1 Introduction: Canonisation as Cultural Innovation

In essence, this Chapter argues, canonisation is about interacting with the past in an attempt to shape the present and thus to determine the future.¹ As a socio-cultural process resulting in the Umwandlung of cultural memory, establishing a canon is one of the most important acts in defining a cultural identity.² In the famous words of Jan Assmann: “Kanon ist die mémoire volontaire einer Gesellschaft”.³ Once a canon has been established, it functions as a normative tool: “Ein Kanon antwortet auf die Frage: Wonach sollen wir uns richten”.⁴ It thus becomes “an instrument for measurement”, which is the full meaning of the word in ancient Greek.⁵ Assmann has argued that the creation of a canon is often a response to what we could call an identity crisis for societies.⁶ Indeed, a canon is often developed as an instrument that should provide society with a different cultural coherence – based on a (new or reaffirmed) reading of the past, to create a different present for a novel future. As such, canons often seem to function as anchors for the societies in which they function, connecting the new with the familiar while mediating change in relation to continuity. As such canonisation frequently leads to new forms of cultural formation – and is thus an important instrument of innovation.

In his book Contre François Jullien, the sinologist Jean-François Billeter even argues that it is the main and most innovative instrument of cultural formation.⁷ He maintains that the real secret of the success of the Han Empire (206 BCE–220 CE) did not, or not mainly, rely on military, administrative, institutional or ritual domains, but rather on canonisation as innovation. It is worthwhile to quote his conclusion in full:

Rappelons que l’empire chinois a été fondé par Ts’in Cheu-Houang, le « Premier empereur de Ts’in », en 221 avant notre ère, à la suite de terribles guerres, et que la violence dont est né ce nouveau pouvoir s’est retournée contre lui puisqu’il a sombré dans le désordre quinze ans plus tard, en 206. (–) Après quelques hésitations, les vainqueurs de cette nouvelle guerre ont repris à leur compte l’idée d’empire et fondé, en 202, la dynastie impériale des Han, qui est devenu la deuxième. Leur principal souci était de ne pas subir le sort de la première, c’est-à-dire de durer. Ils y ont réussi au-delà de tout espoir puisque leur dynastie a subsisté pendant quatre siècles (les Han forment la période romaine de la Chine). Mais les empereurs Han et leurs conseillers ont fait plus que cela puisque l’empire a duré plus de deux millénaires et que, grâce à eux, la folie, la démesure du Premier Empereur, qui aurait pu rester une aberration sans lendemain, sont devenues le moment fondateur de toute cette histoire impériale. Ce fait capital doit être médité. Les historiens voient la raison de cette réussite extraordinaire dans l’ordre militaire, administratif, institutionnel et rituel qu’ils ont su créer et qui a, en effet, perduré dans ses traits essentiels jusqu’à la fin de l’empire, au début du XX^e siècle. Le véritable secret de cette réussite, cependant, que les historiens ne voient pas ou ne comprennent pas suffisamment, c’est que ces empereurs, leurs conseillers et leurs agents ont instrumentalisé la culture au point de la refondre entièrement et d’en faire la base d’un ordre nouveau. Pour faire oublier la violence et l’arbitraire dont l’empire était né, et par lesquels il se soutenait, il devait paraître conforme à l’ordre des choses. Tout fut recentré sur l’idée que l’ordre impérial était conforme aux lois de l’univers, depuis l’origine et pour tous les temps. Tous les domaines du savoir, toute la pensée, le langage, les représentations devaient concourir à persuader les esprits que cet ordre était, dans l’ensemble, naturel. C’était le moyen le plus efficace d’assurer la pérennité du régime impérial, de ses hiérarchies, des formes de domination qu’il imposait, de la soumission qu’elles exigeaient. De cette refonte générale est née ce que les Chinois eux-mêmes ont considéré depuis lors, et que l’on considère aujourd’hui encore, en Chine et ailleurs, comme la civilisation chinoise. Le passé préimpérial a été si bien réinterprété qu’il est lui-même devenu une partie intégrante du nouvel ordre des choses. On peut admirer cette synthèse, qui a duré plus de deux millénaires en dépit des crises que l’ordre impérial a traversées, des défis qu’il a dû relever des transformations sociales profondes auxquelles il a dû s’adapter. Mais il faut bien voir qu’elle a été sécrétée par le pouvoir impérial, qu’elle a eu pour fonction principale d’occulter la nature de ce pouvoir et de rendre impensable toute alternative au despotisme. Et il faut être conscient du fait que tout ce qui passe aujourd’hui pour spécifiquement chinois, en particulier dans le domaine de la pensée, fait partie de ce système.

When such an “instrumental reshaping” is successful – that is: becomes canonised – it can subsequently develop into a cultural tradition; a tradition that might continue to exert its influence over millennia. For classicists, the Augustan era, with its reshaping of an Italo-Hellenistic Republic as the Roman Empire by Octavian Augustus, probably springs to mind at once as example par excellence.⁸ It is important to realise that many of the cultural traditions that we distinguish today, as being present in our modern world or as the most important cultural foundations of that world – think of what we now call Chinese, Buddhist, Indian/Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Greco-Roman, et cetera – are “instrumental re-shapings” and their successful canonisation that go back to Antiquity and often the 1st millennium BCE in particular; a point to which I will return below.

From the moment that a canon is in place, it often immediately does away entirely with the complex historical process behind its formation – the period of crises and the choices then made.⁹ Instead of a mémoire volontaire, the canon is represented and even mythologised as divinely established and “natural”. The idea is created that the canon simply imposed itself through its own authority.¹⁰ Although this is what a canon needs, as a technology to arrive at a novel cultural coherence, nothing could be further from the truth. Focussing on canonisation therefore allows us to understand the cultural formation of societies as complex and contested historical processes. It enables us to go beyond the convenient truths that societies tell about their own past and identity, as in reality canons are never as pure or uncontested as one would wish.¹¹ This is important, in itself, to arrive at a better understanding of how the ancient societies that called themselves “Assyrian”, “Persian”, “Greek”, “Egyptian” or “Roman” (et cetera) came about – what kind of work they had to do to arrive at this self-definition of cultural coherence and what kind of competing definitions they had to obliterate.¹² The observation also prompts us to investigate processes of canonisation themselves from a comparative perspective: How do canons operate as anchors for the societies in which they function? Does canonisation indeed result in cultural formation and how? How were canons able to innovate? Why did particular canonisations do so well as cultural traditions – in the historical context in which they were created as well as beyond? And why are so many canonisations from Antiquity still with us today?

This essay suggests some initial ideas to answer these big questions, with the additional intention of serving as a framework for the case studies that follow in the subsequent part of this book. I will first elaborate on how canonisation works by focussing on (overlapping) questions of ideology, documentation, history, and transmission, with the attempt to connect all these concepts with canonisation in a somewhat different light than is usually done, that is: through the lens of cultural innovation. By drawing in the concept of anchoring, I will subsequently discuss the impact of canonisation with the aim to understand why some canonisations were so successful. Lastly, we will turn to the historical context of the 1st millennium BCE. A much-debated theory on canonisation in this period has been around for more than half a century already: the notion of Achsenzeit (Axial Age), as formulated by Karl Jaspers in his Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte from 1949. The original idea, as formulated by Jaspers, has been strongly criticised for various reasons. As a historical theory, it is indeed lacking in many aspects, as will be discussed below, but it certainly does not lack the insight that canonisation is fundamental to understand cultural formation in this period of Antiquity, in particular. To this I will add the concept of Globalisation and suggest that increasing connectivity throughout the 1st millennium BCE necessitated the major canonisations that gave us the cultures of the ancient world we still live with today.

