One of the first questions anyone asks about past societies is, ‘how many people were there?’ It is one of those basic bits of information and generally speaking those of us who teach these societies are usually prepared with an estimate to answer the question. But what we often don’t talk about is how we come to those estimates or how reliable they are and that can lead to an excessive amount of confidence in estimates that are often deeply uncertain – especially when those estimates get used by other disciplines and scholars who seem unaware or uncaring as to how thin their evidentiary support is.
So this week, we’re going to look at how we go about answering this question, which is to say the various methods we can use to get a sense of ancient population figures, along with their drawbacks. I am, of course, going to be particularly drawing on methods used for the ancient Mediterranean, because that’s what I know best. So we’re going to look at some of the evidence which sits behind things like those neat little block graphs I’ve used in the past.
But I can lead with the upshot here: despite the apparent confidence of works purporting to present historical populations over broad periods, we really don’t know the population of most of these places at most of these times. In particular, venerable books like the McEvedy and Jones, Atlas of World Population History(1978) are mostly built on sand1 and yet they in turn get used as the foundation for all sorts of social science work by social scientists who assume the confident conclusions presented in these sorts of books are, you know, confident and who lack the area-specific skillset to assess them.2
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Population Figures in the Sources
Understandably just about the first place anyone starts with this question is to check and see if the sources just tell you how many people there are.
Immediately, however, we have to divide these kinds of reports into two categories, divided by a very basic question, “did they actually count?” That is to say, is this population figure the clear product of an effort to conduct some kind of a census (and thus perhaps reliable) or is it a blind-guess figure or worse yet a symbolic figure, a number chosen to mean “a lot” or “not many.” That last possibility, figures chosen for their symbolic importance, may seem strange, but it is remarkably common in ancient literature. If that seems strange, well, think of how often in regular speech people describe something big as ‘a ton’ or ‘a million’ not to mean an exact figure, but just ‘a lot.’ Our sources often use stock numbers (like a ‘myriad’ which is notionally 10,000) to mean ‘a lot.’
The gold standard for reported figures is, of course, the Roman census. In that case, we know that the Romans did in fact count and that our authors reporting those figures are doing so with access to the official records. Moreover, we know that the documents produced didn’t just render a number, but rather a list of citizen-households, with their members, age and property, which makes an accurate count more likely; that relative accuracy was a product of the census being essential to the conduct of Roman taxation in Italy (before 167 when tributum ended in Italy) and Roman conscription. So while those census figures aren’t perfect (historians in particular debate what percentage of the population might have been missed), they’re pretty damn good.
Of course that immediately just moves the debate from the veracity of the count to the question of what is being counted. The bulk of our key census reports are delivered by Polybius, Livy and Augustus himself (in the Res Gestae), covering different years. Livy and Polybius are generally relatively clear about who is being counted. Livy’s standard formula is censa sunt capita civium tot, ‘so many heads of citizens were counted’ (implying, neatly, that he is including poor citizens, the capite censi, ‘those counted by their heads’), while Polybius’ figure for 225 is a military one, composed of men of military age liable for conscription, citizen and non. What becomes tricky is the Augustan figures. The bulk of scholars generally assume that Augustus deviated from the practice of the Republic of only reporting the total count of men and has counted women and children as well as men, because that produces a population growth curve which makes the most sense and follows archaeological settlement data; this is called the ‘low count.’3 Arguing that Augustus has kept to the old practices would produce a total population would produce a population in Italy under Augustus more than double that generally accepted by scholars.4 And then finally there is a ‘middle’ count, which assumes that what is actually being counted were individuals who are sui iuris (legally independent), which after a few twists and turns, produces a figure only modestly higher than the ‘low count.’5
All of which is to say that even when we have an official census we generally figure is quite reliable and which has been faithfully transmitted to us, there is ample ground for uncertainty and confusion, though I must note that I think the debate about the population of Roman Italy has largely settled and the standard range of 4-5 million free persons (note that none of these figures include enslaved persons!) in peninsular Italy (to include Cisalpine Gaul) during the republic, rising to c. 6m by the early empire, is fairly secure.
The moment we move beyond Roman census data for Italy (while the Romans did conduct census (the Latin plural of census is census) in the provinces, the figures from these do not survive) reported population statistics get terribly murky, terribly quickly. These figures are often presented without any sense of how they were reached and frequently seem implausible if not impossible when assessed by the other methods we’re going to discuss here.
So for instance, Diodorus (1.31.6-8) says 7 million people lived in Egypt (first cent. BC); Josephus (BJ 2.385) says it was 7.5 million, excluding Alexandria (first cent. AD), that point about Alexandria’s exclusion being important because it was a massive city that would likely add at least a couple hundred thousand more people. Those figures seem possible, but more than a bit high and scholars have tended to discount them,6 with a range of estimates from the Ptolemaic period to the Roman one clustering between 4 and 7 million.
On the more absurd end we have some city population figures. Strabo (17.3.15) reports that before the Third Punic War ‘seventy myriads’ (700,000) people lived in the city of Carthage, a figure so high few scholars would accept an estimate even half of that.7 Carthage was a big city, to be sure, but 700,000 at that early date would have been absolutely massive for the western Mediterranean; Rome itself would only get that large in the late first century.
And then there is the hot mess that is the sources on Athens. You might imagine that the best attested polis in the whole of the ancient world would have some reliable population figures, but what we have is messy. Thucydides (2.13) gives an overview of Athens’ military strength; the difficulties with that approach are discussed below. Meanwhile, Athenaeus (6 272cd) quotes a census reported by another source (Ctesicles) taken by another figure (Demetrius of Phaleron) in the late fourth century which reported 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics and 400,000 slaves. The problem with that is of course that while the first two figures may be reasonably plausible (c. 20-30,000 citizen males is generally what we suppose), the last is not – it would make Attica (the territory of Athens) the most densely populated human terrain in the pre-modern Mediterranean or quite possibly anywhere, which it very clearly was not. Alain Bresson concludes the figure is metaphorical and he is, I think, clearly right.8
As you can see, once we get past the Roman census figures with their uncommon reliability, the evidence gets remarkably poor, remarkably quickly. The figures we are given in particular tend to be too high, sometimes ‘plausible, but on the high end’ but frequently absurdly high. Of course the consequence of that is that, notwithstanding the odd Roman exception, nearly all of the ancient population figures we have are doubtful, at the very least to the degree that they would require some kind of external confirmation before becoming useful, where they are not wholly useless in assessing population (though, of course, still useful in assessing the perception of population).
So if ancient reported populations mostly can’t help, how do we go about estimating, even in a very general, error-prone sort of way, how many people lived in a given place?
Counting My Army Men
The first recourse is to look for another sort of population-related figure out sources might report which would be reliable, and here the recourse is to reported army sizes. While ancient sources rarely report total population figures and even rarer still would be likely to actually know, they report the size of armies very frequently, as war is one of those activities which deeply interests our aristocratic ancient writers. This was the core approach of Julius Beloch in Die Bevölkerung Der Griechisch-Roemischen Welt (1886) for the Greek poleis, attempting to derive the number of people from the number of hoplites each polis deployed in its largest deployment, assuming that this figure would basically match the size of the adult male citizen body with minor adjustments and that the rest of the population could be computed from there. And subsequent efforts to compute the population of classical Greece have often offered some significant deference to Beloch’s figures (often, I’d argue, excessive deference, to the point of not fully following through on the conclusions their own approach implied).
But you may already be coming up with the considerable problems with this approach and there are many. Of course at the get go one must question if the reported sizes of these armies are reliable. For many periods and places, that would be an insurmountable objection, but we have good reason to suppose this was tracked by Greek poleis (Athens, at least, did keep a registry of citizen males): accurate figures were both possible and desirable. And for the most part, the figures we get for the size of hoplite polis armies are not unreasonable, so we generally assume they are more or less accurate.
The next problem is more critical: this assumes that the great majority of the citizen body is in the hoplite class – that is, that there are very few people in this society who are free citizens, but too poor to serve in the army. Except this is a substantial assumption. Hoplite equipment in Italy was associated not merely with landed farmers, but with a relative elite – in the Servian Constitution (itself an anachronistic creation of our sources and in Italy, but bear with me) only the First Class of the Roman infantry were expected to serve as hoplites (Livy 1.43; Dionysius Ant. Rom. 4.16) out of five classes of infantry. The one polis we can see most clearly – Athens – seems to have a pretty significant sub-hoplite class given the economic role that jury pay and enrollment in the fleet and the political importance of their enfranchisement (and our sources apparent assumption that, once enfranchised, they – as a class – dominated the assembly). Beloch’s assumption is that Athens is unusual in this regard – and that’s not an entirely insane supposition – and that the ‘typical’ polis would have consisted almost entirely of freeholding farmers – a far more courageous assumption.
Immediately following on that problem is the simple fact that militarization rates are highly variable: that is, looking more broadly at pre-modern societies, some put a very high proportion of their military-aged males in service and some do not. Michael Taylor’s work on the manpower deployments of the second century Mediterranean great powers (in Soldiers & Silver (2020)) demonstrates very clearly how untethered ‘manpower effective’ – that is, the actual number of troops deployed – can be from total population sizes. To make this problem worse, the one ancient society where we can see this dynamic clearly is also very clearly the most unusual: Rome. Rome’s militarization rates are extremely and deeply unusually high (how this is possible forms the core question of my book project). Assuming, as Beloch does, that other ancient city-states must behave rather like Rome and thus have mobilizations which include all or nearly all of their military-aged citizen males, seems unwise.
Attempting to use this method beyond relatively small city-states and instead trying to apply it to large empires thus runs into immediately insurmountable problems, because the ‘men not counted’ (that is, free males not serving in the military) suddenly surge from being a possibly significant minority of the population to a massive super-majority of the population. The Seleucid Empire, to take one example, seems to have had a maximum military capacity around 80,000 men; being generous we can assume maybe another 20,000 in garrison duty (though in practice, many of these garrisons seem thinned out for major military activity, so we’re at risk of double-counting here), giving us perhaps 100,000 troops total, out of an empire that may have numbered anywhere from 10-20 million – so roughly 2.5-5m military aged males; the effective military manpower is anywhere from 4-8% of the free, adult male population. In contrast the figure for the contemporary Roman Republic that, in a single year approaches 25% and for Roman citizens over the first four years of the Second Punic War seems to have been above 70%; the possibility for variation here is enormous – so much depends on where on that sliding scale from 4% to 25% you think the society you are looking at is.
