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Ok, I'm officially fascinated, especially as I haven't had a history class involving anything before Rome. Is there a good, general book on the Bronze Age and its mysterious finale? I sort of wonder, though, in a completely inexpert way, if the simplest explanation isn't simply that Bronze age cultures became rich, powerful, and politically interconnected to the point where war escalated far out of control, somewhat like World War I+II blowing up Europe and taking a few empires with it. Or is the scale of the collapse just too large to explain that easily?
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Nov 14, 2012 04:41
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Well the cause of the collapse of everything seems to be the fact that those drat sea folks were going around disrupting sea trade routes. And these trade routes were very important to the entire Mediterranean area economy. So even though it didn't exactly help that these people would go around looting and plundering and killing folks, the biggest problem was the destroyed sea trade.
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Nov 14, 2012 04:50
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Base Emitter posted:Ok, I'm officially fascinated, especially as I haven't had a history class involving anything before Rome. Is there a good, general book on the Bronze Age and its mysterious finale? It's also important to remember that despite the destruction done to some of the main civilization centers, like the sea people invasion of Egypt, it is not like whole civilizations burned to the ground. The majority of people lived basically the same way that they always had, only the elites who were the ones writing things down and living in the palaces really changed. If it helps, you can think of it as sort of like the "dark ages" of Europe. Basically, not a lot really changed for 90% of the populations. Government more-or-less decentralized. It was somewhat less safe (you could say much less safe, but nobody really knows) but there were always pirate and cattle raids anyway, and groups of assholes from the next hamlet over starting fights.
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Nov 14, 2012 04:58
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Can anybody say more about Bronze Age collapse in Egypt? I mean, I know a decent amount about the Third Intermediate Period, but not really how it fit into the broader narrative of the mysterious Mediterranean apocalypse.
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Nov 14, 2012 05:47
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I don't know a lot. Egypt was the only civilization to make it through okay. At the time Egypt controlled the Levant and some other territory, they lost all that during the fighting. Egypt proper (remember that in ancient times Egypt is basically just the Nile valley, no one cared about the desert) was attacked by the Sea Peoples but they were able to hold them off. Egypt's international trade collapsed with everyone else's, and there may have been famine, but they made it through. You could argue that Egypt never fully recovers from it. They had been the major power of the region in the bronze age, they remain important and influential but they never have much power again, and then they get conquered by Alexander and that's the end of Egyptian independence until 1953.
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Nov 14, 2012 05:53
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Speaking of destruction in the ancient world: "At this time the total area of Nineveh comprised about 7 square kilometres (1,730 acres), and fifteen great gates penetrated its walls. An elaborate system of eighteen canals brought water from the hills to Nineveh, and several sections of a magnificently constructed aqueduct erected by Sennacherib were discovered at Jerwan, about 65 kilometres (40 mi) distant.[8] The enclosed area had more than 100,000 inhabitants (maybe closer to 150,000), about twice as many as Babylon at the time, placing it among the largest settlements worldwide. Nineveh's greatness was short-lived. In around 627 BC after the death of its last great king Ashurbanipal, the Neo-Assyrian empire began to unravel due to a series of bitter civil wars, and Assyria was attacked by its former vassals, the Babylonians and Medes. From about 616 BC, in a coalition with the Scythians and Cimmerians, they besieged Nineveh, sacking the town in 612 BC, after which it was razed to the ground. Most of the people in the city who could not escape to the last Assyrian strongholds in the north and west were either massacred or deported out of the city. Many unburied skeletons were found by the archaeologists at the site. The Assyrian empire then came to an end by 605 BC, the Medes and Babylonians dividing its colonies between them."
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Nov 14, 2012 06:02
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't know a lot. Egypt was the only civilization to make it through okay. At the time Egypt controlled the Levant and some other territory, they lost all that during the fighting. Egypt proper (remember that in ancient times Egypt is basically just the Nile valley, no one cared about the desert) was attacked by the Sea Peoples but they were able to hold them off. Egypt's international trade collapsed with everyone else's, and there may have been famine, but they made it through. You could argue that Egypt never fully recovers from it. They had been the major power of the region in the bronze age, they remain important and influential but they never have much power again, and then they get conquered by Alexander and that's the end of Egyptian independence until 1953. They bounced around in the Persian Empire before Alexander. Athenian fleets supporting Egyptian revolts against the King was one of the ways the Delian League kept itself occupied.
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Nov 14, 2012 06:31
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the JJ posted:They bounced around in the Persian Empire before Alexander. Athenian fleets supporting Egyptian revolts against the King was one of the ways the Delian League kept itself occupied. Ah, I couldn't remember if they were Persian controlled or not. Okay, either way, they never recover their bronze age power and spend the next 3000 years being oppressed. Egypt remains a cultural force though, if not a military one, and the Nile's ability to produce fucktons of grain always gives them a bit more leverage than your average client kingdom/province/whatever.
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Nov 14, 2012 06:36
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the JJ posted:They bounced around in the Persian Empire before Alexander. Athenian fleets supporting Egyptian revolts against the King was one of the ways the Delian League kept itself occupied. Egypt wasn't doing so hot even before that. The Nubians conquered it c. 760, and then the Assyrians came in and did their thing (pyramids of skulls, graphic tortures, cities erased). The Egyptians briefly gained independence after that, but then Cambyses conquered Egypt in 525 or so. Of course, they never accepted it easily, Xerxes, for example, had to delay his Greek expedition for severa; years because of a massive rebellion in Egypt. Of course, there was quasi-independence under the Ptolmeys, even though it was ruled by an inbred Macedonian elite, they adopted Egyptian rituals and religion to cement their rule over the peasants.
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Nov 14, 2012 13:10
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ScottP posted:Do we have much on how glamorous the lives of the hetaerae of ancient Athens really were? It's really cool that they were expected to be educated, especially in a culture that attached women to the household, and it's incredible that one of them had so much pull that Perikles dropped his wife for her (and she apparently helped write his speeches? that was my professor's claim), but I can't imagine the average hetaera had that great of a life. Sorry, but could someone explain who they were? I don't think I've ever come across the term.
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Nov 14, 2012 13:56
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Base Emitter posted:Ok, I'm officially fascinated, especially as I haven't had a history class involving anything before Rome. Is there a good, general book on the Bronze Age and its mysterious finale? On the other hand, it might not be the best introduction book, sitting at over 900 pages, spending 400 pages on specific archaeological sites and generally seems written with historians or students of ancient history in mind. It also doesnt say a whole lot about the collapse specifically (looking at the table of contents +- 12 pages), but it should give you a bibliography to check for more information.
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Nov 14, 2012 15:05
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't know a lot. Egypt was the only civilization to make it through okay. At the time Egypt controlled the Levant and some other territory, they lost all that during the fighting. Egypt proper (remember that in ancient times Egypt is basically just the Nile valley, no one cared about the desert) was attacked by the Sea Peoples but they were able to hold them off. Egypt's international trade collapsed with everyone else's, and there may have been famine, but they made it through. You could argue that Egypt never fully recovers from it. They had been the major power of the region in the bronze age, they remain important and influential but they never have much power again, and then they get conquered by Alexander and that's the end of Egyptian independence until 1953. I can't see how Egypt wasn't independent under the Ptolemys, sure they were a culturally different ruling class than the population but then you could say that the English weren't independent under the Normans. Furthermore the Fatimid caliphate and the Mamluks were Empires based in Egypt. Muhammed Ali was also pretty much independent.
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Nov 14, 2012 15:52
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Munin posted:Sorry, but could someone explain who they were? I don't think I've ever come across the term. My understanding (with the caveat that I haven't studied them specifically): Hetairai were a female social class in ancient Greece. There are similarities to Japanese geisha, but hetairai were typically more independent and politically active. It's important to note that they weren't prostitutes (known as pornai), although they sometimes were sexually involved with clients. They weren't on the same sociopolitical level as male citizens, but were far more powerful, connected, and socially independent than the average woman, and were welcomed in many places we think (and they generally thought) of as male-only, like the Symposium. Think of them as a combination of lobbyists, socialites, and ambassadors. (I can't remember if there's any evidence of hetairai being xenai* of clients in other city-states, but I wouldn't be surprised.) * Xenos/xena meant "stranger" or "foreigner", but it also was used to mean something like "guest-friend" - your xenos was someone to whom you'd granted basically unlimited hospitality in your city-state and from whom you enjoyed the same hospitality in their hometown. It also carried the connotation of "political ally" or "personal ambassador"; you could rely on a xenos to get things done for you in their home city, just as they could rely on you to do the same for them. SneezeOfTheDecade fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Nov 14, 2012 |
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Nov 14, 2012 16:33
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Just to add, Athens is weird in that we think of it as the land of Plato and Aristotle, the birthplace of democracy and freedom and all that jazz. While that's certainly true, Athenian culture stands out as treating women exceptionally poor, even by the standards of the time. Many of the customs that we associate with modern Saudi Arabia would have been familiar to Athenians - covering women's bodies, veiling, ensuring they weren't outside without a male relative to escort them, segregating the interior of the house, and so on. Hetairae were, as Besesoth mentioned, Athenian sex workers that, for some unknown reason, were allowed to break the gender norms. There's a couple stories that my hazy memory says are in  at how the Athenians treated women. (Thinking about it further, I'm pretty sure it's a story about Gorgo, Leonidas's queen, which would make it from H-dot.)
fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Nov 14, 2012 |
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Nov 14, 2012 16:52
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sullat posted:There was an anecdote about a hetaira that was being tried in Athens for blasphemy; the defense attorney had her strip down in court with the argument that someone so good lookin' was so favored by the gods that they couldn't possibly be guilty. Ah yes, the inverse glove don't fit argument.
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Nov 14, 2012 17:21
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Xguard86 posted:Ah yes, the inverse glove don't fit argument.
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Nov 14, 2012 18:41
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A quick glance tells me that lots of this migration happened because of climate change. So how did climate change effect the make up of the people and nations of the mediterranean? Edit: Spelling. My year 12 Ancient History teacher would be ashamed. Big Willy Style fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Nov 14, 2012 |
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Nov 14, 2012 19:26
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Big Willy Style posted:A quick glance tells me that lots of this migration happened because of climate change. So how did climate change effect the make up of the people and nations of the mediterranean? The climate change has a bigger effect on the peoples of the steppes and the northern forests. It gets colder, the grazing season gets shorter, so they move south, "displacing" whoever was already there. Those people then move south, "displacing" some other peoples, and so forth.
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Nov 14, 2012 19:46
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Tao Jones posted:Just to add, Athens is weird in that we think of it as the land of Plato and Aristotle, the birthplace of democracy and freedom and all that jazz. While that's certainly true, Athenian culture stands out as treating women exceptionally poor, even by the standards of the time. Many of the customs that we associate with modern Saudi Arabia would have been familiar to Athenians - covering women's bodies, veiling, ensuring they weren't outside without a male relative to escort them, segregating the interior of the house, and so on. I think being the land of Aristotle and "treating women exceptionally poor" kind of goes hand in hand. Aristotle posted:Females are weaker and colder in nature, and we must look upon the female character as being a sort of natural deficiency.
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Nov 15, 2012 01:16
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Was Athens really the birthplace of democracy? As I understand it, the modern form of democracy that America has comes from German things through England and its aristocratic traditions. Ancient Rome always was around as one example to follow, as well as being the origins of the oldest legal traditions in Europe. All that goes back directly to Athens is the word. I also find it a little hard to believe that Athens was the only place in the ancient world to set up a system where a reasonably large group of people got to all have a say in what the state does.
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Nov 15, 2012 03:28
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Lord Tywin posted:I can't see how Egypt wasn't independent under the Ptolemys, sure they were a culturally different ruling class than the population but then you could say that the English weren't independent under the Normans. Furthermore the Fatimid caliphate and the Mamluks were Empires based in Egypt. Muhammed Ali was also pretty much independent. I know little about Egypt because I never cared. My impression was Alexander -> Rome -> Caliphate (not based in Egypt) -> Ottomans. They got hosed up pretty bad in the collapse, in any case--but they did survive it. I guess the Ptolemys do count as independent Egypt, just not an Egyptian ruled independent Egypt.
