Herodotus

1. Presentation of Historiography
Topic - Herodotus
Presented by – Royson Joseph
Guide – Ravi Sir
Session - 2022-2023
P.G.DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
RTMNU NAGPUR

2. HISTORIOGRAPHY
 Writing of History
 History of History
 Based on critical examination and authentic materials of
Sources
 Historiography is "the study of the way history has been
written the history of historical writing”.

3. Greek historiography
 Greek historiography originated in the activities of a group of writers whom the
Greeks called logographers.
 Logography was the prose compilation of oral traditions relating to the origins of
towns, peoples, and places.
 Hecataeus of Miletus, the best known of the logographers, defined are as follows: “I
write what I consider the truth, for the things the Greeks tell us are in my opinion
full of contradictions and worthy to be laughed out of court.”
 The logographers also served as advocates and speech writers in the courts

4. SOME OF THE ANCIENT GREEK
HISTORIANS.
 Herodotus
 Plutarch
 Thucydides
 Xenophon
 Anna Komnene

5.  Herodotus was a Greek writer and geographer credited with being
the first historian.
 Around 425 B.C., he published his magnum opus: a long account of the
Greco-Persian Wars that he called “The Histories”.
 Before Herodotus, no writer had ever made such a systemic, through
study of the past or tried to explain the cause and effects of its events.
HERODOTUS

6. EARLY LIFE
 Born in about 485 B.C. in the Greek city of Halicarnassus, a lively
commercial center on the south-western coast of Asia Minor.
 He came from wealthy and cosmopolitan Greek- carian merchant
family.
 In the middle of the 6th century B.C. Halicarnassus become a satrapy
or province, of the Persian emperor and was ruled by the tyrant
Lygdamis.

7. KNOWN THE World BY TRAVELLING
 Instead of settling in one place, Herodotus spent his life travelling
from one Persian territory to another.
 He crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt and traveled through
Palestine to Syria and Babylon.
 He sailed through the Hellespont to the Black Sea and kept going
until he hit the Danube River.
 While he traveled, Herodotus collected what he called “autopsies”
or “personal inquiries”

8. THE HISTORIES BY HERODOTUS
 Herodotus spent his entire life working on just one
project : an account of the origins and execution of
the Greco-Persian Wars. (499-479 B.C.) that he called
"The Histories".
 As it has survived, the History is divided into nine
books (the division is not the author’s)
 Books I - V describe the background to the Greco-
Persian Wars.
 Book VI-IX contain the history of the wars,
culminating in an account of the Persian king "Xerxes"
invasion of Greece and the great, Greek victories at
salamis, Plataea, and Mycale in 480-479 BC.

9. THANK YOU