Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World

Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World offers linked essays on uses of the past in prominent and diverse cultures in ancient civilizations across the world. The contributors are leading experts in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Sinology, Biblical Studies, Classics, and Maya Studies.

This volume addresses crucial questions in current scholarship on historical consciousness and historiography. These questions include the formation of different traditions and the manifold uses of the past in particular socio-political contexts or circumstances; the ways in which these traditions and these types of cultural memory informed or contributed to the rise of more formal modes of historiography; interactions between formal modes of historiography and other traditions of historical consciousness during their transmission; and the implications of such interactions for cultural heritage, collective memory, and later understandings of history.

By taking an interdisciplinary approach, this volume situates the rise of formal modes of historiography within a larger context of developments in historical consciousness and a wider web of intercommunicating discourses. It also uncovers intellectual processes, literary mechanisms, and social institutions involved in the construction of history. During the construction of ancient historiographies, while many local traditions persisted, some ancients gradually went beyond the temporal and spatial limitations of their local traditions, arriving at a more extended and unified timespan, a wider geographical region, and a common origin.

Linked essays on uses of the past in prominent and diverse cultures in ancient civilizations across the world. The contributors are leading experts in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Sinology, Biblical Studies, Classics, and Maya Studies.

John Baines is Professor of Egyptology Emeritus at the University of Oxford. His most recent books are Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt(2007), The Disappearance of Writings Systems (2008, co-edited with John Bennet and Stephen Houston), and High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt (2013).
Henriette van der Blom is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Birmingham. She has published extensively on Roman republican memory culture, oratory and politics, including Cicero's Role Models: The Political Strategy of a Newcomer (OUP 2010) and Community and Communication: Oratory and Politics in Republican Rome (with C. Steel; OUP 2013). Her next monograph is Oratory and Political Career in the Late Roman Republic (CUP, forthcoming).
Yi Samuel Chen is Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He specialises in Sumerian, Babylonian and biblical literary history and historiography. His monograph The Primeval Flood Catastrophe: Origins and Early Development in Mesopotamian Traditions was published in the Oxford Oriental Monographs Series (2013).