[History of Historiography 1] The Ancient Orient and the Beginnings of Historiography

Hello, I am Nikolai. Starting with this installment, a new series, [History of Historiography], begins.

Historiography is the study of the human past, but it also has a very long history of its own. In this installment, I would like to consider what kind of endeavor historiography is, starting from how historiography has been established and what transitions it has followed.

In this first installment, we will cover the story from before the birth of historiography, addressing the theme of when and why humanity began to record history in the first place. The first civilizations of humanity arose in the Ancient Orient, which corresponds to the modern Middle East and Egypt, and a culture of writing history had already been born in this era. This time, I would like to look at how historiography began in the Ancient Orient.

1. The Invention of Writing and Calendars

In order to record history, writing is naturally indispensable for writing it down. In the Ancient Orient, there were mainly two writing systems in existence. One was cuneiform, which was widely used in Mesopotamia. Although this was originally a script invented to write the Sumerian language, due to its versatility, it was borrowed by other peoples and used to record various languages such as Akkadian, Ugaritic, Elamite, Old Persian, and Hittite.

The other is the hieroglyphs (hieroglyphics), which are pictographs that developed in Egypt. Because hieroglyphs, which took the form of people and animals, were complex and difficult to write, as time passed, hieratic (hieratic), a cursive form of hieroglyphs, and even more simplified demotic (demotic) were also devised.

When recording history, it is necessary to record the date, such as "Year XX, Month XX, Day XX," or at least the year. This is where the calendar becomes important. In the Ancient Orient, two types of calendars were used: the lunar calendar and the solar calendar. The lunar calendar, based on the cycle of the moon's phases, was adopted in Mesopotamia, and in later eras, the lunisolar calendar, which corrects the discrepancy between the seasons and the calendar using intercalary months, was devised.

On the other hand, the solar calendar was invented in Egypt and consists of 30 days per month with 5 leap days added at the end of the year. This concept of a 365-day year originated from the fact that the Nile River would around the summer solstice in June enter its flood season just after Sirius (Sothis in ancient Egypt) appeared in the eastern sky at dawn, and the period from one appearance of Sirius to the next was 365 days.

With the invention of writing and the calendar in this way, the prerequisites for recording history were established.

2. Creation of lists of events

The people of the ancient Orient who acquired writing created a vast number of lists to organize knowledge and information. Examples include receipts for taxes and tributes, itemized lists of spoils of war, distribution of rations and official salaries, census records, lists of personal and place names, and property inventories; these were used for administrative and financial management in courts and temples.

Among these lists, there exist "lists of events" that organized events deemed worthy of record. These lists are called "year-name lists" because each year was named after an event, such as "the year in which such-and-such event occurred". For example, regarding the reign of King Hammurabi of the First Dynasty of Babylon, the first year of his reign was named "Hammurabi becomes king," the fourth year was "the wall of the sanctuary Gagia was built," and the 37th year was "by the great power of Marduk, he defeated the armies of the lands of Turukku, Kakmu, and Subartu."

The background to the creation of year-name lists was the question of how to distinguish one year from another, which was a problem of administrative and financial management. Today, we use era-based dating systems, such as the Christian era or Japanese era names, which count years starting from a specific event as the first year. However, era-based dating systems were underdeveloped in the Ancient Orient, and it was not possible to count years in the way we do with "2024 AD" or "Reiwa 6." Therefore, they made it possible to identify a specific year by assigning a name to each individual year.

3. Records of Kings and Dynasties

Year-name lists were eventually organized into lists that arranged the names of years, which were named after events for each successive king, in chronological order of their reigns, and as time went on, lists that simply recorded the names of kings and the lengths of their reigns in order were created for each dynasty. Such lists are called king lists, and in Babylonia, starting from the Kassite period in the 16th century BC, and in Egypt, from the Middle Kingdom period, the method of indicating dates by the king's regnal year became standardized.

However, king lists were not merely summaries of past records; they were edited with political intent. In the "Sumerian King List", in order for each city-state to demonstrate that they themselves were the legitimate successors to kingship, even for periods when multiple dynasties actually coexisted, it was written as if a single city-state held the kingship. For example, during the era of warlords after the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the Isin dynasty added the reigns of the Isin kings to the king list while ignoring the existence of Lagash, a powerful city in the south.

Meanwhile, the "Assyrian King List" created in northern Mesopotamia contains content that emphasizes the historical continuity of the royal lineage, as connecting to the long tradition of Assyrian kingship was linked to their own legitimacy. The "Turin King List" created in Egypt begins with the era when gods and semi-divine kings ruled, and then moves on to descriptions of real kings, thereby demonstrating that kingship originated from the gods. In any case, it remains true that they attempted to demonstrate the legitimacy of kingship through king lists.

4. Chronicles and Annals

As a form of written material created to preserve the achievements of kings, distinct from king lists, we can cite inscriptions. Inscriptions were created to commemorate military victories or the construction of buildings, and rather than being a mere list of facts, they adopted a style of narrating events. Among such inscriptions, those that describe the years of a king's reign in chronological order are called "chronicles".

Chronicles were also not merely records, but had the character of royal propaganda. For example, in the "Assyrian King Chronicles" left by successive Assyrian kings, the sections written about the conflict with Babylonia in the south always portray Babylonia as being at fault and always end in an Assyrian victory, which is a description favorable to Assyria.

As the ancient Oriental era came to an end, documents finally appeared that were not lists or royal propaganda, but rather a format for describing objective facts. These are the "Babylonian Chronicles", a group of documents recording the reigns of successive kings of Neo-Babylonia. The "Babylonian Chronicles" cover kings from the beginning of the dynasty by Nabonassar in 747 BC to its fall in 539 BC; they are written in the third person and are characterized by describing facts calmly and objectively, without praising or criticizing the kings.

5. Civilizations that did not leave behind history

In 539 BC, starting with the conquest of Neo-Babylonia, the Achaemenid Empire brought Egypt, Anatolia, and northern Greece under its rule, establishing the first world empire in history spanning three continents. Although the Achaemenid Empire built a powerful state and the inscriptions left by each king remain, they did not create historical accounts that continued uninterrupted from the past like the people of Mesopotamia or the ancient Egyptians. This tendency was the same for the later Sasanian Empire, and research into the history of the Persian Empire must rely exclusively on records left by contemporary foreigners.

Similar to the Persian Empire, civilizations that did not leave behind historical records include ancient India. While inscriptions (referred to as "engraved texts" in the case of India) do remain in India, prior to the influx of Islam in the 12th century, they still did not produce historical writings. Due to this situation, India is also called "India without history books."

Why did the Persians and Indians not leave behind history? Explanations are sometimes given that their sense of "time" differed from other peoples and they had little interest in the past, or that their literacy was low, but the definitive reason is not well understood. It is also possible that the sense of "recording history" is actually what is unique.

6. Summary

The first historical records in human history began with "year-name lists" that named years after events for reasons of administrative and financial management. Eventually, year-name lists were replaced by king lists that summarized the names of kings and their regnal years, and their nature shifted from the purpose of distinguishing one year from another to being based on political intentions to demonstrate one's own legitimacy. Furthermore, apart from these lists, inscriptions praising the achievements of kings also began to be created.

The culture of compiling such records of the past, the stance of seeking the legitimacy of royal authority in the past, and the consciousness of wanting to preserve the achievements of kings for eternity indicate that a "historical consciousness" aware of a connection to the past was born. The budding of historical consciousness and the beginning of historical writing in the ancient Orient became the prototype for those in later ages.

Thank you for reading until the end.

Reference

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