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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29523 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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How much do we actually know about Bronze Age morality?

This is an honest question from someone who doesn’t know a ton about the era.

People here and elsewhere sometimes point out that the Bronze Age Mindset is a bit of a LARP, its followers mostly white collar workers idealizing an unrealistic world they would hate if they inhabited. It’s hard to take people seriously whose main experience with conflict is arguing on Twitter when they exalt the warlike morality of the Iliad or the Odyssey.

My question is: were the actual people writing the Odyssey and the Iliad also LARPing? These are books portraying the height of the Bronze Age civilizations by people who emphatically did not live in them, but rather in their ruins. Today we’re apparently Tanner Greer-maxing because I’m quoting another piece of his to you: “How I Taught the Iliad to Chinese Teenagers.”

I spend about 15 minutes outlining what we know about Mycenaean civilization through archaeological discoveries: the grandeur of their palaces, how they fought, their role in an entire ecosystem of Near Eastern civilizations. But most of all I focus on the mystery of their fall, the “Bronze Age Collapse” that littered the Greek isles with Mycenaean ruins, ruins that would have towered over the humble abodes of “Dark Age” Greece (pictures of Dark Age archaeological finds are included in the slides to drive home this point).

I then have students read Book IV.35-62. Here Hera declares that in exchange for the destruction of Troy, she will allow Zeus to destroy Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae without complaint. These three cities were devastated in the Bronze Age collapse. This gives us another way to think about the Iliad. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a popular genre with high schoolers. But if you actually lived in a post-apocalyptic setting… what would your fiction be about?

Homer’s Greeks lived in the ruins of a golden age. They had forgotten how to write and read, but they still remembered a time when the Aegean was full of great cities, wealthy kings, and enormous armies. The Iliad portrayed that golden world as it was imagined hundreds of years later—and explained why this golden age was no more. It is a true piece of post-apocalyptic fiction.

Do we expect the illiterate, post-apocalyptic Greeks to be the same morally and socially as their highly advanced ancestors? Can we be confident their portrayal of those societies is how the ancients would have portrayed themselves, or could they just be later cultures trying to insert themselves and their customs into that time period? I imagine ancient Greece was a more violent place than modernity, but the portrayal of its inhabitants as people who killed, looted, and enslaved without a second thought - was this really how they felt back then? Or was this the tribal, warlike peoples who came after them back-projecting their contemporary values onto the golden age? When I look up ancient literature in the Bronze Age I don’t see anything from Greece - how much do we really know about these people, how they felt, and what they thought?

When I look up ancient literature in the Bronze Age I don’t see anything from Greece - how much do we really know about these people, how they felt, and what they thought?

It is true that we do not have literature, poetry or historical chronicles of Bronze Age Greeks. Maybe they never existed, maybe they were never written down, maybe they were written on perishable material.

But we have lots of detailed bureaucratic records, similar to ones from Near Eastern states.

We can know a lot about these centrally planned, militaristic, theocratic and bureaucratic societies, we can know well that stereotypical Bronze Age man was not wild barbarian looting, raping and pillaging from horizon to horizon, but conscientious office worker dutifully filing all the forms on clay tablets in triplicate.

We know well that while Troy existed and was destroyed at the time, the plot of Iliad is pure fantasy - real Briseis would be given number and personal file in archive, assigned to workplace and issued clothing and ration card like any other laborer.

Do we expect the illiterate, post-apocalyptic Greeks to be the same morally and socially as their highly advanced ancestors?

I have related questions that intrigue me, such as what is the cognitive development at each stage of human development, how widespread is it, and how diversely expressed?

An an example of what I've thought more about than the Bronze Age, though somewhat related is the development of Abrahamic religions and precursors from the bronze Age collapse onwards. I am fond of the kind of frame that links the metaphors/symbols/archetypes that appear over history to fundamental shifts in cognitiion as a process of cognitive-cultural adaptation, or levelling up.

This kind of view (eg Petersonian religious big history thinking) might frame Christianity as a major stage of development beyond previous religious ideas such as Zoroastrianism and Judaism. My knowledge of religion is limited, and haven't yet traversed JPs religious series, but I understand that the claim can be made that ideas of forgiveness and salvation from sin become more central in Christianity, alongside a radical shift in perspective, whereby God is instantiated as the more personal God-in-Christ.

Jung points to this sort of idea in his Answers to Job. I may not be remembering it right, but hopefully a sketch in its direction is that God, in his demonstration of absolute tyranny through Satan shows that He lacks, temporarily, omniscience in all things in that he lacks access to the personal. In contrast Job, as a human, can see in his own suffering the injustice, and perhaps failure of empathy, of God. When God's omniscience at a larger scale reestablishes, this prompts God to incorporate himself in human form through Jesus Christ.

Now there are presumably innumerable examples across all religions of symbols that point to useful adaptive behaviour in humans. But can a case be made for a kind of integral theory hierarchy, and thus a need for all religions to adapt, or more controversially and argument that Christianity reflecting a more cognitively adapted human, and Old Testament the less evolved.

Or is it better to think that standards of cooperation that evolved in hunter-gatherer tribes are set early, and understandings around symbols that serve flourishing somewhat timeless, such that most religions have access to them in differing degrees and emphases.

Or, finally, do they each capture something unique, and thus we should seek wisdom through their plurality, essentially operating in a secular mode?

Jung points to this sort of idea in his Answers to Job. I may not be remembering it right, but hopefully a sketch in its direction is that God, in his demonstration of absolute tyranny through Satan shows that He lacks, temporarily, omniscience in all things in that he lacks access to the personal. In contrast Job, as a human, can see in his own suffering the injustice, and perhaps failure of empathy, of God. When God's omniscience at a larger scale reestablishes, this prompts God to incorporate himself in human form through Jesus Christ.

Another perspective on this type of transformation in God that Peterson discusses is the idea that the one thing an omnipotent being such as God would lack, would be limitation. And so the answer to Evil, and the resulting Incarnation in Christ, is a way to provide god with what he lacked - limitation.

This formulation is, of course, a paradox. But to paraphrase Jung, true wisdom always comes from a place of paradox.

