The History of Anthropology Revisited - A Byzantine Viewpoint

[originally published in American Anthropologist, 75:1347-1357, 1973]

MICHAEL A. HOFFMAN
University of Virginia
This article maintains that an unwarranted extension of our ideas about the Western European Medieval
world has led to several problems in many recent treatments of the historical emergence of anthropological
inquiry. Utilizing Byzantine sources, it suggests that the postulated Medieval break in the Western
intellectual tradition is non-existent and the result of an over-emphasis on Western European developments
at the expense of the larger socio-cultural milieu which constitutes the basis of that tradition. The broader
anthropological position that emerges from this study involves a realization that interest in cross-cultural
behavior is basic to at least some individuals in every society and takes on added significance in state-level
systems.
ALTHOUGH a characterization of Western
European intellectual history must recognize its
essentially ecclesiastical nature and limited
horizons during the major part of the Middle
Ages, such a view is unjustified when extended
to the entire Western intellectual tradition and
the total geographical area over which it held
sway. In the following pages I will contend that
an unwarranted extension of our ideas about
Western Europe has led to several problems in
many recent treatments of the historical
emergence of anthropological inquiry. It is in
response to some of the cultural-historical
difficulties raised by these treatments that I wish
to address myself. The central theme that I will
develop is that the often-suggested Medieval
break in the Western intellectual tradition is nonexistent and the result of an over-emphasis on
Western European developments at the expense
of the larger socio-cultural milieu which
constitutes the basis of that tradition. The
broader anthropological position that emerges
from this study involves a realization that
interest in cross-cultural behavior is basic to at
least some individuals in every society. When we
deal with large, complex state-level systems, we
would expect to find at least some institutional
patronage and literary energy devoted to
understanding the strange peoples and customs
regularly encountered and dealt with.
In
examining the role of Byzantium as a carrier and
transmitter of an anthropological tradition of
comparative studies during the Middle Ages, the
correlation or anthropological writings with the
political, social, and economic interests and
fortunes or the state will become apparent.
In discussing Byzantine anthropology, I will
suggest that many past studies of the history or
anthropological inquiry have committed a double

fallacy: first, they have assumed intellectual

discontinuity between ancient Greco-Roman and
Renaissance traditions; second, they have
confined themselves to Western Europe. Since
Classical times, however, the Western
intellectual tradition out of which general
anthropological inquiry emerged was restricted
not merely to Western Europe but was
coterminous with the entire Mediterranean world
(Pirenne 1937: 1-29). To demonstrate a real
break in tradition between Classical and
Renaissance inquiry, therefore, one has to
demonstrate a cultural discontinuity throughout
the entire Mediterranean world. This assumption
would, as we shall see, be unjustified. If we
confined studies of Western intellectual history
to Western Europe and restricted ourselves
temporally to the last two and a half to three
centuries, then a valid case for the essentially
Western
European
origins
of
modern
anthropology could be constructed (Harris
1968:8-52; Slotkin 1965:vii, xiii; Collingwood
1956:5-6). If, however, we choose to trace
intellectual trends back to the Renaissance, then
we incur the responsibility of asking whether or
not there might be some direct link between the
intellectually similar Classical and Renaissance
traditions.
John Rowe (1965:1-2) seems to reflect a
widely held attitude toward the intellectual
background of anthropological inquiry when he
states that: "there was no continuous tradition of
comparative studies stretching back through the
Middle Ages to Classical antiquity. .." And while
he accurately observes that there were "a number
of individual writers in both periods who
displayed some interest in cultural differences,"
he maintains that "The number of such writers
was not large, and their anthropological interests

made little impression on their contemporaries.

.."
Again, J. S. Slotkin (1965:xiii) maintains
that: "If we consider social anthropology to be
the comparative study of cultures, it does not
begin until the sixteenth century, when a
substantial body of travel accounts became
available." In regard to "history and
ethnography," Slotkin (1965:6- 7) states that:
"Few early travelers wrote accounts of their
travels. .." and that most Medieval compilations
were "mainly distinguished by their lack of
veracity."
Pre-Renaissance
anthropological
inquiry is dismissed by Slotkin (1965:1) because
"during the first fourteen centuries in Western
Europe, social phenomena were considered to be
supernaturally caused."
Glyn Daniel (1967:34) in discussing the
origins and growth of (anthropological)
archaeology echoes Rowe:
the Greek thinkers alone of their time had reached the
stage of rational reflection on primitive man which
needed to be reached before positive gains of
knowledge would begin. It is very odd that even this
state of mind did not recur until very recent times [my
italics].

