The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Believing Because It Is Absurd

 

I did the Axial Age five years ago from the perspective of the relationship between religion and technological change. Let's come at the issue of learning, literature, scripts, and the problem of finding the "there," there. 

Wikipedia's article on the individual it designates as Siddharta Guatama is entitled "The Buddha."  in Buddhist theology, Prince Siddharta is one of a number of soteriological figures designated as "Bodhisattvas." I hesitate to refer to him as the first among equals, but that's the sense of the concept that I am going with, and one of the most important things that distinguish him from other Buddhist saviour figures is that he is considered to be a historical figure, "a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains during the 6th or 5th century BCE." One of the odder things about this conversation is that their is a tradition that places his life a century before Ashoka, who is fairly firmly dated to c. 250. Given that archaeologists have suggested that the picture of the state of civilisation in this region in the biographical stories of the Buddha more nearly fits 350BC than 550BC, you would think that the conversation would take this tradition more seriously. The introduction goes on to point out that the Buddha is first attested in c. 250, but this turns out to depend on the Ashokan attribution of the Lumbini Pillar, which refers to the Emperor in the third person and past tense, undermining the dating claim. It was also a discovery of  notorious fraud Anton Fuhrer. As a practical matter, the Buddha's existence is first affirmatively asserted in Greco-Roman literature by Clement of Alexandria. One would think that he would be a fascinating figure in early Christian Alexandria, well worth discussion.  

If, however, the Buddha lived in "the 6th or 5th century BCE," he was contemporary with . . . well, here's another level of difficulty. Per no less an authority than Plato, this was the age of Zoroaster, but Wikipedia, intending to present the consensus of scholarship, or as close to such as can be achieved, puts Zoroaster at 1500BC. The argument is that the Avestas (not attested before c.1200AD) have linguistic parallels with Vedic literature, and on the argument that the Indo-European languages arrived in India about 1500BC, this must be Zoroaster's flourit, not withstanding the authority of Plato and various etymological problems, of which the historian of technology must insist on the claim that "Zarathustra" means "Manager of Camels," and that camels were domesticated once and for all during the Iron Age. To this (non-)contemporary we add Laozi, almost certainly a fictional character and unlikely at best to have been a pre-Confucian figure if real, but certainly claimed as such in the Daoist tradition, and the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, and let's not even get started on them! 

It seems as though arguing about the historicity and dates of the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Laozi in the same breath is a bad thing to do. It is weird that the traditional historical dates of the spread of Indo-European should be on the same level, but they are, and at the end of the day we launch into yet another realm of mystery by noting that these contested claims of contemporaneity (and more besides, as the Wikipedia account shoehorns in Jainism and "Second Temple Judaism") are in service of Karl Jasper's axial age, which cannot be better summarised than as this . . . 

But in the Iron Age. 

To be fair to Karl Jaspers, and many authors before him, if something happened in history, than it is history. I don't think that it is fatal to the thesis that we extend the axial age to five centuries. History is long, after all. There is, I think, a more serious objection, which is that at the earliest and most tentative stage of the "axial age" in Iran, China, Greece, and India, Ashurbanipal was assembling the library of "thirty thousand tablets and other fragments," or perhaps ten thousand texts, but probably only a fraction of holdings including writing boards and . The closest thing to a parallel from the "axial age" instances is the five (or six) Confucian classics. These appear to derive from the Zhou dynasty, and overlap with the latest periods of composition of the contents of Ashurbanipal's collection. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the most famous item in the collection, may not be as ancient as it is sometimes breathlessly claimed to be, but appears to be, like the other early texts, a product of the Late Bronze Age. I would make some kind of claim about how alphabetic scripts made the difference, except that Chinese is not written in an alphabet. 

So what is happening? Perhaps the most salient point of all about the "axial age," and where it contrasts strikingly with the Library, and, for that matter, Egyptian remains and archaeologically recovered literary corpuses from Ugarit and Hattusa is that the latter are texts, the former, doxologies. Neither Zoroaster nor Pythagoras are claimed to speak to us in their own words. Confucius and the Ionian sages come down to us as collections of aphorisms  (and edited texts associated with Confucius) from which later philosophical traditions claim to deduce genealogies of ideas. Surely the existence of earlier texts would allow people who wanted to talk about literary traditions to do so without invoking such shadowy figures! (Indeed, in the Chinese tradition, they do. Whatever else one can say about the Duke  of Zhou, he was a real person who existed in history.)

I will set the obvious ideological import of these claims aside. They are notoriously easy to make with reference to Confucius and Biblical literature, if we engage with the scholarship, and there is an argument about a "cosmic republic" behind the Ionians. Probably every philosophical project is liable to be hijacked by political projects. What does it mean to find such a diverse set of individuals and societies sustaining claims about the importance of the teacher/disciple relationship? We of course see academic schools wherever there is academic activity, and almost always in a teaching environment; but why this crucial moment? Why such intensity at this particular moment, and not, mind you, constructed moments created later? Whatever you can say about the Buddha and Laozi, we cannot doubt the simultaneous development of traditions about Confucius and Pythagoras, probably shouldn't doubt that for Zoroaster, and can make a solid case for Jeremiah.

Here's a theory, inspired by reading way too many historical reminiscences in the letter columns of Flight (the main offender, as the long time reader will know), and, really, everywhere else. Because wrenches signify 'wrench rash," and the master/apprentice relationship, which, in the old days, reinforced learning with a rap of the knuckles. We don't do that any more, but that's how "learning by doing" works in the trades. This is more than my normal wildly speculative flier, but what if the "axial age's" preoccupation with teaching and the teacher/student relationship reflects the unusual rate and intensity of technological change in the Iron Age?

Eh. These are ideas I've been kicking around for a while. It's activity elsewhere on the Internet that occasions this attempt to nail my thinking down a bit more explicitly.  There's a story about the spontaneous and simultaneous global advance to literature. It is safer, if nothing else, to take an external approach that doesn't obligate the reader to engage with the antiquity of the Vedas or the validity of Mencius' interpretation of the Springs and Autumns. And maybe it gets us as far as we need to go.