“Here are the results of the enquiries made by Herodotos of Halikarnassos."
With these words, Herodotos started his Historiê, meaning enquiries.
Now while history of mankind did not start with the Histories of Herodotos, historiography probably did: not what happened, but what people thought had happened and wrote a narrative account of it. So, history as we know it today, is the result of the conflict between the Hellenes and the Persians and how the Hellenic writers, starting with Herodotos, wrote their own versions of it.
With only limited access to low-level officials in the fringes of the Persian Empire, if any, generations after actual events had long faded even from the best of memories, 'why' was ignored in favor of superficial 'how' by the Hellenic writers.
In time, Hellenocentrism became Eurocentrism.
In the absence of a known contemporary Persian view of the events, the biased and hostile Hellenic enquiries became 'Western History'.
Wanderer @ the Hot Gates
When for whatever reason Herodotos had to leave his hometown of Halikarnassos, he went here and there and he saw this and that and he asked questions. And presumably, based on what he heard, what he understood and what he remembered, he told stories, applying his own view of the world and later wrote them down for remembrance. Those who think this method of enquiry was fruitful, should try asking questions in English while traveling in France.
Anyway, Herodotos wrote that he knew the name of all the 300 who had died at the Battle at Hot Gates, but curiously enough he thought the old pass ran from north to south. Was he ever there? ... or to many other places he had written about... or was it pure nationalistic romance? Or did the later editors and translators of Histories corrupted his original document?
No one can know for sure.
Whether he wrote all of Historiê himself or not, and whether he was rich or poor, and whether Perikles, Sophocles, Euripides and Protagores listened to him at Symposiums or Athenians and other Hellenes heard him in agoras, does not matter much here.
What matters is that even though he knew the difference between telling a good story and telling the truth, somehow during his travels he realized that the world of the Persian Empire was so vast and so complex compared to the small world of the Hellenes that it was impossible for any Hellene to understand the magnitude of it. It was something he himself did not fully understand and appreciate either. But by breaking this vast colossus into small stories, he made some sense of it, albeit biased and distorted, for the Hellenes of his own time: He gave a voice to their fears and concerns in a world that was beyond their control and comprehension.
Although Herodotos wrote about the victory of the Hellenes over the Persians in a few old battles two generations old by his time, he knew war was not over, it had just started. Those were uncertain times. Titans no longer lived in ancient legends, they lived on the other side of the sea and they could sweep down at any time and destroy Hellas on a whim, while the Hellenes, Athenians and Spartans and their allies, were gathering to fight among themselves, again. Maybe he was nostalgic about the only time in the known history that Hellenes had united to fight a common enemy. Every Hellene at the time must have known that the war that was about to break between the Athenians and Spartans was to be murderously brutal and the Persians were the only power that could have helped the Hellenes from self-destruction. While Hellas was where peace broke out once in a while, this time it was different: the pending war was not just another typical border fight but a fight to death for total and absolute victory. Hellenes were becoming more desperate and barbaric as the war progressed as recorded by Herodotos himself in the final few pages of his Histories. But since Hellenes by then had rejected to send Earth and Water to the Great King, the Persians could care less what happened to the Hellenes, as long as it did not interfere with the affairs of the empire.
Well...
He might have heard Persian frame stories during his travels: the way the Persians told stories within stories, not that different from the tales of Šahrzâd [pronounced Shahr'zaad: Scheherazade]of the later periods, which had its roots in the rich oral tradition of the Persians, and had used the concept for his own stories.
He told his observers to decide for themselves what they wanted to believe among different versions of a story that he was told. Sometimes he gave various versions for the stories closer to home that his audiences knew about and created his own versions for the people and places far away that no one knew and did not make much difference.
"... My job, throughout this account, is simply to record whatever I am told by each of my sources..." (2:123)
"Now, I am not in a position to say with absolute certainty that Xerxes did send this message to Argos and that an Argive delegation did go to Susa to ask Artaxerxes about their friendship... I do, however, know this much: if everyone in the world were to bring his own problems along to the market with the intention of trading it with his neighbors, a glimpse of his neighbors' problems would make him glad to take back home the ones he came with... I am obliged to record things I am told, but not certainly required to believe them - this remark may be taken to apply to the whole of my account. After all, one can hear it said that it was actually the Argives who invited the Persians to invade Hellas..." (7:152)
So, who invented the wheel?
When the remnants of the ancient Sumerians were found in the mid 19th century, the discovery of a magnificent, literate and lawful early civilization of nearly 6,000 years ago who were not the sons of Noah, forced the scholars who had relied on Bible as documentary evidence, to grudgingly revise their views. Sumerians literally invented the wheel... and the art of writing. So, historians are fully aware that the 'history' of the ancient cultures hangs on the flimsiest of the evidence, sometimes no more than a few surviving lines etched in ancient languages here and a few pieces of broken pottery there. There is no question that most of the material evidence that once existed has perished in time. Inevitably, what has survived the ravages of time, favors certain views and forces certain perspectives, where reality could be entirely different.
Look @ mê...
No, not me, mê: the universal laws created by the great gods governing all aspects of life; what is needed for a civilized life.
So, in these enquiries, we would consider data that has not yet been fully exploited; elements that are either misinterpreted or totally ignored or dismissed as irrelevant, by those who have no cause of their own to dig any deeper under the pale surface of things.
We would look more closely at some traditional misconceptions about the Persian Achaemenids that have been accepted uncritically in the past or need further studies or offering a different perspective, no matter how imperfect, by asking questions, and leave it to the readers to decide for themselves.
Giving the splendid Persians their dues, would not diminish the gifts of the Hellenes.
So, while we would never know what really happened in the past, that should not keep us from enquiring about the world around us, and why things are the way they are... and preserve what we love in little stories...
It is, however, entirely up to us to decide whether we want to build walls to keep out the 'others' or invite them to join us to eat, drink, and be merry at the Imperial Table of the Great Kings.