Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World

John Baines is Professor of Egyptology emeritus at the University of Oxford. His most recent books are Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt (2007), The Disappearance of Writings Systems (2008, co-edited with John Bennet and Stephen Houston), and High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt (2013). Henriette van der Blom is Lecturer in Ancient History in the University of Birmingham. She has published extensively on Roman republican memory culture, oratory and politics, including Cicero's Role Models: The Political Strategy of a Newcomer (OUP 2010) and Community and Communication: Oratory and Politics in Republican Rome (with C. Steel; OUP 2013). Her next monograph is Oratory and Political Career in the Late Roman Republic (CUP, forthcoming). Tim Rood is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Oxford, where he is the Dorothea Gray Fellow and Tutor in Classics at St Hugh's College. His research focuses on Greek historiography and its reception. His first book, Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (1998), was published in the Oxford Classical Monographs series. Since then, he has written two books on the reception of Xenophon's Anabasis: The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (2004) and American Anabasis: Xenophon and the Idea of America from the Mexican War to Iraq (2010). Yi Samuel Chen is Research Fellow in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He specialises in Sumerian, Babylonian and biblical literary history and historiography. His monograph The Primeval Flood Catastrophe: Origins and Early Development in Mesopotamian Traditions was published in the Oxford Oriental Monographs Series (2013).

Preface
Introduction: Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in a Material World John Baines,Henriette van der Blom,Yi Samuel Chen,Tim Rood

I: Mesopotamian and Hittite Traditions
1. Ancient Near Eastern and Hittite Traditions: Introduction
Paul Collins, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
2. The Domestication of Stranger Kings: Making History by List in Ancient Mesopotamia
Piotr Michalowski, University of Michigan
3. `He who saw the Deep': History as Ritual in the Material World of Mesopotamia
Paul Collins
4. `I swear that these are no lies, it is indeed true!' On the Role of the Individual in Early Mesopotamian Historiography
Gebhard Selz, University of Vienna
5. The Hittites and their Past: Forms of Historical Consciousness in Hittite Anatolia
Amir Gilan, Tel Aviv University

II: Egyptian and Maya Traditions
6. Egyptian and Maya Traditions: Introduction
John Baines
7. Meaningful Pasts: On Social Logics and Conceptions of the Past in Ancient Egypt
Marcelo Campagno, University of Buenos Aires
8. History and Historiography in the Material World: Ancient Egyptian Perspectives
John Baines
9. Telling Time: Historical Thinking and the Ancient Maya
Simon Martin, University of Pennsylvania Museum

III: Chinese Traditions
10. Chinese Traditions: Introduction
Glen Dudbridge , University of Oxford
11. Reflections and Uses of the Distant Past in the Chinese Bronze Inscriptions from the 10th to 5th Centuries BC
Maria Khayutina, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich
12. The Scene of Inquiry in Early Chinese Historiography
David Schaberg, University of California, Los Angeles
13. Three Moments of Definition in Chinese Historiography
Glen Dudbridge

IV: Biblical Traditions
14. Biblical Traditions: Introduction
Laura Feldt, University of Southern Denmark
15. Periodization in Biblical Historiography
Peter Machinist, Harvard University
16. Using the Past in the Hebrew Bible: The Fantastic, Memory Techniques and `history' in the Exodus Narrative
Laura Feldt

V: Classical Traditions
17. Classical Traditions: Introduction
Henriette van der Blom and Tim Rood
18. Waiting for Herodotus: The Mindsets of 425 BC
Christopher Pelling, University of Oxford
19. Historical Consciousness and the `aitiology' in Greece
Rosalind Thomas, University of Oxford
20. Myth and History Entwined: Female Influence and Male Usurpation in Herodotus' Histories
Emily Baragwanath, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
21.`Stories embroidered beyond truth': Reading Herodotus and Thucydides in Light of Pindar's Olympian 1
Jonas Grethlein, University of Heidelberg
22. Thucydides and Myth
Tim Rood
23. Fabula and History in Livy's Narrative of the Capture of Veii
Christina Kraus, Yale University
24. Roman Republican History in Imperial Rhetorical Exercises
Henriette van der Blom