ETA: To answer your question, I find the pluralistic idea that all religions are created equal to be almost childishly false. Unless you buy into the idea that there is no true good or evil, that everything is essentially the same morally (a very Eastern, Buddhist, cyclical religious view, I'll add) then it's clear some religions are better than others.

In defense of the illiterate post-apocalyptic Greeks, given how much of their literature has survived to the present day they couldn't have been that illiterate.

That said, I think you raise an excellent point. In contrast with the classical age and early Christian era from which numerous primary sources have survived pretty much everything do we know of bronze age culture comes either from secondhand sources after the fact or has been inferred from archeological evidence. That doesn't mean we can't draw reasonable conclusions from recurring themes and motifs.

I actually started writing this as a reply to your post about Tolkien down thread, but this strikes me as an even better example.

I feel like this sort of commentary underlines just how provincial and illiterate our academic class has become. Tolkien didn't invent a new sort of hero, he was instantiating a very old (and very Catholic) sort of hero that 'most people today outside of the trad-right are simply unfamiliar with because modern culture is overwhelmingly secular and liberal. "Your will Lord, not mine, be done." Is just one of those sentiments that just doesn't compute to someone who's entire worldview/life-experiance has been filtered through multiple layers of irony, post-modernism, and their Jewish Poli-Sci Professor's theories about Freud, Nietzsche, and "the will to power". But it computed to Tolkien, and it evidently computed to a great deal of his audience.

I read academic commentary about how lines in Homer like "the wine dark sea" prove that bronze age people were color-blind and I want to ask, have you ever looked West over the ocean at sunset? I have. Maybe my brain is just less evolved but, on those evenings, when the reflections of the oranges and reds off the sky turn the water a grape-juice purple, comparing the sea to wine feels rather apt.

Come on guys, Get on my level.

I feel like this sort of commentary underlines just how provincial and illiterate our academic class has become. Tolkien didn't invent a new sort of hero, he was instantiating a very old (and very Catholic) sort of hero that 'most people today outside of the trad-right are simply unfamiliar with because modern culture is overwhelmingly secular and liberal. "Your will Lord, not mine, be done." Is just one of those sentiments that just doesn't compute to someone who's entire worldview/life-experiance has been filtered through multiple layers of irony, post-modernism, and their Jewish Poli-Sci Professor's theories about Freud, Nietzsche, and "the will to power". But it computed to Tolkien, and it evidently computed to a great deal of his audience.

It might be relevant that Tanner Greer himself who made the argumment is a devout Mormon. I think there's something more specific happening that I maybe did a bad job getting at, but tried to articulate downthread. It's not that Tolkien invented the reluctant hero, but that in the modern YA trope (that's taken off since then) you see a different kind of post-divine revelation, post-destiny, post-prophecy kind of relationship between purpose, power, and morality.

I think a hero who accepts their mission specifically because it was handed down from God is of a very different nature, this is someone who believes there is an absolute authority that can and will be answered to. The moderns protagonists don't believe that, which is part of why they're so uncertain about their mission and nervous about accepting. It's the very breakdown in authority and trust that partially defines their reluctance and their character. The fact that their worlds are exagerrated, disfigured pastiches of totalitarian governments and corporations is another sign their stories are reflecting the psychology of people inhabitating a highly modernized world rather than calling back more traditional themes and motifs.

Separately, surprised to see you joining the crowd here blaming modern malaise on the Jews. I thought you were pretty solidly in my camp against that kind of vulgar count-the-jew philosophy.

I think a hero who accepts their mission specifically because it was handed down from God is of a very different nature, this is someone who believes there is an absolute authority that can and will be answered to. The moderns protagonists don't believe that, which is part of why they're so uncertain about their mission and nervous about accepting.

Again, an excellent point.

Separately, surprised to see you joining the crowd here blaming modern malaise on the Jews. I thought you were pretty solidly in my camp against that kind of vulgar count-the-jew philosophy.

To be clear I am not blaming modern malaise on the Jews. I've got nothing against Israel or anyone who goes to Synagogue on Saturdays. That said one of the grand ironies of the motte is that (directionally at least) I probably agree with our WN interlocutors more than most other users here do. There really is a subset (emphasis on a subset) of Jewish intellectuals who resent everything about western culture and want to see it undermined and overthrown, but that subset isn't "the Zionists" or the ADL, it's the atheists, the intersectionalists and the grievance-mongers.

...and my opposition to them makes me an enemy of the wignats on the alt-right because when push comes to shove, they are far more concerned with their place in the intersectional stack than they are securing the future for their (or anyone else's) children.

I guess I struggle to see what’s really different about your views and theirs here. You both think (if I understand) that jewish people are driver of the things you don’t like in civilization and want some kind of power dynamic change that makes that stop happening. It’s hard to accept that “race is bullshit” is really part of this belief when you’re suddenly foregrounding all your criticisms of society in explicitly racialized terms, talking about jewish brain parasites and whatnot.

More to the point, I don’t remember you ever saying this stuff in all the years I’ve been here. But I DO remember you debating WNs and criticizing their weird obsession with jews. After years of telling them to kick rocks, you decided they were just right?

After years of telling them to kick rocks, you decided they were just right?

Not at all.

I'm saying that to the degree that there is any truth to their claims at all, they are still wrong in the details. I'm saying that it isn't "the Boomercons" the ADL or Bibi Netanyahu who are undermining the foundations of western civilization. It's the intersectionalists and the grievance-mongers, IE the exact people the wignats want to empower.

Since the group of people you dislike excludes many if not most jews and relevant jewish organizations, and includes many, many non-jews, why not just complain about intersectionalists instead of jews?

I feel like for a long time you were one of the few clarion voices here against the wave of low effort bigotry so I gotta say man, it’s disappointing from somebody who respects you.

it's the atheists, the intersectionalists and the grievance-mongers.

That's all stuff that's blamed on the Jews in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and it didn't start there. The idea that the Jews were trying to undermine White, Christian civilization is an old White nationalist trope. It's what the Nazis pushed as well. Just read a summary of the Protocols.

"White Christian civilization" died intellectually in the 18th century, when elite human capital of Europe rejected old Christian values and adopted Enlightenment ones.

"The Jews" played very small part in the process, unless you want to lay all praise/blame for enlightenment on Baruch Spinoza alone.

