Although his plans misfired, indeed more
than three millennia have passed since the day Akhenaten, standing in his chariot
of gold, read out his proclamation of revelation and hope to an inspired and
enthusiastic audience gathered on the site of his new city at el-Amarna.
Some two thousand years after
Akhenaten's birth, towards the end of the 8th century AD, on the opposite side
of the globe, the Japanese imperial court took the radical decision to abandon
the existing capital at Nara and move, lock, stock and barrel, to a new site
elsewhere. There would be two attempts at the shift: first stop, in 784, was a
site known as Nagaoka, located to the southwest of present-day Kyoto; and this
move was followed, a decade later, by a second transfer to the site of Kyoto
itself, then named Heian-kyo. For Japanese
historians, the abandonment of Nara marks the start of a flourishing new era,
the Heian period; what interests the Egyptologist is less this future glory
than the dynamic behind the move.
Japanese society at this time was
dominated, and would continue to be dominated for some years to come, by the
influence of a single family: the Fujiwaras. The
strength of the Fujiwara clan depended upon two factors: first, various key
positions they held within the government structure had, during the course of
time, become hereditary; and, secondly, the tradition had grown up of marrying-off
Fujiwara daughters not only within the imperial family but to the very emperor
himself.
The jealousies and intrigues Fujiwara
prestige generated at court were considerable, and beginning to pose a real
threat to stability; matters were made worse by an extraordinary rise in the
wealth and political power of the Buddhist temples and their personnel, and an
attendant jostling on the part of the priests themselves for worldly influence
and control. It was a situation which clearly could not be allowed to continue.
With the accession of a new and capable
emperor, Kanmu (who owed his own rise to a Fujiwara
plot involving the removal of an inconvenient rival prince), the problem was
addressed by upping sticks. It was a clever ruse: by it, the troublesome
priests were abandoned in Nara, while the drain on time, effort and money
required to build the new capital provided a more than adequate distraction to
those among the aristocracy inclined to make mischief. When this mischief
continued, in 794 the process was repeated, and the capital moved yet again, to
another site geographically close-by but physically more remote; and this time
it worked. With the aristocracy cut off from their economic base, and the
priesthood left behind in their temples, power was again concentrated firmly in
the hands of the emperor.
Although the cultures of Egypt and Japan
are separated by a great distance in time, space, and much else besides, the
parallels between Kanmu and the Amarna experience are
striking: for 'Fujiwara' substitute 'Yuya family';
for 'Buddhist priesthood', 'Amun priesthood'; for 'Kanmu',
'Akhenaten'; for 'Nagaoka' and 'Heian-kyo', 'Akhetaten'.
But What is Nationalism?
It is worthy to start with the modern
theory of Nationalism, in this case based on a reading of two well known experts A.D.Smith The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1987,
and Eric Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism
Since 1780, 1990.
In their widely held view, the nation
refers to an ideal-type of a named human community with the following features:
1) the nation is a geographically
bounded community, with clear and recognised borders,
within which the members reside, and with a clear centre
of authority;
2) the nation is a legal community, that
is, its members have common rights and duties as members under a single law
code;
3) as a result, the nation is a mass
participant community, with all classes participating in politics and society;
4) the culture of the nation is equally
a mass, public culture, with culturally distinctive elements inculcated through
mass educational institutions;
5) the nation is an autonomous
community, and the members are accordingly citizens of a national state;
6) the nation and its state are part of
a wider inter-national system of national states, of which they are sovereign
members;
7) the nation is a human community that
owes its conception and legitimation to nationalism, the ideology.
Now, measured against the yardstick of
this ideal-type, ancient Egypt clearly fails to qualify as a nation. Not only
does it lack many of the features of the ideal-type nation, it also exhibits
features that are not part of that type - for example, a theocratic and
dynastic ideology in place of nationalism. It appears to lack legal rights and
duties common to all members of ancient Egyptian society, since they were
specific to particular classes, and we cannot speak of mass participation of
all classes except in the corvee and army. Egyptian culture, albeit quite
distinctive and very public, could hardly be described as a mass culture and
education system, and though there were diplomatic relations with other states,
certainly at the time of the New Kingdom, it is doubtful how far we can speak
of political membership in an `internatiorial
system', even in the Tell-el-Amarna epoch of the
second millennium BC .
