How do curious humans go about doing history when confronted with the absence of sources from the past they seek? The history of the ancient world as attempted in the modern West presents one of the most distinct, and perhaps extreme, examples of this scholarly problem. This roundtable brings together decorated experts on classicism, orientalism, and the study of deep antiquity in America, Europe, and the Arab world to gather and reflect on the “source scarcity” problem: the difficulty of accessing the ancient world from the vantage point of post-Enlightenment modernity.

The eastern edge of the ancient Mediterranean world provides one shared geographic focus for the panelists. Nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans strained to understand the strange and compelling peoples that occupied the Eastern Mediterranean region in antiquity: especially the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians. These populations appeared fleetingly in the historical record, produced texts in languages that were largely indecipherable, or were subject to large degrees of distortion by their better-understood enemies in antiquity—making them notoriously difficult to know. One group finds their existence disputed by modern historians entirely; the other, while solidly visible in the historical record, remains stuck in an information vacuum, even today. Yet, as the first two panelists will discuss, unknowable actors such as the Phoenicians and Carthaginians have come to bear large amounts of weight in the stitching of modern historical narratives. As hinge characters on the great stage of human history, they seem to become more compelling the less knowable they are.

The next two panelists will shift from discussing attempts to locate specific groups of people in antiquity to discussing the innovative methods that modern onlookers have used to study the deep past. Arabic-speaking writers in the early twentieth century drew on local discursive traditions to generate an image of the Middle East that was not a reservoir of artifacts but a place for the production of knowledge about the ancient world. Historians of an even more remote past—the Paleolithic era—have conducted almost impossible research (finding, perhaps, a role for intuition to fill severe gaps in the early historical record) that reveals an entirely new set of insights into the methods that the practice of deep history requires. This roundtable will provide an opportunity for the historians in attendance to dig deep into the questions that besiege us in our work: how do we make sense of the evidence that we have and the evidence that we do not have? How do we decide which stories to tell? And how do we decide how to tell them? The difficulty posed by the archives of antiquity is an issue well explored by ancient historians. In this panel, the source scarcity problem and the various attempts that scholars have made to find solutions for it will be examined in the context of modernity.