The question that initiates this program is a broad one: Why study ancient cultures? You might feel that the question is moot: students do study and will study ancient cultures; such study is an expected part of a tradition of intellectual development. The response to the why of the initial question is a matter of tradition, if not fact. A study of the ROMAN EMPIRE, a reading of Greek philosophy and literature, a look at the PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT -- these are all accepted parts of a Western education, aren't they?
Probably so: even today, in the plurality of approaches to the study of history and to the study of cultures, people talk about PLATO or DANTE or Krishna or Mohammed. But there is an important proviso: How you approach ancient cultures (or any other culture, for that matter) and how you conceive of the people of such distant worlds are of paramount importance. At this point, you might ask yourself these two additional questions: Do we study these cultures because, to some extent, all cultures share certain characteristics? Does our own culture reflect aspects of these other cultures?
The answer to the first of the two questions has historically been found in a discussion of universality. Consider, for a moment, the case of Arjuna in The Bhagavad Gita. You might well ask how the battle that Arjuna holds off while frozen on his chariot relates, for example, to contemporary battles in World War II. Convinced that his relatives will die in this life only to be reborn in another, Arjuna can reluctantly permit the carnage to begin. No such choice is left to Schindler (featured in Spielberg's film Schindler's List), on the other hand, whose intervention on behalf of Jews saved many people in this life. The danger in looking for universals thus consists in reformulating other, possibly alien, views to fit our own. We must always guard against the assumption that other people think as we do -- or that they should. Arjuna speaks within the context of one culture; Schindler acts within the confines of another.
The differences among cultures are of greatest interest here, and reading about ancient cultures is thus reading about other people whose lives were surely different from our own. The social organization of Socrates' ATHENS -- where a gimpy-legged man could hobble around interrogating citizens at will -- differs profoundly from today's world beset with modern media whereby people rarely get to see or literally hear their critics. How can we today understand the psychology of the thousands of Egyptian workers who, apparently unquestioningly, spent their lives dragging great blocks of stone across burning sands in the construction of staggering pyramidal edifices whose completion took many lifetimes? Interestingly, these differences may help us better to see -- and know -- the limits of our culture and the limits of our language and experience.
The problem with the second question lies in its formulation. What is a culture after all? This paper and this program proceed under the assumption that there is some sort of definition to the word culture. Most people would ascribe an abstract value to culture -- that which produces good art, great literature, right behavior, etc. Yet the criteria of quality are scarcely international or inter-cultural: a revered "classical" work on the sitar resists comparison to a Mozart symphony beyond the statement that both are considered great cultural achievements in the context of their home cultures. Is, then, culture something that can be taught, or are its constituent parts more sweeping and pervasive than what can be learned from books or lectures? Answers to this second question already exist in the form of canons and reading lists, though there is much discussion today about what makes up those reading lists and about the assumptions concerning what should or should not fit on such lists.
Many people would like to conceive of history as a succession of movements or stages in an on-going (and, generally) ever-improving cultural novel of human life. For these people, the Romantic period is definable, its gifts to the human spirit are calculable. Yet, how can any culture speak for all its practitioners? Do all people share equally in the culture of which they are a part? It is precisely because AKHENATON chose to resist the pantheism that characterized pharaonic Egypt before and after his brief reign and instituted a qualified monotheism that he is remembered (and magically, too, in a contemporary opera by Philip Glass). So, a culture includes both the dominant tradition and its transgression.
As you begin your study of ancient cultures, you might want to recall these questions as you forge for yourself a meaning to the term culture. In the process, try not to measure others against your own cultural standard, which has, in many ways, formed you and your apprehension of the world. Instead, try for a moment to see the glittering battle scene with Arjuna's eyes.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
From the Near East comes the Old Babylonian account of the life and death of GILGAMESH. There was a real Gilgamesh, a king who ruled some 2700 years before Christ lived and the Romans consolidated their vast empire. The character and the exploits of this king were preserved in the form of stories that circulated for many years after the king's death. Some of these tales -- more than 600 years after Gilgamesh's rule -- were collected by a story teller and were put down in the form of an epic poem. This poem is what we know today as The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Who knows how many versions The Epic of Gilgamesh went through before consolidation in its written form? Who knows how many translations the stories underwent before their reworking in the Babylonian language? Who knows how many parts of the story might have offended or misrepresented the eponymous king? Who knows how many story-tellers made more (or less) of Mashu, the mountainous gateway to the other world, as they kept their audiences spellbound with fantastical details of this greatest of human adventures -- the struggle to find (and retain) eternal life?
