The oldest known mention of " Atlantic " is in The Histories of Herodotus around 450 BC ( Hdt.

Italian language | Italian translation of Herodotus ' Histories by Count Matteo Maria Boiardo, published in Venice, Aldine Press in 1502 ( 1533?

For example, the story of the Amazons settling with the Scythians ( Herodotus Histories 4. 110. 1-117. 1 ).

* Herodotus, The Histories

* Herodotus, The Histories

The Histories of Herodotus vii. 33-37 and vii. 54-58 give details of building and crossing of Xerxes ' Pontoon Bridges.

Herodotus in his Histories ridiculed the belief that water encircled the world, yet most classicists agree he still believed the earth to be flat because of his descriptions of literal " ends " or " edges " of the earth.

* 440 BC: Herodotus defends the Athenian political freedom in the Histories.

The earliest known critical historical works were The Histories, composed by Herodotus of Halicarnassus ( 484 BC – c.

Herodotus announced the size and scope of his work at the beginning of his Researches or Histories:

Only fragments of the latter's work survive ( and the authenticity of these is debatable ) yet they allow us glimpses into the kind of tradition within which Herodotus wrote his own Histories, as for example in the introduction to Hecataeus's work, Genealogies:

Herodotus actually mentions Hecataeus in his Histories, on one occasion mocking him for his naive genealogy and, on another occasion, quoting Athenian complaints against his handling of their national history.

Although The Histories were often criticized in antiquity for bias, inaccuracy and plagiarism — Lucian of Samosata attacked Herodotus as a liar in Verae Historiae and went as far as to deny him a place among the famous on the Island of the Blessed — modern historians and philosophers take a more positive view of Herodotus's methodology, especially those searching for a paradigm of objective historical writing.

Herodotus wrote his Histories in the Ionian dialect yet he was born in Halicarnassus, originally a Dorian settlement.

According to Lucian, Herodotus took his finished work straight from Asia Minor to the Olympic Games and read the entire Histories to the assembled spectators in one sitting, receiving rapturous applause at the end of it.

Aristotle refers to a version of The Histories written by ' Herodotus of Thurium ' and indeed some passages in the Histories have been interpreted as proof that he wrote about southern Italy from personal experience there ( IV, 15, 99 ; VI 127 ).

Despite this, The Histories of Herodotus displays many of the techniques of more modern historians.

Ephorus made Homer a younger cousin of Hesiod, Herodotus ( Histories, 2. 53 ) evidently considered them near-contemporaries, and the 4th century BC sophist Alcidamas in his work Mouseion even brought them together for an imagined poetic agon, which survives today as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod.

This family is reasoned to be a pre-Indo-European Mediterranean substratum of the 2nd millennium BC, sometimes referred to as Pre-Greek, and this is supported by confirmation from ancient Greek authors like Herodotus in Histories that the Etruscans were from Lydia ( SW Turkey ).

Later, Herodotus ( Histories i. 7 ) adds that the " Meiones " were renamed Lydians after their king, Lydus ( Λυδός ), son of Atys, in the mythical epoch that preceded the rise of the Heracleid dynasty.

Herodotus, in Book II of his Histories, describes as a " labyrinth " a building complex in Egypt, " near the place called the City of Crocodiles ," that he considered to surpass the pyramids in its astonishing ambition:

Herodotus ' description of the Egyptian Labyrinth, in Book II of The Histories, inspired some central scenes in Bolesław Prus ' 1895 historical novel, Pharaoh.

* Herodotus, The Histories, Newly translated and with an introduction by Aubrey de Sélincourt, Harmondsworth, England, Penguin Books, 1965.

* Herodotus iv.

Being called Buto by the Greeks during Ptolemaic Egypt, a Greek dynasty ruling from 305 to 30 BC, it was the capital town, or according to Herodian, merely the principal village of the Nile Delta, which Herodotus ( l. c .) calls the Chemmite nome ; Ptolemy, the Phthenothite nome (, iv.

Gergis, a city of Dardania in the Troad, a settlement of the ancient Teucri, and, consequently, a town of very great antiquity ( Herodotus iv: 122 ).

According to Herodotus ( iv.

** Reginald Walter Macan, Herodotus iv .- vi., i. 336 foll.

The Iyrcae () were an ancient nation on the north-east trade route described by Herodotus ( iv.

Herodotus recorded a detail recalled from Arimaspea that may have a core in fact: " the Issedones were pushed from their lands by the Arimaspoi, and the Scythians by the Issedones " ( iv. 13. 1 ).

Harris dates studies of both to Classical Greece and Classical Rome, specifically, to Herodotus, often called the " father of history " and the Roman historian, Tacitus, who wrote many of our only surviving contemporary accounts of several ancient Celtic and Germanic peoples.

Herodotus first formulated some of the persistent problems of anthropology.

His oracular shrine in Abae in Phocis, where he bore the toponymic epithet Abaeus (, Apollon Abaios ) was important enough to be consulted by Croesus ( Herodotus, 1. 46 ).

The use of the abacus in Ancient Egypt is mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus, who writes that the Egyptians manipulated the pebbles from right to left, opposite in direction to the Greek left-to-right method.

The connection to Phoenician religion claimed by Herodotus I. 105, 131 ) has led to inconclusive attempts at deriving Greek Aphrodite from a Semitic Aštoret, via hypothetical Hittite transmission.

According to the historian Herodotus, the poet threw away his shield to make good his escape from the victorious Athenians then celebrated the occasion in a poem that he later sent to his friend, Melanippus.

Most of our information about him is derived from Herodotus ( 2. 161ff ) and can only be imperfectly verified by monumental evidence.

Herodotus describes how Amasis II would eventually cause a confrontation with the Persian armies.

According to Herodotus, Amasis, was asked by Cambyses II or Cyrus the Great for an Egyptian ophthalmologist on good terms.

Amasis worrying that his daughter would be a concubine to the Persian king refused to give up his offspring ; Amasis also was not willing to take on the Persian empire so he concocted a trickery in which he forced the daughter of the ex-pharaoh Apries, whom Herodotus explicitly confirms to have been killed by Amasis, to go to Persia instead of his own offspring.

Herodotus also describes that just like his predecessor, Amasis II relied on Greek mercenaries and council men.

One such figure was Phanes of Halicarnassus, who would later on leave Amasis, for reasons Herodotus does not clearly know but suspects were personal between the two figures.

Herodotus called them Androktones (" killers of men "), and he stated that in the Scythian language they were called Oiorpata, which he asserted had this meaning.

* Herodotus v. 17, 94

According to Herodotus, when Anacharsis returned to the Scythians he was killed by his own brother for his Greek ways and especially for the impious attempt to sacrifice to the Mother Goddess Cybele, whose cult was unwelcome among the Scythians.

The word is attested in Herodotus, who wrote some of the first surviving Greek prose, but this may not have been before 440 or 430 BC.

Herodotus identified the Achaeans of the northern Peloponnese as descendants of the earlier, Homeric Achaeans.

Pausanias and Herodotus both recount the legend that the Achaeans were forced from these homelands by the Dorians, during the legendary Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese.