Historiography

69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page xxxv HISTORIOGRAPHY ince very early times, human beings have had some sense of the past, both their own and that ofS their community or people. This is something that has distinguished us from other species. Having said that, historiography in the narrower sense of “intentional attempts to recover knowl- edge of and represent in writing true descriptions or narratives of past events” has had a rather briefer career throughout the world, though one more complex and variegated than most accounts allow. It is not possible in the space of a brief essay such as this to convey the entire richness of the human effort to recapture the past, but an effort must be made to summarize the historiographical traditions of many different regions. At least three major (in terms of their international scope, longevity, and influence) and a variety of minor independent traditions of historical thought and writing can be identified. The major ones are the Western (descended jointly from the classical Greek and Roman and, via the Old Testament, from the Hebraic), the Islamic (originating in the seventh century C.E.), and the Chi- nese. Minor ones include the various indigenous traditions of thinking about the past (not all of which involved writing), including ancient Indian, precolonial Latin American, African, and those arising in certain parts of east and Southeast Asia. The Western form (which would include modern Marxist Chinese writing) has predominated for a century or more in most of the world, but it would be a mistake to see that as either inevitable or as based on an innate intellectual superi- ority of method. Its hegemony springs much more from the great influence of Western colonial powers in various parts of the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and per- haps even more from the profound effect in the last hundred years of Western, and especially North American, cultural, linguistic, and economic influences. A consequence of the global dominance of Western academic historical practices is that not just history, but historiography, has been “written by the victors.” None of the major histories of historical writing produced in the last century addresses other historiographical traditions, un- doubtedly in part owing to linguistic difficulties. This has produced a thoroughly decontextual- ized and celebratory grand narrative of the rise of modern method that has only been challenged in recent years. It is thus critical that any new survey of historical writing not only pay serious at- tention to non-Western types of historical writing (and indeed to nonliterary ways in which the past was recorded and transmitted), but that it also steer clear of assuming that these were simply inferior forms awaiting the enlightenment of modern European-American methodology. Early Ideas of History in the Western Tradition Arguments can certainly be made for a sense of the past in ancient Egypt, and in particular an effort to memorialize the successive dynasties of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. An early specimen is the so-called Palermo stone, a fragmentary stele inscribed with king lists from predy- nastic times to the fifth dynasty (mid-third millennium B.C.E.); this was probably used by the much later Hellenized Egyptian Manetho in his own Aegyptiaca, very little of which has survived. The later Turin papyrus (c. 1300 B.C.E.) extends to the sixteenth century B.C.E. However, the lack of a written alphabet imposed limits on the capacity to convey the past; nor is it clear that Egypt- ian efforts at record keeping, though certainly serious, were deliberately aimed at constructing accounts of the past for the benefit of present and future generations. Elsewhere in the ancient Near East, various historical inscriptions and texts are attributable to the Hittites, Syrians, and Phoeni- cians. It is in Mesopotamia, however, that one finds the clearest early evidence of a deliberate human intention to write about the past. The successive peoples that inhabited the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, especially the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, generated the first type of writing in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas xxxv 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page xxxvi HISTORIOGRAPHY cuneiform and developed rudimentary forms for the representation of the past, such as king lists, annals, and chronicles. The oldest extant epic, that of the Uruk king Gilgamesh, though it re- counts largely legendary episodes, probably has some connection to historicity. Closer to a recog- nizable historical document is the Sumerian King List probably initiated in the twenty-second century B.C.E., and existing in several recensions. It stretches back into mythical antiquity but goes beyond a mere list in later times to indicate inquisitive uncertainty about the historicity of some rulers expressed in the utterance “Who was king? Who was not king?” It is also a deliberate at- tempt to present the historical record in a particular light, necessitated by the circumstances of the author’s own time. Various other forms of Sumero-Babylonian historical record exist, including building inscriptions, stele, and other durable media. Other genres, such as astronomical di- aries, played a part in establishing a precise chronological grid against which to record events, and both the Babylonians of the second millennium and their neo-Babylonian or Chaldean successors of the middle of the first millennium were keen astronomers and devoted listmakers. Other ancient peoples in the region authored historiographic documents of some variety. There are significant differences between these writings, but the focus of most was on maintaining a proper record of kings and their achievements—the Assyrian Eponymous Chronicle, for example, relays the annual military campaigns of its kings down to Sennacherib (r. 704–681 B.C.E.). While it would be foolish to impose modern Western standards of “objectivity” (themselves highly con- tested today) in assessing ancient forms of historical writing, subtle differences in this regard have been noted between Assyrian and Babylonian approaches. Assyrian royal annals are largely written in first-person bombastic prose, allegedly by the kings themselves. And whereas the Synchro- nous History of the Assyrians, in describing boundary disputes in the late second to early first millennium invariably blames the Babylonians, those accounts written by the Babylonians themselves are often more neutral. The neo-Babylonian and Chaldean periods produced further works such as the Babylonian Chronicle Series. The Persians, successors to Babylonian power in the sixth century B.C.E., would continue this historiographical activity, for instance in the multilingual Be- histun Inscription erected by Darius I (r. 521–486 B.C.E.). The latest Babylonian work is that of Berossus, a contemporary of the Egyptian Manetho in the third century B.C.E.; nothing of Berossus’s original work has survived though it was well known in Hellenistic and Roman times. What truly puts these writings into the realm of the historical is the evidence that successive works had to be based on what we would now call research—the examination, selection from, and collation of multiple earlier sources—rather than on any tradition of continuous record keeping. Many went beyond that to aspire to provide advice, counsel, or cautionary tales, a recurring motive through much of the global history of historical writing. One of the best-known examples of early Mesopotamian history is the Old Babylonian Weidner Chronicle, reaching back to early times but largely devoted to the Sargonic dynasty of Akkad in the twenty-fourth century B.C.E. This is one of the first historical works clearly designed with a didactic purpose, to recover and preserve the past for the edification of present and future, with a lesson attached, in this case the propagation of the cult of the god Marduk. The Weidner Chronicle’s account of Sargon I and his grandson Naram-Sin contrasts the godliness of the former with the disobedience to Marduk of the latter, with the consequence of the downfall of Akkad at the hands of Gutian barbarians. The alternation of divine favor and punishment, another frequent theme in historical writing, thus had an early start. It turned up again in the early seventh century B.C.E. when the later Assyrian de- feat of Babylon was ascribed to Marduk’s displeasure at recent kings, and it appears frequently throughout the travails of the children of Israel at the hands of foreign hosts depicted in the He- brew Bible. The Israelites (or Jews as they later became) were the other major people in the ancient Near East to develop historiography. The Old Testament or Hebrew Bible is now known to have been the work of several hands, and much of it originates from later periods such as the Davidic king- ship (tenth century B.C.E.) and the Babylonian Exile (late seventh–early sixth centuries B.C.E.). But in the early genealogies of Genesis and in the more chronological accounts of the Books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, one finds both an effort to memorialize the past accurately as a written record and a strong sense of the divine destiny of the Israelites as a chosen people, a lin- ear progress through which oscillates a recurrent cycle of triumph and misery as God chastises an erring people for disobedience, sin, or idolatry, and then delivers them from oppressors such as the Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, and Babylonians. The Hebrew-Judaic view of history and of time is one of the foundation stones of Christian historiography of the past two millennia. It is xxxvi New Dictionary of the History of Ideas 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page xxxvii HISTORIOGRAPHY an achievement all the more striking when one contrasts it with the relative dearth of Jewish secular historical writing during the millennium-and-a-half of Diaspora between Flavius Josephus (c.

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