P.S. It’s rather telling that the word ‘history’ comes from the Greek
istoria ‘inquiry’ - knowledge acquired by investigation and research.
But when you go to other cultures, their words for (their concept of) ‘history’ isn’t the same. In Chinese for example, the character for ‘history’ is 史. It could either be a combination of 中 (‘middle’, ‘inside’) and 手/又 (‘hand’), or it’s a pictograph of a hand holding a sort of writing implement (either a brush or a
bamboo slip?) In other words, it represented someone who wrote something: a piece of writing, a record, a chronicle.
Chinese Etymology 字源
In fact, the character 史 is related to
事 ‘business’, ‘matter’, ‘thing’, ‘event’ (i.e. someone who gives out a piece of writing, or a matter or an event which is written down) and
吏/使 ‘government official, magistrate’ / ‘messenger, envoy’ (i.e. someone who carries or delivers the piece of writing, or someone writing what was said from the mouth).
It’s said that the original meaning of 史 was ‘scribe’ or ‘chronicler’, i.e, someone (吏) who recorded events and matters (事). It eventually came to mean the chronicle itself due to the influence of
Sima Qian’s chronicles (145/135-86 BC). The term 歷史 (currently used today to mean ‘history’) is a combination of 史 and 歷 ‘to experience’: in other words, a ‘chronicle of experiences’. (Note in East Asia, much of what was called ‘history’ is actually closer to ‘propaganda’: they are chronicles which are designed to confer and uphold a ruler’s legitimacy and right to rule. Note that East Asian historians were also not above “fictionalising” or using what would be classified in the West as ‘myths’ in their records.)
Sanskrit, as mentioned, has
itihāsa (
iti +
ha +
asa “so indeed it was”). The ancient Indians applied the term to narrated events which were about the past, with no care whether it was - from the Western perspective - ‘history’ or ‘myth’. There is also
purāṇa (‘ancient’), which was basically anything that was ‘old’: stories of ‘the old days’ - again, with no clear distinction from the Western POV between ‘history’ and ‘myth’ - dogmas, rituals, moral codes. In other words, a sort of encyclopedia of ‘ancient’ lore and belief.
In fact, I just noticed that in a number of cultures, their word for ‘history’ is either the same word as ‘story’ or ‘tale’ or even ‘conversation’ or ‘anecdote’ (for example, the Old Norse word
saga - which survives today in Icelandic; the Tagalog word
kasaysayan, which comes from the verb
saysayin ‘to tell’, ‘to relate’; Ilocano
pakasaritaan, from
sarita ‘tale’, ‘story’, ‘conversation’, cf. Tagalog
salita ‘word’ - both ultimately come from Sanskrit
cārita ‘career’, ‘deed’, ‘act’ via Old Malay
cerita ‘tale’, ‘story’) or the word for ‘past’. (Estonian has sort of both:
ajalugu, from
aeg ‘time’ +
lugu ‘story’.)
In other words, these cultures really don’t/didn’t share the scientific precision that the Greeks had (
istoria = the result of investigating, researching, comparing organizing information about past events): ‘history’ was more like stories of the past
per se, usually ones that was handed down from their ancestors. In that sense, it is actually closer to the original meaning of another Greek word:
mythos. (It’s telling that many languages simply adopted the word
historia into their own languages than give a native equivalent.)
)
). To them, the Hindus seemed to have always mixed up their human heroes with their gods. Even ‘historical’ elements like chronologies of kings and dynasties are mixed in with the fantastic and the supernatural - what they dismissed as ‘myth’.
You asked about the Quirinius question 4 times and I thought you might be genuinely interested in a plausible answer. I might have guessed wrong.
hanziyuan.net
- is gospel truth: one side attacks the Bible for failing to hold up to modern ‘scientific’ and ‘historical’ standards, and the other side desperately tries to make the Bible hold up to modern ‘scientific’ and ‘historical’ standards - not always with the best of results.)