Much the same might be said of the
ancient Persians. It is true that the Persians had a clear sense of themselves
as a distinct community of language and religion, as much as did the Egyptian
elites, and that on the staircase of the Apadana in Persepolis we may still see
the sculptured reliefs of various peoples of their empire bearing gifts for the
Persian New Year. But the Persians too were class divided; there was no sense
of popular participation in politics, no common rights and duties for all
Persians and no nationalist legitimation. Nor is it clear where the borders of
the Persian community ran, both before and after the acquisition of an empire
by the Achaemenids, even after their migration to the Iranian plateau.
Much the same can be said about the
Hittites and other peoples of Antiquity. True, the Old Kingdom of the Hittite
nobles had its centre in the bend of the Halys river, and Hittite kings consulted a pankush, or assembly of notables, but this is hardly
evidence of common rights and duties, let alone mass participation. As with
many other early peoples of the ancient Near East, such as the Elamites or the
Kassites, the record is insufficient to allow any inference about the intensity
or diffusion of a sense of collective cultural identity beyond a very small
ruling class. There is slightly more evidence for the sentiments and conduct of
city-states like those of the Sumerians, Phoenicians and Philistines, but
earlier theories of a primitive form of Sumerian democracy seem to have been
misplaced, and the fierce rivalries of many of these city-states seem to have
prevented any attempt or even desire to give unitary political _expression to
their sense of common ethnicity based on myths of common origin, language and customs,
though Nippur did serve as a religious centre for the
Sumerians, and the Philistine lords did manage to field joint armies against
external foes.
I shall not run through the gamut of
possible candidates for nationhood in the ancient world, but, given its
enduring legacy to the modern West, the `failure' of ancient Greece to
constitute itself as a political nation needs to be recalled. For there, the
panhellenic dreams entertained by a small minority around Isocrates continually
stumbled on the rock of loyalties to the polis, with the result that cultural
identity centred on Hellas or its ethno-linguistic
subdivisions (Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians etc.) remained, for the most part,
apolitical. 'Hellas' remained a cultural network of common religion, languages,
customs, calendars, artistic styles and the like. Of course, many Greeks did recognise that there was a political dimension to Hellas;
Pericles' Funeral Oration can be read, inter alia, as an Athenian bid for
political as well as cultural leadership of 'all-Greece'. But, even under dire
Persian threat, some poleis medised; and if Edith
Hall is right, the idea of Hellas really gained currency only as a result of
the Persian Wars.
Must we then accept the argument that
the ancient world had no trace of, and no place for, nations?
So let us start from the premise
that the nation, unlike the state, is a form of human community which is
conceptually a development of the wider phenomenon of ethnicity, and that
particular nations originated as specialised and politicised subvarieties of one or more ethnic categories,
networks and communities (or ethnies). The latter, in
turn, may have derived from smaller clan-based groupings, but by the time they
became ethnic networks or communities, they had lost any earlier kinship
elements, except in their myth of origin and descent. Ethnies
can be defined ideal-typically as named human communities, with myths of common
descent, shared memories and one or more elements of common culture such as
language, religion and customs, and a sense of solidarity, at least among the
elites. While they are often linked to specific territories, ethnies may continue to function outside any homeland as
diasporas, and remain resilient over centuries.
On `state' and `nation', see Connor,
Ethnonationalism, ch. 4; and more normatively,
Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on
Nationalism and Patriotism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). For the definition
of ethnie, see Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins
of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), ch. 2; on its
kinship basis, see Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), chs.
1-2, and Pierre van den Berghe,'Does race matter?',
Nations and Nationalism 1, 3 (1995), 357-68. On diaspora ethnies,
see John Armstrong, `Mobilised and proletarian
diasporas', American Political Science Review 70 (1976), 393-408.
Though the concept of the nation shares
certain elements with that of the ethnie, the
emphasis falls elsewhere. For example, fictive descent myths play a much
diminished role in nations, except in the nationalist rhetoric of blood and
perhaps in times of extreme danger. Instead, nations are distinguished by a
panoply of shared memories, myths, symbols and traditions, including foundation
myths; but the cultivation of shared memories, myths and symbols is only one of
the processes of nation-formation that endow it with such power. Conversely,
where a link with a given territory may have been present in the case of the ethnie, if only symbolically, that link turns into
occupation and possession of a homeland and comes to occupy centre
stage in the concept of the nation.
