Richard Bulliet - History of the World to 1500 CE (Session 7) - The Mediterranean and Middle East

you all were ready to start now than we'd all be together on that the chapter that you've been assigned for this week deals with Greece Iran and India in the comprehensive version of the book as opposed to the brief Edition that we are using this is two chapters chapter on Iran Greece and Iran in a separate chapter in India and Southeast Asia in order to make the book shorter we decided to dump early Southeast Asia and to lump India in with Greece and Iran hoping to pick up Southeast Asia at some later point because everything in world history up that level has to do with how many words you have how many pages do you have and how do you you know how do you make compromises in the area of coverage but in fact we had in earlier stages debated the whole relationship of India to Iran to Greece and that debate had oh you know shown up in some of the early manuscripts of these relevant chapters and in different appreciations among the authors of some of the debates in current historical thinking and here I'm particularly thinking about the question that in the broadest sense is the question of people a supplanting people B or B supplanting C or C supplanting D whatever where you have a sequence of people who live in the same place and the later ones will typically create histories that route them in that place and a much earlier point in time than they were there and the earlier people to the degree that they are able to will often push back and emphasize that they were there first and that priority of occupation is a is a priority of virtue as well as a priority of time so for example you know Christians in Spain will point out that they were that there were Christians in Spain before the Arabs invaded Spain you have a huge debate over the question of who has the priority rights to Palestine or Israel or the Holy Land or whatever you want to call that wretched piece of ground there are debates like this in all parts of the world sometimes they are have very powerful political resonances sometimes they are more within the historical community sometimes their debates that rest on questions of who is called what what terminology is used so that for example last week you read about the Sumerians and the Hittites you know two ancient peoples of the Middle East in the 1920s when there was a Turkish Republic established after World War one that Republic founded by Muslim Kemal atatürk had a very strong economic philosophy of state capitalism so they set up large state Development Bank's to provide the money to develop the country and to of the banks they set up we're sumaré Bach and Ettie Bach the Sumerian bank and the Hittite Bank as if these terms that related to people's who had ruled in the area let's say Oh at least a thousand in supplicating in the kisssss barians like 4000 years before the church ever arrived in Turkey somehow they were names that they could appropriate and in association of that you had a a linguistic theory that came out from certain scholars in Turkey that there were there were some languages that there were certain languages that were fell into a family the son language family that showed they're all related and the hittite and Sumerian lo and behold were related to Turkish no non-turkish zoologist or linguist has ever agreed with that theory nor is the theory pursued now by Turkish scholars but it was a part of a of an effort at that time to to create a myth of early occupation in which the Turks would be original inhabitants of a land that was in fact full circa 1920 of Greek Armenians who had much better claims historically to have been early inhabitants bland you had something similar in in Lebanon in the 1960s where you had certain Lebanese who said we are not Arabs true we speak Arabic it is our native tongue but we are Phoenicians because the Phoenicians had a great civilization focused on towns that now exist in Lebanon and ruins or later occupation Sidon and tyre and byblos and so forth and also in the city of Carthage in Tunisia said we were one of the greatest peoples in the world and at a time when these Arabs that we have next door to us from Syria were you know sort of walking around naked in the desert trying to find a camel to ride and of the Lebanese Phoenicians were politically strongly anti Syrian whereas you had Syrian nationalists who maintain that Lebanon was an intrinsic part of Syria so that so these contemporary political arguments I mean contemporary at any given point in time often use myths of origin or historical constructions of origin for for political purposes in the case of Greece and Iran and India the issue that has arisen has to do with people who are believed by most scholars to have moved into all three regions from somewhere else and they're the same people these are people who speak in no european languages and in the case of the Indians and the Iranians they belong to a subgroup who of this who speak into Iranian languages and who are known as the Aryans this word is the word that you actually have an ancient Indian and Iranian languages it is not a some sort of backward borrowing you know from the Nazis I mean the ancient Iranians to know the Nazis are going to appropriate the word and it has a substantive evening of noble but basically if it was a name people used for themselves now the other terms indo-european and into Iranian are scholarly inventions it was an English scholar who worked in India Sir William Jones who sort of first formulated the notion of indo-european the indo-european language family but the resemblance between Persian and certain European languages and Indian languages had been noted earlier than that particularly by my travelers merchants there was an earlier theory for example that the original by Dutch scholars after they start to travel around the world after 1600 on the creation of the Dutch East India Company there were Dutch merchants who came to believe that Dutch was the original language of humankind because otherwise how do you explain that the Iranians so far away in Persia speak what is essentially a form of Dutch and the Indians speak what is essentially a form of Dutch and but in a more scientific fashion who was with Sir William Jones with