SourceS for frameworkS of world HiStory

SOURCES FOR FRAMEWORKS OF WORLD HISTORY 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 1 12/11/13 7:58 PM 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 2 12/11/13 7:58 PM SOURCES FOR FRAMEWORKS OF WORLD HISTORY VO L U M E O N E : TO 1550 Lynne Miles-Morillo WABASH COLLEGE Stephen Morillo WABASH COLLEGE NEW YORK OXFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 3 12/11/13 7:58 PM Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2015 by Oxford University Press For titles covered by Section 112 of the US Higher Education Opportunity Act, please visit www.oup.com/us/he for the latest information about pricing and alternate formats. Published by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 http://www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-0-19-933227-4 OUP to supply Printing number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 4 12/11/13 7:58 PM To students everywhere who are doing history. (And a debt of gratitude to our patient progeny, who lived with this project for many moons indeed.) 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 5 12/11/13 7:58 PM 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 6 12/11/13 7:58 PM SOURCEBOOK TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME 1 INTRODUCTION A.1. A.2. xi Early Humans and the Origins of Complex Systems: to 8000 B C E 1 1.1 Images: Early Hominins 2 1.2 Map: Global Language Groups 3 1.3 Image: Hunter-Gatherers 4 1.4 Images: Cave Paintings 4 1.5 Steven Mithen, “Last of the Cave Painters” 5 Patterns and Parameters: Development of the Agrarian World since 10,000 B C E 9 2.1 Images: Ötzi the Ice Man 9 2.2 Ground Plans: Early Settlements 10 2.3 2.2a Çatal Höyük 2.2b Early Proto-Indo-European settlements 10 10 2.2c Mohenjo Daro 2.2d A Temple Ziggurat 11 11 Epidemic Disease 11 2.3a Plague in Athens from Thucydides, The Peloponnesian Wars 11 2.3b The Plague of Justinian from Procopius, History of the Wars 14 2.3c “Rat Death” in China, 1792 17 vii 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 7 12/11/13 7:58 PM sources for frameworks of world history viii A.3. A.4. The World of Early Complex Societies: 4000 to 600 3.1 Oracle Bone Inscriptions 19 3.2 The Code of Hammurabi 20 3.3 A Peace Treaty between Ramesses II and Hattusili III 3.4 The Hymn to Purusha 27 3.5 Harappan Unicorn Seal 29 The Axial Age: 600 to 300 4.1 A.5. Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease 31 4.1b Yellow Emperor’s Classic on Medicine 4.3 The Baghavad Gita 33 35 38 4.4 The Buddha, The Four Noble Truths 40 4.5 Zoroastrianism: Yasna 19 42 4.6 The Bible: The Book of Isaiah 43 4.7 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 45 The Age of Empires: 500 BCE to 400 CE 49 Pliny the Younger: Correspondence with Emperor Trajan 5.2 Res Gestae Divi Augusti 52 5.3 Asoka, Rock and Pillar Edicts 5.4 Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian 5.5 Huan Kuan: Discourses on Salt and Iron 59 49 55 57 Societies and Peoples: Everyday Life in the Agrarian World 6.1 Ban Zhao, Lessons for Women 65 6.2 The Code of Manu 68 6.3 The Life of St. Thomaïs of Lesbos 70 6.4 The Byzantine Farmer’s Law 73 65 Land Reform in Song China 76 6.5a Su Hsün, The Land System 6.5b Wang An-Shih, Memorial on the Crop Loans Measure 78 The Salvation Religions: 200 7.1 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 8 24 31 4.1a Confucius, Analects 6.5 A.7. 19 Medicine 31 4.2 5.1 A.6. BCE BCE Mahayana Buddhism 77 BCE to 900 CE 81 81 7.1a The Lotus Sutra 81 7.1b Mou Tzu, The Disposition of Error 85 12/11/13 7:58 PM Sourcebook Table of Contents 7.2 Devotional Hinduism: The Vishnu Purana 7.3 Christianity 89 7.4 A.8. 7.3a Romans 1, 5, 10; Matthew 5, 6 89 7.3b Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks 92 Islam 94 7.4a Quran, Selections 94 7.4b The Pact of Umar 98 Intersections 101 8.1a Guibert of Nogent, Revolt of the Laon commune 8.1b Guild Regulations 106 101 8.2 Wise Practitioners: The Arabian Nights 107 8.3 Informed Officials: Zhau Rugua, Description of the Barbarous Peoples 8.4 Worldly Travelers: Ibn Battuta, Travels 112 114 Traditional Worlds I: Inner Circuit Eurasia, 400–1100 9.1 9.2 A.10. 87 Contested Intersections: Networks, Hierarchies, and Traditional Worlds to 1500 C E 101 8.1 A.9. ix The Steppes 119 9.1a Han Shu: Descriptions of the Xiongnu 9.1b Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 123 China 119 119 125 9.2a Du Fu, Poems 9.2b Chu Hsi, Further Reflections on the Things at Hand 125 126 9.3 Islam: Al-Jahiz, The Merits of the Turks 9.4 India: Abdul Raiban al-Biruni, Description of India 131 9.5 Byzantium 129 134 9.5a Digenes Akritas 9.5b The Russian Primary Chronicle 134 139 Traditional Worlds II: Outer Circuit Afro-Eurasia, 400–1100 143 10.1 Japan: Murasaki Shikubu, Tale of Genji 143 10.2 Ghana: Abu Ubayd Allah al-Bakri, The Book of Routes and Realms 146 10.3 Western Europe: William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi 149 10.4 Mali: Sundiata 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 9 153 12/11/13 7:58 PM x sources for frameworks of world history A.11. Traditional Worlds III: Separate Circuits, 400–1500 157 11.1 Popol Vuh 157 11.2 Bernard de Sahagun, General History of New Spain 11.3 Diego Durán, Book of the Gods and Rites 160 163 11.4 Pedro de Cieza de Leon, Chronicles 167 A.12. War, States, Religions: 1100–1400 12.1 First Crusade 171 171 12.1a The Siege of Antioch: Fulcher of Chartres, Chronicle 171 12.1b The Siege of Antioch: Ibn Al-Athir, The Perfect History 176 12.2 Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople 12.3 The Poem of the Cid 12.4 The Tale of the Heike 179 182 186 12.5 