On territory and nation, see David
Hooson (ed.), Geography and National Identity (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell,
1994); Mark Bassin, `Russia between Europe and Asia:
the ideological construction of social space', Slavic Review 5o,1 (1991),1-i7;
Eric Kaufmann and Oliver Zimmer, `In search of the authentic nation: landscape
and national identity in Switzerland and Canada', Nations and Nationalism 4, 4
(1998), 483-510. For discussions of traditions of poetic landscape and the territorialisation of memory, see Simon Schama, Landscape
and Memory (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995), and Anthony D. Smith, Chosen
Peoples: The Sacred Foundations of National Identity (Oxford University Press,
2003), ch. 6.
Here briefly the main
elements of an alternative ideal-type, which, as the nation is a moving
target', are better conceived as generic processes of nation-formation. They
include: 1) the discovery and forging of a common self-image, including a
collective proper name, which symbolises `us' as
opposed to others around us; (2) the cultivation of distinctive shared
memories, -myths, symbols and traditions of the historic culture community
formed on the basis of one or more ethnic categories and communities;
(3) the occupation, residence in and
development of a common ancestral homeland with clear and recognised
borders;
(4) the creation and diffusion of a distinctive
public culture for the members of the collectivity;
(5) the observarrce
of distinctive common customs and the framing of common laws for the members.
Of course, these processes vary in duration
and extent, and their develoment can be reversed.
Collective self-definition, myth and memory cultivation, territorialisation
of ancestral memory, creation and diffusion of public culture, and development
of law and custom: these are the essential processual elements of
nation-formation, and they are simultaneously subjective and objective, a
mixture of unplanned development and conscious intervention. Analytically
separate, they develop historically in different ways and at varying rates,
depending on a host of economic, political and cultural circumstances. If and
when they combine to an observable extent, the result is the creation of what
we term nations out of pre-existing ethnic and cultural elements.
Ideal-typically, then, a nation would be a named and self-defined human
community whose members cultivate shared memories, myths and symbols, occupy
and develop an ancestral territory, create and spread among themselves a
distinctive, public culture, observe common customs and are bound by common
laws. It is to this pure type that given instances of communities termed
`nations' (by themselves or others) approximate.
For fuller discussion of these
processes, see Anthony D. Smith, `When is a nation?', Geopolitics 7, z (2002),
5-32; also Gordana Uzelac,
`When is the nation? Constituent elements and processes', Geopolitics 7, 2
(2002), 33-52, and other essays in the same Special Issue. For some measures of
these processes of ethnic and national formation, see Eric Kaufmann, `Modern
formation, ethnic reformation: the social sources of the American nation',
Geopolitics 7, 2 (2002), 99-120.
Nations in Antiquity?
With this simpler, and more generic,
ideal-typical definition of the nation in mind, let us return to the initial
question of the relations between `nations' and the various kinds of collective
cultural identity found in the ancient Near East and the classical world.
That is, how far were these processes
developed in the ancient Near East and to what extent were they combined in
such a way that we may begin to speak of nations in Antiquity? Let us look at
three possible cases: Edom, Aram and Armenia. As regards the first, in the Book
of Numbers (20:21), we read: `Thus Edom refused to give Israel passage through
his border'; a little later we meet the phrase (20:23) `at the border [gebul] of the land [eres] of
Edom'; and much later Edom was conquered by the Hasmonean kings. On the later
conquest and forced conversion of the Edomites, see Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings
of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 2000), ch. 4.
It is also possible that Edom had become
a monolatrous society under its local god, Qaush, by
the late eighth century, as had Judah under Yahweh. But we know nothing of other
relevant processes: no myths of origin nor historical memories, no distinctive
public culture nor laws and customs, only references in the Hebrew Bible to kol-Edom (all Edom) and edomi
(the Edomites).See Steven Grosby, Biblical Ideas of
Nationality, citing , for example, II Samuel 8:14.
The case of Aram is more complex and
intriguing. The treaties on the Sefire Stele of c.
745 BC contain the following clauses: and the treaty of KTK with [the treaty
of] Arpad; and the treaty of the lords of KTK with the treaty of the lords of
Arpad; and the treaty of the un[ion of... ] W with all Aram and with <the
kings of> Must and with his sons who will come after [him], and [with the
kings of] all Upper-Aram and Lower Aram and with all who enter the royal palace.(
Ibid., p. 127 , Grosby's emphasis, citing Sefire Stele I, face A ,11. 3-6).
