What Is History?

In this recent post I described my newfound obsession with the Hardcore History podcast, an obsession that I assumed was driven by a desire to learn more ancient history, and which I had expected to lead me into all kinds of historical non-fiction literature. But here I am many months later, still finding it hard to focus on any historical content that isn’t presented in Dan Carlin’s characteristic style.

Part of the reason is simply due to his voice and narration style. Not to get weird about it, but I could listen to that guy talk all day long. His passion for the subject matter comes through so clearly in his voice, and in the things he chooses to emphasize, the points that he repeats, how he frames and re-frames the events from multiple perspectives; it all has the effect of making the listener feel passionately about those events too.

But Dan Carlin’s dead sexy voice is only part of the issue. When I tried moving on to another source for ancient history, I went for something more traditional and academic. I listened to an enormous tome by Susan Wise Bauer titled (undeservedly, as I shall argue) The History of the Ancient World.

This book presents itself as an authoritative overview of an all-encompassing “history” of the BCE era, and it seems to have been well received by both readers and historians. Although I personally found the prose and presentation to be quite dull most of the time, that’s not the bone I came here to pick. I knew it would never be as exciting as Hardcore History, and I was prepared for something more cut and dry anyway.

No, the real issue I have with this book is that while its content certainly is historical, I think it falls well short of being a complete “history”. In fact, this account is so lacking in scope that it’s made me question what the word “history” even means.

Thanks to Carlin, as well as Daniel Bolelli of the History on Fire podcast (which I’ll come back to later), the kinds of questions I’d come to expect in historical non-fiction were those regarding situational experience, people’s personalities, questions about what they might have felt on an emotional level, the difference in perspective between classes and from different sides of a conflict, discrepancies between different historical accounts, and what we can deduce based on those discrepancies… true deep dives into the lifeways of ancient people as best we can understand them, as well as explanations of how we’ve come to understand them.

Furthermore, during my anthropology studies, most of what we focused on in human history were practical, measurable variables in the environment. What was the landscape like? What kind of flora and fauna were available for human exploitation? How plentiful were resources? What natural predators or natural disasters threatened them? Did they practice agriculture? What kind of agriculture? Etc, etc.

Even in archaeology, where human civilizations are the focus, they don’t just care about which individual owned an artifact, they care about what that artifact can reveal about the lives of ancient people. They care about the mechanics of how that society functioned, and what the experience of living in it was like, how that experience differed across the strata of that society.

But judging from this Wise Bauer book, it seems to me that classical historians don’t consider any of those anthropological questions to be part of “history”, and only seem to care about royal lineages and the outcomes of battles.

This may be due to classical history being a tradition of what is written down. As far as I understand, much of what we label as “history” is in fact a literary jigsaw puzzle, pieced together through whatever ancient literature has come down to us from those times.

Apparently it’s only in the last 50 years or so that many of the old historical preconceptions have really been put to the test by modern archaeology. *And indeed, many traditional preconceptions have turned out to be wrong.

The traditional discipline of history might have had a valid excuse as to why it is so concerned with certain specific aspects of the past, while completely ignoring others, but I for one am not comfortable calling that discipline “history” in a comprehensive sense. **In this day and age, we can combine input from numerous fields of science and literature, from sources all over the globe, and in this way construct a far more complete picture of the past than what was possible before.

The point I’m trying to arrive at is that I found something to be severely lacking from actual “history” in The History of the Ancient World. We get very in-depth explanations of dynasties, of who succeeded whom in a given royal line, of how each transfer of power was contested and the wars that occasionally broke out as a result. We hear a lot about royalty, not how they lived or what kind of people they were or anything like, just the absurdly convoluted sequence of marry, fuck, kill that the ancient power structures were based on.

We hear a lot of lines with the jist of, ‘when the Babylonians were desperate and opened their gates, Ashurbanipal’s army sacked the city, and razed it to the ground’...

What we don’t hear about are things like, what happened inside Babylon for them to be so desperate? What happened to the survivors after? Did literally all of them die? If those are the stakes, why the actual fuck did they rebel against the Assyrians? Who’s doing the actual fighting and what are their motivations? Who the shit is still there to rebuild Babylon, rebel, get besieged, and lose the city all over again one generation later? (It’s truly ridiculous how often Babylon got sacked and razed in ancient times).

For all its long length, Ancient World blasts past the human details of events, determined instead to name every point of succession for every state-level nation of the ancient Middle East.

Although, credit where it’s due, Bauer does at least get into their belief systems. We hear a lot about mythology, and at least a little about the role of each belief system in its given society. I would have liked to hear more about each society’s relationship to its religion or philosophy, but at least she gives us a taste.

