History is written by the people who write history, and sustained by the people who curate history.
That seems self-evident when I say it, but it's important. The winners sometimes but not always end up writing the history books, and those history books need to make it to the modern day as well as the means to read those history books.
The Minoan civilization is a perfect example. They appear to have preceded the Mycenaean Greeks, and they were by what we can tell an outrageously powerful player in the region, having writing and sophisticated architecture, and art. It appears that their history was told in the story of the minotaur and suggested that it was able to get human sacrifices from the local mainland due to their water superiority. The thing is, in the bronze age collapse their civilization ended and nobody who was involved with their civilization wanted to pass on their script (presumably because they were such a horrible civilization to exist under the thumb of) and so today we can't even read their history books even though they wrote it all down. The only history we have is from the Greek perspective told allegorically through that story of the minotaur. The Greeks didn't really win per se, no more than any other civilization that existed after another one did, but that one was wiped from history.
Another example would be the writings of the Mayans. There were all kinds of writings, but the Spanish who came over were so disgusted by the culture of human sacrifice that they found every book and burned it, and today all we have left is the Dresden codex, a tiny scrap compared to the millennia of history previously recorded. Europeans colonized many civilizations but didn't do to every civilization what the Spanish did to the Mayans.
For an alternative example, look at the dark ages in Europe. Many writings were lost in that time, but Arab scholars had curated Greek philosophers works and eventually those works (often commented on by the Arab scholars during the brief Muslim golden age of scholarship) returned to the west after millennia. But for the curation of a completely different culture, these works would have been lost forever in the west.
Another example would be the Indian civilization. In terms of winning wars, the Indian subcontinent isn't very defensible, and on a number of occasions it was totally taken over. We all know about the English successfully colonizing India, but it's far from the first. I recall one example of Muslims coming over and absolutely ransacking the place, using superior military technology to totally defeat the ruling class. You'd think this is the story of the Indians losing everything, but in each case the Indian culture persevered. I consider it to be a sort of immortal culture, because the Muslims became more Indian in the face of such culture. Even the English became slightly more Indian, and when the English left, what remained was some English culture (It was a very powerful culture as well), but also a powerful Indian culture that remained despite everything. (On the other hand, their history is really hard to ascertain despite having millennia of it because their culture doesn't consider time to be a straight line or the world to be something worth paying as much attention to as the spiritual world that is more real)
On the other hand, it shows how arbitrary the "right side of history" really is. History doesn't choose based on moral merit, but on many factors that determine the survivability of a set of ideas.
That seems self-evident when I say it, but it's important. The winners sometimes but not always end up writing the history books, and those history books need to make it to the modern day as well as the means to read those history books.
The Minoan civilization is a perfect example. They appear to have preceded the Mycenaean Greeks, and they were by what we can tell an outrageously powerful player in the region, having writing and sophisticated architecture, and art. It appears that their history was told in the story of the minotaur and suggested that it was able to get human sacrifices from the local mainland due to their water superiority. The thing is, in the bronze age collapse their civilization ended and nobody who was involved with their civilization wanted to pass on their script (presumably because they were such a horrible civilization to exist under the thumb of) and so today we can't even read their history books even though they wrote it all down. The only history we have is from the Greek perspective told allegorically through that story of the minotaur. The Greeks didn't really win per se, no more than any other civilization that existed after another one did, but that one was wiped from history.
Another example would be the writings of the Mayans. There were all kinds of writings, but the Spanish who came over were so disgusted by the culture of human sacrifice that they found every book and burned it, and today all we have left is the Dresden codex, a tiny scrap compared to the millennia of history previously recorded. Europeans colonized many civilizations but didn't do to every civilization what the Spanish did to the Mayans.
For an alternative example, look at the dark ages in Europe. Many writings were lost in that time, but Arab scholars had curated Greek philosophers works and eventually those works (often commented on by the Arab scholars during the brief Muslim golden age of scholarship) returned to the west after millennia. But for the curation of a completely different culture, these works would have been lost forever in the west.
Another example would be the Indian civilization. In terms of winning wars, the Indian subcontinent isn't very defensible, and on a number of occasions it was totally taken over. We all know about the English successfully colonizing India, but it's far from the first. I recall one example of Muslims coming over and absolutely ransacking the place, using superior military technology to totally defeat the ruling class. You'd think this is the story of the Indians losing everything, but in each case the Indian culture persevered. I consider it to be a sort of immortal culture, because the Muslims became more Indian in the face of such culture. Even the English became slightly more Indian, and when the English left, what remained was some English culture (It was a very powerful culture as well), but also a powerful Indian culture that remained despite everything. (On the other hand, their history is really hard to ascertain despite having millennia of it because their culture doesn't consider time to be a straight line or the world to be something worth paying as much attention to as the spiritual world that is more real)
On the other hand, it shows how arbitrary the "right side of history" really is. History doesn't choose based on moral merit, but on many factors that determine the survivability of a set of ideas.