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Nov 15, 2012 03:40
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SlothfulCobra posted:Was Athens really the birthplace of democracy? As I understand it, the modern form of democracy that America has comes from German things through England and its aristocratic traditions. Ancient Rome always was around as one example to follow, as well as being the origins of the oldest legal traditions in Europe. All that goes back directly to Athens is the word. I don't think that when people say "the birthplace of democracy", they mean a literally unbroken line of democratic governments. They just mean "they were the first people to do it". And, honestly, they really were. Nearly everywhere else in the ancient world - even other Greek city-states - had sole or shared monarchies or dictatorships. The prevailing government structure leading out of the Dark Age was the Big Man style, which was just about exactly what it sounds like - the biggest, toughest, most powerful guy got to be in charge. Most of the city-states ended up with a system that evolved from that, including Sparta's dual(?) kingship and the various dictatorships and minor kingships around the Aegean. In fact, even Athens had a dictator for a while, called a tyrannos - yes, literally "tyrant", although it didn't initially have that connotation, and it was often an elected position at that and wasn't very consistent. If you have time, read the story of Peisistratos, the second-to-last tyrant of Athens (he was a decent guy, but really wanted to be in charge, and went to kind of absurd lengths to do it, including riding into town in an ornate chariot with a peasant girl made up to look like Athena singing his praises), and his sons. Peisistratos himself ended up being relatively popular; he was a benevolent dictator and enacted an awful lot of public works to better the lives of average citizens. His sons, Hipparchos and Hippias, took over when he died, and were also generally well-liked, right up until Hipparchos was murdered in broad daylight; Hippias promptly turned into a total rear end in a top hat. A couple years later, the King of Sparta, Cleomenes I, was instructed by the Oracle at Delphi to help Hippias's enemies overthrow him, and he did so - only to turn back around and try to put Hippias back on the tyrant's throne after it came out that those enemies of Hippias had bribed the Oracle to lie to Cleomenes. Between Hippias being an rear end in a top hat (which is where we get the negative connotation on "tyrant") and Cleomenes generally dicking around in Athens once he'd commandeered the Acropolis and pissing everybody off, the Athenians essentially decided "gently caress tyranny, we'll make our own decisions from now on" and founded the first democracy. It's worth noting, too, that Athenian democracy was considerably more liberal than the Roman Republic; in Athens, any citizen (including, as noted, the hetairai) could participate, where in Rome it was largely limited to the landowning citizens. Athens also had the tradition of ostracism - named after ostrakoi, the potsherds on which votes were cast - which allowed the populace to force one of their own into exile for a certain number of years. This was done by writing the name of the person you wanted to exile on a potsherd and casting it into the pile. The potsherds were counted, and if the person who got the most votes also exceeded a certain threshold, they were exiled - I believe for 10 years. This leads to entertaining stories like that of the politician Aristides "the Just", who was approached by an illiterate man he'd never met before, who wanted him to write down a name for him. Aristides politely asked which name; the man said "that pompous windbag politician Aristides." Aristides asked if that man had done anything to harm him. "No, but it pisses me off hearing him called 'the Just'." Aristides dutifully wrote his own name down (and was, in fact, exiled - and then promptly recalled to Athens to help deal with the Persian War). Short version: yes, Athens is the birthplace of democracy; if there's an earlier version we don't know about it. No, there's not a direct line of descent between Athenian democracy and modern democracy, but that isn't what people mean when they say "birthplace of democracy". Also, Peisistratos is funny as hell. Grand Fromage posted:I know little about Egypt because I never cared. My impression was Alexander -> Rome -> Caliphate (not based in Egypt) -> Ottomans. They got hosed up pretty bad in the collapse, in any case--but they did survive it. Yeah, it depends a lot on what you mean by "independent". The Ptolemys considered themselves Egyptian - they weren't ruling on behalf of anyone else - but not ethnic Egyptian, which was a crucial difference to them. SneezeOfTheDecade fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 04:08
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One of the reasons for the disappearance of literacy after Mycenae and the Hittites fell is that the writing systems like Linear B were pretty much diplomatic and mercantile languages. There was little reason for anyone besides clerks, merchants, or diplomats to be literate, and all those professions depended in large part on the palace-centered societal framework which was the most notable casualty of the collapse. EDIT: Beaten like Hector by Achilles. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 04:54
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Besesoth posted:I don't think that when people say "the birthplace of democracy", they mean a literally unbroken line of democratic governments. They just mean "they were the first people to do it". Hipparchos was, incidentally, murdered for hitting on the wrong man (well, adolescent). Harmodius, the youung man in question, refused because he was already with Aristogeiton. So Hipparchus has Harmodius' sister kicked out of a religious festival for all the young maidens. Harmodius gets royally pissed (Hipparchus basically publicly called his sister a slut, after all) so he and Aristogeiton plot to off the two brothers. They see a co-conspirator talking to one of the two, assume they've been betrayed, and launch the attack on their own, thus only killing the one and the other gets very paranoid. That said, democracy in Athens was pretty complicated. Plato, Socrates, most of the famous Athenians were rich aristo's, and pretty disinclined toward democracy. Lots of mob justice and erratic choices. They had a real bad habit of executing generals when wars went poorly. Also, there was a pretty big underclass of 'resident aliens,' no such thing as birthright citizenship in ancient Greece. Now, they often ended up in Athens by choice (it was a good place to find work) but they wouldn't vote. The hetaera were women and usually noncitizens, and they would not be voting or speaking at the assembly. They were usually foreign ex-slaves; influential, but only if they charmed the right men. They had no direct access to power. Oh, also, slaves. Slaves didn't vote. P.S. My favorite Peisistratos story is that he shows up at the assembly all beat up and cut up and claims to have been attacked by bandits. He asks for money to hire soldiers to protect himself, and promptly used the Assembly's soldiers to occupy the acropolis.