All of which intensifies the core problem of counting the uncounted in these figures. Figures of these sorts aren’t counting women, children or the very elderly, so even if they did scoop up every single military-aged male, we’d expect them to miss about three-quarters of the population (pre-modern societies are very child-heavy to make up for very high infant and child-mortality, so at any given time, probably close to half of these societies are under military age). And then we have the problems of non-citizens (do they serve? are they counted?) and the non-free (that is, enslaved persons) who are almost invariably not counted and do not serve in the military.
In the case of the Roman figures, the actual census figures put us on a firm enough basis to pin down a reasonably range for these other figures: poor-but-free persons are captured in the census numbers (particularly in Polybius’ figures for 225 which include the socii) and with a relatively complete grasp of the free population we can look to the other methods we’re about to discuss (urban density, arable land) to get a good sense of how much ‘space’ is available for the enslaved population and thus very roughly its size (an assumption we can then test against the sources to see if it is plausible). But the smaller and smaller one makes the counted population and the less clear its boundaries become, the more the question-marks overwhelm the information you have.
And so, for basically any place that isn’t Roman Italy, the question-marks do overwhelm the information, leading to the search for alternative approaches.
Arable Land, Urban Spaces and Agricultural Modeling
Most of these alternative approaches are focused on trying to take the sort of evidence we can glean and then trying to use that to model or compute the population from them. The most basic of these is the carrying capacity study: how many people, at a reasonable rate of agricultural fertility, could the land support? The problem of course is that just because a population could exist doesn’t mean that it did exist; few pre-modern populations actually approached the true maximum carrying capacity of their regions. As we talked about with agriculture, these sorts of societies often end up ‘stuck’ at a ‘low equilibrium’ for extended periods and reaching agricultural carrying capacity would require pushing up to a ‘high equilibrium’ and staying there for some time as marginal land was cleared and brought into production to account for the rising population.
The more sophisticated approach to this we might then term an arable land and population density approach. In ancient Greece, the classic example of this approach is Corvisier and Suder, La population de l’Antitiquité classique (2000); the authors divide Greece into zones of population density and then compute the total population of Greece. But this is a method that is clearly entirely dependent on its assumptions: all depends on the population densities chosen. On the one hand, Corvisier and Suder’s own estimates produce a figure, c. 3m inhabitants in Greece, including Macedonia, Epirus and Thessaly, which is suspiciously close to Beloch’s estimates; one feels, I will admit, a bit of concern that the convergence was intentional. On the other hand, that figure also doesn’t seem right; the general consensus, so far as I can tell, is that Beloch is too low for Greece for the reasons stated above – he hasn’t accounted for enough non-hoplites be they free-poor or enslaved – so matching his figures is not a good sign. This is a method that is better than blind guessing, but bound to be profoundly imprecise, offering order-of-magnitude at best estimates.
A better approach is to try and use settlement data, drawn either from archaeology or from literary evidence. In Greece, this was the approach of M.H. Hansen, The shogtun method: the demography and ancient Greek city-state culture (2006). Hansen takes advantage of the already existing M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004) which provided a count of every known polis with a rough size-classification for each one. He could then create a population range for each set of size classifications, creating a range for the total population of the poleis, which Hansen computes at around 4-6m for Greece proper (and as many as 10m for every polis across the Mediterranean). This approach is also chained to its assumptions, namely the population ranges for small, medium and large poleis, but given the nature of our sources, that’s something we might have a clearer grasp on than population density. In particular, Hansen tries to get a grasp on those figures by focusing on cities which have been excavated archaeologically and using their area of urban settlement – the built up area of the city – to compute a total population based on urban population densities. That is a bit more grounded of an approach than arable land because you are assessing visible settlements rather than empty land which may – or may not! – have been settled.
Which is why it is so striking that Hansen’s estimate is substantially higher, to the point of being double what Beloch or Corvisier and Suder (inter alia) produced. Hansen’s method suggests there were quite a lot more Greeks than we supposed before. His conclusions have not, so far as I can tell, gained widespread adoption, but for my part I suspect he is probably right or at least closer to right because I think a lot of the other methods have imported assumptions from the structures of Roman Italy – a population absolutely dominated by the freeholding assidui (households liable for military service) – which I don’t think holds for Greece where it seems like there were more enslaved people and the hoplite class was more exclusive. But the confidence we can place on those assumptions is very low and in the meantime we’re left with a range of populations from 3 million to 6 million – quite the range!
While we’re here, McEvedy and Jones9 suggest a population for the area on the modern borders of Greece of 2.5 million in 400 BC falling to 2 million by AD 1, which is conspicuously not in any of these ranges.
Similar methods for Roman Italy can – no surprise here – produce much better estimates, because archaeological data can be married to the existing census figures as a means of interpreting them. This is the approach notably of Launaro, Peasants and Slaves: The Rural Population of Roman Italy (2011) and De Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012). They have the advantage of working in Italy, which is probably the most extensively excavated region on Earth. We’ve talked about the import of archaeological field surveys which track settlement patterns over larger areas rather than exhaustively excavating individual settlements; once you get enough good field surveys (and you need a lot of them) you can start drawing overall conclusions about settlement patterns – things like “is new land coming into or leaving cultivation?” “Are new villages forming, or are old villages vanishing?” “Are urban centers growing or shrinking – and how large are they and how many people might fit in them?” When you have some census figures, even very approximate answers to these questions can clarify how you understand those census figures.
Of course once we move out of Greece and Italy things get more difficult and we’re often back to squinting at weaker archaeological data and arable land studies relying on plausible population density figures. Making matters worse, we can be quite sure that ‘barbarian’ Europe was well below its ‘carrying capacity’ (much land now under cultivation was then forested, for instance) and the army size numbers we get reported for various groups are being reported by their enemies (the Romans, mostly) and are thus also less reliable. Consequently, the sort of regional estimates one gets for places like pre-Roman Gaul or Britain are really order-of-magnitude estimates and senses of relative proportion. So long as they are understood like that they can be valuable! It is certainly the case that we do not know how many people lived in the Roman Empire in 14AD, but it is also true that we can know that it was, say, not so low as 10m, nor so high as 100m. ’Around 50m’ is, by the by, the generally accepted figure, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it revised significantly as the years go by (more likely upwards, in my view, than downwards).10
Counting the Uncounted
These modeling-reliant methods are also handy, when you have a firm number, for estimating the uncounted. Note how nearly all of our figures only count military-aged males or male citizens. That leaves a number of different groups uncounted: women, children and enslaved persons in effectively all cases. But also sometimes men who are too old to fight or too poor to fight. How do we count them?
We generally estimate uncounted women, children and elderly males by using demographic modeling based on model life tables – data tables which project mortality simulations based on real-world populations. But how do you know what tables to use? The answer here has typically been that you comb the evidence you have (grave inscriptions, fragmentary census records that survive in Egypt) to create a statistical snapshot of your population and then try to match that, as best you can, to one of the extant models that ‘best fits.’ That’s tricky too of course: your sources are bound to under-report certain groups (especially the very young), and to give dates and ages which are, at best, approximate. For the Roman world, the general consensus is that Model West Level 3 (or close to that) from Coale and Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (1983) is the ‘best fit’ for the data we have.11 My own view is that you have to use what you have, and these life tables are what we have, but that some of Walter Scheidel’s arguments are well-taken that our ‘error bars’ may be rather larger than we think.
That leaves the question of how many enslaved persons and those too poor to be counted in some of our figures.
Once again in Roman Italy our situation is perhaps a touch better, although not particularly good. Because we have better demographic data for the rest of the free population and a better grasp on the mechanics of Roman agriculture, we can do something a bit better than blind guessing here (though blind guessing there has been in abundance), but not much better. Walter Scheidel walked through much of this math, guesstimating the urban enslaved population under Augustus (r. 31BC-14AD) at around 600,000 (based on an estimated breakdown of Roman social classes and estimates of how many enslaved persons each elite household might have) and another c. 600,000 in the countryside (based on rather more confident agricultural modeling showing the figure can’t be much higher than this without pushing out all of the small farmers and tenants we know from our sources there were) for a total of 1.2m probably representing the height of the enslaved population in Italy, coming as it does at the explosive conclusion of Rome’s long streak of rapid expansion in warfare.12 For an Italy under August between perhaps 5.7m and 7.0m that would imply an enslaved population of very roughly 15-20%, with a bit of wiggle room on both sides.13 This, we can be quite sure, is a significant increase from the earlier period so the figure for 225 BC and the Middle Republic must be lower, perhaps very roughly around 10%. Again, those figures are very rough, but I think Scheidel14 does a good job showing that something much higher, say, 30+% simply doesn’t make much sense given our evidence.
That actually is a useful conclusion, by the by, the full import of which I think has not been fully observed: while Rome has a reputation as the slaveholding society – and it certainly was a slaveholding society, make no mistake – those rates are probably rather lower than what we see in Greece, suggestive of an Italy countryside in particular that had more freeholding citizen small farmers than a comparable Greek polis. Comparisons with the Near East are more fraught; Egypt seems to have been modestly less enslaved than Roman Italy in the Roman period, but reaching earlier or elsewhere is difficult.