Finally, Taylor (1967:9) proposes that:

The lineal and continuous development of
antiquarianism, from which modern archaeology has
developed, began with the return of Humanism to Italy
at the close of the Middle Ages. Although such men as
Pausanias and the Venerable Bede, many years earlier,
had studied their local antiquities, these men represent
isolated instances cut off by a void of considerable time
from the continuum which culminates in the discipline
of archaeology [my italics] .

It should be apparent from the quotations

cited above that in discussing the Renaissance
background of modern general anthropology,
intellectual historians have placed particular
emphasis on the role of the Italian revival of
Classical learning in the fifteenth century.
Although it would be readily admitted that this
revival provided the immediate impetus for the
Renaissance in Western Europe, the nature and
source of its origin are usually ignored. Taylor
alone (1967:9) touches on the source of the new
Classical learning which gripped Italian
intellectual circles in the fifteenth century when
he cites Van Loon (1937) on the migration of
Greek scholars from Constantinople to the West
after the fall of that last bastion of ByzantinoRoman civilization to the Turks in 1453. Aside
from this somewhat oblique reference to the
Greek East, there is a general silence on the role

played by Byzantine learning, the direct heir of

Classical scholarship, in the preservation and
eventual dissemination of the Greco-Roman
tradition of history and historical ethnography.
This is not surprising when we realize the
general tendency, even among professional
historians, to ignore or deprecate the role of
Byzantium in Western history (Vasiliev 1964:331). It is no accident, however, that the rebirth
of Classical learning in Italy paralleled its
decline in the Greek East. Indeed, the Byzantine
Empire, or to use its own label, the Roman
Empire, entered into a period of extreme decline
only after its temporary conquest by Western
Latin powers in 1204. The independent
Byzantine state that reemerged from this period
of foreign domination was a greatly weakened
one that bore with difficulty the imperial and
intellectual tradition of Classical learning. The
concomitant rise to power of the Italian trading
cities provided a fertile field for this sundering
tradition in newly-created and well-endowed
institutions of higher learning.
BYZANTIUM AND HISTORICAL THOUGHT
Having set the stage, I will now trace the
course of development of Classical history and
ethnography in Byzantium and, in so doing,
demonstrate a basic continuity between older
Classical and later Renaissance traditions within
the overall framework of the Western intellectual
community.
Before
examining
specific
personalities and their contributions, it will be
necessary to consider briefly the culturalhistorical background out of which Byzantium
developed and the course that it was to take
during the Middle Ages.
Although the last emperor of the West" was
overthrown in A.D. 476, it has long been the fad
for Western historians to neglect the fact that the
eastern half of the empire that had been Rome
survived for another millennium. The great
historian Edward Gibbon sullenly conceded this
point, but deprecated its importance by
contemptuously regarding the Eastern Roman
Empire as a decadent shadow of its glorious
progenitor.
More recent reexaminations of
Byzantine history (e.g., Vasiliev 1964;
Ostrogorsky 1957), however, have shown that
the Eastern Roman world played a significant
role in shaping Western Medieval culture
history. Indeed, during much of its thousand
year existence, the Eastern Empire was anything
but the political, social, and economic
lightweight portrayed by Edward Gibbon, and

