The Fall of Rome, VI: Flying Canoes and Revolutionary Santas

 

There's nothing to discourage a guy from amateur FallofRomeism than the "Men think about Rome a lot" thing of a few years back, for which reason I haven't visited this thread in a long time. I'd like to say that I was into the fall of Rome before it went mainstream, but, yeah, no. Gibbon  might be the most influential historian in history, and I will actually read Pocock's Gibbon if someone can make  a case that he didn't have Seventeenth Century precursors. What brings me back this week is, first of all, a Quora answer about Picts that reminded me of a small bit of loose ends, and second the fact that it's Christmas, and I am off to meet my first great-nephew in Campbell River on Boxing Day, which is anything but a guaranteed day off in my line of work. O. is six months old, so a bit young for Christmas, but soon! I, on the other hand, am totally ready for Christmas, which the visiting and the family reunions and the long walks with dogs and the Baldur's Gate 3 marathons . . .Oops, definitely shouldn't have said that last bit. 

It has also been suggested that for various more widely applicable reasons that we should lighten up and just enjoy a Christmas for a change. And I don't disagree, so here's a Christmas message calling for peace on Earth, good will to all, and a proletarian revolution!

Yeah, Angela didn't say that last bit.

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.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1953: Sluice Gates

 

I'm sorry, Dutch people, "Watersnoosdramp" reminds me of Futurama. This is a picture of Oude Tonge, on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee, which has such a clumsy name because it is a relatively late formation, being carved out of the mainland of North Brabant and South Holland by flooding events in 1216 and 1421, per Wikipedia. Oude Tonge, first attested in 1420/1, is a village carved out of the "Old headland polder" in the manor of Grijsoord, which sounds like an exposed location, and proved to be so over the night of 31 January/1 February 1953 when a windstorm drove the spring high tides up over its embankments, killing 305 people in this village including 42 family members of poster-child survivor Jos de Boet. 

The reclamation history of these islands in the Meuse/Maass/Escaut/Scheldt/New Rhine estuary (I vote for bringing back "the Maze" as the geographic designator) is an interesting one for the historian of the Late Middle Ages/Early Modern Period, perhaps the clearest evidence that the economy and population of northwestern Europe was expanding during the "waning of the Middle Ages" and not contracting as the grand overarching "The Black Plague Kills Everyone Except One Person To Pass On The Message" theory of European history. But I'm never going to roll that rock up that hill, so let's not talk about it.  Let's talk about even older coastal defences, instead.

The Bishops' Sea: Marine Ecology, Industry Fundamentals, and Ethnogenesis

 

So here is, I think, a pretty basic question suited for a footnote as I gallop through the way that the politics of Sixteenth Century Europe led to the Pilgrims' exit from Leiden and the world of Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage, which, to my shame, I still know from the cod summaries of others and not from a direct reading in spite of it being on my list since I first encountered Fenimore Cooper's Nineteenth-Century-novelist-style sly hints about the role of marriage, church and deception in American ethnogenesis. Ahem, digressive sentence over, direct question: What was it like to sail from Devon and Newfoundland. I mean, people did it, by the millions! Canada's most important contribution to the world's inventory of dirty drinking songs is about the "North Atlantic squadron." 

I've posted this Youtube-guaranteed bowdlerised version from Stompin' Tom before, but it's not hurting anyone to do it again. 

So, yeah, not finding it, although I'm pretty sure it's out there and I've just not landed on it. But what I did find is some fine scholarship posted to the web  here, here, and here, and a historiographic recommendation to Jeffrey Bolster's  Mortal Sea, which turns out to be a book which I've bounced off before, so now I've got two copies counting a Kindle edition. Oops. (It seems I wanted Peter Pope's Fish Into Wine, at $57 for a paperback delivered next month. Fuck!) Anyway, I am presented with a thesis which, after reading about early Scottish lawsuits and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York, 2140AD, of all things, I now have something to say.

Summer Trip and a Book: Reza Aslan's Zealot In Ranch Country

 Sometime during his Christmas, 2013 visit to his sister, just as his mental decline was getting in the way of his packrat intellectual curiosity, my father bought a copy of Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House, 2013). The Guardian review describes it as controversial, which must be true, since there's a Wikipedia article. However, when I actually bothered to read the review, it seems that the Guardian has Aslan's number. He is a prominent public Muslim, wrote provocavtively to rile up the rubes, got a hostile interview on Fox, and from there it was just a matter of counting my Dad's money. 

