Olympic Games (interesting, actually)

[Jona Lendering]

I personally find it rather distrubing that they are going at this with some revolutionary goal in mind. Not the lets gather the evidence and theorize from there but instead this sounds more like lets create a theory and then see what evidence we can dig up to support it.

Actually, the evidence was already gathered about a century ago, and the great Ed. Meyer tried to write a handbook for ancient history that started in Sumeria. The Cambridge Ancient History tried to do this for the English language, and there you see the problem: this series was made by a team. It was no longer possible for one man to sum up all ancient history. From the earliest writings to the economic crisis of the sixth century is about 4,000 years and it covers three continents.

A second point is that Winckelmann is still not dead. He's the guy who single-handedly created the idea that the origin of civilization was not the Garden of Eden but a group of noble savages called Greeks. Especially in Germany and Britain, this became a standard view on the past, because in France, Napoleon venerated the Romans.

Now the modern university is a German invention: it was sort of invented by Wilhelm von Humboldt (the university he founded in Berlin is now named after him). In order to give the Greeks a special place, the study of the ancient past was divided into subdisciplines: subfaculty of Indo-European languages (including Greek and Roman history) versus subfaculty of Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arab, and later also Babylonian). Ancient historians were educated at these language subfaculties. This model was copied elsewhere, although other names were used. Even today, people who research both cultures, have to move between separate buildings and libraries.

A third factor is that the "cult of Greece and Rome" has led to the idea that a civilized man had to be able to know some Greek and Latin, an idea that goes back to Winckelmann/Von Humboldt, and -before that- the Catholic Church. In many countries, people who have studied Greek and Latin, can easily find a job as a teacher, telling the youth how important Greece an Rome were. This makes the subfaculties of Greek and Latin more powerful -they have a solid base of people who can actually find a job- than those of Babylonian and Egyptian when it comes down to dividing the government money. Believe me, I have seen too many university politics. So we get another critical edition of the Iliad nearly every decade, while 100,000 cuneiform tablets are left abandoned in the British Museum alone (more about this in the next issue of Ancient Warfare).

Orientalists have also made silly mistakes. Iranologists have accepted money from the Iranian Shah, and allowed themselves to become instrumental to creating an image of ancient Iran that is still influential (read this month's issue of the National Geographic for some already refuted nonsense).

As a consequence of all this, Winckelmann's idea has never been challenged, and age-old prejudices, sometimes with a no longer seen anti-Semitic root, have survived.

I am currently studying the history of the Pythagorean Theorem, which was known in c.2000 BC. The Greeks could prove this (Euclid, Elements, c. 300 BC), and would much later (fourth century AD) ascribe it to Pythagoras. Now the funny thing is that nearly every classicist will admit that the Babylonians knew it, but they will add that the Greeks created real mathematics because they found proof. I have heard this very, very often, and it is quite simply untrue. There is indeed no cuneiform tablet with the proof, but the way the Babylonians construct their problems proves that they knew a proof (tablete Plimpton 322 is a case in point).

I could add more (the Museum in Alexandria is a copy of the scientific institute of Babylon, for example), but will leave it at this. What I am trying to say is that the real revolution was made by Winckelmann and became institutionalized by Wilhelm von Humboldt. What the authors of that Gilgamesh Games website are doing is essentially a counterrevolution that ought to have happened about a century ago.