One thing that a lot of people tend to forget is that the past had….people. We get so bogged down on the epic battles, kings and queens, struggles for land, forming of constitutions, etc, that I think we often stop thinking about the individual people involved. Oh sure, we consider a few of them. We know a fair bit about Alexander the Great, King Tut, Rameses, Julius Ceasar…but what about the artisan who build their tables? Or the slave who poured their wine? Or the farmer who grew the crops that fed them all? The vast majority of humanity is lost through time, never to be recovered. But that does not make these people any less fascinating nor any less worthy of study and consideration.
Normal, average, everyday people are easy to ignore in archaeology. Archaeology is the study of what people left behind – and the rich left behind rather a lot. The rich people of many different cultures simply produced way more traces for us to examine– their large buildings were often made stone, not mud. Their deeds were chiseled into rock, not passed on through family memory. They had power and money and the ability to flaunt it materially– all of which leads to preservation within the archaeological record. The vast majority of people who did not have power or money lived their lives simply and died, soon forgotten. Archaeology is therefore often the excavation of the lives of the wealthy. I’ve always had problems with this. It gives us a very skewed perception of the past since very few people were wealthy. The vast majority of people who have ever existed have simply been farmers.
This is not to say that traces of average people do not exist. The more I study history and archaeology, the more I am fascinated at how people are always people. They laughed, they cried, they got drunk and had affairs. They celebrated happy events and mourned their losses with each other. They had petty fights with their neighbors and ate many meals with their friends and families. They got married, had children and sometimes lost them. Their lives may have been different from our lives today, their belief systems may seem strange, but above all, they were human with everything that implies.
Some of the voices of these forgotten people do get preserved. They may not have a giant mural depicting their epic deeds – but the mason putting the finishing touches to a room may have drawn a bit of graffiti on the wall on his way out, proving that he was there. The carpenter may not have written a book about his great works of art – but he may have bought a tombstone with a short paragraph about his life. A man mourning the death of his wife may have written her a letter, pouring out his heart and emotions. Little snippets like that, allowing us to see into the lives of dead people from the past are some of my favourite things to read.
Hence, my new project. I am going to call it “Letters from Dead People”. A simple name perhaps, but that is the crux of it. As often I as can, I will post something that someone wrote – a letter, an inscription, a crude drawing, a curse, a memento – something from the past, something from someone who has been dead for hundreds, even thousands of years. It may not be earth-shattering news that shaped history but it’s a voice from the past, often written by someone who is otherwise completely forgotten.
I recognize that I am mostly limited to literate societies. But that does give me several thousand years to work with and a large variety of civilizations. I think it will be interesting. I want to show the humanity of human history.
I hope you enjoy it.
Perhaps, in honour of my atheistic leanings that lead to this blog, I will start off with a funerary inscription by a rather cynical ancient atheist. It comes from an anonymous ancient Roman. The Romans often put their tombstones on the sides of popular roads, up for examination by anyone passing by. It was a last chance for them to say something to the world of the living – to talk about their lives, their deaths, their philosophies. This unknown man chose to make a final statement about his view on the universe. Not cheerful, perhaps, but it is human.
“Do not walk by this epitaph, traveler, but stop, listen, learn, and then proceed. There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon, no caretaker Aeacus, no dog Cerberus. All those who die become bones and ashes – nothing more. I speak the truth. Go now, traveler, lest even though I am dead, I seem to you long-winded.” CIL 6.17,672.
