Methods of studying history in ancient and ancient times

"A glance turned into the past plunges us into the mysteries of human existence," said Karl Jaspers. And indeed, the need to explore the past appeared, evidently, in such times, when only archeology dares look. It is known that chronicles chronicles were one of the first written monuments of Chinese, Egyptian, Babylonian and other ancient civilizations. But already with the advent of such records, a lack of a chronicle approach began to be felt, and from the search for the meaning of events and the connection between individual facts methods of studying history were born.

Nevertheless, no theorizing can do without structures and categories that are no longer historical facts. So there is the problem of the relationship between the event and the category that summarizes the facts. The first systems of categories known to us, which had both historical and philosophical significance, derive from mythological stories about the genesis of the world. They divided time into mythological (sacred) and historical (profane), because time for them was synonymous with "corruption". However, methods of studying history were unknown to this era, because mythological thinking excluded the notion of transition from one society to another and recognized neither society nor personality. In addition, the myth, while telling, neglected the explanations, because revelation and explanation are different in nature phenomena.

A closer understanding and explanation of history is born in the epic, where under the mythological shell the history of a certain people is revealed, as, for example, in the Bible or the Iliad. Thus, even before the scientific methods of studying history arose, historical consciousness emerged. This is the realization of time, changes that occur with people, states and the world. It was characteristic of Egyptian, Jewish, Chinese and ancient historians. Not for nothing almost simultaneously lived such bright personalities, which descendants called "the fathers of history" - Herodotus and Thucydides in Greece and Syma Qian in China. They initiated the interpretation of people's behavior in terms of time, and also tried to give the events a certain meaning.

These scientists also have the honor of creating different types of historiography. Thucydides created a scientific and pragmatic method, a careful selection of facts and reliable evidence, and Herodotus - a historical retrospective and explanation, the ability to understand and formulate the deep essence of what constitutes a historical process. This, according to the famous thinker, was the course of world history, the meaning of which he tried to draw. It can be said that, barely born, ancient historiography began to draw a field of interaction between different peoples and cultures - barbarians and Hellenes, barbarians and Han Chinese (Chinese). This field is a constant struggle for power and influence. But not only does confrontation determine the course of events.

Methods of studying history, which ancient and ancient writers used, led them to the conclusion that behind certain facts underground, anonymous and incomprehensible forces are hidden, which people usually treat as random. Historians described them in two ways.

On the one hand, the causes of events are rooted in human nature, in the thirst for power or certain socio-psychological interests. Many Greek and Roman scholars linked the reasons for successes and failures to the internal unity or contradictions of the demos, the polis, the people, the state. On the other hand, more powerful forces intervene in the course of history-destiny, destiny. In the era of Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire , the theory of the universality of history finally became dominant. A bright representative of this type of thinking was Polybius. In his work he tried not only to generalize and analyze, what was determined by the fate of a particular state, but also to link political theory and facts.

Thus, it can be concluded that the first methodology of historical science appeared in ancient times, when the idea was first expressed that history, like any science, should open regular regularities that are characteristic of the flow of human affairs in time.

However, ancient historiography believed that the course of these cases is formed according to certain laws that are not very well known or understandable to us. This process could be understood as regression, degradation or cyclical cycle. Hesiod gave one of the first periodicals in Europe of qualitative changes between the five "centuries" associated with the fall of morality. Polybius, however, believed that history develops along the lines of successive changes in various political regimes - democracy, oligarchy and tyranny. But almost all ancient historians and philosophers were sure that they live in a period of terrible decline, in anticipation of catastrophic changes.