Stan Shebs wrote:
More than a little of the ancient history that we know
has been
painstakingly
reconstructed from reports of sensational but ephemeral events; those
reports
often give us bits of cultural insight that the ancient scholars didn't
understand well enough to describe in their encyclopedias and histories.
A lot of archaeological excavations take place in ancient garbage dumps.
We don't study what these societies treasured, but what they threw
away. :-)
Ec