© 2009 Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel
WHAT
IS ANCIENT HISTORY?
1. The ancients and us
We start with an obvious question: why study the
distant past? In every documented society, people have tried to understand themselves
by tracing their origins. In the eighteenth century, western Europeans
perceived that they were pulling away from the rest of
the world in terms of technology, wealth, and military power. Some of them felt
that an identity rooted in the Bible could not explain this. They augmented
that narrative of origins with a second, positing a distinct “Europeanness” that began in fifth-century-BC Greece. They
contrasted this Greek heritage with the supposedly static, ancient societies of
China, India, and the Middle East.
Classics and Biblical studies become the twin
pillars of theories of Euro-American identity. Both fields were distinct from
the other branches of world history that developed in the nineteenth century.
Many classical historians felt that their job was to explain the origins of
western civilization, while other historians worked to show where the rest of
the world had gone wrong. The founding fathers of the social sciences
(particularly Marx and Weber) built many of these assumptions into their
models.
This view of the field has fallen apart since 1945,
as academics found it increasingly difficult to define the core issue as being
to explain Euro-American superiority. By the 1980s, some scholars even claimed
that any study of ancient Greece and Rome was automatically part of a
Eurocentric charter myth.
Much in this critique of the eighteenth-century
model was justified; but in the same years, archaeologists and historical
sociologists were putting together a very different framework for understanding
the evolution of human societies on a worldwide scale. Their models emphasized
a series of great transitions—the agricultural and urban revolutions in the
Middle East, the creation of empire and forms of monotheism across Eurasia, and
the scientific and industrial revolutions in northwest Europe.
These debates have put exciting new questions on the
agenda. Some scholars argue that human societies have the forms they currently
do because of geographical and ecological differences operating 13,000 years
ago (e.g., Jared Diamond); others, that there were few real differences between
agrarian empires before the eighteenth century AD (e.g., Jack Goldstone). The
great challenge now facing Greco-Roman historians is to make sense of where
their field fits into these questions. Should it remain distinct? Or be part of
a larger inquiry embracing all pre-modern societies? Or
something of both?
Ancient history is changing faster today than at any
time in the last hundred years, but few of these developments have reached
introductory books for undergraduates. In this volume, we aim to provide a
brief explanation of how ancient historians work, what the major issues are in
the field, and how the field is contributing to understanding human
development.
2. Doing ancient history
We divide this chapter into
three parts: the nature of the evidence, what ancient historians have done with
it, and how they are now trying to go beyond their traditional limitations.
(a) What survives to work
with?
We review the main sources.
We start with the traditional literary texts. Much of nineteenth-century
ancient history was really just the explication of authors like Thucydides and
Tacitus, who were thought to embody exemplary European qualities. We explain
the evidence, the skills it calls for (philology, literary sensitivity), and
the professional revolution in these skills in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
Antiquarians gathered other
non-literary written documents (particularly coins, Greek and Latin inscriptions
on stone, papyri from Egypt, and clay tablets from the Middle East). We
describe these sources and the skills that have been developed for their study.
Finally, we turn to archaeological evidence, and the rapid advances in its
interpretation since the 1960s.
We close this section by
briefly comparing the Greco-Roman evidence to evidence from other areas
(particularly China, India, the Middle East, and the New World) to give a sense
of what is peculiar about this evidence and what is common to all ancient
societies.
(b) What do we do with it?
Next we look at the kinds of
work that have been done, sketching developments from Gibbon to now. We
emphasize the progressive narrowing of legitimate research toward political
narrative history in the nineteenth century, the split between social
scientists’ use of ancient history and professional historians’ concentration
on details, the partial rise of socioeconomic history in the 1960s-70s, and the
turn toward postmodernism in the 1990s. We emphasize throughout how the nature
of the evidence constrained the questions people asked and constantly imposed
limits.
(c) How can we go further?
We close with three emerging
directions in attempts to get past these limitations—first, the combination of
textual and archaeological evidence; second, the use of comparative evidence to
set parameters; and third, postmodern approaches to art and the literary
sources.
3. What happened in ancient history?
In this chapter we describe
the major problems and controversies in the field today. We do this in roughly
chronological order, though some of the issues are very long-term ones.
We begin by suggesting that
one thing that still fascinates people about the Greco-Roman past, and which
largely accounts for the sharp increase in the field’s interest in
eighteenth-century Europe, is the feeling that this world had a lot in common
with modernity. Greeks and Romans wrestled with many of the same problems of
citizenship, freedom, and equality as the moderns, and
(unlike most ancient societies) grounded authority in politics more than in
religion.
We hope to focus on ten
major problems:
(i)
the origins of complex society in the
third-millennium-BC Aegean and its relationship to the Near East
(ii) the
collapse of Bronze Age civilization after 1200 BC and the emergence of the
Greek city-states in the eighth century BC
(iii) why
religious authority was so weak in these Iron Age city-states (compared to the
Middle East and Egypt), and the relationship between this and the “Ionian
Enlightenment,” male democracy, art, historiography, and philosophy
(iv) the
relationships between male freedom, the low status of women, and mass chattel
slavery in Greece
(v) whether
the empires created by Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Middle East were
colonial and oppressive or multicultural and open
(vi) how
and why Rome conquered the entire Mediterranean basin
(vii) why
these conquests led to the collapse of the Roman Republic in an orgy of
violence, and its replacement with a monarchy
(viii) how
the ancient economy worked, whether it produced sustained economic growth, and
why there was no scientific or industrial revolution
(ix) how
the early Church grew from a few dozen members to fifty million
(x) the
fall of the Roman Empire and the transformation of antiquity to the Middle Ages
4. So what?
We close by returning to the
opening questions: was there something distinctive about Greco-Roman
civilization compared to other pre-modern societies? Can we explain the shape
of human societies today by looking to Greco-Roman antiquity?
After recapping the
difficulty of creating a single model of Greco-Roman history, we offer a
sweeping review of the major similarities and differences between this period
and other ancient societies (particularly in China, India, the Middle East, and
the New World). We emphasize the secularism of Greco-Roman societies between
about 700 BC and AD 300 and the peculiar forms of their culture, but put this
into the context of the broad similarities between all ancient societies. We
try to offer a balanced conclusion - that irresistible ecological forces
operating from the end of the last Ice Age did mean that similar advanced
agrarian societies would emerge across Eurasia; but not that they would
necessarily develop in the particular way they have done in the last 2000
years.
We conclude that the
importance of ancient history lies in taking part in a worldwide comparative
history, but without losing sight of what was unique about Greece and Rome.