And also my attention, as I read it in my motel room overnight on Wednesday. In my defence, there is only so much you can do with 92-year-olds, Grand Forks, or a body in the midst of an 800km bike trip, and because She-Hulk has so far settled into half-hour episodes, and there the book was on my Dad's shelf. 

But there's a bit, just a bit, more of interest here, including a lede that Aslan buries, for some reason.

Evangelists and Politicians: the Fall of Rome, IV: With Bonus Sacred Spring Engagement (Edited)

 

So I understand that the way to get ahead in this blogging game is to go after the big guns and Brett Devereaux, of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, did a three-parter on the fall of Rome back during the winter. Well, I did a three parter back in 2013, and I could easily do a fourth, and I have some things to say about the things that Devereaux says about the fall of Rome!

Which, big deal. Everyone talks about the fall of Rome. People were talking about it before Edward Gibbon decided it would be a good idea for a big book that would make him famous and offer a sly commentary on the whole thing with America, which everyone was on about back in the day. The idea for the series was foisted on Devereaux by his Patreon patrons, and I am only talking about it because it is a way to focus on the throughline from the Early Iron Age Revival of the State. Also, apart from some minor errors in the ongoing archaeological-reconstruction-of-the-Roman-economy thing, Devereaux mainly put me out by trash-talking Gibbon. Which, the thing about Gibbon is that it is easy to trash talk the man; the writing finger moves on, and all that. But what we know about ancient Rome is still dominated by what ancient Romans said about Ancient Rome, and Gibbon lived in a milieu in which everyone read the ancient Romans in the original, and talked about them. We don't do that today, and it is easy to see how Gibbon might have had a fingertip feel for the way that Romans thought and lived their lives that even a modern archaeologist might lack. 

Also, and most importantly to get at the throughline from Revival to Decline we go by the most prolific literature of ancient Rome, ancient Christian apologetics. and while I am not going to make a point from this literature that Gibbon knew so well, I am going to make a point about it.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIII: For the Bible Told Me So

 

(Richard Gere is only fifteen years older than I am, and was in a BBC show as recently as 2019. I find that I am extremely jealous so I'll repeat the gerbil insinuation)

It has been a while since I visited this topic, but interesting things have come up, so I thought I would write about them. Oh, I can hear you thinking, "But, Erik, weren't you just working on Postblogging Technology, December 1951, II, yesterday?" And I can firmly answer that I don't know where you heard that, but it must be wrong. I would never bail on a postblogging entry after realising that this was a three-issue-month and that I was running out of time even before realising that I would have to cover three issues of Newsweek and Aviation Week, and that next week I have three days off in a row instead of single days split up, like this week. You can hear more about the rise of the cubicle next week! (There's already been an ad for cubicles in the series, which is why I say, "more." It's going to involve another Illinois university experimental house, State, this time, and the guinea pigs are going to be a select nuclear family and not undergraduate engineers.)

So. Ahem. The general thesis around here is that, the end of the Late Bronze Age was, sometimes, at least, a "successful collapse" responsive to the breakdown of inter-regional exchange, involving a systemic reorientation of economic exploitation from the coastal lowlands to upland niches that were more productive at a subsistence level but less able to generate agricultural and craft exports, albeit still able to take part in exchange via livestock. For lack of surplusses, these polities were necessarily non-state entities, but as they succeeded and grew, economic activity pushed downslope to the lowlands to exploit biotically productive lacustrine environments, giving rise to what I think I dubbed "lagoon states" on the model of Carthage, in particular. 

In all of this, I have been neglecting what might be the paradigmatic case, the Land of Israel. 

The Bishop's Sea: Train Oil, The Atlantic, and Africa

 As close to Sable Island as to Europe, but not the doorstep of America: The Island of Crows. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXII: Roman Britain's Window Into the Sacred Spring

 The Roman Empire arrived in the United Kingdom in 43AD and left it in 408BC. These are relatively late and early dates compared with adjacent regions of northwestern Europe. I think we can probably argue that they are latest and earliest for some class of  normal Roman provinces that I haven't seen constructed but feel plausibly could be. It has a good claim to be the most economically backward province so integrated, in the northwest or absolutely. This makes the archaeological signal of the comparatively short-lived Roman occupation unusually easy to pick out.

