Letters That Carried History: Private and Diplomatic Letters from Cicero to Ben-Gurion

The letters Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus between 68 and 43 BC are a candid, largely private record of his daily concerns and political calculations, which is why they count among the most reliable sources for the last decades of the Roman Republic. They seem to have stayed unpublished until well after both men had died, and they survive through a manuscript that Petrarch found in Verona in 1345.

This exchange between the Byzantine emperor Leo III and the Umayyad caliph Umar II has each ruler urging the other to convert. Modern scholars regard the texts as a later pious fiction, since the earliest surviving version appears in an Armenian chronicle written around 788 to 789, decades after both men had died. It survives in six main versions across Latin, Armenian, Arabic and Aljamiado, and shows how a letter, even an invented one, could be reused for centuries of Christian and Muslim debate.

These letters passed between the twelfth century theologian Peter Abelard and Heloise, his former student, after their romance ended and they entered monastic life, he as a monk and she as an abbess. They mix intense personal feeling with intellectual argument and are read as primary evidence for medieval attitudes toward gender, love and monastic discipline.

Three generations of the Paston family of Norfolk wrote and received these letters between 1422 and 1509, a span that covers the Wars of the Roses and the early Tudor period. They record legal disputes, business dealings and daily concerns in unusual detail. Because they are in vernacular English rather than Latin or French, linguists also use them as evidence for the Great Vowel Shift.

Roughly three thousand letters reached Calais between 1533 and 1540 for Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, and his wife Honor, during his time as Lord Deputy of Calais. His London agent John Husee was the most frequent correspondent. When Lisle was arrested for treason in 1540 the papers were confiscated and eventually placed in the Tower of London; they now give a detailed picture of Tudor domestic life and the court of Henry VIII, and are held at the National Archives.

In 1572 and 1573 King John III of Sweden and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia exchanged letters known in Swedish as Skällebreven, the scolding letters. Disputes over diplomatic delegations and claims to Livonia made the tone openly hostile, with each ruler questioning the other's royal status. Far from opening a path to peace, the exchange hardened both sides' positions during the Twenty Five Years' War.

Six letters written in 1645 by pro-Portuguese Potiguara leaders, including Antonio Filipe Camarão, urged Dutch-allied Indigenous leaders to change sides during the Pernambuco Insurrection. They are in Old Tupi, normally an oral language, and are considered the only known texts written by Brazilian Indigenous people before independence. Discovered in 1885, they were not fully transcribed and translated until an annotated edition appeared in October 2022.

In 1715 and 1716 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, who wrote in defense of Isaac Newton's views, argued by letter over whether space is absolute, as Newton and Clarke held, or merely relational, as Leibniz argued. The exchange also took up divine freedom and whether God must create the best of all possible worlds. It was published in 1717, shortly after Leibniz died, and remains a clear statement of his mature metaphysics.

The Chatham Papers gather the correspondence of William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, and his son William Pitt the Younger, both prime ministers in the eighteenth century, and are held at the British National Archives. They are a primary source for the careers of two of the most significant British statesmen of their era, passed from father to son across generations of government.

David Ben-Gurion wrote this letter to his son Amos on 5 October 1937, answering the Peel Commission proposal to partition Mandatory Palestine. He argued that a Jewish state on only part of the land should be seen as a beginning rather than a final settlement. The original Hebrew letter is held in the Israel Defense Forces Archive, and crossed-out passages in it remain a subject of scholarly debate over what he truly intended.