Herodotus & Sima Qian

Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and HanChinaAuthor(s): Siep StuurmanReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of World History, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Mar., 2008), pp. 1-40Published by: University of Hawai'i PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20079459 .Accessed: 14/02/2013 22:17

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal ofWorld History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 22:17:06 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient

Greece and Han China*

SIEP STUURMAN

Erasmus University Rotterdam

History

as a critical account of the past and a means of self-knowl

edge and political enlightenment was independently invented in two civilizations in ancient Eurasia: China and Greece. It received its two best-known canonical formulations in the Shiji (Records of the

Scribe, written ca. 100-90 b.c.e.) of Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Ch'ien) in the former Han dynasty in China, and in Herodotus s Histories (Inqui ries, written ca. 450-425 b.c.e.) in the Greek communities of the east ern Mediterranean after the Persian Wars. The Greek city-states were

vibrant newcomers to the established world of the ancient civilizations of western Eurasia, while China was the most advanced civilization of eastern Eurasia. The independent development of history in two Eur asian civilizations provides us with a fascinating comparative case in

the world history of ideas.

History represented a new way for a society to reflect on itself, com

Journal of World History, Vol. 19, No. 1 ? 2008 by University of Hawai'i Press

I

* Part of the research for this article was done when I was a member of the School of

Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. I wish to thank Jonathan Israel, Joseph McDermott, and Carol Gluck for enlightening conversations about European and Asian history. I owe a special debt to Nicola di Cosmo for sharing his vast knowledge of

Chinese-Xiongnu relations with me. I also want to thank the Leiden sinologist Axel Sch neider for valuable advice. Finally, I am grateful to my Rotterdam colleague Maria Grever

and to the anonymous reader of the Journal of World History for their helpful comments on

previous versions of this essay.


2 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 20o8

peting with older religious, poetic, and philosophical modes of self

understanding. More than those older genres, history investigated the

contingencies of time and place. It made it possible to explore frontiers and to reflect on the differences between one's own way of life and the customs of foreigners. It is surely significant that in Greece as well as in China, the new discourse of history comprised a large amount of

geography and ethnography. My comparison of Herodotus and Sima

Qian focuses on the ethnographic parts of their histories, in particular on Herodotus s description of the Scythians and Sima Qian's treatment of the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu). In both cases, historians belonging to a

sedentary civilization confronted the nomadic culture of the north ern peoples inhabiting the great band of steppe lands that traverses Eurasia from west to east. I will discuss their nomadic ethnographies in the context of their views of empire and cultural difference, as well as in connection with the temporalities underpinning their historical narrative.

The dialectic of empire, ethnography, and history powerfully frames these histories. The writing of history is always an exercise in self-defi nition. More than anything else, it is the confrontation with others that compels people to question their own identity. That is what makes

imperialism so central to my comparison, whether empire is a menace from without, as in Herodotus, or a perilous course the fate of one's own civilization depends on, as in Sima Qian. Both Herodotus and Sima Qian were fascinated by the conditions and morality of empires, giving much thought to cultural difference, and trying out formula tions akin to what we today call cultural relativism. The problematic of empire incited both historians to compose a history of "the known world." Their societies had reached a stage when it was no longer pos sible to understand one's civilization without taking the measure of its wider environment. This, then, is the problematic that will guide my comparative investigation.

A few theoretical observations may be useful at this point. The ethnographies in the Histories and the Shiji are instances of what we may call the anthropological turn. Our historians inform their readers about the way of life of "others" living in foreign lands. The anthro

pological turn happens when they attempt to understand those others "from within," examining the functioning of their culture, instead of

merely compiling a list of weird and outlandish customs. Now, the type of ethnography we encounter in Herodotus and Sima Qian has fre quently been labeled under the generic notions of "othering" and "Ori entalism" ("Occidentalism" would be more appropriate in Sima Qian's case). In an influential book, Fran?ois Hartog has analyzed Herodotus's


Stuurman: Herodotus and Sima Qian 3

Scythian ethnography as an exemplary case of othering, while Owen Lattimore has long ago deplored Sima Qian's "strongly conventional" ideas about the steppe nomads.1 Over the past decades, the diagnosis of

"othering" has been made about virtually every European text discuss

ing non-European cultures, and there is no good reason why a similar evaluation could not apply to Chinese accounts of "barbarians."

The problem with such readings is not that they are "untrue." There

obviously ?5 a great deal of "othering" in these texts. My objection to an

overly exclusive focus on "othering" is that it makes us miss the signifi cance of the anthropological turn. To get the problem in sharper focus we must realize that there was a way of looking at foreigners before the anthropological turn. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann has called our attention to the habit of the Egyptians of the Old and Middle

Kingdom of "calling all non-Egyptians Vile enemies,' even when there were bonds of amity?established by treaties or political marriages? with the ethnic groups thus designated." The Egyptians equated Egypt with the meaningfully ordered world. Beyond its borders lived "abso lute aliens with whom any relations would be unthinkable."2 Against this background, much of what is called "othering" represents a real

accomplishment. That Herodotus and Sima Qian typify the compo nents of other cultures in a series of contrasts with their own way of life is not in itself very significant. It could hardly be otherwise. Any account of remote lands seeks to understand the unknown by compar

ing it with the known. What is significant is that they investigate the

functionality of other cultures as interlocking systems, and inquire how

the others "look back" at the civilized "center." That is a new approach. Even when these ethnographies contain negative judgments and ste

reotypical representations, they present us with the first step toward an

appraisal of the rationality of foreign ways. In this connection, it is of vital importance to see frontiers as zones

of creative interaction, and not just as sites of hostility and prejudice. The widespread adoption of "othering" as a theoretical framework in

intellectual history has led to an underestimation of the critical and

universalistic impulses in "frontier texts." The mutual awareness that

is a necessary prelude to reflecting upon the nature and value of other

cultures makes for the thinkability of a common humanity transcend

1 Fran?ois Hartog, Le miroir d'H?rodote: Essai sur la repr?sentation de l'autre (Paris: Gal

limard, 1991); Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962),

p. 448. 2 Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (New

York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), p. 151.


4 journal of world history, march 2008

ing cultural boundaries. The frontier, taken in this sense, is the real or imagined locus of rejection and acceptance, incomprehension and mutual understanding. We should bear in mind that this is not an

all-or-nothing game. The denial of other peoples' humanity and the

recognition of their equality represent two extreme cases. Much, and

perhaps most, of history is played out on the continuum between the two extremes.

Two "Fathers of History"

With some justification, both Herodotus and Sima Qian have been called "fathers of history" in their respective civilizations, but, as Grant

Hardy observes, comparative studies of Greek and Chinese historiog raphy are rare.3 The Histories, written in the late fifth century b.c.e., and the Shiji, written at the beginning of the first century b.c.e., were

among the most influential books of history ever written. The Shiji stands at the beginning of the long Chinese tradition of historiography that continued through the entire imperial era. Subsequent Chinese historians, beginning with Ban Gu (Pan Ku) in the later Han dynasty, have frequently voiced criticisms of Sima Qian, but, as Burton Watson observes, they, as well as their readers, have always read, studied, and admired the Shiji.4 The case of Herodotus is different. He was widely read, and frequently criticized, in antiquity, but was not well known in

3 Grant Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian s Conquest of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 261 n. 2, mentions S. Y. Teng, "Herodotus and Ssu-ma Ch'ien: Two Fathers of History," East and West 12 (1961): 233-40, and N. I. Konrad, "Polybius and Ssu~Ma Ch'ien," Soviet Sociology 5 (1967): 37-58, to which must now be added David Schaberg, "Travel, Geography, and the Imperial Imagination in Fifth-Century Athens and Han China," Comparative Literature 51 (1999): 152-91, and G. E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 5-20. Of these, Teng gives a brief introductory account, Konrad focuses on political cycles, Schaberg mainly compares Sima Qian and Thucydides, while Lloyd's discussion privileges epistemological concerns. 4 Burton Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien: Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia Uni versity Press, 1958), p. 38; see also William H. Nienhauser Jr., ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 689; and

Stephen W. Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. xxi. Moreover, historiography has greatly influenced the evolution of other Chinese literary genres; see Anthony C. Yu, "His tory, Fiction and the Reading of Chinese Narrative," Chinese Literature: Essays, Arricies, Reviews 10 (1988-1989): 1-19. Quotations from the Shiji, unless otherwise indicated, are from Burton Watson's translation: Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, 3 vols., rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); references contain Shiji chapter number, relevant volume (Han I, Han II, Qin), and page.



medieval Europe, only to resume his career with Lorenzo Valla's Latin translation in the fifteenth century.5 The canonization of Herodotus has thus not been a continuous process in time, nor did it represent a geographical or cultural unity. While we can consider Sima Qian a Chinese historian, who wrote about a Sinocentric world and saw him self as an inheritor and successor of the Chinese classics, Herodotus cannot stand for "Europe." He was a historian of the Greek city-states, the Persian empire, western Asia, and Egypt. In the Histories, Europe is the name of a continent, but for Herodotus it did not denote a mean

ingful cultural tradition or intellectual canon.6 Insofar as Herodotus's world had a cultural center, it was the Greek-speaking part of the Med iterranean. It follows that we must be careful not to project back later

oppositions between China and Europe into our discussion of Herodo tus and Sima Qian.

The differences between ancient Greece and Han China are unde niable and important, but so are the instructive parallels between the two civilizations. We should pay equal attention to both. Moreover, we must take into account the specificity of intellectual history. The

writings of Herodotus and Sima Qian present us with two varieties of

historiography that originated in the eastern and western regions of Eurasia. Both were bold, innovative thinkers who conceived of his

tory as a critical, explanatory discourse about political power that went

beyond its traditional annalistic and mnemonic functions. It is thus

entirely possible that we will find methodological and political similari ties between them that transcend their different cultural backgrounds.

Generic readings in terms of "Greekness" or "Chineseness" easily over

look such similarities. Herodotus's Histories recount the history of the Greco-Persian Wars

in the early decades of the fifth century b.c.e., against the backdrop of a history and ethnography of the world of western Asia and northern Africa. The rise and defeat of Persian imperialism and the maintenance

of Greek independence are the main themes of his history. In the Shiji, Sima Qian presents a history of China from its mythical beginnings to the Han empire of his own lifetime, including large swaths of the

5 See Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berke

ley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 50-51. 6 To the Greeks, Europe represented a heterogeneous collection of lands and peoples. The Histories do not even contain a "synthesizing geographical description of Europe": Wido

Sieberer, Das Bild Europas in den Historien (Innsbruck: Institut fur Sprachwissenschaft der

Universit?t Innsbruck, 1995), p. 29; see also Martin Ninck, Die Entdeckung von Europa durch

die Griechen (Basel: B. Schwabe & Co., 1945).


6 journal of world history, march 2008

history and ethnography of the frontier zones of the empire. The emer

gence of a unified empire out of the Warring States of pre-Qin China, the consolidation of the former Han, and the relations between the

empire and the surrounding peoples are major themes of his history. To frame what follows, let us briefly review some elementary facts

about the two historians. Herodotus was born before 480 b.c.e. to a well-to-do family in Halicarnassus on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor. It has been suggested that the family was of mixed Greek and Carian descent, but that is not certain.7 He received a thorough grounding in poetry, drama, and philosophy. At some point, he left for the island of Samos, then part of the Athenian confederacy, possibly because his family was expelled from Halicarnassus by the tyrant Lyg damis. He later returned to his place of birth, which had deposed its

tyrant and joined the Athenian confederacy. In the 440s, Herodotus

spent some years in Athens. Probably in 443, he moved to the newly founded Athenian colony at Thurii in southern Italy. There he died between 430 and 424. Herodotus's places of residence thus covered a

great part of the Greek world. Moreover, he traveled extensively, and in the Histories he frequently refers to firsthand oral and visual evidence of many lands. He claimed to have visited Egypt, Cyrenaica, Babylon, Phoenicia, and Scythia, but some students of Herodotus do not accept all of those claims.

Though well connected, Herodotus seems never to have belonged to the inner circles of the political elite in any of the cities in which he resided. In a broad way, Herodotus sympathized with the Greeks, which is hardly surprising since the successful resistance of the Greek cities against Persian imperialism is his main subject, but he was not a par tisan of any Greek city, not even of Athens, which he greatly admired for its paramount role in defeating the Persians. Several commentators have argued that his insistence on the hubris and inevitable decline of empires implied a censure of Athenian maritime imperialism that probably was not lost on his Greek readers who were living through the Peloponnesian War when Herodotus finished his work.8 Herodotus, then, was a man keenly interested in politics but not directly attached to state power. Accordingly, he wrote the Histories for the literate citi

7 See James Romm, Herodotus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 49.

8 See, e.g., Charles W Fornara, Herodotus: An Interpretative Essay (Oxford: Cleren

don Press, 1971), pp. 46-58; John Moles, "Herodotus and Athens," in Brill's Companion to Herodotus, ed. Egbert J. Bakker, Irene J. F. de Jong, and Hans van Wees (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 50-52.



zenry in the Greek world, and not at the behest of any particular city or prince.

Contrasting with Herodotus's relative political independence, the career of Sima Qian was from start to finish intertwined with the politics of the Han state under the ambitious and severe emperor Wu (r. 141-87 b.c.e.). He was born in 145 b.c.e., near Longmen ("Dragon Gate") on the Yellow River in North China. When he was five, his father, Sima

Tan, obtained the position of Grand Astrologer at the imperial court in the Han capital Chang'an. However, neither Sima Tan nor his son

was an official imperial historiographer. They had access to the palace archives, but Sima Tan's historical work was a self-imposed, "private" project. And so it was with his son, who, complying with his father's last wish, continued the latter's history of China.9 In his youth, Sima

Qian got a thorough education in the classics. "At the age of ten," he later recalled, "he could read the old writings."10 At twenty-one he took up service as a gentleman of the palace. Like Herodotus, Sima

Qian traveled widely, within China as well as in the borderlands to the south and north of the Han territories. In no, he accompanied emperor Wu on an inspection tour of the northern frontier, a region of intermittent clashes and skirmishes with China's most redoubtable enemies, the nomadic Xiongnu. Besides, he collected much knowledge about distant lands and people by interrogating travelers.11 In 108, he succeeded his father as Grand Astrologer, and in 104 he assisted the

emperor with the reform of the calendar.12 Five years later, however, he suffered disgrace because he had spoken in defense of general Li

Ling, who had surrendered to the Xiongnu after a heroic battle against numerically superior forces. Sima's punishment was death for "defaming the emperor," but the sentence was eventually commuted to castration. In such cases, the code of honor prescribed suicide. Sima Qian, how

ever, continued to work on his history, living in shame and humilia

tion, but fulfilling his filial duty to his father and hoping for recognition in future ages. Rehabilitated and appointed Prefect Palace Secretary in

96, he managed to finish the history before he died in 86, a year after

emperor Wu. The Shiji is a work of inordinate length, comprising 130

9 See Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, pp. 16-18. 10 Shiji 130, quoted in Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, p. 48. 11 See Nicola di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in

East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 268-69. 12 See Christopher Cullen, "Motivations for Scientific Change in Ancient China:

Emperor Wu and the Grand Inception Astronomical Reforms of 104 b.c.," Journal for the

History of Astronomy 24 (1993): 185-203.



chapters. It recounts the entire history of China up to the historian's time. Like Herodotus's Histories, the Shiji contains a sizable amount of

geography and ethnography, in particular of the "barbarian lands" to the west and north of the Han empire.

On the face of it, Sima Qian's relation to political power appears as almost the opposite of Herodotus's. As a loyal servant of the emperor, one would expect him to write a history endorsing the Han empire. To some extent, he lived up to such expectations, justifying the order and

unity of the empire and contributing to the new Confucian canon that informed the Han vision of Chinese history. For all that, Sima Qian envisaged the task of the historian as an eminently critical one. Attrib

uting his own views to Dong Zhongshu's (Tung Chung-shu) exegesis of Confucius's explanation of the message of the Spring and Autumn

Annals, he declared in the concluding chapter of his work that "Confu cius realized that his words were not being heeded, nor his doctrine put into practice. So he made a critical judgment of the rights and wrongs of a period of two hundred and forty-two years in order to provide a standard of rules and ceremonies for the world. He criticized the emper ors, reprimanded the feudal lords, and condemned the high officials in order to make known the business of a true ruler."13 Sima Qian's invo cation of the authority of the great sage to justify his view of history as

critique was in line with the Confucian view of the double function of history as the public concern of the ruler and the private duty of the sage to uphold moral rectitude.14 Here, he is drawing on the authorita tive commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals, in which, accord ing to David Schaberg, Confucius "becomes the unerring judge of his tory, the uncrowned king."15 Sima Qian's self-image can be traced back to the autonomous critical role historical writings had achieved during the Warring States period.16 Accordingly, the Shiji contains numerous criticisms of emperors, ministers, and lower officials. Such criticisms, however, are invariably found in the speeches of personages in the nar rative rather than in the meta-narrative first-person comments placed at the end of each chapter. Grant Hardy has characterized the Shiji as

13 Shiji 130, cited in Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, p. 50. 14 See Sarah A. Queen, From Chronicle to Canon: The Hermeneutics of the Spring and

Autumn according to Tung Chung-shu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 119.

