1.1 On the possibilities for a deep history of humankind

In the mid-nineteenth century, as the great French historian Victor Duruy sat down to revise the general history of the world text used in French schools, he found himself facing a question few historians since antiquity had had to contemplate: when should history begin? “Scarcely twenty or thirty years ago,” he wrote, “unexpected discoveries have forced us to break all the old systems of chronology.” Victor Duruy, Abrégé d’histoire universelle, comprenant la révision des grandes époques de l’histoire depuis les origines jusqu’à 1848 , nouvelle édition (Paris: Hachette, 1873), 3: “Il y a vingt ou trente années seulement que des découvertes inattendues ont forcé de briser tous les vieux systèmes de chronologie.” He was alluding to the time revolution that began in 1859, when the short Biblical chronology, over the space of a decade or so, was abandoned as a geological truth. Important studies of the time revolution include Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (New York: Harper Row, 1965); Claude Albritton, The Abyss of Time: Changing Conceptions of the Earth's Antiquity after the Sixteenth Century (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, 1980); Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico , trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Thomas R. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. 32-35 and 205-30. To the new geology was joined the new archaeology, an approach to the past that challenged the very framework of history’s chronology. “A science born yesterday,” Duruy wrote, “has pushed the birth of humanity back to an age where the measure of time is no longer given by means of a few generations of men, as it is today, but instead by hundreds of centuries.” Duruy, Abrégé , 4: “Cette science née d’hier a donc reculé la naissance de l’humanité vers une époque où la mesure du temps n’est plus, comme de nos jours, donnée par quelques générations d’hommes, mais où il faut compter par des centaines de siècles.” His predecessors had all written in the comfortable certainty that human history was as old as the earth, and that both began in a moment of creation in 4004 B.C. Not twenty years earlier, Duruy himself had published a new edition of a sacred history according to the Bible. Victor Duruy, Histoire sainte d’après la Bible , 2 ^nd ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1856). When he took up the task of revising world history for the French curriculum, he was one of the first historians to stand on the precipice of time, contemplating, in his own words, “an obscure and terrifying antiquity.” Duruy, Abrégé , 4: “une vague et effrayante antiquité.” The question of how French historians responded to the challenge of deep time has been little studied, to my knowledge. For the situation in the United States and England, see Daniel A. Segal, “Western Civ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 770-805, and Doris Goldstein, “Confronting Time: The Oxford School of History and the Non-Darwinian Revolution,” Storia della Storiografia 45 (2004): 3-27.