despite the fact that it suffered periods of decline,

it also experienced brilliant revivals of power.
Over the centuries, although the Latin veneer
gradually gave way to the stronger Greek
intellectual, social, and linguistic underpinnings,
the Empire still, to the end of its days, regarded
itself as the legitimate successor to Roman
imperium in the entire Mediterranean world and
on many occasions attempted to force its
somewhat archaistic view of the world on its
neighbors. Thus, in terms of its "folk model"
Byzantium behaved as if it were a continuation
of the old Roman Empire. In many respects this
claim was true. First, there was a continuation of
Roman civil and military authority in the Eastern
Mediterranean. Second, urban life and economy,
the backbone of Classical culture, did not
disappear in the East as in the West but, after a
short period of crisis, arose as strong as ever.
Third, Hellenistic Greek learning was much
more firmly rooted in this the area of its origin
and, unlike the West, was able to affect an
amicable syncretization with Christianity and
survive as an important facet of Eastern Roman
(not to mention Islamic) culture throughout the
Middle Ages. Fourth, the tradition of secular
learning and secular scholarship persisted in the
East and remained, as it had been in the Classical
period, the primary vehicle for the transmission
of organized knowledge. This stands in marked
contrast to the completely ecclesiastical nature of
scholarship in the early Medieval Western
European world.
With this cultural-historical background as a
springboard, we can now consider the nature and
course of the Byzantine historical tradition and
its role as a transmitter of the earlier Classical
strain of general anthropological interest. We
shall see that, although admittedly tenuous, a
thread of historical-ethnographic interests which
would later spawn general anthropological
inquiry runs through many of the works of
Byzantine scholars and links Classical and
Renaissance learning and inquiry into a
continuous intellectual tradition.
A beginning date for Byzantine as opposed
to Roman history is difficult to fix because one
evolves insensibly out of the other. Nevertheless,
most experts (Vasiliev 1964:59) would see the
shifting of the capital from Rome to
Constantinople in A.D. 324-330 by Constantine
the Great as the first step in the creation of an
Eastern Roman Empire. To be sure, this was not
the original intention of Constantine but, as the
years passed and the western portion of the
Empire broke up, it was only in the Eastern

Mediterranean that Roman authority continued to

be maintained. It is appropriate, therefore, that
our review of the Byzantine historical tradition
should begin in the fourth century.
The most important historian of the fourth
century was Ammianus Marcellinus. He was
born of noble Greek parentage in Antioch and
served in various official administrative and
military posts in his younger days. Subsequent to
his retirement from public service, he undertook
the extension of Tacitus' histories. His work,
written in Latin, was entitled the Rerum
Gestarum and, in its original form, covered the
years from A.D. 96 (the ascension of Nerva) to
the death of the Emperor Valens in 378.
Unfortunately, of the thirty-one books originally
written, the first thirteen have been lost and the
remaining eighteen cover only the period from
353 to 378. As an accurate observer and
historian, he was first rate and his works provide
the major source for Gothic and early Hunnic
history (Vasiliev 1964: 125). His previous
experience on military campaigns had given him
first-hand knowledge of the barbarian peoples
whose customs he recorded in great detail.
Indeed, "in his attitude toward the non-Roman
peoples of the empire he is far more
broadminded than
Livy
and
Tacitus"
(Encyclopaedia Britannica 1959, 1:815).
E. R. Boak (in Gordon 1960:viii) notes that
the dominant theme in secular history during the
fifth century was the struggle of the Roman
world against the barbarians.1 For this reason,
the successors of Ammianus Marcellinus
frequently concerned themselves with barbarian
peoples, although none quite equal the great
fourth century historian in richness of
ethnographic information. One of the most
irritating tendencies of Roman historians or this
period (and in the fifth century they were all East
Roman) was deliberately to use Classical Attic
Greek style and nomenclature, so that the Huns
are frequently referred to as Scythians."
Nevertheless, the historians or the fifth century
form a continuous line covering, originally, most
or the important events and new" non-Roman
peoples or the period. The five historians who
have left us accounts or the barbarians at this
1

I use the term "barbarian" in the Greek and Roman sense, to

refer to members of other cultures, especially cultures lacking
functional literacy and state-level political organization. I do
not use the word to refer to a "stage" of social evolutionary
development or to impute inferiority (although this was
frequently done, at least subliminally, by educated Greeks
and Romans).

time are: Candidus, Zosimus, Malchus,

Olympiodorus, and Priscus of Thrace. Of these,
Priscus appears the most informative and
accurate in his accounts. His presence on several
embassies from the Eastern Roman court to the
camp of Attila gave him a firsthand opportunity
to observe the Huns. His records supply most of
our knowledge or the life and customs or these
peoples (Vasiliev 1964:125). In order to gain a
better perspective on the nature of Priscus'
ethnographic information, it seems worthwhile to
reproduce a portion of his description of the
housing and clothing of the Huns:
The next day I approached the enclosure of Attila with
gifts for his wife. Her name was Kreka, and by her
Attila had three sons, the elder being ruler of the Akatiri
and the other peoples along the Black Sea in Scythia.
Inside the enclosure were many houses, some of carved
planks beautifully fitted together, and others of clean
beams smoothly planed straight; they were laid on
timbers which formed circles. Beginning at the ground
level the circles rose to a moderate height. Here dwelt
the wife of Attila. I gained entrance through the
barbarians at the door and came upon her lying on a
soft spread. The floor was covered with mats of felted
wool. A number of servants were waiting on her in a
circle, and maidservants, sitting on the floor in front of
her, were embroidering with color fine linens to be
placed as ornament over their barbarian clothes [
Gordon 1960 :90] .

