Well, he is hardly considered a well-respected source anymore, but good ol’ Oswald Spengler devotes a big and fascinating part of The Decline Of The West to this exact question.
His belief was that it was something unique about Western culture (n.b.: in his view, “Western culture” does not include the Greeks and the Romans). Something about how they are - well, we are - uniquely obsessed with the past, with earlier cultures, with the passing of historical time, and, more abstractly, with ideas of eternity and endlessness. While not necessarily correct, it’s certainly some pretty fascinating stuff.
Somewhere I remember reading that real archaeology, meaning a scientific study of past human activity, didn’t start until after WWII. The people we call archaeologists from before that time were closer to grave-robbers than scientists. This characterization was mostly refering to the techniques used. There may be exceptions, but most just dug up sites looking for gold and silver objects or other dramatic objects. There was little in the way of careful excavation that archaeologists engage in now.
Perhaps the planetary trauma received from the conflagration and destruction of WWII has some effect on the human psyche.
As we can see now in the middle east, and maybe was very obvious in the postwar era, it is almost a given that mankind will always destroy it’s cultural heritage, be it books, monuments, art, etc.
It’s not that they weren’t interested, it’s that (in Europe at least, I can’t claim the same for other geographical locations) they assumed that, by and large, the past and the present were very similar. Also that the past wasn’t all that long ago.
The reason for this is, in large part, unfaithful copists ; the other part is faulty datation and timekeeping. You see, throughout the Middle Ages educated men and women tried keeping the “wisdom of the ancients” alive, particularly the Roman Empire which remained for a very, very long time a symbol of “back when shit was right”. Even when the people striving to revive it, restart it, restore it or reforge it knew fuck all about the Roman Empire. But I digress, my point is : copists and scribes tried their level best to preserve and disseminate the writings of Roman historians, poets, philosophers… But in so doing, they progressively perverted them. When a scribe ran into stuff he did not personally approve of, or did not understand, or could simplify/update for “modern” audiences in more up-to-date terms, he edited the text and wrote his own stuff instead to his/her heart’s content, without leaving a note at the bottom of the page.
Apply this principle for a thousand years, see if you end up with the same text you started with. Yet since the book’s title was the same, and the attribution was the same, people figured it was a **copy **of the original book.
And that applied to every aspect of a text, not just, I dunno, religious dogma or political zeitgeists. So by the 14th century, the old *De Re Militarii for example, *which was still widely published, read and admired as one of the classics for warmongering aristocrats, talked about knights and lances and cavalry charges, even though the Romans didn’t fight that way at all and the guy who originally wrote it had never seen a Frankish knight in his life. Which is also why you’ll very, very often see paintings and drawings from that era representing famous people or events from the Antiquity under the trappings of the Middle Ages - Julius Caesar wearing Frankish splintmail or the Apostles dressed like Benedictine monks for example or great battles from the 11th century depicted in armour and weapons of the 14th. It’s not a stylistic decision, as far as I can tell that’s how they really pictured it in their mind’s eye.
Now, move forward a little further and you reach 1453, the year Constantinople got took by the Muslims. Suddenly, a whole bunch of Greek academics flooded into the West, bringing with them *originals *from Artistotle and Socrates and whatnot (since they already spoke Greek and never had to translate them), mostly into Italy. At which point Italian scholars realized how far their own versions of Aristotle and Socrates had strayed from the “real” ones. Which prompted a belated and quite shocking realization that the past was a long time ago (which they genuinely had no real notion of), that it was a really, really different time ; but at the same time that even though these people that they thought they knew turned out to be quite alien, they were still fundamentally relatable.
Cue humanism - the notion you allude to, that beneath all the cultures and the politics and the religion and the bullshit we’re still, well, human, when it comes right down to it, with all the good and evil that implies - and the Renaissance. Take that spirit two hundred years forward and you’ve got the scientific method… and archaeology.
It might all seems trivial and naive/stupid to us, but that’s because we have a much longer, more exact frame of reference. They did not. The people of the past were not dumb, they just didn’t have access to quite as much information (and a lot of what they trusted or assumed to be factual information was bullshit. Kind of like people who watch Fox News :D). From the ~16th onward we kept better care of our historical documents and their keeping “as was”, which is how we can see the evolutions and differences… which is why it’s all fascinating.
Or maybe it’s just me and you’re bored to death by now :p.
Underline mine, that isn’t something peculiar of Middle Ages. Maybe Mad Men has changed this somewhat, but many people appear to have less problems accepting the super-fancy dress of The Tudors than the clothes and mannerisms of movies made and set in the 1940s, in which people wear what was actually fashionable at the time.
A lot of that Middle Ages art has the people from places that are mentally or physically distant enough in strange clothing, but those who are mentally close - why, they wear the same stuff we do, right? Yeah, and they had internet and radio on demand and DVDs in their cars. The world was in black and white but they had internet (that is one actual example, someone watching a Katharine Hepburn - Cary Grant movie and at one point pondering why they didn’t “just look it up”, whatever it was).
I’d dispute that. Schliemann’s trenching at Hissarlik verged on treasure-hunting but Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s excavations at Maiden Castle, and the Sutton Hoo graveship excavations in 1939 show systematic method and recording, even though Wheeler’s method has now been superseded and some of his conclusions are disputed.
That’s not really a contradiction of what I said. Someone had to work out the details of how to conduct a careful excavation and then convince the others to do the same. It’s not like all archaeologists suddenly decided to do it on their own. The timing is about right, too.