History is shaped not only by what we preserve—but also by what we decide to forget. In the ancient Mediterranean, Phoenician merchant elites may have chosen to seal their archives and sever their memory of the Sea Peoples. In our own time, powerful actors continue to practice a version of that same erasure: not by overt destruction, but by strategic silence, selective disclosure, and institutional neglect.

When we look back at Phoenicia’s silence during the Bronze Age collapse, we see not a passive casualty of destruction but perhaps a conscious act of omission. By refusing to record alliances, raids, or migrations, merchant elites might have protected trade, preserved neutrality, and cleaned the slate for the future.

Today, we recognize that similar maneuvers are still at work. Corporations, states, and elites routinely decide which chapters of their history are told—and which are locked away.

Modern Echoes of Silent Erasure

Climate Science and Big Oil’s “Forgotten Knowledge”

One of the most striking parallels lies in how major fossil-fuel companies handled the climate science they quietly understood. Internal documents from Exxon show that its scientists were producing accurate climate projections decades ago—even as the company publicly sowed doubt. (Harvard Gazette)

A 2023 study in Science determined that many of Exxon’s internal climate models were accurate when tested against later observations—an outcome that should have demanded reckoning, not suppression. (Science) Instead, the company continued to publicly dispute climate science, funded climate denial think tanks, and lobbied to block legislation it privately acknowledged would undermine its business. (The Guardian)

This is not a case of simple negligence. It’s a merchant-class decision: maintain plausible deniability in public while preserving internal knowledge. The collective forgetting shields reputations, protects balance sheets, and defers accountability.

Suppressing Dissent and Memory in the Digital Age

Silence does not always require erasing archives; sometimes, it’s about drowning them out or locking access. In recent years, debates over censorship, “cancel culture,” and control of archives have centered on efforts to suppress narratives that challenge dominant power structures.

For example, movements to remove or rewrite historically uncomfortable statues and public memorials sometimes “sanitize” collective memory by eliminating reminders of colonial violence, racial terror, or state complicity. The places where those stories are erased often remain empty spaces—or replaced by neutral symbols.

In the U.S., campaigns to eliminate or soften teaching about racism, slavery, or systemic injustice in school curricula reflect a form of communal forgetting. Some states have passed laws forbidding certain topics or textbooks. The memory of contentious or traumatic historical events becomes contested ground.

Or consider how marginalized communities often depend on oral history projects precisely because official records have been suppressed or neglected. When those projects are defunded or deplatformed, entire lineages of suffering risk fading into silence. (incite.columbia.edu)

State-Level Suppression and Historical Memory Projects

On the level of nations, state actors sometimes actively suppress historical memory:

• In Russia, courts have forced the closure of Memorial, a human-rights organization dedicated to documenting Soviet-era state terror, labeling it an “undesirable organization.” The suppression is not just legal but symbolic—a signal that some parts of history are no longer welcome. (The New Yorker)
• In Spain, debates over the Democratic Memory Law seek to address whether and how to remember the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship. Pushback from political conservative forces aims to maintain silence or selective commemoration. (EL PAÍS English)
• In Latin America, projects to recover the memory of state violence—such as investigations into Operation Condor—face institutional resistance. Some regimes seek to prevent full disclosure of economic networks, corporate complicity, or state terror infrastructures. (Education International)

These are not mechanical purges of archives but political decisions about which narratives to legitimize, fund, or allow space for.

Rewriting the Op-Ed with Modern Resonance

History is not simply a ledger of days—it is a choice of ledger keepers. The Phoenicians may have sealed their cuneiform jars—not to deny the Sea Peoples, but to prevent them from anchoring in the story. The merchant class decided what would live on and what would die unspoken.

To do that, you do not need to bulldoze archives or torch libraries. You can:

• Stop commissioning public inscriptions or memorials that commemorate difficult alliances.
• Shift language to omit certain actors or events, so that generations inherit a blank.
• Transition writing systems (e.g. from cuneiform to an alphabet) without carrying over the old records.
• Let oral history lose prestige, so memory becomes weak.
• Fund institutions that reinforce the “safe story” and starve those that tell the dangerous ones.

This is exactly what modern elites do too:

• Sell the narrative that scientific uncertainty justified delay—while privately knowing better.
• Deflect responsibility by burying inconvenient internal reports behind NDAs, classification, or corporate spin.
• Use PR and lobbying to frame regulatory agencies as overreach, so history is rewritten as a political debate, not a factual record.

The result is that the ledger is never destroyed—it is simply never opened.

When we look back at the Bronze Age and read Egyptian reliefs of the Sea Peoples, we see only a partial portrait. We see the conqueror’s perspective, not the merchant’s. The Phoenicians’ omission is our loss—and their silence today lingers in the gaps of history.

But remembering matters. Because the act of forgetting is itself a transaction: what we allow to vanish, who we allow to vanish, and whose stories we refuse to preserve.

In both ancient and modern times, the commercial class that trades in words, vessels, and ideas often has the final say over which voices will speak—and which will be silenced. And sometimes, that silence is deliberate.