Herodotus in Chronological Context
This timeline puts Herodotus, active in the last years of the fifth century BCE, within a chronological context, starting with the founding of the first cities (~3500 BCE), and ending with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. Dates are generous; in many cases, all we have is a best guess as to when something revolutionary happens.
Viewing Herodotus Through a Five-Part Matrix
One of the reasons I am reading Herodotus is because I am very interested in knowing what he knew. The reliability of what he knew is of less interest; knowledge functions better within a matrix:
- What did Herodotus know? (That is what I am hoping to cover over the 10 months we will spend reading through the text.)
- How did he know it? Is he giving an eyewitness report? Is he relaying information given to him by someone else? Is he looking at a written source?
- When did he know it? Reliability should be inversely proportional to chronology. The more pre-alive you are, the less we can rely on your reporting. How far back into the past is Herodotus reaching?
- Where does he know it? Does he know it from his own travels? Or does he know it because someone else sat near him once at a party.
And, maybe most importantly:
- Why does he believe it enough to report it?
History is an attempt to put what we think we know about the past into some kind of order. It is, as the novelist Hilary Mantel explained in a 2017 Reith lecture, “the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record.”
(Sources mentioned in this post, such as Mantel’s Reith lecture, are given in full at the end.)
This timeline is an attempt at a method that I hope will orient new and newer readers to when Herodotus knew what he knew.
We can assume some things he knew: the existence of Homer, the events of both the Iliad (the tail-end of the Trojan War) and the Odyssey, the Persian War, the Great Pyramid(s). He may not know that Rome exists. If he is aware of the Israelites, it is an ambiguous awareity.
He does not know about Rome, which in the late fifth century, was still a backwater where wolves or prostitutes suckled foundlings. He does not know of Venus’s son, Julius Caesar, or that he will be stabbed to death in a political act of murder. He does not know about Jesus, who is still some four hundred and fifty years away.
And yet, here we are, 21st century readers, reading the musings and prejudices of a man utterly unlike us in time, but maybe more like us than is comfortable to contemplate in terms of his gullibility, and credulity, and deep-seated sense that he’s got a handle on what he is communicating — but more on this when we need it. (There are some distressing practices involving flutes and horses that will take us some time with which to get comfortable.)
Below, I will explain why I chose each of the items on the timeline.
The Timeline in Context: Brief Essays on Big Moments
The First Cities
Many of the events on this timeline are going to have uncertain dates — and this is no less true of the first cities.
There are roughly thirty-seven other questions, packed like clowns, into the words “first city,” that can make it tricky, if not impossible, to firmly confirm a date for when the first cities on earth appeared. What do we mean by city? What do we mean by first? How do we know that it is the first? (Maybe there aren’t thirty-seven other questions.)
For purposes of this timeline, we are treating the area once known as Uruk (now called Warka), circa 3,500 BCE, as the temporal location of the first city. There are other sites that rival Uruk, and if you find a site that you like better for the first city, I would love to hear it! There are a variety of theories as to why humans decided to build cities rather than roam over hill and dale. All of them are probably as right as any of them, by which I really mean to say: We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter that we don’t know.
As Galileo Galilei allegedly whispered under his breath while recanting his heliocentric view of the universe, “E pur si muove.”
But still it moves.
The First Writing
This can be as controversial as flag-planting when the first cities show up. What do we mean by “writing”? Do we mean prose? Poetry? Markings on a strip of wood that kept a memory of some event for the people involved? What do we cut off when we draw a line in the sand?
One thing that I think is incredibly important to keep in mind: If we grant the scholarly consensus as to when the first modern humans (“modern” being another slippery and squiggly word that doesn’t bear the weight we might think it does) show up on the scene — something like 300,000 years ago, per a 2017 Nature paper on recent fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco — we have been non-readers for far longer than we have been readers. (Not to mention that not all of us got to reading at the same time.)
Think about what it means when information that used to be related orally, either in prayer, song, or chant, is written down? Cynically, I sometimes think of this as “calcifying” the text, with all of the accompanying pejorativeness. But that’s a subjective view on my part, and you may have a different insight. But when we write something down, we are doing something to it: we are affixing it, and saying, “This is the version that should be protected and transmitted.”
