Herodotus of Halicarnassus, a Greek city on the coast of what is now Turkey, wrote the first great narrative history in the West: why Greeks and Persians came to war, and a tour of the world he could reach. Book 1 starts in Lydia, in western Asia Minor, with Croesus, the rich king who asked an Athenian sage named Solon who was happiest, misread an oracle — a god’s riddling answer — and lost his empire to Cyrus of Persia.

Croesus thought the god had promised him victory if he crossed a river. The empire he destroyed was his own. Cyrus, the Persian founder, takes the Lydian capital and pulls him from a pyre. Babylon falls when the river is drawn off its bed. Tomyris, a queen of the steppe, fills a skin with blood and gives the dead Cyrus his fill of it. You do not need the names already. This is where history as a genre begins: inquiry, wandering, and the idea that great houses fall.