And look down on the city of Lo-yang.
In Lo-yang how still it is!
Palaces and houses all burnt to ashes.
Walls and fences all broken and gaping,
Thorns and brambles shooting up to the sky.
I do not see the old men;
I only see the new young men.
I turn aside, for the straight road is lost;
The fields are overgrown and will never be ploughed
again.
I have been away such a long time
That I do not know which path is which.
How sad and ugly the empty moors are!
A thousand miles without the smoke of a chimney.
I think of our life together all those years;
My heart is tied with sorrow and I cannot speak."
-Cao Zhi [Ch'ao Shih], transl. A. Wales, web-hosted by Gwilym Williams
Outer fortifications of Tongwangcheng, from Borbala Obrusanzky's "Tongwancheng," hosted at www.transoxiana.org |
How a Google search for "Ruins of Louyang" leads me to a university poet in residence and pictures of a "southern Hun city" taken by a member of the "Research Group on Hungarian Ancestral History" I leave to the high priests of the search algorithm. I would speculate, but there's enough of that around here already.
Specifically, I want to explore the idea of iron (and the Iron Age) as an exogenous technological economic input, and take some steps to draw together what seems to me to be related developments.