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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.
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.
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