history

On the Use and Misuse of Primary Sources

ErikLeave a comment

Sometimes you come across someone making interesting claims about history, and it’s hard to tell whether you should take them seriously or not. If you’re not an expert in the field, how do you know whether to believe what you’re reading? There’s no perfect answer, and basic critical thinking will take you a long way, but here area few tips that can help set you on the right path.

Since I’m a historian of the ancient Mediterranean, my advice is particularly focused on the use of ancient texts when making claims about ancient history, but many of the fundamental principles outlined here are applicable to historical claims in any time period.

One important thing to look at is how people use primary sources, that is: documents and other texts written in the time period of the events or people in question. Here are some questions you can ask about the use of primary sources to help evaluate historical claims.

Do they engage with primary sources at all?

This is a basic one. All historical argument is based on evidence drawn from primary sources. If someone’s making claims without any primary sources to back them up, that’s reason to be suspicious.

A lack of primary sources does not necessarily mean that a historical claim is unfounded. People, especially non-historians, may cite secondary sources and modern research, but you should be able to trace the claim back through those sources and find the primary source evidence that it is based on. Some scholarship, if it is more historiographical and theoretically based, may not engage with primary sources directly, but then it will not be making claims about specific events, places, or people in history.

Do they cite their sources?

This is another basic one. In casual conversation, you don’t need to back up every assertion with footnotes and bibliography, but if someone wants their claims about history to be taken seriously, they should tell you what evidence those claims are based on. In particular, they should be able to point you to a source that you can look up for yourself to verify that it actually says what they claim it says.

Different kinds of sources have different standards for citation. With ancient texts, there are established ways of referencing specific passages. Shorter works are divided into sections or lines; longer works are divided into books, which are further subdivided into sections or lines. We never cite ancient sources by page number, since page numbers vary between different editions and translations. If someone is citing an ancient source by reference to the page numbers of a modern edition, that’s a warning sign that they may not be knowledgeable enough about the topic to interpret an ancient source with appropriate attention to its context, influences, and biases.

Do they use sources appropriate to their subject?

You should always use the right tool for the job and the right source for the claim. When someone is using a source that isn’t relevant to their argument, or isn’t using a source that is relevant, you should question whether they know what they’re talking about.

For example, our main primary source on the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta is Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Some other sources, like the comedies of Aristophanes, also provide relevant insights, but if someone is making a claim about the Peloponnesian war and doesn’t mention Thucydides, they should have a good reason why not.

Do they use non-literary sources?

The most accessible primary sources are literary sources composed with the intent of engaging readers, like the folk stories in Herodotus’ Histories or the palace gossip in Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars. There are many other kinds of textual sources that are not literary, such as coin texts, building inscriptions, graffiti preserved in places like Pompeii, and dedicatory texts on religious offerings.

Specialized fields of study, such as epigraphy, papyrology, and numismatics, focus on finding, interpreting, and contextualizing such sources. Using such sources is often more difficult and requires more expertise and study than reading literary sources. Not every historical question has relevant non-literary sources to refer to, but if someone does reference non-literary sources in their arguments, that is a good sign that they have some real knowledge of the subject and have undertaken serious research.

Do they situate their sources in time, space, and social context?

All primary sources were produced by specific people in specific social and historical settings. We can use them most effectively as evidence for things that those people had good reason to know about. The farther the writer of a source is from the topic they wrote about, the less confidence we can have in what they tell us.

The Greek historian Herodotus and the Macedonian rhetorician Polyaenus give different accounts of how the Persian Empire conquered Egypt in 525 BCE. Herodotus traveled in Egypt less than a century after the Persian conquest and interviewed local priests about Egypt’s history. Polyaenus wrote in the second century CE, almost seven hundred years after the events, and, as far as we know, never traveled in Egypt or had any contact with Egyptians. These facts shape the weight that we should give to their different accounts, and anyone who does not acknowledge the difference is not practicing responsible scholarship.

Do they engage with the sources in their original language?

Many ancient texts are available today in good translations, and, simply for the sake of efficiency, most practicing historians will begin their research with modern translations. Serious historical scholarship must go beyond translations, however. The more that an argument relies on the meaning of particular words or on the details of what an ancient author did or did not say, the more crucial it is that we pay attention to the original words in the original language and linguistic context.

