Herodotus in Chronological Context

This timeline puts Herodotus in the middle, in the last years of the fifth century BCE. It starts with the founding of the first cities (~3500 BCE), and ends with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE.

One of the reasons I wanted to read Herodotus is because I was very interested in knowing what he knew. The reliability was 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.”

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.

He has literally no idea about America in the year 2026.

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 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.

Writing Begins

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.

Great Pyramid of Giza

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. (Dewald, Histories, Robin Waterfield translation)

Herodotus Writes the Histories

We know the why — sort of. And 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 Too Much, you can safely close out of this post. And if it prompted any questions, I would love to hear them, either in the comments, or in an email.

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Sources:

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.

(I mean seriously, friends: any discipline that requires that much hedging should just automatically be labeled witchcraft on account of the flat-out prognosticating.)

Nubia — the Kingdom of Kush. Herodotus writes about these people under the name Ethiopians (or Aethiopians if you want to). He records Cambyses II’s failed invasion of Kush around 530 BCE and even describes Kushite archery technique — palm-wood bows, cane arrows. By Herodotus’s own writing decades later, Kush’s capital had already shifted south from Napata toward Meroë (a move King Aspelta made possibly as early as 591 BCE, though the monarchs weren’t actually buried at Meroë until much later, around 300 BCE), and from roughly 425 BCE — right around the time Herodotus is finishing the Histories — king Amannote-erike began reviving older Kushite practices like royal stelae and statues. Kingdom of Kush — Wikipedia

(Btw: the famous Great Serpent Mound is often loosely associated with Adena, but its actual attribution and date remain genuinely disputed among archaeologists.) Adena culture — Wikipedia