Q: What do you do?
A: I’m a historian.
It can be a bit of a conversation killer. (For what it’s worth, I know from experience that, ‘I’m a numismatist’ is worse and ‘I’m a Byzantinist’ is instantly fatal except in very particular company.)
As a follow-up, ‘so, what’s your favourite time in history?’ isn’t a bad question. It is probably what I would try to do if somebody told me they were a painter (so, who's your favourite artist?) or a gardener (so, what’s your favourite plant?). It’s still a really difficult question to answer, though.
I research the first millennium CE, mainly in the East Mediterranean and Western Indian Ocean, and I think that is endlessly fascinating. I’m also aware that a series of fairly random chances got me there. Meeting one or two generous or interesting scholars, reading the right book at the right moment or choosing one class over another can all lead in one direction when something else might have been just as endlessly fascinating.
Added to that, specialisation means that I don’t really have the information to know whether, e.g. Mesoamerica c. 500-1400 CE or early industrial Germany or the Fatimid Caliphate would be just as cool and exciting as what I do. Probably, yes!
Perhaps it doesn’t have to be about whether one time is more interesting than another. A fairly common variant on the ‘what’s your favourite time’ question is ‘when would you most like to go back in time to?’. That doesn’t make for a very good answer either, though.
The first answer that comes to mind is ‘the East Mediterranean and Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium CE’ because that is where I have the most unanswered questions about. Of course I want to really know if it was like I say I think it was in my work. It is equally true, though, that if I studied some other time or place, I’d probably want to go there most to answer a whole different set of unanswered questions.
Beyond research, though, I don’t study history because I want to go back in time. Some people maybe do, but they are pretty rare. Knowing a time and a place well is a pretty good way to be clear about all of the reasons why you wouldn’t want to hang out there on some sort of trans-temporal holiday basis.
This isn’t about a progress narrative of things getting better all the time. Women’s freedoms, antibiotics (and medicine in general), communication technology: there are plenty of things which are pretty straightforwardly better, even if not perfect. There are things which have gotten worse (climate instability, global-scale environmental degradation, to name a couple).
Most things are harder to judge because what does better or worse even mean? More people today are suffering violence and food insecurity than at probably any other time in history, but then, many more people are alive right now than at any other single moment in history. Farming techniques have produced higher yields than for most other times in the past, but in some areas regional-specific land management is returning to methods centuries old because they turned out to be more sustainable and resilient.
For me at least, history isn’t about trying to figure out when or where was doing better than anywhere else. It is about understanding how people made sense of the same stuff we all have to make sense of: who are we, what choices do we have (and want to have), what can’t we change, how do we deal with life and what do we think happens afterwards? Ranking times in the past would be a bit like trying to put my friends in some sort of ‘quality friend’ league table: I don’t know where I would start or why I would try.
But, to follow that comparison a bit further, I definitely do have people I like being friends with, because of finding them fun and interesting. There are, likewise, definitely things like that in history: moments, times, places, things, that immediately just seem cool and interesting and exciting and happen to have come across.
Should you find yourself talking to somebody who tells you they are a historian, therefore, a better follow-up question might be ‘What is one of your favourite sources?’ That is like asking us to tell you all about one of our besties.
This is one of those…
This particular coin weighs 7.7g and is probably made of fairly pure gold (at least 80% pure and likely a lot higher). This specific example has not been tested, as far as I know, but other coins of the same ruler have been. It was minted in central India in the reign of Samudragupta I (reigned c. 330-370 CE), the second emperor of the Gupta Dynasty.
Coins of later Gupta emperors had lower gold purity, telling us something about changing economic circumstances over time. Thinking of Samudragupta, 7.7g of high-purity gold is fairly big. A coin like this was a statement, especially as no rulers in India had issued large gold coins for several centuries by this point. The large size (it is about 2cm across, which, for a coin, is pretty big, and gold is nice and soft so you can squash quite a lot of detail into it) also allowed the designers lots of space for elaborate imagery.
A coin like this would not have been in everyday use. For a farm labourer it would have been more than they could earn in probably a few years’ work. It would, however, have circulated among the court elites, in cities across the empire. In this way, it linked the wealthy and educated into a shared set of stories about what the Gupta Empire was, what it stood for and what it could accomplish. (You can also tell that it was not in everyday circulation because it isn’t scratched or worn or damaged. Again, gold is very soft, so they wear quite quickly.)
