Islamic autobiography is distinctive for its universal ancestry-opening

Evidence

What sort of pattern, if any, emerges from this kind of first-person writing, memoirs, autobiographical fragments, and the like, of which I have selected merely the high points? Certain things are almost standard. These writers begin with ancestry, although in Greco-Roman antiquity only Josephus does so. In Islamic autobiographical writing, this opening is practically universal and in­ cludes as many generations as possible. In extreme cases people will go back to Adam, but certainly as far back as ancient Arabia. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1916

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the standard Islamic autobiographical convention through the ancestry-opening formula.
• QUESTION: Why only Josephus in Greco-Roman antiquity — is the ancestry genealogical convention traceable to a particular biblical or Arabian narrative source worth tracing?