The oxford history of historical writing volume 1 beginnings to ad 600

Tai Lieu Chat Luong


T H E OX FOR D H IS TORY OF
H IS TOR IC A L W R I T I NG


T H E OX FOR D H IS TORY OF H IS TOR IC A L W R I T I NG
The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a five-volume, multi-authored scholarly
survey of the history of historical writing across the globe. It is a chronological
history of humanity’s attempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past with
considerable attention paid to different global traditions and their points of
comparison with Western historiography. Each volume covers a particular period,
with care taken to avoid unduly privileging Western notions of periodization, and
the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, reflecting both the
greater geographical range of later volumes and the steep increase in historical
activity around the world since the nineteenth century. The Oxford History of
Historical Writing is the first collective scholarly survey of the history of historical
writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time.
Volume 1: Beginnings to ad 600
Volume 2: 400–1400
Volume 3: 1400–1800
Volume 4: 1800–1945
Volume 5: Historical Writing since 1945


THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING
Daniel Woolf
general editor

The Oxford History of

Historical Writing
volume 1: beginnings to ad 600
Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy
volume editors

Ian Hesketh
assistant editor

1


3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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The Oxford History of Historical Writing was made possible
by the generous financial support provided by the Offices of
the Vice-President (Research) and the Provost and Vice-President
(Academic) at the University of Alberta from 2005 to 2009 and
subsequently by Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

General Editor’s Acknowledgements
The Oxford History of Historical Writing has itself been the product of several
years of work and many hands and voices. As general editor, it is my pleasure to
acknowledge a number of these here. First and foremost are the volume editors,
without whom there would have been no series. I am very grateful for their willingness to sign on, and for their flexibility in pursuing their own vision for their
piece of the story while acknowledging the need for some common goals and
unity of editorial practices. The Advisory Board, many of whose members were
subsequently roped into either editorship or authorship, have given freely of their
time and wisdom. At Oxford University Press, former commissioning editor
Ruth Parr encouraged the series proposal and marshalled it through the readership and approvals process. After her departure, my colleagues and I enjoyed
able help and support from Christopher Wheeler at the managerial level and,
editorially, from Rupert Cousens, Seth Cayley, Matthew Cotton, and Stephanie
Ireland. I must also thank the OUP production team and Carol Bestley in
particular.
The series would not have been possible without the considerable financial
support from the two institutions I worked at over the project’s lifespan. At the
University of Alberta, where I worked from 2002 to mid-2009, the project was
generously funded by the Offices of the Vice-President (Research) and the
Provost and Vice-President (Academic). I am especially grateful to Gary Kachanoski and Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offices, who saw the project’s
potential. The funding they provided enabled the project to hire a series of
project assistants, to involve graduate students in the work, and to defray some
of the costs of publication such as images and maps. It permitted the acquisition
of computer equipment and also of a significant number of books to supplement
the fine library resources at Alberta. Perhaps most importantly, it also made the
crucial Edmonton conference happen. At Queen’s University in Kingston,
Ontario, where I moved into a senior leadership role in 2009, funding was
provided to push the project over the ‘finish-line’, to transfer the research library,
and in particular to retain the services for two years of an outstanding research

associate, Assistant Editor Dr Ian Hesketh. I am profoundly grateful for Ian’s
meticulous attention to detail, and his ability ruthlessly to cut through excess
prose (including on occasion my own) in order to ensure that volumes maintained editorial uniformity internally and together with other volumes, not least
because the volumes are not all being published at once. A series of able graduate
students have served as project assistants, including especially Tanya Henderson,
Matthew Neufeld, Carolyn Salomons, Tereasa Maillie, and Sarah Waurechen,
the last of whom almost single-handedly organized the complex logistics of the


General Editor’s Acknowledgements

vii

Edmonton conference. Among the others on whom the project has depended
I have to thank the Office of the Dean of Arts and Science for providing project
space at Queen’s University, and the Department of History and Classics at
Alberta. Melanie Marvin at Alberta and Christine Berga at Queen’s have assisted
in the management of the research accounts, as has Julie Gordon-Woolf, my
spouse (and herself a former research administrator), whose advice on this front
is only a small part of the support she has provided.


