This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system across the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East during the 12th century (that is, the 1100s) BC. In the broader Mediterranean world, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is the event that probably comes closest to a true ‘end of civilization’ event – meaningfully more severe than the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West (although as we’ll see LBAC is also not as ‘total’ of a collapse as was sometimes supposed).
This is going to be, by our standards here, something of a brief overview, roughly the equivalent to the lecture I give to my students when we cover this period (with a bit more detail, because text is more compressed). A full ‘deep dive’ of all of the debates and open questions of this period would no doubt run quite a few posts and more importantly really ought to be written by specialists in the bronze age. This is also a very archaeologically driven topic, which makes it more sensitive than most to new evidence – archaeological site work, but also epigraphic evidence (mostly on clay tablets) – that can change our understanding of events. As we’ll see, our understanding has changed a fair bit.
So what we’ll do is run through what we know about what happened in the collapse (which is the most visible part of it) and then we’ll loop back to the question of causes (which remain substantially uncertain) and then finally look at the long-term impacts of the collapse, which are considerable.
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The (Partial?) Collapse
We need to be clear, to begin with, that while we have scattered fragments of epigraphic evidence (that is, inscriptions), almost all of our evidence for the Late Bronze Age Collapse is archaeological. Without archaeology, we would remain largely in the dark about this event. But archaeological evidence also brings with it challenges: it can tell you what is happening (sometimes) but often not why and dating with precision can be challenging. Most of what we’re tracking in understanding LBAC is site destruction, identified by the demolition of key buildings or ‘destruction layers’ (often a thin layer of ash or rubble indicating the site was burned or demolished), but dating these precisely can be difficult and there are always challenges of interpretation.
With that said, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is a sequence of site destructions visible archaeologically from c. 1220 BC to c. 1170 BC, which are associated with the collapse or severe decline of the major states of the region (the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East). We generally conceptualize these destrictions as a ‘wave’ moving in sequence beginning in the Aegean, moving over Anatolia, sweeping down the Levant and arriving in Egypt but in many cases my sense is the chronology is more complex than that. Many sites in the path of this ‘wave’ were not destroyed, with some declining slowly and others declining not much at all; other sites (I have in mind Tiryns) see the destruction of their political center but the decline of the urban settlement around it happens slowly or later.
First, we ought to set the stage of the Late Bronze Age. What really marks out the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500 BC to c. 1200 BC) from earlier periods is that the emerging state systems in Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia and Egypt had expanded to the point of coming quite fully into contact with each other, with a significant degree of diplomatic, economic and cultural interconnectedness, to the point that we sometimes refer to the ‘Late Bronze Age Concert of Powers’ (evoking 19th century European balance of power politics) when talking informally about them.
Now I should caution, we often provide these nice neat maps of the Late Bronze Age powers (and they’re useful to a degree) but the borders of these states were quite fuzzy – their outer ‘possessions’ were often tributaries under the rule of local kings which might be weakly attached to the imperial center. Nevertheless, going from East to West: southern Mesopotamia was dominated by the ‘Middle Babylonian’ Empire, ruled by the Kassite dynasty (the Kassites being an ethnic group who had taken power around 1530 BC) while northern Mesopotamia was dominated by the Middle Assyrian Empire (from about c. 1350 BC). Anatolia and the Northern Levant was controlled by the multi-ethnic Hittite Empire, which seems to have sparred regularly with the New Kingdom of Egypt which controlled Egypt and the southern Levant. Basically all of these powers had less settled, often pastoral peoples in their hinterlands which presented on-going security challenges for them.
These larger imperial states were more economically complex as well. In particular, their large armies required significant amount of bronze which – because its core ingredients of tin and copper effectively never occur in the same place – demanded substantial long-distance trade, though trade was hardly only in copper and tin, but also included other high value goods and even (where feasible) bulk staples. So while these powers clashed regularly, at the elite level (if not at the level of the subsistence economy) they were also reliant on each other to some degree.
Finally, at the edge of this state system is the Mediterranean and especially the Aegean. In the Aegean – in Greece and Crete especially – we see effectively miniature versions of these state structures, complete with (by Near Eastern Standards) itty-bitty palaces (the Minoan urban centers on Crete had come under Mycenean (=Greek) rule in c. 1450, the palaces there largely abandoned). Cyprus shifted between being nominally subordinate to either the Hitties of the Egyptians but seems to have mostly run its own affairs and was integrated through trade into the state system.
As noted above, LBAC starts perhaps as early as 1220 or so, and what we see in very rough sequence is as follows.
As far as I know, we still generally think the earliest rumblings are instability in the Mycenean Greek palace states. Things had been unstable in this area for a few decades and we have some scattered destructions (Thebes) and intensified fortifications around 1250, suggesting things were not going great in Greece. Then from c. 1200 to c. 1180 we see the destruction or collapse of basically all of the palace centers in Greece. In some cases the urban core continues for a while, in other cases it doesn’t – in a number of cases, once the site is abandoned, it is not reinhabited (e.g. Mycenae itself, the largest of the palace centers).
As we’ll see below, the impact in Greece is greater than basically anywhere else because the collapse of the LBAC is more severe in Greece than basically anywhere else.
Meanwhite, the Hittite Empire was itself not in good shape when this started. As far as we know, the Hittites were very much on the ‘back foot’ in the late 1200s, pressured by the Assyrians and Egypt and so potentially already short on resources when their neighbors to the West began imploding. As far as I know, precise dates are hard to nail down for this, but the Hittite Empire in the early 1100s comes apart under pressure and by 1170 or so it is gone. That collapse of imperial power is matched by a significant number of site destructions across Anatolia, including the Hittite capital at Hattusas and the large settlement at modern Hisarlik, now fairly securely identified as ancient Troy. Some (like Troy) were rebuilt, others (like Hattusas) were not, but centralized Hittite power was gone and there’s a marked reduction in urbanization and probably population.
Moving into the Northern Levant, Syria and Northern Mesopotamia, we see Assyrian power – which had been advancing before, you’ll recall – contract sharply alongside more site destructions, though again chronology is tricky. One of the key sites here is Ugarit, a major Bronze Age Levantine coastal city which was destroyed c. 1190 – before the last of the Mycenean palaces (but after the first of them). The city’s destruction in fire preserved clay tablets with diplomatic messages from the local king of Ugarit (a Hittite vassal) frantically writing to his Hittite superiors for reinforcements in the face of significant (but frustratingly unnamed) threats prior to the destruction of the city.
That said, destruction in the Fertile Crescent is very uneven. The Middle Assyrian Empire contracts, but does not collapse, while the Kassite Dynasty in Babylon clearly suffers some decline, but largely stabilizes by the 1160s before being run over by the Elamites in the 1150s. Site destrictions in the Levant are uneven and some key Bronze Age centers like Sidon and Byblos were not destroyed and remained major centers into the Iron Age.1 My understanding is that while there was significant decline in the southern Levant, it is hard to pin any specific large-scale site destruction to the 1220-1170 period.
Finally we reach Egypt in a period we refer to as the ‘New Kingdom’ (1570-1069); we can trace politics more clearly here due to surviving Egyptian inscriptions. Egypt was also in a weakened position going into this crisis, facing pressure from Libyan raiders coming overland from the West and also some internal instability. In c. 1188, civil war broke out as the last queen of the reigning 19th dynasty was unable to retain control, leading to revolt and the seizure of power by Setnakhte and the 20th dynasty; his son Ramesses III took power in c. 1185. Things didn’t get easier from there as we hear reports of renewed Libyan incursions in c. 1180 (coming from the west) followed almost immediately by an invasion by the ‘sea peoples’ (see below) who were evidently fended off in at least two major battles, the Battle of the Delta (c. 1179ish?) and the Battle of Djahy (c. 1178ish?).
Egypt holds together, but there’s a fair bit of evidence economic strain (likely climate based, see below) and the ability of Egypt to project power outside of Egypt seems largely spent by the end of the reign of Ramesses III; his successors do not appear to have been able to right the ship and Egyptian power continued to fragment and decline, with the dynasty stumbling on until it collapsed in 1077 leading to the Third Intermediate Period (‘Intermediate Periods’ are the term for periods of fragmentation within Egypt).
I should note in this overview that our understanding of this sequence of collapses and declines has changed significantly. The idea of the Late Bronze Age Collapse has been around since the early 1800s when historians first noticed that the end of the Greek ‘Age of Heroes’ (linked by them to the Fall of Troy, which the (Classical) Greeks believed happened in 1184) seemed to map neatly on to the failure of the Egyptian 19th Dynasty. As archaeologists in the later 1800s and early 1900s started actually excavating the Greek ‘Age of Heroes’ (thus discovering the (Mycenaean) Greek Late Bronze Age, which we term the ‘Late Helladic’ period (c. 1700-c. 1040 BC)) and then finding site destructions dateable within a band of perhaps 1250 to 1150 BC in Greece, Anatolia, Syria and the Levant the idea of a general collapse around the legendary date for the Fall of Troy picked up a lot of steam.
My sense of the scholarship is that this ‘civilizational collapse’ narrative has been drawn back a bit as it becomes clear that some sites were not destroyed and also that some site destructions or abandonments happened significantly later or earlier than the relatively tight 1220-1170 BC time frame that emerged for the core of the collapse. No one (that I know of) is arguing there was no LBAC – there was clearly an LBAC – but the scale of the collapse remains something of a moving target as we excavate more sites, adding them to lists of sites that were destroyed, declined or (sometimes seemingly randomly) were spared.
And the list of sites that were not destroyed is significant. Of note, Athens very clearly has a Mycenaean citadel on the Acropolis (which can’t be excavated because the Acropolis is in the way, but it is very obviously there) but there’s no break in settlement in Athens. Already mentioned, Byblos and Sidon remained very prominent centers before and after, while Jerusalem and Tyre, both apparently minor settlements before LBAC (and not destroyed) will become increasingly prominent in the Iron Age Levant. Likewise the great cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia remain, few to no site destructions in either regions. At the same time, many settlements that escape destruction do not escape decline: in many cases these cities continue to shrink (and some places that escape destruction, like Tiryns, shrink slowly rather than vanishing all at once) or grow visibly poorer in a longer process. So the moment of destruction comes with a long ‘tail’ of decline stretching out decades.
So to summarize, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is a series of site destructions, abandonments and declines running from roughly 1220 to roughly 1170 (though decline continues after this point) distributed quite unevenly through the interconnected Late Bronze Age Mesopotamian-and-Eastern-Mediterranean world. Greece and Anatolia are severely impacted, the Levant somewhat less but still fairly strongly, while the states of Egypt and Mesopotamia do not collapse but enter long periods of decline.
What that description leaves out, of course, are causes and effects.
Bad Theories
While the ‘what’ of LBAC can be pinned down fairly conclusively with archaeology, the ‘why’ is tougher – a lot of potential causes (wars, armies, civil unrest) don’t necessarily leave a lot of clues in our source material.
There are a few theories we can largely discount at the outset though. The older of these were theories that assumed that the cause of at least some of the Late Bronze Age Collapse were large-scale migrations of people into (rather than within) the settled, urban zone we’ve been talking about, in particular the idea of a ‘Dorian Invasion’ of Greece as the spark of the collapse. Proposed in the 1800s, the idea here was that the ‘Dorians’ – the ancestors of the Greeks – would have migrated into Greece, destroying the Mycenaean cities and palaces and displacing or dominating the previous (non-Greek) inhabitants. This notion was based on mixed and competing ideas within (Classical) Greek literature: Greek authors both expressed the idea of the Greeks being autochthonous (indigenous to their territory, literally ‘[arising] on their own from the earth’) and also being invaders, arriving at some point forty to eighty years after the Trojan War (e.g. Thuc. 1.12; Hdt. 1.56-58). That idea got picked up by 19th century European scholars who, to be frank, often thought uncritically in terms of population migration and replacement, through an often explicitly racist lens of ‘superior stock’ driving out ‘inferior stock.’ And so they imagined a ‘Dorian invasion’ of the (racially) ‘superior’ Greek-speaking Dorians2 driving out the pre-Greek Mycenaean population, particularly in the Peloponnese.
As an aside, it is not uncommon for a single society to utilize both legendary myths of autochthony and arrival-by-conquest, choosing whichever is more useful in the moment, even though they are obviously, from a logical standpoint, mutually incompatible.
Archaeology has fundamentally undermined this theory – nuked it from orbit, really – in two key ways. First, we have Mycenaean writing, which was discovered in a strange script called Linear B (Minoan writing is Linear A). Originally unreadable to us, in 1952 Michael Ventris successfully demonstrated that Linear B was, in fact, Greek (rendered in a different, older script) and so the Mycenaeans were Greeks. Meanwhile a wide range of archaeologists and material culture scholars, as more late Helladic and early Archaic pottery and artwork emerged, were able to demonstrate there simply was no discontinuity in material culture. The Greeks could not be arriving at the end of the Bronze Age because they were already there and had been for centuries at least. Migrations within the Eastern Mediterranean might still play a role, but the idea that the collapse was caused by the arrival of the Greeks has been decisively abandoned. There was no Dorian Invasion.
The other cause we can probably dismiss is a single, sudden natural calamity. There are two candidates here to note. The first is simply people confusing the major eruption of Thera (c. 1600) which is sometimes associated with the decline of the Minoan Palaces (though the chronology doesn’t really work well there either) with LBAC. The second is effort to connect the eruption of Hekla in Iceland with LBAC. The problem again is that the chronology does not appear to work out – estimates for the dating of the Hekla eruption range from 1159 to 929 with the consensus being, as I understand it, closer to 1000 BC. For our part, the range doesn’t matter much – even that earliest 1159 date would mean that Hekla’s massive eruption could hardly explain the collapse of Mycenean palaces happening at least forty years earlier. Climate played a role in LBAC, but it is not clear that volcanic climate influence did and it is very clear that Hekla did not (though perhaps it contributed to make a bad decline worse.
So no ‘Dorian Invasions’ and no volcanoes, so what did cause it?
Causes of LBAC
We have no firm answers, but a number of plausible theories and at this point my sense is that just about everyone working on this period adopts some variation of ‘all of the above’ from this list.
We can start with climate. For reasons there’s been quite a lot of research into historical climate conditions and we can actually get a sense of those conditions to a degree archaeology from things like tree rings (where very narrow rings can indicate dry years or otherwise unfavorable conditions). I don’t work on historical climate, but my understanding is there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC, especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).3 And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.
Crop failures may have been particularly politically volatile because of the structure and values of the kind of Near Eastern states (to include Anatolia and Greece here) that we’re dealing with. We haven’t discussed early bronze age states very much but the evidence we have suggests that these were significantly centralized states, with a lot – not all, but a lot – of the resources moving through either state (read: royal) structures or through temple institutions which might as well have been state structures. Which is to say these are societies where the king and the temples (which report to the king) own most of the land and so harness most of the agricultural surplus through rents and then employ the lion’s share of non-agricultural labor, redistributing their production. Again, I don’t want to overstate this – there is a ‘private sector’ in these economies – but it seems (our evidence is limited!) to be comparatively small.
Meanwhile, the clearly attested religious role of the king in a lot of these societies includes a responsibility – often the paramount responsibility – to maintain the good relations of the community with the gods (who provide the rain and make the plants grow).
Repeated crop failures are thus going to be seen as a sign that the King is falling down on the job. Worse yet, they’ll have come at the same time as the King found himself strained to maintain his bureaucrats and soldiers, because the entire top-heavy royal administration this system relies on is fed off of the surplus it extracts.
It is not hard to see how this is a recipe for political instability if large states do not have the resources to fall back on to respond to the crisis.
To which some scholars have noted that the period directly leading up to LBAC seems to have been a period of intensifying warfare: we hear of larger armies operating in the wars in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Levant and we see massively greater investment in fortification in the Aegean all suggesting that the states are pouring resources into warfare. That may have left these states with fewer resources (idle labor, stored grain, money-covertable valuables or simply reserves of public goodwill since long years of high taxes in long wars tends to tire people out) with which to confront a sudden wave of combined political unrest and food shortage.
What is clear is that once the collapse started, it was contagious, likely for two reasons: first that collapsing areas produced invading forces and refugee flows that destabilized their neighbors and second because as you will recall above, these states are interlinked and their rulers rely on trade to furnish the key military resource (bronze) as well as to acquire key prestige goods necessary to maintain the loyalty of the aristocracy.
The clearest evidence of this are the reports in Egyptian inscriptions of peoples grouped under the modern heading of ‘Sea Peoples’ because they are often described as being ‘of the sea’ in one way or another. The evidence here is tricky: what we have are a set of inscriptions, spanning from 1210 through to the mid-1100s describing fighting against – and, this being Egyptian royal writing, invariably the victory of a Pharaoh over – a range of invading peoples. What is tricky is these reports cover multiple periods of fighting and they’re using Egyptian names for these people meaning we’re not always entirely confident that we can tell who exactly the Egyptians meant to identify.
Generally, however, what we seem to be seeing is increased pressure on Egypt from c. 1205 to c. 1170 from multi-ethnic coalitions of peoples drawn from the Aegean, Anatolia and the Levant. In particular, inscriptions from the reign of Merneptah (r. 1213-1203) report attacks by the Ekwesh (possibly an Egyptian rendering of Achaioi, ‘Achaean,’ meaning Greek) along with the Lukka (an Anatolian people), the Sherden (probably a Levantine people, perhaps the Philistines) and others even harder to pin down like the Shekelesh (more Anatolians? Sicels? other people on boats?). Later inscriptions from the reign of Ramesses III (r. 1185-1154) report relatively early in his reign victories against coalitions that include the Denyen (possibly an Egyptian rendering of ‘Danaioi,’ meaning Greek), the Sherden (again), the Shekelesh (again), the Peleset (Levantine people, probably Philistines) and others.
The way this evidence is generally read – and this seems the most plausible explanation – is that the disruptions in the Aegean, Anatolia and Levant may have themselves produced armed mass-migrations, moving by sea (these were all sea-faring peoples), perhaps looking for safe harbor. Or perhaps quite literal bands of raiders – the collapse of state structures in Greece and Anatolia might well have left a lot of full-time violence-doers without steady employment and going raiding may have been a natural recourse for some. There is some sense in Hittite documents, for instance that the ‘Ahhiyawa’ (Hittite rendering for Achaioi, meaning Greek) might have been an hostile neighbors to the Hittites and given how heavily militarized elite Mycenaean culture seems to have been, it wouldn’t be shocking if they regularly went on seaborne raids (though, again, the evidence here is very thin).
Meanwhile, while trade does not completely stop, it certainly seems to be reduced by the collapse of these states, possibly interrupting the supply of key goods – the most obvious being bronze – and any state revenues derived from taxing trade (which they did).
Consequently the ‘consensus’ vision – which remains to a degree conjectural, although it is the ‘best fit’ for the evidence – runs roughly like this:
- Intensifying warfare in the E. Mediterranean and Mesopotamia may have reduced the resources available for major states to confront a crisis and perhaps were already associated with some kind of unrest.
- A shift to a drier climate causes harvest failures which begin to push the teetering states over the edge into collapse.
- In Greece, the palace states begin to collapse one by one – probably from internal strains (e.g. an oppressed peasantry) rather than external invasion.
- Because the ‘palace economy’ was so central (and employed a lot of people, including a lot of warriors), collapse within Greece may have been contagious as raids and refugees spawned by collapsing palace systems fatally strained others.
- Those collapses in turn begin to disrupt trade but also produce outward movements of refugees and/or raiders, which may in part be what is being ‘remembered’ in Homer’s account of the Trojan War or the broader Greek mythological assumption that the Trojan War marks the end of the ‘Age of Heroes’ (which is how the Classical Greeks understood this period).
- That same strain hits the already ailing Hittite Empire, strained by wars and defeats in the Levant against the Egyptians and Assyrians. Battered by harvest failures and increasing raids (such as those Ugarit is crying for help from), Hittite power collapses.
- The states of the Northern Levant, under pressure already now lose their protector, while the other major states of the region (Egypt, Assyria, Kassite Babylon) lose a key trade partner and at least some access to tin in particular (required for bronze).
- The resulting economic contraction produces internal instability (Nineteenth dynasty replaced by Twentieth in Egypt) and combined with further raiding/refugee pressures, all of these imperial powers contract into their homelands, no longer able to project power far afield.
- In Babylon, the Kassites more or less stabilize by the 1160s, but in a weakened state, are overrun by the Elamites – a perpetual local threat – in the 1150s. In Egypt there’s a moment of recovery and stability under Ramesses III of the new Twentieth Dynasty, but further succession disputes – perhaps in part motivated by bad economic conditions – lead to power fragmenting until central rule collapses in the early 1070s. Assyrian power contracts back to the Assyrian homeland in Northern Mesopotamia, but the state survives, to reemerge as a staggeringly major power in the early Iron Age.
You will of course note that we can observe all of these stages only very imperfectly: we’re working with fragmentary letters, inscriptions that are often unreliable and often very good archaeology that can tell us what happened (‘this palace was burned and all of the finery was dumped in a well’) but not why.
The Effects of the Collapse
Just as the collapse itself was uneven – some states and settlements destroyed, others largely spared – so too its effects were uneven, so we might do a brief rundown by region.
But first I want to note the effect the collapse has on our evidence. In many places, I compare it to a lightning bolt at night that takes out the power. Immediately before the collapse, it was dim, but there was some light: though deep in the past, we have large states that are creating records and inscribing things on stone some small portion of which survive; we can’t see anywhere near as well as we can during the last millennium BC, but we can see some things. Then the collapse hits like that bolt of lightning and we suddenly get a lot of evidence at once. Destruction layers are often archaeologically rich (things get deposited that wouldn’t normally) and when, for instance, someone burns an archive full of clay tablets, that fires the clay tablets in ceramic, which can survive. Meanwhile it is easier to excavate sites that were abandoned and not re-inhabited: they probably don’t have major modern cities on them and you don’t have to excavate carefully through centuries of dense, continuous habitation to get down to the bronze age level.
But then in many areas – especially Greece – we are plunged into a lot of darkness. The states that were producing written records are either much smaller or gone entirely. Reduced at the same time is trade in goods that we can use to see long-distance cultural connections. And in many cases poorer societies build in wood and mudbrick rather than stone; the latter survives far better than the former to be observed archaeologically.
The Aegean and mainland Greece – that is, the Mycenaean Greeks – were evidently hit hardest by the collapse. Much like Britain when the Roman Empire collapsed in the West, being on the very edge of the state system as it came apart left them evidently far more isolated with a much more severe decline. Large-scale stone building effectively vanishes in Greece and won’t reappear until the Archaic period (750-480), which in turn makes it much harder to observe things like settlement patterns during the intervening period, sometimes termed the Greek Dark Age (1100-750; many archaeologists of the period dislike this term for obvious reasons). But from what we can see, Greece seems to largely deurbanize in this period, although at least one Mycenaean center survives – Athens. That may in turn explain to some degree why Athens is such a big polis in terms of its territory by the time we can see it clearly in the Archaic.
Perhaps most shockingly, mainland Greece loses writing. The Mycenaean palaces had developed a syllabic script, which we call Linear B, to represent their spoken Greek. This form of writing is entirely lost. In the 8th century, the Greeks will adopt an entirely new script – borrowing the one the Phoenicians are using – to represent their language and we (and they) will be unable to read Linear B until 1953.
The totality of the collapse of central state institutions in Mycenaean Greece may in part explain the emergence of a political institution as strange as the polis. It is clear that through the Greek ‘Dark Ages’ and the subsequent Archaic period, though Greek communities have ‘kings’ – though called basileis (a word that in the Mycenaean Linear B tablets would mean ‘village chief,’ a subordinate to the actual king in the palace, the wanax, a term Homer uses for Agamemnon and Priam only) – they lack the centralized economic engine of the palace economy and instead have much weaker central governing systems. It is something not quite but perhaps close to a ‘clean slate’ from which to develop new systems of governance that will look very different from what societies to their East had developed.
No other part of the Eastern Mediterranean suffers a civilizational setback quite as intense as in Greece, but perhaps the most significant effect is a period of prolonged political fragmentation in Anatolia and the Levant. These regions had been, over the Late Bronze Age, largely under the control of major imperial powers (Egypt, Assyria, the Hittites), but with those powers removed they have a chance to develop somewhat independently. That period of relative independence is going to slam shut when the Neo-Assyrian Empire – itself a continuation of the Middle Assyrian Empire, recovered from LBAC – reasserts itself in the ninth century, dominating the Levant and even Egypt.
But in the intervening time a number of different smaller societies have a chance to make their own way in the Levant, two of which are going to leave a very large mark. In the northern Levant, this period of fragmentation creates space for the rise of the major Phoenician centers – Byblos, Sidon and Tyre (of which the latter will eventually become the most important). As we’ve discussed, those are going to be the starting point for a wave of Phoenician colonization in the Mediterranean, as Phoenician traders steadily knit Mediterranean trade networks (back) together. They are also, as noted above, using their own phonetic script, the Phoenician alphabet, which is in turn going to form the basic of many other regional scripts. Perhaps most relevant for us, the Greeks will adopt and modifying the Phoenician alphabet to represent their own language and then peoples of pre-Roman Italy will adopt and modify that to make the Old Italic alphabet which in turn becomes the Latin alphabet which is the alphabet in which I am typing right now.
Meanwhile in the southern Levant this period of fragmentation creates the space for the emergence of two small kingdoms whose people are developing a very historically important religion centered on the worship of their God Yahweh. These are, of course, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. We are unusually well informed about the history of these kingdoms because their history was preserved as part of Jewish scripture, although verifying elements of that scripture as historical fact is quite hard – scholars remain divided, for instance, about the existence of an actual ‘united monarchy’ (in scripture under Saul, David and Solomon) which would have existed c. 1000 BC (by contrast the later split kingdoms are attested in Assyrian records). The development of these two kingdoms – and thus the development of all of the Abrahamic faiths – is greatly influenced by this period of fragmentation. Readers who know their Kings and Chronicles may have already pieced together that it is that re-expansion of Assyrian power which will lead to the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in the 720s, while the southern kingdom of Judah persists as a quasi-dependency of Assyria before being dismembered and destroyed finally by the Neo-Babylonian Empire (which replaces the Neo-Assyrian Empire, however briefly) in 597 BC.