As if that were not enough, modern Britain is quite a well-developed place, with a strong archaeological rescue requirement. This makes for a fast pace of construction in south-eastern Britain, and lots of archaeological work, published to an increasingly enormous "grey literature" available to British archaeologists. For all that archaeologists complain about the loss of sites and precious information to general construction and modern deep ploughing, we are in an unusually good, perhaps even uniquely good position to understand what happened when the Romans came. This may, or may not, give us some additional insight into the reordering of human life that I have dubbed the "Sacred Spring."  

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State: The Axial Age?

 

Not that I'm complaining or anything, but the Academia.edu algorithm can bombard you with tangents if once you reveal some idle curiosity to it. In its most recent assault on my attention span, I got a whole lot of papers and monographs related to religious change in Late Antiquity, and, in the midst of the bombardment, Guy Stroumsa's "The End of Sacrifice: Religious Mutations in Late Antiquity." Dr. Stroumsa is a historian of comparative religion, and it turns out that the end of animal sacrifice is important to those guys, so Stroumsa is onto the theological implications like nobody's business.

Fine. I'm not the Thought Police. If theology is your bag, it's your bag. The problem is that it isn't what I do around here. Here, it seems like a drastic transformation in the pastoral economy ought to have implications for land use, agronomics, taxation and transportation infrastructure, not to mention the rise of cavalry heavy armies. But people aren't talking about this, above and beyond the role that cavalry and Christianity has played in everyone's discussion of the  Fall of the Roman Empire since, like, forever.

That's not a project I'm going to be following up on any time soon, but Stroumsa is an emeritus at the Hebrew University now, tidying up a lifetime of productive scholarship, and while I was offered "The End of Sacrifice" as a freestanding download, somehow I ended up with the version bundled into 2015's The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity.  As monographs go, it's a bit of fix-up of the kind you associate with Brill, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and a little taste of that, in parallel with Robert G. Hoyland's Seeing Islam as Others Saw It left me with some questions about the Axial Age and early Zoroastrianism that bear on a project I am allowing myself to pursue: The Early Iron Age Revival of the State.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, 17: "Boiled in alkalis and then laid out in the sun and wind to bleach:"

 Thus F. H. Bramwell, who begins his very brief discussion of the "chlorine bleaching powder industry" (F. H. Bramwell, "Mechanical Engineering in the Chemical Industry," Engineering, 24 June 1949: 597--600, for those coming in late) with the observation that in the vague, early times before the chemical industry, crofters used to boil cloth in alkalis, than lay them out to bleach. "Chlorine was found to expedite the process," and "chlorine stills" were developed for the home production of chlorine. He goes on to describe the Weldon still, which doesn't seem very homemade to me, and says that it worked by the oxidation of hydrochloric acid with manganese dioxide.I assume that manganese dioxide was a common industrial earth, and that people were burning salt in sulphates to produce hydrochloric acid. Which, as these things go, is actually a reasonably safe thing to do.

Or perhaps that's just the sort of thing that Professor Bramwell had learned to say about doings on Britain's blasted heaths. 

Fresh from war work at "the X Site,"  just outside Rhydymwyn, Flintshire, or perhaps just from investigating it, the erstwhile Major Bramwell knew from wild chemistry on wild moors. (Which is to say, I am not giving this trivia up.)

Professor Bramwell explains that Weldon still was assembled of locally-available flagstones, boiled in tar if of porous stone, with seams closed by more tar, hemp cords, and external ties. The aqueous acid was collected as it dripped out of the still. Making bleaching powder involves some extra steps, of which the most hair-raising involves men with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths, raking a powder of hydrated lime laid on the floor of the insufferably hot still until it was deemed sufficiently saturated for sale.

Just in case the imagery I'm invoking isn't explicit enough already:

Camels, Salt, and the Rise of Islam: Some Small Reflections on a Minor Controversy on Someone Else's Blog

Westwold, British Columbia, lies in the trees at the far left. The view is from the shoulder of Highway 97C. Arable bottomland stretches to the right of the picture and beyond Westwold proper. It's quite a big piece of land, is what I'm saying.

British Columbia Highway 97 has a familiar and storied number for those who've taken long vacations on the Pacific slope, continuing the California-Washington-Oregon route number for the simple reason that it is the Canadian extension of that road. In its earliest recorded form, it follows the Okanogan River, becoming the Okanagan Trail at Osoyoos once it crosses the border and the regional spelling changes. Once into Canada, many old-time travellers on the Okanagan Trail wanted to get to the Cariboo gold fields, which requires crossing from the Okanagan- Columbia basin to the Fraser-Thompson basin at Kamloops, which happens to be where my sister and her family are now living. 