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Foreword
Daniel Woolf, General Editor
Half a century ago, Oxford University Press published a series of volumes entitled
Historical Writing on the Peoples of Asia. Consisting of four volumes devoted to
East Asia, South East Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia, and based on

conferences held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London in the late 1950s, that series has aged surprisingly well; many of the individual essays are still being cited in our own day. The books were also remarkably ahead of their time since the history of historical writing was at that time
firmly understood as being the history of a European genre. Indeed, the subject
of the history of history was itself barely a subject—typical surveys of the early
to mid-twentieth century by the likes of James Westfall Thompson and Harry
Elmer Barnes, following Eduard Fueter’s paradigmatic 1911 Geschichte der Neuren
Historiographie, were written by master historians surveying their discipline and
its origins. The Oxford series provided some much needed perspective, though
it was not followed up for many years, and more recent surveys in the last two or
three decades of the twentieth century have continued to speak of historiography as if it were an entirely Western invention or practice. Since the late 1990s
a number of works have been published that challenge the Eurocentrism of the
history of history, as well as its inherent teleology. We can now view the European
historiographic venture against the larger canvas of many parallel and—a fact
often overlooked—interconnected traditions of writing or speaking about the
past from Asia, the Americas, and Africa.
The Oxford History of Historical Writing is conceived in this spirit. It seeks
to provide the first collective scholarly history of historical writing to span the
globe. It salutes its great predecessor of half a century ago, but very deliberately
seeks neither to imitate nor to replace it. For one thing, the five volumes collectively include Europe, the Americas, and Africa, together with Asia; for
another, the division among these volumes is chronological, rather than by
region. We decided on the former because the history of non-European historical writing should, no more than that of its European counterpart, be viewed
in isolation. We chose the latter in order to provide what amounts to a cumulative narrative (albeit with well over a hundred different voices), and in order to
facilitate comparison and contrast between regions within a broad time
period.
A few caveats that apply to the entire series are in order. First, while the series
as a whole will describe historical writing from earliest times to the present, each


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Foreword

individual volume is also intended to stand on its own as a study of a particular
period in the history of historical writing. These periods shrink in duration as
they approach the present, both because of the obvious increase in extant materials and known authors, but also because of the expansion of subject matter to
a fully global reach (the Americas, for instance, do not feature at all in volume 1;
non-Muslim Africa appears in neither volume 1 nor volume 2). Second, while
the volumes share a common goal and are the product of several years of dialogue
both within and between its five editorial teams and the general editor, there has
been no attempt to impose a common organizational structure on each volume.
In fact, quite the opposite course has been pursued: individual editorial teams
have been selected because of complementary expertise, and encouraged to ‘go
their own way’ in selecting topics and envisioning the shapes of their volumes—
with the sole overriding provision that each volume had to be global in ambition.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, this series is emphatically neither an encyclopedia nor a dictionary. A multi-volume work that attempted to deal with
every national tradition (much less mention every historian) would easily spread
from five to fifty volumes, and in fact not accomplish the ends that the editors
seek. We have had to be selective, not comprehensive, and while every effort has
been made to balance coverage and provide representation from all regions of
the world, there are undeniable gaps. The reader who wishes to find out something about a particular country or topic not included in the OHHW ’s more
than 150 chapters can search elsewhere, in particular in a number of reference
books which have appeared in the past fifteen or so years, some of which have
global range. Our volumes are of course indexed, but we have deemed a cumulative index an inefficient and redundant use of space. Similarly, each individual
essay offers a highly selective bibliography, intended to point the way to further
reading (and where appropriate listing key sources from the period or topic
under discussion in that chapter). In order to assist readers with limited knowledge of particular regions’ or nations’ political and social contexts, certain chapters have included a timeline of major events, though this has not been deemed
necessary in every case. While there are (with one or two exceptions) no essays
devoted to a single ‘great historian’, many historians from Sima Qian and
Herodotus to the present are mentioned; rather than eat up space in essays with
dates of birth and death, these have been consolidated in each volume’s index.

