Tell people about what makes your site special.

oses, Not Herodotus: First Historian in Western Civilization”

by Judd H. Burton, Ph.D.

Any historian worth his or her salt would be remiss not to acknowledge the intellectual debt we owe to Greek tradition when it comes to the field of history. There aren’t many history majors and serious students of history that are not exposed to The Histories by Herodotus, and accounts of the Pelopennesian Wars by the likes of Thucydides and Xenaphon. So notable wasHerodotus in antiquity that no less a person than Roman senator Cicero dubbed him “The Father

of History.” Herodotus’ fifth century opus covers both the Greco-Persian Wars and ethnographic

musings on ancient peoples. As such, historians and anthropologists have for centuries looked to

The Histories as the first structured cultural inquiry that formed the foundations of their

respective disciplines, with historians such as Thucydides and later Roman writers Tacitus and

Suetonius continuing the tradition. But was Herodotus really the first historian in Western

tradition?

I will be the first to admit the importance of Herodotus in the great line of historical

writers. Much of historiographical methodology remains anchored to approaches utilized in his

work. However, in recent decades some scholars have begun to call into question the primacy of

Herodotus in historiographical tradition. They suggest that it was the ancient Hebrew lawgiver

Moses who was the first great historian–not Herodotus–by centuries. The case is compelling.

Before plunging headlong into this, what do we mean by “history.” We hear and see that

word all the time. We sit in classes, read books, and watch programs all with the label “history.”

While that’s all certainly valid, for historians it is more that a noun–it’s a verb. Simply defined,

history is a cultural narrative of the past. Historiography is generally the word academics use to

describe the research and writing of history, as well as a descriptor of the traditions of the

discipline and notable contributing historians. So, it’s the narrative and the act of recording the

past. However, history should be concened with the betterment of humanity, not simply the

recoutning of important names and dates. As one colleague put it to me “we are teachers of

morality.” I can’t argue with that ideal. At any rate, humans have been doing this in oral form

for millennia and with writing for the last 6,000 years. The reasoned analysis of human culture,

as opposed to the recording of the past, is a practice long-believed to have begun with the Greeks

of the classical era. The aforementioned “biggees” like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenaphon

have long been ensconced as the founding fathers of history and anthropology, most notably

Herodotus.

Herodotus is famous for his great work The Histories, a rousing account of the

Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century B.C. He hailed from the city of Halicarnasus in Anatolia

and lived from about 485 to 425 B.C. In addition to his observations and account of the war, he

recorded many of the cultures and various ethnicities of the Greek and Persian worlds. It

continues to be required reading in ancient and historiography classes the world over for

historians in training, and for good reason. It is a milemarker in the evolution of history as a

discipline, offering a map for the systematic investigationn of historical problems. this space to add more details about your site, a customer quote, or to talk about important news.