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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29532 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?

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.

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.

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.

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