To us, the Romans from 2,000 years ago are “the ancients.” Even people from the Middle Ages are ancient, too.
But to people living in the year 100 B.C., what sort of opinion did they have about people from 2000 BC? Did they view them with the same sort of attitude or history-quaintness lens that we do?
Given the particular dates you mention my guess is that the answer is yes. There were many Greek and Roman historians from that time period who had a fascination with the (to them) ancients. I’d guess Caeser probably spent a night or two pondering who built the pyramids. Of course western civilization was at a high point during the 100 BCE to 200 CE time period. If we posit later dates, say the people of 600 CE and their fascination with people from 1400 BCE, the same might not be true.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest literature that still exists… but it’s set in a time far earlier, ancient from the point of view of its writer. I don’t think it gives a year for its setting, but describes it as being just after humans invented bread.
Perhaps the most popular literary work of ancient Greece was the Iliad / Odyssey, which was taken to be a real history of events that took places hundreds of years in the past.
Yeah. The Romans and Greeks reaction to the Egyptians was much like our reaction to Egypt - Wow! How’d they do that?!
Interestingly Romans like Julius Caesar or Marc Antony and their Egyptian counterpart Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than to the construction of the pyramids.
Alexander is just about midway.
Our ‘ancients’ knew a lot about their ‘ancients’ through the great stories of their civilisations, and the Iliad and Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh have already been mentioned.
These stories are often of very heroic but very normally flawed humans [or human-god-demon hybrids]. I don’t think the average Greek or Sumerian was under any illusion that people in times before were very different from them in their motivations, loves and reactions, whatever great deeds they claimed or whatever favour they were given by the gods. And in their own writing about themselves they are often just as whiny or full of crap as we are (present company excluded).
Something I learned about in a World History class: The people of the Middle Ages, at least in Western Europe, had a very poorly developed notion of how to acquire new knowledge – mainly, they didn’t have the “scientific method” as we now understand it. Knowledge was gained mainly by studying existing texts, written by earlier people who had gained their knowledge – somehow.
They believed that the “ancients” already possessed all knowledge that existed or could ever exist. Yet they also knew that much knowledge had been lost by their own (Middle Ages) time.
Their primary concept of how to regain all that ancient knowledge was NOT based in doing any kind of original research or observation of nature. Rather, their pursuit of knowledge consisted primarily of searching for ancient lost texts. Monasteries had long been repositories of learning (such as it was), and the search for manuscripts focused heavily on the storage rooms and attics of monasteries.
Meanwhile, the Islamic world was doing much better at this. They had preserved ancient knowledge, translated to Arabic languages, much more extensively. When the Western nations began to re-discover the knowledge of the ancients, much of it came via Islamic texts that they found.
Yes, I remember reading that they had guidebooks for Egypt just like we do today, for the history-fascinated roman tourist.
And commerce, including tourism, among far-flung lands, created mysteries and paradoxes for later archaeologists and historians trying to piece together the histories of those people and places. Even in ancient times, there were museums and private collections of artworks and artifacts that were bought, traded, or stolen from lands near and far. Later archaeologists who dug up these artifacts were often confounded by the things they found and the lands where they found them.
Your world history class was flat wrong unfortunately.
Try reading The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science by Seb Falk.
Seb Falk is a Professor of History at Cambridge University, specializing in the history of science.
In northern Europe they certainly thought of the ancients, but beyond that it’s hard to be certain. Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments were later used for, for example, Pictish carvings, but we don’t even know what the Pictish carvings mean let alone what they thought about the Bronze Age monument.
I visited an Iron Age souterrain, which is an underground chamber possibly used for storage, that had set in the wall a block of stone with neolithic carvings on it. So the people of 2000 years ago were re-using an artefact that was about 3000 years old at the time, not that they could have known the age. It might have intended as decoration, it might have had spiritual significance to them, but I don’t think they had any more idea what the neolithic carvings originally meant than we do.
Well, part of the reason was that to this day we don’t even know of the truest extent of the borders of some polities.
For instance, the Farasan Islands in the southern part of the Red Sea, had a substantial Roman garrison and as Mary Beard points out, they developed civilian administrative setup as well and seemed to have had it for over a century. So it wasn’t just a forward occupied base.
No one had any idea the Romans were ever even there until 2004 when some remains of the garrison were found.
Point is, that if the actual borders were further than believed then its not surprising so was established commerce.
