Anthony Grafton - Dating History, The Renaissance and the Reformation of Chronology

In 1485, the Portuguese explorer DiogoCo erected the Cape Cross monumentin what is now Namibia. He and his menhad long since passed the boundaries ofthe space that Europeans had tradition-ally navigated. They did not and couldnot know exactly where they were. Still,they were condent that they knew onething: when they had arrived. They in-scribed the cross with a commemorativemessage, which dated their coming, witha precision that boggles the modernmind, to the year of the world 6685.

To obtain this date they used a methodas traditional as their exploits in naviga-tion were radical. The Greek text of theOld Testament, the Septuagint, andmost Western world chronicles held thatfty-two hundred years had passed be-tween the Creation and the Incarnation.

To locate their particular doings in thelongest imaginable term, that of worldhistory, Co and his men simply addedthe number of years that had passedsince the birth of Christ to this biblicaltotalwhich they evidently saw as xed,governed by an authoritative text, thesort of knowledge that could be set instone.

In the fteenth and sixteenth centu-ries, as everyone knows, European ex-plorers ranged the world and revolution-izedamong many other thingsthestudy of geography. They found that theAtlantic and the Indian Ocean, whichthe world map in the great ancient atlas,Ptolemys Geography, represented asclosed, really opened to the south. Theydiscovered unknown continents to thewest and made contact with a vast rangeof societies in Africa and Asia as well asthe Americas. Gradually even the schol-ars who stayed home in Europe realizedthatas Gerard Mercator put it in 1572Ptolemys work was now of merely his-torical interest, and they replaced it withmore modern charts.

Explorers and scholars alike under-stood that their new knowledge of theearths surface called many establishedbeliefs into question. When Europeanshad known only three continentsAsia,Europe, and Africathey could easily

74 Ddalus Spring 2003

Anthony Grafton

Dating history: the Renaissance & the reformation of chronology

Anthony Grafton, a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 2002, is a professor of history andchair of the Council of the Humanities at Prince-ton University. His books include Forgers andCritics: Creativity and Duplicity in WesternScholarship (1990), Defenders of the Text: TheTraditions of Humanism in an Age of Science(1991), The Footnote: A Curious History(1997), Cardanos Cosmos: The Worlds andWork of a Renaissance Astrologer (1999), andtwo monographs on the Renaissance chronologerJoseph Scaliger (1983, 1993).

Ddalus Spring 2003 75

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trace the population of each of themback to one of the three sons of Noah.But from whom did the inhabitants ofthe Americas descend? Why had theBible and the ancients not mentionedthem? Or did they? Could the newlydiscovered land of Peru, with its goldmines, be the biblical Ophir that hadsupplied Solomon with his riches? Wasit a Chinese settlement, reached by dar-ing expeditions across the Pacic? Orwere the Incas and the other Americanpeoples the children of a separate cre-ation?

The new geography called much indoubtas the Jesuit Jos de Acosta fa-mously noticed when he shivered whilecrossing the equator. Acosta found him-self laughing aloud at the Aristoteliandoctrine of the torrid zone that was stilltaught, along with Ptolemys more accu-rate views, in colleges back home inEurope.

Yet most of those who made this revo-lution in Europes mental spacesex-plorers like Co and innovative intellec-tuals like Mercatorfor many years con-tinued to accept a traditional account ofhistorical time. According to this ac-count, history began with the Creationof the world, as narrated in the Bible andpictured in endless sequences of imagesof the Six Days of Gods work. But thiswas not the end of the matter, since un-certainty remained about the exact dura-tion of the time between the Creationand the coming of the Messiah. If oneaccepted the Greek text of the Old Testa-ment as authoritative, the total numberof years was fty-two hundred; on theother hand, if one accepted the Hebrewtext of the Old Testament, the biblicaltotal came to around four thousandyears. (Thus, in the 1640s, ArchbishopJames Ussher of England, treating theHebrew text as authoritative, arguedthat the world was created in precisely4004 b.c.)

Whichever version of biblical chronol-ogy they accepted, scholars and sailorsnormally thought that the Old Testa-ment offered a detailed narrative of theearly stages of historyespecially thosethat took place before the universalFlood. Where the biblical text thinnedout, as it seemed to in the rst millenni-um b.c., the ancient poets and historianschimed in, telling their tales of Troy,Athens, and Rome. These in turn set thestage for the birth of the Savior and thebeginnings of a new, Christian age. Thisage too would end at a determinate timean eschatological date that radicals setin the immediate future, while moreconservative thinkers, who insisted thatonly God knew when time would havean end, generally placed it within a fewhundred years.

