There are two ways to look at the question of who invented history. The first, of course, is that no one invented it; History is simply the result of the slow unfurling of time and the actions of those who have lived and died within its murky eddies. But the study of those actions, which we also call history, has a more definite beginning. For many of us in the Western world today, it began with a man named Herodotus.
Called “the father of history” by the Roman statesman Cicero, Herodotus is the author of the first authoritative historical text of any length. The Histories is a multi-volume account of the Greco-Persian wars, filled with informative digressions that span from Egypt to the near East. (It also gave us very the word history, which meant inquiry in the original Greek). To this day, Herodotus is often cited by scholars as a source of information on the lands and civilizations of his time.
Of course, Herodotus wasn’t quite a historian as we might think of today. His account, which relied largely on oral sources and second-person retellings, is replete with instances of fantasy. His tendency toward credulousness also earned him the somewhat less flattering appellation, “father of lies,” based on the numerous critiques of his work that began shortly after The Histories was published.
