Posts Tagged ‘ancient history’
“All the cities of the world are going to expand. We need to have a better understanding of what makes good urban habitat for home sapiens.”*…
“When did our vision of the future become so constrained, tired, and even dystopic?” Julien Crockett talks with Bruno Carvalho, the author of The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, about the history of city planning and how urban design intertwines with a society’s prognostications and projections…
Cities have long been places of possibility—places where it seemed that we could break from the past and create an entirely new future. As Bruno Carvalho observes in his new book, The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, this mindset is a key feature of what it means to be “modern”—a sensibility toward the present and the future as it relates to the past.
Yet, as Carvalho’s wide-ranging history details, a break from the past does not assume a positive vision of the future. In fact, Carvalho begins his book with the question “Where did the future go?”—the title of a debate between the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and anthropologist David Graeber. Both imagine that the only cities of tomorrow are on Mars. When did our vision of the future become so constrained, tired, and even dystopic?
Carvalho’s book returns to a recurring paradox we have faced since the Enlightenment: the better our capacity for creation and prediction, the more limited our ability to imagine a new future. He marvels, though, that “we know some of what is coming: urbanization and climate change, life and death. Between all that, there is a lot of space for reinvention.”
In our conversation, we look to the past to help us think through what reinvention might look like and discuss what it means to plan for a radically different future. We also discuss the legacies of Silicon Valley, the construction of New York City, urban futures moving from the West across the Pacific, and whether Carvalho is optimistic about what’s to come…
Eminently worth reading and pondering: “Where Did the Future Go?” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.
* Jan Gehl
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As we undertake to understand the urban, we might recall that it was on this date in 455 that the Vandals entered Rome, which they plundered for the next two weeks. It was, as sackings went (this was Rome’s third, of four altogether), relatively “light”: while the Vandals (who had destroyed all of Rome’s aqueducts on their approach) looted Roman treasure and sold many Romans into slavery, their leader Genseric acceded to the pleas of Pope Leo that the Vandals refrain from the wholesale slaughter of Rome’s population and the destruction of the Eternal City’s historic buildings.
“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind”*…
As Greg Woolf observed, “The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest examples of what is sometimes termed a “Mirror of Princes,” a book that illustrates the conduct of both bad and good rulers, and makes clear the difference between them.”
Nicolas Liney reviews a new verse translation of the 4,000-year-old text by Simon Armitage and considers its remarkable power, its extraordinary history, and its profound relevance to our moment…
There are two stories of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian epic written in the second millennium BCE. First, there’s the story of Gilgamesh himself, the semidivine king of Uruk. He is 11 cubits tall and four cubits from nipple to nipple (roughly 16 by six feet). He is hyperactive and priapic. He is not a good ruler. The gods create the wild Enkidu out of clay to keep him in check. The pair clash mightily, and then become inseparable. Restless and hungry for glory, they journey to the Forest of Cedar to defeat the monster Humbaba. Then they slay the Bull of Heaven sent by Ishtar, the god of sex and war whose advances Gilgamesh rejects. The gods deem that Enkidu must die, and so he does, slowly and unheroically. Gilgamesh watches over Enkidu’s body until a maggot falls from his nostril, a fantastically intense image that drives home death’s finality.
At this point, the register of the poem shifts, and Gilgamesh’s triumphs are replaced by sorrow and an overwhelming awareness of his own mortality. Alone and anguished, he journeys to the underworld to visit Uta-napishti, the immortalized survivor of a cataclysmic flood, intent on unlocking the secret to eternal life. Inevitably, he is disappointed and returns to Uruk. Gilgamesh is an epic about power, about self-knowledge, about passionate companionship and the unquenchable pain of its loss. Fundamentally, it is an epic about death. Rilke labeled it “das Epos der Todesfurcht”—the epic of the fear of death—and this is what gave it its vital appeal: “It concerns me,” he confessed. “Thousands of years later death is no less bewildering to humankind,” the poet Simon Armitage says in the introduction to his new translation of the epic; “there is no more relatable subject.”
