Homework answers / question archive / Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han China* siep stuurman Erasmus University Rotterdam istory as a critical account of the past and a means of self-knowledge and political enlightenment was independently invented in H two civilizations in ancient Eurasia: China and Greece

Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han China* siep stuurman Erasmus University Rotterdam istory as a critical account of the past and a means of self-knowledge and political enlightenment was independently invented in H two civilizations in ancient Eurasia: China and Greece

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Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han China* siep stuurman Erasmus University Rotterdam istory as a critical account of the past and a means of self-knowledge and political enlightenment was independently invented in H two civilizations in ancient Eurasia: China and Greece. It received its two best-known canonical formulations in the Shiji (Records of the Scribe, written ca. 100 – 90 b.c.e.) of Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Ch’ien) in the former Han dynasty in China, and in Herodotus’s Histories (Inquiries, written ca. 450 – 425 b.c.e.) in the Greek communities of the eastern Mediterranean after the Persian Wars. The Greek city-states were vibrant newcomers to the established world of the ancient civilizations of western Eurasia, while China was the most advanced civilization of eastern Eurasia. The independent development of history in two Eurasian civilizations provides us with a fascinating comparative case in the world history of ideas. History represented a new way for a society to reflect on itself, com* Part of the research for this article was done when I was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. I wish to thank Jonathan Israel, Joseph McDermott, and Carol Gluck for enlightening conversations about European and Asian history. I owe a special debt to Nicola di Cosmo for sharing his vast knowledge of Chinese-Xiongnu relations with me. I also want to thank the Leiden sinologist Axel Schneider for valuable advice. Finally, I am grateful to my Rotterdam colleague Maria Grever and to the anonymous reader of the Journal of World History for their helpful comments on previous versions of this essay. Journal of World History, Vol. 19, No. 1 © 2008 by University of Hawai‘i Press 1 2 journal of world history, march 2008 peting with older religious, poetic, and philosophical modes of selfunderstanding. More than those older genres, history investigated the contingencies of time and place. It made it possible to explore frontiers and to reflect on the differences between one’s own way of life and the customs of foreigners. It is surely significant that in Greece as well as in China, the new discourse of history comprised a large amount of geography and ethnography. My comparison of Herodotus and Sima Qian focuses on the ethnographic parts of their histories, in particular on Herodotus’s description of the Scythians and Sima Qian’s treatment of the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu). In both cases, historians belonging to a sedentary civilization confronted the nomadic culture of the northern peoples inhabiting the great band of steppe lands that traverses Eurasia from west to east. I will discuss their nomadic ethnographies in the context of their views of empire and cultural difference, as well as in connection with the temporalities underpinning their historical narrative. The dialectic of empire, ethnography, and history powerfully frames these histories. The writing of history is always an exercise in self-definition. More than anything else, it is the confrontation with others that compels people to question their own identity. That is what makes imperialism so central to my comparison, whether empire is a menace from without, as in Herodotus, or a perilous course the fate of one’s own civilization depends on, as in Sima Qian. Both Herodotus and Sima Qian were fascinated by the conditions and morality of empires, giving much thought to cultural difference, and trying out formulations akin to what we today call cultural relativism. The problematic of empire incited both historians to compose a history of “the known world.” Their societies had reached a stage when it was no longer possible to understand one’s civilization without taking the measure of its wider environment. This, then, is the problematic that will guide my comparative investigation. A few theoretical observations may be useful at this point. The ethnographies in the Histories and the Shiji are instances of what we may call the anthropological turn. Our historians inform their readers about the way of life of “others” living in foreign lands. The anthropological turn happens when they attempt to understand those others “from within,” examining the functioning of their culture, instead of merely compiling a