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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.”
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?
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:
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.
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.
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Indeed.
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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.
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..
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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).
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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?
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...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.
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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.
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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?
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“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.
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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.
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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).
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Or take the Vikings. "Viking" means both to go on a raid or a trading mission. The Norse were renouned for both.
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