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Cross-Cultural Interactions in Herodotus' Histories: Information Exchange and Cultural Expression

Abstract

While the Histories is telling the story of the Persian wars, it still contains significant ethnographic interest that has not been fully explored yet. This dissertation explores the narratives surrounding all the meetings between different cultural groups in the Histories, and proposes a typology for examining these different types of interaction. This typology focuses on three categories relating to cultural information that is shared between groups: information assimilated, information distorted, and information hidden. By sorting interactions into these categories, it is possible to see more clearly the kind of systematic thinking underlying Herodotus’ presentation of other cultural groups, how those interactions propel his narrative forward, and finally, they offer a new way to define the construction of the Histories as a narrative.

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