Origins of philosophy

This very short post by philosopher Stephen Hicks states that:

*Metaphysically*, philosophy was born with Thales and the Milesians. *Epistemologically*, it was born with Parmenides and the Eleatics.
The Milesian school began around 600 BCE on the coast of Asia minor. The Eleatic school began around 500 BCE about 1100 kilometers west in the southern Italian peninsula.

He also has a nice post on what distinguishes philosophy from pre-philosophic thought.

There are three original cultures with serious philosophical traditions -- Greece, northern India and China. Their philosophical traditions all started in periods of small, competing polities sharing a common language and culture: the Archaic Period in Greece (776-480 BC), the Srmana Period in northern India (700s-332BC ) and the Spring and Autumn Period in China (771-456BC).

The contiguous time periods are very noticeable. One can see why German philosopher Karl Jaspers came up with the notion of an Axial Age. As for what they have in common, one is that they all had contact with the militarised pastoralist societies which developed as a result of the invention of the composite recurve bow and effective deployment of mounted archers. They were periods of increased urbanisation (particularly noticeable in India but also in the Hellenic world.) They were all places that developed coinage but that was after philosophy and is a natural response by urbanised trading polities to intense inter-polity competition.

In the case of China, the focus was on competing autocracies developing out of a vassalage-and-honour ("feudal") system. So Chinese philosophy focused on how to live and what to serve (Confucianism), how to rule (Legalism) and how to navigate serenely a world of flux (Taoism).

India had a range of types of polities, including deliberative assembly republics. The Vedic order was collapsing and being challenged by new ideas, notably Buddhism and Jainism, followed by the Brahmin response, which led to what is known as Hinduism or better understood as the Hindu synthesis. This clash of ideas, ways of thought, ways of being governed, led to the very rich Indian philosophical tradition, ranging from mathematics to ethics to metaphysics but with a strong tendency to an otherworldly focus.

The Hellenic world (which ranged from Spain to Crimea) also had a wide range of types of polities, but much less religious flux, resulting in a very rich philosophical tradition ranging from mathematics, to ethics to metaphysics but with a stronger element of epistemology than elsewhere and a more this-world focus leading to proto-science and (if physicist and historian of science Lucio Russo is correct) a full-blown Scientific Revolution in the Hellenistic Period.

Philosophy starting in culturally linked competing jurisdictions makes sense because:
(1) thinkers could move from less friendly to more friendly locales;
(2) diversity of polities led to more chances of "positive mutations" (i.e. mixtures of circumstances and institutions provoking, or friendly to, more intense and broader reasoning);
(3) common language facilitated far more connections between thinkers and ideas.

India and the Hellenic world had a far richer range of polities than China, leading to a much broader range of experience and examples for reasoning about social and political matters. The effect was much stronger in the Hellenic world, which had few significant monarchies and which was in contact with a much broader range of societies and geographies than northern India and far more so than China. In particular, the sheer number of polities with deliberative assemblies made the politics of persuasion a much stronger factor. This encourages thinking about rhetoric but also public reasoning in general.

So, it is not surprising that the Hellenic world had a somewhat broader ambit of philosophy than India and that both had much broader than China. Nor is it surprising that philosophy, as with other forms of human creativity, tends to operate more strongly in periods of polity diversity and competition.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History Hidden Heroines

Archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball's Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History's Hidden Heroines is book mostly about the fun and experience of being an archaeologist. As such, it is a lively and engaging memoir.

It is also refreshingly free of cant and jargon. It is clearly written for a lay audience, but that the author came late to academe (she got her Ph.D. at 49) after what could only be described as a broad range of life experiences--three marriages, six children, surviving breast cancer, and what she describes as:

a varied resume that included stints as a nurse in Idaho, an administrator in a convalescent hospital in southern California, an English-language teacher in Bolivia and Spain, and a failed cattle rancher in South America (p.xii)

likely helped the easy-to-read and practical tone of the work.

The book wears its scholarship lightly but pervasively. There are boxes (ranging in size from half a page to three pages) providing background on matters touched on in the main narrative and the text is extensively footnoted and referenced.

The rhythms, discomforts and joys of archaeological endeavour are nicely brought to life. Much of her archaeology was in the former Soviet Union, concentrating on various kurgans or burial mounds, and the "joys" of dealing with Soviet agencies and suspicion of outsiders are woven into the narrative. Though it turns out that the contemporary People's Republic of China is worse, with Chinese officials going as far as to insert a (headless) museum exhibit mummy into a dig site as part of the official disapproval of interest in the Caucasian features of said mummies (p.140).