For instance, people sometimes make much of the fact that Herodotus describes the ancient Egyptians as “black-skinned.” This is a literal translation of the ancient Greek word Herodotus uses, melanchroies, but the Greek word has a different set of associations than the modern translation. To an ancient Greek, melanchroies meant ‘deeply suntanned.’ It had none of the racial implications that the English word Black has today, and historical arguments that depend on the modern translation risk misunderstanding what Herodotus was saying (and not saying).

Do they engage with sources that don’t support their argument?

Few things in history are simple. Almost any claim we can make about historical events, people, or societies is going to be contested, and there will be sources that both support and contradict it. People who want to put forth dubious claims tend to cherry-pick the sources that support (or can be made to sound like they support) those claims while ignoring the ones that don’t. How a historian deals with those contradictions is an important mark of good scholarship.

People sometimes make claims about the role of women in the Celtic-speaking societies of northwestern Europe on the basis of passing references in some ancient authors, but the writers who give us the fullest and most detailed accounts of societies in those regions—Polybius, Caesar, and Tacitus—do not describe societies in which gender relations were significantly different from those of the Mediterranean. There are sound reasons to critique those authors and question the accuracy of their ethnographic knowledge, but someone who doesn’t engage with those sources is not making a good historical case.

Do they critically examine the sources?

Just because someone wrote something down doesn’t make it true. Sometimes people don’t know what they’re talking about. Sometimes they lie. If a historian is relying on a primary source to support a particular claim, part of the argument they need to make is that the writer they’re citing actually knew what they were talking about and were telling the truth about what they knew.

The Roman historian Tacitus famously wrote that the Germanic peoples of Rome’s northern border were of pure stock, having never mixed their bloodlines with any other people. This claim has been uncritically and enthusiastically embraced by modern nationalists and racists of various stripes, but a critical reader needs to ask: how would Tacitus, a Roman aristocrat who didn’t speak any Germanic languages and probably never even visited the northern frontier, actually know anything about the long-term genetic history of the peoples he was writing about? What other ideological or literary agendas might Tacitus’ claims about the people of the empire’s northern frontier be serving–either for Tacitus himself or for whoever he relied on for his information?

As I said above, there is no perfect technique for separating good historical scholarship from bad, but these questions are a useful place to start, and applying them thoughtfully to both online discussions and claims you may come across in your research will help you find better historical arguments and avoid worse ones.

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

The Opening Lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh Performed in Sumerian

ErikLeave a comment

We have no direct evidence for how the epic of Gilgamesh was performed or what it sounded like to hear live, but this is a speculative reconstruction that helps open up our imagination. Canadian musician Peter Pringle performs on a reconstructed ancient lute called a gish-gu-di and sings the opening lines of the epic in the language of ancient Sumer.

The Epic Of Gilgamesh In Sumerian by Peter Pringle via YouTube

While this is an artistic reimagining, not a scholarly reconstruction (as Pringle himself has been clear about), it makes for a fascinating way of bringing the ancient text to life.

An occasional feature on music and sound-related notions.

Quotes: History Was Full of People

Eppu1 Comment

My recent reading has serendipitously included a many empires, both fictional and factual.

“’Empires are not …‘ She trailed off before she said anything truly treasonous. Librarians of Alyssium were trained to be impartial, but how could anyone who studied history not have feelings about it? She’d never understood that. History was full of people, all of whom had lives and dreams that were affected by the dry laws and military actions that filled university textbooks. Emperor Mevorin liked to insist every action taken by the empire was for the good of its people, but far too many of its actions throughout history had been for the good of the empire, which was not—regardless of what the emperor espoused—the same thing. An empire, unchecked, was a selfish beast of insatiable hunger.” [original emphasis]

– Terlu Perna in The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst

Current Reading The Enchanted Greenhouse Sm

It’s not the empire aspect that grabbed me about this quote, however. History is indeed full of people, and I have a homebrew hypothesis why that fact is often forgotten.

We’re living through a phase when science and/or technology are seen as the most important lens(es) to view life through (unlike, say, during Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment). Scientific research seeks to observe phenomena objectively, quantifying them, and removing as many hints of the personal as possible.