What is known is no less intriguing. How curious is the parallel between the story of Utnapishtim and the Hebrew account of Noah. How symbolic is the description of Enkidu, the prototypical natural man, as he sheds his animalistic behaviors in preference for the pleasures of human society. How extraordinary is the description of the snake, whose stealing of the essence of immortality from Gilgamesh results in the snake's rebirth each time it sheds its skin.
Of course the Hebrew iteration of the Flood story is not coincidence. For a time, the HEBREWS lived in SUMER, home to Abraham's people. Nomadic people, they left the fertile river valleys and headed for CANAAN and later EGYPT, taking with them ancient accounts of floods and righteous people whose obedience and wisdom helped them to survive the consuming waters.
Nor is the function of the snake coincidental either. The Hebrews find the powerful, mysterious serpent in their creation story and the Garden of Eden, which surely was located in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, not the dry vistas of Canaan or the arid Sinai peninsula. But while, for the Sumerians, the snake is merely deceitful and clever, the snake becomes the symbol of creeping evil for the Hebrews.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
It is not surprising that thinkers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mahatma Gandhi have found inspiration in The Bhagavad Gita, the great HINDU religious poem. At first glance, this statement must seem odd to you: after all, The Bhagavad Gita describes a momentary surcease in a vast battle in which brothers fight brothers in bloody, historical technicolor. The principal character, Arjuna, sits in a chariot in the midst of the mass of soldiers who wait -- surprisingly patiently -- as Arjuna looks into his conscience and questions his divine charioteer, Krishna. Krishna's temporary job as charioteer is by no means accidental: this moment before the heat and horror of battle was chosen as precisely the right time to reflect on the nature of duty and devotion. The Bhagavad Gita, then, becomes a record of Arjuna's questions and Krishna's provocative responses.
You might ask: What does this single work, a strangely didactic addition to the epic Mahabharata, "say" about ANCIENT INDIA? What does this work "say" about modern India? Can a reading of The Bhagavad Gita help us today to "recreate" life in Indian societies some 25 centuries ago? Can a reading of The Bhagavad Gita "disclose" elements of Indian life?
It is doubtful that Emerson read The Bhagavad Gita as a guide to the world of the Hindoos (as he would have spelled it). It is doubtful that he felt he "knew" India as a result of his reading, much as people (foolishly?) feel they know a country by reading a travel and tourism guide to that nation. Instead, Emerson responded to the great concepts and questions that The Bhagavad Gita explores: the notion that an individual human life is but part of a greater reality of which humans, likewise, are a part; the notion of the transitory nature of suffering and pain (not to mention pleasure); the valorizing of the spiritual, not the material, part of human nature.
It is this last point that, perhaps, is most interesting -- the Hindu denial of the self-existence of the natural world. To people in a culture that values obvious trappings of wealth and visible emblems of material success, an acknowledgement of such a proposition can only come as frightful recognition of the tawdry emptiness of life in contemporary industrialized societies. Hinduism provides a lasting critique of Western acquisitiveness.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
Somewhere around 1375 years before the birth of Christ, an Egyptian pharaoh publicly changed his name. That change signalled a return to long-standing tradition, a hallmark of Egyptian culture that flourished for more than three thousand years peacefully in the rich Nile River valley. The king had been called Tutankhaton. The last portion of his name, aton, was the name for the sun-god, which, in the years before the king's reign, had achieved preeminence among the competing deities in Egyptian religious tradition. The king changed his name to the one by which he is known today -- TUTANKHAMEN or, more popularly, King Tut -- and ended the brief experiment in monotheism in favor of the older religion with its promise of an afterlife.
And what an afterlife the pharaoh would have! Embalmed in order to endure the elements of disintegration, richly attired to attest to his fabulous earthly wealth, magnificently housed to remind all on-lookers of the towering greatness of the entombed human -- the pharaoh lived on in perpetual association with the stone structures that rose portentously out of the hot, barren sands of the desert so close to the life-giving, greening Nile. And the solemn bearing of these great structures reminds people today of the human hope for immortality and the way an entire culture fashioned a collective immortality in astonishing stone. Here was a culture that would persist, just as its pharaohs would live on in their silent palaces.
