Though the etiology of seizures has been attributed to many causes through history, their described semiologies are remarkably similar, tracing back over 4000 years. Through these millennia, seizure semiology has been described using much of the language on which we base our current terminology.

The first description of seizures was made by the Sumerians in early Mesopotamia, however it was the elaborate description of the Babylonians 1000 years later that first described the semiology of aura, several seizure-types, and even lateralizing/localizing signs. Later in Greece, during the Hippocratic era, seizures were first proposed as derived from the brain rather than from ethereal beings, heritable rather than contagious, and signs were first documented as being localizable to the contralateral cerebral hemisphere. The Roman physician Galen was the first to formally define and categorize seizures based on semiology and the first to coin the term aura. Later during the Roman era, the first elaborate and specific description of the generalized tonic-clonic seizure as well as the first description of special sense hallucinatory auras was documented by Aretaeus of Cappadocia. Lastly, in 18^th and 19^th century France and Britain, several physicians first described the semiologies of absence seizures and infantile spasms.