Of course the difficult thing in all of this is that it is this initial period, where a lot is clearly forming and brewing in the Eastern Mediterranean that our evidence is significantly weaker than we’d like (again, especially in Greece, but note how much uncertainty we have even in the Levant). The first few centuries of the Iron Age, immediately following the Late Bronze Age Collapse are clearly a very important formative period which are going to set some of the key patterns for events to play out in the rest of antiquity as ‘the curtain goes up’ as it were and we start being able to see those events clearly.
All that said, I have to stress this is really a very basic overview. I am doubtless missing out on some of the latest work in this field (because I am a late/post Iron Age scholar) and in any case a lot of this cannot help but be a fairly basic summary. Perhaps one of these days I can get a Late Bronze Age or early Near Eastern Iron Age specialist to guest-write something more detailed on specific facets of the collapse and its impact.
- Sidon and Byblos, alongside Tyre (settled in the Bronze Age, but only prominent in the Iron Age) would be the most powerful and prominent Phoenician cities in the early Iron Age.
- That is, speakers of the Doric dialect of Greek
- Reduced rainfall in the Armenian highlands could, of course, negatively effect the Tigris and Euphrates, but that’s a ‘less water’ problem as opposed to a ‘no water’ problem.
I don’t get why they didn’t just call on the Atlanteans – after all, they had that sweet card game and Yugi would have made short work of the Sea Peoples. Oh well, such is historical contingency…
The Atlanteas had spent all their gold converting their citizens into hero citizens and were at pop cap.
100% here for the AoM reference.
The Atlanteans *were* the Sea Peoples, so that wouldn’t have helped.
Well, as someone who knows virtually nothing about the period, even this very basic overview was very informative. I’m glad for having read it.
One question though. I seem to recall reading somewhere that there is at least extremely limited iron production in the Hittite part of the world prior to this. Is that something that is no longer considered accurate? Or if it is, why didn’t the transition to iron spread? Or was the collapse itself a cause of the spread of iron usage? I can see a sort of chain of logic where large trade links make bronze production possible, the empires collapse, the ability to make bronze collapses, but the much more common iron is easier now to manufacture locally, so everyone starts to switch over and even by the time you start seeing large states again, nobody goes back. But lots of things that seem reasonable to me nonetheless never happened.
Your chain of events seems reasonable to me. Iron requires higher temperatures to work than bronze, and when the technology was in its infancy, the resulting metal wouldn’t be as good: softer and more prone to rust. So if you can get tin to make bronze, you’re better off using that. If you can’t make bronze but you can make iron, then you switch to that for most applications.
As ironworking technology becomes more commonplace, the price of iron decreases until it’s cheaper than bronze, so it continues to see widespread use even after bronze is more readily available again, with bronze becoming a metal for specialist applications and iron used where it doesn’t matter.
In particular, iron not well made would have slag inclusions, and might very well be brittle.
Of note, this question of metalworking quality stays around …indefinitely, more or less! When the Romans adopt the Montefortino helmet shape, already made in iron by the Gauls, for a few decades they make it in bronze. Likewise, Early Modern Europe had at least a century when the largest and best cannon had to be cast from bronze — cast iron ingots that large tended to have defects, and couldn’t be bored out anyway, so the only way to make iron cannons that big was to build them up from many smaller pieces of wrought iron, the way a cooper makes a barrel from wooden hoops and staves. (No, the modern image of “a wooden barrel” has wooden staves and iron hoops; imagine the predecessor, where the hoops were also wooden; being a weaker material, they had to cover more of the outside of the barrel.)
The greater reliability of bronze castings meant that bronze cannon were often buillt lighter than equivalent iron guns despite the material being, on paper, both denser and weaker. That, rust resistance, and lingering prestige status meant bronze cannon continued to be used into the industrial era, only becoming obsolete when bored steel guns came into their own.
The “ages” system isn’t exact: We do see the occasional iron artifact in the Bronze Age. (I want to say Tutankhamon had a dagger of (presumably meteoric) iron in his tomb?) and of course, bronze continues to be used (especially for armour) *well* into the Iron Age.
Tutankhamon’s dagger is now verified to have been made from an iron meteorite.
Of course the Old Testament has frequent references to iron AND bronze; the two coexisted in wide use for weapons and armor for a considerable time.
There’s actually a book on this The Coming of the Age of Iron, from, erm 1980! You’d think there would be something more recent). Anyway, they combine metallurgy with history, and basically agree with you.
Some extra trivia (doing this from memory): IIRC, the bronze smiths knew about iron because they used iron oxide as a flux when smelting copper ore, and got metallic iron as a byproduct. Working iron is as different from casting bronze as working titanium is from blacksmithing iron, with much the same results: iron in the Bronze Age was used for jewelry and art, primarily.
Iron is considerably more common elementally than copper, let alone tin, so once they figured out blacksmithing, they switched over because it could be done locally, no need to erect an authoritarian weasel to do the international trade in tin and exotic slave girls for them (/slap at current politics).
The thing to remember is that bronze and iron are different metals. You can cast a bronze sword (I have one, it’s gorgeous), but you have to forge an iron one, partly to control how much carbon gets into the iron from the fire. That difference in skills and tools is one of the main barriers between bronze work (brightsmithing/whitesmithing) and iron work (blacksmithing).
Your book may be outdated as the earliest iron objects were likely made from iron meteorites. I can’t help wondering for how long iron smelting was known before people started making useful things from it. Iron has a considerably higher melting temperature than copper or tin. This makes it much harder to extract from its oxidized form.
It’s not necessary to reach the melting point of iron (or iron oxide) to smelt it. Long before anyone could liquify iron it was being produced as a “bloom” of finely divided iron that at heat could then be hammered into solid pieces; hence “wrought” iron.
Still, I am quite sure the Egyptian New Kingdom did not smelt iron. They used iron ore for paint and dyeing fabric but did not extract any iron from it.
bright/whitesmithing is for tin, not bronze. bronze/copper is called a brown (or sometimes red) smith, although the wikipedia page just calls them [metal]smiths
There is an economic historian, Patrick Fitzsimmons, who claimed the causation ran the other way around: the spread of non-meteoric iron, by ‘democratising violence’, was an important factor in the Bronze Age collapse.
However, I had only read the blogpost in which he had briefly summarised his findings: https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/blood-and-iron-political-fragmentation
According to him bronze weapons and tools, thanks to being so expensive favoured the elite and larger polities; according to his application of econometric methods ‘the introduction of bronze is associated with around a 50% decrease in the number of polities within an area, as larger and wealthier polities conquered others.’
Iron by contrast lowered the gap between small, poor communities and large, rich empires. He used the data for iron adoption produced by somebody else to measure when in a region iron had replaced 70-80% of bronze weapons and tools; after this happened political fragmentation increased to the point that the number of polities within a given area was more than doubled.
He provided multiple pathways:
Increased Interpersonal Violence: weaponry became cheaper not only for states but also for individuals. ‘This could potentially make polities more difficult to govern as both the elite class and their subjects can kill each other more easily.’
Increased Polity Warfare: His ‘analysis of battle records shows an uptick in conflicts as a polity adopts iron.’
Political Instability: Babylon and Assyria witnessed more kings per century as a result of internal violence becoming cheaper.
Population Growth: ‘A larger army could support independent polities organization in areas previously ruled by foreign entities.’
However, I don’t know what Bronze Age Historians, other economic historians, and so on, think of his work.
For all I know it could be that he had somewhere forgotten to control for such confounders as ‘spatial autocorrelation’, maybe the data he used was of low quality, or possibly even if the correlation was correct he had misidentified the mechanism(s) of causation.
And it’s not just about iron being cheaper – it also disrupts the elite hierarchies. The bronze elites rely on stable trade to provide the weapons (and tools) that prop up their status; disrupting that trade weakens them. In contrast, pretty much everyone can start making iron tools and weapons without trouble, even though it’s still very expensive and labour intensive. All else equal, that would make the elites less tied to the centralised government, and the governments themselves less able to exert influence. Of course, very few communities had anything even close to autarky, but the dependency of the elites on bronze trade is painfully obvious. And yes, trade taxation was a big source of revenue for governments. I’m sure there’s many more ways in which the switch to iron weakened central governments 🙂
“I can see a sort of chain of logic where large trade links make bronze production possible, the empires collapse, the ability to make bronze collapses, but the much more common iron is easier now to manufacture locally, so everyone starts to switch over and even by the time you start seeing large states again, nobody goes back.”
My understanding is that this is how we think it happened.
Late bronze age bronze is a far superior metal to early iron for two main reasons.
1. Existing societies already have considerable infrastructure (and expertise) in creating it.
2. The material itself is superior to early iron in a number of ways. It does not rust. It is not much softer at all, considering that early iron is of very poor quality compared to the stuff the Romans are producing. It is also much more recyclable.
However, the fundamental issue with it is that you need long-distance trade networks to produce the stuff in any quantity. The tin, for instance, was largely imported from the mountains of Afghanistan or from Cornwall in south-west Britain for much of the European bronze age.
With the collapse of those long-distance trade networks (which were made viable by the demand for bronze in the near east, as well as other goods like ivory, amber and lapis lazuli), large-scale bronzeworking is no longer viable. It takes a long time of dodgy early steps ironworking to start producing tools/weaponry/armour that starts approaching the quality and utility of its bronze predecessors.
The only real benefit to early ironworking was that it was possible and better than stone and bone tools.
> The tin, for instance, was largely imported from the mountains of Afghanistan or from Cornwall in south-west Britain for much of the European bronze age.
How does such trade links from the Near East to Britain got their start? Did Near East trader knew they need tin for bronze so sent trade expeditions until they found a place which had started excavating it?
From what I understand it’s a lot more piecemeal than that. Effectively each group trades stuff with their neighbours, travelling relatively short distances (because travelling long distances through what is effectively unknown and quite likely hostile territory with valuable stuff is really dangerous). Demand for specific goods gets transmitted along these chain-link networks as people speak to each other about the stuff that they want (or the stuff that the next lot along wants, because that will allow them to make more favourable exchanges themselves).
However, on top of that thoroughly localised model we have to layer on the development of what is effectively an internationally mobile warrior/trader/mercenary/caravan-guard complex that develops in Bronze Age Europe. We find evidence of a sort of shared cultural complex among the warrior elite of Europe stretching from Mycenaean Greece all the way to the Baltic and the Nordic Bronze Age (I think the Atlantic coast gets a slightly different cultural complex, but I’m not sure yet).
Basically we have a boatload of shared cultural and religious practices, artifacts, and evidence of actual population movement along the trade networks stretching up through Europe. The current thinking is that this is evidence of a newly developed class of warrior elites who controlled and accompanied long-distance trade through Europe. There is evidence that actual people did physically travel long distances along these routes.
However, it’s not currently known whether they travelled long distances with one shipment of cargo, or if they ended up travelling long distances because they were a highly mobile and in-demand class of people for local elites to employ to protect trace within their own boundaries. So something like a mercenary police force protecting trade, where someone who was born near the Baltic could ultimately end up in the employ of a Mycenaean Wanax protecting trade around their state.
As with everything bronze age, take these ideas as ‘what we think is the most likely explanation for these disparate pieces of comparatively sparse evidence’ rather than a cast-iron ‘we know this is exactly how it worked because people at the time told us’.
This was actually exploited in “Island in the Sea if Time” by Stephen Michael Stirling. The premise is the island of Nantucket being transported from 1998 to the middle of the 13th century BC. The people happening to be on the island have a tall ship allowing them to get food from the mainland. After they build smaller boats for this purpose some of them sail the tall ship to the island of Great Britain. There they meet a mercenary from the Iberian Peninsula who speaks Mycenaean Greek. The astronomer who helped with celestial navigation is familiar with Ancient Greek. This allows them to make sense out of each other’s languages.
As a guess the copper, being more common and an obviously desirable trade item, would have made its way to the tin sources where locals stumbled upon adding tin to the copper producing bronze. Then a back-diffusion of the superior bronze would have led to a demand for the tin ore, which being the lesser part of bronze would have been easier to transport.
This sounds SO TTRPG, or maybe “Conan the Barbarian”, or maybe post-apocalyptic antihero wanderer. And as others have remarked bears strong similarities with the Vikings of post-Western Roman Empire.
I’ve seen an economics text outright state that a lot of old literature portraying the image of the wandering hero warrior really fit the lifestyle of traders and merchants more than military aristocrats.
Yeah it’s absolutely ripe for it.
Runequest Glorantha is the TTRPG that you want, though I don’t think it’s properly plumbed the depths of how cool of a dynamic this is.
@Isator Levi I’d probably agree, though in my head the distinction is a bit of a modern projection. Trade/piracy/raiding/fighting being all bundled up into one Odysseus-shaped ideal.
If you want to bundle Triple Alliance pochtecas into it you could add interstate espionage to the bundle as well…
Incidentally, the Mesoamericans were stepping into the Bronze Age when Europeans started turning up.
I’m a little surprised that you didn’t reference Cline’s After 1177 BC.
Are there any similar pattern of events in other parts of the world from a more recent historical period with better records that we could use as a sort of comparison/template?
We have a bunch, unfortunately they’re just as mysterious: The Harappan civilization collapses a bit before this and the classic maya goes through a pretty severe contraction and reorganization in the 7th-9th centuries, just to pick two. We also have the US complex around Cahokia that gets abondoned before european arrival.
Unfortunately for the very same reasons as the Bronze age collapse we have similar issues.
The collapse of the Classical Mayans was triggered by the worst drought in millennia. They were already strained by environmental destruction by then.
Isn’t it currently believed that the Harappan civilization was destroyed by the Indo-Aryans, similarly to the Old Europe being destroyed by the Indo-Europeans a thousand years earlier?
no, that was the belief when it was first found, but continued archeological examination doesn’t support it. all the sites found lacked any signs of the kind of violent action you’d expect from an invasion (broken weapons, bodies with wounds caused by weapons, lots of burned buildings, etc) in the layers where the settlements ended. instead, they just seem to have been going along fairly normally, then the inhabitants just stopped living there. the archeological evidence suggests a gradual decline in population prior to the settlements being abandoned, as well as an increase in disease.
local climate change leading to population migration is the current thought, with the urbanized settlements declining as the society broke down. there were signs that the Indus river had undergone some major changes in course increasing the aridity of the region around the time the decline started, and of some great droughts right around the time the cities were abandoned. their farming methods appear to have been rain-fed and reliant on the monsoons, which means that droughts and the resultant weakening of the monsoons would have hit them hard.
Much of the Early European Farmers’ population died from plague. This disease hit Europe for the first time in the Copper Age. The British Islands also suffered environmental collapse at about the same time. Indo-European-speaking herders subsequently moved into the vacant areas. However, this did not happen entirely peacefully as we have found victims of massacres from both groups. But for the most part the pre-existing farmer population was culturally absorbed by the herders. In some areas the languages of the Early European Farmers lived on into historical times. Several are documented in writing although only Basque survives today.
It’s notable that we don’t have solid enough chronologies yet to determine causation here with the EEF to WSH transition in the chalcolithic. It’s not 100% clear if the EEF were significantly reduced by plague and then the WSH moved in, or if the WSH brought plague with them as they moved (so effectively the two things happened effectively concurrently, as in the European colonisation of the Americas).
It’s clear that plague-like strains of yersinia pestis were present in EEF populations around the time of transition, and that people were likely dying of it in significant numbers, but we have also found immediately pre-plague-strain yersinia pestis in WSH herder populations just prior to the transition.
There’s also the evidence that the zoonotic population of yersinia pestis that gives rise to the plague in humans is most commonly found in rodents on the Eurasian steppe, which is where the WSH were resident (and thus potentially had some degree of resistance, and a proportion of their population infected with a non-plague-grade strain).
The Maya are particularly interesting because their ‘collapse’ is a very interesting one in comparison to places like bronze age Mycenaean Greece.
For the Maya, there absolutely was a collapse in the centralised city-state societies just like in Bronze Age Greece. There was also a general ruralisation of the population. Effectively, what it looks like is that people en masse decided that they didn’t really want to live in cities anymore, and dispersed into more localised rural communities. It wasn’t the sort of ‘everyone was killed in this collapse and it’s only a handful of rural farmers that survived’ collapse. There was significant population movement from cities to the countryside.
There was also a few city-states that survived or even grew during the collapse, notably those in the Mayan highlands like Chichén Itzá and Mayapán.
This sort of pattern is also observed in Cahokia and the other Mississippian big centralised polities. The historic and modern day Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Lakota, Dakota and a boatload of others are all Mississippian people who adopted less centralised/urban lifestyles after the collapse of the big Mississippian polities. There was even at least one surviving Mississippian polity operating in the pre-collapse manner upon the arrival of the Europeans, the Natchez.
One of the interesting things about these parallels is that one of the shared aspects of these urban populations appears to be that the social contract for living in such a stratified, hierarchical, urban manner is that the leader of all of these cultures is ultimately responsible for agricultural success or failure (through their link to the gods). You can easily imagine how the breaking of that social contract (via successive climate-induced agricultural failures) could convince people en masse that this arrangement wasn’t really working, and to go and try something else.
The key thing to note is that these collapses weren’t a case of everyone dying and being replaced by different people. It’s a collapse in state structures, often accompanied by reductions in population density (either precipitating or resulting from the collapse of state structures) and reductions in technological sophistication (specifically in stuff that elites use, like writing and stone carving…which unfortunately is most of the stuff we use to discover people archaeologically).
I think most of the Ancient Mayans died from starvation. A few killed each other over dwindling resources. The survivors gave rise to most or all of the current Native American tribes speaking Mayan languages. These are still mostly found in the same area as the Ancient Maya civilisation.
It’s a popular conceptualisation that the ancient Maya mostly died out with the survivors becoming the modern Maya. I’m not actually sure as to how well the evidence supports this versus a sort of mass population movement from urban centres to rural ones with comparatively little death (at least compared to the aforementioned ‘lots of death’ idea).
What’s clear is that the present-day Maya are absolutely a continuation of the ancient Maya rather than some break and replacement idea, which has been a theory in the past.
Oh, and the collapse was specifically in terms of the lowland Maya population centres. The highland ones seem to have chugged along just fine right up until the Spanish arrived…
Yes, there were Mayan city-states well into the 16th century. However, there is evidence in of extreme drought in the 9th century. By then the Mayans were already pressed by environmental destruction. It makes sense to me that most would have died from the resulting famine. The survivors would have spread out with surviving city-states taking in a considerable number of refugees. Some of them increasing in population does not disprove a significant population decrease overall.
” I’m not actually sure as to how well the evidence supports this versus a sort of mass population movement from urban centres to rural ones with comparatively little death (at least compared to the aforementioned ‘lots of death’ idea).”
Then where were the rural people? Whatever became of them?
When the Spaniards came in 16th century (with, shortly behind or ahead of epidemics), they did NOT find Maya lowlands farmed by villages of numerous independent peasants.
No, they found the Maya lowlands around Tikal and such mostly wild rainforest. The city of Tayasal and associated peasants farmed only a small part of Maya lowlands, and said they were recent immigrants anyway.
“The highland ones seem to have chugged along just fine right up until the Spanish arrived…”
No. The major highland Maya realm of Kiche was founded in 13th century by non-Maya immigrants from north (their history said that when their ancestors arrived, they could not communicate with the locals). Kaminaljuyu was abandoned around 1200 and when the Spaniards arrived, no one told its story.
@chornedsnorkak That’s not my understanding of the population dynamics of the post-classic Maya lowlands. My understanding is that the Terminal Classic had a fairly robust rural population that largely survived the collapse of complex urban structures largely intact (though not unscathed).
The population in the Post-Classic leading up to European contact experienced substantial population recovery, which was attested in early colonial accounts.
This paper articulates what I understand to be the current status of the field, which describes a fairly solid picture of ‘long term resiliency’ of lowland Maya populations through the collapse into the Post-Classic.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416524000412
There could be misunderstandings around exactly when these accounts were made. If I understand it correctly the Mesoamericans suffered repeated epidemics of diseases accidentially brought there by Europeans in the 16th century. For this reason the very earliest accounts are probably more representative than ones made decades later. For example some Spaniards suffered shipwreck off the coast of Yucatan in 1511. When Hernán Cortéz turned up eight years later two survivors of this shipwreck were still alive and had learned Yucatec. They also met a Mayan woman who spoke both Yucatec and Nahuatl. This way Hernán Cortéz and his followers could talk with the Aztec.
There’s also an interesting case that the postclassic Maya seems to have moved towards a more collective, council-based form of government: We don’t really see Maya kings like they existed in the classic.
Huh, another parallel to the Greek situation.
1. Climactic issues cause large-scale agricultural disruption.
2. Repeat agricultural failure fatally undermines the social contract the broader population have with their priest-king elites.
3. Reconstituted/surviving polities seem to emerge on a slightly more egalitarian footing after disposing of their kings.
It’s important to look at the differences as well rather than just jumping at all the similarities, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
One of the ways we identify that a collapse of equivalent magnitude has occurred, is that it creates a period where local written records are generally absent. Something big happened to Ankor in the ~1300s, for instance, and the reason we know that is there’s a 200+ year gap in written records. There’s speculation that the Saxon invasion of Roman Britain and the Viking conquests in the British Isles looked like this, but that’s derived from people who “knew” that the LBAC was caused by (Dorian) Sea People and were then able to “reconstruct” those poorly recorded eras by extrapolating that they went down like the LBAC did.
Ankor was abandoned because the seasonal rains became unreliable. The surrounding area was no longer able to support the population of the city.
A PBS program told us that Ankor was abandoned because of the shift from Mahayana Buddhism to Thervada Buddhism. Mahayana was preceded by Hinduism which is why the larger temples were built.
Mahayana could use large temples but Thevada was a more auster sect
and no longer were hordes of priests, acolytes and temple dancers needed. The conversons happened from the top down. The
Kings were convinced then as when Christianity invaded Europe the populace had to conform. In addition while the seasonal rains may
have failed the loss of population meant that that the giant resorvoirs
could not be properly maintained and they quickly filled with sediment
from the plant life that proliferated. Also a plague may have happened as the Black Death was spreading over the Eurasian land mass at the time.
Same part of the world: Balkans from ~602AD into the 9th century. With the exception of the surroundings of Constantinople and the towns of Thessalonike, Thebes, Athens, Corinth and the fortress of Monembasia, the rest of the Balkans lost writing, stone building and towns in general. This seems to have been associated with a loss of population rather than immigration of barbarians, so again similar to 1100 BC.
This was caused by the Plague of Justinian which killed an even larger part of the population than Black Death 800 years later. In addition I suspect the area was already in decline from environmental destruction and climate change.
I agree that environmental destruction, climate change and the plague probably all contributed to population decline (in the middle of the 6th century AD there were more than 50 towns on the Peloponnesos). However, final abandonment of sites was somewhat later, at the very end of the 6th century. It may have been related to failing trade with the Levant and Egypt during the Persian wars.
My favorite passage from Florin Curta’s “The Long 6th Century in Eastern Europe:” “Amphipolis [in Thrace] had several basilicas,… five of which were built over the course of the 6th century… The latest coin found in Amphipolis was struck for Emperor Maurice [killed 602 AD], and no occupation can be dated later than ~620.”
Curta elaborates that no sign of violent destruction was found in Amphipolis, nor basically anywhere in Greece at that time. Delphi, Olympia, Sparta and other cities of more than 1200 years of urbanity were all abandoned at that time and lost writing.
What you call “failing trade” could have been the final straw leading to abandonment.
There was Slavic migration into Balkans during this time, with some tribes, like the Ezeritai and the Melingoi, settling even in the Peloponnese. The Melingoi might continue to speak Slavic language till the 15th century. The exact scale of this migration is debatable, but at least Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in De Thematibus wrote about the thema of the Peloponnese that “the whole country was then slavicised and became barbarian”.
With a large decrease in population there would have been plenty of room for Slavic-speaking settlers. Still, I think the change was more cultural than biological. If I understand it correctly present-day Bulgarians and Serbs are more genetically similar to their Romanian neighbours than to Poles or Ukrainians.
This is extensively discussed in Florin Curta’s The Long 6th Century in Eastern Europe. The archaeological evidence points to very sparse human settlement in the Balkans north of modern Greece after 602 AD (it had been mostly military settlements in the preceding decades), not widespread immigration in the 6th and 7th centuries CE. The few 7th century sites in modern Greece south of Thessaly (e.g. Olympia, Delphi) suggest the inhabitants tried to maintain cultural links with the Christian tradition (e.g. interment in the ruins of a church), again suggesting these may not have been pagan Slavic immigrants.
Of course, the Slavic language and, to some extent, culture must have been introduced somewhat later, at some point in the 8th or theoretically 9th century.
The point is that this was not an invasion with deplacement, but most probably slow infiltration of a rather empty space.
1. Florin Curta is often criticized by other historians, archaeologists and linguists. While I am not saying that he is always wrong, I have some doubts about his conclusions.
2. Florin Curta himself noted that there were many burials and cemeteries of that period in the Balkans, but “next to nothing is known about the associated settlements”, so I am not sure if this area was sparsely populated or just that these settlements aren’t excavated yet.
3. While some of these cemeteries are associated with churches and church ruins and thus likely are Christian, there also are burials with weapons, which certainly do not look Christian to me. For example, there is a late sixth
or early seventh century burial in Corinth, with a Slavic pot and an Avar sword. Maybe such burials do not belong to pagan Slavs (who preferred cremation and generally didn’t put weapons in the graves), but they certainly represent “Barbarization” of this region.
4. According to Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus the Slavic migration into the Peloponnese happened during the reign of Constantine V, during or shortly after the plague outbreak. Presumably some Greeks in Peloponnese died from the plague while others were resettled to Constantinople. Therefore this migration could be dated somewhere around 750 C.E. Although there is archaeological evidence of earlier Slavic migration into the Peloponnese as well, for example Slavic funerary pyres excavated in Asea in Arcadia belong to the 7th century.
