fucking fascist WESTOIDS love their silly gay little romane boys in their foolish fucking garb and their daft protofascist customs but cannote fathom writing interesting his-fi about da fucking bronze age collapse which is INFINITELY cooler

TO CLARIFY: i do not want anyone to the political right of Stalin to write fuck nor shit about the Bronze Age Collapse lest they focus entirely on da scary migrant Sea Peoples

  • Dolores [love/loves]
    ·
    1 year ago

    somehow i knew it'd be Guy Halsall-esque. we're probably not far out from the synthesis arguments, i'd definitely need to read more specialist stuff but saying "oh only the state & elite collapsed" is a kind of egalitarian sounding thing but it has to be squared with what those people were responsible for and what kind of affects trickled down by their absence. Halsall-type scholarship really likes talking about the common man being unlikely to come to personal harm during the collapse of Rome, but consequently elides things the depreciated elite state had been running which disappeared, like long-distance goods distribution & industrial production---which was not cloistered exclusively in the homes of the elites in the roman period.

    i'm not well read on bronze-age archaeology but i'm suspicious of the characterization of the networks that existed and broke down being exclusively 'elite'---surely more people than a king benefited from bronze products before iron was widespread. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins is the (dramatically titled) book that tries to synthesize & situate "collapse" and "transformation" narratives in the context of the roman west

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      the collapse of Rome

      Isn't that another narrative that's been recontextualized in more recent scholarship? Namely that Rome didn't "collapse" at all so much as slowly decline in the west over several lifetimes, deurbanizing and losing the trade networks that made its elite logistics possible, down to the point that where you can mark a definite "end" it was already functionally irrelevant because its end came after it had lost all of its former wealth and power? To say nothing of how the Byzantines are being more recognized as a surviving chunk of Rome rather than another self-proclaimed successor like Charlemagne.

      That seems to be the same adjustment that's happening with the end of the Bronze Age: the idea that while it was a transitional period and some places definitely got absolutely fucked in the process for one reason or another, it didn't really "end" most of the civilizations that were previously believed lost, that places that were believed to have been razed or lost in cataclysmic fires actually survived and continued to be used by the same civilization as before, just worse off. Like the Aegean islands got fucked by economics but remained inhabited by the same people using the same language, growing the same crops, and practicing the same religion, they were just somewhat materially poorer than they had been before.

      Specifically about trade, this was a followup post in the same thread.

      pasting it here for anyone who doesn't want to click through:

      'Trade' is a tricky word in this period - what we're talking about is the realignment of long-distance networks of exchange. Cline is right to flag this up and in fact makes much less of it than most scholars - in the general narrative I've sketched, the primary process behind what happens in the final LBA is that technologies and institutions change so that goods are no longer going where they used to go by the means that they used to. An awful lot of the rest follows from that.

      The definingly 'Bronze-Age' way of exchange is large-scale 'gift' exchanges between rulers. 'Trade' isn't quite the right word - it's primarily about status, because giving grandiose gifts proves your wealth, generosity and power (the subtext is 'look how great I am, that I can send you these awe-inspiring treasures as if it's nothing to me'), and you're expecting a return though not calculating exactly 'how much' you've received and trying to make a 'profit' (in fact, you're trying to make a 'loss', because being unable to equal or exceed a gift you've received is a major humiliation for your friend/rival in the other state). We have a little evidence for how this happened - most notably in the Amarna Letters, a collection of correspondence between Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian and (possibly) Aegean rulers that forms the bulk of Cline's written sources. We also have a few shipwrecks, such as the one off Ulu Burun, which carried large amounts of high-value goods and might well have been the actual agents of this process.

      Most current interpretations of the 'palace'-states of Bronze Age Greece see this exchange as the main lifeblood behind how they worked. On this, the defining article is Susan Sherratt's 2001 'Potemkin Palaces and Route-Based Economies'.1 Sherratt's image of a 'palace' is of an institution centred around a powerful individual, who gains access to prestige goods and eventually to these networks of long-distance exchange. Not just anyone can send a gift to the king of Hatti and expect something in return - the Amarna letters make clear that this is what Cyprian Broodbank has called 'a great-power club', where part of the point is that rulers only bother with people worth their time. He then distributes these goods among his loyal retainers, who become, through distributing lesser goods among their own followers, the fundamental core of his power and authority.

      Three big things seem to happen towards the end of the LBA. Firstly, this all rests on exotic (especially Near Eastern) goods having a unique prestige value, and this seems to have been increasingly uncertain - much more work needs to be done here, but it seems that powerful people were no longer so concerned about certain 'traditional' expressions of prestige, particularly the age-old habit of depositing exotic finery in a monumental tomb. Secondly, the political troubles in Hatti, the Near East and Egypt mean that these goods are no longer coming - these networks are all about personal relationships and precedents, and have no durability when rulers and political setups change.

      Finally, we have the big, technological change - essentially, the coming-together of a number of shipbuilding and navigational innovations that mean that ships can travel further, faster, carrying more stuff. This opens the door to much more 'private' commerce (and, as I mentioned in my first answer, private robbing and raiding), loosening the grip of the palaces on their prestige goods - if you can now get a fancy sword or a gold ring from the traders who pop into port every few months, suddenly there isn't the same motivation to devote yourself to a palatial overlord in return for the same things.

      More importantly, these technological changes also change the map - now that ships can travel further over open sea, they are no longer stopping in the same places to repair and re-provision. While the goods coming from the Near East were vital to society in the Aegean, there's little evidence that it worked the other way around: we do see a few Aegean imports in e.g. Egypt and Syria, but by and large these people are interested in metals that come from further west. So there's a lot more movement of goods going on in the Mediterranean, but it's no longer coming as reliably to the Aegean palaces, and no longer in the way that palatial leaders had come to rely on to maintain their status. Indeed, if you look at the places that seem to have done as well or better in the Early Iron Age than they did in the LBA, they are almost all coastal places in a position to remain or become relevant on these faster East-West routes.

      To put it simply, technological and political changes rewrote the rules of the political game: those political systems that had relied on them to justify themselves, mainly those on the Greek mainland, became irrelevant and had to change.

      Sources

      'Broodbank' is Middle Sea as referenced above. This is very much up his street - his early work is on island connectivity in the Early Cyclades, which itself provides a case study in what happens when ships get faster and no longer need to stop as often - the prominent sites of the Cyclades in the Early Bronze Age are minor if even present in the Late Bronze Age, because sailors are now simply bypassing them.

      1 Susan Sherratt (2001) 'Potemkin Palaces and Route-Based Economies' in Economy and Politics in the Mycenaean Palace States, S. Voutsaki and J. Killen eds., pp. 214-238.

      • Dolores [love/loves]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Ward-Perkins is specifically in conversation with that 'no collapse' reappraisal, because slowly declining, deurbanizing, and losing economic complexity had material consequences for even average people. and a lot of this comes down to what one means about 'collapse' and 'decline' i'm on board with the thesis that severe economic contraction and loss of complexity constitutes a significant event, and when it happens in a few decades a word like "collapse" seems appropriate. but some people assume that to have apocalyptic connotations, and for the survival of people and things, in however a declined state, to disprove a "collapse". semantics, really

        i really get the impression from that trade stuff that the "palace economy" states were responsible for the import of copper and tin. unless we're looking at archaeological sites that lose their palace social structure and immediately pick up the slack some other way, i think there has to be a discussion of what the breakdown of 'elite economy' would mean for everyone else. bronze wasn't just for clouting your king---plows, nails, wheels---things normal people used and needed.