Ancient

Alexander conquered from Greece to India by the age of thirty, and almost every anecdote historians repeat about him was written by biographers three or four centuries after he was dead.

-331

Almost everything vivid about Ashoka's life comes from Buddhist legends written centuries later; his own edicts, the only contemporary evidence, say far less.

-7500

Almost everything vivid about Cleopatra, her wit, her languages, her death, comes from Roman writers who had reason to make her either glamorous or monstrous, and rarely both at once.

The Analects, the book most people mean when they cite something Confucius said, was assembled by his students' students long after his death, which means most quotations attributed to him rest on someone else's memory of someone else's memory.

Only one ancient writer ever names Cyril of Alexandria as responsible for Hypatia's murder, and that writer also demeaned her intellect elsewhere in the same text, a contradiction later admirers of Hypatia rarely mention.

-9600

Caesar wrote his own war reports to sell his campaigns back home, and his account of the Gallic Wars is still the main source historians have for what happened in them.

-800

-600

The historian who wrote the definitive account of China's first emperor was working roughly a century after his death for the dynasty that had just overthrown his, which is worth remembering every time that account calls him a tyrant.

Deciphered in the 1830s, the emperor's own carved words went unattributed to him for another eighty years until one inscription finally named its author.

-490

-480

Muhammad's biography was written more than a century after his death, by which point, one historian notes, almost nothing of documentary use to a historian remained beyond confirming he had lived.

The Chinese character Sima Qian used to describe how Qin Shi Huang killed his critics originally just meant pit or moat, and only came to mean burying someone alive in later centuries, which is a fairly large amount of weight to hang on one word's drift in meaning.

1050

476

After Alexander's empire broke into rival kingdoms, three centuries of Greek-speaking dynasties in Egypt, Asia and Macedon produced much of the science and philosophy later credited to a cleaner idea of classical Greece.

-2000

More than double the number Egypt built, these pyramids survived a nineteenth-century treasure hunter who demolished forty of them from the top down searching for gold.

A war fought over roughly fifty years survives mostly through one Greek writer working decades later, and the numbers he gives for Persian armies remain the most argued-over figures in ancient history.

Rome's own historians wrote its early conquest of Italy centuries after the fact, and modern archaeology increasingly disagrees with the story they told about it.

Rome's move from republic to empire was declared in a single year, 27 BC, but historians still argue whether anything about the republic it replaced was still real by then.

The ancient histories that describe Qin's conquest of six rival states report casualty figures running past a hundred thousand dead at a single siege, numbers the Wikipedia article itself flags as unsourced and that no independent record survives to confirm.

The popular story that he vengefully erased his stepmother's monuments out of long-buried resentment turns out, once the dating is checked, to point to his son instead.

-3800