International relations and political history approches within Herodotus and Herodotus's historiograpy

A historian of Classical Antiquity and the author of The Histories, which is translated into Turkish as Tarih, Herodotus of Halicarnassus has received an ambivalent reception in the literature over the 2500 years; he has been either criticized damagingly as the "father of lies" or has received lavish praise to the extent of the title of the "father of history." The root causes for the inconsistency of approaches to Herodotus's scholarship are the question concerning the reliability of Herodotusian historiography and the question of locating his scholarship in the discipline of history that has been evolving over time. That being said, while Herodotus's The Histories has been long integral to the scholarly debates and the establishment of professorial chairs as a special investigation topic of many other social sciences disciplines in the world (e.g., history, anthropology, geography, ethnography, and etc.), it has been largely overlooked in the Turkish academia and, instead, the body of works of dubitable validity have still been in use. The first objective of this study is to show the Herodotus historiography with an emphasis on the innovations and approaches Herodotus brought into the discipline of history along with its centuries-long scholarly impact and its unique position within the Political Historiography (PH) field. To attain this objective, the author attempts to determine the position of Herodotus in the discipline over the arc of history by examining the historical processes of the discipline of historiography. The second objective of this thesis is to detect the traces of certain core areas of the International Relations (IR) discipline (i.e., IR theories, concepts, politics, and society) and of PH in Herodotus's The Histories and to unravel the scholarly messages that Herodotus would like to convey to his readers. By contributing to the literature on Herodotus's life, his peculiar approach to historiography, and the analysis of his scholarly works, this study intends to fulfill a significant gap in the discipline. It is suggested that the Histories, which had been extant before Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian Wars, should be acknowledged as one of the first seminal works of the history of IR and PH. As an interdisciplinary study, the Histories should be recognized as a critical and valuable source material of IR, which has been long hallmarked as an interdisciplinary field of study.