History is a genre, and whether handed
down by memorized oral traditions, through ancient or new religious and other
writings found throughout the world, cave paintings in Lascaux France from
30,000 years ago all the way to modern magazines, books and internet are all
examples of historical documentation; History is a genre with which all people
should be familiar. As George Santayana stated, “Those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is
frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in
consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and
barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.” (Santayana)
History is currently taught as an art form in college but it is also a study of
from where we have come and possibly a roadmap to where we are going in the
future. From the early chants and oral traditions handed down through religious
ceremonies in Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and a litany of
forgotten religions such as The Greek and Roman Pantheons, or the Babylonian
and Mesopotamian Gods. These traditions eventually crossed into and became
written secular histories given us by Greeks such as Homer, Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle. In Mesopotamia Hammurabi’s code, “penned” in one of the first known
forms of writing, Cuneiform, to the Torah, the Bible, The Quran and many other
newly written religious traditions are some of the first histories of moral
laws and codes by which people should live. Beyond religion, to what has become
secular writings by people such as Josephus to modern times with people such as
Dumas Malone, John Meacham, and Christopher Hitchens history is a vibrant and
living record of all that has come before and the only way by which we humans
can learn or remember anything about those who preceded us.
History as a genre has been
around since the beginning of human abstract thought as Neolithic peoples.
Upwards of 30,000 years ago man put the first known forms of historical
writings in caves near Lascaux France (among others across the world). Many
Anthropologists, Historians and Archeologists have pointed to these cave
paintings as one of a few things: Recorded histories of animals and life they
hunted and gathered, records of animals that humans hunted which appeared to be
dying off during the latest ice age that had just begun, training tools for the
next generations or abstract “ideals” of the animals they had seen and
representations of those animals left for future generations to discern. At
this point in history man was still a hunter gatherer, he had not settled into
the Agrarian standard of city building to come with later settlements in the
known ancient river valleys and beyond. Each group within those river valleys,
The Indus, The Yellow and Yangtze, the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates developed
during the Axial Age; their own languages, as well as written and verbal
histories to be passed on to the next generation and generations to come. (Sivers,
Desnoyers, and Stow) The first forms of religion; also considered a type of
historical documentation, were developed as cities and permanent settlements
sprung forth from the fertile valleys.
As
Paleolithic man evolved into Neolithic man, roughly 10,000 years ago he settled
into the area known now as ancient Mesopotamia, developing the first crops,
beer, irrigation and organized religion around the city of Ur. (Sivers,
Desnoyers, and Stow) Abstract thoughts came and man questioned from where he
spawned and to where he might be going. As mankind moved forward, he found ways
to record his thoughts and ideas on permanent storage devices like clay
tablets. The first known writing to develop was Cuneiform; a series of hashes
and angled marks placed on those clay tablets for storage purposes. The first
use of these historical devices was keeping records of taxes and Agriculture
outputs, another form of historical record keeping. Shortly after this time
different types of writing were coming to fruition in other key parts of the
world. China began with Pictograms, while there were Hieroglyphics in Egypt, in
the Indus region Harrapan’s began Indus script, and later in Mesoamerica more
Pictograms with the Olmec tribes. (Sivers, Desnoyers, and Stow) Through time
many ancient Chinese, Egyptian and Mesopotamian scripts have been deciphered
and it has been seen that people recorded the same events of daily life or
historical events that we do today: Costs to do business, jokes, parables and
teachings from religions, orders from the governments, all the way to what you
did on a daily basis if you could afford said writing implements and a scribe,
or trained writer. Modern people may do it with a photo or short note, they had
a Cartouche. Most of these ancient
scripts have not yet been deciphered. However, if you look at the rhyme and reasoning,
or pattern behind those which have been unlocked it is not a far jump to see
these other forms of writing were to record events of life as well as
religions, weather, planetary and other historical events to those peoples.
As time marched on newer and
“better” ways of communication were happened upon and used to relate the
historical information known; things changed. Phoenicians created the first
Phonetics, or spoken language known to have specific sounds related to
characters and words. Arabic peoples created an alphabet and number system and
the world of record keeping or “history” was never the same. (Sivers,
Desnoyers, and Stow) In quick succession the world gained Greek and Latin, each
recording some of the greatest known historical events with some of the biggest
names to cross the pages of any historical reference books. Socrates began
Philosophical thinking as it is now known and recorded many of his ideals.
