'History’ as the past truly was and ‘history’ as the representation of the past can often, or rather invariably, be at variance. No representation of history can ever capture the complexity of all that happened in the past. Therefore, various civilisations have seen the rise of a large variety of writing about the past. These range from hagiographies, mythical accounts of heroes, fantasised depictions of conflicts, vaguely remembered memoirs of large migrations and natural calamities, as well as well-reasoned reproduction of facts, events, lives, regimes and transitions in a given people’s past. It was precisely due to the gap between...