This reminds me. You often hear it said "history is written by the victors," and while there's truth to that, I much prefer "history is written by those who wrote it down."

Because writing was, for most of history, an expensive and time-consuming process that only a few had access to, there are some big implications from that. One of which being that nobody was very inclined to write down the mundane day-to-day because it just wasn't worth it and few had any interest in preserving it.