Towards Equitable Histories of Ancient Built Environments
In a recent conversation with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay hosted by the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Laurie Monahan asked whether one might include ancient civilizations in an analysis of imperialism. Citing her personal expertise, Azoulay understandably steered the discussion back to a post-1492 context. From my perspective as a historian of the ancient built environment, I offer here a response to Prof. Monahan’s excellent question.
Figure 1. Obelisks of Hatshepsut (left) and Thutmose I (right) in their original setting at the Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt. Photograph by Dennis Jarvis. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Instructors, students, and anyone critically engaged with the built environment have an urgent need for ancient architectural histories that reckon openly with our field’s perpetuation of imperialism, but there are no ready inroads for this potential turn. First, historicism itself discourages us from directly correlating modern concerns and events to those embedded in such fundamentally different ancient contexts. Second, assumptions and outlooks prevalent in our field tend to resist our applications of ancient material to problems of the present. Third, and largely resulting from of our own doings, radical inquiries outside our field may operate within parameters that limit or dissuade the potential strengths that many ancient architectural historians may bring to our shared conversations.
To the first objection on historicist grounds, we should recognize how our scholarship and the realities of our modern context imbricate. While we adhere to the tenet of race as a specifically modern construct, our listeners and readers have internalized film and television’s repeated depiction of Greeks and Romans as white. And with this perception in mind, we would do well to consider our minoritized audience members and avoid actively rehearsing colonialist extraction in matter-of-fact presentations of Romans’ appropriation of material culture from Egypt, for example (Figures 1 and 2).
Figure 2. Egyptian Obelisk in Piazza Montecitorio, Rome, extracted from its original context under the Roman emperor Augustus. Photograph by Yves Doutreligne. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Recognizing the limits of where historicism should apply may be salutary. It would help to clarify the disconnect between the conservative messages our audiences receive from our narratives and whatever political positions we may otherwise intend to project. If anything, the deeper remoteness of the cultures we study further upholds their imperialism as a fait accompli, facilitating our rehearsal of imperializing norms in our scholarship and teaching (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Detail of the Egyptian Obelisk taken to Rome under Augustus, against the background of the Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Photograph by Harvey Barrison. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Grasping this divergence between perceptions of our contributions within and without our field can address the above-mentioned second challenge. It can point us past the obstacles to applying our efforts toward current issues with contemporary relevance. I’m referring to broad social and political realms far beyond the well-tread question of architectural history’s relevance to design education.
One of the biggest such obstacles may be our insularity. Joel Christensen, a faculty member in the Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University, remarks that classicists largely self-identify as liberal, but that we do so “because most of the time we’re not in spaces or with people who push us about our liberalism and what that means.” While I’ve never been based in a classics department, I would extend Christensen’s observation to all kinds of units I’ve been a part of, including departments of history, architecture, and art history. I therefore hesitate to accept the current proposal for a “magic pill” solution that would dissolve departments of classical studies and disperse their faculty to different corners of our campuses.
So, what would classical architectural historians say among themselves about issues surrounding Prof. Monahan’s question about ancient imperialism? Her question is difficult because the premise for addressing such issues lies in a sphere of radical approaches that are not fully endemic to our field. Anecdotally, I’ve received communications in which field colleagues bemoan interdisciplinary orientations, going so far as to characterize them as departures from “real architectural history,” leading these colleagues to disengage from the activities of the Society of Architectural Historians.
“Enduring reform would require a fundamental shift in widely held ways of interrogating historical material, enabling researchers to overcome the potential obstacle of blind peer review as an insulated realm of protection for custodians of tradition.”
But before we dismiss classical architectural historians outright as protectors of an unwelcome conservatism, let’s consider the kernel of the criticism itself. In a discussion with the audience following a paper I gave in Pittsburgh this past April for a session on radical methods and equitable histories at the 75th Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Swati Chattopadhyay asked about what I had not sufficiently foregrounded: the element of expertise one can bring to the task of unlearning. If as classical architectural historians, in fact, we share such an expertise-based critique among ourselves, there’s a potential path toward a collaborative purpose across field specializations.