The Investiture Controversy 188 12.5a Dictatus Papae 188 12.5b Letter of Henry IV to Gregory VII 189 12.6 Magna Carta 190 A.13. The Crisis of the Mongol Age: 1200–1400 13.1 The Mongols 195 195 13.1a The Secret History of the Mongols 195 13.1b Ibn al-Athir, The Perfect History 199 13.2 The Plague 201 13.2a Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah 201 13.2b Ahmad al-Maqrizi, The Plague in Cairo 203 13.2c Boccaccio, Decameron 204 13.3 Tradition Reasserted: Dee Goong An (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee) A.14. Innovation and Tradition: 1350–1550 208 213 14.1 Western Europe in Crisis 213 14.1a The Statue of Laborers of 1351 213 14.1b Froissart, Chronicles 215 14.2 China at Sea 218 14.2a Zheng He, Inscription of World Voyages 218 14.2b Ma Huan, Overall Survey of the Ocean Shores 221 14.3 Europe at Sea 223 14.3a Vasco da Gama, A Journal of the First Voyage 223 14.3b Christopher Columbus, Letter 226 14.4 Framing Innovation: Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 10 229 12/11/13 7:58 PM INTRODUCTION his is a book of primary sources designed to accompany Frameworks of World History. Primary sources are the basic working material for working historians, including student historians. Historical sources are pieces of the past that have come down to us today and that allow us to reconstruct, at least partially, a model of the time and place of their origin. They are the evidence that historians use to construct hypotheses of the past. But sources do not really speak for themselves: historians must interpret them, and historical interpretation involves many possible steps. Two sources can corroborate each other, if they agree, assuming that they are truly independent sources (i.e., that one is not a copy of the other or that both are copies of a lost original). Interpreting any source requires an explanatory model of the world to guide that interpretation. The Frameworks model of networks, hierarchies, and cultural frames and screens is one such model, and the text makes the model explicit so that you can examine it, determine whether you agree with it, and use it to interpret the evidence in this book. You can also invert the use of the evidence and the model by using the evidence to test and refine the Frameworks model. That’s how science works—including historical interpretation. Let’s help you get into this process by exploring two questions. First, what is a primary source? Second, how do you go about interpreting a primary source? T W H AT I S A P R I M A RY S O U RC E ? Historians generally talk about two kinds of sources, primary sources and secondary sources. “Primary” and “secondary” do not refer to the importance of a given source, either in general or for the purposes of a particular historical investigation. In the most basic terms, primary sources are sources from the time, place, and people under investigation. Thus, Abbot Guibert of Nogent’s autobiography, which he wrote himself during his life in the early 1100s (to be utterly clear to the point of silliness), is a fine primary source for Guibert’s life and even for the events he reports on and the people he tells us about. We can even consider him a primary source for aspects of the First Crusade, even though he did not witness it personally, xi 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 11 12/11/13 7:58 PM xii sources for frameworks of world history because the information he gives us come from the time of the First Crusade. When his reports are secondhand, however, we must be skeptical of the reliability of his information more than we are of his personal narrative, and other sources, ideally eyewitnesses, should corroborate any such information in his story. (We are skeptical of the reliability of his personal narrative as well, but one person’s own biases about his or her own life are easier to assess than the biases of any secondhand information.) This definition of a primary source is idealized, of course. Things are not always simple or straightforward. Sometimes we accept certain accounts as primary sources because they are as close to the time period as we can get. Our sources for the life of Alexander the Great include only a handful of truly primary sources: a brief inscription that mentions him in passing, a handful of coins he issued, and the archaeological remains of his activities, including cities and, in one spectacular case, a coastline that he altered. (He built a causeway out into the Mediterranean during his siege of the island city of Tyre in 332 BCE. It remained after the siege, silted up, and the island is now a peninsula.) But the major narratives we have of his life and campaigns are Roman, they date from several hundred years after Alexander’s time, and they do not show a particularly good understanding of his time. They refer to and sometimes even incorporate bits and summaries of narratives written during Alexander’s time. We still accept these Roman sources as “primary sources” for Alexander’s life because they are the closest we can get. What we’ve just said about sources for Alexander also demonstrates that primary sources need not be written sources. Anything from the time and place we are studying can be a primary source: works of art, archaeological finds, scientific data about the natural world (the natural world being, after all, an aspect of a time and place), and so forth. Even written evidence comes in many forms beyond self-conscious narratives. Government documents, fictional writing, daily newspapers, and mundane bits of writing such as grocery lists or restaurant menus—all of these can be primary sources. Primary can