Printer-friendly versionSchool of Historical Studies
The History of Historical Practice and the Study of the Middle Ages
By Paul Antony Hayward
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A leaf from the Later Winchcombe Annals (London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B.I, fol. 23v). The layout of these annals—the wide margins that have been left for the insertion of alternative versions of the items listed in the central panel— suggests that this is a working draft. Yet, the presence of decoration—of highlights, rubricated initials, and illustrations—implies that this copy and its many contradictions were meant to endure unresolved. |
A natural starting point for any attempt to know a past society is its histories—the texts with which its members recorded what had happened and was happening in their world. Many precious witnesses of this kind have survived from medieval Europe, but they are not easily used to answer the questions that modern historians would like to ask.
In essence, three types of historical writing flourished in the Middle Ages: chronicles, hagiography, and the rhetorical monograph. The first category refers to seemingly simple lists of events or, to use the current jargon, “factoids.” These texts usually arrange their factoids in some sort of chronological order; many assign them to the anni, or years, in which they took place, for which reason they are often called “annals.” The second type comprises records of things that God has done in this world, through the grace that he has bestowed on his saints and their devotees. The third category refers to narratives that celebrate or criticize the acts of rulers, dynasties, or communities.
All three types clash with modern ways of thinking. Hagiographical texts baffle, because they are the most overtly empiricist and yet, it often seems, the most unreliable. They ask us to believe that God was an active presence in the life of a certain saint and his or her people, that whenever he or she requested divine help he provided diverse wonders, extending from food and water in times of need to the resurrection of the dead. They ask their readers to accept as absolute fact events that most of us find implausible.
Chronicles favor the mundane, but many incorporate miracle stories, and they typically lack two qualities that modern readers require of a proper historical text: “narrativity” and a metahistorical voice. That is, their authors fail to guide their readers with comments that point them toward a particular interpretation—they fail to connect events in ways that tell stories and explain how one gave rise to the next. The third type, on the other hand, has these “missing” elements in excess.
The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Kingdom in Arabia
By Glen W. Bowersock
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The negus Kaleb celebrated his campaign in Arabia with an inscription set up in Axum. The text is in classical Ethiopic but written in South Arabian script (right to left). Note the cross at the left end of the first line. |
In these turbulent times in the Middle East, I have found myself working on the rise and fall of a late antique Jewish kingdom along the Red Sea in the Arabian peninsula. Friends and colleagues alike have reacted with amazement and disbelief when I have told them about the history I have been looking at. In the southwestern part of Arabia, known in antiquity as Himyar and corresponding today approximately with Yemen, the local population converted to Judaism at some point in the late fourth century, and by about 425 a Jewish kingdom had already taken shape. For just over a century after that, its kings ruled, with one brief interruption, over a religious state that was explicitly dedicated to the observance of Judaism and the persecution of its Christian population. The record survived over many centuries in Arabic historical writings, as well as in Greek and Syriac accounts of martyred Christians, but incredulous scholars had long been inclined to see little more than a local monotheism overlaid with language and features borrowed from Jews who had settled in the area. It is only within recent decades that enough inscribed stones have turned up to prove definitively the veracity of these surprising accounts. We can now say that an entire nation of ethnic Arabs in southwestern Arabia had converted to Judaism and imposed it as the state religion.
This bizarre but militant kingdom in Himyar was eventually overthrown by an invasion of forces from Christian Ethiopia, across the Red Sea. They set sail from East Africa, where they were joined by reinforcements from the Christian emperor in Constantinople. In the territory of Himyar, they engaged and destroyed the armies of the Jewish king and finally brought an end to what was arguably the most improbable, yet portentous, upheaval in the history of pre-Islamic Arabia. Few scholars, apart from specialists in ancient South Arabia or early Christian Ethiopia, have been aware of these events. A vigorous team led by Christian Julien Robin in Paris has pioneered research on the Jewish kingdom in Himyar, and one of the Institute’s former Members, Andrei Korotayev, a Russian scholar who has worked in Yemen and was at the Institute in 2003–04, has also contributed to recovering this lost chapter of late antique Middle Eastern history.
Security Versus Civil Liberties and Human Rights
By Daniela L. Caglioti
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A memo from the Institute archives explaining the process of reclaiming a camera seized during World War II from Shizuo Kakutani, Member in the School of Mathematics from 1940–42. |
The security of a nation and the safety of its population versus the protection of constitutional liberties and human rights is a quandary that arose in the aftermath of 9/11, but it is not novel to the twenty-first century. Discrimination between citizens and aliens, ethnicization of citizenship, the use of emergency powers in order to deal with the enemy and bypass the constitution, and the tendency to shift guilt and responsibility from the individual to a collective category (e.g., the Jews, the Muslims, etc.) are practices rooted in the past.
