The 'Father of History' -- the first extended prose work of history in the Western tradition, recounting the Greco-Persian Wars alongside a vast survey of the peoples and lands Herodotus encountered or heard about.
Herodotus wrote the Histories in the 5th century BCE, and the book is often credited as the founding work of history as a discipline distinct from myth or epic -- though Herodotus himself mixes careful eyewitness reporting with secondhand travelers' tales, myth, and outright fabrication in ways that later, stricter historians (starting with his near-contemporary Thucydides) found frustrating. At its core, the Histories tells the story of the Greco-Persian Wars, but Herodotus constantly digresses into ethnography and geography -- describing Egyptian customs, Scythian nomads, and the vast Persian Empire itself -- producing something closer to a survey of the known world than a narrow military history.