Topic: ethnography (1)

• SourceHerodotus, The Histories

  The earliest surviving Greek history, and the fullest classical account of the Persians: their rise, their customs and religion, and the wars with Greece. Indispensable and endlessly informative, but an outsider's report to be read critically: sound in its institutional substance, where the Iranian evidence repeatedly confirms it, and most Greek in the motives, speeches and court-tales it builds over the facts.