In my research, I have been looking at how governments and armies during World War I began to deal with these issues. The governments of almost all the nations that took part in World War I issued decrees and implemented measures against civilians of enemy nationalities who at the outbreak of the war were within their territory. Persons with ties to an enemy country were presumed to be more loyal to their origins than to the countries in which they worked and lived. German and Austro-Hungarian subjects living in France, Britain, or Russia, and later in all the countries that joined the Allies, and British, French, and Russian citizens who lived in Germany or in the Habsburg Empire, and then in Turkey or Bulgaria, were recast as dangerous, sometimes extremely dangerous, internal enemies.
Individuals with connections to enemy countries were in some cases passing through as tourists, students, or seasonal workers, but in most cases, they had been residents of the country for many years. Some of them were born in the country, some had married a national, others had acquired nationality papers, others were in the process of getting them. Many owned houses, land, or firms and spoke the local language. The outbreak of the war transformed them––independently of their personal story, feelings, ideas, and sense of belonging––into enemy aliens, accused of posing a threat to national security and the survival of each country.
DNA, History, and Archaeology
By Nicola Di Cosmo
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A lecture on archaeological perspectives on ethnicity in ancient China, delivered by Lothar von Falkenhausen, Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was part of the workshop “DNA, History, and Archaeology” organized by Nicola Di Cosmo in October 2010. |
Historians today can hardly answer the question: when does history begin? Traditional boundaries between history, protohistory, and prehistory have been blurred if not completely erased by the rise of concepts such as “Big History” and “macrohistory.” If even the Big Bang is history, connected to human evolution and social development through a chain of geological, biological, and ecological events, then the realm of history, while remaining firmly anthropocentric, becomes all-embracing.
An expanding historical horizon that, from antiquity to recent times, attempts to include places far beyond the sights of literate civilizations and traditional caesuras between a history illuminated by written sources and a prehistory of stone, copper, and pots has forced history and prehistory to coexist in a rather inelegant embrace. Such a blurring of the boundaries between those human pasts that left us more or less vivid and abundant written records, and other pasts, which, on the contrary, are knowable only through the spadework and fieldwork of enterprising archaeologists, ethnographers, and anthropologists, has also changed (or is at least threatening to change) the nature of the work of professional historians.
Technological advances, scientific instrumentation, statistical analyses, and laboratory tests are today producing historical knowledge that aims to find new ways of answering questions that have long exercised specialists of the ancient world. Should historians, then, try to make these pieces of highly technical evidence relevant to their own work? Or should they ignore them? The dilemma is not entirely new. Archaeology, material culture, and historical linguistics have already forced historians to come out of the “comfort zone” of written sources. Archaeologists have by and large wrested themselves free from the fastnesses of the classical texts, and much of their work cannot be regarded as ancillary to the authority of the written word. Satellite photography, remote sensing, archaeo-GIS, C14 dating, dendrochronology (tree-ring dating), and chemical analysis have become standard tools of the archaeologist that coexist with the trowel and the shovel. But the palaeosciences and ancient DNA studies pose challenges of a different order, directly correlated to the greater distance that exists between scientific and historical research in terms of training and knowledge base.
In Search of an Identity: European Discourses and Ancient Paradigms
By Angelos Chaniotis
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Figure 1. Aeneas, the son of Aphrodite and the founder of Rome, escapes from Troy in this relief panel in the Sebasteion (a building dedicated to imperial cult) at Aphrodisias (mid-first century C.E.). |
“Who are you?” A simple question sometimes requires a complex answer. When a Homeric hero is asked who he is (e.g. Iliad 7.123 ff.), his answer consists of more than just his name; he provides a list of his ancestors. The history of his family is an essential constituent of his identity. When the city of Aphrodisias (in Asia Minor) decided to honor a prominent citizen with a public funeral (ca. 50 B.C.E.), the decree in his honor identified him in the following manner:
Hermogenes, son of Hephaistion, the so-called Theodotos, one of the first and most illustrious citizens, a man who has as his ancestors men among the greatest and among those who built together the community and have lived in virtue, love of glory, many promises of benefactions, and the most beautiful deeds for the fatherland; a man who has been himself good and virtuous, a lover of the fatherland, a constructor, a benefactor of the polis, and a savior . . .
The components of Hermogenes’ identity include his name and nickname (Theodotos = “the gift of the gods”), his social class, the history of his family, and his personal achievements.
We can define “identity” in an elementary manner as the answer to the questions “who and what are you?” Depending on the context in which the question is asked and who wants to know, the answer may vary and change over time.
It is hard to imagine contexts in which a modern-day citizen of a European country when confronted with these questions would give the answer: “I am a European.” And yet discussions about European identity abound, usually tacitly taking the existence of European identity, cultural rather than political, for granted. Studies of how identity was defined in other cultures invites us to critically reflect on modern discourses of European identity.