Thus, even while there may have been extraordinarily sophisticated evidentiary historians in the past such as Thucydides, Sima Qian or Ibn Khaldun, they understood the past in a radically different way from the moderns.

All humans have a past however they represent it; modern historiography is as dependent on imagination as myth or ritual and other ways of giving meaning to the past. Narrativization is not only an act of historicality – it is simultaneously about power. However, in his important contribution about the ideological function of history, White tends t