Series Preface
Culture as a set of shared attitudes, values and practices that characterizes a group or society - modern as well as ancient - is to a large extent based on the construction and transmission of memories.
Differing from collective and individual approaches to the past, cultural memory describes a process that emerges from distant and collateral events and only appears in standardized forms once a group or society has agreed upon them. Memory is a phenomenon that - by definition - is directly related to the present. When dealing with ancient societies, cultural memory as a tool can be used to disclose and identify this contemporary presence of the past within ancient societies. When investigating cultural memory of past societies, key questions are how and what ancient societies remembered about events that shaped the formation of their identity, and how they built on agreed memories to create a collective present.The term ‘cultural memory' was first introduced in 1992 by the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann in his book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (translated in English as Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance and Political Imagination), in which he further developed the theory of collective memory, first established in 1950 by the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in La memoire collective (translated in English as On Collective Memory). Although Assmann's approach was soon adopted by linguists, sociologists and anthropologists, ancient historians and classicists only slowly incorporated this term into the vocabulary of their disciplines. Today, 19 years later, Historical Studies and contiguous disciplines are increasingly reconsidering the question of history versus memory, rethinking history's border zone. The use of competing terms such as ‘collective memory', ‘social memory' and ‘cultural memory' - all discussing the ways in which individuals remember the past and at the same time define their social experience and involvement - has led to confusion about how social connections work and where priorities lie when human beings construct their relationship with the past.
As historians, we are unable to access the mental process of culturally defined memory of the past but only how memory is embodied in texts and objects.
This new series is designed to investigate the role of physical remains or rather material memories such as written and archaeological sources that were regarded to have had symbolic significance by ancient societies. By identifying the ways in which the collective past was remembered by ancient societies as cultural memory encoded in archaeological and written data, this series will address and respond to the challenges that come with this term when used uncritically. Social memory, if pushed too far, inevitably represents a theoretical and idealizing picture of the past in the past, if the influences of conflict and the use and abuse of power of groups over others are not taken into account. Diverse recollections of the past can deconstruct cultural memory and hamper its integration into a collective past. In order to allow cultural memory to construct a collective past, groups of power can encourage and promote remembering, marginalize individual memories, initiate reinterpretation or even actively instruct forgetting.Cultural Memory and History in Antiquity aims to reveal the mechanics of social connections in order to understand better the sources of collective pasts and to identify its continuative drifts rather than the connections established between generations. The motor of cultural memory is actively practised memory based on an agreed set of data, rather than tradition. In tracing shifts of meaning within ancient society, both cultural memory and cultural forgetting offer purposeful tools to identify the courses of history through both elite and non-elite perspectives.
Martin Bommas Series Editor