Davis-Kimball also interweaves current observation of steppe nomads with the archaeology, partly in the hope that the lives of the former might shed light on some of the finds of the latter (which, on at least one case, it did). Indeed, the observations about the life of steppe nomads are of interest in themselves. The book is something of a treasure trove of information on the archaeology, ethnology and history of the steppe nomads and is worth reading for that alone.

The warrior women of the title are only one of several themes in the book. The most striking passage on warrior women is early in the book, when the characteristics of the 194 adult skeletons found in the Povkrovka kurgans are listed. 94% of the men were buried with weapons, 3% with a clay pot or two, 3% with a child (though none of the women were). Roughly 15% of the women were buried with weapons, 7% with artefacts that suggested they were priestesses, (3% fell into both categories), 3% with chalk whorls too fragile to be of practical use and 75% were buried as hearth women (Pp46-7).  The percentage of women buried with weapons is within the range of Scythian, Saka, Sarmatian burials more generally.

Davis-Kimball's book is full of striking details, though at times I would have liked a bit more interweaving with general patterns. Low population densities societies tend to teach women to fight (the men might be away) and (as Davis-Kimball notes, p.62) the horse archery of the nomads made imbalances in upper body strength and physical size less of a problem than other styles of fighting. Since it took a lot of grass to support animals, and a lot of animals to support people, and pasture is effectively a given, there would also be less pressure on women to give birth early, allowing a warrior stage of life in one's teenage years among early nomad peoples (most of the women warriors found died in their teens, p.60). There is not much evidence of women actually fighting with armies among later nomad peoples (and limited evidence for the early nomads, p.65), though more intense competition for pasture (and trade) may have shifted the balance against incorporating women in armies, rather than as last-ditch home guard. Even with these early nomads, Davis-Kimball suggests that women warriors may have been largely auxiliary or home defence forces (p.65).

Davis-Kimball is interested in all of the roles of women in these societies. Their apparent domination of religious activities is striking. Those men who seem to be of religious or shamanistic significance seemed to have cross-dressed (Pp180ff), part of the wider pattern associating queer folk with shamanistic roles. A considerable part of the text examines the role of women in spirituality and religion, religious rituals and belief in goddesses, particular a Mother Goddess.

A 12th century sheela na gig on the church
at Kilpeck, Herefordshire, England. 

The two chapter segue into the myths and archaeology of Ireland towards the end of the book at first seems to be just about being an archaeological memoir but she relates both back to the archaeology and history of the steppes. (Davis-Kimball clearly favours the steppes as the origins of Indo-European languages and culture.) That the genealogy of Irish heroes is always traced through the female line suggests a matrilineal past (p.210). She also points out that these were oral traditions until written down by Irish monks seems to have affected their transmission, with the role of women becoming more dependant and more morally perverse the later the transcription (Pp196ff). (She actually uses the term patriarchy correctly, as authority being centred in certain males, which is good to see.) There is also a discussion of those oddities, the sheela na gig's (Pp205ff).

The role of women in Norse (Viking) society is also discussed, including how archaeology supports Ibn Fadlan's claims about the rich adornment of their women: indeed, the archaeology suggests that women might have had more role in commerce than the men (Pp216ff). There is also a nice discussion of the series of powerful women in Mongol history--that the Mongol elite was highly polygynous did not seem to stop wives being regents in the interregnum between the death of one khan and the election of the next (Pp220ff). The contrast with Islamic history on this matter is striking, likely reflecting steppe women being taught to fight and the absence of religious-based relegation of women.

The final (short) chapter provides a summary of what has been traversed in the book, noting the historical downward shift in the standing of women when patriarchal priesthood-kingship models were adopted but ending, where she began, with the sheer fun of archaeological discovery.

Jeannine Davis-Kimball's Warrior Women is both an informative journey and a fun read. A good starting point or way station to understanding the varying gender dynamics of human societies in history.

Sultans of Rome: The Turkish World Expansion

Some works of history are excellent introductions to the history of a period, region, people. Others are much better read only if you already had some background knowledge -- either because they assume such knowledge, or because the author has such a pronounced point of view that background knowledge is desirable to balance out what is being written, or not written.

Sultans of Rome: The Turkish World Expansion by archaeologist Warwick Ball falls into the last category.