this indo-european family is is conceptualized it is a family eventually before that relates languages from Ireland across to Bengal and it has been studied in great detail with careful examination of the way in which one language spins off from another in sub families like the Germanic or the romance so forth and so on I won't go into that within this big family of indo-european into Iranian is a subfamily and it is a family that is thought to be a late appearing family and like the other indo-european languages probably has its roots in the area of north of the Black Sea of what we now call Ukraine but what is now Ukraine I should say and they migrated eastward and then southward into Iran Afghanistan and northern India according to the scholarly reconstruction of things there are many techniques that have been used to you know to corroborate this for example one thing you can do is to take a word that shows up in many different into European languages for some thing that is intrinsically localizable geographically you can say if all the languages have this word and if that word geographically is only located in one particular place then that must be where they all languages come from so there's been a lot of there's a there's a book on this called proto-indo-european trees where the effort has been to take the names of trees and see where those trees grow naturally is a little awkward because you have changing climates and therefore you have to look in the distribution of pollens and archaeological deposits to decide where the trees were and the other word that has been used a lot is the word for salmon with the idea that if basically the proto-indo-european word for salmon is locks and but the idea was that these languages must have originated where there were salmon all right that's one technique but of course if it precludes the notion that you could have borrowing from some other some other language family so all of this has been an extremely elaborate linguistic exercise which is a difficult exercise because there's no way prior to writing to determine where a language was spoken you can find things that will correlate with the language that is to say if you have a language that has a word for Oh some object say a plowshare then and you find a place that has plowshares then maybe the language is spoken there something of that sort but what has happened in recent times by this I mean the last twenty or thirty years is that there has been in India a very strong reaction against this theory that the indo-iranians or the Aryans entered India from Afghanistan or beyond Afghanistan from Turkmenistan and the area's farther to the north the counter theory says that the Aryans originated in India and they go from India to other places why would this be what would we care well one of the reasons we care is that this theory became central to the political philosophy of a Hindu conservative party the BJP you know as a as a political statement saying that we were not invaded by people from somewhere else who brought their culture in their religion but rather we invented our culture and our religion and other people have borrowed from us in its most extreme form the argument goes that the Aryans originated in India established as a civilization in 7,000 BC so to say some 4000 years before the Sumerians or three thousand years before the Sumerians and every part of the world has received civilization from India you know the Sumerians were just an offshoot of the Indians the Greeks the Romans the Chinese everyone gained their enlightenment their dose of civilization from this mythical / or holy invented early India and and so the great Indian epic the Mahabharata which means the great Maratha and it's the great bar to war it's an epic of about a war and according to this theory this war was fought something like 5,000 BC scholars of the ma Bharat a normally questions whether the war was ever fought at all or whether it's entirely mythical just as people questioned a prior to the excavation of Troy whether the Trojan War ever really happened or whether it was it was mythical now what I you know I have I very strongly that the notion what's called the indigenous area theory that is to say the theory that the Aryan languages and peoples originated in India and go from there elsewhere personally I think that that's wrong and I think that a way in which philologists and archaeologists have constructed the migration of indo-european Ukraine into other parts of the world including India I think that is a much sounder theory on the basis of the sorts of evidence that scholars usually come up with the reason I bring it up is because it it is such a hot political issue or has been such a hot political issue in India hearing of a theory that says that the basic Indian beliefs that you have first in the in the sacred texts of the Rig Veda and the other Vedas that these sacred texts were brought in from somewhere else that the rituals associated with sacred texts originated somewhere else and that the religions of India today Hinduism and you know less numerous faiths derived in in substantial part from this intrusive religion and the Vedas are still regarded as as sacred texts and the the caste system that is seen to be intrinsic to the world of the Aryans the world of the Vedas is seen to be intrusive into India so people who follow the indigenous Aryan Theory say who invented this idea it was invented by Europeans and who were the Europeans who cared about this they were Europeans who were invading India they were the British and primarily the British but other European powers have interests commercial interests imperialist interests in India and so they said well isn't it likely that these Europeans have invented this story of people coming from the north who are the ancestors of the Europeans by common belief haven't they invented this story as a as a model justification for their own of India and haven't we seen this occur before when Muslims came to India so isn't there a theme in which India is a passive vessel receiving influences from elsewhere but lacking the dynamism to generate its own its own culture so the entire the entire apparatus of well Western scholarship relating to the earliest peoples of India and Iran and Greece is putting the