Bret Devereaux

But a lot of times, when you don't know the evidence, the difference between the fact-supported pillar and the guess-work-supported lintel isn't clear, especially if the lintel is the point of the argument and thus directly asserted as the conclusion of the pillars. 3/

That can be a problem, especially when a given event or issue goes through the game of classics-to-public telephone. See, scholar 1 might write an article on >EVENT< in the text. The sum total of that event might be only a couple of paragraphs in a few authors. 4/

Very limited information! But the scholar builds out an argument, making inferences from other evidence, or similar events in the past (or maybe just irresponsible guesswork, but usually not). Suddenly a couple of paragraphs in the sources has become a 15 page article. 5/

Now a trained ancient historian is going to check the footnotes and know full well which is which. But often specialists in other fields (esp. non-history, non-classics fields) are not able - or don't care - to do this. They take the entire 15-page narrative for truth... 6/

...And then build arguments on top of that. And so you end up with a book aimed at the public with an argument balanced on a 15 page article, balanced on just three paragraphs in the sources with minimal details. Clearly not a stable argument! Many claims, little evidence! 7/

But it is unstable in ways that are not going to be obvious to someone who isn't familiar with the nature and content of the sources! To them, there is a statement in a book, it has a footnote to a specialist article, everything looks good. 8/

They then end up either wildly over their skiis when trying to use that information themselves, or are shocked that the book they like is poorly regarded by specialists (often with some variation of "where it's right, it's not new; where it's new its wrong"). 9/

So let's talk about the nature of the ancient sources, because that gives a good impression of the difference of what it is possible to *know* versus what must be *guessed* about the ancient world (particularly, but not exclusively, Greece, Rome, and the Near East), 10/

And that is to be clear, original+translation! And that's the *best* it gets in the ancient world. Egypt, Persia, ANE, Phoenicians, etc? Even less - often a LOT less. Sometimes effectively none! 12/

The problem is that for certain kinds of things, it's literary-evidence or bust. Events (wars, plagues, short crises)? Often literary-or-bust - even if there might be archy evidence, without a literary source to understand that evidence, often hopeless. 13/

Biographies? Literary or bust, most cases. complex political systems? mythologies? philosophy? tricky social values? A lot of that relies heavily on literary evidence. If it isn't there - if it's lost (e.g. a consitution for carthage!) it's lost. 14/

Moreover, the literary sources have interpretation problems, because they're written by people (mostly men) and reflect their perspectives (mostly elites talking to other elites about elite things). Also they get things wrong and make mistakes! But better than nothing! 15/

But ok, so you have a question about the ancient world which the literary sources don't answer, or answer only incompletely (like a 3-paragraph reference you want to understand more fully). What are your other options? 16/

2) Representational evidence. Basically artwork. Really good at telling you what things looked like (but beware of artistic conventions!), but little help for names-dates-events kind of work. 17/

Bigger problem with representational - 'so that's what it looks like, what is it?' Trying to match thing-you-see with thing-in-texts is crucial and often hard (e.g. the wtf is a kotthybos argument). Also, what something looks like is actually often just not very important! 18/

Representational evidence gets a lot more useful if you can say 'X depicts Z event from B lit.source' or 'Z object from B lit.source' but obviously you need to have B to make that work and B is generally doing most of the lifting. 19/

3) Epigraphy. Words carved in durable materials like stone. Upside: more texts to read and also unlike the literary texts (which are basically fixed and we don't find anymore), more of these found all the time! 20/

Downsides: types of texts very limited. Mostly laws, decrees, lists. Narratives of events are rare. Very useful source for legal texts, but you need literary sources (again!) to provide a framework. But also *very* difficult to read and use... 21/

...often very damaged; typically requires specialists (epigraphers) to reconstruct the text into a form (still not english) that a historian can use. Also very narrow in scope. Very few major historical events recorded in our literary sources can be attested epigraphically! 22/

4) Papyrology (and related branches of paleography): reading texts on papyrus. Good news: much larger corpus, which includes lots of every-day documents instead of just lists and decrees. Receipts, private letters, census returns, fragments of lit. texts! 23/

Bad news! Almost entirely restricted to Egypt (and if we add wood tablets, one site in N. England). Unfortunately, Egypt is weird! It is one of the most unusual places in the ancient Med., certainly in the Roman Empire. Not weird bad, just weird different! 24/

So extrapolating from Egyptian evidence to anywhere else in terms of census data, life expectancy, family size, customs dues, etc. is very hard. Lots ?? because Egypt is different and you may not know if it is also different in the way you care about! 24/(to be continued)

Otherwise, papyrus shares epigraphy's problems: often need specialists to read and reconstruct into plain demotic/greek/latin, often damaged, lines missing, text missing, context missing. Last part is crucial - say you have a tax receipt, is it typical? 25/

Often getting a clear view of that question requires LOTS of examples to get a sense of what is normal. Good news in Egypt is that you have lots of papyrus - bad news is that very little of it has been edited and published. And outside of Egypt...::sad!crickets:: 26/x

5) Archaeology. Most of what I do is at least 25% archaeological evidence. Often 50%+ Archaeology is wonderful, easily the biggest contributor to the improvement in our knowledge of the ancient world over the last 100 years. 27/52

(yeah, I said it, suck it Aristotle's Ath. Pol., archaeology is cooler than you). Thing is, Archaeological evidence is really good to answer specific questions, but *only* specific questions. Most research topics are not archaeological visible. 28/52

Is your research question related to what objects where were at a specific time (objects here broadly could mean 'pots' or 'houses' or 'farms' or even 'people' if you are fine with them being dead)? Good news, archaeology can help you. 29/52

But only if >object< leaves archaeological remains. Come back to that in a second. But the thing is, that still covers lots of important questions. "When did people Y start using tool X?" "When did people start building here?" "what sort of pots did they use?" All good! 30/52

The best part is that archaeology is like fax machines (remember fax machines?) the more of it you do, the more valuable it becomes. New discoveries help to date and understand old discoveries. 31/52