Sphinx

I am celebrating – very quietly, as I very much doubt that any fees were paid to the original publishers – the appearance of the Iranian translation of my old Theories, Models and Concepts book; partly, it is nice that anyone still thinks it might be useful, and mostly I just find the script so beautiful even if I can’t understand a word of it. Apparently my name gets transliterated as Noobil, which I rather like… I did write a short preface for the translation, reflecting on the writing of the original, and since I imagine that few of the small number of people who might be interested in this will actually be able to read Farsi, it makes sense to reproduce it here…

To a significant degree, the modern social sciences emerged out of the study of the ancient past. The pioneering economic, social and cultural theorists of the 18th and 19th centuries like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim or Max Weber were of course familiar with the societies and culture of classical antiquity, and to a lesser extent those of the Near East, as part of their school and university education, and so it was natural that they drew on them as a source of evidence and examples. But this engagement with ancient history was more than just coincidence or convenience. Ancient societies were fascinating because they were complex and sophisticated, the producers of ideas and cultural artefacts that were still admired and imitated in the present, and yet in many ways they were utterly different and alien. They represented a crucial test case, and challenge, for any theories based on the study of European modernity that claimed to be universal; and they provided an illuminating point of contrast with the developing modern society that was the main focus of interest for these thinkers. 

It was only when the social sciences abandoned their interest in historical comparison in favour of abstract theories with claims to normative status (classical economics is the most obvious example) that ancient history faded from view. But it is tempting to suggest that ancient historians should also share the blame for this estrangement, since with rare exceptions they showed little interest in maintaining a dialogue with social science; they insisted on prioritising language skills above all else, and frequently dismissed any mode of argument beyond the citation of ancient literary texts. Of course this attitude was never universal – we might think of figures like M.I. Rostovtzeff, Jane Harrison or M.I. Finley, who drew on the ideas of other disciplines to develop new interpretations – but ‘normal ancient history’, to echo the theory of scientific progress of Thomas Kuhn, was resolutely untheoretical, or even anti-theoretical. This was still more the case when it came to the teaching of students. Until about twenty years ago, if you learnt any kind of general principles of historical analysis, rather than just accumulating factual information, it focused on discussion of ancient sources, without any concern for problems of interpretation. The idea that there might be ways of studying the past that questioned the priority of literary evidence, or even ignored it altogether, was a heresy that one encountered only at graduate level. 

One significant factor was the separation of ‘ancient history’ – the study of the classical Greeks and Romans – from the rest of ‘history’ in many universities, certainly in the United Kingdom up to the 1980s. While the social sciences had largely turned away from history at the beginning of the twentieth century, the separation was not absolute, and from the 1930s some historians (most notably the Annales school in France) sought to narrow the gap and adopt a more social-scientific approach to the study of the past. One reason why I ended up with a slightly different perspective to the dominant mode of ancient history was that I had started my undergraduate studies on a History programme, which included a course on General Historical Problems that introduced me to a selection of other ways of ‘doing history’. It was rather haphazard in its coverage, and a lot of it has made sense to me only in retrospect – partly, if I’m quite honest, because at the time I was focused as much on playing in bands and writing journalistic essays as I was on my actual studies. But studying this course established in me a basic assumption that one should always ask about a historian’s approach and concepts, rather than just reading their conclusions; and, with a couple of key examples – above all the micro-history of Carlo Ginzburg and the panoramic longue durée of Fernand Braudel – it demonstrated that one might achieve a radically different and exciting perspective on the past simply by thinking about it differently. 

This stayed with me after I switched to ancient history and then embarked on doctoral research. At that level of study there was far more explicit discussion of theory and methodology, not least because of the past influence of M.I. Finley and the present influence of figures like Keith Hopkins, Paul Cartledge and Anthony Snodgrass; but it was obvious from the scholarship I was reading that an anti-theoretical, positivist attitude persisted among many respected and important ancient historians, let alone their students. The reason seemed obvious: if students do not study ‘how to do history’, but simply accumulate information and learn about literary sources, then inevitably most of them will develop intellectual habits unconsciously through imitation, and if the historians they imitate are mostly untheoretical positivists, that’s what they’ll become. True, those students who went on to further study would encounter more debates and uncertainty, especially around these theoretical and methodological issues – but that’s too late for the majority of students who leave university after their first degree. If we were honest, we’d have to admit that we’d failed to teach or encourage those students to be properly critical, or to reflect enough on how we interpret the past. 

So, when I continued my career path into the lower ranks of university teachers, I looked for opportunities to change things. This was actually easier than I’d expected; most departments had some sort of Introduction to Ancient History course, that no one really wanted to teach so they were happy for me to take it on, and I could then quietly subvert it for my own purposes. Generations of students have endured my lectures on historical theory and methodology (it was a good year if one or two students in a group actually enjoyed them) – a significant proportion of whom commented in later years, mostly to other people, that now they could see the point of those classes, and realised how useful they were. This book emerged directly from that project; partly for the convenience of being able to give students something to read that was directly relevant to the course, partly because it was the book I wish I’d been able to read when I was a student, and partly with the polemical hope that it might enable me to influence the teaching of ancient history in other universities, if just one student were to pick it up and start questioning the way the subject was being researched and taught. 

