Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World - John Baines

Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World - John Baines

8. History and Historiography in the Material World: Ancient Egyptian Perspectives

Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World - John Baines

John Baines [+-]
University of Oxford
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John Baines is Professor of Egyptology Emeritus at the University of Oxford. Recent books are The Disappearance of Writings Systems (2008, co-edited with John Bennet and Stephen Houston), High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt (2013), and Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World, co-edited with Henriette van der Blom, Yi Samuel Chen, and Tim Rood (2019).

Description

Curation of the past, which underlies written historiography, relies on the interplay of social institutions, material culture, and physical setting. ‘Historiography’ in complex societies is contained not only in oral narratives and written texts but also in a range of other domains, material, spoken, and written, loosely structured or ritualized. This background is the most basic presupposition for historiography. This chapter explores relevant practices in ancient Egypt, asking three principal questions and paying particular attention to evidence from material culture. First, how far are institutions organized in the present in such a way as to create materials that will serve a mobilization of the past at some time in the future? Second, is it meaningful to draw distinctions between a ‘documentary’ or factual and discursive approach to the past and a ‘mythical’ one, and would such distinctions have made sense to the ancient actors? Third, in a culture such as that of early Egypt, where narrative forms do not seem to have had a privileged status at least in written form, how should the imposed concepts of historiography and historical consciousness be applied? Should other modes of presentation be given comparable or greater weight?

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Citation

Baines, John. 8. History and Historiography in the Material World: Ancient Egyptian Perspectives. Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 109-132 Jun 2019. ISBN 9781800500266 . https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=33723. Date accessed: 07 Nov 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.33723. Jun 2019

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