Sri Lanka kept one of the world's longest unbroken written histories
History, strictly speaking, starts when people write things down, around the late 4th millennium BCE in Sumer and Egypt. But different cultures began at very different times, and some kept going remarkably long: Sri Lanka's monastic chronicles form a continuous record running over two millennia, right up to the British takeover in 1815.
Historians divide the past by writing. Prehistory is everything before written records, or before a script can be read. Protohistory is the in-between zone, when a people are literate but have no historians yet, or when they are described only in their neighbours' texts. Proto-writing complicates the boundary: the Jiahu symbols of China date to around 6600 BCE and the Vinča signs of the Balkans to around 5300 BCE, and scholars disagree about when such marks became true writing. Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs grew out of earlier symbol systems between 3400 and 3200 BCE, though coherent texts only appear around 2600 BCE.
The Greeks gave the West its model. Herodotus, hailed as the father of history, wrote his Histories between the 450s and 420s BCE, but his contemporary Thucydides is credited with the first rigorous method, explaining events through human choices and cause and effect rather than the will of the gods. In China, the Spring and Autumn Annals, traditionally linked to Confucius, covers 722 to 481 BCE, and around 100 BCE Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian laid the foundations of professional history writing, including biographies of commoners as well as rulers.
Sri Lanka's Mahavamsa was compiled in the 5th century CE by a monk named Mahanama from chronicles Buddhist monks had kept since the 3rd century BCE, and a companion Lesser Chronicle carried the story on. Together they preserve rare traces of the island's pre-Vijaya peoples.
Method kept evolving. In 1377 the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun listed seven recurring errors historians make and attacked uncritical acceptance of sources, earning the title father of historiography. Hegel pushed history towards a secular footing around 1800, and in the 20th century France's Annales School used raw data to track the lives of ordinary people.
Source: Recorded history
