Damnatio memoriae

Damnatio memoriae (Latin pronunciation: [damˈnaː.ti.oː meˈmo.ri.ae̯]) is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. Depending on the extent, it can be a case of historical negationism. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing. The practice has been seen as early as the Egyptian New Kingdom period, where the Pharaohs Hatshepsut and Akhenaten were subject to it.

After Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of antiquity, the people of Ephesus banned the mention of his name. His name has since become an eponym for people who commit crimes for the purpose of gaining notoriety.

Etymology

Although the term damnatio memoriae is Latin, the phrase was not used by the ancient Romans, and first appeared in a thesis written in Germany in 1689.^[1]

Ancient world

Today's best known examples of damnatio memoriae from antiquity concern chiselling stone inscriptions or deliberately omitting certain information from them.

Ancient Mesopotamia

According to Stefan Zawadzki, the oldest known examples of such practices come from around 2000–3000 BC. He cites the example of Lagash (an ancient city-state founded by the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia), where preserved inscriptions concerning a conflict with another city-state, Umma, do not mention the ruler of Umma, but describe him as "the man of Umma", which Zawadzki sees as an example of deliberate degradation of the ruler of Umma to the role of an unworthy person whose name and position in history the rulers of Lagash did not want to record for posterity.^[2]

Ancient Egypt

Egyptians also practiced this,^[3] as seen in relics from pharaoh Akhenaten's tomb and elsewhere. Akhenaten's sole worship of the god Aten, instead of the traditional pantheon, was considered heretical. During his reign, Akhenaten endeavoured to have all references to the god Amun chipped away and removed.^[4] After his reign, temples to Aten were dismantled and the stones reused to create other temples. Images of Akhenaten had their faces chipped away, and images and references to Amun reappeared. The people blamed their misfortunes on Akhenaten's shift of worship to Atenism, away from the gods they served before him.^[5] Other Egyptian victims of this practice include the pharaohs that immediately succeeded Akhenaten, including Smenkhkare, Neferneferuaten, and Ay.^[3] The campaign of damnatio memoriae against Akhenaten and his successors was initiated by the latter's successor, Horemheb, who decided to erase from history all pharaohs associated with the unpopular Amarna Period; this process was continued by Horemheb's successors.^[6] Tutankhamun was also erased from history in this way even though he had restored Egypt to the Amun god because he was simply one the kings who succeeded Akhenaten and he was likely Akhenaten's own son.

Ancient Hittites

One case of damnatio memoriae is known for the ancient

There is a well known relief of Mursili's father Muwatalli II near the village of Sirkeli Höyük in Turkey,, as well as a second, very similar relief that is believed to be that of his son Mursili. It was largely destroyed in antiquity, most likely by his spiteful uncle. The relief of the father was left untouched.

Ancient Greece

The practice was known in Ancient Greece.

Compounding this difficulty is the fact that a completely successful damnatio memoriae results—by definition—in the full and total erasure of the subject from the historical record. In the case of figures such as emperors or consuls it is unlikely that complete success was possible, as even comprehensive obliteration of the person's existence and actions in records and the like would continue to be historically visible without extensive reworking. The impracticality of such a cover-up could be vast—in the case of Emperor Geta, for example, coins bearing his effigy proved difficult to entirely remove from circulation for several years, even though the mere mention of his name was punishable by death.^[13]

Difficulties in implementation also arose if there was not full and enduring agreement with the punishment, such as when the Senate's condemnation of Nero was implemented—leading to attacks on many of his statues^[14]—but subsequently evaded with the enormous funeral he was given by Vitellius. Similarly, it was often difficult to prevent later historians from "resurrecting" the memory of the sanctioned person.