question in in tune with the political currents that you have in India today now the interesting thing with respect to this linkage of groups in this chapter or areas of this chapter is that in Iran which is not next-door to India literally although you know Pakistan which it is next door to was once part of India for under the British was governed by the same central government in Iran so far as I can tell nobody cares whether the Aryans invaded Iran indeed they seem to think that that's a cool thing you know they you're more likely to get the view is a powerful you know militant conquering people the Aryans came into Iran and we are their descendants and who cares who was there before because we rub their faces in the mud and now we are done nor does anyone in Iran to the best of my knowledge claim that Aryan influences originate in Iran so here you have two countries both of which have strong nationalist movements that are virtually next-door to each other that share an identical heritage as far as we can tell by identical I mean that the earliest form of the Persian language of language or the Iranian language we now have which was contained in the holy book of the Zoroastrians the Avesta language of the Avesta which is called Avastin you know cleverly and the language of the Rig Veda which is called Vedic those languages are so close to each other that if you take a you know a small number of of sound ships and you simply make those shifts you actually go from one language to the other so that an s in in a vest them is an H in Vedic and an H in Vedic is an S and s in Vedic is an ancient a vestal and you make these shifts and you actually have almost almost identically the same language so there's no there's no real question about the degree to which the people there were one time people living in Iran who spoke the same language as the people living in at least parts of India there is question about whether they were invaders I suppose from an Indian point of view but the point is that the Iranians don't care because there there's no political ground to be to be contested on this issue you could imagine an Iranian who would say the English made up this theory of Aryan languages in order to dominate us but since Iran was never part of an empire they were dominated in some respects by the English but they were never turned into a colonial possession in the way that India was the venom against England is tends to be much more specific than at a kind of cosmic level that you have that you have represented here so you have this comparison of two places that where one time spoke the same language that appear to have a culture to religion that is merely identical that that culture and religion are carried by people who seem to come in from someplace else geographically and yet from the point of view of a world history book this question of are these are the interpret chapters I mean one time I remember make the argument that we should have a chapter on Iran and India because they're the same country and our ancient historian and our writer team said no no it's Iran and Greece because you know the Battle of Thermopylae was between Iranians and Greeks and it got into this question as to whether the dominant structuring factor should be a narrative where we actually have a history of a war for a series of wars between Greeks and Iranians or whether it should be the the cultural / religious / linguistic / social structural identity between Iran and India that becomes the structuring factor now in some respects you might say it doesn't make much of a difference but I would argue that the question of whether Iran is a country that isn't is in its history culture language geography and almost every other way a part of the territories that lie - its East Afghanistan Pakistan India and some of the states of Central Asia or whether it is part of the Middle East I think that's a very serious serious issue we treat it as part of the Middle East and say when we set up programs in this country of Middle East Studies all the programs included Iran but it was also recognized by everyone that even though the Persian language was written in the Arabic script the Persian language bears no relation whatsoever to Arabic or the languages spoken west of Iran neither to the Turkic languages in the North or the northwest nor to the Semitic languages directly to the West it isn't in the European language it is related languages of Afghanistan India and going up into Russia and westward into Europe but the the territory in the Middle East what we now call the Middle East is dominated by languages that are unrelated to Persian when people who study the middle-east discover this they're often delighted because what they discover is that for an English speaker Persian is one of the easiest languages of the world to learn all you have to do is learn how to read that that writing system and then you discover all oh oh that's that's English or that's laughing or I mean it's just a remarkably similar language not only similar in the vocabulary and in the sentence structure and in the structure of the verbs but also in that most wonderful aspect of English of having no genders for the nouns and having no case endings so all those horrible things you have learned in German and Russian and of the language you don't learn in Persian and in fact Persian goes even farther they don't distinguish between he and she which makes for this marvelous corpus of completely and Roger this poetry that has been a you know special quality of Persian literature for many centuries so on the other hand for an Arab to learn Persian that's pretty hard because it's just so different but we've lumped them together why were they lumped together why did I Ron become part of the Middle East in the 1950s when we were thinking in academic terms of how to divide up the world in the aftermath of world war two and looking forward to the United States ruling the world in one way or another the countries of North Africa were under the control of France the same Morocco Tunisia Algeria and the Muslim countries of Central Asia were part of the Soviet Union you know Azerbaijan Turkmenistan Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Kazakhstan then you had the country's private to the east that were