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What are the expectations of our society regarding the uses of history?  Why do we study history?  Who makes use of it, and how?  Why and how do we record our own history as it unfolds?  Given the very different uses and motives for recording in the ancient world, what kinds of cautions do we need to take when interpreting written records from past societies?

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Julia Troche

These questions spur into my mind many other questions and ponderings concerning the nature of (ancient) history.  This is perhaps more of a personal theoretical tangent, but I find it thought provoking: Professor Bestock asked us in class, what is history? To which, I ask: Is history created in the act of recording? Or does it exist ontologically? For anyone of a science background, you can think about it like the concept of Schrodinger's cat.  Does/How does the act of observation and recording influence the "truth" or "reality" of a situation? A more common parallel is based on the same thought experiment - if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?  If something occurs in the world, but is not recorded does that change the reality of its existence?  In a very real way, if there is no living record of an event, then we cannot know of it and in our minds it does not exist.  This is the basis for defining pre-history and history by the advent of writing in a culture.  But I think this brings up an interesting issue - the history of things which are not recorded can be illuminating in their own right.  The story left by the silent gaps in history recording can be equally as informative as the records themselves if we take the delicate care to excavate the silent past.

What I think would be beneficial to comment on here, in a more tangible fashion, is the Egyptian notion of history.  Especially with ancient cultures, it is exceedingly important to be hyperaware of the lens through which we record, analyze and interpret.  Over 5,000 years separate us from those that we are now beginning to study.  But before we can attempt to do so, it is always prudent to address ourselves.  Professor Bestock asked Why and how do we record our own history? Whatever the answer to this question might be, we need to realize that the ancient Egyptians had a very different answer.  To the ancient Egyptians history of the modern sort – the attempt to tell a story of “factual” events and their reflexes – was not necessarily high on their list of ‘history-recording’ priorities.  An esteemed Egyptologist, Erik Hornung, comments that history for the Egyptians was a “history as celebration,” where the symbolic continuation of certain mythological and theological occurrences was more important to record than what modern historians would define as ‘factual’ events.  Which brings this discussion to the final question posed by Professor Bestock, which is what kinds of cautions do we need to take into account?  Beyond taking into account my own generic 21st century, industrial, American/”western,” feminist potentially embedded biases, we need to take into account the intentions and contexts of ancient sources – their biases! Who was writing this text? For what purpose? Who was the intended audience? Where was the source found? Is it one of many, or unique?

But we can’t simply ask these questions, but we must also think about what the significance of the answers to these questions might be.  So what if the text is a unique texts, of which none others like it have been found? Why is it important whether or not a text was written for a tomb versus a temple? Is there a possible discrepancy between intended audience and actual audience?

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As discussed in class, "we" (members of academia, casual scholars, or merely interested parties) study history for many reasons and are quite capable of crafting seemingly-presitigious, lofty arguments to justify spending so much time looking at the past.  I do think a lot of it comes from curiosity, especially for cultures like ancient Egypt, where the personal connection between "us" now and those who lived their lives under pharaonic rule is thin at best.  However, the monuments still make up the Egyptian landscape, just as the Colosseum still stands in Rome and earthen mounds mark the Mississippian cultures.  Without the ability to talk to the people who built and utilized these sites, we turn to history and archaeology to explain them.  But I am averse to arguing that historians undertake their study just for curiosity's sake.  Various fields reflect an interest in looking back, including biological disciplines, linguistics, and religious studies, and I think this has to do with an innately human (and I use this term knowing that it is problematic) impulse to search for our origins, and therefore, the origins of life, the universe, and human behavior.  When one is able to not just look at history, or Egyptian history, as a whole but focus on specific questions, then it is possible to get closer to considering what might have happened and the motivations behind human actions.  The ways in which any people, especially whose culture or way of life is far removed from that of our own (American, Western, modern, insert what you like), chose to grieve their dead or celebrate new births can inform us about our own attitudes and practices.  What they fought and died for may be the same things that are upheld today as legitimate reasons to fight or die.

I think the uses of history are harder to answer or recognize, as I am not sure most people would be able to say that they truly think about the longue durée of time when making decisions in their lives (as opposed to just relying on personal experience/"personal history").  But then, I have friends who have received Master's degrees in subjects like Applied Mathematics, and the fact that I only use math in my life when paying bills via calculator does not invalidate their field of study.    

Responding to Julia, and I think this may also have been touched upon in class discussion, I agree that it is important to look at the native Egyptian view of history.  That the Egyptians had two named concepts of time is significant, as I think the modern idea of time and history is mostly limited to the continuous passage of units of time and a moving forward, creating one long line of "what happened."  But ancient texts were not necessarily written to record "what happened," but exaggerations or purposeful re-writings of events were not limited to royal propaganda.  Within the concept of cyclical, ritual time, the individual event only took meaning from the tradition to which it belonged.  As mentioned above, a "factual" recording of history was not always the primary concern.  Written words themselves had different meaning than they do today in a society where the majority are literate.  In ancient Egypt, reading and writing were highly restricted, and this had a direct influence on most of the written evidence we have from Egypt and what was written and how.