15 David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 308; Sima Qian invokes Confucius by quoting his older contemporary Tung Chung-shu, the major author involved in the Han canonization of Confucianism.

16 See Schaberg, Patterned Past, pp. 258-70; Queen, From Chronicle to Canon, pp. 118-19.



"an arena for moral hermeneutics" rather than a straightforward exer cise in criticism.17 The trope of indirect criticism was long established in Chinese historiography, and Sima Qian's bitter experiences had

undoubtedly impressed the need for authorial prudence on him. Here, he differs from Herodotus, who expresses some of his harshest condem nations of the behavior of rulers in his own authorial voice.

What about the philosophical background? When it moves beyond the annalistic genre, the writing of history always involves theoretical notions, however implicit these may be. The important thing to note here is that both Herodotus and Sima Qian drafted their histories in a climate of intellectual pluralism and uncertainty about the ultimate foundations of knowledge and morality. In Greece, this was the age of the Sophists, who excelled at questioning the validity of traditional ethics and epistemology. Herodotus's strong formulation of cultural relativism shows his affinity with Sophistic skepticism.18 In China, the intellectual strife between the "hundred schools" of the Warring States period persisted as a living memory in Sima Qian's days. In his account of his own education he relates that his father explained the

mutually contradictory doctrines of the "six schools" to him.19 Sarah

Queen characterizes the intellectual culture of the early Han as plu ralistic and syncretistic.20 In the intellectual cultures of fifth-century

Greece and early imperial China traditional knowledge-claims no lon

ger commanded unquestionable authority, so that tradition had to be shored up or supplemented by "philosophy." Introducing systematic and interpretative history, Herodotus and Sima Qian experimented, each after his own fashion, with a new type of knowledge about the human condition. Both attributed a political function to history, albeit in widely different political regimes.21 Both conceived of history as a

critical discipline that would enlighten the minds of men in uncertain

and dangerous times.

Finally, they were convinced that their society was passing through a political crisis caused by its involvement in a wider environment. Even as Herodotus was writing the history of the momentous colli

17 Grant Hardy, "Form and Narrative in Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Shih chi," Chinese Literature:

Essays, Articles, Reviews 14 (1992-1993): 22. 18 See Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Per

suasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 11-12. 19 Durrant, Cloudy Mirror, pp. 3-6; Sima Tan was probably the first to classify the

schools according to their intellectual content instead of the names of founders and masters; see Kidder Smith, "Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism, 'Legalism,' et cetera," Journal of

Asian Studies 62 (2003): 129-56. 20 Queen, From Chronicle to Canon, pp. 2-3, 22-23. 21 See Lloyd, Ambitions of Curiosity, pp. 18-20.


IO JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 20o8

sion of the Greek city-states with Persian imperialism, he was witness

ing the early stages of the war between Sparta and Athens, and the first tremors of the decline of the Athenian maritime empire that had

emerged from the Persian Wars. Likewise, Sima Qian was writing when the Han empire was engaged in a perilous and costly course of impe rial expansion, a policy he himself deemed misguided and harmful. For both historians, issues of empire called for a rethinking of the place of their society in the "known world." Both supplied their readers with the latest geographical and ethnographical information to enable them to understand their own history in a broader, "global" framework. In that sense, we may call them world historians.22

History, the Politics of Empire, and the Eurasian Frontier

Herodotus and Sima Qian belong to the age Jerry Bentley has called "the era of the ancient silk roads." The ethnic, linguistic, and religious boundaries traversed by the far-flung Eurasian trade routes contributed to their interest in ethnography. Long-distance travel remained excep tional, but there was enough of it to provide inquisitive minds with information about remote places and peoples. In particular, the silk roads cut across the sedentary-nomadic divide. As Bentley observes, the network of trade routes that sustained east-west communication across the entire expanse of Eurasia and North Africa was facilitated by the "political and economic collaboration between settled and nomadic peoples."23 Collaboration was, however, frequently interrupted by war fare. The nomads regarded the sedentary societies as targets for raiding and sources of tribute. The settled peoples, who feared and respected the military power of the nomads, often had to pay up, but they also attempted to curb nomadic power by military means.

The encounter between the "civilized" and the "barbarian" affected the earliest notions of history and culture in the Eurasian world. The frontier between the sedentary civilizations and the nomadic-pasto ral societies of the north ran from present-day Moldavia through the

22 See William H. McNeill, "The Changing Shape of World History," History and The ory 34 (1995): 8: "Historians of the portion of the earth known to the writer are properly classed as world historians inasmuch as they seek to record the whole significant and know able past." 23

Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 32.


Stuurman: Herodotus and Sima Qian ii

entire breadth of western and central Asia, and thence along the series of defensive mounds and ramparts known as the Chinese "Great Wall" that reached the Yellow Sea at the base of the Korean peninsula. To the north of the frontier lay the steppe lands, a vast "sea of grass," as world historian William McNeill has called it.24 The sea of grass fed the herds of the nomads and enabled them to migrate and raid over impressive distances. The zone to the south of the frontier was the locus of the rise of all the great sedentary urban civilizations, from China, India, and

Iran, to Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The frontier was an ill-defined intermediate zone, a locus of trade, raiding, and warfare, as

well as confrontations and exchanges between different cultures. The written sources have overwhelmingly been on the side of the sedentary cultures. Unsurprisingly, they mostly depict the tensions and struggles in the frontier zone in terms of an opposition between the "civilized" and the "barbarian."

The dialectic of the civilized and the barbarian, and of the seden

tary and the nomadic, was an organizing principle of ancient historiog raphy from its inception in the writings of Herodotus and Sima Qian to its subsequent development in Hellenism in the west and the later

Han in the east (and, much later, in Ibn Khaldun in medieval Islam). The Histories range widely across western Eurasia and North Africa. Book IV is devoted to the Scythians north of the Black Sea, with brief

digressions on other northern peoples. Books I and III contain much material on Persian culture, while Book II deals with Egypt and north ern Africa. Sima Qian likewise devotes much space to ethnography, though not as much as Herodotus. The Shiji contains six chapters on

barbarian peoples.25 One of the longest chapters of the book discusses the Xiongnu to the north of the Great Wall. The Xiongnu and their relations with China figure in many other chapters as well. The Shiji also contains accounts of the southern marchlands of the Han empire, as well as Korea (Chaoxian), Ferghana (Dayuan), Bactria (Daxia), and Parthia (Anxi).

The descriptions of the Xiongnu and Ferghana are fairly detailed, the others are shorter, and about still other regions Sima Qian pos sessed only bits and pieces of disconnected knowledge.26 About India

24 William H. McNeill, The Shape of European History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 47. 25 See Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, p. 132. 26 The original version of chapter 123 of the Shiji, which contains the description of

the western lands, is lost, except for the introductory alinea; what we now have is largely based on an interpolation from the Han Shu by Ban Gu (Pan Ku), which was in turn based



(Shendu) he presents some information the Chinese had obtained from Bactrian merchants who had visited Indian markets. India, they told the Han envoys, lies several thousand li (1,000 li is about 415 kilo

meters, or 260 miles) to the southeast of Bactria, the people cultivate the land, they use elephants in battle, the climate is hot and damp, and the kingdom is situated on a great river.27 The regions described

by the two historians represent adjacent parts of Eurasia. The eastern extremities of Herodotus's Scythians border on Sima Qian's western most nomads, the "great Yuezhi," who live some six hundred miles west of Ferghana, and whose customs are "like those of the Xiongnu."28 Sima

Qian's remote and little-known Anxi geographically overlaps with Herodotus's Persia. To both of them, India is a far country at the rim of the known world, although Sima Qian's information about it is more

matter-of-fact than Herodotus's account of "gold-digging ants."29

They are understandably most interested in knowledge about the lands and peoples with which Greece and China had entered into com

mercial or political relations. To the Greeks, the Persians were important as enemies, the Egyptians were important because theirs was the most ancient of all known civilizations from which a part of Greek culture was believed to derive, and the Scythians were important because there were Greek trading colonies on the northern coast of the Black Sea. Herodotus's interest in Cyrenaica is likewise explained by the presence of Greek colonies there. Apart from that, Scythia and Ethiopia were of interest because of the Persians' failure to conquer them. Sima Qian's geographical focus can be explained in a similar fashion.30 His most elaborate ethnography concerns the nomadic Xiongnu, with whom the Han were frequently at war.31 Other geographical and ethnographical data in the Shiji concern the borderlands of China. In Sima Qian's time, several border regions had come into the orbit of the ambitious policy

on Sima Qian's text. See A. F. P. Hulsew? and M. A. N. Loewe, China in Central Asia: The Early Stage: 125 B.c.-A.D. 23. An Annotated Translation of Chapters 61 and 96 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty (Leiden: Brill, 1979), pp. 14-39. 27

Ibid., pp. 235-36. 28 Ibid., p. 234. 29

Herodotus, III, 102; cited from Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. A. D. Godley, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); all references to Herodotus are to book and section number.

