Troy: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology #3)

by Stephen Fry

There exist History and Prehistory. Put simply, prehistory is what happened in the human world before the development of writing. Prehistory can therefore be studied only by reading not words but objects. This study is archaeology: the analysis and imaginative reconstruction of ancient buildings and their ruins, the excavation and interpretation of artifacts, relics, and remains. History, conversely, is mostly analyzed through documentary records—manuscripts, tablets, inscriptions, and books. Human prehistory is understood to have begun around three and half million years ago, when our hominin ancestors first constructed stone tools whose archaeological traces we can unearth and examine. Anything before that time we call paleontology, where the only indications left behind are fossils. History, on the other hand, is extraordinarily recent. It began not much more than five thousand years ago, with the invention of phonetic scripts in Babylonian Sumer, writing systems that were spread by the trading Phoenicians all around the Mediterranean world, developing into the alphabets we still use today—chiefly Greek, Roman, and Cyrillic.