That is a bigger decision than I fully appreciate, even now.
The Great Pyramids Show Up
There is this frequent kind of factoid that uses the equation [x] old thing is actually closer to [y]ou than it is to [zed] super old thing. So, for instance, Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza. This sounds insightful; but also, so much was built or happened after the Great Pyramid. They happened so long ago.
Stonehenge
In seminary, one of the most important ideas I took away with me was this: You have to be upfront about your biases when you are writing or trying to compel someone to a point of view. I put Stonehenge on this particular list because I think as Americans, we understand “Stonehenge” as an already-super-old thing. Herodotus almost certainly does not know that this stretch of ground will ever have a name at all, in any language he speaks. No Greek or Roman had reached the place yet in his lifetime — the first Mediterranean writer to make contact with the island was a Greek explorer named Pytheas, who sailed there and wrote it up under a name of his own coining, something like Bretannikē, sometime around 325 BCE — a full century after Herodotus finished the Histories. Rome’s own name for it, Britannia, is later still: it starts showing up after Julius Caesar’s expeditions in the 50s BCE, and the island doesn’t become a proper Roman province until Claudius gets around to it in 43 CE. So it isn’t that Herodotus missed the memo. There was no memo yet. He isn’t ignorant of a fact here so much as standing in the world before the fact existed.
The Exodus
We have to leave aside the historicity of the Exodus, much like we are putting aside the historical reliability of Herodotus himself. If the Exodus happened, most scholars who agree on such things agree that it was likely in this period, represented on the timeline as 1250 BCE.
(And in general, but also especially for Herodotus, conversations are more fun when the spirit is more yes, and than when they are here’s everything you’re wrong about. This is as good a time as any to prepare yourself for how much I am going to insist that almost every single thing that happens to you is subjective.) (This is the part where I would spin the chair around and sit backwards in it while the camera pans over your blown-mind face.)
That is, until it isn’t subjective.
The Persian Wars
Herodotus writes the Histories with an express intent:
[To display my] enquiries, that human achievement may be spared the ravages of time, and that everything great and astounding, and all the glory of those exploits which served to display Greeks and barbarians alike to such effect, be kept alive — and additionally, and most importantly, to give the reason they went to war. (Histories, proem, Holland translation)
And I will quote from opening paragraph of Carolyn Dewald’s excellent introduction to the 1998 Oxford World Classics edition of the Histories:
In the earliest years of the fifth century BCE, the dominant power in the Greek world was the Persian empire, which stretched from the Mediterranean Sea eastward to India, and from Egypt northward through the Near East to Thrace and modern Afghanistan. The Greeks of the mainland were in comparison a small, disunited, and quite poor people scattered in little towns through the southern Balkan peninsula. In 490 BCE the Athenians repulsed a Persian naval invasion at Marathon on the north coast of Attica; in 481 Xerxes, the Great King of Persia, led a massive invasion by both land and sea to conquer all of Greece and open the western Mediterranean to Persian rule. To the great surprise of everyone (most of all, the Greeks themselves), in about two years the Greeks—few in number, poor, and disunited as they were—managed to thwart Xerxes’ ambitions. The Greeks, not the Persians, won the Persian Wars.
Herodotus Writes the Histories
We will try to know the why — sort of. But this is the when.
Julius Caesar Assassinated
This feels like a truth universally acknowledged that most everyone in America first learns about Julius Caesar because of Shakespeare — which is a weird thing to say, because it makes us sound like a land of people who quote a lot of Shakespeare. But I find it very interesting that he misses the entirety of Rome because he showed up in the chronology too early.