While the Western understanding ofgeography expanded during the Renais-sance, then, the traditional dating of thepast and future remained curiouslynarrow-minded. So, at least, one mightthink, when one stands by Cos monu-ment, now in a museum in Berlinorwhen one sits in any rare book room andturns the leaves of most of the dozens ofchronicles and chronological textbooksproduced between 1450 and 1700. Theserange in size and splendor from Hart-mann Schedels massive, magnicentlyillustrated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493,with its hundreds of woodcuts, some ofthem the work of the young Drer, tothe Jesuit Denys Petaus tiny, tight-packed, text-only On the Reckoning ofTime, which went through dozens of edi-tions and introduced thousands ofschoolboys and scholars to the basicconcepts and problems of chronology.

With what now looks like inexplicablepatience, the authors of these booksbuilt and rebuilt the same basic arma-ture of names and dates. On illuminatedscrolls and in heavy printed folios, onwall charts and in textbooks, they pack-


AnthonyGrafton ontime

aged history as a single genealogical tree.Rooted in the family dramas of the OldTestament and the Trojan War, the trunkgradually branched out into the ancientPersian, Macedonian, and Roman Em-pires. Still later, it flowered into the var-iegated cities and states of the MiddleAges. Again and again, chronologers ap-plied the same techniques to the materi-als they assembled along the trees trunkand branches.

In order to cope with the awkward dis-crepancy between the Hebrew andGreek texts of the Old Testament, chro-nologers from the thirteenth century ondated the events of ancient history back-ward from the birth of Christ, as well asforward from the Creation. By datingbackward, chronologers could use bothcomputations, showing how they dif-fered. They assured their readers thatthey could resolve whatever discrepan-cies they encountered. Pocket almanacsand wall charts, modest textbooks andstately folios all taught, long before theunfairly notorious Archbishop Usshercame on the scene, that the world beganat a particular time on a particular dayaround 5200 or 4000 b.c., and thatscholarly examination of the evidencecould securely identify the exact date.

Why all this interest in what Voltairecondemned as the sterile science offacts and dates, that connes itself to de-termining the year in which some totallyinsignicant man was born or died?We all know that space mattered, in thisage of exploration. But time matteredtoo, in early modern Europe. New de-vices for measuring the passage of timemore exactly than ever before appearedthroughout the continent. Immense,spectacular escapement clocks rang thehours in every city square, indicating thephases of the moon and the movementsof the planets. Their mechanisms didmore than tell time. They mobilized

squads of automata, designed to teachmoral and theological lessons. Clock-work cocks crowed and clockwork skele-tons swung their sickles, all to remindpassersby that time moved quickly, sothey must hurry to their places of workand worship. Smaller but equally mag-nicent clocks glittered and rang on ev-ery affluent familys mantelpiece.

Splendid as they were, moreover, thesetimekeeping devices were only the mate-rial embodiment of a new consciousnessof time that would, eventually, trans-form the traditional forms of dating thepast. This new consciousness rst ap-peared in the advanced mercantile citiesof Italy and Flanders and in the wealthymonasteries of England, France, and theHoly Roman Empire. Old men schooledtheir sons in the principle that businessand politics alike depended on prompt-ness. Long before Protestants appearedon the scene, creating the new ethics ofthe secular vocation, the Florentine writ-er Leon Battista Alberti made a characterin his dialogues On the Family tell theyounger members of his family thatyou must always watch the time. Heexplained that he kept a diary of engage-ments, followed it to the letter, and nev-er went to bed with business undone.Clock time drove workers in Europesmost sophisticated manufacturing enter-prises, from Brunelleschis workshop tothe Venetian arsenal. It also drove thereligious to their prayers. Old monks in-structed novices just as rigorously as oldmerchants instructed their apprenticesabout the vital importance of their dailyroutine. Monasteries built massive, ex-pensive clocks and bells to teach astron-omy and ensure that everyone woke intime to pray. A new sense of time, assomething uniform, determined by thestars, and accessible to human industry,pervaded Western culture. It found ex-pression in every imaginable medium:from the paintings that represented Op-

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portunity with the back of her head bald,to the Shakespearian play in which a de-posed king cried out, I wasted time, andnow doth time waste me.