Politically, it perished since 1789. (((They))) held also minuscule role in these events.

Everything since then is just rearranging the rubble.

I think tales of it's death have been greatly exaggerated and even if it is dead, I'd place the date far later. It was still very much alive at the outset of the First World War, whether it died there is a matter of debate.

As Chesterton says, Christianity has died at least five times and rose again stronger from the tomb. It's almost as if there's a theme somewhere in the Gospels...

As Chesterton says, Christianity has died at least five times and rose again stronger from the tomb. It's almost as if there's a theme somewhere in the Gospels...

You probably mean Hillaire Belloc, writer even more prolific than Chesterton and one half of "Chesterbelloc" inseparable duo.

In The Great Heresies he boasts how the Church survived attacks of Arianism, Islam, Cathars, Reformation and modern unbelief and ends in rather optimistic tone.

Of this new tendency to sympathize with Catholicism--and in the case of strong characters to take the risk, to accept the Faith, and proclaim themselves the defenders of it--there can be no doubt. Even in England, where the traditional feeling against Catholicism is so universal and so strong, and where the whole life of the nation is bound up with hostility to the Faith, the conversions which strike the public eye are continually the conversions of men who lead in thought; and note that for one who openly admits conversion there are ten at least who turn their faces toward the Catholic way, who prefer the Catholic philosophy and its fruit to any others, but who shrink from accepting the heavy sacrifices involved in a public avowal.

...

Even the most misguided or the most ignorant of men, talking vaguely of "Churches," are now using a language that rings hollow. The last generation could talk, in Protestant countries at least, of "the Churches." The present generation cannot. There are not many churches; there is one, it is the Catholic Church on the one side and its mortal enemy on the other. The lists are set.

Thus are we now in the presence of the most momentous question that has yet been presented to the mind of man. Thus are we placed at a dividing of the ways, upon which the whole future of our race will turn.

The book was written in 1938 and, sadly for Catholic Church, Belloc's optimism turned out to be badly misplaced.

Catholic church rejected everything that would make it Catholic in Bellloc's eyes and is not looking very well.

Protestant churches are still there, and the churches that are thriving and growing are churches that would drive Belloc into rage and total despair, if he saw them.

As great sage said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

It's not an old white nationalist trope so much as it's just an old trope, and like I said, one of the grand ironies is that the wignats are themselves products of progressive politics.

So your only issue with this line of reasoning is the racial line, but you are 100% on board with the cultural idea that Jews want to destroy Christian civilization and have been actively working on that program for centuries?

its not my only issue but the take that "race is bullshit" is effectively built in.

Tolkien didn't invent a new sort of hero, he was instantiating a very old (and very Catholic) sort of hero that 'most people today outside of the trad-right are simply unfamiliar with because modern culture is overwhelmingly secular and liberal.

...

I think a hero who accepts their mission specifically because it was handed down from God is of a very different nature, this is someone who believes there is an absolute authority that can and will be answered to. The moderns protagonists don't believe that, which is part of why they're so uncertain about their mission and nervous about accepting.

Again, an excellent point.

I'm disappointed Hlynka. You started out on the right path, but flubbed the ending. Tolkien's heroes are Catholic heroes not just because "Your will Lord, not mine, be done." I think the more important part distinguishing Tolkien's protagonists (and the opposite for his antagonists) is the emphasis on acting virtuously and avoiding sin even in the presence of great temptation--the ends do not justify the means and the world can never be saved through sin. Do not chase great deeds, but act appropriately when circumstances make them necessary. This is very different than what Greer and @Soriek are describing.

I'm disappointed Hlynka. You started out on the right path, but flubbed the ending.

I think we might agree more than disagree. That "the world can never be saved through sin" is precisely why I reject Identity politics and wignatism, much to consternation of folks like @2rafa.

I suppose I struggle to see why ‘the world cannot be saved through sin’ is not merely a slightly-higher-order form of consequentialism than ‘whatever it takes’. The logic on the Christian (or any Abrahamic religion’s) side just adds on the final level of consequence which is God’s judgment after death.

Basically what the aptly named @ThisIsSin said.

You don't overcome corruption by embracing corruption. You overcome it by building, by becoming better than this base flesh.

I suppose I struggle to see why ‘the world cannot be saved through sin’ is not merely a slightly-higher-order form of consequentialism than ‘whatever it takes’.

No, it's more of a "Satan can't drive out Satan" thing. You can't out-corrupt those who are already corrupt; instead you must produce value elsewhere such that the influence and power of the corrupt is minimized (as the corrupt will always be there in the background).

One can see this as a common thread through history. In conditions where creating value is easy the impact of corruption is minimized (society has a pro-freedom emphasis- the value-producers are running the show here- usually characterized as a "golden age" after the fact); in conditions where this is more difficult, corruption dominates (society has a pro-control emphasis- the parasites are running the show here).

Of course, God does not care all that much under what earthly authority his followers are operating; the underlying difficulty of obeying his commands doesn't meaningfully change, but the incidentals can and do.

filtered through multiple layers of irony, post-modernism, and their Jewish Poli-Sci Professor's theories

First Elon, now Hlynka, what made everyone start naming left and right. Genuinely asking

Hlynka has been on this for a while, it’s a strange but not entirely unforeseen twist. Since he rejects wignatism and gets occasionally made fun of even by more moderate conservatives here for rejecting HBD and some ideas common on the new/dissident right for a colorblind, middle-American form of Christianity, he had some kind of mind break and has now cast ‘Jewish professors’ as a kind of enemy class. Since Jews are very overrepresented on the dissident right, for Hlynka the entire dissident right is a Jewish movement (presumably BAP, who does literally have a Yale political science PhD, counts as one of these Jews).

Ironically this particular kind of antisemitism is fundamentally Marxist (even though he replaces the economic motive with the social one); like Marx, to Hlynka these Jews aren’t defined by their race or even religion, it’s a strange cultural designation, it’s ‘New York’, it’s ‘cultural Marxism’ maybe (which he considers identical to the dissident right ideology), I’m not sure. What should be done about ‘Jewish poli sci professors’ remains to be seen in his view.

to Hlynka these Jews aren’t defined by their race or even religion, it’s a strange cultural designation,

It's only "strange" if you continue to insist that culture doesn't matter.

