Our issue last time was that Gibbon knew nothing about the archaeology of Mesopotamia and therefore nothing about the ethnology. It was all 50 years and more in the future when he died. Since science has moved on (as it always does), his pages on Mesopotamia are worthless.
The same thing applies in chapter IX. This is about the regions from which the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Alans, Avars and, later, the Vikings came. Gibbon supposes that, without "civilization", Germans could have no politics. I have almost no footnotes in this chapter because it's a waste of your time. Gibbon knew nothing about the history or prehistory of the Goths and his ignorance of the habits of social animals allows him to use all the slurs he wants.
Gibbon admits that there were individual leaders among these peoples and can name some -- Hermann, Alaric, Attila, and so on. You don't get leaders without agreement from the polity, and that means there's politics going on.
Gibbon was unaware that all mammals who live in groups have hierarchies and ways of determining which animal is where in the hierarchy. In the Bible when it discusses cattle as pushing or goring (Exodus 21:35), it distinguishes between cattle establishing their position in the hierarchy, or cattle trying to injure each other. Pick your favorite mammal that lives in groups and google it with "hierarchies" and see what you find.
Gibbon thought of politics as something that happens only in a "civilized" culture with "monumental buildings" and "advanced" technology. Nowadays, politics is defined as a way of getting things accomplished and dealing with the ups and downs of social interaction. In other words, establishing and dealing with human hierarchies and how they interfere with or promote the aims and goals of a given human endeavor.
So in the modern sense, it's impossible for any human culture not to have politics, because all of them have hierarchies who have to be taken into account when the culture is in operation.
Then Gibbon gets into the idea of "savages" having a history. Every culture has its history of how its various customs came into existence. Until the culture develops or adopts writing, this history has to be transmitted by word of mouth. It is phrased in words that the culture defines, and this phraseology is only understood by the transmitting culture. The history is passed as stories of ancestors; their behavior in the stories is always an example of how to behave, and it is expressed by their actions, not by descriptions of the ancestors. The narratives are usually short and contain stylistic elements that are easy to remember as well as entertaining and instructive about cultural mores or events.
This is the field of Axel Olrik's Principles for Oral Narrative Research. In the previous centuries, oral narratives like the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm were relegated to children's stories, and people who didn't live in the Jewish culture were starting to say the same thing about the Bible, which is a record of the Jewish oral tradition. Orthodox and Chassidic Jews never said such a thing, because they were educated to see how scripture played out in the Jewish law they lived by every day. At any rate, when Tolkien has a character say that old tales reflect things that were once important for the wise to know, he is expressing one of Olrik's basic principles, whether he knew it or not. (I doubt he read Olrik, because Principles was available only in Danish until 1992.)
Oral traditions the world over coordinate with a culture's laws. Axel Olrik and later Roger Abrahams both knew that the Fjoort of Africa had a strong tradition of oral narratives, and Abrahams knew that if they sat in judgment, they rehearsed numerous stories. He didn't understand why, but I do, because in writing Narrating the Torah, I realized that stretches of legalistic material are always followed by a narrative that isn't comprehensible without the legal verbiage. The narrative is a case study related to the laws. In Numbers, there is a cluster of three narratives, all case studies on slander, the point of which is that no matter who is slandered or who does it, the slanderer is punishable. If you can figure out what narratives I'm talking about, let me know. For the Fjoort, the narratives they recited taught the members of the court what law applied to the case.
But when you get into applying some other culture's stories to your own history, that happens in a literate environment, not an oral one. The original oral narratives of the Welsh said what their history was. For Geoffrey of Wales to say that "Britain" derives from "Brutus" and Caesar's assassin was an ancestor of the Welsh, is strictly literate.
So there's no question but that the Germanic peoples had an oral tradition that taught each generation how to behave, and Gibbon's sneer at their "lack of letters" gives us one more chapter that we can safely ignore because cultural studies have moved on and Gibbon is outdated.
When it comes to claiming that northern Europeans didn't mine metals, that's as outdated as everything else. Copper mining in Salzburg, when it was pre-Celtic, dates to 3500 BCE, at the same time as such mining was going on in Mesopotamia. Copper in Mesopotamia was found in ores that also contained iron, and the same is true in Salzburg.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ernst-Pernicka/publication/227604333_Prehistoric_copper_production_in_the_Inn_Valley_Austria_and_the_earliest_copper_in_central_Europe/links/5abf5431aca27222c757fb6b/Prehistoric-copper-production-in-the-Inn-Valley-Austria-and-the-earliest-copper-in-central-Europe.pdf
Welsh copper in tools and other products, has been tracked to the Baltic up to 1400 BCE and also shows up in Scandinavia. You could almost say that northern Europe was awash in metals long before there was a Rome.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-50213846
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0219574
And ironworks dating before 1000 BCE (before Rome was founded) have been found in Sweden. The implications for ironworking farther south at this time are obvious.
http://www.fiskecenter.umb.edu/Staff/Steinberg/Viking08/Readings/Stenvik2003.pdf
Finally, we have Waldgirmes.
Waldgirmes has a stone-built city center that has been dated to the Augustan period. It is not west of the Rhine or in Gallia. It is east of the Rhine in "Greater Germania". Almost all that remains of it now that is visible at ground level, is a forum. From Waldgirmes, soldiers and traders could travel by boat to places like Castra Vetera. It was abandoned when Varus lost his three legions, after which the Watch on the Rhine and Danube was established.
This is an indication that Rome was not running an economy. It couldn't. There was no concept of profiting from the resources of a given place. There was only squeezing money out of the population in sales and taxes. If Rome had been interested in exploitable resources, they would have tried to find out where amber came from. The myths about its origins reported by Ovid, among others, show how clueless people were, until Pliny the Elder showed that it washed up on the shores of Germany. Well, Pliny died during the Vesuvius eruption in 79 CE, decades after Waldgirmes was abandoned. If Varus had known what Pliny found out, Waldgirmes would have been a teeming metropolis enriched by the amber trade, the way Syria was enriched because it was the western terminus of the Silk Road.
There was enough civilization among the Germans to a) create a complicated alliance to destroy Varus' forces and b) make it worthwhile to plan for a series of cities east of the Rhine, which never came off because Augustus realized he had pushed his boundaries a bridge too far.
So again, you'd be better off spending your time finding and reading modern archaeology on Scandinavia, the Baltic, and East of the Rhine, than reading Gibbon.
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