All Europeans, northern and southern,Protestant and Catholic, agreed: soci-eties that measured time accurately weresuperior to those that did not. The impe-rial ambassador to Turkey, Ogier Ghis-lain de Busbecq, mocked his hosts be-cause they have no chronology, andthought that Job was King Solomonschamberlain, and Alexander the Greatthe master of his cavalry. By contrast,when Michel de Montaigne read Lopezde Gomaras account of New Spain, heappreciated the sophisticated calendricsof the Aztecs. The people of the king-dom of Mexico, he concluded, wereclearly more civilized and skillful in thearts than the other inhabitants of theAmericas.

This newfound mania for precisionmade Christian experts on the calendarrage and mourn, every year, as theChurch celebrated Easter on the wrongSunday. Mother Church was in thewrong. Worse still, in every synagoguein Europe the Jews, who used a moreaccurate nineteen-year luni-solar cycle,ridiculed the Christians while theythemselves celebrated Passover on thecorrect days. Even a Christian who didnot understand the importance of timecould hardly claim to be cultured. Whenan acquaintance asked the mild-mannered Protestant scholar and teach-er Philip Melanchthon why he shouldbother studying chronology, since thepeasants on his estate knew when to sowand when to reap without doing so, theReformer flew into a rage. That is un-worthy of a doctor, Melanchthonrailed: someone should shit a turd intohis doctors beret and stick it back on hishead.

If time and the disciplines that openedup its mysteries inspired fear, respect,

and fascination, historical time seemedespecially alluring. Ancient bookssolearned men agreedcontained the keysto the kingdom of knowledge. Only amastery of historical time could make itpossible to set the events they described,the inventions they commemorated, andthe philosophical systems they pre-served on a single, coherent time line.No wonder, then, that chronology, thescholarly study of time past, attractedambitious, hard-driving thinkers. Everyyear at the Frankfurt book fair, the pub-lishers laid out new chronologies forsale. These thick volumes, stuffed withtables and larded with long quotationsin Greek and Hebrew, offered their read-ers long analyses of the dates of worldhistory and the development of everyimaginable calendar. Influential scholarswrote them: Luther and Melanchthon,Mercator and Ussher, Newton and Vico.

One chronologer in particular, theHuguenot scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger(15401609), won renown for his refor-mation of the traditional approach tochronology. Working in the decadesaround 1600, Scaliger relaid the techni-cal foundations of the eld.

As Scaliger practiced it, chronologylooks startlingly remarkably modern. Hetreated biblical and classical texts asequally important, and read both withhistorical insight and imagination. Heused dateable eclipses and conjunctionsto x great dates from the fall of Troy tothat of Constantinople. And he not onlydetected gaps in the historical record,but also managed to ll them by aston-ishing feats of historical detective work.In many cases, the works of ancient his-torians who offered vital testimony hadbeen lost. Ransacking ancient glossariesand polemical treatises by the fathers ofthe Church, Scaliger collected and evalu-ated their fragments. He performed bib-liographical and philological miracles,



and used their results to create a coher-ent, solid structurebasically, the onethat scholars still use. His achievementinspired widespread excitement. It wonhim eager, expert readers like JohannesKepler. It provoked bitter attacks fromhis Catholic rivals in the Jesuit order.Eventually it gained him a full-time re-search appointmentthe rst in modernEuropean historyat the innovative Lei-den University.

If time mattered to everyone, chronol-ogy mattered to all scholars. In an age ofpolymaths who mastered all the disci-plines, knew many languages, and wrotemore than any modern can read, chro-nology, with its varied contents andtechnical difculties, seemed the es-sence of scholarship. That explains whyScaliger, the most arrogant as well as themost learned of menhe believed hewas a descendant of the della Scala ofVerona, and wore the purple robes of aprince when carrying out ofcial dutiesas a professorchose to cultivate thisrocky eld.