Next to Priscus probably our most valuable

source for ethnographic information on nonRoman peoples is Olympiodorus. He seems to
have been active in the first part of the firth
century since the surviving fragments or his
works cover the years 407 to 425 (Gordon
1960:194). Unlike his contemporaries, his style
was straightforward and descriptive and for this
reason his commentaries are most valuable to us.
It is worth noting that although in his own day he
was criticized for his provincial style (he was
from Thebes in Egypt) modern researchers find
his plain style and clear description more useful
than the fashionable antique Attic Greek
employed by his contemporaries (Gordon
1960:194). Moreover, "his passion for statistical,
geographic and chronological accuracy have
proved most valuable for historians of his own
day as well as ours" (Gordon 1960:194). The
remaining fifth century historians of note,
Candidus, Malchus, and Zosimus, were more
purely political historians and are less useful for
ethnographic information.
The sixth century was one of political and
economic revival for the Eastern Empire and this
prosperity is reflected in the increased volume of
contemporary literature, This was a period when

the Empire took the offensive against the

barbarians in the West and, for a brief moment
under Justinian, regained the provinces of Italy,
North Africa, and part of Spain.
The most prominent historian of the age was
Procopius of Caesarea in Palestine, whose works
dealt with the greater part of the reign of
Justinian (527-565). His position as adviser and
secretary to the great general Belisarius in the
latter's campaigns gave him firsthand access to
information on the contemporary Vandals,
Goths, and Persians. Most of the ethnographic
information he recorded can be found in The
History in Eight Books. So important a source of
early non-Roman peoples and their cultures is
Procopius that "Slavonic history and Slavonic
antiquity rind in
Procopius invaluable
information about the life and beliefs or the
Slavs, while Germanic peoples gather from him
many facts about their early history" (Vasiliev
1964:181). A lesser contemporary or Procopius,
John Laurentius Lydus (ca. 490-565) produced a
work known as De magistratibus in which he
tried to trace the ancient Roman origins or
imperial
institutions
(Dlger
1967:228).
Although rather inaccurate, his work has been
termed a study of the "antiquities of the Roman
State" (Dlger 1967:228) and foreshadows both
the antiquarianism and historical sociology of
more recent times. Also contemporary with
Procopius was the historian Peter the Patrician
who apparently wrote a History of the Roman
Empire from the second Triumvirate to Julian
the Apostate (Vasiliev 1964:181). Although he
served as ambassador to the Ostrogothic and
Persian courts, we do not know to what extent, if
any, he incorporated his observations or foreign
peoples into his writings because only his
constitutional treatises have been preserved.
Menander the Protector, like Procopius, was an
historian of the contemporary scene. His History
covers the years 552 and 582 and, although it
survives in fragmentary form only, provides
accurate
ethnographic
and
geographic
information (Vasiliev 1964: 181). Finally, the
writings of the Syrian, John of Ephesus (d. ca.
586) were of a cultural historical nature and not
only provide information on the cultural
foundations or the last phases or the struggle
between Christianity and paganism but also
elucidate the "manners and customs and
archeology or the period" by giving details or the
minutiae or everyday life (Vasiliev 1964:184185).
In addition to historians, some travelers and
poets provide useful information on geography

