Roger Pearse

This seems to be merely a reiteration and expansion of your earlier claims. I refer you to my earlier replies. History should be written as objectively as possible, but to claim that the archaeology is the only objective basis on which to write history is rather exaggerated. A belt-buckle is mute. But I have already dealt with your claim earlier.

I would suggest that anyone interested in this purchase a copy of Betty Radice's excellent translation of Pliny's Letters (or via: amazon.co.uk), and read it informally a couple of times, over time. This is partly because it is well worth the reading, but also because it gives us so much about those times.

What I would suggest is that they then ask yourself how much of that information we would have, if we merely wrote a version "based initially on materials from the era, coins, epigraphy and inscriptions, statuary, and anything else in the archaeological record." I imagine the result would fill half a page of paper at most. What part of the conduct of Regulus is recorded in such sources? Or the table talk of Nerva?

If they are uncertain, let them compare the early volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History where the information is almost entirely archaeological, and so tentative, against the later ones.

Archaeology is incredibly valuable; but also incredibly limited, as I remarked earlier. As I remarked earlier, scholars differ on where the balance should be; but the limitations of archaeology as a source for writing history tend to become obvious when you try to do so.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Huon

Nitpick : I have seen some of them with the motto "Gott mit uns". They are not mute. They speak to me of a colour (vert-de-gris), and of an epoch (1939-1945).

A gothic belt-buckle found in a burial-place next to a skeleton is an important element when the archeologist wants to date the burial-place.

You could change your example.

spin

A belt-buckle isn't mute. It's just that you're not listening and/or you're not interested in what it's saying. It seems that you might be surprised just how eloquent the smallest things in archaeology can be.

But your comment indicates to me that we aren't communicating.

You seem to think that history must be one or the other but not both. Texts are just narratives until that can be attached to the real world. That's where archaeology comes in. It attaches narrative to the real world. Once a narrative has been validated, it doesn't mean everything in the narrative must be real but it means that the writer was working with at least some real data. Such validated narratives then can supply the equivalent validation for other narrative. But the further you get away from the hard evidence the more tenuous the potential history in the narrative becomes.

Archaeology is not necessarily the source for writing history. It is the major source of validation of narratives. How can you decide if an ancient text is dealing with real events?

There are vast problems with the Augustan History and we are lucky to be able to validate or repudiate some of the content in that work because there is enough connection between the narrative contained in it and events that can be checked. So, how can you decide if an ancient text is dealing with real events?

It doesn't matter how much narrative you've got, if it is untestable. The meager results from archaeology are far better than a tome of unattached narrative.


spin

No Robots

Here is Paul Cartledge:

However, respect for the primacy of texts, and texts written in at least two 'dead' languages requiring a lengthy period of linguistic and cultural immersion before they can be 'read' at even the most straightforward level, has tended to inhibit any Gadarene rush towards modernity, let alone postmodernity, of local or global interpretation in this field of historiography. Ancient historians have even been relatively slow to deploy systematically the 'ancillary' disciplines of archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics to eke out or contextualize their preferred literary sources, let alone indulge in the consensual interdisciplinarity and and comparativism rightly desiderated below by Jairus Banaji (Chapter 6), across the whole range of thematic and material issues confronting them in their potentially highly heterogeneous area and period.--"Introduction: The Anxiety of Ambiguity" / Paul Cartledge. In Companion to Historiography / Michael Bentley (Taylor & Francis, 2002), p. 2-3.

Cartledge notes three exceptions to the general rule: Arnaldo Momigliano (paging Dr. Mountainman), Moses Finley and Geoffrey de Ste Croix.

Now, this is all well and good, but none of it leads Cartledge to think that Christ's historicity is in question any more than is that of Alexander the Great. He asserts in his biography of Alexander (p. 268) that, "[i]t has been well said that the search for the historical Alexander is something like the search for the historical Jesus." He elaborates:

Yet no contemporary narrative account of [Alexander the Great's] career exists, and what is generally reckoned to be the most persuasive of those that do survive was written by Arrian, a Greek from Asia Minor, well over four centuries after Alexander's premature death, aged thirty-two, at Babylon in 323 BC. This situation makes the search for the 'real' Alexander almost impossibly difficult.