After an involved discussion, Grosby concludes that, with the city-kingdom of Arpad at
its head, Aram was in the process of nation-formation:
This common designation of 'Aram' in the
terms `all Aram', `Upper Aram' and `Lower Aram' would appear to indicate the
developing sociological uniformity of a collective self-consciousness of a
nation. An element of this uniformity may also be seen in the fact that Hadad appears to have become the leading god of the Aramean
pantheon. (Ibid., pp. 135-6.)
This conclusion is supported by the wide
diffusion of the Aramean language throughout its city-kingdoms and a probable
sense of common ethnicity, expressed in the very names of the Aramean states:
the Bible speaks of Aram-Naharaim, Aram-Zobah, Aram Beth-Rehob, and AramDamascus, and Tiglath-Piliser
III speaks of `The kings of the land of Hatti (and of) the Aramaeans of the
western seashore'.( Ibid., p. 135, citing Stele IIIA of Tiglath-Piliser III from Iran.)
A preference here could be to treat the
Arameans as a large-scale ethnic network, divided, in the manner of Hellas,
into a series of rival, but culturally similar, city-kingdoms whose
jurisdiction waxed and waned as a result of intra-ethnic wars and of encounters
with external powers, notably Assyria. In this, they conformed to a well-known
pattern of development with a long history in the area, including the
Phoenician, Philistine and Canaanite city-kingdoms whose members shared
elements of culture such as language and religion, but retained separate
political identities. The isolation of this pattern allows us to discriminate
between looser ethnic city-kingdoms and confederations with shared culture and
more compact ethnies and ethnic territorial kingdoms
in which processes of nation-formation begin to be visible, in which we can
also observe the links between such ethnic networks and ethnies,
on the one hand, and the formation of nations, on the other.
The third example, Armenia in the fourth
and fifth centuries AD, may help us to clarify the distinction and illuminate
some of the processes involved. The period commences with the conversion to
Christianity of King Trdat III and his family by
Gregory around 314 AD, and sees a remarkable flowering of religious activity,
language reform, art and epic history wriing. The
self-definition of Armenia and Armenianness was no
longer purely ethnic - stressing the myth of Haik and early Armenian migration
- nor purely territorial-political - a relatively autonomous province of
Achaemenid Persia and then Parthia, with a temporary period of greatness as an
independent state under Tigranes the Great in the first century BC. Now the
emphasis shifted to culture, and more specifically to the Gregorian version of
Monophysite Christianity and the Armenian language, the latter soon to be
reinforced by the deliberate invention in the fifth century by Mesrop Mashtots of a separate
script both to secure internal cohesion and to aid external missionary
activity. Missionary activity by Gregory and his successors in Iberia and
Albania to the north stimulated the parallel growth of the Georgian Church and
kingdom, and compensated in no small measure for the depressing political
situation of Armenia, with the mountain kingdom being a regular battleground
for Roman and Sasanid Persian armies. By 387, the
Armenian kingdom had been partitioned, but this did not end the succession of
revolts followed by repression or the need to invoke Roman/Byzantine aid
against the Sasanid threat.
For a detailed history of early Armenia,
its myth of origins and its conversion to Christianity, see Anne Redgate, The
Armenians (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), especially chs.
1, 4-6. On the dating of the conversion, the debates about Chalcedon and the
missionary efforts, see Vrej Nersessian,
Treasures from the Ark: boo Years ofArmenian
Christian Art (London: The British Library, zooi), chs. 1-3. On early Armenian literature and script, see
David Lang, Armenia: Cradle of Civilisation (London:
George Allen and Unwin, î98o), ch. 7. For a more
general discussion of pre-modern Armenian ethnicity and modern Armenian
nationalism, see Razmik Panosssian,
`The past as nation: three dimensions of Armenian identity', Geopolitics 7, 2
(2002), 121-46.
