Herodotus

Herodotus was a Greek writer from Halicarnassus in Asia Minor. His Histories, an account of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire, is the first great narrative history to survive from the ancient world, and it earned him the title 'father of history'.

To explain the war, Herodotus described the peoples involved. He traveled widely, including in Egypt, and recorded what priests and local informants told him about Egyptian history, customs and kings. He is the main source for Greek history between about 550 and 479 BCE and an important one for Egypt and western Asia.

He mixes careful inquiry with stories he says he cannot vouch for. He reports that Solon visited Egypt, and he tells a separate story of field mice gnawing the bowstrings of an Assyrian army attacking Egypt, which is often compared with the Bible's account of Sennacherib's army struck down outside Jerusalem. The Egyptian priest Manetho later wrote partly to correct Greek writers like him.