title: In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History
author:  John Van Seters 
description: John Van Seters is James A. Gray Professor of Biblical Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
zlib_text: Introduction
  There are many ways to tell the history of the world. Oral histories
  that were later written down, including the Book of Genesis, the
  Rig Veda, and the Popul Vuh, focused especially on the actions of
  gods and on human/divine interactions. The ancient Greek histor-
  ian Herodotus drew on such oral traditions along with eyewitness
  testimony to provide deep background for his story of the war
  between the Persians and the Greeks, setting this within the context
  of the world as he knew it. The ancient Chinese historian Sima
  Qian told history through an encyclopedic presentation of events,
  activities, and biographies of emperors, ofﬁcials, and other import-
  ant people, beginning with the semi-mythical ﬁrst sage rulers of
  China. The tenth-century Muslim historian Abu Ja’far al-Tabari
  began before the creation of Adam and Eve, and used biblical,
  Greek, Roman, Persian, and Byzantine sources to present history
  as a long and unbroken process of cultural transmission. Dynastic
  chronicl