One interesting aspect of tradition and culture is that in many ways we have a vastly better historical overview of this now than people ever had before the 20th century. This is why e.g. in medieval and Renaissance artwork depicting the ancients, the depicted scenes show people dressed in contemporary clothing of the time, with pluderhosen and doublets. Bits by bit we have learned since, through ancient texts and archaeology, but the actual historical understanding of history was quite short in span and mostly based off of what the priests told you in church.
This of course also means that history, in a historical perspective, hasn’t been regarded as terribly important outside of the religious context, for a particularly long time, and is basically a very modern concept only evolved with archeology in the late 19th cent, where also nationalromanticism grows, defining cultural traits claimed to be rooted in history, but often on very loose grounds.
