The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIX: Lazy Sunday Outline with Premonitions of Mortality

 Two things, first, a very late change of schedule; second, a scary moment at the Silver Kettle Lodge as my 92-year-old father seemed to be failing after his vaccination. These mean that I do not have Sunday to work on my postblogging, although I am covering a mid-shift on time change day, and do have some extra writing time. And I am reminded that we do not live forever and I should get my intellectual life in order. 

So here's a summary of work to date on Sacred Spring: The Early Iron Age Revival of the State  and a brief outline.

Several series on this blog bear on the mysterious process whereby the Late Bronze Age gave way to Classical Antiquity via the "Late Bronze Age Collapse" and the subsequent "Iron Age."

Way back in the early days of the blog, responding to something on Brad Delong's old site, I began a four part series, helpfully labelled as being about the "Hittites" (Part 1; for navigation see below) which put forward an unashamedly late Anatolian revisionist take on the spread of the Indo-European languages. That is, the spread of Indo-European came very late, and was a result of the glamour of the revival of the state in the Middle Eastern Afro-Asiatic milieu being refracted through a Hittite lens and disseminated through already-extant trade networks. I won't rehearse the argument, which depends heavily on "I don't know historical linguistics, but I know what I like" crankishness, but I still think that there is something there. Even if western Europeans were already speaking Indo-European, I would still want to argue that their speeches were heavily influenced by the Middle East in the Early Iron Age, with the adoption of gendered cases the most important innovation, and some sense that it is the ideas embedded in this change that are important. 

On 2 June of 2011, I began writing about the Late Bronze Age Collapse, contesting the idea that it was due to an exogenous intrusion by "Sea Peoples" who were at one time imagined as prehistoric Vikings, and who arguably are still imagined as such at some mental level where romance and fetish escape analysis. I also tried to link to a post rather than the edit window, as above, which I suspect will be a broken link in the finished post. As of this writing, with a deadline looming in 30 minutes, I don't see a reliable way of navigating to and from these pages without losing my place in Blogger's extremely janky "Posts" Display/ I'm not spending the rest of the morning slowly scrolling, so what I will do instead is give post dates. From those to the post themselves will be an adventure for all of us at some future date. 

Part II discussed Norman Yoffee's Myths of the Archaic State, which sought to demystify ancient state collapse, a discussion now overtaken, especially in Egyptological circles, by the itself-debatable concept of "resilience," or not falling. Both strands of thinking seem to have their merits. (4 July 2011). Next week, in fact only three days later (7 July 2011), probably a measure of how much work I put into it, I discussed whether we can think of the collapse as "supply-driven." That is, iron was invented, turned into useful tools (wool shears) or weapons, and overthrew the Late Bronze Age order either with violence or too much wool, an interesting point given various discussions trying to quantify the number of sheep being run on Crete in the Late Bronze Age, which would appear to have been its modern sheep carrying capacity, which is crazy, if we trust Saro Wallace, as I am inclined to do. (Here's a link to her Amazon site, which seems like the best way of getting to know more about her.) On 18 August, 2012, I tried to make an argument that the well-known Late Bronze Age site of Pylos, associated with wily Odysseus and the largest known cache of Linear B documents, might have something to do with the ancient lagoon below it, suitable for retting flax and landing Mediterranean-style galley-type boats. As I recall I was trying to minimise claims for the geographic extent of the old Messenian state of which Pylos was proposed to be the capital, and gunning for the idea of a Mycenaean "empire," and even the idea that Greek necessarily originated on the Greek peninsula and "colonised" the Aegean coast of Turkey. On 22 May 2013 I returned to this series with a look at Eric Cline's 1177BC: The Year That Civilisation Died, which uses this book to springboard a look at Crete as the place between Egypt and Greece via the Egyptian Delta, which is probably not the first framing around here of the Delta as the place where the Egyptian state goes to die, but is an attempt to "extend" the Delta across to the biotically similar Kommos plain, a neglected area in much Cretan history. There's some more language stuff on 17 December 2014, a look at Kerkenes Dag, which might be another lost Herodotean city. But if  it is, it is a Median city on the Halys with a strongly Phrygian look, raising various questions about the "Medean Empire" and the early history of Indo-European. Also, Lameen burst one of my bubbles by letting me know that one of the presumed isolate Gulf coast First Nations languages that make Lyle Campbell question the universality of language families, is actually a  member of one such family.
 

