When Adam was evicted from the Garden of Eden, “to till the ground from which he was taken” (Genesis 3:23), the whole world lay before him. Just where does one go?
In starting Archaeology Odyssey, we were in a similar quandary. Unlike Adam, we had done it before, publishing Biblical Archaeology Review, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in exactly a year. But we did have Adam’s problem: The past is a universe stretching far beyond where the eye can see. Just where does one go?
There was another complication, at least for me. I cannot agree with Santayana that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. The ancients were different from us—our history and sense of identity are shaped by forces they could not have imagined. I don’t mean that we gain nothing by studying the past. We gain a world. But ancient history cannot tell us how to live our lives; it offers little of practical benefit.
Thus my other problem: Why bother with an archaeology magazine in the first place?
The answer, for me, is enchantment. Music and poetry, too, offer little that is useful. The fugue Beethoven wrote as the adagio movement of his 15th Quartet transports me into a world utterly different from the one I ordinarily inhabit. The music teaches me nothing—except about music. Similarly, the past teaches us little, but it gives us a privileged view of human possibility: ways of thinking, forms of art, modes of worship that were once—but are no longer—common currency. That is the enchantment of ancient history: We reckon with large movements of thought and feeling that have been submerged by time.
In thinking about Archaeology Odyssey—what the magazine should look like, what material readers might be drawn to again and again—we turned a problem into an opportunity. Besides the usual sections devoted to letters, news items, reviews and travel pieces, we created three special departments to explore those quirky continuities and disjunctions between past and present.
Origins, as befits its name, leads off the magazine—examining ideas we take for granted that first took root in the ancient world. This issue’s Origins explains how, 2,500 years ago, a Greek scholar organized human knowledge into categories we still use today—to create a card catalogue for the Alexandria Library. In an upcoming issue, however, we will run a report that this system may be antiquated by the computer.
Closing the magazine is Ancient Life, presenting snapshots of How They Lived Then. This time we look at tomb-robbing in ancient Egypt; such plundering is common today, of course, but we don’t consider our presidents gods or mummify them so they might endure eternity.
Right in the heart of the magazine we’ve put a voice—someone traveling among the vestiges of the ancient world. We call this section Past Perfect. In this issue’s Past Perfect, Mark Twain visits Pompeii. Standing in the ancient city’s theater, he realizes, in a moment of comic despair, that the audience will never show up, thanks to Vesuvius.
Perhaps they weren’t so different from us, after all. That is also an enchanting thought.
When Adam was evicted from the Garden of Eden, “to till the ground from which he was taken” (Genesis 3:23), the whole world lay before him. Just where does one go? In starting Archaeology Odyssey, we were in a similar quandary. Unlike Adam, we had done it before, publishing Biblical Archaeology Review, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in exactly a year. But we did have Adam’s problem: The past is a universe stretching far beyond where the eye can see. Just where does one go? There was another complication, at least for me. I cannot agree with Santayana […]
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