and the ethnography or non-Roman peoples

during the Justinianic age, "Justinian's
ambassador to the Saracens and Abyssinians,
Nonnosus, wrote a description or his distant
journey... (which) ... gives excellent data on the
nature and ethnography of the countries he
visited" (Vasiliev 1964:182). At the same time,
the so-called Cosmas Indicopleustes (Cosmas,
Traveller to India) published an account of his
travels to India and the Far East which is the
earliest definite eye witness account or China in
Western literature (Vogel 1967:295). From
roughly the same period, the poem Johannis
written by Corripus of North Africa in praise or
the general John Troglita provides some
excellent ethnographic and geographical
information about contemporary North Africa
(Vasiliev 1964: 186). His accounts are especially
valuable because they can be compared to those
of Procopius. In fact, at times Corripus' facts are
more dependable than those related by Procopius
(Vasiliev 1964: 186).
Toward the end of the sixth century , as the
Empire's political and military organization
weakened as the result of over-extension under
Justinian and growing external and internal
pressure, literary production underwent a general
decline. Theophanes of Byzantium was an
approximate contemporary of Menander whose
works covered the period from the death of
Justinian to the first years of the reign of Maurice
(582-602). His works include "one of the earliest
references to the Turks" (Vasiliev 1964:182).
Menander and Theophanes were succeeded by
the Egyptian Theophylact Simocatta who wrote,
in addition to a short work on natural science and
a collection of letters, a somewhat artificial
account of the reign of Maurice (Vasiliev 1964:
181-182). He provides, however, "extremely
valuable information about Persia and the Slavs
in the Balkan peninsula at the end of the sixth
century" (Vasiliev 1964: 181-182).
Dlger (1967:229) commenting on the state
of historical inquiry after the early seventh
century notes that:
After the development of an excessively erudite and
rhetorical historical style there followed a gap of more
than three hundred years, although some information on
the period 602-813 was supplied by the Chronicale of
Theophanes (the Confessor) and the Brevarium of the
Patriarch Nicephorus ...

This
political,
Empire.
although

gap corresponds to a period of acute

social, and economic decline for the
The tradition of secular learning,
it did not utterly disappear, was

severely weakened, especially after the closing

of the ecumenical academy at Constantinople by
Leo III the Isaurian in 726 (Vogel 1967:268).
For a while it must have appeared that the
Hellenistic tradition was bound for the same
sterile course that it had taken in Western Europe
after the early fifth century. Indeed, probably the
main factor which kept learning from becoming
an altogether ecclesiastical province was the
need to train personnel for the governmental
bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the chronicles, our
only historical records from the period, are all
ecclesiastical in character. Their summary nature
and restricted subject matter paralleled for a time
trends which were to restrict Western European
scholarship until the Renaissance. However close
the tradition or Classical learning and inquiry
came to extinction,2 it did not fail utterly, and
beginning in the ninth century , it reemerged
with a renewed vigor that lasted until the
political, economic, and social structure of the
states of Western Europe became sufficiently
redeveloped to support the tradition on their
own.
A second epic in the history of Byzantine science
begins with Theophilus. His taste for splendor and
luxury was itself a stimulus to building and the
ornamental arts; but he was also anxious to make
Byzantium the leading cultural force in the orient,
impelled in this ambition, perhaps, by thoughts of
rivalling Baghdad where the caliph al-Ma'mum (813833), like his father before him, was seriously
concerned to make translations of the Greek works
preserved in Syrian monasteries or purchased from
Constantinople available to Arab readers [Vogel
1967:269].

As is often the case, the revival or historical

inquiry lagged behind the revival or scientific
learning. Nevertheless, the atmosphere had been
created which would once again encourage the
flourishing or historical-ethnographic inquiry
.Concomitantly, the political and economic
fortunes or Byzantium enjoyed a period or
relatively uninterrupted ascendance for the next
two centuries.
Foremost in the ninth century intellectual
revival stood the Patriarch Photius, equally at
2

One problem in evaluating the status of secular learning and

scholarship in this period, especially during the eighth
century, is that surviving documents are scarce and what
references we do have deliberately try to depict the reigning
iconoclast emperors of the times as impious and illiterate
savages. Moreover, it is almost certain that some of the
scarcity of written references from the eighth century is due
to deliberate destruction of iconoclast works in later
centuries.

home with Classical pagan or Christological

writings.
In his Bibliotheca Photius gave extracts from numerous
works, sometimes brief, sometimes extensive, as well
as his own essays based on those abstracts, or critical
comments on them. Here are many facts about
grammarians, orators, historians, natural scientists,
doctors, councils, and the lives of saints [Vasiliev
1964:297].

Photius, with his interest in universal

knowledge and insistence on the study of the
ancient pagan writers became a prime mover in
the intellectual-academic revival of the mid-ninth
century and attained a personal stage of
intellectual (cultural relativistic) detachment
which enabled him to carry on a friendship with
the Moslem Emir of Crete based on common
intellectual interests and attitudes (Vasiliev
1964:297).
The
Emperor
Constantine
VII
Porphyrogenitus (913-959) may be credited with
the revival of scholarly analytical history (Dlger
1967:229). One of Constantine VIl's most
famous works is De administrondo, a handbook
on imperial government in which he
laid down principles of diplomacy for use in dealing
with the various countries and peoples either under
Byzantine rule or on her frontiers. In so doing it
provided valuable information of their history and their
individual differences. It is a unique source-book for the
early history of the Slavs and Turkic peoples and its
statements are increasingly corroborated by the findings
of modern archaeology [Dlger 1967:229; my italics].

