Visual sources derive from the material culture of the past—religious icons or paintings that add to our understanding of belief systems, a family portrait that provides insight into presentations of self in a particular time and place, a building or sculpture that reveals how power and authority were displayed in a specific empire. These kinds of evidence represent another category of primary source material that historians can use to re-create and understand the past. But such visual sources can be even more difficult to interpret than written documents. The ideas that animated the creators of particular images or artifacts are often not obvious. Nor are the meanings they conveyed to those who viewed or used them. The lovely images from the Indus River valley civilization contained in the visual sources feature for Chapter 2, for example, remain enigmatic although still engaging to twenty-first-century viewers.

Despite the difficulties of interpretation, visual sources can provide insights not offered by written documents. Various images of the Buddha shown in Chapter 4 effectively illustrate how the faith that he initiated changed as it spread beyond India to other parts of Asia. And the posters from Mao Zedong’s China in Chapter 21 convey an immediate emotional sense about the meanings attached to communism at the time, at least to its supporters. Indeed, for preliterate societies, such as those described in Chapter 1, archeological and artistic evidence is almost all that remains of their history.

To use visual sources, we must try as best we can to see these pieces of evidence through the eyes of the societies that produced them and to decode the symbols and other features that imbue them with meaning. Thus context is, if anything, even more crucial for analyzing visual evidence than it is for documents. Understanding scenes from the life of Muhammad, featured in Chapter 9, depends heavily on some knowledge of Islamic history and culture. And the images in Chapter 16, illustrating various perceptions of the French Revolution, require some grasp of the unfolding of that enormous upheaval.

A set of basic questions, similar to those you would ask about a written document, provides a starting point for analyzing visual sources:

Having established this basic information about the image or artifact, you may simply want to describe it, as if to someone who had never seen it before.

Finally, you will want to take a stab at more interpretive issues, making use of what you know about the context in which the visual source was created.

Beyond analyzing particular images or objects, you will be invited to draw conclusions from sets of related visual sources that address a central theme in the chapter. What can you learn, for example, about the life of Chinese elites from the visual sources in Chapter 8? And what do the images in the Working with Evidence feature of Chapter 15 disclose about the reception of Christianity in various cultural settings?

Primary sources—documentary and visual alike—are the foundation for all historical accounts. To read only secondary sources, such as textbooks or articles, is to miss much of the flavor and texture of history as it was actually experienced by people in the past. But immersing yourself in the documents and visual sources presented here allows you to catch a glimpse of the messiness, the ambiguity, the heartaches, and the achievements of history as it was lived.

Using these sources effectively, however, is no easy task. In fact, the work of historians might well be compared with that of Sisyphus, the ancient Greek king who, having offended the gods, was condemned to eternally roll a large rock up a mountain, only to have it ceaselessly fall back down. Like Sisyphus, historians work at a mission that can never be completely successful—to recapture the past before it is lost forever in the mists of time and fading memory. The evidence available is always partial and fragmentary. Historians and students of history alike are limited and fallible, for we operate often at a great distance—in both time and culture—from those we are studying. And we rarely agree on important matters, divided as we are by sex, nationality, religion, race, and values, all of which shape our understandings of the past.

Despite these challenges, scholars and students alike have long found their revisiting of the past a compelling project—intensely interesting, personally meaningful, and even fun—particularly when working with “primary” or “original” sources, which are the building blocks of all historical accounts. Such sources are windows into the lives of our ancestors, though these windows are often smudged and foggy. We hope that working with the evidence contained in these sources will enrich your own life as you listen in on multiple conversations from the past, eavesdropping, as it were, on our ancestors.