In building upon disciplinary and field expertise, furthermore, classical architectural historians have innovated outlooks that lend themselves to equitable readings of built form and urban space. For example, starting with her seminal work on Rome in the age of Augustus, Diane G. Favro has centered the experiential dimension of everyday, eye-level viewers moving through space. Similarly, Jessica Paga has reconceptualized the entrance of the Athenian Acropolis as a space of public protest. Margaret M. Miles has explicated the reality of Classical Greek temple buildings as collaborative projects defying reduction to designs reflecting the imprint of individual elite architects.
By contrast with these humanizing approaches, and irrespective of my interests in historical processes and my book’s focus on non-elite creative labor and affective experience, I have habitually embedded my own work in familiar scholarly conversations focused on canonical monuments framed in terms of elite patrons and architects. The fact of already having contributed in this way complicates my subsequent attempts to break through the insularity and collaborate with non-classicist colleagues in epistemological critiques of our larger discipline.
This point underscores the third of the above-mentioned difficulties for classical architectural historians who wish to bring our interests into conversations about pressing issues like imperialism, inclusivity, diversity, and equity. For example, how can I expect to direct my knowledge of ancient buildings toward collaborative efforts that resist materialist studies of monumental architecture for their privileging of elite stability at the expense of marginalized peoples who experience their worlds in transitory ways?
This question is not hypothetical. Arijit Sen, who chaired the SAH IDEAS session on radical methods and generously welcomed my contribution, published the call for papers in precisely these terms. And I answered this question for myself by adhering to my own expertise, but doing so in a way that would continue to push forward the human element in the fluid space-time of creating and experiencing ancient monuments (Figure 4).
Figure 4. The Parthenon, Athens. Photograph by Phanatic. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
I first applied my approach in a recently published article on the origins of the celebrated Parthenon Frieze. In that study, I show how the conception of the Parthenon’s Ionic frieze should be traced neither to the design of an elite architect/overseer nor the patronage of Athens’ polis administration, but rather to the workers within the fluid processes of construction. In connection with the physical evidence for those processes, workers collaboratively explored form and space on site in real dimensions, making changes as they built (Figures 5, 6, 7, 8).
Figure 5. The Parthenon, Athens, exploded axonometric view showing the Parthenon Frieze at 1 in its original architectural context of the east peristyle, east porch, and pronaos. Drawing by John R. Senseney, “The Architectural Origins of the Parthenon Frieze,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 80 no. 1 (2021), 12-29.
Figure 6. The Parthenon, Athens, photograph showing portion of the Parthenon Frieze visible through the west peristyle, restored as a modern cast to its original setting. Photography by VideoVik. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Figure 7. The Parthenon Frieze, detail of cavalcade in its eye-level setting in the British Museum, London. Photograph by Bram Souffreau. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Figure 8. The Parthenon Frieze, detail of cavalcade in its eye-level setting in the British Museum, London. Photograph by Egisto Sani. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
This framing suggests a major epistemological shift in how we think about canonical monuments. The experiential dimension of the Parthenon is owed to the embodied experience of construction on the part of common and enslaved laborers who were the hands-on experts of tools, materials, structure, and the art of building. But beyond the architects named in our sources, who were these builders whose creative agency brought such remarkable innovations? Merely asking this question begins to uphold ancient laborers’ humanity in a way traditionally reserved for elite architects and patrons.
This orientation toward equity was precisely the central purpose of my paper for the IDEAS session, which focused on the construction process of another canonical monument, the Roman Pantheon. Though we do not know the Pantheon builders’ names, their work tells the stories of their agency and incredible accomplishments obscured for so long under the shadows of the imperial patrons who exploited their skills and creativity. While the value of materialist studies of the Parthenon and the Pantheon should remain open to scrutiny, our expertise in reading ancient built form may help to ensure that canonical monuments can no longer stand as refuges for inequitable histories (Figure 9).
Figure 9. The Pantheon, Rome, detail of front portico and intermediary block. Photograph by Cogito Ergo Imago. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Returning to the question of the ancient laborers responsible for building projects in imperial contexts, Diane Favro shared with me a newsletter report for a newly discovered painted tomb in the village of Bayt Ras, site of the Roman city of Capitolias located in the governate of Irbid, Jordan. The murals, which perhaps date to the second century CE, include scenes of builders engaged in the transport of materials and construction process of the city walls of Capitolias, which was founded in 98 CE. Painted inscriptions in Greek identify specific deities by name, but additional inscriptions convey the colorful dialogue of the builders in the common language of Aramaic, whereby the Greek alphabet merely transcribes their speech.
