From the Mouth of Historians

"Chance, as Conrad liked to call it---luck, or even fate, as others prefer to think---plays its part as much in shaping the destinies of races as of individuals, dispensing vicissitudes or boons alike upon the lone figure and the composite group.  Of the vicissitudes the saddest, though assuredly not the most dire, is that by which the dead are relegated to oblivion.  It is perhaps a subconscious awareness of this hazard that so often directs the steps of an indolent walker to an old churchyard, leading him to pause by a decayed tombstone, to wonder as he gazes at its perished and illegible inscription as to what manner of man was laid beneath the enigmatic slab, to speculate upon his way of life, and to regret that all traces of this once vital and alert being---even to the record of his name and life span---have now forever faded from the notice of mankind."
-Introduction to 'The Scythians' by Tamara Talbot Rice