How Herodotus Saved World History

Plunging into the heart of the debate about the origins of ‘modern’ historical criticism, this paper examines the rising importance and credibility of Herodotus’ The Histories for eighteenth-century French, German, and English scholars seeking an answer to historical Pyrrhonism and a less ham-fisted means of understanding mythology than Euhemerism. It uses material from debates in the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris as well as from a series of other French, German, and English texts to analyze and interpret a notable increase in historical fact-checking, one which made ‘the father of history’ (and especially the first four books of his Histories, devoted chiefly to the Near Eastern world before the start of the Persian Wars) more useful and more respectable than ever before. It shows that these fact-checkers came from all walks of life—both libertine érudits and classics-loving Abbés—but chiefly positioned themselves as the truth-loving enemies of the overly ‘philosophical’ belles esprits. In an era in which massive numbers of new ‘oriental’ texts were coming to light—but many of them proving to be forgeries or undatable documents—the fact-checkers found that Herodotus was an essential means to pin down and date at least some aspects of ancient oriental history and, crucially, religious life, meaning that ‘the father of history’ played an especially important role in this period in saving mythology as a source and the ancient Near East as a crucial staging ground for world history, even as a new period of philological exactness and philhellenic agnosticism began to dawn.