How do historians use unwritten sources to reconstruct the history of the earliest civilizations?
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How do historians use unwritten sources to reconstruct the history of the earliest civilizations?
Actually it's really important to use written sources to study any civilization because often if we're thinking about people who don't have access to writing, we would know, for example, nothing about slaves in the antebellum south that they had produced themselves if we didn't use archaeology.
So, even when we happen to know a lot about a period, it's really useful to look at images, to look at artifacts, to look at archaeological excavations because they give us insight into things that people didn't necessarily want us to know about themselves, but which they have accidentally left behind. So, a historical record which is produced by somebody who wants to give us a particular story about themselves can be very useful but a historical artifact that you leave behind because it's trash can tell us so much more about things that you do in your daily life that you might not yourself think about as being historical evidence. So, I mean, I bet even if you keep a journal, you don't record what you had for breakfast, or how far you had to walk in order to get to work and that's often the exact kind of minutiae that historians really want to know about your life, and you would actually only write about that if something went wrong and you had to somehow account for your day. So, even when we know a lot about you, we want to know this stuff.
Obviously, for the distant past it's even more important, so in the era before 3200 BCE when writing was invented, we have to fall back on archaeology. But also, these days, historians have teamed up with microbiologists and geneticists and we can do really extraordinary kinds of things with evidence that we thought was unusable. For example, a team a University College London, in 2006, was looking at the Y-chromosomes of men living in England today and they discovered that the vast majority of Englishmen have different genetic structures than people living in Wales or Scotland. And they were able to hypothesize from that that when the Anglo-Saxon peoples from Germany arrived in England in the 5th century, they may have practiced a form of sexual apartheid. That is, they must have denied Celtic Britons (Celtic men) access to women. They would themselves have mated with these women and eventually these Celtic men who didn't want to be living under the subjection of these Anglo-Saxon invaders would have moved to what we call the "Celtic Fringes" of the British Isles.
Anyway, this is the sort of thing for which we might have a little bit of chronicle evidence about the arrival of the Anglos and Saxons, we don't actually have that type of historical evidence, so it's really the "history of the future."
How did ancient rulers like Hammurabi stay in power, and are these methods still relevant?
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How did ancient rulers like Hammurabi stay in power, and are these methods still relevant?
The key point here is staying in power, maintaining power. Anybody can gain power through violence, but how do you keep a hold of this power once you've got it?
The people of ancient Mesopotamia, where Hammurabi came to power, had a word for men in power; they called them Lugels ("big men") and I think that's really significant. It means these are guys who get power by throwing their weight around, but they're not guys who necessarily can keep that power. And if we look at the histories of ancient Mesopotamian city-states, for example, what we see are a succession of short-lived dynasties that managed to hold on to power for a generation or two before they're thrust out by another dynasty.
What makes Hammurabi different, around 1800 BCE when he comes to power in Babylon, is that he uses techniques that we associate with authorities. I want to make a distinction here between "power" and "legitimate power." And the word, legitimate, comes from the word for "law." Hammurabi quite famously produces a law code, which we still read today. It's the oldest surviving law code. It's probably not the oldest set of laws from ancient Mesopotamia but it's the one that survives. Hammurabi uses writing, diplomacy, law to govern his people and he actually manages to put together an empire through these means. He puts together an empire, which, with a few fits and starts, manages to last for a couple of hundred years. So power has to be something that can actually outlive the person who acquires it; if you cannot pass your power down to somebody, then it's really no good.
The Pharaohs of Egypt are a wonderful example of this. The word, pharaoh, in fact, doesn't mean "king" or even "ruler;" it means "household." So what it suggests is that the power of pharaoh is vested not in the individual person - man or woman, because there were female pharaohs - but it's vested in the whole apparatus of government that surrounds the pharaoh. And so what matters is not jut the person of the pharaoh but all of this apparatus around him or her. That means that the Pharaonic office itself can survive for almost 3,000 years. It can survive two intermediate periods of warfare or famine. It can survive even a fantastic change of dynasty in the 4th century when the pharaohs of Egypt become Macedonian Greeks. It can even survive becoming a part of the Roman Empire. And so, it's the longevity of this political institution that is important.
Again, the violent acquisition of power is one thing but this capacity to maintain it through stable, legitimate institutions is what makes an empire possible.