Which is not to say that I did not find it a useful and informative work of history. It gives an excellent overview of Turkish history, informatively covering the centuries before the Seljuks conquered much of the Middle East. The difficulty comes with the coverage of the Ottoman Empire (Chapters 7 - 10).

A European State
The author is at pains to point out that the Ottoman Empire was, from very early on, a European state. The Ottomans first took territory in Europe in 1354. The movement of its capital from Bursa to Edirne (formerly Adrianople) in 1363 meant that its capital was in Europe for the rest of its history, until the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate in 1922 and the Ottoman Caliphate in 1923. With Selim I's conquest and abolition of the shadow Abbasid Caliphate in Cairo, this location history meant that the Sunni Caliphate was resident in Europe for over 400 years, though the Ottomans put much more emphasis on the title once they started losing Muslim-inhabited lands to European states, particularly Russia.

Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent --
being positively Roman in its use of client states.

At its height, the Ottoman Empire controlled about 20% of the land area of Europe (p.7). It was clearly a part of the European state system. Even the phrase used of its latter years, the sick man of Europe, acknowledged that. So, yes the Ottomans were a European state, indeed a European Great Power an acknowledged (though not original) member of the Concert of Europe. So it is easy to have fun with various historians and commentators who talk of the Ottomans as being somehow exterior to Europe and to being European; and Ball does have such fun.

The trouble is that Ball is so concerned to score points in current controversies--former French President Giscard d'Estaing's comments about Turkey not being part of Europe are clearly a particular annoyance--that his text systematically minimises differences, and emphasises similarities, between the Ottoman state and European states.  In doing so, Ball does make several useful corrective points. But he also pushes his book into the realm of polemic.

Ottoman astronomers, C16th.

The notion of a clash of civilisations based on Team Christian versus Team Islam is easily demolished. Not least because there was often such vicious hostility between Catholics and Orthodox on one side, and Sunni and Shia on the other. Selim the Grim's expansion of the Ottoman Empire by 70% with, among other things, the conquest of Mamluk Egypt, completely (if temporarily) shifting the axis of advance of the Empire from conquest of Christian lands to conquest of Muslim lands, was largely motivated (or at least justified as being) to block the advances of the rabidly Shia Safavid dynasty which had conquered Iran and brutally converted it to being Shia.

And the Ottomans were ever opportunistic, making alliances with Christian states when it suited them, incorporating Christian forces into their armies, having Christian vassal states. The border lands between civilisations are noted for such patterns. But that does not mean they are not border lands between civilisations.

But a civilisational divide
To talk of the Ottomans not being a European Power is geographic nonsense. But to talk of them being of a different civilisation than the Christian states is not. The advance of the Ottomans into Europe was the advance of a civilisation from outside Europe into Europe. As the Ottomans imperium lost ground after 1683, so that was the retreat of a civilisation from Europe.

Skull tower at Nis, Serbia, erected by
the Ottoman commander to contain skulls
of defeated Serbian rebels, 1809.

That there were non-Muslim minorities in Muslim lands did not mean that Muslim-majority countries were not lands of Islam as a civilisation. Just as the leaving of Muslim minorities in Christian-majority countries did not stop those being lands of a different civilisation. Nor was being a majority required for a civilisational divide, who controlled the state in a territory was sufficient. The border of the Ottoman Empire was a civilisational divide, one that not only represented a different established religion, but different marriage systems, understanding of law, basic institutions and metaphysical presumptions.

Jihad as system
When Ball writes "the perceived Holy War symbolised by Kossovo--was simply not an issue to the early Ottomans" (p.98) he is being less than accurate. The Ottomans turned jihad into a system. A system operated for their benefit, but a system nonetheless. (Indeed, creating systems to expand and buttress their rule was the Ottoman genius.) All the first nine rulers of the Ottoman state called themselves ghazis (holy warriors).

Serbian historian Srdja Trifkovic, in his The Krajina Chronicles: A History of the Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia (which I review here) provides a useful summary of how the Ottomans used jihad, (and his work is a useful corrective to Ball's Ottoman spruiking more generally). Raiders devastated border regions, promoting flight and reducing economic activity (and thus long-term ability to resist) while the spoils of raids (already sanctioned by Islamic jurisprudence) motivated and maintained the raiders. Larger armies periodically probed the borders. Eventually, conquest of a new region would be accomplished, the surviving inhabitants would be subject to the jizya poll tax on non-believers, Muslim warriors were settled as “tax-farmers” in the newly-conquered region and the process would roll on from the new (expanded) borders.

