It must be obvious that serious problems arise from the very success of the ancient historians of the twentieth century in redefining and extending their discipline. The subject depends heavily on high skill in ancient languages; but schools in almost all countries are less and less likely to offer the two classical languages, except where teachers and pupils are willing to give up their own time to extra classes.
For most of the many other ancient languages (Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian of several periods, Persian, Aramaic, Syriac, and so on) the situation has of course always been that they are normally available only at the undergraduate, or even postgraduate, stage. It is not, however, only ancient languages that are needed: work of importance is written in many modern languages, and it is not possible to conduct research without some reading ability in at least half a dozen.
Linguistic skills, however essential, are still only the starting-point: there are other tools as well that are just as much needed. In many areas of work, and in any attempt to write general history, understanding archaeology is as important as knowing languages. It is, of course, still possible to find topics of work where written materials provide the only evidence to be studied; but even then the context of discovery and the use made of written materials raise archaeological issues that may be crucial to the argument. Meanwhile for many questions, essential to the writing of history, where the evidence would once have been seen as primarily linguistic, modern scientific techniques are providing material that will give us hard data on such subjects as diet, health, expectation of life, climate and agricultural methods. The need to control such results will give a major advantage to the ancient historian who has archaeological training and practical experience. Archaeologists sometimes maintain that they can pursue their discipline without recourse to written texts; ancient historians cannot be allowed the converse luxury. They have to go wherever their problem leads them.
The expanding boundaries of the subject raise practical problems. The more ambitious the program that ancient historians, who are all too few in number, are seeking to maintain, the more difficult it becomes for the new recruit to meet the requirements of the subject. What once seemed to be a simple affair of reading a limited number of texts and using little but “common sense” to interpret them has become more complex, more theoretically demanding and more interdisciplinary. Ideal postgraduates, in addition to their languages and archaeological experience, will also have a wide knowledge of modern history, a good deal of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political theory; they will also be very much at home in the application of modern critical theory to the interpretation of ancient texts. Without all these skills, they will be sent vulnerable into the conference-chamber.
If initiation into the discipline is one problem, the relationship of ancient history to its various parent departments is certainly another. The intellectual ambition of the subject, as it is now understood, does not fit readily into a department of Classics. Nor is it desirable to split away the archaeologists who work on the classical period from those who precede and follow them in a department of Archaeology. My ideal (I admit not shared with many) would see history departments everywhere accepting the need to cover all periods from the early Near Eastern civilizations onwards as an essential part of their discipline; there would then, of course, have to be collaboration at all levels, but especially research level, with colleagues in archaeology, philosophy and language and literature departments. Of course, there can be many different ways of achieving effective collaborations; but issues of disciplinary organization can easily have repercussions on the possibilities of research activity and on the distribution of research funding. If ancient history is in the end isolated and not taken seriously by historians of other periods as part of their discipline, that can only weaken it in the longer run.
It is not easy to strike a balance between these hesitations about the future of an important intellectual enterprise and the undoubted strength of the tradition of study that supports it. In fact, there are very good reasons to be optimistic, to think that, as it has in the recent past, so the subject will overcome the current round of obstacles. Extremely able young ancient historians have continued to choose this as their field and are now working in many different parts of the world, sometimes with limited local support, but sometimes as part of a strong culture of debate and cooperation. Their choice is the best guarantee that the great vitality shown in recent decades is not an ephemeral episode, but a phase in the ongoing development of a natural and fundamental human concern with the remote past and with its continuing effects on our life today. It is most important to emphasize that the problems discussed are all the direct consequence of the vitality and innovativeness of the subject in the recent past. Long may it so continue.
World History
