Alcibiades Wrote:
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>
> As for meaning, there are two types as I see it.
>
>
> There is the original contemporary, intentional
> meaning - cultural, religious, symbolic - actually
> built into the structures by their creators, which
> we piece together bit by bit by painstaking
> empirical method against a backdrop of what we
> know about the culture which produced them.
THis is really the only meaning that matters to a serious, disciplined student of Egyptology.
>
> And then there is "meaning" in the greater sense,
> the kind of higher, nobler motive that it is
> always tempting to look for in large ancient
> projects when we look back at them through the
> foreshortening telescope of history - we see them
> as a completed whole, and we want them to "mean"
> something more, something greater than just the
> products of insular religious custom or large
> scale human vanity. We flatter ourselves that
> they are a "message" to us, or a designed or
> implied mechanism that speaks to the technology or
> science of our age, simply waiting all these eons
> for people like us who are smart enough to
> interpret them.
Ethnocentrism at its finest (or worst, as the case may be).
>
> The search for the latter type of meaning says far
> more about us than it does the AEs, and I think
> for some people it is hard to accept that the
> mundane former type of meaning is all there is.
The part I find most ironic is that the "former type of meaning" is the really fascinating one. The superimposed ethnocentric meanings (New Age, Geomantic or Numerological) are the mundane, uninteresting ideas.
> Unravelling history in my view - if I can steal a
> quote from Edison - is 99% perspiration and 1%
> inspiration. There's a lot of dull, worthy
> ground to be covered, but if you want to find the
> truth you must be prepared to follow it out into
> the dry places. That's the price, but ultimately
> you appreciate the real rewards.
Brilliantly stated. Thank you for putting it so succinctly.
>
> There will always be those who come along and set
> the cat amongst the pigeons with theories that are
> 99% inspiration - but I actually think that this
> is healthy in terms of debate - these theories and
> ideas are all grist to the mill, and ultimately
> they serve to remind us that we should always have
> solid ground beneath our feet before we even think
> of taking the next step.
>
Some of my most important discoveries were made while I was desperately trying to find out why I was wrong about another quasi-related discovery. Good academicians, I think, spend more of their time trying to find out why their new idea is wrong... not trying to prove it is right. Coming up with "plausible scenarios" that encompass most of the evidence is probably the easiest part of real historical research. Making the effort to find out why one's idea cannot be right is the mark of a serious student of a subject.
Anthony
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.