Moving Back in Memory Studies

First published in German in 1992 (by Beck in Munich), Jan Assmann’s Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen has now been translated into English from a 2007 German revision of the original edition. The jacket blurbs hail it as ‘an absolute classic’, ‘a genuine tour-de-force’ that ‘will surely transform discourse in Anglophone scholarship’. There is no doubting the first two judgements, but the last is unlikely to happen because the comparative, phenomenological and structuralist analysis that Assmann employed in this early study of cultural memory has already occupied Anglophone scholarship in comparative religion and anthropological histories for more than three decades. If there were an English series of ‘Classic Studies in the Social Sciences’, Assmann’s book would surely have an honoured place. Reading it now, I have a strong sensation of moving backwards in time, a reaction reinforced by the failure to update the bibliography to any significant degree since the 1992 German edition, except for additional works by Jan Assmann and/or his wife and co-author, Aleida.

Assmann is best known in North America and Britain as a deeply thoughtful historian of ancient Egypt and ancient Israel. His first English publications were all on Egyptian religious cultures and the development of monotheism, beginning with The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca NY, 1991, published in German in 1984). Then came books such as Moses the Egyptian (Cambridge MA, 1997, written in English) and The Mind of Egypt (New York, 2003, published in German in 1996). Additional studies of poly- and monotheism have appeared in English more recently: Of God and Gods (Madison, 2008) and The Price of Monotheism (Stanford, 2010). He has always, and commendably, used his command of ancient societies to comment on current academic interests, such as cultural memory and forgetting, the controversial ideas (especially that Moses was not Jewish but Egyptian) in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, and the national traumas and schisms that have played such major roles in the public lives both of Germany and of Israel.

Cultural Memory and Early Civilization consists of three long chapters of theory (‘Memory Culture’, ‘Written Culture’, and ‘Cultural Identity and Political Imagination’) and a set of ‘Case Studies’ in which Assmann examines the role of writing and books as cultural and mythographic implements primarily in two ancient cultures, Late Period Egypt (under the Ptolemies) and Deuteronomic (post-Exile) Israel. These studies are, to my mind, the ‘best wines’ of the present book, appropriately served last.

One may question, as I do, the sharp opposition Assmann draws between orality and writing and still learn much from his discussions of the cultural singularity of writing in ancient Egypt and Israel. The division is simply not so strong in later cultures, including the later Greco-Roman and medieval ones. Assmann argues that rupture, trauma, and schism are the essential conditions of memory-making: ‘The past ... arises out of a break in the flow of time and out of the attempt to bridge the gap’ (p. 83) through various forms, including writing. Written texts, he says, ‘objectify’ and thus make possible the sense that the past is fully gone, that a codified difference exists between past and present, then and now. His case studies focus on how three very different ancient cultures dealt with such codified pasts when traumas arose – Egypt, Israel, and Greece.

Egypt for him is the exceptional case, for ancient Egyptian culture finally came to an end, whereas both Jewish and Greek cultures have continued in recognizable manner into the present day. The reason, Assmann asserts, lies in the extremely conservative social principles behind hieroglyphic writing and the encyclopedic cultural ambitions of Late Period temples of the Ptolemaic age. The temple’s ‘sole function was to provide a visible and permanent link’ between the state, its people, and the gods (p. 150). Its monumentality is invariant, and thus permanent: the temple is ‘built architectural memory’, a phrase Assmann uses...