Mercy of the Longue Durée

Forgetting shapes human experience in vital ways. In the 21st century, many of us go about our lives in ways that will ensure that we will be remembered: we produce content on social media, we make scientific discoveries that carry our names, and we construct transnational business empires. However, there is also a tremendous weight to leaving a legacy: we attempt to harm the least amount of people according to our own limited moral codes. We also have little choice in how others record our accomplishments and undertakings.

We can lighten the burden of our existence by recognizing that we, too, will one day be erased from memory. Time will erase our successes, and it will wipe out our errors, mistakes, and missteps too. A close examination of ancient societies and peoples can be a source of healing.

Over the course of the past year, I struggled as I reflected upon the course of my life. I did not know whether I would regret my choice of leaving a Ph.D. program, or if it was the correct decision. The question haunted my nights, and I didn’t know how to justify my actions to those important to me. I discovered Amanda H. Podany’s Weavers, Scribes, and Kings at exactly the right moment.¹

Podany’s book is, on the surface, a history of the Middle East between the formation of the first urban settlements and Alexander the Great’s conquests in the 4th century BCE. Significantly, the book is not all-encompassing: while she does rely on archaeological evidence, the bulk of the story she tells comes from textual documentation in cuneiform. The language of the text matters less to her than the form. Podany refers to texts written in Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, and other languages. Notably, her choice intentionally excludes those writing in hieroglyphics and/or alphabets/abjads: the Egyptians, Hebrews, and Phoenicians do appear in her book, but only in correspondence with the Assyrians, Babylonians, and numerous city-states who relied on cuneiform.

Podany’s primary intervention is to highlight the lives of those who did not hold traditional seats of power: weavers, scribes, priestesses, diplomats, peasants, and pastoralists. Given the nature of the sources, which are almost entirely produced for or by state institutions, Podany’s success is both remarkable and unexpected.

Yet as I traced these forgotten lives through Podany’s careful reconstruction, something unexpected happened. The book moved me more than it taught me. As I read, I realized that–until recently–this book would have been wholly impossible: hieroglyphics largely fell out of use in the Roman period and were not deciphered until the 19th century. Cuneiform was still more impenetrable: languages like Sumerian and Akkadian were supplanted by Aramaic, Persian, and Greek before the common era.² Worse still, ancient Near Eastern languages were–early on–seen more as a tool to contextualize Biblical history than as an area of inquiry in its own right.³

The kings, priestesses, and places referenced vanished: they were only rediscovered over the course of the past century and a half. What would it mean to have dedicated your life to acquiring fame, fortune, wisdom, and honor, only for it to be forgotten? Such a turn of events seems impossible to us now, but it is true: we will all disappear with time. Given a long enough span of time, all will dissolve.

As I reflected on Podany’s book, a poem came to mind:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—’Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’⁴

Not even the Egyptian name of the king survives: Ramesses II becomes Ozymandias, a term filtered and passed down to us by the Greeks. Here lies the ultimate irony: even in remembering, we forget.

Yet, we should not romanticize these vanished civilizations. People certainly suffered under Ramesses, Alexander the Great, and numerous other rulers, just as so many people suffer due to state dynamics today. It was the Assyrians who invented mass deportation as a tool of controlling subject peoples. While we do know these facts today, they had largely fallen out of our memory.⁵

Two ancient thinkers in significantly different contexts remind us that “this too shall pass.”⁶ Both the author of Ecclesiastes–traditionally thought to be King Solomon–and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius grappled with questions of their own mortality and found healing in confronting their own deaths.⁷

The book of Ecclesiastes begins with a poem that resonates with me so much that I feel I must place it here.

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down
and hurries to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
round and round goes the wind
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they continue to flow.
All things are wearisome,
more than one can express;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing
or the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
‘See, this is new?’
It has already been
in the ages before us.
The people of long ago are not remembered,
nor will there be any remembrance
of people yet to come
by those who come after them.⁸

In his notebooks, Marcus Aurelius corroborates Solomon’s perspective. He writes that “[p]eople who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn. Until their memory, passed from one to another like a candle flame, gutters and goes out.”⁹

We see both Solomon and Marcus Aurelius as distant, nearly exotic figures due to the ages in which they lived, yet they shared our same worries, fears, and anxieties. By recognizing the ephemerality of all that exists, they found mercy in the longue durée.

The 21st century has forgotten how to forget. Our societies produce powerful historical analyses, commemorate events that give legitimacy to our national or ethnic identities, and emphasize the importance of “remembering” those who came before us.

Forgetting proves as meaningful as remembering. The thought that we, too, will be lost to time allows us to see our own lives with perspective and live without succumbing to the unbearable weight of our obligations. We can find value in our own lives and the people we care about without dwelling too deeply on our legacies. After all, “whatever happens has always happened, and always will, and is happening at this very moment, everywhere. Just like this.”¹⁰

Luke Sebastian Scalone

Luke, the owner and writer of D-INTEGRATION, dives deep into complex ideas to surface with thought-provoking fragments. His goal is to illuminate how we can find meaning in our often uncertain world.

Endnotes

1
Amanda H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
2
Peter T. Daniels, “The Decipherment of the Ancient Near East,” in A Companion to the Ancient Near East, 2nd edition, ed. Daniel C. Snell (Hoboken: Wiley, 2020).
3
Kenton L. Sparks, “The Ancient Near Eastern Context,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, ed. Stephen B. Chapman and Marvin A. Sweeney (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); see also Martti Nissinen, “Assyrian and Babylonian Sources,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible, ed. Brad E. Kelle and Brent A. Strawn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021) and Mark Chavalas, “The Ancient Near East and Biblical Scholarship: Recently Uncovered Archives from the Cuneiform World,” in A Companion to the Ancient Near East, 2nd edition, ed. Daniel C. Snell (Hoboken: Wiley, 2020).
4
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” Poetry Foundation.
5
The one notable exception was the case of the Hebrews. The two books of Kings, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and various prophetic texts narrativize mass deportations under the Assyrians and Babylonians while giving ancient peoples the tools to make sense of their own experiences. This topic is covered well in Mary Joan Winn Leith, “New Perspectives on the Return from Exile and the Persian-Period Yehud,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible, ed. Brad E. Kelle and Brent A. Strawn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021) and Laurie Pearce, “New Perspectives on the Exile in Light of Cuneiform Texts,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible, ed. Brad E. Kelle and Brent A. Strawn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). See also Martien A. Halvorson-Taylor, “Displacement and Diaspora in Biblical Narrative,” in *[The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28265322-the-oxford-handbook-of-biblical-narrative), ed. Danna Nolan Fewell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
6
This expression is believed by many to be Biblical. It is not. In fact, it is far more likely to be of Persian origin, although it is unclear when precisely it was coined.
7
For further discussion on the authorship of Ecclesiastes, see Katharine J. Dell, “Solomon and the Solomonic Collection,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wisdom and the Bible, ed. Will Kynes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
8
Eccles. 1:2-11 (NRSVUE).
9
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Gregory Hays (New York: Modern Library, 2002).
10
Marcus Aurelius, *Meditations, trans. Gregory Hays (New York: Modern Library, 2002).

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