A big chunk of the disagreement here is that I continue to maintain that culture not only matters, but matters a great deal.

What exactly is a Jew if they're not defined by being descended from a Jewish parent/mother nor being of Judaistic confession, then?

The obvious counter is to ask whether can anyone be properly considered "a Jew" without believing in God or keeping the Sabbath?

Mean while I'd say the answer to your question is simple, it's Culture.

So the answer is "whoever I say"?

No, the answer is culture.

We know very little directly, but what we do have from the bronze age in terms of written inscriptions is mostly kings boasting about how many thousands of people they killed in various inventive and horrifying ways, how many they carried off into slavery and how many they sacrificed to various deities. This was the propaganda being put out to impress the populace, which says something about the public morals of the day. And the fact that there were several empires maintaining major standing armies, all our evidence points to a time of significant, regular state violence on a mass scale. Many of our remaining bronze age-era human remains were killed, and many of the ones that weren't have healed wounds from repeated violence. Even Pharaohs were sometimes bashed in the head with a mace.

It may be the case that in the smaller societies which left much less historical footprint, violence was less than in settled cities. No way to really tell for sure. What we have says that these people were far more violent than most modern states before the collapse. Then things got worse.

A sample inscription from an Assyrian king:

In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of the heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.

I believe you and I fully accept that morality was highly different back then. But notably the two areas you referenced are Egypt and Assyria. What do we know about the Greeks? I would honestly totally accept just being pointed to archeology from then, I just haven't found much in my own casual online research.

The short answer is that greeks arguably don't exist in the bronze age. The language group moves down from the black sea mid-bronze age, shore hopping colonies into the Aegean onto Greece proper, but there were already people there. We can trace the language a bit, and we can trace the archaeology of various durable goods and burial practices, but we don't have a cohesive group of people we can call "greek" until perhaps late in the Bronze age, but even that is wobbly. It is not until after the Bronze Age Collapse that we get clear evidence of classical greeks (even then, half or more were in the Balkans, Turkey, Italy, etc.). Their myths (Troy, etc.) take place during the Bronze age, but at that stage, there weren't many of these people in Greece itself. At least parts of the greek migration south may have been the "Sea Peoples" of the collapse. There is a theory that the biblical Philistines were a proto-greek invasion/migration that was turned back by the Egyptians and settled in one of their hinterlands (the Gaza strip).

People here and elsewhere sometimes point out that the Bronze Age Mindset is a bit of a LARP, its followers mostly white collar workers idealizing an unrealistic world they would hate if they inhabited.

Just as ideology resembles a horseshoe, so does aesthetics it seems in regard to IQ or wealth. And then at the middle 'mitwit' are the "I fucking love science/technology/new stuff" crowd.

Kind of assuming the conclusion there, innit?

memes by definition are reductive

Surviving literature set in the Bronze Age is frequently not written in the Bronze Age, but a lot of it is preexisting oral tradition.

There’s also The Tale of Sinuhe, an Egyptian primary source on the Bronze Age proto-indo-European people, which does show a fairly Bronze Age morality similar to the Iliad and the odyssey.

Finally there’s a lot of archeological finds relating to conflict from the period, and killing enslaving and looting the local population looks like standard practice.

How, like, preexisting are we talking though? The Trojan War (supposedly) happened some 400-500 years before the Odyssey and the Iliad reached their moden forms. Even if they were stories that were passed down from the conflict till their final form, you'd still expect to see massive change as successive cultures inserting their own values and re-interpretations. It's taken us far less long to re-do many of our classic books and movies in ways that fit with our evolving culture.

Or put otherwise, the Greeks of the Dark Ages had forgotten how their ancestors read and wrote, forgot how they built their architecture, forgot how they sustained urban life or organized their societies, but we're sure they didn't forget anything else?

What archeological evidence do we have from then? Honest question I don't much about it. I also don't know anything about The Tale of Sinuhe, would definitely be interested to learn more.

The indo-european expansion is reasonably well archeologically studied, and physical evidence shows that it involved lots of raping/sexual slavery and destroying of settlements. There are also remains in the southern Levant showing that the conquests of the bible happened more or less similarly to how the bible says they did. Obviously these two topics attract a lot of archeological attention, but Troy was, notably, destroyed in war and filled with human remains in the year calculated by Jerome based off of the bible and Greek mythology, as well.

I don't think anyone actually knows for sure how preexisting oral tradition is to the actual writing of the Trojan cycle. We can, however, be pretty sure on the basis of archaicisms in the Greek that it wasn't written from scratch by Homer.

https://infogalactic.com/info/Story_of_Sinuhe

So I misremembered- he didn't join the indo-europeans. Just a random tribe in Canaan. And it was probably fictionalized but discussing very real behavior. So yes, weaker evidence than I thought it was, but still directionally correct.

One thing that's pretty remarkable is that the Greek bards were able to pass down the story of the Trojan War for 500 years or so without access to written records. At one point, historians thought that the ancient Troy was surely mythical. Then it was unearthed by a German archaeologist in the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Iliad

My general bias is to doubt the validity of orally transmitted information. But the Greek bards did have methods to preserve information fidelity, such as cadence and epithets. Think of these as a sort of "check sum" that would allow data to be transmitted with less error.

If I recall correctly, there were some other details that the Iliad gets right. For example (and this is from memory) I believe that chariots were mentioned as a method of warfare. This would have been true in the Bronze Age, but not 500 years later when the Iliad was first written down.

If I recall correctly, there were some other details that the Iliad gets right. For example (and this is from memory) I believe that chariots were mentioned as a method of warfare. This would have been true in the Bronze Age, but not 500 years later when the Iliad was first written down.

On the flip side, I've heard that most of the tech is more rooted in their modern era, and the period-accurate stuff is more the exception:

[The Iliad's] final form was probably secured in the 700-600s BC, and most of the technology, art, and so forth described in the poem matches the archeology of this period. But hidden in the Iliad are remnants of an earlier era. The third slide of this presentation includes an image of a boar tusk helmet dug up from a 14th century BC archaeological site and a passage from the Iliad describing this same sort of helmet. Its appearance in the narrative would be something like a galleon from the Spanish Armada appearing in a World War II drama.

