Sketching Borders
Brief notes:
Crcata said:
So how far back have we "directly" and clearly documented history?
As
DaveC's inquiry↑ suggests, there are some vague dimensions about the question. To use Western civilization as an example, we generally trace our history back to Mesopotamia, and among the earliest historical documents we have is the Code of Hammurabi, circa eighteenth century BCE.
There arises a question of why it matters. This is not compared against an abstraction of worthlessness, but it tells us more about the civilization abstractly than anything else.
Karen Armstrong, in
Fields of Blood (2014), cites fragments of poetry and inscriptions from Uruk suggeting people then were not so foreign to our human sentiments:
All that we know for certain is that by 3000 BCE there were twelve cities in the Mesopotamian plain, each supported by produce grown by peasants in the surrounding countryside. Theirs was subsistence level living. Each village hat to bring its entire crop to the city it served; officials allocated a portion to feed the local peasants, and the rest was stored for the aristocracy in the city temples. In this way, a few great families with the help of a class of retainers―bureaucrats, soldiers, merchants, and household servants―appropriated between half and two-thirds of the revenue. They used this surplus to live a different sort of life altogether, freed for various pursuits that depend on leisure and wealth. In return, they maintained the irrigation system and preserved a degree of law and order. All premodern states feared anarchy: a single crop failure caused by drought or social unrest could lead to thousands of deaths, so the elite could tell themselves that this system benefited the population as a whole. But robbed of the fruits of their labors, the peasants were little better than slaves: plowing, harvesting, digging irrigation canals, being forced into degradation and penury, their hard labor in the fields draining their lifeblood. If they failed to satisfy their overseers, their oxen were kneecapped and their olive trees chopped down. They left fragmentary records of their distress. "The poor man is better dead than alive," one peasant lamented. "I am a thoroughbred steed," complained another, "but I am hitched to a mule and must draw a cart and carry weeds and stubble."
(23)
But what are we looking for in historical records?
I ask because there is a lot of "folklore" out there and myths and what not supposedly based on history but yet we seem to not really know.
You know, I'd have to go back and look up the exact issue, but I had this weird experience once having to do with Josephus, proof of Christ, the viable argument that all else aside that part of the document is a post hoc forgery, and then this bizarre twist in which Josephus suddenly became unreliable because something else he had written and now it was important to remind that he was a turncoat Jew, or whatever. And it was just really weird because in one moment Josephus needed to be reliable, in the next unreliable. But I said all else aside; Josephus is not specifically contemporary; his record is what it is. If it is a primary history it is in questions of Christian history a documentation of custom and oral folkore in the latter first century.
And I'd have to look up the page number―I can't find the book offhand―but in
Lies my Teacher Told Me, James Loewen recounts an episode having to do with the Empty Continent proposition. It's kind of obscure today, but there really was a time in which students learned, essentially, that aside from the few tribes the Pilgrims encountered the place was largely empty.
I would have to search for the specific resource, because it was a chart in the back of a history textbook once upon a time, but European immigrants wiped out as much as ninety-five percent of the indigenous population.
Nonetheless, it turns out we've "known", the whole time it wasn't true.
That is to say, once upon a time someone made a record. One day someone found that record. Loewen criticizes a number of specific history textbooks; they were at the time the leading textbooks in the country. In the question of Empty Continent, Loewen points to the record and asks how it was missed. "I didn't know," the textbook author responds.
The record had been found; somebody wrote an obscure paper; nobody paid attention and the whole thing languished for generations.
In this case, it matters because we've been teaching people the wrong history. Empty Continent is a dying notion, but there are plenty askew about the historical record; after all, history is written by the champions of human society. In the past humans have even taken to destroying the historical record; it makes even less sense in the twenty-first century, but that's war for you.
But people include history and tradition in the fashioning of their moral frameworks. And we can say what we want about the Bible, but Pope Francis recently canonized Junipero Serra. How could
he, of all Popes, do that?
He needed a saint. The historical record be damned. And, besides, what do any of us want from it? But there's a moral framework for you.
The historical record is what it is:
This record says this about this.
What we require of it depends entirely on what we expect of the history itself.
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Notes:
Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New Press, 1995.
