What is Ancient History? Ian Morris & Walter Scheidel Abstract: Every society has told stories about ancient times, but contemporary ancient history was the prod- uct of two main developments. The first was the invention of writing, which made scholarly study of the past possible, and the second was the explosion of knowledge about the world from the eighteenth century on- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 ward. Europeans responded to this explosion by inventing two main versions of antiquity: the first, an evo- lutionary model, was global and went back to the origins of humanity; and the second, a classical model, treated Greece and Rome as turning points in world history. These two views of antiquity have competed for two hundred and fifty years, but in the twenty-first century, the evidence and methods available to -an cient historians are changing faster than at any other time since the debate began. We should therefore ex- pect the balance between the two theories to shift dramatically. We close by considering some possible areas of engagement. Ancient history is the study of beginnings, and is thus organized around two central questions: 1) how to define the subject matter whose beginning is be- ing studied; and 2) what that beginning means for the world that the studiers live in. Across the centu- ries, the answers ancient historians have offered to these questions have changed significantly, largely in response to new evidence and new methods. But now, in the twenty-first century, the evidence and IAN MORRIS is the Jean and Re­ methods available are changing faster than at any becca Willard Professor of Clas­ sics at Stanford University and a time since the eighteenth century, and we should Fellow of the Stanford Archaeol­ expect the answers ancient historians offer to do the ogy Center. same. Ancient history has always been with us because, WALTER SCHEIDEL is the Dick­ ason Professor in the Humanities so far as we know, every society has had stories about and Professor of Classics and His­ its beginning. In the absence of writing, howev- tory at Stanford University. He is er, ancient history could never be much more than also a Catherine R. Kennedy and myth-making. Such stories usually describe the Da n iel L. Grossman Fellow in Hu­- world’s creation and peopling, as well as the origins man Biology. of the particular group telling the myth. Since most (*See endnotes for complete con­ adults in the world were still illiterate as recently tributor biographies.) as 1960, for most of our time on earth, these hazy, © 2016 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00381 113 What is once-upon-a-time worlds–worlds which of radicals, especially in France and Scot- Ancient Aboriginal Australians describe with the land, were responding to the anomalies by History? won derfully evocative term “the dream- proposing a new paradigm. time”–were the only ancient history pos- What if, they asked, the hunter-gather- sible. ers and herders that missionaries, traders, Writing introduced vastly superior evi- and conquerors had met in other conti- dence for antiquity, and every literate civ- nents were actually survivals of how every - ilization has produced its caste of ancient one had once lived? What if, rather than historians. Remarkably, though, almost all representing the beginning, Jesus and the of these groups did much the same as other moral exemplars of antiquity were their predecessors with the available data, really just actors within one stage of histo- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 choosing a particular piece of their own ry? And what if history had really begun ancient history and pronouncing it exem- with a worldwide state of nature and had plary. The best example of this is proba- then improved, until humanity reached bly the case of China, where, by the first the heights of enlightened Paris and Ed- century bce, scholars had already nom- inburgh? inated the sage Confucius, who lived in This wild new theory, which its cham- the fifth centurybce , as an ancient par- pions called philosophical history, shook up agon of virtue. This anointing took place salons all over Europe. But by the 1750s, it even though–or perhaps because–Con- was already generating a backlash. Philo- fucius himself claimed merely to be reviv- sophical history, its many critics (particu- ing the virtues of a still earlier paragon, larly in Germany and England) observed, the Duke of Zhou, of the eleventh cen- had not actually proven that humanity had tury bce: “I transmit but do not create,” climbed from foraging, through herding Confucius wrote, “I am an admirer of an- and farming, on to the current age of com- tiquity.”1 Confucius’s popularity went up merce. To them, the whole endeavor should and down, but until well into the twenti- really be called conjectural history, not philo- eth century, the texts attributed to him re- sophical history. mained at the center of elite education in What was needed, these critics argued, China. was not just-so stories about civilization’s emergence from so-called “savagery,” but In this way, each civilization produced its serious scholarship–like that being done own version of exemplary ancient history, at the time on the literature and sculp- and until the eighteenth century, no seri- ture of ancient Greece and Rome. Faced ous challenge to this way of thinking about with the mass of new facts being generat- the distant past appeared. Only then, and ed by philologists and connoisseurs, con- only in Western Europe, did new facts jectures about hunter-gatherers were re- make such stories of beginnings seem in- vealed as not just unprovable, but also un- adequate, and thinkers responded by com- important. What really mattered to these ing up with two new ideas that have dom- reformers was that two-and-a-half-mil- inated ancient history ever since. The ba- lennia earlier, the Greeks had invented a sic problem–and opportunity–was that unique civilization based on the princi- ever since Marco Polo came back from ples of reason, freedom, and beauty. The Cathay in 1295, evidence had accumulat- towering intellects of ancient Greece– ed that there were things in heaven and Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides–had earth that just did not fit into Europe’s ex- wrenched humanity out of its long slum- emplary history; and by the 1720s, groups ber. This, and not conjectures about Am- 114 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences azonian hunters, was the beginning we never existed, human life, and the right Ian should be studying. conduct of it, would have been in their es- Morris 5 & Walter sentials exactly what they are now.” Scheidel In one sense, classicists of the eighteenth Many evolutionists, including Marx and century could legitimately be accused of Weber, granted Greece and Rome a big- trying to go back to an exemplary mod- ger place in the story than this. However, el of antiquity, but in another sense, they by 1900, it was clear that cultural evolution, were moving far beyond it. They accept- as the theory came to be known, was not ed the emphasis of conjectural historians going to collapse like conjectural history; on comparison with the new data coming it was able to organize far too many facts, in from other continents, but insisted that and its theoretical frameworks were far too Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 what that comparison actually showed was robust for that. The invention of radiocar- that the Greeks and Romans were incom- bon dating in the 1940s and the calibration parable. When Johann Joachim Winckel- revolution of the 1970s provided a global mann in 1755 contrasted the “noble sim- framework for comparisons, and fossil and plicity and quiet grandeur” of the Greeks DNA data pushed the story of mankind’s with the decadence of Etruscan and Egyp- beginnings back millions of years. tian art, he saw it as evidence for the com- Despite the high quality of much of plete superiority of the Greeks; and by the scholarship being done on Greece and 1808, Wilhelm von Humboldt was ready to Rome, the twentieth century was one go much further.2 “Our study of Greek his- long retreat for the classical vision of an- tory,” he wrote, is “a matter quite different cient history, in part because evolutionism from our other historical studies. For us, the proved vastly more exportable on the world Greeks step outside the circle of history. stage. Herbert Spencer was one of the first We fail entirely to recognize our relation- English-language nonfiction writers to be ship to them if we dare to apply the stan- translated into Chinese and Japanese, and dards to them which we apply to the rest his work quickly spawned Asian imitators. of world history. [F]rom the Greeks we European classical scholarship did have take something more than earthly–some- a significant impact on the methods of thing godlike.”3 Asian ancient historians (China’s “Doubt- Unable to compete with classicists’ meth- ing Antiquity” movement and Japan’s To- odological sophistication and weight of kyo and Kyoto Schools all drew inspira- data, conjectural history collapsed in the tion from European Quellenforschung, the early nineteenth century. However, it is philological analysis of sources) but its hard to keep a good theory down, and as in- core claims about Greco-Roman excep- formation from other fields of scholarship tionalism were largely ignored.