This post began as a response to an article by Charles Halton at awilum.com; please see his “Why Is Academic Writing So Boring?” and the comments of readers at http://awilum.com/?cat=25. Charles is of the opinion that academic writing is less than “engaging” due, in part, to an excess of footnotes and facts.
I disagree. I wrote to him that, in fact, it has long been the norm in Near Eastern Studies for scholars to omit sources and evidence, using as their excuse that they are writing for the general public. This deceitful practice has been damaging not just to laymen but to the field as a whole. Here are three examples from well-known scholars whose works have influenced generations of students as well as the general public.
Thorkild Jacobsen’s Treasures of Darkness (1976) and The Harps That Once…Sumerian Poetry in Translation (1987) were both written for the general public. In Treasures of Darkness, Jacobsen wrote, p.246:
“All translations given are from the original texts. They do not always agree with earlier renderings and we hope on other occasions to present the philological justifications for them”.
Apparently, he never got around to doing this, because in 1981, Mark E. Cohen commented in his Sumerian Hymnology The Ers(h)emma, ( p. 71, n. 206) regarding Ers(h)emma no. 97:
“Sections of this text were translated by S. N. Kramer, Sacred Marriage Rite, 127 ff. and more recently by Th. Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness p. 49ff. Both of these translations contain ideas and insights into the work. Unfortunately, lacking their text editions and commentary, it is very difficult to compare our translation to theirs, since their translations may be based upon other texts or interpretations of words unfamiliar to us. We find ourselves in the predicament of wanting to alert the reader to the great variances in the three interpretations, yet not being in a position to offer the scholarly reasoning behind each interpretation…”
And in 1987, Jacobsen was still not forthcoming, writing in The Harps That Once…Sumerian Poetry in Translation, p.xv:
“The notes are intended for the general reader. Sumerologists will normally, I hope, have little difficulty in seeing how I arrived at the translations given. For cases where that is not obvious I hope to make available the relevant philological and text-critical notes in separate journal articles or otherwise.”
Notes did not appear and “otherwise”, in Jacobsen’s case, typically meant verbal communications, unrecorded, unverified, yet alluded to in later scholars’ academic writing, as if Jacobsen’s testimony alone should be an acceptable substitute for proof. This extended not only to issues of translation but to the use of unpublished, unauthenticated artifacts which Jacobsen claimed to have seen in unspecified private collections. (See, for example, J. J. Finkelstein, “The Antediluvian Kings, A University of California Tablet”, The Journal of Cuneiform Studies, Vol. XVII, No. 2.)
Another type of omission common in Near Eastern Studies is exemplified by John Maier and Samuel Noah Kramer, in their introduction to The Myths of Enki, The Crafty God, 1989, p 8:
“Until 1944…the mythological tales inscribed on the hundreds of tablets and fragments lying about unidentified, uncatalogued and unstudied in museum drawers were largely unknown, and Sumerian mythology was virtually terra incognita for the cuneiformist, let alone the humanist and lay reader. ….The collection entitled Mythology of All the Races…published in thirteen volumes between the years 1916 and 1932 includes one volume on Semitic mythology by Stephen Langdon. Langdon does attempt to sketch some of the Sumerian mythological concepts but because of the very limited source material available at the time, as well as the serious linguistic problems that Langdon failed to treat adequately, its conclusions are quite untrustworthy and misleading.”
Maier and Kramer did not bother to specify which linguistic problems Langdon failed to treat adequately, nor did they afford this great scholar the same license granted to Jacobsen to omit philological justifications from a work addressed to the general public. I have found this to be typical of current scholars, who dismiss whole bodies of early work with the glittering generality that the languages of early Mesopotamia are now much better understood. Yet, they do not bother to prove their case, and simply expect the general public to take them at their word. And, as so many early works are inaccessible, having disappeared entirely from library shelves, this too amounts to hearsay testimony.
A third type of omission practiced by current scholars is exemplified by P. R. S. Moorey’s ‘update’ of Woolley’s Ur of the Chaldees, entitled Ur ‘of the Chaldees’, The Final Account, Excavations at Ur, Revised and Updated by P. R. S. Moorey, (1982). In his preface, Moorey writes (p. 8):
“There are few archaeological excavations which have had such an abiding interest for the general public as those at Ur in modern Iraq directed by Sir Leonard Woolley between 1922 and 1934….. In accepting the publishers’ invitation to produce a revised edition of this book, under its original main title, I have followed the lines indicated here by Woolley for his own account in 1954. I have striven to retain the immediacy and vivid quality of his original text, in which nothing was made too difficult for the general reader, whilst presenting the record of a fifty-year-old excavation in the context of modern study. This has inevitably involved changes, some of them substantial.”