There was a time when there was discussion within history and other humanities about emulating that approach (e.g. cliometrics), but in the past 30 to 40 years or so, research focus in the social sciences has been shifting more towards the individual experience.

However, since the rest of society is still wearing pink science love goggles, this shift hasn’t broken through to mainstream discussions yet. Hence, the lay public—including the character in the above quotation—is under the false impression that historians do not regard history as concerning actual people.

Again, this is a personal crackpot theory of mine.

The book’s protagonist, Terlu, does also remind me of my high school teachers in a way. In my senior year, during the prep for our finals, teachers would spend some time in class iterating how important their subject is. It got almost comical one day when class after class literally every single one of them said a variation of “These things are so important” or whatever—each surely aware of the spread of subjects on offer at our school, and of our work load, not to mention the fact that even at high school level some of us students had already started on our paths towards specializing in our future fields.

In a way that was good, though—we clearly had motivated teachers who cared about their fields. Terlu in the quotation above also is clearly very passionate about her interests, to the extent of being blind to a host of other considerations in life, and it shows. She’s also young, and that also shows.

(There is a more curmudgeonly comment I’d like to make as well: “university textbooks” are the kindergarten version of academia. History at university level is a very different beast from the rote learning of names and dates that the lower levels of education pretend constitutes history. If Terlu imagines “university textbooks” or other basic treatises contain the whole of what historical research is, she’s a staggeringly more junior librarian than the novel purports and greener than a St. Patrick’s Day parade. *grumbling in librarian-married-to-a-historian*)

Durst, Sarah Beth. The Enchanted Greenhouse. London: Pan Macmillan, 2025, pp. 105-106.

Image by Eppu Jensen

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.

Worldbuilding: Food Production and War

ErikLeave a comment

A fundamental problem faced by pre-modern societies—and one which our own fictional societies may have to grapple with as well—is how to balance the demands of food production and war. The ways in which a culture managed this problem had deep effects on how that culture functioned, how its members related to one another, and how it dealt with outsiders. Thinking about how your fictional cultures deal with this problem is a useful worldbuilding exercise.

The problem is simple: the ability to produce food and the ability to protect one’s own food sources from other people who would take them by force are both essential to a society’s survival, but they compete for the same human resources.

Food production is labor. In societies without industrial technology, it is the main occupation of at least ninety percent of the population. Food production can take many forms, such as farming planted crops, tending domesticated animals, gathering wild resources, or producing trade goods to exchange for food from abroad. While nearly the entire population of a pre-industrial society must contribute in some way to food production, the bulk of the work rests on the shoulders of healthy adults without other callings.

War is also labor. It demands physical competence and endurance, just like ploughing a field, managing a herd of cattle, or hauling in fish from the sea. The prime contributors to the labor of war are the same as the prime contributors to food production: healthy adults who aren’t needed for more specialized tasks.

War and food production compete for the same pool of labor. Every day that a person spends marching on campaign, laying siege to a city, repairing their armor, or standing watch at an outpost is a day they aren’t milking cows, weeding a vegetable garden, picking mushrooms in the woods, or making trade goods to exchange for food from abroad. To successfully produce enough food to feed itself and protect that food from from hostile outsiders, a society has to find a way of balancing these two needs.

Every culture’s solution to this problem is unique, but we can categorize the possible approaches in a few broad patterns, each of which come with certain advantages and drawbacks:

