“A glance facing the past immerses us in the secrets of human existence,” said Karl Jaspers. And indeed, the need to explore the past appeared, obviously, in such times, where only archeology ventures to look. It is known that chronicles were one of the first written monuments of Chinese, Egyptian, Babylonian and other ancient civilizations. But already with the advent of such records, a lack of a chronicle approach began to be felt, and from the search for the meaning of events and the connection between individual facts, methods of studying history were born.
However, no theorizing can do without structures and categories that are no longer historical facts. This raises the problem of the relationship between the event and the category, which summarizes the facts. The first systems of categories known to us, which had both historical and philosophical significance, come from mythological tales of the genesis of the world. They divided the time into mythological (sacred) and historical (profane), because for them time was synonymous with "corruption". However, the methods of studying history were unknown to this era, because mythological thinking excluded the concept of transition from one society to another and did not recognize either society or personality. In addition, the myth, when speaking, neglected explanations, because revelation and explanation are phenomena that are different in nature.
A closer understanding and explanation of history originates in the epic, where under the mythological shell the history of a certain people is revealed, as, for example, in the Bible or the Iliad. Thus, even before the scientific methods of studying history arose, historical consciousness appeared. This is an awareness of time, the changes that are taking place with people, states and the world. It was characteristic of Egyptian, Jewish, Chinese and ancient historians. No wonder almost simultaneously there lived such vivid personalities whom the descendants called the “fathers of history” - Herodotus and Thucydides in Greece and Sima Qian in China. They laid the foundation for the interpretation of human behavior in the context of time, and also tried to give events a certain meaning.
These scholars also have the honor of creating different types of historiography. Thucydides created a scientific and pragmatic method, a careful selection of facts and reliable evidence, and Herodotus created a historical retrospective and explanation, the ability to understand and formulate the deep essence of what constitutes a historical process. This, as the famous thinker believed, was the course of world history, the meaning of which he tried to draw. We can say that, barely born, ancient historiography began to draw the field of interaction between different peoples and cultures - barbarians and Hellenes, barbarians and Han Chinese (Chinese). This field is a constant struggle for power and influence. But not only confrontation determines the course of events.
The methods of studying history that were used by ancient and ancient writers led them to the conclusion that underground, anonymous and incomprehensible to us forces that people usually interpret as coincidences are hidden behind individual facts. Historians described them in two ways.
On the one hand, the causes of events are rooted in human nature, in the thirst for power, or in certain socio-psychological interests. Many Greek and Roman scholars associated the causes of success and failure with the internal unity or contradictions of the demos, polis, people, state. On the other hand, more powerful forces intervene in the course of history - fate, destiny. In the era of Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire , the theory of the universality of history finally dominated. A prominent representative of this type of thinking was Polybius. In his work, he tried not only to generalize and analyze what determined the fate of this or that state, but also to connect political theory and facts.
Thus, we can conclude that the first methodology of historical science appeared back in ancient times, when the idea was first expressed that history, like any science, should open up regular patterns inherent in the course of human affairs in time.
However, ancient historiography believed that the course of these affairs is formed according to certain, but not very well-known or understandable to us laws. This process could be understood as regression, degradation, or the cyclic cycle. Hesiod gave one of the first periodizations of history in Europe on qualitative changes between the five “centuries” associated with the decline of morality. Polybius believed that history develops in a circle of successive changes in various political regimes - democracy, oligarchy and tyranny. But almost all ancient historians and philosophers were sure that they live in a period of terrible decline, in anticipation of catastrophic changes.