinchingly. In fact, for the purposes of my work (I have been investigating the first millennium AD and the first half of the second millennium AD), everything but the coins might raise questions; but when the coins are brought into the equation, we are rather forced to accept at least the relative chronology and event sequence we are taught in schools, if not the absolute dates given. The events associated with the named figures on European and Arabic coins might be completely bogus for all I know, but we cannot possibly deny that people with those names had coins minted for them in a particular sequence - the development (and regression) of styles and materials is clear, and the Arabic coins are dated from within a century of Mohammed's given death date, so we have a pretty reliable framework for world chronology from about the 8th century onwards.
Before anyone suggests that I have not done due diligence on the coins - believe me, I maintained until faced with the sheer impossibility of it that the majority of them were fakes and had been put in their contexts fraudulently. Such arguments simply do not bear up to scrutiny once the vast array of global coinage is taken into account. One must put far too much energy into believing that far too many people are far too invested in pulling the wool over their own descendants' eyes for no sensible (or even discernible) reason, when it is simply sensible and obvious that the bulk of these coins were found perfectly innocently, and are contextually appropriate relative to their accompanying materials (yes, even Roman coins in Viking contexts - find me one Viking coin in a Roman context, please, and I will throw the coins out again with all haste).
I have had to completely divest myself of the idea that there has been any consolidated grand scale attempt to obscure history as a whole; rather, there would appear to have been many (sometimes conflicting) attempts to obscure histories in part, some of which still filter down into our modern textbooks.
I believe the answer to this question - how has history become so corrupted - implies in no small way the kinds of attitudes and approaches practised by a range of the members of the old Stolen History forum (I cannot vouch as to whether these attitudes/approaches are maintained here, but I hope they are not).
"Antiquarians" of the past, making wild and outrageous claims on next to no evidence (but certainly to contemporary social, political, or financial benefit), did not have a "scientifically established narrative" against which to fight, so one or the other of their interpretations won out in the end - largely backed by private investment - forming, of course, the bedrock of that very "scientifically established narrative" we all in our own ways seek to upset now.
Many of their more insane assertions have of course been undermined by further investigation and analysis by people who stand to gain nothing like as much as they did (academia pays less and less as time goes on): rather, "history" as we have it now is increasingly a labour of love for the past, not one for the gain of a few. This doesn't mean that we've caught every "bug," but we're getting to it, slowly but surely. The work is extremely fine though; the blunderbuss approach isn't as appropriate as I might have once thought.
The "conspiratorial" assumptions of sites like SH completely overlook the slow development of humanistic science - science which has left its paper trail, no less than in e.g. diaries inherited by modern descendants of those who first took "antiquarianism" out of its backwards, Biblically-oriented, Classically illiterate origins into the light of proper scrutiny...
To ignore the history of history (which, I might say, is what this and similar sites often fall into) is to ignore rather simple things like e.g. my family tracing back reliably over 230 years, long before many people's proposed "19th century resets," through handwritten materials which only my family have access to (since there are only single copies, and they are in our family house, which was built by my family in the 18th century - we have the paperwork). I am hardly alone in this, there are millions of us who have inherited reliable testimony as to the 18th, 17th, even the 16th centuries, all over the world.
So, many of the theories presented on SH in the past would actually completely ignore copious evidence that many modern families have regarding the past 2-300 years, the period during which our present historical and chronological narratives have been cemented. Actually, as far as I can tell from my research, it has often been in overlooking history (or I might say "lore" more generally), not in trying to fabricate it, that errors have crept into the historical record (though I have found a number of forgers - historical forgery was a business in the Medieval period and then a fad in the Renaissance - but they didn't have the means to meddle with archaeology significantly, so we can prove a lot of falsities to be false).
To give an example, the earliest attempts to frame north west European history in literature were woefully scarred by mythical considerations: time scales, migratory routes, moral and legal imperatives and all sorts of finer details were corrupted by people trying to fit reality to fiction. Nowadays through fields like archaeogenetics we can show exactly where these Greco-Roman and Medieval "historical" narratives hit the mark, and exactly where they diverge from them.
