But we said above that we would be prescriptive and say what ought to happen. One could argue with Van De Mieroop that a more sophisticated approach to data about the past might be a good thing for practitioners of ancient history. But does it necessarily help everyone to have such doubts about epistemology? Perhaps it does, but one is concerned with the sorts of questions that are posed in the future. And that must inevitably be dictated by our own experience and what seems of interest to our culture in the future. Right now it appears that issues of religion will become perhaps more important than in the past. Chronology will continue to be refined, but it will also seem to matter less as we get more firm grips on various periods.
We all face the tension toward specialization in research and breadth in teaching, not only in historical disciplines, and yet I believe we must all think, and publish, as broadly as possible. If we do not exert ourselves in such efforts, we will be more marginalized when hard economic times cause institutions of learning to cut back.
The North African historian Ibn Khaldun, who lived from 1332 to1406 of our era and originated the study of historical sociology, suggested that the task of the historian was to become an expert in two cultures, one’s own and the target culture. As an example, Ibn Khaldun took his contemporaries to task because they assumed that teaching was always an apolitical role. But in early Islam to teach the Quran was in fact to inculcate new members with the values of the elite and was a duty undertaken by the very most politically powerful individuals. Then if we assume that teachers were ‘‘rootless and lacking in political power’’ as they were in Ibn Khaldun’s day, not to mention our own, we commit an error (1967: 26-7).
Most students easily grasp the need to study the languages and cultures, including the physical cultures as represented in archaeology, of the Ancient Near East. But the changing institutions and the senses of words are harder to grasp. Harder still perhaps to understand is why one should try to become an expert on one’s own culture. This is necessary because it is one’s own culture that one is addressing. One may not master all the jargons of all the by-ways of contemporary life, but one writes for people who know these things, or at least may know these things. One can speak to them more clearly and directly if one has some knowledge of how one’s culture works. This is particularly true for Ibn Khaldun who thought that a major task of the historian was to draw analogies to contemporary phenomena, guarding always against anachronism. ‘‘The past resembles the future more than one drop of water another’’ (1967: 12), he wrote, but the key is to draw attention to the proper drops of contemporary water and not to become confused by pollution that renders the analogy false.
The task of mastering two cultures is almost impossible for a single lifetime, but luckily we are not limited to a lifetime. to the ancients’ invention of literacy, we may build on the work of many others long dead. Bagnall characterizes history ‘‘as the enterprise of a complex community rather than an individual,’’ and the individuals have different strengths and weaknesses (1995: 114-17). If occasionally we do not succeed in understanding the target culture or our own, we end by propagating lies and speaking incomprehensibilities. There is no question that the study of the Ancient Near East has done its share of both, and yet the lure of the remains persists, and it is against the evidence and the consensus of the community of historians interpreting that evidence that we can test our guesses and measure our theories.
If we need to defend concentrating on details of an ancient past, we might remember that to study history is to try on the varieties of being human, and as that variety is increased, so may our sense of humanity increase. Recent observers of the progress of early Egyptology remark on the impact of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and its publication of the variety of ancient and modern Egyptian phenomena, ‘‘Suddenly the world as viewed from western Europe was much larger, older, and stranger than it had been before’’ (Adkins and Adkins 2000: 17). The historian is always trying to expand the contemporary culture’s ideas about humanity, to give depth and nuance to one’s fellows’ sense of the past and how it might impinge on current problems.
An example still debatable in our culture is the status and roles of women. As Van De Mieroop pointed out (1999a: 138-54), our view of Ancient Near Eastern women is a mixture of the restrictive portrait of the Classical Greek age along with the saga of pre-modern Islamic women’s limited social roles. Those who would see a unilinear progression admit that this image does not fit early periods, but that there was then deterioration down to Israel, which then transmitted to the West a limited role for women (Lerner 1986). Subsequent study has indicated that there were ups and downs in women’s power and roles throughout Ancient Near Eastern history. The relevance of these findings has not yet been considered in societies of the region now, but it seems clear that ancient precedents for an expanded role for women may have relevance as those societies confront cohorts of women more educated than in the recent past.
There is no nobler intellectual quest than attempting to understand the past, unless it be a more directly altruistic one. The depth of history in its long duration may provide cautionary tales for confident eras, and it may give comfort and hope in darker times. Since we cannot convince ourselves that Gilgamesh is served by our perpetuation of his story, we must hope that our children are served by having a depth of history and knowing that, though not everything has been done before, a very great deal has.
World History
