Putting aside the issue of whether going from seeing to wanting to buying with only the slightest movement of a single finger advances the human condition
via Over the High-Tech Rainbow by Sue Halpern | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
One of the great things about studying Hebrew Bible is that it is one of the few remaining disciplines that, at least among its better practitioners, doesn’t let society put aside issues such as this.
Reading your own work objectively is a trick that some master more easily than others. The best-known tactic is highly effective: Put your paper away for as long as you’re able and then read it with a fresh eye. Unfortunately, that trick is available only to those who work ahead, have no deadlines, or research in fields that change slowly. Most writers don’t have the luxury of putting their work in a drawer for a month.
As a copy editor, I’ve noticed some glitches that writers often fail to see in their own work, as well as a few imagined flaws that they appear to monitor needlessly.
via Lingua Franca – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Some helpful tips in the full post.
The concept of arbitrage, or buying a good in one market and selling in a distant one for higher price, goes back to Sumerian times where the practice was diarized on cuneiform tablets in the seventh century B.C. I don’t read or write ancient scripts, but I can imagine a shrewd entrepreneur buying clay pots from a merchant and paying with grain, and then gingerly transporting the pottery by camel across the desert to another locale. On arrival, the stoneware would be sold in the local bazaar, with payment being received in a different commodity, maybe pieces of copper. Knowing the market in both locales, the clever businessman could make money on both the pots and the ‘currency exchange’ between grain and copper (and the camel would be satiated too). It all sounds byzantine (because it is), but such profit-seeking, cross-market dynamics have long been a powerful force for shifting the supply of goods between regions.
I can imagine a lot of things as well. The question, at least for informed opinion shapers, public policy makers, and curious minds that respect intellectual integrity, is whether these imaginations correspond in any way with reality as we know it. As for this reflection, it’s true that arbitrage goes way back. And for everything else, well, not so much.
By the way, you know it’s going downhill fast when people say things like: “I don’t read or write ancient scripts, but I can imagine…” whatever comes next is wrong about 87.2% of the time.
Columbiana author Trisha (Storey) Kaschalk debuts her novel, “Divine Misconception.” What happens when an elementary school teacher unearths an ancient Sumerian artifact in her own backyard in Agricola, Miss.? Lisa Jenkins is about to come face to face with an ancient secret that defies logic and places her in an extraordinary save the world mission. Kaschalk’s novel is a science fiction thriller, that blends an ancient Sumerian myth into a modern day adventure that is challenged with conspiracy.
via Local author introduces novel – The Salem News.
Yes, this is most definitely science fiction.
In fact, history writing must be considered an imposition of form upon the past. To paraphrase Aristotle, it is representational and figurative. In regards to divine inspiration, it appears that God did not conform to our own narrow perceptions of history nor of literary genres.
via Mark W. Chavalas: Bible often isn’t easy to interpret.
This piece is written for a newspaper audience and is quite general in nature, nonetheless, it is a thoughtful reflection on the difficulties of biblical interpretation and how our expectations don’t always correspond to ancient ones.
He even uses the word “translation” to demonstrate some of its complexities. “We think that the English term ‘translation’ names something general, of self-evident reality,” he writes. Yet Japan has about two dozen words for different kinds of translation and no all-encompassing umbrella word like ours.
Bellos slowly demonstrates that translation is making choices — at the level of the word and phrase and sentence — which account for tone and meaning and force, understanding both the initial language and the receiving one. He contends that the difference in how we speak comes not from a long-lost single language that has been ripped apart but from a multitude of places and voices that have grown increasingly intermingled. “It is translation,” he writes, “more than speech itself, that provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought.”
via ‘Is That a Fish in Your Ear?’: Book review – latimes.com.
Translation is a multi-faceted beast that requires constant balance and compromise. It is hard work, to be sure, but is rewarded by the sweet experience of communicating across cultures and in some cases across time.
AS A SOCIAL SCIENCE, history uses scientific—or at least systematic—methods. But there is a less tangible, spiritual aspect to history that many historians have been loath to acknowledge. Their motivations may be more akin to theologians than scientists. History requires rigor and diligence, but it also needs, I believe, mystical devotion to the importance of collective memory.
via The Spiritual Ground of History | Harvard Divinity School.
Cameron McWhirter begins this short reflection on the nature of historiography in an intriguing manner. Mystical devotion? A spiritual ground to history? Interesting and provocative, tell me more. But the more he does the more I think he is toying with his readers in a game of bait and switch.
A few paragraphs later he states:
My impulse to write the book, however, came from a place that is less tangible but equally as important as the gathering of facts: a desire to understand human relations and why things happened the way they did. I identify this desire as mystical in origin.
What would drive him to identify issues relating to sociology and causality as springing from a mystical source? These are the very things that separate historiography from annal-compiling. Furthermore, one can have an interest in human motivation and causality that is entirely non-mystical.
In a round about way McWhirter admits this:
This spiritual aspect does not require God or a god or gods. Many historians are atheists, agnostics, or intellectually uninterested in the question of a God. But good historical research and writing has to include a need—often never articulated—to commune with the dead, to understand on a human level the people about whom you are writing.