Moorey apparently lacked respect both for his peers and the general public, as well as for the ethics and history of his field. He inserted his ‘updates’ into the body of Woolley’s text, without any footnotes to distinguish for the reader what he changed or why. He also incorporated the findings of other scholars without any attribution, i.e. Robert Dyson Jr. [See Dyson’s “A Note on Queen Shub-ad’s ‘Onagers’, Iraq 22, “Ur In Retrospect”, 1960.] Dyson had gone to considerable trouble to investigate Woolley’s claim that the chariots in the ‘Royal Cemetery’ of Ur had been drawn by wild asses (a claim which had long troubled physical anthropologists as this unique species had never elsewhere been domesticated, from ancient times until the wild ass went extinct in the 1920s). Dyson confronted Woolley with the scientific proof that these draught animals were oxen, and Woolley admitted that what he had published as fact had been merely his assumption.
Without citing Dyson’s contribution, Moorey simply expunged the references to ‘equine’, replacing them with ‘bovine’, and thus obscured not merely an amusing historical footnote but one with important ethical consequences. Woolley’s treatment of the evidence from the so-called Royal Cemetery was not simply ‘colorful’ as characterized by Moorey; it was sensationalist. His use of artists’ renderings and ‘deep reconstructions’ were sharply criticized in his day, yet these techniques are now routinely used by scholars without any objections being raised.
I could add dozens of other examples, and may in the future, if asked. But for now, I think I’ve made my point. The problem of academic writing is not about style. The reliance on ‘testimonials’ and ‘glittering generalities’ in lieu of evidence, the ‘card-stacking’ technique of omitting opposing opinions and inconvenient facts, the use of emotionally loaded vocabulary - these are all well established propaganda techniques; see mason.gmu.edu. Why are they being used? Why have they been tolerated for so long? These are more important questions for scholars to ask themselves than how to provide, as Charles put it, “an enjoyable and even fun reading experience.”
Tags: archaeology, propaganda, scholarship, Assyriology
May 3, 2008 at 9:19 pm |
[...] Academic Hate Crimes wrote an interesting post today on The Problem of Academic WritingHere’s a quick excerpt … nagers’, Iraq 22, “Ur In Retrospect”, 1960….“There are few archaeological excavations which have had such an abiding interest for the general public as those at Ur in modern Iraq directed by Sir Leonard W oolley between 1922 and 1934……. [...]
May 6, 2008 at 5:30 am |
Very interesting post. While I am more familiar with Egyptian History I have at least a superficial knowledge of Sumerian History. I was fascinated by the reference to the use of oxen and not asses to pull chariots. I have just completed “Great Battles of the Ancient World” a class conducted by Professor Garret Fagan at Penn State. In his lectures on Sumeria he states that the war chariots were pulled by asses and not by horses. From a military perspective this is more logical than having war chariots pulled by oxen which are not noted for their speed or nimbleness. Nevertheless, your main point that academics are becoming less and less diligent and accurate is a point well made. Stephen Ambrose admitted before he died that he taught a very distorted view of American History because that is what he was taught and he “regretted it”. I have less and less respect for academics and no longer accept anything that they say without some supporting proof. Science has become statistics and as an engineer who has dealt with numbers my whole life I don’t trust statistics as a basis for anything.
May 14, 2008 at 9:05 pm |
Thanks for your comment, Royce. You might want to ask Professor Fagan which sources he’s using (please let me know if you do).
In addition to Dyson, there was an interesting article published in 1941 about this issue; see Max Hilzheimer, Animal Remains of Tell Asmar, in Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization No. 20, University of Chicago Press. Prof. Hilzheimer wrote that, on the basis of Woolley’s original assessment that the chariot found among the grave goods in Queen Shu-bad’s tomb at Ur was drawn by asinus onager, “We should then have to give the ancient Sumerians full credit for the taming of Equus onager and its use as a draft animal for war chariots, an accomplishment all that more characteristic of ancient Sumerian culture because, so far as we know, the onager has nowhere since been tamed on an extensive scale…In any event the taming of the onager remained restricted to the Sumerian culture. The later culture apparently knew it no more. It must therefore have been abandoned in Akkadian times.”
In other words, it is clear that, even prior to Dyson, Hilzheimer also doubted Woolley’s assessment, because it would not make sense that, once accomplished, the taming of this animal would have been abandoned.
