What this chamber argues

• History begins as a deliberate act of inquiry — Herodotus's word historíē means 'investigation' — turning memory and rumour into tested evidence.
• From Thucydides' political autopsy to Ibn Khaldun's theory of social cohesion — and on through Rome's own chroniclers (Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius) to the grand narrative histories of Gibbon, Macaulay, and Parkman — the historians ask not only what happened but why peoples and powers rise and fall.

Primary works in this chamber (13)

• Herodotus — The Histories (−440) — Book
• Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War (−400) — Book
• Polybius — The Histories (−150) — Book
• Sima Qian — Records of the Grand Historian (−94) — Book
• Tacitus — Annals (110) — Book
• Ibn Khaldun — Muqaddimah (1377) — Book
• Julius Caesar — The Gallic Wars (−50) — Book
• Livy — The History of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita) (−27) — Book
• Tacitus — Germania (98) — Book
• Suetonius — The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (121) — Book
• Gibbon — The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) — Book
• Macaulay — The History of England (1848) — Book
• Parkman — France and England in North America (1865) — Book

Connected chambers

• Philosophy — The historians' search for causes is philosophy applied to time; Polybius and Ibn Khaldun theorise the cycles of constitutions and civilisations.
• Governance & Society — The record of how states actually behaved is the raw material of statecraft — Thucydides and Tacitus are read as manuals of power.