By contrast, as I’ve noted before, estimates for the number of enslaved helots in Sparta range wildly from 75,000 to somewhat north of 200,000. Agricultural modeling and arable land approaches, used by Figueira, establish that lower bound, while the upper-bound is the product of extrapolating from accepting the 1:7 ratio implied by Herodotus’ report of the size of the helot force accompanying the Spartan army at the Battle of Plataea (Hdt. 9.28.2). The lower-bound is wedged against the lowest feasible figure from an arable land perspective, but the upper-bound is plausible; I tend to think Hodkinson’s split-the-difference guesstimate of 162,000 is, if not right, reasonably plausible.15
But then what of the uncounted in the rest of Greece? These simple answer is we don’t know. Helotry and the economic system in Sparta was odd and so it attracts attention from our sources and their description of the system lets us chart it; it helps that there is no labor interchangeability between helots and poor spartiates, because there are no poor spartiates. But in the rest of Greece, you have no merely large, leisured landholders like the spartiates, but smaller farmers – sometimes very small and very poor – plus landless free persons, both citizens and non-citizens and also a large enslaved population. So the key question – what slice of the poor rural and urban classes were enslaved – is awfully difficult to tease out, with frustratingly limited evidence. As noted above, ancient figures for the number of enslaved persons are frequently metaphorical big numbers that mean ‘a lot,’ yet at the same time, it is clear the number was ‘a lot.’ The figure ‘one third’ gets thrown around a lot, based on the assumption that the number of enslaved was basically equal to the citizenry and/or that, because this is roughly the figure for the American South before the Civil War, it is reasonable to extrapolate it to Greece (it is not).16 Higher estimates exist; Alain Bresson figures 40-50%, but presents little evidence to support this17 while Nemanja Vujcic in a review of the evidence recently argues for a figure between 15 and 30%.
In fact, what we may mostly be able to say here is that the average Greek polis was both meaningfully less enslaved that Sparta, but meaningfully more enslaved than Roman Italy. Further precision is difficult. Once again, moving westward, the evidence vanishes into insignificance rapidly; it seems clear there was slavery in pre-Roman Gaul, Spain and Britain, but now how much. It seems a safe bet the answer here must be ‘not nearly so much’ given the societies in question are poorer, less densely populated (visible from settlement evidence) and less urbanized (same), but how much less so? Almost entirely speculative.
Building on Sand
So what can I tell you about the population of the ancient Mediterranean?
Not much! In many regions, we can chart settlement data to get a sense of how the population changed, but not its absolute number. Here, the basic is that we see almost everywhere slow growth, picking up pace in the Hellenistic period (except for some areas like Greece already heavily urbanized by that time), with a peak population reaches probably in the second century AD., and as we’ve discussed, a severe population collapse in the fourth and fifth centuries.
But turning that general sense into numbers – rate of change, absolute figures at particular dates? Outside of Roman Italy, the task is almost hopeless. The best we can do are very rough order-of-magnitude figures, often with huge error-bars. And those figures are in turn often a product of their own assumptions, creating a real danger for circular reasoning where, say, the population of Gaul needs to be low because we figure it was underdeveloped and because the population of Gaul is low, we figure it must have been underdeveloped. Archaeology can backstop that doom-loop to a degree – pre-Roman Gaul was less urbanized than Roman Italy, for instance, in ways that are archaeologically visible – but here too we are refining a broad sense of the matter, not a specific estimate.
But all of this discussion brings me back around to a core observation here which is how little we know for certain. Even in a case where you have responsible academic estimates across cultures, those estimates may not be comparable: if you wanted to compare the population of Roman Italy and late-classical or Hellenistic Greece, you could easy end up comparing 4.2m (De Ligt) with 3m (Corvisier and Suder) and say Italy has more or compare it with M.H. Hansen’s upper-bound at 6m and say it has less. To be really crazy, you could compare Corvisier and Suder with Elio Lo Cascio’s figures for Italy and come to the opposite conclusion that Roman Italy had more than twice the population of Greece.18
Where that uncertainty ends up mattering most is in the efforts to do ‘macro-history’ that covers the ancient world by scholars that do not appear to have a firm grasp on the underlying weaknesses in what they perceive as ‘data.’ Economic historians in particular who assume that works like McEvedy and Jones,19 can be a useful tool to back-project ‘global GDP’ or estimate the productivity of ancient societies are fooling themselves. Likewise, the notion that we can assess ‘elite overproduction’ in antiquity is a castle built on sand: we don’t even know to the nearest million how many people there were or to the nearest ten thousand how many ‘elites’ there were. Significant changes in population are almost impossible to track in all but the most well-documented regions – a perhaps 25% increase in the population of Roman Italy really only became clearly archaeologically visible to us in the last 30 or so years and remember: Italy is the best archaeologically documented place on Earth. In places that are not Roman Italy, it is not just possible but fundamentally certain that there could be double-digit percentage movements in population that are not now and may never become archaeologically visible to us. We just don’t know.
What we do know is that basically all peoples at all times complain about useless, lazy aristocrats – the useless, lazy aristocrats complain about it most of all, so you will always find evidence of that complaining. But if you project that complaining back into demographic studies built on these sorts of estimates, you are building on sand.
That’s not to say all of these studies are useless. As a means of understanding the Roman economy, modeling based on demographic assumptions and what we know about Roman agriculture can be very helpful, so long as one keeps in mind how approximate it is. Those are models build almost entirely on assumptions, not facts. They are not data nor can they become data – they can never become stronger than the meager evidence that supports them. Short of inventing a time machine, we are never going to have confident population estimates for most of the ancient world outside of strange places like Roman Italy (from 225BC to 14AD) and perhaps Roman Egypt.
But we have to approach our own meager powers and the meager powers of our evidence with due respect. We can estimate, in a very rough order-of-magnitude sort of way, about how many people may have lived in antiquity, but for any approach that requires even extremely modest precision, the evidence simply will not support such efforts.
We have to be willing to admit what we do not and indeed cannot know.
- On the general weakness of the McEvedy and Jones, see especially Guinnane, “We do not know the population of every country in the world for the past two thousand years” Journal of Economic History 83.3 (2023).
- That is not necessarily a criticism of those social scientists: we all have our specialties. I’m not qualified to critique complex economic models. However it is a call for a bit more caution in treating ‘data’ from the deep past, because the pre-1500 world does not present to us neatly packaged ‘data’ at all.
- On this, see L. De Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012).
- Arguing instead that Livy’s censa sunt capita civium tot includes women and children would produce the reverse problem: a much larger population in the Roman Republic that, during a period we can see an increasing population archaeologically, catastrophically declines for Augustus.
- On this approach, see Launaro, Peasants and Slaves (2011).
- For some of the more recent work on this, see Scheidel, Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (2001)
- Estimates for Carthage range wildly because we don’t know. Beloch, Die Bevölkerung Der Griechisch-Roemischen Welt (1886) figures 200-300,000; Kahrstedt, Geschichte der Karthager von 218-146 (1913) figures only 125,000 or so; Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty (2003) guesses around 200,000 citizen men (so c. 700-800,000 total) but split between the city and its territory, while Ameling, Karthago (1993) has a wide range between 90,-225,000 for the city.
- L’économie de la Grèce des cités (2007/8), now in translation as The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets and Growth in the City-States, trans. Steven Rendall (2016), 459, n.144.
- op. cit.
- To be sharper with it, Bruce Frier estimates 45.5m people in 14AD, rising to 61.4m in 164AD, Frier, “Demography” CAH2 XI (2000), which has become the standard go-to figure.
- See Bagnall and Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994) and also Frier, “Demography” CAH2 XI (2000), but notice the objections raised W. Scheidel, “Roman Age Structure: Evidence and Models” JRS 91 (2001).
- Scheidel, “Human Mobility in Roman Italy, II: The Slave Population” JRS 95 (2005).
- 5.7m here is drawing from De Ligt, op. cit., while 7.0 for 14AD is from Frier, op. cit.
- op. cit.
- Hodkinson, Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000).
- On the weakness of these points, see Scheidel, “The Comparative Economics of Slavery in the Greco-Roman World” (2008) and Vujcic, “A Numbers Game: The Size of the Slave Population in Classical Athens” (2021).
- op. cit.
- Elio Lo Cascio, “Roman Census Figures in the Second Century BC and the Property Qualifications of the Fifth Class” in People, Land and Politics: Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 BC-AD 14, eds. L. De Ligt and S. J. Northwood (2008). This is the ‘high count‘ and is not generally accepted by scholars.
- op. cit.
Have there been any attempts at estimating population sizes through genetic analysis?
Not that I know of and I have no idea how you would do so.
There’s a bottleneck estimated to have reduced humans to arround 40 breeding pairs 70,000 or so years before present. The polulation estimate is based largely on genetic diversity and some assumptions about mutation rates. So, you can get an estimate, but this sort of method works for bottleneck events, but I’m not sure you can apply it to larger groups.
And even for bottleneck events, you can’t say how many people there were. Only how many people from back then have living descendants, that showed up in the study.
Isn’t that the whole deal with “Mitochondrial Eve”? She wasn’t the only woman on Earth at the time, simply the only one who left descendants that have survived until today.
“the only one who left descendants that have survived until today”
Not, not even that. She’s simply the _strict matrilineal_ ancestor of everyone alive today. E.g. we could also all be descended from Eve’s contemporary Lilith, who had only sons, and thus is not a mitochrondial ancestor to anyone (beyond her sons).
I recommend the wikipedia page, and its section on misconceptions.
(To be clear, I made up “Lilith” as an example.)
That was my first thought when I read Bret’s conclusion that we will *never* have reliable population estimates for antiquity. As I understand, it is possible to estimate small populations by examining the genetic diversity of their descendants; perhaps increasing analytic sophistication will eventually enable us to distinguish between the descendants of a 30 million person population and one of 60 million.
For that to work, though, you’d need to know that you were dealing with one single isolated population. It’d be impossible to tell whether there were sixty million people *living in Roman Italy,* or simply sixty million people *whose descendants ended up in Roman Italy.* (You know: you can maybe draw some conclusions if there are significant geographical barriers, but if you’ve got people marrying across the Adriatic or into and out of Gaul on the regular, there’s not going to be any genetic way to tell who actually lived on which side of those borders.
“For that to work, though, you’d need to know that you were dealing with one single isolated population.”
You’d also need reliable genetic information. That’s remarkably hard to get at. Many human burial customs result in rapidly-decaying corpses, and many of the ones that don’t (cremation, somewhat ironically, is favorable for long-term preservation of bones) tend to destroy genetic information. We have far better genetic data for humans than for most critters in the fossil record, but that’s mostly due to the fact that we have ANY genetic data. Yes, I am aware of the various places where genes can hide in humans (teeth, marrow, a few others). They improve the odds, but the odds are not good. See “The Life History of a Fossil” for an in-depth discussion here (humans are animals, thus the principles of taphonomy in that book apply to us).
