In Ancient Greece, Herodotus ( 5th century BC ), as founder of Greek historiography., presents insightful and lively discussions of the customs, geography, and history of Mediterranean peoples, particularly the Egyptians.

Herodotus presents the battle as though it occurred directly after the capture of Athens, but nowhere explicitly states as much.

Although Herodotus presents the revolt as a consequence of Aristagoras and Histiaeus's personal motives, it is clear that Ionia must have been ripe for rebellion anyway.

Although Herodotus presents the revolt as a consequence of Aristagoras's personal motives, it is clear that Ionia must have been ripe for rebellion anyway, the primary grievance being the tyrants installed by the Persians.

Both of these accounts draw on the story by Herodotus ( i, 94 ) of the Lydian origin of the Etruscans.

According to Herodotus ' account of the Lydian empire under the Mermnads, Arion attended a musical competition in Sicily, which he won.

According to Herodotus and Plutarch, he met with Croesus and gave the Lydian king advice, which however Croesus failed to appreciate until it was too late.

Herodotus tells us that in the Lydian account, Croesus was placed upon a great pyre by Cyrus ' orders, for Cyrus wanted to see if any of the heavenly powers would appear to save him from being burned alive.

Herodotus relates also the Lydian tradition: " yet the Lydians claim a share in the latter name, saying that Asia was not named after Prometheus ' wife Asia, but after Asies, the son of Cotys, who was the son of Manes, and that from him the Asiad clan at Sardis also takes its name ".

In the genealogy given by Herodotus, someone may have grafted the tradition of a Lydian son of Heracles at the top end of it, so that Ninus and Belus in the list now become descendants of Heracles, who just happen to bear the same names as the more famous Ninus and Belus.

Herodotus in his Histories wrote that the Mysians were brethren of the Carians and the Lydians, originally Lydian colonists in their country, and as such, they had the right to worship alongside their relative nations in the sanctuary dedicated to the Carian Zeus in Mylasa.

There is no archaeological evidence from material culture of such a cultural shift, but adherents of this latter school of thought point to the legend of Lydian origin of the Etruscans referred to by Herodotus, and the statement of Livy that the Raetians were Etruscans driven into the mountains by the invading Gauls.

Several accounts on the dynasty of Tylonids succeeding the Atyads and / or Tantalids are available and once into the last Lydian dynasty of Mermnads, the legendary accounts surrounding Ring of Gyges, and Gyges's later enthronement to the Lydian throne and foundation of the new dynasty, by replacing the King Kandaules, the last of the Taylanids, this in alliance with Kandaules's wife who then became his queen, are Lydian stories in the full sense of the term, as recounted by Herodotus, who himself may have borrowed his passages from Xanthus of Lydia, a Lydian who had reportedly written a history of his country slightly earlier in the same century.

In particular, the tomb at Pasargadae has almost exactly the same dimensions as the tomb of Alyattes II, father of the Lydian King Croesus ; however, some have refused the claim ( according to Herodotus, Croesus was spared by Cyrus during the conquest of Lydia, and became a member of Cyrus ' court ).

Pythius is a Lydian mentioned in book VII of Herodotus ' Histories, chh.

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.

The accounts of historians Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, and Strabo suggest that boats were being used for commerce and traveling.

Most accounts incorrectly attribute this story to Herodotus ; actually, the story first appears in Plutarch's On the Glory of Athens in the 1st century AD, who quotes from Heracleides of Pontus's lost work, giving the runner's name as either Thersipus of Erchius or Eucles.

Early conceptions of ecology, such as a balance and regulation in nature can be traced to Herodotus ( died c. 425 BC ), who described one of the earliest accounts of mutualism in his observation of " natural dentistry ".

Herodotus attempted to distinguish between more and less reliable accounts, and personally conducted research by travelling extensively, giving written accounts of various Mediterranean cultures.

However, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic of Augustan Rome, listed seven predecessors of Herodotus, describing their works as simple, unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including popular legends, sometimes melodramatic and naive, often charming-all traits that can be found in the work of Herodotus himself.

According to the Suda ( an 11th-century encyclopaedia of Byzantium which likely took its information from traditional accounts ), Herodotus learned the Ionian dialect as a boy living on the island of Samos, whither he had fled with his family from the oppressions of Lygdamis, tyrant of Halicarnassus and grandson of Artemisia I of Caria.

The town was within the Persian empire at that time and maybe the young Herodotus heard local eye-witness accounts of events within the empire and of Persian preparations for the invasion of Greece, including the movements of the local fleet under the command of Artemisia.

Some accounts place the youth of Midas in Macedonian Bermion ( See Bryges ) In Thracian Mygdonia, A wild rose garden at the foot of Mount Bermion was called by Herodotus " the garden of Midas son of Gordias, where roses grow of themselves, each bearing sixty blossoms and of surpassing fragrance ".

In contrast, Thucydides claims to confine himself to factual reports of contemporary political and military events, based on unambiguous, first-hand, eye-witness accounts, although, unlike Herodotus, he does not reveal his sources.

Some of the first historical accounts of Egypt were given by Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus and the largely lost work of Manetho, an Egyptian priest, during the reign of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II in the 3rd century BC.

* Herodotus: A contemporary historian from Halicarnassus famous for his exotic accounts of various nations and their customs, which many Athenians found hilarious.

