Ancient history is the study of the written past from the beginning of recorded human history in the Old World until the Early Middle Ages in Europe and the Qin Dynasty in China.

The period following these events includes the Imperial era in China and the period of the Middle Kingdoms in India; The span of recorded history altogether is roughly 5,000 years, with Sumerian cuneiform emerging from the protoliterate period around the 30th century BC being the oldest form of writing discovered so far. This is the beginning of history, as opposed to prehistory, according to the definition used by most historians.WordNet Search - 3.0, "History"

The term classical antiquity is often used to refer to ancient history since the beginning of recorded Greek history in about 776 BC (First Olympiad). This coincides, roughly, with the traditional date of the founding of Rome in 753 BC, the beginning of the history of ancient Rome. Although the ending date of ancient history is disputed, Western scholars use the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476, or the death of the emperor Justinian I, or the coming of Islam and the rise of Charlemagne as the end of ancient European history.

The study of ancient history

The fundamental difficulty of studying ancient history is the fact that only a fraction of it has been documented and only a fraction of those recorded histories have survived into the present day.Gardner, P. (1892). New chapters in Greek history, historical results of recent excavations in Greece and Asia Minor. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Page 1+. It is also imperative to consider the reliability of the information obtained from these records. Literacy was not widespread in almost any culture until long after the end of ancient history, so there were few people capable of writing histories. Even those written histories which were produced were not widely distributed; the ancients, not having the luxury of a printing press had to make copies of books by hand.

The Roman Empire was one of the ancient world's most literate cultures, but many works by its most widely read historians are lost. For example, Livy, a Roman historian who lived in the 1st century BC, wrote a history of Rome called Ab Urbe Condita ("From the Founding of the City") in 144 volumes; only 35 volumes still exist, although short summaries of most of the rest do exist. Indeed, only a minority of the work of any major Roman historian has survived.

Historians have two major avenues which they take to better understand the ancient world: archaeology and the study of source texts. Primary sources have been described as those sources closest to the origin of the information or idea under study. Primary sources have been distinguished from secondary sources, which often cite, comment on, or build upon primary sources.