The impossibility of actually erasing memory of an emperor have led scholars to conclude that this was not actually the goal of damnatio. Instead, they understand damnatio:

not so much as an attempt to obliterate memory entirely as to transform honorific commemoration into a form of visible denigration. That is: the power of an act of damnatio relies, at least in part, on the viewer of a monument being able to supplement the gaps in an inscription with their own knowledge of what those gaps had once contained, and the reasons why the text had been removed

— Polly Low, "Remembering, Forgetting, and Rewriting the Past"^[15]

These emperors are known to have been erased from monuments:^[16]

Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, heresiarchs could have their memory condemned. The Council of Constance decreed the damnatio memoriae of John Wycliffe.^[19]

The practice of replacing

In her book Medici Women - Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal, Gabrielle Langdon also presents compelling evidence concerning a probable damnatio memoriae issued against Isabella de' Medici, a prominent female figure of the 16th century Renaissance Medici court.^[21]

Similar practices in modern times

Alexander Malchenko, an early socialist revolutionary, removed due to his support of J. Martov

Nikolai Yezhov removed after his 1940 execution.

While complete damnatio memoriae has not been attempted in modern times—naming or writing about a person fallen from favour has never been made subject to formal punishment—less total instances of damnatio memoriae in modern times include numerous examples from the

The graphic designer David King had a strong interest in Soviet art and design, and amassed a collection of over 250,000 images. His most striking examples of before-and-after alterations were published as The Commissar Vanishes.

Poland

19th century Polish writers often omitted mentioning two kings from the list of Polish monarchs, Bezprym and Wenceslaus III of Bohemia, which has resulted in their being omitted from many later works as well.^[29]

China

The treatment of Chinese politician Zhao Ziyang following his fall from grace inside the Chinese Communist Party is regarded as another modern case of damnatio memoriae.^[30]

Germany

The destruction of all copies of

North Korea

In December 2013,

digitally removed from photos with other North Korean leaders.^[33]

Analysis

The term is used in modern scholarship to cover a wide array of official and unofficial sanctions through which the physical remnants and memories of a deceased individual are destroyed.[34]^[35]

Looking at cases of damnatio memoriae in modern Irish history, Guy Beiner has argued that iconoclastic vandalism only makes martyrs of the "dishonored", thus ensuring that they will be remembered for all time.^[36] Nonetheless, Beiner goes on to argue that the purpose of damnatio memoriae—rather than being to erase people from history—was to guarantee only negative memories of those who were so dishonored.^[36][37] Pointing out that damnatio memoriae did not erase people from history but in effect kept their memory alive,^[37] Beiner concluded that those who partake in the destruction of a monument should be considered agents of memory.^[38]

Author Charles Hedrick proposes that a distinction be made between damnatio memoriae (the condemnation of a deceased person) and abolitio memoriae (the actual erasure of another from historical texts).^[39]

In case of removal of Soviet monuments in Eastern Europe, the primary reason was that they were established as a symbol of occupation, domination or cult of personality, rather than simple historic mark. It has been pointed out that all Nazi-established monuments and street names have been removed after World War II which has been perceived as natural reaction after liberation at that time.^[40][41]

See also

• Alan Smithee, pseudonym used by film directors who disown a project
• Anathema
• Cancel culture
• Censorship in Italy
• Censorship in North Korea
• Censorship of images in the Soviet Union
• Crisis of the Roman Republic
• Denazification/De-Ba'athification/Decommunization/De-Stalinization
• Historical negationism
• Iconoclasm
• Execration texts
• Forced disappearance
• List of condemned Roman emperors
• List of tombs of antipopes
• Mass shooting contagion#"Don't Name Them" Campaign
• Memoricide
• Memory hole
• Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell's novel: the 'writing out' of historical figures by a Stalinist regime
• Nonperson
• Persona non grata
• Proscription
• Shunning
• Slighting
• Yimakh shemo, an equivalent concept in Judaism