About halfway from Vernon to Kamloops,  Highway 97C runs through the unincorporated community of Westwold, which lies in a peculiar, glacial valley suspended about 200m above both river basins. Westwold is only one of three major areas of flat, arable land along the route. Since that kind of farm country is rare in British Columbia, it might seem surprisingly little-used, but it is probably too high and too cold for fruit, and back when steep climbs and bad winter weather actually mattered to travellers, it was avoided in favour of the slightly longer route running through Salmon Arm. Traditionally, Westwold was the  winter pasture of the nearby Douglas Lake Ranch. 

I could talk about this at even greater length, but really my only point would be that I was thinking about mountains and winter pasture a great deal this past week, and I travelled through Westwold three times in four days. Since the thing I wasn't doing was reading and writing towards the next postblogging installment, I thought that I would talk about something else. Specifically, a reading that bloomed over at Brad Delong's blog not incidental to my own attempts to plough through Raoul McLaughlin's Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean. 

The Bishop's Sea (And, incidentally and Minimally, a Technical Appendix): Coldingham

Since I'm in the very earliest stages of putting together Postblogging Technology, January 1949, I: Uhm, Something Clever I Hope, thanks to Lameen for starting an easily followed hare!

Besides, with Brexit speeding rapidly towards the next thing that happens, what better time to return to the theme of European immigrants overrunning sea-girt Albion?

By Tom1955 - Based on an extract of a small part of the map of Berwickshire in
Philips Handy Administrative Atlas of Scotland, 1900 (out of copyright),
which was then editted and enhanced to show Coldingham.
Previously published: No prior publication, CC BY-SA 3.0,
 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50014872

That's Coldingham, Berwickshire, Scotland, a little off centre courtesy of the Atlas of Hillforts site, via a piece of Microsoft software that's trying to compete with Google Earth. (Which reminds me of a new phrase I learned a few months ago. "Good hustle, Redmond.") It's off-centre because the hillfort in question is at St. Abb's Head, a brisk pre-lunch walk from Coldingham proper.

Britain being Britain, even an unoccupied nature reserve has a Wikipedia page, to which you can refer if you'd like to know a bit more about this bit of scenery. If the world already throws more links than anyone wants to follow at you, I have deployed my snipping tool for a bit more intellectual property theft: 

By Emoscopes - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4155435

St. Aebbe's Head has been associated with St. Aebbe of Coldingham since at least 1200, when an official history of the Palatine Bishopric of Durham claimed that, at the time that a cell of Durham was established at Coldingham proper, there was a cult of St. Aebbe at St. Abb's Head. The Venerable Bede tells us that St. Aebbe, daughter of Aethelfrith of Bernicia and sister of Oswald, King in the North, founded "double monasteries" (monasteries for monks and nuns) at Ebchester and then at a place that he calls Urbs Coludi. Since "Coludi" is a British name, it follows that the "Urbs Coludi" is an antediluvian hillfort, or possibly a spectacular coastal setting similar to Lindisfarne. It is then inferred that the name got tired of the draft and wandered inland a bit to Kirk Hill in Coldingham village, where Coldingham Priory sat until its secularisation during the Reformation. 

This isn't exactly airtight, but it is solidly in line with the information that we do have, and points in various directions, so archaeological confirmation of a Northumbrian-era elite site at Coldingham is a useful contribution to the problem of the plantation of the Atlantic. 

A (Mostly) Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1948, I; Hydraulic Despotism

This was going to be a 100% technological appendix, albeit with a reference to Karl Wittfogel, about this.

Then I scanned the election numbers of Time and Newsweek and decided that I couldn't pass up a bit of digressive cultural look-what-I-foundism.

At an earlier date, it was going to be part II of October postblogging, but my work schedule was massively upended mid-week. I know that this is an old song, but, point is, my writing plan was shot, and that's that. I'll add, again, that the aging Canadian workforce is increasingly a disaster like that 1919 molasses flood that killed 21 people. It doesn't matter if the flood wave is slow as molasses if you don't get out of the fucking way!* Since this is tied to a labour shortage of twenty years standing that isn't eliciting the textbook response (MOAR MONEY), one is left with the conclusion that it is some kind of collective action problem. So, hey, Canada, get with the collective action. 