The second story of Gilgamesh is about the text itself, one of the world’s oldest surviving long-form poems. Like Homeric epic, its roots are most likely oral, and questions of authorship are futile. The earliest version was a Sumerian cycle of five poems from around 2100 BCE, probably part of a larger group of stories about the heroic dynasty of Uruk. Sumerian eventually died out, and the five episodes were replaced by one unified version in Akkadian. This was recorded in cuneiform script, often carved in clay tablets, and spread throughout Mesopotamia and the Levant. Sometime between 1300 and 1000 CE, a man called Sin-leqi-unninni created a heavily revised edition organized into 11 “tablets”—referred to now as the Standard Version—which was copied widely and included in the great library of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king, built in Nineveh in the seventh century.
And then … silence. By the new millennium, Akkadian was a defunct language, and Uruk and Nineveh were in ruins. As far as we know, Gilgamesh was not translated into other writing systems, so when cuneiform fell out of use, the epic seemed to go with it. For centuries it slept, until the Library of Ashurbanipal was discovered by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam in 1850, and what documents could be recovered were transported to the British Museum. Cuneiform was eventually deciphered, and in 1872, George Smith, an assistant curator working on the archive, came across a fragment of the epic describing a great flood—similar to the one in the Book of Genesis,but in a work significantly older than the Bible. This was too much for Smith, who began stripping his clothes off in excitement: “I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion.”
Critics like to say that Gilgamesh is both incredibly old and refreshingly young. Its sheer age staggers—for comparison, just try to imagine a current novel being rediscovered in the year 5120 CE. As a quasi-historical figure, Gilgamesh was considered by Babylonians to be even older: the Sumerian King List,a chronographic record,hyperbolically places his reign in 7800 BCE. Within the world of the epic itself, time reaches back further still: when Gilgamesh meets Uta-napishti, the Noah-type figure who survived the flood long before Gilgamesh, even he can speak of an “ancient city,” Shuruppak, on the banks of the Euphrates. The epic constantly forces us into these dizzying loops of deep time, forces us both to drastically exceed the limits of our brief lifespan and to be persistently reminded of them.
But Gilgamesh’s comparatively recent reentry into the modern imagination makes it feel fresh, not overburdened by centuries of interpretation and adaptation, like Homer or Virgil, and firmly outside Western literary traditions. There is no first looking into Chapman’s Gilgamesh.This can be dangerous for translators and adapters: there’s an urge to treat the epic like a blank canvas, to make it say something relevant to contemporary concerns, which can strip it of its strangeness and also cut it loose from its Iraqi heritage. But the subject matter of Gilgamesh also seems undeniably contemporary: how could a story about ecological destruction, poor leaders, and misogynist alphas not concern us here and now?…
Eminently worth reading in full. A classic which has survived, against all odds, and what it offers us today: “The Epic of the Fear of Death” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.
* William Butler Yeats
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As we reach back, we might recall that it was on this date in 2004 that the discovery of what was (and is) believed to be the world’s oldest seat of learning (dating from 295 BCE), the Library of Alexandria, was announced by Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities during a conference at the University of California. A Polish-Egyptian team had uncovered 13 lecture halls featuring an elevated podium for the lecturer. Such a complex of lecture halls had never before been found on any Mediterranean Greco-Roman site. Alexandria may be regarded as the birthplace of western science, where Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years.
See also: “Oldest University Unearthed in Egypt“
“All cannot be lost when there is still so much being found”*…
We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. As Justin Germain explains, their contents may reshape how we understand the ancient world…
We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect; that’s what made it fun. As budding classicists, we grew up in an academic world where we didn’t have A, but did have B. How different would classical scholarship be if that switched? If we had had A all along, but never had B? For me, the text I always chose to find was a little-known pamphlet circulated in the late fourth century by a deposed Spartan king named Pausanias. It’s one of the few texts about Sparta written by a Spartan while Sparta was still hegemonic. I always lost the Gospel of Matthew. It’s basically a copy of Mark, right down to the grammar and syntax. Do we really need two?
