It is the discipline that records and analyzes past events.
Primitive peoples keep the past alive in songs and poems.
The ancient Egyptians and Chinese kept extensive records, but since these were never combined together into a connected narrative, they cannot be regarded as history either, though, again, the historian of today could find them extremely valuable for his own work. True history begins in Greece in the 5th century BC, and Herodotus is usually considered the first man to have written a proper historical work. He described the wars between Greece and Persia, and attempted to explain them as a clash between different kinds of states, and oriental autocracy and a league of Greek cities, who misunderstood and distrusted each other. In the 20th century historians have become increasingly skeptical of the idea that history accumulates more and more facts until, at last, the past can be perfectly known. There is a new self-consciousness about the writing of history, and new questioning of the historian's proper task.