May 25, 2008 at 12:05 pm |
Far be it from me to enter this dispute because I have absolutely no knowledge one way or another. I subscribed to Prof. Fagan’s class by DVD so there is no personal interaction — just the lectures. However an Onager is a Wild Ass and a member of the horse family, so it seems logical to me that such an animal would have been pressed into service. From a military perspective an OX simply isn’t logical as an animal suitable for pulling a war chariot. I would submit that the Onager fell out of favor in favor of the horse which is more tractable and faster. The Egyptians used horses to pull their chariots and I THINK the horse was introduced to them by the Hittites or Sumerians, but I am uncertain about this. I have no basis to doubt that oxen were used other than my gut reaction that I would never select an ox to pull a war chariot. However, the first chariots were four wheeled so maybe oxen could have been used because a foru wheeled chariot isn’t exactly really manueverable either.
May 26, 2008 at 11:42 am |
Thanks for your comment, Royce. I’m not saying that oxen were used to pull war chariots; this was not the question I was trying to address in my post and, frankly, I don’t really know what was used, but I will check the sources I have in-house and report back to you what I find. I’ve read that horses were used at the time of Sargon the Great, which was mid-3rd millennium, and of course the Elamites, to the east of Sumer, rode camels, as did the Eblaites and other cultures involved in the caravan trade. I think the Sumerians were pretty sedentary; they fed the world but depended on outside distributors. One doesn’t find a lot of maps among the cuneiform records, at least not maps of territories outside of Mesopotamia. In addition, there are at least three, if not four, classifications of onager, and one was certainly domesticated, so that might have been the type hitched to war chariots.
Also, the ‘wild ass’ Hilzheimer was referring to was, he wrote, actually a feral onager, and I should correct my original post to say that this is not the ass that went extinct in the 1920s. There was another wild ass which is always sharply distinguished from the others. It looked exactly like a miniature Arabian horse and was extremely fast, and some scholars have even speculated that the Arabian breed was developed from it. (My sources are limited to English-language texts, and there might be a lot more data about all this in Arabic.)
Initially, I thought that this was the wild ass Woolley had referred to but, according to Hilzheimer, it was the feral ass that he specifically claimed was buried in Queen Shubad’s tomb. In either case, he was working from an assumption and should not have reported this as fact. Nor should Moorey have brushed aside the entire issue of fabrication in scholarship, especially in regard to Woolley, whose work had long-lasting negative social consequences, as Moorey well knew. Woolley’s dig at Ur is still used for anti-Semitic purposes, to assert that human sacrifice was practiced by early Semitic cultures, of which there has never been any proof whatsoever. Moorey would disagree with this, I’m sure, as, after he finished his rewrite of Ur, he went on to do a similar job with the excavation of Kish, another early Semitic city-state, and claimed that evidence of human sacrifice had been found there as well.
I should add, in defense of Woolley, that he was not entirely responsible for the exploitation of his work by bigots. Max Mallowan, who began his career as Woolley’s assistant at Ur, called attention to the fact that Woolley had published very detailed journal articles about this excavation immediately after every season. In addition, Woolley had finalized his excavation report of Ur within just a few years of the completion of the dig, but its publication was delayed for decades. No explanation has ever been put forth to justify the withholding of this material – I believe, in fact, that it was withheld until after Woolley died.
May 27, 2008 at 10:31 am |
Clearly you have a great deal more knowledge than I do although I have read very widely in ancient history. I will say that I have never run across any drawing, painting, frieze, or other representation that would illustrate human sacrifice in either Sumeria or Egypt. However, Agamemnon did sacrifice Iphigenia(sp) and there are friezes showing the execution of war prisoners so I guess human sacrifice is POSSIBLE, but I tend to side with you that even it there were examples it was not a widespread or common practice. From my readings the various governments in Mesopotamia were very enlightened, very prosperous, and well governed. The Persian Empire under Darius and Xerxes was huge and very well governed and arguably more civilized than Greece.
Well — if we are talking Onager’s in general, then yes very possibly they were either not used at all due to their intractablility or were only used briefly. Oxen are undoubtedly stronger and more placid so if you were a farmer they would be more practical. However, using oxen to pull the royal conveyance would probably not give the “class” associated for royalty so indeed they might have been used for limited things. But I am really out of my element here.
As you know I am very skeptical about academics and their claims. I am reminded of MacCauley’s book “The Motel of the Mysteries”. If you haven’t read this I highly recommend it and when I hear some archaeologist make some suspcious claim — like human sacrifice — I am reminded of this book.
RLCallaway@aol.com