2024 Author: Adelina Croftoon | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 02:08
How reliable is the information provided by written and other historical sources? After all, they were created by living people who, like us, also had many weaknesses - a desire to embellish reality, forgetfulness and a whole set of various superstitions characteristic of the time when the creator of the evidence of the era lived
What is history for a person? A weapon that helps him understand his opponent in society and successfully resist him ?! The object of aesthetic pleasure - "oh, there were people in their time, heroes - not us!"
Or maybe this is just something akin to a myth, and this or that historical concept entirely depends on the skill of its "storyteller"? Or is there still some objective data about certain events of the past, according to which we can create a fairly consistent picture of it?
In short, can we trust one or another historical source, or is their reliability to a certain extent also a myth? Let's understand this with specific examples …
For example, a statue, the inscription on which says that this is Pharaoh … "number so and so". Can we assume that we see a portrait of him in front of us? It seems to be "yes", but only to a certain extent. Why? Yes, simply because until a certain time Egyptian sculptors worked strictly according to the established canon, and it was in this canon that they inscribed the portrait features of the original!
That is, he had to look like himself, but at the same time, it was also impossible to break the rules. Pharaoh-reformer Akhenaten commanded to portray himself as he is, that is, he violated the ancient canons, and after him the images of people in Egypt became more realistic. But how much? We do not know for sure, and we can judge about it only by comparing the sculptural images of the same faces that have come down to us.
The same thing happened in Ancient Greece, but in Rome sculptors, on the contrary, even depicted emperors so accurately that … if, say, one of them had a wart on their face (and this even applied to emperors!), Then they he was portrayed like that with her. Their sculptural portraits were distinguished by extremely accurate reproduction of the individual features of the face. But does this mean that the same Roman sculptors never "lied" and their works can be considered as a reliable historical source? Unfortunately no!
Take for example the famous "Trajan's Column", erected at the beginning of the 2nd century AD. NS. over the tomb of this emperor in honor of his conquest of Dacia. The column's trunk from bottom to top spirals 23 times around a 190 m long ribbon with reliefs depicting episodes of the war between Rome and Dacia.
It is believed that the relief of the column serves as a valuable source for the study of weapons, armor, costumes - both Romans and Dacians of that time. However, if we turn to the little things, it turns out that its value as a source is by no means unambiguous. For example, all the Romans depicted shields very small, while, judging by the finds of their fragments, they were much larger.
Why is that? Most likely, because the author of their reliefs wanted in this way to emphasize the courage of the Roman soldiers and show them "in all their glory." And how to do this if you are covered by a large rectangular or oval shield above the waist? Then some shields will have to be depicted, but the sculptors clearly did not want this. But they could not sin against the truth and decided to compromise: they made the shields, but … small!
However, this is not all. If we look at the relief scenes on the column of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, also erected in Rome in honor of his victory over the Germans and Sarmatians in 175 AD, we will see on them Sarmatian horsemen covered with scales like lizards literally from head to toe, as if they were dressed in scaly overalls! It is clear that this simply could not be and, therefore, we have an unreliable source.
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