5. I am not saying that there was a Slavic invasion with the total displacement of local population. There were Slavic raids (which contributed to depopulation due to killing ad enslavement of locals) and later Slavic migrations, when Slavic tribes settled on depopulated lands and (to some extent) assimilated the remaining locals.
As I have pointed out before I don’t trust the idea of biological replacement in such contexts. There would have been some gradual population decline in late Antiquity caused to climate change and regionally soil erosion. Then the Plague of Justinian hit in the middle of the 6th century killing a large fraction of the population. This was followed by the gradual migration of Slavic-speaking people from the north. These would have become culturally dominating in large areas of the Balkans culturally absorbing much of the pre-existing population. Not all because the Albanians and Greeks survived in considerable numbers. Romans surviving on the Balkans were numerous enough to give rise to the Romanians.
Very far removed, but interesting parallel: the collapse of the USSR and its network of satellite states (primarily the Warsaw Pact). They likewise had a
templecentrally planned economy, deep economic contraction as that broke down in a disorderly fashion, large numbers of people employed by/through the state were left unemployed as government budgets went poof, and there was a notable spurt in “brin drain” migration as people with marketable skills sought greener pastures elsewhere (also, previously there were significant restrictions on departure). Numerous items of large-state products, whether military, dual-use, or prestigious, were effectively abandoned, from the Buran “Soviet Space Shuttle” (destroyed some years later, when the monumentally-sized hangar’s roof collapsed for lack of maintenance), to some actual stockpiles of military hardware. Luckily for us, military activity has stopped being operationally profitable at some point in the 19th century, and this was already well-understood at this time, thus there were no battalion-to-brigade-sized raiding forces running amok all over Eastern Europe, but in an earlier period, that absolutely would have been a consequence. (So, uh, that “internal collapse under excessive military activity” as trigger sounds a lot like tsarist WW1 Russia breaking down into the Russian civil war, which was exactly the sort of chaotic mess where we would have trouble even knowing what name meant what group — examples include the Czechoslovak Legion, the Makhnovshchina, and the Mennonite militia.)Furthermore, the state geographically contracted, leaving previously “vassal” states (aforementioned Warsaw Pact states) and directly-administered peripheral regions (Baltics, Ukraine, Kazakhstan) independent. However, “history speeds up” (if you played e.g. the Civilization series: the notional chronological time covered by turns decreases), thus where it took centuries for the Assyrian state to consolidate and again push into the Levant, it only took a few decades for Russia to make an attempt to conquer Ukraine.
I consider Communism doomed to fail from start:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/The-origin-and-failure-of-communism#wbb1
The fall of the USSR did not produce “ battalion-to-brigade-sized raiding forces running amok all over Eastern Europe”, but it did produce large numbers of criminal gangs running economic raiding activities (fraud, extortion and theft) across the Western world. So in a 21st century context that is actually fairly comparable. And those gangs and activities may yet be effective in causing the collapse of the EU and the U.S. (where they have been extremely effective).
(So, uh, that “internal collapse under excessive military activity” as trigger sounds a lot like tsarist WW1 Russia breaking down into the Russian civil war, which was exactly the sort of chaotic mess where we would have trouble even knowing what name meant what group — examples include the Czechoslovak Legion, the Makhnovshchina, and the Mennonite militia.)
As someone very interested in the era, I knew about the Czechoslovak Legion and Makhno’s forces, but it was news to me there was a Mennonite militia!
One interesting parallel to some of the previous “collapses of civilization” is that, i understand it, there was a big collapse of learning, science, intellectual inquiry as well. Partly because so many of the scientists left, but also because maintaining a scientific and academic infrastructure takes both money and institutional order and continuity. If your power gets cut for a couple of days and your -80 C freezers melt, then you can get 10, 20, maybe even 50 years’ worth of scientific data up in smoke.
It’s important to note that Babylonia and Egypt do not collapse, while Assyria shrinks but survives. State collapse is the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittltes, plus a bunch of small states in Syria.
A parallel might be the precarious polities erected on the fringes of medieval Europe – Denmark, Norway, the Avars …In these places state power rested on the redistribution of prestige goods (recall Nestor’s slave women producing fine garments, his craftsmen making ivory inlaid chariots) gained by raiding. Kings are ‘ring-scatterers’. They grow fast and then collapse back when either their victims become too strong or they reach the logistic limit of raiding. In either case, fewer prestige goods means more aristocratic discontent, more rivalries, loss of control over peripheral areas, rebellion or invasion.
> No one (that I know of) is arguing there was no LBAC
At least one person is Peter James in “Centuries of Darkness”, and they seem to have a sizeable community with them; although I’m poorly placed to judge how mainstream academic following it has, it definitely has some credibility is attached to it. As I understand it the gist of the argument is as follows.
Many sites that are supposed to be destroyed during the LBAC reappear a couple of centuries later, with a very similar material culture. Suspiciously similar, in fact. The LBAC therefore necessitates that some goods were produced in one particular style during the LBA, then stopped being made for ~200 years, and the resumed being made in much the same way in the Early Iron Age (EIA). The alternative put forward in “Centuries of Darkness” is that we’ve got the dates in the LBA wrong, and the “darkness” of LBAC is an artifice caused by us jumping from one chronology (which has all the dates a few centuries too ancient) to another that is broadly correct. Bring the LBA forwards those few centuries and things flow seamlessly from Bronze to Iron, explaining the stark similarity in finds either side of the LBAC as simply continuity without interruption. As for the Sea Peoples mentioned in Egypt, a “correct” translation is that it is a rebellion of people living on the islands / marshes of the Nile delta: more Hyksos than Achaean.
The argument goes that belief in the LBAC is what has led archaeologist to date finds either side of a destruction layer this way (~1200BC above, ~900BC below); rather than the LBAC being founded on objective dating. Relying on scientific methods like carbon dating is problematic because they have to be calibrated, which means using reference finds of a pre-determined date, making the whole thing dangerously circular. Dendrochronology is also problematic because there is no continuous ring series, so instead different species from different regions are stitched together in a way that is not entirely reliable.
Hence, the central thesis is that if things were dated correctly – rather than shoehorning them into a pre-supposed LBAC narrative – we’d have a smoother transition from LBA to EIA with (more or less) the usual amount of site destruction scattered through out this period; rather than a sharp collapse, followed by few centuries of very little, and a revival that is suspiciously similar to what was there before.
I really don’t know enough about this theory – or this time period generally – to be able to judge the evidence for or against it. But I know enough people who are experts and fully subscribe to this idea, that I don’t think it can be rejected out of hand as crackpot nonsense. What I do know is that chronology and dating issues in Bronze Age history are very real and very substantial, shifting things (like Egyptian Dynasties) by centuries is not unheard of. Even reputable historians (like Jonathan M. Hall in Blackwell’s “History of the Archaic Greek World”) feel the need to acknowledge that this theory exists.
(Caution, not a domain expert.) Apparently this is considered valid scholarship rather than crackpot nonsense – from 1991. But the theory was not generally accepted.
The Egyptian chronology is wrong, carbon dating is improperly calibrated, various tree ring and ice core samples have all been interpreted wrong… seems a lot to ascribe to confirmation bias. And raises entirely new chronological headaches. (How does Greece evolve the polis system and adopt a new alphabet in maybe 2 centuries, while retaining zero cultural memory of whatever went down?)
Hopefully this work generated some controversy and rethinking of methodology. It didn’t persuade the next generation of researchers.
That sounds uneasily like “phantom time” nonsense.
I agree with you although the problems are less severe in this case. (The Phantom Time hypothesis is hopelessly Eurocentric to the point of not even considering the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.) There are written records of astronomical observations from before the LBAC. If we know in which places they were made it can be calculated when. This is the standard way of correlating historical calendars.
Superficial in that it seeks to drastically amend the chronology, yes, but this really isn’t conspiracy theory wackiness. “Centuries of Darkness” could be completely wrong, or apply only to a handful of mis-dated sites rather than the whole chronology, but it is argued from the evidence up. At the very least, it’s a colourable position.
That does feel like one of those scholarly debates that looks huge and divisive when simplified but is actually about fine nuances. As far as I can tell from your summary, Peter James’ position is not that there wasn’t a period of increased warfare and destruction in that region at that time, but only that the “lights out” period was considerably shorter and more localised than the mainstream position supposes. Which is frankly a colourable position to hold.
My summary did it disservice then. The thesis is definitely that there was no “lights out” period, and only appears to be one because we’ve added a few hundred fake years into the calendar. Some sites were destroyed during the transition from LBA to EIA, but some sites are destroyed even at the peak of the Bronze / Iron Age, so there’s nothing out of the ordinary here.
I don’t like the expression “fake centuries”. It makes it sound like a deliberate hoax instead of a possible honest mistake.
I remember encountering a guy who held that the Greek Dark Ages basically didn’t exist and that Homer therefore was in more or less direct contact with mycenean culture (as it transitioned into the archaic)
Heck, there are people who believe that the Odyssey was originally set in the Baltic and only adapted by Homer like a retrofitted sequel movie script.
Ah, the Baltic Greeks guy.
He’s a nutcase.
I am not sure if the Baltic even had sail-ships at the time. Also, snow is not unknown in Greec or Anatolia.
There’s potential evidence of sailed ships in Nordic Bronze Age pictograms around the time, though I’m not sure how tight the chronology is on that (the carvings seem to start at ~1700BC and run through to 0AD, and only a few of them have sails).
This paper has a tentative chronology that places them around the right period: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00293652.2024.2357135#d1e1475
Note that this does not indicate any support for the Baltic Greeks guy. That guy’s bonkers.
Interestingly, there are glaciers on Mount Olympus. There is a large hole were snow has accumulated since it is always shaded. However, this glacier only dates back to the Little Ice Age. On the north side of the mountain there is a layer of ice now hidden under rocks and gravel. During the late Bronze Age it would have been visible from the sea.
At bare minimum, surely there was a Greek collapse? Given the destruction of nearly every major Greek settlement and the loss of the Linear B writing system?
There must be a reason why Linear B stopped to be used. To me it seems plausible that central administration of most of the economy stopped with the administrators no longer needed. Since they were the only ones able to read and write it Linear B stopped being used.
In Cyprus (formerly known as Alashiya), people kept using the Cypriot syllabary, a sister system to Linear B, until the 4th c. BC (or even later).
Cyprus is a real puzzle here. They were right in the centre of all that raiding and the agriculture there is rainfall-based and somehow they not just survived but prospered.
Isn’t the usual argument that Cyprus more or less just kept going with Mycenean palace-society? I want to say they had *Wanaxes* well into the early classical?
@Alex two reasons: Firstly, it’s a polity controlling one island, and that for a long time. It’s easy to keep seafaring invaders out if you know all possible harborages and have already turned most of them into fortified harbors yourself. And secondly, the island is literally got its name from the abundant copper deposits on it – it has no problem keeping its weapons and armor in shape.
They would still have needed to import tin. Copper and tin are almost never found in the same area. This is why bronze has only been invented twice. Once by the Danubian culture and once by the Moche culture if I remember it correctly.
@Alien@System The tin is the tricky bit. The closest place to get tin if you’re on Cyprus is from the mountains of Afghanistan (which is right through the destruction zone of the LBAC). Failing that it’s Iberia, the border of Germany and the Czech Republic, or Cornwall (which was a major source even for the easter Med). The trade routes for which were all through polities that suffered greatly in the LBAC.
Cyprus was a very prosperous island though, and a real hub of metalwork and mining. Perhaps they had enough stockpiles of the stuff to ride out the political turmoil.
There’s such a thing as arsenic bronze. Distinctly second-rate but better than unalloyed copper. Were there sources of arsenic more readily available than tin that bronze workers could fall back on in a pinch? If so, does the archeological record note any uptick in such alloys?
Might be interesting to see if the proportion of copper to tin in local bronze changed over that time in Cyprus. If you’re short on tin, you can still make stuff out of copper and less tin, or recycle existing bronze with a bit more copper added.
@Michael Alan Hutson
Arsenic occurs as a contaminant within many copper ores. From what I understand arsenical bronze was the primary tool metal on Cyprus for a considerable time prior to the invention of tin bronze, so it’s definitely a possibility. As far as I’m aware they didn’t import arsenic-rich ores for that, but I’m not an expert so they may well have done (I know the main arsenic-rich ores for chalcolithic arsenical bronze were on the Iranian plateau, plus some smaller deposits scattered around elsewhere).
It should be something that’s relatively easily testable, compared to the mess of the rest of the LBAC. It may well have been done, and I just haven’t looked for it properly!
Same with the debasement of tin contents in bronze items @douglampert
Are there no astronomical observations that we could use to date things more accurately? The Babylonians should still be observing the sky at this time, and over in China the Shang dynasty is still kicking around (though they will be conquered by the Zhou in ~1050BC). Are their no astronomical events that we could use to align Babylonian and Shang records?
I think there are but I can’t point out any specific ones.
James wants to lower the chronology — that is, treat events as roughly 200 years younger than the standard dating — but those studying the eruption of Thera (roughly 1629 bce) want to *raise* it (that is, treat events as *much older* than the standard dates). I’ve been waiting 30+ years for them to sort this out, to no avail.
A tree killed by the eruption has been radiocarbon dated to 1626 – 1605 BC. I think this is the most exact we can date it.
They’re still arguing the dates. Any date in the 17th C bce creates problems for dating other sites. To quote Wikipedia,
“The Minoan eruption is an important marker horizon for the Bronze Age chronology of the Eastern Mediterranean realm. It provides a fixed point for aligning the entire chronology of the second millennium BC in the Aegean, as evidence of the eruption is found throughout the region. Yet, archaeological dating based on typological sequencing and the Egyptian chronology is significantly younger than the radiocarbon age of the Minoan eruption, by roughly a century.”
If the Egyptian chronology is off by a century, then the LBAC would have to be dated 1320 -1270 bce, instead of the current 1220-1170. That makes a much longer “dark age”, which James says didn’t even happen at all. I’m losing hope that they’ll resolve this in my lifetime.
>> I’m losing hope that they’ll resolve this in my lifetime.
Yes, this is a “abandon all hope ye who enter here” kind of situation. Classical / Roman / Hellenistic source material is sparse enough and there are lots of unanswerable question “how” and “why”, but for the Bronze age it feels like we’re still even the most basic “what” questions are tough going.
The catastrophism of the Thera eruption would go a long way towards explaining the trigger for the LBAC, if only the chronology could be reconciled.
All datings of the eruption place it during the 17th or 16th centuries BC. The LBAC is thought to have happened around 1200 BC with Antiquity beginning around 800 BC. It is the centuries between the LBAC and the beginning of Antiquity that Peter James wants to erase. Records of astronomical observations could disprove that idea.
The problem is that the radiocarbon dates from this time period are not certain due to a spike in atmospheric Carbon-14 during the 16th century BC.
Also, only a twig of an olive tree was found. Not the whole tree. And certain parts of olive trees can stop growing. So even if the radiocarbon dates are correct, we cannot be certain that the growth of that twig did not cease well before the Minoan Eruption.
As I have pointed out before all datings indicate the Minoan Eruption to have taken place in the 17th or 16th century BC. I can understand it being an important archaeological marking considering how devastating it was. This eruption was basically a larger version of Krakatau’s 1883 eruption. Most of the island the volcano stood on was blasted away creating a tsunami. When it hit Crete I think it was ten meters tall. Not only did it destroy numerous building around the coasts of the Mediterranean. It would also contaminate the soil with salt as the Mediterranean is saltier than the great oceans. This disaster was followed by a volcanic winter impacting the northern hemisphere more severely. It may have been worse than the 1816 volcanic winter but only in the northern hemisphere.
Oh hell yeah, this is always a fun one.
It’s funny how recent scholarship has questioned basically every single bit of evidence we have for the LBAC (e.g. Kaniewski et al.’s climate evidence is so low-resolution, it’s difficult to nail the changes they describe down to a single century, let alone a decade. Meanwhile, the texts from Ugarit generally lack context and can’t be dated). Despite that, the evidence is so overwhelming when viewed altogether that you can’t *not* end up with some version of “internal systems collapse in the Aegean leading to elites disappearing and widespread political instability across the Eastern Mediterranean”.
There does seem to be some parallel there to the scholarly debate about the collapse of the Roman empire in the west – where the newer research has found many ways to point out continuity and that the initial apocalyptic understanding of the collapse was overblown. And yet everyone has to agree that things *are* different before and after and that whatever happened in between was not business as usual.
I’m currently reading Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire and would recommend. He argues not just the cause of the fall (a growing power symmetry between Rome and the western ‘barbarians’) but the limits and capacities of the late Roman state.
These limits were caused by a combination of environmental destruction and climate change. We are talking about deforestation, soil erosion and the climate becoming cooler and drier.
Don’t forget about our old friend irrigation-induced salinity!
I think this is the main reason why present-day Iraq can’t feed its own population despite having been highly productive in early Antiquity. But I don’t know how much irrigation was used in the Roman Empire other than obviously in Egypt.
Agreed that most of the landmass of the Roman Empire was rainfall-fed…but Egypt had an outsized contribution to their total food production.
To be fair, it was less Egypt I was thinking about. From what I understand, the mechanics of irrigation agriculture on the banks of the Nile protect somewhat from salinity crises. I was mainly thinking about the rest of the North African coastline stretching from Libya through to present-day Morocco.
You are right in that they would not have been able to control Africa’s entire north coast without irrigated agriculture.
I have been reading Chris Wickhams Inheritance of Rome and, despite the author generally emphasising the continuity between late antiquity and the early middle ages, he does mention quite a bit that there was a significant amount of ‘simplifcation’ and ‘localisation’ of the economies of most regions.
It’s not even limited to the Eastern Mediterranean. I feel people focus in on that part of the bronze age world (understandably) because it’s the place we have the most evidence for. And in a situation as evidence-sparse as the European Bronze Age, that’s understandable.
However, these eastern Mediterranean polities were at the centre of vast trade networks that didn’t stop at Mycenaean Greece. Greece was the outskirts of the people who wrote to us but there were many other polities stretching across the length and breadth of Europe that were connected into this trade web.
For instance, there was a massive trade network for amber that stretched from the Eastern Med through Mycenaean Greece, through the Terramare culture in the Po valley, up through central Europe to the Baltic. That trade network linked places as distant as the cultures of the Nordic Bronze Age to the Eastern Mediterranean.
I should also note that the Terramare culture experienced a significant collapse around 1150BC, seemingly driven by similar environmental pressures as everyone else, with all of their sites being abandoned at that time. This also coincides with an increase in Terramare-style weaponry and jewellery in Mycenaean and Eastern Mediterranean contexts (it was already present there, evidencing significant trade and mobility, but increased dramatically).
Not to mention that a good chunk of the tin that fuelled the Bronze age came from Cornwall.
Yep!
One of the gaps in my knowledge at the moment is what route that tin took to get to the eastern Med. Was it coastal along the Atlantic, tying in western France and the Iberian peninsula into the bronze age trade web, or was it overland over riverine routes?
We may well know the answer, I just haven’t looked yet!
People from the Nordic Bronze Age culture are known to have travelled (probably rowed) to present-day Spain to get copper. So tin could well have been transported along the coast. The few rock engravings showing sail-ships could have been modelled on ships from the Eastern Mediterranean encountered on the way.
Thanks very much for this! It’s always nice to hear about some slightly earlier history (and archaeology). I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d love to hear more about the Bronze age – especially the early development of states and their associated institutions.
The Amarna letters (1388 – 1332 BC, more or less), or less than 200 years before the LBAC, are strong evidence of the “significant degree of diplomatic, economic and cultural interconnectedness” of that period, to the point that they are (mostly) letters to or from the reigning Pharaoh _written in diplomatic Akkadian_. I have to wonder if Akhenaten or Tutankhamun studied Akkadian when they were kids – they certainly communicated with their vassals in Akkadian.
The LBAC stopped this.
On the one hand, this is what scribes are for. On the other hand, elite display is a thing; just as King Théoden is a poet, a New Kingdom pharaoh may be an accomplished calligrapher, because the language and/or writing system is difficult to learn.
However, I can’t bear not remarking on their language. I don’t know how to render this well in English, but take e.g. Amarna letter 35. Its cadence is an uncannily good fit to stereotypes for how gypsies talk (and that copper is the topic of business discussion).
From the article, “In EA 35 [the sign for “my brother”] averages about two uses per paragraph.” Or about every other sentence, bro.
Everything’s great, bro! Except for the little bitty fact that we’re all too busy dying of plague to do any mining!
Is Sherden = Sardinians no longer taken seriously? I definitely recall reading this claim but may have been reading outdated scholarship.
My understanding was that the academic consensus (as much as one exists for any part of the LBAC) is that the Sherden are likely nuragic Sardinians based on nuragic pottery finds in Crete and Cyprus (evidencing their presence in the eastern Med) and the similarities between nuragic bronze statues of warriors and ships and the Egyptian temple depictions.
I suspect this is one of those things where Brett is talking a little outside of his area of expertise, which he was open about.
I could be wrong of course, but I don’t think I am. Within the caveat that all of the suggestions that sea peoples are a certain group are all possibilities and likelihoods rather than certainties.
“Athens very clearly has a Mycenaean citadel on the Acropolis (which can’t be excavated because the Acropolis is in the way)”
*Heinrich Schliemann noises intensify*
The version of Troy Heinrich Schliemann excavated was considerably older than the one he was searching for.
Rookie mistake. Pick a location that polite society doesn’t care about, as Giuseppe Ferlini has done. It may come around to bite him in the butt, though: “He tried to sell the treasure, but at this time nobody believed that such high quality jewellery could be made in Sub-Saharan Africa.“
He took the jewellery from a Nubian pyramid which is clearly Egyptian influenced. I got the association to racists denying the Benin Bronzes (sculpture and relieves) were made by locals despite comparable one being made in the area even today!
How can you leave out the most important part of the Bronze Age collapse: merchants who sell you poor copper and are rude to your servant!
Ea-Nasir had been dead for several centuries by this time.
If he’d sold better copper maybe the LBAC wouldn’t have happened.
“these states are interlinked and their rulers rely on trade to furnish the key military resource (bronze)”
Oh come on surely running out of military goods wouldn’t be immediately fatal to a socie-
oh, right, yes, carry on
there was a middle part of the joke where I claimed to be rereading articles from the last few years about shell, missile, and drone hunger. But I, like a fool, put it in them angle brackets. And this blog’s digital guardians barked, “gee that looks like html, can’t have that now can we chaps” and confiscated it.
The Late Digital Age Collapse will surely pass over this blog, leaving it for future historians to ponder.
Several science-fiction writers (among others) have noted that (1) we don’t have much data on how long our digital media might last and (2) even if it is readable a thousand years from now, most of it’s encrypted. So it’s possible the archaeologists of 10000 CE will have better sources for Bronze Age Assyria than for 21st Century Europe.
We have plenty of inscriptions in stone as well as writing on ceramics (such as porcelain). Unless their metal is oxidize away or is melted down there would also been metal plates. I came to think about the monument erected by Solidarity in Gdańsk. It has text in four major languages (English, French, German, Russian) as well as the local one (Polish). As long as any of them have living descendants and there are some clues as to the sound values of the letters it will be readable.
Almost every movie made in Indonesia prior to the invention of the VHS tape is already lost, a period in which demand for originally Indonesian-language movies to show in Indonesian theaters was significant and production volume was on par with a lot of Western countries.
Wow, that’s both horrible and interesting to know! Thank you for telling us!
There is a ton of writing on paper being produced still. Even with switching to internet for a lot of things, remember industrial society making lots of stuff where just about everyone can read vs. ancient society. (This is an almost literal comment from I think social media, maybe reddit.) So historians would have plenty to work with if at least a little paper stuck around. Or in an equivalent to scribes copying things, lots of digital stuff to be copied to a new version, printed, copied, etc.
Ah yes. Paper. That famously durable material.
To be fair, we produce so much of the stuff that we might be able to brute-force out way into its survivability outside of deserts, but its no clay tablet.
Preservation of digital information generally doesn’t rely on physical preservation of media; it relies on dirt-cheap copying.
If anything, there would be a “gap” of lost media that doesn’t get digitized, with everything else being constantly copied to newer media because why not copy everything if you’re making a new archive.
(The archaeology in this case would be like modern professional “code archaeology” – figuring out the custody chain and authorship and context of an absolute firehose of information.)
The concern is that we may lose the ability to manufacture suitable storage media to tide us over the “dark age”. You can’t store data on SSD Flash for even a decade without it degrading, so we will have to keep producing new flash constantly. Or new mechanical harddrives which probably last a bit longer than flash. But those are very intricate examples of manufacturing technology and we may easily lose the cutting edge technology. If we have to revert back to couple decades old harddrive technology, then we will be severely limited on how much of our data we can store. Same problem if we tried to store our data in paper format.
Our best chance of preserving data may be M-DISC DVDs which are claimed to last a millennia. But we would also need to preserve DVD drives with their clockwork mechanisms for a thousand year too. Extra problem is that the concept of storing data has already become pretty obsolete, people aren’t buying new drives and burning their data, or buying discs with some stored information. We would need a project to specifically store our data on M-DISCs and store them in vaults all around the world, as a preparation for apocalypse.
Once you’ve stored data on M-DISC, reading it back out is a problem for the archaeologists; you don’t need to preserve the reading technology for the data to be preserved.
I am writing this on a 14-year-old PC using a 23-year-old word processor. My parents own a laptop running Windows Vista which was released in 2006. It can’t connect to the net but I have started it a few times to use its older graphics software.
“you don’t need to preserve the reading technology for the data to be preserved.”
*Internally screams in quipu*
Of cause we have to preserve information on how to decode the data or it would still be useless. The storage mediums would just be pieces of plastic and metals.
The problem is digitation: converting information into coded strings of ones and zeroes. Many feel that long-term archiving will require a return to analog formats, including plain old-fashioned text and images.