Another of Constantine's works relevant to

the problem under consideration is his De
legationibus in which the most important
information from various Byzantine embassies
was condensed and combined (Dlger
1967:230). Unfortunately, most of this work
does not survive, but it surely provided a wealth
of comparative information on non-Roman
peoples extending back over half a millennium
before Constantine VIl's reign.
Accompanying the revival of historical
scholarship was an apparent though modest
increase in vulgate accounts of travelers, which
occasionally provide useful geographic and
ethnographic information. One such account was
the so-called Stadiasmus or Voyage in the Great
Sea
produced
in
the
tenth
century
(VogeI1967:295).
Following Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus
occurred a long succession of highly competent
imperial historians. Their accounts, however,
tended to focus on political and military history

more than on ethnographic information.

Information on the Bulgarians is to be found in
the accounts of Leo the Deacon who
accompanied Basil II on his Bulgarian
campaigns in the later part of the tenth century
(Dlger 1967:230). It is not really surprising that
the attention of the later Byzantine historians
would turn from "barbaric" non-Roman to the
"civilized" rivals which the Empire was
beginning to encounter more frequently - the
shift in subject matter reinforcing the previously
suggested hypothesis that history and
ethnography were intimately involved with state
policy and needs. After peaking in the first
quarter of the eleventh century, Byzantine power
gradually declined under increasingly severe
internal factionalism and disfranchisement of the
peasants and renewed external military threats.
Following the battle of Manzikurt in 1071, the
Anatolian heartland of the Empire was steadily
eaten away by Saracen incursions from the East.
Soon the rising economic and military power of
the Western European states effectively
challenged Byzantine supremacy in the Eastern
Mediterranean. After a century of preliminary
sparring, the "Latin" Crusaders seized
Constantinople in 1204 and the remnants of
Greek political authority and the Greek
intellectual community fled to Nicea. Although
the Byzantines regained Constantinople in 1261,
the powers and limits of the Eastern Empire were
now severely circumscribed. The historical
literature reflects the rampant internecine strife
that plagued the Empire in the fourteenth century
and the growing menace of the Turks. The
second half of the fourteenth century was
virtually devoid of true historians, although some
semi-popular geographical works (portulani)
which appeared in Italy (in Italian) and which
were attributed to Greek authors might have
originated around this time (Dlger 1967:238;
Vogel 1967:295). In the way of travelers'
accounts, we have the work of Andrew
Libadenus in which the author describes his
journey to Egypt and Palestine in the fourteenth
century and a record left by Cananus Lascaris of
his sojourns in Germany, Norway, Sweden, and
Iceland during the first half of the fifteenth
century (Dlger 1967:238).
The fifteenth century saw the final collapse
of the Empire as an independent political entity,
although the status of historical scholarship
during the final half century was somewhat
improved over the preceding fifty year stretch.
The steady encroachment of the Ottoman Turks
on the last remnants of Byzantium, which

culminated in the fall of Constantinople in 1453,

manifested itself in the historical literature of the
time in the form of a great awareness of Turkish
history .
The first Byzantine historian to
recognize the Turkish authority as such was
Laonicus Chalcocondyles
(c.1432-c.1490)
(Dlger 1967: 233). His history, which covered
the years 1298 to 1463, was patterned after that
of Thucydides, and he took as his central theme
the origin and growth of Turkish power (Dlger
1967:233).
For almost a century prior to the fall of
Constantinople, Byzantine learning, science and
art were beginning to find increasingly fertile
ground for growth in Italy. What the Western
Europeans took from Byzantium were those
elements of its culture that preserved the old
Classical traditions of antiquity. Manuscripts
were purchased, and Greek as well as Latin came
to occupy a place of prominence in late Medieval
and early Renaissance curricula. Although it is
true that Western Europeans also drew on Arabic
sources for information about classical times,
most of these sources were originally copied
from Eastern Roman versions written in Greek.
The debt to Byzantium was clear. What the
Italians and their successors did was to strip the
Classical tradition of many of its Christian
adornments and redevelop it along more wholly
secular lines.
In surveying Byzantine intellectual history ,
we have seen that there was no break within the
Western intellectual tradition from Antiquity to
the Renaissance. Thus, although Rowe (1965: 4)
has questioned the importance of Herodotus'
contribution to Renaissance and modern
ethnographic inquiry by correctly observing that
the tendency toward ethnohistory that Herodotus
represented was "tenuous" in the ancient world, I
suggest that "tenuousness" does not necessarily
equal
discontinuity.
Sophisticated
"ethnographies" were no more common in the
Renaissance than in Antiquity.3 In a sense,
Renaissance works were also quite "tenuous,"
although their nineteenth century successors
finally
acquired
sufficiently
consistent
excellence
(or
sufficiently
prestigious
institutional affiliation) to mark them as
professional (also see Slotkin 1965:vii). The
3

