History and Honesty

History and Honesty

The word history is most commonly used to express a thing that has already happened. So one can say that the mankind LIVES the history. But the term history does not mean only this - it means much more: it can also mean a kind of science, that has a growing importance in the developed world.

But why has history as science such a big importance?

It's because of its educational meaning. The old Romans used to say: historia vitae magistra est. This means that history is the teacher of life. We all learn from the mistakes that we've made in the past. The utmost one can hope not to do is to repeat the mistakes made in the history. The same stands for the whole humankind. But as it seems the humankind is not so smart: it repeats the mistakes made even more times in history - for example wars.

The history as science had begun to exist within the first countries. With the formation of the first countries appeared also the need for more organized and effective justice. It was not anymore self-evident that the prosecutor was also the judge. The documents for contracts, inheriting and other legal matters were needed. The documents needed to be written and with written laws and documents there appeared also the need for archives, the fundamental history source. So the people not only lived the history, they've begun to write it. The history as science was born.

The history had experienced further development in the times of ancient Greeks. Two of their historians were of great importance for the future of the history: Herodot and Tukidid. Their work contained mostly the descriptions of the Greek - Persian wars. Herodot is important because of the structure of his books and essays: his works were short and brief so he didn't involve with mythic descriptions of the facts. With Tukidid the history had begun to exist as science. He acquainted the rule that a historian should always first research the facts and causes of the happening and yet then describe it in his works. Not all of the modern historians stick to this rule and maybe that is one of the causes for nowadays problems we must face.

Next step in the history of the history as science is the history-telling of ancient Romans. I mentioned that their principle thought was that we all learn on our failures, so a nation learns on its history.