The Application of Modern Theories of the Use and Function of Memory
It is both tempting and sometimes even dangerous to apply modern theories on memory as cultural achievement where social groups who once formed this memory are not consultable anymore.
The major problem can be seen in the fact that memory is fading with every generation and has to be reconstructed once three generations have passed. While historians interested in memory of the nineteenth century ad and later can refer to archives where access usually is generously granted, ancient historians face a more challenging situation. As a rule, ancient archives have rarely survived, written and archaeological evidence is in most cases fragmentary and while the past can be reconstructed from the surviving primary sources, the way the past was remembered in the past is often opaque and only reveals itself in non- or semi-official records. None of these sources can be taken at face-value as they often stem from ancient writers or foreign visitors who themselves had no access to archives but relied on living memory which often was individual memory with a strong bias.Although major aspects ofcultural memory are addressed by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann in his ground-breaking study Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (1994), memory studies still play an underrated role within ancient history. The reason why memory still is a contentious issue is difficult to explain, especially given that memory and with it also reception is a widely recognized area, or as Le Goff put it: ‘memory has become a best-seller in a consumer society' (1992: 95). During the 1990s, memory became a key word within interdisciplinary research, although not clearly defined and still open to debate. Even the definition of the various terms is still in flux as pointed out by Fentress and Wickham (1992) and Cubitt (2007: 13-14). As things stand, there is no common ground among historians, the majority of whom seem to operate with the term ‘social memory'. Being interested in how individual memories of the past and existing narratives meet each other is one focal point, and indeed early modern societies from the nineteenth century onwards provide a wealth of evidence for fruitful research in the fields of modern history and social science.
For the ancient historian, this approach often proves limiting as the past can less clearly be reconstructed from the sources available due to the complex and constantly ongoing challenges to make these sources available for research. When explaining past memories within past settings, modern philosophical approaches often concede a mediating role to history. In his epochal study Memory, History and Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur argues that ‘history distances itself from memory' because ‘writing... is the threshold of language that historical knowing has already crossed' (Ricoeur 2004: 138). To him, the ‘question of confidence' is the question of what ‘becomes the relation between history and memory'. It is all too obvious that within the field of ancient history this question is often impossible to answer, due to the lack of sources.This does not mean, on the other hand, that memory studies of ancient societies represent a battle that cannot be won. Cultural memory - different from social memory - is focused on strategies of recollection (often archivebased) where literary and visual sources mediate between the individual and the collective in past and present. Due to the notorious lack of appropriate sources that can be taken at face value and issues of genre, the methods students of cultural memory use are often unsuitable for students of modern history, or to speak metaphorically in the language of grammar: while social history is interested in the perfect, cultural memory is focused on the past perfect.