This becomes apparent when we consider the different

lengths of time involved and hence the greater chance for
later material to have suffered less from the vicissitudes of
time and decay. An additional factor of great importance
which prejudices the sample of surviving documents from
both eras is the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth
century and the greater facility of duplication it allowed.

notion that the Medieval world was obsessed

entirely with an ecclesiastical outlook is simply
not accurate, although it may loosely
characterize the Western European segment of
the Western intellectual community from the
fifth through the fifteenth centuries.
This
viewpoint has often led us to a rather
ethnocentric evaluation of the development of
Western intellectual history. In fact, as has been
pointed out in the preceding pages, the Classical
tradition persisted and, for long periods of time,
nourished in the Byzantine Empire. It could be
argued, moreover, that the medieval Islamic
world remained intellectually attuned to the
mainstreams of Classical thought and that from
Iraq in the East to Spain in the West it preserved
and fostered many branches (including history)
of Classical learning. It cannot be the fault of
these powers, Byzantium and the Caliphates, that
the social, economic, and political bases which
permitted the tradition of secular scholarship to
nourish in their lands had disappeared in Western
Europe in the ashes of the Western Empire and
did not arise again until the thirteenth,
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.
CONCLUSIONS
In examining the proposition that there was
no significant Medieval break in the intellectual
tradition that generated general anthropological
inquiry, I have reviewed the background of
Byzantine ethnography, comparative history and
historiography. Two important themes can be
detected in Byzantine historical writing that link
Classical and Renaissance scholarship. These
themes contain the germs of comparative history
and ethnography and, by extension, of general
anthropological inquiry. The first manifested
itself as an interest in the behavior and customs
of non-Roman or "barbarian" peoples. Although
this interest was never a dominant one, it
persisted mainly due to the pragmatic political
necessity of knowing something about the
diverse groups that were attacking the Empire.
A second theme, noted by Rowe (1965:2-4) for
the Classical period, is the frequent eastern
origin of many of the comparative or
ethnographic historians (e.g., Herodotus). Rowe
(1965:2-4) uses this evidence to argue that a
comparative interest in foreign peoples was a
non-Greek (therefore non-Western) tradition. He
does not, however, consider that the
Hellenization and Romanization of the
Mediterranean basin incorporated many diverse
intellectual strains into one tradition. Variation,

therefore,
and
not
homogeneity
was
characteristic of the Greco-Roman world after
300 B.C. (witness Neo-Platonism, stoicism,
Mithraism, the Isis cult, and Christianity itself).
An attempt to restrict the definition of the
Western intellectual tradition in time (i.e., the
'Classical" period of Antiquity) or space (i.e., to
Western Europe) without accounting for the
great variation within it and the successive
transformations through which it has gone can
only result in a mechanical and arbitrary
approach to intellectual history.
Such an approach has often characterized
the way anthropologists in general (including
prehistoric archaeologists) view the emergence
of their discipline. We have erected an artificial
boundary between "Classical" and "Renaissance"
traditions of anthropological inquiry where the
empirical evidence cannot support it. The reason
usually given or implied for positing a hiatus
between Classical and Renaissance traditions of
anthropological inquiry is that the thread
connecting them is too thin to justify the
assertion of continuity (Rowe 1965:4). I suggest,
however, that the types of "anthropological"
works characteristic of the Renaissance West are
little different in origin or intent than earlier
inquiries characteristic of Classical or Byzantine
periods. In all these cases, historicalethnographic-anthropological works were most
common in periods of economic, social, and
political expansion when new peoples were
being encountered ("new" from the point of view
of Westerners, that is) and new explanations
for new types of socio-cultural systems were
consequently in greater demand. The need and
desire on the part of a centralized, literate statelevel society to know something about these
"new peoples" was stimulated by increased
interaction, involvement, and competition. In
short, the expansion of "anthropological" studies
with their emphasis on comparative research
correlates most directly with periods of
economic, political and social collision in which
at least one of the cultures involved is a literate,
state-level society. To cite but a few examples
from Western culture history: the times of
Herodotus and Tacitus, fifth and sixth and ninth
through eleventh century Byzantium and
fifteenth through nineteenth century Western
Europe. Moreover, I would submit that the
"comparative approach" (or, more properly,
"comparative approaches"-for there are many
varieties) and even anthropology itself are ways
of looking at and explaining the world. It is a
way of explaining similarities and differences,

