While the Akka documentation is incredibly well written, it has surprisingly few images. Since I visualize concepts to remember them, here is my take on how Event Sourcing in Akka Persistence works:
The text I took this from is
A persistent actor receives a (non-persistent) command which is first validated if it can be applied to the current state. Here validation can mean anything, from simple inspection of a command message’s fields up to a conversation with several external services, for example. If validation succeeds, events are generated from the command, representing the effect of the command. These events are then persisted and, after successful persistence, used to change the actor’s state. When the persistent actor needs to be recovered, only the persisted events are replayed of which we know that they can be successfully applied. In other words, events cannot fail when being replayed to a persistent actor, in contrast to commands. Event sourced actors may also process commands that do not change application state such as query commands for example.
https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.5/persistence.html#event-sourcing, emphasis mine