As for using modern data, that only tells you about the populations that 1) extended to today, and 2) were included in your sample. Populations that went extinct in the past are necessarily excluded from this analysis. This is why I’m not terribly excited about genetics when applied to the fossil record–the cladograms it provides are EXTREMELY pruned trees.
To further complicate things, human societies are not the same as biological populations. It’s entirely possible for someone to be of a culture when they are genetically not of the population. Immigrants, for example. Genetics tell us absolutely nothing about culture or other cognitive aspects of human life (which is in fact the majority of them).
Genetics is a powerful tool, but it remains a mere tool–and like any other it has inherent limitations. Doesn’t make it useless, but it does limit its use more than the press releases would have you believe. There’s a reason why the morphospecies concept endures.
My opinion (not as a historian but in a stats-maths-adjacent profession with some interest in this sort of thing): I recommend this post, but I also think the solution if any would look like relentlessly publishing and citing work where the range estimates, error bars and distributions are presented as prominently as possible. It is mathematically and statistically possible to work around a data point that is not a point but an estimated range or distribution. It requires bit more effort and looking up references or help, but I can’t imagine a situation where it is not possible. If the data is uncertain enough, then such method is clearly required. (In extremis, the simplest possible Monte Carlo method or even a simpler set of sensitivity analyses for range of estimates is better than nothing.) And yes, the downstream analysis by economists and others will need to add more error bars, but those error bars are useful information too. (Sometimes, it could turn out that there is something useful in the downstream analysis model despite or because of the propagated uncertainty. Sometimes, it will turn out the model can’t tell anything useful with such uncertain data.)
The problem with presenting point estimate is that with a verbal description of uncertainty, “our estimate is X, but this figure is very uncertain”, it is too easy just take the number and use it and perhaps remember to add paragraph about uncertainty in a footnote or discussion section of a paper. I agree it is lazy, but it sounds like a thing that predictably will happen. When the estimate is presented as a range “with reasonable likely range of initial assumptions, our method yields an estimated range X1 — X2, and additionally, previous historiography strongly suggests there could be +/-25% swings we can’t know about unless we stumble upon the right archeological evidence”, __then__ it is obviously the user who is at fault as they have misrepresented the data they and and didn’t pick a good method to incorporate the error bars and +/- 25% uncertainty into their analysis. I reiterate that the methods for doing this kind of analyses exist.
If the issue is that some authors present overinflated confidence in their single point estimate, then again, please do advocate people to cite instead the not-too-confident reviews and meta-analyses that try to report the true uncertainty and variability. In such case, it is good and worthwhile to relentlessly critique researchers who keep single-mindedly applying single point estimates instead of looking up the work that present and discusses the importance of the ranges.
I can confirm in my own (STEM, not history) work, I am often frustrated because I know that the numbers I’m using are uncertain, but the people who published them didn’t even make an attempt to indicate the degree of uncertainty. I know the best practice is to carry the uncertainty forward, but I can’t do that if I don’t know what the uncertainty is! And this is in a field where those uncertainty values are almost always calculable.
So I assume there’s a confluence of multiple problems here. Some people don’t carry the uncertainty forwards because they don’t understand they ought to; and some really want to but can’t because there aren’t reported error estimates. And this problem will tend to compound the more complex a model gets, because each input to the model has error that needs to be carried forward.
The problem with statistical expressions of uncertainty is that we don’t know what we don’t know – we know our estimates are uncertain, but we do not know, in a quantifiable way, how uncertain they are. What you’ll instead get is an approach of ‘the highest plausible/possible figure is X, the lowest is Y, and the most plausible figure is Z (which is between X and Y).” But something like confidence intervals isn’t, as far as I can tell, possible.
What aqsalose is talking about (and I agree) is a fairly new development in statistics. Computing a posterior distribution is easier than getting a point estimate, when you do it this way. And a confidence interval is exactly as much work as a point estimate. A lot of the ways uncertainty is framed in the OP are close to how we think of it when we’re setting up our models, so I infer that historians know this and will be along with satisfactory modeling shortly.
You couldn’t point me to a nice tutorial or overview for someone with a basic statistics background?
So you run your economic model with all three inputs and report the three results.
Beloch and Jones’ friendship started to fall apart with their dispute on ancient Greece population density, and ended badly over the Ark of the Covenant.
There’s been a lot of work on estimating the population of pre-Exile Judea, but the figures vary by a significant factor.
Typos:
“The shogtun method:” ITYM shotgun
“We’ve talked about the import of archaeological field surveys” Should that be importance?
“population de l’Antitiquité”: one fewer ti
Much of Europe had a very low carrying capacity because it could support only a hunting and gathering culture. The ground could not be plowed with a scratch plow, you needed a plowshare, and they didn’t have it until the Middle Ages.
No, our sources and the archaeology are quite clear that the peoples of Europe are engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry no later than 4,000BC and in some areas quite a bit earlier.
In places. Much of it is not fit.
And yet people were doing it. The notion that Britain was largely hunter-gatherers by the roman conquest is pretty much nonsense.
You do realize there is more to Europe than Britain?
You do realize there is more to Europe than Britain?
Well, give your proof of those hunter-gatherer peoples, then. Insofar as I can see, look like populations leaned more towards pastoralism — which, while sometimes not as intensive as agriculture, is absolutely not hunting and gathering.
And this would somehow mean that Britain is all of Europe?
I don’t know about the dates involved, but my understanding is that Scandinavia and the Baltic region were areas where farming remained highly difficult and marginal for a long time (and where conversely hunting/gathering remained a good alternative because of marine resources). Which is why you see a lot more genetic ancestry from early European hunter gatherers among Sami, Finns, Estonians, Latvians etc. than you do elsewhere.
That’s not really the case, scandinavia is mostly farmers by the late stone age. Supplementing your diet with hunting and/or fishing (especially the latter) remained a thing, but farming (including livestock) was the main source of food.
There were some groups (like some sami) who were more purely hunter-gatherers into the late middle-ages/early modern period (when they switch to their currently traditional reindeer pastoralism) But even in Sapmi there’s plenty of evidence of agriculture. (it kinda tends to get confused because medieval and later authorities tends to make the division between sami and other groups based largely on subsistence type rather than ethnicity, so a lot of the agricultural sami don’t get “counted” as sami)
@Emil:
to be clear, i’m not at all agreeng with the claim above that Far North / Northeast Europe was H/G “until the middle ages”, just that it was agriculturalized later than the southern and central portions (which is why the H/G peoples were able to leave a bigger genetic imprint).
“Only supported hunting and gathering” is wrong, but it is true that the introduction of the heavy plough caused a big increase in Northern Europe’s carrying capacity.
If I’m not mistaken in the farming series Bret addressed how there could be different farming techniques in neighboring areas, because elites had dibs on the animals the peasants not necessarily had access to plow teams for their farms and could have to do without.
Also isn’t it a mistake to assume plowing is a requirement for agriculture? There was agriculture in the pre contact Americas but no beasts of burden or plowing.
South America had beasts of burden carrying packs, but they didn’t use them to plow.
Correct, a plow is a labor-saving device, it is not a neccessity: You can do it manually with hoes or similar if you have to. (and it remained an option for the truly destitute well into the early-modern period)
It’s also a productivity enhancing one.
There are a lot of people in Africa today who still cultivate manually with hoes (I think the climate and disease environmnent tend to make cows and especially horses more difficult to raise than in many other places, although they do of course exist). As you say, the poorer you are the more likely you are not to have access to plough animals or of course tractors.
It’s worse, just because people do not produce vast amount of grain, does not mean, that they aren’t planting and harvesting crops. But elites, especially military elites, tend to discard anything but grain production, because it’s less accesible for taxation, and foraging armies.
But whatever other crops you’re growing, you will also need to be growing or (I suppose) buying a lot of grain, because grain’s your staple food in these pre-potato times. It’s the most important for foraging armies for the same reason it’s the most important for everyone else – they eat mainly grain.
And why are other crops less accessible for taxation? If you’re taxing in money, then it doesn’t matter what crops the farmer grows as long as he comes up with the cash.
If you’re taxing in kind, what makes olive oil (say) less accessible than grain? It’s portable, storable… it’s more compact than grain for the same market value (1.5kg of oil is worth very roughly the same as 15kg of grain in Roman markets).
According to James Scott’s _Against the Grain_, states depended on cereal grains since it combined various features: compact, storable, nutritious, and ‘determinate’ — harvest maturing all at once, making it easy for a visiting taxman to take a share. Looking at some alternatives:
pulses: indeterminate, with long harvest season, making it easier for peasants to squirrel it away in caches.
tubers: not compact and less storable once pulled out of the ground (or pond), unless you live in a climate that lets you freeze-dry potatoes naturally. (And even then, I think the Incas relied on maize taxes a lot.) Also less visible and accessible since potatoes (at least; I know less about taro or manioc) are best stored in the ground until use.
olive oil: I don’t know what their harvest schedule is, but anyway, though calorically dense as pure fat, it’s not very nutritious and your soldiers will not march far on it. Really you’d just be selling your oil taxes and trying to trade them for grain.
taxing fixed amounts rather than shares of the crop: kills your peasants (directly or through suppressed revolts) when it’s a bad year and the crop simply doesn’t exist in sufficient quantity.
money: requires a sufficiently monetized and market economy. In early states, money often _was_ grain, eliminating the dichotomy.
“Also less visible and accessible since potatoes (at least; I know less about taro or manioc) are best stored in the ground until use.”
Manioc/cassava can be dried or stored as flour, but yes, I think it’s *better* stored in the ground, if you can.
particularly since unlike potatoes, many manioc varieties (not all) are poisonous (before processing) and therefore have some degree of protection against animals eating them.
No, most of Europe was not occupied only by hunter-gatherers until the Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, enough was not arable to make a distinct effect.
Look at you, not knowing about the existence of non-arable agriculture.