Beginning on 22 March 2012 and continuing on 4 April 2012, 18 April 2012, 26 April 2012, 27 April 2012, 4 May 2012, and ending on 2 June 2012, I engaged with "The Art of Not Being Governed," James C. Scott's Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. It was a book that everyone wanted to like at the time, with vast insights into language change, myths of migration, the role of state surveillance in the establishment of state religions, literacy, de-literacising (there's got to be a better word) and the cyclic rise and fall of the "paddy state" of Southeast Asia. It seems convincing and provocative, but also endlessly repetitive, and it is fascinating to look back through the lens of postblogging the Indo China war. The application of all of this to the "fall" of the Late Bronze Age and the subsequent rise of a new Iron Age state is laid out in these posts in more detail. 

On 7 August 2012, I began "Old Europe" with a look at an odd Technology and Culture article about the double-bitted axe, which really does seem like the best, although also most dangerous, forester's axe, and which only appeared in the Eighteenth Century due to advances in ironmaking, but which has interesting Late Bronze Age and Neolithic precursors. As the "labrys," it plays a significant role in German dentist and all around crank, Hans George Wunderlich's attempt to prove that the Minoan Crete was heavily influenced by Second Kingdom Egypt, with some interesting implications for what "labyrinths" actually were, and for the origins of the purportedly pre-Indo European "Minoan" language. I don't know how much of his general crankiness holds up today, but I found Wunderlich refreshing when I first read him, and still do. A big takeaway from a woodsman's axe! On 14 November 2012 I talked about Roman Bologna, conquered originally by Marius, and on the one hand late Republican Roman politics and perhaps the invention of the Cimbri and Teutones, and on the other the importance of a specific kind of geology --springline hillside sites-- in the spread of the Roman Empire. The idea here is that instead of being uniformly spread over an undifferentiated landscape, we should look at Roman real estate interests as being focussed on highly localised and particularly exploitable development plays, which is why the name "Bonona" and its variants, probably derived from (Cow)boy, reappears across the Empire. Also, I wanted to talk about long distance commercial cattle drives. Pretty ambitious for one post, or, here, half a paragraph! I'm honestly not sure what I'm on about on 3 March 2013 except that I'd like some comics blogger to talk about the Golden Gladiator and the Silent Knight, two early Kanigher backups in Brave and the Bold, and ain't that a nonsequitur. The 18 April 2013 number is about Watling Street and what the Romans got out of Britain, the 19 June 2012 about the neglected importance of buckwheat (and the importance of cover/subsistence) crops in a full history of agriculture, 31 July 21013 about grain farming. On 30 September 2013 I extended my thinking about "Cowboys" to the "Young Ones," or Jugunthi, who rampaged through northern Italy in the middle of the Third Century crisis. Were they, in fact, German cowboys, unemployed by the end of cattle drives across the Alps to feed the Roman games/sacrifices?

I'll leave my "Thalassocracy" series out of this discussion. It's more criticism of the Minoan Empire concept, and also engagement with Graydon Saunders. In a tangential note, I finally caught up with the last two Commonweal novels over the summer, thoroughly enjoyed them, and like the comparison of his "Sea Peoples" with the Numenoreans. Now that's literary engagement! (And TV.)

