The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVI: The Past Isn't Even Past

 

Something about how for every Southern boy, it's 3PM on 3 July 1863, and Pickett's Charge hasn't been launched yet and I'm not even going to continue with this line of thought about history not being past. The last week of June isn't a good time to be thinking about the Neo-Confederate capture of American government in the Anglosphere because 70 million of us are suffering through a historic heat wave, and a major British political party's solution to the problem is to let the oil and gas industry rip.  

It hasn't been terrible in British Columbia. My work week was disrupted by a heat wave, and everyone in Vancouver felt it, but it was, as these things go, a normal heat wave with cooling at night. We're seeing plenty of early signs of a food security crisis in the form of chronic and persistent shortages of seasonal crops like watermelon, asparagus, strawberries, and sweet corn, and part of that is down to weather; but it is also in large measure politics, and I guess we're back to the first paragraph. 

I was away visiting last week, but I was rewarded for my time off with a five day work week followed by a single day off (yesterday). I didn't feel like high effort blogging yesterday, and there's some business to catch up, specifically Eric Cline's book about the "collapse and survival of civilisation" after the "collapse" of 1177, which struck me as fairly low effort for most of its run, until the final chapter, which was on about the IPCC's take on Climate Change and Cilizational Collapse, as the bloody Wikipedia article is titled.

(The short week is why Postblogging March 1956, II, isn't up yet. There may then be delays in July over library issues, and I still won't have an aviation magazine next week, as Aviation Week managed to fill up a whole volume with the January-February issues, and I have no idea what was going on with Flight in the spring of 1956, what with the labour trouble in the British printing industry.) 

  

Meanwhile some well-intentioned activist is on about homelessness in the United States. Homeless encampments have been a political issue for my entire life, and one of the lowlights of my Kamloops visit was a drive by the city's new supportive housing estate down by the river at the pulp mill. I've no doubt that concentrating a typically heterogenous population of unhoused in a marginal space will work out great this time! 

Obviously the issue in any surge of attention to the homeless is the extent to which that population is "normal," and worthy of help, insofar as being working poor priced out of normal housing, as opposed to being mentally ill or addicted, the divide between the two being not nearly so clear cut as one would wish. Which brings us to "1177 and after."

Can desert and "steppe" have mountains? I'm confused!

"Then you shall declare before the LORD your God: “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous." [Deut. 26:5)

I picked up a misattribution of this quote to refer to Abraham rather than Joseph from somewhere this last week. I hope it wasn't Cline. I've already been unkind to Cline in calling this latest book a low-effort affair. That is because the front three-quarters or so is essentially a superficial history of the post-Collapse period through 800BC. It's not the book I would have written, and it is not particularly original. We have had plenty of  archaeological histories of the Aegean in this period, although the specialists are not in the habit of stopping at 800.  "Phoenicia" lacks the quality of archaeological sources, but the thin written material at the very least allows some uncontroversial conclusions about "collapse" and "survival" to the effect that there was no collapse there whatsoever. We can write a political history of Assyria to the point where political biographies of Neo-Assyrian kings are a real genre; and, considering that they were lost to history, etc, the confusing array of Neo-Hittite city-states in the thigh of Anatolia where Cilicia meets northwest Syria, and of Egypt, come through surprisingly clearly. This is largely because of some extraordinary survivals at Carchemish, an Iron Age city site, possibly because it has been stuck in the middle of a militarised  border zone for many decades, perhaps because the road network in this area was radically reordered by the opening of the Cilician Gates, whenever that happened. Here at least the 800BC ending date makes sense, because the Assyrian takeover erased the neo-Hittite identity over time, leaving it to be an archaeological surprise. Finally, there is Egypt, and modern Israel (plus, well, you know). Here, it seems, Cline's handling is either weak or soft pedaled.   

