4. The historiography

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Historiography as hermeneutics

While serving as a tool, the 4banks.net cluster aims to go beyond. We propose a historiographic study in selected research areas, one where the individual titles are integrated within a core narrative dealing with a specific topic.

We can thus delineate the growth of awareness in any given field: what were the critical questions is a special form of hermeneutics.

In some ways, perhaps, it is hermeneutics at its best: historiography becomes much more that an account of moments, sorted in chronological order – a chronicle. By bringing out trends, it shows how scholars have confronted issues: identifying structures and patterns in the data, meant reaching for the deeper meaning behind them. However unreflected this effort may have been in many cases, possibly in most, the very confrontation implied adherence to a methodology which, even if unstated, guided the process of analysis.

The history of a discipline aims thus at tracing a journey and at highlighting the vistas that progressivley opened up during the journey itself. Thus it is that we can go beyond the documentary dimension and gain a double hermeneutic result.

Back to top: 4. The historiography

Two examples

Two examples will illustrate the usefulness of a historically minded approach to the discipline, one from linguistics and the other from archaeology.

1. At the very beginning of the scholarly confrontation with Akkadian, the “decypherment” related primarily to the nuts and bolts of the process: reading of the cuneiform signs, lexical identifications, rough comparisons with cognate Semitic languages. One scholar, Edward Hincks, was a key player in this phase of the decypherment, especially as a result of his successful participation in the interpretive “competition” at the Royal Asiatic Society in 1857. For this, his contribution was duly recognized, but not so his linguistic contributions – which we highlight in the language website, in both the history of the discipline and the bibliography. Hinck’s insights into the verbal system were ignored because of his “lower” standing in the world of Academia, and this caused a serious delay in the appreciation of the “conceptual autonomy” of Akkadian (see Landsberger’s Eigenbegrifflichkeit).
2. The second example is of a different nature. Pinhas Pierre Delougaz’ publication of the pottery from the Diyala (see Buccellati G 2020 Degrees or Buccellati G 2020 Degrees) is recognized as a landmark in the field, however, his categorizaiton system was not picked up by other archaeologists. And yet, looking at it today from the vantage point of all the efforts that have gone into creating coding systems for ceramic analysis, the system appears to be truly pioneering. It shows all the sensitivity for what would be today a digital organization of the data (i.e., displaying different degrees of digitality). Reviewing carefully his approach, helps to understand the susbstantive conceptual merits of such organization, apart from whatever shape, digital or not, it might take.
   
   

– my history in CM as reflection