One more plea for Something To Be Done fired off into the uncaring ether, it's on to the substance of the post. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XII: The Queen of May

Most publicity shots from Duel in the Sun feature Jane Russell's boobs against a backdrop of hay. Jennifer Jones is this blog's Queen of May for 2018. (Thanks to all the gals who came out: Also, if it comes up, the blog's choice is distinct from the author's.)

And this image of a British wildflower meadow is cheerfully scraped from a "How to" article in the Daily Telegraph explaining how to go about creating your own wildflower meadow on a few hectares of your land for which you can't think of any other use. But setting my clumsy attempt to start class warfare aside (we're all in this together, you know!), let's just stop and meditate on spring and flowers and fertility and the mysterious way in which they're connected, deep in the human psyche.  

Done? Enough meditation! What about scythes?

Er, yeah. No, I mean like this,

as it turns out that haymowing re-enactors are seriously a thing these days. The idea of dueling with scythes isn't completely preposterous, given that the fifty-centimeter-plus long scythe is the second largest Iron Age toolblade after the sword, and your typical scythe saw fan order of magnitude more use during its lifetime than your typical sword. That quietly and unobtrusively puts it in position to claim the title of apex technology for hand blacksmithing, which makes it all the more remarkable that its history is so obscure. I do have some results to report, or I would be talking about my recent correspondence with Dietrich Eckhardt, but I want to be brief, since, in pursuing the subject, I was sidetracked into buying Manning's "major new history of economic life in the Mediterranean in the Iron Age," and Marc van de Mierop's Philosophy before Greece, and may eventually have something to report. 

God Speed the Plough! Recapping Two Collapses of Complex Society in Light of Planting and Hoarding

Lotus bread; Or, actually, a raw bread made with oat flour, sunflower meal, hemp and chia seeds as well as lotus root.  Recipe at Shokuikuaustralia (Current website for Melbourne raw food enthusiasts.)

First off, apologies all around, because Nymphaea caerula, the blue lotus, one of the three species present in the Nile, contains " [an] aporphine having activity as a non-selective dopamine agonist," and it is a controlled substance in the Baltic states. That being said, some people get high by chewing an entire sheet of Zantac, and I kind of doubt that the Early Iron Age had a blue-lotus-related public health emergency going on.

It most certainly did have a problem with people who were tempted to take off into the marshes and get away from it all.

"A happy day, as we go down to the water-meadow
As we snare birds and catch many fish in Two-Waters [Fayum]
And the catcher and the harpooner come to us
As we draw the nets full of fowl
We moor our skiff at the thicket
And put offerings on the fire For Sobek, Lord of the Lake"
. . . I would do as my heart desires
When the country was my town
When the top of the water-meadow was my dwelling
No one could part me from the people my desires and from my friends
I would spend the day in the place of my longing
In the . . and the papyrus clumps
When it was dawn, I would have a snack
And be far away, walking in the place of my heart [Fragment of a New Kingdom poem; quoted in part from Blouin, trans. Parkinson, 1998, but lifted from here; reconstruction indications omitted] 

These are thoughts related to last week's inadvertently meaty post, thanks to Katherine Blouin, who has given us so much to think about. So it's good that I need to get a low-effort post out of the way. (Work on the postblogging posts will coincide with a trip to 100 Mile House for my youngest niece's elementary school graduation. Go Aly!)

The collapse of complex societies used to be big! With drama! Cities left to ruin; economies transformed, technologies changed. None of this dragging-out "secular stagnation" thing for the Ancients, no sir! Lay yourself down a nice "destruction/dark earth" layer, and go off and live in the mountains or the swamp or wherever. 

With some exceptions: Egypt made it through the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Fall of the Roman Empire well enough. It looks as though the country was uniquely suited to complex society (no need to spell out why, I suppose). It didn't go entirely unscathed, however. Egyptologists divide the Ancient Egyptian past into three periods of high monarchy, and three "Intermediate Periods," although, as the maths of group theory will suggest, one of those Intermediate periods can't have been Intermediate. (The trick is that we don't count the Persian-Ptolemaic-Roman interlude as an Egyptian monarchy; so the Third Intermediate can also be the last period --unless we throw in a brief phase of Egyptian revival in the Classical Period, as we can if we want, for we are licensed historians. 

What made Egypt special, in comparison with, say Roman Britain? My conclusions probably aren't worth the electrons they're written on, but the evidence I rely on is building up, and really ought to be accounted for in a good theory.