and as such is a mechanism which can be called

into play by at least the philosophically-minded
members of any society (Radin 1957:4) any time
that a situation requiring its use (e.g., contact
with unknown peoples, cultures, artifacts, etc.)
materializes. Individuals who possess this
inclination to comparative, speculative thought
are never numerous. Thus, the comparative
interests which certain individuals throughout
history have manifested (whether they be
Herodotus, Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus,
Procopius, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Roger
Bacon, Ciriaco de'Pizzicolli, Pietro Martire, or
Bernardino de Sahagun) were a combination of
personal inclination and ability, the type of
socio-cultural system in which they were
enmeshed and the ready availability of
comparative information. When viewed in this
light, and qualified by the necessarily greater
overrepresentation of later periods in the
surviving historical documents, the state and
magnitude of "anthropological" writings in fifth
and sixth and tenth and eleventh century
Byzantium compares very favorably with that
from fifteenth and sixteenth century Western
Europe. Indeed, as stated previously, one is not
struck by any significant change in the
orientation of comparative studies until
eighteenth century rationalism consciously and
permanently introduced systemization and
relativism into the repertoire of the intellectual
milieu. These two ideas, systematic observation
and relativistic evaluation, became the dominant
themes in late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century history and natural science, and in so
doing became the determinative factors in the
emergence of modern non-theological historical,
sociological,
and
biological
inquiry
(Collingwood 1956:5-6; Barnes 1948:29-78). It
was in tandem with these disciplines that modern
anthropological inquiry arose.
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Ostrogorsky, George
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BIBLIOGRAPHIC GUIDE TO
SOME PRIMARY BYZANTINE SOURCES
(LISTED IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)
Ammianus Marcellinus
1935-39 Rerum Gestarum. J. C. Rolfe, Trans.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Candidus Isaurus
1828-97 Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, VoI.
14. G. B. Niebuhr, Ed. Bonn: E. Weber.
Zosimus
1971 Histoire nouvelle (par) Zosime. Franlois
Paschoud, Trans. (French). Paris: Societ
d'edition "I.es Belles Lettres. Collection
d'universit de France.
Malchus Philadelphensis
1828-97 Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, Vol.
14. G. B. Niebuhr, Ed. Bonn: E. Weber.
Olympiodorus (the Historian)
1729-33 Corpus Byzantinae Historiae. Venice:
Bartholomaei Javarina.
Priscus of Thrace
1828-97 Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, Vol.
14. G. B. Niebuhr, Ed. Bonn: E. Weber.
Procopius of Caesarea
1914-40 Procopius. H. B. Dewing, Trans. New
York: Macmillan; London: W. Heinemann.
John Laurentius Lydus
1967
loannis Lydi De magistratibus populi Romani
libri tres. R. Wuensch, Trans. (German).
Stuttgart
and
Tiibingen:
Bibliotheca

Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum

Teubneriana.
Menander the Protector
1828-97 Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, Vol.
14. G. B. Niebuhr, Ed. Bonn: E. Weber.
Theophylactus Simocatta
1828-97 Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, Vol.
22. G. B. Niebuhr, Ed. Bonn: E. Weber.
Theophanes the Confessor
1828-97 Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae,
Vols. 33, 41, 42. G. B. Niebuhr, Ed. Bonn: E.
Weber.
Patriarch Nicephorus
1822-23 Valerius Maximus De distis factisque
memorabilibus ...Paris: N . E. Lemaire.
Patriarch Photius
1959-71 Bibliothque. Rene Henry, Trans. (French).
Paris: Societ d'edition "Les Belles Lettres,"
Collection d'universit de France.
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus
1967 De Administrando Imperio. R. J. H. Jenkins,
Trans. Gy. Moravesik, Ed., Washington:
Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies.