Meyer’s concept of a universal history of antiquity was not actually new; new was the intensity with which he succeeded in uniting a broad synchronistic view with the most exact research into details, thus bringing the history of Egypt and the Near East (including Israelite and Jewish history) into the ancient historian’s range of vision. When Meyer died in 1930 it was clear to all scholars in his field that, because of the expanding wealth of material and because of the increasing specialization of research, no single historian would probably ever again be able to control so extensive a field of work.
The foundations of Meyer’s universal lifework were laid in his parents’ home and in school. The son of a scholarly preparatory-school teacher in Hamburg, he grew up in a cultivated atmosphere in which classical German poetry and ancient literature were central. At the age of twelve he wrote a tragedy in five acts: Brutus oder die Ermordung Cœsars; the play was inspired by Shakespeare, but its details were based on the author’s own study of sources (chiefly Plutarch). The Johanneum in Hamburg—a school designed to educate scholars and at that time a center of research on Thucydides—gave the highly gifted pupil a philological training that was at university level. In particular, the director of the Johanneum, Johannes Classen (1805-91), a student of Niebuhr, exerted a decisive influence on Meyer by making him familiar with Niebuhr’s style of viewing ancient history from the perspective of universal history. While still at school Meyer learned, along with Greek and Latin, Hebrew and the basics of Arabic.
In his first semester, at the age of seventeen, he had his eyes firmly fixed on the goal of his studies. The history of antiquity interested him not because it was to serve as a model for modern civilization nor because of its classicism, but because it was “the first epoch in the evolution of the human spirit” (Hoffmann, Calder-Demandt). He sought in antiquity answers to the fundamental anthropological questions that had been raised since Darwin, of the descent and primitive history of man and of the origin of language, religion, culture, and morality. The young Meyer was persuaded that he could use positivistic methods of research to illuminate an area that had hitherto lain in the semi-obscurity of religious or philosophical speculation. In conformity with his universalist anthropological approach, Meyer devoted himself during his university studies (one semester in Bonn, five semesters in Leipzig) almost exclusively to the ancient Orient as the earliest form of human civilization. With admirable tenacity and sense of purpose, he studied the most important oriental languages: Arabic, Persian, and Turkish with H. L. Fleischer (1801-88) and O. Loth (1844-81), Sanskrit with the Indo-Europeanist E. Kuhn (1846-1920), and Egyptian with G. Ebers (1837-98). He later added a knowledge of cuneiform inscriptions. In addition, he devoted himself—for the most part autodidactically—to studies in the history of languages and religions. The young student’s appraisal of religion as “the most interesting part of the history of illusions” is entirely in the tradition of the rationalistic criticism of religion. He attended Christian worship services “as a cultural study” and grew indignant at the “hypocrisy, mendacity, and immorality that religion brought into the human race” (Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum: 136 n. 10).
At the early age of twenty he received his doctorate with a thesis directed by Ebers, on the Egyptian god Set-Typhon. Next, as a tutor to the children of the British general consul in Constantinople, Sir Philip Francis (1740-1818), Meyer had the opportunity in 1875-1876 to become acquainted with the Orient by personal observation. In his long wanderings through the city and by means of his contacts with European diplomats Meyer investigated political, social, and religious conditions in the Ottoman Empire, which had been weakened by serious crises. Longer excursions took him also to the ancient sites in Asia Minor, to Bithynia and Troy. As the product of this personal observation, he published in 1877 the short treatise Geschichte von Troas, in which he took a critical attitude toward Schliemann’s (1822-90) hypotheses.
