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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   29571 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?

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.

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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