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Nov 15, 2012 04:57
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the JJ posted:The hetaera were women and usually noncitizens, and they would not be voting or speaking at the assembly. They were usually foreign ex-slaves; influential, but only if they charmed the right men. I feel obliged to note that this is exactly the opposite of what I was taught - that many hetairai were not only welcome but invited in the Assembly, and that they could cast votes as citizens (even though, as women, they didn't enjoy some of the other privileges of citizenship). Unfortunately, I don't have sources to back that up (they're in a storage unit about 700 miles away).
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Nov 15, 2012 05:29
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Besesoth posted:It's worth noting, too, that Athenian democracy was considerably more liberal than the Roman Republic; in Athens, any citizen (including, as noted, the hetairai) could participate, where in Rome it was largely limited to the landowning citizens. Athens also had the tradition of ostracism - named after ostrakoi, the potsherds on which votes were cast - which allowed the populace to force one of their own into exile for a certain number of years. This was done by writing the name of the person you wanted to exile on a potsherd and casting it into the pile. The potsherds were counted, and if the person who got the most votes also exceeded a certain threshold, they were exiled - I believe for 10 years. That's a very interesting view of Athenian democracy, since as far as I know from my readings, it was limited to wealthy male citizens at first, with the ability to participate being gradually extended to less wealthy males (under Solon), until finally male citizens would be compensated for participating (under Pericles), meaning they could take time off work to do some voting. But I've never heard any suggestion that women were allowed to participate, much less "resident aliens" and slaves, who comprised at least 2/3rds of the population. Rome also allowed all male citizens to vote, (at least after the creation of the tribunes) even if the tribes were gerry-mandered to hell. sullat fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 05:31
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Besesoth posted:I feel obliged to note that this is exactly the opposite of what I was taught - that many hetairai were not only welcome but invited in the Assembly, and that they could cast votes as citizens (even though, as women, they didn't enjoy some of the other privileges of citizenship). Unfortunately, I don't have sources to back that up (they're in a storage unit about 700 miles away). Wiki says the hetairai, unlike other women, could go to the Symposium, a place for intellectual discussion but not governance. It's most famous for being the site of Plato's Symposium and thus Socrates' discussion of love (e.g. Platonic love). So yeah, a place for rich men to get nude and hit on each other/the totally-not-prostitutes. Maybe that's what you were thinking? e: The symposium is not a specific place or anything. 'A drinking party' is a pretty literal translation. the JJ fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 06:35
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sullat posted:That's a very interesting view of Athenian democracy, since as far as I know from my readings, it was limited to wealthy male citizens at first, with the ability to participate being gradually extended to less wealthy males (under Solon), until finally male citizens would be compensated for participating (under Pericles), meaning they could take time off work to do some voting. But I've never heard any suggestion that women were allowed to participate, much less "resident aliens" and slaves, who comprised at least 2/3rds of the population. Rome also allowed all male citizens to vote, (at least after the creation of the tribunes) even if the tribes were gerry-mandered to hell. I like how "very interesting" means "completely wrong".  But I chose my words carefully, although I was perhaps remiss in my implication that "citizen" implied "male". I'm not sure I'm aware of a contemporary instance where a woman was referred to as a full citizen of Athens. As for the hetairai, theJJ points out that I may be misremembering. And "citizen" in Athens never meant resident aliens or slaves.As far as I'm aware, the distinction you're drawing with regard to wealth and voting seems to draw from "may" vs. "can". Perhaps I should have said that any (male) citizen was permitted to vote - if they could make it to the polls. If there's a source that contradicts that, I'm all ears.  the JJ posted:Wiki says the hetairai, unlike other women, could go to the Symposium, a place for intellectual discussion but not governance. It's most famous for being the site of Plato's Symposium and thus Socrates' discussion of love (e.g. Platonic love). So yeah, a place for rich men to get nude and hit on each other/the totally-not-prostitutes. Maybe that's what you were thinking? That's possible. Like I said, my sources are several hundred miles away and my classwork years in the past, so I'll lay down my claim and back off it for now.
