When we started studying history, we soon asked ourselves: "how can I know if what happened in the past was real?" Or: "What kind of proof does the historian offer to his readers, in order to confirm the veracity of what he is expounding? So, the answers to these questions need a clarification on what is called “sourceshistorical”.
In order to fully understand what historical sources are, it is necessary to know that the word "source" here is understood in the sense of "document", that is, something on which the testimony of some event that took place in the past is recorded. In this sense, historical sources or documents constitute everything that human beings have produced since their beginnings. Such sources can range from archeological artifacts to electronic devices made in the 20th century, such as the first computers or microchips.
There is, of course, a difference in complexity between the fonts. For example, the robes that the Romans wore during the empire are less complex historical sources than the poem “Aeneid” by Virgil, which tells the whole story of Roman civilization. However, clothing history as well as literary history are equally important to understand a given historical period well, given that each one of them focuses on an object specific.
Pieces of pottery, chipped and polished stones, funerary urns with human bones, cave paintings and the entire range of archaeological finds are also historical sources, as they relate to the ancestors of man. contemporary. What differentiates the records of prehistoric man from the records of other animals is the production of systemssymbolic. No other animal, besides man, developed artifacts such as hatchets made of bone or stone, nor did it draw scenes with a strong symbolic charge on cave walls.
There are even special studies on certain types of historical sources, such as numismatics. The study called numismatics aims to analyze, under the historical point of view, coins. “Numisma” in Greek means “coin”. Through the various types of coins that have been minted throughout history, since the first one, made by the Persian king Darius I (call daric), until today, coins bear witness to political, economic and cultural situations.
Another example of very thought-provoking historical sources are the monuments, which are also landmarks of memory. Let's look at an example: the Egypt's pyramids, located in the Giza Valley, near the current city of Cairo. They testify to the civilizational vigor of the time of the pharaohs, who built them to function as mausoleums to guard bodies and wealth. However, given their permanence, the pyramids also formed the scene of many other relevant historical events, such as the battle that the troops of NapoleonBonaparte fought against the Mamluks in Egypt. The Pyramids, millennia after their construction, were there, as memorials to many past glories.
In this sense, the historical sources are varied and very broad. Each type of source requires a different skill and specialty from the historian. The historian is responsible for interpreting these sources well and extracting from them what will support his argument. The difference between “proof” in history and “proof” in the context of other sciences concerns the way the historian handles the sources in the narrative he constructs.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes