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Navigating Online Ancient History Research

by Justin McHenry on November 16th, 2020 | 0 Comments

 

Finding true primary sources from ancient times is incredibly difficult even under the best of circumstances. Finding online ancient sources is even more difficult. As the name suggests, ancient manuscripts and records are old and time always takes its toll on these. This means that few if any actual documents have made it through the centuries to the present.  

 

Gather  

 

 
What is left often offers an incomplete view, but even from incomplete views, massive amounts of knowledge can be extrapolated. Sometimes no records exist and it is left to relying upon up the archeological record and the interpretation thereof to gleam a semblance of the past. In other cases the past is not presented in records and documents like it can be from our modern times but it takes the shape of histories written by those closer to the time period and who did have access to those records or people and even though they are technically secondary sources time and lack of anything else has made them into primary sources. 
 
Another roadblock with primary sources and artifacts from these eras is that they are in the original language. So in some cases viewing these materials, you might need to be familiar with the source language. Otherwise, you are relying upon translations and maybe not all of the work has been translated. 
 
As I noted over in the previous post about best practices for doing archival research, it is best if you read up on the secondary literature of your topic. Browse the references that they use in those works and see what primary sources they used. This will not only give you names and titles of works, but also some keywords that you can then use when you start searching in earnest. 
 
With all that being said here are a few of the online resources available that provide ancient primary sources. 
 
Perseus Digital Library - Contains a wide range of primary and secondary records from Ancient Greece and Rome. Also, includes Germanic and Renaissance materials as well.  
 
Internet Ancient History Sourcebook - A number of sources provided covering back to Mesopotamia to the Early Christianity period. Each time period or era is broken down further into useful subsections. 
 
EuroDocs - The site provides links to a wealth of primary sources throughout European history dating back to the Prehistoric era and broken down by different eras and countries.  
 
Chinese Text Project - This project makes available pre-modern Chinese texts and includes over thirty thousand titles and more than five billion characters. Houses scanned images of Chinese documents as well as transcriptions and translations of other documents. 
 
Duke Papyrus Archive - Provides digital access to papyri from ancient Egypt and is a valuable online resource for all of those interested in ancient Egypt. 
 
As always, HathiTrust and Internet Archive are two great sources for finding translations of ancient text such of Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War. 
 

 


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