list of weird and outlandish customs. Now, the type of ethnography we encounter in Herodotus and Sima Qian has frequently been labeled under the generic notions of “othering” and “Orientalism” (“Occidentalism” would be more appropriate in Sima Qian’s case). In an influential book, François Hartog has analyzed Herodotus’s Stuurman: Herodotus and Sima Qian 3 Scythian ethnography as an exemplary case of othering, while Owen Lattimore has long ago deplored Sima Qian’s “strongly conventional” ideas about the steppe nomads.1 Over the past decades, the diagnosis of “othering” has been made about virtually every European text discussing non-European cultures, and there is no good reason why a similar evaluation could not apply to Chinese accounts of “barbarians.” The problem with such readings is not that they are “untrue.” There obviously is a great deal of “othering” in these texts. My objection to an overly exclusive focus on “othering” is that it makes us miss the significance of the anthropological turn. To get the problem in sharper focus we must realize that there was a way of looking at foreigners before the anthropological turn. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann has called our attention to the habit of the Egyptians of the Old and Middle Kingdom of “calling all non-Egyptians ‘vile enemies,’ even when there were bonds of amity—established by treaties or political marriages— with the ethnic groups thus designated.” The Egyptians equated Egypt with the meaningfully ordered world. Beyond its borders lived “absolute aliens with whom any relations would be unthinkable.” 2 Against this background, much of what is called “othering” represents a real accomplishment. That Herodotus and Sima Qian typify the components of other cultures in a series of contrasts with their own way of life is not in itself very significant. It could hardly be otherwise. Any account of remote lands seeks to understand the unknown by comparing it with the known. What is significant is that they investigate the functionality of other cultures as interlocking systems, and inquire how the others “look back” at the civilized “center.” That is a new approach. Even when these ethnographies contain negative judgments and stereotypical representations, they present us with the first step toward an appraisal of the rationality of foreign ways. In this connection, it is of vital importance to see frontiers as zones of creative interaction, and not just as sites of hostility and prejudice. The widespread adoption of “othering” as a theoretical framework in intellectual history has led to an underestimation of the critical and universalistic impulses in “frontier texts.” The mutual awareness that is a necessary prelude to reflecting upon the nature and value of other cultures makes for the thinkability of a common humanity transcend1 François Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote: Essai sur la représentation de l’autre (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), p. 448. 2 Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), p. 151. 4 journal of world history, march 2008 ing cultural boundaries. The frontier, taken in this sense, is the real or imagined locus of rejection and acceptance, incomprehension and mutual understanding. We should bear in mind that this is not an all-or-nothing game. The denial of other peoples’ humanity and the recognition of their equality represent two extreme cases. Much, and perhaps most, of history is played out on the continuum between the two extremes. Two “Fathers of History” With some justification, both Herodotus and Sima Qian have been called “fathers of history” in their respective civilizations, but, as Grant Hardy observes, comparative studies of Greek and Chinese historiography are rare.3 The Histories, written in the late fifth century b.c.e., and the Shiji, written at the beginning of the first century b.c.e., were among the most influential books of history ever written. The Shiji stands at the beginning of the long Chinese tradition of historiography that continued through the entire imperial era. Subsequent Chinese historians, beginning with Ban Gu (Pan Ku) in the later Han dynasty, have frequently voiced criticisms of Sima Qian, but, as Burton Watson observes, they, as well as their readers, have always read, studied, and admired the Shiji.4 The case of Herodotus is different. He was widely read, and frequently criticized, in antiquity, but was not well known in 3 Grant Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 261 n. 2, mentions S. Y. Teng, “Herodotus and Ssu-ma Ch’ien: Two Fathers of History,” East and West 12 (1961): 233–40, and N. I. Konrad, “Polybius and Ssu-Ma Ch’ien,” Soviet Sociology 5 (1967): 37 – 58, to which must now be added David Schaberg, “Travel, Geography, and the Imperial Imagination in Fifth-Century Athens and Han China,” Comparative Literature 51 (1999): 152–91, and G. E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 5–20. Of these, Teng gives a brief introductory account, Konrad focuses on political cycles, Schaberg mainly compares Sima Qian and Thucydides, while Lloyd’s discussion privileges epistemological concerns. 