30 On the strategic background of the ethnographies in Chinese historiography, see Michel Cartier, "Barbarians through Chinese Eyes: The Emergence of an Anthropological Approach to Ethnic Differences," Comparaave Civilization Review 6 (1981): 3-4. 31 See Thomas J. Barfield, "The Hsiung-nu Imperial Confederacy: Organization and Foreign Policy," Journal of Asian Studies 41 (1981-82): 45-61.



of expansion of Emperor Wu. Ferghana (Dayuan) represented a link in the Chinese trade routes to the west, but its main attraction was the excellent opportunity it offered to outflank the Xiongnu.32 Around 100

b.c.e., the Han had established garrisons in Dayuan. As I noted above, frontiers are places of creative interaction. Beyond

"othering" and hostility, they open up the possibility of recognizing the humaneness and rationality of "others." To make the notion of com mon humanity thinkable, the first step to take is a negative one: the abandonment of unreflective ethnocentrism. In his Egyptian ethnog raphy, Herodotus observes that "the Egyptians call all men of other

languages barbarians."33 In Greek parlance, the term "barbarians"

commonly denoted all non-Greek-speaking peoples, so that Herodo tus's statement represents a conscious inversion of the standard Greek discourse on cultural difference. In Sima Qian's ethnography of the

Xiongnu we encounter a similar inversion of the standard Chinese view of the northern "barbarians." The standard view was, of course, that the customs of the Han Chinese were in every way superior to those of the nomads. Sima Qian, however, first explains the functioning of Xiongnu society in remarkably neutral and unbiased terms, and then has a Chi nese who has gone over to the side of the Xiongnu explain why the customs of the nomads are reasonable in the steppe environment, and in some ways even superior to the ways of the Han.34 The inversion is

not as perfectly symmetrical as Herodotus's Egyptian maxim, but the rhetorical figure is the same.

It is this inversion that constitutes cultural relativism. To avoid

taking on board too much philosophical overweight I propose to define cultural relativism in very simple terms: it is the awareness that "others" look at "us" just as "we" look at "them." As the Greeks regard the Egyp tians, so the Egyptians regard the Greeks. It is an elementary idea with

momentous consequences: People who realize that they are "others" in

the worldview of those they themselves were accustomed to see as "oth ers" will not have the same self-image as before. It should be underlined that cultural relativism does not necessarily entail moral relativism.

Usually it does not. Moral relativism, the conviction that ethical val ues are entirely contingent on time and place, is hard to find in the his

32 Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, p. 495; Hulsew? and Loewe, China in Cen

tral Asia, pp. 40-43. 33

Herodotus, II, 158. 34

Shiji, no: Han II, pp. 143-44.



torical sources.35 Both Herodotus and Sima Qian, for example, believe that it is absolutely wrong to kill an innocent person. Where they differ from each other, and from us, is in their notions of innocence, guilt, and the appropriate procedures of justice. Cultural relativism denotes the modest proposition that it is wise to study a culture in its own terms

(not necessarily on its own terms), to attempt to understand it "from

within," instead of passing a summary verdict on it. The intellectual and rhetorical move of cultural relativism paves

the way for the thinkability of common humanity. The other intellec tual origin of the notion of a common humanity is the conviction that there are attributes shared by all members of the human species. Such ideas were available in Greek as well as in Chinese intellectual culture.

Homer, the premier canonical author of the Greek world, asserted that all men need the gods, all men must die, and no one is nameless.36

Likewise, he strongly endorses Zeus's command to treat strangers in a humane way, thus establishing the notion of a morality common to all men who are reasonable and heed the gods. Scattered notions of the

unity of humanity were found in Greek thought from the sixth century onward.37 From the late sixth century, Greek authors amassed a body of ethnology.38 The Greek world itself was a patchwork of local cul tures, and through their trade, travels, and colonies, the Greeks were

well aware of the multiplicity of customs and beliefs in the surrounding lands. Among the sophists, the idea that the laws and moral prescrip tions of particular cultures are merely human conventions was wide spread.39 One of them, Antiphon, would later assert that Greeks and barbarians are the same "by nature."

40

The Chinese notions of ethics and civilized life were grounded in a cosmic order, and thus presumably absolute. The "barbarians" are often berated for their failure to understand them, suggesting a clear-cut con

35 Strong moral relativism is a self-contradictory concept, for the elementary reason

that moral rules are, among other things, defined by the fact that they do not depend on "local preferences"; see John W. Cook, Morality and Cultural Differences (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1999). 36 Odyssey, III, 48, 236; VIII, 552-53. 37 See H. C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind.in Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1965), pp. 24-32. 38 See W. A. Heidel, "Hecataeus and Xenophanes," American Journal of Philology 64 (1943): 264. 39 See John Gibert, "The Sophists," in The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy, ed.

Christopher Shields (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 39-44. 40 See A. W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 113-14; Thomas, Herodotus in Context, pp. 131-33.



trast between a homogeneous Chinese "civilized" way of life and "bar barian" incoherence and confusion. In reality, the preimperial history of "China" was marked by ethnic and cultural diversity.41 The Han

empire itself was by no means a culturally homogeneous space. Against this backdrop, the insistence on the cosmic grounding of Chinese civi lization appears as a discursive means of domesticating diversity rather than as a confident extrapolation from "reality."

The power of the notion of a human nature common to all men (at least potentially including "barbarians") is apparent from the fact that it is shared by philosophers who otherwise sharply disagree. Mengzi (Mencius), a fourth-century successor of Confucius, presents a well

developed theory of a benevolent human nature.42 However, another

highly influential and original philosopher, Xunzi (Hs?n Tzu), writing in the third century, rejects Mencius's view, maintaining that man's nature is evil.43 For his part, the early fourth-century philosopher Mozi

(Mo-Tzu) posits a primordial selfishness "before there were any laws or government."44 The chief representative of the legalist, or "realist," school, the third-century political theorist Han Fei, is distrustful of gen eral theories but nonetheless maintains that all men can be governed by means of punishments and rewards.45 Though unable to agree on what makes people tick, the different schools all seem to subscribe to the belief that there is such a thing as a universal human nature. Arthur

Waley points out that Confucius himself perhaps tended to limit the reach of the concept of humaneness to civilized Chinese society, but that later Confucians used it in a more abstract manner, so that it came

to stand for "human being" and "humaneness" as opposed to "animal" and "animality."46 In Sima Qian's time, this was the generally accepted meaning. Chinese philosophers did not develop the stark opposition between "nature" and "convention" characteristic of Greek thought, although one statement by Xunzi comes close to it: "Children born

among the Han or Y?e people of the south and among the Mo barbar

41 See Jacques Gernet, Le monde chinois, vol i : De l'?ge de bronze au Moyen ?ge (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), pp. 18, 40, 71. 42

Mencius, translated with an introduction by D. C. Lau (London: Penguin Books,

1970), pp. 12-15. 43 See Hs?n Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia Univer

sity Press, 1996), pp. 157-59. 44 See Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hs?n Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu, trans. Burton Watson

(New York: Columbia University Press, s.d.): Mo Tzu, 34. 45

Ibid., Han Fei Tzu, 30. 46 See The Analects of Confucius, trans, and annotated by Arthur Waley (New York:

Vintage Books, 1989), p. 27.


i6 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 20o8

ians of the north cry with the same voice at birth, but as they grow older

they follow different customs. Education causes them to differ."47 The concepts of common humanity and human nature have intel

lectual as well as political roots. Intellectually, they represent a cogni tive strategy of explaining plurality in terms of an underlying unity. Politically, they are a means to deal with cultural diversity, both within

polities and in the marchlands of empires, a strategy of bridging cultural distances by appealing to higher-order bonds of humanity. What the intellectual cultures of ancient Greece and Han China have in com

mon, then, are two things: first, a keen interest in foreign lands and a sizable amount of ethnographic knowledge, making cultural difference a possible object of investigation; second, generic concepts of human nature that might be developed into a notion of common humanity. The combination of these discourses created the intellectual matrix for the anthropological turn. In the next two sections, Herodotus's and Sima Qian's deployment of the anthropological turn will be examined in more detail.

