Q&A for History of Mankind (14)
Climate change, Bronze Age collapse, plus no evidence of European matriarchy; and contra Bret Deveraux
Welcome! I'm David Roman and this is my History of Mankind newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone kind and decent forwarded it to you.
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This is the fourteenth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.
Before we get to that, let me remind you that my book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history of ancient Western and Chinese philosophy” is available at Amazon here and also at a much cheaper price and straight from the publisher, which you can contact here. And it’s also free for all paid subscribers of A History of Mankind, who get an electronic copy.
I have one other announcement: it just came to my attention, for those of you who are in Reddit, that a subreddit has been created to discuss the contents of A History of Mankind. If you are so inclined, please check it out. I’ve joined the subreddit myself as well.
Now, as tradition requires, we’ll look at a recent academic paper that may shed some light on an earlier post, in this case this one about the fall of many Bronze Age societies during the so-called Crisis of the Sea-Peoples.
This is the most heatedly disputed issue in Bronze Age scholarship, so it definitely deserves attention. The fact that the Nature paper (“Severe multi-year drought coincident with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 BC”) postulates climate change, a modern and also controversial topic, as a key reason for the fall of the Hittite Empire, makes it doubly important. I wrote about the period here:
The best evidence available indicates that global climate kept cooling until the Roman Climatic Optimum started in around 250 BC, leading to warmer trends across the globe, with temperatures very similar to those of 2000 AD, until around 400 AD. In fact, it's likely that a particularly cold snap occurred around the turn of the 13th-12th centuries BC, leading to particularly low rainfall in Africa and unusually weak flooding in Egypt, which contributed to troubles there.
In the new Nature paper, Sturt W. Manning et al examined the width tree rings and stable isotope records in central Anatolia and concluded that a severely dry period spanned between 1198 BC and 1196 BC, just as the Hittite state was hit hardest by the Sea Peoples.
There’s another Nature paper I came across that I think deserves a brief mention. “Extensive pedigrees reveal the social organization of a Neolithic community,” by Maïté Rivollat et al (Nature, 26.7.2023) looks at the DNA and burial patterns of 100 individuals from the site Gurgy ‘les Noisats’ (France), dated to around 4850–4500 BC. These people were descendants of the Anatolian wave of invaders that entered Europe about a millennium earlier, as I wrote in the very distant sixth installment of A History of Mankind:
In central Europe, simple pottery without handles became commonly used around 5500 BC, with the so-called Linear Band ceramic culture, similar to Japan's Jomon culture, gaining much popularity all the way to the Ukraine. Together with the pottery, adorned with bands of narrow lines, the habit of constructing timber-made long houses and using cattle and pig rather than sheep and goats spread across much of the continent, probably driven by waves of more sophisticated immigrants from Çatalhoyuk and other parts of Anatolia, who picked new tricks as they moved west across Greece and the Balkans looking for new lands away from the ever-more crowded Fertile Crescent.
The migrants settled at some interesting places: in Lepenski Vir, on rugged terrain by the Danube in Serbia, they created some of large settlements of the time anywhere in the world, based on fishing sturgeon at large gorges and ponds, and carved haunting images of human faces and abstract designs on boulders. They lived there with descendants of Old European hunters and gatherers, at least some of whom may have been captives or slaves.
It's hard to tell to which extent the migration caused large-scale conflict, but it certainly caused friction, epidemics and probably massive population replacement with the usual influx of local female mitochondrial DNA into the newly-arrived tribes. Suddenly, all new houses in central Europe were built exactly in the same style, a sign less of successful design and more of new customs forcibly replacing the previous ones.
The Linear Band peoples were farmers who cleared forests and bushes to plaint their crops, including wheat, peas and lentils from the Middle East, as well as hemp and flax that they grew for raw material to make ropes and clothing. With farming taking on a more important role, social roles became more fixed: burials show a growing sexual split, as men were buried with stone tools that had previously been used for woodwork, butchery, hunting, or interpersonal violence, while women were buried with stone tools used on animal hides or leather.
Generally speaking, Linear Band peoples buried their dead in kinship groups, with remarkably more care than the inhabitants of Skateholm across the Baltic, or even cremated them – an innovation that first appeared in Australia around 15,000 BC. They weren't as nice with their enemies, and those they displaced.
The authors of the paper conclude, to nobody’s surprise, that these peoples who died in Gurgy, near modern Paris, relied on patrilineal descent and had high levels of female exogamy, often sending teenaged girls as young as 15 to marry outside the clan. When steppe Indo-Europeans arrived in force in the region, roughly five centuries later, and in turn displaced the Linear Band cultures, their social customs didn’t differ much, so theories about old European matriarchies remain, given the current evidence, fanciful.