2 Canonisation and Ideology

The first important issue concerning canonisation is the power and authority that are linked to it.¹³ Canonisation is about selection and that is never an innocent or random process. With canonisation, it is therefore always important to ask the question of ideology: who selects what, for what reasons and with what kind of intended outcome in mind?¹⁴ From this perspective, canonisation is essentially a political procedure that enforces internal coherence and unity at the expense of diversity – and thus results in the marginalization of competing narratives about past, present and future.¹⁵ Pierre Bourdieu has illustrated how canonisation, as an ideological instrument, revolves around the accumulation of symbolic capital, often from materials from the past.¹⁶

His observation immediately reveals a central and most interesting paradox concerning canonisation. On the one hand, a canon necessitates seclusion and inscrutability: “Nichts darf hinzugefügt, nichts weggenommen, nichts verändert werden”, as Assmann put it.¹⁷ On the other hand, a canon transcends time, needs constant maintenance and thus develops, as all cultural products do. Although it should look stable and immutable, therefore, a canon is in fact constantly in the making. This renewal, however, cannot be achieved simply through more accumulation, as this violates the main principle of seclusion and inscrutability – and precisely that is the paradox. Societies have found many different ways to evade this dilemma. For instance, they made canons extremely self-referential in order to maintain their authority. Possible additions, moreover, needed to be negotiated extremely carefully and almost in a ritual way – and we will encounter many more (improvised) solutions in the case studies discussed in this book. A canon, in other words, needs to constantly mediate continuity and change and does so by disguising the latter in order to present it as the former. Anchoring is an important tool, perhaps even the instrument par excellence, to make that work.

How canonisation functions and succeeds as an ideological process has been well investigated for what is one of its most important case studies: the canonisation of saints by Church authorities, a process that started in the 12th century CE. Contrary to common understanding, these studies illustrate that canonisation is never merely a top-down process, but rather a form of negotiation and compromise between different societal groups and their interests.¹⁸ Moreover, these canonisations often stretched out over a long period of time, as a slow and, in fact, never finalized project. Long after the canonisation process of the Reformation, for instance, many (now) Protestant communities were still very much interested in relics and saints – which the new cultural coherence no longer allowed them to be. In turn, Catholic Church authorities needed much time and debate to arrive at proper Counter Reformation canonisation policies. These included decrees against an all too swift canonisation of popular saints, like the “50-year wait” issued in 1627. This was an attempt to keep the authority of the canon intact and to present change in terms of continuity, as described above.¹⁹ To underline the importance of negotiation and comprise with canonisation – thus nuancing a simplistic and singular understanding of power as a top-down process – Didier Lett uses the notion of “saint-making”.²⁰ He shows how the canonisation of saints was a long procedure also in juridical terms, which allowed for the evidence to be structured and framed.²¹ His analysis of the elevation of Nicolas de Tolentino to the level of saint, in the first half of the 14th century, even shows that the figure of De Tolentino was, in fact, more created than revealed throughout the process. This complex historical development, however, was forgotten as soon as Saint Nicolas de Tolentino was functioning as a canon saint. Change and innovation, which thus sometimes even reached the point of invention, had been successfully disguised as continuity.²²

Another important insight arising from the study of the canonisation of saints, is the fact that canonisation processes often work both internally and externally simultaneously and often not as originally planned. Canonisation, in other words, has many “unintended consequences”.²³ The canonisation of saints after the Reformation in the 16th century provides an illustrative example of this. The Catholic cults of saints had been strongly criticised by the Protestant reformers and were at the heart of their quest for a new religious and cultural coherence. The council of Trent (1545–1563) assertively defended saints and their (spiritual) role within the church, as a result. The subsequent Catholic canonisation of saints, then, served two goals. It was, of course, a militant response of the Catholic church towards Protestantism and therefore externally aimed. At the same time, it shows that it had an important innovative role to play internally, as well; namely, serving almost as “a Catholic Reformation in which Church authorities focused on removing corrupt practices”.²⁴ The latter, internal part of this complex historical process was covered up and meant to be forgotten, as it was not in line with what canonisation is supposed to do: produce coherence internally, against those outside the canon. But it certainly happened, and not only during the Counter-Reformation.

If we study canonisation, we should always pay attention to issues of power and ideology. This has been done extensively in literature from the past decades, probably influenced by the “culture wars” that characterised academia in the final part of the 20th century, if not until today.²⁵ This (exclusive) focus on canonisation as a vehicle for institutional intent, however, has pushed the analysis of how canonisation works as a process of cultural formation or innovation to the background.²⁶ To arrive at more complete and nuanced understandings, therefore, we can probably analyse power and ideology best as influenced by all manner of socio-cultural factors and players; functioning both top-down and bottom-up, internally and externally at the very same time; and with a lot of “unintended consequences”. Moreover, a canon is distinctly part of the long-term, almost to the point where we could call it “the formalisation of a tradition-in-the-making”. The examples mentioned so far, at least, strongly suggest that canonisation is more a process evolving over time than a single conscious decision made through the agency of a person or group of persons at a specific point in time. I will argue that it is essentially a combination of both; but that conclusion indeed poses problems for the definition of canonisation in relation to concepts like formalisation or standardization; a point to which I will return further below. Be that as it may, the concept of canonisation is crucial to any theory of tradition, its constitution and its transmission.²⁷

3 Canonisation and Documentation

Documentation is central to the functioning of a canon, as it needs to be made crystal clear what the new normative tool exactly entails; what is allowed and what is forbidden; what is inside the canon and what is outside. Therefore, only documentation allows the canon to serve as an instrument of measurement and to have a profound impact. The idea of making a list is probably usually the start of what canonisation is about, as selection in order to change society. As such, canonisation is Listenwissenschaft with the invention of writing representing a crucial step forward in this respect as well.²⁸ Strongly related to the list, is its formalization as a catalogue. Without these forms of documentation, it would probably be impossible for canons to persist over time. One other element that is crucial to the life of a canon, is the exegete; a person with special knowledge of the canon. With religious canons, this person is most often called a priest. The exegete distributes the prescriptions of the canon to its members and monitors their obedience. This is why this person, as interpreter of the canon, has authority and is deemed essential for the survival of the group or society in question.²⁹ Above we have already encountered a central paradox that characterizes canonisation: although a canon should look immutable and unchanging it is, in fact, always in the making. It takes much effort to keep that tension at bay. Exegetes play a crucial role also in that respect. Their explanations and interpretations are usually strongly self-referential, and thus strengthen the authority of the canon.³⁰ Moreover, the work of the exegete also serves to update the canon, making it relevant for new generations, while hiding this innovation as tradition through careful anchoring. As such, the interpreter almost is the canon, as mediator between continuity and change.

