What is History For?

Ibn Khaldoun, the Moroccan traveller and historian, tells a story about Alexander the Great. The story was related by his predecessor, Al Mas’udi. Sea monsters, according to the story, were hindering the building of Alexandria. Alexander the Great therefore had a wooden-and-glass box constructed in which he was lowered to the ocean floor. Once there, he drew likenesses of the monsters, came back to the surface, and had full-scale effigies of the monsters created. These he positioned near the harbor, and when the sea monsters saw them they fled in terror.

Neat huh?

Well, Ibn Khaldoun, who had seen quite a bit in his time, and fancied himself a keen analyst of historical reality, says that the most unbelievable thing about this story is that Alexander would have died in that box from a “surfeit of hot air.” And his point in relating this anecdote is that historians often get history wrong because they misunderstand how things actually work.

Historians certainly get plenty wrong, often because they just don’t know how the world actually works. But they also get stuff wrong because the primary function of History has rarely been to tell an objectively verifiable truth, even if most historians claim it is.

Al Mas’udi, in other words, had it about right. Not about Alex and the sea monsters, but about the fact that the young, world-conquering…