Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So you can't interact with others unless you understand where they're coming from. And the answer to where they're coming from is where they came from and what shaped them and what forces affect them. So I think it's absolutely vital to have some understanding of the past in order to make competent decisions in the present.
Probably the biggest problems are history. The sources themselves, the incompleteness of them. And this gets more intense the farther back we go in time. Yes. So if you say, I want to write a book about the 19th century. There is more material available for almost any topic you want to pick than you could possibly go through in your lifetime.
If you say, I want to write a book about the Roman world, this is a very different thing. In my office, I have a bookshelf that's, I don't know, 8 feet high, 10 feet wide, and it contains pretty much all the main surviving Greek and Roman literary texts. Mm-hmm. Okay? One bookshelf. Wow. It's a big bookshelf. Yeah. But that's what we use to interpret this world.
Now, there's a lot of other types of texts. There's, you know, papyri. There's all sorts of things. There are inscriptions. There's archaeological evidence. So there's other stuff. But honestly, you know, 99% of things about the world I study are lost. So then you get into all the issues are – is what we have surviving a representative example? We know it's not.
For example, all the literary texts are written by one tiny group, elite males. So that's a problem there. There's the problem of bias. We know that they're not necessarily telling us the truth. They have an agenda. They're representing history in a certain way to achieve certain things. Then there's the problem of transmission. I mean, all those texts are copies of copies of copies of copies.
And everybody knows that game where you whisper a sentence to someone and then go around the room. Are you going to get that same sentence back? Well, every ancient text we have has gone through that process. So this is a real problem, and that's just with the sources, right? And this is the historic era.
When you move back just a little earlier to the prehistoric era or to civilizations that don't have written sources surviving, and some of these are ancient Mediterranean ones, I mean, anything goes. I mean, one of the jokes is that museums, archaeological museums, are full of objects which are labeled cult object. Right. It's a religious object.
And I think the honest label that should be on that thing is, we have no idea what the hell this is. But I want to believe it's something important, so I'm going to say it's a religious object. But in reality, it's an ancient toilet paper roll holder or something. And it's a huge problem when you try to interpret a civilization without written text.
And my favorite little story that kind of illustrates this is in the 19th century, this German who had gone to school in England, one of the best educated guys of his time, goes to North Africa and is poking around in the desert. And he finds this site with these huge stone monoliths, 10 feet tall in pairs. Mm-hmm. And there's a lintel stone across the top.
So sort of like big, you know, two posts with a stone across the top. And there's a big stone in front of them too. And so he looks at this stuff and he says, well, what does this remind me of? It reminds me of Stonehenge, right? And there's even a site where there's multiple of these kind of in a square.
So he goes back and talks about this, and an Englishman goes and studies them, and he finds a ton of these sites, and he finds some of them where there's 17 of these pairs. And so he goes back and he writes a whole book about how clearly the Celtic peoples who once lived in Britain came originally from North Africa.
Because he's found this site and he reconstructs the religion where obviously they practice religious rituals here. And they had rites of passage. They squeeze between the things. And the altar stones have this basin. So they had blood sacrifice and all this. And it seemed reasonable. And then, you know, you ask some locals, well, what's that stuff out in the desert there?
And they mean, oh, the old Roman olive oil factory. And those are the remains of an olive press. And we're back to olives. I keep dwelling on olives. Yeah. Olives don't grow in England or Germany. Yeah. So this is cultural bias. If all you have is physical evidence, you're going to interpret that evidence through your own cultural biases.
So if you're an Englishman and you see big stone uprights like this, you're going to think Stonehenge. If you're from the Mediterranean, you're going to think olive press. So that's a salutary example, I think, of the dangers of interpreting physical evidence when you don't have written evidence to go along with it. And, you know, think today.
Like, if our civilization were to blow up in a nuclear war and archaeologists were to dig this up, you know, how might they misinterpret things?
I mean, if they were to, you know, dig up a college dorm, like where I work, and that's what you had for this civilization, you'd probably go in the dorm rooms, you'd find all these little rooms, and maybe in every room you'd find this mysterious plastic disc that And so everybody has these, so it must be a cult object. And it's round, so obviously they're sun worshippers.
And if you can decipher the inscription, you'll see that obviously they all worship the great sun god Wham-O. It's like, what do you find in every dorm room? A frisbee. So that's the level of interpretation you have to beware of. And there's examples where we've done exactly this.
Yes. I mean, as a professional historian, that's what you do. You attempt to reconstruct an image of the past that is – Faithful to the evidence you have as filtered through what you can perceive of both the biases and the problems of the source material and your own biases. And it's a interpretation. It's a reconstruction.
But it's a lot like science where you're in a process of constantly reevaluating it and saying, okay, here's some new evidence. How do I work this into the picture? How do I now adjust it? And that's what's fun. I mean, it's a mystery. You're being a detective and trying to reconstruct and to understand a society. And it's even more fun where it's, yeah, you have to try to empathize.
Empathy is a great human thing, to empathize with people who are not yourself. And we should do this all the time with just the people we encounter, but this is what we're doing with ancient civilizations. And as I talked about earlier, sometimes you'll feel great sympathy there. Sometimes you'll feel incomprehension.
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