Formal rhetoric, it has been said, isone of the great obstacles that prevent usfrom understanding our ancestors. Wehave forgotten the technical canons thatthey followed religiously every time theyspoke in public, and we fail to see whywhat now seem empty words oncegripped audiences. Technical chronolo-gy, in its own way, also stands betweenus and our scholarly forebears. Thisdensely difcult body of scholarshiphad, for its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century devotees, something of the all-consuming excitement that structural-ism generated in the 1960s. But whatthey knew as a scene of lively activity, ofconstruction and reconstruction, has be-come a sunken city. We look up the datesof events in biblical or classical history,the moment at which an eclipse tookplace or the sequence of Egyptian pha-raohs, online or in reference booksand

rarely worry how this knowledge wasobtained. Experts in chronologylikeBonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, the authors of the magnicentOxford Companion to the Yearstill con-sult Scaliger and his ilk. But they alsoconsult primary sources unknown in theRenaissance, like the masses of datedpapyri discovered in Egypt in the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries that havetransformed our knowledge of how thecalendars of Roman Egypt functioned.The waters of oblivion cover the ruinedtowers of Renaissance chronology.

A few historians have duly celebratedScaligers achievement. A hundred andfty years ago the brilliant, bitter Jewishclassicist Jacob Bernays wrote his biogra-phy and hymned his universal erudi-tion in phosphorescent terms. So, someyears later, did Bernayss eloquent Brit-ish friend Mark Pattisonwho not coin-cidentally became the model for GeorgeEliots Mr. Casaubon. Yet even Bernaysand Pattison, who knew the learnedworld that Scaliger inhabited at rst-hand, did not nd it easy to explain whatmade his work excite his contemporariesso muchmuch less why an ambitiousand brilliant scholar would have chosenthe eld of chronology as the one inwhich to exercise his great mental pow-ers. Both of them described chronology,before Scaliger transformed it, as a co-herent, unchallenging, elementary disci-plineone whose questions and answerswere cut and dried, and whose purposewas merely to produce simple tables ofthe Jewish kings and Roman consuls.Hitherto, wrote Pattison, the utmostextent of chronological skill which his-torians had possessed or dreamed of hadbeen to arrange past facts in a tabular se-ries as an aid to memory. He and othershave evoked an almost pastoral pictureof chronology: herds of contented schol-ars browse, placidly, over the same stub-ble of biblical and historical data, con-


structing baby books for students. Patti-son thought that it took a Scaligersomeone whose name had the prover-bial power of Einsteins name, in themid-twentieth centuryto charge itwith excitement, to make the pasture acity inhabited by active, irritablecrowds.

Early modern readers, however, sawchronology in very different terms. Forall its appearance of coherence and sim-plicity, the eld swarmed with challeng-ing, unsolved problemsas becomes ap-parent when one looks away from thedecorative scrolls and wall charts andinto the more technical literature of theeld. Jean Bodin, a French jurist whobrought out in 1566 a pioneering manualon the method for studying history criti-cally, was only one of many Renaissancethinkers who compared chronology togeography. He treated them as twin dis-ciplines: the two eyes of history, as heand many others put it. Bodin insistedthat no one could practice either of themexcept by mastering a wide range of dis-ciplines. Like the geographer, the chro-nologer had to wield not just the philo-logical and hermeneutical keys thatcould unlock biblical texts and ancienthistories, but also the mathematical dis-cipline of astronomy. Only dated astro-nomical eras and eclipses, in the end,could establish a rm framework for his-torical time. Yet even astronomical datacould not solve every problem. The dateof Creation itself, for which scholars hadproposed dozens of differing solutions,remained uncertain, as Bodin pointedout. His rst readers went through hischapter on chronology pen in hand, ea-ger for enlightenment on what they sawas a difcult and important topic.

When Bodin came to England in the1580s on a diplomatic mission, thelearned Cambridge scholar Gabriel Har-vey put him through an interview on

chronology. Harvey noted down not ascheme of dates but a bibliography ofthe best ancient and modern sources forthe eldclear evidence that chronolo-gy seemed to both men to offer betterquestions than answers. When Scaligerwrote his rst major work in the eld,On the Emendation of Chronology, in theearly 1580s, he not only made many dis-coveries and innovations of his own, butalso synthesized arguments alreadymade by Bodin and Mercator and bynow-forgotten chronologers like JohannFunck and Paulus Crusius. Chronologyhad already attracted the attention ofsome of the most innovative thinkersand writers in Europe. Bodins ItalianJewish contemporary Azariah de Rossiwhose work, in Hebrew, Christianscholars like Scaliger encountered rela-tively latelabored with equal energy,and quite independently, to reconcile theevidence of the skies with that of theclassical and biblical texts, as JoannaWeinberg has shown in her magisterialedition of Azariahs The Light of the Eyes.