One of the things that coins like achieved was circulating the names of rulers in an age before most kinds of mass media. Curiously, though, although this does not directly mention Samudragupta’s name and he doesn’t even appear on it.
Instead, on one side (in numismatic terms, the reverse, or the ‘tails’ side) is a picture of his chief empress, standing on a lotus flower, suggesting that she (and by extension, he) were divine or semi-divine. There is actually an intentional ambiguity about whether this figure is the chief empress or the goddess Lakshmi. She holds a fly whisk in her hand, a traditional symbol of royal authority.
On the other side (the obverse, or ‘heads’ side) is a horse. Alas, this isn’t a terribly good story for the horse. The thing right in front of it is a ‘yupa’ or sacrificial post and the writing beside the empress/Lakshmi states that this is a depiction of the ‘Ashvamedha’ sacrifice.
This was a ritual described in literature that was already seen as ancient by the time of Samudragupta. The sacrifice, which Gupta sources tell us had not been performed for a long time, was all about land and power.
A horse was allowed to wander, followed by a huge procession of holy people and courtiers. Wherever it went, local rulers submitted to the emperor who had arranged the sacrifice, showing off the huge breadth of his realm. Finally, when the horse got back to the imperial capital, it was sacrificed.
The Ashvamedha coins of Samudragupta, of which there are only a small number, are widely considered to be very beautiful coins, and I wouldn’t disagree. Some of my other favourite sources are quite ugly things so beauty isn’t necessary, but it doesn’t hurt: looking at this coin, it is possible to get a glimpse of an artist at work and appreciate the feel for movement, scale and line, as well as thinking about what is shown and why. Most of all, though, what I find deeply exciting about this coin is the back-and-forth between reality and representation.
We cannot be absolutely certain that Samudragupta actually carried out an Ashvamedha sacrifice. In its full form, as described in epic literature (which was not meant to be totally realistic anyway), it would be almost impossible. It was unfeasibly huge in scale and cost. However, it seems reasonable to assume that he did something like it.
And the sorts of people who were probably present for that sacrifice were exactly the sort of (rich and powerful) people who would have had access to this coin. In fact, we might speculate that this coin was made either for, during or immediately after the Ashvamedha sacrifice, perhaps to be given out as a souvenir.
We can see a physical trace of an experience that was designed to be multi-dimensional and immersive: people would have seen, heard, smelled and tasted the ceremonies, perhaps walked some distance following the sacrificial horse, imprinting the memory of the event on them through physical effort. They would almost certainly have had the epic accounts of how ancient emperors used to perform this sacrifice read to them, or acted or danced or drawn or sculpted (or all of these!). Then they might have received a coin, designed to keep those memories alive but also to be part of the ceremony itself. Giving their followers wealth was one of the key duties of a good emperor.
In other words, we start to see, from one tiny fragment, how people built up political, religious and social identities and networks full of overlapping codes and subtle communications. (Lakshmi = the empress = Lakshmi, for example.)
We can begin to imagine how different sensory experiences might have made events memorable and impressive, so that the people who saw them might tell their own stories about them, perhaps using a coin like this as a prop, spreading the message further, across space and generations.
Those networks in turn made the Gupta Empire itself continue to exist and to affect people’s lives. The boundaries between reality and representation start to break down and we get a glimpse of how all societies are clumps of stories, shared and fought over and depicted and re-imagined.
For a moment, I can almost hear the drums and the hoofbeats of the Ashvamedha procession and when I open my eyes, the world today looks just a little bit different, as I look for the stories we tell about ourselves and the ways that doing things and holding things and talking about things spread and shape those stories.
The history that I studied most was Chinese history – that and the late Roman Republic (a high school Latin class taught me more of that than any history course). As you say, actually going back in time would be perilous and probably unpleasant, but in my imagination I suppose I'd like to visit Tang Dynasty China (well before the ruinous An Lu-shan Rebellion). I could visit the Song Dynasty, too, but that was when they invented bound feet for women; even as a male, I wouldn't want to see or experience that.
Byzantine? Have you read Guy Gavriel Kay's novel "Sailing to Sarantium"?