Mehmet II triumphal entry into Constantinople
(painting by Benjamin Constant).

The Ottomans could be very pragmatic in how they interpreted non-believer submission to their rule. Hence their extensive use of Christian vassal states and Christian warriors. But that same pragmatism used jihad quite ruthlessly as a means and justification for imperial expansion. The Ottomans were never a jihadi state, but they were certainly a state that used jihad, and did so quite systematically. They saw themselves as expanding dar al-Islam; as, indeed, they were. During the long imperial retreat, they were defending dar al-Islam.

An Islamic Empire
As Ball points out, it was only after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 that Muslims became a majority of the Empire's subjects (p.158). The balance of pragmatic consideration then moved to harsher treatment of what were now clearly non-Muslim minorities. This culminated in Hamidian Massacres of the 1890s and the Armenian, Assyrian and Pontic-Greek genocides followed during the Dynasts War. While admitting to the slaughters, Ball is at pains to blame European factors--the rise of nationalism (p.156), the push of the Christian Powers to protect Christian nationalities within the Empire (p.158). This represents a sadly typical "I will now signal I am a good and sophisticated person" move of allocating the "real" agency for anything bad to those bad "white" people. Ball having systematically glided over awkward bits in his Ottoman narrative makes it easier to do.

A photograph, taken by the American W. L. Sachtleben,
depicting the victims of a massacre of Armenians
 in Erzerum on October 30, 1895, being gathered
for burial at the town's Armenian cemetery.

The reality is that the Ottoman Empire was always ultimately an Islamic state. The Ottoman dynasty prided itself on being a defender of Sunni Orthodoxy and Sharia, albeit with typical Ottoman systematic finessing, was the dominant law of the Empire. (In accordance with Sharia, the various millets each operated their own law, but only as subordinate to Sharia.) With a majority of their subjects being non-Muslims, of course the Ottomans were pragmatic in their treatment of non-Muslims. But Muslim supremacy was always the bedrock the state was built on.

The balance of tolerance and oppression
There is a recurring pattern in history of states with established and legitimating religions being pragmatic when the dominant group is a minority and then becoming increasingly oppressive as the dominant group's proportion of the population shifts to being a majority, with that intolerant oppressiveness worsening as their dominant group's proportion of the population increases further. We can see this pattern in Norman Sicily, where the treatment of Jews and Muslims was relatively tolerant when the Christians were a minority, tending to worsen as the Christians became a majority and culminating in the expulsion of the remaining Muslims (and later the Jews). We can also see the pattern in Spain and Portugal during and after the Reconquista, culminating in the expulsion of the Jews and later of the Moriscoes.

Similarly, the treatment of Jews in Christian Europe was often worse than in Islamic Europe because Jews were typically the only significant religious minority in Christian states, and a relatively small one at that, while Jews were part of a wider mosaic of religious groups in Islamic realms. (Not that Jews did not also suffer massacres and pogroms in Islamic lands.)

Selim III receiving foreign dignitaries,  1789.

But the wider pattern also occurs in Islamic lands. Indeed, is continuing to this day, with the flight of the Jews after 1948 and the current steady erosion of Christian populations in the Middle East. The Ottoman massacres and genocides were a particularly vile manifestation of the wider historical pattern. (The Habsburg Monarchy also had ethnic minorities of dubious loyalty in a time of rising nationalism, with Russia posing as protectors of Orthodox groups: but the Habsburg state did not resort to massacres and death-marches as a response, not even under the stress of the Great War.)

So, there are some serious weaknesses in Ball's treatment of the Ottoman Empire. But there is also plenty of useful and striking information. And even folk being polemical can make useful points. The discussion of the Ottoman attempt to incorporate the Roman heritage, for example, is enlightening.

The real strength of the book is in its treatment of the wider Turkish history, which extends centuries before the Seljuk and Ottoman Empires.  The Turks are no longer the folk who suddenly appear out of the steppes as conquerors in the C11th, but as a people with a rich and complex history before that. So, a useful book, but not one to be read as a stand-alone, particularly not regarding Ottoman history.

Imperialism, it is what rulerships do

I came across (via) this very silly statement:

The very idea of empire was created in ancient Rome ...

That would be news to the Persians, the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Egyptians, the House of Ur, the Gutians, the Akkadians, the ... And that is just the Middle East.

