Historical Sources, Historiography and Map Work
What the domain covers
This domain covers historical sources, historiography and map work. Code 128 tests how historians classify evidence, evaluate bias, compare schools of interpretation and read maps of sites and empires.
Core rules and concepts
- Primary sources are contemporary with the event: inscriptions, coins, charters, monuments, diaries, official records and oral testimony. Secondary sources interpret primary evidence.
- Literary sources: Vedic texts, epics, Puranas, Arthashastra, Indica, Rajatarangini, and travellers' accounts by Al-Biruni, Ibn Battuta and Francois Bernier.
- Colonial historiography divided Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods; nationalist historians challenged this; Marxist historians stressed modes of production; subaltern historians recovered peasant and marginal voices; feminist historians questioned male-centred narratives.
- Source criticism asks who produced a source, for whom, when, why, and what it omits. An official inscription shows royal ideology; a court chronicle flatters the ruler.
- Map work: locate sites, rivers, capitals, battlefields and trade routes; note direction, scale and the difference between physical and political maps.
Worked example
A question asks how to compare Ibn Battuta and Abul Fazl as sources. Reasoning: Ibn Battuta, a fourteenth-century traveller, records society, markets and customs but depends on intermediaries and has literary conventions. Abul Fazl, Akbar's courtier, provides administrative detail in the Ain-i Akbari but writes to legitimise Mughal rule. Conclusion: use both, but for different claims; corroborate with coins, monuments and local records.
Traps
Do not call a source reliable simply because it is old. Do not treat maps as neutral; boundaries and names reflect the mapmaker's purpose. Do not confuse historiography with chronology: it is the study of how history is written.