Crucial safety information needs to be stored analogously. Apart from that we have to make choices about what to achieve. By now the information stored digitally is probably orders of magnitude beyond what can be stored on paper. I would suggest printing text and stills published by publics service TV on their websites. Private individuals could choose to printout their own selection of the texts and images they have made electronically themselves. I have printed a lot of photos I have taken myself although I don’t have space for any more photo albums.
It’s an interesting conceit, that most of our written culture might be lost due to the impermanence of our digital records, but history suggests that societies with relatively high levels of literacy do a pretty good job of transferring texts to new material as needed. Clay tablets last much longer than papyrus, but we still have more texts from 100 AD than from 1200 BC, because the Mediterranean world had higher levels of literacy in the later period.
Of course, if you imagine our species being totally wiped out, then most of our records would not survive. The last volume of the Three-Body Problem trilogy discusses this issue, and concludes that carved stone tablets would be the best–perhaps the only–way to preserve written records.
“societies with relatively high levels of literacy do a pretty good job of transferring texts to new material as needed”
That’s the issue. Civilisational collapse has historically caused drastic drops in literacy rate on multiple different occasions.
A frequent example is the Domesday Book, which is still readable (viewable?) after more than 900 years. Back in the previous century the Brit govt sponsored a special digital edition of the Domesday book on CD for use in schools. Took about a decade for the school computers to become thoroughly obsolete and the Domesday Book CDs couldn’t be read on anything else.
Although this also shows the solution described by @asazernik: when enough people had pointed out how silly this was, a special effort transcribed the digital Domesday Book into more modern formats that could be read.
It took some doing to recover ~50 year old moon mission data, and that was luckily done before the tapes had degraded or otherwise been destoryed, see the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project for details. I’ve found tapes in a cabinet with a (very optimistic) “30 year backup” label on them: good luck finding a working tape drive from that era, possibly also a working computer from back then or some means to replicate the tape drive interface (SCSI? some weird parallel port protocol with extra special vendor sauce?), and the funding and motivation necessary to try to recover the data, assuming the tapes haven’t gone bad. Not impossible, just unlikely except where the data (say, from moon missions) is culturally important, funding is available, motivation is available, and the data hasn’t met entropy never sleeping.
My oldest files are from the late 90ies. They have survived by being transferred from one storage medium to the next. I tend do use things with movable parts as long as they work. Renewing for renewal’s own sake is a waste of resources.
Oh, angle bracket markup works, it’s just that anything in brackets that is not a supported code gets deleted. I wonder if double brackets <>?
I tend to lean towards “united kingdom” being a thing, because we have an older reference to the “House of David”, and it’s not a stretch that a charismatic pastoralist chieftain could have rolled up a small realm in his life-time (held together by his son, before it fell apart under his grandson). Although most of the biblical grandeur of Solomon is clearly projecting later years backwards into the time.
Personally, I tend to think that David’s exploits have good internal evidence:
*Samuel’s books describe a local chief who is, very essentially, a trickster favoured by his God. David is not, by any means, a perticularly moral man.
*Ruth’s Book claims to be the origin story of David: the story of his paternal greatgrandmother, who, in desperate poverty, snuggled into the bed of a wealthy landowner. (Normally in the Bible, adultery, a felony deserving death), and was rewarded with a good marriage. In particular, Ruth is a Moabite.
These stories are so negative to their protagonist that their survival is most easily explained by the fact that they were considered important by the people who told them orally before they were written down. In particular, I would say that the likeliest reason for Ruth’s story to survive would be that David liked telling it to his men. He strikes me as a guy who would get perverse enjoyment in telling this kind of story about the amoral resourcefulness of her greatgranny.
So, I think that it is more likely than not that there was a charismatic local leader named David whom the later Judean rulers claimed as the founder of their throne. But I would not go any further in claiming that any particular facet of the myths around the person were true.
The Bible is full of stories that aren’t meant to be “daring exploits” but “none of us are free of sin”. The OT particularly paints a picture of a horrible fallen world in which good is very limited, people keep straying from the right path and very hard law is needed to at least somewhat prevent it. Those are stories that got passed down as important warnings!
You can see how David gets his success: he’s loyal and rewards loyalty, to the point he repeatedly gives Saul what’s politically a boop on the nose when Saul is trying to kill him and he could kill Saul, because he considers Saul his rightful king. He also doesn’t seek maximum glory in war, in contrast to big strong Saul, though he’s willing and capable of going to war if necessary. On the other hand, he can be plenty ruthless to those he has no such ties to and likes to take what he has an opportunity to take – particularly women. These traits finally conflict when it comes to Uriah. David does something unacceptable and it takes some time, but he sees how he fucked up in the end. You see it as myths because you think it’s all told positively when David is actually presented as a realistic person with particular, consistent good and bad traits.
I feel as though “the Bible depicts a horrible fallen world in which good is limited” is not quite a framing that would be agreed on by people for whom there is no profound redeeming event later on.
Sure, but that’s a re-write that has to move the constituent books around to break their thematic arc and then tacks on the redemption story as a separate volume. The fallen world stuff is all still in there, somewhat obfuscated, and indeed the final chapters are about how the world will fall back after the redemption and have to be completely unmade to be truly redeemed.
I think you are, in your notion of a “fallen world”, projecting later Christian understanding of the text.
There is very much the notion you point out of divine consequence (sometimes delayed) for human transgressions, but the idea that there was some previous “pure” period is really only there in one story (Adam and Eve), which is never mentioned in other texts in the corpus.
Actually, that is just one Christian way of reading the Old Testament. I must humbly confess that this framing is something I have never encountered in a form this strongly expressed, even though I have some formal theological education. (For me, the historical-critical forms of exegesis and the classic four senses are the ways I’ve learned to read Bible: you either read it like a modern liberal or like a medieval monk. But not as a 19th century rationalist.)
It’s interesting that you analyze it this way – the criterion of embarrassment is normal in analysis of the historicity of Jesus, but not in that of the Tanakh. It doesn’t mean it’s bad for biblical criticism, but the Big God model that produces the criterion of embarrassment for Jesus (would you really say that your god was crucified if it didn’t happen?) should not apply to someone like David. As it is, the narrative in Samuel portrays David as a considerable improvement over Saul, who disobeys God and Samuel more often than he obeys them.
For a much more modern historical analogy of where the criterion of embarrassment does not apply: much of the middle school-level history of WW2 as told in the US and UK invents things that embarrass the state. The myth that the Nazis and Italian Fascists ran the trains on time is pervasive; Hitler and Stalin are both portrayed as dangerously efficient tyrants, and this goes back to the 1940s (it’s a main theme in 1984), rather than as comically incompetent in a way that led to the destruction of the German state in 1945 and came close to leading to the destruction of the Soviet one in 1941-2; British appeasement is treated as pure naïveté rather than as an amoral attempt by Chamberlain to buy time to rearm. All of this can be explained in terms of postwar politics – for example, boosting German nationalism for Cold War purposes, or connecting efficiency with totalitarianism out of discomfort of the ahistorically large role of the state in the US and UK – but it still is an embarrassment to the state every bit as inventing the story of David and his sundry sins against God.
These examples are about real people having their characteristics corrupted. I am not sure if Saul, David or Solomon really existed. It is hard to know after this long time.
Furthermore, it can be noted that the criterion of embarrassment is now rather out-of-fashion in historical Jesus scholarship
“much of the middle school-level history of WW2 as told in the US and UK invents things that embarrass the state. The myth that the Nazis and Italian Fascists ran the trains on time is pervasive; Hitler and Stalin are both portrayed as dangerously efficient tyrants, and this goes back to the 1940s (it’s a main theme in 1984), rather than as comically incompetent”
I don’t think your argument holds together. “Hitler was a dangerously efficient tyrant, not an incompetent clown” is false, but it is not embarrassing for the British state to say it. Saying the reverse would be more embarrassing!
“Hey, so, what happened in France in 1940?”
Which answer is more embarrassing from the point of view of the British state?
Is it A
“The British and French armies were defeated by an army led by a dangerously efficient tyrant”
Or is it B
“The British and French armies were defeated by an army led by a comical incompetent”?
Because you’ve got to admit the defeat happened either way.
The generals of the German Army were dangerously efficient when it cam to fighting the
somewhat lackadasical armies of The UK and France with more modern weapons and
The Panzers advanced so quickly that Bobbie wasn’t even able to finish her sentence!
I recommend the book “The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero,” which posits that he was ruthless b*st*rd who would go to any length to get the kingship (and then cover it all up with a good public relations firm) and not a charismatic leader.
I do note that this is the kind of thing that show up for a lot of founder-or-refounder figures, Romulus has many of the same plot beats.
Some of those seem to be historical, some of them are not. “minimalist” David is clearly *plausible*, but that doesen’t mean he existed. (the same is true for Romulus and a lot of other figures from graeco-roman myth)
“David” may had been a god later claimed to have been a human king. This is a common rationalization made after a people become Monotheist.
Projecting modern attitudes backward though it may be, I refuse to countenance the idea of a god named Dave.
In any case wasn’t David originally a title or epithet rather than a personal name?
“Dave’s Not Here!” — Cheech & Chong had it figured out long ago?
I have personally met people which give name is the name of a god no longer worshiped.
In light of the fact that the seals of several named individuals from the Talmud have been found, the perspective that the prophetic and kingship era stories are made up, exaggerated, or otherwise confabulated … needs to defend itself.
https://www.newsweek.com/bible-archaeology-ancient-seal-2112149
https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/2600-year-old-seal-bearing-name-of-first-temple-era-official-discovered-in-jeruslam
https://www.cfhu.org/news/western-wall-plaza-excavations-yield-first-temple-hebrew-inscribed-message/
And here, an absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence. Many sites in the area, such as Timna, have specialized buildings but no evidence of living facilities (in Timna’s case, copper industrial buildings). But the Hebrew of the Book of Judges is very specific; though the end of each episode is often rendered “and everyone returned to their homes”, in fact the correct translation is “and everyone returned to their *tents*”. They lived in tents though some of them worked in buildings. The size of ancient Israel has been systematically underestimated due to the assumption that there should be houses.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/what-matters-now-to-archaeologist-erez-ben-yosef-king-davids-tent-dwelling-monarchy/
Those seals only go back so far, and only attest so much. The existence of a state (what that seal in the JTA article mentions) and the confirmation of a relatively late bit of the kings list (Josiah).
As texts, we have the Deuteronomistic source (first composed under Josiah, late 7th century) and the Chronicles source (likely mid-6th century). We have very good corroboration for Hezekiah (early 7th century, three generations before Josiah).
Extrapolating the reliability of the Hezekiah-and-later texts backwards by another three centuries to David is a big stretch that bears the burden of proof, in light of the ways that sources frequently get less reliable as their narratives get farther back in time from their authorship.
Study of the size of ancient Israel should be treated with exceptional caution considering the imperialist ambitions of present-day Israel.
I’m not saying I disagree with the findings per se. Just that I would expect considerably more reputable sources than the Times of Israel to be presented as evidence.
It really is disappointing when you have to factor nationalism into historic studies.
The perspective that the later books of the Tanakh are exaggerated or otherwise confabulated seems harder to defend given that we’ve found the seals of many named individuals from the First Temple period. I apologize for just listing them, links seem to not be allowed in the comments.
– Ahaz of Judah, son of Yehotam (King Ahaz of Judah)
– Hezekiah, son of Ahaz (King Hezekiah)
– Azariah son of Hilkiah (Son of high priest Hilkiah and discoverer of a ‘lost’ book of Jewish law, possibly Deuteronomy)
– Yedayah ben Asayahu (one of the senior officials King Josiah turned to after Azariah’s discovery)
– Natan-Melekh, Servant of the King (someone of this name is recorded in connection with King Josiah)
– Yeho’ezer son of Hosh’ayahu (Hosh’ayahu was recorded in the Book of Jeremiah as part of the Southern Kingdom, a senior member of the administration)
– Yechuchal son of Shelemayahu (an official named in the prophecies of Jeremiah)
– Gemariah son of Shaphan (a scribe and high ranking officer in the court of King Jeoiakim)
– Achiav son of Menachem (possibly the infamous King Ahab son of Menachem, from the period of the prophet Elijah)
– Belonging to the Governor of the City (there are two governors of Jerusalem named in the Tanakh; Joshua, in the days of King Hezekiah, and Maaseiah in the days of Josiah)
And at least a dozen others that can’t be identified with any named role or individual. These finds would likely have been made earlier had the evidence not been deliberately bulldozed by islamists (see the Temple Mount Sifting Project). The predominance of the Josiah-period finds is likely one of those “lightning illumination” moments due to the imminent destruction of Judah by the Babylonians.
And efforts to downplay the scale of ancient Israel also suffer from methodological problems; such as mistranslating the Hebrew of the Book of Judges. The episodes of Judges typically end with a line often translated as “and everyone returned to their homes”. The absence of finding those homes has been taken as evidence of absence of a developed ancient Israel. However, a more correct translation would be “and everyone returned to their *tents*”. A line for which absence of evidence would seem like just that. And in fact, sites like Timna have shown specialized buildings (in that case, copper industrial) but no habitation, lending credence to the theory that the locals lived in tents even if they built and worked in stone buildings. (This is also alluded to in the holiday of Sukkot, which celebrates that ancient Jews lived in booths or shacks.)
Now, none of these are direct evidence. And also clearly there was still some myth intertwined with the history. But for the post-Torah books of the Tanakh, our archaeological evidence lines up much better behind the theory of it being basically accurate rather than mostly inaccurate.
It is possible those workshops were only used seasonally. If so it would make sense for people to live in tents. People living in the same place year-round would build houses if they could. Even in refugee camps people tend to build sheds out of whatever material is available if they have to stay for too long.
“Even in refugee camps people tend to build sheds out of whatever material is available if they have to stay for too long.”
To be fair, the people in those refugee camps overwhelmingly come from sedentary societies that have a tradition of building static structures for long-term inhabitation. I’m not surprised they continue to follow those traditions in different situations.
I don’t know of a refugee camp that’s populated primarily by nomadic people to test that against.
There are not that much nomadic people left. However, you could compare the reservations were previously nomadic Native Americans were forced to settle.
Agreed on the lack of nomadic peoples.
Native American reservations would definitely be interesting, though you’d have to control for efforts to ‘civilise’ them by the forcible adoption of Western-style lifeways.
May well be doable though.
“There are not that much nomadic people left.”
The Mongols of Outer Mongolia.
Look at Ulan-Bator. While the city has a lot of concrete apartment blocks and some wooden houses. much of the outskirts are permanent camps of tents. They are not war refugees or forced into reservations – they are people who might camp out in the steppe or live in apartments, but choose the camp of suburbs of Ulan-Bator.
Thank you for the tip about Ulan-Bator. I checked out some photos from this city on Wikimedia Commons. The less densely populated parts of the city have a mix of low buildings out of different materials including some yurts.
All of those you pointed out are from the Judah period, many of them in the latter period. Which AFAIK, isn’t disputed much. A lot of those kings have external attestations or generally “fit” with what we know from other areas. The 7th century Judean kingdom (or the Omride Northern Israelite one) aren’t really disputed, afaik.
The question is whether or not that holds for the “united monarchy” around or slightly after 1000 BCE. (dates vary, a lot.)
“The perspective that the later books of the Tanakh”
Just to further confuse things: While these come later *in the Tanakh* AFAIK, a lot of these are assumed to be some of the *earlier* books compiled chronologically. (at least in their complete form)
Yeah, the issue here is that we have an analog from the polity that Bret studies professionally, in the Roman Republic. We have very good histories of the Mid-Republic by ancient standards, and decent ones of the Early Republic (for example, the list of consuls is complete), but the regal period is poorly attested and the founding stories of Rome are shrouded in myth, to the point that they tell us more about the Augustan society that produced the Aeneid than about the actual founding.
Though even then the list of consuls has its own issues (see: Consular tribunes) and there’s still debate son whether or not Camillus was a historical figure or not, f.ex.
The Ancient Greek myths I once read mentioned “kings” of Athens. When I later red about Ancient Greece the history books explicitly stated that Athens did not have any kings. So I concluded the city-state had at some point abolished monarchy in favour of a very extensive power sharing scheme. Something similar would have happened in Rome resulting in the Roman Republic.
Which raises the interesting question of what prompted such a decentralization of power? Specifically what motivated people to stop thinking of monarchies as sources of wealth and security, which they had been in their day, and begin to view them as obstacles to prosperity and safety? Do the legends of the Romans go into why exactly the Rex was overthrown? Any plausible analogy with the wave of republicanism that began in the English speaking world with the overthrow of Charles I and later the Glorious and American revolutions?
A king usually has several functions – typically war-leader, priest, judge. As one or more of these is transferred to some other position the post can become ceremonial or fade away. Athens kept a ‘king-archon’, Venice kept a doge (originally duke with considerable power), England has Charles III …
The Glorious Revolution resulted in constitutional monarchy.
Which is a republic in everything but legal theory.
“Do the legends of the Romans go into why exactly the Rex was overthrown?”
Yes. “One of the princes raped an Honest Patrician Woman”.
Reading between the lines a possible interpretation is that the upper classes felt that the monarchy had gotten a swollen head, especially if this was a period when monarchies were undergoing a decline in prestige or ability to produce results, and the nobility did a combination John I/ Charles I on the Rex. Who knows, a dispute over a prince’s alleged sexual misconduct with a Patrician woman (rather than some nobody serving girl) who then arrogantly insisted that he was not answerable to anyone but his father the King may have literally been the final straw in resentment over royal prerogative.
The argument “no United monarchy” isn’t that David didn’t exist (No external evidence, but no reason to think a David was made up either), but that the two kingdoms were never run by a single ruler and split. Instead the story would be that the kingdoms emerged separately at about the same time with their own rulers (David and Solomon being southern rulers, if they existed. Otherwise, they’d be mythical founding figures for the actual family), and the idea that the Israel split from Judah appeared later.
I know there’s an israeli historian who had this theory that the United Kingdom existed… But it was *Saul’s* Kingdom and David and Solomon only ruled the soutehrn part of that.
People have pointed out that this solves nothign and just adds more confusion.
Interesting to think of the LBAC having a sort of “Viking Age” of raids and pillage and destruction from “Sea Peoples”. The effect seems to have been similar, even to some migratory Sea Peoples (Philistines? Who may have been Hellenic) carving out their own small states, i.e. Philistia = Normandy.
The attackers of Egypt are far clearer in part. Ekwesh is clearly a rendition of Essex, Weshesh (mentioned in two inscriptions of Ramses III) is Wessex, Shekelesh can then be interpreted as Sussex, and there’s no Neshesh (*Norsex). Clearly, the Anglo-Saxons helped bring on the Egyptian Third Intermediate Period. And their language developed naturally, so that 1000 years later, Jesus was speaking Early Modern English, as recorded in the Bible (King James).
Do you actually believe that or is it a joke?
The people who believe that post elsewhere.
I laughed.
Sorry, but there are people out there ascribing the well-known to their own group. Apparently in the belief that the well-known is the only thing we know existed. I have personally met a Black woman who claimed the original Jews were Black because they were from Egypt. What she claimed is an Afrocentric myth. Few Ancient Egyptians were Black in any meaningful sense. The Egyptian New Kingdom did have some influence on the development of early Judaism. However, the Torah was written in a language very distantly related to Egyptian. I think the Ancient Israelites were genetically similar to present-day Samarians and Middle East Jews.
The “from Egypt” part would be pretty questionable no matter how you classify the skin color of Egyptians at this or that point in history, anyway.
I mean, the Ancient Jews lived directly to the South of the Phoenicians, they spoke a language apparently very closely related to Phoenician, their religious writings were full of angry people scolding their fellow countryfolk for worshipping Phoenician gods instead of the One Proper God – all that means that the idea that they had started out as one side of a religious/cultural/political schism in what had previously been a unified Levantine Semitic culture sounds more plausible to me than they idea that they had lived in Egypt for a while and then, by an amazing coincidence, just happened to end up living right next to the Phoenicians while speaking a language closely related to the Phoenician language.
The Hyksos, who ruled the Nile Delta for about a century, precede the claimed date for the Exodus, and nobody disputes that they came originally from Canaan. Indeed, it’s generally agreed that a lot of people from the Levant moved into the eastern Nile Delta starting in the late Twelfth Dynasty. There’s nothing implausible about the Israelites being part of that settlement, preserving a Levantine language, and later moving back when the native Egyptians turned against anyone who resembled the “foreign” Hyksos.
I don’t deny there were some population movements between Egypt and the southern Levant. It just seems most plausible that the Ancient Israelites were a cultural sister group of the Phoenicians. About the Ancient Egyptians they are now thought to have resembled the Arabs inhabiting much of the coasts around the Persian Gulf. This would have made them more European-looking than present-day Egyptians. The statistical change in physical appearance as well as genetics is due to 1,200 years of Black slave import.
It is also possible that there was a group of people who migrated from Egypt, conquered the local population and adapted their language and customs. Thus the majority of the Ancient Jews were close relatives to the Phoenicians and never were in Egypt, but “the origin story” of the Ancient Jews was based upon the legends of the conquerors, who did migrate from Egypt.
I have a book written in the 1920s whose whole thesis is that the British are the Lost Tribes of Israel. Tracing the migration through the Goths and northwards. Bizarrely, the Japanese (upper classes only) are included too.
“Tracing descent back to a popular myth” is a common European pastime at least since the Aenead. The Irish according to their founding myths are apparently descendants of Troy through the Spanish. And apparently the Ottar in the Hyndluljóð is related to *every* other character in the Poetic Edda, somehow.
In a society where wealth and fame are hereditary, it does make sense to claim a famous heredity as a way to enhance one’s reputation. And of course the projects of racism and nationalism has the same reasons to unify ancestries, however outlandish the explanations had to become.
Snorri traces Odin back to the kings of Troy.
Snorri presents Norse culture as already existing in the north when Odin shows up. Odin learns about Norse mythology, including about himself, from a Norse king. The book later clarifies that this Odin took on the name and identity of a god that people already worshiped, and then stories about him got mashed together with older stories about the god.
A better example is Geoffrey of Monmouth claiming that the Britons are descended from a king named Brutus, a great-grandson of Aeneas and therefore related to the Romans.
He was a Monotheist believing the gods of his ancestor’s Polytheism to have been mundane humans. I think most gods originated as anthropomorphic personifications:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/On-mythological-figures#wbb1
“Odin learns about Norse mythology, including about himself, from a Norse king.”
What. No? Are you confusing the prologue (where Snorri gives his euhemerized account) with the actual poem Gylfagrinning? (where king Gylfe is tricked by the aesir and then goes and asks them questions, revealing basically serving as an excuse to show off poetry)
Human populations have turned out to be much less genetically isolated than previously thought. For this reason I prefer to talk about cultural decent. This can be traced archaeologically though styles of artefacts. Oftentimes the origins of a people have turned out to be entirely different from such “ancestry from the famous” myths.
“The Irish according to their founding myths are apparently descendants of Troy through the Spanish.”
Want to hear an interesting thing about that?
The founding population of the Insular Celtic peoples (of which the Irish are a relatively unmolested descendant, comparatively anyway) are the Early European Farmer (EEF) population that was already living on the island in the neolithic, and the Western Steppe Herder (WSH) peoples that swept over Europe from the Eurasian Steppe in the Chalcolithic.
It was initially thought that the expansion of the WSH peoples (from the Yamnaya culture) occurred in a relatively even wave across Europe, but recent studies have shown that the picture was more complicated.
What they did was expand across mainland Europe, missing out the British Isles. There was then a back-migration Eastwards of mixed WSH/continental-EEF peoples that displaced/absorbed the existing EEF population of the British Isles (including Ireland).
The place that back-migration appears to have occurred from? Spain.
Now, I’m not necessarily suggesting that Irish myth definitely preserves this interaction, but it’s interesting how well it rhymes (and it would be bloody remarkable if it did).
The British Islands were largely depopulated during the Copper Age. I think it was a combination of ecological collapse and plague spreading through Europe. The Western Steppe Herders could have lacked the technology to safely cross the English Channel. Let us say the group resulting from the mixing of them with Early European Farmers first had it on the Iberian Peninsula. This would explain why the people more efficiently repopulating the British Islands came from present-day Spain.
I’m slowly working my way through the Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age and this is covered in there. Effectively, yes they think that there was a significant (though nowhere near complete) population bottleneck in pre-WSH chalcolithic Britain. If this was caused by climactic and ecological issues at effectively the far-extent of agricultural viability at the time, folks from the continent may well have known it as a difficult place to live. And/or something plague-induced, as that’s been detected in late neolithic/early chalcolithic populations (and there’s the anomaly of the Orkneys being a significant holdout of pre-WSH culture, and that’s as far north as you can get in the British Isles…but and island population stands a better chance than most of riding out a pandemic).
By the time the Beaker phenomenon (and mixed agricultural/pastoral practices) had developed in Iberia from a WSH/EEF fusion population, the British Isles became a much more viable place to live.
One of the lines of evidence that it was this newly developed agricultural package that enabled Beaker colonisation of the British Isles is that agricultural practices there differ significantly compared to the rest of the continent, being decidedly heavier on the pastoral elements compared to crops.
Oh, and they also mention the cultural continuity of megalithic structures running in a band along the Atlantic coast from the western British Isles through western France to northern Iberia. It could well be that the back-migration followed existing trade and cultural networks from Iberia to Britain.
It’s a really good book. Couldn’t recommend it more.
It has been suggested the British Islands lost 90% of its population. I don’t know if this holds true but there was certainly a drastic decrease in population. The combination of slash-and-burn agriculture, hilly terrain and high precipitation lead to catastrophic soil erosion. The spread of plague probably contributed too. But I don’t know if there was any climate change at the time. Anyway, I think the moorlands of the British Islands are the result of such soil erosion. There is no equivalent in other parts of the world with similar climate.
The Iberian Peninsula has considerable areas where the natural vegetation is steppe. Without irrigation it is unsuitable for intense agriculture. Living on the Iberian Peninsula could pre-adapt a culture to live in an environment with limited arable land for other reasons. Even if they had ard ploughs prehistoric Europe generally did not have deeper-cutting ploughs. This would have set considerable limits to what land could be cultivated.