Despite the independence of each team, some common standards are of course
necessary in any series that aims for coherence, if not uniformity. Towards that
end, a number of steps were built into the process of producing this series from
the very beginning. Maximum advantage was taken of the Internet: not only
were scholars encouraged to communicate with one another within and across
volumes, but draft essays were posted on the project’s website for commentary
and review by other authors. A climactic conference, convened at the University
of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada in September 2008, brought most of the editors
and just over half the authors together, physically, for an energizing and exciting


Foreword

xi

two days during which matters of editorial detail and also content and substance
were discussed. A major ‘value-added’, we think, of both conference and series,
is that it has introduced to one another scholars who normally work in separate
national and chronological fields, in order to pursue a common interest in the
history of historical writing in unique and unprecedented ways. As the series’
general editor, it is my hope that these connections will survive the end of the
project and produce further collaborative work in the future.
Several key decisions came out of the Edmonton conference, among the most
important of which was to permit chronological overlap, while avoiding unnecessary repetition of topics. The chronological divisions of the volumes—with
calendrical years used instead of typical Western periods like ‘Middle Ages’ and
‘Renaissance’—remain somewhat arbitrary. Thus volume 1, on antiquity, ends
about ad 600, prior to the advent of Islam, but overlaps with its successor,
volume 2, on what in the West were the late antique and medieval centuries, and
in China (the other major tradition of historical writing that features in every
volume), the period from the Tang through the early Ming dynasties. Volumes

4 and 5 have a similar overlap in the years around the Second World War. While
1945 is a sensible boundary for some subjects, it is much less useful for others—in
China, again, 1949 is the major watershed. Certain topics, such as the Annales
School, are not usefully split at 1945. A further change pertained to the denotation of years bc and ad; here, we reversed an early decision to use bce and
ce, on the grounds that both are equally Eurocentric forms; bc/ad have at
least been adopted by international practice, notwithstanding their Christian
European origins.
It became rather apparent in Edmonton that we were in fact dealing with two
sets of two volumes each (vols. 1/2 and 4/5), with volume 3 serving in some ways
as a bridge between them, straddling the centuries from about 1400 to about
1800—what in the West is usually considered the ‘early modern’ era. A further
decision, in order to keep the volumes reasonably affordable, was to use illustrations very selectively, and only where a substantive reason for their inclusion
could be advanced, for instance in dealing with Latin American pictographic
forms of commemorating the past. There are no decorative portraits of famous
historians, and that too is appropriate in a project that eschews the history of
historiography conceived of as a parade of stars—whether Western or Eastern,
Northern or Southern—from Thucydides to Toynbee.
Volume 1, under the editorship of Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy, covers
the longest span of time in the entire series, reaching from the earliest known
examples of historical writing in the Ancient Near East and in China, to the first
centuries of ‘late antiquity’ in the West and the eve of the Tang dynasty in the
East. The two editors, coming from very different backgrounds, have done an
excellent job of putting together an international team of experts. The volume
runs the gamut, chronologically and geographically, from early inscriptions, to
the emergence of historiographical forms such as annals and chronicles, poetry


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Foreword

and prose. It deals with the complex interactions of historiography with different
political structures, and with empires. The chapter topics reveal some fascinating
common features, as well as critical differences, between European and Asian
(here predominantly Chinese and Indian) modes of representing the past, and
these are drawn together in a comparative epilogue by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd. The
team has collectively presented an informative and wide-ranging account of the
beginnings of historical writing and an impressive opener to the series.


Contents
List of Maps
Notes on the Contributors
Advisory Board

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.

Editors’ Introduction
Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy
Early Mesopotamia
Piotr Michalowski
Later Mesopotamia
Mario Liverani
Ancient Egypt
John Baines
Historiography in Ancient Israel
John Van Seters
Greek Inscriptions as Historical Writing
Robin Osborne
Early Greek Poetry as/and History
Deborah Boedeker
The Rise of Greek Historiography and the Invention of Prose
Jonas Grethlein
Hellenistic Historiography
John Dillery
Josephus
Jonathan J. Price
History and Inscriptions, Rome
Alison E. Cooley
Annales and Analysis
Uwe Walter
Imperial History and Biography at Rome
Ellen O’Gorman
The Greek Historians of Imperial Rome
David S. Potter
Imperial Christian Historiography
Michael Whitby

xv
xvi
xix
1
5
29
53
76
97
122
148
171
219
244
265
291
316
346


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Contents

15. History and Inscriptions, China
Edward L. Shaughnessy
16. Chinese History and Philosophy
David Schaberg
17. Pre-Qin Annals

