i don't storm, i sunshower

I've been talking about the preservation of history as a matter of written records, but as a trained archaeologist, I am obliged to note that history also inheres in the materials we leave behind, from the grand -- elaborate sarcophagi and ruined temples -- to the humble -- potsherds, post holes, and the bones of our meals.

Nobody really took much of an interest in that latter end of the spectrum until fairly recently, but museums for the fancier stuff are not new at all. The earliest one we know of was curated by the princess Ennigaldi two thousand five hundred years ago. Her father, Nabonidus, even gets credited as the "first archaeologist" -- not in the modern, scientific sense, of course, but he did have an interest in the past. He wasn't the only Neo-Babylonian king to excavate temples down to their original foundations before rebuilding them, but he attempted to connect what he found with specific historical rulers and even assign dates to their reigns. His daughter collated the resulting artifacts, which spanned a wide swath of Mesopotamian history, and her museum even had labels in three languages identifying various pieces.

That's a pretty clear-cut example, but the boundaries on what we term a "museum" are pretty fuzzy. Nowadays we tend to mean an institution open to the public, but historically a lot of these things were private collections, whose owners got to pick and choose who viewed the holdings. Some of them were (and still are) focused on specific areas, like Renaissance paintings or ancient Chinese coins, while others were "cabinets of curiosities," filled with whatever eclectic assortment of things caught the eye of the collector. As you might expect, both the focused and encyclopedic types tend to be the domain of the rich, who have the money, the free time, and the storage space to devote to amassing a bunch of stuff purely because it's of interest to them or carries prestige value.

Other proto-museums were temples in more than just a metaphorical sense. Religious offerings don't always take the form of money; people have donated paintings to hang inside a church, or swords to a Shintō shrine. Over time, these institutions amass a ton of valuable artifacts, which (as with a private collection) may or may not be available for other people to view. I've mentioned before the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala, which has eight vaults full of votive offerings that would double as an incomparable record of centuries or even millennia of Indian history . . . if they were studied. But making these things public in that fashion might be incompatible with their religious purpose.

Museums aren't only limited to art and artifacts, either. Historically -- especially before the development of the modern circulating library -- books got mixed in with other materials. Or a collector might equally have an interest in exotic animals, whether taxidermied or alive, the latter constituting a proto-zoo. More disturbingly, their collection might include people, individuals from far-off lands or those with physical differences being displayed right alongside lions and parrots.

What's the purpose of gathering all this stuff in one place? The answer to that will depend on the nature of the museum in question. For a temple, the museum-ness of the collection might be secondary to the religious effect of gifting valuable things to the divine. But they often still benefit from the prestige of holding such items, whether the value lies in their precious materials, the quality of their craftsmanship, their historical significance, or any other element. The same is true for the individual collector.

But if that was the only factor in play, these wouldn't be museums; they'd just be treasure hoards. The word itself comes from the Greek Muses, and remember, their ranks included scholarly subjects like astronomy and history alongside the arts! One of the core functions of a museum is to preserve things we've decided are significant. Sure, if you dig up a golden statue while rebuilding a temple, you could melt it down for re-use; if you find a marble altar to an ancient god, you could bury it as a foundation stone, or carve it into something else. But placing it in a museum acknowledges that the item has worth beyond the value of its raw materials.

And that worth can be put to a number of different purposes. We don't know why Nabonidus was interested in history and set up his daughter as a museum curator, but it's entirely possible it had something to do with the legitimation of his rule: by possessing things of the past, you kind of position yourself as their heir, or alternatively as someone whose power supersedes what came before. European kings and nobles really liked harkening back to the Romans and the Greeks; having Greek and Roman things around made that connection seem more real -- cf. the Year Eight discussion of the role of historical callbacks in political propaganda.

Not all the purposes are dark or cynical, though. People have created museums, whether private or public, because they're genuinely passionate about those items and what they represent. A lot of those men (they were mostly men) with their cabinets of curiosities wanted to learn about things, and so they gathered stuff together and wrote monographs about the history, composition, and interrelationships of what they had. We may scoff at them now as antiquarians -- ones who often smashed less valuable-looking material on their way to the shiny bits -- but this is is the foundational stratum of modern scholarship. Even now, many museums have research collections: items not on public display, but kept on hand so scholars can access them for other purposes.

The big change over time involves who's allowed to visit the collections. They've gone from being personal hoards shared only with a select few to being public institutions intended to educate the general populace. Historical artifacts are the patrimony of the nation, or of humanity en masse; what gets collected and displayed is shaped by the educational mission. As does how it gets displayed! I don't know if it's still there, but the British Museum used to have a side room set up the way it looked in the eighteenth century, and I've been to quite a few museums that still have glass-topped tables and tiny paper cards with nothing more than the bare facts on them. Quite a contrast with exhibitions that incorporate large stretches of wall text, multimedia shows, and interactive elements. Selections of material may even travel to other museums, sharing more widely the knowledge they represent.

It's not all noble and pure, of course. Indiana Jones may have declared "that belongs in a museum," but he assumed the museum would be in America or somewhere else comparable, not in the golden idol's Peruvian home. When colonialism really began to sink its teeth into the globe, museums became part of that system, looting other parts of the world for the material and intellectual enrichment of their homelands. Some of those treasures have been repatriated, but by no means all. (Exhibit A: the Elgin Marbles.) The mission of preservation is real, but so is the injustice it sometimes justifies, and we're still struggling to find a better balance.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/WA5QzG)

Thanks to my research for the upcoming Sea Beyond duology, I became aware of something called the "Alexander Romance." Like Arthuriana, this is less a text than a genre, an assortment of tales about how Alexander quested for the Water of Life, slew a dragon, journeyed to the bottom of the ocean, and so forth.

