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