The functioning of the list, catalogue and exegete in relation to the notion of canon has been demonstrated by Jonathan Z. Smith, in a brilliant article on persistence, that I will therefore briefly summarise here.³¹ The existence of a list implies that a selection has been made; a selection that has been documented. Most lists are open-ended: “they have neither a necessary beginning nor end save that provided by the duration of the attention of the compiler or the use to which the list is to be put. There is no necessary order. Everything may appear to be quite arbitrary”.³² In this way, it is discontinuity that characterises the list. For the list to really function in terms of canonisation, therefore, other things are needed as well. When lists show relatively clear principles of order and are aimed at information retrieval, we usually call them catalogues. “The items in a catalogue remain heterogeneous (–) but an account of why the items have been brought together can be given, transmitted and learned”, as Smith formulates it.³³ Codes of classification now matter in a strong way. When the catalogue is seen as a list that is (fundamentally) complete, Smith argues, we talk about a canon. For a canon, there must be an element of closure and one of the most important steps in the process of canonisation is the closing of the canon. At that moment, a distinction is created between the canonical and the apocryphal. With the creation of that distinction, however, the tension between continuity and change becomes immediately acute. Because how are canons kept alive, how can they develop, when they cannot be changed? Here the exegete, or hermeneut as Smith also calls this person, comes into play: “an interpreter whose task it is continually to extend the domain of the closed canon over everything that is known or everything that exists without altering the canon in the process”.³⁴

The exegete has a crucially important function. Not only does he or she have to mediate the tension between continuity and change, as explained above. The exegete also has to deal with the tension that exists between the arbitrary and the specific. From a limitless horizon of possibilities, only a very small and, in fact, arbitrary selection makes it into the list or catalogue. Theoretically, therefore, everything can become canonised – and be used for cultural formation with the intent of becoming a tradition with its cultural identity. This arbitrary selection, however, is consequently treated as being very specific and therefore called “chosen”, “holy”, “sublime” or “ultimate” once it has developed into a canon. Therefore, the canon constantly has to be explained as the canon by these specialised exegetes. Canons can therefore only function through time because they are studied and interpreted; something that is called Auslegung. They need constant interpretation and discussion to mediate the relation between a changing tradition and an the unchanging canon. Documentation is crucially important in this respect and canonisation thus results in the formation of Auslegungskulturen through instruments like libraries, school curricula, museums, et cetera.³⁵ Canons may look stable and unchanging – but making them look that way thus requires a lot of work through lists, catalogues and exegetes.³⁶ We could ask ourselves whether the success of certain canonisations as enduring cultural traditions is, perhaps, due to their ability to productively mediate this tension; a point to which I will return below.

4 Canonisation and History

We have seen above that questions of authority and political power loom behind many interpretations of canonisation not without reason, also in relation to documentation and the ordering of knowledge.³⁷ It has likewise become clear, however, that canonisations are to be equally understood as part of much wider, long-term developments in culture and society.³⁸ Canonisation is therefore about both the immediacy of political history and the long durations of cultural evolutions, simultaneously – and I would argue that we can only properly understand canonisation as cultural formation and innovation when we integrate both perspectives.³⁹ How then, does canonisation write history, in the short term and in the long term? To explore this question, I will briefly elaborate on two fundamental canonisation case studies: the coming into being of Jewish culture and religion in the 1st millennium BCE and the making of Christianity. I will do so with brutal brevity, and only on the basis of the research of two important thinkers about canonisation: Jan Assmann and Guy Stroumsa.⁴⁰

Assmann’s analysis of the canonisation of Jewish cultural and religious traditions during the 1st millennium BCE provides a good example to illustrate the above-mentioned interplay.⁴¹ He sees this process developing as follows. First there would be a codification of law and kingship, in the homeland, at the end of the 7th century BCE. This was followed by the Babylonian exile from the 6th century BCE. The lived tradition of Jewish culture and religion was no longer a given, in these new circumstances. What “being Jewish” exactly meant, therefore, now needed to be described and defined, thus marking a next important step in the canonisation process. The third step was also triggered by an interaction with the foreign: the power of the new Achaemenid Empire over the Levant. The coming of the Persians, Assmann argues, triggered a top-down codification of what Jewish culture and religion entailed. The Persians organised knowledge because they needed to know what cultures and religions they were dealing with in their Empire. This brought Jewish self-definition, such as it had developed in the Babylonian exile, one important step further. The fourth step would be the creation of textual communities around these codifications, as they had developed throughout the ages. Libraries like those from Qumran and Nag Hammadi as well as exegetes dealing with the interpretation of what now had become an established canon testify to this. Assmann regards the Jewish condemnation of idolatry as the fifth and final step. This was a much older feature of Jewish religion for sure, but it was only in the Hellenistic period that it started to play a defining role in terms of canonisation. If you do not allow people to make images, Assmann argues, all symbolic capital that constitutes the canon must end up in a text, as it did. In terms of textual canonisation, therefore, this is a clever move, as the text now definitively becomes the text. How central this text subsequently became for Jewish identity formation is encapsulated by the expression “the people of the book”.⁴² With this example, as analysed by Assmann, the immediacy of political history plays an important and constant role but probably not in the way we traditionally imagine political power and authority to play out. It was not the intention of the Babylonians to help the Jews to arrive at a form of cultural self-definition, nor was it the goal of the Achaemenids to codify Jewish culture for the Jews. Still, this is what seems to have happened. Jewish culture and identity, in Assmann’s view, were created through a long process of canonisation. It is important to underline that some of the key moments within that process were determined by agency from outside the own culture and its “unintended consequences”; a confrontation with the Other and the impact of that encounter.

This also is the case, and perhaps to an even more extreme degree, with the formation of Christianity; another major canonisation process from Antiquity. Following the analysis by Stroumsa, the translation of the Hebrew torah into Greek as the Septuagint was of crucial importance in this respect.⁴³ This translation took place in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE and was probably initiated by Jews and for Jews because knowledge of Hebrew was dwindling. That initiative, of course, strengthened the status of the torah as canonical book for Jewish culture and religion at the time.⁴⁴ The Septuagint, however, is also the text that Christianity would later take as point of departure for building its own canon. This strategy was not only quite unprecedented but also extremely high-risk as the start of a canonisation project. Why? In the first place, because by selecting the Septuagint as its canonic book, it made Christianity base itself on another, foreign, already existing, Jewish canon. In the second place because it made Christianity part and parcel of Hellenistic civilisation by taking a Greek text compiled in the cosmopolis of Alexandria as its foundation. Thus, the birth of Christian culture simultaneously becomes a process of the canonisation of both Jewish culture as well as the Hellenistic tradition. Stroumsa calls this “the Christian hermeneutical revolution” and underlines that it had a double helix: Jerusalem and Athens.⁴⁵ This particular choice for what we could call a double anchoring – a canonisation of the Jewish torah, on the one hand, and Hellenistic legacy, on the other – would come to define what we call European culture: the fact that we talk about the Judeo-Christian and Classical fundaments of Western civilization today still relies on a particular and remarkable choice of canonisation from two millennia ago.⁴⁶ Through this particular form of anchoring, the tension between continuity and change, and between the arbitrary and the specific, was probably more acute than with other canonisation processes, as the Christian canon openly made other traditions its own, being ostentatiously secondary. A comparable example of such a double anchoring process might be visible in the 3rd century BCE Roman decision to build their own literature, identity and culture on Greek models while that was a very Hellenistic thing to do. Thus, the birth of Roman culture simultaneously becomes a process of the canonisation of both Greek culture as well as the Hellenistic traditions of the eastern Mediterranean in particular: Rome’s double helix consisted of Athens and Alexandria.⁴⁷

