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Rewriting History
Every society in every era rewrites its history...
The world is rightly disgusted at the Taliban's outrage last week when they blew into smithereens two 2,000-year-old statues of Buddha carved into mountainsides in Afghanistan. The statues are religious and historical works of art, listed by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites.
But we should be less surprised at the Taliban's attempt to erase history and replace it with their version that will place Islam at the dawn of the national birth of Afghanistan. Malta does the same. And at every epoch in every country, even within every generation, there are those who fiddle with history to make a statement on the present or to justify some political or religious agenda. Totalitarian regimes rewrite or erase history by spectacular violence, an act that swings towards its extremity with genocides such as the Holocaust or, more recently, the massacres in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. It's such calculated, blatant acts in cold blood that trigger a chill down our spine, but closer to home, the attempts to distort or strip or embroider historical events are insidious in their subtlety.
A current squabble about Neolithic Europe (particularly in Malta, which stood at the cusp of the Neolithic civilisation) has entrenched divergent views into two hostile factions. On the one hand we have the followers of archeologists such as Marija Gimbutas and Christina Biaggi who maintain that Neolithic societies were matriarchal, worshipped the Goddess of fertility, and were eventually subdued by waves of warring tribes with male Gods that spilled across Europe east to west. On the other hand we have hardline archeologists who argue that there is little convincing evidence that societies were matriarchal and revered a Goddess. Both factions accuse the other side of covert political agendas.
When I was researching the Neolithic Culture, I found myself impossibly caught in the crossfire of these arguments. The matriarchal defenders (mostly feminists) accuse their detractors (mostly male archeologists) of rejecting the matriarchal status in defence (even if subconsciously) of the patriarchal status quo. But the feminist, Goddess-worshipping bleeding hearts are eager to make the point that matriarchy, as the Neolithic experiment proves, is the answer to thousands of years of rape, violence, environmental destruction and wasted snobbery of patriarchy. The hardline archeologists, on the other hand, hide behind the pretensions of scientific objectivity to undermine the matriarchal perspective, and argue that the feminists seek to rewrite history to justify a feminist takeover. Then, in a departure from their cautionary note (in Malta's case), they dish their own final blind-end theory: that Malta's Neolithic civilisation destroyed itself by overrunning the environment and sliding into religious obsession. This is a simplistic view whose plausibility is the echo of contemporary cultural resonance. I had learned more about present issues - environmental destruction, fanatic cults, the combined victimisation and tyranny of feminism - than about the Neolithic Era.
A lot of history is a study of the present: how the present writes the past to justify or rebuff the present. To extricate the motifs behind conflicting historical views, ask who's writing history and how that person's (or group of people or country) stance is dictated by culture, religion, politics, geography and worldview. Conflicting views are healthy exercises in scholarly pluralism and scientific rigour, but sometimes there are conscious or subconscious political undercurrents at work. The former chief of East German spy agency Markus Wolf, wrote in the introduction of his autobiography Man Without a Face that `history cannot be written only by the victors,' and he set out to redress any perceived imbalance by telling the East German and Communist side of the story.
If there is a common streak among those who attempt to rewrite history or stifle the truth, it is an inferiority complex that seeks to reinforce or shift the foundations of history to lend legitimacy to one's aims. The Taliban's act of razing history and exquisite monuments is, besides a fundamental alteration of historical thought, a move in their political chess game with the West and their defiant retribution for the UN sanctions.
In Israel, the recent publication of the book The Bible Unearthed by Tel Aviv University professor of archeology Israel Finkelstein and journalist Neil Asher Silberman, has triggered a brawl for the last word about the region's history. The Bible Unearthed cites new research that desecrates the Old Testament as `fanciful priestly literature.' Anachronisms and absence of corroborating evidence show, among other things, that the Kingdom of David and Solomon was a cowtown (not a vast kingdom), that the Exodus never happened, that the Battle of Jericho and the drama of its walls tumbling down is legend (Jericho did not exist at the time), and that patriarchs such as Abraham and Isaac and Joseph are fictional characters. The Bible Unearthed also suggests that the Old Testament was concocted as an instrument of political and religious spin. They allege that King Josiah, descendant of David, commissioned the Old Testament to set the stage for cementing his strictly monotheistic religion and forge a national identity. Israel's modern founders half a century ago also piggybacked on the Old Testament when, invoking the supposed empire established by David and Solomon, they set in motion the `restoration' of that empire by carving modern Israel.
When The Bible Unearthed was published, Israel frowned collectively. To hardline Zionists (who often cite the Jews' God-chosen status to justify the condescending treatment of their Middle East neighbours) the book is 400 pages of blasphemy. Articles in newspapers accused the authors of being `anti-Semitic' - a charge that doesn't hold when you consider that both authors are Jews who plan to live in Israel all their life. Columnists worried the book might erode Israel's cultural identity and political legitimacy. Hershel Shanks of the Biblical Archeology Review, who wants us to believe the Old Testament is the factual blueprint of creation instead of a novel, wrote in the national Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz that the authors are motivated by `a political agenda.' Amy Dockser Markus, author of How Archeology is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East, wrote: "People say that Finkelstein means well but what he is doing is giving ammunition to people who are anti-Israel."
Closer to home, Malta is fond of another biblically-inspired myth: the Shipwreck of St Paul in 60AD. During St Paul's three-month stint in Malta, the Maltese' mass conversion to Christianity underpins, the historical whitewash goes, the Maltese' Catholic devotion - Christians descending straight down the line from Jesus' left-hand man at the very dawn of Christianity. St Luke, in his account of the shipwreck, wrote that `the barbarous people showed us no little kindness,' a statement so imprinted in Maltese complacence that even today it colours the national trait with so-called `warm hospitality' - another feel-good myth.
The only circumstantial evidence for St Paul's Shipwreck, which is found in the Roman Villa of the supposed governor Publius in San Pawl Milqi, consists of a stone inscribed with the symbol PAULUS and a crude painting of a man and two ships. Besides, Malta has been virtually repopulated in the last two millennia, and two centuries of Arab rule extinguished Christianity. Most historians now agree that St Paul was shipwrecked on the island called Keffallinia in Greece. If St Paul never set eyes on Malta, why is the story of St Paul's Shipwreck recounted in Maltese schools and Catechism classes with theatrical drama and factual finality?
© Victor Paul Borg
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