Chapter 6 of 16 · The great periods of history
Chapter 5. Antiquity
The period that begins with writing: what this change of source brings, the great centres, and the two dates that close it.
When the people of the past start to speak
The whole difference between Prehistory and Antiquity lies in one thing: from Antiquity onwards, the people of the past have left us words. This is not progress in their intelligence, it is a change in the nature of the traces. A broken pot says how people cooked; a clay tablet says how many sacks of barley were delivered, by whom, to whom, and on what day.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France dates the invention of cuneiform writing to the course of the second half of the fourth millennium, between 3500 and 3300 BCE, in Lower Mesopotamia, in the land of Sumer, and it gives the cause: the complexity of the new social order, tied to the development of the urban phenomenon, brought about the invention of a new tool of communication, namely writing.
This detail of the cause is worth keeping, because it contradicts a widespread image. Writing was not invented to tell stories or to write poems: it was invented to count, to record, to administer. The first texts in the world are accounts of goods. Literature comes afterwards, and it comes because the tool already existed.
The vocabulary of the period
Five words are enough to describe what appears with Antiquity. They designate forms of organisation, not peoples.
- Writing
- A system of agreed signs that notes a language and makes it possible to read it back. It makes speech lasting and portable: a written order is obeyed at a distance and long after it was given.
- Cuneiform
- The writing made of wedge-shaped signs, pressed into fresh clay with a cut reed. It is the oldest known writing system. It was in use for close to three thousand five hundred years.
- The State
- An organisation that holds authority over a territory, raises taxes, dispenses justice and keeps archives. Writing and the State appear together, and that is no accident: a State without registers cannot raise a tax.
- The city-state
- A city that governs itself, with its farming territory around it, its laws, its gods and its army. It obeys no higher capital. It is the political form of the Greek world before the conquests.
- The empire
- A set of different territories and peoples subject to a single authority. An empire does not ask its subjects to resemble one another: it asks them to pay, to obey and to supply soldiers.
| Grouping | Period assigned | What characterises it |
|---|---|---|
| The Near East and pharaonic Egypt | From the fourth to the first millennium BCE | The first societies with writing, the first States, the first great temples and the first administrations |
| The Greek world | From the fifth century BCE to 323 BCE | Independent city-states, then the conquests of Alexander the Great, which spread the Greek language and Greek forms very far |
| The Celtic worlds | From the eighth century to the middle of the first century BCE | European societies in constant contact with the Mediterranean world, known above all through archaeology and through what Greek and Roman authors say about them |
This table does not claim to cover world Antiquity, and it says so. In the same centuries live the China of the first dynasties, the kingdoms of the Indus valley, the cities of East Africa and the societies of Central America. The division used here was made in Europe to file the history of Europe and its neighbourhood: applied to the rest of the world, it files badly. The chapter on the five periods explains why.
What writing changes for the historian
What it makes available
- Names: of people, of cities, of gods, of months.
- Numbers: quantities delivered, taxes collected, army strengths, prices.
- Dates: a dated text gives a fixed point to which everything else can be attached.
- Declared intentions: a king who has his acts engraved says what he wants remembered.
- Laws and contracts, and therefore the way a society settles its conflicts.
What it does not bring
- Truth: a text says what its author wanted known, which is not the same thing.
- Balance: those who write are a minority, and they rarely write about the others.
- Completeness: what was written on fragile materials has disappeared, and that disappearance is not random.
- Ordinary life: archives keep exceptions, disputes and accounts, rarely normal days.
- The point of view of the defeated, almost never kept by those who win.
Clay
The support that saved everything
A tablet of raw clay is an ordinary, fragile object. Put through fire, deliberately or in the burning of a building, it becomes ceramic: virtually indestructible. That is how tens of thousands of Mesopotamian administrative texts have reached us.
The paradox deserves to be looked at. The archives that have survived are those of the palaces that burned. The documents written on nobler and more fragile supports have disappeared. What we know of this period therefore depends, in part, on the disasters that struck it.
Papyrus
The support that requires a dry climate
Papyrus is made from a plant of the Nile marshes. It is light, supple, easy to roll and to carry, and that is what made it the support of writing throughout the Mediterranean world for centuries.
It rots as soon as it is damp. The papyri that survive come almost all of them from desert areas of Egypt, where the sand kept them dry. A similar letter written in Greece or in Gaul at the same moment has disappeared without a trace. The map of what we know about Antiquity therefore follows, in part, the map of dry climates.
Stone
The support that says only one thing
Engraving in stone is expensive, slow, and visible from far off. Nobody therefore writes a grain account on it: what is written on it is laws, treaties, lists of victors, names of donors and accounts of reigns.
For this reason stone inscriptions are the best preserved and the least representative texts. They say what a power wanted made public and permanent. Reading them without knowing this amounts to writing the history of a town from its commemorative plaques alone.
The end of Antiquity, and why it is double
The French official syllabus writes two dates for the end of Antiquity: 395 and 476. The first is that of the division of the Roman Empire between an eastern part and a western part. The second is that of the deposition of the last emperor of the West.
Neither of the two is an event that contemporaries lived through as the end of a world. In 395 the Empire had already been divided and reunited several times; the division of that year only looked final afterwards. In 476 a chief installs his own authority in Italy and stops appointing an emperor of the West, which for an inhabitant of Gaul or Spain changes nothing perceptible.
These two dates above all share one fault: they hold only for the western half. The Empire of the East carries on for close to a thousand years more, with its emperors, its administration and its language. Saying that Antiquity ends in 476 therefore amounts to saying that history stops where we stop looking at it.
It is the best example of what this book has been repeating from the start. A boundary is not a fact, it is a filing decision. It is useful because it gives a shared vocabulary; it becomes harmful as soon as it is taken for the description of a real tipping point.
| Date | The fact | What does not change afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| 395 | The division of the Roman Empire between an eastern part and a western part | The laws, the administrative language, the roads, the taxes, the coinage and the cities of both halves |
| 476 | The deposition of the last emperor of the West | The Empire of the East carries on for close to a thousand years, with its emperors and its administration |
Three received ideas about Antiquity
"Antiquity means Greece and Rome"
The official syllabus begins its study with the Near East and Egypt, more than two thousand years before the Greek cities. Greece and Rome are the end of Mediterranean Antiquity, not its beginning, and they occupy only a small part of its duration.
"We have texts, so we know"
What we have is what has survived, and what survives depends on the support and on the climate. A papyrus kept in the sand of Egypt and a letter rotted in the soil of Gaul do not measure two levels of activity, but two levels of humidity.
"The Roman Empire collapsed in 476"
One half stopped having an emperor; the other carried on. The transformations that the word collapse covers spread over more than two centuries, and they did not happen at the same pace from one province to the next.