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Double, Double, Toil, and Trouble: the Ergonomics of African History1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

David Henige
David Henige*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
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Extract

The longtime-accepted equation of Xian with the Siamese kingdom of Suhkothai having been discarded now …

Knowledge and speculation would appear to have been confused.”

“Considering the enormous output … of theories concerning the Assyrian kings and their chronology—by far the greater art of which has proved untenable in the light of later discoveries and most of which, as we can see now, might well have

been avoided by refraining from premature speculation …

As I was growing up—when the automobile was becoming a standard accoutrement—two large car parks were in the downtown area of the city where I lived. These were not street level but were laid out 15 to 25 feet below the streets, and thousands of cubic yards of dirt had been removed to create these. Since then, much reconstruction (“urban renewal”) has occurred in the area, which entailed putting back just about as much dirt as had been removed earlier. Doubtless, each project required an enormous amount of time, labor, and money, yet the end result was a configuration very much like that which had existed before one minute, one bead of sweat, and one dollar had been spent. Some might regard this as simply an accommodation of differing needs for different times, whereas others might wonder how necessary it all had been—why, for instance, was it thought useful to render these car parks subterranean in the first place. Was the dirt needed elsewhere? Or were they make-work public works projects during economic downtimes? In short, what was the point? After all, the car parks were surrounded by imposing concrete walls, ramps were constructed to gain access; even the floors were concrete to neutralize the elements.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 34 , 2007 , pp. 103 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2007

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Footnotes

1

This paper was first presented at the Wisconsin@45 Symposium held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 2005.

References

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4 Poebel, Arno, “The Assyrian King List from Khorsabad,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2(1943), 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The occasion for this observation was the publication of the first complete list of Assyrian kings. Hitherto, the names of these rulers had tended to emerge sporadically one or a few at a time, whereas the Khorsabad list had 117 names, each one conveniently arranged in chronological order. It would be no exaggeration to estimate that the output based on pre-Khorsabad information aggregated to tens of thousands of pages over about a century.

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28 It is just this fear of unmasking my ignorance of the principles of historical linguistics that keeps me from wondering at greater length how Ehret, Chistopher (The Civilizations of Africa: a History to 1800) [Oxford, 2002], 15)Google Scholar can make the astonishing claim that “two of the early African religions … were distinctly monotheistic thousands of years before the idea of monotheism ever occurred to Middle Easterners of Europeans,” and support it with a casual and unexplained reference to a single word. Is it no longer the case that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?

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30 Webster, David, “The Not So Peaceful Civilization: a Review of Maya Warfare,” Journal of World Prehistory 14(2000), 65–119CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and the many sources cited there.

31 Ehret, , Civilizations, 2Google Scholar. Earlier, , in his An African Classical Age (Charlottesville, 1998), 144–46Google Scholar, Ehret tempered his discourse somewhat and offered the glimmerings of an argument.

32 For a discussion of some consequences of this see Henige, David, “The Implausibility of Plausibility/the Plausibility of Implausibility,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 30(2004), 311–35Google Scholar.

33 Redford, D.B., “The Writing of the History of Ancient Egypt” in Egyptology at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hawass, Zahi (3 vols: Cairo, 2003) 2:7Google Scholar.

34 To quote a biblical archeologist on the matter.