Ancient History and Mapping the Past

One of the greatest misconceptions about the study of History is that it’s a static thing--that all you have to do is learn “what happened,” and then you “know history.” But it’s a lot more complex than that. Once something happens, it’s in the past, and its complete nature is lost to us. We can have extensive documentation, photographic evidence, even audio and video recordings of an event, but it’s still not a complete reproduction of what actually happened. Our experiences have a totality to them that is impossible to completely, 100-percent, reproduce. For example, we may know quite a bit about the events in Paris, France in the year 1789--the beginning of what we now know as the French Revolution. We have documents, firsthand testimony, archaeological and other physical evidence to help us describe what happened then--but we still can’t perfectly reproduce the past. We don’t know how 1789 smelled, for instance. And we can only surmise how it sounded. Only those who lived through those events--who actually experienced them--can know what “really happened” in the most complete sense of the term. As historians looking back on the past, the best we can do is come close as we can to a “complete” description using whatever evidence we have available to us.
Doing history is a lot like creating a map. Think about a really detailed road map of Des Moines, for example--it has an enormous amount of information on it, but it’s also a representation of the city rather than a reproduction. If a map were a completely accurate reproduction, it would be the same size as the city--and that defeats the whole purpose (and makes it hard to fold it up and keep it in the glove compartment. As historians, we may not be able to completely reproduce the past, but we can certainly map it. And if you’ve ever used a map to find your way to an unfamiliar location, then you know how useful and valuable that can be. As we map the past, we use the evidence and sources that we have to create a guide, a representation, of historical events. And in some ways, that’s an advantage. Standing on the corner of East 14th Street and University Avenue, you can experience part of Des Moines in all of its aspects. But the view from that intersection doesn’t allow you to see the whole city like looking at a map would. In a similar manner, the diary of a Paris merchant who lived through the events of 1789 gives us a detailed perspective of the French Revolution, but from a limited perspective--one merchant’s viewpoint. Only through combining sources and analyzing a range of materials can we get the broad view, the larger perspective, that helps us understand the French Revolution as it was experienced by an entire society. We map the past.

For the study of ancient history, this mapping analogy is especially pertinent. As you’ve already seen in our readings, we don’t have anything near a “complete set” of sources. We have fragmentary documentary evidence, scattered archaeological sites, some oral and linguistic evidence, but it’s still like trying to put together a puzzle with less than half the pieces. It can be frustrating--there are so many fascinating questions for which we can only guess at the answers. But it’s also exciting, in that there are continual opportunities to discover new evidence, or to see existing evidence in a new light, and change the ways in which we understand the ancient past. One excellent example is through climatological and archaeological research that’s been done over the last two decades that has completely changed our understanding of ancient Mesopotamia. We used to think that the earliest Sumerian city-states (like Uruk, and Ur, for example) were the products of irrigated agriculture. In other words, the arid, semi-desert environment of the region meant that larger concentrations of people, like those of an urban area, could only sustain themselves through the channeling of water in efficient enough ways to overcome the environmental difficulties and create large-scale agriculture. And the only way to create irrigation systems in that scale was by a larger state entity mobilizing the labor and resources to do so. Thus, the standard interpretation goes, we see the rise of the first city-states. But as James Scott details in a new book called Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, we now know that southern Mesopotamia wasn’t an arid desert 3000 years ago. It may be today, but we are making a mistake if we read these present conditions back into the remote past. In actuality, Scott argues, the Persian Gulf extended much further north in this earlier period; he analyzes recent research that clearly established that rather than a desert, southern Mesopotamia’s climate was actually that of a wetlands region, with low-lying marshes and floodplains as the predominant terrain. So rather than irrigation, city-states actually needed another set of tools to control too much, not too little, water. Thus, Scott concludes, “the classical view that ancient Sumer was a miracle of irrigation organized by the state in an arid landscape turns out to be totally wrong.” [1] What does that mean for us as historians? Well, a lot, really; much of what we thought we knew about the rise of Sumerian states needs to be re-examined. It’s a clear example of how new technologies and techniques of research can reshape our understanding of even the distant past. In essence, we’re able to make a much better map than the one we had before. 

That’s what the study of history is, then--it’s not just memorizing “what happened.” It’s looking at what happened and saying, “OK, what else happened?” Or asking why and how those things happened. And, most importantly, history is thinking about what the significance of all that is and engaging in that conversation with other students of the past. In this course, we’ll have the opportunity to do that repeatedly, and in the process, we’ll also have the opportunity to radically reshape our understanding of the past, and of the study of History.

If you're interested in Scott's arguments about how we should reconsider our understanding of the ancient world, here is a recent podcast where he discusses his research.


References:
[1] James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 47.