ABSTRACT
The first answer to the question of why we do history-why we write about the past or study it-must be, as Hume asserts in the quotation above, that it provides incomparable ‘amusement’. It is intrinsically interesting, and we want ourselves and others to be entertained by it. This is probably the earliest of motivations. An account of the Trojan War had been passed on by word of mouth long before the poet Homer committed it to writing, and both the oral and written traditions of that
history were no doubt primarily intended to give ‘amusement’ to the listeners and readers. Other countries and cultures, too, have maintained links with their past by means of such informal ‘historians’, and some continue to do so. So, for example, in the main square of Marrakesh in the late twentieth century, a historian, or teller of traditional tales, still regularly entertains a circle of variously aged Moroccans; and that sight could be paralleled in many other places.