For this reason, and because Alexander soon passed from the territory of factual history proper to the plane of myth and legend (thanks, not least, to his own self-propagandising efforts), the search for him has been likened to that for the historical-Jesus. Much was written about both men, but practically nothing contemporary has survived, and very little indeed without a severely prejudiced axe to grind.--"Alexander the Great: hunting for a new past? Paul Cartledge goes in search of the elusive personality of the world's greatest hero". History Today 01-JUL-04

Roger Pearse

Why do you suppose such an absurd thing?

Indeed they can; when illuminated by the texts.

Since I explicitly say otherwise in this thread, I don't know why you should suppose this.

But I note that you have ignored everything I said. If you read what I said, and follow my suggestions, you will learn why I demur at the position you have decided to repeat.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Yes, I have books on the Afrika Korps too -- a legacy of a teenage interest in WW2. But surely that example rather supports my point? That words are worth a thousand lumps of metal?

But surely they are mute, unless we know about that epoch -- from literary sources, for the buckle doesn't tell us -- and how the lump of metal fits into it? Then discoveries of it can tell us something, properly interpreted, by comparison with other sources.

Lumps of otherwise unknown archaeology provoke head-scratching. (In my experience they are usually assigned as "religious items", if no-one on the dig can think of any better explanation).

I feel that attempts are being made to maneouvre me into a position that I don't hold and have already disagreed with -- that archaeology is worthless -- to advance the proposition that ancient texts are fundamentally unreliable and secondary. Yet I've already said different, and will repeat in summary (don't you hate it when people ignore your nuanced comments, and then jump on a brief summary?).

Archaeology is inestimably valuable, because it allows us direct factual access to the past. The difficulty is the limited nature of what it actually *says*. Nearly always we have to draw deductions from it, to get anything historical out.

This is why artefacts, however lovely, without an archaeological context are so infuriating to us all.

Thus we really have to work to get information out of these things; and, however hard we work, we won't get nearly the sort of information that an scurrilous anecdote of a paragraph from a writer will give us, however inaccurate, biased, or whatever, simply by virtue of being a human pair of eyes looking at the scene with the attitudes of the era.

Indeed. But... how do we know it is "gothic" (as opposed to "Mari stratum 2.3" -- the sort of description we have to live with in non-literary excavations)? And who are these "goths", aside from that record? -- We find out the value of the item, because we have the literary record. The archaeology then controls what we find in the texts.

Of course to some extent you can see it the other way as well! I'm not taking a position either way, and the wars between the historians and the archaeologists are not for me to get involved in! But I don't feel that we're in any danger of dismissing archaeology; rather the opposite, of overvaluing it. But I was really serious about reading history written almost solely from archaeology -- the early volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History are really pretty unreadable in consequence.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

gurugeorge

Yeah but the point of history isn't to produce nice, flowing prose, it's to get at the facts. If solid facts are hard to come by, then so be it. To be disappointed with this situation from the point of view of entertainment is understandable, but it can't be a serious intellectual position.

But actually both a belt buckle and a text are in need of interpretation, they are logically on a footing, only one has more symbols on its face - and the interpretation that a text is an eyewitness testimony (for example ) is as much an interpretation (i.e. a punt, a hypothesis) as that the belt buckle was a product of the apparel factories of Nazi Germany.

spin

What the reference in "thing" is in your rhetorical question is not derivable from your statement in conjunction with mine. Is it the claim that "[a] belt-buckle isn't mute" or that "you're not listening and/or you're not interested"? Sorry, I shouldn't ask questions: you don't usually answer.

See below.

Then you should realize you are not communicating either. Nor are you answering questions.

Still talking past. :huh: Oh, well.

Back to this:
Archaeology produces sources that you don't seem to contemplate: the libraries and collections from el-Amarna, Hattusa, Ugarit, Asshur, Nineveh, other Babylonian sites, the Dead Sea area, and Oxyrhynchus, along with monumental remains from Mesopotamia and Egypt, produce vast amounts of source material for ancient history. Most of the historical material in the first four volumes of CAH come from archaeological yields.

I think you are just lean too much towards nice traditional literary sources.


spin

arnoldo

There is ample evidence for early christianity existing in the first century including from the following Roman Historian, Pliny the Younger.

Topher

Thanks for the reply.

I can see the sense is well informed information as apposed to merely contemporary information. However, how do we establish that they are well informed? I guess we can look to see how accurate they are about things we do know (things we have multiple sources on) such as the geographic area, local customs of the area the write about, etc. If they make mistakes here then perhaps it indicates that they are not informed, or are not concerned with being accurate, which would seem to cast doubt about content entirely, right?