part of the British Empire that was India before partition into India and Pakistan with a very strong British footprint in Afghanistan so the Middle East ended up being the the leftovers the residual category of those countries where Islam was a predominant language but there was no long term colonial overlord it was where was the Muslim territories that didn't have any Russians didn't have any British didn't have any French now you did have brief domination by the British from the French after World War one which I'll be lecture on some day you know that semester but but these were very very light touches of colonialism compared with what you had in North Africa or Central Asia or or India so you ended up taking Turkey Iran and the Arab Middle East and throw them together in a category that was called of the Middle East now did that make sense in geopolitical terms it made sense particularly in the cold war where the Middle East was seen as a frontier zone between the freedom-loving peoples in the West led by us and the victims of communist slavery in the East led by the dastardly Soviets and therefore the Middle East was a was a contested area and indeed in the 1950s there was a active debate over the question of which way will the Muslims go will they become will they prefer slavery under the Soviet dictator or will they prefer freedom under george w bush now what will they prefer most American observers said that they will ultimately prefer the West because communism is atheistic but you had one very important British observer a man named Bernard Lewis who argued that they would prefer dictatorship because it is in their nature to prefer dictatorship and we see this through the history of Islam now that's neither here nor there for this course except that it has been picked up by and this is really post 9/11 it's been picked up by writers historians some of them first while honorable people who have said the Muslim world does not like freedom or the Middle East doesn't like freedom and the reason we know this is because of the fight between the Greeks and the Persians so you get people who go back and re-examine the history of Cyrus and Darius and Xerxes and the struggle between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire and they look at it in terms of values and they say that the values of that we have today in America and other freedom-loving countries in the West were already there in you know in Athens and the other city-states at the time of the Persians invaded and that Persia stood for for slavery and so it's always been that way so I've given you a couple of quotations from a book by Anthony pag Dhin who is a eminent historian from UCLA who who makes that case explicitly and says that you know we do not have you know it's different from from the question of will the Muslims become up for freedom or out for tyranny because this something goes way back before the Muslims this goes back and says that the people in the East have always been and so I always preferred to live under tyranny because they do not understand freedom and people in the West have always preferred freedom historically this makes no sense at all particularly when you consider the Greeks were conquered and were subordinated by the by the Romans and the city-states all came to an end plus the fact that the city-states all had slaves and when they conquer when they fought one another enslaved the people they took prisoner plus the fact that Aristotle in his politics is very explicit by saying that barbarians by which he means everyone who is not Creek speaking are by their nature slaves not because they're living under a eastern potentate but because they aren't Greeks and of course by that token the Romans were also slaves and everyone else was not a Greek was a natural slave the pag Dan's book has been world war was received with great enthusiasm by various reviewers but it was not the only he's not the only person who became drawn into this this restructuring of the history and two books were written only one of which I've actually read they were written on the topic of counterfactual history counterfactual history is history of it's the history of what did not happen it's a history of what would it have been like if the South had won the Civil War but would it have been like if the Germans had won World War two what would it have been like if the black death of 1348 in Europe instead of killing a third of the population and killed 95% of the population so we didn't have any of these Europeans around to screw up the world for later centuries these topics all written are all written about and have been written about for a long time and they're usually written by science fiction writers or writers of thrillers or things like that and it is one of the most interesting genres of historical fiction because of course it is it is not a fiction set in history it is rather a complete fictionalizing of the history so you can read the cyberpunk authors of Bruce Sterling and no no Steve no Neuromancer William Gibson yes they wrote a big historical novel called the difference engine and it was based on the idea that that the digital computer was invented in the early 19th century only and operated by steam instead of by electricity and that all of the transformation all the transformative power of information control and management took place in the steam age as an electrical age and part of the premise of the whole thing was that the United States divided into two countries in the Civil War so you help separate countries in the south and in the north the the number of novels about the Nazis winning in new Europe is is numerous but this counterfactual history has always been regarded as sort of a species of a fiction it could be argued that we probably have a fair number of history books that are regarded as important sources that are employed affect counterfactual in the sense that they were that their invented stories that that that are received at some point as being true but probably weren't true or maybe proven not to be true there has for example in last 20 years been a huge debate over whether Marco Polo ever went to China or whether the travels of Marco Polo are a fiction that was made up but what's happening now is that you have counterfactual