How do we know any of this? No ancient Egyptian wrote a history of Egypt in the way a modern historian does. Instead, historians piece the past together from many kinds of evidence, each useful and each with its own point of view.
Key idea
| Kind of source | Example | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Royal inscriptions | temple reliefs of battles | names, dates, what the king wanted remembered | victories only; defeats left out |
| Papyri | letters, accounts, the Turin king list | daily business, law, literature | fragile; most were lost; mostly from dry sites |
| Ostraca | notes from Deir el-Medina | ordinary people's lives | short, often hard to date |
| Archaeology | workers' houses at Giza | how people lived, ate and worked | needs careful recording and interpretation |
| Foreign records | the Amarna letters, Hittite tablets | the other side of a story | their own biases |
| Greek writers | Herodotus, Book 2 | what visitors saw and heard | written long after; mixed with legend |
Why it works
Writing on many surfaces
Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs on stone and in the quicker hieratic script on papyrus and ostraca; later came Demotic, and in Christian times Coptic. Papyrus survives mostly in the dry desert edge, so some places and periods are far better documented than others. The wet Delta, where great cities stood, has lost almost all its papyri.
Worked example: Comparing two sources
- Both sources had reasons to praise their own side.
- The outcome on the ground (who held the town afterward) is harder to spin than a description of the fighting.
- So the historian treats the temple account as the king's version and weighs it against the letter and the later situation.
Answer: The result was probably not the clear victory the temple claims; the evidence must be weighed together.
You will meet exactly this problem at the battle of Kadesh.
Common mistake