Monday, June 11, 2007
I've been reading one of the first universal histories through interlibrary loan, Geschicte des Altertums by Eduard Meyer. It's in German, so I've been stumbling through it; and with all five volumes, it's several thousand pages, so maybe even the hundred I've scanned aren't representative; but so far, it seems like nothing more than a gigantic review of all the historical writings before him. It's like an endless special edition of the Times Literary Supplement discussing only history books, perhaps designed to teach scholars how to waste their time. But who knows, maybe he throws in a little synthesis every hundred pages.
5 comments:
I've never heard of this. what's the english translation of it? I don't read German (ashamed to admit). Perhaps when you're done with it, do check out Reiner Schurmann's Broken Hegemonies. I read parts of it for a class, and sufficiently to realize i need to read it in its (daunting) entirety.
https://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?isbn=0-253-34144-2
It means History of Antiquity. Mayer wrote at the turn of the last century, and was the first (in modern times, anyway) to write a universal history. It covered the civilizations on the Mediterranean Sea up to around 400 A.D. It hasn't been translated into English, although it appears to have been widely read at the time.
Maybe this sounds boring to other people. I get kind of stubborn when I find an interest. I want to read all of the things, and so I get stuck on the first, biggest one.
So Greg, let me get this straight: you're going to read several "histories of everything" in a row? That's the plan?
So, Jess, you've got a blog, man? Can I take a peek?
Jess: no, not really. I see why you thought that. The plan, though, was to find enough "histories of everything" to at least have a foundation for every time period. No one work actually seems to do this. Even the 30+ volume Cambridge Histories don't cover parts of the world away from the Mediterranean and Europe very much at all.
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