Themiclesian historiography

Themiclesian historiography is the Themiclesian effort to record history.

Overview

The historical period of Themiclesia is conventionally held to start in 385 BCE, the opening year of the annalistic work Springs and Autumns of Six States. 19th-century scholars have reconstructed a mostly-accepted chronology that confirms the internal consistency of the work and historicity of the events mentioned. Unearthed oracle bones that appear to be the originals of the compilation further buttress its accuracy. Despite this, Six States is a compilation of divinations, mostly about weather, natural disasters, injuries, cultic activities, and warfare, and does not seek to explain events within its limited ambit.

Medieval historians classify historical documents from the Classical Period and before into the canons of "archaic histories" and "recent histories", both containing six titles. The six "recent histories" are historiographic in the modern sense, and all of them deal with the history of Themiclesia between 100 and about 280 CE. The "archaic histories" are compilations of annals and short documents that date centuries before the "recent histories": aside from Six States, they encompass Elder Testaments, Younger Testaments, Book of Documents, Book of Charges, and Annals of Sjin. Many of these compilations contain writings that predate historiographic writing by centuries, but they were not extensively consulted by historians until the Historical Revolution after 1760.

According to Classical historians writing in the 3rd through 4th centuries CE, the historical period starts around 100 CE, since only after this date are accounts and treatises about history available. The historian Lord Snga (蘇君), who wrote his magnum opus around 245, unreservedly dismisses older documents:

From about 150 years before the present, there are continuous dates and events, as writers who came before us have bequeathed to us. As for the matters before then, they are wholly unknowable. If you go to temples and look at the carvings in the walls or the divination bones, you will see much writing that are hundreds or thousands of years old; if you visit a good house you will find copies of the Testaments and Documents, but they are useless and irrelevant. I know this because priests and testators still produce documents in similar language like them every day, and they are not produced for the purpose of discussion of past or present events. They are broken sentences and incomplete phrases, fortuitously preserved for the marvelling of historians but ill-suited for discussion. It is the only key to the Great Past, but regrettably no mind is strong enough to turn it.

Modern historians have commented on Classical historians' apparent lack of interest for the remote past and explicit preference for matters within memory and easily relatable to their readers. This is often contrasted with post-Classical authors, who were much more concerned about the aetiology of Themiclesian people. Some argue that the genre of historical writing was still developing during the Classical Period and had not fully separated from treatises on contemporary affairs, and some comments on relevant historical information do appear typical of the genre. Lord Snga himself apparently drew only on treatises to create his 100-book history that covered the Classical Period down to the very year he wrote in, and the final chapters were markedly more polemical than didactic.

The phrase "continuous dates and events" is often analyzed to mean "prose history", that is writings that connect multiple events, and therefore viewed as "continuous". The "continuous" style is contrary to the "broken" style that views events as unrelated incidents, or annalistic writing. The rise of prose history in Themiclesia is not well-understood, as only a single work, the Stories of Tsjinh, seems to exhibit a transitionary style, some events being described continuously despite the progression of time, and others being divided by the same. Yet the Stories of Tsjinh was composed in 290, well after Lord Snga had published his wholly-prosaic Histories.

The historian B. Hat believes that while political treatises appeal to history to rationalize a recent event, the prose history of the 3rd century narrates each event to rationanlize the next event, and all events are (at least in the historian's treatment) tied in a web of causes and effects, hence the monicker "continuous". The six "recent histories" are without distinct thematic, chronological, and geographic subdivisions, treating the entire period at once. Thus the work of the historian in the Classical Period was to compile treatises and connect facts amongst them, producing an "encyclopedic treatise" that addresses the entire present.

Revolution and counterrevolution

Around 1700, an interest in antiquities, both material and literary, became prevalent in Themiclesia. This phenomenon is partly attributable to the recent discovery of caches of oracular plates and ostraca, some of which were inscribed, but historians note that the influence of an equally-prominent interest in Casaterran antiquity cannot be discounted. In 1757, the Treatise on Antiquities and Histories was published by Lord K.lring, who made the seminal connection between the information on the oracular plates and a long-neglected Springs and Autumns of Six States. K.lring, who was an avid collector of oracular spacula, was reportedly deciphering a plate when the Six States suddenly fell from his bookshelf, opening at a page that matched his decipherment exactly. The matching text was nine characters long, which he believed was impossible as a co-incidence.

While this story may be fictional, Antiquarians across Themiclesia noted strong parallels between the Six States and deciphered oracles, and in some places texts as long as 15 characters were identical. In this period, interest was solely focused on the matching texts, while scapula that did not match texts received little attention. Nevertheless, Antiquarians organized digs that created so many holes in cities, fields, and cemeteries, that the government forbade digging holes larger than three foot across in arable land between spring and autumn. These digs proved largely unsuccessful in finding more scapula, probably because they dug with no reliable methodology for detecting deposits. The phenomenon, nevertheless, was recognized as an pioneering effort in archaeology.

In 1770, the first illustrated reference to all known scapulae and ostraca, amounting to 12,240 articles, was published as the Reference to Unearthed Texts on Antiquities. In 1802, Kam Tsut published his studies on scapulae and ostraca, identifying 248 of the rubbings as datable through comparisons with events in the Six States and the Annals of Sjin. Kam in 1803 further published an addendum to his 1802 work identifying 139 ostraca bearing private names as related to figures appearing in the Testaments. His work elevated the Six States from an antique curiosity of limited value to "a sacred scripture of unquestionable truth", effectively making that text and its interface with unearthed texts compulsory to a new generation of scholars in the 19th century.

