The Archival & Research Standard
This page sets out how articles on Tales From Time are researched, written, checked and corrected. It is one person’s standard, not an institutional one, and I would rather publish it than have you guess.
Who writes and edits
I write every article here. I also edit every article here. There is no second reader, and I am not going to pretend there is. What that means in practice is that the responsibility for every error on this site is mine alone, and that the corrections process below is not a formality.
Sources
Every article starts with primary material where primary material exists: the ancient texts, the inscriptions, the excavation reports, the coin hoards, the archive documents.
Where I quote a primary text, I name the translation. This matters more than it sounds. A myth read in one translation is not quite the same myth read in another, and translators make choices that change what a passage appears to claim.
Beyond the primary material I use peer-reviewed scholarship, excavation and site reports, and publications from museums, universities and archives. I do not build articles from other websites, encyclopaedia entries or content summaries. Where a modern figure comes from an official body, such as WHO case counts or a UNESCO inscription date, I name that body. Where I have relied on a single scholar’s argument, I name them in the text rather than presenting their reading as settled fact.
Every article ends with the sources it was built on.
The line between myth and record
This is the whole point of the site, so it gets its own rule.
A myth is a story that was told, written down and copied. A record is evidence of something that happened. These are different categories and I never let one stand in for the other.
An article can tell you exactly what the Poetic Edda says about the end of the world without implying that anyone watched it happen. It can tell you what Plato wrote about Atlantis without suggesting there is a city to find. Where a story has no evidence behind it, the article says so in plain words rather than leaving the reader to infer it.
Disagreement between historians
Where the scholarship genuinely disagrees, the article sets out the competing readings and says which way the weight of evidence leans, if it leans at all.
I do not resolve open questions for the sake of a cleaner article. “It cannot be established” is a legitimate conclusion and appears on this site more than once.
Speculation
Where I speculate, I mark it. The words are usually “probably”, “it is likely that”, or simply “this is a guess”. If a sentence is not marked that way, it means I think the evidence supports it as written.
Headlines
A headline on this site describes what the article actually argues. If the article concludes that something cannot be established, the headline does not promise a revelation. This is a real constraint and it costs traffic, and I would rather pay it.
Illustrations
The images at the top of each article are artistic interpretations made to set a mood, not evidence. They are not photographs of real artefacts, sites or people, and no argument in any article rests on one.
Where a real object, inscription or place matters to the argument, I describe it in words and name where it is and who published it.
Independence
Nobody pays for coverage on this site and nobody ever will. No advertiser, sponsor or partner has any say in which topics I write about or what I conclude. If that ever changes, this page changes first.
Corrections
I get things wrong. When I do, the article is corrected and the change is logged on the corrections page with the date and a description of what was altered. Silent edits to the substance of an article do not happen here.
Typographical fixes and small clarifications that do not change the meaning are made without a log entry. Anything that changes what the article claims is logged.
If you think something here is wrong, email sauravsinha@talesfromtime.com. Corrections are opened before anything else in the inbox, and you do not need to be a specialist to send one.
Updates
Articles are revisited when new scholarship or new excavation changes the picture. Where an article has been substantially updated, the date is shown on the page.