References

1. ISBN 978-0-19-255827-5
   .
2. ISBN 978-83-61336-45-7
   .
3. ^
   ISSN 1874-1665
   .
4. ^ Jarus, Owen (July 24, 2014). "Egyptian Carving Defaced by King Tut's Possible Father Discovered". Live Science. Retrieved January 6, 2021.
5. ISBN 978-0-691-03567-3
   .
6. ISBN 978-0-429-78398-2
   .
7. ISBN 9783868352511
   , retrieved June 17, 2022
8. S2CID 234432435
   .
9. ^ Low 2020, pp. 239–243.
10. ^ Low 2020, p. 246.
11. ISBN 9789609929707
    .
12. ^ ^{a b} Low 2020, p. 240.
13. ^ "Geta: The One Who Died". Archived from the original on December 3, 2010.
14. doi:10.11141/ia.32.5
    .
15. ^ Low 2020, p. 245.
16. Cambridge UP
    . p. 232.
17. ^
    S2CID 244835165
    , retrieved September 4, 2022
18. ISSN 2281-1400
    .
19. ^ "Article". riviste.unimi.it. Retrieved May 31, 2020.
20. ISBN 978-83-03-02015-4
    .
21. ISBN 978-0-8020-9526-8
    .
22. ISBN 978-1-78320-744-2
    .
23. ^ The Newseum (September 1, 1999). ""The Commissar Vanishes" in The Vanishing Commissar". Archived from the original on February 8, 2007. Retrieved September 30, 2012.
24. ISBN 978-1-4985-0726-4
    .
25. ISBN 9780578680590
    .
26. ISBN 978-90-04-37943-5
    .
27. ISBN 978-0-226-56953-6
    .
28. ^ Wilford, Greg (August 20, 2017). "Ukraine has removed all 1,320 statues of Lenin". The Independent. Retrieved October 8, 2020.
29. ISSN 0948-8294
    .
30. ^ Gerard, Bonnie. "Damnatio Memoriae in China: Zhao Ziyang Is Laid to Rest". thediplomat.com. The Diplomat. Retrieved November 15, 2019.
31. ^ Jorge Álvarez (November 19, 2019). ""La victoria de la fe", el documental propagandístico del nazismo que Hitler mandó destruir". La Brújula Verde (in Spanish). Retrieved December 17, 2021. se aplicó una damnatio memoriae sobre el fallecido mandatario y, dado que salía en bastantes escenas de La victoria de la fe, se ordenó la destrucción de todas las copias existentes
32. ISBN 978-1-4668-2164-4
    . Retrieved April 12, 2020.
33. ^ "Der retuschierte Onkel". Der Spiegel. Hamburg. December 10, 2013. Retrieved December 10, 2013.
34. ^ Varner, Eric R. (2004). Monumenta Graeca et Romana: Mutilation and transformation: damnatio memoriae and Roman imperial portraiture. BRILL. p. 2.
35. ^ Friedland, Elise A.; Sobocinski, Melanie Grunow; Gazda, Elaine K. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture. Oxford. p. 669.
36. ^
    ISBN 978-0198749356
    .
37. ^
    ISBN 978-0-299-21824-9
    .
38. S2CID 240526743
    .
39. ISBN 978-0292718739. Archived from the original
    on June 11, 2022. Retrieved February 20, 2021.
40. ^ Andrejevs, Dmitrijs (August 17, 2022). "Ukraine war prompts Baltic states to remove Soviet memorials". The Conversation. Retrieved September 6, 2023.
41. ^ "Should Soviet monuments be dismantled or preserved? – DW – 07/09/2023". dw.com. Retrieved September 6, 2023.

Bibliography

• Low, Polly (2020). "Remembering, Forgetting, and Rewriting the Past: Athenian Inscriptions and Collective Memory". In Constantakopoulou, C.; Fragoulaki, M. (eds.). Shaping Memory in Ancient Greece: Poetry, Historiography, and Epigraphy (PDF). Histos Supplements. pp. 235–68. Retrieved January 13, 2023.

External links

• Media related to Damnatio memoriae at Wikimedia Commons
• Damnatio memoriae at Livius.org

Listen to this article (15 minutes)

Audio help · More spoken articles

)