History

By Michael van Walt van Praag 

War-displaced ethnic Tamil civilians wait for rations at a resettlement village in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

Human beings have waged war or engaged in violent conflict with each other since ancient times, an observation that prompted a Member at the Institute to suggest in the course of a casual conversation that surely it was a waste of time and resources to try to prevent or resolve armed conflicts, since there will always be others.

War, by any name,* does indeed seem to be a permanent feature of human society, as is disease for that matter. We do not consider the efforts of physicians to cure patients or the research that goes into finding cures for illnesses a waste of time, despite this. Both phenomena, armed conflict and disease, change over time as circumstances change and as human beings develop ways to prevent or cure some kinds of ills. A doctor treats a patient for that patient’s sake without necessarily having an impact on the propensity of others to fall ill. Mediators and facilitators seek to help resolve conflicts to bring an end to the suffering of those caught in their violence and destruction. Researchers in both fields hope to contribute in a broader and perhaps more fundamental way to understanding and addressing causes of these human ills and to finding new or improved remedies for them.

By Paul Antony Hayward 

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.

By Mary L. Dudziak 

When Mary Dudziak was the Ginny and Robert Loughlin Member in the School of Social Science in 2007-08, she intended to explore the history of war's impact on American law and politics. Instead, she found herself puzzling over ideas about time, which resulted in the book War-Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Does war have a time? The idea of “wartime” is regularly invoked by scholars and policymakers, but the temporal element in warfare is rarely directly examined. I came to the Institute in 2007–08 intent on exploring the history of war’s impact on American law and politics, but assumptions about wartime were so prevalent in the literature that first I found myself puzzling over ideas about time. Ultimately, this resulted in a book, War ·Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012).

The idea that time matters to warfare appears in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: “War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war.” Time’s importance calls for critical inquiry, but time is often treated as if it were a natural phenomenon with an essential nature, shaping human action and thought. Yet our ideas about time are a product of social life, Émile Durkheim and others have argued. Time is of course not produced by clocks, which simply represent an understanding of time. Instead, ideas about time are generated by human beings working in specific historical and cultural contexts. Just as clock time is based on a set of ideas produced not by clocks but by the people who use them, wartime is also a set of ideas derived from social life, not from anything inevitable about war itself.

Yet war seems to structure time, as does the clock. Stephen Kern argues that World War I displaced a multiplicity of “private times,” and imposed “homogenous time,” through an “imposing coordination of all activity according to a single public time.” During World War I, soldiers synchronized their watches before heading into combat. In Eric J. Leed’s description of trench warfare, war instead disrupted time’s usual order. Battle became an extended present, as considerations of past and future were suspended by the violence of the moment. “The roar­ing chaos of the barrage effected a kind of hypnotic condition that shattered any rational pattern of cause and effect,” so that time had no sequence. And so one meaning of “wartime” is the idea that battle suspends time itself.

By Oleg Grabar 

Oleg Grabar (back row, second from right) with the 1969 staff of his archaeological team in Syria excavating a site known as Qasr al-Hayr

It has been nearly sixty years that I have been engaged in an active scholarly life. My first article came out fifty-eight years ago, and there are still now two or three studies in the process of being printed or ready to appear on the Internet. In between lie some twenty books, several of which were translated into at least seven languages, and over one hundred and twenty more or less significant articles.

This considerable production can easily be divided into three groups, whose chronology raises interesting conclusions about the path of research traveled by a historian of the arts of the Islamic world who came into academic existence in the middle of the twentieth century. Whether this path is unique or typical is for others to decide.

The first group consists of traditional research based on the publication of documents, the excavation of new documents, and the significance of these documents within relatively strict chronological and spatial limits. Scholarship of this type is for the most part restricted in its interest and usefulness to other scholars of the same vintage, and it dominates the first half of my creative years. The number of works of this type that would have been initiated by me has clearly diminished with time, even though their scientific quality (or weakness) tends to remain steady over the years.

By Christian Habicht 

Stephen Tracy (left) and Christian Habicht (right) examine a squeeze in the Institute’s collection.

Soon after his appointment as a Professor at the Institute, Benjamin D. Meritt took the first steps to build a Repository of Squeezes, “which will be second only to that in Berlin,” as he wrote to the Director, Abraham Flexner, on September 8, 1935. He intended to begin with the Epigraphical Museum in Athens and to have squeezes made of all its inscriptions, more than 13,000 at the time. He expected this to be done within a year for a sum of about $500. He also planned to establish a Working Library for Greek Epigraphy with an initial outlay of $2,000, plus $200 annually to keep it up-to-date. Before the end of the year, the Director had allocated the requested sums for both projects. Meritt went to work. From December onward, three men were working in the Epigraphical Museum making squeezes, a fourth on the Acropolis, and a fifth at Eleusis, a large community with a famous sanctuary, and a fortress. Furthermore, Meritt contacted several museums that had large holdings of Greek inscriptions; he wanted them to contribute to the squeeze collection: the Ashmolean, the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Archaeological Museum at Izmir.

Today, the total number of squeezes from the Epigraphical Museum amounts to 8,532 pieces in the IAS collection. It is rivaled only by those from the Athenian Agora. American excavations had begun there in 1931. Meritt was put in charge of dealing with the inscriptions, which soon ran into the thousands. Copies of their file cards, photographs, and squeezes, as well as Meritt’s transcriptions of their texts, came to the Institute, by August 1940 already amounting to six thousand. By August 1974, the number had risen to 7,184, of which the Institute has 7,135, plus 7,047 copies of their texts by Meritt. After Homer Thompson, another Institute Professor, retired as Field Director at the Agora and was replaced by Leslie Shear Jr. of Princeton University, the new materials went to Princeton University. After that, only a few dozen squeezes reached the Institute from the Agora, the one with the highest number in the inventory being 7,642.

