Non-Western Historiography

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 865.

UNIT 3

Many non-Western peoples have traditions of historical writing that date back over millennia. Perhaps the most familiar to Westerners is the Jewish tradition as known from the Bible. The triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire during the 4th century assured the predominance of a type of historiography radically different from the works of the pa­gan Greek and Roman historians. Its origins were Jewish. The Jews were the only people of antiquity who had the supreme religious duty of remembering the past because their traditional histories commemorat­ed the working out of God's plan for his chosen people. By contrast, no Greek ever heard his gods ordering him to remember. It was the duty of every Jew to be familiar with the Jewish sacred writings, which were ul­timately gathered into what became the Old Testament. The writers of these biblical books only gave an authoritative version of what every­body was supposed to know; and they were only concerned with the selection of such facts as seemed relevant in interpreting God's purpose. In addition, the Jews also cherished unwritten traditions. To quote Josephus, a Jewish historian of the 1st century AD, "what had not been written down, was yet entrusted to the collective memory of the people of Israel and especially of its priests."

The origins of Arabic historiography still remain obscure because of the gap between the legendary traditions of pre-Islamic Arabia be­fore the start of the Muslim era (AD 622) and the sophisticated and fairly exact chronicles that began to appear in the later 8th and 9th centuries. But while the detailed stages of this development still await reconstruction, the main influences shaping the early Muslim histori­ography are clear enough. As in the case of the ancient Jews, it was created and perpetuated by religion, Mohammed (died 632) regarded himself as a successor to a long series of Jewish and Christian proph­ets and he made Islam a religion with a strong sense of history. The compilation and verification of the Hadith, the traditions which formed with the Koran the basis of Islamic law, encouraged early de­velopment of historical skills. Teachings of Mohammed (Hadith) were transmitted orally for several generations, until they were written down in the 8th and 9th centuries. The resultant collections were only partly historical, as myths and inventions crept into them. But the better Muslim historians scrupulously quoted their authorities and tried to be truthful. This was particularly true of the "classical” school of historians, who were writing at the centre of the Abbasid caliphate inIraq in the 9th and 10th centuries, Al-Tabari (died 923), the most authoritative of them all, wrote his History of Prophets and Kings whichbecame the accepted source of early Islamic history.

One of the original features of Muslim historiography is the large amountof attention devoted to the lives of devout men and of scholars To many Muslim historians, these spiritual and intellectual activ­ities were of much greater importance than the doings of princes and warriors. One of the peculiarities of Muslim historiography was the liking for encyclopedic dictionaries of famous men. The earliest of thesewere devoted to the Companions of Mohammed and to the early transmitters of the Muslim traditions. For a thousand years ex­tremely diverse types of biographical collections have continued to ^5t appear in the Muslim world.

In the 14th century Ibn Khaldun who is considered the greatest Arabhistorian wrote a universal history that reveals the extraordinary extent of his learning and his unusual ability to conceive of general theories to account for centuries of social and political development.

Muslim historiography appears to have originally developed inde­pendently of European influences. Until the 19th century Muslim writers only very seldom consulted Christian sources and almost never noted events in Christian countries. They displayed at times more cu-riosity about the non-Muslim peoples of Asia. It is worth mentioning that in several countries, notably in parts of India, the first works that deserve the name of history appeared only after the Muslim conquest

or the conversion to Islam, After the 12th century Arabic ceased to be the main language of Muslim historiography. Distinguished histories were written in Persian in the I3lh century, and subsequently Turkish and other vernaculars came to be used by historians in different parts of the Islamic world. But, in its isolation from non-Muslim influences and its traditional interests, Islamic historiography underwent no in­trinsic change until the 19th century, when it began to be affected by the impact of modern Western civilization.

Of all nations in the world, China has the longest, most volumi­nous record of its past, dating back nearly 3,000 years. Historiography was an interest of Chinese scholars from very early times and it was invested with the task of conveying applicable lessons for human life. According to the Chinese conception, history makes sense only if it can furnish practical directives for action or to supply correct infor­mation upon which action can wisely be based. All the schools of Chinese thought quoted the lessons of history. Confucius, with his stress on the moral content of exemplary history and the keeping of authentic records formed part of the universal belief in the value of history. The careful attention to writing down and preserving infor­mation became a central obligation of the Confucian scholars who served as bureaucrats to the unified Chinese state after the 3d century BC. Most ancient Chinese histories are the official records of scholar-bureaucrats, immensely detailed and concrete, with no attention at synthesis or explanation. The sayings and actions of each emperor were recorded day by day and later used to compile a survey of his reign. A long series of official histories and of records connected with them has survived from the time of the T'ang dynasty (618—907) onward. From then on, the great bulk of Chinese history was written by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. In 626 a History Office was set up for the first time to collate state documents into official dynastic annals, and by 636 five official histories of the preceding inter-dynastic period, including precise biographies, had been composed.

The first person to write a comprehensive history of China from earliest times was Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Ch'ien), who produced his Historical Records during the Han dynasty. This masterpiece was pat­terned after the Chungiu included tabulated data, separate topical es­says, and biographies of important figures. Its breadth and literary power made it immensely influential. Sima Qian's successor Ban Gu covered his own time in the History of the Han, adding more essays and including a list of sources. Within a fairly unified tradition, China produced a mass of historical writings unequaled by any other country
before modern times. Until the late 19th century, Japanese historiog­-
raphy formed an offshoot of this tradition.

From a practical point of view this immense body of historical writings fulfilled a very useful purpose. Such histories were hound to be highly stereotyped and restricted in content to what interested the higher officialdom. It is easy to condemn it by modem Western stand­ards for its excessive preoccupation with concrete details and inability to produce works of wider synthesis. But this Chinese tradition did gradually evolve in the direction of greater rationality and subtlety. Its scope widened as the sphere of government expanded.

Furthermore, within this tradition there appeared from time to time writers of genius, men of bold critical spirit, genuine historical insight, and overriding integrity. One of the greatest was Liu Chih-chi (661-721), the writer of the Shih T'ung, the first thorough treatise in Chinese, or any other language, on historical method, which also constituted in effect a history of Chinese historiography. He had a successor in Ssu-ma Kuang (1019—1086), the author of the first fairly comprehensive general history of China (covering the years 403 BC— AD 959). In the 17th century a remarkable group of historical schol­ars virtually founded a school of critical Chinese philology. None of these writers succeeded in radically transforming Chinese historiogra­phy, but they created an increasingly sophisticated and critical tradition. Their successors in the 20th century assimilated some valuable features of modern Western historiography.