Socrates taught Plato to think for self and understand the world around you as
you sense it to be, or by your own ideals. Plato is thought to have described
one of the first possible historical places lost to the ages, “Now in this
island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over
the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent and,
furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the
columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.” (Plato)
Aristotle learned from Plato and expanded on the idea of sense running the human
cause and is thought to be the father of logic who also taught Alexander the
Great. There was Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad for the Greeks giving explanation of
the historical events of war as well as the wants, needs and human
characteristics of the Pantheon of Gods. This was purloined by the Latin group;
or Romans after the Punic Wars and turned into the Aeneid, or Virgil’s books, basically
coopting Greek history, giving a slight rewrite in favor of Rome by saying Rome
was with the Gods roughly 1,000 years earlier (or the Gods were with Rome). Josephus
was a Jewish man with an education in the Torah, considered a history as well
as religious book by some. Also, he was a Roman scribe during the time shortly
after Jesus supposedly lived. He is credited with making claims to Vespasian
about Jewish Dogma calling for the rise of a man like Vespasian to rule over
the known world thus becoming a royal scribe and translator for Vespasian. He
reported on the uprisings of the Jews in Galilea, and was squarely known to be
in the corner of the Pharisees, or Jewish ruling class. He is considered a
point of reference for the First Jewish wars as well as knowing all the players
including Jesus from the later known Bible “Gospels”. However, it is very
unlikely he actually lived during the same time as Jesus and was reporting second
and third hand accounts at best, but that was considered known history due to
the oral traditions in the area at the time. (Hitchens)
After Rome’s long and illustrious
course ran as the major world power, the Dark Ages befell the world, and
religious peoples became the sole historians of the day. Along with the
purposeful burning of the Library at Alexandria, this is probably the worst
time for historical referencing beyond the time of Paleolithic man. Rome and
all of its ways beyond language were forgotten, and the language was only
remembered by a select few who were tasked with reading and conveying the
messages from the new Holy Bible ordained by the Catholic Church and used to
control the masses. Histories of medicine, engineering, monetary systems,
ancient peoples, agriculture, political systems and more were all purposely
wiped off the books so to say and replaced with the God of the Bible in lieu of
really knowing from where humans came. (Hitchens) Not until the Enlightenment
Era and heavy use of the printing press was documentation of actual records and
not mythological stories about God or Gods considered to be true history, or
should it be said that History became a Genre. In other words, man was going
back to the ideals of Aristotle after a long intermission and looking to logic
and testing to see the world around in its true form.
Over the course of time
after the Enlightenment Era the genre of history evolved to include
documentation of just about every category known to man as the printing press
came to be. Not only are writings and books considered to be historical, but
also painting, archeological finds, ancient graffiti, people, photographs,
newspapers, magazines, machines, types of textiles, foods and now Tweets, Blog
posts and Internet Memes... the list is nearly endless of things our
Smithsonian Institute saves in the name of historical preservation. In modern
times people seem to understand that everything is woven into the tapestry of
history. Not only the newspaper from 1945 is historical, but the car used to
get that paper, where said paper was purchased, the cost of the paper, even the
ads inside said paper and so forth are all considered historical features worth
remembering to one group or another.
Now-a-days due to the open
nature of media and in particular Social Media the old line of history being
written by the victors is not the way things go. Following World War II media
opened in some manners and closed in others. Fear of the Red Scare and a
propensity to “force” American consumerism to boost American power economically
throughout the world had Americans walking in lock step around ideals of
anti-Communism, Socialism and any “ism” that wasn’t based on our ideal of
Democracy. By the time of the Vietnam War some people started to openly
question our hold on the world and a different “history” was beginning to
emerge. No longer was everything done by the victor the “best” or most
historically accurate thing, but now voices of dissent were being heard and the
victor was no longer able to propagandize history for themselves. There had
formed a greater world community to which the victor must answer for his deeds
in war. Man had moved from, in the case of Rome, history being written to
promote and uphold the victor’s ideals and partially used as propaganda to keep
conquered peoples under rule with proclamations about the greatness of the
conquerors. Suddenly history was being written in various parts of the world
discussing the same events but from opposing views. The world has grown a
voice, and where it may have taken millennia in earlier times to find out a
truth or “what really happened” with an historical event, now those events
could be broadcast live into homes all over the world for people to surmise for
themselves.
