Nevertheless, history is essentially the study of the past by means of written records. Though not everyone would agree with this statement, it is fundamentally true. True history is only possible for periods when there are written records. Physical evidence can supplement it, and allows for various inferences in the pre-historic period. Nonetheless, most history involves the use of written records, and the difficulties inherent in interpreting purely physical evidence should be clear to anyone interpreting pre-historic archaeology.
Philology is crucial to interpreting all written evidence.
It is the rigorous effort to attempt to recover the sense of the passage in question through the detailed examination of the language in context. First one examines the words of the text. This can only be determined by a nuanced examination of other uses of the words. Dictionaries are of course an indispensable aid in this effort, but a dictionary is simply someone else's attempt to digest the sense of a word. They may not have noticed idioms relative to the present case, and in any case have no objective determining authority.