history that is being written by my sort of card-carrying history professors no part of this guild I belong to and the two books that I know of as I say I've only read one of them are devoted to to the idea of what if something had happened that had kept the West from rising I got involved with this because I had a colleague who had been asked to write an article about the Muslim incursions into Europe that ended the Battle of tour in 732 and say oh if the most if the Arabs had won that battle then we would all be you know praying to Allah and he refused to write the article or he declined to write the article so then the editors came to me and said would you write an article that I said no I think that's total that was a minor battle with a fragment of an army and really didn't have any significant result but I'll write an article about the siege of Vienna in 1529 and so I wrote an article that they didn't choose to publish in which I said that maybe Europe would have been a lot better if the Muslims had won but after the book came out and I read it I realized that it was a neoconservative tract and that the whole purpose of the book was to show how close Western civilization came to being destroyed you know if there had been you know one more regiment of the Battle of such-and-such or two more ships in the Battle of such-and-such or if King so-and-so had died two days earlier than he did Western civilization would have fallen because the greatest miracle in the world is Western civilization and how do we imagine how no what would have been like if Western civilization hadn't hadn't come into being now paramount in these books you know right for the beginning of the book is the question of the Greeks and the Persians and the argument that is made by these writers is that if Persia had won the wars that have fought against the Greeks and say if the invasions of Greece had been successful there would have been no Western civilization heaven knows what we would have here at Columbia if the Persians had won one of those battles because that is where it hung in the balance of the Greeks understood freedom and understood individualism whereas the Persians stood for slavery and the rule of a tyrannical monarch what this innocence did was to take the the reality that we had in 1950s and since that time in which we throw Iran in with the countries to its west and read it back into history and say that that is the most crucial thing thing in the world now this comes up today in the issue of whether Iran is an enemy of the United States and indeed if we were to lose to Iran in the Great War that Iran hasn't a prayer of actually participating in because of a very weak country but if we were to lose would that be the end of civilization and I don't want to predict that because we're having a symposium a week from Wednesday on war with Iran and the probability of whether that might occur and so forth and this is just sort of advertising for it but but when you look at a chapter that throws Greece and Persia and India together you get this question when you have a historical story in this case the story of the confrontation between the Greeks and the Persians which frankly really wasn't that interesting in a popular level until the moving 300 came out I mean with the 300 it sort of made all made a lot more sense instantly if you if you look up at the book instead of the movie you'll find what Hollywood did in order to make this Frank Miller's book the 300 palatable for American audiences was to introduce sex so you have a affair between a an evil sparking advisor and a noble Queen and so forth doesn't occur in the book the book is just straightforward killing killing killing killing killing and is a better read than the movie is there's also people who feel that there shouldn't be any ninjas of the movie that the ancient Persians did not have any ninjas but what you have if you actually read Herodotus and the story of of Thermopylae and the Persian invasions is that you have long descriptions of who was fighting on the Persian side who makes up the person see here you have the soma drinking Sofia pnes who fight with this of that and here you have the Thracians and here you have the this of that and these these words for people that nobody knew who they really were but they were fighting in the Persian army these words carried the same menace as things like ninja and transgendered black Giants things like that yo well what would carry now it's a the translation in other words of the of a threat feel that you have and Herodotus into what you get in the on the movie screen and 300 he is not not all that bad I thought I kind of liked it but in any case a curse we haven't seen the movie that doesn't just forget that the but what we've had now is a reactivation of a historian history and I don't think instantly you can separate the movie 300 or the the graphic novel 300 from this this retelling by serious historians of the fight between the Greeks and Persians of a fight between tyranny and freedom but this whole reactivation of a of an episode in history as a as a mirror or as a some sort of a paradigm for the way we are functioning the world today this is is not that unusual this is one of the things that historians do this is something that that occurs again and again that historians will choose particular stories or sometimes invent or at least ornament particular stories in order to to feed the the current interest or to take advantage of the current political confrontations in the historians environment crucial to this of course is that there was a narrative there's no narrative of anything that happens between Iran and India in other words we have a holy book for the Iranians the Avesta we have a holy book for the Indians the Rigveda and no story about a war between the Indians and the Iranians the Malabar at the war is within the Indian segment of that indo-aryan society and not between segments and yet we know that there were Wars so that the the founder of the Persian dynasty the fought against the Greeks was killed in warfare on the eastern border of Iran but not on the western border with with the Assyrians or the Greeks or anything like that so we know there were Wars we don't have a narrative and so this gets to me the next topic I want