Wai-yee Li
18. Historiography and Empire
Mark Edward Lewis
19. Sima Qian and the Shiji
William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
20. The Han Histories
Stephen W. Durrant
21. Historiography of the Six Dynasties Period (220–581)
Albert E. Dien
22. Buddhism: Biographies of Buddhist Monks
John Kieschnick
23. Historical Traditions in Early India: c. 1000 bc to c. ad 600
Romila Thapar
24. Inscriptions as Historical Writing in Early India:
Third Century bc to Sixth Century ad
Romila Thapar
25. Epilogue
G. E. R. Lloyd
Index

371
394
415
440
463
485
509
535
553
577

601
621


List of Maps
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

The Near East c.1500–1400 bc
Hellenistic Kingdoms 185 bc
Roman Empire ad 395
China 350 bc
Ancient India c.500 bc
India c. ad 150

32
186
338
416
560
588


Notes on the Contributors
John Baines is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford. His publications
include Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt (2007) and High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt (in press).

Deborah Boedeker is Professor of Classics at Brown University. From 1992 to 2000,
together with Kurt Raaflaub she directed the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington,
DC. Her publications and current projects focus on early Greek poetry, tragedy, historiography, and religion.
Alison E. Cooley is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History,
University of Warwick, UK. Recent publications include an edition of, and commentary
on, the Res Gestae divi Augusti (2009).
Albert E. Dien is Professor Emeritus, Stanford University. He is the author of Six Dynasties Civilization (2007).
John Dillery is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, USA. He is
the author of Xenophon and the History of His Times (1995) and the Loeb Library edition
of Xenophon’s Anabasis. His research is now focused chiefly on the historical writing of
the Hellenistic period.
Stephen W. Durrant is Professor of Chinese at the University of Oregon. He is the
author of The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian (1995) and
(with Steven Shankman) The Siren and the Sage: Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient
Greece and China (2000).
Andrew Feldherr is Professor of Classics at Princeton University. He is the author of
Spectacle and Society in Livy’s History (1998) as well as articles on Vergil, Ovid, and
Catullus.
Jonas Grethlein is Professor in Classics at Heidelberg University, Germany. His recent
publications include Littells Orestie: Mythos, Macht und Moral in Les Bienveillantes (2009)
and The Greeks and their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE
(2010).
Grant Hardy is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
His publications include Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History
(1999) and The Establishment of the Han Empire and Imperial China (with co-author
Anne Behnke Kinney, 2005).
John Kieschnick is Reader in Buddhist Studies at the University of Bristol. Among his
previous publications are The Eminent Monk: Monastic Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography (1997) and The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (2003).
Mark Edward Lewis is the Kwoh-ting Li Professor of Chinese Culture at Stanford
University. Among his previous publications are Sanctioned Violence in Early China

Notes on the Contributors

xvii

(1990), Writing and Authority in Early China (1999), The Construction of Space in Early
China (2006), and The Flood Myths of Early China (2006).
Wai-yee Li is Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, USA. She is the
author of Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (1993)
and The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography (2007).
Mario Liverani is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at the ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome, Italy. Among his previous publications are International Relations in the
Near East, ca 1600–1100 BC (2001), Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography (2004), Israel’s History and the History of Israel (2005), and Uruk, the First City
(2006).
Geoffrey Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the University of Cambridge, and Senior Scholar in Residence at the Needham Research Institute,
Cambridge. His latest book is Disciplines in the Making: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on
Elites, Learning and Innovation (Oxford, 2009).
Piotr Michalowski is the George G. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at the University of Michigan. Among his other publications are The Lamentation Over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur (1989) and The Correspondence of the Kings of
Ur: The Epistolary History of an Ancient Mesopotamian Kingdom (2010).
William H. Nienhauser, Jr. is Halls-Bascom Professor of Chinese Literature at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among his previous publications are the multivolume translation of the Shiji (Grand Scribe’s Records [1994, 2002, 2005, 2008]) and the
two-volume Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (1986 and 1998).
Ellen O’Gorman is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol. She has
written Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus (2000) and many articles on historical writing in ancient Greece and Rome.
Robin Osborne is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and a
Fellow of the British Academy. His previous publications include Greece in the Making
1200–479 B.C. (1996; 2nd edn, 2009) and Greek History (2004).
David S. Potter is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of
Michigan. He is the author of a number of books on Roman history and historiography
including Literary Texts and the Roman Historian (1999), The Roman Empire at Bay

