My long suffering readers will be aware of my fascination with time. It seems indisputable that, no matter how you construe time, the only reality is “now”. No sentient being is able to access any time other than the present. In essence we reconstruct the past and we imagine the future. Mind you some of our historians seem more adept at reconstructing our past and some futurists have proved better than others in anticipating the future.

But nevertheless I have an abiding interest in history, even though in my understanding of the world it may be mistaken or even illusory, because it has shaped us all and created our experience of the present from among the multitude of options that were possible.

Now I suppose that there are two main sources that we rely on for recreating our past.

The first of these is archaeology.

Archaeological excavations unearth physical objects from our past from which we can infer how our predecessors lived. Excavations of the ancient city of Ur for example provided clues to how people lived in Mesopotamia three thousand years ago.

In Australia we had the excavation of the skeletal remains of “Mungo Man” which have been dated to 40,000 years ago and significantly influence the historical record of indigenous people in Australia. But this excavation only exposed bones and very few artefacts which might give a clue to how prehistoric indigenous people lived. Whilst it was a significant discovery it could not provide the same insights into aboriginal society as archaeological digs in the Middle East for example have provided into the emerging societies in the “Fertile Crescent” for reasons I will soon explain.

It is undoubtedly true that some ancient societies leave more evidence of their existence than others. When societies have mastered agriculture and have therefore been able to store food, cities naturally evolve. When people congregate in cities archaeologists naturally find more material to deal with.

In a similar manner wealthier and more culturally advanced societies leave a wider range of historical evidence than less wealthy and more primitive societies.

Nomadic societies like the Saharan Bedouins and Australian Aborigines leave little evidence of their historical existence. Some of the best archaeological sites with respect to gaining knowledge of Australian Aborigines have proven to be middens. Aborigines gathered on a seasonal basis to harvest both saltwater and freshwater shellfish. The detritus heaped up at these sites contained distinct concentrations of shell, bone, botanical remains, ash, charcoal and discarded tools. This has provided evidence of Aboriginal diet, food gathering techniques and tool use.

But archaeological findings require interpretation and therefore don’t reveal history explicitly but rely on subjective elucidation.

The other source of history is through written records. The earliest form of writing of which we are aware is cuneiform script which seems to have appeared in Mesopotamia in its simplest form around 3,500 BC. The development of agriculture on the fertile plains between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers enabled farmers to produce and store surplus grain. This ability led to the formation of cities and caused further social and cultural development of humankind.

Cuneiform script seems to have evolved from the necessity to account for the storing and trading records of grain and other foodstuffs and materials. (As well as grain, some of the earliest cuneiform records relate to the trading of beer!) But over a few centuries or so, the communications became more complex so that they were able to describe people’s lives and preserve important stories and customs.

Some centuries later the Egyptians developed hieroglyphic symbols that enabled their priests to record events and ideas from their society.

Soon after, the Greeks and the Romans (and other societies) developed their own linguistic symbols which enabled significant events to be recorded and other significant materials like their myths and legends to be preserved..

Now whilst it is probably true that written records provide more direct observations of the past than archaeology does, what has been written down by our ancestors can often be subjective and its interpretation as history even more so.

As well as this, in the first written languages there were technical difficulties. In the beginning a symbol represented a word, usually a noun. But the wedge shaped symbols of cuneiform were limited in the number of symbols they could articulate. Consequently one symbol could stand for a number of words. This renders translation difficult and translators rely on context to select the particular word they believe the symbol represents. It is obviously easy under such circumstances to be mistaken.

As language developed, written symbols became more likely to represent syllables. The written word became more dynamic with the development of verbs and adjectives aiding a more vivid description of the writer’s world.

But history can never be completely objective; it must necessarily reflect the point of view of the historian. As Anaïs Nin famously wrote:

We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.

That historians have their own biases which colour their version of history is easily seen,

With respect to the colonisation of Australia by the British, two ideologically different positions have been promulgated. This has resulted in what has popularly been termed the “History Wars”.

 One position taken by the more conservative historians suggests that the colonisation of Australia has been a largely positive development resulting in Australia becoming an independent country benefitting from the British heritage of democracy and liberal capitalism.

The other position, favoured by those more aligned to the political Left, portrays colonisation as a disaster for indigenous Australians. They assert that the new settlers were largely hostile to indigenous people and were responsible for propagating many atrocities against them. They like to portray pre-colonisation Australia as some sort of idyllic world for the Aboriginal inhabitants which was overturned by colonisation.

The historian Geoffrey Blainey argued that the telling of Australian history had moved from what had largely been a positive story to an unduly negative view which he termed “the black armband” view of Australia’s history.

