Excellent documentary on Parthia

[ARCHIPPOS]

Historic documentaries and films are targeted to largely uneducated audiences and are usually produced by non-historians ( artists and media-people) who have a flare for theatrics and stylisation... i suppose similar comments can be made by actual soldiers on war-films, police officers on cop flics, organised crime members on crime films etc... the problem of history is that it's usually perceived as "boring" and "uninteresting" by people. If such efforts succeed in inspiring (some) youths and convincing them there is something exciting in studying the past then we're ok. Of course to the majority of historians, social scientists etc such representations seem "graphical" or flawed (and they are)... however they are elemental in luring larger audiences into studying and develloping a historical/political awareness... in didactic courses they teach us to actively use such stuff into triggering kids' interest...

[Mulceber]

Historic documentaries and films are targeted to largely uneducated audiences and are usually produced by non-historians ( artists and media-people) who have a flare for theatrics and stylisation... i suppose similar comments can be made by actual soldiers on war-films, police officers on cop flics, organised crime members on crime films etc... the problem of history is that it's usually perceived as "boring" and "uninteresting" by people. If such efforts succeed in inspiring (some) youths and convincing them there is something exciting in studying the past then we're ok. Of course to the majority of historians, social scientists etc such representations seem "graphical" or flawed (and they are)... however they are elemental in luring larger audiences into studying and develloping a historical/political awareness... in didactic courses they teach us to actively use such stuff into triggering kids' interest...

This is largely true - although I think a lot of people would find the real history more interesting. For example, I'm very much into history, but even I thought history was boring in high school: they don't breath life into it. They keep it as purely stale facts without asking you to involve your mind. Not only that, but they censor it to take out some of the more colorful elements. Once I got to college, my opinion of history courses took a 180 degree turn. So I think that history can be presented in an interesting and yet accurate way. I think the biases of most documentaries is due to the fact that in order to be accurate, they would have to either gloss over a lot of the more basic material in order to cover the important points, or just cover a very small topic, neither of which would be very helpful to those uneducated in history. Thus they dumb it down so that people can have something which in some way resembles the truth. And I think that is what this documentary does. Since properly dispelling the Romano-centric view 19th century historians imposed on us would cover far too much ground for a project of that scope, they just take a Romaiophobic viewpoint and hope it will cancel out the bias people have grown up with. -M

[vartan]

And no, you are not correct that we should listen to all biases - that would be like suggesting you should only get your news from MSNBC and Fox. What we should do is try to find the sources that have the least bias and listen to them. ie. the scholarly equivalent of watching PBS news and CSPAN. -M

Nope. It would be like getting your news from MSNBC, Fox, CNN, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc...and so on and so forth. Nobody in their right mind has the time for that. And what has the least bias? MSNBC? Fox? CNN? Assume that all have similar amounts of bias, and then go ahead and pick a few perspectives to listen to. You can't possibly sift through so much dude. It's not realistic. For instance, right now I'm reading a text on Greek and Persian wars of 499 to 386 BC, and mostly it is an author's interpretation of Herodotus' text combined with more realistic estimates (as opposed to his ridiculously large amounts of PERSIAN ZERGLINGS). I don't really have the time to read all texts on these wars, but a few is more than enough. Besides, you would only go through all texts if you were working solely on these wars.