In many ways, Armenia possessed an orientalising culture, much influenced by Persian
Zoroastrianism, and her social structure mirrored that of Sasanid
society. But, as Nina Garsoian points out, the
conversion to Christianity, perceived as a western Roman religion, together
with unbending Sasanid hostility, pushed Armenia
towards Rome and the West, though never to the point of accepting the
Chalcedonian position adopted by Byzantium in 451. The myth of Armenia as the
`first Christian nation', and in time the one truly Christian nation, became a
source of pride for subsequent generations, as did its missionary record.See Garsoian, Church and
Culture in Early Medieval Armenia (Aldershot: Ashgate
Variorum, 1999), ch. 12.
Equally important for self-definition
was the glorious defeat of Avarayr in the self-same
year of 451. In fact, the defeat was not comprehensive, and was one of a series
of battles with the Sasanids, in much the same way as
the later Serbian defeat by the Ottomans at Kosovo Polje in 1389 was one of a
series of battles. But because, like the Serbian king Lazar, the Armenian
commander, Vardan Mamikonian, and many nobles with
him fell heroically on the field, this battle has been commemorated throughout
the centuries as a saints' day, and has continued to inspire resistance. Even
more potently, it was quickly embedded in the collective historical memory
retailed in the flowering of epic histories from the late fifth to the eighth
centuries, from the histories of Agat'angelos and Paustos Buzand to those of Elishe and Mouses Xorenatsi. Thus
Paustos' Epic History proclaims that the `pious
martyrs [who] strove in battle ... died so that iniquity should not enter into
such a God-worshipping and God-loving realm ... [so] let every
one preserve continually the memory of their valour
as martyrs for Christ for ... they fell in battle like Judah and Mattathias Maccabei‘. (bid., p. 128, citing Paustos
Buzand, Epic Histories III, xi, 80-1.)
By the fifth century, Armenian elites
were provided with a providentialist reading of their
history and situation, through the cultivation of myths, symbols and memories.
Equally important, that reading placed the ancestral homeland, erkir Hayoé (land of Armenia), at
the centre of their self-understanding, and it is
clear that for the Christian historians its boundaries were well known. For
example, Agat'angelos' History recounts in great
geographical detail the missionary travels of Gregory throughout the length and
breadth of Armenia. There is also a much greater cohesion in terms of a distinctive
public culture. This is partly the result of the adoption of a unique script,
but even more because of the influence of a particular religious culture and
its theological concepts. Through the institution of the Church and its
scriptures, liturgy and clergy, Armenians became party to a covenant with
Christ, and thus subject to its laws and regulations. Here, too, we find some
movement towards a greater legal uniformity and cohesion, at least in theory.
On the boundaries of Armenia at the time
of the missions, see Nersessian, Treasures from the
Ark, ch. i. On the
religious culture of Christian Armenia and its combinations with earlier Sasanid Zoroastrian beliefs and rituals, see Anne Redgate,
The Armenians, chs. 6-7. On the Armenian Monophysite
religion and Church, see A. S. Atiyah, A History of
Eastern Christianity (London: Methuen, 1968), Part IV, and K. V. Sarkissian,
`The Armenian Church', in A. J. Arberry (ed.),
Religion in the Middle East: Three Religions in Concord and Conflict, vol. 1:
Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 1969).
At the same time, this process should
not be exaggerated. Armenia was a semi-feudal peasant society, divided into
regions dominated by great noble families or Naxharars,
as well as lesser nobility or azats; even the Church
was a feudal appanage. Armenia was also divided into Roman Lesser Armenia and
partitioned Greater Armenia, so that the picture of unity given by the
Christian historians was considerably idealised.
Nevertheless, there was a supreme noble family, that of the royal dynasty, to
which the church leaders in fact belonged, which acted as a restraint on the Naxharars. Moreover, the spirit of martyrdom for the holy
covenant of the Armenian Apostolic Church united the aristocracy to a clear conception
of the Christian nation of Armenia. Lazar P'arcepi's
sixth-century History speaks of the valiant princely men `who gave themselves
in countless numbers to martyrdom on behalf of the covenant of the holy church.
(Nina Garsoian, Church and Culture, p. 128, citing
Lazar P'arcepi's History, LPI, ii, 2,34.)
Elishe, too, according to Robert Thomson, argues that the
reason for the covenant, which he thinks was modelled on the brit qodesh of the Maccabees, was to preserve the Armenians'
`ancestral and divinely-bestowed awrenk, a term that
embraces more than religion to include customs, laws and traditions, a whole
way of life that characterised Armenians as
Armenians. See Robert Thomson (ed.), Elishe: History
of Vardan and the Armenian War, Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 1o.
