Rulers and Their Records: From the Sumerian King List to Domesday Book

The Sumerian King List names the cities that held kingship in southern Mesopotamia and the kings who ruled them, with early reigns running to thousands of years. It was likely composed to legitimize the claims of later city-states, which is why it reads as political argument as much as record.

The Palermo Stone is one of seven surviving fragments of the Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom, a stele probably made in the Fifth Dynasty. It listed Egypt's kings from the First Dynasty onward and recorded notable events for each year of their reigns. Today it is held in the Regional Archaeological Museum Antonio Salinas in Palermo, which gives it its name.

The Ipuwer Papyrus, held in Leiden, contains the Admonitions of Ipuwer, an incomplete literary lament describing a society in chaos. Egyptologists generally read it as reflective literature about breakdown rather than a chronicle, a useful reminder that not every old document is a record of events.

The Merneptah Stele was carved in the fifth year of the pharaoh Merneptah, who reigned from 1213 to 1203 BCE. Flinders Petrie discovered it at Thebes in 1896, and it is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It is a king's own account of his victory, set in stone.

The Gezer Calendar is a small limestone tablet with an early inscription found at Gezer, generally dated to about the tenth century BCE. Instead of a king, it records the farming year in sequence, and scholars remain divided over whether its language is Phoenician or a northern dialect of Hebrew.

The Tel Dan Stele is a fragmentary basalt inscription in Old Aramaic, found at Tel Dan in northern Israel and now on display at the Israel Museum. It records a military victory by an Aramean king and contains a phrase widely read as House of David, an early reference to that dynasty outside the Hebrew Bible.

The Edicts of Ashoka are more than thirty inscriptions on pillars, boulders and cave walls, attributed to the Mauryan emperor Ashoka. They are the earliest written and datable texts from India, and because they were cut in stone they survive exactly as carved.

The Edict of Milan was an agreement of 13 February 313 between the emperors Constantine I and Licinius, who met at Mediolanum, to treat Christians benevolently within the Roman Empire. The original letters are not preserved; the text survives in the writings of Lactantius and Eusebius.

The Justinian Code, or Corpus Juris Civilis, is the great collection of Roman law compiled under the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, directed by the jurist Tribonian in Constantinople. It was composed almost entirely in Latin, and its four parts gathered imperial constitutions, legal opinions, a teaching manual and later laws.

The Domesday Book is the manuscript record of the Great Survey of much of England and parts of Wales, commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085 and completed in 1086. It recorded manor by manor who held land and what it was worth, and it is now kept at The National Archives in Kew.