Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and the Achaemenid Empire: Meditations on Bruce Lincoln’S Religion, Empire, and Torture1
ORIENTALISM, POSTCOLONIALISM, AND THE ACHAEMENID EMPIRE: MEDITATIONS ON BRUCE 1 LINCOLN’S RELIGION, EMPIRE, AND TORTURE HENRY P. COLBURN Benedetto Croce’s dictum that all history is contemporary history is nowhere better exemplified than in Bruce Lincoln’s 2007 book, Religion, empire, and torture: the case of Achaemenian Persia, with a postscript on Abu Ghraib. This book, despite its foregrounding of an ancient empire, is by Lincoln’s own admission the product of his ‘anguish and outrage concerning the American imperial adventure in Iraq’.2 But rather than criticizing American actions directly, he does so through an extended case study of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Though Lincoln’s main thesis merits much consideration, this case study is the focus of the present paper, because of the severe methodological flaws that inform it, and their potentially insidious consequences. Indeed, their insidiousness is made all the more worrisome because of the book’s largely uncritical reception. The ten Anglophone reviews known to me appear in a wide range of scholarly journals, many serving academic specialties far outside of classics, ancient history, and Near Eastern studies, and only two of them even recognize some of the methodological issues.3 Even more troubling, this book was the recipient of the 2007 Frank Moore Cross Award given by the American Schools of Oriental Research.4 This organization’s endorsement of such a misinformed and biased study demonstrates that despite the efforts of scholars in the field of Achaemenid studies, outdated and inappropriate ideas about the empire still persist among well informed and well meaning scholars of antiquity.
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