Not so much knowledge in history

[Connacht]

Inspired by the posts in the "Things you learnt from playing vanilla" topic, I thought it would be nice to move the OT talking about people ignoring history in a new thread, where we can talk about silly, crazy, unbelievable things we heard during our life.

Here are the first posts:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Is this normal for European countries? Kids in Russia seemed much smarter. Europe is better than US in geography, but then any country is. What about history though? How much better are Europeans in history? I have traveled to almost very European country, but it is very difficult to tell how smart the people are in a certain country just after spending week in there. BTW, according to the stuff I read in the Economist as well as Time magazines, British students were just as bad as the American ones. Continental Europe was much better and Asian countries such as China, Japan and South Korea were the best, of course.

People here in the UK just seem to be getting dumber. One example is that 3/4 of the students in my year have no idea where Austria is ("your family are from where?") and another example is that, on finding out that one of my friends was Polish someone asked if he could speak "Poland."

Let´s just say that were I to ask anyone in my class who Hannibal was they´d think I was talking about the cannibal. One or two might after a while realise that there is someone else known as Hannibal, but it´s doubtful.

I´d say Julius Ceasar is the only Roman who´s name most would recognise, unless they´ve just watched Gladiator, in which case they might recognise at most 2 or 3 more names.
The Seleukids, Parthians, Ptolemy´s, Carthaginians... all totally unheard of. Alexander the Great is only known as "that gay guy who conquered a lot of shit", and knowledge about ancient Gaul, Germania or Britain is completely unexistant.
Well, some might recognise that Asterix and Obelix were Gauls and lived in France, but that´s about it.

Thats just so on the spot!!!

Sometimes, you marvel at the historical ignorance of some people...

Having been passionately facinated by ancient history for more than a decade, I always assumed that people knew, at least to some extent, who Hannibal or Attila was. So when in High School, upon discussing ancient Rome, I made a reference to the former's crossing of the alps, people basicly asked in which of the movies that was...

Or when, upon discussing the death of king Charles XII, (Swedish king, killed at Halden, Norway, in 1718, alledgedly shot with a uniform's button by a friendly soldier), someone asked why they didn't use a DNA-swab to expose the murderer...

Really, I think its sad that some people so completely lack knowledge of large parts of the history of the world, as this, in many ways, still influence the world today.

I'll willing to bet you guys money that you can't find a person [who isn't on this forum and who isn't a historian or archaeologist] who knows who Ashurbanipal was.

I'm in High School and we just finished our first history course (out of two, the other one focusing solely on Finnish history), which astoundingly dealt with everything from the rise of civilization to the beginning of the 18th century. Anyway, most people did know that Hannibal was a military leader who crossed the Alps in order to invade Italy, but when we got to the part that he was Punic everyone besides me asked in unison what on earth that meant. It's sort of disappointing, since I'm completeing the IB diplomma program in one of the most demanding schools in the country and even here people have only a rudimentary grasp of history. I know that the IB is natural sciences oriented but still, one would assume that Carthage is something everybody has heard of.

It is normal that people in US don't know geography. Even some newspapers or televisions haven't realised thet Czechoslovakia splited 15 years ago or that Slovakia and Slovenia are two different states. But if you ask somebody in Europe about some US states, perhaps except for California, Florida, Alaska, Texas or Hawai, he will have no idea where the others are. The same goes for US history.
Especially in post-socialistic countries schools demand encyclopedic knowledge and so people know a lot of facts. If you search results for example from some international scielnce olympiads, you will discover that most successful are countries from eastern Asia and eastern Europe. Secondary schools are on higher level here, but it's much worse with universities.

And I learned a lot from playing RTW because thnks to it I disovered EB which taught me a lot.

I have an idea: let's prepare some questions from history (like who was Pyrrhus, what do you know about Seleucid empire, how do you imagine barbarian cultures...) and make a survey among people from our countries. Every forum member who will do this will post his results and we will have some kind of global ancient history knowledge study.

OK, first question: Who is Hannibal Barca?
What is Carthage?

and on topic, I lerned that Epirus wasn't in existance, and neither was Phyrrus

I just remembered something quite amusing that took place during our history lesson. Some of my classmates had done a presentation about Indian history from about 300 BC to 200 AD. When I asked them about the Indo-Greek kingdoms they just stared at me with a mixture of total disbelief and amazement and asked me if I just made up the question.

Second question: What do you think happened to Alexander the Great's empire after he died?

I also heard many things that here in Italy we would call "castronerie" when I still was at high school. Here the stereotype about us is that people living in Italy should well know Mediterranean history, at least Roman and Greek one.
However, I even saw somebody who even didn't know where Asia Minor is during school times. (I could also tell you about those who couldn't find Dalmatia on the map and a friend of mine who believed that Mexico was in South America - another friend instead neither knew it was in America).

Another incredible show was this:

Italian literature teacher: "where is Carthage?"
Student: "hmmm, er... there, in Morocco"
Teacher: "uh"

(nobody noticed that)

My first high school history book also quoted the topoi about barbarians, IIRC. Yes, they were all uncivilized grunters, except the Gauls that lived near Massilia, since it was a Greek colony, and those that entered in contact with the Romans in the province of Gallia Narbonensis. Well, they were the ones that become civilized and opened the doors of civilization for the other Gauls, the other ones being dirty, unorganized savages.