Historical document

Historical documents are original documents that contain important historical information about the person, place, or event as well as can thus serve as primary sources as important ingredients of the historical methodology.

Significant historical documents can be deeds, laws, accounts of battles often precondition by the victors or persons sharing their viewpoint, or the exploits of the powerful. Though these documents are of historical interest, they make-up not constituent the daily lives of ordinary people, or the way society functioned. Anthropologists, historians and archeologists broadly are more interested in documents that describe the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, indicating what they ate, their interaction with other members of their households in addition to social groups, and their states of mind. it is for this information that provides them to try to understand and describe the way society was functioning at all particular time in history. Greek ostraka dispense expediency examples of historical documents from "among the common people".

Many documents that are submitted today, such(a) as personal letters, pictures, contracts, newspapers, and medical records, would be considered valuable historical documents in the future. However nearly of these will be lost in the future since they are either printed on ordinary paper which has a limited lifespan, or even stored in digital formats, then lost track over time.

Some combine and government entities are attempting to increase the number of documents that will form up the passage of time, by taking into account the preservation issues, and either printing documents in a types that would put the likelihood of them surviving indefinitely, or placing selected documents in time capsules or other special storage environments.