Greater mixing with the pre-existing population could explain why the Beaker Culture was significantly different from the Corded Ware culture. Both cultures are now thought to have been Indo-European-speaking. In 1958 Alice Norton suggested that the Beaker Culture conducted a lot of trade across Europe. While she was a speculative fiction author this would explain why it had so much overlap with other contemporary cultures. This includes parts of Maghreb which does not seem to have had any significant number of Indo-European-speakers before the Roman conquest.
Beyond that you also had the claim that the Scots descend from ‘Scotta’ the daughter of a pharaoh and ancestor of the Gaels. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scota )
Then there also is Sarmatism which posits that the nobility of Poland-Lithuania descended from the Sarmatians.
I had been told this served two purposes.
First, it was a way to distinguish the nobles from the common serfs, who descended from conquered non-Sarmatians according to this theory, to justify the nobles’ oppression of the serfs.
Further, it both increased Poland-Lithuania’s prestige and served to justify its independence from the Holy Roman Empire, by connecting the country with an ancient nation not subjugated by the Romans.
The nobility of a lot of countries have historically claimed to be biologically separated from the rest of the population. This was done to justify their legal monopoly on certain positions in society. The idea is pretty much disproved today. Not only are there plenty of cases of people acquiring or losing status as nobles. But some of the noblemen would make their maids pregnant. Sometimes a child has a different father than his or her mother’s husband, too.
There is an entire list on Wiki of peoples who claim, or are claimed, to be a lost tribe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groups_claiming_affiliation_with_Israelites
including Pashtuns, British, French, Scandinavians, Native Americans, various groups of Indians and Japanese.
For purely psychological reasons I choose to believe that the Scots (living in Ireland) were really Israelites (living in brackets). It just makes sense that a group of Israelites might finally have had enough of living in one hot arid country and being periodically resettled or enslaved and sent to live in other hot arid countries, and thought to themselves “right, that is it. We are starting to walk in the direction of the coldest, wettest places we know, and we are going to keep going in the direction that the cold and wet comes from until we run out of known world”. And eventually they ended up in Argyll and Co Wicklow.
“And eventually they ended up in Argyll and Co Wicklow.”
The tribes were of course eventually reunited by, among others, Victorian Kwisatz Haderach Karl Marx, who was himself of Jewish descent (ie from the non-Lost Tribes), and who married a relation of the Duke of Argyll.
I laughed too. Silly enough in context to be clearly a joke.
I have impaired Theory of Mind so I asked for safety’s sake.
Also, while some of the historical decisions are the usual nonsense*, I still want to recommend Total War: Pharaoh, which is set in the period. Criminally underrated Total War game.
* Entire units in Dendra panoply, Iron age assyrians in the late Bronze Age
I wonder if there’s been a realism mod for TW: Pharoah (in the lines of Divide et Impera for Rome 2). If so, I’d be dead interested.
What do you think of the genetic evidence that the Peleset Sea Peoples had a lot of southern Europe genetic material? Does this clarify the situation in any way.
There is archaeological evidence of a considerable number of people immigrating from the Terramare culture to Greece. This was followed by the regional collapse of Greece and Anatolia. The “Sea peoples” subsequently attacking Egypt was the result of this later collapse. The present-day inhabitants of Anatolia, Greece and Italy are majority White. If I understand it correctly the current genetic variation in Europe had already been largely established by the late Bronze Age. So it is nothing strange some members of this multiethnic coalition would have been recognisably South European.
I can heartily recommend the YouTube channel ‘Dig’ for further information on the period- they’ve been going for a while with various videos summarising the current archaeological understanding of aspects about the Late Bronze Age – now also dipping into the early Iron Age on occasion. Occasionally dips into speculation or favoured theories but always clear on when it’s only ‘the preferred option of the channel creators’, and lots of sources cited.
https://www.youtube.com/@dig.archaeology
I was wrong about the LBAC being caused by the eruption of Thira/Santorini. Radiocarbon dating has been done on olive trees killed in the eruption. One was dated to 1627 – 1600 BC, one to 1630 – 1600 and one to 1626 – 1605. Since their error margines overlap we can say with reasonable certainty it was in the late 17th century BC. This is several centuries before the LBAC. Still, this eruption could explain how the Greeks could conquer the Minoans if they suffered less from the effect of it.
How did clay tablets work? It seems like an unfired clay tablet would fall apart, or at least flop over, when you pick it up. Did they have a wooden backing or something?
They’d be dried in the sun or air, but not fired. (this meant they could be wet and re-used if neccessary)
Unfired clay will hold its shape if stored in a dry space, essentially indefinitely. They’d have been using slabs with a little moisture in to allow for markmaking, but probably less than you’d use for actually throwing on the wheel or coiling.
(Disclaimer: nearly everything I know about clay tablets comes from “Snow Crash” and the afterword by Neal Stephenson.)
Firing the tablet makes it “read-only”, suitable for long term archive storage. And for added security you’d fire the tablet, then wrap it in another clay layer and fire that too: because the inner tablet is already baked solid, the two won’t merge. Contents now can’t be read unless the outer casing is (carefully I assume) broken.
Also, sometimes fired clay cylinders would be used to roll out text onto wet clay in the way we would be using stamps or primitive printing methods, as a method to replicate official documents or seals (in this case, the cylinder would be an inverse relief compared to the “stamped” version).
I wonder what historians and archaeologists know about early Jewish history, before the kingdoms of Israel and Judah emerge. Since the Exodus, post-Exodus conquest, Book of Judges, and United Monarchy are all set during (or in the aftermath of) the LBAC, I suppose that the archaeological record is sparse for those parts of Jewish history.
We know some things about religious practice (altars similar to Biblical description, but clearly polytheistic; and worship “on the high places” outside of Jerusalem being the more ancient norm and not a later innovation as presented in the texts); diet (“no pork” is shockingly early); and material culture (essentially indistinguishable from their neighbors, cf our host’s comments above about inventing “we were foreign invaders” narratives where convenient – the Joshua narrative doesn’t stand up archaeologically).
Epigraphy is AFAIU quite scarce until the 8th century, a similar era as the likely composition of the more detailed kings lists and biographies we have available, so for anything from about 800 onwards we can be quite confident in basic facts in Jewish texts like reign dates and king names. Still leaves us that LBAC-period gap in textual evidence.
The taboo against pork was likely the result of the environment the Ancient Israelites lived in. What pigs can eat does not differ much from what humans can eat. They need to bath in water to keep cool which would be wasteful too. Moreover, pigs frequently have parasites which can be transferred to humans. In particularly hot climates it is nearly impossible to butcher pigs hygienically. I don’t know if high temperatures mattered in the case of Ancient Israelites. For comparison the Sumerians and Babylonians are known to have eaten pork.
That’s a universal answer, which makes me skeptical, because it wasn’t a universal taboo. Why did Judahites have this taboo and their neighbors – Canaanite-speaking, with very similar material culture, living in the exact same climate – not have this same taboo?
There’s something ideological/theological going on here, not just rational calculation based on hygiene theory (which they didn’t have at the time anyway).
(Also, pigs are famously omnivorous, eating lots of food waste that humans can’t process and mostly scavenging random vegetation when they free roam; and they cool off in unusable mud, not in running water. There’s a reason they were such popular protein sources in the pre-modern world!)
That’s a universal answer, which makes me skeptical, because it wasn’t a universal taboo. Why did Judahites have this taboo and their neighbors – Canaanite-speaking, with very similar material culture, living in the exact same climate – not have this same taboo?
I’m not going to defend the thesis of Marvin Harris here (which is what I believe @Lena is channelling), I can see arguments both ways and don’t have a strong opinion, and of course his views were intensely controversial. But, I think he would probably argue that, give long enough, the Jews would have outcompeted the Canaanites economically (just as Muslim societies would outcompete their Christian and animist neighbors in dryland regions) because they weren’t devoting valuable grain to feed pigs. He would probably also argue that the kinds of non-grain materials that pigs can feed themselves on (tubers, nuts, etc.) tend not to grow well i Middle Eastern drylands. (There are certainly other drylands, in Africa, where you do have substantial amounts of foods like that, though).
He might also be exaggerating how dry ancient (or modern) Israel/Palestine is, though (from my understanding much of it is “Mediterranean”, not desert, and other Mediterranean cultures in Spain and Italy certainly chow down on pork). Then again, he might push back and argue that created economic problems for Spain, so the argument could probably go on indefinitely.
Israel/Palestine is absolutely not that dry, and we have a long-standing wild boar population that’s subsisted for millennia on a similar diet to domesticated pigs.
I have not heard of Marvin Harris, but if this is representative of his arguments on the pig taboo, I have serious doubts that this is based on any empirical or comparative study, or even a passing knowledge with agriculture and livestock husbandry. Sounds like some overly-materialist attempt to explain away cultural variation by material factors even when the facts don’t cooperate.
(And in any case, Jews did not “outcompete” Canaanites economically, nor did Muslims “outcompete” non-Muslims in arid areas in any more significant way than pre-Islamic Arabs did. This whole thing just seems like a theory in search of facts.)
@asazernik,
Oh yea, he absolutely defined as a “cultural materialist” who thought most of culture especially around food, etc., was driven by economics, demographics, resource tradeoffs etc.. He also thought that the Hindu prohibition on beef was because cattle were too valuable as draft animals to slaughter. That makes *somewhat* more sense to me than the pork thing, because my understanding is that the taboo there was not so unique, and that other, non-Hindu Asian cultures often did discourage or frown on eating cattle, although not as strongly as in South Asia.
If I understand it correctly the Levant gets dryer the further south it gets. Which may matter for the economic resources available. Also, the Israel/Palestine area is more sensitive to climate change than present-day Lebanon and Syria. Some groups may have developed a pork taboo during the LBAC with their descendants using it as a cultural marker.
“Israel/Palestine is absolutely not that dry,”
And IIRC; used to be at least slightly less so.
@asazernik,
It’s worth pointing out that we do have examples of food taboos which seem like they’re *purely* cultural, without any clear economic, nutritional or health related basis. I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but I lived for three years in Madagascar, which is an interesting country where food taboos exist not at the level of the country or even the ethnic group, but really more at the clan / sub-tribe level. One family lineage might be forbidden to eat goats, another sheep, another eels or some of the local wildlife, etc.. (Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim and Hindu immigrant minorities with their various food prohibitions all fit in easily in that context since the native people are quite familiar with the concept of animals that you’re forbidden to eat). It’s hard to think of why two different family lineages might be forbidden goats or sheep respectively, when they live in more or less the same environment, so it does seem to indicate that there can be more to these type of food prohibitions than pure material considerations.
Do we even have evidence that ancient Judaeans, as a whole, did not eat pigs? A lot of the dietary strictures of the Old Testament originated as strictures intended for the priestly caste that were then universalized as general rules for the population in the diaspora.
You may be right about other dietary strictures, but for the pig one one we do have good evidence. Jewish/Judahite sites are very distinctive for the absence of pig bones in trash piles; this goes back quite far (at least the 10th century BCE).
The pork taboo could have spread from the priestly cast to the general population relatively early. This might have been followed later by taboo against various types of seafood.
“worship “on the high places” outside of Jerusalem being the more ancient norm and not a later innovation as presented in the texts);”
Hard disagree here–worship “on the high places” is presented as being the local norm in the Biblical text, and the Tabernacle and, later, Temple as being something new.
I barely learned anything about the Late Bronze Age Collapse, and I actually did some Ancient History at school! Thanks for the post, Bret.
Troy really is a funny story of Surprise! It was actually real.
Yes, and also no, but possibly also yes.
The key thing to understand about the Iliad is that it’s a descendent of a pre-existing tradition of ‘siege-epics’ from the near East. This video has a fascinating discussion with an academic specialising on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ao2sps9bR4
If I remember correctly there’s evidence of ‘siege epic’ stories from the near East predating the Iliad considerably. They’re fragmentary, but it’s clear that there are significant shared story-beats between them and the Iliad that are specific enough that it would be very coincidental if they occurred simultaneously in two cultures that we know were in close contact with one another.
It’s not clear if the Iliad is describing a siege that occurred against the city of Troy/Hisarlik, utilising pre-existing story-beats from a known oral storytelling tradition, or if there was a siege that occurred against the city of Troy/Hisarlik completely independent of any of the actual story-beats in the Iliad but was then recast as a local background for pre-existing ‘siege-epic’ narratives. It’s also not clear if those pre-existing siege narratives from the near east were entirely fabricated, or if they themselves do depict a real life siege somewhere in the history of the near East.
I’d definitely give the interview a watch. It’s fascinating stuff, and the interviewer does a good job of asking the right questions and then sitting back to listen.
Oh, and one of the other interesting tidbits is that the Iliad as we know it appears to have emerged as a meeting point between two different tails of this storytelling epic tradition, the Greek perspective and the Hittite perspective, intended to be performed to a mixed Greek/Hittite audience. That’s why we have this beautiful narrative that flicks between the tension and tragedy of the besieged and the warlike rambunctiousness of the besiegers.
It also comes through in some really neat little tidbits, considering that the audiences likely knew about the history of the two different traditions (the walls of Troy being a long-term meeting point for large-scale retellings of these heroic epics).
For instance, the near-Eastern tradition appears to have featured Ishtar as one of the main gods at play in the narrative, with her having a significant martial aspect. However, Ishtar’s hellenic counterpart was Aphrodite who lacks the martial aspect. So the arc in the Iliad of Aphrodite getting involved in the fighting, being wounded without achieving anything, and being told ‘not for you these weapons of war’ has been interpreted as a bit of an in-joke for a Greek-speaking audience by subverting the expectations of the original near-Eastern narrative to fit their cultural expectations.
I would have my doubts due to the fact that a huge part of the narrative of the Iliad is the Greeks and the Trojans sharing the same gods; the curses the Greeks bring down upon themselves for profaning the temples of the Trojans during the sack for example. At best the composers of the Iliad would have had to extensively reinterpret the narrative in terms of a belief in the universality of their gods.
“At best the composers of the Iliad would have had to extensively reinterpret the narrative in terms of a belief in the universality of their gods.”
Considering the significant influence near eastern religions have had on early Greek belief, I suspect that’s exactly what happened (the Greeks had a deeply weird Indo-European belief system, in part for this reason).
Though personally I’d replace ‘universality’ for something more like ‘interpretatio Hellenica’.
I feel folks often gloss over the fact that the Greeks ‘faced East’ for a good few thousand years during most of their most formative historical periods, in favour of a schema that neatly divides ‘Western Europe’ from ‘the Middle East’ pretty much at the border of Greece more in line with modern perceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ than historical ones.
I’d encourage you to watch the video. It really is very good.
“, Ishtar’s hellenic counterpart was Aphrodite who lacks the martial aspect.”
Not quite. She’s still has the title Areia (“Warlike”) in some cases. I’d say Aphrodite’s martial aspects were *diminished* but they’re still there in some of the nooks and crannies.
Yeah that’s fair.
In fact, I think that’s one of the lines of evidence linking the two. That some semblance of her warlike alter-ego from the east persists, even though it doesn’t particularly feature in her surviving mythology at all.
Interestingly, it’s been postulated that there had been a previous collapse of civilization in the eastern Mediterranean/ Middle East roughly 2200 BCE. This YouTube video gives some info about it:
The polis is certainly a peculiar structure and very different from the Mycenaean palace economies. On the other hand, the peculiarity of the Greek polis compared to Near and Middle Eastern cities may have been exaggerated. Sumerian cities seem to have had elements of self-rule (guilds and town wards) from the very beginning (actually earlier than any evidence for monarchic rule), and such elements seem to have perdured all through Mesopotamian history, even when the cities were aggregated in empires. This is not altogether different from poleis from Athens to Ktesiphon under Macedonian rule.
The Phoenician city states were aristocratic republics in historical times. Even though there is epigraphic evidence for rulers in the Bronze Age, I am not sure this was absolute monarchy. Even Classical Athens had an archon called “basileus”, after all! It may be better not to assume a black and white contrast between republican or even democratic Greek poleis and monarchical everything else.
The Modern Greek word for “king” is βασλευσ. I think it has been transcribed as “vasilevs” or something like that. A moment after reading the transcription I realized it was the word for “king” because of context and similarity to the word “basileus” which I already knew.
Sorry, it should be βασιλεύζ (vasiléfs) or βασιλεάζ (vasiléas). I copied the word letter by letter from a modern Greek coin. Then I locket it up in Wiktionary for safety’s sake.
The Greek political trinity of people-in-arms, assembly of elders, and king goes back to Bronze Age Mesopotamia too. One of the Amarna letters features an Egyptian client king in the Levant complaining that the people have come and told him to make peace with an enemy and that he can’t kill them or there will be nobody to live in the city. The Assyrians got rid of their kings early on and replaced them with a “steward of the god Assur” then were forced back under the thumbs of kings again. We see a gaggle of “Neo-Hittite” states in Iron Age Syria until the Sargonids of Assyria take over, so in part of the former Hittite empire life and literacy went on.
Also, as far as I know there is not enough data to be sure how exactly the Mycenaean palace economies functioned. Since the only data we have comes from the palaces themselves, the rest of the society remains poorly represented. It seems quite possible to me that the Mycenaean polities were much more democratic end egalitarian than usually assumed. At least there are some mentions of concepts like “gerousia” (the assembly of elders?), “agora” (the assembly of commoners?) and “demos” (the commoners as a political power?) in the Linear B documents.
I have not encountered the word “gerousia” before. But you risk over-interpreting words for concrete things as later abstract concepts. The word “agora” may have simply meant “square” (as a place) and “demos” only meant “people”. I think the concrete meaning come first with the abstract meaning arising later as a metaphor.
The “ke-ro-si-ja” sometimes mentioned in Linear B tablets (PY An261, PY An616) has been translated as “gerousia” and interpreted either as a local ‘council of elders’ or as a ‘craftsmen’s guild’.
As for “agora”, it is related to the verb “ageiro”, which means ‘collect, gather’, so it seems more likely that the initial meaning of “agora” was ‘gathering, assembly’, and the meaning ‘square’ as ‘the place where such gatherings happen’ emerge later. Although it is also possible that Mycenaean “a-ko-ra” meant ‘flock, herd’ and/or ‘market’ and was not related to political assembles.
As for “demoi” (“da-mo”), it is clear from the tablets that they were local village communities, that collectively owned their land and therefore had some social and economic (and therefore political?) power. They also functioned outside the palatial administration, although they paid taxes to the palace and were not completely independent.
Overall, I am not trying to claim that Mycenaean society functioned like a democratic polis of the Classical Greece. However, I think that the centralization of Mycenaean palace economies is often overestimated. Some modern studies critique the “centralized model” of the Mycenaean society and suggest that it was much more complex and de-centralized. See, for example, “Redistribution in Aegean Palatial Societies” by Timothy Earle (2011) and chapter “Mycenaean society and economy” in “Plain of Plenty” by R.E. Timonen (2024).
I also thought the word “a-ko-ra” / “agora” could mean “marketplace” although I don’t know much about Ancient Greek. Modern Greek is largely incompressible to me although I occasionally recognise a noun as being descended from an Ancient Greek one I happen to know. One of them was clearly descended from “da-mo” / “demos”. Judging by the subtitles it was used in the meaning “people”.
“the Hittite Empire in the early 1100s comes apart under pressure and by 1170 or so it is gone.”
This should probably read “the Hittite Empire in the early 1200s”.
Or is that a case of early being chronologically early (i.e. further in the past) while the BCE follows the negative numbering system; so that 1199 BCE would be “very early 1100’s”?
Writing at the time, a technical skill largely used by a business/ government class of functionaries, quite possibly bears similarities to the prevalence and use of shorthand and stenography in the 20th century. I wonder if anyone has done a study of this; for example what conclusions some future archeologist might come to based on shorthand and stenography as their only records from the 20th.
Hey, are you related to our host?
Yeah I’m immediately reminded of Macedonians. I think lots of them know and speek Greek, and Phillip absolutely invade the hell out of Greek. If he’s more focused on that, he may displace the population too but he didn’t.
Given the centralization of the palace economies, are the bronze-age city-building games correct about treating their cities as vehicles for state production (“armies and monuments”), after all?
Separately, how do these palace economies compare to the Dominate? (The linked article makes a parallel between royally-appointed offices gradually becoming lifelong and hereditary between Carolingian, Achaemenid, and Old Kingdom Egypt states.) And if it weren’t for the massive difference industrialization makes, I’d also ask about the USSR’s central planning.
I’d also mix in Mixtec temple-redistribution practices for a bit of a flavour of a non-market redistribution system we can actually see the function of:
https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/bitstream/handle/1803/5788/VUPA46.pdf
Effectively it involves localised temple-structures taking in significant religious offerings, holding them ‘in trust’ for the deity, and redistributing them in case of need (further indebting people to the god/temple, which obligates further sacrifice).
I always think about that example when people mention ‘palatial economies’ for Bronze Age societies, because I think people automatically default to the idea that the single palatial centre was dictating literally everything that happened within its territory and that’s not necessarily a given. There could well be significant localisation in these sorts of structures while still remaining ‘temple-controlled’.
It also gives some colours as to how and why people may have created these sorts of structures as a natural consequence of differing religious and societal beliefs. Not necessarily saying ‘this is how it all happened’, but it certainly gives something to the imagination around the day-to-day function of these things at an individual level.
Trying to control the entire economy in detail is doomed to fail. The “palatial economies” did centrally control most of the economy but definitely not all.
@Ynneadwraith,
Many Latin American socialist/communist thinkers, most famously this guy, saw in the Inca Empire, in particular, a source of inspiration as a premodern planned / non-market based economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Carlos_Mari%C3%A1tegui
It seems like the link is not working, at least on my end.
One thing that can make a drought period much worse is degraded soils. Years ago I read a book about the history of man’s rotten relationship to the very dirt they depend on to grow their food. It mentioned that Greece was the first one to lose basically all their topsoil from early deforestation, it’s all on the bottom of the Mediterranean now.
Alas, I don’t recall when this happened, but it was long long ago. Perhaps prior to the LBAC? If your remaining soil is only 6 inches deep, a drought will kill all your crops off pronto.
I have heard of such a book but I can’t remember its title. Soil erosion is definitely the enemy of all civilisation. This can explain why large parts of Greece are very sparsely populated. For long stretches of road you neither see any human settlements nor forest or woods. Last year my daily newspaper reported a third of Greece’ population to live in Attica. This surprised me but not my dad who has actually been there.
Ok it really started to bug me, so I went and searched and searched until I found it:
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery.
A very eye-opening read and good introduction to the subject.
I thought it was named “Dirt” but Wikipedia don’t list any non-fiction book with that name. It does list the author as a scientist in field of soils, however.
I’m curious whether historical genetics can shed any light on the LBAC. Are there enough datable human remains to enable any genetic analysis? I note that, per David Reich, modern historical genetics has tended to rehabilitate nineteenth-century theories of conquest and population replacement (at least the male population), thereby denigrating the more politically palatable twentieth-century theories of peaceful exchange leading to adoption of new pottery styles.
I note that, per David Reich, modern historical genetics has tended to rehabilitate nineteenth-century theories of conquest and population replacement (at least the male population),
In some places and times, sure. In others, not so much. People in Turkey today are not genetically mostly the descendants of the original Turkic invaders, nor are Hungarians mostly the descendants of the original Magyars, nor are Finns mostly descendants of the Uralic migrations, nor are Punjabis mostly the descendants of the Indo-Aryan invaders (although in all those cases there was obviously linguistic replacement). As far as I can tell from my reading (bearing in mind that I’m not an expert, that studies do disagree, and that since a lot of these methods are relatively recent, some of them are superseded by later studies).
You do hedge a bit by specifying “at least the male line”, but even if you just look at the male line, I thik people often tend to exaggerate the degree of replacement as much as to understate it.
Some of this is subjective, of course- does a 35% replacement count as a lot or a little genetic change? How about 50%, or 10%, or 5%? It’s going to depend on what our baseline standards and expectations are (and of course, if you’re part of the population experiencing the change, I’m sure you’re going to feel differently about it than an outside observer might).
Side note: the term “Aryan invasion” hasn’t been used by serious scholars arguing for Aryan migration in many decades. These days if you hear someone discuss “Aryan invasion theory” by that name, it’s very likely someone who believes Sanskrit is autochthonous to India denigrating the idea that Vedic Sanskrit speakers migrated to India from elsewhere.
Side note: the term “Aryan invasion” hasn’t been used by serious scholars arguing for Aryan migration in many decades. These days if you hear someone discuss “Aryan invasion theory” by that name, it’s very likely someone who believes Sanskrit is autochthonous to India denigrating the idea that Vedic Sanskrit speakers migrated to India from elsewhere.
That’s right, I should probably have said “migrants”. (The idea that Sanskrit is autochthonous to South Asia is wrong, of course). My general point though was just that in this and other cases, you got complete linguistic replacement with only minor replacement of the people.
It is a variant of the nationalist “we were here first” myth. Sanskrit has a Dravidian substrate meaning Dravidian languages were spoken in the area before it.
It is a variant of the nationalist “we were here first” myth.
As such, it clearly runs straight into conflict with the Dravidian nationalist narrative which is that they’re indigenous and that the Indo-Europeans were later migrants who imposed their language (and depending on who you ask, also imposed backward cultural innovations like the caste hierarchy: Dravidian nationalism tends to be broadly “left coded”).
Dravidian languages may have arrived from outside as well, but it is true that (generally speaking) their speakers have more genetic continuity with the first peoples of South Asia. (Again, as far as we can tell thus far).
This reminds me, I once read a claim somewhere, I don’t remember by whom, that one interesting thing about India is that
1) a whole lot of different groups of people arrived there, in one way or another, throughout the prehistory and history of the place, and
2) for a surprisingly large number of these groups, their descendants are *still there*, with all their different distinct identities.
To Hector:
The castes are much younger then the Aryan migrations. Most castes date back to the Middle Ages. They were not even that rigid until the 19th century. Then the current Indian caste system was codified under British colonialists. So we should blame classist/racist colonialists trusting self-righteous Hindu scholars too much.
