In which I consider the nature of primary sources, with a little despair
Fragment of Herodotus's Histories
My primary academic home is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,* periods in which primary sources and material artifacts are relatively abundant. As a result, the question of whether something counts as a primary source is generally clear--at least in terms of a given sources's temporal relationship to the event/period in question.** (How we use sources and the type of sources admitted to the canon are constantly evolving topics as the subjects we consider worthy of historical consideration expand.)
Recently I've been playing in time periods that are definitely Not My Field and I've been forced to consider the question of what constitutes a credible source when written sources are limited. Here are three examples that I have struggled with over the last few weeks:
- The story of Queen Tomyris, who defeated Cyrus the Great of Persia in 530 BCE. Our principle source for this is a brief report by Herodotus, who wrote his Histories roughly 100 years later. This is equivalent to my blog post about the beginning of World War I being the only surviving source for that conflict in 5090.
- We have a little more information in the case of Queen Boadica, who led a rebellion against the Roman occupation of Britain in 61 CE: two written sources (both Roman) and some archaeological confirmation. The Roman historian Tacitus, who was born five years before the revolt, wrote two separate accounts of Boudica’s rebellion. He could at least claim second-hand knowledge of the events on which he reported: his father-in-law served as a member of the Roman governor’s staff during the revolt and there is evidence that Tacitus interviewed other veterans of the rebellion. Our only other source is part of an account written roughly a hundred years later by Dio Cassius, which appears in a selection of readings compiled by a Greek monk in the eleventh century.
- Most recently I've been working on Assyrian reliefs that document the Assyrian conquest of Lachish, the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah, in 701 BCE. What we know about the event comes from a complicated interplay between Assyrian inscriptions, a blurb in our old friend Herodotus, the reliefs themselves, archaeological evidence from ruins that have been identified as Lachish and the accounts of the invasion, siege, and conquest in the Old Testament.***
My only conclusion: The winner may write history in the short run--if by short run you mean over the course of 300-400 years and assuming you write the kind of history in which there is a winner). But in the long run, time itself edits history with the help of nibbling rodents, grinding sand, fire, water, and the occasional military rampage. I bow my head to those who untangle the distant past from not much data.
* With occasional forays into the medieval and early modern periods, where the nature of primary sources is a little fuzzier. Possibly the most famous example of a dodgy flexible use of sources for the early modern period is the common use Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) as a primary source for the reign of Richard III, which lasted from 1483 to 1485. I don't know about you, but I'm not a credible source for historical events that occurred when I was five to seven years old.
**Whether a given source is reliable is a different question entirely.
***I must admit, I have a hard time wrapping my head around using the Old Testament as an historical document. It stops me short every time one of the secondary sources I'm reading quotes a passage of Kings or Isaiah the same way I would quote a nineteenth century newspaper clipping.
Running on Railroad Time
I was recently reading an excellent new book on the Battle of Waterloo* in which the author made an off-hand comment about the difficulty of synchronizing accounts even when sources give exact times for events because there was no standardized time.
Until the rise of the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century, time was essentially local. With the exception of the few points where public institutions intersected private schedules,** most people’s lives were measured by sun time rather than clock time.*** Clocks became more important with the industrial revolution and the growth of factories; whole communities found their lives regulated by the factory whistle. But even when two places used the same calendar,**** there was no way to synchronize their clock towers. More importantly, there was no reason to. The factory in No Place In Particular had no need to match its schedule to the factory in The Town Over The Hill.
That all changed with the railroads.
Railroads were born in Britain in 1825, using technologies developed in the British mining industry. The first public railway, the Stockton and Darlington, carried six hundred passengers over a twenty-six mile line in only four hours on its first trip. Over the next twenty years, investors formed more than six hundred rail companies that together laid more than ten thousand miles of track in Britain--transforming train travel from a novelty to a necessity. As rail travel became more common, differences in local time (sometimes as much as twenty minutes!) became a problem. In 1840, the Great Western Railroad instituted “railway time”. Other railroads soon followed. Some towns resisted bringing their public clocks into line with the railroad,***** but by 1880 all of Great Britain was using the same time standard, assuming everyone remembered to wind their watches.
