Here are not the dry data of history, but the fears, hopes, triumphs and tragedies of individuals and whole dynasties. Here are lives cut down by diseases that are now a distant nightmare or lost in a moment to stupid accidents.

But here also are the stories of those who lived long and fulfilled lives, those who made things better for later generations, those who gave something back of the bounty that was then theirs by right.

It is a chronicle in the words and attitudes of its own time -- a portal through which we can share the mundane and the extraordinary, the misery and the comedy that comprised the real lives of our ancestors.