Historians and Their Sources


 
 
Concept Explanation
 

Historians and Their Sources

Historians and Their Sources: Historians use different types of sources to learn about the past depending upon the period of their study and the nature of their investigation .Some continuity in the sources used by historians for the study of the period. They still rely on coins, inscriptions, architecture and textual records for information. But there is also considerable discontinuity.

The number and variety of textual records increased dramatically during this period. They slowly displaced other types of available information. Through this period paper gradually became cheaper and more widely available. People used it to write holy texts, chronicles of rulers, letters and teachings of saints, petitions and judicial records, and for registers of accounts and taxes. Manuscripts were collected by wealthy people, rulers, monasteries and temples. They were placed in libraries and archives.

The Problem of Dearth of Original Manuscripts:

We can rarely find original manuscripts of the authors .this is a serve problem today.

  • We are entirely dependent on the copies made by later scribes.
  • As a consequences , the historians have to go through different manuscripts (versions) of the same text to identify what the author had originally written.
  • At times various authors revised their chronicles.
  • For example , Z Barani wrote his first chronicle book in 1356 and another version came two years later. The two version differed from one another and the historians did not even know about the existence of the first version till 1960s as it had remained lost in massive library collections.
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