Editorial Policy

Every subject on this site has been read through more than one lens, and an article is expected to carry the lenses that have something sourced to say. We use five: Mainstream, Alternative, Mythological, Traditional and Unverified. They are defined below, each by what it claims and what kind of source can carry it, not by how much we agree with it.

The viewpoints are interleaved in the prose rather than filed under separate headings. A paragraph on the age of the Sphinx gives the Fourth-Dynasty dating and its stratigraphic evidence, then in the next sentence gives the water-erosion reading and its evidence, naming the scholars on each side and citing them at the end of the sentence. The reader follows one narrative line that says which lens it is using and moves on. There is no "alternative theories" section, because a section like that tells the reader, in the page's own structure, that some claims belong in a quarantine.

An article carries a viewpoint when a claim made under that lens can be sourced to the standard set out for it. A lens without a qualifying source is not written around; the claim is either left out or published as Unverified and labelled as such. Our model for all of this is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: declarative sentences, sources at sentence-end, named scholars introduced with their argument rather than with a verdict on their character.

The Mainstream lens is the reading held by the relevant academic field: the dating, attribution and interpretation that peer-reviewed research and university-press monographs currently support. A Mainstream claim is carried by peer-reviewed publication or a university-press monograph; a trade popularisation of academic work, even one written by an academic, may be cited as an accessible summary but does not on its own carry a Mainstream claim. Examples on this site include Hawass on the Sphinx, Lehner on pyramid construction and Champollion and Budge on the decipherment of hieroglyphs.

The Alternative lens is a reading that disagrees with the field's consensus on the evidence, advanced by a writer with relevant training in geology, archaeology, engineering or journalism and published at length by an established press. Robert Schoch's water-erosion dating of the Sphinx, John Anthony West's symbolist reading of Egypt and Bauval and Gilbert's Orion correlation are examples. A claim carries the Alternative label only when two such sources support it; a podcast appearance, a video lecture or a self-published essay can be mentioned for context but cannot be one of those two. Where an Alternative claim has been taken up by a university press or a peer-reviewed journal, that source counts as well.

The Mythological lens reports what a culture's own sacred or legendary texts say about a subject, cited from scholarly editions: the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts in Faulkner's editions, the Book of the Dead, the Bible in a critical edition, the Eddas. A passage under this lens treats the text as primary evidence for what the cosmology held, not as evidence that the cosmology was correct, and it is not an endorsement of the belief. It takes the text seriously enough to cite it accurately, with the corpus's own locators: an utterance number, a chapter, a book and verse.

The Traditional lens carries what has been handed down orally about a subject, once that oral account has been collected by someone whose collection can be cited: a recognised cultural-heritage archive such as the American Folklife Center or the American Research Center in Egypt, a peer-reviewed ethnographer, or an ancient witness such as Pausanias, Strabo or Herodotus read in a critical edition, since their texts gathered the traditions of their own day. The act of collection is what makes the account citable; a single travelogue entry, an undocumented family story or an anonymous post does not qualify. The collector, the method and the venue are part of the citation.

Unverified is the label for a claim we have not yet been able to source to one of the four standards above. Such a claim may still be published, and when it is, it is published with that label rather than quietly folded into a stronger lens or dropped. A claim that only a tertiary aggregator or an uncredentialed video supports stays Unverified until an editor finds sources that carry it, at which point it is reclassified. Unverified is a holding pattern, not a hiding place: the label tells the reader exactly where our sourcing stands.

A claim made under any lens other than Mainstream or Unverified needs two supporting sources, and both must meet the standard set out for that lens. The rule is deliberately conjunctive: one peer-reviewed paper and one popular podcast do not add up to an Alternative claim. Mainstream is exempt because peer review is the default expectation for that lens; Unverified is exempt because it is the label a claim receives while it waits for sources.

Sources are graded by the kind of publication they are: peer-reviewed, university press, mainstream trade press, credentialed but not peer-reviewed, religious primary text, collected oral history, popular, or unverified. The grade is recorded on every source page and governs which lens the source can carry. The same source can serve two lenses depending on the claim it supports; a peer-reviewed translation of the Pyramid Texts is primary evidence for the Mythological lens and supports a Mainstream claim about what the texts say.

Citations are placed at the end of the sentence they support, in the form used by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: author, year and a locator such as a page number, an utterance number or a chapter and verse. The locator is part of the citation; a source cited without one is incomplete, however unambiguous it may seem. The full bibliographic record is a link away on the source page.

Articles on this site are drafted with the assistance of AI systems working from sources that have been gathered and graded first. The drafting tools are constrained to the sources they are given and to the viewpoint and citation rules on this page, and they can make mistakes: a misread source, a misplaced locator, an over-confident sentence. Every draft is read by the editorial desk before publication, and the desk, not the drafting tool, is answerable for what is published.

That is why the byline on every article is The History of History Editorial Desk. The name is not a person's, and it does not stand in for one; it names the editorial process described on this page and the people who run it. Readers are asked to treat AI-assisted articles as they would any secondary source: as a well-cited starting point to be checked against the primary sources it cites.

If you find an error of fact, a misattributed claim, a citation that does not support the sentence it sits after, or a viewpoint label that the sourcing does not justify, tell us through the contact page, naming the article and the passage. Reports that cite a source are the quickest to act on.

The desk checks the report against the sources. A confirmed error is corrected in the article and the article's modification date is updated; a claim that cannot be sourced to the standard for its lens is relabelled Unverified or removed. Where two articles turn out to cover the same subject, period and viewpoints, they are merged into one and the retired address redirects to it, so a link you saved keeps working.