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.”
