1990/04/01 by William W. Hallo · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Ancient Near East History #Skepticism #Philosophy #Epistemology
paper · doi:10.2307/604525
openalex publication_date 1990/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
IN 1978, THE CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE convened a meeting in Paris on the subject of the archaeology of Iraq from the beginning of the neolithic period to 333 B.C.' It was subtitled perspectives and limits of the anthropological interpretation of documents, and the principal Assyriological contribution to the subject was made by Miguel Civil of Chicago. His paper was entitled, appropriately enough, Les Limites de l'information textuelle (The limits or limitations of textual information).2 The paper was published in 1980, and the following year I received a copy from the author on the occasion of a visit to Chicago, with the cautionary note that I would probably find it provocative. Thus forewarned, I quickly turned to the paper on my flight home and found there only a mild critique of one of my own efforts a critique, moreover, that could be fairly easily countered.3 But what was more important, and thought-provoking rather than provocative, was Civil's insistence on the inadequacy of the cuneiform record for the task of reconstructing ancient Near Eastern history, institutions, and society. As the disciple of another Chicagoan, I. J. Gelb, I had long taken an opposite point of view: that the abundant textual documentation from Mesopotamia and its environs provides a precious resource for tracing the origins and evolution of countless facets of civilization unrivalled anywhere else on the globe for so early a period and therefore potentially valid beyond the borders of Mesopotamia, perhaps even beyond the Near East. In the perennial tug-of-war between credulity and skepsis, between maximalism and minimalism, all of us would no doubt like to stake out a place on the middle-ground of sweet reasonableness. But there is a notable lack of even-handedness on this high ground in the presumed middle. We hear, more often than not, of healthy or honest doubt, of suspension of judgment as in the sacramental word of 'iT[oi' Far more rarely do we hear of a suspension of disbelief. Belief or credulity is little more than a euphemism for gullibility; it hardly lacks for critics, while the defenders of skepticism are legion, from Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who said, A skeptic is not one who doubts, but one who examines5 which is true enough etymologically6 via Bertrand Russell's Skeptical Essays' to Richard Popkin, who has given us a whole history of skepticism.8 And yet if the textual documentation of antiquity has its epistemological limits, surely there are also