Interesting point that the rigid structure of the poetry might make it easier to keep the story preserved via strict guardrails.

Chariots were on their way out by then, but not quite yet extinct in the broader Mediterranean; indeed, the Persians deploy a couple hundred at Gaugamela, many centuries after the Iliad was dreamt up.

What are “epithets” in this context? Is there published research or articles on this checksumming process?

Epithets were descriptors of a character in epic poetry which appeared repeatedly throughout the poem- swift Achilles, pious Aeneas, wise Odysseus, etc, etc.

The other attraction of epithets is that they scan well. For example, wise Odysseus is polumetis odysseus in the original greek, which has the syllable pattern short-short-long-short short-long-long. The standard second half of a hexameter is long-short-short, long-short-short, long-long, so wise Odysseus fills out a line-end nicely.

This refers to nicknames or descriptors such as "wrathful Achilles" and (I think) "wine dark sea" which appear repeatedly in the text. I'm not a classicist, and I don't have any privileged access to research, but I believe it's speculated that these were intended to maintain cadence and help with memory.

For example, let's say I am reciting the epic poem of Donald Trump. I can't remember if this section is about Hillary Clinton or the New York Times. Knowing that it's "Lying Hillary", and the "Failing New York Times" might help me to keep it straight, especially if we're to maintain a cadence.

You can definitely infer some philosophical questions from the Iliad. Fate vs the will of Zeus. The barbarian Achilles( emotional, honor bound) vs the civilized man Hector( rational, dutiful.)

Sure, there are totally very deep themes to be explored and grappled with - but were those the philosophical questions the Golden Age Greeks were wrestling with or the Dark Age Greeks?

Homer was a Bronze Age figure, his poems were taken seriously in Classical/Hellenistic Greece. Athens paid rhapsodes to sing the poems at festivals. Aeschylus's Orestia takes off from the end of the Iliad and characters from Homer appear in many other plays. Plato discusses Homer in relation to great art vs bad morals. What impact, if any, did this have on the average person? It's impossible to say.

Parts of their morality can be inferred, mainly from the time period's namesake: Bronze.

Some minor background for people that don't regularly go on history binges:

  1. Bronze is a very useful metal. It is easier to work and in most use cases superior to iron. Steel is best, but really difficult to make with their furnaces.
  2. Bronze was an economic innovation. Its an alloy of tin and copper. The mines for these two types of metals were not next to each other. To make the metal in any meaningful quantities you had to have a Mediterranean Sea spanning trade network.
  3. The end of the Bronze age is a frightening event. The "Bronze age collapse" happened suddenly. Scholars seem to think some kind of widespread invasion and war caused the collapse. The trade network of the Mediterranean collapsed within a short time period. Some archeology has found clay tablets from the time period asking for help to fight off invaders.

The people in the civilizations using Bronze were likely soft trader types. They likely had a morality that allowed for trading and interacting with foreign cultures. They probably weren't very war like (which would have made them bad traders, and it might have allowed them to fight off the invasion that ended the Bronze age).

Most of the rest of the world was full of hunter gatherers and pastoral farmers. The exceptions being in the other cradles of civilization, Indus valley, China, and possibly Mexico/South America.

I don't really know what Bronze Age Pervert, or any of the other "larpers" say about bronze age mentality. It would be interesting if they have come to similar conclusions, but what little I have heard makes me think they have a very different understanding.

I feel like the idea that traders must naturally be "soft" is something of a modern secular notion that doesn't really hold up to historical scrutiny. See Athens and Rome.

Early Rome: Yes

Late Rome: No

Athens: too small of a place to be drawing examples. It was a weird place, so was Sparta.

I expand elsewhere. Summary of my thoughts: Rich trading civilizations can have soft people. Pastoral and hunter gatherer societies cannot have soft people. Rich trading civilizations can also have hard people. But trendline is gonna be towards softness overtime, since it is usually individually easier, even if it dooms the civilization longterm.

I'm guessing these "soft traders" were more similar to the Vikings, Portuguese circa 1600, or the East India Company. One of the main things they traded was weapons and armor.

The Bronze Age Middle East was dominated by organized states with professional armies (and large levies). Viking traders would have been crushed.

Bronze Age traders were legalistic extended families building kinship enterprises over large distances, like Medieval Italians.

Not necessarily. The main states seem not to have done much sailing of their own, possible a maritime trading empire could be relatively safe to raid and slip off into the Med. One wonders exactly how peaceful Tyre was, for instance.

Well, other than some trade with India I don't think we know much about and the tin trade, most trade in the Bronze Age was overland, riverine, or coastwise.

Piracy certainly existed (plenty of coastwise trade happened in areas distant from central authorities), but it wouldn't have been part of most trade that happened.

Actually the Venetians would be a good corollary.

The thing is the aristocratic warlike chariot riding elites of the Iliad as from the steppe. That whole thing started on the steppe by barbarian nomads and was transmitted across Eurasia sometimes by mass migrations like in Greece or India and sometimes by trade or small groups of mercenaries like in Syria or China. You don't give your warrior elite lavish chariot burials with massive amounts of bronze if you don't value them.

God. Imagine a modern state funeral, trumpets, motorcade, tearful eulogies. The king is dead, long live the king. And then you lower him into his grave with a recumbent bike, not because he ever used one, but to fuck with future generations.

You ought to inter them with at least a tank, maybe a fighter jet or nuclear submarine if you want something akin to the pinnacle of military technology as the chariot was at the time.

Not very good in absolute terms, which is why they were phased out when normal cavalry became feasible, but it makes me chuckle to think of Trump or Biden buried in an armored Cadillac with a pair of micro Uzis, to represent how chariot warfare was kinda like gangbangers doing drive-bys on each other, with a touch more class.

Gandhi, of course, should be buried with an ICBM.

I understood that reference.

Scholars seem to think some kind of widespread invasion and war caused the collapse.

I've heard an interesting theory that the widespread invasion and war was actually the result of a powerful volcanic eruption, Hekla 3, that threw up so much ash that it impacted on the global climate. The ash cloud and global cooling that resulted caused widespread crop failures and famines that were likely the motivating event behind the invasions of the Sea Peoples, as well as severely impacting the ability of the various civilizations to fight back. It sounds plausible to me, though there is some debate over the dating of the eruption.

