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Inscriptions are Texts Too1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2014
Extract
Epigraphic evidence is a virtual terra incognita for Africanists; few of our sources have come down to us from the past quite so directly. This is in contrast to many other parts of the world, where dealing with inscriptions falls squarely within historians' purview. Where such evidence exists, it tends to exist in very large quantities. For example, for Ur III dynasty, of circumscribed length and extent (2112-2004 BCE, southern Mesopotamia) at least 50,000 texts have been published and tens of thousands more are known to exist. Even larger numbers exists for what is now India, although admittedly covering both a much larger area and a much longer period of time. One estimate is that more than 90,000 have been discovered. Nearly everything we think we know about the Maya civilization is derived from the numerous stelae that have been discovered there. The same applies to the pre-Islamic political entities in south Arabia. And so on. In contrast, the materials included in the work under review represent almost the entire corpus for sub-Saharan Africa.
This embarrassment of riches outside Africa involves another embarrassment as well. Despite heroic efforts, many of these inscriptions—a majority for some areas—are attracting dust rather than scrutiny; as a result many of the interpretations built on the edited and published ones are potential prey to the evidence in those as yet unexamined.
The so-called epitaphs of Gao have not wanted for study—study carried out largely by French orientalists looking for sources more congenial to their first fields of study, but harking back to Heinrich Barth, who at least had the excuse of being unaware of the inscriptions. The present work escapes this faute de mieux aspect; its author has been at work on them for nearly forty years and did not come to them from a sense of misplaced desperation.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 2005
Footnotes
1
A review of P.F. de Moraes Farias. Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles, and Songhay-Tuareg History (London: British Academy, 2003), hereafter AMI.
References
2 Widell, Magnus, The Administrative and Economic Ur III Texts from the City of Or (Piscataway NJ, 2003), 1–4Google Scholar.
3 Benerjee, Manabendu, “Some Problems of Editing Sanskrit Inscriptions” in Problems of Editing Ancient Texts, ed. Jha, V.N. (New Delhi, 1993), 53–73Google Scholar. For a recent example of the tendency to make much of very little in Indian epigraphic historiography see Sharma, Mahesh, “State Formation and Cultural Complex in Western Flimalaya: Chamba Genealogy and Epigraphs—700-1650 C.E.,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 41(2004), 387–432CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 However the geography might be interpreted, for this review Aksum is not considered south of the Sahara.
5 This set of circumstances has especially marked the study of ancient south Arabian epigraphs. Excessive heat, strenuous travel conditions, and civil war interfere with the ability to study these in anything resembling favorable conditions.
6 In fact, as Farias (xxvii-xxix) points out, Georges-Reynard de Gironcourt made over 800 such squeezes (“estampages”) in 1912, which had since lain dormant in the Institut de France, providing an example of an opportunity wasted. He notes as well that some inscriptions in the corpus have no estampages while some estampages exist for inscriptions that do not appear to have survived.
7 E.g., the Qumran texts, the Ebia texts after the in/famous Sodom and Gomorrah reading was overthrown. In the first case a cartel was established and granted a long-term—some thought indefinite—license to study the texts. The results were disastrous in every respect.
8 Some of these are line drawings, which complement, but do not replace, the photographs that they render.
9 Already four unusually long reviews have addressed some of the issues I do not: Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 59(2004), 1206–10 (Triaud, Jean-Louis)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Journal of African Archaeology 2(2004), 285–86 (Kuba, Richard)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Journal of African History 46(2005), 148–50 (Cheikh, Abdel Wedoud Ould)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Libyan Studies 35(2004), 207–09 (Norris, H.T.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Sauvaget, Jean, Introduction à l'histoire de l'Orient musulman: éléments de bibliographie, corrections et supplément (Paris, 1946), 49Google Scholar.
11 Or chose to modify them to suit later imperatives; for one such case see Farias' discussion of “the erasure of early rulers” in AMI, clxvii-clxx.