Herodotus: Persians, Scythians, and Greeks

Herodotus's Histories revolve around the new world order created by the Persian bid for domination of the "known world." The Persians had extended their power to the borders of India; they ruled Iran, Mesopo tamia, and Asia Minor; and after their conquest of Egypt they were the

masters of the Levant. To the Greeks this was an awesome and menac ing empire. Nothing remotely like it had ever been seen.48 Herodotus recounts the failure of the Persian campaigns to conquer Ethiopia and Scythia, followed by his much more detailed narrative of the defeat of their attempts to subdue the Greeks. He offers his reader a dazzling panorama of the known world, followed by the spellbinding story of the failure of the first bid for "universal empire." Even though Greek victory was important and dear to him, his basic subject was Persian defeat.

In a way, Herodotus already announces his cultural relativism in the opening statement of the Histories, informing his readers that he has written down the results of his inquiry so that "the great and marvelous

47 Hs?n Tzu, 15. 48 See James Romm, Herodotus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).



deeds done by Greeks and barbarians shall not fall into oblivion."49 The

barbarians, or so it appears, have also accomplished great deeds that are worth remembering on a par with those of the Greeks. This is not the

language of ethnocentric parochialism. Another Herodotean maxim in the opening sections of the book likewise conveys a powerful equal ity effect: "[I will] speak of small and great cities alike. For many states that were once great have now become small: and those that were great in my time were small formerly . . . human prosperity never continues in one stay."50 The transience of greatness, a recurrent theme in the

Histories, seems to preclude the lasting success of any imperial ven ture. Generally, Herodotus disapproves of the lust for wealth and power he observes in most rulers. Even the thirst for knowledge, a drive he otherwise holds in high esteem, becomes corrupted by its instrumental use for ignoble ends by greedy and prideful kings?that is, by virtually all kings.51 In this connection it is important to note that Herodotus's most powerful and explicit statement of cultural relativism comes in the course of the gruesome story of the madness and death of the Per sian king Cambyses (r. 530-522), who has rightfully been called "the

most cruel and stupid of all Herodotus's kings."52 The story of Cam

byses actually represents Herodotus's first instance of Persian defeat. It recounts the failure of his attack on Ethiopia, a defeat Herodotus attributes to the Persian king's reckless mismanagement of his army.

Only when his troops are near starvation and resort to cannibalism does he abandon the campaign. Upon his return to Egypt Cambyses demonstrates that he has learned nothing from his mistakes. Instead,

49 Herodotus, I, i ; for a time, Herodotus's cultural relativism has been downplayed in the

historiography, see Hartog, Miroir d'H?rodote; Romm, Herodotus; James Redfield, "Herodo tus the Tourist," in Greeks and Barbarians, ed. Thomas Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2002), pp. 24-49; see ^so Vivienne Gray, "Herodotus and the Rhetoric of Otherness," American Journal of Philology 116 (1995): 185-211; and Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Recently, however, such assessments have been (convincingly, in my opinion) challenged by Thomas, Herodotus in Context; Rosaria

Vignolo Munson, Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodo tus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and Munson, Black Doves Speak:

Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, Harvard University Press, 2005). See also Christopher Pelling, "East

Is East and West Is West?Or Are They? National Stereotypes in Herodotus," http://www .dur.ac.uk/Classics/histos/1997/pelling; and Walter Burkert, Die Griechen und der Orient

(Munich: Beck, 2003). 50 Herodotus, I, 5. 51 See Mathew R. Christ, "Herodotean Kings and Historical Inquiry," Classical Antiq

uity 13 (1994): 167-202. 52 Richmond Lattimore, "The Wise Adviser in Herodotus," Classical Philology 34

(1939): 31.


i8 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 20o8

he blames the Egyptians and kills the Apis, the holy calf of one of the

major Egyptian religious festivals.53 Blinded by his overweening pride, Cambyses believed that he could

wantonly kill and insult, respecting neither the customs of other peo ples nor those of his native Persia. The fate of Cambyses was an object lesson in the perils of hubris and unchecked power, and in particular of the risks of trampling on peoples' cherished beliefs and customs.54 It

provides the background to the famous "anthropological experiment" executed by the Persian king Darius: "Darius ... summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them what price would persuade them to eat their fathers' dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do it. Then he summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks

being present and understanding by interpretation what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act. So deeply rooted are these beliefs."55 Generalizing from Darius's experiment, as well as from the Cambyses's case, Herodotus formulates cultural rela tivism as a universally valid maxim: "For if it were proposed to all men to choose which seemed the best of all customs, all, after examination

made, would place their own first; so well all are persuaded that their own are by far the best."56 Custom, Herodotus declares, quoting a well known line from the poet Pindar, is "king of all." Here, his maxim resonates with much of ancient opinion, for this was one the most fre quently quoted lines of poetry throughout antiquity.57

Introducing his maxim, Herodotus tells his readers that he deems it in every way proved that Cambyses was "very mad," or else he would

never have endeavored "to deride religion and custom." Cultural rela tivism thus represents the counterpoint to the delusions of imperial ism. Herodotus likewise explains the Persian failure to conquer Scythia and Greece by their lack of understanding of other cultures. The Per sians misinterpreted the guerilla tactics of the Scythian nomads, and

53 Herodotus's judgment of Cambyses has been criticized; see Cyrus Masroori, "Cyrus II and the Political Utility of Religious Toleration," in Religious Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 20-21. 54 See Rosaria Vignolo Munson, "The Madness of Cambyses," Arethusa 24 (1991): 43-65 55

Herodotus, III, 38. 56 Ibid. I have slightly modified the translation. Godley renders "pasi anthropoisi" as "to all nations," which sounds a bit anachronistic. I prefer the literal translation: "to all men." 57 See Martin Ostwald, "Pindar, Nomos, and Heracles," Harvard Studies in Classical Phi lology 69 (1965): 109.



their belief in the military superiority of monarchies led them to fatally underestimate the strength of the Greek city-states. Herodotus's les sons, however, were also intended for the Greeks themselves. His invo cation of the Egyptian perspective, to which I have already alluded, gets its point from his critique of the Greek pretensions to superiority over the Egyptians.58 In particular, the Histories implicitly targeted the Athenian empire. Let us recall that Herodotus finished his work during the Peloponnesian War, which contemporary popular views blamed on the excessive power of the Athenian empire.59 Chester Starr has esti

mated that at its apex the Athenian thalassocracy directly ruled some two million Greeks, while some twenty million people in the Mediter ranean lands had to reckon with Athenian power.60 In the second year of the war, Pericles himself had argued in the people's assembly that the

empire was largely based on self-interest and functioned as a "tyranny" in its rule over other Greek cities.61

Of the major peoples discussed in the ethnographic part of the His tories the Scythians, who inhabited what is today the Ukraine, are by far the most Other, for they do not live in cities and their mode of warfare is almost the opposite of the infantry tactics practiced by the Greeks, the Persians, and most other sedentary civilizations. Some authors, notably Fran?ois Hartog and James Romm, therefore have interpreted Herodotus's study of Scythian culture in terms of a fascination with the exotic. Romm places them, together with the other northern peoples, in the Herodotean category of "the most remote of all human beings,"

while Hartog reads the Scythian ethnography as a structural inversion of Greekness.62 However, Herodotus's full-blown ethnography of the

Scythians places them on a par with the Persians and the Egyptians in the narrative structure of the Histories. It stands in sharp contrast to his treatment of the other northern peoples, represented as a motley collection of oddities at the edge of the world. Herodotus assuredly contrasts Greek and Scythian customs, as he does with other cultures, but this narrative device should not be inflated into the "deep" and

58 See Christ, "Herodotean Kings," p. 185. 59 Rosaria Vignolo Munson, "Ananke in Herodotus," Journal of Hellenic Studies 121

(2001): 42. 60 See Chester G. Starr, The Influence of Sea Power on Ancient History (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1989), p. 38. 61 See Mason Hammond, "Ancient Imperialism: Contemporary Justifications," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 58 (1948): 109-10; and Russell Meiggs, "The Crisis of Athenian

Imperialism," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 67 (1963): 1. 62 See James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 45-81; and Hartog, Miroir d'H?rodote, passim.



ultimate meaning of the text. Actually, Herodotus's approach is better

explained by the long history of Greco-Scythian contacts that contin ued into his own time. For over two centuries, there had been Greek colonies on the northern coast of the Black Sea, Greek traders had traveled widely in the Scythian hinterland, and they even marketed art

tailored to Scythian taste.63 Scythian archers were employed as a police force in Athens.64 The controversial question of whether Herodotus himself ever visited Scythia is not really material to this.65 The second reason for his interest in the Scythians is that they were enemies of the Persians. Herodotus explains Darius's invasion of Scythia as a revenge for a previous Scythian invasion of the Persian empire.66 At the same

time, the Persian defeat in Scythia provides a runner up to the main

story of their defeat in Greece. In his gleeful account of the failure of Darius's campaign in 512 b.c.e., Herodotus skillfully interweaves Per sian defeat and Scythian ethnography.