When revenue was based on control of farmers and trade, then imperialism was what all rulerships did to the limits of territory they could control and which generated a positive return. It was about optimising expropriation, both intensively (pdf) and extensively.  What else would one have expected?  It is not possible to understand the history of farming-and-trade rulerships until one understands what a natural feature of rulership imperialism was.

Of course, creating a serious empire was not easy. You had to have the organisational and military power to seize and hold significant territory. So, what you could do, what those around you could do, what the geography was, all mattered. But, within those constraints, imperialism came naturally to farming-and-trade rulerships.

May the best predator win
As river-valley rulerships arose, there tended to be a fairly Darwinian "survival of the fittest" process of expansion and elimination until one rulership dominated a river valley. It was a bit like putting a whole lot of yabbies in a fish tank and leaving them; the stronger predators eat the weaker until you are left with one uber-yabbie or, in this case, uber-rulership. (The post-Roman British Isles displayed a not dissimilar pattern, until the English Crown ruled the lot.) The process could take a long time (from the start of the Kingdom of Wessex to the union of the British Isles under one monarch, about a thousand years, although English absorption of Wales and domination of Ireland predated the full unification by centuries).

As organisational capacities improved, this domination of a river valley could expand until you dominated several river valleys or, in the case of the Roman Empire, an entire sea, their Mare Nostrum("Our Sea"). Empires tended to be river-and-coasts-based because rivers and coasts were where the fertile land was and water transport was a lot cheaper and quicker than land transport--the rough estimate is that water transport was about 15 times cheaper than land transport, so travelling 100km by land was the equivalent of travelling about 1500km by water. Hence, rivers and coasts were where the farming and the trade that rulers expropriated to fund their rulerships were and where control could be maintained.

It is not surprising that the largest (and longest surviving) Empire of the above series was the one that was spectacularly good at road building. But it was still based on a sea.

The exceptions to this coast-and-rivers pattern were the horse-archer empires of Central Eurasia. But they were based on flat plains and lots of horses. Cavalry could easily go 40km in a day, so you could send a cavalry force 1000km in 25 days and couriers much quicker. They also had the Silk Road trade system to manage and exploit.

Problems of empire
All such empires ran into what modern economics calls principal-agent problems, the difficulty of maintaining stable internal control, and organisational advantage problems--those you interacted with learn from you. So, maintaining internal coherence and external effectiveness was a difficult balancing act.

Ibn Khaldun famously set out the pattern for the rise and fall of farming-and-trade rulerships. First, a group bound by common feeling seizes power. Then the ruler separates himself from the original group to entrench his own power. The regime slowly decays as group solidarity fades and corruption (the ruler's agents enriching themselves in ways that undermine the ruler's expropriation) erodes social resilience and regime power. Until the regime finally collapses.

Lest one think this a relic from the past, let's match the most recent Eurasian empire to rise and fall (the Soviet Empire) against the pattern: a group bound by common feeling seizes power (Lenin 1917-1924). The ruler separates himself from the original group to entrench his own power (Stalin 1924-1953). The regime slowly decays as group solidarity fades and corruption erodes social resilience and regime power (Khruschev to Chernenko 1953-1985). Until the regime finally collapses (Gorbachev1985-1991).



[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer or at Critical Thinking Applied.]

The taxman cometh (but only for what he can see)

There have been two great transformations in human affairs. One is the Neolithic Revolution, the transition from foraging to farming. This is a transformation which is still going on, as there are still some foraging groups around the planet (though it is a vanishing way of life). The second is the Industrial Revolution, the shift from reliance on what is produced by land (farming), a factor of production managed but not created by humans, to reliance on factors of production produced by humans, the produced means of production (capital), such that farmers change from being about 80% of the workforce to less than 5%.

Compare and contrast
Both transformations are technological and involve expanded use of energy, setting off dramatic population increases (the second much faster than the first). In the foraging-to-farming transition, humans no longer merely took food from the environment around them; they deliberately grew food. This food was typically storable, so able to cope with variations in food production across the seasons.  Farming both increased the (food) energy to humans and allowed it to be stored for later use, to be actively managed across time. (Hence the very different attitudes to time between foraging and farming cultures.)

Industrialisation used wind, water and (particularly) steam energy to produce things which produced things. Increased agricultural production allowed increased production in general, with expanding sources and use of energy, ushering the creation of, not merely mass prosperity, but increasing mass prosperity. This is in stark contrast for the foraging-farming transition, where it is likely that general standards of living actually fell and, with some exceptions, remained stagnant for thousands of years.