Lotus Eaters: Flights and Fragments of the Year 251

Rubens, Consacration of Decius Mus

As the story goes, Publius Decius Mus, consul for 340 BC, was so eager for victory over the Sabines in battle that he consacrated ("dedicated/devoted himself") to the Dii Manes and the Earth.  His life was then duly exacted on the battlefield by the chthonic gods of earth, which seems like a bit of a cheat in terms of assessing the sincerity of his commitment, but at least meant that the gods didn't have to worry about organising a re-battle. This was deemed to be a sufficiently edifying example of old Roman patriotism that it passed Livy's not very high critical standards for choosing old family stories for the History of Rome. Or, he made it up at the behest of his boss, Augustus, as part of the first emperor's programmed of religious reforms disguised as restorations. This seems less likely, but, either way, those old Romans were weird.

The relevance here is that Trajan Decius was Emperor from 249 to 251, and died in battle with an army of Goths invading Rome's Balkan provinces in the last year. This was the first time that a Roman emperor died in a losing battle with a 'barbarian' enemy. It's hard to emphasise just what a cataclysmic event this was. Back in the day chief executives fought battles, they rarely lost, and even more rarely died. Skillful handlers knew how to choose battles, and when to bundle the boss off the field.

On the other hand, what do you do with a chief executive you can't handle? You might notice a big caveat to my generalisation, above. In old English and more recent Moghul civil wars, the losing king pretty much always died. I'm going to suggest that that is because there was a different political dynamic at work in which death-in-battle was part of the succession process, and those handlers stood ready at hand to facilitate the unfolding of political life.

Game of Thrones hasn't yet given us a scene of summary murder on the battlefield, probably because it's anticlimactic, and wild dogs devouring infants has a higher Q rating. 

Exactly that has been inferred about Decius' death.

Thanks to the recent publication of additional restored fragments of a history of the period, we are now positioned for another dive into the moment. A couple of additional pages of the history of an entire empire over a generation are transformative!

It's a little eye-raising that it's still hard to establish who was emperor when in the middle of the Third Century, when we also know the ownership and use of long lists of farms in the districts of the Mendesian theme of the Province of Egypt at the turn of the Fourth Century, about fifty years later. It is true that this has a great deal to do with accidents of survival; but here's the thing. Historians use what they have, not what they wish they had, or what they make up. In a ground-breaking recent study, Katherine Blouin has used papyrus documents from a fiscal archive in that theme to reconstruct a significant juncture of rebellion and social collapse in the northeastern corner of the "triangular landscape" of the Nile delta in a way that might shed some light on the crisis of 250.

The Fall of Rome, IX: Transhumance and Local Elites

Transhumant pastoral agriculture is the movement of herds of livestock from one pasture, for fairly obvious reasons. 

That being said, there is "transhumant" agriculture, and "transhumant agriculture." On at least two occasions in the last millennium, herding peoples have moved between the Dzungarian Basin north of Urumchi in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and the Volga steppes north of the Caspian Sea in Russia; in the 1870s, sheep were routinely herded from the Midwest around Chicago to ranges in Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, and back. This is long distance transhumance, and clearly a very different thing than having a farm at the bottom of a mountain/on the bench above a drowning river valley, and taking the sheep to the fodder in season.

The argument here is that the fall of the Roman Empire (and by that I mean the crisis of the Third Century) is linked too, but not caused by, the breakdown of long-distance transhumant pastoral agriculture. It's not a new argument, in general, but the particular sequence of events I am pushing is perhaps somewhat novel. More importantly, the evidence to support the argument is accumulating. Which is why this post --apart from my needing a break from more ambitious projects. 

Night crew rotation! (Semi-autobiographical comment on the persistent labour shortage-that's-somehow-not-a-shortage.)

First of all, obviously long-distance transhumant agriculture is primordial. Take the "agriculture" out, and we humans have been doing it for a very long time, because it's just another way of saying that they're following the herds, which organise themselves for "transhumance" perfectly well without human intervention.

(This is where I link to the "Buffalo Trace" that became America's first interstate, and invited everyone to wonder at the depths and mysteries of the founding of the United States, at the first glimmers of the written record.)

Here's a picture of the sheep moving out of a paddock on a big Australian "station," as they call them, because  Australians speak English funny.

