Epilogue
tion in the canon of Greek texts used for educational study, firstly, of the vast
mass of primary material preserved on papyrus or in inscriptions, and, sec-
ondly, of Jewish and Christian texts. In a ‘‘Western’’ culture based on a (very
partial) fusion of Judaeo-Christian and classical traditions, it is puzzling to
reflect on how few students of Greek will ever have been offered the chance
to read a private letter on papyrus, an honorific inscription put up by a Greek
city—or the Septuagint, or the New Testament, or Josephus’Antiquities,or
Eusebius.
But there could be a perfectly valid framework (and educational syllabus)
of ‘‘ancient history’’ which took as its central focus the Levant or the eastern
Mediterranean of (say) the first millennium..and first millennium..,
up to the Islamic conquests, and from that perspective would incorporate
the emergence of Greek literature, the rise of the Greek city-state, and the
spread of Greek colonisation on the one hand, and late Pharaonic Egypt on
the other, as well as Phoenicia, the Aramean kingdoms, Israel and Judah, and
the Neo-Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. These empires would
be essential to the story, and so—and in the same way—would Alexander’s
conquests, the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire.
There is naturally no suggestion here that many elements of the sort of
history which this framework implies have not already been written; in-
deed, from major works in French alone it would be possible to construct a
massively impressive bibliography of high-level surveys for use in this pro-
gramme.^35 Nor is it feasible that any one student, or even scholar, could mas-
ter more than a modest proportion of the ancient languages required. In fact
the central core of such a programme would be, in several different respects,
a highly traditional one. Firstly, it would focus on ‘‘our’’ (Western) concep-
tual origins; secondly, it would require a focus on two ancient languages,
as a minimum: not Latin and Greek, but Greek and Hebrew. Thirdly, at its
centre would lie historical narratives composed in the ancient world: He-
rodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and their successors on the one hand; and
the biblical narrative, from the Pentateuch to Chronicles, on the other. Since
Chronicles concludes with ‘‘the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia,’’ it cannot
(obviously enough) have reached its present form before the Achaemenid
period. As an exercise in historiography, – Chronicles is therefore broadly
contemporary with the major works of classical history writing. But there
. Think for example of a syllabus which ran as follows: P. Briant,Histoiredel’empireperse
deCyrusàAlexandre(); C. Préaux,Le monde hellénistiqueI–II; M. Sartre,D’Alexandre à
Zénobie:l’histoireduLevantantique,IVesiècleavantJ.-C.—IIIesiècleaprèsJ.-C. (); C. Mor-
risson, ed.,Le monde byzantinI:l’empire romain d’Orient (–)().