Look at you, acting as if all forms of agriculture were equally productive
So to recap, we’ve gone from “Much of Europe could only support a hunter-gatherer culture before the Middle Ages” (which is ludicrously, comically wrong) to “some of Europe could only support herding, a less productive form of agriculture, before the Middle Ages” (which is so banal as to be pointless to say. Some of Europe can only support herding today!)
Notice how ajay is claiming it’s grazing land, to allow herding.
It’s not. They didn’t invent transhumance because the lowlands were so hospitable to herds.
Notice that ajay has come up with two mutually incompatible interpretations of what I said.
Interesting. I was recently reading a discussion on the population of Rome itself with one person being adamant that it could not have ever reached the famous million person high mark, and instead arguing that it was around 500,000 based on IIRC, someone’s work studying the popualtion density of Pompeii.
It’s very interesting to see how much both figures are probably informed by a level of guesswork, despite the relative wealth of evidence you mentioned.
Neville Morley does the urban area estimates for the population of Rome question in Metropolis and Hinterland and concludes that it could have reached the one million mark.
“someone’s work studying the popualtion density of Pompeii.”
Pompeii is one ancient city where we can actually count the households, count rooms, figure the purpose/usability of rooms. Count the corpses too. But since most people escaped their homes (many but unknown number died in the fields outside), we still don´t know how cramped the rooms were with people. (Something we have some information for in case of Renaissance Florence… but there some, though not all, houses have been rebuilt).
Yes, Pompeii has been used to estimate population density. The problem is that Pompeii is mostly one storey city. Second storeys are not preserved in Pompeii but traces of their presence, like stairs going to the lost second storey, are. The estimates are that about 20% of Pompeii houses had second storey, probably no third storey.
We know from literary sources that Rome had many multistorey residences. We have evidence from other cities – Ostia has a few preserved examples, Carthage has literary mentions of multistorey houses and foundations whose thickness suggests multistorey house, several Italian cities have foundation thicknesses and layouts suggesting multistorey houses.
So what could be a better comparison? A suggestion was actually cities of 18th and early 19th century Italy, facing same technological limits.
When people talk about the population of ancient Athens, surely they mean the population of Attica right? Attica was pretty small compared to > 80% of modern nation-states but it was big enough that if you had, say, a farm near Marathon you wouldn’t want to have to walk from Athens to Marathon and back on a daily basis.
Whoops just saw I forgot to tag you, I’m double posting here for clarity:
I recall this came up in our host’s excellent discussion on the greek city states, that the population of the largest of them was ironically more rural shifted and only the smallest of the city states could have everyone living in the walled city center.
For Athens this meant that when they evacuated Attica into the long walls in the first years of the peloponesian war, sanitary conditions worsened and possibly caused the disease outbreak that carried off many of them including Pericles!
I recall this came up in our host’s excellent discussion on the greek city states, that the population of the largeest of them was ironically more rural shifted and only the smallest of the city states could have everyone living in the walled city center.
For Athens this meant that when they evacuated Attica into the long walls in the first years of the peloponesian war, sanitary conditions worsened and possibly caused the disease outbreak that carried off many of them including Pericles!
I’m somewhat familiar with this from my uni, days, and how medieval population numbers get even more difficult to guess. (the particular case was trying to disentangle the population of Sweden in the 1600’s, where we have data, the post-black death minimum in the 1400’s, and then the pre-black death maximum, and how it’s basically impossibel to get any kind of reliable data for that)
the various attempts to take the spotty data we have and extrapolate it is…. not encouraging.
It should be noted that land does not have to be Ploughed in order to be Cultivated.
Small holdings can be worked with hand tools.
Horticultural societies can maintain civilizations. (See: Aztecs, Mound Builders.) However, the plow makes a big difference in carrying capacity.
How well can we assess arable land in ancient times? My vague understanding is that some places have changed rather dramatically (salination in the near east, deforestation in much of Europe). Does geology/archeology let us back out earlier conditions with reasonable date ranges?
Fascinating essay. A few other possible considerations — if a census is counting “military age” or “military liable” males, does it in fact include ALL those men of a certain age, or are there exemptions for the lame, infirm, or trades that are excluded in some fashion (were any?) because the state needed those workers to keep producing crops or weapons or livestock or whathaveyou. I think of the American civil war, when so many white men of military age in the South went under arms that slaves and women and the young and the old had to take up the slack to keep the farms and trades in operation.How would that be accounted for in an ancient Mediterranean society?
Another thing, do any of the modern reckonings take into account what must have been a substantial migration of Hellenes out of classical Greece and Ionia following the Macedonian conquests? This was a diaspora of Greeks across the Near Eastern world, soldiers and settlers and scholars and traders with families — would this have depopulated Aegean Greece proper for a period? I think of the Irish diaspora as a comparison, and the oft-repeated statement that Ireland had a higher population before the Great Famine than it does today. There are more people of Irish descent outwith Ireland today than living in Ireland. Things like this can play havoc with census reports or population estimates in the bygone days.
This may be tangential, but the Spartan citizen chart raises the issue, what accounting is there for Spartiates who fell out of the “homoioi” class (due to poverty, loss of land, loss of inheritance, or other failings, some of which we may not fully know about) and thus were not considered full citizens liable for military service and the full rights and obligations of “equals”? It would seem there would be a substantial class of Spartiates by blood or birth who were NOT counted as full citizens but at the same time, were not perioicoi, or helots — by the end of the classical era, with what we are told about fallen Spartan citizen numbers, this might have been a substantial number of people living in Laconia who were in a state of some uncertain status and I’m not sure we’re told very much about them by contemporary writers.
IIRC our host discussed this in great detail in his series on Sparta. Highly recommended
Thanks. A recent paper in an economic history journal might be of interest. It discusses McEvedy and Jones and ponders on the consequences for statistical models: Guinnane, T. W. (2023). We do not know the population of every country in the world for the past two thousand years. The Journal of Economic History, 83(3), 912-938.
I did see that earlier this month, but couldn’t find it again when writing this post. Thanks for the reminder!
I’ve added it in a footnote. Thanks again, I realize I had jotted down the title wrong enough to explain why I couldn’t find the darn thing.
A typo: “Arguing that Augustus has kept to the old practices would produce a total population would produce a population in Italy under Augustus more than double that generally accepted by scholars” contains “would produce a total population” twice.
It would be interesting to contrast this with China, which as per my understanding also took good imperial censuses during the times contemporary to the Roman Empire and late republic,
Historian working on early China here. Early Imperial China indeed have a very decent census compared to many ancient civilizations. On the other hand, we are also facing the issue of “who were counted”.
Imperial China was counting “registered households”, that is, households that could pay taxes and drafted to military services. In essence, these were households that fell within the control of the government. That obviously left out foreigners, “barbarians” (non-Han people living in the empire), and people for whatever reason did not want to be included in the register (usually trying to avoiding tax and corvee labor – a practice that sometimes still happening in modern PRC). In addition, the census number of individual in a given household was provided by the head of the household, who may also have the interest of reporting fewer people, so they can pay less tax (usually happens when the govt. became weaker in power).
With those factored in, the Imperial Chinese census numbers are often very high in peace time but very low after a dynasty changing war – not because a lot of people were killed (although of course there were many), but due to the new govt. was unable to have everyone in the empire on the register after a massive turmoil.
> Once again, moving westward, the evidence vanishes into insignificance rapidly; it seems clear there was slavery in pre-Roman Gaul, Spain and Britain, but now how much. It seems a safe bet the answer here must be ‘not nearly so much’ given the societies in question are poorer
How certain can we be about that? There can be several degrees of “unfreeness”. And just because a person can’t be bought on a market, does not mean they are in any meaningful capacity free.
We usually use different words, like serf or helot or indentured servant, to express types of unfreedom other than chattel slavery.
Our host called helots slaves, in his series about Sparta.
But as the distinction is between “free people” and “slaves”, I think we probably should count other “none-free people” under slaves, for the purposes of the comparison made here.
I suppose one of the other complications is any estimates that are either based on, or said to be disproved by, more accurate estimations in other locations would be compounded by similar levels of development not incurring similar levels of population. For example, taking the point about some estimates maybe causing the population of Greece to be estimated at half that of Italy might imply that using both these figures together is less accurate. But you could counterargue that comparisons between modern Greece and Italy or Spain, being similarly developed nations in a similar climate also produced wildly variable numbers – Spain is by far the biggest (about 30% larger than Italy), but somewhat less populated than Italy, whilst modern Greece has 1/5th of the people on 1/3rd of the land. Whilst this comparison is obviously explicable in the modern era with our deep understanding of the reasoning for the differences in population density, it creates the point that just because two contemporary regions with broadly comparable circumstances seem to have wildly different populations, it doesn’t mean we simply haven’t missed the evidence as to why they have such disparate overall densities (I’m not arguing that Ancient Greece should have half the population of ancient Italy, just that comparisons between the two don’t really make either figure any less likely than it was previously).
I’m a little surprised at the “enslaved percentage Greece > Italy > Egypt”.
Italy > Egypt I can see depending on the period – Rome would generated a lot of slaves from all those wars. Egypt was mostly a bread basket under Rome. They likely already had enough Egyptians for the farms; no need to buy slaves to do it.
Greece > Italy? I assume this is pre-Roman Greece. Where would all the slaves come from? I got the impression that the Greeks mostly fought each other. Enslaving someone from the next city state over seems like a bad idea, as he or she is quite likely to be able to successfully run away. I suppose Alexander’s wars (and the succession wars) would have generated a lot of them.
Perhaps I’m just showing my ignorance here.
There were Greeks who held that you shouldn’t enslave Greeks, but nevertheless, they did it.
Enslaving someone from the next city state over seems like a bad idea, as he or she is quite likely to be able to successfully run away.
You could enslave someone from a neighbouring city-state, and then sell him to someone from another, more distant, city. It’s all very well escaping from Corinth to Argos; escaping from Olynthus to Argos is a bit trickier.
I read about something similar. British colonies in America imported African slaves, while at the same time exporting Native American slaves to the Caribbean.
Ok that makes sense. Rather like posting provincial soldiers away from their home province, so they don’t a) desert or b) have too much sympathy for rioters.