The condition of the top cover in the foreground demonstrates why you would want to transhumant. Ah ha, you may say! Isn't transhumant herding between high, mountain pastures, and low ones. Aren't we all romantic about it. Didn't the Silencers have an inadvertent hit when they recorded a rock version of the classic Scottish folk air, Wild Mountain Thyme? Why, yes, they did, and yes, it sometimes is. 

Come, and trip it as you go
On the light fantastic toe;
And in thy right hand lead with thee	35
The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty;

That Milton. Wild and crazy guy. So, if Australians should decide to focus on producing sheep, nature has put a pretty big obstacle in their way, in that their country is pretty darn flat, with an average elevation of 330 m. I wrote that first sentence, editing not included, before I actually looked up my facts. It is a lot higher than I expected, and for a moment I was wondering if the intuition that guided my comment above was wrong. Fortunately, 330m turns out to be the lowest for any continent, Wikipedia says).

Recapping the Fall of Rome: Game of Thrones

Lots of caption here, because credit where credit is due. This is Abdelratif Reda's fresh goat cheese, served with apricot jam on a bagel in the medina of Rabat, Morocco.. The photograph is by Eloise Schieferdecker (imputed c. 2015), and appears in an article by Zoë Hu, running in the online lifestyles magazine Zester Daily 

Did Rome have a crisis? The basic outline of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire is Decadent First Century-Golden Second Century-Third Century Crisis-Fourth Century Dominate-Fifth Century Fall-Sixth Century-

Cliche, but good point. Let's just stay the heck away from the Byzantine Empire or whatever it is. 

The confusing thing here is that the crisis comes in the middle. There's an elaborate theory of politics in which governments pass through cycles of development. Domitian's government is a "Dominate," replacing an earlier "Principate." Yes, the restored empire is a different, and lesser thing, rather like the old Chinese Western and Eastern dynasties, but it is restored.

In this analysis, it is all about politics. A number of specific factors make the Empire politically infeasible: the government is badly structured; The location of the Roman capital is bad; it is overspending to buy army support; changing elites mean that new groups will have to seize control of the imperial office, whatever the short term cost of political stability. Etc. Not a single mention of cream cheese for breakfast!

Since I am on record as arguing that the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west is due to a breakdown in long-distance trade causing a shortage of money and local deflation in the far west, it might be time to go through the long, long list of emperors and usurpers and highlight the factors that, I think, make a purely political explanation inadequate.

The Fall of Rome, VII: Bread, Circusses

Those are some happy elephants, because Tirupati deluxe bran is the best bran. 

iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses

--Juvenal, Satire X. (Note that like any Nineteenth Century parliamentarian on his feet to deliver a zinger on the Balkan Question, I've cut and pasted out of Wikipedia.)

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

- Elmer T. Peterson.

In this week of so much going astray down south, the fact that the nominee for American Secretary of Labour has riffed on the idea that democracies are destroyed by social welfare benefits ("bread and circusses") might easily take a back seat to more pressing concerns about his boss. 

But! I'll start with the attribution, which is a spanking new, modern thing for which we can thank Google, even if my store of gratitude to Google is being drawn down by the gradual disintegration of Google Books, although that's a rant for another day. Traditinally, we see this quote attributed to much more famous people than Elmer T. Peterson, and he himself began this tradition by attributing it to a  a minor Nineteenth Century thinker with a funny name. He did so in a 1951 letter to the editor published in a minor Oklahoman paper, which raises the question of how it entered the public record so quickly. Peterson himself was a writer, but his literary record [pdf] is pretty second rate, and it would be surprising if many people took him very seriously. "Alexander Fraser Tyttle," on the other hand, is someone to reckon with! I suppose.

Perhaps Peterson noticed the general shortage of actual examples of welfare payments destroying democracies. After all, he may have had the Juvenal "bread and circusses" line in mind, and perhaps even has some recollection of being rather brusquely informed that Juvenal came a full century after the Republic. Perhaps, although this is asking a lot of the basically optimistic mind of the early 1950s, which feared only communist roentgens,  someone even pointed out that rich tax evaders have a better record of destroying regimes than poor handout beneficiaries.

This is what makes the Roman example so handy, in that rich people might evade taxes and even attend gladiatorial games, but they certainly do not stand in bread lines. Not that Peterson needed to explore things very deeply. Everyone knows that the ancient Romans gave out a corn dole to the urban poor of Rome. 

But!

Cheesecake Factory.