Crucifixion of Jesus
I included this more for its touchstone for Western culture. The past of Ancient Greece and Rome can sort of look all the same shade of white toga, and thus happening all at the same time. But Herodotus shows no sign of knowing about Judah’s own hope for a king descended from David — and in fairness to him, that hope was barely older than he was. It first surfaces with the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, who pinned it on an actual living man, Zerubbabel, sometime around 520 BCE; when Zerubbabel quietly disappeared from the historical record without becoming anyone’s king, the hope didn’t die, it just came unattached from any particular candidate. By the time Herodotus is writing, a century later, that hope has had time to become a fixture of Judean prophetic thought, but nothing suggests he ever heard of it. The closest he comes to this part of the world is a passing mention of “the Syrians of Palestine,” who he says practice circumcision — which they learned, he claims, from the Egyptians.
The Fall of the Western Roman Empire
Because genug. Ten felt like a round number.
If at this point you feel like you have Learned Exactly the Right Amount, or Even Too Much, you can safely close out of this post. And if it prompted any questions, I would love to hear them, either during one of our meetings or in an email.
Sources:
Hilary Mantel, “The day is for the living,” BBC Reith Lectures 2017
Jean-Jacques Hublin, et al., “New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens,” Nature 546, 289–292, 2017
Tom Holland, trans., Histories, Viking Penguin, 2013
Carolyn Dewald, notes, Histories, Oxford World’s Classics, 1998
Oh. You’re still here. Well, here is my big finish: some notable thing happening roughly around the same time that Herodotus is likely writing and distributing the Histories.
Snapshot: What’s Happening Elsewhere While Herodotus Writes (c. 450 BCE)
- China: Confucius has just died (479 BCE); the Spring and Autumn period is ending and the Warring States period is beginning (~475 BCE). Sun Tzu’s Art of War dates to roughly this era.
- India: The Buddha has recently died (traditional date ~483 BCE, though modern scholarship often pushes this later); the Upanishads are being composed; Magadha is rising as a dominant kingdom.
- Mesoamerica: The Olmec center at La Venta is near its height. Monte Albán is being founded (~500 BCE) by the Zapotec, who will soon develop the first true Mesoamerican writing system.
- Andean South America: Chavín de Huántar is a major pilgrimage and cultural center (Chavín culture, ~900–200 BCE).
- North America: Adena culture is building burial mounds in the Ohio Valley; the Hopewell tradition hasn’t yet emerged.
- Sub-Saharan Africa: The Kushite kingdom has shifted its center from Napata toward Meroë, developing into a major iron-working power. Nok culture terracottas are being produced in what’s now Nigeria.
Herodotus himself knew of Persia, Egypt, Scythia, and had heard (vaguely, secondhand) of India as the edge of the inhabited world. He had no conception of sub-Saharan Africa beyond rumor, and obviously none of the Americas.
Asia (East & South)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| ~2070–1600 BCE | Xia dynasty (China), semi-legendary |
| ~1600–1046 BCE | Shang dynasty; oracle-bone script — China’s earliest confirmed writing |
| ~1500–500 BCE | Vedic period in India |
| 1046 BCE | Zhou dynasty founded |
| ~800–500 BCE | Upanishads composed |
| 771 BCE | Zhou capital sacked; Spring and Autumn period begins |
| 563–483 BCE | Life of the Buddha (traditional dates) |
| 551–479 BCE | Life of Confucius |
| ~500 BCE | Life of Mahavira (Jainism), roughly |
| ~475 BCE | Warring States period begins in China |
| ~5th c. BCE | Sun Tzu’s Art of War |
| 4th c. BCE | Rise of the Magadha–Nanda dynasty in India |
| 322 BCE | Chandragupta Maurya founds the Maurya Empire |
| 268–232 BCE | Reign of Ashoka |
| 221 BCE | Qin Shi Huang unifies China; Great Wall construction begins |
| 206 BCE | Han dynasty begins |
| 111 BCE | Han China conquers Nanyue (northern Vietnam) |
| 1st c. CE | Buddhism spreads into China via Silk Road contact |