Discourse
languages within history vary widely due to history being an all-encompassing
genre. A Historian must be able to take documents written in ancient or dead
languages and find ways to decipher them. The Rosetta Stone is a perfect
example. The stone was a record, Egyptian hieroglyphs (a long dead language), translated
to the Demotic script (used in Egypt prior to Ptolemy’s rule) and finally
Ancient Greek at the bottom of the stone. This stone is a perfect example of
how history moves with time, and through time and as things change people want
to record the past the way they could currently understand, in a language they
could understand. A Historian must also be able to figure out through
accompanying texts, archeological finds, architecture and more how people lived
thus giving a historian a better grasp on how things were perceived at various
times throughout the historical timeline. The discourse language only changes
as languages change and evolve, but it is for the historian to make connections
between all of them, as humans are pattern seekers.
The conventions of history
have changed with time as touched on previously in this paper. As languages
opened, more people became literate and other sources have been found. Historical
documentation has changed and become open to all who can cite a source or
witnessed specific events. No longer left in the church’s hands, or to only
those who could afford a scribe or person able to record a “specific history”
given by a rich person, family, ruler or religious leader history was opening
to the greater population. No longer are only a few in charge of what is to be
remembered by the people; or history. As Universities opened, scholarly debates
and talks came to light, preservation tactics have gotten better, and more
archeological finds have been saved for posterity. As deciphering of languages
and patterns of historical change has gotten more detailed, man has been able
to update the conventions from single huge entities like the churches or known
writers like Josephus and have expanded it to include the average Joe on the
street if he was indeed witness to a great event like 9/11.
In the past we had to take a
man like Josephus’ words that a Jesus did exist and was not indeed made up by
the Flavians to control the Roman and outside populations. That was a one
source horse, and the other sources are verbally handed down stories that do
not match each other throughout the four gospels, so a lot of the historical
evidence has been lost and allegory takes the place of an actual event. In
modern times if a man such as Jesus existed and was performing such miracles
and deeds, there would be a blog, a Twitter feed, Snapchat photos and constant
live updates from cable news organizations. There would be no mystery about the
man from Galilea.
Atlantis
would not be a “magical and mythical” place only spoken of briefly by an old
Greek in one or two phrases. It would not be a place of fantasy or farce but
would be forever concrete in our understanding of the historical world by way
of creating an amusement park; a magazine dedicated to it and constant Internet
travelers posting ad-naseum photos of it from every perspective imaginable. There
was a time when you only had limited sourcing of information and how that
information was to be disseminated amongst the general population. When
populations were illiterate for the most part as in early England, biblical
history was given through a sermon for those of means within the church walls and
outside the church on the street would be a play acting out the sermon of the
day so the layman could get the underlying parable or moral instruction to take
away from the lesson. Today with a more informed and literate populous, the
actual sermon would be on giant jumbo screens for the whole population to hear
and discern for themselves what to take away. This is the “change” in
historical discourse and convention. No longer is the information forming
history and its’ events based on the knowledge, writings and ideals of a few,
but it is now open for all to see and contribute toward on the fly as we move
forward in time.
In summary, history as a
genre has evolved over time to reflect the changing peoples, languages,
religions, technologies and thoughts over the course of years. At one time a
history could be wiped away with a single battle and the conquered people’s
former lives forever lost to the ages as a new history was given them by their
conquerors. Now, with the advent of film, telephones and instant communication,
it is highly unlikely that anyone is totally forgotten or left to the
underbelly of history. If it had an effect, someone will write, picture or
record it in some manner if at all possible. No longer does history need to be
found on hidden walls painted by peoples from 30,000 years ago. Now it happens
and is logged in front of our eyes. No longer do we have to hope the person
telling us a story about specific peoples or actions was actually there to
witness it, we no longer have to trust that a person is not writing from 100
years past the event from oral traditions, but we can now see it in
action. As with a few of the biggest
historical events of my lifetime, I was able to view them in live action. The
Challenger Disaster broadcast live into my science class, 9/11 on my PC screen
at work then my television at home and many more events happened and were
broadcast to each of us who were alive at the time, making anyone who lives in
modern times their own personal historian for now and into the future.
Santayana, George. The Life of Reason [or] the Phases of Human Progress,
Volume 1, 1905. The Classics.us, 2013. PrintUS (Spanish-born) philosopher (1863
- 1952) 4 October 2015
Sivers, Peter Von, Charles Desnoyers, and George B. Stow. Patterns of
World History. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. Print. 7 October 2015
Plato, Benjamin Jowett, and Plato. Gorgias and Timaeus. Mineola, NY:
Dover Publications, 2003. Print. 10 October 2015
Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
New York: Twelve, 2007. Print. 8 October 2015
Great work!
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