  • Raiders. For raiders, fighting is itself a means of food production. A society can afford to spare people from food production to fight if the result of the fighting is bringing in at least as much food as those people would have produced had they stayed home and planted potatoes or gathered wild berries. The upside of raiding is that when it succeeds, the results can be extremely profitable. The downside is that the targets of raiding tend to respond by protecting their resources better or mounting a stiffer resistance, and when a raid fails it can lead to starvation and vicious internal conflicts over the limited resources left. Societies that live by raiding tend to be precarious and violent, and it is rarely a successful strategy in the long term.
  • Citizen militia. In a society with a citizen militia, the people who produce the food also do the fighting. Most people spend their day-to-day lives farming, herding, fishing, or practicing other essential crafts, but when there is a threat, they are called up to fight in defense of their homes. The advantage of this solution is that it puts a minimum burden on food production. Farmers and herders are not carrying the dead weight of full-time soldiers who don’t contribute to food production, and as soon as the fighting is over, they can get right back to their usual business. The drawback is that such society cannot sustain a long-term military effort or fight far from home. Every person in the militia needs to get back to their farm or ranch as quickly as possible or risk losing their harvest or herd. Societies that take this approach tend to have strong social cohesion and a sense of civic obligation among people, because without it they would never be able to get people to leave their homes and livelihoods to go fight. They also tend to face frequent wars, because the can rarely afford to commit the troops and supplies necessary to decisively defeat their enemies and eliminate threats to their territory.
  • Warrior aristocrats. Where there are warrior aristocrats, the people who do the fighting have people to produce food for them. A pre-industrial society can sustain a small number of full-time warriors if each one directly controls a food source, such as a spread of farmland or a large herd of cattle, and has subordinates whose job it is to work that food source for the warrior in addition to working for their own sustenance. On the plus side, this arrangement allows for a small but full-time fighting force without taking away from food production. Warrior aristocrats can be prepared to fight at a moment’s notice and can afford to be away from home for long periods. On the other hand, such societies tend to fragment, as each warrior aristocrat has good reason to stay close to their own resources and little incentive to risk themselves in defense of the farms or herds belonging to another aristocrat.
  • Professional armies. With a professional army, some central authority gathers food from the people who produce it and provides it to the people who do the fighting. Unlike warrior aristocrats, the soldiers in a professional army do not have their own food sources which they directly control; they depend on the state for their supplies. On one hand, this system can create a well-trained, experienced army that can operate in the field indefinitely and far from home, as long as they keep getting supplies. On the other hand, the process of gathering resources from producers, coordinating logistics, and delivering food to where it is needed is a substantial additional burden on state power and usually requires a whole professional bureaucracy dedicated to oversight and record-keeping, which itself is a further drain on the labor pool available for food production. A culture that maintains a professional army requires a high degree of centralized organization and control, which are likely to manifest themselves in other areas of life.

Food production and war are two of the most fundamental activities for most pre-modern societies. The different ways in which societies have historically reconciled the competing demands of these activities had deep effects on the lives of the people who lived in them. If you are writing about a pre-industiral society in your own imagined world, even if you aren’t writing directly about farming or fighting, it’s worth taking some time to think about how your culture solves this problem and what effects that solution has on the daily lives of your characters.

Image: Cincinnatus Leaves the Plough to Dictate Laws to Rome via Wikimedia (Prado Museum, Madrid; c. 1806; oil on canvas; by Juan Antonio Ribera)

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

A Concordance of Polybius and What AI Can and Can’t Do for Historians

Erik3 Comments

Boosters of large language models (LLMs) and other kinds of so-called artificial intelligence make big claims about what the technology can do for us, sometimes referencing the benefits brought by other inventions like the Internet or mass production. I rarely find such arguments convincing when applied to my field, history. An experience from my graduate student days may help illustrate why.

When I was a graduate student in the early 2000s, I wanted to write about the Greek historian Polybius and his idea of what constituted Italy. Polybius lived and wrote in a time when the Roman state had fought a century of wars to conquer and defend the Italian peninsula. The idea of Italy as a single thing that could be defined and found on a map was still somewhat new and up for debate. I was interested in seeing where the boundaries of what Polybius called Italy lay, as a reflection of how the Roman elite whose society he moved among thought about their empire and its place in the world.

The obvious place to start was to search the text of Polybius’ Histories for references to Italy, but remember that this was the early 2000s. Search engines for the internet were still in their adolescence, and while there were some projects under way to digitize Classical texts and make them searchable, they still had their limitations. To get the information I needed, I went to the library and found a concordance of Polybius.

A concordance is a type of scholarly reference work that was common in the days before texts became searchable. It is a list of every word used in a particular text (such as Polybius’ Histories) and the context in which it is used. To find every instance when Polybius used the word Italy (or Ἰταλία in Greek), I just had to open the volume to the letter iota, scan down to Ἰταλία, and start going through the references to find which ones were worth looking up in my copy of Polybius and which ones were not useful for my research.

