What's a "Moral Compass Cricket Thingy"?

[Maniakkid25]

Things that I wish we knew more about...

Robert Johnson immediately comes to mind. The most important Blues musician of all time, and we only barely managed to reconstruct the last decade or so of his life (granted, he died at the age of 27) because he was a black man in 1930's America.

The full text to the Epic Cycle. You know the Iliad and the Odyssey? The Ancient Greek Epics? Yeah, there's like, 9 of them, all relating to the Fall of Troy, and the only reason we know anything about the others is because we got lucky, and managed to find a manuscript that summarized the others.

Where the hell Punt is. It was a major trading power with Ancient Eygpt, and no one knows for certain where the hell it is because no one wrote it down in a surviving document. After all, it's Punt! Everyone knows where Punt is! (Think about that the next time you see a cake recipe calling for eggs and milk)

The history of music before the 9th century or so. While we do have surviving records of music study, Western Music proper has been lost before the 9th century, where we start to see Plainchant (or Gregorian Chant). Thousands of songs that will never be heard again, lost to time.

And even going back to World War 2: the true losses of the German Armed Forces. There is a distinct and known unreliability to their records, because equipment losses were only counted if the equipment could not be recovered or repaired. So, as an example, if a German Division had 35 damaged tanks, and all but 4 of them were repaired, then the report will only say "4 tanks damaged". As such, there is a massive underrepresentation of German losses across various battles in WW2, endemic through all the fronts they fought on.

This list could go on, I'm sure, but those are just the things I can immediately think of. But most of all that I wish we knew more of is the personal stories. At every event in history, there are dozens, hundreds, or thousands whose stories are forgotten. What they thought, what they said, and what they did can never be recovered from the ever onward march of time. I wish we knew more of these stories, untinged by retrospective knowledge or biases. I just want to know what John Smith of the 314th Batallion thought when his Batallion was chosen to go Over the Top in World War 1.