Ancient Maps

- The discovery of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann.
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Most of what is known of the ancient world comes from the accounts of antiquity's own historians. Although it is important to take into account the bias of each ancient author, their accounts are the basis for our understanding of the ancient past. Some of the more notable ancient writers include Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Sima Qian, Sallust, Livy, Josephus, Suetonius, and Tacitus.
The earliest known systematic historical thought emerged in ancient Greece, beginning with Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 BC–ca.425 BC). Thucydides largely eliminated divine causality in his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, establishing a rationalistic element which set a precedent for subsequent Western historical writings. He was also the first to distinguish between cause and immediate origins of an event.