The Oxford History of Historical Writing - Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600

THE OX FOR D HISTORY OF

HISTORICAL WRITING

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a fi ve-volume, multi-authored scholarly

survey of the history of historical writing across the globe. It is a chronological

history of humanity’s attempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past with

considerable attention paid to different global traditions and their points of

comparison with Western historiography. Each volume covers a particular period,

with care taken to avoid unduly privileging Western notions of periodization, and

the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, refl ecting both the

greater geographical range of later volumes and the steep increase in historical

activity around the world since the nineteenth century. The Oxford History of

Historical Writing is the fi rst collective scholarly survey of the history of historical

writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time.

Volume 1: Beginnings to ad 600

Volume 2: 400–1400

Volume 3: 1400–1800

Volume 4: 1800–1945

Volume 5: Historical Writing since 1945

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING

Daniel Woolf

general editor

The Oxford History of

Historical Writing

volume 1: beginnings to ad 600

Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy

volume editors

Ian Hesketh

assistant editor

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp

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© Oxford University Press 2011

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First published 2011

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3

The Oxford History of Historical Writing was made possible

by the generous fi nancial support provided by the Offi ces of

the Vice-President (Research) and the Provost and Vice-President

(Academic) at the University of Alberta from 2005 to 2009 and

subsequently by Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

General Editor’s Acknowledgements

The Oxford History of Historical Writing has itself been the product of several

years of work and many hands and voices. As general editor, it is my pleasure to

acknowledge a number of these here. First and foremost are the volume editors,

without whom there would have been no series. I am very grateful for their will￾ingness to sign on, and for their fl exibility in pursuing their own vision for their

piece of the story while acknowledging the need for some common goals and

unity of editorial practices. The Advisory Board, many of whose members were

subsequently roped into either editorship or authorship, have given freely of their

time and wisdom. At Oxford University Press, former commissioning editor

Ruth Parr encouraged the series proposal and marshalled it through the reader￾ship and approvals process. After her departure, my colleagues and I enjoyed

able help and support from Christopher Wheeler at the managerial level and,

editorially, from Rupert Cousens, Seth Cayley, Matthew Cotton, and Stephanie

Ireland. I must also thank the OUP production team and Carol Bestley in

particular.

The series would not have been possible without the considerable fi nancial

support from the two institutions I worked at over the project’s lifespan. At the

University of Alberta, where I worked from 2002 to mid-2009, the project was

generously funded by the Offi ces of the Vice-President (Research) and the

Provost and Vice-President (Academic). I am especially grateful to Gary Kach￾anoski and Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offi ces, who saw the project’s

potential. The funding they provided enabled the project to hire a series of

project assistants, to involve graduate students in the work, and to defray some

of the costs of publication such as images and maps. It permitted the acquisition

of computer equipment and also of a signifi cant number of books to supplement

the fi ne library resources at Alberta. Perhaps most importantly, it also made the

crucial Edmonton conference happen. At Queen’s University in Kingston,

Ontario, where I moved into a senior leadership role in 2009, funding was

provided to push the project over the ‘fi nish-line’, to transfer the research library,

and in particular to retain the services for two years of an outstanding research

associate, Assistant Editor Dr Ian Hesketh. I am profoundly grateful for Ian’s

meticulous attention to detail, and his ability ruthlessly to cut through excess

prose (including on occasion my own) in order to ensure that volumes main￾tained editorial uniformity internally and together with other volumes, not least

because the volumes are not all being published at once. A series of able graduate

students have served as project assistants, including especially Tanya Henderson,

Matthew Neufeld, Carolyn Salomons, Tereasa Maillie, and Sarah Waurechen,

the last of whom almost single-handedly organized the complex logistics of the

General Editor’s Acknowledgements vii

Edmonton conference. Among the others on whom the project has depended

I have to thank the Offi ce of the Dean of Arts and Science for providing project

space at Queen’s University, and the Department of History and Classics at

Alberta. Melanie Marvin at Alberta and Christine Berga at Queen’s have assisted

in the management of the research accounts, as has Julie Gordon-Woolf, my

spouse (and herself a former research administrator), whose advice on this front

is only a small part of the support she has provided.