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Nov 15, 2012 12:47
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Grand Fromage posted:I know little about Egypt because I never cared. My impression was Alexander -> Rome -> Caliphate (not based in Egypt) -> Ottomans. They got hosed up pretty bad in the collapse, in any case--but they did survive it.
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Nov 15, 2012 15:25
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Grand Fromage posted:That's one of the many ideas. There's evidence of a gigantic eruption in Iceland around the mid 1100s BCE that probably cooled the Earth a few degrees, which could've started a huge famine. This sounds pretty likely since there was a catastrophic eruption in Iceland in the 1780's that caused the death of one in every five Icelanders as well as 75% of the livestock and affected the climate on the mainland enough to cause widespread crop failure. Something like that could easily have happened before. FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 16:04
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Lord Tywin posted:The Fatimid Caliphate based itself in Egypt after they built Cairo, also speaking about the Ptolemys does anyone know if they had any ruler who was as hosed up as Charles II of Spain? I mean their inbreeding was pretty intense. I've got a running theory that the rulers of Egypt never actually consummated their sibling marriages, because the idea of a family ladder (As opposed to a tree) is sickening. Not that it matters, as a whole, the Ptolemys averaged on the mediocre, and most were vindictive assholes. Like the Seleucids, the family drama was insane, and the dynasty managed nothing of note while the Romans swept across the Mediterranean. Cleopatra must have been alright though, she definitely had a charming personality.  lol (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 15, 2012 18:07
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FreudianSlippers posted:This sounds pretty likely since a catastrophic eruption in Iceland in the 1780's that caused the death of one in every five Icelanders as well as 75% of the livestock and affected the climate on the mainland enough to cause widespread crop failure. The question this leaves me asking is where is the evidence of such an incident? Ice core drilling and analysis is sophisticated enough to have shown definitively whether something like this happened around this time. You would think there would be papers on the subject, and perhaps there are, I'm pretty ignorant of all this stuff, I've just been following this absolutely awesome thread.
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Nov 15, 2012 18:08
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FreudianSlippers posted:This sounds pretty likely since there was a catastrophic eruption in Iceland in the 1780's that caused the death of one in every five Icelanders as well as 75% of the livestock and affected the climate on the mainland enough to cause widespread crop failure. I read somewhere that the king of Denmark (ruler of Iceland) seriously contemplated evacuating the entire icelandic population, because the whole situation was so fubar. Might not be very true, though.
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Nov 15, 2012 23:38
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Is there any good fiction set during the Peloponnesian War?
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Nov 16, 2012 01:58
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epsilon posted:The question this leaves me asking is where is the evidence of such an incident? Ice core drilling and analysis is sophisticated enough to have shown definitively whether something like this happened around this time. You would think there would be papers on the subject, and perhaps there are, I'm pretty ignorant of all this stuff, I've just been following this absolutely awesome thread. Yeah ice cores and stuff. There was definitely a bigass eruption around the time, it's just a question of whether that actually caused anything to go wrong or was just a coincidence. And even if it did cause problems, did it start a climate disruption that made everything else happen? Was it just one more pile of poo poo on top of an already existing pile of poo poo? Nobody knows.
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Nov 16, 2012 01:59
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The two biggest things that hosed things up was 1) Sea People smashing up towns and cities and 2) Sea People disrupting the highly developed trade routes and systems in use. What we don't know is why the Sea People themselves decided to get out there and cause 1 and 2.
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Nov 16, 2012 02:05
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cheerfullydrab posted:Is there any good fiction set during the Peloponnesian War? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwwY9y6O3hw Okay, so that's Anabasis, but it's pretty close, right?