I think this is the most plausible theory. There are pollen samples from Syria that point to a dry age of 300 years just before the bronze age collapse. I believe the evidence actually suggests the bronze age empires were hit harder than the area the Sea Peoples came from.

As cjet79 pointed out, bronze requires both tin and copper. Copper is common, but tin is extremely rare. There was a tiny tin mine in Anatolia, Spain, and Italy, but not enough to supply the entire region. The largest nearby tin mines were in Britain and Afghanistan, but these are far distances to travel. So if the trade network collapses, there is no more bronze. With no bronze you can't have a Bronze age.

Fucking volcanoes man.

The volcanic winter of 536 helped lead to the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of Islam.

The Thera eruption of 1600 BC may have caused the collapse of Minoan civilization (and the myth of Atlantis)

The Lake Toba eruption (Supervolcano VEI8) from 74,000 years ago may explain why humans and cheetahs have so little genetic diversity.

And that's before we even get to the Permian Extinction of 225 mya, the greatest mass extinction in world history.

I'm curious about the effects of a 536-like event once 40% of the world's energy production is solar.

For a partial example, you can look at the Texas electrical grid(which is partially separated from the rest of the country and experiences supply crunches on hot-yet-overcast days for exactly that reason. The solution to this problem suggested by a given politician is a pretty guide to where he stands in the Texas GOP’s internal factional disputes- technocrats want to build nuclear plants, rinos want to connect to the rest of the country, populists want to pollute more).

For a partial example, you can look at the Texas electrical grid...

I live just outside Houston, so I don't need to look very far. Unfortunately the Valentine Vortex would absolutely pale in comparison, I'm afraid.

Much overlooked in the interconnect and renewables conversation is the systemic nature of certain failure modes of solar, I feel like. Much like the 2008 financial crisis, where the odds of one mortgage failing were slim, but if it happened no big deal, one wind or solar farm underproducing or going offline is no big deal--but each one that is offline increases the chances of another being offline. If, say, all the solar in Texas suddenly has difficulty producing, it's highly likely that whatever the cause is stretches beyond Texas borders, be it weather pattern disturbances or atmospheric conditions or whatever, which sets up catastrophic and cascading failures. Interconnection advocates discussing the VV often gloss over the fact that neighbor grids didn't have power to spare either.

That's a troubling thought. Especially since the energy produced by solar panels is already so poor compared to the energy required to create them.

That's even ignoring the prospect of the next Miyake Event.

Even a mere Carrington Event could wipe out a lot of solar production.

Yeah once you realize how much volcanoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters fuck up the world, you realize maybe religions have something to their constant calling of the impending apocalypse.

Fucking volcanoes man.

You should be glad that Florida Man doesn't have access to volcanoes, but this hypothetical person sounds like a hoot ;)

Another thought about Bronze:

It is easier to turn peaceful Bronze towards war than it is to turn peaceful Steel towards war. What I mean:

Bronze has a much lower melting point than Iron, and requires far less knowledge for metal working than something like Steel. You can get wood fires hot enough to melt and then cast bronze. Cast iron is nearly impossible with wood as a fuel source. Also, cast iron is a strictly inferior metal to cast Bronze.

If you want to outfit your entire military with Bronze, the main limiter is going to be how much Bronze you have.

If you want to outfit your entire military with Iron/Steel, the main limiter is going to be how many skilled craftsman you have.

A barbarian horde that loots a Bronze age city suddenly has way more Bronze. They can melt down the currency, decorative items, tools, etc. A barbarian horde that loots a city with iron tools is still limited by the number of crafters that can re-work iron into weapons/armor. Iron is also very fuel limited. They cut down entire forests to supply the iron industry.

Parts of their morality can be inferred, mainly from the time period's namesake: Bronze.

Parts of the morality of some of them, maybe. It only takes a small number of soft trader types to supply the significantly less soft looter and burner types.

Willingness to trade is not orthogonal to war-waging ability. Exhibit A: this message, written to you using military-grade technology.

Go back 200 years, and it’s gunboat diplomacy. 400, and the European powers are wiping out whole legions of natives to set up their mercantile empire. 600 and we see the early “Free Companies” of roving sellswords, but the concept of mercenaries goes back much further.

Getting closer to the Greeks, Romans didn’t shy away from conquest or trade. They had a bunch of social and economic technology that let them fold ridiculous amounts of territory into their sphere of influence.

The idea that trading civilizations tend to be soft and conflict-averse probably owes a lot to our sense of fair play. (Uncharitably, that means video game balance teams.) But there’s a reason war is called “spending blood and treasure,” and acquiring more of their treasure without spilling your blood is usually a good deal.

The Greek and Phoenician colonies are also good examples of trading people not being particularly averse to violent conflict.

The most spectacular example of a nation of shopkeepers who nevertheless fought successfully on multiple continents was, of course, the British Empire. Napoleon wasn't the only former world leader who thought that being a nation of shopkeepers would make the British soft, but he was one of the few who thought that despite being smart enough to know better.

But there's a meaningful difference between your capacity to win wars and your actual, underlying values (is what I think @cjet79 is getting at as well).

The British Empire, for instance, was for much of its duration a society that was very internally concerned with progressive values and uplifting its conquered people rather than celebrating grinding them into the dirt (whether they actually accomplished this is of course highly debatable). But if all historians had were the wreckage of ships from the Royal West African Squadron, but no writings, we wouldn't know that the point of all that military capacity was to carry out a moral mission to end slavery. If all historians had from the American intervention in the Vietnam War were cannisters of Agent Orange, but no records of the peace movement at home, we would have a very impoverished, circumscribed understanding of popularity morality at the time and how comfortable society was with violence.

My argument is how do we know we aren't just doing the same thing here - inventing an artificial morality for the Golden Age Greeks based on only being able to see their societies from an extreme distance, and filtered through the cultural values of a later peoples?

@netstack and @HlynkaCG as well.

Indeed.

Its a comparison to the people they are around.

Civilizations that trade with others civilizations are softer than civilizations that only engage in war and conquest.

Ancient China was by no means soft compared to people today. But they were softer than the neighboring Mongolians, so they kept getting invaded and conquered every few centuries.

