When did people start writing history books?

Maple Leaf: When did people start writing history books and putting all these historical facts together?
Are there any history books before 1700? Someone said that we started collecting history facts and putting them in books starting since 1700, but before then, there were no history books, but only artifacts and individual recordings of history written by ancient historians thousands of years ago.

Answers and Views:

Answer by bagpipesavage
History has been recorded since the sawn of time. From cavemen pictographs of successful hunts, the Viking sagas, every monument in Egypt, the ancient Romans, the Chinese, the Mayans…etc etc have been recording their histories since way before Gutenburg invented the printing press. Even the bible is a history book recounting the life and times of those who came before us. History has been recorded since history began. Some were written on parchment, others carved into stone, but all represented the history of the people who wrote them.

Answer by Taizu
Yes, there are many books of the kind you’ve described that were written before 1700, even if you exclude (which your definition seems to do) books like those of Herodotus. The Chinese dynastic histories, beginning in the first and second centuries CE, for example, were typically compiled by a committee of scholars who used a wide range of records and sources in researching their histories.

Answer by ammianus
The first proper history book was ‘Histories’ by Herodotus,written between the 450s and 420s BC.

As it’s clearly a collection of (at least in part) historical facts put together in book form,it equally clearly fits your definition.

Thucydides ‘History of the Peloponnesian War’ is wholly a collection of history facts put into a book,and was written in the late 5th century BC.

So,it all began in the 5th century BC.