The Interpretation of Ancient History

[This is the introduction for Echoes of Eternity, originally due summer 2019, but rescheduled for May  2020.]

Introduction: The Interpretation of Ancient History

I’ve occasionally submitted work for competitions, and Echoes of Eternity (as it now is), grew out of an extended essay I wrote in 1991-2 for a university prize offered while I was a student at UCL.  It didn’t win, and at the time I didn’t imagine that it would. This is because I began with an essay critical of historicist approaches to the study of the ancient world, and particularly that form of historicism which appears in the writings of Marx. The historicist approach was very widespread in the University of London at the time, and so I regarded writing the essay mainly as an opportunity to blow off some steam which had been building up during the preceding three years.

The essay was titled: ‘Mirrors of the Divine’, and subtitled ‘Aristotle's Teleological Model of the World and the Interpretation of Ancient History’. The main part of the essay was built on three pieces of text I'd written during my course at UCL.

What was the point of the essay beyond the opportunity to criticise modern historical methods? One of the reasons I chose to study ancient history was to understand ancient cultures within their original contexts. Which means gaining an understanding of how they themselves understood the world in which they lived, and in which they functioned. Before arriving at UCL I’d already absorbed Wittgenstein’s criticism of J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, which was to the effect that it is arrogant to presume that the ideas of other peoples are absurd or wrong-headed, simply because they do not make sense to us. Wittgenstein argued that if we understood their ideas in their original context, they might turn out to make a great deal of sense.

Modern scholars of ancient history would respond by saying that is exactly what they are doing – it is just that we now understand that the important drivers shaping ancient societies and cultures are material and economic, and are the universal drivers, operating in all times and places. Study those things, and you will understand the cultures.

And so much of the original context of ancient evidence is lost or ignored by modern historians of the ancient world.

However I am not at all arguing that the study of material and economic forces is unimportant. Studying those things is just as important as the other things which are available for study, such as religious ideas and rituals, literature, philosophy, mythology and art. But I grew tired of the argument that for example, the Romans of the 1^st century B.C.E. understood their deep history and culture more poorly than we do, because they did not possess the proper context in which to analyse the limited historical materials they had available to them.

The importance of material and economic forces derives from the Marxist philosophical perspective, which is the bedrock philosophy of many historians (though many would deny that they are Marxists in outlook – I once heard an eminent historian say that he was ‘Marxian’ in outlook, rather than a Marxist). The sociological approach to ancient history is based ultimately on Marx’s philosophy.

Marxism contains a useful concept for dealing with things which do not fit the model. That concept is ‘false consciousness’. The philosophical analysis of Marx is assumed to be correct, and so any body of thought which doesn’t square with that analysis is presumed to be wrong, and the product of a false consciousness. According to this way of thinking, the Romans lived in a false consciousness of who and what they were, and why they did what they did. For the whole of their history.

Any body of thought which uses such a catchall concept in which to spirit away what doesn’t fit with its own conceptions, isn’t a properly functioning model of reality. It can’t be, because it already presumes its own truth.

The original four sections of the essay from 1991-2 survive here, though they have been revised and re-englished (‘Synoikismos’ first appeared in Understanding Ancient Thought in 2017). They are ‘Camera Obscura’, ’Synoikismos and the Origins of the Polis’, ‘Kingship in Ancient Assyria’, and ‘Proskynesis, and the Deification of Alexander’. The subtitle of the essay,‘Aristotle's Teleological Model of the World and the Interpretation of Ancient History’, was chosen because of the importance of the teleological perspective in antiquity, and particularly in Greece, and the fact that our principal source of detailed discussion of the concept is Aristotle. Aristotle did not however invent the concept (I have heard a specialist in both Greece and Aristotle rather foolishly suggest that he did).

What I was doing with the three sections which followed on from the opening criticism of the historicist approach, was showing how (firstly) the evidence for the development of the Athenian polis suggests a background of philosophical and religious ideas out of which the practicalities of the polis were woven; (secondly)  how the extensive evidence we have for the religious and moral background to Assyrian Kingship shows that the conception of what the king represented was essentially teleologically understood, some three centuries before Aristotle, and shaped by a body of religious ideas which are available to us in Assyrian records. it explores the Assyrian emphasis on excellence and perfection, which anticipates ideas later discussed by Aristotle; (thirdly) how the principle source for the life of Alexander (Arrian’s Anabasis) constructs its argument according to a teleological frame, in which the principle protagonists represent different points of view about whether or not a man can become a god in his lifetime. This was not merely an artistic conceit, since the argument illuminates the desperate contradiction which underlies the idea of deification of the living if Aristotle’s teleological interpretation of divinity is correct (argued in the Nicomachean Ethics), which is that the gods, who are at the apex of the creation, can only contemplate, and are utterly incapable of action.

