Born c. 484 B.C.,
Halicarnassus, Greece
Died c. 425 B.C.,
Thurii, Greece
Herodotus is known as the father of history. His History, an account of the Persian-Greek wars, is considered to be the first attempt at historical writing. Herodotus was born at Halicarnassus, a Greek colony on the coast of Asia Minor (now Turkey), where his parents, Lyxes and Dryo, seem to have been prominent citizens. Herodotus exhibited intense curiosity about the Greek world, and he began to travel extensively as a young man.
Although the exact period of his travels has not been determined, Herodotus apparently left Halicarnassus around 454 B.C. and journeyed to the Aegean island of Samos. He may have returned briefly to Halicarnassus before going to Athens. He then traveled to Asia Minor, the Aegean Islands, Greece, Macedonia, Thrace, the coast of the Black Sea as far as the Crimean Peninsula, Persia (modern-day Iran), Tyre (in Lebanon), Egypt, and Cyrene (in Libya). During this time he collected historical, geographical, ethnological, mythological, and archaeological material, which he used for writing his History.
In 447 B.C. Herodotus returned to Athens, the intellectual center of the Greek world, where he gave public readings from his book. He later joined the colony of Thurii, which was founded by Athenians on the Gulf of Taranto in southern Italy in 443 B.C. From Thurii he visited Sicily and southern Italy. It is possible that he traveled back to Athens after civil strife broke out in Thurii. Since the History mentions the Peloponnesian War, which started in 431 B.C., it is thought that Herodotus finished writing the work in the final years of his life.
The History is the most comprehensive early history of the ancient world. It tells about the wars between the Greeks and their neighbors, beginning with the conquest of the Greek colonies in Asia Minor by Croesus, the king of Lydia (in modern-day Turkey). It continues with a history of Lydia, Persia, Babylon, Iraq, and Egypt, concluding with an account of the two wars between the Persians and the Greeks. Included in the book is the story of Queen Artemisia, an ally of the Persians, who ruled Halicarnassus at the time of Herodotus’s birth. Following the defeat of the Persians in Ionia in 478 B.C., the throne passed to her son Lygdamis, who became involved in a civil war that resulted in the death of Herodotus’s uncle.
The History is distinctive for many reasons. For instance, it shows that Herodotus was an astute geographer. During his time people thought the world was divided into three equal parts—Asia, Europe, and Africa (which he called Libya)—but he did not accept this view. He thought Europe was as wide as the other two continents, although he knew nothing about northwestern Europe (Britain and Scandinavia). While his concept of Asia went only as far east as the Indus River, he was the first geographer to realize the Caspian was a great inland sea and not the gulf of an ocean that encircled the world.
Herodotus described a supposed voyage by the Egyptian king Necho that circumnavigated Africa around the year 600 B.C., thus suggesting that he thought the continent was surrounded by water. Yet he made two major mistakes. First, he thought that the Nile River rose in the Atlas Mountains and then flowed eastward through what would be the Sahara Desert before turning north into Egypt (it flows northward from Lake Victoria). His other error is more surprising. He was aware of the voyage of Scylax of Caryanda, a Persian naval commander who had sailed southwest down the Indus River into the Arabian Sea and then around Arabia to Egypt. But Herodotus still described the Indus as flowing southeastward.
Despite these two misconceptions, Herodotus’s observations, interspersed throughout the History, give the most thorough and accurate account of classical geography. Significantly, his book also shows that he had visited many of the places he described.
Scylax of Caryanda
Scylax was an ethnic Greek from the town of Caryanda in Asia Minor. He was a naval commander in the fleet of the great emperor Darius I of Persia. After ascending to the Persian throne in 521 B.C., Darius set out to expand his empire in several directions. He wanted to invade India, so he sent Scylax out to visit the mouth of the Indus River and to find the best sea route from the Persian Gulf to India.
To accomplish his goal, Scylax started out from the reverse direction—at the source of the Indus River in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. Some historians have said he started from as far upstream as Kabul, the capital of modern Afghanistan. But the river is not navigable at that point, and he probably started out near the meeting of the Kabul and Indus rivers not far from the modern town of Attock, Pakistan.
Scylax sailed down the Indus River to its mouth near present-day Karachi and then followed the coastline of Pakistan to the Gulf of Oman, crossing it to reach Arabia. Darius made use of the information that Scylax brought back to him. He conquered Sind, the region through which the Indus flows.
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