On 16 February 2015, with "Grexiting the Late Bronze Age," I tried to hop on the fiscal crisis in the European Union (remember that?) by talking about upland agriculture. As often, I wanted to talk about the relationship between swidden farmers, iron axes, and the various charcoal-using industries, but also the way that the centre of Greek agriculture, so once economic, life has shifted up and down hill depending on whether it was more interested in commercial exchange at sea level or mixed farming at the centre of the Greek landscape, which is, due to its mountainous nature, about 800m up. This was good for three parts and a freestanding 11 March 2016 post, which, after a very weird intro mainly intended to trash Eastwood's Flags of our Fathers, is about iron and salt in the English Weald, instead of the Peloponnese.  3 June 2016 visits Umbria between Rome and Ravenna for another look at the "uphill retreat" in Mediterranean history.

 I do that a lot, because I like mountains. 

Also deltas, to which I returned, specifically the Egyptian one, on 6 une 2017 to yoke the Late Bronze Age Collapse to the Second Century Crisis. When people stop paying for grain and cattle, delta people start producing "subsistence" crops like fish and lotus root, instead. They can't be taxed outside of a monetised economy, and they fill the belly, so if you want to tax a delta's productivity it is on the state to maintain monetisation! 

My developing sense of the importance of the salt/charcoal/soap nexus led to the launching of the Early Iron Age Revival of the State series on 16 November 2017, although I'm pretty sure that I had already explained the "Sacred Spring" idea. (In a particularly fruitful year, an early Iron Age state, for this is a myth out of the early Roman Republic, would declare a "Sacred Spring" dedicate all the animals and children born in a certain year to the gods, and "sacrifice" them by driving them out to found a new city/settlement/colony. "Sacred Springs" become my shorthand way of alluding to the rapid spread of urban civilisation through the western Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age.)

 

Collapse, and rise again, and the powerful imagery of Michael Morris' choreographed version of  Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, make an appearance a week later, on 16 November 2017. On 2 December 2017 I survey some of the archeological sites that give depth to a phenomena that could easily be reduced to waving at Carthage and Rome. There were a lot of Sacred Springs, many of which leave no historic record, and the most interesting of which occurred in southern Germany. On 23 December 2017, I introduce lye-cured olives, yet another charcoal industry, and talk about the rise of equestrianship in the Roman Iron Age, and its peculiar religious practice that so forcefully reminds me of Byer's Cahokian "spiritual mall," that is, a site with a heterarchic distribution of competitive/complementary religious sites and practices, rather than a unified concept of city, state, and cult. On 19 January 2018, I talked about the "sin of Sargon." Why was the defeat and death of Sargon in 705BC so monumental, according to his descendants? Was it that founding a new city was blasphemous? Is this a literary construction? Or a world historical moment in which the steppe rider cultural and technological horizon is invented out of military necessity at a specific moment of crisis, on the borderlands between Assyria and Urartu? Next week, more of the same, with some astrological/extipicy related material. Assyrian cosmology might be weird to us, but it was probably the most comprehensive and useful cosmology yet invented --"Good to think with." More on this in the 28 April 2018 post, to get out of order, where I look at Sybilline books and Iguvine Tablets and such. On 28 May, I look at modern efforts to do ancient Babylonian/Assyrian intellectual history with these resources. Fascinating, at least in theory. And it obviously has nothing to do with Sargon I, the Middle Bronze Age founder of Akkad.  