The work that went into creating such a concordance was enormous. The surviving text of Polybius’ Histories runs into the hundreds of pages in a modern printing. Someone had to go through the Greek text and catalog every single word (not to mention dealing with the issues of differing texts in different manuscript traditions, scribal errors, and emendations), then compile all those references into one enormous volume. All of this work was done by hand in the days before computers. The book that I laid out on the table in front of me when I was writing that paper represented thousands of work-hours, a significant chunk of some previous scholar’s working life. (I was lucky to have chosen a research question about a well-known author whose work had been concordanced by scholars of past generations. If I had wanted to check the work of some more obscure author or uncatalogued fragments, I would have had to sit down and scan every page myself.)

If I wanted to research the same question today, I could simply load a copy of the Greek text, type the word into a search box, and have the results in seconds.

Technologies like searchable electronic text have not only changed what questions scholars are able to ask, they have changed the meaning of scholarly work altogether. The kind of rote mechanical labor that went into creating something like a concordance of Polybius used to be a staple of an academic historian’s life. While scholars have always aimed to make new discoveries and present new interpretations of the evidence, up to the late twentieth century it was understood that as a working historian, you would spend a significant amount of your productive life just reading through texts and assembling data a piece at a time, either for your own research or to make a tool for others to use.

These days, although there are still times when searching doesn’t help and you still need to just go through the text line by line, a significant amount of what historians used to do is now automated. Indexed, searchable texts with good metadata have taken the place of a lot of the more cumbersome old scholarly tools in much the same way that electronic databases have replaced the old card catalog system.

This is a change I fully approve of. I have no nostalgia for the old days. I am not shaking my cane at the clouds complaining about kids these days who don’t have to use a concordance in the snow uphill both ways. Making basic information more readily available and easier to probe in new and unexpected ways leads to better questions and more interesting arguments about history, and both scholarly and non-specialist audiences benefit from the wealth of new research that modern tools have made possible.

Now, some have tried to present artificial intelligence as a new revolution in scholarship parallel to the development of searchable catalogs and texts. Just as searchable texts allow us to skip the tedious and unrewarding work of slogging through sources word by word gathering references by hand, so an LLM can save us the tedious work of reading through the existing literature finding the answers to questions so we can spend more time focusing on our own research interest. I find this argument unpersuasive for two reasons.

First, the LLM services which currently exist and promise to perform this kind of operation are not up to the task. They may have scanned all the relevant literature that I would want to consult in my research (and there is a good chance that they have not, but let us suppose for a moment that they have), but they have no understanding of it. They do not know how to separate different threads of argument, how to weigh different theoretical approaches or contrast older and newer scholarship, or how to critically assess evidence. They do not actually know anything, they just slap together text in a way that fits the models they’ve been fed. A search engine may produce wrong results, depending on how well the text it’s searching has been coded or how accurate a search term one uses, but these errors at least point to specific data points that can be checked. An LLM produces authoritative-sounding nonsense with as much facility as truth. It saves no time or effort to use an LLM for research, since everything it produces is suspect, and it does not present its sources for checking.

Second, the tedious work of reading through existing literature is a vital part of scholarship. We have to understand the arguments made by scholars in the past and the bases on which they made them if we are going to do any better at tackling the same questions ourselves. Historical research depends on extensive reading of sources and prior scholarship, not just as a way of assembling data but in order to actually understand our subjects. It is not the same as the rote work of compiling all the words used in a text. There is no royal road to historical understanding, and this part of the research process cannot be automated away.

No one makes concordances any more, and hardly anyone uses them. Search technology saves us labor and frees up scholars’ time to do the more interesting and more important work of engaging with evidence and contemplating new questions. The human work that searches replaced was work that we could well do without. The work that LLMs promise to replace is essential, and they can’t do it for us effectively anyway.

Here there be opinions!

Textile Work on a Greek Vase

Erik1 Comment

In ancient Greece, as in many pre-industrial societies, textile work was primarily the domain of women, and since ordinary women and their lives rarely appealed to ancient Greek artists as a subject, we have few artistic depictions of women doing the work that filled much of their lives. That fact is one of the things that makes this vase so interesting. The decoration on the main body of this vase depicts many different stages of textile work, including spinning thread, weaving, folding the finished cloth, as well as weighing and perhaps dyeing it. All of these activities were part of the daily life of most women in ancient Athens, where this vase was painted.

