Why Do We Care About Ancient History?

This week I’ve been writing a TV script about one of the great mysteries of ancient history: the Great Sphinx of Giza.

Who built the Great Sphinx? What was it supposed to represent? And why, 4,500 years later, are archaeologists and historians still arguing about it?

It’s a subject I know pretty well. In fact, one of the first archaeology films I ever made for television, nearly thirty years ago, asked many of the same questions.

Which raises another mystery: why on earth are we still asking them?

I’ve spent much of my career making documentaries about ancient history and archaeology — the pyramids, the Lost Ark, the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, Troy, Machu Picchu — stories that live somewhere between archaeology, history, legend and, occasionally, outright B.S.

And somehow we never seem to get tired of them.

Part of the reason is that the ancient world rarely gives us the complete story.

Take the Great Sphinx. It may be one of the most recognizable monuments on Earth, yet there is no surviving inscription that simply tells us who built it, when, or why. Archaeologists can make a strong case that it belongs to the age of the pharaoh Khafre. But after thousands of years, there are still pyramid-sized gaps.

And gaps are irresistible.

Give us an ancient monument without an inscription, a tomb without a body, or a story without an ending, and somebody is going to try to fill in the blanks.

Sometimes archaeology does it. Sometimes science does it. Sometimes imagination gets there first.

I ran into the same problem while writing Prime Time Troy, the third novel in my Prime Time series

The first two books drop my fictional TV crew into places we know were real: ancient Egypt and Pompeii. We have buildings, inscriptions, papyri, graffiti — even the bodies of some of the people who lived there.

Troy is different.

The Iliad is one of the most famous stories ever told, yet archaeologists and historians have argued for centuries about how much of Homer’s Trojan War — if any — actually happened.

That creates an obvious conundrum for a writer of time travel. If a butterfly flaps its wings inside a tale that may be invented, does anything change? Or do centuries of retelling produce the same legend, regardless of how badly we meddle with it?

My suspicion is that the legend always wins.

People seem to need certain myths. Achilles. Helen. Odysseus. And that impossible wooden horse outside the gates.

Homer composed his poems centuries after the supposed Trojan War, yet those stories have survived for almost three thousand years. Madeline Miller turned Achilles into a modern bestseller. And this year Christopher Nolan turned The Odyssey into a $1.7-billion blockbuster.

For whatever reason, we still can’t get enough.

Maybe that’s because ancient history gives us the perfect combination: enough evidence to convince us these people and places were real, but enough missing pieces to leave room for mystery.

We know the Great Sphinx exists. We know there really was an ancient city at Troy. We know pharaohs, kings and soldiers lived and died thousands of years ago.

What we don’t always know is exactly what happened, what they said and why they said it.

And that leaves the door open.

Thirty years after I first went looking for answers at the Great Sphinx, I’m still asking the same questions.

I suspect I’m not going to be the last.