By Andrew Klein

Dedicated to my wife, who taught me that the most important stories are the ones we live, not the ones we are told.

I. Introduction: The Toy Chariot

They found a bronze object in Greece — a platform with tiny wheels, barely large enough for a toddler. And they called it a “chariot.”

Not because it was a chariot. Because they needed it to be one.

This is how history works. We find fragments — a pot, a bone, a toy — and we weave them into stories that fit our expectations. We call a toy a chariot because we want to believe in epic battles. We call evolution a ladder because we want to believe we are at the top.

But the toy is not a chariot. And history is not a ladder.

History is a story — a story that has been edited, embellished, and repackaged countless times. It is a story told by the victors, shaped by the powerful, and passed down through generations as if it were fact. And like all stories, it reveals more about the teller than about the events themselves.

II. Homer’s Epics: Entertainment, Not History

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are among the most influential texts in Western civilisation. They have been read as history, as myth, as the foundation of Greek identity. But what were they really?

They were entertainment.

As one scholar bluntly states, Greek myths were “not to tell history, only to masquerade as history.” They were stories sung by bards in courts and marketplaces, shaped and polished through generations of oral transmission. They were meant to entertain, to educate, and to explore big questions about life and the gods — not to provide a reliable record of the past.

The epics do contain fragments of historical truth. Homer’s description of weapons and armour, for instance, is highly accurate — the boar’s tusk helmet, the bronze plate armour, the chariots — and these have been confirmed by archaeological finds. But as one analysis notes, “the political, social, and economic life of the heroes is neither Mycenaean nor Early Iron Age: it may represent an amalgam of elements from all the centuries during which the epic tradition flourished.” Even where Homer seems to describe the Mycenaean world, he is often describing the world of his own time.

The epics are not a window into the past. They are a mirror — reflecting the concerns, values, and imaginations of the people who told and retold them.

III. The Conquest Myth: Fiction Disguised as History

If Homer’s epics are entertainment masquerading as history, the conquest narratives of the modern era are propaganda masquerading as history.

Consider the Battle of Otumba (1520), a key moment in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Spanish accounts claimed that the Aztec army attempted to annihilate Cortés and his men, that Cortés and his cavalry charged bravely, killed the Aztec commander, and took his feathered standard, causing the Aztec army to flee in confusion.

Historians have taken this story at face value for centuries. But a 2025 study argues that this narrative is largely a fabrication — a myth that Spanish writers and non-Indigenous historians elaborated over time, feeding off and reinforcing inaccurate beliefs about Mesoamericans. Eyewitness testimony from Indigenous sources tells a very different story.

The conquest of Mexico was not a heroic victory over a confused enemy. It was a brutal campaign of violence, disease, and destruction. But the victors wrote the story, and the story became history.

This pattern repeats throughout history. Ancient empires, as one scholar notes, “would not typically inscribe their god’s defeats or humiliations in their official records”. They wrote their own victories, and they erased the losses. The narrative of conquest is always a narrative of erasure.

IV. The Bronze Age Economy: The Reality Behind the Myths

While the epics and conquest narratives tell stories of heroes and gods, the real history of the Bronze Age is recorded in clay tablets — mundane records of trade, taxes, and daily life.

The Ugarit archives, for example, contain thousands of cuneiform tablets documenting the export of copper, wood, and other goods, and the import of wares from Cyprus and Egypt. They record diplomatic letters, accounting ledgers, and increasingly desperate pleas for help as drought and famine began to upend life around 1200 B.C.

These tablets are not heroic. They are ordinary. They record grain shipments, not epic battles. They document taxes, not conquests. They tell the story of a merchant city that was burned to the ground by the Sea Peoples, not by the wrath of the gods.

The clay tablets are history — not the history we remember, but the history that was actually lived. They are the receipts of the past, not the legends.

V. History as Narrative: The Construction of the Past

The ancient historians themselves understood that history was a story. As one study notes, “history was primarily the edifying record of the unfolding of God’s divine plan for humanity.” It was not a science. It was a narrative — a way of making sense of the world by telling a coherent story about it.

Modern historians have reached similar conclusions. Hayden White’s Metahistory argued that historiography is a literary act, not a scientific one. The ancient historians, too, “often blended epic diction and narrative unity into their telling of events.” They constructed their narratives to be compelling, not just accurate.

History is not a collection of facts. It is a story — a story that is told by the powerful, shaped by the expectations of the audience, and constantly rewritten to serve the needs of the present.

VI. Conclusion: The Stories We Tell

The toy chariot was not a chariot. The Homeric epics were not history. The conquest of Mexico was not a heroic victory. And the Bronze Age was not a world of gods and heroes.

But we tell these stories because we need them. We need to believe that we are the apex of evolution. We need to believe that our victories were righteous. We need to believe that the past is a ladder leading to us.

The past is not a ladder. It is a bush — a tangled, branching, chaotic bush of forgotten lives and lost stories. And the stories we tell about it are not the past itself, but a reflection of our own desires.

We are not at the top of the ladder. We are just one branch on a very old bush. And the stories we tell about ourselves will be forgotten too — unless we learn to tell them differently.

Andrew Klein

References

1. Greek myths were “not to tell history, only to masquerade as history.” Ken Dowden, The Uses of Greek Mythology.

2. Greek myths were meant to entertain and examine the world. The Uses of Greek Mythology.

3. Homer’s descriptions of weapons and armour are highly accurate. The Light of Dark-Age Athens.

4. Homeric epics reflect an “imaginary world, only loosely tied to reality.” Greek Epic and Mycenaean Archaeology.

5. The Battle of Otumba narrative is largely a fabrication. Mendoza, C. (2025). Colonial Latin American Review.

6. Ancient empires would not inscribe their defeats in official records. Biblehub.

7. The Ugarit archives document trade, taxes, and daily life in the Bronze Age. Archaeology Magazine.

8. History was understood as an “edifying record” and a narrative. Sched.com.

9. Ancient historians blended epic diction and narrative unity. Deepblue.lib.umich.edu.