Most accounts incorrectly attribute this story to the historian Herodotus, who wrote the history of the Persian Wars in his Histories ( composed about 440 BC ).

Herodotus, writing about 30 to 40 years after the events he describes, did, according to Miller ( 2006 ) in fact base his version of the battle on eyewitness accounts, so it seems altogether likely that Pheidippides was an actual historical figure, although the same source claims the classical author didn't ever in fact mention a Marathon-Athens runner in any of his writings.

He argued that these eliminate phantom " Dark Ages ", and vindicate the biblical accounts of history and those recorded by Herodotus.

As these accounts contradict each other, due to their roles as propaganda ( the Cyrus Cylinder and Isaiah ; for the latter, see Cyrus in the Judeo-Christian tradition ), oral traditions ( Herodotus and Xenophon ) and conflicting records ( Berossus ), they are quite confusing.

In the 1st century BC, Dionysius of Halicarnassus mentioned the chronicle-type format of the writing of the logographers in the age before the founder of the Greek historiographic tradition, Herodotus ( i. e. before the 480s BC ), saying " they did not write connected accounts but instead broke them up according to peoples and cities, treating each separately.

Illustrated above is Ilya Yefimovich Repin's Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom ( 1876 ). There are currently no known written accounts of Slavic mythology predating the fragmentation of the Proto-Slavic people into West, East, and South Slavs, with the possible exception of a short note in Herodotus ’ Histories, mentioning a tribe of Neuri in the far north, whose men, Herodotus claims, transform themselves into wolves for several days each year.

In his biographies, he draws directly from many ancient histories that have not survived, and thus often preserves details of the period that are omitted in Herodotus and Thucydides's accounts.

" Most of current knowledge about the ancient Persian empire comes from the accounts of others, most famously the Greek storyteller Herodotus.

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

Herodotus relates that under his prudent administration, Egypt reached a new level of wealth ; Amasis adorned the temples of Lower Egypt especially with splendid monolithic shrines and other monuments ( his activity here is proved by existing remains ).

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

Many changes that were subsequent with ancient historians, despite following in his footsteps, criticised Herodotus, starting with Thucydides.

The prevailing modern view is that Herodotus generally did a remarkable job in his Historia, but that some of his specific details ( particularly troop numbers and dates ) should be viewed with skepticism.

Connected with this episode, Herodotus recounts a rumour that this manoeuver by the Persians had been planned in conjunction with the Alcmaeonids, the prominent Athenian aristocratic family, and that a " shield-signal " had been given after the battle.

As early as 490 BC a breed of large horses was bred in the Nisaean plain in Media to carry men with increasing amounts of armour ( Herodotus 7, 40 & 9, 20 ).

In antiquity, the Greek historian Herodotus mentioned that the world had been divided by unknown persons into three parts, Europe, Asia, and Libya ( Africa ), with the Nile and the River Phasis forming their boundaries — though he also states that some considered the River Don, rather than the Phasis, as the boundary between Europe and Asia.

Herodotus is the first who stated the main characteristics of ethnicity, with his famous account of what defines Greek identity, where he lists kinship ( Greek: ὅμαιμον-homaimon, " of the same blood "), language ( Greek: ὁμόγλωσσον-homoglōsson, " speaking the same language "), cults and customs ( Greek: ὁμότροπον-homotropon, " of the same habits or life ").

There is no proof that Herodotus derived the ambitious scope of his own work, with its grand theme of civilizations in conflict, from any predecessor, despite much scholarly speculation about this in modern times.

In 425 BC, which is about the time that Herodotus is thought by many scholars to have died, the Athenian comic dramatist, Aristophanes, created The Acharnians, in which he blames The Peloponnesian War on the abduction of some prostitutes-a mocking reference to Herodotus, who reported the Persians ' account of their wars with Greece, beginning with the rapes of the mythical heroines Io, Europa, Medea and Helen.

Thucydides, who had been trained in rhetoric, became the model for subsequent prose-writers as an author who seeks to appear firmly in control of his material, whereas Herodotus with his frequent digressions appeared to minimize ( or possibly disguise ) his auctorial control.

Moreover, Thucydides developed a historical topic more in keeping with the Greek lifestyle-the polis or city-state-whereas the interplay of civilizations was more relevant to Asiatic Greeks ( such as Herodotus himself ), for whom life under foreign rule was a recent memory.

In fact Herodotus was in the habit of seeking out information from empowered sources within communities, such as aristocrats and priests, and this also occurred at an international level, with Periclean Athens becoming his principal source of information about events in Greece.

Herodotus's recitation at Olympia was a favourite theme among ancient writers and there is another interesting variation on the story to be found in the Suda, Photius and Tzetzes, in which a young Thucydides happened to be in the assembly with his father and burst into tears during the recital, whereupon Herodotus observed prophetically to the boy's father: " Thy son's soul yearns for knowledge.

As Herodotus himself reveals, Halicarnassus, though a Dorian city, had ended its close relations with its Dorian neighbours after an unseemly quarrel ( I, 144 ), and it had helped pioneer Greek trade with Egypt ( II, 178 ).

Much like Herodotus ' works, it mixes facts with legends, and was often quoted by later Islamic historians.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus says of the Phocaeans that " it was they who made the Greeks acquainted with ...