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Foreword

Daniel Woolf, General Editor

Half a century ago, Oxford University Press published a series of volumes entitled

Historical Writing on the Peoples of Asia. Consisting of four volumes devoted to

East Asia, South East Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia, and based on

conferences held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of

London in the late 1950s, that series has aged surprisingly well; many of the indi￾vidual essays are still being cited in our own day. The books were also remark￾ably ahead of their time since the history of historical writing was at that time

fi rmly understood as being the history of a European genre. Indeed, the subject

of the history of history was itself barely a subject—typical surveys of the early

to mid-twentieth century by the likes of James Westfall Thompson and Harry

Elmer Barnes, following Eduard Fueter’s paradigmatic 1911 Geschichte der Neuren

Historiographie, were written by master historians surveying their discipline and

its origins. The Oxford series provided some much needed perspective, though

it was not followed up for many years, and more recent surveys in the last two or

three decades of the twentieth century have continued to speak of historiog￾raphy as if it were an entirely Western invention or practice. Since the late 1990s

a number of works have been published that challenge the Eurocentrism of the

history of history, as well as its inherent teleology. We can now view the European

historiographic venture against the larger canvas of many parallel and—a fact

often overlooked—interconnected traditions of writing or speaking about the

past from Asia, the Americas, and Africa.

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is conceived in this spirit. It seeks

to provide the fi rst collective scholarly history of historical writing to span the

globe. It salutes its great predecessor of half a century ago, but very deliberately

seeks neither to imitate nor to replace it. For one thing, the fi ve volumes collec￾tively include Europe, the Americas, and Africa, together with Asia; for

another, the division among these volumes is chronological, rather than by

region. We decided on the former because the history of non-European histor￾ical writing should, no more than that of its European counterpart, be viewed

in isolation. We chose the latter in order to provide what amounts to a cumula￾tive narrative (albeit with well over a hundred different voices), and in order to

facilitate comparison and contrast between regions within a broad time

period.

A few caveats that apply to the entire series are in order. First, while the series

as a whole will describe historical writing from earliest times to the present, each

x Foreword

individual volume is also intended to stand on its own as a study of a particular

period in the history of historical writing. These periods shrink in duration as

they approach the present, both because of the obvious increase in extant mate￾rials and known authors, but also because of the expansion of subject matter to

a fully global reach (the Americas, for instance, do not feature at all in volume 1;

non-Muslim Africa appears in neither volume 1 nor volume 2). Second, while

the volumes share a common goal and are the product of several years of dialogue

both within and between its fi ve editorial teams and the general editor, there has

been no attempt to impose a common organizational structure on each volume.

In fact, quite the opposite course has been pursued: individual editorial teams

have been selected because of complementary expertise, and encouraged to ‘go

their own way’ in selecting topics and envisioning the shapes of their volumes—

with the sole overriding provision that each volume had to be global in ambition.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, this series is emphatically neither an ency￾clopedia nor a dictionary. A multi-volume work that attempted to deal with

every national tradition (much less mention every historian) would easily spread

from fi ve to fi fty volumes, and in fact not accomplish the ends that the editors

seek. We have had to be selective, not comprehensive, and while every effort has

been made to balance coverage and provide representation from all regions of

the world, there are undeniable gaps. The reader who wishes to fi nd out some￾thing about a particular country or topic not included in the OHHW’s more

than 150 chapters can search elsewhere, in particular in a number of reference

books which have appeared in the past fi fteen or so years, some of which have

global range. Our volumes are of course indexed, but we have deemed a cumula￾tive index an ineffi cient and redundant use of space. Similarly, each individual

essay offers a highly selective bibliography, intended to point the way to further

reading (and where appropriate listing key sources from the period or topic

under discussion in that chapter). In order to assist readers with limited knowl￾edge of particular regions’ or nations’ political and social contexts, certain chap￾ters have included a timeline of major events, though this has not been deemed

necessary in every case. While there are (with one or two exceptions) no essays

devoted to a single ‘great historian’, many historians from Sima Qian and

Herodotus to the present are mentioned; rather than eat up space in essays with

dates of birth and death, these have been consolidated in each volume’s index.

Despite the independence of each team, some common standards are of course

necessary in any series that aims for coherence, if not uniformity. Towards that

end, a number of steps were built into the process of producing this series from

the very beginning. Maximum advantage was taken of the Internet: not only

were scholars encouraged to communicate with one another within and across

volumes, but draft essays were posted on the project’s website for commentary

and review by other authors. A climactic conference, convened at the University

of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada in September 2008, brought most of the editors

and just over half the authors together, physically, for an energizing and exciting

Foreword xi

two days during which matters of editorial detail and also content and substance

were discussed. A major ‘value-added’, we think, of both conference and series,

is that it has introduced to one another scholars who normally work in separate

national and chronological fi elds, in order to pursue a common interest in the

history of historical writing in unique and unprecedented ways. As the series’

general editor, it is my hope that these connections will survive the end of the

project and produce further collaborative work in the future.

