structural:summarization, stylistic:style_transfer
Greece

The earliest known systematic historical thought and methodologies emerged in ancient Greece and the wider Greek world, a development which would be an important influence on the writing of history elsewhere around the Mediterranean region. The tradition of logography in Archaic Greece preceded the full narrative form of historiography, in which logographers such as Hecataeus of Miletus provided prose compilations about places in geography and peoples in an early form of cultural anthropology, as well as speeches used in courts of law. The earliest known fully narrative critical historical works were The Histories, composed by Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484–425 BC) who became known as the "father of history". Herodotus attempted to distinguish between more and less reliable accounts, and personally conducted research by travelling extensively, giving written accounts of various Mediterranean cultures. Although Herodotus' overall emphasis lay on the actions and characters of men, he also attributed an important role to divinity in the determination of historical events.

The generation following Herodotus witnessed a spate of local histories of the individual city-states (poleis), written by the first of the local historians who employed the written archives of city and sanctuary. Dionysius of Halicarnassus characterized these historians as the forerunners of Thucydides, and these local histories continued to be written into Late Antiquity, as long as the city-states survived. Two early figures stand out: Hippias of Elis, who produced the lists of winners in the Olympic Games that provided the basic chronological framework as long as the pagan classical tradition lasted, and Hellanicus of Lesbos, who compiled more than two dozen histories from civic records, all of them now lost.

Thucydides largely eliminated divine causality in his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, establishing a rationalistic element which set a precedent for subsequent Western historical writings. He was also the first to distinguish between cause and immediate origins of an event, while his successor Xenophon (c. 431 – 355 BC) introduced autobiographical elements and biographical character studies in his Anabasis.

The proverbial Philippic attacks of the Athenian orator Demosthenes (384–322 BC) on Philip II of Macedon marked the height of ancient political agitation. The now lost history of Alexander's campaigns by the diadoch Ptolemy I (367–283 BC) may represent the first historical work composed by a ruler. Polybius (c. 203 – 120 BC) wrote on the rise of the Roman Republic to world prominence, and attempted to harmonize the Greek and Roman points of view. Diodorus Siculus composed a universal history, the Bibliotheca historica, that sought to explain various known civilizations from their origins up until his own day in the 1st century BC.

The Chaldean priest Berossus (fl. 3rd century BC) composed a Greek-language History of Babylonia for the Seleucid king Antiochus I, combining Hellenistic methods of historiography and Mesopotamian accounts to form a unique composite. Reports exist of other near-eastern histories, such as that of the Phoenician historian Sanchuniathon; but he is considered semi-legendary and writings attributed to him are fragmentary, known only through the later historians Philo of Byblos and Eusebius, who asserted that he wrote before even the Trojan war. The native Egyptian priest and historian Manetho composed a history of Egypt in Greek for the Ptolemaic royal court during the 3rd century BC.