Herodotus(ca. 484-ca. 425 BC)

Herodotus (born in Halicarnassus, ca. 484 BC; died in Thurii, ca. 425 BC) was a Greek historian and geographer. His value in the history of geography is related essentially to his focus on ethnicity. His hometown had frequent relations with the so-called barbarian world, and that, together with his extensive travels, especially through the lands of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, contributed to developing his great curiosity about different countries and allowed him to come in contact with various populations, their traditions, and their customs.

His work The Histories provides considerable interesting geographic and cultural information, and for this reason, Herodotus has been described as the father of ethnography as well as the father of history. Among the topics dealt with in his writing are the cultures of Persia, Assyria, India, and Arabia; the customs of various and sometimes legendary populations such as the Hyperboreans, the Androphagi, the Budini, and the Melanchlaeni; and the geography of Scythia and Egypt. The label that he gave to the latter country—“the gift of the Nile”—is still famous and was meant to underline the importance the river's course had in the development of Egyptian civilization.

In some cases, as in his account of the Nile, whose sources he believed to be in the Atlas mountains, Herodotus's geographical knowledge was erroneous; moreover, his words sound imaginative and unreliable on many occasions. However, through collected stories and interviews, he succeeded in describing in a very suggestive way those territories beyond which the world was, at the time, imagined to be uninhabited. Thus, for instance, India became the symbol of distance and mystery both from the physical point of view and from the cultural one. He only reached its boundaries, but he wanted to report about the supposed immense quantities of gold that could be found there and its incredible animals, much bigger than those of any other place. He described ceremonies and traditions that he did not know, supported by the idea that in such far-off countries, everything could be possible.

Herodotus's view of the world was based on a sort of ethnocentrism that expressed itself through the processes of analogy and opposition, keeping Greece as a reference. He postulated that his homeland was at the center of the inhabited area of the world and that the areas distant from it were the most different from Greece, from both the environmental and the cultural points of view. He also considered Greece to have the most favorable location and climate. According to him, at the borders of the known inhabited world, people had to face the hazards of cold weather or unbearable heat, but on the other hand, they could sometimes enjoy extraordinary natural riches.