By Stephen V. Tracy 

Due to the efforts of Benjamin D. Meritt, the first Professor in the Institute's School of Humanistic Studies (a precursor to the current School of Historical Studies), the Institute houses one of the world's largest collections of squeezes––impressions of inscriptions that allow scholars to more easily study them. This image shows a portion of a squeeze made from lettering inscribed on the base of a statue by the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles in about 375 B.C.

We do not know who made the first paper squeeze of an inscription. The practice is quite old; large numbers of them were made by Richard Lepsius on an expedition to Egypt (1842–45) and by Philippe Le Bas in Greece (1843). The invention of the squeeze must stem from the desire to acquire an accurate copy of the text of an inscription. Rubbings constitute a simpler, more rudimentary way of doing this. Photographs more recently provide an easy means of recording inscriptions, but each photograph is taken in a certain light. That lighting may not do justice to the inscription, or it may actually be misleading at places where the stone is difficult to decipher. A well-made squeeze provides the best and most accurate record of the state of the inscribed surface of an inscription. In the future, digital images may come to match them.

The term squeeze itself is not very elegant; the French estampage is more descriptively accurate of what they are. They are sort of papier-mâché impressions of inscriptions. They are made using acid-free chemists’ filter paper. The paper is wetted thoroughly and placed on the inscribed surface; then it is beaten with a long-bristled, specially made brush from the center out so that any air bubbles trapped under the paper may be worked out to the edges and dispersed. (Air bubbles not removed cause soft spots, places where the letters are unclear.) The squeeze is then allowed to dry on the stone. When removed, it provides a very accurate image of what is preserved on the inscribed face. It must be read from the back, and so the image is in reverse. (Students of inscriptions become very adept at reading backward!)

By Julia M. H. Smith 

After presenting her lecture at the Institute, Julia Smith was introduced to Elena Petronio, a member of the Chairman’s Circle of the Friends of the Institute, who had brought with her some small silver display cases of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century date, in which carefully labeled relics had been sealed with an official ecclesiastical seal. Between them, the two containers contained the relics of three saints, each relic a speck of matter far smaller than the label that accompanied it.

Reliquaries were designed as receptacles for tiny bundles of sacred stuff such as handfuls of dust, pebbles from Biblical sites in the Holy Land, tiny fragments of the hair, clothing, and even bone of those deemed to be saints and martyrs by the Christian church. Wrapped in cloth and carefully labeled, these paltry, nondescript objects were transformed into things of eye-catching beauty and great prestige by the containers crafted to house them—reliquaries. But, prior to about 1200 C.E., reliquaries did not make their contents visible to the viewer: instead, they were designed to conceal them. The specifics of the content were nevertheless important to medieval Christians, and hence their care to label and inventory their contents in minute detail.

Several medieval reliquaries, upon scientific investigation, have been shown to retain their original contents to this day. These collections of relics can be mapped to reveal the social and geographical networks of contacts that contributed to their formation. These anchored a church in its locality and region, but might also extend across much or all of Christendom. In this way, the items inside a reliquary represented the key events and notable places of the Christian story from the perspective of the particular patron who commissioned the craftsman to produce these stupendous works of art. The contents are as fascinating as the container; when we look inside a reliquary, we see “Christianity in miniature.”

By Caroline Walker Bynum 

Medieval reliquaries such as this one from a church in Cologne were among the devotional objects examined in the conference “Matter for Debate.” The conference was made possible with support from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

Material objects play a role in all religions. Jewish women light candles for the Sabbath; Christians sprinkle or douse bodies with water to baptize; Hindus offer coconuts and clarified butter to images of the gods and goddesses; the ancient Incas preserved mummies of their ancestors in caves, and Quechua-speaking peoples in the Andes still feel uneasy about these remains. Such objects—coco­nuts and images, candles and mummies—carry with them a com­­­mu­­nity’s past, making it present and at the same time underlining its location in the past. They convey holiness from place to place, focus prayer and meditation, enforce or undermine hierarchy. But religions do not all venerate or fear the same objects or use them in the same ways. Over the past hundred years, historians of religion have been particularly interested in a subset of devotional objects that have been designated by worshippers with a word that can be translated as “relics” or “remains”: holy bodies or parts of bodies, or physical objects that have been in contact with them or their burial sites. Given this definition, relics are not found in all religions. Jews, for example, do sometimes venerate gravesites (although rabbis have been very dubious about this practice) but they do not revere dead bodies as holy. Hindus return the ashes of the dead to the Ganges rather than preserving them, but Buddhists build monumental containers or stupas for the ashes of the Buddha, and these stupas are considered so powerful that even their shadows convey healing or harm. Moreover, traditions vary over both space and time in how far such objects are crucial. Protestant Christians in the sixteenth century rejected the relic cult of Catholic Christians as superstition or idolatry. So it might seem as if it would be an interesting exercise in comparative religion to explore why some religions have relic cult and some do not. That is what Julia M. H. Smith of the University of Glasgow (see article, page 5) and I thought we were setting out to explore when we began to plan a workshop titled “Matter for Debate: Relics and Related Devotional Objects,” to be held at the Institute in July 2010. But the topic ended up being far more amorphous and far more challenging than that.

By Angelos Chaniotis 

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.

By Nicola Di Cosmo 

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.