The pushback against "collapse" has been going on for a long time now in at least two strands. First, Yoffee's claim that the collapse of early civilisations is "normal" brought pushback from Egyptologists who reframed the Old Kingdom as resilient and "anti-fragile." Here's a link to a paper posted at ScienceDirect that seems to hit the keynotes. Second, as Cline is  hardly the first to demonstrate, you can write a continuous political history of Assyria through this period, and, through that lens, Babylonia and Elam, the latter two having no indigenous political history due to the non-survival of the kind of rich cuneiform archives that were recovered at the various Neo-Assyrian capitals in the Nineteenth Century. As far as Assyrian history goes, we have to reserve the collapse to the 41 year reign of Ashur-rabi II (1012--972BC) on the surely suspicious grounds that between him, his son, and his grandson, Tiglath- Pileser Ii (966--932BC), we have an eighty year span in which nothing seems to have  happened worth noting, and that when Ashur-dan II assumed the throne in 934 or so, he had to bring the people of Ashur back from the mountains, and clear out Aramaean statelets which had formed on rightfully Assyrian territory in the Jazira between the Tigris and Euphrates, according to him, in the extensive inscriptions we have found from his times. I'm not sure that Ashur-Dan was the first Neo-Assyrian king to have a captured enemy ruler flayed alive, but if there's one thing no-one is going to forget about Neo-Assyrian modes of governance, that would be it. 

The issue here, of course, is what an "Aramaean" was. I believe I've blogged about this, but way up above the fold, I postulated two models of "civilisational collapse." One features climate change as either an exogenous or endogenous (unless chariot team poop makes for climate change!) driver. The other features people giving up on being governed, and governing. The Aramaeans are either people being conveniently forced from their homes elsewhere (perhaps some  mountain ranges in central Syria) into Assyria by climate change and overrunning a drought-weakened civilisation with the sheer virile  might of their barbarism. The other features the Aramaeans as a political event, an ethnogenesis. Weirdly, the Aramaean rampage comes at the tail end of a similar era during the Late Bronze Age involving the more-completely contained "Apiru/Habiru," and they, in spite of what would seem like a slam-dunk historical identity, are much more readily dismissed as an ethnogenesis amongst marginalised peoples of the Middle Eastern "steppe." I do not say strangely here to dismiss the politics lurking behind it, because God knows we all do that these days, but because of the unwillingness to extend the thesis of ethnogenesis out of marginalised communities to the Aramaeans. 

Egypt is, you would think, the key context in which 1177 as a political/social collapse is to be  made, in that the end of the New Kingdom saw the "Third Intermediate Period," in which contemporary Egypt was distinguished and stigmatised in the eyes of its own historians by its division into "Libyan," and "Kushite" dynasties of foreign kings, often dividing the "natural" Egyptian state into three once the chief priest of Thebes are included.  The unexpectedly clear light that is shone on various episodes in Egyptian history such as the 1155BC harem coup against Ramesses III, the legal proceedings against a tomb robber syndicate in 16 Ramesses IX  ("around 1100"). Cline would seem to prefer to have an example of "partial collapse" for his model, and what we have of a traditional political history of the Third Intermediate Period will work perfectly well for him. The less said about his credulous acceptance of the "United Monarchy" against Finkelstein's, in my view, devastating deconstruction, the better. 

As I have said many times before, it is almost impossible to believe that the sheer scope of observed technological change in this period did not have enormous social implications. Obsidian arrowheads are lethal against bare skin and fabric armours; bronze arrows penetrate the latter; Iron arrows will go through anything up to reinforced chain mail or a thin shaped iron plate.  Iron shears double the amount of wool which can be recovered from a sheep compared to combing and plucking; Iron axes cut down trees in minutes compared with days for polished stone axes. Taking the inventive rather than reliable Robert Drews at his word, you cannot have well-ridden horses without iron bits. Copious wood ash is needed for the production of glass, food lye (for treating fish and olives), soap, largescale wool cleaning, silver refining, and dye making. Forest salt production breaks dependence on the sea and salt springs for the purposes of stabling and breeding livestock in the summer. Iron ploughs are, well, I gesture at a century and more of agricultural history. I cannot believe that a political reordering will not flow from the complete transformation of everyday life. Observing that ironmaking probably maybe replaced bronze making on Cyprus around about then and that Shalmaneser III was the first neo-Assyrian king to have cavalry in his army is not even close  to adequately reckoning with these changes, Eric. 

As for climate change now and then. well, fuck me if we're not causing it this time round. It's political, man. And if you can't even bear to say that the "House of David" is a myth in an age when a "Kingdom of Israel from the Euphrates to the Brook of Egypt" is on the table in a government that can close the Straits of Hormuz, well, fuck me again.