History Skills 01

This KS3 quiz tests your skills. When studying history, the further back you look, the harder it gets to discover what really was happening. The reason for this is that there are fewer sources of reliable information available, and they can also be very hard to find. Written records go back many thousands of years, the Ancient Egyptian and Babylonian civilisations had writing. These languages no longer exist so translating what was written was no easy task. Ancient Egyptians used a system of heiroglyphs (little pictures) to write things down. Translating these had been impossible until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. This contained the same information written in 3 'languages', one of which was Greek. That enabled historians to work out how to translate heiroglyphics.

Historians work a little like scientists - they come up with an idea about a person or event from pieces of evidence that they find. This can then be revised as someone looks at the same evidence from a different viewpoint, or when new evidence is found. History can be very subjective, two people looking at the same facts can come to very different conclusions.