to deal with which is the the question of the rise of narrative in history by narrative I mean the telling of a story by historical narrative I'm here telling of a story that is presented as though the events narrated actually took place as opposed to a what you would get in he sees the ogyny where you have events that are not thought of historical how the gods came into being or something like that you know purely in the realm of the imagination or the realm of of a myth and of course when you have a narrative you have the question of the difference between myth and history there is a widespread view that history is a natural propensity of human societies that you take any people and they want to remember their past and to tell the story of their past to the next generation there is almost nothing to support that assumption writing comes into existence long before narrative does and writing even when it becomes fairly sophisticated rarely focuses on historical narrative there are parts of the world that have had a sophisticated literate culture particularly India that seemed to go for Oh thousand years without anybody writing down any historical events now that there are different explanations for that some people say well they were written down that they are written on imperishable materials and therefore we don't have them another argument is that the stories were passed on by word of mouth and we're not written down because writing was reserved for for other purposes another one is that people they didn't care to tell the story of the past and you know if you built the latter option is fairly attractive in other words if if you're given a chance to watch The History Channel as your primary source of entertainment as opposed to watching something like you know World Wrestling Federation reruns or something most people will go for the wrestling because the historical narrative mixes the dull with the dollar and it has to be either you know spectacularly riveting in its presentation or the story has to be redacted with all the dull bits cut out in such a fashion that it really makes good reading in order for people to be to be drawn to it history books are not very popular on the whole at least mine but historical novels are you take say Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett and you have a historical novel of the 12th century that has a huge following even though it's a thousand pages long 800 pages long ken palette is a thriller writer he's not a historian and you have lots of other books written about the 12th century that nobody reads those are history books ken Follett writes it as a story about a family with you know amazing things happening and so forth and so on it's a pretty good historical background but but it's still enough so the question is whether stories about the past whether historical narratives are really something that a society wants to do some of the earliest narratives for example show up on the walls of the Assyrian Kings in Mesopotamia and what they are are narratives of the people the names of the people that became conquered now here we presume that it wasn't the the plan to write something that was going to be a page-turner but rather that the king who wanted to have pictures of himself in glory and pictures of his captives subject to his command he wanted the story the basics of the story related simply for his own grandeur and there is a kind of history of that of that sort where the purpose of history writing is to aggrandize the person who's paying to have a history written number of years ago I had a class and graduate students and we read a bunch of history books and each week we talked about how does this book relate to the biography in the background the nationality and the political outlook the religious bias of the author and the students came adept at sort of reading between the lines and saying well here we can see apply this office presenting the story in this particular way and so at the end I said now so we've had a semester we all more or less agree that all historians are biased they all have unstated purposes and writing their history and you all want to become historians so we'll go around the table now and each of you will tell what our what your bias is because if you're going to be historian and evolve story and you're biased then what is your bias and of course they all said they had no bias and so well do you expect to be assigned one when you get your page that you're going to have no bias after you get a PhD and then belongs your diploma we give you a bias of some sort I did one year and I got a wino table and there's a Korean students that I going to write nationalist history of how great my country is and the students looked at him and said chief that's primitive he said you see you all come from countries that already have nationalist history but my country was under Japanese occupation and it doesn't have a real you know gung-ho nationalist history and therefore we can't have a revisionist anti-nationalist history until we have a nationalist history so I'm going to write the heroic nationalist epic of my great nation of Korea and then that the next generation of historians come along and say that I'm biased and I thought that was a pretty good a pretty good response to the question but but it's something that we're continually conscious of and using historical sources is you know in who for whom was the narrative written what was the audience was as it was there a particular patron what was the who was a payoff for the author and so forth and so on so when you get to an inscription glorifying an Assyrian King it's pretty easy you can say this was written by someone who got paid to glorify the king then you get to the Greeks and this is of course where you get a narrative history of a what we would consider a modern sort this is a reason Greeks like Herodotus and facilities are looked upon as the fathers of historical writing you know here you've got narratives that seem like modern history books and are usually regarded in history departments as principal documents in the history of historiography and say what why do these exist why do we have these stories when other countries don't do that of course one of the things you do is say well what else was there