In the middle of the sixteenth century,in other words, informed readers sawchronology not as a xed textbook disci-pline but as a challenging interdiscipli-nary study, one that swarmed with un-solved problems. They had regarded it inthe same light a hundred years before,when the brilliant German astronomerJohannes Regiomontanus correspondedwith a Ferrarese colleague, GiovanniBianchini, about the dates of the Saviorslife. And they would nd it even moredifcult a hundred years after Bodinwhen Catholic scholars like MartinoMartini and Protestant scholars likeIsaac Vossius, who agreed on very little,found common ground in arguing, fromthe best available historical and astro-nomical evidence, that Chinese andEgyptian history apparently began be-fore the usual dates for the universalFlood. The textbooks existed. Sailors


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might think that chronology was simpleand uniform. But in the musty librarieswhere scholars rooted in the past, thestudy of time seemed just as complex,just as difcult, just as provocative andscary as the study of space.

From the late sixteenth century on-ward, in fact, religious dissidents regu-larly cited chronological evidence whenthey challenged the authority of the Bi-ble. The impious poet Christopher Mar-lowe, who blasphemed against the Biblein London taverns, had little in commonwith the pious Christian without aChurch Isaac La Peyrre, who argued ina scandalous, anonymous book thatthere had been Men Before Adam. Yetboth believed in the deep time of Aztec,Chinese, and Egyptian history, as re-vealed by modern travelers accountsand ancient texts. And both saw it as suf-cient reason to reject as absurd the ideathat the world could have come into ex-istence a mere fty-six hundred or sixty-eight hundred years before their ownday. Baruch Spinoza seems not to havetaken a great deal of interest in chronol-ogy. Yet this purportedly mainstreamform of scholarship troubled the ortho-dox and supplied ammunition to Spin-ozas radical allies.

It is not surprising that the study of his-torical time proved so complex, andeven contradictory, in pre-modern Eu-rope. The anthropologist Bernard Cohnshowed, in a classic article, that thetwentieth-century Indian villagers ofSenapur, not far from Benares, foundmeaning in multiple pasts, ancient andrecent, legendary and historical, as theircaste memberships and political situa-tions dictated. Learned Europeans, simi-larly, used chronology to sort out a widerange of problems, from the origins andfate of the universe to the privileges ofparticular towns, convents, and universi-

ties (one of the great chronological con-troversies of the sixteenth century hadto do with the ages of Oxford and Cam-bridgea scholarly anticipation of theBoat Race, in which both sides claimedTrojan ancestry). Like the Indians ofSenapur, the Europeans of Leiden andLondon approached the past from manydifferent standpoints. Religious andnational, disciplinary and personalattachments shaped their views.

The raw materials that chronologersdeployed, moreover, came from an im-mense variety of sources. Any givenscholar attacking a single problem mightnd himself ransacking the Bible and theGreek and Roman historians, thumbingthrough modern commentaries on all ofthese, consulting Islamic astronomicaltables, and examining patristic andmedieval chroniclesnot to mentionRenaissance forgeries crafted to showthat Pope Alexander VI or the HolyRoman Emperor Maximilian I couldtrace his ancestry back to the rulers ofancient Egypt. Every librarys referenceshelves for history and chronology bentunder materials that could explode whencombined, and chronology regularlybrought these into contact.

Suppose, for example, that a scholartried, as many did, to x the exact dateof Noahs Flood. Simple reckoning ofthe ages at which each of the biblicalpatriarchs produced his son would notsufce. As we have seen, the Hebrew andGreek texts of the Old Testament dif-feredin this case by several hundredyears. Another source of informationhad to be found.

Everyone knew that the sun, moon,and planets moved uniformly, that Godhad set the sun and moon in the skies torule the seasons and the years. Astron-omers could predict their future posi-tions or compute their past ones withcertainty. So the scholar might hopefully




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consult the standard astronomical tablesof the time, the Alfonsine Tables, com-piled in Christian Spain from Islamicsources. And there he would nd whatlooked like an astronomical date for theFlood. This served as one of the Tablesepochs, the rm dates from which theirauthors and readers reckoned later datesand the positions of the planets.

