Damnatio memoriae

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]

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 3000-2000 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 Hittite empire. Mursili III was a king of the Hittites for about seven years in 1282–1275 BC who was then overthrown by his uncle Hattusili III, who assumed the throne.

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.^[8] The Athenians frequently destroyed inscriptions which referred to individuals or events that they no longer wished to commemorate.^[9] After Timotheus was convicted of treason and removed from his post as general in 373 BC, all references to him as a general were deleted from the previous year's naval catalogue.^[10] The most complete example is their systematic removal of all references to the Antigonids from inscriptions in their city, in 200 BC when they were besieged by the Antigonid king Philip V of Macedon during the Second Macedonian War.^[11] One decree praising Demetrius Poliorcetes (Philip V's great-grandfather) was smashed and thrown down a well.^[12]

At Delphi, an honorific inscription erected between 337 and 327 BC for Aristotle and his nephew Callisthenes, two philosophers who were closely associated with the Macedonians, were smashed and thrown in a well after the death of Alexander of Macedon in 323 BC.^[12]

Ancient Rome

In ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae was the condemnation of emperors after their deaths. If the Senate or a later emperor did not like the acts of an emperor, they could have his property seized, his name erased and his statues reworked (normally defaced). Because there was an economic incentive to seize property and rework statues, historians and archaeologists have had difficulty determining when official damnatio memoriae actually took place, although it seems to have been quite rare.

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]

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 pagan beliefs and motifs with Christian, and purposefully not recording the pagan history, has been compared to damnatio memoriae as well.^[20]

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]

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 Soviet Union, retouching photos to remove individuals such as Leon Trotsky,^[22] Nikolay Yezhov,^[23] and even Stalin.^[24] After Stalin ordered the murder of Grigory Kulik's wife Kira Kulik-Simonich, all photographic records of her were destroyed; although she was described as very pretty, no photographs or other images of her survive.^[25] Following their fall from favour, Lavrentiy Beria and others were removed from articles in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.^[26] Following the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, many communist statues, particularly of Lenin and Stalin, were removed from former Soviet satellite states.^[27] Following a 2015 decision, a process of decommunization in Ukraine successfully dismantled all 1,320 statues of Lenin after its independence, as well as renaming roads and structures named under Soviet authority.^[28]

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 The Victory of Faith in order to erase Ernst Röhm is considered an act of Nazi damnatio memoriae.^[31] In the end, two copies survived: one preserved in London and one preserved by the Communist government of East Germany.^[32]

North Korea

In December 2013, Jang Song-thaek was abruptly accused of being a counter-revolutionary and was stripped of all his posts, expelled from the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), arrested and executed. His photos were removed from official media and his image digitally removed from photos with other North Korean leaders.^[33]

Spain

In Spain, and in particular since the promulgation of the so-called "Ley de Memoria Histórica" (Historical Memory Law), in 2007, an intense task of destroying memorials to those who fell in the Civil War, plaques, monuments, has been carried out, as long as they were of the called "Bando Nacional", or supporter of Franco.^[34]

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.^[35][36]

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.^[37] 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.^[37][38] Pointing out that damnatio memoriae did not erase people from history but in effect kept their memory alive,^[38] Beiner concluded that those who partake in the destruction of a monument should be considered agents of memory.^[39]

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).^[40]

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.^[41][42]

• 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.

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

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