Recorded history is the period in history of the world after prehistory. It has been written down using language, or recorded using other means of communication. It starts around the 4th millennium BC, with the invention of writing.
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Recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world by antiquity's own historians. The earliest chronologies date back to Mesopotamia (Sumer) and ancient Egypt (Early Dynastic). Some of the more notable ancient historians include: Josephus Flavius, Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Manetho (Greek historiography), Zuo Qiuming, Sima Qian (Chinese historiography), Livy, Sallust, Plutarch, Tacitus, Suetonius (Roman historiography). Although valuable, these accounts can be biased, and should be used with caution.
In pre-modern societies, epic poetry, mythography, collections of legends, and religious texts were often treated as sources of historical information, and so one may see references to such writers as Homer, Vyasa, Valmiki and to such works as the biblical Book of Exodus as historical sources.
Primary sources are firsthand written evidence of history made at the time of the event by someone who was present. They have been described as those sources closest to the origin of the information or idea under study.[1] These types of sources have been said to provide researchers with "direct, unmediated information about the object of study."[2] Secondary sources are written accounts of history based upon the evidence from primary sources. These are sources which, usually, are accounts, works, or research that analyze, assimilate, evaluate, interpret, and/or synthesize primary sources. Tertiary sources are compilations based upon primary and secondary sources.[3] These are sources which, on average, do not fall into the above two levels.