As always, let me remind you that you can find all posts divided by chronology and theme in the How to Read a History of Mankind guide:
On to the questions by paid subscribers. The first one this time I left outside the paywall, while the others are paywalled:
Question 1 (by fr_History): Bret Deveraux recently wrote a previous controversial article on Spartans, essentially calling them whiners and losers with an overrated reputation. I know you have sparred with BD in Twitter in the past, so I’d like to get your take on the Spartan Question.
Answer: The article that Bret Deveraux published recently in Foreign Policy is very much in line with some of his recent, popular production. When I objected to Deveraux shitting on Sulla, I did it because he wanted to have his cake and then eat it too: he started by writing that Sulla sucked and was a horrible dictator who killed a lot of people (quick: name any military leader who didn’t kill a lot of people) and then he added that, yes, he came up with a lot of reforms, which didn’t matter because those reforms were quickly annulled after his death. That’s wrong (many reforms survived) and unfair because that’s happened in history to many reformers, and Sulla can’t be blamed for things that occurred when he wasn’t around. So the take is bad, and useful for modern consumption only. Much the same can be said of his Spartan article.
When BD shits on Sulla, he’s arguing against giving specific people too much power over what in effect was a Roman aristocracy: he’s in fact, arguing for oligarchy against monarchy, which is a contemporary political argument; in the same manner, when he writes about the Spartans, he’s arguing against giving the idea of military virtue, as exemplified by the Spartans, too much importance: not because he’s a pacifist (on the contrary, he’s a nuclear-weapons-loving interventionist) but because, when he writes on Foreign Policy, he knows he’s got the ear of the DC foreign policy establishment and he wants to tell them how to do imperialism right.
And there, he’s correct although he doesn’t know why. Ignore the anachronistic, infantile accusation that Sparta was a proto-Fascist state (it was Rome, as he knows, that used Fasces, from which the word Fascism comes; and we don’t call Fascist salutes “Spartan salutes,” do we?). BD’s biggest problem is that he’s right for the wrong reasons: he wants to give DC good counsel, and he’s alleging that the Spartans are the wrong blueprint because they never built an enduring empire. Which is actually correct and right! As a DC resident, I know people in DC will appreciate the point. I just published a whole freaking book about people who wanted to make a living advising important people! The problem is that Sparta never built an empire because it never meant or wanted to be an empire.
Western scholarship is obsessed with the question of what exactly made the Roman Empire fall, but the protracted fall of Sparta (the city would remain largely independent, and often bellicose, until the Second century BC), is a much more interesting issue. As Paul Cartledge noted in his History of the Spartans, most historiography which deals with the period between 404 and 362 BC is concerned to pin down where Sparta went wrong “with the benefit of hindsight,” attempting to isolate those factors “but for which [Sparta’s loss of hegemony] would either not have occurred in the form it in fact took or not have been resolved in the way it in fact was.” This is in many ways the wrong question.
The Spartan system was an excellent defensive system, ill equipped to administer an empire, and there were no provisions, such as a hereditary priestly class, that would have allowed it to survive a military conquest – a contingency that was all but inevitable in the ancient world and even today.
Polybius, a Hellenistic historian who documented the rise of Rome, gave a balanced summary of the greatness and limits of Sparta through a useful comparison with the Roman Republic. He remarked that “the constitution so framed by Lycurgus preserved independence in Sparta longer than anywhere else in recorded history” (Polybius, 6.10). Furthermore: “The Lycurgan system is designed for the secure maintenance of the status quo and the preservation of autonomy. Those who believe that this is what a state is for must agree that there is not and never has been a better system or constitution than that of the Spartans. But if one has greater ambitions that that – if one thinks that it is a finer and nobler thing to be a world-class leader, with an extensive dominion and empire, the center and focal point of everyone’s world – then one must admit that the Spartan constitution is deficient and the Roman constitution is superior and more dynamic.” (Polybius, 6.50)
As Helen Roche writes in "Spartan Supremacy: A "Possession for Ever"? Early fourth-century expectations of enduring ascendancy," (in "Hindsight in Greek and Roman History," ed. Anton Powell, Classical Press of Wales, 2013, pp. 91-112) after two centuries of dominance in Greece, the adjustments needed to transition to Mediterranean empire “might very well have seemed both impractical and unnecessary to contemporary Spartans.”
So, yes, BD, if you are in the business of building an empire you shouldn't do as the Spartans did. You just don’t need to underrate Sparta’s accomplishments and blame them for Hitler to make that case. For those interested in another, more conservative take on the controversy, you can read here.
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