Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Histories by Herodotus is an account of the rise of the Persian Empire and the Greco-Persian Wars between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states in the 5th century BC. Herodotus also covers the customs, geography, and histories of many peoples encountered by the Persians, from Egypt to Scythia to India. The work is considered the founding text of history in Western literature.
Herodotus states his purpose at the opening of the work: to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, to preserve the fame of important achievements by both Greeks and non-Greeks, and to explain the causes of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks. He claims to have traveled extensively and conducted interviews to gather material.
The Histories is divided into nine books, conventionally named after the nine Muses: Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Urania, and Calliope. This division was made at some point after Herodotus composed the work and appears in all modern editions.
The oldest surviving manuscripts of the Histories are from the Byzantine period, dating to the 9th and 10th centuries CE. The most significant is the Codex Laurentianus (Plutei 70.03), a 10th-century manuscript. Early papyrus fragments are older, with some from the Oxyrhynchus collection datable to the 1st century CE.
Herodotus has been disputed since antiquity; critics including Cicero, Plutarch, and Duris of Samos called him unreliable or a myth-monger. However, archaeological discoveries have repeatedly supported his accounts, including the 1975 rediscovery of the city of Gelonus in Scythia and the recovery of a baris boat from the submerged Egyptian port of Thonis-Heracleion. Modern historians generally view the Histories as a valuable, if imperfect, source.
In Book Three, passages 102 to 105, Herodotus describes fox-sized furry ants in an eastern Indian province of the Persian Empire that unearth gold dust when digging their burrows, which local people then collect. French ethnologist Michel Peissel later identified the Himalayan marmot on the Deosai Plateau in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, as a possible match, since the plateau's ground is rich in gold dust and local Minaro people have historically collected it from marmot burrows.