Only one fly disgured the ointmentbut it was a big one, and buzzed loudly.The Alfonsine Tables set the Flood in 3102b.c.a date that agreed with neither theHebrew nor the Greek text of the Bible.Indian astronomers had taken 3102 b.c.as the epoch date of the Kaliyuga, thecurrent celestial cycle. Muslim astrono-mers took over this usefully early astro-nomical era, but they also transformedits meaning, as translators so often do.Christian scholars, totally ignorant ofIndian astronomy and religion, couldnot possibly know the dates origin. Yetsome saw the date as the best one theyhad, since it appeared in an authoritativework on astronomy. As a result, theystruggled to explain why the evidence ofthe book of the heavens departed so rad-ically from Holy Writ.

In this intellectual situationone inwhich books theoretically contained all-powerful knowledge, but standard hand-books rested in practice on historicallydiverse and even contradictory founda-tionschronologers naturally came todifferent conclusions. In fact, they ar-gued so vociferously, over everythingfrom the dates of the kingdoms of Israeland Judah to those of the consuls of an-cient Rome, that their quarrels becameproverbial. Everyone knew, one seven-teenth-century expert wrote to a col-league, that chronologers, like clocks,never agreed.

Scaliger did not invent modernchronology. Rather, he recongured theelements of what had long been a fash-

ionable eld of study. And his version ofit, though powerful and provocative,lasted no more than a generation, sincehis Jesuit rival, Denys Petau, replaced hiswork with a more user-friendly, lessidiosyncratic synthesis.

To appreciate the explosive impact ofthis reformation of historical chronolo-gy, we need to look backward. For likegeography, chronology was an ancientscholarly disciplineone that tookshape long before the Renaissance, andthat had always drawn methods and ma-terials from widely different traditions.

As early as the fth century b.c., Greekscholars compiled lists of Olympic vic-tors and priestesses of Hera, to whoseyears they could afx major historicalevents. They also tried to use astronomyto date earlier events. A scholar namedDamastes noted that according to onetext, the moon rose at midnight on thenight when the Greeks sacked Troy. Hedated the citys fall, accordingly, to thethird quarter of the lunar month in ques-tion, when the moon rises late, and thisin turn to seventeen days before thesummer solstice. His effort and otherslike it, now obscure and preserved onlyin scraps of lost texts, were widelyknown in antiquity. When Virgil wrotein the Aeneid that the Greeks sailed backto Troy tacitae per amica silentialunae, through the friendly silence ofthe moon, he made clear that he knewexactly when Troy fell. Poetswho inantiquity were often scholars in theirown rightstudied chronology.

Once Alexander the Great conqueredMesopotamia and Egypt at the end ofthe fourth century b.c., moreover, newkinds of chronology burgeoned as soci-eties came into close contact for the rsttime. Scholars from the conquered na-tionsthe Chaldean Berossus and theEgyptian Manethodrew up chronicles



of their kingdoms in Greek, designed toshow that their nations and cultureswere far older than those of their mas-ters, and thus to avenge their militaryand political downfall in the realm of thearchive. A little later, Greek-speakingJews did the same.

Meanwhile the Greek scholars who in-habited the new city of Alexandria inEgypt did their best to collate everythingthey could learn about historical time.Eratosthenesthe Alexandrian scholarnow best remembered for his ingeniousmethod of measuring the earthalsodrew up chronological tables. Thesewere widely read in a verse reworking byApollodorus. Already in the ancientworld, geography and chronology wenttogether, as demanding technical disci-plines designed to put order into the ap-parent chaos of world history. The riseof empires not only gave rise to a morecosmopolitan view of history, but pro-moted the technical study of eras anddates.

The Romans of the late Republic andearly Empire were as obsessed withtime, in their own way, as the Europeansof the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-turies. Their calendar malfunctionedregularly until Julius Caesar and Augus-tus reformed it. Their future worriedthem as well. Throughout the seismicpolitical shifts that brought the Empireinto being, prophets and astrologerstried to x the duration of Romes pastin order to predict the moment at whichthe city would fall. The Gauls sack ofRome, in which all early records hadperished, made the citys early historyobscure. Sorting out the divergent tradi-tions posed endless problems. Some Ro-man scholars tried to x their citys paston massive stone structures, which theyinscribed with lists of magistrates andtriumphs, year by year. Others, like Var-ro, who mastered the technical disci-plines of Greek scholarship and applied

them to the Roman historical tradition,practiced chronology as a technical dis-cipline in the Greek mode. Unable tond historical records that establishedthe date of Romes founding beyonddoubt, Varro asked an astrologer, Nigid-ius Figulus, to infer from Romulusscharacter the dates of his birth and life.Nigidius did so, using what he thoughtwere the dates of eclipses to gain a x onRomes early past.

