The histories

Papyrus is not as durable as clay still and the fragment above is the oldest that still survives of a chain of copies first written in Greek that have carried the stories told by a Greek called Herodutus all the way down to us today. In his time, Herodotus was one of a very few that could read and write so he read his stories out aloud at public gatherings like the olympic games, alongside stories of Homer or plays performed by actors.

Writing the first known history book he introduced it by saying:

In this book, I hope to preserve the memory of the past by capturing the amazing achievements of both us Greeks and our neighbours and explain how we came into conflict.

He was the first person we know of who sought to capture what had happened in the past in a more “objective” way, not seeking to impose a view although, of course the stories had to be entertaining too. He had travelled to far flung places and gave accounts of amazing animals and strange customs of people all around Europe, Africa and Asia as well as trying to separate his opinions from those of others.

the egyptian king sent out a fleet manned by Phoenicians to sail out of the persian gulf and right around Africa and come back into the mediterranean sea through the straits of Gibralter. They took two years to do it stopping each year somewhere on the coast long enough to grow new supplies of grain before continuing.

He also reports that they came back with a story that he for one did not believe, but he still wrote it down for posterity:

They said that as they sailed west around the southern tip of Africa they had the sun on their right (to the north)

We now know that they would have crossed the equator and those of us that live down under in the southern hemisphere where land is scarce know very well that the sun does indeed shine from the north at midday. We also know that the earth spins at a tilt that gives us the seasons in the temperate latitudes where the greeks and egyptians lived.

He also compared the Greeks who depended on unpredictable rains with the Egyptians who considered themselves more secure because of their mighty river nile continually watering their crops and quenching their thirst. Little details are scattered amongst the tales of bloodshed, heroics, betrayal and revenge wreaked by men starting, allegedly, when a few Phoenician traders put into a greek port to sell their wares and snatched some female customers and made off with them on their boat.

Since one was the King’s daughter it started a series of tit for tat including a few decades later the theft of Helen and the start of the Trojan war also recorded by Homer in his Illiad. These wars continued down to Marathon and the time when Herodotus himself was alive and the great battles between the Greeks and the Persians in the time of Xerxes were raging on the Greek mainland.