The linguistic element is telling. A scene of local builders speaking a shared language among themselves reflects a self-contained world that was meaningful on its own terms, and not simply from an imperializing standpoint that would reduce such depictions to “provincial” imagery. And by extension, such visual representations help us to imagine the ethnic diversity of the masses of common and enslaved laborers deployed in major projects like the Parthenon and Pantheon in imperial centers.
But to return this discussion to the contemporary context of our readers and listeners, such workers would be understood today not just as ethnically diverse, but racially diverse. In addition to positing assemblage of different languages, dialects, and clothing, our audiences would envision a variety of genetic characteristics like hair types and skin color. For the sake of our shared impulse to see something of ourselves in historically remote worlds, how helpful is it really when ancient historians overlook such diversity on the grounds of race as a modern phenomenon?
Furthermore, the very notion that racism did not exist in ancient contexts is unconvincing. Imperial Athens made it very clear that an essential quality separated Athenians from non-Athenians, and that this inextricable difference was passed down genetically. In 451/450, just four years before the start of the Parthenon’s construction, Athens passed a new law that required not just an Athenian father, but also birth from an Athenian mother to qualify for citizenship. So, we can talk about racial supremacism as inappropriate to the question of who built the Parthenon, but members of our own audiences, especially our students, may have cause to disagree.
Beyond the general question of race, something else stands out in the ancient contexts in which the construction and use of buildings and urban spaces unfolded. Denise E. McCoskey has brought our attention to several texts written by Greeks and Macedonians in reference to public urban spaces and multi-unit residences in Ptolemaic Egypt. As McCoskey emphasizes, these texts uncomfortably read like racial supremacism endured by Egyptians. They reflect Greeks and Macedonians’ discernment of permanent, essential differences that set themselves apart. What is absent from these reflections on inherent identity is references to the specific element of skin color that preoccupies modern racial thinking.
“At every turn within the historical processes of building, working, and inhabiting, new possibilities remain open, calling for interventions that hinge on the specifics of the context in play. If we include these processes in our historical inquiries, we dwell in that fluid space-time of hands-on builders and everyday people.”
Along these lines, my current research project involves an explication of the element of whiteness specifically as a lynchpin in the very different context separating post-1492 and ancient imperialism. To sharpen our lens on ancient contexts, I am exploring visual poetics in built environments for the foundations of early modern whiteness and racial thinking in religious practices and humoral medicine. For classical architectural historians, one of the direct applications of this research is toward cultivating awareness of our reading of ancient buildings according to early modern classicism, which David Karmon, a specialist in Renaissance architecture, aptly characterizes as a history of modern racial thinking.
Despite our reliance on historicist approaches that alienate members of our audience, this unreflective reliance on early modern classicism is itself a breach of historicism. So much of our framing of classical architecture emerges from a patently racist transatlantic context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which assigns creativity to the design process of white male architect-intellectuals in distinction to the enslaved Black laborers forced to construct the master’s designs. When we present ancient architecture according to the strict design/construction dichotomy prevalent in Neoclassical architecture, we center whiteness in an ancient context where whiteness did not exist.
Prior to elaborating some of these views at the SAH IDEAS session in Pittsburgh, I honestly had no clue how the several leading specialists in my field would react. To my relief, they were both effusive about the excellent papers that my fellow panel members presented on a range of topics from the nineteenth century to the present, and enthusiastic about my presentation focused on the Pantheon. While this positive reception should not surprise us considering classicists’ liberal self-identity, the most welcome outcome was hearing my colleagues’ delight to encounter such issues conveyed through evidence and methodological grounds they could verify through their own familiarity (Figure 10).
Figure 10. The Pantheon, Rome, interior of rotunda. Photograph by Moon Man Mike. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
In no way would I recognize these informal conversations among colleagues actively engaged in SAH conferences as portending anything like a breakthrough, however. Publications focused on plunder, along with earlier impacts of critical race theory, feminism, and LBGTQ studies have shown how classical studies can move in new directions, but the continual reversion to elite-centered design and patronage should guard against naiveté. Enduring reform would require a fundamental shift in widely held ways of interrogating historical material, enabling researchers to overcome the potential obstacle of blind peer review as an insulated realm of protection for custodians of tradition.