There were also a few chapters that stood out as more vivid overall than the others; the chapter on the Minoans for one, though I’m hard pressed to think of another that gave me much of a mental picture.

Maybe Dan Carlin has spoiled me, but I want more of an experiential account. I don’t feel like Bauer’s book gave me any clearer impression of lifestyles, personalities, or motivations, much less the sights, sounds, smells, or emotions. There’s no vibe, it’s just pure semantics.

This king conquered this city at this date, his son took the throne on this date, he was murdered by his half-brother on this date, which started a civil war that killed off a huge percentage of the population, until that half-brother was in turn murdered by his step-mother on this date.

Like, alright, but how did all that affect the lives of the citizens? What kinds of hardships would the common people face due to all these high-up political maneuvers? Who is fighting in these wars? What does it do to the city or the state when they lose a war? What even really happens when a city is sacked and razed?

I feel like these are really important questions to have answered, however accurately they can be, in order to grasp this concept of “history”. In fairness, according to Mr. Carlin a lot of those types of questions have been plaguing historians for centuries, and attempting to answer them can be very controversial and polarizing… but if you ask me, those are the questions that really matter.

And again, maybe this frustration is because I don’t have an interest in history so much as anthropology. I want to know how the human animal adapted to its reality. Who inherited what title from whom is of less interest to me.

However, I do have another big criticism of The History of the Ancient World, namely the World part of its title. Because, while we do get occasional chapters discussing India and China, the vast majority of the book is focused on the Middle East. I know a lot of this problem comes down to what written historical sources are available, but it also seems to come down to what written sources are available in English. Because I can guaran-fucking-tee that the Chinese know more about their history than what’s in this book, and I would assume the Indians do too.

Not only does Ancient World gloss over India and China, but it doesn’t even fucking mention the Americas, despite at least a couple of notable state-level civilizations that existed within the timeframe of ‘ancient world’.

The Caral-Supe people and their successors in South America, and the Olmec in Mesoamerica, both had advanced enough societies to leave behind monumental architecture that has lasted until the present day.

***As far as I know, modern science has yet to decipher any written language those American civilizations have left behind, but even so I don’t think it’s fair to claim that you’ve written a “History Of The Ancient World” without even mentioning some of the most advanced societies of that ancient world.

The book doesn’t even have a forward or an introduction to explain these omissions, it just acts like nothing at all happened anywhere in the world besides these Middle Eastern states where they kept good records.

Maybe the issue comes down more to the definition of “history” rather than any actual failure on the author’s part. But if you ask me, it shouldn’t be called history if it doesn’t at least try to reveal some of the most fundamental aspects of human life in its given time period.

Before closing, let me return to the other podcaster who does a great job of looking at history from this more humanistic or anthropological perspective: the History On Fire podcast by Daniel Bolelli. He is a huge fan of Dan Carlin himself, and I would venture to say Bolelli is actually the better writer—he is a little more eloquent, and doesn’t rely on idioms or repetition the way Carlin does.

However, I hate to say it but, his Italian accent is so strong I often can’t understand him clearly, at least not without focusing harder than I typically would with a native English speaker. I feel really bad raising this as a criticism because it’s not really his fault or even necessarily under his control, but I can’t deny it’s something that does affect my listening experience. That said, his content is excellent, and perhaps more intellectually rigorous than Carlin’s.

Okay so I think that’s it. This ended up being a sort of back-door review of The History Of The Ancient World, I hope you enjoyed it! But how do you feel? What does the word “history” mean? Are battles and royal lineages the real meat of history? Or do you also want to know what ancient Babylon smelled like? Let me know in the comments, thanks for reading!

Nosbig

*Just to provide an example (according to Dan Carlin), among western historians it was generally assumed until about 40 years ago that the Mongols had such a powerful military due to nothing but sheer numbers, while more recent analyses and cross-references have found that in fact, the Mongols probably had a much smaller military than most of their rivals, and overwhelmed their opponents through superior strategy and tactics.

**A fascinating problem for modern historians is that there are things that someone born in ancient times would intuitively understand about their histories—such as the actual mechanics of a battle fought with swords and arrows—while a historian born in the modern era needs to have a strong imagination to relate to any event from pre-digital, pre-electric, pre-industrial, pre-gunpowder times.

***In the case of the Caral-Supe civilization, their records were likely kept with a series of knotted wool strings called Quipus, most of which have been destroyed by time, and those that have survived have not been successfully decoded so far.