2 - The Invention of History: From Homer to Herodotus

Summary

The Greeks are considered to be the first inventors of history, and Greece is seen as the place from which everything began. Isn't Herodotus thought to be the “father of history,” at least since Cicero (although Cicero quickly added, “even if [with him] there are innumerable fables.”)? Father, surely, but for whom and meaning what? For the ancients? Or for us, the moderns, inheritors of a historical culture fashioned by and through the Western tradition?

Two approaches offer themselves, as a starting point, for answering these questions: decentering and historicization. To decenter and historicize Greek experience would be to confront it with other cultures and show how it constituted itself through a series of choices.

To move in this direction, consider four other ancient traditions concerned with the past. It is well known that history and its writing did not begin in Greece; rather it began further to the east and earlier. In Egypt, where continuity was so crucial, the royal lists go back to the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E. The Egyptians started by inscribing pictograms on wooden and ivory tablets; then, later, their compilations on papyrus were at the origins of the first annals. The annals kept the records of the prominent deeds of the kings (or at least of what was viewed as important to record at that time). But perhaps the most striking feature of Egyptian civilization is its autochthony (to use a Greek notion). As far as they looked into the past, the Egyptians didn't see anybody but themselves and the gods. And, as is well known, their monuments have something unique: instead of expressing an interest in the past, they exhibit a desire for eternity, but a material one or a petrified one, which contrasts sharply with the Greek epic and its celebration of an “immortal glory” (kleos aphthiton).

In Mesopotamia, at the end of the third millennium B.C.E., the monarchy of Akkade was the first to unite the country under its authority and to enlist scribes to write its history, thereby legitimating its power in the present. This historiography was a royal history (only kings made history), a monumental one (making itself visible especially through enormous inscriptions), and an exclusive one (held in the hands of a caste of intellectuals, masters of writing).

To the East also, the sacred books of the ancient Hebrews were always fundamentally considered as history.