Enslaving someone from the next city state over seems like a bad idea, as he or she is quite likely to be able to successfully run away.
The evidence seems to falsify that assumption; successfully running away from slavery isn’t easy in almost any context.
I think, respectfully, that this is coming at it from an incorrect perspective that wars are the only way to get slaves. Slave traders bringing slaves from distant lands have been a thing for probably as long as slavery has; you can just buy them without having to go the expense or danger of a war. Some of those slaves might come from distant wars, sure, but there’s always some desperate starving subsistence farmer out there forced to sell a child or two into slavery for the money and having fewer mouths to feed. Some cultures throughout history have also allowed slavery as the legal punishment for various crimes, so they might just be criminals serving their sentence. And slaves are still human beings capable of having children born into slavery, after all, so it’s not that hard to have a self-perpetuating population of slaves even if all other sources are cut off. (Look at how slavery continued in the U.S. after the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves went into effect in 1808.)
>Egypt was mostly a bread basket under Rome. They likely already had enough Egyptians for the farms; no need to buy slaves to do it.
Slavery’s not about need, it’s about greed. If you have enough Egyptians to work the farms, then enslaving some of them means higher profits to the enslaving overseers (since you no longer need to pay wages to the slaves). And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from history (and the present day), it’s that humans will do pretty much anything for higher profits.
Having a self-perpetuating slave population is extremely unusual, because (taking greed for granted) the phenomenon is effectively synonymous with the broader society being very far below the relevant equilibrium carrying capacity. Unless you happen to be surfing a wave of agricultural technology (like EEF, PIE, Austronesians, etc.), instead your society is more or less at equilibrium, therefore food is expensive enough that non-negligible numbers of poor families are forced to sell children, as a slave-owner you wouldn’t invest a fortune into raising a slave child from birth. That just can’t compete with the other sources you listed. (And parenthetically, interest rates used to be very high, which is relevant because you are investing that expensive food years before you get a usable/marketable slave. The point is, the NPV of the slave infant is negative.)
It’s only in the rare cases where food is uncommonly cheap, and (for a more or less identical reason) labor unusually productive (i.e. adult slaves expensive), that it’s worth it to raise, rather than kill, slave children. Heck, Mediterranean peoples killed-by-exposure their own unwanted newborns. The various legends where someone takes such a kid and raises it as their own are very clear that this is a great act of charity, financially speaking.
The number of slaves in the Roman Empire declined during the imperial period when Rome was no longer fighting great wars of conquest and enslaving hundreds of thousands of captured enemies. That was a big factor behind the growth of (proto-)serfdom in the later Empire.
OTOH, there are numerous references to slaves raised in their masters’ households in classical writing. It may have been a luxury good, but it happened. (The advantage was, of course, that you raised them.)
It happened, certainly, but not enough to keep the overall slave population stable.
You’d expect different attitudes towards “letting the children of the enslaved workers in a household grow up in that household” in the household of a wealthy Roman aristocrat, as compared to someone who was a slaveowner on a smaller scale and who didn’t have the aristocrat’s reliable confidence of having plenty of money for the rest of his life.
You’re assuming a slave is cheaper overall than a peasant. I think not.
You need to buy the slave, cash money up front. Then you need to feed him, and you can’t abuse him too much, or he dies and you’ve wasted your money.
He is unlikely to marry a peasant (they have their standards…), so if you want a self-perpetuating population, then you need more slaves, and to allow them to marry etc. – which is shelling out more money.
They were able to keep things going in the American South because cotton and tobacco sold for lots of cash money. Romans didn’t have cash crops in most cases, so I think the applicability is limited.
Children sold into slavery wouldn’t be general farm or mine labor – they don’t have the capacity or skills compared to adults. No, those would be for a “specialist” market (and that’s all I want to say about it).
“War” covers a lot of things, from a Roman legion marching on a town, to a Viking raid of a shore. Both could produce slaves.
“He is unlikely to marry a peasant (they have their standards…), so if you want a self-perpetuating population”
And while several barbarian laws ruled otherwise, when the law “partus sequit ventrem” applies then a male slave marrying a free woman does not contribute to perpetuating slave population because her children are free. As was the case in Roman Egypt.
It actually happened, whether or not it is termed “marriage”. P.Brux. 19 = SB V 8263. Arsinoe, 117/8.
One urban household out of the about 200 preserved census declarations (number varies depending on how well preserved) and out of 26…36 slaveholding households turns out to have 4 slaves… all of them owned, not by a single master, but actually in equal shares by a married woman (age 32) and her sister (living elsewhere). One of the 4 slaves is a 29 year old man, a weaver… and living in the same household is a 26 year old free woman with 3 children aged 8 to 1 years, all of them children of the same slave!
It may not be “marriage” for Roman law (but the census declaration actually does call her his wife!), but apparently the society, her family and his owners approved of a 17 year old free girl moving in with a 20 year old slave and his owners and bearing his children in their household.
From the demography of Roman Egypt, the estimate is that about 9…10% people in Egypt were slaves. Actually lower percentage in villages than cities (8% in villages, 13% in cities). The slaves were usually a few slaves per household… one summary counts 118 slaves in 36 households, only 4 households had more than 6 slaves. All indicators are that the slaves were either household servants or artisans – no signs of large scale gang labour farming.
Maybe it is connected to dense population and intense irrigation farming? Someone who owned land in Egypt would do better to rent it out at rackrent prices to free families (who had the skills and incentive to extract maximum productivity) rather than try to employ slaves in farm work. Whereas the household servants in the big house would be slaves.
And while several barbarian laws ruled otherwise, when the law “partus sequit ventrem” applies then a male slave marrying a free woman does not contribute to perpetuating slave population because her children are free.
Pedantry: it should be “partus sequitur ventrem”. Sequi is a deponent verb, meaning it’s passive in form, although active in meaning.
One thing that I think people miss when comparing enslaved labor to free labor is that the “efficiency boost” enslaved labor brings to the table isn’t just a simple matter of “you can force them to work harder”, it’s that you’re forcing them to give you their entire output.
As OGH pointed out in their series on farming and textile production, most of the output of a subsistence farmer/textile worker is going to be used within their family unit, since their goal is to survive and thrive, not to be “efficient”. This means that the amount of surplus you can get out of free labor is inherently limited.
If you then look at unfree labor, the calculus changes because suddenly the laborer doesn’t get to choose to do things like “feed their children and elderly parents” or “make themselves a second outfit so that they can look nice”. They have to hand EVERYTHING they produce to someone else, who then decides how much they get to eat/wear/etc.
The fact that the comparison isn’t “peasant vs. slave” but actually “peasant+their dependents+their personal dignity/happiness vs. slave” is part of what makes slavery so nasty — deciding that it’s OK to treat some people like property is going to be such a massive multiplier in terms of how much surplus you’ve got floating around that you’re going to out-compete other cultures that decide that doing that is messed up. You need something on the scale of industrialization to break this up.
On the face of it, in a subsistence economy, the cost of hiring someone is the minimum required to keep him alive. However cheap slaves are to acquire, it is going to be hard to keep them alive for a lower cost than that. And dead slaves tend not to do much work.
“If you then look at unfree labor, the calculus changes because suddenly the laborer doesn’t get to choose to do things like “feed their children and elderly parents””
Some slaves did not feed their children. Serfs (and helots, who were actually regarded as worse off than slaves) were unfree but most definitely did have to feed their children.
Slaves might not feed children if they were fresh prisoners of war thus the cost of raising the children was the loss of the society they were captured from. But this was not the case in Roman Empire. Case of demography of Roman Egypt: the census schedules found and analyzed by 1995 mention 118 slaves, but many entries are damaged so that sex or age cannot be ascertained. 67 slaves of known sex and age: 23 male, 44 female. Of the 23 males, 9 were infants aged 0 to 6, and 14 were ages 10 to 32 – not a single male slave over 32. 10 girls aged 0 to 6, 24 aged 8 to 33, and 10 aged 35 to 68.
The slaves in Roman Egypt were brought up in households of their owners. Some were brought up with their slave mothers, some were unwanted children abandoned by their free parents and adopted to be raised as slaves. Either way, they were expensive. The cost of adopting and raising a child who survives to be a working slave – PLUS the costs of attempting to raise the babies who do not survive to working age – must be priced into the sales price of a slave!
AFAIK in pure economic terms (these are not the only terms, remember there are also social, prestige, etc. issues involved) whether or not slaves are cheaper is going to depend on a whole lot of factors.
Slaves still have to be fed, and guarded, and of course they have to be purchased in the first place.
Interestingly we rarely seem to see slaves working like peasants do: Instead we see slaves working in high intensity/high reward stuff (plantations, mines, construction projects) or as, basically, luxury goods (as servants, where they’re something you spend money *on* not something you expect a return out of)
Slave labor isn’t necessarily always going to be more profitable to large landholders than other ways of getting labor to work that same land. There are a variety of reasons for this. For example:
1) Enslaved workers have to be watched by overseers who themselves do not participate in the labor and have to be paid. The workers have a very strong incentive to escape if they can, or simply to slow down their work if they cannot. After all, the enslaved workers get little if any reward for good performance, and the cost of replacing them for any but the most egregious failure is going to be a serious burden to the slaveowner.
2) Enslaved agricultural workers have to be either fed year-round at the slaveowners’ expense or provided with means to grow their own food themselves by their own labor on the slaveowner’s property. In the latter case, they are effectively a lot like tenant farmers, except (see #1) the slaveowner has to hire a guy with a whip to stand over his workforce all day whereas the landlord does not.
3) Natural population growth and generational cycles (see also Dr. Devereaux’s posts on grain production in the ancient and medieval world) ensure that the local free farming population will include many households with more workers than they have land to feed those workers. This ensures that free (read: un-enslaved) labor remains a reliable source of labor for the large landholders, and makes mass enslavement largely redundant.
In many cases, it’s simply going to be more practical to use, say, hired hands or tenant farmers to cultivate the same land. So slavery does not automatically expand as an institution everywhere it is legal; an equilibrium can be reached depending on the cost and availability of labor from the surrounding free population.
