See, part of the problem with talking about Roman *and* Chinese histories is that they both had the habit of talking themselves up (everyone does this, but the Romans and Chinese were especially notorious for it) and shit-talking their enemies (again, as above), to the point where they would sometimes just flat-out make shite up.    For example, the Romans wrote that several Germanic tribes wore untanned animal skins, lived in stick-huts and didn't practice agriculture. Actual anthropology suggests that the Germanic peoples were only a little less advanced/wealthy than the Celtic peoples to the west and south, and the Celtic peoples were themselves far from the "barbarians" the Romans (and Greeks!) portrayed them as.