Equestrian Historical Record?

Sjogre
The End wasn't The End - Found a new home after the great exodus of 2012

Just how well recorded is history in Equestria? They know about the old pony homeland, but not the Crystal Empire. They know about Star Swirl the Bearded, but not Princess Luna. Heck, they don’t even know that Princess Celestia has been ruling Equestria for a thousand years. Discord’s reign could have erased a lot of records, but that still doesn’t explain why they didn’t know about him.
 
Even the play for the founding gets odd at the end. The flag at the end of the play shows a pair of winged unicorns, but the story precludes the possibility of them being Celestia and Luna. Either the flag was inaccurate, meaning that the Equestrians couldn’t be arsed to find a picture of their first flag, or there was another pair of winged unicorns back then that were revered for an unmentioned reason, or the original flag had Celestia and Luna on it, in which case the entire episode was nothing but lies.
 
So, what the deal is with Equestrian history? Why is the record so spotty?
Vlakc
The End wasn't The End - Found a new home after the great exodus of 2012

My wild guess for all of this would be.
 
That ancient ponies might have recorded their history, but most of it was lost during heat’s warming eve’s migration, leaving them with scarce real documented history, therefore, like in the history of many real countries, for example, the foundation history of a good number of countries in Europe is shrouded with mythological or semi-historical characters and events.
 
With this I mean that, characters like “princess platinum” and “commander hurricane” etc etc might not have existed at all, and were created for the sole purpose of making the play and try to explain pony history, or they might have been semi-historical characters but there is just not enough documents and/or other proof to fully confirm that they existed, because again they might have been lost during the migration. The same goes for the migration itself, the migration might have went very differently from that which we saw in the play, but since probably again, no one documented the migration or the documents were lost, and what we saw in the play was what the ponies think might have happened (same with the Asian migration across the Bering strait, no one documented that, we just guessed what happened based on clues)
 
As for the flags and such, it could be the same, we don’t know which were the flags of many ancient kingdoms or even if they had one, we just guessed in some cases.
 
As for Luna, my only guess is that with a thousand years of absence, generation after generation she became more and more like a fairy tale to ponies.
 
“they don’t even know that Princess Celestia has been ruling Equestria for a thousand years”
 
I never heard that claim in the show (might have missed it)
 
And yes, though I don’t remember how long was Discord’s reign, it sure as hell destroyed more than just recorded history.
 
Then again, this is just me guessing, I might be all wrong here XD
SpacePaladin
The End wasn't The End - Found a new home after the great exodus of 2012

Watcher of the Watchmen
@Vlakc
 
“they don’t even know that Princess Celestia has been ruling Equestria for a thousand years”
 
In the second half of the pilot, Twilight and the others were surprised to hear how Celestia and Luna were sisters.
SpacePaladin
The End wasn't The End - Found a new home after the great exodus of 2012

Watcher of the Watchmen
@Background Pony
 
Generally, I consider stuff Twilight doesn’t know, despite being a massive bookworm and the personal student of Princess Celestia, who lived through many grand events, to be really obscure and not necessarily recorded properly.
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