Let us begin with Persian defeat. Because the Scythians have no

cities, while their army consists of fast-moving mounted archers, their

guerilla tactics can easily avoid a regular open-field battle with the

heavily armed Persian infantry. The Persians are lured into Scythia, in search of an enemy they cannot find and suffering the hardships of a barren land from which they cannot draw sustenance. Their plight is the consequence of their inability to understand the functioning of Scythian society. As usual, Herodotus blames this in particular on the Persian king. Darius's obtuseness is highlighted in the story of the

63 See Ellis H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), pp. 37, 283-91, 438-41; see also J. G. F. Hind, "Greek and Barbarian Peoples on the Shores of the Black Sea," Archeohgical Reports 30 (1983-84): 71-97; M. Rostovtsev, "South Russia in the Prehistoric and Classical Period," American Historical Review 26 ( 1921 ): 203-24; Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiq uity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 315-327, esp. 321-22; David Braund, ed., Scythians and Greeks: Cultural Interactions in Scythia, Athens, and the

Early Roman Empire (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005); and Thomas, Herodotus in Context, pp. 54-74, esp. 55-56. 64 See Balbina B?bler, "Bobbies or Boobies: The Scythian Police Force in Classical Athens," in Braund, Scythians and Greeks, pp. 114-22. 65 See O. Kimball Armayor, "Did Herodotus Ever Go to the Black Sea?" Harvard Stud ies in Classical Philology 82 (1978): 45-62; and Armayor, "Sesostris and Herodotus' Autopsy of Thrace, Colchis, Inland Asia Minor, and the Levant," Harvard Studies in Classical Philol ogy 84 (1980): 51-74; but cf. Lionel Pearson, "Credulity and Scepticism in Herodotus," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 72 (1941): 335-55, esp. 340-45; Jack Martin Balcer, "The Date of Herodotus IV. 1 Darius' Scythian Expedition," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 76 (1972): 99-132; and Stephanie West, "The Scyth ian Ultimatum (Herodotus IV 131,132)," Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (1988): 207-211. 66

Herodotus, IV, 1.



Scythian message. The arrogant king had demanded that the Scyth ians surrender and offer him their land on a plate. With the Persian army exhausted by the inconclusive guerilla war, the Scythians finally dispatch a herald who brings the Persians a gift consisting of the fol

lowing items: a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. The herald refuses to disclose the meaning of the gift, saying that the Persians should find out themselves, if they are clever enough. Darius thinks that the mouse

signifies the earth and the frog water, while the arrows stand for arms, so that the upshot of the message is that the Scythians surrender their

earth, water, and arms to the Persians. His na?ve reading is disputed by his adviser Gobryas, who argues that the meaning of the gifts is a far less pleasant one. Read correctly, it spells Persian doom: "Unless you become birds, Persians, and fly up into the sky, or mice and hide you in the earth, or frogs and leap into the lakes, you will be shot by these arrows and never return home."67 Gobryas is right: note that Herodo tus is thus not saying that the Persians as a "race" are incapable of good intelligence; Darius's wishful thinking is just another item in Herodo tus's long list of monarchical misinterpretations of messages, omens, and oracles. Only after additional misfortunes does Darius finally come around to Gobryas's view. The Persians abandon the campaign, happy to get out alive.

The next thing to note in Herodotus's ethnography of the Scyth ians is that he does not portray them as backward barbarians. When he remarks on the feeble mental powers of the inhabitants of the far

north, he at once makes an exception for the Scythians.68 His appraisal of Scythian intelligence also appears in the first story he tells about them. When the Scythians returned from their Persian expedition, their slaves' sons, born from their wives during the absence of the men, rebelled against them, but they were defeated by a clever stratagem:

Herodotus relates that one of the Scythians said: "'... my counsel is that we drop our spears and bows, and go to meet them each with his horse

whip in hand. As long as they saw us armed, they thought themselves to be our peers and the sons of our peers; let them see us with whips . . .

and they will perceive that they are our slaves. . . .' This the Scythians heard, and acted thereon; and their enemies, amazed by what they saw, had no more thought of fighting, but fled."69 The Scythians are here

depicted as perfectly capable of analyzing the role of the imagination in

67 Ibid., 132.

68 Ibid., 46. 69 Ibid., 3-4.



power relations?no mean feat. Coming to the functioning of Scyth ian society, Herodotus expresses his admiration for their technology of

military nomadism, the combination of mobile homes and fast-moving mounted archers that had enabled them to defeat the mighty Persian war machine: "[T]he Scythian race," he declares, "has in that mat ter which of all human affairs is of greatest import made the cleverest

discovery that we know."70 We may contrast this with Hippocrates, who also gives a description of the Scythian mobile homes, but entirely refrains from any positive appreciation of them, and generally gives an

unflattering picture of Scythian physique and customs.71 Herodotus's

appreciative judgment of military nomadism is undoubtedly stimulated

by its role in defeating the Persian army, but the entire ethnography cannot be reduced to an admire-your-enemies'-enemies logic.

Although Herodotus does not admire the Scythians in all respects, the only aspect that explicitly comes in for criticism is their stubborn ethnocentrism. "The Scythians (as others)," he says, "are wondrously reluctant to practice [the customs] of any other country, and particu larly of Hellas, as was proved in the case of Anacharsis and again also of Scyles."72 Anacharsis and Scyles were Scythians who visited Greece and "went native" there. When they returned home and their adoption of Greek ways was discovered, both were killed.73 We should further consider that Scythia stands on the side of liberty in Herodotus's grand opposition between free peoples and despotic imperialism. What we learn about their political regime is much closer to the tribal democ racy of Tacitus's Germans than to the great Oriental empires. The story of Darius's Scythian campaign ends with the Ionian Greeks' refusal to assist the Scythians in destroying the Persian army, and so to use the opportunity to free the Greek cities in Asia Minor from Persian rule. Herodotus depicts the Ionian leaders as shortsighted petty despots who are fearful that an anti-Persian revolt will bring about a victory of the democratic party in their cities, and he gives the Scythians the last word: the episode concludes with their biting critique of the Greeks'

70 Herodotus, IV, 46. 71 Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places, xviii; on the mostly negative treatment of the

Scythians by later authors, see James William Johnson, "The Scythian: His Rise and Fall," Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 250-57. 72

Herodotus, IV, 76; but note that Herodotus says that the Scythians share their aversion to foreign ways with all other peoples: "They too ['kai houtoi'] are very keen to avoid ...."