Thomson's Introduction places Elishe's History in the
context of the wars and martyrdom, and of the new history writing of the
period.
In other words, though the fragmented
social structure appeared to deny the possibility, a conception of nationhood
made its appearance and received _expression in the distinctive institution of
the Armenian Church and its covenant. This is something more than the vague
relationship of 'all-Aram', or the separate territory of Edom. There are even references
in Paustos' Epic Histories to the gathering of an
Armenian `council (zolov)', which included `even
[some/many?] of the ramik (ordinary people) and sinakan (peasantry)', though we should not make to much of this. See Grosby,
Biblical Ideas of Nationality, p. 145, citing Paustos
Buzand, Epic Histories III, xxi, and indicating the
parallel with Josiah's council in II Kings.
Once again, the evidence for processes
of nation-formation is uncertain and conflicting. Centrifugal and unifying
elements appear side by side. But for students of modern nations this should
come as no surprise. Well into the nineteenth century, the aristocracy
dominated political life and assemblies, even in western national states and
even when their estates no longer afforded a base for separate political
activity; and large sections of the population remained disenfranchised into
the twentieth century, with little protection from the law. Instead, we should
look for parallels in an earlier period: Armenia was closer to early modern
nations in absolutist states, with their great nobles competing with the court
and bureaucracy, but with a clear sense of a shared origin and history, the
growth of a distinctive public religious culture, a growing attachment to an
ancestral land, and the appearance of laws and customs specific to the
inhabitants of that land.
Similar centrifugal and centripetal
forces can be discerned in ancient Israel and Judah. Leaving aside the ongoing
debates about early Israelite tribal assemblies reflected in the relatively
egalitarian laws of the Mosaic code, and the lack of evidence for a strong
united monarchy, there is little doubt that by the eighth century BC, clear
self-definitions of `Israel' and 'Judah' as related sociological communities
had taken hold among many people in both the northern and southern kingdoms.
But, despite the efforts of certain prophets such as Amos and Hosea, following
in the traditions of Elijah and Elisha, to insist on the exclusive worship of
Yahweh and popular obedience to His laws, the ruling elites of the materially
more advanced northern kingdom of Israel were much more powerfully influenced
by the pagan Phoenician and Aramean cultures than were the rulers of its poorer
southern neighbour. For all that, the destruction of
the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 721 BC and the deportation of its
elites did not entail the destruction of the northern religious traditions.
Rather they seem to have been incorporated into the Deuteronomic, and other, editings of the much older Israelite laws, histories and
prophecies that appear to have achieved their present biblical form in Judah
and Babylon from the seventh to the fifth centuries.
For Steven Grosby,
the Judaites of the time of King Josiah in the later
seventh century BC possessed the characteristics of a `nationality'. By that
time, they appear to have had a clear self-designation and a sense of their
collective existence as a people under threat, as well as an exclusive devotion
to a single God of the land. They were also in the process of collating the
many traditions, memories and myths of their ancestors in a fixed religious centre, Jerusalem, and they had a clear attachment to the
God-given land of Eretz-Israel, which they claimed to have fixed boundaries
which they were intent on reoccupying in the wake of the Assyrian withdrawal.
But the extent to which the reforms of Kings Hezekiah and Josiah, and the laws
of the Deuteronomic code, were observed and accepted by non-priestly segments
of the Judean population is uncertain. The facts that pagan asherot
(sacred trees which came to be regarded as idolatrous by Judaite
leaders) had to be destroyed in the high places throughout the land, that a
Book of the Law was `discovered' in the Temple around 621 BC, and that it had
to be publicly promulgated in the purified Temple by Josiah, suggest that we
are witnessing only the beginning of a process of observance of common laws.
On early biblical history, see inter
alia Martin Noth, A History of Israel (London: A.
& C. Black, 1960); G. W. Anderson, Tradition and Interpretation (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979); Irving Zeitlin, Jesus and the Judaism of his Time
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); Gosta Ahlstrom: Who
Were the Israelites? (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns,
1986); and from an archaeological perspective, Israel Finkelstein and Neil
Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology s New Vision of Ancient
Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts (New York: The Free Press, zoos).
On the Josianic
reforms, see Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, ch. u.