1) a whole lot of different groups of people arrived there, in one way or another, throughout the prehistory and history of the place, and
2) for a surprisingly large number of these groups, their descendants are *still there*, with all their different distinct identities.
@Raphael,
yes, the peopling of South Asia is definitely pretty interesting. I don’t think the number of “different groups of people” settling in the subcontinent is necessarily all that much different than Europe (in both cases it looks like you had 4-5 major waves and then a number of smaller ones), but like you say, in South Asia there’s been more continuity over time. Probably because of extreme endogamy.
@Lena,
The castes are much younger then the Aryan migrations. Most castes date back to the Middle Ages. They were not even that rigid until the 19th century. Then the current Indian caste system was codified under British colonialists. So we should blame classist/racist colonialists trusting self-righteous Hindu scholars too much.
This isn’t entirely wrong, and does contain a grain of truth, but it’s mostly wrong, and specifically wrong in a way that right wingers like to use when they argue that subcontinental Hindus are really just one people at bottom and that their divisions of race, caste, language family etc.. are trivial and artificial. Even on the one point where it’s correct, it doesn’t really engage with the arguments of Dravidian nationalists, and caste-based political movements, that the caste hierarchy* is a legacy of the Indo-European migrations.
The argument that would be made by either a Dravidian nationalist or a defender of Scheduled Caste interests, or someone more broadly on the left, would make, isn’t that the caste hierarchy *as we know it* is actually 3500 years old. The argument is that it’s a *legacy* of the Indo-Aryan migrations, i.e. that the Indo-Aryans set themselves up in a dominant position, possibly due to their access to horses and better military technologies, and that they developed various social and cultural tools to ensure their dominance, which eventually crystallized into what we know today as the caste hierarchy. And while that’s to some extent an oversimplistic description, as most national myths are, i think in essence it’s correct. High caste is absolutely correlated, today, with Indo-European ancestry (not perfectly or completely, but still, correlated). We can tell that from genetic studies, but it’s also obvious to anyone who compares, say, a Tamil Brahmin to a normal Tamil (and even more so, one of the Irulas). Not only are the genetics different, and things like susceptibility to various health conditions, but there are clear phenotypic, linguistic, cultural, religious etc. differences as well, that all do line up with the broad generalization.
This is somewhat less important, but while the British colonial authorities absolutely did take overly literally the opinions of some Brahmin scholars (which ended up having unfortunate implications for gender relations as well as caste), it’s absolutely incorrect that the caste hierarchy was “not so rigid prior to the 19th c”. The hierarchy is not actually 3500 years old, you’re correct about that, but it does seems to be about 1700 years old in its current form, i.e. 70 generations or so, based on a quick search of some recent genetic studies. (I.e. the castes that we know today have been mostly reproductively isolated since around 300 AD). Which is more “late antiquity” than “middle ages”.
*I’m using the term “caste hierarchy” here to specifically distinguish caste as a system of extremely endogamous communities, from the actual hierarchical system with some groups dominating others. there seem to be some tribal groups on the fringes of the subcontinent, in the extreme northeast, which have something like caste in terms of the extremely stringent endogamy rules, but where there aren’t clear hierarchical distinctions.
I knew about the genetic correlations between social position and degree of Indo-European ancestry. Since the prehistoric Aryan migration there have been repeated military invasions of South Asia from the northeast. Of cause each wave of conquerors would set themselves up as Big Men increasing the fraction of such ancestry among them. However, I may have overestimated the influence of a few Hindu scholars in the 19th century. At least some of the Iranian-speaking peoples traditionally had endogamous groups called “brotherhoods” which were somewhat similar to casts. So the beginning of the cast system may have been introduced during the Aryan migration. On the other hand we have to consider gradual development throughout historical times. One which results was eventually codified under British colonial rule.
According to Reich, the Indian government doesn’t want to open this can of worms, and therefore forbids historical genetic inquiry or research. So we really don’t have up to date information on the extent of population transfer or replacement in India, and we can believe whatever suits our preconceptions or our current political agenda.
But I would hope that no one really has a political agenda with respect to the Dorian invasion (if any) or the sea peoples (if they existed), and that research would be permitted if it were possible, which was my original inquiry. I mean, were the inhabitants of Laconia in 450 BC generally the descendants of the inhabitants of 1250 BC? It seems like a harmless enough question.
According to Reich, the Indian government doesn’t want to open this can of worms, and therefore forbids historical genetic inquiry or research
I’m sure that the ruling party would like to forbid it, but I don’t think they’ve been very effective, since we do now have a fairly large body of information on the successive waves of people moving into South Asia (there were four major ones) as well as the rough extent to which they’ve contributed to the different ethnic groups. (There are some ethnic groups for example with almost zero Indo European ancestry, like the Irulas).
I think the “Sea Peoples” were really ethnically mixed groups of sailors turning to piracy when trade decreased. The Ancient Egyptians depicted them as groups of people dressed individually in many different ways. Due to the cartoony style of most of their art this would have been the simplest way of depicting different cultural origins.
The spread of agriculture is now described in migrationist terms. I have even written a blog post to defend this idea based on most hunter-gatherers not wanting the lifestyle of fully developed agriculture:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/In-defence-of-migrationism#wbb1
For later cultural changes the idea of biological replacement has been largely disproved. I think a lot of colonialist wishful thinking went onto that idea. In addition there was the widespread belief that ethnic groups would be biologically adapted to practice a certain culture. As if there was no cultural change before people stated to notice it. Later historical research has disproved the idea of unchanging cultures too.
Pre-industrial peoples were simply not capable of killing off the pre-existing population and then replace it with members of its own. The modernly organised armies of Genghis Khan and later his successors were able to massacre entire cities. Including millions of refugees in areas without any forest to hide in. Such massacres on the already assembled resulted in considerable decrease in population. Still, it was not biologically replaced by Mongolic- or Turkic-speaking peoples. (Some member of the original tribal coalition spoke Turkic languages.) Horse-riding herders were far too few for that. The current extent of Mongolic languages is shown on this map:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linguistic_map_of_the_Mongolic_languages.png
Similarly, the current extent of Turkic languages is shown here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turkic_Languages_distribution_map.png
The appearance of their speakers varies from East Asian in most of Siberia to Eurasian in Central Asia to White in West Asia. Knowing this it is obvious they took over culturally at least as much as biologically.
I think that simply from empirical viewpoint, you can pardon the late 19th century Europeans of assuming that biological replacement has been commonplace, historically. They had seen the actual process happening: the 19th century settlement of the vast areas North America and the simultaneous genocide of the Native Americans, and the similar process in Australia were well known, and widely considered at least inevitable or even morally good. In addition, the imperialist theoreticians of the time really believed they could replicate these phenomena in Africa and Asia.
So, believing that similar genocidal processes had taken place earlier, too, was natural as a mistake, and quite understandable.
What cannot be as easily pardoned is actually committing the contemporary genocides.
@Finnish Reader,
Some of this is going to, like I said, have a subjective aspect to it- like, *how much* genetic change has to happen before you’d consider that your old group has disappeared and been replaced by a new group? Peru seems to be one of the countries in the Americas where indigenous people survived best, and today it seems like the average person has around 75% indigenous ancestry (in some groups much higher, in some much lower). Still, it’s not considered a majority indigenous country anymore, it’s considered majority “mixed”, and apparently it was a major cultural moment in the 1930s when the transition happened and occasioned a lot of national discussion. The point at which we consider a group to have been replaced is going to be something of a judgment call and is going to depend on our expectations and standards (and also, probably, on where we stand in terms of our own identities).
https://www.nature.com/articles/jhg201373
I still think most Native Americans died from epidemics during the 16th and 17th centuries. Driving people away from the areas they controlled may still be considered genocide if the victims were numerous enough and the process rapid enough. Moreover, the large scale White settlement of parts of the Americas in the later half of the 19th century was made possible by motorised transportation. Such large scale population movements would have been impossible without engines.
Actually the Mormons used oxen and hand carts to travel to Utah.
The Pioneers in the Pacific Northwest also used Oxen and hauled stuff over mountains
and similar by hand power. The engines did not participate until after the gold rush
to California in 1849. The railroads on which the engines ran were build by explosives
and human labor mostly Irish from the East and Chinese from the West.
The reason that the Original Occupants did not resist better is that the Euro-trash
who are presently our heroes killed their food supply and generally had better
weapons.
About Australia the Aborigines were never that numerous. Because of mostly poor soils and often unpredictable weather patterns they were never more than a few hounded thousand. After British colonialism begun in 1788 most died within a few decades. Either they died from diseases accidentially brought there by the British. Or they died from starvation after being driven away from the most fertile areas. It is unclear how many died from diseases compared to deliberately killed or driven away. So I now hesitate to call it a genocide.
May I ask what your source is for so many people advocating that than?
I am but a layman on that period, but as far as I am aware not even Rudyard ‘General Dyer did nothing wrong’ Kipling had advocated for such things…
Also, what I had read gave me the impression that in the early phases of colonialism tropical Africa and Asia were regarded as ‘malaria ridden green hells’; the agents of the colonial companies did not want to settle there but only get rich quick and then go home again, in some cases they even went home before they became rich as the climate and diseases had turned out even worse than expected.
By the time that such medicines as quinine had been invented it already was the era of ‘New Imperialism’ were colonial powers were supposed to ‘civilise’ natives by doing such things as abolishing slavery (and then instead instituting systems of forced labour), which is not the most compatible with genociding natives to make place for settlers. Though, there were instances which could be classified under that, like the Herero genocide, but those were more exceptions than the rule.
Even in the few parts of Africa which saw large-scale European settlement, like Algeria and South Africa, even if systematic massacres and ethnic cleansing happened in the process of ‘pacifying’ those places, genociding natives to make place for settlers did not make much sense; the colonists were exploiting those same natives as cheap labour.
Anyway, the European take-over of Australia and parts of the Americas was a false analogy for archaeological cultures. To take a European example neither the Romans nor the later Germanic conquerors biologically replaced the population of France. The current French people are largely biologically descended from the Gauls and Aquitanians. The later were the cultural ancestors of the Basque which speak a language isolate. Most of the Basque now live in Spain. But they are on average more genetically similar to French than to Spainards.
I seem to recall that so few people wrote Linear B that the archeologists know of individual scribes from their handwriting. Could be wrong. Regardless, the fall of Bronze Age Greece seems to have some parallels with the fall of the classic Maya, complete with less authoritarian city states surviving for centuries afterward.
Including, seemingly, rule by kings being replaced by more collective forms of rules in the postclassic maya/archaic Greece.
I can’t remember who I’ve replied to this with already, but have a look at the collapse of the Mississippian polities and the survival of the Natchez as another parallel, complete with ruralising processes and continuous cultural continuity between previous hierarchical state structures and later/present day populations.
I think the same is true for the early Greek alphabet. I recall reading that the current theory is that it wasn’t a gradual diversion from the Phoenician one, but the invention of one man in more-or-less one go. There’s no slow transition step, it just emerges fully formed in what seems like one hand. A bit like how the Cyrillic alphabet was just invented.
“the Kassites ore or less”. I think where is an m missing here.
The element wherein the kings have a paramount responsibility of maintaining the community’s good standing with the gods is interesting to me. Combined with some things I’ve read about the scholarship on Akkadian kings, it seems to give an ideological motive to expansionism that is arguably absent from some later kingdoms and empires, which might be seen as more concerned with the economic and strategic utility of acquired territories (as well as the prestige attained by the victorious conqueror).
Namely, the gods are perceived to have a desire (or cosmic imperative) for an orderly, regimented existence to be imposed upon the mortal world, and the kings will perceive the likes of pastoral inhabitants of the hinterlands as failing to live as such. Therefore, a divine mandate to go forth and bring those people to heel so that they can be forced to live in a manner more pleasing to the gods, or at least make the system that does so more expansive.
I wonder whether raids coming from the western Mediterranean influenced or even triggered some of these collapses. I remember reading that at that time some damage could have been done by people from the nuragic civilization from Sardinia, which seemed to be very warfare focused given their love for building huge fortifications.
What would have made them attack at that particular point in time? Or why were their attacks successful then and not earlier? These are the weaknesses I see in every attempt to “explain” the collapse of a culture by foreign invasion.
It’s not going to be a single cause but an external attack (part of a routine or exceptional) combined with internal instability can break a system that was handling one or the other well enough for a millenium.
This “internal instability” can’t be entirely due to defiance in leadership. If it was such invasions would happen randomly instead of being concentrated to certain time periods. Rather than wealth turning people into wimps it actually makes it possible to stop invasions. This is why I use explanations like epidemics, environmental destruction and climate change.
Similar climate-drive pressures have been evidenced in western Mediterranean cultures like nuragic Sardinia and the Terramare culture of northern Italy, which were both intricately linked into the trade networks of the late bronze age. The Terramare in particular experienced a wholesale collapse right at the start of LBAC, whcih coincided with an increase in Terramare-style material culture find in Mycenaean Greece and further east.
The Bronze Age collapse wasn’t an Eastern Mediterranean thing. We only conceive of it as such because that’s where most of the archaeology uncovering it has been done, and the collapse was more visible because of the sophistication of the state architecture in those places. It occurred all over the Med, and likely significantly far into continental Europe as well.
“the Greeks will adopt and modifying the Phoenician alphabet”
->adopt and modify
Ok, so, this touches on something I’m still somewhat confused about, even though I feel like I understand the effects of it, namely, you talk a lot on this blog about state capacity and administration, and I understand that some forms of government require more of that versus others which can function with very little administrative overhead. I also understand that you need higher literacy and people who can fill administrative roles in order to have that larger capacity for centralisation. The thing I’m struggling with is why some societies have those administrative candidates available, and others don’t. If the greek poleis developed from smaller groupings after the larger states of the LBAC, why is a medieval noble so much less able to organise the kind of internal administration to run a city that was the core of the polis? Or whatever other comparisons you want to make with Rome or whoever else.
It’s been discussed a few times on this blog. A good starting point for medieval societies vs ancient could be
https://acoup.blog/2019/06/12/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-iii/
Or the entire series on the Crusader Kings game.
(Yes both of these are fictional subjects: Prof Devereaux always brings up real world examples for comparison.)
Oh I’ve read all his series on here, what I’m asking is less why certain systems didn’t have the ability to do some things, and more, why did those systems develop that way in comparison to others. Which I realise is an incredibly speculative area, but I was curious as to whether historians had any general ideas about it.
This is in some senses a question that is basically the entire field of history – and so answering it in detail is quite a project.
One point I do think is worth remembering is that in the past, people aren’t looking at this in some sort of “choosing from a menu of options in a video game”. The ‘options’ available in a given society at a given time are culturally dependent, things like “how people expect authority to be expressed” and “the importance of literacy to religious practice” and so on. It’s not like a medieval noble is looking at their realm’s government screen and can see that if they get another 3% of educated pops and a second luxury trade good they’ll be able to develop a Hanseatic quarter.
It’s not that leaders and societies had no way to adjust these things – the situations they find themselves in are just the sum of a series of decisions made up to that point, and so by making new decisions they could shape what options they had in the future. But at any given time the range of decisions to make was pretty constrained, and the implications of those choices ten or fifty or a hundred years down the line very hard to foresee. A nice practical example of this is late Medieval France, which spent a couple of hundred years trying and failing to raise effective infantry because of various structural factors which interfered with recruiting and using them.
(Also, medieval cities were perfectly able to run themselves with the sort of administrative complexity that characterises a polis – and did it just fine without needing any interference from those pesky nobles.)
Indeed, no small part of Medieval city governance seems to exist in terms of the tension between the desire of municipal authorities for as much autonomy as they can manage and being part of a larger governing structure that includes nobles and monarchs who want greater authority over them.
In fairness, this seems to have been a tension shared by many a polis when incorporated into larger states.
I get that to an extent, what I’m asking is less why certain systems didn’t have the ability to do some things, and more, why did those systems develop that way in comparison to others. Which I realise is an incredibly speculative area, but I was curious as to whether historians had any general ideas about it, which yeah, you’re right, it is a very big topic to deal with.
I think the series on this blog analysing the narrative of the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire can shed some light on that. The basic transition for Europe seems to be a combination of several coinciding pressures causing a breakdown of cohesion in the governing institutions of the empire (at a time when successor kingdoms seek to appropriate them), which results in economic disruption that causes population reduction and redistribution, which in turn impedes the capacity for a new administrative class to easily redevelop.
This coincides with factors such as Germanic hierarchical and governing customs, the pressure of more immediate and decentralised governing structures needing to form ad hoc in the face of major invaders such as the Vikings, and the fact that much of the surviving and renewed literary class gets absorbed by the Church.
“why is a medieval noble so much less able to organise the kind of internal administration to run a city that was the core of the polis?”
It varies case-by-case. For example, in France, the administrators themselves turned into feudal lords, until the Capetian kings was able to centralize the realm and installed new administrators to oversee it. In England, however, the kings centralized the realm early on, with most of it managed by administrators (sheriffs), although feudal lords (barons) were still needed to raise troops.
There’s also that say Fulk Nerra running Anjou or Baldwin I in Flanders are very effective administrators, ruling considerable territories. (the medieval County of Flanders is comparable in size to Macedonia). And, of course, England is about the same size as all of Greece. By mid-late medieval times most states in Europe were much more tightly governed than the Roman Empire.
Regarding the idea of the Dorian invasion: I have found that even recent works on Greek linguistics* present the theory of a Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus after the LBAC, displacing earlier Greeks speaking the Arcadian dialect, either as fact or as the most likely explanation for the fact that the Mycenaean inscriptions from this area are in a form of the Arcadocypriot dialect, while in the classical period Doric Greek was spoken throughout this region (except for the inland region of Arcadia). (Horrocks mentions, but considers less probable, the alternate explanation that in the Mycenaean period the common people already spoke Doric Greek while Arcadocypriot was used by the upper class, including the scribes.) Have views on this changed drastically in just the last 10-15 years, or is this a subject on which philologists & archaeologists have long disagreed? To what do you attribute the change in distribution of Greek dialects?
* Horrocks (1997), Greek: A History of the Language; several contributors to Bakker, ed. (2010), A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language; Palmer (1980), The Greek Language.
As far as I can tell, the idea of the migration of the speakers of the Northern Greek dialect group (“Dorians”) into the Southern Greek language area is still considered the most probable explanation of this language change by linguists. See, for example, “The Greek dialects in the early phase of the Dark Ages” by Ivo Hajnal (2023). On the other hand, Ivo Hajnal stated that the idea of the “Doric invasion” leading to the end of the Mycenaean civilization is completely outdated. As far as I understand, his idea is that there was no singular invasion of the Northern Greeks into the Mycenaean lands, causing the collapse of this civilization, but rather a series of smaller-scale migrations from the north after the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization. By the way, this conception might be closer to the Ancient Greek myth of the Return of the Heracleidae, which happened two generations after the Trojan War and affected only some areas of the Peloponnese (Messenia, Laconia and Argos), not the whole of the Mycenaean Greece.
Perhaps note that the “Menelaion” in Laconia was (as far as we know) not called that in the Bronze Age, but named that ca. 800 BC?
The fact that the Mycenaeans were Greeks doesn’t disprove a Dorian invasion. The Greeks were anything but homogenous and fought each other quite a bit. The Dorians could have been a group that either had not yet moved into Greece or which was outside of the Mycenaean system and successfully attacked the Mycenaean settlements. After Troy turned out to have a historical basis, I would be inclined to believe that the Greek claims of a Greek invasion have a historical basis too.
Early Indo-European-speakers immigrating to the area around the Aegean Sea gave rise to the Greeks after settling there. However, there were likely significant regional population movements during the LBAC. The “Dorian invaders” could then have been one subgroup of Greeks invading another.
If we’re looking for an origin for raiders coming out of the collapse of the Mycenaean states, I’ll point out that whatever group took out the citadels would be a leading contender. That took a capable military force, and once they were done with their first citadel, what’s next? Probably another, and then once most of the Mycenaean citadels were gone, time to go abroad.
The Philistines have recently been established genetically as being originally of Greek origin (or at least their elites) so if they were the Peleset I’d call them Greeks rather than Levantine, although they did eventually settle in the Levant.
When is a collapsing neighbor a source of instability and a security risk, as opposed to being a power vacuum to expand into?
When your own state capacity is already under strain.
And not even always then, I think. The Roman Republic was probably doing quite well after the Second Punic War, but the breakdown of the neighbouring Macedonian kingdom was ultimately enough of a problem as to drive converting them into a province. It’s apparent from sources and the historical process that the Republic didn’t initially want to annex Greece, because they’d have preferred to not be involved in the conflicts of the poleis.
However, those conflicts wouldn’t leave the Republic alone, for reasons such as “the fighting threatens to spill over borders” and “the component factions of the governing breakdown keep trying to get Romans involved on their side”.
Combine with things like the neighbour being an important trading partner, and it’s not a trivial thing to replace that by just strolling in and appropriating the resources.
“As an aside, it is not uncommon for a single society to utilize both legendary myths of autochthony and arrival-by-conquest, choosing whichever is more useful in the moment, even though they are obviously, from a logical standpoint, mutually incompatible.”
I think the idea of a group simultaneously being autochthonous and outsider is only logically incompatible if your schema for how ethnicities function is as a closed group of lineages descending through time, expanding or contracting, invading or staying put.
The alternative, which is quite a bit closer to reality, is that ethnicities are an amalgamation of different previously distinct groups in a process stretching back as far through time as we’re able to see.
Take the population history of the English as it’s popularly understood. Most people, when asked, will say that the English are a fusion of Celtic (autochthonous), Anglo-Saxon (outsider) and Norman (outsider) peoples. This seems to match the evidence we have archaeologically and ethnographically as well. Thus, it would be perfectly logically coherent to claim that the English are both autochthonous and invader, depending on the context.
This picture only gets messier the further you look into it. Those ‘autochthonous’ Celts we mentioned earlier are themselves made up of a mashup of (autochthonous) Insular Celts and (outsider) Belgae (a separate Celtic ethnicity, perhaps even Germanic). Those ‘autochthonous’ Insular Celts were themselves made up of (autochthonous) Early European Farmers and (outsider) Western Steppe Herders (via Spain it seems). Those ‘autochthonous’ Early European Farmers were themselves made up of (autochthonous) Western Hunter Gatherers and (outsider) Anatolian Neolithic Farmers.
And so on and so forth throughout the entirety of the genus homo (as evidenced by the prevalence of Neanderthal, Denisovan, and at least one ghost lineage of hominins in our DNA), likely continuing before genus homo was even a thing.
Everyone, everywhere is some degree of autochthonous and outsider, depending largely on when you arbitrarily set the start-point for the discussion.
Note: many people use this argument as justification for colonial projects in order to delegitimise the current residents’ claim to land in favour of the colonialists. This is not what I am arguing for. For me, this is one of the issues of building our concepts of land-rights-appropriateness on shifting sands.
Mind, Celtic people originated in a more central part of Europe and only arrived in Britain somewhere between 1000 and 800BC. We have archaeological evidence to know that they weren’t the first inhabitants of the isle.
This is the kind of thing that raises interesting questions about what any given culture’s perception of its own origins is, and where the bar is for how far back a habitation needs to be before it is considered native. After all, homo sapiens as a species only originates somewhere in eastern Africa, and apparently didn’t start migrating elsewhere until somewhere around 70,000 years ago.
Dammit, I can’t edit this, can I? This is what I get for only reading halfway through a comment before responding. Please disregard.
Haha no you can’t edit stuff (maybe you can, but I haven’t found out how). You raise some interesting points though, so I won’t ignore it 😉
“Celtic people originated in a more central part of Europe and only arrived in Britain somewhere between 1000 and 800BC. We have archaeological evidence to know that they weren’t the first inhabitants of the isle.”
Celtic culture originated somewhere in central Europe (in the Hallstatt culture) and then spread out from there. It’s not currently clear whether that was accompanied by movement of people or whether it was a sort of ‘cultural revolution’ that was taken up by local peoples, or some proportional blend of the two (as the Beaker phenomenon seems to have been in the early bronze age).
My understanding of the current state of the field is that a ‘celtic migration’ or ‘celtic invasion’ of the British isles is less well supported than the idea of a steady ongoing cultural diffusion and mobility between continental ‘celtic’ and insular ‘pre-celtic’ peoples.
There’s also tentative evidence that Belgae-celtic peoples did significantly populate/acculturate south-eastern England (from toponyms, or rather the lack of specific ones in the South East).
Really, I think the crux of the matter is that ‘celtic’ is a broad-brush description of a cultural complex that obscures more than it enlightens the level of population movements we’re trying to look at.
“This is the kind of thing that raises interesting questions about what any given culture’s perception of its own origins is, and where the bar is for how far back a habitation needs to be before it is considered native.”
Exactly. This is the logical argument people are using to justify colonialism, and is something that we could really do with settling as a convention and decoupling from the study of ancient population movements as it gets in the way of all sorts of objectivity.
“After all, homo sapiens as a species only originates somewhere in eastern Africa, and apparently didn’t start migrating elsewhere until somewhere around 70,000 years ago.”
Even that turns out to be messier than we thought! All present day homo sapiens populations outside of Africa appear to descend from a wave of expansion starting around 70,000BC…but it seems like there may have been multiple ‘unsuccessful’ expansions out of Africa prior to that. Potentially stretching back to 270,000BC (though that evidence is very thin indeed). What is known is that there appears to be homo sapiens in the Arabia from around 115,000BC, and in China around 80,000BC. These didn’t seem to ‘stick’ with those populations either dying out or migrating back into Africa.
Unsurprisingly, absolutely every aspect of human population movement is more complicated than we first imagined.
@Ynneadwraith,
I guess the “authochthonous vs. outsider” thing isn’t that troublesome for me, because I see indigeneity as a relative thing, not an absolute thing. I can simultaneously say that in a particular context, I’m more indigenous than you, while at the same time some other person X is more indigenous than me, and maybe a fourth person Y is more indigenous than X, and i can weight our competing claims and interests accordingly.