More interesting, perhaps, is the collective underwriting of the PYRAMIDS. No fewer than 70,000 workers would have been needed to lug limestone blocks from desert miles away to the building sites. Yet there is little evidence that the pharaohs had to coerce their subjects to leave their fields and families in order to build a monument whose completion any single worker would certainly never see. In this way, the pharaohs showed that they knew their people: all people apparently willingly participated in the pageant of immortality-made-real. With no hope of a berth for themselves in the tomb, the workers nonetheless must have taken comfort from knowing that their king, their earthly representative, would live on for them in perpetuity. The Egyptian hoi polloi became immortal by proxy.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
Imagine: a collection of poems whose date of authorship has not been determined. Imagine: a Chinese thinker about whom little is known and whose authorship of the poems has been challenged. Then read statements like these: "Accept being unimportant" and "Give up learning, and put an end to your troubles." You have entered the mysterious world of The Tao Te Ching.
Despite their cloudy and distant origins, the poems make many statements that may sound curiously familiar to contemporary Americans. The Tao describes the allure and artificiality of wealth as it reaffirms the value of a modest, balanced life: "Amass a store of gold and jade, and no one can protect it. / Retire when the work is done. / This is the way of heaven" -- a refreshing antidote to the "keeping-up-with-Joneses" syndrome. The Tao relocates humans in an ecological context where the company of humans is but part of a natural world order: "Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things." How appropriate this injunction is today, when many people worry that they must care for the physical environment that must, in turn, care for them. At the same time, the Tao questions the value of abstract thinking in favor of selfless action: "Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom. / It is more important / To realize one's true nature." And, the Tao recognizes the limitations of coercive power and encourages "leading, not dominating," certainly a desirable profile for leaders of the future, where consensus-building might take place of patriarchal authority.
For all its difficulties (of translation, of transliteration), the Tao offers a restorative vision of a balanced human life lived in the context of a natural world community. Do the poems describe a Chinese society contemporaneous with the writing of the poems? No more than they refer to societies years later and miles away. Do we need to know about Lao Tzu in order to more fairly interpret the poems? Not if we read with care and caution, recognizing necessary limits to our conclusions.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
There will always be critics. Even when things are going pretty well, when the government is relatively stable, when more people than ever are living well, when the future looks promising -- even at these times, there are those whose need to speak out overcomes their mute acceptance of the status quo. PLATO'S description of SOCRATES shows the grizzled sage to be one such critic.
Socrates is typically Greek in his relentless questioning -- of himself, of authorities, of accepted traditions and practices. And Socrates' questioning displays another characteristic associated with the Greeks -- a belief in the capacity of the mind (rationality) to apprehend the universe and a concomitant belief in the power of language to come to terms with that understanding.
Not all Greek critics chose Socrates' direct approach. ARISTOPHANES' play Lysistrata hilariously lambastes war-mongers. Despite its playful ribaldry, Lysistrata was written at a time of great duress, when the welfare of the fragile Athenian city-state was threatened from hostile forces both inside and out. Yet, the play's parody displays its profound critique of contemporary society.
Likewise, SOPHOCLES' play Antigone is an outspoken critique of absolute power and unenlightened rule. The play details the disasters that befall a society in the midst of change, when long-accepted traditions conflict with interests of a new era.
That all people should be morally accountable for their actions is characteristic of Greek thought. For this reason, Socrates insists on accepting the punishment his fellow Athenians have meted out to him. Socrates is, to the end, a believer in democracy and the will of the majority despite his grievous doubts about honest self-questioning on the part of his fellow citizens. His friend Crito makes convincing arguments for Socrates' escape, yet the sage remains clear-thinking, hard-headed, and true to his moral principles: he accepts the sentence that has been given him. These three criteria well describe the Greeks.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
The art and artifacts from the Karanis excavation provide a useful, summary statement about the culture of ROME, the great imperial city.