It was really only after the reforms of
Ezra and Nehemiah that a restored Judean community committed to the worship of
Yahweh and the observance of His laws, and centred on
Jerusalem and the Second Temple, seems to have been able to persist as a
separate ethno-religious community first under Persian, and later under
Ptolemaic and then Seleucid, protection. Though there were schisms - between hellenisers and traditionalists and then between Sadducees,
Pharisees and Essenes - they do not appear to have undermined the sense of a
separate Judean ethnicity, or the boundary introduced by the exclusive worship
of Yahweh, the importance of Shabbat and the annual festivals, and the
observance of the Mosaic law code throughout the whole community, right into,
the period of Hasmonean and Roman rule. Indeed, it may be that, as Shaye Cohen
has so fully and vividly documented, it is in this latter period that the
creation of a Jewish ethnicity vis-à-vis Edomites and others can be traced. See
Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2ooo), chs.
3-4. See also Martin Hengel, Jews, Greeks and
Barbarians (London: SCM Press, 1980), Parts II and III.
But does all this allow us to characterise ancient Judea as a nation' in this period? For
Doron Mendels in his provocatively titled The Rise
and Fall of Jewish Nationalism, the Jews are indeed a nation, and one of many
cases of `nationalism' in the Hellenistic and early Roman world. This term, Mendels makes clear, actually signifies `ethnicity'; it is
quite unlike the modern usage of the term. But, then, says Mendels,
historians of Antiquity frequently make use of anachronistic terms like
`imperialism' and `utopia'. In fact, Mendels is
really concerned with the ethne (peoples) of the Hellenistic world, though,
like S. G. F. Brandon before him, he is happy to speak of nationalist feelings
or nationalistic traits such as `language', `territory', `history', `culture',
and `religion'. Indeed, on the same page we read that Alexander the Great, for
all his ideas of the unity of mankind, failed to abolish the existence of
nations, just as Napoleon, with similar `universalist' ideas, actually aroused
nationalistic feelings among some of his subjects. Yet, in this modern sense of
the term, there is little evidence of `nationalism' in Maccabean or even Zealot
circles.
All this seems to me to be a far cry from
the penetrating sociological enquiry of Steven Grosby
into the presence or absence of constitutive elements of nationality in Judah
and other collectivities in the ancient world. On the other hand, one must
admit that Mendels's choice of epoch is a more likely
milieu for the generation of nation-forming processes in Judea. As I indicated
earlier, it is unclear to what extent the Mosaic code had a deep impact in the
seventh or sixth centuries BC. But it clearly became much more widely observed
in the late Second Temple epoch, as well as in the Mishnaic period, when, as
Jacob Neusner documents, a much more participant
synagogal Judaism had replaced the Temple hierarchy and when the rabbis sought
to create a largely self-governing community, mainly in Galilee, based on the
needs and circumstances of the Am-haaretz, the common
man of the land. Here, I would argue, we have the nucleus of a nation operating
according to its own religious laws, even though it was at the time under
Roman/Byzantine occupation and suzerainty. In this respect, we should recall
that not all nations have sought outright independence, even in the modern
world, as the cases of modern Scotland, Catalonia and perhaps Quebec remind us,
but they have nevertheless exhibited all the processes of nation-formation that
I enumerated earlier.
Both in Armenia and Judea, the emergence
of a national community took place in the crucible of pre-existing states in
which political action appeared as the main factor in ethno-genesis. In other
words, kingdoms helped to forge these nations by providing the arena and
impetus for those processes of self-definition, myth and memory cultivation,
territorial development, the diffusion of public culture and legal standardisation that together constitute the bounded
sociological and cultural community we call the nation.
But this is only one aspect of the
matter. For all their importance as impetus and arena, political action and the
state require other non-political sources and factors to galvanise
the processes of nation-formation, in particular shared origin myths,
historical memory and culture (mainly language and religion). In both Judea and
Armenia, these factors, and especially those of religious belief, sacred law
and clerical institutions, were able to `carry' the sense of common ethnicity
and the memory of nationhood into exile and diaspora. While it is possible to
argue that, unlike most ethnic categories, networks and communities in
Antiquity, Judea and Armenia exhibited a balance between state and nation, and
this was significant for survival, it was ultimately the strong territorial
attachments, distinctive scriptures and messianic beliefs of their members that
enabled these ethnic communities to persist through the vicissitudes of
diaspora and to nurture over the longue durée the dream of collective
territorial restoration to an ancestral homeland.
