Prehistory

Protohistory protohistory , it. Frühgeschichte is a term common in foreign historical literature, but not rooted in Russian. It means a transitional period between the prehistoric era and the era of written history , when the culture or civilization in question has not yet created its own written language, but has already come into the attention of others with written cultures, and thus is witnessed in written documents.

Classical examples of proto-historical civilizations are the Aztecs , Chibcha , Incas , Mississippi culture and ancient pueblo in America, the early Slavs in ancient and Byzantine documents, Troy , various ancient peoples, mentioned in ancient Greek and ancient Roman sources, etc. As “conditionally proto-historical” we can consider civilizations that had their own written language, which, however, cannot be read at the current level of knowledge: Etruscans , Minoans , etc., China of the Shang Dynasty ^[1] . On the other hand, if the peoples or cultures mentioned in the sources were chronologically far enough from the time in which they were first described, and the ideas about them are strongly mythologized, then they should be considered prehistoric rather than protohistorical.

In German historical science, in addition to the term protohistory , the term early history is also used . Frühgeschichte . It covers the period from the emergence of the first states in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the beginning of the V century BC. e. when the first real historical works of the “father of history” Herodotus appear.