12 On this particular attitude, writ larger, see Henige, David, “Epigraphic Evidence and the Abhorrence of a Vacuum: Some Phantom Dynasties of Early and Medieval India,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 38(1975), 325–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “For a case study from the ancient Near East see Henige, David, Historical Evidence and Argument (Madison, 2005), 135–47Google Scholar.
14 One pretty salient discrepancy is that the inscriptions imply matriarchy and proclaim matriliny, quite in contrast to the mainstream Islamic attitudes of the later chronicles, which have nothing to say about either.
15 In fact, this particular god from the machine has been applied in a closely parallel case unfolding in China, where a cemetery thought to contain the remains of the rulers of Jin during the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1050-221 BCE) has revealed a series of apparently royal names that do not match up with the data in the later annals. As with Gao, opinion oscillates between accepting the epigraphic evidence as accurate but de-contextualized to finding ways and means to force the two bodies of evidence into matrimony. On this see Xu, Jay, “The Cemetery of the Western Zhou Lords of Jin,” Artibus Asiae 56(1996), 193–231CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boqian, Li, “The Sumptuary System Governing Western Zhou Rulers' Cemeteries, Viewed from a Jin Rulers' Cemetery,” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 1(1999), 251–76Google Scholar; Nivison, D.S. and Shaughnessy, Edward L., “The Jin Hou Bells Inscription and Its Implications for the Chronology of Early China,” Early China 25(2000), 29–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 This would be analogous to the case of late New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period Egypt, where lines of high priests co-existed with pharaonic dynasties, leading to much head-scratching in the early days of ancient Egyptian historiography, but it took a lot more evidence to determine this concurrency than is likely ever to be available for Gao.
17 Such a lack of completeness owing to breakage and loss of part of the inscription accounts for much of the controversy over what is probably the most debated epigraph of recent times—the so-called Tel Dan inscription, which purportedly contains the phrase “house of David,” leading many biblicists to pronounce the inscription as the long-awaited exteral evidence for the historicity of the bibical narrative. The state of affairs has allowed one scholar to re-assemble the pieces to create a substantially different message. Whether this author is correct must await the unlikely discovery of further pieces in this particular puzzle
18 Such ambient circumstances have resulted in certain areas of the epigraphic world being less favored than others. For instance, commenting on a recent work on the archeology of early Korea, the reviewer notes this: “[i]t is understandable that this book deals mostly with archaeological data from the southern half of Korea … I suppose the archaeology of Koguryo is discussed only briefly, because of the relative inaccessibility to archaeological data, which are scattered in northeast China and North Korea.” Pak, Yangjin, “Review of Gina L. Barnes, State Formation in Korea: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives,” Asian Perspectives 43(2004), 152CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 A (very) few things struck me as falling short of the impeccable standards of the whole. The “Republic of Mali” part of the title jars somehow, as if modern political boundaries also had significance in medieval times—maybe they have little significance even in our own! Farias has divided his very extensive bibliography (221-68) into several sections, and this creates an unnecessary burden on the part of readers, who must check too many places to track a citation (e.g., Hunwick 3/224; 1/229; 3/238; 25/255-56: Farias 1/230; 6/235; 4/241; 14/262-63). While Farias provides a Christian equivalent for every A.H. date as it appears, for those of us have never learned to think instinctively in other than “A.D.” terms, a Christian-hijra calendar for the relevant period would have been useful for explicating such matters as lunar vs. solar reckoning.
The first is not unlike the correlative situation in contemporary India, when many epigraphical editions are published by state governments and the contents and titles often reflect this. Unfortunately, in India, as in Nigeria, the trend has been to more and more smaller and smaller states, so that a work devoted specifically to the inscriptions in Tamil Nadu, for instance, might find its title rendered obsolete by some kind of retroactive geopolitical legerdemain.
On the other hand, and concerning an equally trivial matter, Farias rightly uses “data” as a plural throughout, in the scientific tradition rather than ape the typical modern usage in the humanities and social sciences, where practitioners fail to remember the word's inescapably plural origins.