What would you choose? Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.
The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most recent translation of the Iliad or works of Cicero on the shelf at a bookstore, and assume that these texts have been handed down in a fairly predictable way generation after generation: scribes faithfully made copies from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and eventually, with the advent of the printing press, reliable versions of these texts were made available in the vernacular of the time and place to everyone who wanted them. Onward and upward goes the intellectual arc of history! That’s what I thought, too.
But the fact is, many of even the most famous works we have from antiquity have a long and complicated history. Almost no text is decoded easily; the process of bringing readable translations of ancient texts into the hands of modern readers requires the cooperation of scholars across numerous disciplines. This means hours of hard work by those who find the texts, those who preserve the texts, and those who translate them, to name a few. Even with this commitment, many texts were lost – the usual estimate is 99 percent – so we have no copies of most of the works from antiquity. Despite this sobering statistic, every once in a while, something new is discovered. That promise, that some prominent text from the ancient world might be just under the next sand dune, is what has preserved scholars’ passion to keep searching in the hope of finding new sources that solve mysteries of the past.
And scholars’ suffering paid off! Consider the Villa of the Papyri, where in the eighteenth century hundreds, if not thousands, of scrolls were discovered carbonized in the wreckage of the Mount Vesuvius eruption (79 AD), in a town called Herculaneum near Pompeii. For over a century, scholars have hoped that future science might help them read these scrolls. Just in the last few months – through advances in computer imaging and digital unwrapping – we have read the first lines. This was due, in large part, to the hard work of Dr. Brent Seales, the support of the Vesuvius Challenge, and scholars who answered the call. We are now poised to read thousands of new ancient texts over the coming years.
But first, a bit of background on the provenance of ancient texts. We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies. These were first written on scrolls but later in books – the Romans called books codexes – starting in the first century AD.
Did I say copies? That’s actually not correct either. We don’t have first copies of anything. What we do have is copies of copies, most of which date hundreds of years after the original was penned. Even many of our copies are not complete copies. Take, for example, the earliest surviving piece of the New Testament: a fragment from the Gospel of John known as P52. Far from a complete copy of the book, this fragment is about the size of a credit card and dates to, in the earliest estimation, 125 AD. That is over 100 years after Christ was crucified. The fragment is without a doubt at least a copy of a copy because its dating is too late to be either an original or a first copy. It was also found in Egypt, far from both Judea or Syria, where John is thought to have originated. Finding a complete copy of a text – let alone an early Christian Bible – is a home run. We have only found two such Bibles, the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both dating to the mid-fourth century.
More often than finding such complete copies, scholars instead compile the various fragments of copies and try to reconstruct the original work. Once scholars agree on what the original text should be, and in some cases they never reach agreement, the text is ready for publication in the original language. Where there are still variants in the text, scholars will include an apparatus criticus citing the manuscript from which the text is published and listing manuscripts with variant readings. The last step is to add a translation in the vernacular, and there are bilingual and even polyglot editions. These could range from the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a magnificent, six-volume work printed in Madrid in 1519 giving the scriptural text in no less than four languages – Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Aramaic – to the popular Loeb editions printed with both the ancient text and an English translation, for those with some limited knowledge of the ancient languages.