73 See A. MacC. Armstrong, "Anacharsis the Scythian," Greece and Rome 17 (1948): 18-23.



servile mentality.74 Here, the Scythians seem to represent the Greeks' bad conscience about a missed opportunity rather than a simple inver sion of the values of Greek civilization. (But note that Herodotus recounts elsewhere how the Scythians, having subdued the Medians in Cyaxares's days, lose their conquests because of their pride and lack of prudence.75)

Generally, Herodotus's discussion of the Scythians is remarkably even-handed. His serious examination of their customs exemplifies what I have called the "anthropological turn." He really wants to under stand Scythian society, displaying a detailed knowledge of their food, clothing, and funeral customs. That he contrasts their ways with those of the Greeks is not so surprising given the fact that cultures are con stituted by difference, so that it is impossible to describe them without terms of comparison. What matters is not the bare fact that Herodotus contrasts and compares, but the intellectually serious and open-minded way in which he does so. Herodotus's Histories make thinkable, I con

clude, a new discourse of common humanity that actually comes close to a notion of transcultural equality. Starting from the stark "facts" of cultural difference, Herodotus makes two major discursive moves, one on the meta-narrative level and another in the narrative text. The meta-narrative move is his explication of the logic of cultural relativ ism. Acknowledging difference, it affirms sameness on a higher level of abstraction: all men are fundamentally alike in the way they relate to their own customs. In most cases they stay within the ambit of their own culture, but culture ("nomoi") is not a hermetic prison from which there is no escape. Human beings have the potential capacity to cross

the border toward another culture. The second move is made up of countless little moves: passages in

which the hubris of rulers, the prideful ambitions of empire builders, and the pretensions to superiority of (among others) Persians over Scyth ians and Greeks, and Greeks over Egyptians and others, are scrutinized and found wanting. In numerous other passages Herodotus displays his

mastery of the anthropological turn: his intellectual engagement with non-Greek cultures is serious, often sympathetic, and almost never

haughty and patronizing. He decidedly glorifies the Greek victories over

the Persian invaders, and he believes in the virtues of Greek democ

racy, asserting that the Persians are servile and do not fight in good

74 Herodotus, IV, 142; see also Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits ofHel

lenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 131-32. 75 Herodotus, I, 106.



order.76 However, his really biting criticisms are aimed at the Persian

kings, while he has their advisers counsel prudence and moderation. As we have seen, Gobryas correctly read the Scythian message, censoring Darius's wishful misreading. Likewise, Artabanes vainly warns Xerxes of an impending disaster on the eve of the invasion of Greece.77 The

emphasis is on the theme that great power blinds those who wield it, coupled with the retribution the gods mete out to those who overstep the bounds set for them. Herodotus's criticisms of the Persians focus on their despotic political regime; they should not be read as evidence of Persian cultural or "racial" inferiority. His discussion of Persian cus toms is fairly balanced, giving praise where it is due.78 And let us recall that it is the Persian king Darius who conducts the anthropological experiment that exemplifies the maxim on cultural relativism. In his narrative of Persian behavior in the wars against the Greeks, Herodo tus often censures them, but even there he does not write as a Greek chauvinist hack.79 Nor is Herodotus an uncritical admirer of all things Greek. As we have noted above, his extremely critical treatment of

empires and imperialism, made public during the Peloponnesian War, was rather obviously applicable to the Athenian maritime empire and the high-handed, sometimes cruel, policies of Athens against Greek cities that resisted her designs.

The upshot is that Herodotus appreciates the specific virtues of many, perhaps most, cultures. His working hypothesis seems to be the

equal worth of all cultures, unless there are strong arguments to judge otherwise. Not to overstate my conclusion, it should be added that he nowhere explicitly says that all cultures are of equal worth. But his nar rative and the lessons he draws from it strongly suggest it.

Sima Qian: The Han Empire and Its Barbarians

In Sima Qian's world, empire was a solid reality. Unlike Herodotus, the Chinese historian assumed that one central empire would dominate "all under heaven" in the future.80 The recent past, however, was a

76 See Sara Forsdyke, "Athenian Democratic Ideology and Herodotus' Histories," American Journal of Philology 122 (2001): 329-58. 77

Herodotus, VII, 10. 78 Herodotus, I, 131-40. 79 See Thomas Harrison, "The Persian Invasions," in Bakker, de Jong, and van Wees,

Brill's Companion, pp. 551-78. 80 Schaberg, "Travel, Geography, and the Imperial Imagination," p. 154, even considers

the Shiji "the imperial text par excellence."



different matter. Chinese tradition held that there had been wise and

righteous emperors in dim antiquity, but the living reality of empire was quite recent. The unification of China by the Qin (Ch'in) dynasty in 221 b.c.e. lay less than a century in the past when Sima Qian was born. The power of the Han was a still more recent accomplishment. The Han believed that Chinese civilization was the most advanced in the world, but they knew quite well that there were other sedentary and urban civilizations, certainly after Zhang Qian's mission to the far west (139-126 b.c.e.). The habit of calling China "all under heaven"

persisted, and according to the imperial ideology no foreign prince could claim equal status with the Han emperor, but this symbolic Sino centrism did not blind the Han to the significance and power of realms outside China.81

Ironically, the most redoubtable foreign power was not a sedentary civilization but the nomadic Xiongnu federation. In 209, shortly before the fall of the Qin dynasty, Maodun became Shanyu, the traditional title of the Xiongnu ruler. Under his leadership, the Xiongnu defeated their steppe rivals in the east and the west, and established a strong nomadic confederacy that now confronted China across a major part of the Great Wall frontier. The construction of the confederacy was in

part a defensive move, for under the Qin the Chinese had sent armies and settlers northward, threatening the nomads' access to agricultural areas. The Xiongnu pastoral nomadic economy entertained a symbiotic relationship with agricultural regions and towns in the steppe regions from central Asia to southern Siberia. They also engaged in trade in the northern frontier zone of China, exporting horses, furs, and jade, and importing luxuries and seasonally necessary agricultural products.82 The Xiongnu eventually came to control a large territory, extending from the Tarim Basin in the west to northern China, and to Manchu ria in the east.83 Their formidable fighting power rested on the same

technology of military nomadism Herodotus so admired in the western

Scythians.

81 See Ying-Shih Y?, "Han Foreign Relations," in The Cambridge History of China, vol.

I, ed. Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 378-81; and di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies, pp. 6-7. 82 See Nicola di Cosmo, "Ancient Inner Asian Nomads: Their Economic Basis and Its

Significance in Chinese History," Journal of Asian Studies 53 (1994): 1092-126; H. G. Creel, "The Role of the Horse in Chinese History," American Historical Review 70 (1965): 659-60; and William Watson, "The Chinese Contribution to Eastern Nomad Culture in the Pre

Han and Early Han Periods," World Archeology 4 (1972): 139-49. 83 On the Xiongnu state, see Nicola di Cosmo, "State Formation and Periodization in

Inner Asian History," Journal of World History 10 (1999): 1-40; Thomas ]. Barfield, The Peril ous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford:

Blackwell, 1992), pp. 32-84; and Barfield, "The Hsiung-nu Imperial Confederacy."



In the steppe environment, the military tactics of the nomads were

superior, but they usually avoided regular field battles with numerically superior Han forces. They raided northern China, but never occupied

Chinese territory. The upshot was an unstable equilibrium, precariously regulated by the peace treaties concluded by Emperor Wen (r. 180

157). The Chinese paid annual tribute to the Xiongnu, a Han princess was given in marriage to the Shanyu, the Great Wall was to demarcate the border, and China and the Xiongnu recognized each other as co

equal states.84 Because the Chinese considered nomadism a definitely inferior way of life, and failed to appreciate the agricultural and urban elements in the nomadic economy, they only reluctantly admitted the

equal status of the Xiongnu. Military necessity forced them to accept it, but it sat ill with their deep convictions of propriety and hierarchy.

The ensuing emotional and intellectual ambivalence could lead to a

dogmatic closure, upholding Chinese superiority against the backdrop of Xiongnu "barbarian" baseness, but it might also occasion a more

open, questioning outlook. Both perspectives are discernible in Sima

Qian's history. The distinction between civilized and barbarian long antedated

the Han. In the Warring States era, the superiority of Chinese values was taken for granted, and even the occasional "wise barbarian" who rebuked the Chinese did so in the name of traditional Chinese val ues.85 However, it is important to realize that the civilized/barbarian divide did not neatly coincide with the boundary between Chinese and non-Chinese. Only the Han are always on the civilized side, but in other cases Sima Qian mentions "ethnic mixing" within China. He asserts, for instance, that the mixture of the Qin dynasty's customs with those of the Rong and Di barbarians accounts for the violence and cruelty of the regime.86 In an earlier chapter he had reported that the Qin themselves were considered barbarian by the more centrally situ ated states in preimperial China.87 In a recent investigation of Chi nese perceptions of the Yue (Viet) peoples in pre-Han and Han times, Erica Brindly notices a general ambivalence in the different notions of

"barbarity" in Chinese sources, ranging from not-yet-civilized Others within the orbit of an expanding Chinese cultural space and an essen tial alterity ascribed to the more remote "barbarians." She observes that Sima Qian's treatment of the Yue contains depreciative essentializing

84 See Barfield, Perilous Frontier, pp. 41-46. 85 See Schaberg, Patterned Past, pp. 130-35. 86 Shiji 15: Qin, p. 85; see also Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, pp. 171-72. 87 Shiji 5: Qin, p. 23; see also Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, p. 171.



elements, but also allows for their "potential to act in a civilized man

ner," depicting them as "less civilized others" rather than unchangeable "barbarians."88 As we shall see, Sima's ethnography of the Xiongnu presents an even more critical perspective.