Weird question, but have you ever read “Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus” by Orson Scott Card? It’s a Sci-fi book, where the plot device is they they have a device which allows them to view the past. Not travel, not do anything, all they can do is watch it. It’s like a livestream of history.
What would you do if you had such a device? How would the field of history change? Would you be able to shut down the entire field if you could just open up a live stream of any historical figure you want? Or would there be a massive increase in historians trying to process all this new data?
I’d listen to Cicero’s Pro Milone, and see how different it really was to the version that later got published.
It could be used to resolve some controversies, but not others.
Watch Cato make his speeches? Probably; we have a very good idea of where he would have to have made them.
Resolve whether there was somebody behind any given story of Arthur? Probably not; we don’t know where or when a lot of things may have happened. If you tune in to a given time and place and nothing happens, does that mean it was false, or did you get the coordinates wrong?
History as a field probably changes a ton, and expands to incorporate lots of new data. Just think of the large amount of unknowns that this device lets you figure out: examine ancient civilizations where few records remain (Harrapans, Persians, Carthage, Moche, etc.), see directly how ancient people live (Our blog author’s research of how a standard farm family lives and buys equipment can be observed.), You can rewatch events to see exactly how they happen, no reconstruction needed (JFK assassination conspiracies? Use device on exactly where the points of interest are. How were Pyramids built? Lets watch and find out.)
Historians as a job probably shift from reconstructions of limited data to seeing larger patterns, or beneath the surface stuff of why and how things happen, using that massive firehose of data, plus prioritizing what is most worth looking at.
You get a lot of new data. Depending on the specifics of how the device works, there may be a lot of data that is not relevant to what you’re studying.
If the coordinates are random, or only so accurate, you may not get much at all – most of Earth’s surface doesn’t have a human nearby even today.
Can you shut off the device, and come back to the same coordinates the next day? If not, you may end up observing one human (if you can track a person) or just whatever happens nearby. How representative is this data?
Assume that you can control the device perfectly. You still have to find out who to track. Even assuming we can hear through the device, and we can translate the language spoken, there were a number of cultures where people changed names.
I’m assuming you can’t reach through and put a tracking device (undetectable, otherwise you at the very least likely change their behavior), so how do you follow people? How do you decide how long to track someone, and when it’s time to turn the device over to the next group (assuming the device is relatively expensive in some fashion, so not everyone who wants one can have it).
Who tracks the person involved? I’m assuming that someone is likely sitting in front of it, rather than putting a camera there and just recording. But if you’re sitting there tracking, you’re not in a library or writing a paper…
Sounds like such a device would open a big can of worms. Is it ethical to watch a living person at any time without their knowledge or consent? If not, is it ethical to do so to a deceased person (where there’s no possibility – even in theory – of obtaining consent)? Being able to spy on anyone in the past at any point in their lives sounds like a massive invasion of privacy after all, even if you stay away from more intimate moments. On the one hand, our attitudes towards the right of privacy do tend to erode the further away in time the deceased are to us, so we might collectively rule it’s fine, but on the other hand, watching people through such a device might also remind us that these are people just like us and strengthen our sense of empathy with them. Assuming such a device was considered ethical to use in the first place, I imagine any historical studies making use of it would have to go through rigorous examination by ethics committees to make sure it’s being used in a manner congruent with societal expectations.
Isaac Asimov addressed this is his short story “The Dead Past.”
I could see it being treated differently according to the historical prominence of the person being viewed. Getting permission to view the life of someone like George Washington or Julius Caesar or Winfield Scott? Easy. Joe Schmo, on the other hand? Not so much.
Modern interest in history has very much shifted to focusing on Joe Schmo, though. Sure, Caesar is in the record books–but for 90% of the people in the areas he ruled, it didn’t matter whether Caesar or some other person ruled. Their daily lives simply weren’t heavily impacted one way or another. And what happens with 90% of humanity is almost always going to be more significant in the long run than what happens with rulers.
Plus, modern people are more interested in “How would I have lived?” Look at YouTube channels such as Modern History TV, or Brandon F, or the like. Or go to Pensic. This is history we can USE. I can wear Mongolian garb, while eating potage, and drinking beer brewed with Old Kingdom yeast strains. while listening to Summarian songs. And while modern uses of things aren’t great in terms of figuring out historical uses, there have been some interesting developments (knitters are using Roman dodecahedrons to make gloves, for example).
I could see ample interest in what Joe Schmo did on the daily. Easily enough to justify watching him from the past.
But when people say “How would I have lived?” They mean as an aristocrat in that society.
Brett is constantly complaining about how even working class / left wing students are always identifying with the historical elites in written sources.
Being able to spy on anyone in the past at any point in their lives sounds like a massive invasion of privacy after all, even if you stay away from more intimate moments.
I think it would be fine as long as you followed the same rules that journalists (theoretically) follow re: photographing famous people, namely, that it’s OK if they’re out and about in a place where they’d expect to be seen anyway, but not if they’re somewhere where they’d not expect anyone (or at least anyone who isn’t a friend/family member) to see them.
It would certainly change the face of police work and criminal prosecutions!
Much would depend on the energy expenditure/cost of such viewing. If it were pennies per minute, I personally would be looking at Native Americans just before the Colonial period and going back into the Woodlawn period, sampling the Saxon period in England, and idly looking in on the Celts & Druids—just off the top of my non-historian head
Is the actual farm production (as opposed to maximum capacity) something that gets tracked in pollen diagrams? The production of pollen of crops, vs. pollen of short-term weeds of fallow, vs. long-lived herbs of permanent pasture, vs. young scrub, vs. old growth forest?
As my old Minerology professor used to say, “It’s not impossible, but you don’t live that well.”
Time-averaging and space-averaging are going to be huge problems here. Fallow fields, crops, pastures, and woods would all be so intermixed that it would be extremely difficult to differentiate palynologically. These areas are going to shift over time, on scales that are significant to humans but not to most geological settings. Plus farming techniques weren’t the same as today. Monoculture isn’t exactly a modern invention, but there are a lot of cases where the polyculture farming was a more efficient use of manual labor. And things we consider weeds were valuable. I grew up picking wild garlic from the fields to add to various dishes, and it wouldn’t have been different at really any point in the past.
Some lake deposits might provide some insights–they can produce monthly, or even daily, layers that are distinct from one another–but actually getting the data would be extremely difficult. And again, you have space averaging to consider. Of course, bioturbation (plowing, digging, dredging, and the like, as well as the actions of non-human animals) are going to further mask any such signal.
If we could find some human-made thing that was produced annually and retained pollen it would be more likely. I can’t think of anything, but it’s an avenue to explore for someone more familiar with the material culture of the time period you want to look at. It’d give you a snapshot–still space-averaged, but with minimal time-averaging. But since no one would be thinking of doing this intentionally, it’s going to be tricky to find an example of such a material.
What do we know about the gender balance in these societies? It stood out to me that your charts are split right down the middle into equal male:female halves. It is an ambitious question, but perhaps in some ways easier to get right than total population numbers, as long as the sources mention:
* Gender-selective infanticide
* Imbalanced dating/marriage norms (in modern day we see that even small imbalances in the gender ratio can make it very hard for the overrepresented gender to find partners on acceptable terms)
* Many more elderly widows than widowers or vice versa
I suspect this is one of those things where we don’t have enough data to even guess, so 50-50 is “good enough to start with”.
Widows likely were not more common in this era. We don’t have a good look at anyone not rich, but even for those we hear far more stories of men remarrying than women. Childbirth was fairly dangerous.
Gender balance is a complex question – our best evidence comes from Egypt, which of course has a whole post (https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/) on its caveats.
Very old scholarship often assumed a male-shifted family, extrapolating from other traditional societies in which girls were less valued and thus less often raised (read: sex-selective infanticide). But our evidence from Egyptian records and tombstones doesn’t suggest a detectable sex-selection effect in Roman society.
Other causes of skewed gender ratios are harder to gauge with the evidence we have. Maternal mortality is a factor, so is military and other violent mortality. Accepting a model life table like the West L3 makes some assumptions about those impacts, but our confidence in those assumptions is low outside of Egypt (and sometimes, even within Egypt).
That said, you’d expect more widows than widowers in Roman society anyway because of the difference in average age at first marriage. Roman men marry in their late 20s, early 30s, Roman women in their late teens or very early 20s. Consequently, a lot of women are going to survive their first husband (and their father, of course), which because Roman law makes widows legally independent, that has significant impacts.
The uses I’ve described just need a location, or a time and place. Things like “see how people lived in an ancient society’ just require observing some random people, so a location search or random person search will do. Good enough standard for a hypothetical device in media we haven’t seen.
Even with just this, lots and lots of potential info to work with.
Whoops, Not sure how this got here, was supposed to be in the “device which watches a historical person” thread.
Both Strabo and Diodorus the Sicilian mention that the Egyptians have the peculiar custom of not killing their children.
Hi Bret, thanks for this post!
It seems the right place to ask a question that’s been on my mind for a while. The standard narrative for the collapse of (Eastern) Roman rule over the Balkan peninsula, including Greece, in the 7th century AD, is one of Barbarian, mostly Slavic invasions. Florin Curta has collected the archaeological evidence (e.g. in his monograph The Long 6th Century in Eastern Europe to argue that
– Greece, particularly the Peloponnesos, was densely populated and urbanized throughout most of the 6th century AD
– the Balkan Peninsula from Constantinople to the Danube mostly lacked a civilian population in the 6th century AD, so that the military garrisons had to be supplied with food from other provinces
– urban centres and military garrisons disappeared from the entire Balkan peninsula at the beginning of the 7th century AD except for Constantinople, Thessalonike, Athens, Monembasia and very few others; there are rarely any signs of destruction
– population remained at extremely low levels until the very end of the 7th century, being entirely invisible to archeologists in places
I would like to know how far Curta’s narrative has been accepted by other historians.
PS: It has been discussed above which parts of Europe, including the Baltic, were suitable for agriculture. For this period, Curta’s book goes into extreme detail for each region, from Istria and Crimea to Estonia and the Urals.
