Remembering and Forgetting the Ancient City

Javier Martínez Jiménez, Sam Ottewill-Soulsby

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781789258172
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Storia dell'antica Roma

The Greco-Roman world is identified in the modern mind by its cities. This includes both specific places such as Athens and Rome, but also an instantly recognizable style of urbanism wrought in marble and lived in by teeming tunic-clad crowds. Selective and misleading this vision may be, but it speaks to the continuing importance these ancient cities have had in the centuries that followed and the extent to which they define the period in subsequent memory. Although there is much that is mysterious about them, the cities of the Roman Mediterranean are, for the most part, historically known. That the names and pasts of these cities remain known to us is the product of an extraordinary process of remembering and forgetting stretching back to antiquity that took place throughout the former Roman world. This volume tackles this subject of the survival and transformation of the ancient city through memory, drawing upon the methodological and theoretical lenses of memory studies and resilience theory to view the way the Greco-Roman city lived and vanished for the generations that separate the present from antiquity. This book analyzes the different ways in which urban communities of the post-Antique world have tried to understand and relate to the ancient city on their own terms, examining it as a process of forgetting as well as remembering. Many aspects of the ancient city were let go as time passed, but those elements that survived, that were actively remembered, have shaped the many understandings of what it was. In order to do so, this volume assembles specialists in multiple fields to bring their perspectives to bear on the subject through eleven case studies that range from late Antiquity to the mid-twentieth century, and from the Iberian Peninsula to Iran. Through the examination of archaeological remains, changing urban layouts and chronicles, travel guides and pamphlets, they track how the ancient city was made useful or consigned to oblivion.

Chapter 1

Zimbabwe and Rome: Remembering and forgetting ancient cities

Sam Ottewill-Soulsby and Javier Martínez Jiménez

For a site or monument to retain its significance across time, it must be the subject of continual reinvestment; that is to say, it must be modified and transformed by others who take on its legacy, even if they distort it. Memory is the condition, not the negation nor the opposite, of history.¹

These observations by François-Xavier Fauvelle appear in the introduction to his history of medieval Africa, The Golden Rhinoceros. He notes that one of the challenges of writing such a history is the lack of any such continuity of memory among many of the great cities of sub-Saharan Africa in the period. An example of this is the extraordinary remains of the city known as Great Zimbabwe, which flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the other ‘Zimbabwe-type’ settlements distributed on the Zimbabwe Plateau.² The first European explorer to closely examine the site of Great Zimbabwe in 1871, Karl Mauch, was awed by what he found, but frustrated by the lack of knowledge or interest in the remains shown by the local Shona people.³ Later scholars interested in the history of these remains have attempted to employ oral sources from the Shona, with some success, but the results are controversial.⁴ Something of the difficulty is revealed by the name given to the city, commonly translated as ‘houses of stone’, suggesting a relationship to the site predicated largely on the most obvious physical remains rather than an enduring link to the inhabitants of the city. In the absence of continuous memory, outside narratives have been applied, beginning with Mauch, who attributed the city to King Solomon, whose builders must have raised the city for the Queen of Sheba.⁵ Others saw in the walls of the city the hands of the Egyptians, or the Phoenicians, or the Arabs, peoples with a respectable pedigree of city-building familiar to the observers. In more recent years they have become symbols of African civilisation and achievement, with the ‘houses of stone’ lending their name to the country they are found in as part of a rejection of the Rhodesian colonial past.⁶

This volume is about ancient cities in the Mediterranean. Yet we begin far away from it because the high veld of southern Africa offers a viewpoint to grasp how unusual this classical or Greco-Roman city is. The cities of the Roman Mediterranean are, for the most part, historically known. Although there is much that is mysterious about them, we have their names, sometimes preserved in daughter languages, sometimes rediscovered through inscriptions in writings we can read and understand. For many of those cities we also have their stones. The essential archaeological labour which is the chief source of our growing knowledge of the Greco-Roman city takes place in conversation with the words of the inhabitants of these cities, whether from learned texts and histories, solemn official inscriptions or from ribald graffiti. Unlike Great Zimbabwe, places like Rome or Leptis Magna or Petra can be understood from the inside view of the past as well as the outside view of the present. Such a comparison is not intended to aggrandise the Roman past at the expense of that of Zimbabwe, for memory is not inherently virtuous. Rather it is meant to make it clear that there is a historical question here that needs an answer.

As Fauvelle observed, the key difference is memory. The Roman city has been continually remembered while those of Zimbabwe – and here we could add Mohenjo-Daro and Teotihuacán and a hundred other cities across the world – have not.⁷ Much of our knowledge of the classical city comes from the work of scholars in the last few centuries. The steady accumulation of knowledge and understanding built by generations of increasingly technically skilled and methodologically sophisticated practitioners standing on the work of their predecessors has resulted in a deeper comprehension of the ancient city than was previously conceivable. But this was made possible because over the course of the past two millennia there has never not been someone interested in the memory of the ancient city. The texts we employ were consciously preserved and used and studied, creating a continuous thread of memory, even when peoples who were not invested in the classical past came and went.

