Title: Recorded history - Wikipedia
Headings: Recorded history
Recorded history
Contents
Prehistory
Historical accounts
Europe
East Asia
South Asia
Middle East
Methods of recording history
Historical method
See also
References
Works cited
Further reading

Content: Europe
Dionysius of Halicarnassus knew of seven predecessors of Herodotus, including Hellanicus of Lesbos, Xanthus of Lydia and Hecataeus of Miletus. He described their works as simple, unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including popular legends. Herodotus (484 B.C. – c. 425 B.C.) has generally been acclaimed as the "father of history" composing his The Histories from the 450s to the 420s B.C. However, his contemporary Thucydides (c. 460 B.C. – c. 400 B.C.) is credited with having first approached history with a well-developed historical method in his work the History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, unlike Herodotus, regarded history as being the product of the choices and actions of human beings, and looked at cause and effect, rather than as the result of divine intervention. History developed as a popular form of literature in later Greek and Roman societies in the works of Polybius, Tacitus and others. Saint Augustine was influential in Christian and Western thought at the beginning of the medieval period. Through the Medieval and Renaissance periods, history was often studied through a sacred or religious perspective. Around 1800, German philosopher and historian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel brought philosophy and a more secular approach into historical study. Sumerian inscription in monumental archaic style, c. 26th century B.C.
According to John Tosh, "From the High Middle Ages (c.1000–1300) onwards, the written word survives in greater abundance than any other source for Western history." Western historians developed methods comparable to modern historiographic research in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in France and Germany, where they began investigating these source materials to write histories of their past.