The same happened to the Romans, who were certainly a hardy and war like people during the expansionist phase of their empire. But turned rich and soft, then had to rely increasingly on foreign mercenaries, until those mercenaries turned on the Romans.

I don't think the bronze age civilizations were peaceful by our standards, but they probably were peaceful by the standards of the "hill people" or whatever Barbarian tribe invaded them all and tore down their civilization.

Ancient China was by no means soft compared to people today. But they were softer than the neighboring Mongolians, so they kept getting invaded and conquered every few centuries.

There's a really strong "This is Their Super Bowl" effect in the historiography of barbarian invasions. In the same way that when a shitty team plays a rival who is having a good season, they show up and give their all, the barbarians get vastly excited about a victory, while the civilized shrug after defeating the barbarians. When the Chinese armies defeat a steppe confederacy that wasn't quite ready for prime time, it goes in the annals as "The emperor defeated a steppe army. Now about tax collection that year..." When the Mongols get a world-historic leader and win one, they never shut up about it for a thousand years.

Same pattern holds in Rome, where defeating barbarian armies was "mowing the grass" duty until the last years of the empire. Right up to today, where weirdoes will insist that American failures to impose their will in Vietnam or Iraq indicates the superior martial ability of third-worlders, when it mostly reflects an increased willingness to die for the cause of local independence.

I think so many of those weirdos don't even consider or realize to note that America's goal was not to wipe out Vietnam or Iraq.

Wiping out a nation is probably easier than trying to reform or subdue a nation. A major goal was trying to get those nations to become ideological aligned to America by bringing democracy and other western Ideas. If you're trying to get people to embrace democracy, you can't just kill everyone left and right.

I get the same feeling when people say there is no way American citizens can beat the US military in case of a civil war or insurrection. If the rebels are hiding in cities or rest of the population, you can't exactly bomb those cities indiscriminately. And there's the matter of public support, look at how much Israel gets criticized in their fight versus Hamas. You don't have to win in a straight up fight, you just need to hang on long enough until the fight becomes too expensive to be worth it or there is enough external pressure to stop the fighting..

Great post. Also, almost every single country gets invaded ‘every few centuries’, including the US, it’s an absurd standard.

Depends on the definition of "few". Rome had an 800-year run from Brennus to the Fall. Constantinople similarly from the founding of the city as a purposes-built capital of the Eastern Roman Empire to the 4th crusade. On a strict definition of "invaded", England is at 950 and counting. In China, based on a quick wiki-check, all changes in dynasty from Jin to Song are due to Chinese domestic politics, not foreign invasion - about a 1000 year run.

Yes, but the fact that everyone knows these examples, and that such a core part of the British mythos is that it's been a thousand years since that invasion are kind of the point. Much of the rest of the world has been invaded rather more recently (a lot of it by Britain).

But that sort of “softness” is not the same as (lack of) state capacity. The fact remains that a rich, well-fed society is capable of raising more and better-equipped fighters than one clinging to the edge of survival. Under the fog of war, though, it’s hard to tell how many you need, where they’re needed, and whether they are as loyal as you think.

Rome was still demolishing barbarian armies in the decades leading up to its sack. But sooner or later enough plates stopped spinning.

Going back to the original question "what do we know of their morality"

The ability of a state to wage war doesn't necessarily say much about the morality of the people within it.

America's war capabilities are highly decoupled from the internal morality. Empires have a point tip of the spear.

America has a commerce oriented set of ethics and morality. We have ideas about fairness and trading.

Sure, so what makes you say the Bronze Age collapsers were soft?

Because it was an option for them, and people tend to take that option when it is available. Even when it might mean the long term collapse of their civilizations. The Romans and Mongolians were both well aware of this phenomenon and took steps to address it.

A civilization can be soft and still be willing to step on people beneath them. It doesn't take balls to park a gunboat in a foreign port when you can blast them out of the water, and they have nothing to retaliate against you. The Vikings mostly raided villages and Monasteries, not hard targets. The European trading empires had gunpowder and armor against sticks and stones. Rome's armies were mostly composed of non-Italians in the late stages of the Empire.

The original question is difficult to answer, even for civilizations we know a lot about. For example, what do we know of the morality of an American? The very pertinent thing to ask back is "which Americans"? Where do they live? How wealthy are they? How do they vote? What religion do they follow? Are they a military family? Etc, etc.

I suppose the point I am trying to make is that in a civilization with "hard" people I generally think of everyone having to be hard. A civilization with "soft" people doesn't mean there are no hard people within it. It just means that soft people can exist within it. Pastoral farmers and hunter gatherers don't really have the option of an easy life of luxury. They work for food, men must fight for territory with other tribes, women are subject to rape and kidnapping, and kids need to be valuable contributing members at a very young age.

I'm curious what people like Bronze Age Pervert say about the bronze age. Are you familiar with their work at all?

The fact remains that a rich, well-fed society is capable of raising more and better-equipped fighters than one clinging to the edge of survival.

...How does this model account for the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, etc? The general pattern of relatively advanced, settled, built-up civilizations getting wrecked by successive waves of plains nomads? My understanding is that in the east at least, the nomads themselves settled down to rule what they conquered, and were wrecked in turn by the next tribe to come along.

@hydroacetylene's comment is an excellent reply; I'd also point you to Brett Devereaux's Fremen Mirage cataloging 800 years of conflict between Rome and the barbarians, with Rome overwhelmingly the consistent winner.

This isn't exactly true- plains nomads lost a lot more than they won, but a lost battle didn't lead to conquest of their nation because agrarian armies can't venture too far into the steppe for logistical reasons. To be more specific, an army reliant on feet and hooves can carry about ten days worth of grain. Shifting to higher value foodstuffs or better technology(wagons etc) can stretch this, but not for long enough to carry out an actual military campaign(remember, a foot-and-hoof army travels about ten miles a day- it can travel 100 miles between resupplies). So armies from large, settled empires had to stay near fields growing crops that could support them, or else ports under their control. Thus when ancient China beats a nomadic army, it can't pursue it very far into the steppes. Nomads got around this mostly by having lots of extra sheep to eat; settled societies couldn't afford this because their land is mostly in use for grain production, not pasturage.