It is with the survival of the ancient city via memory that this volume is concerned. As many of the chapters will demonstrate, the preservation of the memory of the classical city was by no means inevitable. An example of what forgetting the ancient city looks like may be found in the Old English elegy, ‘The Ruin’, which describes (most probably) the ruins of Roman Bath:⁸

Wondrous is this masonry, shattered by the Fates, the fortifications have given way, the buildings raised by giants are crumbling.⁹

The city is unnamed and its Romanness unspecified and forgotten. For the poet, their bathhouses and ‘wondrous walls’ were both the alien ‘work of giants’ and achingly recognisable in their ‘many mead-halls filled with human-joys’. The tension between foreign and familiar provides much of the energy of the poem, with a universal experience being brought out of contact with a lost and distant past. It is quite possible that the author of ‘The Ruin’ was familiar with classical culture, yet their description shows how even a literate society could potentially forget the Greco-Roman city, reducing their ruins to ‘houses of stone’, to be conjured but not remembered in a context where all standing stone buildings were inherited from this mysterious past.¹⁰ Many of the chapters in this volume are concerned with times and spaces where the Roman city was forgotten. These histories of forgetting are just as interesting and worthy of study as the histories of memory considered elsewhere. As some of the chapters in this book demonstrate, the Islamic world is particularly relevant as a place where the memory of Rome could run thin. The example of Great Zimbabwe is once again instructive here. We will encounter Solomon among the ruins of North Africa and on the Parthenon in Athens.

Continuous inhabitation of the city does not guarantee the survival of its memory. This point is made clear in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, where the Monkey-People squat in the Lost City:

The monkeys called the place their city, and pretended to despise the Jungle-People because they lived in the forest. And yet they never knew what the buildings were made for nor how to use them.¹¹

The monkeys’ claim to the city is rendered hollow by their inability to remember it. When they attempt to make the space their own by rearranging the plaster and stone, their efforts are scuppered because they promptly forget what they have done:

They explored all the passages and dark tunnels in the palace and the hundreds of little dark rooms, but they never remembered what they had seen and what they had not; and so drifted about in ones and twos or crowds telling each other that they were doing as men did.¹²

The city is lost because people who built the city, who lived in it and made it their own, are gone and forgotten. The stones have no meaning because they have no memories, and no new ones are being made to replace them.¹³

In attempting to understand the enduring memory of the ancient city, we can draw upon the voluminous scholarship of the field of memory studies.¹⁴ Marlena Whiting and Elizabeth Key Fowden in particular consider in their contributions the ways in which topography encouraged and reinforced communal memory, thereby creating complex relationships with the ancient city. Such consideration of the construction of memory within historical landscape goes back to the accepted founder of the field. In his La Topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte, the great Maurice Halbwachs explored the way a shared memory of a fictional past was constructed for sites across the Levant on which Christian communities across the world created their common histories.¹⁵ This importance of place was at the heart of the revival in interest in Halbwachs’ work in the 1980s, when Pierre Nora travelled France to investigate the way a national history was built around places of memory.¹⁶ That the city served as a particularly good refuge for memory has long been understood from this perspective.¹⁷ Memory in the specifically ancient world has not been neglected, thanks to the labour of scholars such as Jan and Aleida Assmann and Karl Galinsky.¹⁸ The importance of memories of the Greco-Roman past on subsequent generations has enjoyed much fruitful exploration.

Much of this work has focussed on sites of memory, reminiscent of the urban mnemonics used by Cicero and other classical rhetors to pin the points of memory onto a succession of physical elements of the city.¹⁹ This volume is concerned with something slightly different, the memory of an entire city as a community, the space where, in Fauvelle’s words, memory conditions history. In these memories whole cities live because, as present reminders of the past, they exist within the urban space, either physical or cognitive. This multi-dimensional understanding of place allows cities to understand themselves with temporal depth.²⁰ In order to understand the role played by memory in the survival of the ancient city, many of the contributors have embraced resilience theory. Emerging from the study of ecology, resilience theory provides a model for thinking about how systems adapt to change.²¹ While in the study of the human past resilience has been employed more by archaeologists than by historians, people working with ideas and written texts may also benefit from some of its modes of thinking.²²

Resilience theory places great emphasis on resources that can be drawn upon and exploited at different stages of the cycle. The memory of the ancient city might be one such resource that can be drawn upon by subsequent inhabitants of the city. In the case of the ancient city, some elements, like large buildings, may prove resilient because of their size and their secondary usefulness; some others, like urban councils, may be resilient because their role in managing the city and its community. Some others may prove to be resilient only after being reimagined under a modern light, like urban hygiene. Louise Blanke and Alan Walmsley develop this point in their contribution to this volume, offering a radical statement for the rewriting of the history of the eastern Medi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. Zimbabwe and Rome: Remembering and forgetting ancient cities
• Resilience and memory
• Repurposed cities