Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

One important predecessor of Herodotus, Hecataeus of Miletus, had already engaged in the systematic study of the lifestyles of different peoples. Hecataeus had extended Anaximander’s map by adding the lands that comprised the Persian Empire by the end of the sixth century, especially Egypt. He also included detail about Scythia and the western Mediterranean, which colonization had opened up to the Greeks and which had stimulated the curiosity of their thinkers. Part of his achievement was cartographic, but what absorbed him was the study of the individual character of different ethnic groups—ethnology. To put it another way, Hecataeus pioneered comparative anthropology. To understand a people—say, the Libyans—it was of course necessary to know something about their past and their physical environment as well as their customs, and so both historical and geographical material contributed to his great work, Journey Round the Earth. This read like a mariner’s handbook, detailing different places and their inhabitants in the order in which a ship would pass them as it sailed along the coastline.