by ProfDave, ©2022
(Feb. 24, 2021) — Contrary to popular opinion, history is not about memorizing names and dates. It is a story. Your story – ultimately. Everyone has a story. You would not be staring at this screen today if you had not decided to follow this blog in the past. You might say that without a past, you wouldn’t have a present, much less a future. Your story is in your DNA and your personal experiences, but it is also in your history. You are part of a larger story. “No man is an island.” Each of us is connected not only to family, friends, and community in our own time, but to the past and to the future. And the ideas and institutions of your community have a past, too. Knowing how to read and think about history can help you find your place in the larger story – tomorrow’s history. So welcome aboard!
Thinking Historically
So how do we think historically? There are four basic principles to watch out for: context, perspective, continuity, and documentation.
· Context: The context of an event or an idea determines its meaning. People live and think in the context of what is going on around them and in their recent past. If you find a coin that says, “33 BC” (or 33 BCE) on it, you know it is counterfeit. We call it an anachronism. Likewise, a word or an idea that does not belong to the time and place we are considering.
· Perspective: Witnesses at the four corners of an intersection will have four different views of an auto accident. That is perspective. If you are one of the drivers, you may also have a bias: that’s another matter. Historians write from the perspective of their own times, nationalities, and belief systems. Honest historians acknowledge this. My Christianity and my cold war American upbringing shape my perspective. But, to willfully manipulate, falsify, or re-write history to support some current cause, however good, is bias. It turns history into myth and propaganda.
· Continuity: Nothing happens in a vacuum. There are always antecedents and consequences. History is a river, not a tray of ice cubes. If something ‘appears,’ we look for where it came from. If it ‘disappears,’ we wonder where it went.
· Documents: Technically, the discipline of history is limited to written documents. If it is not recorded, it is not history. Archaeologists can tell a lot about a people by digging through their trash and anthropologists can write volumes about a fragment of bone, but you cannot really get into the mind of an ancient people without their words. We can only guess what they were thinking. We need their words.
Ancient History and Pre-History
The craft of ancient history is conditioned by limited and fragmentary information. Even words carved in stone do not last forever. In most cases we do not have the originals. We must depend on someone finding the writing valuable enough to hire a professional scribe (a living copier) to laboriously transcribe it letter by letter – many times through the centuries. That’s why we have so much Bible and so little anything else on the ancient Near East. Writings regarded as sacred had an advantage. We also have to be able to decipher the alphabet and language of the document. And someone who knows how to read must find the time to translate it for us. Thus, most of the Dead Sea scrolls have languished in a museum for half a century and there are tons of clay tablets stacked somewhere waiting to be read.
What historians do know: the earliest documents that have been read reveal civilizations that are already old, complex and sophisticated. And ancient languages tended to be more complicated than modern! Your ancestors were not stupid. Think about it, who needed more skill and intelligence: the guy who diagnosed your transmission with a computer or the native American who brought down a woolly mammoth with nothing but sticks and stones and teamwork?
So, where did those civilizations come from? There is, presumably, a big gap from the day the first two homo sapiens found each other (in a Mesopotamian garden or on the African savannah?) and the cities of the Nile and the Euphrates. Every people have their traditions, legends and myths of origins. You can watch modern scientific myths of origin on Nova. Many are forgotten.
Perhaps there is nothing more important to a world-view than where we came from. It tells us who and what we are as human beings and conditions how we treat one another. So it should not surprise us that early history and traditions are integrated with metaphysical and religious ideas. God or the gods or fate or some metaphysical theory of being are inextricably intertwined with events and genealogies. It is possible that even the most far-fetched may have some foundation in real events (like the flood narratives of Gilgamesh, Genesis, and many other peoples: did it really happen around 2600 BC?). How much of these traditional and/or sacred histories is factual and how much is made up to support community values? Or where did the community values come from? A lot depends on whether you believe in Anu, or Vishnu, or Elohim. For example, if you believe in the God of the Hebrews, you have a detailed history of the origin of that people. If you do not, you know very little at all – and will have some difficulty explaining their existence.
Our system of dating was devised in the 6th century AD (Anno Domine, Year of our Lord, or CE – Common Era). Before that there was no common dating system. Dates before 1000 BC/BCE fade into guesswork and we have no sure record of anything before 4000 or 5000 BC/BCE (what is a thousand years among friends?). For example, Moses lived and allegedly wrote either around 1250 or 1450 BC/BCE. Yet civilization is far older than that.
Going backwards, we presume there was life before history. Anthropologists and Archaeologists have found evidence to posit several levels of prehistoric humanity. Civilizations, like the Inca, have been built without any known system of writing. Were Egypt and Sumer like that? How long? Cultures have survived into modern times with no urban centers, political and military structures, economic differentiation, or other trappings of civilization. Did that happen in the Middle East as well? How long did people wander around before they settled down and started keeping records? Why and why not?
Civilization and Barbarians
Another threshold would be the so-called Neolithic revolution: the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers and herdsmen. These changes took place in different places at different times. Can we assume that our ancestors lived like remote and “primitive” tribes of today? Or are they, too, the result of thousands of years of (unrecorded) experience?
In ancient history the interaction between civilization and barbarian is one of the most important themes. The story goes like this. In the fertile flood plains of certain river valleys it was recognized as advantageous for people to settle in agricultural villages. Along the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Yellow Rivers, some of these villages came to dominate their neighbors and/or cooperate in irrigation and flood control in progressively larger units until they became city states. Only a small proportion actually lived in the cities. It took a lot of farm labor to support even a small city. But it is in the urban core that diversified society, economics, advanced technology (like metallurgy), government, art and religion took place. In short: civilization.
But the barbarians remained, of three basic kinds. If the farmers produced more than they ate, Neolithic villages might produce warrior chieftains and bands of surplus males to be explorers and marauders. Nomadic tribesmen followed herds of semi-domesticated animals in annual patterns. Theirs was a portable society, usually operating in small groups of one or two extended families. They traded with settled peoples for necessities: grain and tools. Sometimes conflict led to violence. Occasionally they massed into conquest states, overwhelming civilized areas, displacing elites, but eventually being absorbed by the culture they had conquered. Such were the Indo-Europeans. Other chieftains took to the sea in boats, fishing and trading and occasionally raiding and colonizing distant shores. Such were the Vikings (much later – just a thousand years ago). Wave after wave of these barbarians interrupted ancient and medieval history.
Don’t take civilization for granted.
David W. Heughins (“ProfDave”) is Adjunct Professor of History at Nazarene Bible College. He holds a BA from Eastern Nazarene College and a PhD in history from the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Holiness in 12 Steps (2020). He is a Vietnam veteran and is retired, living with his daughter and three grandchildren in Connecticut.