AD 180–395 (2004), and most recently, Ancient Rome: A New History, (2009).
Jonathan J. Price is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Tel Aviv University. His
books include Jerusalem under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State 66–70 C.E. (1992),
Thucydides and Internal War (2001), and From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic
Change in the Roman Near East (co-editor, 2009).
David Schaberg is Professor in Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA and is
Co-Director of the Center for Chinese Studies. He is the author of A Patterned Past:
Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography (2001).
Edward L. Shaughnessy is Herrlee G. and Lorraine J. Creel Distinguished Service
Professor of Early China at the University of Chicago. Among his publications are


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Notes on the Contributors

Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels (1991), The Cambridge History of
Ancient China (co-editor, 1999), and Rewriting Early Chinese Texts (2006).
Romila Thapar is Professor Emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Among her publications are Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (1961/1997), From
Lineage to State (1984), Early India (2002), and Somanatha (2004).
John Van Seters is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. Among his previous publications are Abraham in
History and Tradition (1975), In Search of History (1983), and The Biblical Saga of King
David (2009).
Uwe Walter is Professor of Ancient History at Bielefeld University. He has published
widely on Roman historiography and the culture of the past and memory in ancient
Rome.
Professor Michael Whitby is Head of the College of Arts and Law at the University of
Birmingham. Among his publications are The Cambridge Ancient History XIV (2000),

The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus (2000), and The Cambridge History of
Greek and Roman Warfare (2007).
Daniel Woolf (General Editor) is Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. Among his previous publications are A Global Encyclopedia of Historical
Writing (1998) and The Social Circulation of the Past (2003). His Global History of History
will appear in 2011.


Advisory Board
Michael Aung-Thwin, University of Hawaii
Michael Bentley, University of St Andrews
Peter Burke, University of Cambridge
Toyin Falola, University of Texas
Georg G. Iggers, SUNY Buffalo
Donald R. Kelley, Rutgers University
Tarif Khalidi, American University, Beirut
Christina Kraus, Yale University
Chris Lorenz, Free University Amsterdam
Stuart Macintyre, University of Melbourne
Jürgen Osterhammel, Universitat Konstanz
Ilaria Porciani, University of Bologna
Jörn Rüsen, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut
Romila Thapar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi


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Editors’ Introduction
Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy

Today, around the world, scholars labour to uncover the past, and they do so
with a set of tools and techniques that have proved their worth over several
centuries. Historians argue with each other and try to persuade the general
public according to conventions of discourse that include narrative, the critical
analysis of authenticated primary sources—especially written documents, but
also visual representations, oral accounts, and material artefacts—reasonable
inference, the identification of cause and effect, the examination of social and
cultural factors, the exposure of bias and unwarranted assumptions, and strict
chronology. Historians may give more or less weight to particular types of causes,
and they might write from different sorts of motivations, yet they generally share
a basic approach to the past that is rational, evidence based, and secular.
This ideal of a disciplined mode of historical inquiry that can transcend
national, cultural, and religious divisions has, like everything else, its own
history. Over the course of the five volumes of the Oxford History of Historical
Writing, readers can follow the development of our modern ideas about how best
to understand the past. Yet this project is not designed as a straightforward
narrative leading neatly from beginning to end. Rather, the series is a compilation of the work of over 150 modern scholars, each offering a distinctive take on
some aspect of historical writing, but all set within a clear chronological and
geographical framework. This type of heterogeneous format may be messy, but
it probably offers a more accurate representation of the wondrous profusion and
creativity that has characterized our human tendency to look backward for
meaning.
Both the strengths and also the challenges presented by the project as a whole
will be particularly evident in this first volume, which announces its chronological bounds as ‘Beginnings to ad 600’. Since some of the writings under
discussion date back to the third millennium bc, this volume will cover, by far,
the longest time span of any in the series. It also arguably features the most
diversity in approach. In chapters dealing with the relatively independent origins
of history-writing in the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, and
India, it will quickly become obvious how many potential ways there are to