Several key decisions came out of the Edmonton conference, among the most

important of which was to permit chronological overlap, while avoiding unnec￾essary repetition of topics. The chronological divisions of the volumes—with

calendrical years used instead of typical Western periods like ‘Middle Ages’ and

‘Renaissance’—remain somewhat arbitrary. Thus volume 1, on antiquity, ends

about ad 600, prior to the advent of Islam, but overlaps with its successor,

volume 2, on what in the West were the late antique and medieval centuries, and

in China (the other major tradition of historical writing that features in every

volume), the period from the Tang through the early Ming dynasties. Volumes

4 and 5 have a similar overlap in the years around the Second World War. While

1945 is a sensible boundary for some subjects, it is much less useful for others—in

China, again, 1949 is the major watershed. Certain topics, such as the Annales

School, are not usefully split at 1945. A further change pertained to the denota￾tion of years bc and ad; here, we reversed an early decision to use bce and

ce, on the grounds that both are equally Eurocentric forms; bc/ad have at

least been adopted by international practice, notwithstanding their Christian

European origins.

It became rather apparent in Edmonton that we were in fact dealing with two

sets of two volumes each (vols. 1/2 and 4/5), with volume 3 serving in some ways

as a bridge between them, straddling the centuries from about 1400 to about

1800—what in the West is usually considered the ‘early modern’ era. A further

decision, in order to keep the volumes reasonably affordable, was to use illustra￾tions very selectively, and only where a substantive reason for their inclusion

could be advanced, for instance in dealing with Latin American pictographic

forms of commemorating the past. There are no decorative portraits of famous

historians, and that too is appropriate in a project that eschews the history of

historiography conceived of as a parade of stars—whether Western or Eastern,

Northern or Southern—from Thucydides to Toynbee.

Volume 1, under the editorship of Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy, covers

the longest span of time in the entire series, reaching from the earliest known

examples of historical writing in the Ancient Near East and in China, to the fi rst

centuries of ‘late antiquity’ in the West and the eve of the Tang dynasty in the

East. The two editors, coming from very different backgrounds, have done an

excellent job of putting together an international team of experts. The volume

runs the gamut, chronologically and geographically, from early inscriptions, to

the emergence of historiographical forms such as annals and chronicles, poetry

xii Foreword

and prose. It deals with the complex interactions of historiography with different

political structures, and with empires. The chapter topics reveal some fascinating

common features, as well as critical differences, between European and Asian

(here predominantly Chinese and Indian) modes of representing the past, and

these are drawn together in a comparative epilogue by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd. The

team has collectively presented an informative and wide-ranging account of the

beginnings of historical writing and an impressive opener to the series.

Contents

List of Maps xv

Notes on the Contributors xvi

Advisory Board xix

Editors’ Introduction 1

Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy

1. Early Mesopotamia 5

Piotr Michalowski

2. Later Mesopotamia 29

Mario Liverani

3. Ancient Egypt 53

John Baines

4. Historiography in Ancient Israel 76

John Van Seters

5. Greek Inscriptions as Historical Writing 97

Robin Osborne

6. Early Greek Poetry as/and History 122

Deborah Boedeker

7. The Rise of Greek Historiography and the Invention of Prose 148

Jonas Grethlein

8. Hellenistic Historiography 171

John Dillery

9. Josephus 219

Jonathan J. Price

10. History and Inscriptions, Rome 244

Alison E. Cooley

11. Annales and Analysis 265

Uwe Walter

12. Imperial History and Biography at Rome 291

Ellen O’Gorman

13. The Greek Historians of Imperial Rome 316

David S. Potter

14. Imperial Christian Historiography 346

Michael Whitby

xiv Contents

15. History and Inscriptions, China 371

Edward L. Shaughnessy

16. Chinese History and Philosophy 394

David Schaberg

17. Pre-Qin Annals 415

Wai-yee Li

18. Historiography and Empire 440

Mark Edward Lewis

19. Sima Qian and the Shiji 463

William H. Nienhauser, Jr.

20. The Han Histories 485

Stephen W. Durrant

21. Historiography of the Six Dynasties Period (220–581) 509

Albert E. Dien

22. Buddhism: Biographies of Buddhist Monks 535

John Kieschnick

23. Historical Traditions in Early India: c. 1000 bc to c. ad 600 553

Romila Thapar

24. Inscriptions as Historical Writing in Early India:

Third Century bc to Sixth Century ad 577

Romila Thapar

25. Epilogue 601

G. E. R. Lloyd

Index 621