Politics & Power Quote by James H. Breasted

A rebuke dressed up as professional housekeeping, Breasted’s line is really a territorial claim: ancient Near Eastern history has finally entered the “disclosed” world of legitimate knowledge, and the people who should be stewarding it have been asleep at the switch. The phrasing is doing double work. “More recently disclosed” flatters the field with a whiff of discovery - as if the past is something modern scholarship has just switched on - while quietly indicting Europe and America for treating that switch like a novelty lamp rather than a civic responsibility.

The sting is in “no such sense of responsibility.” He doesn’t accuse historians of ignorance; he accuses them of negligence. That’s a sharper charge in the early 20th century, when universities, museums, and imperial administrations were vacuuming artifacts and inscriptions out of the region. Breasted is writing in a moment when excavation reports, museum collections, and new philological tools are exploding the available evidence, but the public narratives of “history” still orbit Greece and Rome. His complaint isn’t merely about missing chapters. It’s about an institutional refusal to rearrange the table of contents.

There’s also a telling asymmetry: “historians either in Europe or America” are the agents, the arbiters, the ones who can display “responsibility.” The Near East itself is rendered a “field,” newly opened, available for management. Breasted’s intent is reformist - push colleagues to take the material seriously - yet the subtext carries the era’s paternalism: responsibility is framed as a Western virtue, exercised over a past that the West has decided to reveal.