Ethnography After Antiquity: Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature

by Anthony Kaldellis

Although Greek and Roman authors wrote ethnographic texts describing foreign cultures, ethnography seems to disappear from Byzantine literature after the seventh century C.E.—a perplexing exception for a culture so strongly self-identified with the Roman empire. Yet the Byzantines, geographically located at the heart of the upheavals that led from the ancient to the modern world, had abundant and sophisticated knowledge of the cultures with which they struggled and bargained. Ethnography After Antiquity examines both the instances and omissions of Byzantine ethnography, exploring the political and religious motivations for writing (or not writing) about other peoples. Through the ethnographies embedded in classical histories, military manuals, Constantine VII's De administrando imperio , and religious literature, Anthony Kaldellis shows Byzantine authors using accounts of foreign cultures as vehicles to critique their own state or to demonstrate Romano-Christian superiority over Islam. He comes to the startling conclusion that the Byzantines did not view cultural differences through a purely theological their Roman identity, rather than their orthodoxy, was the vital distinction from cultures they considered heretic and barbarian. Filling in the previously unexplained gap between antiquity and the resurgence of ethnography in the late Byzantine period, Ethnography After Antiquity offers new perspective on how Byzantium positioned itself with and against the dramatically shifting world.

Genres: History, Ancient History

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 25, 2013

About the author

Ph.D. University of Michigan, Department of History (2001)
Anthony Kaldellis’ research explores the history, culture, and literature of the east Roman empire from antiquity to the fifteenth century. An earlier phase of it focused on the reception of ancient Hellenic culture, for example on how authors conceived their projects in relation to classical models (Procopius of Caesarea, 2004), as well as the history of identities (Hellenism in Byzantium, 2007), monuments (The Christian Parthenon, 2009), and genres (Ethnography after Antiquity, 2013). A second phase brought to light the enduring Roman matrices of Byzantine life and thought, focusing on its political sphere (The Byzantine Republic, 2015) and ethnic identities (Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium, 2019). He has translated into English the works of many medieval Greek writers, such as Prokopios, Genesios, Psellos, Attaleiates, and Laonikos Chalkokondyles. His own monographs have been translated into other modern languages, including Turkish, French, Romanian, Russian, and Greek. In 2019, he created the first academic podcast for his field, Byzantium & Friends. He has just published a new, comprehensive history of Byzantium, The New Roman Empire (2023), which embeds social, economic, religious, and demographic developments within a lively narrative framework.

Reviews

[Anatolikon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kaldellis sets out to find out what happened in the middle Byzantine period to ethnographic writing. Whereas classical and late antique writing contained plenty of insights into foreign peoples for the purpose of holding a mirror to Roman civilization, Byzantine writers ignore the outsider. Kaldellis finds this puzzling since it is evident that the Byzantines made an effort to remain informed about the world and would have known a lot. He argues that ancient ethnography became religious polemic after the seventh century and it replaced the "us" vs. "them" sort of writing that could be used to critique one's own society. Only in the 14th c. did ethnography re-appear as scholars discovered a non-Christian and non-Roman world.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful historian who seems to write a great deal, and this told me everything I need to know (in the first instance) about Byzantine writings on Turks and Mongols. He offers thought-provoking suggestions on why the Byzantines 'knew a lot about barbarians but wrote little'. It's an enormous pity they didn't, but here is a guide to what they did write. With the attitudes and structures of thought that might 'interpret the silence.' This subject has not been gone into because of that silence, but as Kaldellis argues, and proves, we can learn a lot about them from what they chose not to talk about, glossed over or ignored -- in writing, while not in the streets of their city, which bustled with barbarians.

He finds that unlike Western Europe, the New Rome kept the old Roman/barbarian construct intact, and Christian identity did not much change things: it was Roman identity that mattered, such that Christianized barbarians remained uncivilized and weren't much affected, in Byzantine eyes, by conversion. Not that Christianity was uninfluential: as he says, it makes a great difference to your ethnographic practice whether you base your outlook on the Old Testament (which he sees as resolutely anti-foreign) or on Herodotos (whom he defends as truly cosmopolitan, against questions asked on this). Late in the piece Mongols, for a short time, in three pieces of writing, overturned centuries of stereotypes about Skythians because of their success.

He's a bit too dismissive of Anna Komnene (I thought we were over that?): I find her Turk portraits richer than he does. I enjoyed his rant about historians who sneer at Byzantine classifications -- e.g. 'Skythians' in an age of Seljuqs -- since our usages are every bit as artificial.

