China - 3,000 Years of History in a Minute

Like I said, erudites in the 19th century all across Europe would be fluent in ancient Greek. As to read vs understand, that's the difference between alphabet and ideograms. But IIRC modern Greek speakers have an easy time making sense of ancient Greek. Kings of Europe would claim their legitimacy comes from the Roman empire times. The pope would continue to crown people emperors of Rome, like Charlemagne (emperor of both Germany and France) Napoleon or the Habsburgs. And Roman empire was in the clear cultural continuity of ancient Greece. We just don't do these claims (outside of some fringe far-right groups), because they are not really relevant to what our countries are today. Ancient Greeks were xenophobic, misogynistic, pedophiles, mostly authoritarian and militaristic. We are nothing like them, but most cultures have very ancient roots. And I'll tell you why I react strongly with that. We used to have school programs teaching us similar bullshit. Mostly, the national narrative would be that we, French, are Celts, Franks, who were occupied by the Roman empire, which spawned the aristocracy, until we defeated it during the Revolution. That sense of belonging to a 3000 years old continuity served to foster nationalism and make sure that we don't feel too close to our neighbors. It is an easy sale, you can write a history with that that is mostly correct. You have to ignore some facts, but for 100 years, "history was written that way" or at least, text books were. China has