Now of course the situation eventually reverses; the US and Russian armies eventually have a long enough logistical tether to defeat the steppe nomads for good. But you'll notice that happens extremely quickly once the US and Russian armies have the logistical tether to fight steppe nomads on their home turf. The pacific railroad opened in 1869 and chief Sitting Bull surrendered in 1881, Quanah Parker in 1875. Nomads lost most of the time but eventually the Lions beat the Patriots and they had essentially unlimited chances until railroads, wagons, firearms, the industrial revolution and the second agricultural revolution combined to give settled societies the capacity to reach out and touch them. And nomad dynasties also didn't last for nearly as long as you think, either; most of Chinese and Persian history is being ruled by native, settled peoples.

I won't say there's no role for assabiyah, hard men, and decadence. But in the real world, quantity usually trumps quality.

What would the alternative look like to you?

Steppe-bound nomadic peoples are poor. They live off flocks of sheep and ride around on literal ponies (yeah) and make war with arrowheads chiseled from rock and bone. They have nothing you can take from them, least of all land that is a blasted icy hellscape half of the time, and an arid plain doing little good by you the rest of it. You cannot destroy their populace, which will migrate away if you invade. You cannot even hold and garrison their land, since this is logistically impossible.

Most of the time, you make do. Once every few centuries, it goes wrong. But I do ask: what would it take to falsify, so to speak, the theory you're vaguely alluding to here?

“This too shall pass.”

The convenient explanation is that everyone loses sooner or later. Sometimes that means getting your stuff looted by nomads.

The more complicated answer is that there were a lot of plains nomads. They were hard to eradicate (since their land was, almost by definition, not friendly to agriculture). They were mobile and warlike enough to show up whenever a neighbor was vulnerable. Arguably, that would make them a symptom rather than the disease—except they really were extraordinarily deadly. They’d basically min-maxed their tactics for shredding immobile peasant armies. At least when an incredibly charismatic leader herded them all in the right direction.

See The Fremen Mirage series for some more interesting detail. Especially part II, which covers the various tribes faced by Romans, and part IV, which talks about the Mongols specifically.

Steppe nomads were a special case due to their access to a very large pool of horses, and their mode of subsistence automatically trained them in skills applicable to cavalry warfare. This isn’t the same as ‘hardness’ - the great river-valley cultures pretty well destroyed all the barbarians who didn’t live on a giant horse pasture or in easily defensible mountains (hence, e.g., the Sinification of what’s now southern China, with the residual ethnic fragments confined to hill tracts).

India and China in particular have the congruence of being unable to maintain an adequate population of indigenous, high quality warhorses due to climate and having an extremely populous northern plain that’s suitable for cavalry warfare and accessible from the steppe.

An interesting component of the Chinese case was that it became so as a matter of state policy. The warring states and especially Qin were terrifying war machines single-mindedly devoted to maximizing military capacity, dissolving pre-existing social relations, land-tenure, taxation, and recruitment in the process. The Han intentionally demilitarized and disarmed the peasantry to reduce the skilled manpower available for rebellion (which is fine as long as the state remains strong - the Han did pretty well against the Xiongnu compared to contemporary empires vs. their own neighboring steppe nomads).

Or take the Vikings. "Viking" means both to go on a raid or a trading mission. The Norse were renouned for both.

portrayal of its inhabitants as people who killed, looted, and enslaved without a second thought

I don't know; you can find plenty of primary source material from individuals and groups of people that were out killing, looting, and enslaving. They justified themselves in lots of different ways - but pillaging and looting and killing, especially in war, wasn't exactly uncommon in the past.

Oh really? I was honestly unaware, my impression was very little had survived from that era at least in terms of writing.

I guess I'd misspoken here: I wasn't referring to Bronze Age peoples justifying their pillaging and looting, but others...the Romans, the British, the French, the Spanish. The Vikings. Plenty of documentation there, much of it in English, about exactly what these people thought as they pillaged and looted. It doesn't seem that much of a stretch to say that people in the Bronze Age were also pillaging and looting shamelessly.

Modern museums have so many cuneiform tablets that most of them have not been published.

If you want literature, check Gilgamesh or the Enuma Elisha (Sinuhe has already been mentioned). If you're interested in morality, check law codices, like the Stela of Hammurabi.

But these are totally different places and eras. I'm talking about the society depicted in the Iliad, Greece around the 1100s. Maybe we could get hints at it from more contemporary literature from other places, but Gilgamesh is about a society 1000 years earlier.

I thought you wanted insight into the Bronze Age. My bad.

Sorry I should have been more specific I'm talking about Greece. At least my impression is that when far right folks invoke the Bronze Age, they are also mostly talking about Greece and using the Iliad vs Odyssey as primary material instead of Gilgamesh or the the Story of Sinuhe

I don’t have details on this, but I believe that there are a few Mycenaean Greek primary sources and that historians who study them broadly agree that the most high-status job in the society they depict was… pirate.

Haha what a resume padder. I would definitely be interested in reading more.

If that is the society you want to know about, the answer is really quite simple: we don't know, we have never known, we aren't going to know. There are places where these are things you can know; China and the near east have left behind enough writing from their bronze ages that you can see what's up. Greece didn't, and it has been combed over more extensively than most anywhere else has been. It's just not happening.

I mean a lot of fedora tipping atheist scholars will try and date most of the Old Testament to slightly before or during the Babylonian Captivity at the earliest (so around 600 BC) but if you believe that Moses wrote the five books of Moses then that dates them solidly within the Bronze Age. And the books of Moses and Joshua are all about conquering the holy land because God gave it to them. That was their motivation, but their actual actions often involved completely eradicating the local populace, which isn't too far off from what we see bronze age morality as. Mind you I'm religious and have no issues with the Israelites wiping out the Canaanites but without the divine justification it would be pretty awful.

That's fair and to be clear I certainly wouldn't claim that ancient morality was the same as ours. But I'd also be skeptical that there was no change in culture or values across regions and time periods, and likewise would think there's a limit to what records from one era in Babylon could tell us about a different era in Greece. And if the books were actually written in the 600s then this would be fairly close to the time period the Iliad was written in itself, and I would even have the same questions about a (comparatively) modern culture writing moral narratives about a more ancient one.

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