The first logographoi made their debut in the mid-6th century B.C., in Ionia. These were compilers of genealogical, ethnographic and geographical material, and they relied on oral and written traditions, above all from Anatolia. These compilers made an attempt to organize the past in a historical way, writing in prose. What they were trying to do was to get past mythological, metaphysical conceptions of it. In so doing, they covered the same ground of rationalizing thought as the Ionian natural philosophers. Not that they stopped weaving myths into history in their work: with the result - according to Thucydides (1.21) - that "the logographoi ...were more interested in entertaining their audience than in telling them the truth".

Works by the logographoi can be divided into two genres. The first is the circumnavigation, where the course of some voyage made by the writer is described, with references to 1) practical experience (distance from one port to another; river estuaries; hazards; freshwater stations and so on), and 2) to the manners and customs of the peoples met with. One representative of this genre whom we know of is Scylax from Caryanda. He described a voyage made towards the end of the 6th century B.C. by command of Darius I. He sailed from the Indus to the Arabian Gulf. Unfortunately no more than a handful of fragments of this work have survived.

A second genre was the horoi, which were town chronicles. For the period before Herodotus we know of no writer in this genre. Charon from Lampsacus, who lived in the post-Persian war period, as well as writing two books (his Persica) on Persian history, also wrote another four with the title 'Horoi of the people of Lampsacus'. Some scholars believe that these were based on annals of older date. The most important of all the logographoi and precursors of Herodotus [-os] was Hecataeus from Miletus. He wrote four books of Genealogies and two books describing the Earth (Perambulation), to go with a map (Circuit of Earth).

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