The problems were bigger in the United States, where the distances involved and the potential time variations were greater and rugged individualism was the national pastime. By 1840, America had more miles of track than Great Britain. By 1860, it had more railroad track than the rest of the world combined--and was laying more. For the first time it was important for someone in Pittsburgh to know the exact time in Poughkeepsie, Peoria, and Pacific City. If local time differed too much from place to place, people missed trains, trains missed switches, produce rotted. At first, time was regulated on a railroad by railroad basis. Busy stations had to have a different clock for each railroad. It was confusing, It was messy. And it was dangerous.
In 1883, North American railroad officers finally adopted a plan for Standard Time, creating four zones in the United States and one in eastern Canada, based on mean sun times at set meridians from Greenwich, England. (Western Canada was apparently left to fend for itself in terms of time.) Despite some local opposition--the Indianapolis Sentinel complained that people would have to “eat,sleep, work…and marry by railroad time”(see *****)-- Standard Time became the norm. The Standard Time Act of 1918 belatedly sanctioned existing practice. (I must admit, I wonder what problem required its passage. Was there a town somewhere that simply refused to reset its clocks?)
"Making the trains run on time" remains a synonym for efficiency, Amtrak not withstanding.
*David Crane’s Went The Day Well, one of a flood of new books on the subject because the bicentennial of the battle is nigh.
**Think the start of a Christian church service or the Muslim call to prayer. Both of which were publicly and loudly announced in the pre-modern world--church steeples and minarets served much the same function.
***At some gut level, we still run on sun time. Who doesn’t remember feeling outraged at the unfairness of being sent to bed while it was still light out on a summer evening? And don’t get me started on Daylight Savings Time.
****Not a given, as we’ve discussed before.
*****Someone is always ready to fight for the status quo, even if it means missing the train.
Image courtesy of ingfbruno, via Wikamedia Commons
History on Display: Project 1915
Armenia (Hayasdan)
A smaller version, which will enable you to see the whole thing, but less detail.
On April 24, 2015, Armenians around the world will commemorate the centennial of the Armenian genocide, generally considered the first large-scale genocide of the 20th century. Many of the remembrances will focus on the horror of the genocide itself. In Project 1915, Chicago-based Armenian-American artist Jackie Kazarian chooses instead to celebrate 3000 years of Armenian culture and resilience.
When Kazarian first considered creating a piece of art to commemorate the genocide, she immediately thought about Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s anguished response to another act of horror in the twentieth century--the first saturation bombing of a civilian population as an act of terror in 1936. The painting that stands at the heart of Project 1915, Armenia (Hayasdan), references that initial inspiration with its monumental size and Kazarian’s skillful use of symbolic elements.* Nonetheless the two works are fundamentally different. In Geurnica, Picasso uses fragmentation, dislocation, metamorphosis and a bleak monochromatic palette to create a searing image of the agony of war. In Armenia, Kazarian combines a semi-abstract landscape, a Pollack-like manipulation of wet paint, Armenian cultural imagery, and the glowing palette of a medieval manuscript to imbue Armenia’s tumultuous history with a sense of both loss and joy.
Kazarian describes the work as an “ascension painting”, a phrase that describes not only the chromatic movement in the painting but the emotional movement that it embodies. As the granddaughter of four genocide survivors , Kazarian witnessed and shared their pain, sadness and anger over what they had experienced--emotions shared by the Armenian community as a whole. She hopes the painting will help foster conversation about genocide, tolerance, and forgiveness: “The painting is a gesture of remembrance for the victims and survivors, but it is also meant to inspire conversation about how to promote understanding, compassion and tolerance amongst different communities of people.”
Armenia (Hayasdan) will be displayed in Chicago from April 17 through May 29 at Mana Contemporary. If you’re in Chicago, or coming through, take the time to see it. It is a breathtaking and thought-provoking work of art. If Chicago isn’t in the cards for you, with any luck you’ll have other chances to see the painting. Project 1915 is a non-profit and is currently raising funds to tour the exhibition to other locations throughout the United States and the world.
For more information about the painting and Project 1915, check the website: http://www.project1915.org/.
*The only explicit echo seems to be a ox-like creature from a medieval Armenia manuscript that occupies the same position on the canvas as Picasso’s menacing human-headed bull. On the other hand, both paintings are so rich that I could have missed something.