When the past and the present came together
There will always be a special place in my heart for ancient civilizations. I owe it to my undergraduate college experience. For its last several years, I was immersed in ancient cultures and artwork. I was blessed with wonderful professors representing some of the finer academic and historical institutions in higher education. I spent every day swimming through an ancient wonderland of mystery and intrigue, where I was the conductor, constructing my own meaning out of the reality before me, be it stele or script.
Ancient Re-Awakenings
So maybe that is why I never cease to get a certain intrinsic glow when I read about things like Infrared Archaeology, such as that reported by the BBC several weeks ago and resulting in the discovery of over a dozen pyramidal structures and 4000 settlements and tombs previously unknown to modernity. Using technology in this way could shed a new and entirely different understanding on Egypt, supposedly the beginning of what we know as large-scale ancient civilization.
But what do we really know about Egypt anyway? In the 1990s, Dr Robert Schoch and his team of experts representing some of the greatest minds in geology dated the Sphinx on the Giza Plateau to between 7000-5000 BCE, effectively doubling or tripling its age and offering up a rebuttal from Archaeologists that lacks any substance other than dogmatic interpretation of existing knowledge in spite (not in light) of more recent and convincing evidence to the contrary.
But this is only the beginning, or should I say the beginning might not be what you, many others, and I have been taught it was. University of Birmingham Archaeologist Jeffrey Rose recently proposed an ancient lost civilization existed in what is now the Persian Gulf area. A landmass the size of the United Kingdom might have flourished almost 100,000 years ago and supported almost as many people at its height, not vanishing until around 8000 BCE, shortly after the end of the last ice age. It supported stone houses, villages, domestication of animals and trade networks that would seriously damage the still-accepted Reconstructionist version of history—one of hunting and gathering, cave painting mentality and basic survival of small groups of nomadic wanderers.
What is a science anyway?
In light of all of the above, the question can easily be begged, what exactly is History anyway? According to Reconstructionist Historians such as Edward Hallett Carr, History is a scientific discipline, rigid with morals and ethics, as well as an historical-scientist type who is able to execute a neutral inspection and dissemination of knowledge, which is what we consider pre-existing conditions or truths. His is a defense born out of over a century of attacks against History as unscientific, as too human based and therefore imperfect to be a science, a true hard science such as, oh, lets just pick the hardest and most fundamental of all of them, Physics is thought to be.
Ah, Physics, you don’t need to be a Physicist to understand the fundamentals. Gravity. Newton and the apple, and a fixed pull, a fixed reality, one perception of how it all functions and works, One Reality. But if Physics is so fundamentally sound and solid as if to put the comparative screws to a softer and more social science as History, then what do we make of Columbia Physicist Brain Greene, the foremost proponent of Einstein’s Quantum Theory and one of leading scholars in his field, who asserts through years of research and publication that Newton missed the mark a bit.
According to Greene, Newton’s desire to comprehend the Universe the way he did was a product of culture and ideological understanding, not a universal constant and not necessarily or ultimately true. Greene argues, and quite convincingly, for multiple universes, multiple dimensions, and multiple realities all connected to ours in some way, like strings vibrating and affecting other strings near them. Although it is much more complicated and intricate than I have purposely made it here, the point is clear: Reality might not be as static and absolute as we have been taught to think it is. If that is true of the hard science realities, then what is to be made of the social ones such as ours?
Truth-the most elusive of all facts
The study of history is the study of truth, whether that truth is outright or more hidden behind other truths that present themselves as facts. But truth being perceptual and not absolute, it might be better to call history the perception of events that leads one to craft their own response to it, as biased and incomplete as that account may inherently be.
Maybe this is why what the Texas State Board of Education is doing frightens me so much to my core. They are of course in the process of rewriting history textbooks for public schools all across the nation--as Texas has historically and currently holds insurmountable sway in the textbook publishing industry and what goes in Texas ends up everywhere else nationwide. The curriculum will favor a more Anglo-Saxon and Christian cultural agenda than is already currently espoused in states like Arizona, where House Bill 2281 forbade the teaching of Latino Studies alongside the major history curriculum for fears of cultural ethnocentrism (note the impossible to hear irony that only teaching one version of history is not considered ethnocentric to those in charge). The above practices and policies basically amount to one culture telling another, or in the case of Texas, many others, that they do not matter, they do not count, and that there is only one Truth worth knowing. Frightening, to the core.
An Argument for Deconstructionist Theory in Sarah Palin's Practice...
Deconstructionist Historian Alan Munslow and his camp (of which I am a member) believe that History is nothing but narrative literary transmissions of power, part of the larger Foucaultdian school of thought that all knowledge as we know it can be ascribed to relations of power—what we were meant to know based on what those in charge want us to. After all and going back to my undergraduate experience as well as critical historians such as Edward Said, the entire ancient civilizations or Orientalist milieu was formed to conform to certain religious and ideological constructs of more modern western thought at the time—including ethnocentric European men who needed the recollection of the past to fit teleologically into their present, even if our present might be yielding a more enlightened and possibly true (even if not absolutely) version of what might have actually been in the past. And in the end, is that not History; a perceptual take on other perceptual takes?
At this point, it would be best to allow Former Alaska Governor and amateur historian Sarah Palin take us home. After all, it was she who recently claimed Paul Revere to have made his famous midnight ride to warn the Americans and the British alike, and the latter that they were not going to steal our guns. This is of course contrary to the facts that he warned only two men, and spent most of the later parts of his evening in British custody as Historian Richard ODonnel put it, ‘blabbing everything’ so that his captors felt confident enough to release him the next morning. But those contextual nuggets must have not made it into Governor Palin’s data banks or her agenda plate, and therefore were not acknowledged. For that matter, many textbooks still discuss Paul Revere more in the Palinesque terms than they do in the more real light and context; much less heroic but much more truthful, and much less impacting to minds and hearts and nationalism, so therefore just kind of omitted and therefore non-existent in the minds of many, just like that.
History as perception of reality
That in a nutshell is history, isn’t it? The acknowledgement of what might have happened, through the lens of a person or culture even farther removed than those they are studying, who themselves might have been farther removed than history in its accepted form acknowledges. After all and going back to Egypt, just once I would love to know what the Nubians thought of the Egyptians, but we just don’t have any records of that. According to the Egyptians, they were uncivilized, which of course gave them a good excuse to take all of their gold if nothing else. Ah history, have you ever changed, and is it not up to us, your living subjects, to help do it for you?
As a scholar of ancient religion who finds Greene’s ideas for physics comfortably and curiously similar to accounts from Egypt long gone on to the journey of the spirit after it leaves this plane, I for one am ready and willing, and wait with open arms and mind for more discoveries and understandings that, if not ultimately true, might be more truthful than what we have known to this point; be they pyramids or populations that force us to rethink all that we thought was worth thinking about. I hope I am not alone; that we truly may begin to understand our past and in doing so, help to shape a better future for all and every, regardless of the perception of any of the above.
Sources:
- Munslow, A. (2006). Deconstructing history. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.
- Greene, B. (2004). The fabric of the cosmos: space, time, and the texture of reality. New York, NY: Vintage.
- Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage.
- Ayres, T. (2004). That's not in my American history book: a compilation of little known events and forgotten heroes. New York, NY: Taylor Pub.
- Schoch, R, & McNally, R. (2003). Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids, from Lost Egypt to Ancient America. New York, NY: J P Tarcher.
- Carr, EH (1961). What is History? New York, NY: Vintage.
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