of the ancient world. A proper history of Greek history writing must take due notice of what has been
lost as well as of what survives.
A second difference between Jewish and Greek historical writing is in their sources and attitudes to the
sources. The Jewish historical account is built on a multiplicity of evidences which would do credit to a
modern historian, and are of three basic types - acts (customs, taboos, rituals, and their explanations), the
spoken tradition (hymns, poetry, prophecy, myths, folk-tales), and the written tradition (laws, official
documents, royal and priestly chronicles, biographies); it is prone to quote proofs and evidence such as
documents. The source material used by Greek historians is initially far simpler and more rudimentary,
and the Greeks were always more concerned with the literary, rather than the evidential, aspects of
history; they therefore seldom quote documents. Paradoxically the Greek tradition remains superior to
the Jewish in its ability to distinguish fact from fiction: God can falsify history far more effectively than
the individual historian with his mere mortal bias. The Greeks indeed taught the West how to create and
write history without God.
Both peoples learned the alphabet from the same source, the Phoenicians who invented it; writing came
to Greece in the eighth-century B.C., yet Greece long remained an oral culture in which men spoke in
prose, but composed in verse. The distinction between poetry and prose was later a mark of the
difference between myth and history, but the earliest known prose literary work was philosophical rather
than historical, and related to the need to formulate and convey thoughts in a precise and accurate form;
about 550 B.C. the philosopher Anaximander of Miletus wrote a book On Nature, which discussed both
the basic structure of the physical world and its visible forms: it contained the first maps and
descriptions of both earth and the heavens. Some fifty years later Hecataeus of Miletus similarly wrote a
Description of the Earth accompanied by a map: it was divided into two books, one for Europe and one
for Asia, and recorded the information he had gathered from his own and others' travels. Geography and
ethnography are important components in the Greek view of history.
Another work of Hecataeus called Genealogies has often been thought to be the first to exhibit that spirit
of critical enquiry which is characteristic of western history writing, for it began: 'Hecataeus the
Milesian speaks thus: I write these things as they seem true to me; for the stories told by the Greeks are
various and in my opinion absurd' (FGH 1, F. 1). The book actually seems to have been a collection of
heroic myths and genealogies of heroes, designed to reduce them into a pseudo-historical account by
rationalizing them; it is a curious false start to history, on the one hand recognizing the need to
understand the past in rational terms, but on the other hand using the fundamentally unsuitable material
of myth. It shows both a desire to liberate history from myth, and an inability to distinguish between the
two.
Herodotus
From time to time critics have tried to discover lost historians in the generation after Hecataeus to help
explain the next development in the writing of history; but such theories are based on shaky evidence
and a mistaken belief that local history or the monograph must come before general history with a grand