>>45125136There's always some big things to remember when looking at the past:
History is written by the victor (Their own losses are often covered up or mitigated, the actual losing side usually loses the ability to write their own narrative* Until fairly recently.)
Royalty and nobility are what we base a lot of study on because those are the sites which survive (It takes a lot of digging, physical and scholarly, to uncover what things were like for the normal person.)
Being modern does not mean being right. Don't let current perceptions/beliefs influence how things of old should be interpreted.
For all the things that have been found over the centuries, think of all that has been lost. Entire cities, libraries of knowledge, sites that were sacred in the past but now nobody would care about. We are simultaneously amazing at preserving our past and awful at it...and I get it. For as much as I love history, we simply cannot preserve every single thing. Otherwise no land would ever be usable and resources would never be recycled.
