" In the time periods ​where we tend to know of peoples' lives, two things are required. One is that it is a literate society.

One of the unfairnesses that history imposes upon the present day, in terms of historians and others who are interested in the past, is a huge prejudice in favour of the cultures that wrote things down. The other is that within that literate society, you need to be of a class or social level where things are being written about you. Which is why most writing about history has tended to be about the upper class. There's more material. But it's the unrecorded lives, or the less-often recorded lives, that tend to interest me at least as much as the ones where we have easy access to a lot of information. "

― Guy Gavriel Kay