Sources of History - Islamic History

Last updated: April 9th, 2025 at 9:57 am · Est. Reading Time: 2 minutes

While reading pages after pages of a history book, a question comes to mind. How does a historian know that those events actually happened? A historian uses certain materials to knit the story called ‘history’. They are ‘historical sources’ or simply ‘sources’. The author might know of a source which was contemporary to the event being described. Primary sources, as the contemporary sources are called, could be a coin, an inscription, a building or a diary or anything which existed at the time of the event. A lot of sources which a historians use are actually not primary. They arose after the event and hence are secondary. Secondary sources can be a text written after the event, a painting about an event drawn afterwards or anything that is not contemporary to the event. Whenever a primary source comes to light, the historian community treats it as a treasure. There is nothing more reliable or dependable than a primary source. It provides first-hand testimony of an event without raising any doubt of distortions by transmission. Primary sources, anyhow, are scarce. A historian always has to depend on secondary sources to construct the full story. However, most of the history books written for a general audience use neither primary nor secondary sources. They use tertiary sources. Wikipedia, textbooks, and dictionaries fall under this category. They are simply reference material, and true historians use them only at the ‘pre-research’ stage.

Primary source: Historical material contemporary to the events

Secondary source: Historical material collected and compiled after the event

Tertiary source: Compiled data in reference format.

Further reading