The notion of standing into a secondary relation to the original is characterized as belatedness or Epigonalität. The fact that this secondary relation is often considered to be a major problem is probably best encapsulated in the famous observation by Karl Marx, who adds to the idea of Hegel that all important events or persons in world history happen twice: “Er hat vergessen hinzuzufügen: das eine Mal als groBe Tragödie, das andre Mal als lumpige Farce”.⁴⁸ Christianity was apparently able to overcome this idea of belatedness and to work against the feeling that the cultural constellation it was creating would only be a “lumpige Farce”. Its revolutionary character was located in the fact that it turned the question of belatedness on its head by presenting it as a defining strength instead of a failure. Christian culture understood itself as the perfection of its predecessors; by means of repeating, yes, but by doing so in a superior way and therefore casting aside its predecessors.⁴⁹ This is how the Christians were able to present themselves as the verus Israel as opposed to the Jews.⁵⁰ The Romans positioned themselves towards (contemporary) Greeks in a comparable way by stating that Roman civilisation would be the only real successor to Classical Greece.⁵¹ Cartsen Colpe has proposed to characterize this particular way of canon development as secondary canonisation or “filiation”.⁵² Its essence is that the relationship towards predecessors, the earlier canons, is not denied but made explicit, yet as “prefiguration”.⁵³ Such secondary canons thus produce cultural dependency, and with that conscious parallels. Yet they produce counter-formations at the same time. The new depends on and is legitimated by the old, while at the same time the new is presented as innovating and overtaking the old. This interplay enables the canon to become even more self-referential, as the older exemplum is framed as already presupposing its successor. This is how the Christians conceptualised the Septuagint. Although it was not an original and even not originally a translation for or by Christians, the Septuagint indeed functioned as good and efficacious for them, as the original in Hebrew did for the Jews. Moreover, this remarkable innovation, by others, allowed Christianity to spread the faith in Greek; a language spoken by many in the Mediterranean and therefore an important factor in the rise of the Christian church at the expense of Judaism.⁵⁴ Did its secondary character perhaps provide Christianity with more or better affordances to develop in the long run?

5 Canonisation and Transmission

Looking at canonisation as history maker puts the question of transmission centre stage.⁵⁵ The two examples briefly discussed above clearly show that transmission of the canon is of key importance for its functioning over time. How to account for successful transmission? Or, to put the question more concretely, why are some canonisations from Antiquity still with us today as cultural traditions and many others not?⁵⁶ There appear to be two (extreme) positions in this debate. On the one hand, one could argue that it is all about the content of the canon. This is, for instance, how the canonisation of Greek culture by the Romans has often been interpreted. The content of the canon – that is: Greek literature, philosophy, art, et cetera – would simply be so superior that it could not but be appropriated and canonised by those coming into contact with it. The canonisation of the New Testament was often described and understood in similar terms of inherent quality – although the exact 27 canonical books were only decided upon around 367 AD. On the basis of what we have learned about canonisation so far, however, we can probably conclude at this point already that this was most likely the image those canons wanted to convey from the moment they were established – not reality. One could also take up the opposite position, and argue that canonisation is not so much about content, but rather about transference through time. As radically formulated by Guillory: “Canonicity is not a property of the work itself but of its transmission”.⁵⁷ This would imply that, in fact, everything could potentially be canonised, and that canonisation is about the medium, not the message.

In order to approach this question, the consideration of texts, and the fact that canonisation often takes place through texts, play an important role. Texts are an ideal instrument for canonisation, perhaps even a necessary precondition in terms of documentation, as we have seen above. Assmann understands this as follows:⁵⁸

Da sich das kulturelle Gedächtnis nicht biologisch vererbt, muss es kulturell über die Generationenfolge hinweg in Gang gehalten werden. Das ist eine Frage der Objektivierung, Speicherung, Reaktivierung und Zirkulation von Sinn. Es liegt auf der Hand, dass in der Geschichte dieser Funktionen die Erfindung der Schrift als eines aussergewöhnlich leistungsfähigen Mediums symbolischer Objektivierung den tiefsten Einschnitt bedeutet.

Through texts, the possibilities of canonisation processes became much more extended and refined, at the same time.⁵⁹ Canonisation, therefore, very much revolves around technologies of canonisation. Texts are not the only important instrument however; objects play a similar role. Illustrative of this, for instance, is the cultural definition of great “masterpieces”: from the Parthenon and the Venus de Milo, to the paintings by Raphael and Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Vermeer, et cetera.⁶⁰ Those are the objects considered to express where “we” come from and who “we” are. It is through canonisation, that such objects change from being commodities into objects that are maintained, cherished, and institutionalised as heritage.⁶¹ Where institutions like libraries are therefore of crucial importance as canon-makers for texts; museums fulfil the same function for objects.⁶² As a result, such institutions are peopled with canonical exegetes. Both texts and objects thus play key roles in the successful transmission of the canon and its persistence over time. As lists and catalogues and together with the exegete, they mediate the arbitrary – all that is available in the world – and the specific – that what is in the canon. In doing so, they closely monitor change and continuity in a balanced relation with each other.

6 Anchoring Innovation

Underlining the immediacy of political history, traditionally canonisation has been studied in terms of ideology and documentation, as has been described and illustrated above. This essay argues for the importance of the long duration of cultural evolutions as an additional perspective to that and has therefore equally analysed canonisation in terms of history and transmission. Focussing on canonisation as a long-term process of cultural innovation underlines the importance of the practice of anchoring. Already mentioned several times above, we will now turn to this concept more in depth.

In the 27 years he was in office, from 1978 to 2005, Pope John Paul II created more saints than all other popes created together (!) since Urbanus VIII centralised control over “saint-making” in 1634.⁶³ Oliver Bennett has analysed this process in terms of what he calls “strategic canonisation”.⁶⁴ In his view, the Catholic church wanted to tie in with changes in society, particularly concerning popular culture, in order to retain its dominant position. In a historical period of secularization, in which the role of the Catholic church became much less self-evident than it had been before, innovation was urgently needed. But how to present it as continuity? The Catholic church authorities solved this dilemma through a careful anchoring of the new. First of all, it started producing more saints than it had ever done before, in order to legitimize and strengthen its own authority through the self-referentially of the canon. Subsequently it began to include what are called “celebrity saints”, like Padre Pio or Mother Theresa, in an attempt to modernise. This would be, in Bennett’s words: “(–) a clear illustration of the Catholic Church’s unique capacity to reinvent very old forms of cultural policy for changing times”.⁶⁵ How was canonisation so successfully, in this example, as a form of cultural innovation? The concept of anchoring is part of the answer to that question. We have seen above that canonisation as cultural innovation has to mediate a tension between the arbitrary and the specific. In other words, what is new and wants to move from the list via the catalogue towards the canon, has to be explained in terms of the canon to become part of that cultural tradition. Anchoring is one of the mechanisms through which this is achieved. In doing so, it simultaneously mediates the other recurring tension with canonisation, that between continuity and change, by presenting the latter in terms of the former.

Anchoring can be defined as the dynamic process by which individuals or relevant social groups connect what they perceive as new to what they consider to be familiar.⁶⁶ Anchoring is dynamic: once something has become part of the canon or cultural tradition, it no longer needs anchoring, but can even be appropriated for anchoring purposes itself. The examples of “saint-making” discussed in this essay are a clear illustration of that process. They first need to be anchored and when this has successfully been achieved, when they are established as part of the canon, they can start serving as anchors themselves. Sometimes, agents can be identified; individuals playing an active role in attempting to anchor a new phenomenon. At other times, no specific agency can be defined in the process and often the two are entangled. Anchoring is relevant for individuals to maintain their sense of orientation, identification and continuity in the world but plays an equally important role at the level of social groups. It is on purpose that I repeat some of the main elements of the definition of anchoring as given by Ineke Sluiter, to highlight the convergences between the concept of canonisation and the concept of anchoring. Both seem to be functioning in similar ways; with anchoring being an important instrument for successful canonisation. We should therefore understand the importance of the exegete that mediates the tension between the arbitrariness of the new and the specificity of the tradition in terms of anchoring, as well. It has been described above how the exegete constantly accounts for the choices that have been made. Exegesis not only explains what the original anchoring was about, but also, in doing so across generations, anchors the canon ever more firmly into its own socio-historical context. Anchoring is thus an important mechanism for understanding how canons are made to work as cultural traditions.⁶⁷ Canonisation needs the exegete as anchorer.

