Ancient History in the Age of Archival Research
Ancient History in the Age of Archival Research
This essay traces the impact of the rise of modern source criticism, Quellenkritik, on the credibility of ancient history in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues that through-going, historicized source criticism had a corrosive effect on ancient history in particular, calling into question the veracity of previously admired ancient writers such and Thucydides and especially Herodotus. In an age, also, of greater and greater scholarly specialization, older forms of ‘universal history’ became increasingly suspect, and writers began to focus on individual, national trajectories. It was against this background that Leopold von Ranke and other nineteenth-century would-be authors of ‘scientific’ history made the use of archives—for which ancient historians had no real equivalent—the foundation of their scholarly authority. Since that time, modern and ancient historians have largely parted methodological ways—to the detriment, it is argued, of both.
Keywords: ancient history, source criticism, history of historiography, Quellenkritik, history of historiography, Leopold von Ranke, Historicism, George Grote
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