Cite?
They weren’t ‘confounded’, they simply had to update their ideas of the extent of ancient trade.
As I point out in the post above yours, they have had to regularly update their ideas of the extent of political borders. So it is not surprising that trade routes become more and more extensive and diverse.
I read some book that pointed out the only information we have of Romans trading by sea with India was one comment in some Roman text about how many days it took to sail to India.
The Egyptians started building big things around the first dynasty about 2400BC - so they had a civilization that came and went through 3 crashes and multiple foreign invasions…
I would think that in Roman times, a lot of credence was given to oral tradition. Much of older history was written down versions of oral history; the Bible, the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, etc. I guess the important point is that there were not a lot of independent texts around, and even fewer people with the inclination and training to make objective observations of historical sites. Those who originated or retold stories of the past were happy to put their particular spin onto it. Without modern science, presumably supernatural occurrences where the gods interfered were given more credit than we would today.
Also, as texts were copied and referred to - quite a lot of original text may be altered or lost and we (and the Romans) have only some later person’s commentary on it.
Absent comprehensive courses on history for the general intelligentsia, I assume too that to some extent, the depth of ancient history was lost. Something built 300 years ago probably was just “old” as was something built 2,000 years before. They may be vaguely aware “the Scythians overran us 4 generations ago, and before that we were an active and productive people as these monument attest”. Local pride likely contributed to the idea of attributing great works to their own people, rather than some ancient wave of conquerors.
Plus in the days before travel books and photography, people had little idea the scope of any more remote monuments and relied on word of mouth and exaggerations. Any unearthed artifacts were probably incidental finds, more curiosities that a concerted effort to find the realities of the past.
If you visit Egypt today, many of the ancient constructs are amazing - but the faces and hands of the human figures are often chipped off of the reliefs and statues because they were “graven images”. Quite often, the need to preserve the past was not a consideration in many cultures, particularly when it came to religion. .
There’s actually a huge amount of archaeological and textual evidence of Indo-Roman trade.
There are large quantities of ancient Roman coins and pottery found in India, and small Indian statues in Italy, all dating from the Roman period.
There is a record of the Emperor Augustus receiving an ambassador from an Indian king of South India. Writers in the later Roman Empire described Buddhism as well as Hinduism. There are mentions of Roman trade and ships in ancient Indian texts.
There is a Christian community in the Indian state of Kerala that is said to have been established by Thomas the Apostle, and still numbers 6 million today. Several Roman Christian writers also mention that Thomas visited India. There is solid evidence throughout all the centuries of this Christian community.
There is also evidence and mention of a number of Roman trading posts along the Indian coast.
You are totally underestimating the detail and quantity of history available to literate societies in ancient times. They had highly detailed timelines of events going back many centuries for various different cultures.
There’s a whole field called textual criticism. Scholars have discussed and investigated texts over a period of centuries, and painstaking established line by line the accuracy and possible copyist errors and amendments to all the ancient texts we have.
Sorry, but I think wild speculation and guesses are a little out of place in GQ.
On travel and trade in the ancient world, and knowledge of different cultures, see also:
Roman coins minted from the 1st century AD onwards have been found in China, as well as a coin of Maximian and medallions from the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius in Jiaozhi in modern Vietnam, the same region at which Chinese sources claim the Romans first landed. Roman glassware and silverware have been discovered at Chinese archaeological sites dated to the Han period. Roman coins and glass beads have also been found in Japan.
In Chinese records, the Roman Empire came to be known as Daqin or Great Qin. Daqin was directly associated with the later Fulin (拂菻) in Chinese sources, which has been identified by scholars such as Friedrich Hirth as the Byzantine Empire. Chinese sources describe several embassies of Fulin arriving in China during the Tang dynasty and also mention the siege of Constantinople by the forces of Muawiyah I in 674–678 AD.
Geographers in the Roman Empire such as Ptolemy provided a rough sketch of the eastern Indian Ocean, including the Malay Peninsula and beyond this the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea. Ptolemy’s “Cattigara” was most likely Óc Eo, Vietnam, where Antonine-era Roman items have been found.
Ancient Chinese geographers demonstrated a general knowledge of West Asia and Rome’s eastern provinces. The 7th-century AD Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta wrote of the contemporary reunification of northern and southern China, which he treated as separate nations recently at war.