History Primary Source Exercise
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
Historians use evidence when they study and write about history. They don’t get to “make it up.” Although there are always uncertain elements in history, given that all we have to understand the past is fragmentary texts and images that have survived the ravages of time, historians try to the best of their ability to create as true an understanding of the past as possible, based on evidence.
When historians write works of history, such as your textbook, they base their writing on two types of source evidence:
Secondary sources: Things people at a later time write about the past, often using primary sources and . . .
Primary Sources
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
Primary sources are objects, images, or texts, or testimony (in the modern age, this can include video or auditory recordings) that derive from the period of time about which you are studying.
So if you are studying the history of 1980s, stories your parents might relate of their lives in that era would be a primary source.
But a book from the 1980s would not be a primary source for World War II, or Ancient Egypt.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
Primary sources for this class can be objects (art objects, like the bust of Nefertiti below), coins, buildings, textiles or any other archaeological materials that have survived and that can inform us about ancient societies.
Primary sources can also be in the form of texts, such as the fragments of an early bible, below.
Your source reader “Sources of Crossroads and Cultures” reproduced excerpts from some of the texts that have informed historians about the periods we are studying in this class.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
3rd century CE. The front side of folios 13 and 14 of a Greek papyrus manuscript of the Gospel of Luke containing verses 11:50–12:12 and 13:6-24, P. Chester Beatty I (Gregory-Aland no. P45).
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:P._Chester_Beatty_I,_folio_13-14,_recto.jpg
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
| Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefertiti_Bust The iconic bust of Nefertiti is part of the Egyptian Museum of Berlin collection, currently on display in the Neues Museum. | |
| Material | limestone and stucco[1] |
| Size | 19 inches High |
| Created | 1345 BC: by Thutmose, ancient Egypt |
| Discovered | 1912: Amarna, Egypt |
| Present location | Neues Museum, Berlin, Germany |
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
c. 1780 BC Babylonian Basalt
This is the upper part of the stele that is approximately 7' 4" tall. The laws, written in cuneiform, are inscribed on the lower part of the monument.
Hammurabi, King of Babylon reunited Mesopotamia and instituted the Code of Hammurabi, a comprehensive set of laws addressing nearly all aspects of both civil and criminal offenses.
Hammurabi is portrayed receiving the laws directly from Shamash the sun god. (a parallel to Moses can be made here). Shamash is the dominate figure—he is seated on his throne, wears a crown composed of four pairs of horns, holds a ring and staff, and has flames issuing from his shoulders. Although Hammurabi is subservient to the god he still makes a powerful authority statement by addressing the god directly. Even though he has his hand raised in reverence he shows that he has a personal relationship with the gods while mere mortals do not.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
The stele (a stone or wooden slab erected as a monument) in the previous slide shows how images and texts together conveyed meaning in some primary sources. In this case, the stele both depicts Hammurabi receiving the laws from the God Shamash, and also reproduces the text of the laws below the image.
In ancient societies, most writing was in the hands of specialists called “scribes” – most of the people, even warriors and nobles, were illiterate and relied on scribes to write down important information. Writing was therefore a costly technology, usually reserved for recording the doings of the powerful and wealthy, or for the needs of the state or the priests.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
Anonymous: Seated Scribe (2620–2500 BC – Old Kingdom of Egypt); Louvre Museum, Paris.
Image http://rijksmuseumamsterdam.blogspot.com/2012/09/anonymous-seated-scribe-26202500-bc.htmlSource:
Because the vast majority of people did not write, and no one bothered to write about them or, usually, depict them in images, most of our primary sources for pre-modern history, the focus of this course, tell us about the state and the elites of society.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
Egypt, New Kingdom, Craftsmen, from the tomb of Nebamun and Ipuky
Image Sohttp://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/548568?=&imgNo=1&tabName=object-informationurce:
Even so, historians have been able to glean much information from surviving texts and images, and other types of archaeological evidence, to inform us about the lives of commoners and slaves in early societies, although we know much less about individual common people than we do about rulers and elites who wrote about themselves or had their words and deeds recorded for posterity.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
Hatshepsut, A Female Pharoh
Source Image: http:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Head_of_a_Sphinx_of_Hatshepsut.jpg
Head of a Sphinx of Hatshepsut, Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt, c. 1503-1482 B.C., found at Deir el-Bahri, Thebes. Red granite sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
This statue is one of six that were likely placed along the processional way into Hatshepsut's temple on the lower terrace. Only the head and shoulders of this statue were recovered.
