People end up incorrectly utilizing a modernist historical lens, and they don't realize just how much of our history is barely transmitted.

2,000 years is a long time. Even this article points to exactly one remaining architectural treatise from the first century, of the entire field which was almost certainly written down somewhere given that the Romans were and still are world famous for their architecture.

If we were to step away from the digital environment which may lose every piece of information it has in a century or two, how many pieces of paper have your name on it, and how many of those pieces of paper are likely to survive over 2,000 years?

Anthropologists looking that far back have a real challenge. So much so that many people are still taught things that were just embellishments by angry contemporaries of certain political figures who's writings on the topic of their enemies happen to be the only one to survive.

They used to say history is written by the winners, but now I say history is written by the people who write and maintain history. It certainly would be nice if a famous historian looked over at the populist Jew in the 0th century would gain quite a following amongst the lower classes, but in the absence of such a piece of documentation, and only having a verbal testimony that was much later written down by a state which had captured those stories for itself, that's what is there.

If we were to take the epistemological stance that people who weren't explicitly recorded didn't exist, then no one would exist in the Americas outside of a few civilizations (and even then the books were burned so no). We have all kinds of tools and buildings and the like, but no one would exist because outside of those civilizations, many of the indigenous Americans didn't have a writing system.

Another uncomfortable reality is that outside of a few examples such as ethiopia, great zimbabwe, and Egypt, most people on the entire African continent would disappear if this was the required epistemological framework. Even today many of their stories remain unrecorded, passed down only by verbal tradition. Which by the way is an absolute tragedy because based on the few that have been recorded, there are some fascinating stories on the continent.

The thing is coming in the modern era, one of the most interesting discoveries was that many verbal stories passed down Did contain empirically true facts. A number of incredible archaeological finds in Greece were discovered by archaeologists attempting to check the locations where ancient poems suggested there might be something. Before Homer wrote down or had written down his stories, many of the tales were passed down over millennia. The Minoan civilization of crete, for example, was only found incredibly recently, and besides the old stories we can't even read their writing.