Sublime

Herodotus wrote the first book about Greek history.

Herodotus called this collection of plain, unvarnished facts History, which in Greek means “inquiry,” and so written history was born.

Thucydides accepted Herodotus’ chronology, the Boeotian migration took place about 1190 B.C., the Dorian migration about 1170.

The word for ‘inquire’ in Greek is historein, and the man who was first responsible for a sustained inquiry, a historia, into the past was Herodotus.

treaty signed in approximately 1225 BC between Tudhaliya IV, king of the Hittites, and Shaushgamuwa, his brother-in-law by marriage. Shaushgamuwa was the king of Amurru, who controlled the coastal regions of northern Syria that provided potential access to the Assyrian lands.

Herodotus, we must remember, tried to re-create, for the most part, the atmosphere and the events of the past, some of it so remote that he would not have been able to interview anyone who had been alive at the time.