of course still have its ordinary, non-history–specific meaning of “chief” or “main”: “The primary source for my paper on Abraham Lincoln is the movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” Primary here indicates that the film was the main source of information you consulted. However, this would not a primary source in terms of types of historical sources (nor would using primarily that source be a very good idea). What then is a secondary source, if so many things can count as primary sources? Secondary sources are sources that discuss the topic, the time, place, and people under study, but on the basis of primary sources or of other second-hand accounts. Thus, if you were writing a paper about Alexander the Great, any biography of him written by a current day historian (indeed, any biography written after the Roman accounts that we characterized above as “just about almost primary”) would be a secondary source, no matter how useful, informative, or wellwritten a secondary source. And of course, like primary sources, not all secondary sources are created equal. A scholarly biography of Alexander might be a good secondary source; a medieval epic poem about Alexander consisting mostly of legends or a movie such as Oliver Stone’s 2004 Alexander? Not so much. To introduce a further complication, however: what if your research topic were on “the historical reception of Alexander the Great from medieval times to the present”, in which you examine what people at different times and places thought 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 12 12/11/13 7:58 PM Introduction xiii of Alexander, whether what they thought were true or not? In that case, both that legendencrusted medieval epic and today’s Hollywood dreck would be excellent primary sources. And what if your research topic is something going on today (or close enough to be called “contemporary history”—topics involving people who are still alive)? In that case you gain the possibility of oral interviews, news footage, and so forth, as primary sources. But another historian’s synthesis of such information, even though it is from the time of the topic, has already become a secondary source. Journalism, sometimes called “the first draft of history,” lies in an interesting gray zone here. Confused? Let’s sum up. Primary sources are sources whose information about a topic comes, as closely as possible, from the time, place, and participants in the topic. For most purposes, that will work for you. But this definition says nothing about the quality of the information a source offers. To evaluate that, we need to say a few things about how to read and evaluate a primary source. H OW TO R E A D A P R I M A RY S O U RC E There are, as we have noted, many different kinds of primary sources. The interpretation of some primary sources, such as the archaeological remnants of buildings and, even more, ancient bones and other natural substances, requires at least some specialized knowledge. We will focus here on the most common kinds of sources selected for inclusion in this book, written documents. The principles for reading these works for many visual sources as well, especially ones such as paintings or drawings that tell a story. Reading a source is like interrogating a witness in a trial. Reading a source productively— so that its story gets you closer to understanding “what happened”—requires answering two fundamental questions. First, how reliable is the source, that is, does its story give us a reasonably accurate representation of the reality it describes? Second, what information can we derive from the source? These questions of assessment and interpretation are tied together. Assessing the reliability of a source that purports to tell a factual story involves answering the same questions you would ask of a living witness. Who is the witness? In other words, who wrote or compiled the source? Sometimes we can’t answer this question precisely, as with a routine government document (author: nameless bureaucrat) or an oral epic poem (author: many people in a culture). But we can get a sense of what kind of person or persons created the source. When and where did the author create the source? Were they close, temporally and chronologically, to the events the source describes? Generally, the closer the better. Finally, what can we know about why the author wrote the document? What audience did the author intend to address and for what reason? How do these factors shape the story the author tells? What you are trying to figure out with such questions is what the author’s perspective is and whether the author has a bias. As the “Issues in Doing World History” box in Chapter 27 of Frameworks says about historians, everyone has a perspective that comes from where that person exists in time, place, social position, and so forth. The world will look different to an elite male author than to even a privileged woman, to any peasant, to a slave, or to a member of an ethnic or religious minority. That an author has a perspective does not mean the source is unreliable. Perspective is inevitable: a historian has to account for what 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 13 12/11/13 7:58 PM xiv sources for frameworks of world history a source author’s perspective allows him or her to see well, and what conversely that perspective might obscure. An author with a bias, on the other hand, is intentionally telling a distorted story, such as an author writing a very partisan account from within a heated political battle. Once you have done a rough assessment of the reliability of the source, you can begin to extract