Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

What survives from the past is not a representative sample; it is whatever was durable, buried, or valuable enough to keep. Stone lasts and cloth does not, records of the powerful last and ordinary lives do not, so the picture we build is skewed by the physics of survival rather than by importance. Knowing that should temper how confidently anyone generalises from the remains. Most of what happened left nothing behind.

The same distortion operates in your own recollection. You remember what got repeated or written down, not what mattered most. Keep a record of something ordinary, because the unrecorded parts of a life disappear at the usual rate.