Kam's works instigated a "historiographic revolution" in the eyes of B. Hat, placing strong emphasis on the written word over abstract beliefs and stories. In his wake, historians engaged in an early form of source criticism on later histories that spoke about the time to which scapula and ostraca were dated. Most of the histories dealing with what is now called the Archaic Period available to Kam's followers were written in the 5th or 6th centuries and relied heavily on myths and legends. With great faith in the unearthed texts and the Six States, they rejected nearly all post-Classical works on the period because they were not provenanced or contained contradictions to the "newly-unearthed or confirmed-by-unearthed facts". Much of their work can be considered hasty or superficial today, but their impact on the study of history in Themiclesia "cannot be overstated" according to Hat.

Tok Njem, Kam's student, verbalized his school's methodology in 1810:

As we realize that speech and thought are ephemeral and easily mutable, whether consciously or unconsciously, we hope to use solely materials which has longevity and resistance to change, namely written words. Inscriptions rank first to us because they are set in stone and cannot be altered without signs of alteration. The good author not only speaks of what he knows but how he knows them; writings which are not witnessed or apologized with texts are, to us, dubious.

At the same time, the new historical philosophy was often compared to empiricism in the natural sciences. However, unlike the sciences that seek to discover laws that govern nature, Kam's approach evolved in the 1810s towards an effort to establish facts exhaustively, rather than seek their explanations; rationalizations of facts were treated with the greatest skepticism, as they were deemed formulations of human mind rather than empirical "fact". From such a growing corpus of verified facts, historians of the 1820s pursued the creation of a "verified chronology", that is a daily calendar that contains all known facts between 385 BCE and 100 CE. In a sense, the school introduced a "historian's antiquarianism", which was aimed to overcome Lord Snga's famous complaint—that histories from 150 years before his time was "wholly unknowable"—and show that it was both knowable and provable.

Historical debate during the early 19th century thus skewed towards chronology and epigraphy, and some modern authors argue that these modes of analysis were preferred because they appeared to be the most scientific and least falliable to human manipulation. Chronology was established often with the assistance of astronomical transit and lunation, but this entailed the troublesome study of astronomy and calendars. In the realm of epigraphy, individual hands, or the writing or carving style believed to be of the same writer, were actively debated, identified, and catalogued. This focus encouraged history to become an academic discipline due to the sheer effort needed to produce an rigorous result, which was often "electron microscopic" in modern terms. Fostering rapid and wide scholarly readership, the initial historical journal, published in 1839, was populated by articles dealing with the precise date when events occurred.

Kam's philosophy about precision and skepticism for beliefs gradually extended to other eras. In 1834, the Redacted Histories was published as a commentary about the "six recent histories" and their treatment of historical figures. The author, Kam's son, painstakingly combed nearly 4 million words and, according to himself, questioned the transmission of information at every turn. He pointed out tens of thousands of omissions, inconsistencies, and assertions that are "historians' best but ultimately unfounded guesses". However, in this field, other historians criticized Kam's methodology as one that "more readily rejects than establishes."

In the middle of the 19th century, Kam's adherents came under assault from others. The critic Lord Lak argued in 1870 that the Antiquarians had reformed history into chronology due to its fascination with the transmission of information and the dogma that beliefs, even widespread ones, are unreliable. Others also criticized that unearthed texts are equally human in their origins and cannot be regarded as the absolute truth. To this the Antiquarians responded that annalistic writings are more reliable than conventional histories because they are not written to complement an author's "formulation", which are often polemical rather than historical. In the 1930s, Antiquarian history was frequently criticized as acausal history, focusing purely on "the occurrence of visible actions rather than their causes and effects"; however, this is not necessarily true in all of the Antiquarians. Prut wrote in 1830 that the infamous Plague of 87 could not have spread from N′ar via the Pin Road because a more precise reading of relevant documents showed that the road did not extend to Bjak until 89, unlike 57 as previously believed; this conclusion was made because an improved understanding of contemporary calendars, which narrowed down several alternative dates to a single possible one, and further promoted the now-accepted theory that the plague had actually come from Maverica.

A revised form of Antiquarianism became dominant in Themiclesian historical circles around 1870, seeking to use chronology and philology to revise received histories rather than outright reject them. This revision occurred under a strong influence from scientific philosophy, which entertained a broader range of documents that some previous Antiquarians would have considered speculative or opinionated. Moreover, the issue about giving excavated inscriptions maximalist interpretations or unwarranted primacy over received documents had been laid bare. Yet by this point, Themiclesian history had experienced an existential crisis, with publications being quickly obsoleted by progressively finer readings of dates and inscriptions that also produced massive rifts in understanding amongst the Antiquarians themselves. A university preparatory school lecturer once complained that he did not know what to teach students that would not be proven wrong in three years.

After decades of intense debate about the chronology, scholars asserted that there were four separate calendar systems in use when Six States was compiled and on this basis in 1857 concluded that the opening year of the Six States was 475 BCE. This consensus was not to last, as the excavated materials showed that the 1857 conclusion had been faulty. In 1878, the revised chronology that placed the opening year was 385 BCE received broad acceptance and remains so today. There remain facts that are not readily explained by the most broadly accepted reconstruction, and some scholars propose that a starting date of 363 or 402 BCE is also possible; others believe that the outstanding records can be explained as scribal errors. These questions remain troubled by the inconsistent placement of intercalary months, which were inserted to synchronize the lunar and solar years, 354 and 365 days long respectively.  Nevertheless, the completion of the chronology of the Six States is still regarded as one of the crowning achievements of the Antiquarian movement of the 19th century.

See also

• Themiclesia