Pre-Islamic civilizations preserved foreigners’ histories mainly through their own authors, and neglected them

Evidence

The Greeks were not particularly interested in other people’s history. There were books written about other civilizations, but they were compiled mainly by writers coming from those civilizations, such as the Babylonian Berossos on Babylon and the Egyptian Manetho on Egypt. It is surely significant that these books have not survived, but are known only from quotations. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1943

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The survival of historical records is itself a political act — only histories written by the dominant civilization’s own authors endured. A dense observation about historiography as power.