Let us now move from the concept of anchoring proper towards cultural innovation and the emergence of new cultural traditions more in general. We have seen that coherence and repetition are of prime importance to the functioning of a canon. These characteristics sit uneasily with the fact that improvisation and change are what keeps societies going in the first place. This is probably the reason why canonisation is often used as a survival strategy for cultural and social identity in times of crisis, when a new form of cultural coherence is needed. From that perspective, canonisation is an attempt to deal with change in a productive manner. For societies to survive, finding a balance between tradition and innovation in how to canonise is therefore crucial. Questions of translation and the copying of both texts and objects are, from this perspective, fundamental and almost evolutionary problems.⁶⁸ For these dramatic innovations to be successful, anchoring was key.⁶⁹

7 Achsenzeit: The Age of Canonisation?

It has been argued above that, in essence, a canon is an authoritative set of ideas that is grounded in the past in order to function as a guiding social imaginary in the present and hence to determine the future.⁷⁰ Canonisation, therefore, is a process at the heart of any form of cultural innovation – with anchoring being key to its impact and success.

For the 1st millennium BCE, a strong and compelling, though heavily debated and often criticised, concept regarding canonisation-as-cultural- innovation has already been developed: that of the Achsenzeit or Axial Age. It was originally formulated by Karl Jaspers as a philosophical idea in his book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte from 1949.⁷¹ Jaspers starts from the surprising conjunction that many of the world’s most influential thinkers like Confucius, Buddha, the Jewish prophets and Socrates all emerged around the middle of the 1st millennium BCE.⁷² That “Axial Age”, in his view, produced the first “classics” in human history; the early works of philosophy, literature and theology that would be the guiding principles for Eurasian societies in the ages afterwards – and to which we still return. As a historical theory, the Achsenzeit has been criticised and nuanced for good reasons: not only is the chronology untenable as far as the main protagonists are concerned, there were also “Axial Societies” long before – think of Egyptian civilisation – and after the period of around 500 BCE.⁷³ This just criticism on the Achsenzeit as a historical theory, however, has not prevented the concept from being discussed and brought forward in a most fecund way.⁷⁴ At present the Axial Age is intensively debated again, as a tool to talk about “transcendence” or “reflexivity” within human evolution, as well as the emergence of new “cultural crystallizations”.⁷⁵ It is remarkable that this discussion mainly takes place amongst philosophers, scholars of religion and sociologists, whereas most historians, archaeologists and classicists remain aloof.⁷⁶ I think this is a missed opportunity; the Axial Age debate has a lot to bring to them as well. For that we should probably not so much try and “re-historicize” the idea of an Achsenzeit but rather frame the issue in more general terms, as cultural innovation through canonisation.⁷⁷ The sociologist Hans Joas has argued that the Axial Age debate is “one of the most important developments in the area of comparative-historical social sciences” and an instrument to write what he calls a “contingent history of emergence”.⁷⁸ I argue that the ever-increasing connectivity that characterises the 1st millennium BCE is one of the most important factors in the “history of emergence” that we can write, from this perspective. Instead of an Axial Age, however, it is much better to talk about “axial breakthroughs” then; periods characterised by a high degree of reflexivity, historicity and what is called agentiality.⁷⁹ What do those terms imply? Reflexivity is the human ability to step outside the immediate present and imagine different worlds; historicity refers to the translation of that imagination in time, by which the present can be separated from the past and Self from Other. Agentiality, lastly, is meant to indicate that human action based on that reflexivity and historicity is intended to change the present and determine the future. All these characteristics come together equally in the concept of canonisation as it has been defined and as discussed in this Chapter.⁸⁰ Let us now first briefly review the Achsenzeit debate, not in its own right but with the goal to see what important insights it has already generated to understand canonisation as cultural innovation in the 1st millennium BCE, in particular in relation to increasing connectivity or Globalisation.

The idea that there would be something of an Axial Age in world history goes back to the 18th century Iranist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron and his study of the Avesta.⁸¹ He noted that Zarathustra, Confucius and Pherecydes of Syros (the teacher of Pythagoras) were 6th century BCE contemporaries who would all, in their own way, inaugurate a defining period for the cultures they were living in. Anquetil-Duperron realized that in the three main cultural spheres of the ancient world, around the period of 550 BCE – China (eastern Eurasia); India and Persia (central Eurasia); and the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean (western Eurasia) – men emerged that through their novel ideas would change history. However, it was clear that these Chinese, Indian, Iranian and Near Eastern/Mediterranean cultures were not directly influencing each other, in this respect. What was at stake then? Was the world as a whole going through some kind of “Axial Age”, a term only coined by Jaspers much later, similar to how it had gone through a Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age before? Many scholars took up the question; a trajectory recently analysed by Assmann in his book Achsenzeit. Eine Archäologie der Moderne.⁸² He defines three different periods in the reception and Aufarbeitung of the idea.⁸³ From the publication by Anquetil-Duperron in 1771 until 1945, many scholars indeed reflected on his Entdeckung der Gleichzeitigkeit, but they did so rather individually and not as part of a comprehensive and coherent intellectual discussion. In this period, the debate was either empirical or historical-philosophical. The empirical research elaborated on the Gleichzeitigkeit-observation by adding names and cultures to what became a treat list of axial thinkers, like Buddha, Laotse, Jeremia, Parmenides, et cetera. Independently of this, the historical-philosophical discussion tried to account for the Gleichzeitigkeit, for instance in terms of (changes to) culture, religion or ethics. For Hegel, for instance, the Axial Age was related to the paring of state-power and writing which, for him, would be the true beginning of history. Without writing, Hegel presumed, there could be no memory and therefore no history.⁸⁴ Ernst von Lasaulx, a 19th century German philosopher of history, explicitly drew on Anquetil-Duperron in the development of his anthropological theory of human evolution.⁸⁵ The cultural-sociologist Alfred Weber, in his Synchronistische Weltzeitalter from 1935, used the Entdeckung der Gleichzeitigkeit to develop something a global cultural history.⁸⁶

With Jaspers, these only very loosely connected ideas were brought together but into a historical-philosophical theory that was meant to explain the present – and in particular the catastrophe of Nazism and World War II. Assmann hence characterizes Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte as essentially hermeneutical.⁸⁷ Jasper’s primary goal was a better understanding of the present, not the 1st millennium BCE, although he considered the two as being strongly related. Jaspers uses the Entdeckung der Gleichzeitigkeit to develop a coherent, evolutionary world history that is based on what he calls the Einheit der Geschichte.⁸⁸ The Axial Age would be defining in this evolution, be a Durchbruch in his terms, because it would have provided Offenbarung, that is: the intellectual sophistication through which a new, self-reflexive attitude towards human existence came into being. Characteristics of this Offenbarung are the birth of philosophy; the deconstruction of mythical thinking; profound reflexion on the concept of history; and an overall drive for explanation, beyond the ruling paradigms of the time.⁸⁹ The main point of Jasper’s theory is that this Offenbarung is the beginning of mankind as we understand it. The Axial Age, therefore, is die Ursprung der Moderne; “wo geboren wurde, was seitdem der Mensch sein kann”.⁹⁰ This spiritual and intellectual development had a profound impact on society: axial thinking resulted in a new understanding of reality that came forth from a tension between political power and intellectual trends. The Axial Age, which Jaspers defines in rather broad terms as the period between 800 and 200 BCE, is the age of criticism.⁹¹