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The Oxford History of Historical Writing

represent the past. There are, of course, the familiar conventions of a single
authorial voice reporting and reflecting on traditional accounts (as in the Hebrew
Bible), oral testimony (as in Herodotus), and earlier literary accounts (as in
Livy), but to focus only on these examples as forerunners of what we regard as
history-writing today is to miss the brilliance of the Egyptian preference for
visual rather than textual representations, or the advantages of fragmented,
multi-vocal presentations such as those of Sima Qian and Fan Ye, or the legitimizing genealogies of the Indian puranas. In the last case, differences between
modern conceptions of history-writing and what nineteenth-century scholars
found in classical India were so great that some denied that India had any tradition of history at all before the coming of Islam. We are pleased to include two
chapters in this volume that contest that narrow view.
If this first instalment of the series is, in many ways, a testament to the breathtaking range of ways in which people have dealt with memory and the past, there
are nevertheless at least three common threads that run through it all. 1) We will
see in various cultures and circumstances the development of historical consciousness; that is, the understanding that the past is different from the present and the
realization that records kept or artefacts created will convey information to future
generations. 2) Many of our contributors will trace how history as a literary genre
defines itself against, even as it borrows from, other forms of discourse such as
poetry, myth, rhetorical panegyric, or collections of anecdotes. 3) As writers about
the past become more self-conscious the notion of historiography arises, by which
we mean deliberate and sustained reflection on the act itself of writing history.
This begins with historians criticizing their predecessors or rivals, and it is accelerated by the clash of cultures, as in West Asia or the Mediterranean basin, and
competition among political regimes, as in China or Rome. In future volumes,
historiography will flower into comprehensive, systematic analyses of historical
writing in terms of evidence, accuracy, argumentation, and presentation. In the
meantime, we will see many examples of ancient histories that illustrate paths not
taken, or abandoned, or left undeveloped. It is not at all clear that there is a natural

or inevitable way to use the past to make sense of the world. But an awareness of
contingency, that things might have turned out differently, is part of what makes
studying history, including the history of historical writing, so fascinating.
The emphasis in this first volume is on the origins and establishment of
literary conventions concerning the past, on seeing different models of historical
inquiry and representation emerge from within their own social, literary, and
intellectual contexts. Our goal has been to offer broad global coverage, but we
include more details on history writing in the Graeco-Roman and Chinese civilizations since these were the two most developed historiographical traditions in
the ancient world, both in terms of the number of surviving works and also the
extent to which history emerged as a distinct genre. By the end of our allotted
time period, we will have seen some contact and merging of traditions: Herodotus knew of Egyptian historiography, Josephus introduced the Romans to
Hebraic understandings of the past, and Buddhist historical genres were reshaped


Editors’ Introduction

3

as they travelled from India to China. Yet there is still nothing like a Eurasian
synthesis. Sima Qian had never heard of Thucydides, and Tacitus was completely
unaware of his contemporary Ban Gu. As editors, we have tried to help readers
navigate a tremendous amount of diverse material in two ways. First, we asked
for essays that lent themselves to cross-cultural comparisons—for example,
chapters that examine the impact of inscriptions, philosophy, and empire, on
representations of the past in various cultures. The second aid is a comparative
epilogue, written by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, which identifies some general patterns
among diverse traditions of history-writing, including eleven distinct reasons
that people have turned their attention to previous generations.
Three cautions are perhaps in order. The first is a warning about a certain
slipperiness of terms, both among authors and sometimes within single chapters.