Now in this essay I am not trying to argue one way or the other about the impact of colonisation and whether it has been beneficial to Australia and its indigenous inhabitants. (I have commented on this in other essays.) I merely want to demonstrate that history is coloured by the worldview of the historian and must consequently be viewed therefore as subjective.

Because Australia’s indigenous people had no written language (indeed they had a multitude of spoken languages which would have been very difficult to render into written symbols) the most authoritative records we have of traditional indigenous life come from the annals of our early explorers, settlers and particularly missionaries who kept meticulous records of tribal life.

Now while there are undisputed facts in history that are generally accepted (for example the European discovery of the Americas was due to Christopher Columbus in 1492 or that for example John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963) the narratives surrounding such facts are often disputed.

In this way history is not so much discovered but created. When weighing up the options, the historian always has his thumb on the scales, and the thumb is heavy with the prejudices of the particular historian and often unconsciously so.

 

Footnote

Let us pause a moment and look at time, not from the mundane perspective of trying to recreate our history or imagine our future,.but from the spiritual perspective.

Colloquially when we urge someone to act we often proffer to them the advice that “there is no time like the present”. But in a very real sense there is in fact no time but the present. The present is  all that we have. Our past (as we have seen) is a construct as indeed is our future.

Unfortunately many of us base our spiritual well-being on the notion that all will be well some time in the future where we may be forgiven, resurrected, reincarnated or whatever. But the sages have often told us we can attain peace within ourselves now, if we truly understand the nature of existence.

Most of us identify with the physical body, which given our inevitable physical mortality, is a fraught problem!. But even worse than this, most have also bought into the ubiquitous illusion of ego. That makes us doubly vulnerable for not only do we fear physical death, we fear ego death. And trust me egos are even more vulnerable than physical bodies. Our notions of ego are often enhanced by our perceptions of how we look, what power and authority we have, our physical prowess, our intellectual dominance, our commercial success and so on, all of which can wane or disappear as time goes by.

The futility of yielding to the ego is well demonstrated in In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s fine poem Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

But the ego is never satisfied and even those who are the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most admired and revered are often not satisfied but strive for more and more. This is what the French Buddhist Matthieu Ricard described as the “hedonic treadmill”. But this does not lead to spiritual well-being. Indeed it is a great distraction from confronting the world as it is. We engage in these pursuits in the hope that one day we will find fulfilment. 

But if we put aside the ego, we can have fulfilment now, in the eternal now, irrespective of our physical circumstances.

Confucius is purported to have said:

A man who understands the Tao in the morning may die with content in the evening.

Because we suffer these delusions we compromise our search for well-being by making two mistakes.

The first of these, as we saw, is to believe it is something to be achieved in the future whereas it can be available to us right now.

The second mistake is we concentrate our efforts to attain well-being on the external. We think we need material success, recognition and adoration. But contentment comes to us from within and that is where we need explore.

There is a Buddhist parable that nicely describes this.

A sage is sitting meditating beneath a tree in a snowy meadow. Along comes a peasant astride an ox. The peasant is frowning and seems distraught.

The sage asks the man, “You seem distressed. What is concerning you?”

The peasant replies, “I am looking for my ox. Have you seen an ox?”

The sage strokes his chin. Finally he says, “I have seen ox tracks.”

The peasant eyes light up. “Where, where, did you see them?”

“I saw them in the snow behind you”

The peasant looks behind and says excitedly, “Oh yes, I see them!”.

“And where do they lead?” asks the sage. But by now it is obvious to the peasant he is astride his ox.

So he just smiles and says, “Thank you Master,” and turns to go home.

And thus it is that we don’t need to go out into the world to find fulfilment and serenity. This comes from looking within and understanding who you really are.

There is a Hindu parable that makes the same point. Let me share it with you.

It is said that in the beginning all men were as gods. However men abused their elevated status and the gods decided to take away the essence of godliness as punishment. “Where will we hide it?” they asked one another.

“It will need to be hidden in a place where they cannot retrieve it,” responded one, “so they cannot again abuse it.”

“We will hide it atop the highest mountain,” suggested another.

Brahman, the god of all the gods shook his head. “One day mankind will learn how to climb even the highest mountain, so that will not do.” “

Then we will bury it deep in the earth,” another god responded.

 “No,” said Brahman. “In the fullness of time Man will learn how to mine the very depths of the earth.”

After a pause another suggested, “Perhaps we can sink it to the bottom of the deepest sea.”

But again Brahman shook his head. “Sooner or later Man will conquer even the ocean deeps.”

“Then what are we to do?” they mused.

“There is only one thing to do,” responded Brahman.

“We will hide the god essence deep within Man himself. He will never think to look there.” And this, of course, is what they did.

So when you are afraid and your physical mortality concerns you, be assured that there is something more enduring that will transport you beyond time and you need look no further than within!.