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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29531 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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