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Hello, in the 6th century AD the Bishop of Tour began his history of the world with the unassailable observation that a great many things keep happening. Some of them good, some of them bad.

Yes, but in writing about the past we are rarely so economical. From ancient epics to medieval hagiographies and modern deconstructions, historians have endlessly chronicled, surveyed and analyzed the great many things that keep happening, declaring them some of them good and some of them bad and trying to work out why.

But the writing of history always illuminates two periods, the one history is written about and the one it's written in.

And to look at how the writing of history has changed is to examine the way successive ages have understood the world, in short there's a history to history.

With me to discuss the history of history or historiography are Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London.

John Barrow, Emeritus Fellow of Ballion College Oxford, Paul Cartledge, A. G. Leventus Professor, Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University.

Briefly Paul Cartledge, can you tell us what historiography is?

It's of course a modern invented word of two ancient Greek compounds so historiography is the writing of history, history originally means inquiry.

Historiography has another meaning in academic circles which is the study of the writing of all the creation of history.

And what that does is draw attention to the fact that historians in some sense make history.

There is the past, what happened, which no one individual can of course comprehend in its totality, and then there's history.

And this is a brilliant discovery of the Greeks and the Greeks discovered that by inquiry into variant traditions or all in their case one can develop a story,

but they went further than just telling stories. Of course in modern European language, Istoia and History, same root, but in French Istoia is both history and story.

In English we distinguish between history and story. It's quite interesting I think that's a sort of cultural question we might come back to, but the Greeks were very clear that it wasn't enough just to tell a story.

It's got to be about something really significant. And of course the first historian, Herodotus, went for the biggest story of them all.

Can you tell us a little about Herodotus and then talk about what he wrote?

Herodotus was born round about 484 BC, and he was born in what's now Western Turkey, place called Halikarnassus, which was a mixed community, not just Greek but also non Greek carians.

It's modern Bodrum and more famous for its windsurfing than for its respect for Herodotus.

But what he did, he came from this part of Greece known generically as Ionia, which had been in touch with Eastern traditions, going as far east as Babylon, even India, in terms of maths.

And his predecessors, thinking about the world, were not so much interested in the world of men, but the world, what we call the cosmos, the universe.

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