thumb|Historia (Allegory of History).
By Nikolaos Gysis (1892).

History is the study of the past, with special attention to the written record of the activities of human beings over time. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns of cause and effect that determine events. Historians debate the nature of history and the lessons history teaches.A famous quote by George Santayana has it that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The stories common to a particular culture, but not supported by external sources (such as the legends surrounding King Arthur) are usually classified as cultural heritage rather than the "disinterested investigation" needed by the discipline of history.

Etymology

The Earth's history comes from Greek ἱστορία (historia), from the Proto-Indo-European *wid-tor-, from the root *weid-, "to know, to see". This root is also present in the English words wit, wise, wisdom, vision, and idea, in the Sanskrit word veda, and in the Slavic word videti and vedati, as well as others. (The asterisk before a word indicates that it is a hypothetical construction, not an attested form.)

thumb|left|History
Frederick Dielman (1896).

The Ancient Greek word , historía, means "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation". It was in that sense that Aristotle used the word in his , Peri Ta Zoa Istória or, in Latinized form, Historia Animalium.Ferrater-Mora, José. Diccionario de Filosofia. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1994. The term is derived from , hístōr meaning wise man, witness, or judge. We can see early attestations of in Homeric Hymns, Heraclitus, the Athenian ephebes' oath, and in Boiotic inscriptions (in a legal sense, either "judge" or "witness," or similar). The spirant is problematic, and not present in cognate Greek eídomai ("to appear"). The form historeîn, "to inquire", is an Ionic derivation, which spread first in Classical Greece and ultimately over all of Hellenistic civilization.

It was still in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the late 16th century, when he wrote about "Natural History". For him, historia was "the knowledge of objects determined by space and time", that sort of knowledge provided by memory (while science was provided by reason, and poetry was provided by fantasy).