More salt and charcoal on 24 February, 2018, which looks at briquetage, the crude pottery used to move salt produced at brine springs and seashore salteries. On 24 March 2018, I look at Bronze Age jewelry, hoarding, status competition, and more difficult-to-grasp concepts about jewelry and the body to look at what the end of bronze jewelry might mean to the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition. Was it an ideological revolution as well as an economic crisis? Did people start a new death cult? They certainly started using cavalry (6 April 2018), although possibly only thousands of years after steppe peoples started riding horses. (I'm skeptical.) The 26 May 2018 entry, confusing entitled "Queen of May" because I wanted to poste some Jane Russell promotional material, is about the time series of lead contamination of Greenland glacial ice samples showing a rapid ramp up of atmospheric lead, hence the refining of copper-lead-silver ores for silver in particular, beginning in the early Iron Age and peaking in the late Republic before falling off in the Second Century Crisis. This, then, is a historical episode --roughly 800BC to 250AD. On 1 July 2018, I introduce an argument about changing international textiles industries and trade in antiquity in a very scattered way. This would all have been greatly helped if I'd been introduced to the idea of a "vernacular industry," so that could have talked about an "Industrial revolution"! The idea is powerful. In fact, I will go with two wool revolutions, the first being that "Yamnaya intrusion" that the modern Nazi-curious so like, the second in the early Iron Age, which re-occurs in my 15 July 2018 entry. Coined money and "urban sanctuaries" enter the discussion on 1 September 2018, probably following up on earlier discussion of Hans Van Wees' Ships and Silver, Taxes and Tribute: A Fiscal History of Early Athens.

A free-standing discussion inspired by an "Academia.edu" bombing episode, with Ad Thijs' dating papers, appears on 1 Sept 2019, and discusses the mid-800s (dating controversial!) episode of the Egyptian "Renaissance," or, leaving out diacriticals and funny letters, "Wehem Messet." There's something going on in Thebes as the Iron AGe is born elsewhere, and it involves massive tomb robbing. Does it also involve massive outflows of precious metals, remonetising the Mediterranean basin? Maybe! On 27 September 2019, inspired by more discussion of Nineteenth Century textile industry practice, a look at the  enigmatic "

burnt mounds" that might have been the sites where Bronze Age and Iron Age wool was cleaned, close to the shearing sites, and on 4 October 2019 a more extensive discussion of Prienne/Oppidum Heuneberg in Bavaria. Is money suddenly so easy in 850BC that people are willing to give this whole "city" thing a fling even in as unpromising a location as the upper Danube valley? Irrational exuberance! On 8 November 2019 I take on the doyen of Roman demographic history, Walter Sheidel, whom I think to inclined to allow massive demographic swings instead of population relocation in his Great Leveller, a book that I am stuck a bit of the way into four years later. On 22 November 2019, a more grounded look at Cyrene, the novel Early Iron Age city state that is still a bit of an enigma compared with Rome and Carthage, but not as much as Bad Heuneberg. On 29 November 2019, more on coins, silver (hence cupellation) and the state. On 5 February 2021, engagement with "the Axial Age," yet another proposed world transformation of the Iron Age, when all the good religions (your Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Confucianism or maybe Taoism, Pythagoreanism) suddenly came along together, as the story goes. I also thought I'd come along far enough for a recap on 13 February 2021.

On 2 April 2021, it was back to Cyrene, and the mystery of "silphium," and some scholarship that tries to de-exoticise the ancient condiment/contraceptive and turn it into an indication of a new mode of long distance trade supplanting the Late Bronze Age state-centred one. Along the way, we  have a skeptical deconstruction of the silphium myth, always catnip for your humble blogger. On 27 March 2022, the first of several posts engaging with Finkelstein's history of early Israel, perhaps the most dramatically upland of upland states, and this goes double if Finkelstein's reconceptualisation of the succession of of Israel to Judah is correct. On 25 September 2022 I take aim at apocalyptic stories again, with a focus on, of all things, the now-discredited "Dunkirk Transgressions," which used to be used to set the Cimbri and Teutones, and then the Anglo-Saxons in motion. (You have to go invade foreign parts if your farms suddenly start sinking between the waves!) The idea of a widespread sealevel rise/erosional-depositional/deforestation crisis has taken a back seat to a new push for the bubonic plague ("Justinian's Plague") as a civilisation ender, and I would argue that the process shows that it is more intellectual fashion than fact --apocalypse is another thing that is "good to think with." On 8 January of this year we visited Carthage and some other archaeological sites along the Tunisian shore. How Phoenician, and how "Semitic" was the founding of the Carthaginian state? This raises the weird question of the absent North African Bronze Age, 26 January. I can't believe in such a thing, since all it takes to declare a Bronze Age is some bronze items in a period site, and how can there not be some bronze items recovered from Maghrebi sites across a two-thousand year span? So what are we even saying when we say that North Africa had no Bronze Age? 