To most fully acclimate the reader to how tenuous this process is, this essay will focus on three different texts. The first will be a very well-known work that was never lost. Nevertheless, almost no one read it in earnest until the nineteenth century. I will then focus on a text that was lost to history, but that we were able to recover from the annals of time. Such examples are fortuitous. Our third example will be a text that we know existed, but of which we have no copies, and consider what important ramifications its discovery could hold. Finally, we’ll turn our attention again to the Villa of the Papyri and the gold mine of texts discovered there that new technologies are currently making available to classicists. By examining the history of the first three texts, I hope to sketch out a picture of how new discoveries from the villa might change our understanding of the ancient world…
[Germain considers Aristotle’s Poetics (“While it’s not accurate to say, as one of Aristotle’s unpublished works, the Politics was ever lost, it was certainly rediscovered”), the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (a group of fragments that cover Greek history in same period– from the closing years of the Peloponnesian War into the middle of the fourth century BCE– covered by Xenophon, but that tell a different story), and the Constitution of the Spartans, also by Aristotle– a work often cited in other extant texts, but never found (“Imagine an alternate universe where all sources about America were written by Soviets at the height of the Cold War. The historians of the future might get a warped sense of reality. That’s exactly the case with ancient Sparta [e.g., Thucydides]… Although still an outsider and Athenian, Aristotle wrote about the Spartan state in the Politics, and he did not have good things to say. It is safe to assume that whatever Aristotle’s Constitution said, its testimony was not influenced by the Spartan mirage, giving us perhaps a more accurate picture of life inside the city-state.”)]…
… Resurrecting the dead is difficult; Jesus knew that. And the only reason we know that he knew that is because the church saw the preservation of scripture as a core duty. Not one scrap of text from the ancient world has come to us without untold numbers of heroes quietly working to hand down, from generation to generation, the texts that have primarily shaped the modern world. We are thankful for documents like the Politics, documents whose life cycle we can narrate from conception to the present moment. Even then, such texts can fall in and out of fashion, and their knowledge can be lost to entire generations. Texts such as the Hellenic Oxyrhynchia are windfalls of good fortune, ones that are completely forgotten in their own day, then lost a second time to history, buried in some ancient Egyptian trash heap. All the work necessary to make texts like the Politics accessible need also be done for texts like the Hellenica Oxyrhinchia.
Yet there is still another monumental step: the texts must first be discovered. Dwarfed in comparison to the first two groups are texts – such as Aristotle’s Constitution of the Spartans – that were attested to by ancient sources but have been completely lost to the annals of time, like the vast majority of Greek and Latin texts. These sources, while now completely unavailable to us, might yet be discovered at any time, on any dig. On any given day the earth might bestow its blessing, uncovering wonders from the past, as was the case with many of the works of Epicurus, which would have fallen into this latter category of lost works, until we discovered the Villa of the Papyri. Yet even such a fortuitous discovery could not be taken advantage of were new techniques not developed for reading scrolls whose survival depends on not opening them. I always tell my Greek and Latin students that there is a point where the science of translating becomes pure art. Likewise, there is a point at which the recovery, translation, restoration, and, finally, the study of ancient texts becomes treasure seeking. You never know what treasure might be hiding in the next ancient Egyptian trash heap…
Filling in the blanks in ancient history: “Doom Scrolling” in @WorksInProgMag.
For more on the Vesuvius Challenge– its process and progress– see here (source of the image above).
* Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler)
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As we revise, we might send carefully excavated birthday greeting to Karl Alfred von Zittel; he was born on this date in 1839. A geologist and paleontologist, he was a pioneer of evolutionary paleontology and was widely recognized as the leading teacher of paleontology in the 19th century. His five-volume Handbuch der Paläonologie (1876-93) was arguably his greatest service to science, and it remains one of the most comprehensive and trustworthy paleontological reference books.
But he also noteworthily proved that the Sahara had not been under water during the Pleistocene Ice Age.
“Is it not always the way of the people to put forward one man as its special champion and protector and cherish and magnify him?”*…
Matt Gatton on the clash of two Athenians, Alcibiades and Callias, half-brothers and students of Socrates, one of whom flirted with becoming the ancient city-state’s tyrant after leading a successful passage past Athens’ enemy Sparta…
… The road to Eleusis is open, and Alcibiades is a hero. The army is exalted in spirit and feels itself invincible under his command. The people are so captivated by his leadership that they are filled with an amazing passion for him to be their tyrant. (A tyrant is, of course, a person with sole political power, which, when matched with his sole military power as autocrat, would make Alcibiades more like a king than a general.)…
What Alcibiades thinks about the idea of being named tyrant is unknown, but it frightens many of Athens’s most influential citizens. Perhaps Callias most of all: imagine the sort of dread that would be triggered by the thought of a psychopath being given the power of a tyrant, particularly since this would-be tyrant has already profaned your religion, stolen your money, punched your father, possibly murdered your sister, and certainly plotted your own assassination. Anyone, but especially Callias, must have grave concerns about what Alcibiades would do with unchecked power. Callias had grown up with Alcibiades, they were “half” brother after all, and he knew him better than anyone else, knew his nature and his malevolence.