To Sima Qian and his contemporaries the Xiongnu question repre sented China's greatest foreign policy challenge. In 133 b.c.e., Emperor

Wu ended the treaty system, commencing a century of Chinese-Xion

gnu wars. The wars were bitter and, at any rate in Sima Qian's time, mostly inconclusive, while the financial and demographic burden almost crippled the Han economy. Sima Qian belonged to a current of opinion questioning the wisdom of Emperor Wu's aggressive foreign policy. The costs of warfare, they argued, were appalling and victory was uncertain, while high taxes and conscription might lead to a popu lar revolt. This, and not his cruel punishment by the emperor, was the

main reason for Sima Qian's doubts about the benefits of Han imperi alism. The prosperity and happiness of the people, he believed, were more important than imperial grandeur. Appreciating the need for a well-trained army to deter aggression from abroad, he was very much aware of the human costs of warfare. With approval he cites the advice of Yan An to Emperor Wu: "Now, when China is not troubled by so much as the bark of a dog, to become involved in wearisome projects in distant lands that exhaust the wealth of the nation?that is hardly right for a ruler whose duty it is to be a father to the people. To seek to

fulfill endless ambitions, determining to win revenge and incurring the hatred of the Xiongnu?this will not bring peace to the frontier."89 Yan An reminded the emperor that the fall of the short-lived Qin dynasty came about when the people rebelled against the heavy burdens caused

by "excessive warfare." More generally, the memory of Qin recalled the perils of a despotic and over-centralized style of government. Simi lar criticisms of despotic and aggressive policies by councilors and

ministers are quoted in the Shiji in other places, usually with prudent endorsement. Like Herodotus's, Sima Qian's critique of imperialism is thus wedded to a critique of despotic rule.90 But we must be careful not

88 Erica Brindley, "Barbarians or Not? Ethnicity and Changing Conceptions of the Ancient Yue (Viet) Peoples, ca. 400-50 bc," Asia Major, Third Series 16, no. 1 (2003): 29. 89

Shiji 112: Han II, p. 202. 90 See Robert B. Crawford, "The Social and Political Philosophy of the Shi-chi," Jour nal of Asian Studies 22 (1963): 402-403; Karen Turner, "War, Punishment, and the Law of Nature in Early Chinese Concepts of the State," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53 (1993): 293-94, 3?5-3?7; and Wang Yu-ch'uan, "An Outline of the Central Government of the

Former Han E>ynasty," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 12 (1949): 134-87.



to push the analogy too far: his standard is not the democratic polis, but

responsible civilian imperial rule. The historian's calling is to act as a moral adviser to the emperor, a role Sima Qian attributed to an ideal ized model of the Confucian sage.91

The chapter on the Xiongnu begins with the observation that

throughout Chinese history the northern nomads have been "a source of constant worry and harm." "The Han," Sima Qian declares, "has

attempted to determine the Xiongnu's periods of strength and weak ness so that it may adopt defensive measures or launch punitive expe ditions as the circumstances allow. Thus I made The Account of the

Xiongnu.'" On the face of it, this is history in the service of imperial ism. There follows a summary description of the economic and mili

tary foundations of Xiongnu society that begins with the emblematic

negative statements found in so many travelogues on nomads: "They move about . . . and have no walled cities or fixed dwellings, nor do

they engage in any kind of agriculture . . . They have no writing." The

ethnography moves to a positive key in its description of the military skills of the nomads, observing for instance that they "are very skilful at using decoy troops to lure their opponents to destruction," but it switches back to the not-like-us mode in another remark on the bat tle tactics of the Xiongnu. Just as Herodotus on the Scythians, Sima

Qian reports that the Xiongnu advance when things go well for them, but do not consider it disgraceful to take flight when they are hard pressed. "Their only concern," the historian scornfully remarks, "is with self-advantage, and they know nothing of propriety or righteous ness."92 Later on, however, the tactics of hitting with lightning speed and vanishing "like the mist" when the enemy outnumbers them are mentioned in an explanation of the military successes of the Xiongnu under the leadership of Maodun.93 His moral strictures notwithstand ing, Sima Qian quite realistically assesses the sources of the Xiongnu's

military power, a power the Han feared and respected. His ethnography of the nomads wavers between his disapproval of their "un-Chinese" ways and an objective appraisal, at times bordering on a grudging admi ration, of their military skills and efficient style of governance. He does not go quite as far as Herodotus's opinion that the social technology of

military nomadism is "the cleverest invention" we know, but neither does he fall into the typically "civilized" underestimation of it.

91 See Wai'Yee Li, "The Idea of Authority in the Shih chi," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54 (1994): 360. 92

Shiji no: Han II, p. 129. 93 Ibid., pp. 137-39.



Sima Qian's ethnography of the Xiongnu thus oscillates between an essentialist reduction of their nature to those aspects of it the Chinese found particularly reprehensible and a more favorable appreciation of their intelligence and versatility. An example of essentialism is the blunt statement that "in times of crisis" the northern barbarians "take up arms and go off on plundering and marauding expeditions. This seems to be their inborn nature."94 Likewise, some Xiongnu customs, such as their

preference for seats on the left and facing north, and their preference of the young over the aged, are depicted as simple inversions of Chinese

ways.95 But the greater part of the ethnography is not like that at all. The description of the political organization of the Xiongnu confedera tion, for example, gives an impression of efficient statecraft rather than backward despotism. In fact, its sophisticated combination of central ized control and decentralized administration seems well suited to elicit the admiration of Sima Qian's Chinese readers, many of whom were critical of the unwieldy governmental bureaucracy of the Han. It is true that Sima Qian mentions several examples of cruel behavior, includ

ing parricide, but elsewhere he recounts even more instances of similar

cruelty on the part of Chinese rulers and aristocrats. It is not easy to determine the cultural distance between the Chi

nese and the Xiongnu in Sima Qian's narrative. The Xiongnu are

surely represented as Other, in the sense that their means of subsis

tence, methods of warfare, code of honor, food, clothing, and housing differ profoundly from Chinese ways. They are also Other because they are consistently represented as enemies, placing them at a political and emotional distance that is absent from Herodotus's depiction of the

Scythians, who are not enemies of the Greeks, but rather enemies of the Greeks' enemies. On the other hand, the nomadic-sedentary boundary is less permeable in Herodotus than in Sima Qian. In Herodotus, there is not a single instance of a Greek "going native" among the Scythians.

Herodotean border crossing is a one-way street. Scythians sometimes

adopt Greek ways, but Greeks never adopt Scythian customs (although there is one mention of "Scythian Greeks"96). Sima Qian, however,

reports continuous travel across the frontier in both directions, with

several instances of Chinese adopting the Xiongnu way of life. Unlike the Scythian frontier, the Great Wall frontier is culturally permeable in two directions.

94 Shiji no: Han II, p. 129. 95 Ibid., p. 137.

96 Herodotus, IV, 17.



In the early Han we find several examples of border crossing and cultural adaptation. In this period, the military balance tilted toward the Xiongnu. Hann Xin, appointed by the first Han emperor, Gaozu, to rule the border province of Dai, went over to the Xiongnu side when

they invaded his province, and eventually became a Xiongnu general. Shortly thereafter, Sima Qian relates, "a number of Han generals" went over to the Xiongnu.97 The most striking example of the cultural inver sions such contacts could bring about is the story of Zhonghang Yue.

This man was a eunuch dispatched by Emperor Wen, not long after 174 b.c.e., to accompany a Han princess who was to marry Jizhu, the successor of Maodun, as part of the peace treaty. The court had forced this mission on him against his will. Upon his arrival at the court of the Shanyu, Zhonghang Yue promptly went over to the side of the

Xiongnu. Jizhu treated him with great favor, making him a sort of offi cial advisor on matters Chinese. Sima Qian quotes Zhonghang Yue

extensively, first when he warns the Xiongnu against adopting Chinese ways, and second when he refutes the criticism of the customs of the nomads voiced by a Han envoy. The speeches Sima Qian attributes to Zhonghang Yue merit a careful reading, for they demonstrate the extent and the limits of the historian's ability to imagine the perils of Sinification for th

Documents

Herodotus & Sima Qian