Archaeologists
An archaeologist is a person who studies the remains of buildings made of stone and brick, paintings and sculpture. They also explore and excavate to find tools, weapons, pots, pans, ornaments and coins. They also look for bones of animals, birds, and fish to find out what people ate in the past.
Historians use the word source to refer to the information found from manuscripts, inscriptions and archaeology. Once sources are found, learning about the past becomes an adventure. So historians and archaeologists are like detectives, who use all these sources like clues to find out about our pasts.
Left : A pot from an old city. Pots like these were used about 4700 years ago. Right : An old silver coin. Coins such as this one were in use from about 2500 years ago. In what ways is the coin different from the ones we use today?
One past or many?
The title of this book is Our Pasts – I. The word ‘pasts’ in plural is used to draw attention to the fact that the past was different for different groups of people. For example, the lives of herders or farmers were different from those of kings and queens, the lives of merchants were different from those of crafts persons, and so on. It is even true today as people followed different practices and customs in different parts of the country.
Archaeology did not help us to know more about the ordinary people in the past because they did not keep records of what they did. Whereas, kings used to keep the records of their victories and the battles they fought.
What do dates mean?
The years are counted from the date to the birth of Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity. All dates before the birth of Christ are counted backwards and usually have the letters BC (Before Christ) added on. In this book, we will refer to dates going back from the present, using 2000 as our starting point. 2000 means 2000 years after the birth of Christ.
ELSEWHERE
Inscription are also inscribed on hard surfaces. several hundreds of years ago, many of Inscribed these inscriptions. All Inscriptions contain both scripts and languages.
Languages which were used, and scripts, have been changed over time. So how do scholars understand what was inscribed? This can be done through a process known as decipherment.
One of the most famous stories of decipherment comes from Egypt, a country in north Africa where there were kings and queens about 5000 years ago.
Rosetta is a town on the north coast of Egypt, and here an inscribed stone was found, which contained inscriptions in three different languages and scripts (Greek, and two forms of Egyptian).
Scholars who could read Greek figured out that the names of kings and queens were enclosed in a little frame, called a cartouche.
They then placed the Greek and the Egyptian signs side by side, and identified the sounds for which the Egyptian letters stood.
As you can see, a lion stood for L, and a bird for A. Once they knew what the letters stood for, they could read other inscriptions as well.
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