There is no word on Socrates’s feelings about the chatter of Alcibiades being named tyrant, but Socrates’s perspective on tyrants in general is well recorded by Plato. To Socrates, the flaw of democracy is its vulnerability to tyrants. The populace—the mob, as he calls them—are gullible and can easily fall under the spell of a charismatic leader. Alcibiades certainly fits the bill. In Socrates’s estimation, the tyrant first appears as a protector. The people have something they fear, either inside or outside of the state, either real or imagined, from which the tyrant claims he can guard them. He will make them the “victors.” The people flock to him of their own accord, for he pays them in lies, lies they want to hear, lies they want to believe. They are “superior”; they are “true patriots.” His favorite tools are false accusations and unleashing his mob against the “threat.” In time, the tyrant erases any and all opposition, “with unholy tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow citizens.” He and his supporters are empowered by the purge, “and the more detestable his actions . . . the greater devotion he requires from his followers.” These words are as true in the modern world as they were in ancient Athens.
Many countries today still struggle with this structural defect of democracy: the majority of the populace in a democracy may elect a tyrant, who will invariably disassemble the democracy that elected him—a democracy can make a tyrant, but a tyrant can unmake a democracy. The weak portion of the populace yearns to be strong, so they attach themselves to a strong man; such is the allure of the bully, the appeal of the despot, the attraction of the tyrant. Ancient Athens is where democracy first began and first fell, and so can teach us lessons that are, unfortunately, still applicable…
A lesson from the past: “The Bloody Rivalry That Led to the Fall of Democracy in Athens,” in @CrimeReads. Excerpted from Gatton’s recent book, The Shadows of Socrates: The Heresy War, and Treachery Behind the Trial of Socrates.
* Socrates, in Plato’s Republic
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As we avoid autocracy, we might recall that it was on this date in 197 that Emperor Septimius Severus defeated usurper Septimius Severus in the Battle of Lugdunum, the bloodiest battle between Roman armies– 150,000 Roman soldiers engaged for both sides.
“Better not bring up a lion inside your city, but if you must, then humor all his moods”*…
Historian Bret Devereaux on why it’s ill-advised to idolize Spartans…
The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta—Spartaganda, as it were—is alive and well.
Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises—an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.
Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other,” a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society…
Eminently worth reading in full. U.S. admiration of a proto-fascist city-state is based on bad history: “Spartans Were Losers,” from @BretDevereaux in @ForeignPolicy.
In the spirit of offering alternative perspectives: Brad DeLong in defense of Gates of Fire, if not of the worshipful view of the Spartans.
* Aristophanes, The Frogs
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As we rethink role models, we might recall that it was on this date in 1951 that Disney’s Alice in Wonderland had its American premiere (in New York, two days after premiering in London).
Walt Disney first tried to adapt Alice into a feature-length animated feature film in the 1930s, but were scrapped in favor of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). The idea was revived in the 1940s. The film was originally intended to be a live-action/animated film, but Disney decided it would be the fully animated feature film. During its production, many sequences adapted from Lewis Carroll’s books were later omitted, such as Jabberwocky, White Knight, the Duchess, and Mock Turtle.
Alice in Wonderland was considered a disappointment on its initial release, so was shown on television as one of the first episodes of Disneyland. Its 1974 re-release in theaters proved to be much more successful, leading to subsequent re-releases, merchandising, and home video releases.
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