HIS129 Varieties in History

2 History, Myth and Identity

What is history?• Time: history is about time, the passing of time.• Psychology: as mortal beings were are preocupied by the

passing of time.• History is a way of dealing with the passing of time.• Recapturing the past, stopping the flow of time,

childhood.• Analogy with taking a photograph of a moving target:

time is never still.• Psychoanalysis: by understanding childhood, one can

understand present states of mind and envisage the future more serenely.

• History is about the here and now.

Why study history? • Like psychoanalysis, history is the investigation of the collective memory for

clues to understand the present in order to help us cope with the future.

• The present does not really interest us. You cannot quantify the present. The present leaves to trace but in our memories. The past however, is omipresent, it is all around us, through monuments, buildings, ruins, testifying of the passage of time.

• History is like philosophy, the love of wisdom, and it seeks the same answers that men have always sought, in many ways the only questions worth asking: Who are we? Where are we from? Where are we going?

• In this statement, again you have the past, the present and the future arranged very neatly in a line. Linear thinking is a characteristic of our civilization. The idea that something necessarily has to take place before something else occurs, the chain of cause and effect, is a european concept.

• Most human societies, have a circular conception of time: time is a circle and everything always come back to its beginning. This is true of African cultures, Hinduism, and China.

Myth and History• From the earliest time, historical writing connected the present

with a mythical past. Genealogies of kings and chronologies linked the present with the moment of creation. The Egyptians, Summerians, all saw their current political systems as coming directly from heaven. The present was not really distinguished from the moment of creation and rulers were the embodiment of deities.

• Pyramid building, in itself is a way of recording history. Pyramids were testimonies to the grandeur of past rulers. They encouraged present rulers to do better, and it also perpetuated a political system built on slavery. In this respect they made sure that the present was a perpetuation of the past.

Morality and story telling• From the earliest time, history was first story. A story has a

beginning and an end, and usual a morality. It has heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys. The Greek myths and stories are full of heroes and villains. Stories also had a moral dimension and served as examples.

• Early Greek and Roman were preocupied from freeing history from myth. The idea of 'truth' and the dichotomy between 'true' and 'untrue' histories emerged. Greek tragedies that depicted historical events were no longer thought to be historically accurate. The rewriting of history emerged as a necessity. Each generation had to rewrite history from its own point of view.

Cicero, De Oratore, II, 62 (106-43 BC)

Who does not know that history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there would be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?

Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Praefatio, 10 (64 BC - 12

AD)This above all makes history useful and desirable; it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.

Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, II, 6, 43 (23-79)

Owing to a curious disease of the human mind, we are pleased to enshrine in history records of bloodshed and slaughter, so that persons ignorant of the facts of the world may be acquainted with the crimes of mankind.

Methods of historical investigation.

• The past is a foreign country that is inaccessible, like the remains of a shipwreck that are washed ashore by the sea, we only have fragmentary remains recording what happened, the historians is like a detective, trying to piece the course of events from these remains.

• If you had to investigate a shipwreck, what is the first thing that you would look for? [the logbook].

• If there isn't a log book you look for clues in the material evidence that is left (archeology, material culture).

• If by chance, you find a survivor, you can ask what happened (oral history).

• History that concerns us is predominantly the first kind, study of written evidence. Survival rates of written documents is very poor, and written records are therefore fragmentary.

History and Myth

• In classical Greece and Rome, there was no distinction between history and myth.

• Greek and Roman history is full of heroes, giants and gods.

• Herodotus, a Greek historian, was called the father of history and the father of lies.

Cicero (106-43 BC)

Everything is meant to lead to the truth, but in poetry, a great deal is intended for pleasure - although in Herodotus, the father of history … there are countless numbers of legends.

History and Narrative

• History often takes the shape of a narrative.• History is first ‘story’, with a beginning, a

middle and an end.• Like in stories, there are heroes and villains,

winners and losers, and a happy ending with a lesson to be learnt.

Origin Myths

• History served to justify one’s position of authority.

• For example, the Romans invented the myth of the foundation of Rome by Remus and Romulus to justify their conquest of the Mediterranean.

Hesiod: The Golden Age (c. 700 BC)

In the beginning, the immortals who have their homes on Olympos created the golden generation of mortal people. These lived in Kronos' time, when he was king in heaven. They lived as if they were gods, their hearts free from sorrow, by themselves, and without hard work or pain; no miserable old age came their way; their hands, their feet, did not alter. They took their pleasure in festivals, and lived without troubles. When they died, it was as if they fell asleep. All goods were theirs. The fruitful grainland yielded its harvest to them of its own accord; this was great and abundant, while they at their pleasure quietly looked after their works in the midst of good things.

Lucas Cranach, 16th

Plato’s description of the island of

Atlantis (c. 360BC)

Leon Krier, Atlantis seen from the south-wes1988

At the centre of the island, near the sea, was a plain, said to be the most beautiful and fertile of all plains, and near the middle of this plain about fifty stades inland a hill of no great size... There were two rings of land and three of sea, like cartwheels, with the island at their centre and equidistant from each other... in the centre was a shrine sacred to Poseidon and Cleito, surrounded by a golden wall through which entry was forbidden

The Garden of EdenGen. 1:28Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth

Book of Hours, Rouen, 15th c.

The Tower of Babel

Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525-6

Genesis 11:4Genesis 11:4‘‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavensa tower with its top in the heavens’’

History and Identity

• Individual and collective identity is determined by the past.

• What distinguishes you from the next person is your history.

• What distinguishes one people from another is also its history.

‘Us’ and ‘Them’ 1: Barbarians

• History is written by the victors.• Romans and Greeks thought they were

superior than their neighbours.• They were ‘civilized’ (they lived in cities).• They despised ‘barbarians’ (those that did

not speak their language).

Tacitus (56-115) Germania

It is a well-known fact that the peoples of Germany never live in cities and will not even have their houses adjoin one another. They dwell apart, dotted about here and there, wherever a spring, plain, or grove takes their fancy. Their villages are not laid out in the Roman style, with buildings adjacent and connected.

History and Morality

• In Greek and Roman histories, things happen for no reason.

• Fortune or fate dominates the classical world view.

• History is determined by the whims of the Gods or the virtue or corruption of rulers.

The Purpose of History

• It is the Judeo-Christians that give a meaning to history.

• In the Bible, God rewards the virtuous and punishes the wicked.

• Unlike for the Pagans, Judeo-Christian history has a purpose: the realization of God’s plans on earth.

‘Us’ and ‘Them’ 2: Pagans

• Like for the Greeks and Romans, Judeo-Christian history is written by the victors.

• For Christians, the world is no longer divided between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarians’but between ‘believers’ and ‘pagans’.

• ‘God is on our side’.

Tertullian (160-220) Apologia

What a city, the new Jerusalem! Yes, and there will be other spectacles too - that last and eternal Day of Judgment, which the pagans believed would never happen, which they scoffed at and ridiculed, when all the ages of the world and all its generations will be consumed in one fire.

Conclusion

• History emerged from a need to define’s one’s identity, often in the face of others.

• In the first instance, history was preoccupied with the origins.

• In this search for origins it had to become distinct from myths.

• History was originally conceived as the history of one chosen people (Jews, Romans, Christians) and its struggle against ‘the other’ (Gentiles, Barbarians, Heathens).