I would really like to read that book. The prehistory of Estonia and the Urals would be especially interesting to me, since like I said up thread Estonians today have some of the highest levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry of anyone in Europe (and the Urals, on the fringe of Europe, are interesting for other reasons).
Well sort of on topic I quite enjoyed Population and Economy in Classical Athens by B Akrigg. I gather its a encapsulation a rather lot stuff already published that I do not have access to (sad when your spouse leaves academia for government science no more free online access). Using Hansen’s methods he gets a higher pop than Hansen’s own 1986 work with he argues was sort of cursory because he was more interested in the 4th century.
But most interesting I though was his argument that metics should not really be seen in large numbers as economic migrants. But rather as a more commonly freed slaves and children of such and thus second class citizens that were had nowhere to go. I find the explanation a good fit for why they seemed to stay through the plague and down parts of the Peloponnesian war.
How large an effect could breadbasket trade/extraction have on regional populations (carrying capacities)? To take the obvious example from the discussions of the Peloponnesian War, the actual carrying capacity of Attica is “whatever the merchant navy can bring, adjusted upward because some things grow locally” (obviously this is an exaggeration). Likewise, peninsular Italy may well be larger than it looks, because it has transplanted ~10% of Sicily, Africa, Egypt, etc.
Regarding uncertainty of vague estimates of complex things, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf is a short paper on uncertainty in the Fermi paradox (“why can’t we find aliens?”) which shows how ignoring uncertainty of numbers taken a priori can cause a false paradox (we know so little about our priors that there could simply be no aliens) and attempts to estimate missing uncertainty. It’s very hard to do since we know so little that we don’t know how much we don’t know, only that there’s a lot we don’t know. It’d be interesting to apply to a situation like this where we at least have some hard limits.
I have to say I never really liked the supposed Fermi paradox. Its assumptions are pretty high. I mean for example Its like the earth put aside everything it was doing as soon as we could build ‘Orion’ type space ships and began launching human generation (knowing ahead time almost all would in fact be doomed) and accompanying cargo ships in every direction endlessly. What would we gain? Nothing in doing it. In addition events like the Dino killer asteroid and Gama ray burst GRB221009A suggest a universe quite willing to reset the table more often than not.
For my part, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that we’ve only been trying to look for alien life in my lifetime, and haven’t really been seriously attempting to do so. It’s very much akin to my (very young) daughter’s propensity to walk into a room and scream “I can’t find it!!!” after a few seconds of glancing around. We haven’t found evidence because we haven’t tried very hard to find it. We can’t even define “life” rigorously, and we have precisely one example to extrapolate from; under such conditions the idea that a lack of evidence is anything other than an expected outcome given the nature of the field is hubris of the highest order.
There IS evidence for life in the solar system outside of Earth. Formations bearing a striking resemblance to stromatolites have been found on Mars (to the point where if these formations were on Earth they would be accepted as stromatolites without hesitation), and the hydrogen decline seen on Titan is consistent with a hypothesized but viable liquid methane-based metabolism. Then there’s Europa, which has organic molecules in the ice volcano eruptions. Yet even here–in our own back yard–these compelling examples of fossil and extant life remain unexplored. We could have life in our solar system and we still don’t know.
Until we at least explore these possibilities the idea that we can know that alien life hasn’t been around is utter nonsense. The various attempts to explaining this lack of evidence only have value in as much as they highlight areas of ignorance, so that we can focus our efforts there. But they tell us nothing about reality, only our own ignorance.
The Fermi paradox relates to the detection of intelligent life capable of interstallar communication. Our observations are perfectly consistent with there being thousands or millions of planets with organic life forms, but they don’t seem to be emitting electromagnetic radiation, much less flying starships to visit us.
This doesn’t address the fundamental flaw with the Fermi Paradox. It presupposes that we can reliably detect both interstellar craft and interstellar communications. Given that we have no idea what these beings would look like, this is, to say the least, a premature assumption.
This is a blog for military history, and that subject is rife with examples of situations where people trying very, very hard, with every incentive in the world, failed both to detect communications and to identify enemies. And that’s with humans, beings that we are intimately familiar with. That encryption, concealment, camouflage, and similar military tactics are possible is ample evidence for the problem of the Fermi Paradox being entirely on our side. It’s a statement of ignorance on our part, not of anything about the universe.
Living creatures tend to self-reproduce, and colonise new areas where they can survive. So the question about the Fermi paradox is not “why can we not find obscure evidence of aliens visiting Earth in the past”. It is more like “why can we not see an alien colony on Earth right now”. We should be in the position of an Australian aborigine in Alice Springs, looking for evidence of people who are not Australian aborigine’s.
One obvious possibility is that the difficulties of interstellar travel are such that intelligent species who pressingly desire more room to colonize find it less troublesome to make room by building habitats or terraforming planets than they do to find already-existing planets that are sufficiently habitable.
Of course, this would still result in a universe tiled with intelligent life that would be bound to have reached us at some point in our past, unless there were specific reasons why species do not reach us. Many such reasons exist, though a lot of them aren’t encouraging for humanity’s own long-term prospects.
I’d love to have a historian’s view of a worldbuilder’s guide to ancient and medieval demography. How many people are there in X area of Y terrain type, what percent of them are farmers, how many soldiers and aristocrats could that support, and so on. Accurate numbers are impossible, but the goal for something like that wouldn’t be accuracy, but rather merely not raising any alarm bells for historians reading them.
Have you read any of Lyman Stone’s work? He’s a demographer who’s written on this, for example this recent series about Middle-Earth: https://medium.com/@lymanstone/how-many-hobbits-a-demographic-analysis-of-middle-earth-cd53b91d141f
Middle-Earth is a particularly tough setting to get population densities from, because so much of it is ahistorically empty for no immediately apparent reason. There are huge stretches of land in Eriador that are just empty, despite superficially seeming to be fertile, and despite the fact that many centuries have passed since the last round of great wars plausibly likely to depopulate the region. It seems as if you could travel from the Shire to Rohan cross-country, a journey of something vaguely like a thousand miles as far as I know, without ever encountering much evidence of human habitation apart from a handful of settlements like Bree strung out along major roads through the wilderness.
Now, this can partly be explained by the fact that most of the long-distance travel in the series is undertaken by the hobbits and the Fellowship who are specifically trying to avoid entanglements and spies of the Enemy. But there’s more examples of this. We don’t see men loyal to Sauron (or orcs for that matter) making any serious attempt to colonize Ithilien. We see the Dunlendings living hardscrabble in the mountains after being driven from Rohan, instead of finding (literally) greener pastures elsewhere, even as vast tracts of land stand empty.
It’s almost as if there’s some kind of supernatural force undermining the natural tendency of men (if not of elves or dwarves) to increase and explore new lands. Which, this being Middle-Earth while Sauron yet lives, is of course not out of the question.
I think Dunland is plains and hills west of the Gap of Isen, not mountains but that’s exactly where the Fellowship never goes. Where it does go, just west of the Misty Mountains, is probably meant by Tolkien to be just empty, but could plausibly host transhumance pasturing — absent during winter time, of course. Eriador proper, you can kind of handwave enough orc/warg/troll attacks to pick off all the smaller settlements, at least east or north of Bree.
Maybe.
But I can’t shake the feeling that trying to come up with mundane explanations for why Middle Earth west of the Misty Mountains and north of Gondor is so empty is kind of a losing proposition. Insofar as there’s a “real” answer, it’s probably something else.
Either authorial (“because Tolkien didn’t want a powerful kingdom that would be relevant to the Shire’s isolated pastoral paradise”) or paranormal (“because the land is accursed and at best marginally habitable due to something that happened thousands of years ago”)
I’d love to have a historian’s view of a worldbuilder’s guide to ancient and medieval demography. How many people are there in X area of Y terrain type, what percent of them are farmers, how many soldiers and aristocrats could that support, and so on. Accurate numbers are impossible, but the goal for something like that wouldn’t be accuracy, but rather merely not raising any alarm bells for historians reading them.
“Rome itself would only get that large in the late first century” – BCE or CE?
Very good point regarding demographic history; this is why Peter Turchin and his ilk are all quacks.
This is very late, but it seems to me that to achieve a particular sort of material culture requires a certain population density. The sophistication of material culture at least can put a lower bound on population, in that, say, a city requires so many specialized laborers supported by so many farmers and so on. Take a particular Roman industry and all that’s required on the supply chain and it will tell you something about population. I don’t think it would be very exact but certainly if you find a bunch of ruins, someone had to build and live in that, and someone had to provide food and labor.
I know that population counts for places like the pre-contact Americas have often been ridiculously low… but even given that much of the material culture for the less citified cultures was not preserved (houses and forts built of natural materials, etc) things like monumental building require a base level of population. Something like Stonehenge probably doesn’t require a huge population, but Rome obviously does, and even Stonehenge requires a big enough and well enough organized population to build.
The Mound-Builders collapsed so thoroughly that some tribes didn’t even know the mounds were artifacts, let alone built by their ancestors, precisely because of population collapse.
Indeed, a certain level of population and specialized skills are required to create and maintain complex social structures and infrastructure such as cities and industrial complexes. What aspects of material culture, other than industry, can reflect population density and the organization of society?
Hmm, this post here reminded me of something I had once read. (Here to be exact: https://communities.springernature.com/posts/income-inequality-in-the-aztec-empire-on-the-eve-of-the-conquest)
Some professors had made an attempt to construct a model of the economy of the ‘Aztec Empire’*, and concluded that: The Aztec Empire was an exceptionally unequal and extractive polity: the Aztec “one-percenters” earned 41.8% of the total income.
I was even more sceptical than usual of income estimates of pre-modern societies. For example, a lack of data had forced them to estimate average income based on population density: In our own estimate, obtained by exploiting the strong correlation that exists, across ancient societies, between population density and income levels,
I was sceptical of this approach; Mesoamerica was an entirely different beast than the ‘ancient societies’ in the Old Word, so I do not see why they would have the same relation between their population density and income levels.
However, now it turns out that even the population density estimates already likely were bogus anyway.
*Which I had been told on r/AskHistorians was actually neither Aztec nor an Empire.
However, now it turns out that even the population density estimates already likely were bogus anyway