Source: TW
Did the ancients have any concept of archaeology?
Most human societies have an explanation for objects that predate themselves. The Iroquois regarded archaic copper tools as lost objects from the spirit world, medieval peasants believed stone arrowheads and axes were made by elves, or lightning, and used them for protection. But beyond this, did any classical civilisation develop a systematic way of studying artefacts?
The ancient Greeks split the study of the past into historia and archaiologia, the former being textual accounts of military and political events, and the latter being the study of origins through myth, story, objects and genealogies. Hero cults often excavated graves and used weapons and objects as votive offerings. Thucydides noted how graves on Delos were opened and the mortuary rituals carefully examined to prove the continuity of the Carian people.
Memories of a time when bronze was used instead of iron helped create speculative chronologies of the world, such as Hesiod’s Five Ages of Man, degenerating from Gold to Silver to Bronze to Heroic to Iron. This attention to the material objects and their change through time qualifies as a sort of proto-archaeology, linking the condition of man and his hardships to the technology and perceived qualities of different metals.
Pausanias’ Description of Greece provides us with a crucial insight into how later Greeks and Romans viewed the past. “He regarded it as significant that the blade of a spear attributed to Achilles, kept in the temple of Athena at Phaselis, was made of bronze”. The Romans were keen collectors of Greek art and artefacts, but with a few exceptions such as Pliny the Elder, did not incorporate a systematic study of these material objects into their textual histories and stories of the Greek past.
The Egyptians and Mesopotamians developed a religious attitude towards ancient objects, ruins and texts, largely to acquire and manipulate divine powers. Prince Khaemweset, fourth son of Ramesses II, has been called the world’s first Egyptologist due to his perseverance in studying ancient writings and graves in order to rebuild and revive cults, funerary practices, monuments and buildings.
Babylonian rulers such as King Nabonidus, often called the world’s oldest archaeologist, would insist on fully excavating temple foundations in order to restore religious practices. His daughter, Bel-Shalti-Nannar, amassed the earliest museum of antiquities.
In China, during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, philosopher Han Fei Zu studied Neolithic pottery and was able to identify it as belonging to an older period from the same culture. Ideas of a succession from stone, jade, bronze to iron were simmering in the zeitgeist of the time. The historian Sima Qian was able to create his historiography of China, the Shi Ji, in part due to his careful examination of ruins, artefacts and changes to material culture. These thinkers helped create the idea of a unified culture stretching back to the Xia Dynasty.
Greece and China in particular then were able to incorporate material culture of previous eras into their chronologies of the world, but still lacked the systematic and institutional practice to raise this to the level of modern archaeology. But all prior investigations into the past by these civilisations share the same character as much modern archaeology, that of bolstering, supporting and constructing a story for the people of today. Archaeology has always been a battleground.