Historical analysis

The main thesis of historical analysis establishes the backbone of what is considered to be history and how history ought to be written. This has not changed much since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides. The first quality is that the historian ought to compile a wide range of sources, either from their own experiences or in the archives. We see this in Thucydides and Herodotus, as they will often comment that they are relying on someone else's account, but they always leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves whether the sources are accurate. This is the first step. The second step is to assess sources based on certain qualities of reliability. These qualities include the amount of time between the event and the record of the event, the corroboration, whether a source agrees with other sources frequently or infrequently, the presence of bias, statements within the source that indicate that the source is not impartial and where they are more likely or less likely to favour one side or another. The duty of the historian is to compile these sources and construct a narrative that represents by their scholarship the most likely course of events. This is what separates Herodotus and Thucydides from the other Greeks like Hesiod. Although they are different from how we look at historical narratives, they still possess this common feature of historical analysis which has not changed.

Historiography in Antiquity

Herodotus and Thucydides were the founders of the discipline of history. Exept Herodotus' Histories there are other Greek historians who are also notable, including Plutarch and his Lives.

Concerning Herodotus (5th century BC), one of the earliest nameable historians whose work survives, his recount of strange and unusual tales are gripping but not necessarily representative of the historical record. Despite this, The Histories of Herodotus displays some of the techniques of more modern historians. He interviewed witnesses, evaluated oral histories, studied multiple sources and then pronounced his particular version. Herodotus's works covered what was then the entire known world of the Greeks, or at least the part regarded as worthy of study, i.e., the peoples surrounding the Mediterranean. At about the same time, Thucydides pioneered a different form of history, one much closer to reportage. In his work, History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote about a single long conflict with its origins and results. But, as it was mainly within living memory and Thucydides himself was alive at the time of many of the events, there was less room for myths and tall tales.

Sima Qian was a Prefect of the Grand Scribes of the Han Dynasty and is regarded as the father of Chinese historiography because of his highly praised work, Records of the Grand Historian, an overview of the history of China covering more than two thousand years from the Yellow Emperor to Emperor Han Wudi. His work laid the foundation for later Chinese historiography. Li Chunfeng was a Chinese historian who wrote the history of the Jin dynasty.

Ibn Abd-el-Hakem was an Egyptian who wrote the History of the Conquest of Egypt and North Africa and Spain, which was the earliest Arab account of the Islamic conquests of those countries. Much like Herodotus works, though, it mixes fact and legend but was often quoted by later Islamic historians. Al-Jahiz was a famous Arab scholar and historian. Hamdani was an Arab historian and was the best representatives of Islamic culture during the last effective years of the Abbasid caliphate. Ali al-Masudi was an Arab historian, known as the “Herodotus of the Arabs.” Ibn Khaldun was a famous Arab Muslim historian and was the forefather of historiography and the philosophy of history. He is best known for his Muqaddimah "Prolegomenon".

Much of the groundwork in creating the modern figure of the historian was done by Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755). His wide-ranging Spirit of the Laws (1748) spanned legal, geographical, cultural, economic, political and philosophical studies and was greatly influential in forging the fundamentally interdisciplinary historian. Referred to as "the first modern historian", Edward Gibbon wrote his grand opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788). However, some authors such as Christiansen regard ancient Greek author Polybius as the first historian of a modern kind, criticizing sources and making unbiased judgements based on presumed neutral analysis; indeed, Livy used him as a source. Polybius, one of the first historians to attempt to present history as a sequence of causes and effects, carefully conducted his research—partly based on what he saw and partly on the communications of eye-witnesses and the participants in the events.