Finally, I think it has to be accepted that the historical/archaeological record may just never be able to answer all of our questions, and because the preservation of evidence will always be partial and selective, care needs to be taken when expecting that evidence to be able to recreate an unbiased, "true" history of ancient Egypt - and really, of anywhere.

- Emily

Posted at Feb 04/2010 11:06PM:
anqi zhang: Anqi Zhang Since I am from a different country, namely China, I don’t really know what the expectations are of the American society regarding the uses of history. As for our country, according to what I learned in the history textbooks in middle school and all that I observed from the media and people around me, I think we first of all treat history as a very precious memory of the glorious past achievements of our country. Since China has a really long history of scholarship and the recording of the history has been long considered as one of the government’s duties, we fortunately have a lot of written records from the past. Why was the recording of history considered the government’s duties? The ancient Chinese people saw history as an indispensable textbook of how to govern the country well so that the country can prosper. It had, on a large scale, a deeply-rooted belief that the good emperors would lead the country to prosperity and the bad emperors would ruin the country. So that emperors and officials should learn from the past experience and tried to behave themselves morally righteously in order to govern the country correctly. Of course, the recording of history is not unbiased and a lot of the emperors would influence the writing of the history in order to have a good posthumous name. But the interesting thing is that there were scribes who were stubborn enough to believe that they must be impartial and record as faithfully as possible what happened. Moral standards in ancient China were really almost the highest priorities. We still think of history in sort of a similar way. History tells us a lot of the morals or wisdom of life and it makes us reflect on our own behaviors in order to be better people. Of course, history in China also has common uses such as in politics, diplomatic and etc. As for why we study history, I was taught at school that we learn history in order to learn the general rule of the development of history. It might be because of the ideology of our country, or it might be also because of the philosophical heritage of the past, we seem to see history has developing in a predictable way. And the learning of history is to learn the general trend of history development. One way to put it is that: given a certain economical, cultural, political, geographical, military situation of a country, it would certainly develop in a certain direction. How exactly? In the middle school history class, we loved to say that “Had XXX(a decisive person in history) not been born at all, it still would not affect the result of the history, since there would be another like him who would have replaced and accomplished the same historical task. People didn’t create history and history creates itself. People collectively create history and a few individuals don’t really affect history as importantly as we think.” Another reason why we study history is that we want to make further archaeological discoveries based on history. There are object that are well described in written record of ancient times but people don’t really know what it is. More crucially is that, some ancient science, for example Chinese medicine, relies on those objects. For example, we need to know how heavy one “jin”(a weight unit) is in the Han dynasty in order to understand how much herb is needed for a specific formula. And history records gave us the clues and the archaeological findings give us reliable account of how much weight one “jin” really is. As for cautions, I think there is one very important point is that we cannot use “science” to judge everything from the past. Even ancient people have very advanced knowledge of a lot of the subjects and they certainly had accumulated a lot of well attested material. So the ancient history might be a mixture of so called reality and myths from time to time but we must understand for the ancient, they were totally valid.

Posted at Feb 07/2010 10:33PM:

#jolshan: I think that in general, our society places a fair bit of value in history, although at times we certainly choose to ignore the teachings of history (papa Bush didn't invade Baghdad for a reason). True, most people do defend the study of history with "it helps us learn from the mistakes and successes of the past" but like we said in class, more than we are willing to admit, we study history because we're curious or because it's fun. Learning about former civilizations and peoples is just plain cool. Plus, Egyptians had cool names and odd (to us) practices and beliefs. So curiosity definitely plays a role.

As far as who writes history, it is fairly commonly said that history is written by the winners, which is often true, but there have been at times accounts of historical events from both perspectives, which greatly aids the academic analysis of history. Until very recently, history was only recorded by a few individuals who devoted their lives to recording it. With the advent of the printing press, widely circulated newspapers, and the internet, historical recording has exploded into something that we do every day. Events are captured on video in real-time and uploaded to YouTube hours later. Photographs are taken in seconds and disseminated across the internet, from flickr to Facebook. The sheer amount of documents, pictures, and videos that can be considered "historical" (videos of a cat jumping into a box might not qualify) that are created every day means that in the future, as long as the standards and formats of our digital storage are not lost, the amount of historical evidence/data will allow future generations to get a much better picture of the way things were in our time.

As far as being careful to jump to conclusions using history, I think that there is always some misinterpretation or bias that is injected into history. No matter what, any time something is written down and relayed, it is tainted. When you take an event that you witness and you describe it, you put bias into it. When you talk about a decision that was made while you were present, you are going to record it with some kind of bias or judgment, even if you try not to. That said, there are certainly historical sources that tend to be very neutral (archaeology), although there are still risks of misinterpretation. As long as there is enough evidence from different areas to show that something was probably true, it is, in my opinion, acceptable to say that indeed it was (very probably) the case.

Short version: history is cool, the winners usually write it, these days we record history all the time and in greater volume than in the past, and it's always important to be aware of the risks of misinterpretations.