After a quarter of a century of relative silence, despite the enormous popular success of the book, within academia the idea is only taken up again from the 1970s onwards, first by sinologist Benjamin I. Schwartz – for whom the Axial Age is about “standing back and looking beyond”⁹² – and then by the sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt. The focus now shifts towards cultural-historical analysis. With this, according to Assmann, “beginnt das Konzept sich im Grunde aufzulösen” – and indeed it is now more and more realised that the Achsenzeit makes little sense as an Epochenbegriff.⁹³ Through a series of conferences, however, Eisenstadt was able to develop it as hermeneutical tool.⁹⁴ He did so by moving away from the idea of a specific Axial Age towards axiality and “axial breakthroughs”, in a broader sense. The process of axiality and its resulting in new cultural constellations thus became tools for analysis of potentially all periods in world history.⁹⁵ Central to “axial breakthroughs” is the idea that a civilization (Hochkultur) starts reflecting on itself by looking back to the past and looking around, in a confrontation with the Other, in the present. This necessitates the formation of a new, or at least different, identity; something that necessarily goes hand in hand with the Umwandlung of cultural memory – and results in profound change. The transition made is therefore often described as one from Archaic to Classical.

Based on this understanding as it has developed from the 1970s onwards, I would argue that the Achsenzeit debate is a great research tool to understand cultural formation and for approaching global history, in particular for the period of Antiquity.⁹⁶ I think, however, that one could have the same historical debate in terms of canonisation as cultural formation, and the various concepts related to it as they have been introduced above. “Axial breakthroughs” and the new cultural crystallizations they provide have three main characteristics: they step outside the immediate present and imagine different worlds (reflexivity); they translate this new imagination in cultural memory and separate the present from the past as well as Self from Other (historicity) while making this new imaginary work in society in order to define the present as well as the future (agentiality or cultural innovation).⁹⁷ All these characteristics indeed come together in the concept of canonisation, as discussed and defined in this essay. Wagner has argued that the Achsenzeit debate allows us “to assess the possibility of human beings to collectively employ their capacity for reflexivity such that they can critically relate to their history and give themselves new orientations in the present”.⁹⁸ This is exactly how the function of canonisation as cultural innovation has been described above.

The confrontation with the Other is crucial to “axial breakthroughs” and canonisations.⁹⁹ The formation of Jewish culture and Christianity, briefly described above, has illustrated the point. This relation has already frequently been noted in general terms and, in fact, plays an important role, although often implicitly, for many theorists and critics of the Achsenzeit idea (see below).¹⁰⁰ In the remainder of this essay I will try to make the link more explicit and use the concept of Globalisation to do so.¹⁰¹ I will argue that increasing connectivity makes the presence of the Other for the Self inescapable and turns reflexivity into a most urgent issue to be dealt with. Moreover, the new historicity thus created – with the help of lists, catalogues, and canons that were put into action by exegetes and the ideology that they were all part of – now had a global repertoire to choose from. All the resulting agentiality is a crucially important constituent of cultural formation in the 1st millennium BCE. This section therefore concludes that a fruitful continuation of the Achsenzeit debate should focus on canonisation as cultural innovation. The next section will argue that the impact of increasing connectivity is central to understanding how that process worked throughout the longue-durée of human history – and that the 1st millennium BCE is a crucial period on that trajectory.

8 Canonisation and Connectivity: Cultural Innovation in the 1st Millennium BCE

An important conclusion of the Achsenzeit debate as it has developed over the past 250 years is that canonisation and connectivity are intimately related.¹⁰² From the outset, the Axial Age Gleichzeitigkeit implied a transcontinental, universal, global perspective on the development of humankind. Already for Anquetil-Duperron, who wanted to break free from Eurocentrism in his work, all cultures of the ancient (and modern) world were equal; while Hegel talked about “Weltgeist” when dealing with the Axial Age.¹⁰³ In his analysis, Jaspers is drawing on what we would now call ‘the Globalisation debate’ even more explicitly. He does so in two different ways. In the first place by strongly underlining the universal character of the Durchbruch around the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. He not only sees this as starting in different regions of Eurasia simultaneously, but he also considers how this intellectual revolution would come to define the oikumeme as a whole. The interplay between the local and the global, central to Globalisation theory, is also central to Jasper’s Achsenzeit and the periods afterwards: “Es gab bisher noch keine Weltgeschichte, nur Lokalgeschichten”, as he phrases it.¹⁰⁴ This idea of the beginning of an Einheit der Geschichte represents, moreover, a truly non-Eurocentric theory of global history. As succinctly summarized by Assmann:¹⁰⁵

Wie der Einzele erst durch Kommunikation zu sich findet, so auch die Kulturen der Welt. Die Achsenzeit erschliesst erstmals die Möglichkeit weltumspannender Kommunikation und führt eine Epoche geistlicher Globalisierung herauf. Zwar kommunizierten Konfuzius, Buddha, Zarathustra, Jesaja und Xenophanes nicht miteinander. Sie hätten sich aber verstanden.

Jaspers does so, secondly, by explicitly linking this universal past to his global present in terms of defining characteristics; a relation encapsulated in his idea of the Achzenzeit as die Ursprung der Moderne.¹⁰⁶ In terms of Axial characteristics, there are no real differences, for Jaspers, between the global past and the global present – this is exactly why he considers the two to have such a strong relation with each other.¹⁰⁷ More than half a century’s worth of scholarly research, following the publication of Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, has not only radically changed our ideas about the degree of connectivity in Antiquity, but also our judgement of the functioning of the various cultures in relation to each other. One could say that Jaspers’ reconstruction of the existence of a global oikumene in Antiquity, between 800 and 200 BCE, has been strongly supported, along with his idea that all these cultures were in communication with each other, directly or indirectly.¹⁰⁸ This is quite remarkable. Nowadays, scholars increasingly use the concept of Globalisation to understand this complex connectivity of Antiquity. This proves to be most fecund for many, but it is important to realize that it is only another tool to investigate the functioning of what Alfred Weber already called “den Kontaktgürtel von China bis Griechenland”.¹⁰⁹ So how do relations between Globalisation, canonisation processes, and cultural innovation play out in Antiquity? When grossly oversimplifying, we can paint the following picture:¹¹⁰