On the importance of institutions in
`carrying' ethnicity and ensuring its persistence, see John Breuilly,
`Approaches to nationalism', in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation
(London: Verso, 1996). For the Armenian case, see Ronald Suny,
Looking Towards Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), and Panossian,
`The past as nation'. For the case of the Greek diaspora and the Orthodox
millet under Ottoman rule, see G. Arnakis, `The role
of religion in the development of Balkan nationalism', in Barbara and Charles Jelavich (eds.), The Balkans in Transition (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1963). For a critique, see Paschalis Kitromilides, "`Imagined communities" and the
origins of the national question in the Balkans', European History Quarterly
19, 2 (1989), 149-92. On national restoration movements among Greek, Armenian
and Jewish diasporas, see Anthony D. Smith, `Zionism and diaspora nationalism',
Israel Affairs 2, 2 (1995), 1-19.
With Armenia and Judea in mind, we can
return to our original question. In some ways, ancient Egypt exhibited the
processes of nation-formation. After all, it had a clear name and
self-definition, a consciousness of being a separate community and a suspicion
of outsiders like the Nubians and the Hyksos. When King Kamose
of Thebes around 1S7o BC exclaims
I should like to know for what purpose
is my strength. One prince sits in Avaris, and
another in Nubia, and here sit I with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each having his
slice of Egypt ... I will grapple with him, and rip open his belly. My desire
is to save Egypt which the Asiatics have smitten ...
Your counsel is wrong and I will fight with the Asiatics
... Men shall say of me in Thebes: Kamose, the
protector of Egypt.( Grosby, Biblical Ideas ofNationality, p. 31, citing A. Kirk Grayson and Donald B.
Redford, eds., Papyrus and Tablet, 1973, p. 22.)
he is surely referring to a wider
collectivity than Thebes or Upper Egypt. There is also much evidence of
territorial attachments in ancient Egypt, as for example in the Song of Sinuhe, who had fled Egypt and become prosperous in
Palestine (Upper Retenu), but felt a foreigner there
and desired to be buried `in the land wherein I was born'. There was also, of
course, a rich corpus of myths and symbols, including Creation myths, widely
disseminated by priests and scribes and enacted in temples, together with a
considerable repertoire of historical memories recorded in both inscriptions
and papyri. We may also discern the growth of a distinctive religious public
culture perpetuated in powerful priesthoods and scribal institutions, in whose
culture all upper-class Egyptians were educated. Finally, there is little doubt
about the high degree of legal regulation by the well-developed state
bureaucracy, and its penetration of the countryside.
But this is where the problem lies. We
can certainly point to a relatively powerful, and enduring, Egyptian state and
its culture, but can we equally speak of a sense of Egyptian nationhood? In
terms of rights and duties, Egypt was a very unequal society, even if there
were links and pathways from commoners to scribes and even nobles; but then
that is true of a great many other, modern societies. More important, there was
nothing like a pact or covenant between the Pharaoh and his people such as we
have seen in the case of fifth-century Armenia or of first- and second-century
Judea. It is also difficult to know to what extent Egyptians were imbued with
the scribal culture or were inculcated with its values.
The public culture was that of the state
and the priesthoods. So when Kamose claims the title
of `protector of Egypt', is it the nation he desires to liberate, or the state
and its territorial integrity? It may be difficult, given the nature of the
sources and the dynastic monopoly on inscriptions, to go behind royal
propaganda, but we should attempt to ask these questions, if only to clarify
our own conceptual categories and test the limits of comparison.
In this connection, it is interesting
that, while a clear sense of common Egyptian identity persisted through the Saite and Persian periods (witness the serious revolts
against the Assyrians and Persians) and into the Ptolemaic and Roman periods,
to re-surface subsequently in more than one period, it was less marked than
that of Armenians and Jews in their diasporas, at least before the modern
epoch. Perhaps the processes of nation-formation had gone much further among
ancient Jews and Armenians, and while all three cases had been formed in the
chrysalis of the state, an emergent Egyptian sense of nationhood was more tied
to the success of an all-powerful and all-pervasive bureaucratic state. The
latter's fragmentation signalled the reversal of
nation-forming processes among the Egyptians.
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