On 14 February we returned to Bad Heueneberg for some jewelry and a discussion of what jewelry means. On 6 October, I posted a lazy post that might be more important than it looks. A great deal of the conversation about the Late Bronze Age, its collapse, and the transition to the Iron Age, is based on the idea that the tin in Bronze Age bronze came from a long distance away via whatever mechanism of long distance exchange we are personally inclined to allow. (Exchange or trade is a pretty big argument in anthropology, alongside the question of long distance mobility of traders.) But the Tin Council spent most of the Twentieth Century exaggerating the rarity of tin; there are viable, or almost viable, tin mining regions in Italy and Serbia, so we need to think a lot more about the economics of mining and less about the richness of ore bodies. 

Okay, then: Outline

This is my dedicated intellectual biographer/ghost writer to turn into a book when I drop dead later today. No pressure, K.!

I) Arguing: We engage cod economic history as an epiphenomenon of neo-Liberalism (to include Malthusianism, Finley, Brenner), look at the idea that ancient states were fragile, and the rival idea of "resilience." We take a stand against apocalypse, talk about historical linguistics, and the applicability of the entire Stone/Bronze/Iron Age paradigm. What's left? Technology: real technology. It's time to talk about the actual history of agriculture, rather than the cod history of the economic historian would look like. Fibre crops, animal pasturage (and the importance of salt), ion balances, crop rotation, grain and non-grain food crops, fibre crops, dyestuffs, infield/outfield agriculture. We look at claims for Neolithic equestrianship. 

II) A brief review of history from the beginning to the Late Bronze Age: Probably short and anodyne after the above, although I probably have to get at the ancient Iraqi cosmology or worldview. 

III) The Late Bronze Age Collapse Imagined As a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones Or as a monetary thing. What collapsed? How far? When? A look at other Bronze Age collapses; a de-emphasis on the technological causes of the change, along with other exogenous drivers (invasion, catastrophe). A discussion of the move uphill, and what it means in Mediterranean history, with apologies to James C. Scott, who came up with it as a solution to the problem of the migration myth in Southeast Asian history. 

IV) The Rise of Assyria: Cavalry, iron, war, omens. The appearance of the urban sanctuary with the shift from private ritual to public cult. The emergence of state finance as a product of public sacrifice. An introduction to what the Axial Age actually was about: Literacy and pedagogy. Perhaps some discussion of what literature could then do, and not do, and its relationship with language change?

V) From Iron and Wool to Glass: The technological nexus of the forest industries, in which glass, iron, soap, wool, pasture, and dyes are all interrelated. The spread of purple factories along the Mediterranean littoral. (Their probable connection to sealing, textiles, and leather.) 

VI) The Egyptian Renaissance and the remonetisation of the Mediterranean economy: The lead spike, silver mining, cupellation. 

VII) The Sacred Spring proper, from Cyrene around the Basin to Bad Heuneberg

VIII) The bust on the peripheries, the rise of the great Western Mediterranean states.

IX) Israel, Judah, monolatry, and the Temple of Jerusalem. Silver and the fiscal state. 

X) The Rise of Rome and the international livestock trade.

XI) Marius? (The late Republic political crisis, anyway) and the Aristotelian treatises, the Torah: The Iron Age at its zenith, precocious signs of collapse. By this time it should be obvious how Jesus clearing the Temple is the moment when this fragile edifice collapses on itself, so I think 70BC is as good a time as any to end the book.