The period around 1500 BCE witnessed a proliferation of networks all over Eurasia.¹¹¹ The direct linkage within and between regions now became so frequent that many scholars consider the middle of the second millennium BCE to be a turning point in terms of increasing connectivity.¹¹² The impact of that increased connectivity makes itself felt with such intensity that it is indeed useful to analyse it in terms of Globalisation.¹¹³ In Egypt, the main political power in this period, the Delta now breaks away from the Nile valley and becomes part of the interplay between the Near East, the Mediterranean and North Africa stronger than ever before. This resulted in more marine contacts and an increased interaction in the eastern part of the Mediterranean and the Near East in particular. Silver and copper were the main commodities in this period and we witness a growing social complexity in exactly those sites and regions that had nodal positions in this network, like Crete and Cyprus. The trade of metals and other raw materials was supplemented by manufactured objects, like metalwork, textiles but also perfumed oil and its containers. The local styles in which these objects were made already soon started influencing each other. As a result, we now not only see, for instance, painted imitations of multi-coloured woollen textile from the Mediterranean in Egyptian tombs but also the development of an “international style” in luxury goods that playfully brings together a wide variety of stylistic elements, perhaps even in order to boast its cosmopolitanism.¹¹⁴ It seems that the site of Tell el-Dab’a, in the eastern Delta, was amongst the many important centres of this cosmopolitan network. One of its main sanctuaries was the temple for Seth, an Egyptian god who was depicted, however, as the Syrian storm god Baal-Sephon. This interpretatio implies a confrontation with the Other which resulted in a reflection and, in this case, recalibration of the own culture. We therefore see reflexivity and agentiality but remain ignorant about processes of historicity. Those might be grasped, however, from Egyptian literature in the period that testifies to the same effect, as it shows that conceptions of the kosmos only now begin to move beyond the horizon of the Nile valley.¹¹⁵ Mental maps, in other words, were changing as a result of increasing connectivity. The world of the Late Bronze Age was not only connected by trade but also by the (sometimes overlapping) empires of Egypt, Babylonia, the Hittites and the Mitanni. Interaction between these was so intense that a “global” lingua franca (Akkadian) developed for their communication.¹¹⁶ The collapse of this world towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE shows that interconnection had reached the level that trouble could spread with alarming speed.¹¹⁷ Centralised palace economies made way for more volatile, seaborne trading practices; a process accompanied by a surge of innovation in maritime technology. The frequency, strength, content and directionality of the network changed and there certainly was political fragmentation and economic recession in some regions.¹¹⁸ High mobility continued to be defining as well however: the famous Huelva hoard, found in Andalucia and dating to the 10th century BCE, shows a mixture of (northern) Atlantic swords and spearheads with Iberian weaponry and objects from the eastern Mediterranean.

This circulation of goods characteristic for the Bronze Age is followed by a more intense circulation of people in the Iron Age. Those people now frequently established permanent and culturally distinct settlements in distant regions. Particularly what scholars call the Phoenician and Greek “colonisations” stand out in this respect.¹¹⁹ First Phoenician and then Greek maritime entrepreneurs and fortune seekers now directly linked up the entire Mediterranean; tapping into comparable Atlantic and Central Asian circuits of exchange with that. They developed new homes away from home to maintain and articulate nodes in the network or safeguard commodities. Not only did this bring the global to a local level – think about the foundation of Carthage on the coast of North Africa by already cosmopolitan Phoenicians from the Levant around 800 BCE – but simultaneously ever more localities were making up the global network as a result.¹²⁰ One of the impacts of this more intense confrontation with other cultures was the coming into being of something like a pan-Mediterranean cosmogony.¹²¹ This implies, as we have already seen with the example of Seth/Baal-Sephon from the Egyptian Delta, a reflexion on the own culture. If you encounter, because of the wider network you are now part of, a figure venerated by others as Heracles that turns out to resemble your own Melqart, this forces you to reflect on precisely those categories of Self and Other – and their relative nature.¹²² Do we see more signs of reflexivity and perhaps even of historicity in this period as result of this increasing connectivity? Do cultures relate to their history in different ways to give themselves new orientations in the present and do they try to canonise those attempts? It seems so. Around 800 BCE, the Bronze Age past of many cultures are made into exempla for their present, with clear signs of antiquarianism and archaism.¹²³ If we focus on canonical texts alone there are the stories about Bronze Age Greece by ‘Homer’ and about the Exodus in Israel; both canonizing events from centuries earlier. There is the continuing popularity of the Gilgamesh epic in the Near East while in Egypt “the book of the Death” is canonised.¹²⁴ Reflexivity of the own status quo as a result of looking back is certainly part of these canonisations; think for instance of how, in the Iliad, the Trojan enemy is presented as equal to the Greeks in many respects. It seems that in the centuries to follow, this form of reflexivity develops much further and in more profound ways, enhanced by increasing connectivity. The coming into being of universal Empires – perhaps the neo-Assyrian Empire can already be characterised as such, but certainly the Achaemenid commonwealth – plays an important role in this, in three respects.¹²⁵ In a general way, Empires facilitate exchange and increase connectivity. Moreover, imperialism did not only bring the Other definitively to each other’s doorstep, but it also forced the imperial authorities themselves to make lists and catalogues to administer their Empire, at the same time. Thus canonisation, internally and externally, became key to contemporary understandings of the world.¹²⁶ Cultures and cultural concepts, the real Other and the constructed Other, hence became fundamentally intertwined.¹²⁷ In terms of canonisation and Globalisation this is a defining breakthrough. Why?

As Arjun Appadurai, one of the most important scholars of Globalisation, has shown, Globalisation is as much about concrete changes in daily life as it is about imagination – and especially about their relation in the form of new social imaginaries.¹²⁸ Increasing connectivity over a millennium had, of course, changed nothing to the physical environment itself but it had profoundly altered the perception and imagination of that world. This conquest as space, as one could call it, is characterised as time-space compression within Globalisation studies, meaning that the nature and experience of space (and time) is radically restructured as a result of increasing connectivity. I argue that the various canonisation processes of the 1st millennium BCE must be understood as part of this radial restructuring. We saw that with the foundation of Carthage around 800 BCE, a pan Mediterranean trade network came into being that linked up with other networks and included the Black Sea. Knowledge about the Other was still relatively limited at that time and the geography of the Mediterranean and Black Sea therefore became loaded with significance through myth. Homer’s Odyssey is exemplary of both: the importance of travel and movement outside the own locality or region as well as the colouring of those strange worlds through myth. The adventures of Iason, Herakles or Diomedes tell similar stories. The next step in the conquest of space, from largely mythical to largely factual, is only achieved in the Persian Empire. Through their infrastructure and collecting of geographical data, the Persian court probably had a better overview of what the world looked like than there had ever been before and it seems that a decisive breakthrough in geographical knowledge materialised there. This allowed the Achaemenids to imagine themselves as a truly universal Empire; something that (again) changed the nature and experience of space. The impact of what one could call “the invention of humanity” around the middle of the 1st millennium BCE is of crucial importance in terms of canonisation, as it implies a radical rethinking of past, present, and future.¹²⁹ Already through the idea of a universal Empire, through that particular imagination of reality, there simply was so much Other now that ideas about the Self and the own culture in relation to the world had no choice but to change. When Remi Brague argues that the Axial Age coincides with the discovery of the world as the world he means, I think, exactly the same thing.¹³⁰ The repertoire for the construction of mémoire volontaire is now wider than ever before; the necessity of compiling lists, catalogues, and canons is more urgent than ever before. Only against this background, the emergence of comparative history projects, like those by Herodotos, are clearly understandable.¹³¹ Herodotos’ world encompassed Mesopotamia as well as North Africa; Spain as well as the steppes of southern Russia; Egypt and Aethiopia as well as the Danube region and the Celts. As a result, his book is one big exercise in reflexivity and historicity. It is immediately during and after this period, in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE in particular, that we see responses towards all this canon work in the form of encyclopaedism, epitomes and libraries.¹³² The conquests of Alexander the Great, heir of the Achaemenids, brought nothing new structurally, yet they enhanced and intensified Globalisation processes and their impact even more. The imagination of the world as single world was further refined: Persian documentation provided Alexander with vital information that he added to by means of the bematisteis (land surveyors) in his consort. Myth thus slowly gave way to ethnography as well as world history and would, in the Hellenistic period, also develop into something a comparative scientific project, as exemplified by the library of Alexandria and many other centres of knowledge.¹³³ As a result, mapping culture and defining cultural identity through the transformation of cultural memory now becomes an almost worldwide obsession.¹³⁴ It is at the heart of the cultural formation of, for instance, the Seleucid Empire, in which the unique and unprecedented decision is taken to introduce a linear and transcendent concept of (global) time.¹³⁵ Such a strategy can only be understood as the impact of time-space compression brought about by Globalisation processes. The same seems to be true for all the major 3rd century BCE cultural canonisations that were written to define what exactly now is local in this global world. These “national histories” were compiled for Egypt by a priest from Heliopolis called Manetho; for central Asia by the Chaldean astronomer-priest Berossos, and probably also for Phoenicia by the Hellenistic source of Philo of Byblos – while one should add the Hebrew canonisation of the Torah as the canonisation of the history of the land Israel.¹³⁶ Their simultaneousness is most remarkable.¹³⁷ That all these anchorers were probably priests is not surprising in view of what has been concluded above, concerning the importance of priests as exegetes to deal with canonisation. Their histories were a form of canonisation as cultural innovation; namely, an attempt to redefine and bring forward the local in what had become a truly global world. Manetho, Berossos, the Phoenician source and the Jewish priests but also contemporary authors like Megasthenes, who wrote a history of India for the Seleucids, and other examples of the ethnographic literature from this period, all were dealing with the same intellectual project: providing what had now become the global present with a global past and map the own local place within that global space.¹³⁸

