Hi. Suppose I wanted to read ancient history, what would be the closest sources to use?
The Peloponissian War by Thucydides is generally considered the first factualy-based historical document. At least, that’s what my Ancient History professer said.
Thanks. I suppose Herodotus came later then?
Well, a translation of The History of Herodotus is just a click away. How much closer do you need? 
This page claims to have over 200 links to resources about Herodotus, the so-called “Father of History” (or “Father of Lies”, depending on who you ask…).
And in case you’re wondering, The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides is credited as being written nine years after The History.
It would help if I spelled Peloponnesian correctly. You can get the text from Project Gutenberg here.
Herodotus came before Thucydides, but if my decade-old memories aren’t decieving me, he wrote things more from a storytelling perspective than a documentary perspective.
Well, a fair amount of the Old Testament and the Apocraphya (YDAMV) is fairly historically accurate. It’s biased towards Israel, of course, and a lot of it is theologically biased in one way or another (see 1 and 2 Chronicles, for example, as an example of the principle that Israel and Judah do well when they follow God’s law and are punished, generally by invasion, when they don’t.) The problem is knowing what correlates with what we know of history and what is universal/ancestral/history of the people myth. So maybe this isn’t a good place to start looking and you should stick with the Greeks.
Forgive me for being dense but what is the antecedent to The History? Did you mean nine years after Herodotous’ history?
If you click on the two links, you’ll see that The History of Herodotus is considered to have been written around 440 BCE and The History of the Peloponnesian War was written 431 BCE.
I’m still working on when the Zuozhuan was written, but it seems like that’s a question scholars are still working on, if this page is anything to go by. It looks like it probably doesn’t predate The History. I’ll give the Zuozhuan the nod as the oldest East Asian history, though.
Interesting… I’m surprised they haven’t managed to date the Zuozhuan though.
chukhung: I’m suprised to hear Herodotus called the father of lies, I think he is very clear when he is relating something he considers dubious.
Ancient kings in Mesopotamia and Egypt recorded their doings on upraised stobes, called stelae. They recorded successions of kings and lengths of reigns on these, too. Such “King Lists” are sometimes seen as the beginnings of history. So if you want to get the oldest real thing, look up translations of these stelae.
But if you want connected narratives, read Herodotus and Thucydides. Modern scholars are dubious that the speeches they report are accurate, by the way. They’re certainly too specific and detailed to be credible, so they suspect the historians wrote what they ought to have said.
From this page
And, indeed, this preference for Thucydides as the first “real” historian is illustrated in this very thread where Punoqllads charges Herodotus with writing “more from a storytelling perspective than a documentary perspective.”
According to the Straight Dope Staff Report, many of the historical books of the Old Testament were written around 600 B.C. As to whether they count as history books, it seems to me a good argument could be made either way.
Well presumably this is how the tradition was previously kept - by word of mouth. I’d imagine that the use of incredible stories served as a useful memory aid.