Rome's greatness grew out of its imperial program of conquering others and establishing colonies. This military expansion at once brought great material benefit to the Roman state and guaranteed a pipeline of wealth for Rome, the imperial city. And Rome becomes a cosmopolitan capital where high-living and material wealth become synonymous with personal importance and success. Note how the Karanis exhibit displays extravagant wall paintings, which did not decorate the walls of churches or temples but rather the homes of wealthy citizens. The exhibit also includes coins, whose minting bespeaks the abiding concern for the tokens of wealth as well.
What the Romans also did was learn from other cultures. You might wonder why APHRODITE, a Greek goddess, was memorialized in a fantastic sculpture in Roman times (and in Egypt, no less!). To their credit, the Romans recognized the richness of Greek art and architecture, and they sought to emulate the Greek masters -- and the Greek styles and themes -- in their own art. To a large degree, it was the Romans who brought Greek (and Hellenistic) culture to world attention. Romans patronized Greek artists and artisans in the glorification of a vast world of their own, Roman creation.
It is no surprise, then, that the Roman poet VIRGIL (or VERGIL) turns to Greek mythology and to the Greek epics as he fashions his own description of the origins and destiny of the Roman state, The Aeneid. Virgil writes his extended poem, in part, to win the favor of Augustus Caesar, the new emperor who emerges from the conflict surrounding the death of Julius Caesar. His other aim is to situate Rome in line with what was considered the great literary tradition of the time -- the Greek. Virgil's work thus is both polemic and propaganda: his blending of history and mythology provides a platform for the imperial agenda that Augustus will undertake.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
Let's counter one of the precepts set up in the introductory comments and consider what makes ISLAM like JUDAISM and CHRISTIANITY. For Americans make much of the purported differences as we carelessly cast Muslim leaders as fanatics or terrorists and justify bombing their nations. These perceived differences reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes, whose influences are pervasive and dangerous, as Edward Said points out in his book Orientalism.
In the first place, Islam is an unflinchingly monotheistic faith. Even the readily-accepted notion that God could have a son (Christ) runs counter to this explicit monotheism. Like the Hebrew god, Allah is invisible, without material form; Allah is omnipotent, wrathful on occasion, yet eternally merciful. Like the God of the Genesis account, Allah has created the natural world and endowed humans with life among a world of divinely-created things. This human creature is regarded as free and individual; and the belief that individuality is good is shared among the Semitic faiths. The religions concur too on the presence and the nature of the soul, which lives on after the body has perished. The Koran describes both heaven and hell and forewarns that a Last Judgement will come when each person shall be judged for his or her deeds.
Muslims trace their lineage back through the Hebrew Scriptures to Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar, Abraham's second wife. Later, as the story goes, Abraham's first wife Sarah conceived a son, whose name became Isaac. Isaac was the chosen one, while Ishmael and his mother were banished to the South and began their lives anew close to what is now the city of Mecca. Hundreds of years later, a child called Mohammed was born in the desert; he was a descendant of the Hebrew Ishmael.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
In history texts, medieval European history often goes by its older soubriquet, the Middle Ages. Typically, the period stretches from the collapse of IMPERIAL ROME to the coming together of the forces of the RENAISSANCE in Europe. It was the intelligentsia of the Renaissance that labelled the years preceding their own as middle -- caught between the ethos of the archaic civilizations Greece and Rome and the revitalized learning of their own time. That the thinkers of the Renaissance were masters of hubris is not news; their less-than-generous characterization of the thousand or so years that separated them from Rome reflects their prejudices and their collective oversight.
For the Middle Ages were much less uniform and much richer than most Renaissance thinkers would allow. MICHELANGELO could sculpt a muscular David alive and full of motion though cut from stone; but it was a magnificent communal enterprise that designed and executed CHARTRES CATHEDRAL in the center of a sleepy town southwest of Paris some 800 years ago. The cathedral stands today as a symbol (for even such a cultural cynic as Henry Adams) of the extraordinary integration of religion and political life that characterizes the Chartres of the twelfth century and the Middle Ages in general. You can still see the spires of the cathedral rise out of the fields of grain as you approach on the train (no bullet train stops here), and the high-rise mentality of modern life is happily absent from the modern, burgeoning town, all of whose buildings bend low as if in homage to the heaven-reaching church. Then there was no division of Church and State: the Church became the State, and the city wore its cathedral like a holy badge of Christendom on earth.
