Iron_Captain wrote:

chyron wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Nobody remembers what Humans were up to 10,000 years ago. Nothing from 10,000 years ago has survived into the present day. The idea that any civilisation can last that long and that people in the Imperium remember Horus or the Emperor is ridiculous.

WE (or at least ones with some education) DO aware of (many) historical events that were HALF as far away from us as 40M from HH. For second - it's almost 5 millenias, with written sources BACK THEN copied in numbers that won't make you took off your boots to finger-count.
And that we know most of this only partially and mostly from indirect or second-hand sources is EXACTLY how Imperium knows most of it's history.

But think for second - unlike us Imperium 40M has both surviving pieces of 30M information in quantitions too huge to even properly organize and categorzie - and millenia of retells and compilations, not to count Emperor with his Custodes and AM as physical evidences of basic facts.

And Imperial continuity is just _six_ times longer that Roman Empire by direct Rome-Byzantium link, and only four times if one counts time between fall of Rome and creation of Holy Roman Empire as interregnum...

I am an archaeologist, so there is no need to tell me what we do and do not know about the past. There is some things we know, certainly. But what we know is very little, and a lot of it is very uncertain. Written sources especially are very scarce, and even then most written sources from the distant past are nothing but storage accounts and other mundane day-to-day communications. We know next to nothing however about important events that took place then. Take the Mycenaeans for example. They build huge palaces and wrote down lots of stuff, we know plenty of the contents of Mycenaean storerooms and can even reconstruct their economy to some extent. But then after some point they start to crazily fortify their palaces, building massive fortifications. Then all palaces and all other Mycenaean sites are suddenly destroyed, all roughly at the same time. Some of the last Mycenaean written accounts mention defense preparations for an expected attack, but that is all. What were these palaces defending themselves from? What destroyed the Mycenaean civilisation? We do not know. This is a massive event in the late bronze age, and we know next to nothing about it! And this the Horus Heresy is much, much farther in the past to the people of 40k than the destruction of Mycenae is to us. To translate it to 40k terms, we would know the Emperor died and was put on the Golden Throne roughly 10,000 years ago, but we would have no idea what the cause of that was. We might have some records detailing the battle of heroic Astartes legions against unspecified enemies, we may find traces of ancient battles and thus conclude it had to do something with war. We might even be able to theorise it had something to do with a civil war, but we would not know any specifics. We would not know what the war was about, what caused it, who exactly were involved etc.
However, from the novels it is clear a lot of people in the Imperium do have a very clear understanding of such a distant past. The fluff makes it seem as if the Horus Heresy happened only a hundred years ago, not 10,000. Stories get retold for long times, yes. But not for 10,000 years. 10,000 years is a ridiculously long time beyond Human comprehension and beyond recorded Human history. It is not realistic to have such a long history. 40k often makes a big deal about the knowledge of the past being forgotten, but given the fact that it has been 10,000 years they are far better at remembering and recording the past than Humans are in real life.

The history of the Imperium is 'just' 6 times longer than that of the Roman civilisation, but Rome is one of the longest-lasting civilisations in Human history, and by the time it finally fell its origins were already virtually forgotten. Sure, Constantine XI may have known that Rome had once been founded by a guy named Romulus, and that it changed at some early point from a kingdom to a republic, but that is about all he would have known of the early days of Roman civilisation. And Imperial history is 6 times longer than that. So why would even a High Lord of Terra know anything more about early Imperial History beyond 'Emperor united Earth, went on crusade, had civil war, died'? After 10,000 years, it is quite remarkable that even such basic details are still remembered.