Yep, that’s certainly a solid way to square it. One I’d be pretty happy with as well, though of course comes with its own set of fistfights and mutual atrocities over how to weight ‘indigenousness’. See the history of Israel/Palestine for how that goes down, or the mess around what’s happening in Xinjiang with the Uyghers, the Chinese government, and claimed descent from the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin.
That’s also sort of what I was trying to get to, though you’ve managed to put it much more succinctly. It is possible to be both autochthonous and outsider and for that to be logically consistent, because at some scales and in some instances you are autochthonous, and at some scales and in some instances you are an outsider.
Of course, people get thoroughly garbled up as to which is which, so it often comes out a bit closer to ‘we’re indigenous/outsiders whenever it suits the point I’m making best’. Especially when you’re legitimacy-building and/or operating in an environment where no-one can effectively fact-check you (i.e. all of the people around the Med claiming descent from the Trojans).
It is possible to be both autochthonous and outsider and for that to be logically consistent, because at some scales and in some instances you are autochthonous, and at some scales and in some instances you are an outsider.
Right, exactly. Speaking personally, for example, I can say that I’m *less* indigenous (in the relevant geographic/historical context) than a middle-caste or low-caste Tamil, who in turn is less indigenous than an Irula, but also than I’m *more* indigenous than a North Indian living in the region (even ones like my cousin’s late mother who moved there in about the 11th c), who in turn is *more* indigenous than, I dunno, some white English person who moved to Chennai 100 years ago and decided to stay after independence, or for that matter some white American who moves there tomorrow. And like I said, i think their interests and perspectives should be weighted correspondingly, whether it comes to political issues like affirmative action, linguistic policy, ideological orientation, etc. (let alone the underlying deeper issues of, “in the long run, should we be a nation state of our own or a component part of India and SL”), or to more personal issues like “what should I name my hypothetical children, if/when I have some” or “how should I conceive of my religious beliefs.”
(At the legal level, of course, the only important aspect to my identity is that I’m a US citizen by birth, but I think the legal stuff is all fairly superficial anyway, especially since it’s not clear to me that the US as we know it will even be here 100 or 200 years from now, and it’s not what I choose to think of as important).
I do think that sort of approach is more obvious in the case of places like India, where we have a fairly solid understanding of population movements over time and lots of different ethnic groups.
There are challenges to it though, especially when you start applying it at the individual level, and working out what ‘counts’ and what doesn’t.
Take me for example. I’m English. Born in England, lived in England all my life. My paternal family is from Yorkshire, and has been since records began as far as we can tell. My maternal grandfather was from the South East, with a family traceable back to Hertfordshire all the way to the 1400s.
My maternal great grandmother was Indian (great grandad was a station master in the British Raj and married out there), making me 1/16th Indian (which is bonkers if you took a glance at me, which just highlights how nuts Jim Crow laws were).
Does that make me meaningfully less indigenous than someone else? What about someone who is half English half Welsh? They’re both from the British Isles, but one of those is a different country. Are the Welsh more indigenous than the English because they’ve had less admixture from Anglo-Saxons (even though their particular bit of Brythonic ancestry is from Wales specifically, and my proportion of Brythonic ancestry is more local to where I currently live)? Is a Welsh person who speaks Welsh more indigenous than a Welsh person who doesn’t? Is a Welsh person who lives in Wales more indigenous to Wales than a Welsh person who lives just the other side of the border (this one may be relevant to your position as an Indian presumably living in the USA)?
You can get into the weeds really quickly with this sort of approach in a way that drives significant wedges through society in very destructive ways.
Considering that the concepts of ethnicity and indigeneity are ultimately social constructs rather than anything particularly hard-coded into reality, there will always be some degree of arbitrary cutoff and decision-making about what ‘counts’ towards indigeneity and what is ‘indigenous enough’.
Personally I’m conflicted as to whether the whole thing is worth it. In some instances (i.e. the colonisation of the Americas), yeah. Kinda important. In others (proposed ‘great replacement’ of ‘indigenous English people’)…no. I’d rather that lot spent their time doing something actually productive for society.
Perhaps the closest thing to my position is that indigeneity matters for land claims, but dominant groups in society should bend and flex to make space for non-dominant groups. If everyone took that approach the whole thing would be a lot less fraught.
The Uyghers are not culturally descended from the Tocharians as they speak an unrelated language. However, they are probably partially biologically descended from them. Not only because cultural absorption makes more sense to me than biological replacement. But also because they are more European-locking than their neighbours in the east and south. Anyway, biological descent does not matter in this context to me. A people’s claim of biological descent from one group or another is often false anyway.
@Lena Synnerholm That’s sort of the point, ‘By what measure indigenous’. What weight does one ascribe to cultural inheritance vs genetic inheritance (as one key question).
And for the record, language =/= culture. That’s not a ruling as to whether the Uyghurs are or aren’t culturally descended from the Tocharians (I’ve no idea personally), but there are myriad instances of cultural inheritance between groups with dissimilar languages. Or direct continuous cultural descent that involved multiple changes of language over time.
Language can tentatively be used as a proxy for culture in some very careful instances, and with a lot of caveats, but it’s simply one of a myriad of different aspects on which you can hang various different groupings of traditions.
My maternal great grandmother was Indian (great grandad was a station master in the British Raj and married out there), making me 1/16th Indian (which is bonkers if you took a glance at me, which just highlights how nuts Jim Crow laws were).
Haha. I’m about half as “English/Scottish” as you are South Asian (I haven’t gotten a genetic test done, and there are no written records of it, but family lore is that my great-great-grandparent was the illegitimate child of a British army officier).
I guess I’m more sympathetic than you are to the concerns that many Europeans (especially in Central/Eastern Europe, it seems like) have over immigration, ethnic/demographic change, etc.. Because it seems to me that, in the last analysis, people in Europe are humans just like I am and are going to share a lot of the same concerns, values, etc.: why wouldn’t they feel attached to their ethnic identities and wish that they continue into the future, exactly the same as I do? Obviously those concerns need to be balanced against other concerns, and what we do with them is going to have to depend on the circumstances and situation.
I use language as a proxy for culture because it is relatively simple to classify. Yet I am aware of language not equalling culture. One case I am familiar with is Finnish people sharing a considerable number of cultural traits with Swedes despite speaking unrelated languages. The explanation is Finland having been part of Sweden for centuries. (It was conquered by Russia in 1809 and become independent in 1917.) As “Finnish reader” points out elsewhere it still has a Swedish-spoken minority.
However, I get shooting pains in my mind when a people claim to be descended from a group which spoke an unrelated language or an only distantly related one. The later refer to languages whish common origin lies millennia in the past. Also, I can’t help wondering how much of a people’s culture could survive language replacement (also called language assimilation or language shift). A people’s culture is expressed through the characteristics of their language. Even relatively similar languages such as English and my native Swedish have considerable differences in things like what they have words for. This makes me doubt that much of culture can be transferred to a different language. Especially one without a traceable common origin.
@Hector I have sympathy too, it’s just that I disagree with their methods. Far too much general whinging and deporting brown people, and not enough doing literally anything to help preserve their culture or make life better for the people living in it.
Complain about lack of integration, then do everything within their power to make integrating with them hard.
Complain about mass immigration, then complain about the single most effective thing at preventing mass immigration (chunky foreign aid packages).
Complain about immigrants suppressing wages, yet vote against labour reform and unions at every given opportunity.
I could go on and one about these.
Makes me think that the concern is being weaponised, rather than being genuine. Either that or people genuinely are that stupid, which I struggle with, because humans are not stupid.
@Lena Synnerholm Again not passing any judgements on the Uygher case, but I’d be careful about making those sorts of sweeping generalisations about not speaking a related language indicating a lack of cultural continuity.
Otherwise there are a lot of indigenous groups that would be very surprised to learn that the extinction of their language and forced adoption of the language of their colonisers indicates that they are no longer inheritors of their indigenous culture.
It would also have some interesting implications for the Israelis, to pick an example that’s typically coded on the other side of the political spectrum.
Regarding the possibility of culture being transferred to a new, unrelated language I am a doubter rather than a denier. On the other hand deep continuity is not needed. My attitude to marginalised groups can be expressed as “they are where they are – let us make their lives better”. This has to be done in dialog with the marginalised groups in question. Many attempts to improve people’s situation dictated from above have failed. Not to talk about futile attempts at forced assimilation.
When I think about it there are at least two types of “descent from the famous” claims. One consists of claiming to be descended from a people which previously inhabited the same area. If they spoke an unrelated or only distantly related language such claims seem doubtful to me. I can’t help wondering how much of culture could be transferred through a language shift. The other type consists of claims to be descended from famous/legendary people which have lived somewhere else. If there is no documented overlap in extent or significant population movement I find the later type preposterous. For examples there could have been some Ancient Greeks ending up in Roman Britain. If they did this would not have had any profound effect on the local culture or gene pool. So the Britons would not be descended from the Ancient Greeks in any meaningful sense as some (Arthur Evans?) has claimed.
I consider a group indigenous if their cultural ancestors lived there in the middle of the 15th century. Claims of the type “we were here first” are not important to me.
Which is a fine point to take, but considering its arbitrarality I’m sure you can see how various people across the world will argue for different ‘clock starts’ for this. For instance, the 15thC was immediately prior to the Reconquista, so folks currently living on the Iberian Peninsula might have significant thoughts about that. You’d also end up poking some very angry hornets nests in the Balkans considering the Ottoman-induced population movements there in the early 1500s. Or the Ateker peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.
Hence the issue.
Personally I’d support the 15th Century as ‘about right, give or take in some places’ as well, but I’m not in a position to influence international policy.
Personally I’d support the 15th Century as ‘about right, give or take in some places’ as well, but I’m not in a position to influence international policy.
I wouldn’t support any kind of a hard cutoff in the 15th c, as I said i think of indigeneity in relative terms. Partly because saying “everything before the 15th c is cool” is to effectively declare an amnesty on everything that happened before then, many of which continue to have implications today.
@Hector Now that you’ve mentioned it I do prefer your option, though the idea I had in my head for how all of this stuff has practically been dealt with in the real world is effectively ‘pick an arbitrary date and say right, this is it, I know we’ve done lots of conquering and displacement and moving around before, but we know better than that now so no-one do any more of it‘. That point being effectively the post-WW2 international order (though this is under considerable strain at the moment).
My main thought at that point was ‘is the 15thC a better option in terms of indigenous rights’ and that turned out to be ‘yeah mostly’. Noting that ‘mid-15thC’ means 1450 or so.
Pre colonisation of the Americas. Pre European Slave Trade. Pre Race for Africa. Pre colonisation of Australia. Pre Chinese annexation of Tibet and inner Mongolia. Pre Russian colonisation of Siberia. Most of the big-ticket stuff is covered.
Another, orthogonal question to any choice of cutoff date is revisionism. There are genuinely a bunch of people out there who over the last century have convinced themselves that Jews aren’t from Judea.
(A more pernicious version, which touches on the question of cutoff dates, is that some people argue that Jews lost our indigeneity in the diaspora, without necessarily acquiring some new indigeneity. Here, choosing 500 years ago could seem like a “convenient” way to make this argument without having to reckon with who is indigenous to the Americas, ie very useful specifically to the current American Left.
There’s probably no single date that would settle every modern conflict.)
@bagel Agreed it’s a difficult question, hence why it’s carried on for so long.
I do note, without attempting to start an argument, that a significant majority of the folks who are dead-set certain that the Jews are from Judea spend a lot of time trying to pretend that the Palestinians aren’t from Palestine, and have been expending considerable effort and money trying to make that a reality.
I have little tolerance for people who claim to follow a logical set of arguments that just so happen to apply to their own people but not others.
I think they are too home-blind to see their own error.
Thinking of the above, I have always thought it would be interesting, and perhaps very entertaining from a sufficiently great distance, to see a DNA comparison between modern Israelis, modern Palestinians, and, for example, the inhabitants of the Roman province of Judea. Even better if we get a comparison with the Canaanites.
@ad9 ‘Sufficiently great distance’ being a self-sufficient colony on Mars, I expect.
For me, the heavy regulation of popular genetic heritage testing in Israel suggests to me that they are somewhat concerned about what they might uncover under that particular stone.
Though I should qualify that genetics is not the ultimate arbiter of belonging as far as I’m concerned. Otherwise we’re leading down other nasty little avenues.
It’s definitely the case that many Palestinians (to use the post-1960s version of the label) are also deeply tied to the land of Israel. One of the best proofs of it is that they’re closely related to and in fact converted from Jews – often pressured by imperial conditions to convert.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas, for example, was born in Tzfat. He is a descendant of a line of rabbis that had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and took the opportunity to return to the land of Israel and settled in Tzfat. Three centuries later, in the 1830s, his family (still in Tzfat) was forced to convert after an earthquake. https://www.jns.org/jns/mahmoud-abbas/23/5/24/290586/
So to use our for-sake-of-argument 1400 CE cutoff – he couldn’t be judged indigenous by his somewhat recent Jewish ancestors or his recent Muslim ancestors, despite his family living in the same place for about 400 years. He might be indigenous by his (presumable) ancient Jewish ancestors, of if the cutoff was brought to an even-slightly-more-round-number of 1500 CE. Perhaps he should be trying to free Catalonia instead.
The fact that Palestinians are intertwined with Jews is dreadfully inconvenient to extremists and revisionists of all stripes. Whatever you say about one side – and particularly their indigeneity – you find yourself saying about the other.
I would like to note here that personally, I think that “indigenous” makes sense only when we are discussing smallish population groups that are in actual or potential danger of physical or cultural eradication, or who are facing some other actual hardship.
The human species has numerous cultures, and we, as humankind, are richer the more cultures we have. It is the duty of every cultural group to contribute to the development of the humankind by striving to achieve as much as possible in the sciences and arts, andthus enrich the totality of humanity. In addition, the right to pursue one’s own culture, in their own language is an essential part of human dignity. This is possible only if each culture has the practical possibilities and widest possible legal freedom to do so. In some cases, like the Swedish-speaking minority’s case in Finland, this means even the state maintaining a separate ethnic university for the benefit of such a minority group, allowing them to maintain their traditional native-language academic life. Similarly, the rights of an indigenous population may trump other legal rules, like, say, on animal welfare or food safety, when these would cause problems for traditional practices.
So, “indigenousness” is good for estimating which minority should be granted this kind of extraordinary protection by the state. On the other hand, usually the majority population can protect its culture via the democratic process, and doesn’t need “indigenous” protections. (There are exceptions though: For example, Lithuania, where the Soviet colonialism almost made the native population a minority, is a place where the indigenousness is actually a moral issue in the protection of the titular nationality.)
@Finnish Reader,
I just wanted to express that I mostly agree with your framing and argument here, and it’s very well stated!
“I consider a group indigenous if their cultural ancestors lived there in the middle of the 15th century.”
The problem with hard-and-fast definitions is that they always give rise to absurdities. Norwegians, in this case, are indigenous to Greenland, but the Sioux are not indigenous, nor are the Cherokee. The Poles are not indigenous to much of modern Poland, but the English are indigenous to Ireland.
The UN promotes a definition of “indigenous” which is even more counter-intuitive: “Indigenous peoples have in common a historical continuity with a given region prior to colonization and a strong link to their lands. They maintain, at least in part, distinct social, economic and political systems. They have distinct languages, cultures, beliefs and knowledge systems. They are determined to maintain and develop their identity and distinct institutions and they form a non-dominant sector of society.”
Taken literally, this definition would mean there were no indigenous people in the Americas at all before Columbus, and that the only indigenous peoples in most of Europe were Roma and Jews.
Heh, if you remember 1970s sitcoms there was an episode of “Maude” where as part of her never-ending championing of oppressed and downtrodden minorities she sponsored an exchange student from North Africa; who turned out to be ethnically and culturally Italian.
The “Norse” people on Greenland were more like Icelanders than Norwegians. They went at least culturally extinct long before Danish settlement. So right before colonialism is probably a better rule of thumb.
Tehcnically, you can make a case that if you start the clock by the start of European colonisation, i.e. with the 15th century, as UN does, Jews are indigenous in most of Europe, but Roma are not, having arrived in the 16th century. (I think that despite its problems, the definition makes sense, because we Europeans did colonise the world in a manner that is qualitatively different from earlier empires.)
On the other hand, many European nations are, by that measure, indigenous in most of their lands, having historical continuity as ethnic groups. For example, Swedes are by the UN measure indigenous in Götaland and Svealand, though not in Scania or in large parts of Norrland. Finnish limit of indigenousness goes somewhere in Ostrobothnia and Savonia, and the Swedish-speaking Finns are definitely indigenous in their historical area, as they settled it in the 13th century. You could make a good case that Finnish-speakers in Helsinki area are not indigenous to that region, as it is historically Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speakers moved to the area only with industrialisation. (By that measure, the Sami in Helsinki area, who make up the majority of Sami people, are technically settler-colonialists, although that is obviously somewhat absurd a result.)
The French would be indigenous in Northern France, though not in many areas which had a different language in the 14th century. The English would be indigenous to England outside Cornwall – and yes, the Catholic Anglo-Irish to indigenous to Ireland. In Germany, Bavarians would definitely be indigenous to Bavaria, but the question whether you could consider the German unified culture to be indigenous to any part of the country except Saxony and Brandenburg is a bit debatable. 🙂
The problem with hard-and-fast definitions is that they always give rise to absurdities. Norwegians, in this case, are indigenous to Greenland, but the Sioux are not indigenous, nor are the Cherokee. The Poles are not indigenous to much of modern Poland, but the English are indigenous to Ireland.
You actually raise some really good points here, one of which is that often, when people like me argue in favor of the importance of indigeneity, what I’m really defending (at least, intuitively), and what I feel really matters, isn’t indigeneity per se. I care about ethnic groups being able to preserve their identity and their self determination, but I’m not actually that excited about particular pieces of land. As you correctly point out, the “native territories” of Poles and some Native American groups have shifted over time. And other groups like the English, Russians, etc. were living in quite a lot of places by the 15th c that other groups had prior and better claims to: accepting that they were indigenous to *all* of those territories would mean denying national homelands to all those other groups. As I often point out to pro-Israeli irredentists, having the right to a nation state shouldn’t mean that you’re entitled to one *in the specific territory where you claim your ancestors used to live*, nor that you’re entitled to one *as big as you would like*, or to one that includes all the territory where your group happens to live in.
@Finnish reader
All of that raises the next question, which is ‘having sorted out the mess of what counts as indigenous…what precisely do we do with that information?’
Do we forcibly reshuffle borders and populations to put everyone in their proper boxes? No thank you, that sounds like WW3. Do we deport everyone who doesn’t meet a certain bar of indigenousness? No thank you, that sounds like a global ICE.
I kinda think @Hector’s hit the nail on the head. The whole ‘what counts as indigenous’ is a bit of a rabbit-hole tangent to the actual questions, which are ‘how do we unpick the worst bits of colonialism’ and ‘how do we live side-by-side with one another in a deeply imperfect world’.
For me, practical steps are more important and impactful than absolutely 100% nailing the definition of who counts as ‘belonging’ and who doesn’t.
@Ynneadwraith “Do we forcibly reshuffle borders and populations to put everyone in their proper boxes? No thank you, that sounds like WW3. Do we deport everyone who doesn’t meet a certain bar of indigenousness? No thank you, that sounds like a global ICE.”
The whole Israel-Palestine conflict exists because the Palestinians failed to achieve those 2 things.
” I care about ethnic groups being able to preserve their identity and their self determination, but I’m not actually that excited about particular pieces of land.”
I think this is a far more sensible attitude.
Note the last bit of the UN definition: “They are determined to maintain and develop their identity and distinct institutions and they form a non-dominant sector of society.”
So the French can’t be indigenous to France, because they are (I think this is indisputable) the dominant sector of French society. The English, meanwhile, are indigenous to France… but not to England.
Of course mocking the UN definition isn’t entirely fair. They aren’t philosophers trying to come up with a bulletproof definition, they are practical men trying to improve the lives of people in terrible conditions. To take an analogy, if a zookeeper or a chef decides that octopuses are, as far as she is concerned, fish, because they require similar conditions to live in or fit into similar recipes, I am not going to mock her for biological ignorance.
It is problematic to believe a certain ethnic groups to have more right to live in a certain area than another. Europeans claiming that nowadays use rhetoric revealing individual inability to handle diversity. Add unawareness of people noticing aberrations more. Then we have individuals worrying about certain groups of recent immigrants biologically replacing the pre-existing population within a human lifetime. It is demographically impossible for them to become in majority that fast, if ever.
I have no problem handling diversity as I grew up with some degree of it. The area were I grew up has a mix of apartment buildings and row houses with a few duplexes and cottages thrown in. When I grew up it was majority ethnic Swedes but far from exclusively. I can remember Finns, Greeks, Gypsies, Jews, Kurds, Poles and Somalis. On top of our first apartment there was one inhabited by a Swedish woman cohabiting with a man from Barbados (and their two daughters). In middle school one of my classmates had a Brazilian mother. I viewed all these as people just happening to live there.
This area has become majority foreign background during my lifetime. But this does not worry me because it is dominated by tenant-owner’s associations. If you have too pay the equivalent of more than 10,000 American dollars to take over a dwelling you get few maladjusted inhabitants. The smaller area of buildings where apartments are rented is not exactly cheep to live in either. It is where it gets easy to get an apartment you get a concentration of social problems. Which is then misunderstood as Islamists taking over.
@nva I’m not sure how accurate boiling down the entirety of Israel/Palestine to ‘the Palestinians didn’t kick the Jews out’ is.
For instance, had the Israelis actually made a concerted effort to integrate themselves into existing power structures and actually create a functional multi-ethnic polity, there’s a significant chance that the conflict as we know it would not exist.
Whatsmore, I think they would have achieved their stated goal of creating a safe haven for Jews across the world far more effectively.
The fact that they didn’t is a function of Israeli agency (and the driving political powers supporting it), not some function of the Palestinians not being successfully intolerant.
I view the Israel / Palestine conflict as two governments demanding their own people’ monopoly on the same piece of land. Which I consider a genocidal goal from Israel and an unrealistic demand from Palestine. The whole problem may have started with early Zionists travelling to the Holy Land and being disappointed it was still inhabited. Why would it not have been? I have written a blog post on this particular part of the “we were her first” idea:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/The-myth-of-the-uninhabited-habitable-area#wbb1
@Ynneadwraith
“For instance, had the Israelis actually made a concerted effort to integrate themselves into existing power structures and actually create a functional multi-ethnic polity, there’s a significant chance that the conflict as we know it would not exist.
Whatsmore, I think they would have achieved their stated goal of creating a safe haven for Jews across the world far more effectively.”
… why would you believe that? In the mid-to-late-1900s Jews were ethnically cleansed out of every piece of the Middle East except Israel, including Judea and Samaria and Gaza. Some of those Jewish communities were up to 2600 years old, dating back to … the 700s BCE, when they were ethnically cleansed out of Israel. (Before 1400 CE!) Justify your position that the Zionists were not completely and utterly correct about Jews’ (lack of) safety as minorities, because what you said sounds like genocide apologia.
Moreover … “integrate … multi-ethnic polity” is what the Jews *actually did* under the Ottomans. The Brits and French offered liberation and self-determination (to Jews as well as Arabs) as the prize for overthrowing the Ottomans during WWI. Until then, Zionism was “merely” about Jews going back to Israel and living as minorities under foreign rule (both in the sense of it being Muslim rule but also that it was Turkish rule). And even so, in the late 1800s Jews had only even theoretically regained citizen rights under the Ottomans a few decades earlier, they certainly weren’t getting into the local government in any meaningful sense. Never mind the Ottoman government.
The Zionists committed to respecting the rights of other ethnicities, and Israel has done a passable job of respecting that for their Arab citizens. The Arabs committed to throwing them into the sea, and succeeded at reducing their own Jewish populations by 95-99%. For a decade and a half the original meaning of their ‘nakba’ wasn’t that Arabs suffered for this goal, it was that the Jews hadn’t suffered enough.
@Lena Synnerholm
“I view the Israel / Palestine conflict as two governments demanding their own people’ monopoly on the same piece of land. Which I consider a genocidal goal from Israel and an unrealistic demand from Palestine.”
Well there’s your problem.
Israel has a sizable Arab minority that participates in society and government. Areas under Palestinian control are Judenrein. So you’re just wrong on the facts.
But by your own admission, even if they were behaving the same way you would treat them differently. If only there was a word for that…
Look up the term “polyglot empire”. There’s a distinction to be made between the progressive ideal of a multi-ethnic representative democracy, and an empire whose rulers simply don’t care which language their conquered subjects speak or what ethnic group or culture they hail from, so long as they pay taxes and serve in the draft.
How much of the area originally intended to be divided between Israel and Palestine is now controlled by Palestinians? Too many Israeli don’t understand they are in an advantageous position while too many Arabs refuse to accept they are at a disadvantage. This is why I described their goals in different terms and not due to double standards.
Also, the Ottoman Empire was pretty much a failed state during its last 47 years of existence.
@Lena
“How much of the area originally intended to be divided between Israel and Palestine is now controlled by Palestinians? Too many Israeli don’t understand they are in an advantageous position while too many Arabs refuse to accept they are at a disadvantage. This is why I described their goals in different terms and not due to double standards.”
Well they have Jordan, parts of Judea and Samaria, and Gaza, all of which were originally promised to the Jewish State by the League of Nations in 1920. So the Arabs seem to be doing pretty alright for themselves.
But even if you go by the three-decades-later and never-implemented UN Partition Plan, it’s still a curious standard, bordering on victim-blaming. The Jews accepted that 1947 division and the Arabs rejected it. Then the Arabs began a series of war with the explicit and well-publicized aim of a genocide against the Jews. The fact that the Arabs were collectively so monumentally incompetent that their wars resulted in overall losing ground instead of gaining it – never mind only getting into a position to carry out their genocide of Jews in Judea and Samaria – seems like something you should take up with them and not Israel.