4 Burton Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien: Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 38; see also William H. Nienhauser Jr., ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 689; and Stephen W. Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. xxi. Moreover, historiography has greatly influenced the evolution of other Chinese literary genres; see Anthony C. Yu, “History, Fiction and the Reading of Chinese Narrative,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 10 (1988 –1989): 1–19. Quotations from the Shiji, unless otherwise indicated, are from Burton Watson’s translation: Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, 3 vols., rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); references contain Shiji chapter number, relevant volume (Han I, Han II, Qin), and page. Stuurman: Herodotus and Sima Qian 5 medieval Europe, only to resume his career with Lorenzo Valla’s Latin translation in the fifteenth century.5 The canonization of Herodotus has thus not been a continuous process in time, nor did it represent a geographical or cultural unity. While we can consider Sima Qian a Chinese historian, who wrote about a Sinocentric world and saw himself as an inheritor and successor of the Chinese classics, Herodotus cannot stand for “Europe.” He was a historian of the Greek city-states, the Persian empire, western Asia, and Egypt. In the Histories, Europe is the name of a continent, but for Herodotus it did not denote a meaningful cultural tradition or intellectual canon.6 Insofar as Herodotus’s world had a cultural center, it was the Greek-speaking part of the Mediterranean. It follows that we must be careful not to project back later oppositions between China and Europe into our discussion of Herodotus and Sima Qian. The differences between ancient Greece and Han China are undeniable and important, but so are the instructive parallels between the two civilizations. We should pay equal attention to both. Moreover, we must take into account the specificity of intellectual history. The writings of Herodotus and Sima Qian present us with two varieties of historiography that originated in the eastern and western regions of Eurasia. Both were bold, innovative thinkers who conceived of history as a critical, explanatory discourse about political power that went beyond its traditional annalistic and mnemonic functions. It is thus entirely possible that we will find methodological and political similarities between them that transcend their different cultural backgrounds. Generic readings in terms of “Greekness” or “Chineseness” easily overlook such similarities. Herodotus’s Histories recount the history of the Greco-Persian Wars in the early decades of the fifth century b.c.e., against the backdrop of a history and ethnography of the world of western Asia and northern Africa. The rise and defeat of Persian imperialism and the maintenance of Greek independence are the main themes of his history. In the Shiji, Sima Qian presents a history of China from its mythical beginnings to the Han empire of his own lifetime, including large swaths of the 5 See Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 50 – 51. 6 To the Greeks, Europe represented a heterogeneous collection of lands and peoples. The Histories do not even contain a “synthesizing geographical description of Europe”: Wido Sieberer, Das Bild Europas in den Historien (Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 1995), p. 29; see also Martin Ninck, Die Entdeckung von Europa durch die Griechen (Basel: B. Schwabe & Co., 1945). 6 journal of world history, march 2008 history and ethnography of the frontier zones of the empire. The emergence of a unified empire out of the Warring States of pre-Qin China, the consolidation of the former Han, and the relations between the empire and the surrounding peoples are major themes of his history. To frame what follows, let us briefly review some elementary facts about the two historians. Herodotus was born before 480 b.c.e. to a well-to-do family in Halicarnassus on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor. It has been suggested that the family was of mixed Greek and Carian descent, but that is not certain.7 He received a thorough grounding in poetry, drama, and philosophy. At some point, he left for the island of Samos, then part of the Athenian confederacy, possibly because his family was expelled from Halicarnassus by the tyrant Lygdamis. He later returned to his place of birth, which had deposed its tyrant and joined the Athenian confederacy. In the 440s, Herodotus spent some years in Athens. Probably in 443, he moved to the newly founded Athenian colony at Thurii in southern Italy. There he died between 430 and 424. Herodotus’s places of residence