Posted by ROSHAN B.S on Aug. 24, 2014, 10:20 a.m.
A fundamental difficulty of studying ancient history is that recorded histories cannot document the entirety of human events, and only a fraction of those documents have survived into the present day.[27]Furthermore, the reliability of the information obtained from these surviving records must be considered.[27][28] Few people were capable of writing histories, as literacy was not widespread in almost any culture until long after the end of ancient history.[29]
The earliest known systematic historical thought emerged in ancient Greece, beginning with Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484–c. 425 BC). Thucydides largely eliminated divine causality in his account of the war between Athens and Sparta,[30] 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.[30]
The Roman Empire was one of the ancient world's most literate cultures,[31] but many works by its most widely read historians are lost. For example, Livy, a Roman historian who lived in the 1st century BC, wrote a history of Rome called Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City) in 144 volumes; only 35 volumes still exist, although short summaries of most of the rest do exist. Indeed, only a minority of the work of any major Roman historian has survived.