Chapter Review :
- Cartographer : A person who makes maps.
- Al-Idrishi : He was an Arab geographer.
- When historians read documents, maps and texts from the past they have to be sensitive to the different historical backgrounds – the contexts – in which information about the past was produced.
- Historical records exist in a variety of languages which have changed considerably over the years. Medieval Persian, for example, is different from modern Persian.
- When the term 'Hindustan' was used in the thirteenth century by Minhaj-i Siraj, a chronicler who wrote in Persian, he meant the areas of Punjab, Haryana and the lands between the Ganga and Yamuna.
- In the early sixteenth century Babur used Hindustan to describe the geography, the fauna and the culture of the inhabitants of the subcontinent.
- A “foreigner” was any stranger who appeared say in a given village, someone who was not a part of that society or culture.
- A city-dweller, therefore, might have regarded a forest-dweller as a “foreigner”, but two peasants living in the same village were not foreigners to each other, even though they may have had different religious or caste backgrounds.
- Archive : A place where documents and manuscripts are stored.
- Today all national and state governments have archives where they keep all their
old official records and transactions. - Historians still rely upon coins, inscriptions, architecture and textual records
for information. - People used it to write holy texts, chronicles of rulers, letters and teachings of saints, petitions and judicial records, and for registers of accounts and taxes.
- Manuscripts were collected by wealthy people, rulers, monasteries and temples. They were placed in libraries and archives.
- There was no printing press in those days so scribes copied manuscripts by hand.