Patches of blue paint on the false beard are still visible, as are traces of yellow and blue on the nemes royal headdress.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
The preceding slide shows an image of Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt, whom you will meet in Chapter 4 of your text. It also illustrates why primary sources, whether of images or objects, are not always easy to understand. Their meaning is not always obvious, and this it takes effort to make sense of them.
Hatshepsut was very unusual, in that she became Pharaoh of Egypt, even though in Egyptian society, power was “gendered male.” This means that like many societies in the ancient world (and many today), it was expected than men, not women, would wield political power.
How to make sense of Primary Sources
Small Sphinx of Hatshepsut originally positioned on the newel posts of the lower ramp of her temple complex. 18th dynasty, circa 1503-1482 B.C.
Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hatshepsut-SmallSphinx_MetropolitanMuseum.png
In Egyptian society, therefore, even though Hatshepsut was biologically female, in her public image, immortalized in propaganda images such as this small sphinx, it was necessary that she be “gendered” male? How? By wearing a false beard, for one thing. But the meaning of this image would not be obvious without the historical studies that have helped us to make sense of it.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
Thus in order to make sense of a primary source, we have to “contextualize” it. This means that we have to know something about it, when and where it was made, by whom, for what purpose, or for whom the text was written. We cannot simply read a text or look at an image from the past and immediately understand what it meant to the people who created it.
In this class, your “context” for your primary sources will come from your textbook, your source reader, and my lectures in these power points.
So be sure that you read that material before your try to complete the primary source exercises for this class.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
Aztec cosmogram in the pre-Hispanic Codex Fejérváry-Mayer—the fire god Xiuhtecuhtli is in the center.
Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec
Historians have to literally and figuratively decipher the meaning of the objects, images, and texts that they use as primary sources.
Your primary sources are translated and deciphered for you.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
The purpose of the primary sources in your textbook and reader, and the primary source exercises in this class, is to help you to understand how historians use primary source evidence to create knowledge.
This is also a GE requirement for courses such as 110A, to introduce students into how knowledge is created in the various fields they are studying.
Your primary sources also can provide you with a “window” into the worldview of the people you are studying.
By reading their own words and looking at images they made, we can come to understand better how they viewed their world and the meaning of their lives and actions.
How to Make sense of Primary sources
There is one important caveat to keep in mind when studying primary sources, however.
Primary sources are not unbiased, neutral accounts of the past. All texts, in particular, are written from a specific perspective, and for a specific reason. We cannot assume that the version of the past they recount is objective or “true,” any more than we can assume that for material we might read today on a website or in a magazine.
That is why part of the training a historian reads is about how one should read primary sources. How should one approach them so as to understand them the way that someone in the time and place (context, again) in which they were written, would understand them? How does one get at, if the “the” truth, some truth that can help us to understand the past better than we do?
That is the goal of historians whenever they work with primary source evidence.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
To understand this problem, we have to distinguish between “the past” and “history.”
The “past” is all that happened before the present moment. THE PAST NO LONGER EXISTS. We can study it via evidence, but we cannot observe it directly. It’s gone!
“History” is the body of knowledge about the past we construct using evidence.
The past is a “given” – history, however, is constructed knowledge.
Here is a basic maxim all historians must understand:
THE PAST DOESN’T CHANGE. NOR CAN IT BE CHANGED.
HISTORY (As a body of knowledge) CHANGES ALL THE TIME.
How to Make Sense of Primary Sources
So when you begin a primary source exercise, first contextualize the sources you are reading or looking at.
Remember: Who, what, where, and when are the bedrock of history, including of studying primary sources.
Then try to contextualize the source in terms of the course. How does it relate to the themes of the chapter? To the themes of the course? Think about these things first, before you attempt to write your responses to the primary source exercises each week.