Legitimate questions of purpose and method are at issue. Some would argue that our research and an honorable commitment to equity are two separate things. This principle emerges from a widely held view described by historian John Tosh, wherein the value of the practice of history depends on an objectively neutral commitment to historicism that activist purposes can only undermine and distort. Among scholars generally, a potential model for the virtues of this outlook may be the figure of Noam Chomsky, my famous colleague in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, who has forged entirely separate disciplinary and public scholarly pursuits.
Speaking for myself, I might consider adopting this principle of separation as soon as my level of extracurricular activism reaches anything remotely comparable to Chomsky’s. Until then, I suspect my avoidance of equitable approaches would do little to blunt my authorial bias.
And I will add that the ideal of objectivity--if that is what is truly at issue--is best achievable by way of equality and inclusion.
To put it another way, an oppositional division between scholarship and social justice is itself an imperializing position. Equitable histories hinge on equality and inclusion toward diversity in every way, and not just strictly in terms of people. Equity in service of diverse peoples itself stems from equality and inclusion as a habitual orientation, as opposed to discriminating and categorizing without first establishing irreproachable justifications.
In service of ancient architectural history, we can bring Azoulay’s observations of how such discrimination and categorization work as imperializing operations. Even before writing or speaking about what we see, we tend to read built environments in unreflective ways that distort them through discrimination and categorization, resulting in exclusion and privileging according to unacknowledged norms and tropes. We discriminate between space and time, origins and historical processes, design and construction, authors and subjects, and on and on.
Wielding a more robust skepticism, we can question our habitual approaches to buildings in terms of dualistic oppositions like origins v. processes, thereby enabling us to position ourselves interstitially to embrace both equally and everything between them. We can engage our work inclusively in what I have called “architectural origins” within the fluid, collaborative creativity of hands-on builders, along with – as Dell Upton emphasizes – the protracted lives of buildings. The processes of both construction and adaptation meander like courses through landscapes with no start and end.
I do not mean this metaphor in the static sense of something like the ruins of the Roman imperial infrastructure of highways. Rather, as my departmental colleague and fellow ancient historian Steven Johnstone has inspired me to understand, I intend something more along the lines of the ceaselessly converging and diverging courses of water activated through the empirically based operations of the aquarii, the enslaved and common staff members who managed Rome’s system of aqueducts. It is in the gaps within controlling imperial institutions where the agency of hands-on, expert workers determines contours, currents, and environs remaining in perennial flux, resisting imposed frameworks throughout the vastness of space-time.
To be clear, this awareness of process should extend to stable, monumental structures as well. Non-discriminating approaches can highlight them in the observable traces of ingenuity in the construction processes of those Roman highways and bridges, Greek hydraulic works, the walls of cities like those built for Capitolias, and buildings like the Parthenon and Pantheon. And beyond the traditional, imperializing privileging of extracting material culture from indigenous contexts, we can honor the equality of origins and processes through approaches that emphasize the non-elite, fluid adaptation of diverse uses for such buildings throughout antiquity and beyond.
At every turn within the historical processes of building, working, and inhabiting, new possibilities remain open, calling for interventions that hinge on the specifics of the context in play. If we include these processes in our historical inquiries, we dwell in that fluid space-time of hands-on builders and everyday people. Through the conduit of our engagement, their creative contributions speak directly for the ancient builders and inhabitants themselves.
In this way, potential architectural histories of ancient worlds are not a matter of our own scholarly “progress” toward methodological innovations, and less so yet about our identities as authors relevant to our subjects in a distant past. They are about ancient builders’ and inhabitants’ agency in expressing their own voices by way of their own creative interventions, which in imperial contexts entails a kind of resistance.
Discriminating divisions like “distant past” and “living present” do not facilitate a neutral operation for determining whether to hear communities tell their own stories. To borrow from Azoulay, we – along with our readers in the present and future – are the companions of ancient peoples and communities with whom we together resist that ground of imperialism. Such inclusive, collaborative engagement displaces the authorial self-interest and proclaimed objectivity that perpetuates imperialism. In my view, that is what history is for.