In the third and fourth century c.e., -nally, Christian scholars set out to fuseall of these materials into a single struc-ture that would encompass Greek Olym-pic victors, Egyptian pharaohs, and Ro-man consuls. In late antiquity, both pa-gans and Christians regularly undertookenterprises like this one, which aimed atthe creation of vast taxonomic systemsencompassing, in effect, the wholeworld. As the Oxford classicist OswynMurray has pointed out, Ptolemys Geog-raphy, his astrology, and the later codi-cation of Roman law all represent paral-lel efforts to impose an intellectual orderon the world. But chronology had a spe-cial task in addition. It had to show thatall of the local histories it encompassedt a single divine plan, one that led up tothe unication of the world by Romeand the appearance of the Messiah. Itsinternal structure and contents, accord-ingly, were pulled and torn by contradic-tions that did not affect the mapping ofthe earth or the codication of the laws.

Julius Africanus, a third-century schol-ar based in Rome, did pioneer work. Hetried not only to trace the contours oftime past, but also to reveal the patternsof time to come, and even to x the dateof the apocalypse. But a slightly laterwriter, Eusebius of Caesarea, used thematerials that Africanus had collectedand other sources to establish the basicstructures of Christian chronology. Para-doxically, he also laid down the dyna-mite that would, some centuries later,

destroy his creation. Aided by the bibli-cal scholarship of Origen, who had laidout the text of the Old Testament in He-brew and Greek in parallel columns, Eu-sebius saw that the Hebrew and Greektexts of the Bible disagreed on chronolo-gy. Accordingly, he made no effort todraw up a dated list of events from theCreation. He divided his Chronicle, in-stead, into two books. In the rst hecompiled a vast amount of information,some of it quite worrying to a Christianreaderfor example, the deep-timechronologies of Egypt and Babylon byManetho and Berossus. And he franklyadmitted that he could not impose orderon this troublesome, teeming body ofdata.

In the second book, by contrast, Euse-bius provided something that seems tohave been new: a comparative table ofworld history from the birth of Abrahamonward. He laid out dynasties and listsof magistrates in parallel columns thatshowed when states and dynasties wereborn, flourished, and died. At times, sixor seven nations flanked one another. Inthe end, however, all of them dwindleddown into the single empire of the Ro-mans, which unied the world in timefor the appearance of the Saviorandnally, thanks to Eusebiuss patron Con-stantine, supported Christianity (thoughEusebius could not make this point inthe early versions of his work, which hecompleted before Constantines victoryat the Milvian Bridge). Eusebius, in ef-fect, drew up a highly legible chart ofworld history, one that adumbrates in itsform Charles Minards famous diagramof the Napoleonic armys sufferings inRussia.

Jerome, the biblical scholar who wasAugustines contemporary, translatedEusebiuss work into Latin. Concernedwith practical needs, always worriedthat too much interest in pagan learning

could tempt a Christian scholar to fallaway from his true religion, Jeromeomitted Eusebiuss troubling rst book,and translated only the second, which healso corrected and brought up to date.He thus created what became the chron-ological tradition in Western Europe:one that taught simple Christian lessons,and used a single, coherent diagram tocapture all of world history. It seems nat-ural that later readers and users of Je-romes work extended it backward tothe Creation, as Eusebius had refused to.They were only doing to Jerome what hehad done to Eusebius. Latin chronology,accordingly, seemed safe, coherent, sim-pleexcept to the few highly perceptivereaders who bothered to ask, for exam-ple, why Egyptian history, in Jeromesversion of Eusebius, began with the sev-enteenth, rather than the rst, dynastyof pharaohs. The textbooks and wallcharts of the Renaissance, like the in-scription on Diogo Cos cross, derivedfrom Jeromes work.