Textile work on a black figure lekythos, via Metropolitan Museum (made in Athens, currently Metropolitan Museum, New York; 550-530 BCE; glazed pottery; attributed to the Amasis painter)

As we discussed in our series about textile production, making cloth and making clothes took up an enormous amount of time. It’s interesting to speculate on why someone might have chosen such a theme for a piece of tableware in their home. Was this a commission for a family who was in the textile business, not just producing for home use? Was it meant to celebrate the unsung daily labor of Athenian women by putting it in the same artistic frame as the deeds of gods and heroes? Was it a marketing ploy to try to appeal to a feminine audience?

Textile work on a black figure lekythos, via Metropolitan Museum (made in Athens, currently Metropolitan Museum, New York; 550-530 BCE; glazed pottery; attributed to the Amasis painter)

Whatever the artist’s intent may have been, this is a wonderful piece to have surviving from antiquity.

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Nan Madol: A Megalithic Palace in the Pacific

Erik

On the eastern coast of the island of Pohnpei, part of the Federated States of Micronesia, are the remains of a gigantic complex of megalithic structures. These structures stand along the coast of the island and on nearly a hundred artificial islands just offshore. This site is called Nan Madol.

Platform and enclosure wall, photograph by Uhooep via Wikimedia (Nan Madol; c. 1100-1200 CE; stone)

The structures of Nan Madol were first built in the 1100s CE and served as an administrative and ceremonial center for the Saudeleur ruling dynasty that held power over Pohnpei from approximately 1100 CE to the early 1600s. They were constructed using columns of volcanic rock that formed natural geometric shapes. By carefully jointing these stones together, the people of Pohnpei created large structures stable enough that many walls still stand today.

Wall with opening, photograph by Patrick Nunn via Wikimedia (Nan Madol; c. 1100-1200 CE; stone)

Nan Madol is one of many sites around the world that remind us that cultures capable of coordinated labor, careful planning, and social complexity are not the product of only one environment or part of the world.

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Quotes: Mistakes in Lesser Matters

Erik

The Roman writer Vitruvius had some opinions about public art, expressed here in a critique of the city of Alabanda in western Anatolia, modern-day Turkey:

The people of Alabanda are sharp enough when it comes to affairs of state, but they have been found foolish for their mistakes in lesser matters, since the statues in their gymnasium are all arguing lawsuits, but the ones in their forum are holding the discus, running, or playing ball.

Vitruvius, On Architecture 7.5.6

(My own translation)

Vitruvius’ gripe about the statues in Alabanda may seem odd at first. Why is it foolish to have statues of people playing ball in the forum? Why shouldn’t there be statues of people pleading cases in the gymnasium? Vitruvius’ point is that the statues the Alabandans chose for their important public spaces didn’t match the functions of those spaces.

The gymnasium was a place for the men of the city to socialize and spend their leisure time, but above all to exercise and improve their bodies. The forum was a public space that served many functions, but importantly among them it served as a courtroom for trying legal cases. Vitruvius was clearly of the opinion that art in public spaces should mirror the functions of those spaces: statues of lawyers belong in the forum, and statues of people playing sports go in the gymnasium. In his opinion, the Alabandans made the foolish mistake of setting up the right statues in the wrong places.

Vitruvius’ text is a useful indicator that people in antiquity thought about the visual culture around them and had opinions about the appropriateness of particular subjects, themes, or styles for particular spaces. You couldn’t just slap any old statue anywhere you liked; there were rules to be followed, and the Alabandans had failed to follow them.

At the same time, Vitruvius’ remark is also useful evidence that not everyone shared the same opinions. Vitruvius may not have appreciated the Alabandans’ choices for public statuary, but the Alabandans clearly saw no problem with them. Maybe they thought that lawyers arguing in court should be inspired by the vigor of athletes or that people exercising in the gymnasium should be reminded to also improve their minds like the great orators of the past. We don’t know for sure, but it’s good to be reminded not only that people in the past had opinions about the world they lived in, but that those opinions could and did differ. What one person considered an artistic mistake was for someone else a sensible decorating plan.

When we read ancient sources, it is important to remember that they represent one person’s perspective, not necessarily a universal ideal.

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.

