The scholarly tradition

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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 historiography at its best: it 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, 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 given topic 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.

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Legacy studies

Much attention has recently been given to what we may call the subterranean history of the discipline, especially in two directions, which I am illustrating here with reference to two major projects.

1. Archaeological sites. – The editorial project Archive Archaeology "is a series dedicated to the publication of monographs and edited collections that explore archives and legacy data as they relate to archaeology and history, and that have formed over the centuries. The aims of this series are twofold. Firstly, materials and excavation reports can be found in museums and archives around the world, but they are largely unpublished, frequently inaccessible, and typically uncited in scholarship, despite often holding crucial information on sites as well as objects. This series therefore aims to make this material available to readers for the first time, in combination with new research and wider discussions around the archive material. Secondly, in the context of wider discussions about handling and disseminating cultural heritage, the series looks to promote research that explores the methodological and theoretical discussions around such material. Combined, these two approaches provide a unique forum for new research into archival and legacy data" (publisher's description). See the recent volume Raja 2023 Shaping.
2. Individual scholars. – The project Gruppo di Ricerca Interdisciplinare di Storia degli Studi Orientali” (GRISSO) (Group for Interdisciplinary Research on the History of Oriental Studies) was conceived as a research group aiming to analze the history of archaeological, philological and historical studies of the Ancient Near East and their reception in contemporary and modern society by establishing cross-cultural academic dialog and international cooperation. In a recent publication (Alaura 2021 Digging) one will find an overview of the project and a number of contributions about specific topics. With its emphasis on working towards a history of ideas the book highlights the goal of going beyond the level of information in order to investigate the depth of the process through which research has progressed.

An important dimension of these legacy studies is that they actively pursue the search for documentation in the private domain, in ways that were not common before.

A related aspect is that of the “grey” literature (Falkingham 2005 Grey) or the deep web (Oita &al 2012 Deep).

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The 4 Banks approach

We share with the GRISSO project the goal of working towards a history of ideas, in the limited sector of Mesopotamian studies. This approach was not yet implemented in the Critique website. One will find instead a section on the History of the Discipline in both the website on religion and the one on politics. An inherent limitation is that in these websites the scope is too wide, given the broad core narrative of each: a “history of the discipline” can at best show, in fact, the overall development of the studies, without developing a proper critique.

We plan to have a more direct approach in future versions of the websites, which will focus on more specific aspects of each of the relative domains.

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Time depth

An important dimension that this approach entails is the attention that is to be paid to the very earliest literature on the subject, including works that have failed to have a direct impact on the discipline, but were prescient of developments to come. Two examples will illustrate the usefulness of such a historically minded approach, one from linguistics and the other from archaeology.

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Edward Hincks

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).

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Pinhas Pierre Delougaz

The second example is of a different nature. Pinhas Pierre Delougaz’ publication of the pottery from the Diyala (see 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.

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The notion of heritage

The notion of “heritage,” which archaeologists have been discovering and applying in very recent times to the sites they excavate, applies also to our own discipline. Scholars are conditioned by the approaches followed by their predecessors, often in ways that are hidden, just as in any other type of cultural heritage, but can be all the more impactful. The undercurrents that develop may condition deeply the mental categories that structure the overall organization of the research, through a sort of collective maturation. It is the goal of an attentive historiographic approach to bring this out in full.

In a personal vein, I may refer to my history of the project in the Cybernetica Mesopotamica project, where the presentation of the many steps taken in a project that lasted more than half a century becomes a reflection on the very nature of the project.