Sources of history

A source of history is a place, person, text or object that gives us information about some past event or period.

Start with your own family. Can you find out about three generations: their names, jobs and places of birth? How did you find out? Perhaps from photographs, diaries, ID cards, or the memories of your parents and relatives. Each of those is a source.

Every object or building tells a story, like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The Taj Mahal tells us about the emperor who built it; a single old coin can tell us about the king who issued it. Museums such as the National Museum in New Delhi keep statues, coins and ornaments from the past so that everyone can see them. We put history together from many sources, but remember: quite a few pieces of the puzzle may stay missing!

The book sorts sources into families:

• Archaeological: things found in excavations (mounds; human, animal and plant remains; tools and weapons; figurines and ornaments; pottery and toys; homes and burials), structures such as monuments, coins, and inscriptions, including copper plates.
• Literary: Indian writings (the Vedas and Itihāsas, manuscripts, scientific and technical texts, poems and plays, historical texts, story collections, family histories) and foreign accounts such as travellers' books and chronicles.
• Oral: folklore.
• Artistic: paintings, sculptures, panels.

When historians study, say, a king or queen of 1,500 years ago, an ancient monument, a war or some traded goods, they gather information from as many sources as they can.

Sometimes the sources agree (the jigsaw pieces match). Sometimes they contradict each other (the pieces don't match), and historians must decide which source to trust more. That is how they rebuild the history of a period.

Who adds to all these sources? Historians (people who study and write about the past), but also archaeologists, epigraphists (who study ancient inscriptions), anthropologists, experts in literature and languages, and more. In the last 50 years or so, science has helped more and more: studies of ancient climates, chemical studies of excavated materials, and studies of the genetics of ancient people. For the last two or three centuries, newspapers count as sources too, and for the last few decades, electronic media.