The reign of Emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1720−48) ushered in a significant revival of Mughal courtly arts. Right at the centre of this vibrant milieu was the Emperor’s singing teacher and master of his atelier, Khushhal’s grandson Anjha Baras Khan. But posterity has forgotten him—it is his rivals Ni‘mat Khan “Sadarang” and Firoz Khan “Adarang” whom we remember as the greatest musicians of the eighteenth century. Why? As Delhi was repeatedly invaded and sacked 1739−61, Mughal court musicians scattered all over India, and had to seek new strategies to survive. What happened to Delhi’s musicians and their music is documented in a genre new to writing on music at this time: the tazkira (roughly, biographical collection). In this chapter I show that the proliferation of musicians’ biographies and genealogies were both a product of upheaval, dispersal, and enforced diversification; and a record of these things, particularly in anecdotes of rivalry.

The main subject of Chapter 2 is the motifs and the content of the Greeks’ myth-historical tales and songs. The Greeks’ past was very clearly structured: the main axis was the battle for Troy with the generations before and after. The more distant past led back to the origin of the world, gods, and men. On the other hand, the stories have led to the present day. Concepts of kinship, mediated by genealogies, played an essential role. This was connected with stories of migrations, colonisation, expulsions, and re-migrations. These narratives served as elements in order to structure the past, to constitute familiarity and difference, to explain relations of friendship or enmity, among the Greeks themselves and in relation to foreigners. We cannot see these stories of migration as evidence for older ‘historical’ events. But they reflect very clearly the dynamics of their time of origin, the time of the so-called Great Colonization. The identity-forming power of the Greek myth-history lay precisely in the fact that it re-located its own experiences into the past. What they had constructed themselves appeared to the Greeks as their past.

One of the primary goals of archaeology is to construct narratives of past human societies through the material evidence of their activities. Such narratives address how people led their lives and how they viewed and interacted with their world at different times in the past. However, the way archaeologists look at time is becoming increasingly disparate, fragmented and sometimes contradictory. While we now have more exact ways of dating past remains and deposits, and more sophisticated ways of examining how past humans may have engaged with their physical and social environments, there is some internal confusion as to the relative merits of alternative interpretations and evidence. In the research drive to determine a greater precision of dating and chronology, the effect that increased dating effort has on the accuracy of archaeological narratives has rarely been discussed. This chapter discusses the problems and opportunities for archaeological narratives in approaches to time.

This chapter breaks with the typical detachment of chroniclers of Russian politics from the social wavelengths that in so many ways defy conventional periodization. Stalin may have proclaimed a classless society, and inconvenient memories were “frozen” out of discourse, yet social distinctions continued to be cognitively programmed among future generations in families and in the realm of the professional, educational, and social institutions to which they were exposed. First, I discuss theorizing on historical memory. This helps us distinguish between articulated injunctions and situational staging on the one hand and unarticulated silences on the other, as expressed in choices, symbols, or artifacts. Next, I present survey results, which corroborate not only hypothesized covariance between educated estate ancestry and white-collar occupations but, intriguingly, awareness of the placement of respondents’ forbears in the imperial estate structure. In the remaining sections, I make sense of these patterns by discussing our protagonists’ journey of ancestral reconstruction; tapping into reminiscences of private spaces and public-oriented practices within them; exploring familial injunctions and artifacts that create mental cartographies and ties structuring exclusion and belonging; and, finally, discerning the descendants’ instrumentalizations of ancestry to actively delineate their place in post-communist Russian society.

This chapter first shows how the Timurid historiographical tradition survived into the early modern period. It then explores some of the formal conventional elements in a number of Persian histories. The chapter makes two overall points.First, the survival of conventional elements depends, to a very great extent, on whether or not a chronicler is modeling his history on an earlier work that contains a similar conventional element.Certain information appears in the sources due to established convention and because of the historiographical choices that the chronicler made. Second, such conventional elements appear in Persian chronicles across the Islamic empires.The specific historiographical elements that the chapter analyzes are benefits of history, bibliographies, genealogies, and dream narratives. The chapter demonstrates how the chroniclers, whether writing for the Ottomans, Safavids, or Mughals, tapped into a common earlier tradition, which they then modified and reshaped according to the political and dynastic expediencies of the time.

Late antique monasticism both participated in and disrupted familial networks of power in the Mediterranean world. The book concludes by arguing that Christian monasticism as an institution positioned itself as both rival and heir to the classical tradition of familia, challenging the ancient household’s position as the cornerstone of society’s political and economic apparatuses. Monasticism asceticized a key component of this institution – fatherhood –while maintaining that this anomaly – the celibate, ascetic father – was no innovation; the monastic father was but one node in a chain of fathers and sons stretching back into the biblical era and forward into eternity. Monasticism transformed traditions of paternity, inheritance, and genealogy. Focusing on the monastic federation of Shenoute in upper Egypt and the monastery of Cassian in Gaul, this chapter demonstrates how the coenobiumpositioned itself as a “house” or domus in late antique culture – an ancient institution that included home, household, property, and family, and required the financial, religious, disciplinary, and educational management of all of those moving parts.

This chapter looks at cultural expressions of dynastic consciousness. Some dynasties associated themselves with a particular saint, on occasion one drawn from their own family, as in the case of Wenceslas and the rulers of Bohemia or St Louis and the Capetians, and such family connections were publicly celebrated in images and writing. Murals and statues of forebears conveyed a message of dynastic continuity, and examples can be found from the Carolingian period down to the late Middle Ages, with notable cases being the forty-one statues of kings of France in the royal palace in Paris and the nineteen of the counts of Barcelona and kings of Aragon in the royal place in Barcelona. The development of heraldry in the twelfth century presented a new, public and visual, way of expressing dynastic identity, and royal families adopted them early. By the end of the Middle Ages, elaborate coats-of-arms conveyed elaborate genealogical information. Simultaneously, graphic family trees were devised and developed, with sophisticated illustration and layout. In late medieval England they often took the form of long parchment rolls, ideal for expressing descent through time. Bernard Gui’s Tree of the Lineage of the Kings of the French is analysed in detail.

Chapter 6 uses ANOC 12 as a case study for a kin group in the initial stages of its developmental cycle, showing that such groups seek to be represented with high-ranking ones in order to accrue status and improve their social position. Stelae can be used both to promote kin groups and to encourage networking with other groups, but they do so through modes of display that need to be decoded if they are to be used as a source of social analysis. One of those modes of display was the use of filiation formulae, which should not be seen as a reflection of genealogical relatedness, but rather as a tool for self-presentation.

Mechanisms of group formation are not clear for ancient Egypt, but sources indicate that groups were probably cognatic and recognition of relatives was bilateral, despite a clear patrilineal bias. Group formation, as in many other cognatic societies, was probably not limited to relatedness by descent, but it could have been based on operational criteria mediated by practice. In this manner, different and complementary groups could have existed throughout a person’s lifetime. In fact, there seems to be a combination of ego-centred and ancestor-centred groups in monumental sources.