In 1879 Meyer habilitated in ancient history in Leipzig with a study on the history of Pontus, the foundations for which he had laid in a paper written while he was still a schoolboy. In the same year the twenty-four-year-old Privatdozent accepted a proposal from the publisher Cotta to write a Handbuch and textbook on ancient history. From now on, the Geschichte des Altertums (GdA) was his life’s work. The five volumes of the first edition appeared between 1884 and 1902; they covered an expanse of time from the earliest days of Egypt to Philip of Macedon. Meyer modeled the basic plan of his work on the universal-historical conception of A. H. L. Heeren (Handbuch der Geschichte der Stmten des Alterthums, 1799), but in the execution of the plan Meyer conformed to the source-critical standards that since Heeren’s time had become obligatory for the scholarly writing of history. Detailed chapters on sources and on chronology introduce each book of the history; political history stands in the foreground, but cultural, religious, and economic history is also dealt with. The most significant and generally acknowledged achievement of the GdA is that here the histories of the individual peoples are set free from their isolation and are integrated, on the basis of synchronistic treatment, into the totality of universal history. Thus the epochs of Menes and Hammurabi, of Moses, Homer, and Zoroaster, of Alexander the Great and the Roman empire all appear together as a necessary unity, and the unique characteristics of individual peoples, placed against a background of the universal tendencies and developments that influenced them all, can be portrayed with especial vividness.
Meyer’s work was criticized chiefly on points of specialized research, in which the state of knowledge was being rapidly expanded by new excavations and discoveries, and Meyer sometimes passed over such problems with excessive self-assurance. Meyer’s decided proclivity toward constructing analogies was also perceived as problematic by his contemporaries, as it is today. For example, to the Homeric and early archaic periods (ca. 1000-650 BCE) Meyer had attached the name “Greek Middle Ages” in order to denote a specific level of cultural development, and he described Athenian society in the Periclean Age in terms of modem categories and perspectives (“agrarians vs. capitalists”). In his justified attempt to free Greek history from the classicizing aestheticism of an Ernst Curtius (1814-96) and to reveal its true conditions, Meyer emphasized too greatly the “modernity” of antiquity. Finally, objections were raised against the form of the work. Meyer wrote in a dry style that mingled general description and specialized investigation. The “Handbuch" form of the GdA, its division into paragraphs, and the extended discussion in the text of detailed problems, rather than in the footnotes, aimed chiefly at an audience of specialists and lessened the work’s popularity among the general public. The judgment of Mommsen, who found the “Handbuch” form scarcely bearable in an historical work, is characteristic: “The narrare breaks down entirely in this book written capitulatim” (Mommsen und Wilamowitz, Briefwechsel 1872-1903, Berlin, 1935: 485-86).
In this same period further important works took shape in connection with the GdA—some as preliminary studies, some as supplements. The Geschichte des alten Ägyptens (1887) was a decisive advance in comparison with previous works, because it went beyond merely enumerating the deeds of particular pharaohs or listing cultural- historical facts and in addition furnished a lively picture of the different epochs of Egyptian history in their historical development.
Meyer’s study Die Entstehung des Judenthums (1896) caused a sensation. Here he maintained that the Persian decrees transmitted in Ezra 4-7 are largely genuine; he defended them against the hypercritical objections of contemporary Biblical scholarship and emphasized the decisive importance of Persian religious policies for the growth of postexilic Judaism. Meyer’s study brought on a sharp controversy with the grand old man of Protestant Biblical scholarship, Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), in Göttingen. The ostensible point of dispute was the criticism and use of sources, but more important were the two scholars’ differing approaches to the study of Jewish history. Whereas Wellhausen sought to understand the history of Israel and of Judaism from itself alone and stressed its internal development, Meyer strongly emphasized the external influences that were exerted on the Jewish people by the surrounding oriental nations. On the question of authenticity, scholarship has largely supported Meyer’s view (Parente, Calder-Demandt). The fragmentary decree of Darius II from the year 419 BCE, discovered among the Elephantine papyri ten years after Meyer’s investigation was published, in which the rite of the feast of unleavened bread is made binding on the whole Persian Empire, provided brilliant confirmation of Meyer’s main thesis (cf. DerPapyrusfund von Elephantine, 1912: 95).
Josef Markwart
