Undergrads learn human relations from the ancients

The undergraduate students in Nick Cahill’s seminar on ancient Greece and his freshman survey of ancient and medieval art have received a rare glimpse into day-to-day life in the ancient and medieval world.

They also are getting a primer on human relations.

Cahill, an in the Department of Art History, is an ardent advocate of “organic” archeology, which assumes that people lived, then as now, in a variety of ways.

“Look at us — we don’t all live in the same style or size of house. Neither did the ancients. There is no archetypal ancient Greek house,” he says.

Cahill has honed his approach over 20 years at the figurative feet of the ancients. Spending the academic year at the Madison campus, he summers in Turkey, at the ancient site of Sardis. There, he is part of an international team of 25 to 30 professional archaeologists, architects, photographers and drafting specialists, and conservators. The ruins of Sardis warrant this sustained attention because they are so historically significant, as one of the rare archaeological locations in the world captured at a precise and verifiable moment in its history. As the capital of an empire which ruled over much of Anatolia in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., Sardis incorporated both Greek and Anatolian cities. To the Greeks, it was the closest and most familiar of the great empires of the Near East, and served as a touchstone against which they could define their own Greek cultural identity. The Lydian empire fell in 547 B.C., when its last king, Croesus, was conquered by Cyrus of Persia. The sack of Sardis in 547 left parts of the area remarkably well preserved, with its fortification wall standing 25 feet high and with dishes, food and household equipment preserved on the floors of the houses.

“One thing that has really been interesting is the absence of Persian artifacts in Sardis,” Cahill says, adding that this very lack might offer the first ancient key to peaceful co-existence.

“The Persians were quite adept at leaving in place customs and practices that worked well in the lands they conquered,” Cahill says. “Letters from the Persian kings clearly show that they respected local customs. King Darius, for example, went out of his way to protect a local sanctuary — it wasn’t even his own religion. He certainly realized that not everyone had to do everything the way he did.”

However, the human psyche often prefers my-way-or-the-highway. Cahill observes that this rigid position even infiltrates scholarship itself.

“Modern critics frequently approach ancient art from a contemporary perspective, but we have to remember that art functioned very differently in the ancient world. We want to see a single, simple ‘norm’ of what art, and life itself, was like at a given moment of time. But the ancient world was incredibly diverse, culturally and economically, and any attempt to simplify this is misguided at best,” he says.

Cahill currently is exploring the notion of organic archaeology in his forthcoming book, “Settled in an Orderly Fashion,” (2001, Yale University Press). He’s been using computer analysis to recreate entire neighborhoods at another ancient city, Olynthus in northern Greece, which was also destroyed, leaving its houses more or less intact. The book presents a domestic and economic analysis of the site and its inhabitants, exploring the variety of lifeways and choices made in ancient Greek households.

Similarly, Cahill also encourages his students to transport themselves to other eras, radically different places and seemingly odd ways of viewing the world and its residents, all with an eye toward applying what they’ve learned to their own lives.

“I love to take my students to the Elvehjem Museum, where they can actually see the objects we discuss in class,” he says. “It’s entirely different than looking at a slide of a piece of pottery. When you see the object, it’s easier to put yourself into that time and place. You have a first-hand idea of what the piece was made from, how it was put together, what it was used for, whether it was repaired and how repairs may have been done, and which areas of the piece are worn from use. When you go home and pick up your own cup, you might be able to envision what it must have been like to live in ancient Greece.”

Cahill says a point that usually emerges quickly in his classes is that ancient people were every bit as psychologically complex and sophisticated as people today.

“Modern people often like to think of ancients as ‘primitive,’ but that’s far from true,” he says.

Despite his immersion in the ancient world, Cahill says he never wishes he had been born then instead of now: “All you have to do is read a very small part of an ancient medical book,” he says. “It really makes you grateful for the advances we’ve made in certain areas.”