Month: April 2013
Egyptian Gallery 2013
The Sources of Historical Knowledge
One aspect of history that appeals to me is that it is so difficult to be certain of the truth. This means that you are not learning just facts, but also considering all the intriguing possibilities. For instance:
♦How come Tutankhamen died at such a young age?
♦Was Claudius, a Roman emperor, murdered by his wife Agrippina?
♦How did the Egyptians actually build those stupendous structures in the desert – without even the wheel to help them?
We can sift the evidence, speculate and wonder, but often we have to rely on well-founded guesses and thoughtful judgements rather than certainties. History is like that.
That’s why we need sources – to try to work out what actually happened. One set of sources are those that remain from the time we are investigating. These are called PRIMARY SOURCES. This group of sources is often affected by the passage of time or naturally limited in scope. Here’s why:
♦Some artefacts are lost and others decay.
♦Certain groups, such as the poor and the uneducated, are less likely to produce written sources, since they rarely learn to write and are likely to spend their lives in menial labour.
♦Some artefacts lie buried for hundreds of years, like Tutankhamen’s tomb and the streets of Pompeii. Others never come to light.
♦Some scripts, like the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians, cannot be deciphered until someone breaks the code. As you know, Jean-François Champollion succeeded in deciphering hieroglyphics in 1822, thereby opening up a rich vein of historical study and illuminating sources that had previously puzzled scholars.
Despite their limitations, these primary sources give us great insight into the lives of people at that time in history. We would be lost without them.
The other type of source is usually written by experts who are scholars or historians, but you, as a history student, could also create this kind of source yourselves. Long after the period being studied, scholars, historians and students write about what happened. These sources are SECONDARY. They are not as immediate as the primary sources and they may be flawed, but they often provide a better overview of what happened, because they can refer to all the primary sources available.
Your task today is to search for a primary source on ancient Egypt and write a short account of what it shows about this intriguing civilisation. The primary source might be a picture of an artefact, a tomb painting or even a translation of a hieroglyphic text. Your description or annotations will then become a secondary source.
Recommended Link: An Online Egyptian Tour at the British Museum
Recommended Link: Cleveland Museum of Art – Egyptian Collection