This profound, global transformation of cultural memory results, towards the period around 200 BCE, into what could be called a global cultural horizon.¹³⁹ It has often been noted that around the period of 200 BCE a distinctly new phase in the history of the ancient worlds begins.¹⁴⁰ This transition has indeed many aspects and profound results.¹⁴¹ However, at the core of it, I would argue, is the impact of Globalisation processes and their handling through canonisation as an engine for cultural innovation. As Ian Morris illuminatingly summarized:

By 200 BCE the East and West had more in common than at any time since the Ice Age. Each was dominated by a single great empire with tens of millions of subjects. Each had a literate, sophisticated elite schooled in Axial thought, living in great cities fed by highly productive farmers and supplied by elaborate trade networks. And in each core social development was 50 percent higher than it had been in 1000 BCE.¹⁴²

It is against this global cultural horizon that the Roman Republic and the Han Empire had to build their identity. “Schooled in Axial thought”, they had no choice but map and innovate their culture through canonisation and ask the respective questions: “who are we against the past and present of the Mediterranean, the Near East and the rest of the world?” and “who are we against the past and present of East Asia and the rest of the world?” This conclusion brings us back to the observation by Jean-François Billeter – that the real secret of success of the Han Empire has to be ascribed to canonisation as cultural innovation – quoted at the start of this Chapter. Drawing in Globalisation makes clear why the Han and the Romans had no choice but to turn to the past to construct their present and future. In that respect, indeed, specific choices were made to construct a mémoire volontaire. But we have seen that those choices were the result of ever-increasing Globalisation processes and the consecutive reactions to their impact that took place in the previous millennium. The past was haunting the Han Empire as much as the Han Empire was instrumentalising world history.¹⁴³ And this was certainly true for the Romans, as well.¹⁴⁴ It seems important, therefore, to distinguish between the establishment of a canon in terms of the immediacy of (political) history on the one hand and canonisation in terms of the long durations of socio-cultural evolutions on the other. From the latter perspective, canonisation is a form of slowly developing standardization with varying degrees of rigidity and flexibility;¹⁴⁵ the evolutionary development of a new habitus with the canon only representing a point in time testifying to its formal anchoring as consensus – and thus not so much the construction of a mémoire volontaire after a crisis. Canonisation, so it seems, is an instrument that all human societies developed and constantly use to deal with the continuous change they are going through.

9 Conclusion and Outlook

Canonisation in the 1st millennium BCE revolves about the engagement with increasing Globalisation and the impact of the discovery of global unity and diversity. This progressive discovery forces societies to construct a new past, to create a different present for a novel future. Increasing Globalisation presented severe challenges for the re-organisation of cultural memory.¹⁴⁶ The new canonical traditions thus created are a response to Globalisation and an attempt to embed local diversity in the emerging global context .¹⁴⁷ This is what all the extraordinary ethnographic literature of the early Hellenistic period is doing in one way or another.¹⁴⁸ If the tensions necessarily inherent in these canons – between change that has to be presented as continuity and between the arbitrary that has to be presented as the specific – are well-managed, these traditions can develop into successful and long-lasting new cultural constellations. Anchoring is fundamental as a process in this, as it is needed to calibrate past, present, and future in relation to each other in order to arrive at cultural innovation.

As an outlook on that conclusion, it is interesting to return to the question of secondarity and the 200 BCE “threshold”. We have seen above that secondary canons were forced to face their own historicity in a quite unprecedented manner. This made them, one could say, into canonisation specialists par excellence and as a result these societies, like Han China and the Roman Empire, developed into cultures with an enormous “mnemische Energie”¹⁴⁹ Did this provide them with the memory-identity they needed to survive in a global oikumene? Or should perhaps even the remarkable success and longevity of the Empires that all took off in the period around 200 BCE – the Han Empire, the Maurya Empire, the Parthian Empire and the Roman Empire¹⁵⁰ – be explained by the fact that the major canonisation processes triggered by increasing connectivity had been finished in their first instalment in the centuries before? The Roman Empire is a case in point.¹⁵¹ In all aspects, the Romans made themselves secondary to the Greek and Hellenistic past of the Mediterranean. But in the end, they were able to turn the question of belatedness around by presenting it as a defining strength: the Greek and Hellenistic past was only a prefiguration of the Roman present. It is Rome that that had become the real Hellas.¹⁵² To present the canon as something quintessentially novel and unique in relation to the predecessors on which it depended, substantial work was needed.¹⁵³ This is, for instance, what Vergil’s Aeneid did. It is a brilliant strategy of cultural formation as the old and the new can only be considered as strengthening each other; the one has to be read in the light of the other. In this way, the Aeneid is presented not a successor to its Greek originals but rather as their Endoffenbarung.

From such a perspective, the 200 BCE threshold should also be explained in terms of a changed relationship between Self and Other: as the result of the impact of Globalisation, ‘a new man had now been born’. For their own century, the Enlightenment thinkers of the late 18th century called this person a “homo duplex”.¹⁵⁴ They used this term to indicate that, due to the opening of the world in their own era, man had become Self and Other simultaneously. Philosophers like Lessing regarded this “so wohl als auch” not as a dichotomy, but as a natural outcome of increasing connectivity. Although historical circumstances were very different, the period after 200 BCE might have seen a similar breakthrough in identity thinking. Roman canonisation, at least, shows the reliance, in terms of identity formation, on sources that stem from outside the Self. This is something that Remi Brague, when he talks about the cultural formation of post-Roman Europe, called Europe’s secondarity.¹⁵⁵ Apparently, Rome and Europe managed the tensions generated by their belatedness well, by specialising in canonisation and anchoring. We might speculate that such a strategy of including alterity is an important source of cultural innovation throughout world history in more general terms, as well.¹⁵⁶