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Nov 16, 2012 02:22
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cheerfullydrab posted:Is there any good fiction set during the Peloponnesian War? Thucydides.  More seriously, I honestly don't know of a lot of modern fiction set in classical Greece or Rome. Contemporariwise, the only thing I can think of is Lysistrata by Aristophanes, which as I recall uses a pastiche of the Peloponnesian War as its backdrop. Xenophon's Anabasis (or "There and Back Again") is roughly the same time period, but focused on a different war. (Fun fact: it's one of the rare attestations in Attic Greek of the word for "bustard"!) So I'll second the request; it's such a fascinating period and nobody seems to do anything with it.(That said, I'm currently plotting a computer game set in a "columnpunk" version of ancient Greece, so if anyone's interested in that I'll keep you informed.) Install Gentoo posted:The two biggest things that hosed things up was 1) Sea People smashing up towns and cities and 2) Sea People disrupting the highly developed trade routes and systems in use. What we don't know is why the Sea People themselves decided to get out there and cause 1 and 2. I hate to beat this horse, but one of the really interesting things to me is that as I recall, all we really know is a) writing stopped, the king/palace-based social structure collapsed in favor of much more local Big Man villages, and art (pottery in particular) seems to have stagnated for a while, and b) there are destruction layers in nearly every major Mediterranean city from around that time, indicating that someone razed the city at that point. The Sea Peoples are the likely culprit, but even the direct evidence we have - like the letter from Ugarit that you quoted - says indirect things like "the enemy". That the Sea Peoples managed a perfect storm of sowing chaos and managed to gently caress up the trade routes and sack the confused and communication-bereft cities is certainly the most likely hypothesis, but it's possible that there was a famine or a plague that resulted in the cities being abandoned, and the Sea Peoples just took advantage of that to lay waste to the empty structures, or that other invaders happened in from a handful of different directions and we're just giving the Sea Peoples the credit, or that half a dozen other interesting but unprovable scenarios played out. I guess what I'm saying is that the fall of the Bronze Age is just sitting there waiting for some speculative-historical-fiction author to write about it. Speaking of destruction layers, the archaeology of Troy/Hisarlik is about the most  story I can think of in recent archaeology. Briefly: Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy 19th-century treasure hunter who honestly believed in and worshiped the Greek gods, decided that the hill Hisarlik, in modern Turkey, was where Troy had been. It turns out he was probably right, but we'll never know for sure, because a) he decided early on that one layer in particular was the Real Troy, and b) one of the tools in his archaeological toolbox was dynamite.Yes: Heinrich Schliemann blew up Hisarlik to get to what he thought was the Real Troy. (Also, Install Gentoo, for some reason I thought your regdate was way earlier than that. I feel like you've been around much longer than I have.) (e: Memo to self: remember how I said you can't apply forum posts to your NaNo wordcount? Yeah, that applies to you too.  )
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Nov 16, 2012 02:34
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Mary Renault wrote several novel about Greece and Greek myth. I really like them. They're a bit outdated in terms of the history but not too bad.
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Nov 16, 2012 02:39
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Install Gentoo posted:The two biggest things that hosed things up was 1) Sea People smashing up towns and cities and 2) Sea People disrupting the highly developed trade routes and systems in use. What we don't know is why the Sea People themselves decided to get out there and cause 1 and 2. I'd say the most popular theory is ~*~something~*~ started a mass migration/invasion of peoples from either northern Europe or the steppes. A climate disruption from Iceland exploding would not have affected the Mediterranean as much as it could've hosed up farming further north, so that could've driven people south and into the civilizations that existed there. Then mass warfare. And the bronze age world was very modern, dependent on a complex web of trade and resource distribution among these giant cities. The warfare hosed that up and everything collapses in a very short period of time. The invading Sea Peoples likely not only disrupted the trade, but then took advantage of the confusion to pillage even more. We're left with a world that recovers some centuries down the line and has all these new ethnic groups that appeared out of nowhere. It's all reasonable and consistent, the problem is just that we have so little evidence surviving from the period that it's impossible to say much with any kind of certainty. We know there was a big eruption. What did it do? We know most of the cities of the bronze age were destroyed. How, by whom? We know the cities that survived are fortified and militarized in a way we don't see before. Is that because they were afraid someone was going to come back? Were the raiders still there, a constant threat for centuries? Was it just warfare between the new strongmen/emerging states? Nobody knows.
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Nov 16, 2012 02:48
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