All the rest of the chapters (parts two and three) are additional, and were written between 2003 and 2020.

 ‘The Greek Ontological Model in the 1^st Millennium B.C.E.’ dates from 2004, and suggests that Plato was not constructing his philosophy according to a programme of research of his own, but was working within something like an agreed and traditional ontology, connected to ideas of the divine, which is discussed. Understanding this allows us to make sense of a number of earlier philosophical writings which are often fragmentary.

‘Post-Enlightenment Plato and That which Cannot Move’ explores this argument in terms of the actual texts of the dialogues. The world view which emerges is clearly paradoxical, and Plato and his predecessors cannot be understood unless the paradoxicality of his outlook is recognised and embraced. The paradoxical nature of reality is what he wished to convey. From the enlightenment onwards, there has been a concerted effort not to see this. Written in 2016.

‘Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire’ is a discussion of the Mesopotamian input into the development of philosophy in Greece from the late eighth to the mid-sixth seventh centuries B.C.E. The Assyrians captured Athens (according to Abydenus, who was a pupil of Aristotle), and they were there long enough to build a temple, and cast statues of the gods in bronze.  Originally written in 2004, and now updated.

‘The Threshold in Ancient Assyria’ looks at the carpet style designs used to decorate the thresholds and entrances to Assyrian royal palaces, with their designs of alternating lotuses, open and closed. Is this just decorative design, or do they tell us something about how the Assyrians conceived of the transition between one state and another? Also written in 2004.

‘Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East’ explores the relationship between iconography in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and the transcendentalist patterns of thought which lie behind the deliberate breaking of symmetries. Written in 2018.

Part Three begins with ‘The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth’, This short chapter explores the meaning of one of the most puzzling passages in the New Testament, and shows that it has its origin in a profound philosophical idea, related to the ‘holiness code’ found in Leviticus, though it is now used to justify temporal power. Written in 2019.

The three chapters which follow concern what we can know of intellectual life in the British Neolithic and early Bronze Age. I was essentially conducting a dialogue with both myself and the evidence while writing these, so they represent research in progress. Consequently there is substantial repetition of things discussed along the way. I’ve left the texts as they are, since they show how I got to the position outlined in the third chapter.

‘Being and Eternity in the Neolithic’ explores some aspects of the late British Neolithic which suggest the presence of a transcendentalist view of reality. Written in 2017.

‘Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain’ is an extensive chapter, which builds on the idea that the builders of the megaliths had a transcendentalist and essentially proto-pythagorean outlook on the nature of reality, and that this outlook shaped their cultural production. Pythagoras reputedly spent 22 years studying in Egypt, and much of what we term as ‘pythagorean’ is therefore likely to be a great deal older. This chapter examines the ancient fit of the ideas which are associated with Pythagoras. Written in December 2017.


‘The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard’ explores the Neolithic and Bronze Age interest in whole numbers, mathematics, geometry, the idea of the infinite, and of infinite series. The chapter concludes that the measure of the megalithic yard expresses the ancient perception that the infinite and the finite are necessarily conjoined. Written in February 2020.

‘What We Have Lost, and How the Ancient Concept of the Cosmos Died’ is an extract from a letter written to a specialist in ancient astronomy written in early 2019, in response to questions about how the decline in the interest of astronomy and related mythology happened, as Christianity took hold. Written in 2019.

‘Marxism and Historicism’ discusses the fact that the Marxist understanding of reality is a deliberate inversion of Neoplatonist understanding, as mediated through Hegel’s use of the writings of Proclus, who was last head of the Athenian Academy. Written in 2015,

All of these chapters, including the two on Marxist ideas in the study of history, illustrate the important role played by philosophical ideas and abstractions in the cultural production of a number of civilizations. These ideas arise ultimately from conjecture about the nature of eternity, and questions relating to the divine – what it is, and what it means for mortals. The Greek word for these puzzles was ‘aporia’. What I am suggesting in these chapters is that such puzzles played a significant role in the development of thought about the nature of the divine,  as well as about the nature and importance of liturgy, art, and ritual practice, and the development of many other details which we associate with the rise of civilization.

Thomas Yaeger, May 10 – September 20, 2019. Updated May 5, 2020.