[Lucas Sipe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anthony Kaldellis has created an interesting work that examines the absence, already a difficult task, of the Ethnographical genre in Byzantine literature through her history post-Late Antiquity. Kaldellis dwells on key aspects of the ethnographical genre and some excellent practioners. Chief among them is Procopius of Caesarea. From there, the author dives deep into scraps and segments of texts that talk about other cultures/ religions/ and societies. From these morsels, Kaldellis does not talk about other cultures but about how Byzantines understood themselves and how they wanted to be seen.

It's an often engaging account that rarely makes grandiose claims without sufficient supporting evidence or reasoning. Like most of Kaldellis' work, the main thesis is that the Byzantine Empire knew themselves as Roman (at least until the late 13th/ early 14 century) and one can only understand the sources once we understand the Byzantines as being Roman. As a result, Kaldellis constantly shows how the Byzantines (Romans) retained the same snobbery and disdain for "barbarian" cultures by utilizing classical motifs and styles like any good Roman did in classical antiquity. Disdainful modern historians quickly discount Byzantine literature because of it's "laziness" and "copying" but Kaldellis demonstrates how that can only be the case if you discount their real identity as well. There is even good reason to suppose that the Byzantines knew far more about foreign cultures than our sources currently reflect but even the tiny bits we have do show that Byzantium constructed intricate narratives and not simply just copying ancient practices.

That powerful emphasis on Byzantium's Roman identity is clearly important to Kaldellis. As a result, Kaldellis spends a big chapter devoted to debunking the idea of "Byzantium Christian Ecumenism" by which many historians have reduced the Roman identity in favor of a Christian identity. Kadellis shows how that is very far from the truth; crucially, Byzantium viewed other societies in two tier: Christian and Roman. Other cultures could only really attain one of these, Christian, and so were better than pagan Barbarians. Outside of other ancient cultures, such as Persian, they could never become as civilized as Roman (Byzantine) culture had become. States that converted to Christianity, therefore, were still treated as barbarian and Christianity was but a method of civilizing barbarian cultures and making them Roman. Personal corresponded as well as some semi-public sources really show the disdain Byzantium had for non Roman, yet still Christian, societies other than their own. I think the overall thesis for this part is sound but Kaldellis can often discount the real Christian identity of Byzantium at this point in history. While the truth of Roman arrogance is almost impossible to ignore, the force of Byzantium Christianity is just as powerful and Kaldellis' subjection of it to Romanness seems misguided. As it stands, however, "Christian Ecumenical Byzantium" is tortured into existence to justify the erasure of Byzantine Roman identity.

There are a few other flaws but they are very minor. Kaldellis acknowledges the problems of doing history by studying the absence of something but after a while that concession seemed to have vanished. It's not really required to read first, but Romanland, also by Kaldellis, would be a great first read before getting into something like Ethnography after Antiquity. Few people are interested in Byzantine History and that's pretty sad but I'm glad a historian of Kaldellis' quality is able to give amazing analysis in an engaging manner.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another Kaldellis book, who is rapidly becoming my favourite active Byzantinist. This book has a rather odd aim in that, unlike many academic studies, it is trying to explain a absence, rather than a presence. In the case of this book, it is the disappearance of ethnography as a literary (sub-) genre. Key to this discussion, of course, is just what Kaldellis identifies as ethnography, which is classisizing ethnographies so familiar to Greek and Roman historiography which tended to include a pretty incisive investigation of the target culture's history, habits, mores and, of course, historical character. Those readers who have read these classical ethnography would find them (in my opinion, gloriously) full of informative historical detail, mixed liberally with the arcane, strange and sometimes completely loopy.

Kaldellis' contention is that the classisizing ethnography disappeared in late antiquity (i.e. before the Arab invasions) and did not really re-appear until the end of the Byzantine period, during the Palaeologian period, and then only spasmodically. His main argument is that shifts in what it meant to be Roman and Christian made these kinds of studies less likely to be produced. Instead, discussion of other cultures, despite a likely abundance of data, tended to be polemic or ignored altogether in order to assert the superiority of 'Roman' culture.

I'm not sure if I find this book as successful as the Kaldellis books I've reviewed. Part of that is probably the difficulty of interpreting silence, but there are times when the arguments get strained. He is right to point out that the Roman-ness of the Byzantines probably inhibited the idea of the universal applicability of Christianity, but I'm not sure how to link this to the decline of ethnography. It is still a good book, especially for those (like me), who have an interest in classical ethnography, but it doesn't necessarily resolve the problem it tries to solve.