Did it make any difference? I have absolutely no idea, beyond the fact that I do occasionally meet someone who had read the book and found it useful. It is certainly the case that ancient history as a discipline seems much more open to discussing theoretical and methodological issues, and to adopting ideas and concepts from different social sciences – there are some who are still resolutely untheoretical, but they are now definitely in the minority. True, this is all at the level of research and publication, rather than offering proof that students are learning about the subject differently – but something must be shifting, if more of their teachers are open to theoretical debates and are conveying this in their teaching. At any rate it means that a new version of this book could discuss a much wider range of examples, and focus on ancient historians using different theories and approaches to study the ancient past, rather than just discussing theories and approaches that could be used if someone chose to adopt them. 

Looking back over the book, I think most of it remains relevant. True, historians have largely stopped arguing about class and status as means of interpreting ancient societies (the focus is almost universally on different conceptions of ‘identity’, emphasising subjective experience rather than objective structures). Many of those studying the ancient economy desperately want to believe that the debate has moved beyond the division between ‘primitivism’ and ‘modernism’ that I sketch in this book; to be honest I think that’s wishful thinking, or an attempt at side-stepping the problem of whether the structures of the ancient economy were radically different from the modern by talking about ‘performance’ instead. But in both cases I think the discussion here still works as an introduction to the underlying issues, a guide to the context within which current historical debates are being conducted, even if some of the protagonists don’t actually recognise this – even if the details of the debates have moved on in the last fifteen years (as one would hope!). Similarly, research activity in environmental ancient history has dramatically expanded, with many exciting collaborative projects between historians and scientists – but since much of this work focuses on gathering more detailed information about ancient climate or plague, rather than developing new theories of how environmental change interacts with historical processes, I think my chapter on Braudel and on ecology still offers a useful introduction to new, longer-term ways of thinking about history. 

Probably the most striking change since I wrote the book has been the questioning of the identity and existence of the entire discipline. I could take it for granted – as in my title – that everyone knew what ‘ancient history’ meant; it was simply a question of whether it should be seen as a sub-discipline of ‘Classics’ (focusing on Greek and Latin language and literature) or of History. Today, we recognise the presumption, and colonialist legacy, of assuming that Greek and Roman societies constitute the only things worth studying in the classical Mediterranean, let alone that they alone define ‘ancient’ history. Some people now argue for adopting a more accurate, less imperialist label: Ancient Mediterranean Studies, for example, or Ancient Greek and Roman History. Others push for a more inclusive discipline, expanding to include Near Eastern societies if not in fact classical India, China and Africa as well. Of course we can’t expect that every scholar will need to have a command of all these languages and traditions – rather, the future of research can only be collaborative. 

It is a great privilege for me to have this opportunity to speak to Iranian students, despite not speaking a word of your language; and it’s also rather terrifying, as I have to admit to ignorance. While my perspective on the discipline of ancient history and its methods was, in its day, relatively radical, my knowledge base is thoroughly traditional; my default, my safe haven, is Roman Italy or classical Athens. I have for more than twenty years taken great pleasure in including an overview of Sassanid Persia and the rise of Islam in my lectures on Europe in late antiquity, and insisting on the role of the early Near Eastern societies in the rise of classical Greece – but I wouldn’t for a moment attempt to research those fields. 

Other than the fact that I unselfconsciously use ‘ancient history’ just to mean Greece and Rome, I don’t think there is anything in the book that could not apply equally to the study of Near Eastern societies (or indeed any other premodern society). Indeed, I think it might be even more relevant. There is a risk, at least from my perspective, that this new recognition that ancient historians cannot ignore the Near East and the rest of Eurasia leads to an assumption that naïve old-fashioned methods may be sufficient, to accumulate knowledge so that at a later date we can start evaluating it properly. On the contrary, the best way for Near Eastern studies to take its rightful place as an equal partner in the scholarly enterprise is for it to be theoretically and methodologically sophisticated from the beginning, free from the parochialism – and the fetishization of a limited number of high-culture texts and authors – of conventional ‘ancient history’. The shift in our perspective on the past – Europe is, for many purposes, merely the western edge of Eurasian history, rather than the centre of everything – needs to be accompanied with a shift in the institutional structures of ancient studies, rather than allowing the old imperialist intellectual powers to continue to dominate. 

It is possible that the one thing more insulting than a European implying that classical European civilisation is the entirety of ‘ancient history’ is that same European laying down the law about how someone else’s subject should be studied – but if I wasn’t inclined to gratuitous polemic, I would never have written this book in the first place. My aim is not to tell you how to interpret the past – but to tell you that you do need to think about this, rather than taking traditional methods or the approaches of your teachers entirely for granted. I’m reminded of an aspect of globalisation theory (another recent set of ideas that, if I wrote this book today, I’d need to discuss): the suggestion that cultural change in the modern interconnected world is not about homogenisation but reflexivity, reflecting on one’s inherited ideas and practices in the knowledge that there are alternatives, and developing a hybrid from the different possibilities. So, western ancient historians increasingly recognise that, whatever the traditions and assumptions of their discipline, they cannot continue to privilege Greece and Rome, and that they need to pay attention to the arguments of specialists in other fields rather than simply imposing their own practices and understanding. Students of, say, Persian History today do not face a binary choice between accepting Western methods (after all, which one?) wholesale or rejecting them outright, but rather must recognise that theory and methodology are something you have to think about, developing your own approach from the many possibilities available, and being prepared to justify and defend it. This book is intended to provoke you into developing your own approach to the study of the past.