A favourite case study of mine: the supposed origin of the Welsh and the Irish (from Trojans and Spaniards respectively) is demonstrable bunk, clearly introduced to the earliest literature through mixtures of error, fantasy, Biblical literalism, contemporary obsession with Rome etc. (because of Romanisation and Christianity, i.e. colonialism - much like Afrocentrists claiming they ruled Medieval Europe). The reality, as shown through modern and ancient genetics, is that the Welsh and the Irish both stem from north French populations that entered into Britain around what standard chronology calls "2,500 BC".
In fact, the most accurate ancient story recorded about British and Irish origins, that they stemmed from "Scythians" - despite this story having been disowned and denied so vociferously for so long, especially by historians who contributed to the historical consensus of last century - is the most accurate: since the antecedents of these northern French migrants did indeed stem from the same ancestors as those of the Scythians, and had emerged into northern France in the first place from what would, over a thousand years later, become Scythia. The "folklore" turned out to be true where the "academic opinion" turned out to be false.
There was no desire to actively obscure the truth here: rather, it was considered at the time the literature was produced that the other stories (Mil Espaine, Brutus of Troy) were simply more realistic, because they corroborated extant literature of the time (on the one hand the Bible, on the other hand recorded Roman mythology). The fact that both of these story arcs proved to be fantasy does not mean that people taught them because they wanted to delude others: rather, they taught them because they honestly believed they were true.
What this means is that contemporary reliance on established literature (one might say "media in general," including e.g. art, theatre, film etc. nowadays) influences thought, sometimes detrimentally. People were pre-conditioned back then by the literature they had access to to discount reality in favour of a good story; I believe the same happens today on many different fronts (this is basically a deep form of "propaganda," but a "cultural propaganda").
I hope the above is not too confusing, and that people can see how the same kinds of misapprehensions, when applied in other countries/at other times, at bigger or smaller scales, can lead to the same kinds of "mistakes" being introduced as "bonafide history" - this, I think, is how history became confused, through compilation of errors and a lack of any scientific means to distinguish between truth and fiction.
I dare say that the work that has been done in the past few hundred years, that is still being done, that is partially supplemented by sites like these (especially where you challenge the received tradition), has gone no small way towards un-confusing history, though there might still be a long way to go.
Perhaps contrary to many people's beliefs here on SH: from what I have seen, and from what I have reliably been able to trace in my own country of origin, the general picture of the past ~2,500 years (i.e. the bulk of the historical period in Europe) is more or less correct, even if there are episodes - entire wars, for example - the history for which is probably filled with errors, propaganda, misperceptions, and so on. As above: we have coins with faces and names on them; for the most part, these people existed, and they existed in the order we are taught they existed in (though not necessarily for as long if you go back before the 8th century); it's only the stories associated with the figures we can doubt, not their existence.
The grand picture, of the Greeks and the Romans ushering civilisation unto the "barbarians," of the latter excelling in it, of Christianisation and crusades, of turning it out towards the wider world (colonialism), the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Era, none of this I can denounce. The material evidence is underfoot. We keep digging it up, often by mistake, and most of the pieces serve only to supplement the story we've already put together (much as these stories as they are today deny things held to be true 500, 1,000, 2,000 etc. years ago).
If there were any total, world-spanning "conspiracy" shaping human recollection at large, I might as well imagine that this universe is my own private dream - and indeed, many of the contrarian interpretations of the old SH lot bordered on solipsistic reveries, I must admit in hindsight (and admit my own part in them as well, since I contributed). It is perfectly possible that this world and any other is only some externally-contrived simulation designed to torment the inhabitants; but no evidence of this is possible, and, I dare say, in such a world, no knowledge is useful. The only course of action in such an existence is to follow Socrates's advice: "gnothi seauton," as it was said on the Academy ("know thyself").
I hope that doesn't burst too many bubbles. Of course you are free to disagree, dismiss, etc. I am not an academic, I am an anti-academic, and I have spent many years snapping at the heels of academia, only to discover over the long term that where they are wrong is mostly in the details; where they are right, and increasingly right, is in the general picture, not least of all because they disagree with each other all the more fastidiously than we do. There is a fantastic paper trail documenting the extreme arguments that have gone towards producing our "prevailing consensus," and constant attempts from within academia to supplant and overturn that consensus (since that is considered the best contribution to a field, to shake it up from within - everyone wants to be their field's Einstein, breaking the old view and bringing in the new).