Imagine Being Surrounded by Maps

Erik3 Comments

The Villa Farnese is a gorgeous Renaissance palace in central Italy, built in the early 1500s and richly elaborated with sculptures and frescoes. One of the rooms in the villa features a map of the world filling the wall at one end, with detailed maps of the continents on the other walls, under a ceiling decorated with constellations. Standing in this room, the magnates of the villa could see the whole world, as it was known to scientists and cartographers of the day.

The map room at Villa Farnese, photograph by Etienne (Li) via Wikimedia (Caprarola, Italy; completed 1574; fresco; by Giovanni Antonio de Varese)

Looking at this space, it occurs to me that a room like this would make an excellent setting for a scene in a fantasy or historical story. Many such stories play out over long distances, and knowing how one territory or city relates to the others around it as well as to the shapes of the land can make a huge difference in understanding the stakes and possibilities in play.

Africa, from the map room at Villa Farnese, photograph by Jean-Pierre Dalbèra via Wikimedia (Caprarola, Italy; completed 1574; fresco; by Giovanni Antonio de Varese)

In a visual medium like tv or movies, it could be very helpful to have a visual in the background while characters are discussing important movements or plans, but even in text, putting your characters in such a place could give you an opportunity to describe them looking at the map, tracing routes of travel or the borders between nations, and arguing for their plans.

Europe, from the map room at Villa Farnese, photograph by Ulrich Mayring via Wikimedia (Caprarola, Italy; completed 1574; fresco; by Giovanni Antonio de Varese)

Maps make everything better!

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

The Sacred Argippaioi

Erik

The Greek historian Herodotus provides some interesting information about a people living in the mountains beyond the eastern steppes whom he calls the Argippaioi:

They are said to be bald from birth, men and women alike, and they have flat noses and large chins. They speak their own language, but wear Scythian clothes, and depend on trees for their food. The tree they live off of is called “pontic.” It is about as big as a fig tree and bears stone fruits the size of beans. When the fruit is ripe, they strain it through cloth, and it yields a thick black juice, which they call “askhy.” They lick this juice up or mix it with milk and drink it; they make cakes out of the thickest of the leavings and eat them. They do not keep large flocks, for their pastures are not suited to it. Each of them lives under a tree, which they cover with white wool felt in the winter, but not in the summer. No person harms them, for they are said to be sacred, and they carry no weapons. Their neighbors refer conflicts to them for judgment, and anyone who flees to them for refuge is safe from harm. They are called Argippaioi.

– Herodotus, Histories 4.23 (my translation)

This is an interesting passage both from a historical perspective and as storytelling inspiration.

Historically speaking, many of the details Herodotus presents seem to indicate some actual knowledge of a central Asian culture. The geographic description could apply to the Altai Mountains, which lie east of the broad Eurasian steppes. The physical description of the people might be a garbled attempt to describe Asian features. The description of the tree fruit and its use matches fairly well with traditional ways of using the fruit of the bird cherry. The tree covered in white cloth could be a Greek’s misunderstanding of a chum or other type of tent. In contrast to some of Herodotus’ wilder accounts of the distant regions of the world, it sounds like he may have gathered some fairly accurate information about peoples in central Asia, which he put together as best he could given the limits of his own knowledge. The trade routes that we know as the silk road were already active carrying people and goods across Eurasia in his time, so it is not implausible that during his research among the Scythians he might have learned about peoples at the farther end of the route.

On the other hand, the idea of a sacred people who live without weapons and are left unharmed by their neighbors is an interesting concept to think about as a writer. Herodotus perhaps mistakenly associated privileges that belonged to a priestly or shamanic class with a whole people, but what if there actually were a sacred people living in peace in the mountains, acting as wise advisers to others and providing refuge to the desperate? What would it be like to live in such a culture, and what kind of conflicts could arise among a people who don’t fight? What worldbuilding could you do around such an idea? In one kind of story, the sacred people could be a refuge for the hero on their journey and a source of wise counsel, like the Elves are to Tolkien’s Hobbit heroes. In a different kind of story, imagine how power struggles would play among a people who do not fight, who even must not fight in order to preserve the awe that their neighbors feel for them. Replace the battles and murders of Game of Thrones with competitions over personal purity or devious advice given to neighboring peoples, and you could have a story that is dramatically different but with just as many opportunities for vicious betrayals and sudden reversals.

History can be a great source of writing inspiration when we get it right, but it can spark good narrative ideas even when it’s wrong.

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.