As has often been pointed out, the English word history, somewhat inconveniently, can refer to both the past itself and writings about the past. Similarly,
although the word historiography usually denotes the critical study of various
modes and models of historical inquiry, it can also be employed as a generic
synonym for all sorts of history-writing (as the etymology suggests). And, of
course, since our volume ends before the invention of the English language, the
individuals and traditions treated herein used other languages, each with their
own distinct terminologies and connotations concerning the notions that we
today categorize as history, history-writing, and historiography. For example,
the semantic overlap presented by the English word history has a striking parallel
in the Latin term res gestae, but does not affect the Greek historia (an inquiry or
investigation) from which the English derives.
A second source of misunderstanding lies in the easy assumption that similar
terms possess similar meanings. Such may be the case with annals and chronicles in the China chapters. Some Western readers will immediately think of the
historical genres of medieval Europe, and while there are indeed some similarities in form, these are outweighed by the differences in context. The Chunqiu
[Spring and Autumn Annals], for instance, is not just a record of local events in
the state of Lu. The text becomes central to the Chinese intellectual tradition, in
part because of its association with Confucius, its adoption as one of the five
Confucian Classics, and also because of the immensely significant Zuozhuan
[Zuo Tradition] commentary that is attached to it. The Confucian Classics,
which include historical accounts as well as poetry and ritual, anchor Confucian
thought in a manner similar to the way the Hebrew Bible provides a foundation
for Judaism and its sister religions.1 This canonicity (though still fluid in both
cases for many centuries) has no exact counterpart in Graeco-Roman culture.
The third temptation is to judge various historical traditions by their allegiance to factual ‘truth’. When Cicero, in the first century bc, asserted that ‘the
1
For a provocative overview of how the creation of historical writing influenced Judaism and
Christianity, see Donald Harmon Akenson, Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the
Talmuds (New York, 1998).

4

The Oxford History of Historical Writing

first law of history is to tell the truth’, many of his listeners would have nodded
in agreement, but there was enormous variety in how this commonly held value
was applied over the thousand-year history of Greek and Latin history-writing.
What might it have meant in the ancient world ‘to tell the truth’? Unlike many
modern professional historians, no classical historian would have seen this ‘law’
as an injunction to exploit every resource to recover the past ‘as it actually was’.
(And as we will see in later volumes, the ideal of disinterested objectivity will be
subjected to withering criticism in the twentieth century.) For some classical
writers, the emphasis would have fallen on avoiding distortions or omissions
based on personal bias; others might have responded by avoiding claims that
went beyond the bounds of what human experience established as plausible—
divine ancestry, for example. An influential modern interpretation of Cicero’s
phrase holds that the ‘truth’ here means an established ‘hard core’ of known data
which any historian would be expected to flesh out with circumstantial detail.2
Herodotus memorably made a distinction between the things that can be said
and the things that can be known,3 but even Thucydides, who in other respects
seems to adhere most closely to a post-Enlightenment scrupulousness in weighing
evidence, composed speeches for the figures in his history in which, as he admits,
the imperfect memory of what was actually said had to be supplemented by his
opinion of what the situation demanded them to say (1.22.2). For Thucydides, as
for all ancient historical writers, the need to present a narrative of the past fully,
vividly, and persuasively exceeded the exact information at his disposal.
Unfortunately, our ending point for this book must seem artificially imposed
by the chronology of the multi-volume project as a whole. There are few dramatic
breaks in the history of historical writing within any one culture, and to choose
a single date where innovation outweighs continuity in all the historiographies

treated in the series would have been obviously impossible. The selection of ad
600 as a stopping point makes sense in relation to the number of new stories that
begin in volume 2—for example Islamic, Japanese, Northern European, and
American historiographies—but it seriously disrupts and distorts some of the
traditions described here, particularly those of Byzantium and South Asia. Still,
after the broad sweep in this first book of the series, and especially after Lloyd’s
analytical overview in the epilogue, readers will be well prepared to venture into
later volumes to see how the choices that ancient writers made about how to
represent history will influence and enrich later generations in very different
historical circumstances.
A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (London, 1988).
For the complexities of distinguishing myth from history in Greek and Roman historiography see Denis Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley,
2007), esp. 68–107.
2
3