But again, why play fast and loose with words? Why would he invoke a “spiritual aspect” as a way of describing a desire to understand humans from generations past? I think that historians should push through reconstructions of bare events and attempt to connect their histories to human dimensions. This thought impressed itself upon me as I was going through the cuneiform tablet collection that belongs to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. I was bogged down in trying to read from broken tablets and keep track of the accounts mentioned in the various texts when, as I held a 4,000 year old tablet in my hand, I saw a fingerprint. It was a powerful sign that reminded me that as I read the tablet I was not merely reading a “sheep text” but a record of the work of a real human being. Someone who probably enjoyed his work some days and other days found it difficult and frustrating. Someone with parents who loved him or was he abused? Maybe he had a wife and child at home and worried about feeding and clothing them and about buying a new house, and so on. This tablet was no longer just about sheep, it was about the humans who engaged in these tasks. Yet, as deeply moving as this experience was for me I would hardly call it “spiritual.”
Maybe what McWhirter means is that there is an unknown quality to historical reconstructions; that causality and the idiosyncrasies of human relations always remain at arms length to the modern historian. This idea is reflected in Julian Barnes’ new novel, A Sense of an Ending, in which this definition of history is attributed to one of the characters:
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
However, I don’t think that this is what McWhirter had in mind. He closes his essay with an anecdote about a time when he learned of aspects surrounding an instance of racial injustice that had not been widely disseminated. He ends the piece with this:
It had all been kept in the dark, he told me, then gave me a sideways glance.
“Maybe we ought to turn the lights on,” he said.
That, at its mystical core, is the purpose of history.
Exposing truth, especially truth that has been suppressed, is a vital role of history-making. Yet, should we describe truth-telling in historiography as a “mystical” exercise? Personally, I think it is a misuse of the term. It seems to me that McWhirter sets us up for a potentially fascinating look at spiritual dynamics of historiography and then veers off course to conclude with an idea that has little do with mysticism or spirituality–at least in the way that McWhirter presents it. What do you think?
For Laes, then, the Romans’ radically different views on child sexuality, child labour and so forth are a product of the stark inequalities within Roman society. It was their intense consciousness of status, and in particular the distinction between slave and free, that generated what seem to us to be ugly and repellent patterns of behaviour towards some of the most vulnerable members of their community. Thus far, Laes’s argument is entirely convincing. Where things get difficult is when we try to determine the consequences of this for emotional relations between Roman adults and children. Take the notion of parental love. Is love for one’s children a human universal? Or, as with the concept of child development, are we dealing with a culture-bound category which simply has no meaning in a Roman context? As Laes points out, the chilly tone of most Roman writers on childhood Statius excepted proves nothing either way: “Contemporary moral concepts such as sincerity, spontaneity and emotionality were entirely alien to ancient writers”.
…
It is salutary to be reminded quite how little we really know or understand about the experience of childhood in antiquity.
Still, not everything is quite so impenetrable as the counting-dreams of Thaues. My own favourite vignette of Roman childhood comes from the third-century author Minucius Felix, who describes walking along the seashore at Ostia with two friends, Octavius and Caecilius. As they passed along the rows of little boats drawn up on their blocks, We saw some small boys fiercely competing at a game of throwing shells into the sea. The game is to pick a shell from the shore which has been rubbed smooth by the beating of the waves. You hold the shell flat with your fingers, and stooping at an angle and low to the ground, you spin it over the waves as hard as possible, so that it may either swim and glide smoothly across the sea’s surface, or flash and leap as it skips again and again along the tips of the waves. The winner is the boy whose shell travels furthest, and skips the most times. Some things, at least, do not change.
It is a constant challenge to know which touch points are common between the ancient period and our own due to the shared experience of being human. Commonalities certainly exist yet many things that we regard as self-evident and instinctual are often culturally conditioned to a remarkable degree.
Specialists in this tiny period of ancient history the campaigns lasted just over ten years were still committed to reconstructing “what really happened,” on the basis of the vivid but deeply unreliable literary sources that have survived Arrian’s seven books are usually considered the “best” evidence, but there is plenty of material also in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander and Diodorus Siculus’ Library of History, to name just two. This project, Davidson argued, was even more flawed than other attempts to reconstruct “how it really was” in the ancient world, because of the particular nature of the surviving evidence. All the narrative accounts of Alexander’s conquests that we have were written hundreds of years after his death, and the historian’s project has usually been to identify the passages within them that might derive from some reliable, but lost, contemporary account—whether the Journals of Alexander’s secretary, which were supposed to have given an account of his final “illness,” or the history of the period written by Ptolemy, the man who was responsible for hijacking Alexander’s corpse and installing it in the capital of his own realm, Alexandria.
The problem is, Davidson insisted, that—even if we could hope to identify which surviving sections came from which lost source—we cannot assume as classicists like to do that what is lost was necessarily reliable. Some of the writing was almost certainly forgery the Journals are a good candidate for being at least a pastiche; some of it, so far as we can tell from critics in the ancient world itself, was simply very bad history. “The lost histories…weren’t mislaid,” as Davidson rightly points out, “they were consigned to oblivion.” The result is that the historical edifice we know as “Alexander’s career” is extremely flimsy and modern scholars have been attempting to squeeze it for answers to questions that it could never deliver—not only what motivated him, but did he really love his wife Roxane, or believe that he was the son of the god Amun? This is not a game of history, but of smoke and mirrors.
via Alexander: How Great? by Mary Beard | The New York Review of Books.
Mary Beard gives a nice round up of a handful of recent books about the great Alex. Some of her observations would apply to other areas of ancient studies as well…
