Dimitri Nakassis sees himself by nature and training as someone who challenges established truths.John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
History is a never-finished project, long-gone time in a constant flux of reassessment. If we are the sum of the past, then our identity and understanding depend on the restless innovations of people like Dimitri Nakassis.
Only there aren't a lot of people like the 40-year-old professor of classics at the University of Toronto – a fact made clear this week when this many-sided interpreter of Late Bronze Age Greece was one of 24 people awarded a $625,000 (U.S.) MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the so-called genius grant.
The MacArthur fellowship rewards original, creative thinking, and doesn't hesitate to spot those rare qualities in someone who tramps ancient landscapes and studies 3,000-year-old clay tablets for vivid details about where complex societies originate. Prof. Nakassis's great insight has been to challenge the dominant, Hollywood-friendly narrative of this far-off period – that it was a rigid, remote kind of culture controlled by despotic kings who have no connection to our 21st-century world beyond their action-film entertainment value.
"A lot of people understand modernity in opposition to antiquity and these early-state societies," he says. "But our understanding of who we are and what makes modernity distinct plays on a trope that simplifies and caricatures early states as these extremely hierarchical and rigid agrarian societies. I'm arguing that there are continuities with later Greek history."
What we know as democracy emerged in a recognizable form in the Athens of fifth century BC. But in the prehistoric world that Prof. Nakassis has analyzed – by patiently itemizing individual names in royal palace inventory records, inscribed in the difficult early Greek script known as Linear B – you can already glimpse a world that is more dynamic, decentralized and even entrepreneurial than its elitist reputation would have it.
Drawing on his skills as a linguist, historian, archeologist and economic theorist – coupled, perhaps, with his connection to the land of his Greek grandparents, where he spent vigorous childhood vacations – the Maryland-raised Prof. Nakassis has fleshed out a wider world of social organization where ordinary people have an identity and an independence previously denied to them.
"The royal palace as an economic and social entity, I argue, is built on the back of a whole lot of pre-existing economic activity that isn't directly controlled by the palace. So in the texts that I study, individuals described as smiths are allocated bronze by the palace and are responsible for returning finished goods – a kilo of arrowheads, say. But because the amounts that are allocated are so small, these guys are presumably already engaged in work for themselves and the community. The system isn't controlled by the palace, but there's a metallurgical industry in place that the palace can tap into."
This may sound like a small insight, but the new perspective changes everything: An old world and its fixed hierarchies can never look the same again. Individuals matter, on a huge scale.
Prof. Nakassis sees himself by nature and training as someone who challenges established truths. "That's the way I was brought up, not to accept things," he says. "Even if you decide that what you are questioning is actually correct, that intellectual process is valuable in its own right."
He aims to overturn the stereotype of classics as a static field of study, and, as a working archeologist co-directing a survey project in southern Greece, he can state confidently that "there's new stuff coming out of the ground all the time that is radically revising our thinking about the ancient world."
His ground-level archeological survey is essentially a highly attentive walking tour, Greek travel as an empirical science. He and his colleagues methodically walk the countryside trying to understand how the human experience of landscape changes over time, with the hope they can recreate the lives of the vast majority of people who remain invisible in the canonical texts.
It's a nitty-gritty, attention-to-detail sort of grind, especially in the hot Greek summer – hazards itemized on Prof. Nakassis's blog include twisted ankles, flea bites, severe cuts from hidden wire and sheer exhaustion. But as a restlessly innovative MacArthur fellow, he can't contain his excitement about the pleasures of applying intellect to the real world.
"The love of exploring is what attracts me. There's a constant process of interpreting and reinterpreting what you see on the ground. You think you know what's happening, that you've figured it out – and then you find something that makes you realize, 'I don't know what's happening.' And then you have to rethink it all."