Israel has given the Sinai back to Egypt twice (which worked out for Israel) and unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2005 (less so). You could make a reasonable argument that Israel has been occupying the Golan Heights since 1967, but they did so to end more than a decade of mortar fire directed at Israeli farmers.
And, perhaps even more directly a rebuttal than any of that, Arabs continue to live and grow in Israel while Jews are vanishing from all Muslim lands (and now that Hamas’s hostages are home there are zero where Palestinians rule). The land Israel controls does not impede the exercise of indigeneity of Muslims. The land Muslims control does impede the exercise of indigeneity of Jews (and Druze, and Kurds, etc). So if you see the Jewish aims as genocidal and the Arab aims as self-determination amongst their neighbors, how do you explain that almost exactly the opposite has happened?
Ehm, in the case of Jordan that was clearly false.
The King of Jordan had before the 1948 war even came up with a proposal in which he was to annex territory as a Jewish autonomous area within Jordan.
Though, I suppose he likely was more motivated by a desire to annex that territory for himself than any goodness of his heart.
After the outbreak of the war Jordan once again displayed a lack of genocidal intent. Whilst there had been massacres and ethnic cleansing committed by Jordanian forces, which was bad naturally; however, I had even read about an incident in which Jordanian soldiers had protected Jewish civilians being evacuated from combat, by opening fire at an Arab mob attempting to attack them, which is quite incompatible with genocidal intent:
From here: ( https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ai0vfq/comment/kourk36/ )
Also, on a side-note, the leadership of the other Arab states did produce quite a lot of rhetoric in the style ‘drive Israel into the sea’, which could be interpreted as either ‘mere bluster/posturing for strategic or morale reasons’ or ‘evidence of genocidal intent’.
However, recently the government of Israel had also produced such rhetoric; look at for Example Netanyahu going on about ‘Amalekites’.
I find it odd how that certain groups of people seem so insistent that the former was clearly ‘evidence of genocidal intent’ but clearly not the latter, or the other way around.
@Tus
Suppose you tried to make the argument that Jordan specifically invaded “merely” with the intent of ethnic cleansing the Jews. (To where?) The facts are all still there. Jordan invaded in coordination with the rest of the Arab League, who came in with the explicitly genocidal goal of “driving the Jews into the sea”. Jordan threw the Jews out everywhere they could. Sure, Jordan only took some opportunities to massacre those Jews instead of just driving them into the area they planned to conquer next. What was the plan when they were doing that in Tel Aviv, exactly?
But to compare that to Netanyahu calling Hamas a modern Amalek days after October 7 is stupid and beneath you. Even if you believe that what Netanyahu said in the wake of one of the most infamous rapes and murders of Jews in history represented a personal or strategic intention … he failed utterly to do it, despite having had the means and opportunity. Israel dropped more than a ton of explosives for every Gazan claimed to have died in the entire war, Hamas or civilian. The population of Gaza went up *even according to the Palestinians*. https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=5791
When is the last time an Muslim army entered a Jewish area and the Jewish population went up? Has it ever happened?
My previous inlay was not entirely correct. I am aware of more than 1/4 of Israeli citizens not being Jewish. My greatest issue with the Israeli is what Amos Oz has compared to collective PTSD. A lot of them actually believe that their country’s neighbours could at any time obliterate it. Which is impossible as Israel is the only country in the area to have adapted the mobile system of combat. I think this is why Israel’s enemies have looked so incompetent all the time.
Levelling this unwarranted fear expansionists have gained too much political influence in Israel. I consider Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal as well as some members of his administration. One of them has expressed a will to empty the Gaza Strip of Palestinians. To me this qualifies as genocidal intent. Then we have those Israeli settlers constantly demanding more land on the West Bank for themselves. This at the cost of the Palestinian inhabitants which numbers grow faster than theirs. I am under the impression a great deal of members of the Israeli governments view Palestinians as having to be oppressed. That is comparable to the considerable number of White Americans viewing visible minorities as undeserving of various rights.
Nothing of that justifies hatred of all the world’s Jews. In the Middle East there is no tradition of reflecting upon other people’s motivations. However, there is a tradition of segregation with different ethnic and religious groups not socialising with each other. Under such circumstances it is easy to fool people into believing every single member of a certain group to be evil, out to destroy one’s own, and the like. That is comparable to the non-negligible number of Europeans believing their countries’ Muslim minorities to systematically physically attack people known not to be Muslims. What they as a group would earn from that I have never gotten any explanation of.
It’s because of Israel’s military and intelligence readiness that their neighbors can’t obliterate them. That state of preparedness isn’t PTSD, it’s realism about what would happen if Israelis were defenseless. Reiterated as recently as the Hamas attack.
I still don’t think any of Israel’s neighbours could obliterate it. It has not been possible for at least several decades. Israel is to military strong for that.
Another thought that’s probably useful. It’s becoming increasing clear that the LBAC was not mainly an eastern Mediterranean thing, but was a process across pretty much the entirety of the Mediterranean world (if not significantly into mainland Europe as well) due to the similarity of climactic conditions and the interconnectedness of trade.
This is evidenced most clearly in the Terramare culture of the Po valley in northern Italy. Although not a literate palatial economy like its eastern contemporaries, it was a sizeable developed culture of the time and formed a key node in the cross-continental trade networks for Baltic amber (through the riverine system of central Europe up to the peoples of the Nordic Bronze Age). The area was densely populated (150,000-200,000 people), and there’s significant evidence for trade between them and the Mycenaeans (and onward to the rest of the eastern Med).
They went through a similar extremely sharp collapse between 1200-1150BC, with their settlements being effectively deserted within a very short timeframe. At the same time, Italian-style flange-hilted swords (widely used in the heavily militarised Terramare), two distinctive types of fibula, and an Italian style of pottery start cropping up all over Mycenaean Greece, Cyprus, and further into the eastern Med. The evidence of fibulae and pottery have been used to argue that this wasn’t simply an intensification of trade relationships with the Mycenaeans but an actual emptying of the Po valley of people and their movement eastwards into Mycenaean Greece and beyond. So the whole ‘successive climate-induced armed groups rippling across the Med’ thing isn’t necessarily dead in the water, even if it wasn’t the ‘Dorians’ doing it*.
There’s evidence that the sharp collapse of the Terramare was precipitated by climate-induced agricultural collapse similar to the rest of the Med (with no widespread destruction layer), though the causes are every bit as difficult to pin down as the rest of the LBAC.
Alongside this you have a decline but not necessarily collapse of the Nuragic civilisation on Sardinia, who are as far as I know the leading contenders for the Sherden Sea Peoples based on similarities between depictions of ships and warriors in Egyptian temples and the widespread bronze figurines produced on Sardinia.
There was also a similar climate-induced collapse of the Argaric civilisation in southern Spain, though that pre-dates the LBAC by a hundred and something years (so was unlikely to contribute to the wider issues across the LBAC), but appears to be an early casualty of the same climactic issues that stressed most of the other polities at the time. This is unsurprising, considering theories around the peculiar architecture of Argaric settlements. They appear to be heavy fortifications around deep man-made ‘wells’ theorised to be used by local societies (and elites within societies, the Argaric people were heavily hierarchical) to control water for irrigation in the arid environment at the time. Considering that the Argaric people had already taken such drastic measures to control their water supply well in advance of the broader LBAC suggests that they would have been closer to the edge of agricultural viability, and thus vulnerable to the further aridification that appears to be taking place at the time (and seems to have been a long process).
I don’t know of any contemporary collapses at the other end of the European trade networks (the Nordic Bronze Age for amber and the British bronze age for tin), but the evidence there is even trickier to piece together (simply because it’s sparser, even though these were areas of considerable local sophistication compared to their neighbours).
*Could well be the Peleset though, if the classical-age myths about the Pelasgians turn out to be a remembrance of the Terramare and the translation into Egyptian holds…
You can add the Paeonians (a culture in present-day North Macedonia) to the list of peripheral cultures significantly impacted by the LBAC outside of the Eastern Med (significant destruction in ~1100BC by people from their north).
My personal take on the causality of the whole thing is that climate stressors around the Mediterranean put pressure on multiple different cultures roughly simultaneously, disrupting agriculture and trade networks across Europe and the Near East. The Argaric culture broke first, but out of sequence with the rest and kept their collapse more or less internal. The next ones to break were the Terramare, who effectively emptied a population of 150,000-200,000 significantly militarised folks into the pre-existing trade networks eastwards into the Mycenaeans (the next step on the well-trodden path towards the progressively more prosperous cultures in the East). This sets off a sort of domino effect where the overwhelmed Mycenaeans (who were already struggling with their own climate challenges) end up joining with the Terramare and rolling up the eastern Med looking for better places to stay, being variously inhibited (and wrecking places) or placated (and sparing them), absorbing and picking up different displaced peoples until we finally see the multi-ethnic pirate/refugee coalition fighting with Ramesses III.
This, in combination with the widespread agricultural challenges states are facing, fatally damages the trade networks that are propping up various different peripheral cultures and the highly-mobile mercenary-trader-warrior class they hosted as part of those trade networks…which then follows the same route of rolling down the old (now defunct) trade routes and contributing to the general mess and destruction. In some cases quickly enough to be a direct part of the LBAC, while in other cases turning up a little later (as the impact on them was buffered somewhat by distance) and causing destruction and upheaval in places like Paeonia, and declines like the transition from the more prosperous Middle Nordic Bronze Age to the less prosperous Late Nordic Bronze Age.
This is a plausible scenario for how the LBAC happened. But I can’t help wondering where you got your “150,000-200,000” number from.
The low estimate at least I found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285677515_The_collapse_of_the_Terramare_culture_and_growth_of_new_economic_and_social_systems_during_the_Late_Bronze_Age_in_Italy
Page 468 in the text (page 22 on the online reader).
The Po Valley of the late bronze age was extremely densely populated…and then right around 1150BC very suddenly wasn’t.
Have you considered a lot of people starving to death before being able to leave? Logistics can’t be taken for granted.
Agreed, and no doubt that did happen…but all of those Terramare style swords, cloak pins and pottery rocking up in Mycenaean Greece complicates the picture. It’s pretty clear that people did leave the area in significant numbers almost exactly around the start of the LBAC.
This is sufficient evidence of a considerable number of people from the Terrmare culture immigrating to Greece. But the number of immigrants should not be overestimated considering the difficulty of transportation before engines.
I’m no scholar, just a guy in an armchair but I find this era fascinating
My guilty pleasure is that when I hear the terms “palace culture”, redistribution of resources, and warrior elites…. I get a little thrill thinking of my distant peasant ancestors seeing the columns of smoke rise, and hearing the crackling of the fires…. And maybe the thud of an arrow 😉
One man’s collapse might be another’s good riddance
I think our host covered that quite extensively in the series on Roman Collapse. Unless you are one of the conquering kings who drained the big pond so they can be the biggest fish in a small pond, you likely would reckon the time after the palaces burned worse than the time before
Now, maybe it allows for something better to rise so your greatgreatgreatgrandchildren would have better life than they would have if palaces stayed. But it is a small consolation in the moment
Understood. Institutions develop and continue for reasons
But the commonality of peasant revolts and revolutions seems to indicate that taking the “big man” down a notch might sometimes give an immediate pleasure that is hard to resist.
I think our host covered that quite extensively in the series on Roman Collapse. Unless you are one of the conquering kings who drained the big pond so they can be the biggest fish in a small pond, you likely would reckon the time after the palaces burned worse than the time before
Even if that was true of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (and as our host pointed out, there’s live debate on the topic, even if he has a clear opinion), it doesn’t follow that it’s the case for every collapse.
Athens surviving the regional collapse of civilisation as a large settlement could explain why it did not have a legend of a founder unlike other Greek city-states.
Refresh my memory, I thought there was a myth about the founder(s) choosing between Athena and Poseidon to be their patron deity.
I recognise this myth but I don’t remember if it was part of a founding story.
“at least one Mycenaean center survives – Athens. That may in turn explain to some degree why Athens is such a big polis in terms of its territory by the time we can see it clearly in the Archaic.”
So, obvious question — does Sparta have an associated Mycenaean survival?
+ Geographically largest polis, even excluding Messenia.
+ Kings into the Classical era. (Not even a common monarchy, but a weird diarchy. Completely baseless speculation, but could a multi-city empire with a separate overlord (wanax) and mayor (basileus) shrinking to a single urban center leave them co-equal?)
+ Unusually large state-level economic redistribution. It would make perfect sense for a bronze-age state to maintain its expensive charioteers by allocating them a standard estate and the helots to work it. (Maybe especially so for a stressed Bronze Age state, which runs short on the administrative capacity to operate a central armory and issue equipment, instead devolving responsibility.) Makes rather less sense after they reequip as hoplites, obviously.
+ Speaking of: helotage. Andrapodize & relocate, as hereditary inalienable slaves of the state, defined as such as a group and maintaining internal organization, sounds a lot like what the big empires did (including the Iron Age Neo-Babylonian Empire), in marked contrast to later Classical Greeks and then Romans, for whom andrapodization produced alienable (chattel) slave individual persons and obliterated all their internal organization. (Thus allowing Epaminondas to do an act parallel to that of Cyrus.)
I see strong parallels between the status of the helots and the status of African-Americans in the post-American Civil War South. Both featured a vast social edifice devoted to ensuring that the lower class, while not being fungible chattel slaves that individual masters could claim as personal property, was maintained in a sort of permanent state of conquest, of existing without rights entirely at the ruling class’s sufferance. This necessitated a rigid caste system which of course was strained by realities such as former upper-class families falling into ruin and the status of people of mixed caste (at what point one could “pass” for example).
Slaves in the US were owned as property by specific individuals and could be bought and sold as such.
Which is why I specified the post-Civil War South.
I think there was considerable time (possibly up to 20 years) from the de facto abolishment of slavery to legally enforced segregation.
It took that long for the southern states, once freed from the direct military occupation of Reconstruction, to work out how to effectively nullify the Fourteenth Amendment by encoding a series of “separate but equal” legal fictions. Before that there hadn’t been even the pretense of African-Americans having any rights within the system.
Do you mean they continued to be treated as if they had no rights whatsoever? Being a slave is being equal to a working animal in a country without any animal protection laws.
Then I remember that slave plantation owners lost their wealth at the de-facto abolishment of slavery. Having already decided to abolish slavery the Union soldiers would not have divided them between themselves to continue treating them as if they had no rights at all.
As far as I know, Sparta was actually considered (both by Ancient Greeks and by modern scholars) as emerging in the result of the Dorian invasion. The Spartan kings were considered descendants of the Heracleidae who led the Dorians during this invasion, while the helots were (at least according to some authors) the descendants of the conquered Mycenean population.
I was under the impression of Sparta not entirely participating in the cultural development of other Greek city-states. Sparta was known to be particularly religious. Now there are highly religious people thinking that just saying you believe gives you a licence to behave as if rules were for others. That approach could have arisen in the Early Modern Era and/or not existed in ancient Polytheism. Anyway, unless they fall into that mental trap the highly religious tend to behave in a way which can be described as Lawful Stupid in D&D terms. Add a council of 30 people consisting of two hereditary positions and 28 elderly men with the right to veto popular votes. Then the Lawful Stupid state of society is likely to continue with relatively little change until the areas is conquered. Because physical fitness and home-field advantage is no longer enough to keep invaders at bay.
Hi Bret,
I would love an article on the role of military chaplains through history. I’m a US army chaplain, and our job is largely about enhancing unit morale and cohesion. Your writings consistently highlight the importance of psychological factors in warfare, and it would be both informative and motivating to learn more about how chaplains have contributed to warfare as force multipliers. Thank you.
There was also a collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization that I have seen linked to the LBAC. I gather that some now think that it fell apart a little bit earlier, but I don’t think that completely rules out a connection of at least a thematic nature.
Richard Bulliet in his ‘Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History’ gives a very detailed discussion of a regional climate change that ushered in the Turks to the “Holy Land”.
“A boom in the production and export of cotton made Iran the richest region of the Islamic caliphate in the ninth and tenth centuries. Yet in the eleventh century, Iran’s impressive agricultural economy entered a steep decline, bringing the country’s primacy to an end”.
Climate change can be relatively narrow in range, and still have large historical importance.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but think about how Homer fits into all this. There are a lot of details in Homer that are either clearly fictitious or dubious, but the basic outline – that Wanax Agamemnon of Mycenae led a coalition of Greek communities against Troy and won after a ten year siege – seems broadly likely to be true, especially since the site of ancient Troy was found and has a destruction layer dating to the correct time period.
Looking at what you wrote about what was already happening in Greece, I would speculate that Agamemnon attacked Troy, and his call for allies to help him attack Troy had so many takers, precisely because they were already stressed. The campaign seemed like a way to busy giddy minds with a foreign quarrel, shore up flagging royal legitimacy with a glorious victory, and shore up ailing state finances with loot from a wealthy city. However, the tactical victory didn’t yield the desired strategic result: the fight dragged on much longer than expected, and the loot didn’t cover the ruinous cost. It ended up making their problems worse, not better. And then came the collapse.
Homer doesn’t tell us about the collapse, but he does hint at it when he speaks of the “sorry homecomings” of the Achaians, implies that Greece has declined badly since the times he’s speaking about, and waxes poetic about how the gods inflict horrible, inexplicable suffering on us poor mortals. He and his audience would have been able to see the ruins of the Mycenaean palaces with their own eyes, still young enough to stand unburied. They knew what had happened to that glorious past. The story of the collapse was a colossal downer, so Homer didn’t speak of it; instead he told a simultaneously glorious and tragic tale of that vanished age’s last hurrah. The story of the Trojan War survived through the no-writing period because it was a good story; the story of the collapse was buried because it was a bad story.
In the Odyssey, raiding is talked about as if it’s simply normal: Odysseus just casually tells Penelope at the end that he’s going to restock his herds by rustling, nobody bats an eye when he speaks of his raid on the Kikonians, and it’s implied that raiding Egypt is something that a guy like Odysseus might do if he’s feeling especially daring. The assassination of Agamemnon also fits with the broader picture of political instability leading up to the collapse. Even without discussing the LBAC directly, Homer does have something to tell us about it.
Most experts in the field agree the Iliad was largely written in the 7th century BC. The Odyssey was written at least somewhat later as it shows a different view of the human mind. Anyway, we have at least 500 years from the events depicted to them being written down. There could be a grain of truth behind those stories taking place at or just before the LBAC. On the other hand some parts of the popular image could be based on misunderstandings. I think the Trojan “horse” was originally intended as a type of cargo ship. The name of the ship type was the same as the word for “horse”.
In a similar manner millennia later, that there had once been a Breton overlord who held back the Saxon invaders for a generation was inflated and romanticized into the legends about King Arthur.
It’s possible that Arthurian legend is even older than the Post-Roman period, and Medieval embellishers placed Arthur there because it was the last period with thin-enough attestation that he could be inserted there without obviously contradicting established history.
I wonder if this is why Poseidon is the god of horses.
This could be due to the role of horses for transport in the Greeks’ cultural ancestors being taken over by ships around the Aegean Sea. A Northern European analogy would be the belief in something like werewolves becoming a belief in selkies.
I’m no expert, but I’ve read both the Iliad and the Odyssey and I don’t see where this “different view of the human mind” idea comes from. The Odyssey was clearly written after the Iliad as it’s the sequel, but both stories are about badass heroes who make mistakes out of pride and pique and cause a lot of grief for themselves and others as a result. The “view of the human mind” in that regard seems very similar to me. Achilles is more into straightforward violence while Odysseus favors craftiness, but that’s because Homer is good at showing distinct personalities and not making characters interchangeable.
One does have to be careful in trying to use Homer to look at the Mycenaean period, as there’s a whole slag heap of embellishment on top of the real history, but I believe some actual history can still be teased out. It makes sense that the names of key figures from the famous conflict would have been remembered: I expect Agamemnon and Priam were both real and close to how Homer describes them. It also makes sense that Achilles, the battlefield MVP of Agamemnon’s army, was remembered, and his ludicrously anticlimactic death by wound infection after taking an arrow to the foot was massively embellished to make it a better story. The assassination of Agamemnon has a real “can’t make this shit up” feel to it, and the fact that later embellishers felt the need to add Iphigenia to make it make more sense and make Clytemnestra less terrifying also suggests to me that it was real. Oral tradition is a lossy medium, but we know from comparative folklore that some things actually persist very well, even across centuries or millennia.
I don’t think oral tradition lasts more than about 1,500 years:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/The-limits-of-oral-tradition#wbb1
On the other hand there is a comic retelling of the Iliad with little or no supernatural elements:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBook/AgeOfBronze
There are a number of folk stories that share their broad outlines with other stories in other cultures, sometimes far apart in time and space. Hercules and Samson are clearly related, as are Oedipus and the Finnish story of Kullervo.
Even if oral tradition doesn’t last more than 1,500 years, the illiterate period in Greece was a lot shorter than that, so a fair amount of information about the Mycenaean period and the Trojan War did survive, albeit in distorted form.
I am aware there was only 500 – 600 years between the LBAC and the Iliad being written down. The similarities between the stories of Kullervo and Oidipous could be due to common human fears together with coincidence. On the other hand the Ancient Greeks are known to have been influenced by mythologies from the Middle East. The similarities between Heracles and Samson could be explained bys such influences.
Other than they were both preternaturally strong, I’m not seeing any narrative similarities between the two. Especially, the story of Sampson is so Hebrew-specific that I don’t see how any other culture could have adopted it.
I suspected super strength was the only thing they had in common. But I was not sure about it.
It depends what you mean by oral tradition. I can think of at least two arguable examples that are longer than 1,500 years.
First, consider the Jewish priestly lines, which are supposedly patrilineal back to Aaron and his son Pinchas. That would be, if true, an unbroken and correctly attested practice of patrilineal descent over 3k years. And, in fact, modern genetic studies estimate that 50% of Jewish men who think they’re from those priestly lines share the same Y-chromosome. It was only a pure oral tradition for the first hundreds of those years, until the (Jewish) Bible began to be written down, but it is an example of the oral attestation of an extraordinarily claim (about patrilineality) being broadly accurate. [Fun aside, for a long time after the Torah was written down, some of the commentaries were deliberately not; but eventually the body known as the Oral Torah was also written down. The name remains, over two thousand years later.]
Second, basically every pre-modern-astronomy society on Earth had a version of the Seven Sisters myth about the Pleiades, of a group of seven (siblings or friends typically) who became six.
Notably, that constellation has six visible stars; but over 100k years ago it had seven, before one slipped too close to another to be distinguishable by eye. And the only exception whose folk name for that constellation correctly numbers it is Japan, who today calls it Subaru (to cluster together) but at least sometimes used to call it Mutsuraboshi (six stars). And Japan was first settled after the Pleiades occluded itself.
Now, which individual went away don’t always map onto the pair of stars that obscure each other. And after the stars drew near each other there was long a period where some people could sometimes tell the two proximate stars together, which has an even stronger connection to the disappearing part of the myth. But there’s a small but real possibility that this myth family is not only one of the most universal, but predates human expansion out of Africa. It could be one of the original human myths, and it survived long enough to be written down.
I have not heard about an “oral Torah”. What is the difference between it and the Five Books of Moses? The story of Aron and Moses takes place during the Egyptian New Kingdom (1544 – 1069 BC). The writing of the Old Testament started in the 7th century BC. This is about the same time as writing was established among the Ancient Hebrew. If I understand it correctly Jewish hereditary priesthood meant a real position of power until the Romans destroyed the Second Temple of Jerusalem. This event resulted in the decentralisation of Judaism. It became necessary for most if not all adult male members to be able to read and write. So even if the priestly cast scattered they would have been able to write down their descent.
The Pleiades is an open star cluster. For how long would it have been possible for people with particularly good eyesight to see seven stars under some circumstances? Also, how old is the idea of the seven-day week? I think it is based on the phases of the Moon. The average time between the four main phases (new moon, first quarter, full moon and second quarter) is pretty close to seven days. This could have led to people wanting things to be seven even when they were not. Even Isaac Newton fell into this trap claiming there to be seven colours in the rainbow. There are no sharp borders between these colours. How many colours you see in the rainbow depend on your own mental categories.
Humanity’s spread across the world is a subject of very active research. On this subject I think in terms of subsistence and means of transportation. In addition we have to consider if people hade any idea of what could be found across the sea. I have written a blog post on the later subject:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Getting-across-the-sea-low-tech#wbb1
It seems plausible to me the current human species only survived the Toba supervolcano eruption in Sub-Saharan Africa. As our ancestors spread to Eurasia there was some interbreeding with Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and Denisovans (Homo denisova). Out of these the Neanderthals are well-documented through Palaeontology and Archaeology. While they were cold-adapted there was likely a limit to how cold winters they could handle. Their skeletons have been found in Europe, the cooler parts of West Asia and parts of Central Asia. Moreover, they grew up 1/3 faster and lived only about 2/3 as long. So to the extent they had oral tradition it would have been considerably shorter-lived.
We don’t know that much about the Denisovans yet. These are named for the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains. They have been found in several places in China and one place in northern Laos. (“Homo longi” has been reclassified as Denisovans.) Part of a jawbone has been dredged up from the sea floor just west of Taiwan. The shape of their jaws and teeth suggest they were adapted to eating more plant parts than other human species. In contrast historically recorded Arctic peoples have lived largely on meat and/or seafood.
It has been suggested the Denisovans reached Greater Australia. That would explain why Papuans have a particularly high degree of Denisovan ancestry (up to 12%). To tell this we would need to find skeletal part on New Guinea, on its nearby islands or in mainland Australia. The interior of New Guinea is hard to access resulting in few archaeological finds. Australia was always sparsely populated due to unpredictable weather patterns and mostly poor soils.
On the other hand I think neither Neanderthals nor Denisovans were able to reach the Bering land bride. The climate in most of Siberia would have been too hash for them. If so the Americas would have remained uninhabited until the current human species reached them. With the invention of the needle it became possible to make windproof clothes. After these were established cold winters were no longer a problem.
About “different view of the human mind” I may have relied too much on critics of psychodynamic thinkers. Psychodynamics have a known tendency to get stuck in premature conclusion. They could have a tendency to over-interpret details taken out of context too.