DANTE ALIGHIERI was born a century after the completion of Chartres. His city-home Florence was racked with political struggle, and Dante had to flee. Exile from city life gave the writer time to create The Divine Comedy, an epic account of the poet's journey through purgatory and hell to heaven. And as can be seen in Chartres, the connection for Dante between the miry political world on earth and the spiritual world of after-life is clear: in The Inferno, the poet encounters those who have sinned on earth -- politicians, liars, murderers, even those great people from history whose only misfortune was to have been born before Christ. His great work reifies the medieval integration of the religious and the social.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
So, What Have We Learned about Ancient Cultures? You could probably tally up a list of facts -- the names of the families represented in The Bhagavad Gita, e.g., Mohammed's birth and death dates, the relationship of crime and punishment in The Inferno -- though such a list would tell you little about how real people lived and how these "facts" influenced their lives. You might want to recall key concepts from this brief essay -- the association of Hinduism with the illusory nature of the material world, the Greek belief in rationality, the Roman ability to organize and delegate. But these generalizations do not allow for minority opinions within the cultures, nor, most likely, do the generalizations say much about the people who were not gifted writers, powerful politicians, influential artists, successful interpreters of their social circumstances. On just about any given day in the midst of choking sand and blazing heat, what might some of those Egyptian stone-haulers have said in passing about their omnipotent pharaoh?
Oddly enough, culture includes all these people. Mikhail Bakhtin looks at cultures as heterogeneous groups of people whose conversations -- the record of their poetry, their discord, and their babble -- become an on-going dialog in a constantly changing, adaptive language. To his way of thinking, there is little of fixed or permanent status to any culture. A culture is always so much more than any given language can express, certainly more than what any icon could represent.
Recent ethnographers have expressed a number of concerns about cultural investigation -- that is, studying and interpreting other cultures. The ethnographers warn that there is no neutral, objective investigation of another culture. One problem is that we are so formed by our own culture that we tend automatically to judge what we see in another culture by what we "know" from our own. So much for disinterested investigation. Another problem arises from the fact that the categories of our understanding -- our criteria for organization -- are, themselves, culture-bound. Westerners think like Westerners because their experience is in and of the West. As colonial authorities in India, the British tried to outlaw suttee, the ritual immolation of a wife who remained after the death of her husband. To the British the ritual was perverse, anti-woman; yet it was an accepted ritual, with a long history and a logic appertaining to a world-system different from that of the British (busy, it must be said, with colonizing and imposing their world-system on others). The British could not accept in others what their culture forbade for them.
But, happily, Americans can learn to listen to and love the music of the sitar (just as they may learn to listen to and love Mozart). And it doesn't take too long a trip through the concrete reality of strip shopping malls and pandering fast-food joints to convince many Americans that maybe we have erred on the side of the material.
At the same time, there's comfort in knowing that we were not the first culture to look upon the sobering wreckage of our wars or the changing forms of violence around us and wonder if there was not a better way to live -- with greater tolerance for others, greater humility for ourselves, greater love for our shared world. This may be what studying ancient cultures teaches us.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
KJ said this in post #8 : Let's counter one of the precepts set up in the introductory comments and consider what makes ISLAM like JUDAISM and CHRISTIANITY. For Americans make much of the purported differences as we carelessly cast Muslim leaders as fanatics or terrorists and justify bombing their nations. These perceived differences reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes, whose influences are pervasive and dangerous, as Edward Said points out in his book Orientalism.
In the first place, Islam is an unflinchingly monotheistic faith. Even the readily-accepted notion that God could have a son (Christ) runs counter to this explicit monotheism.
Ishmael.
Just a point here the idea that God could have a son was not always necessarily readilty accepted, in early Christianity too there weree debates about the devine nature oof Christ and his status as the son ( or not ) of God. I suggest, this maybe stems from the rrsather stand offish way The Hebrew God interacts with his people, either God gives us free will to go off do good or misbehave as we will (after giving us good morals) or (s)he is a constantly interferring perant correcting us when we are naughty. that is the problem with having an omnipresent God. Why doesn't (s)he make the world a better place?
The other problem I understand Mohammad had was the idea not that man could be the son of God, but that God could be the Son of Woman!
+Most people demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." -Soren Kierkegaaard.
05-20-2004 08:15 PM
