Ancient history
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"Ancient" redirects here. For other uses, see Ancient (disambiguation).
Ancient history is the study of the written past from the beginning of human history until the Early Middle Ages.[1] The goal of the modern day critical ancient historian is objectivity. The term classical antiquity is often used to refer to ancient history since the beginning of recorded Greek history in about 776 BC. This coincides roughly with the traditional date of the founding of Rome in 753 BC, the beginning of the history of ancient Rome. Although the ending date of ancient history is disputed, currently most Western scholars use the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476, the death of the emperor Justinian I or the coming of Islam 632 as the end of ancient European history. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 – 5,500 years, with Sumerian cuneiform being the oldest form of writing discovered so far. This is the beginning of history by the definition used by all historians.
The study of ancient historyThe fundamental difficulty of studying ancient history is the fact that only a fraction of it has been documented and only a fraction of those recorded histories have survived into the present day. It is also imperative to consider the reliability of the information obtained from these records. Literacy was not widespread in almost any culture until long after the end of ancient history, so there were few people capable of writing histories. Even those written histories which were produced were not widely distributed; the ancients, not having the luxury of a printing press had to make copies of books by hand. The Roman Empire was one of the ancient world's most literate cultures, but many works by its most widely read historians are lost. For example, Livy, a Roman historian who lived in the 1st century BC, wrote a history of Rome called Ab Urbe Condite ("From the Founding of the City") in 142 volumes; only 35 volumes still exist, although summaries of the rest do exist. Other Roman historians, like Pompeius Trogus, have vanished completely. The handful of surviving records of Rome, mostly inscriptions, were written from the bias of the author; unlike modern history, the other side of the event is usually not available.[2] Historians have two major avenues which they take to better understand the ancient world: archaeology and the study of primary sources. ArchaeologyMain article: Archaeology Archaeology is the excavation and study of artifacts in an effort to interpret and reconstruct past human behavior. In the study of ancient history, archaeologists excavate the ruins of ancient cities looking for clues as to how the people of the time period lived. Some important discoveries by archaeologists studying ancient history include:
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