information from your witness. (These two steps often occur at the same time, of course, because evidence from within the source can tell you about the source’s reliability.) What can the source tell us? One basic division among sources is between those that purport to tell a factual story and those that are overtly fictional. In some ways, fictional sources are easier to deal with (including sources that purport to tell a true story but obviously do not), because you can stop worrying about the “truth” of the story. Instead, if the story comes from the time and place you are studying and is reasonably representative of its time (and yes, that’s another hard question), you can generally get two sorts of information fairly easily. First, what was “normal” at the time in terms of everyday life? This is the social history question. You see this by ignoring the main story and looking at the background details, the ones that are there because that’s what the author assumed was normal about the world without thinking much about it. Suppose, for example, you read the following passage in a murder mystery. Investigator: Where were you on Thursday evening last week between 7 and 10? Suspect: I was home watching The Simpsons on TV. What do we know? We know nothing about what the suspect might actually have been doing. Maybe he was at home, maybe he was out committing the heinous murder at the heart of the plot. He’s an unreliable witness. But his very unreliability means that he will want his story about what he was doing to sound plausible. Thus, we know about the people in this society at this time that they had an easily observed system of timekeeping, that they had TVs, that watching TV was a normal activity, that The Simpsons was probably a well-known show, and that living in a private home was probably normal. So we know quite a bit. The other thing we can learn from fictional sources is even more obvious. What did the society believe? This is the cultural history question. From our brief passage above we can infer something about beliefs regarding privacy, for example. But even more, if we step back and observe that the passage came from a best-selling mystery novel, we can infer that mysteries were a form of popular entertainment. You can then interpret the whole story for at least some of the beliefs, concerns, and outlooks of the culture from which the story came. You can ask these same questions about nonfiction sources. But you can also ask further questions about the particular events the source narrates. What happened? Who wanted what to happen to whom? Why? When it comes to such factual questions, there are ways to assess how reliable this particular information is. The two main ways are to test the source against physical reality and against what other sources say. The physical reality test is especially good at evaluating the often unreliable numbers in older sources: Herodotus claims that the Persian king Xerxes marched a million men across a pontoon bridge on his way to invading Greece. Not possible. Testing against other sources can mean using not just individual sources, but what other similar sources say in general. This is what the Frameworks model is: a generalization based on many primary sources. So test a source against the model. Does what it describes fit 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 14 12/11/13 7:58 PM Introduction xv the model? If so, that suggests a reliable source. If it doesn’t, perhaps the source is unreliable, or perhaps the model needs some modification. Your call. Let’s finish this with a brief example of extracting information from a source. These are a well known pair of judgments from The Code of Hammurabi: 196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out. 199. If he put out the eye of a man’s slave, or break the bone of a man’s slave, he shall pay one-half of its value. This is the famous “eye for an eye” judgment and a less well-known but similar clause. What do they tell us? The easy answers are that the Babylonians dealt with crime by means of physical punishment, and that their society had slaves, and that the punishment for a crime varied with the status of the victim. In other words, this was a society with class divisions. Other pieces of the Code confirm and extend those conclusions, which fit the general patterns of early state-level complex societies. What else can we learn? Well, we know that the “code” looks on close reading more like a set of judgments or precedents than a set of laws, so we can safely assume that the crimes mentioned not only happened, but probably happened frequently enough that is was worth the king’s while to advertise the punishment. They were carved into a massive pillar set in the middle of Hammurabi’s city. We can therefore infer that at least some people in the society could read. Those who couldn’t, we can guess, might have been impressed by the size and complexity of the pillar. The Code therefore served to display royal power—again, a common theme for early states (and later ones, too). There is even more to learn from these passages (see Chapter 3 of Frameworks for what this passage says about limiting vengeance, for example). The sources collected here, in other words, are rich in information about many of the people and places of the past. Dig in and enjoy doing history. 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 15 12/11/13 7:58 PM 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 16 12/11/13 7:58 PM SOURCES FOR FRAMEWORKS OF WORLD HISTORY 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 17 12/11/13 7:58 PM 00-Morillo-FM-V1.indd 18 12/11/13 7:58 PM