thus covered a great part of the Greek world. Moreover, he traveled extensively, and in the Histories he frequently refers to firsthand oral and visual evidence of many lands. He claimed to have visited Egypt, Cyrenaica, Babylon, Phoenicia, and Scythia, but some students of Herodotus do not accept all of those claims. Though well connected, Herodotus seems never to have belonged to the inner circles of the political elite in any of the cities in which he resided. In a broad way, Herodotus sympathized with the Greeks, which is hardly surprising since the successful resistance of the Greek cities against Persian imperialism is his main subject, but he was not a partisan of any Greek city, not even of Athens, which he greatly admired for its paramount role in defeating the Persians. Several commentators have argued that his insistence on the hubris and inevitable decline of empires implied a censure of Athenian maritime imperialism that probably was not lost on his Greek readers who were living through the Peloponnesian War when Herodotus finished his work.8 Herodotus, then, was a man keenly interested in politics but not directly attached to state power. Accordingly, he wrote the Histories for the literate citi- 7 See James Romm, Herodotus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 49. 8 See, e.g., Charles W. Fornara, Herodotus: An Interpretative Essay (Oxford: Clerendon Press, 1971), pp. 46 – 58; John Moles, “Herodotus and Athens,” in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, ed. Egbert J. Bakker, Irene J. F. de Jong, and Hans van Wees (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 50 – 52. Stuurman: Herodotus and Sima Qian 7 zenry in the Greek world, and not at the behest of any particular city or prince. Contrasting with Herodotus’s relative political independence, the career of Sima Qian was from start to finish intertwined with the politics of the Han state under the ambitious and severe emperor Wu (r. 141– 87 b.c.e.). He was born in 145 b.c.e., near Longmen (“Dragon Gate”) on the Yellow River in North China. When he was five, his father, Sima Tan, obtained the position of Grand Astrologer at the imperial court in the Han capital Chang’an. However, neither Sima Tan nor his son was an official imperial historiographer. They had access to the palace archives, but Sima Tan’s historical work was a self-imposed, “private” project. And so it was with his son, who, complying with his father’s last wish, continued the latter’s history of China.9 In his youth, Sima Qian got a thorough education in the classics. “At the age of ten,” he later recalled, “he could read the old writings.” 10 At twenty-one he took up service as a gentleman of the palace. Like Herodotus, Sima Qian traveled widely, within China as well as in the borderlands to the south and north of the Han territories. In 110, he accompanied emperor Wu on an inspection tour of the northern frontier, a region of intermittent clashes and skirmishes with China’s most redoubtable enemies, the nomadic Xiongnu. Besides, he collected much knowledge about distant lands and people by interrogating travelers.11 In 108, he succeeded his father as Grand Astrologer, and in 104 he assisted the emperor with the reform of the calendar.12 Five years later, however, he suffered disgrace because he had spoken in defense of general Li Ling, who had surrendered to the Xiongnu after a heroic battle against numerically superior forces. Sima’s punishment was death for “defaming the emperor,” but the sentence was eventually commuted to castration. In such cases, the code of honor prescribed suicide. Sima Qian, however, continued to work on his history, living in shame and humiliation, but fulfilling his filial duty to his father and hoping for recognition in future ages. Rehabilitated and appointed Prefect Palace Secretary in 96, he managed to finish the history before he died in 86, a year after emperor Wu. The Shiji is a work of inordinate length, comprising 130 9 See Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, pp. 16 –18. Shiji 130, quoted in Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, p. 48. 11 See Nicola di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 268–69. 12 See Christopher Cullen, “Motivations for Scientific Change in Ancient China: Emperor Wu and the Grand Inception Astronomical Reforms of 104 b.c.,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 24 (1993): 185–203. 10 8 journal of world history, march 2008 chapters. It recounts the entire history of China up to the historian’s time. Like Herodotus’s Histories, the Shiji contains a sizable amount of geography and ethnography, in particular of the “barbarian lands” to the west and north of the Han empire. On the face of it, Sima Qian’s relation to political power appears as almost the opposite of Herodotus’s. As a loyal servant of the emperor, one would expect him to write a history endorsing the Han empire. To some extent, he lived up to such expectations, ...