HISTORICAL SOURCES

SOURCES
Primary sources: written

Historians want to find out about people who lived long ago. They look for the clues
these people have left behind. Historians have a special word for the clues they use.
They call them sources.

Historians use sources to find out about people who lived long ago. When a source
comes straight from the past, historians call it a primary source.

There are many kinds of primary sources. The most useful ones are written sources.
Here are some examples of written primary, sources:

Diaries in which people write what they do every day, They tell
us what people thought and felt.

Letters from one person to another. We can learn a lot about

people's lives from letters.

Primary sources: pictures

Pictures are another useful kind of primary source. Picture sources show us what people
or places looked like long, ago. Here are some picture sources.

This is a
painting. it was
made many
years ago. It
gives us an
idea of how
people lived..
This is a painting which was made in Egypt about
three thousand years ago. The man kneeling is a
musician. What kind of instrument is he using?

Points to remember

 Historians learn about the past from sources.

 Sources that come direct,1y from the past are called primary sources.
 Written primary sources include letters, diaries, official papers and newspapers.
 Pictures like photographs and paintings are useful primary sources.

Counting the past

Historians and archaeologists want to find out about people who lived long ago. They
study the writings and the artefacts people left behind and work out what their lives were
like.

But when in the past did people live? To answer that, historians have to count the years.
They do it just like you do.

The Christian Calendar

The way we count the years was started by Christians. They thought the most important
thing that ever happened was the birth of Jesus Christ. They called the year that happened
'Anno Domini' which means the `year of Our Lord'.

They started counting the years from that date . they labelled the years that came after
Christ’s birth AD ( Anno Domini) and the y labelled the years before his birth BC ( for
Before Christ).

Look back at this year's date written in your copybook. Add the letters AD to it. Now
you know that it shows how many years have passed since Christ was born.
Historians use dates to tell when the people they are studying lived. If people lived in 1798
AD then we know they lived almost two hundred years ago. If they lived in 1000 BC, then
we know that they lived about 3,000 years ago (2000 AD and 1000 BC).
Historians also count in centuries. The y e a r s f r o m 1 9 0 1 t o 2 0 0 0 a r e t h e
twentieth century since Christ was born. Soon, in the year 2001, we will be in the twenty-
first century. The year 1745 was in the eighteenth century and so on.

Ages and Periods

Historians have other ways of counting too. They divide the past into ”ages” and
“periods”. These are times when people lived in a certain way and did certain things.

The `Stone Age´ means the time

when people used tools made from
stone because they did not know
how to use metal.

The `Renaissance period' is the time

when new ideas began to change the
old ways of doing things and make
them more like our world today.

Points to remember
 Historians have to count the past. They use the way invented by Christians.
 Christians called the year Christ was born 'Anno Domini' which means the
year of Our Lord. All years after that were labelled AD. All years before
that were labelled BC (for Before Christ).
 Historians count in centuries, ages and periods.