in other words if history writing comes along and ultimately people regard history writing is important what were the options well of course one of the options you had for the Greeks was where the Iliad and the Odyssey you had epoch where you had stories that were narrated aloud but we're not written down and that raises a question of the relationship between oral history and a written text this is an issue that we still have you know is there a different value that you get when you have an oral text as opposed to a to a written text now in some cases it's a question of error for example the the Rig Veda was a purely oral text for probably at least a thousand years before anybody wrote it down and was used by was memorized by priests in India what are now India Pakistan and Afghanistan and it has believed now by scholars to be almost completely unchanged and to say it was every every syllable every vowel every consonant is regarded as being as having a very very high likelihood of being exactly today the way it was in say a thousand BC now the reason is that we know that when you have preserved in the Indian tradition is the technique of memorization so that every verse was memorized then it was memorized backwards that it was memorized sort of inside out you would have several different readings of the same verse that you would simply get by memory and the readings had to had to dovetail and so if you heard someone read it wrong you would know simply by your own memorization of it oh you know exactly where it was wrong by contrast the Avesta is a very questionable text there are a lot of guesswork as to what what certain words are in the Avesta because memory traditions you know will vary quite a bit in the case of the Iliad and the Odyssey you have a different phenomenon instead of trying to preserve exactly the words that Homer initially wrote or spoke or that someone other than Homer but using his name in ancient identity-theft either spoke or wrote instead of trying to keep it at precisely the same words the technique was to have catchphrases that could be used to fit into the meter so that different people would tell the story in different ways the verses would be slightly different and these would be some you know at banquets and the the purpose of them was not to give a precise narrative so much as to be a stately entertainment for people who are attending a bank so here you have a different notion of the audience that this this technique of oral composition has been extensively studied the last generation of the place you start following this is a book by alfred lord called singer of tales which breaks down the Iliad in the Odyssey and compares them with oral composition of of sagas in the Balkans in the 20th century and it's now generally agreed that that these stories were valuable that different singers would sing them in different ways and that there are certain aspects of it that that that show this in the same way you take an epoch like the Mahabharata and that probably was the same thing even though it's enormous ly long there's a theory that's saying that there are two different verse structures in the Mahabharata there shlokas and christians case you're interested but but that the original story is low is in one verse form and the all the ornaments come in another verse form and that if you only read the trish tubes then you get the real ma bar so the original one and everything else is added on you can go to the Analects of Confucius and find the same issue of where did these things come from how were they related and so forth and sought now what happens in a written tradition is that all of the issues relating to - avoidance of error or maintenance of a sense within a flexible environment that would allow change what would wouldn't call that change error all of those things get over taken by by the existence of a writing system where suddenly you shift from flexibility and the conveyance of sense rather than a precision to the issue of accuracy particularly in the thinking of modern scholars who are trying to reconstruct what early text was and often assume with doubtful accuracy that that text actually can be reconstructed in traditional form so with the Persian War of Herodotus you get one of the first narratives and if to some degree does become a kind of a model of how to write history as opposed to tell stories about the past or tell stories that mingle information about the past with invented tales that are better appreciated by appreciated by the audience than the particular details contained in the text so that gets to to the issue of the transformation that comes about through writing I haven't talked much about writing but I want to next time and particularly this period where you have the Greeks the Iranians of the Indians is a period when you having a great transformation in the nature of writing because of the coming of the being of the alphabet and the disappearance of earlier and more complex writing systems that had been characteristic of Mesopotamia and Egypt and other lands in that part of the world and contrasting that with the situation in China where you have a writing system that comes into being by say 700 BC and has no challenge it's one of the strange thing about strangest is nothing in history is strange it just happened one of the interesting things about history of writing in China is that we have no evidence that there were ever any other writing systems in any part of China in other words you know where as Egypt and Iraq which are just a stone's throw from each other have totally different writing systems and the Mycenaean Greeks with linear B have a totally different writing system all within a fairly constrained area and here in China over the entire area of China the only writing system that is known are Chinese ideograms from 700 BC onward so the question of what does a writing system do to a to a tradition is and how it obviously comes to empower the writing of of historical narrative is where I want to start on Thursday

Channel: Columbia University

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Keywords: education, columbia university, history, bulliet, world history

Id: GsRrnL4Sa6A

Length: 72min 26sec (4346 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2010