| 220 CE | Han dynasty collapses; Three Kingdoms period |
| 320 CE | Gupta Empire founded in India (“golden age”) |
Africa (beyond Egypt/Carthage, presumably already covered)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 744–656 BCE | 25th (“Kushite”) Dynasty rules Egypt from Nubia |
| ~590 BCE | Kushite capital shifts from Napata to Meroë |
| ~1000 BCE onward | Bantu expansion begins spreading agriculture and iron-working across sub-Saharan Africa (ongoing for well over a millennium) |
| ~1000 BCE–300 CE | Nok culture (Nigeria) — early ironworking, distinctive terracotta sculpture |
| ~6th c. BCE | Meroë becomes a major iron-smelting center (“Birmingham of Africa”) |
| ~100 CE | Kingdom of Aksum (Ethiopia/Eritrea) rises as a major Red Sea trading power |
| ~300s CE | Aksum conquers Meroë, ending the Kushite kingdom |
| ~324 CE | Aksum’s King Ezana converts to Christianity |
| 4th–5th c. CE | Aksum mints its own coinage, trades with Rome, Persia, India |
Mesoamerica (Central America)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| ~1200–400 BCE | Olmec civilization (San Lorenzo, then La Venta) — Mesoamerica’s “mother culture” |
| ~900 BCE | Cascajal Block — possible earliest Mesoamerican writing (contested) |
| ~500 BCE | Monte Albán founded; Zapotec civilization begins |
| ~600–500 BCE | Zapotec script emerges — first confirmed Mesoamerican writing system |
| ~400 BCE | Olmec decline |
| ~300 BCE | El Mirador (early Maya) grows into a major city |
| ~200 BCE–100 CE | Late Preclassic Maya cities flourish (El Mirador, Nakbe) |
| ~100 BCE | Teotihuacan founded |
| ~1st–3rd c. CE | Maya Classic period begins; city-states like Tikal rise |
| ~150–450 CE | Teotihuacan grows into one of the largest cities in the world (pop. est. 100,000+), contemporary with the Roman Empire |
| 378 CE | Teotihuacan influence/intervention recorded at Tikal (“entrada”) |
| 5th c. CE | Maya Classic period in full flourishing (Copán, Palenque, Tikal) as Rome falls |
South America
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| ~3500–1800 BCE | Caral-Supe (Norte Chico) civilization — oldest known urban society in the Americas, contemporary with early dynastic Egypt and Sumer; monumental architecture, no writing |
| ~900–200 BCE | Chavín culture; Chavín de Huántar as a pan-regional religious center |
| ~800–100 BCE | Paracas culture (southern Peru) — elaborate textiles, trepanation |
| ~200 BCE–1000 CE | Tiwanaku civilization develops near Lake Titicaca |
| ~100 BCE–800 CE | Nazca culture — famous for the Nazca Lines |
| ~100–700 CE | Moche civilization (northern Peru) — pyramid complexes (Huaca del Sol), advanced irrigation and metallurgy, flourishing through the entire span of the Roman Empire |
| ~500 CE | Tiwanaku becomes a major urban and ceremonial center |
North America (north of Mesoamerica)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| ~1700–1100 BCE | Poverty Point culture (Louisiana) — massive earthworks, long-distance trade network |
| ~1000–200 BCE | Adena culture (Ohio Valley) — burial mounds, precursor to Hopewell |
| ~500 BCE onward | Maize agriculture spreads north into what is now the U.S. Southwest |
| ~200 BCE–500 CE | Hopewell tradition — the “Hopewell Interaction Sphere,” an extensive trade and ceremonial-earthwork network across eastern North America, roughly contemporaneous with the entire Roman Empire |
| ~1st c. CE | Basketmaker culture develops in the Southwest (ancestral to the later Ancestral Puebloans) |
| ~400–500 CE | Hopewell tradition declines, right around the fall of Rome |
No indigenous writing system developed north of Mesoamerica in this period — these entries rest on archaeology, not texts.
A note on dating confidence
Old World dates (China, India, Egypt, Mesopotamia) rest on a mix of textual chronology and archaeology and are comparatively firm, especially after ~800 BCE. Andean and North American dates before writing are radiocarbon-based and often given as ranges by archaeologists, not fixed years — I’ve picked representative dates, but if you’re citing these in something scholarly, it’s worth flagging the ranges rather than presenting them as precise.