Positive effects from negative history

Most books I read tend to be text-heavy. I tend to like stuff which is analytical but lively, preferably chronological and focused on either a specific event, time, or place. I usually plump for depth over breadth, but sometimes I make exceptions. One was Towers of Defiance, a comprehensive look at the castles of the Welsh Princes. Another more interesting read, which I've just finished, is Philip Matyszak's Lost Cities of the Ancient World. 

You can read my short review-assessment here. In even briefer form, it's a wonderful hardback coffee-table compendium of an assortment of lost cities from classical antiquity, meaning Europe and its immediate surroundings from ~5,000 BC onwards. I was lured by the wonderful photographs and, to be honest, the thickness of the paper, which just made it feel so dang... high quality. As a souvenir-treat from my recent Berlin trip it's just a lovely thing to have.

But what I want to elaborate on here is not the factual content of the book (which is excellently presented – Matyszak writes in a much more readable style than the authors of most other compendiums) but a concept that it made me think about. In Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites, the protagonists develop a form of magic which revolves around not... doing any magic. That is, not summoning specific demons and not turning people into frogs. Matyszak explores something equivalent here : negative history.

Lost Cities is a fascinating look at cities which died. Some were destroyed, others suffered climate change or other natural disasters that rendered them uninhabitable. A few were out-competed by their neighbours, sometimes (in the case of what Matyszak calls a "vampire city") deliberately, much as though cities were agents in an ecosystem. Despite the title only a few were actually lost in the usual sense of being forgotten and then rediscovered; Matyszak generally means they were abandoned. A few don't really even fit this category, evolving into modern versions of their original selves which are at only slightly different locations.

But some were truly lost in the fullest sense of the world. A few remain so : we know that cities like Tigranocerta existed, we know roughly where, but the precise site has yet to be discovered. And even of those which were only abandoned, Matyszak seems to deliberately pick the ones which are largely forgotten by the modern public, eschewing obvious candidates like Pompeii and Herculaneum in favour of the nearby Stabiae. Some cities were great administrative capitals in their day, while others seem to have played no great role in any important historical events whatsoever. All were once thriving metropolises, but for a host of reasons they failed and faded.

This is truly negative history, the known unknowns : we know the gaps in our knowledge, can see the rough size and shape of them, but have little idea as to what to fill them with.

By drawing attention to these gaps directly, Matyszak reminds us just how incomplete our understanding is. Not only have vast amounts of written records succumbed to the ravages of time, but dozens upon dozens of cities have literally crumbled into dust. Whole cultures and lived experiences are now vanished. And all this reminds us that what we have left is so easily susceptible to misinterpretation. Just as in astronomical catalogues of poor completeness, without proper context things can look very different.

With a degree of mild frustration, many's the book I've read where a throwaway statement makes it clear that there whopping great fundamental gaps in what we know that, if filled, would surely transform how we think about historical events and peoples. Most of the time even the best of history books tend to gloss over this; look, I love everything Tom Holland writes, but he's the absolute master of creating a filled narrative. Matyszak instead opts to draw our attention to the gaps head-on. He doesn't explicitly point out the importance of doing this because he doesn't have to : once a gap is noticed, its importance becomes self-evident.

To be fair, sometimes other popular historians do do this as well. Marc Morris is particularly adept at making the unknown gaps almost something to celebrate by inflaming the reader's curiosity. Trow's Spartacus is another one which is commendable in emphasising how little source material it has to go on; he tries his best to look at what the Romans didn't say to recreate what probably happened. But overwhelmingly, historians (though not archaeologists) tend to prefer actual hard data, verifiable facts and records, rather than inferring things from non-statements and gaps.

Which is all quite understandable, of course. Still, I feel that Matyszak's offering is a welcome change (so much so that immediately on completion I ordered his other book : Forgotten Peoples). Exploring the gaps, even – or especially – if we have to speculate, reminds us of how little of what we have to rely on and how our interpretations might be subject to change. We often only have what one side would wish us to have, but history is written perhaps not so much by the victors as the survivors.

There are obvious parallels to science. In astronomy we're actually really keen on this, "knowing" that so much of the Universe is invisible and inexplicable : exploring the gaps is what we do. In popular history books this is no doubt difficult, and I suppose that professional historians are more like scientists than the storytellers one gets from the bookshop. Even so, perhaps this is something to consider for the popular history author. Trying to feel out the size and shapes of the gaps, inferring what might be inside them... surely this too is interesting for the lay reader ? It's a bit like if we were to have charted the whole boundary of the Pacific Ocean but not bothered to even speculate as to whether there were any islands or continents lurking inside it : except worse, because often in history it seems we know there are massive gaps in which something very important must have happened.

Similarly in philosophy, understanding the mindset of ancient peoples can benefit greatly by looking at what they don't say. At least, when we have good reason to expect them to. Again the parallels to astronomy, in which non-detections are genuinely very interesting but only if we expected to find something. A galaxy without any gas isn't especially interesting, but if it's in a group and all the rest are chock-full of hydrogen, well, that non-detection becomes a bit more exciting.

Take Plato's non-discussion of the morality of slavery. Naively, given his minute, word-by-word dissections of other issues, we might expect him to discuss this, so why didn't he ? Likewise, why didn't he come up with a more liberal (in the strong sense of the word) basis for his ideal societies ? The concept today that everyone should allowed to do as they wish except when that interferes with others seems simple enough.

To be fair to historians, Michael Scott made very interesting suggestions in this area, namely that society at the time was concerned far more with the collective than the individual, and that such a spirit of individualism (epitomised by Plato's mentor Socrates) would have seemed alien indeed. Socrates and Plato alike were not pseudo-fascists or pseudo-Communists, despite advocating certain policies that the more modern extremists on both sides would happily go along with. No, they were just more individualistic than many of their contemporaries. Individualism is sometimes a derided word, but it no more makes one a fascist than it makes one a liberal or a libertarian. All these concepts simply did not exist in ancient Athens. Without considering these vital negatives, one gets a limited and perverted view of history that warps too easily in moralising, entirely missing out on the changes in human thought that have evolved over the last two thousand years or more.

Anyway, rant over. My take-home message is very simple : sometimes, directly drawing attention to the gaps is important and you can't rely on readers doing it for themselves. A degree of speculation about what they might contain and how this would influence the facts you do know is extremely useful. It's not good to go nuts with this, but if you don't do it at all it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all the facts you have are all the facts there are.

And I'm currently reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, surely a classic example of the importance of negatives. The esteemed author apparently thought that recording the appointment of individual bishops and noting epidemics of bird flu was tremendously useful, but cared little for any details of battle tactics or political allegiances or, well, basically anything else. It's a rather fascinating but strange read, and I'm definitely looking forward to more Matyszak.