Cologne (Köln), Germany

Prehistory and early history

Ur- und Frühgeschichte

Master's
Language: GermanStudies in German
Qualification: Master
Kind of studies: full-time studies
University website: www.Uni-Koeln.de
History
History (from Greek ἱστορία, historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory. It is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians.
Prehistory
Human prehistory is the period between the use of the first stone tools c. 3.3 million years ago and the invention of writing systems. The earliest writing systems appeared c. 5,300 years ago, but writing was not used in some human cultures until the 19th century or even later. The end of prehistory therefore came at very different dates in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently.
History
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, "The Hero as Divinity"
History
The greater part of what passes for diplomatic history is little more than the record of what one clerk said to another clerk.
G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936)
Prehistory
But the most remarkable thing about prehistoric naturalism is not that it is older than the geometric style, which makes so much more of a primitive impression, but that it already reveals all the typical phases of development through which art has passed in modern times and is not in any sense the merely instinctive, static, a-historical phenomenon which scholars obsessed with geometric and rigorously formal art declare it to be. This is an art which advances from a linear faithfulness to nature, in which individual forms are still shaped somewhat rigidly and laboriously, to a more nimble and sparkling, almost impressionistic technique.
Arnold Hauser. The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999
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