Succession of Ancient Empires
Introduction
History has no essence in itself, but is a construction and comes into being through human acts of remembering, researching, narrating, writing or enacting on stage. Collection, selection and creative development of information on the past – whether one with an effective likeness to the thus-created historical account or one that is only imagined – is ideally shaped by scholarly methods (‘source criticism’, as the historian would say), but in practice it was and still is most often guided by ideological world views or even more specific political, economic or religious interests. If this is a pertinent description of historical construction in general, then it is particularly pertinent for lists of eras, empires or dynasties ascribed to a past. (Re-) Configurations of preceding time periods are pervasive in the literary productions and cultural memories of any given society, the triplet ‘Antiquity, Middle Ages, Modern Age’ is one of the most established sequences in the Western World. Such sequences usually depend on a mix of received traditions on the one hand and, on the other, on a creative act that is designed to give meaning and purpose to an audience in any given presence.
The basic concept was already known to the Near-Eastern kingdoms of the Bronze-Ages, as a result of which we already find two archetypical variations in highly elaborated versions at the beginning of European literature. In his Theogony (116ff.), Hesiod from Boeotian Ascra (ca. 700 BCE) develops his cosmogony into a sequence from the crudest natural powers (Gaia & Uranos) over an intermediate generation (Titans) to the refined order of the Olympian gods under Zeus. In contrast to this optimistic line of succession, Hesiod views the evolution of human civilization with much pessimism (Works and Days 106–201): mankind started in an ideal ‘golden’ age and then gradually deteriorated, going through a ‘silver’, ‘bronze’ and ‘heroic’ age, before ending up in the most depraved ‘iron’ age. 700 years later, the Latin poet Ovid retells the older and simpler version of the myth, which only knows the four ‘metal’ ages (Metamorphoses I 89–150).
Obviously, the Greeks and Romans shared the same Near Eastern (Ugaritic?) heritage as the Jewish author, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Daniel’ by or in the 160s BCE. His ‘visions’ responded to the politics of King Antiochos IV Epiphanes: it was perceived as the harshest attack on the cult of Yahweh – and, with this, on the most defining element of Jewish identity, imagined as the deep point of a series of foreign rules over Judaea. The Book of Daniel in its canonical form includes four Succession-of-Empires allegories which became the most influential in Jewish, Christian and Occidental thought for over two millennia. Most recent research questions the traditional attempts to decode those allegories and proposes new keys to unlock the historical construction as intended by its author. The present workshop seeks to discuss these and other findings more broadly in the context of the ideological creation of past dynasties and empires that are meant to give meaning to a present audience.