In the Greek world, however, scholarscontinued to read Eusebiuss entireChronicle. Many found his inclusion ofstrange material from Egypt and Meso-potamia upsetting. Somelike the Alex-andrian scholars Panodorus and Anni-anustried to use astronomical infor-mation to impose order on the sprawlingmass of Eusebiuss material. Others sim-ply copied it, adding critical remarks.But it was not until the summer of 1602,when Scaliger discovered the remains ofEusebius in Greek, that the explosive po-tential of his work became clear. Scaligerrealized at once that the kingdom ofEgypt had begun not only before theFlood, but before the Creation itself. Hefelt strongly temptedas he said in mar-ginal notesto dismiss the new materi-als Eusebius had collected as obviouslyfalse. But he also saw that they were gen-


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uinely old and strange. He concludedthat they were more likely the work ofEgyptian and Mesopotamian scholarswho had learned Greek late in life thanthat of Greek forgers. So he publishedthem, in 1606, to the dismay of many ofhis Protestant friends and the delight ofmany of his Catholic critics. Disquietinginformation had already reached Eu-rope, from both the New World and Chi-na. Learned pagan priests, it seemed,claimed that history began long beforeEuropeans thought it had. And now Eu-ropes greatest scholar had shed up,from an ancient and impeccable source,evidence that posed a radical challengeto biblical chronology.

In other words, Scaliger not only de-vised what became the modern disci-pline of chronology; he also opened itsancient Pandoras box of intractabledata about the early history of the world.In geography, knowledge obtained in thegreat world smashed the walls of thescholars hortus conclusus. In chronology,the explosion took place in the garden,when Scaliger dug up and touched off anancient bomb.

Strong-minded dissenters, as we haveseen, seized on all this new informationand used it to raise doubts about the in-errancy of the Bible. So, more surpris-ingly, did highly respectable members ofthe Jesuit order. In the 1650s, MartinoMartini drew up, in Latin, the rst histo-ry of China based on a wide range ofChinese sources, which he had read inthe original. Though Martini hesitated,in the end he argued that recorded Chi-nese history had begun before the Flood.He felt able to do so, he made clear, be-cause his own teacher, Athanasius Kirch-er, had shown that the Egyptian king-dom also preceded the Flood. AndKircher, in turn, had learned as muchfrom Scaliger, even though as a good Je-suit he pretended to rely on a different

set of sources, one not discovered by aCalvinist. Through the later seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, scholars ar-gued relentlessly about the details ofEgyptian and Chinese chronology. Theirintricate, sometimes violent debatesdragged on for decades, and no solutionany of them could propose compelledassent. Edward Gibbon, who avidly readchronology as a boy, recalled in later lifethat after he steeped himself in that liter-ature, the dynasties of Egypt became histop and cricket-balltoys used incombative play. Eventually, the chronol-ogers argument without end broughttheir whole eldand the authority ofthe Bibleinto widespread disrepute.Giambattista Vicos New Science repre-sented only one of many efforts to showthat all detailed chronologies of ancienttimes rested on a misconception of thenature of ancient record keeping. Vol-taire and other philosophes, less com-mitted than Vico to the tradition oflearning, turned chronology into a syn-onym for sterile pedantry, a noun thatalmost demanded the adjective mere.

Chronology, in short, is more than aonce-fashionable discipline that has lostits apparent urgency and interest in anage when few professional scholars seethe Bible as inerrant and encyclopediasprovide all the dates that most of usneed. Once upon a time, it was both anancient and deeply curious tradition anda cutting-edge interdisciplinary eld ofstudy. In Europes great age of unre-strained, exuberant learning, it attractedthe most learned writers of them all. Asthese giants sorted the rubble of biblicaland classical, ancient and medieval,Western and Eastern traditions, theybuilt strange, fascinating new structuresfrom the debris. Its worth the dive totheir sunken city to gain the chance ofexamining what remains of these.



It seems safe to assume that chronolo-gy will never again become fashionable.But the history of this once compellingeld is a complex, all too human storythat does not quite resemble any other.The ancient geographical system ofPtolemy fell apart when Diogo Co andothers found new lands and seas. Theancient chronological system of Euse-bius, by contrast, fell apart when Renais-sance scholars did their best to recon-struct it. Sometimes, even scholarshipcan be renewed from within.


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Documents

Anthony Grafton - Dating History, The Renaissance and the Reformation of Chronology