Yes, that Alexander. The Great.

How the heck did we wind up with an entire genre of stories about a Macedonian conquerer who died young that bear so little resemblance to the historical reality?

The answer is that history is much easier to forget than we think nowadays, with our easily mass-produced books. However much you want to lament "those who do not remember the past" etc., we know vastly more about it than any prior age could even aspire to. The legendary tales about Alexander arose quite soon after his death, but by the medieval period, his actual life was largely forgotten; more factual texts were not rediscovered and disseminated until the Renaissance. So for quite a while there, the legends were basically all we had.

Historians tend to not like the phrase "the Dark Ages" anymore, and for good reason. It creates assumptions about what life was like -- nasty, brutish, and short -- that turn out to not really match the reality. But while plenty of people have indeed used that term to contrast with the "light" brought by the Renaissance, one of the men responsible for popularizing it (Cardinal Cesare Baronio, in the sixteenth century) meant it as a statement on the lack of records: to him, the Middle Ages were "dark" because we could not see into them. The massive drop in surviving records had cast that era into shadow.

How do those records get lost? Year Two went into the perils that different writing materials and formats are vulnerable to; those in turn affect the preservation of historical knowledge. Papyrus texts have to be recopied regularly if they're to survive in most environments, so anything that disrupts the supply of materials or the labor available to do that recopying means that dozens, hundreds, even thousands of texts will just . . . go away. Parchment is vastly more durable, but it's also very expensive, and so it tended to get recycled: scrape off the existing text, write on it again, and unless you were lazy enough in your scraping that the old words can still be read -- think of a poorly erased blackboard or whiteboard -- later people will need chemical assistance (very destructive) or high-tech photography to see what you got rid of.

And when your supply of written texts shrinks, it tends to go hand in hand with the literacy rate dropping. So even if you have a record of some historical event, how many people have read it? Just because a thing gets preserved doesn't mean the information it contains will be widely disseminated. That is likely to be the domain of specialists -- if them! Maybe it just sits on a shelf or in a box, completely untouched.

Mind you, written records are not the only way of remembering the past. Oral accounts can be astonishingly precise, even over a period of hundreds or thousands of years! But that tends to be true mostly in societies that are wholly oral, without any tradition of books. On an individual level, we have abundant research showing that parts of the brain which don't see intensive use tend to atrophy; if you don't exercise your memory on a daily basis, you will have a poorer memory than someone who lives without writing, let alone a smartphone. On a societal level, you need training and support for the lorekeepers, so they act as a verification check on each other's accurate recitation. Without that, the stories will drift over time, much like the Alexander Romance has done.

And regardless of whether history is preserved orally or on the page, cultural factors are going to shape what history gets preserved. When the fall of the Western Roman Empire changed the landscape of European letters, the Church was left as the main champion of written records. Were they going to invest their limited time and resources into salvaging the personal letters of ordinary Greeks and Romans? Definitely not. Some plays and other literary works got recopied; others were lost forever. The same was true of histories and works of philosophy. A thousand judgment calls got made, and anything which supported the needs and values of the society of the time was more likely to make the cut, while anything deemed wrong-headed or shocking was more likely to fall by the wayside.

The result is that before the advent of the printing press -- and even for some time after it -- the average person would be astoundingly ignorant of any history outside living memory. They might know some names or events, but can they accurately link those up with dates? Their knowledge would be equivalent to my understanding of the American Civil War amounting to "there was a Great Rebellion in the days of Good President Abe, who was most treacherously murdered by . . . I dunno, somebody."

In fact, there might be several different "somebodies" depending on who's telling the tale. John Wilkes Booth might live on as a byword for an assassin -- imagine if "booth" became the general term for a murderer -- but it's equally possible that some people would tell a tale where Lincoln was murdered by an actor, others where a soldier was responsible, and did that happen at a theatre or at his house? (Booth originally planned to kidnap Lincoln from the latter; that detail might get interpolated into the memory of the assassination.) Or it gets mixed up somehow with Gettysburg, and Lincoln is shot right after giving his famous speech, because all the famous bits have been collapsed together.

Even today, there are plenty of Americans who would probably be hard-pressed to correctly name the start and end dates of our Civil War; I'm not trying to claim that the availability of historical information means we all know it in accurate detail. But at least the information is there, and characters who need to know it can find it. Furthermore, our knowledge is expanding all the time, thanks to archaeology and the recovery of forgotten or erased documents. Now and in the future, the challenge tends to lie more in the ability to sift through a mountain of data to find what you need, and in the arguments over how that data should be interpreted.

But in any story modeled on an earlier kind of society, I roll my eyes when characters are easily able to learn what happened six hundred years ago, and moreover the story they get is one hundred percent correct. That just ain't how it goes. The past is dark, and when you shine a light into its depths, you might get twelve different reflections bouncing back at you, as competing narratives each remember those events in variable ways.

For a writer, though, I don't think that's a bug. It's a feature. Let your characters struggle with this challenge! Muddy the waters with contradictory accounts! If you want your readers to know the "real" story, write that as a bonus for your website or a standalone piece of related fiction. Then you get to have your cake and eat it, too.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Tnyzpz)