Another contrast is that the foraging-farming transition lead to hierarchical societies with elite-dominated rulerships--whether autocratic, monarchic (i.e. containing powerful noble elites) or deliberative. The last were polities run by elite assemblies, the most democratic of these being some Mediterranean city-states where as much as a third of the adult population got to vote--i.e. male citizens; women, slaves and resident foreigners being excluded. Outside the Mediterranean, assemblies were also important in cities in Lower Mesopotamia and in the kshatriya republics of India. Conversely, with some hiccups, the Industrial Revolution has led to much more broadly-based forms of political life. Another contrast is that the share of output taken by taxation tended to be fairly constant across farming rulerships but has been steadily increasing in modern states.

Why did farming lead to hierarchical societies dominated by controlling elites? The standard answer has been increased production of food led to a surplus above subsistence which allowed a more differentiated society. The problem with this is, why there was any such surplus? Why did not population just increase to consume the surplus? What blocked population increase sufficient to allow the creation of the food surpluses that sustained these elites?

The second problem is, even if there was a food surplus, why did that not just lead to increased specialisation? What happened such that population was blocked from rising to consume the food surplus and that surplus was largely appropriated by a narrow, controlling elite? And, moreover, elites of differing sizes, with different land tenure systems.

Expropriating what you can see
Three Israeli economists have produced a paper (pdf) which provides an elegant answer. Their argument is that the key element is transparency; both in stored food and in expected production. Food had to be stored across the seasons, which made it more vulnerable to expropriation. In their words:


[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer.]

Why did the Middle East select for monotheism?

A variation on the Whig interpretation of history that still has surprising sway is of human religious history as having a “natural” progression from animism through polytheism to monotheism. It has led to such nonsense as the psychotic tyrant Akhenaton being written up positively solely because he was monotheist (or, at least practised monolatry: Kerry Greenwood’s Out of the Black Land provides a revealing fictional treatment). This animism-polytheism-monotheism “progression” is an interpretation that has nothing to recommend it, apart from monotheist self-satisfaction.

If one doubts that polytheism is perfectly compatible with highly sophisticated societies, I refer you to classical Rome and Greece; to India, China and Japan. If you doubt it is perfectly compatible with thoroughly modern societies, I refer you to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. If you think monotheism is necessary for a highly compassionate morality, I refer you to Jainism and Buddhism.

Not only does the animism-to-polytheism-to-monotheism progression fail as a moral and intellectual claim, it fails as history in the quite basic sense that monotheism is purely a product of the Middle East. It spread from there around the globe (indeed, it is still doing so), but it evolved nowhere else.

The Middle East itself produced not one but several forms of monotheism: the proto-monotheism of Zoroastrianism; the monolatry-turned-monotheism of Judaism; the universalising monotheism of Christianity; the universal dominion monotheism of Islam; plus various offshoots of the above. Monotheism in its various forms now thoroughly dominates the religious landscape of the Middle East. So, what is it about the Middle East that it has repeatedly selected for monotheism?

Social geography
When looking to a recurring pattern in a particular region, it is a good idea to start with social geography; the patterns of interactions of people with the terrain.

By the time monotheism first arose, the enduring patterns of Middle Eastern social geography were already in place. River-valley civilisations dominated by major urban centres interacted with herding pastoralists living in the surrounding deserts, mountains, plateaus and plains. Their interactions were those of trade, raid and conquest: interspersed with retaliation and protection payoffs. The fear of the settled (and thus vulnerable) farmers had for the mobile (and thus dangerous) pastoralists is well expressed in the Biblical story of Cain and Abel.

The great conquering peoples of the Middle East after the demise of the last Mesopotamia-originating empire (also subject of a famous Biblical story)—the Iranians, Arabs, Turks and Mongols—were all pastoralist peoples. Pastoralist conquest became so much a pattern of the region that Abd-ar-Rahman Abu Zayd ibn Muhammed ibn Muhammed ibn Khaldun, statesman, jurist, historian and scholar, in his The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, written in 779 AH (1377 AD), famously developed his cycles of history based on it.

His analysis is that rule is based on the rise of group feeling (asabiyyah) that leads to rulership over others (pp 107-8). Having conquered urban lands, the ruling group becomes distracted by the luxuries available that weakens group-feeling and courage. This proceeds until it is swallowed up by other nations or dynasties (p.109).

Ibn Khaldun’s theory is based on internal dynamics and external response. Expenses grow (p.134), the ruling group become complacent and lose their edge (p.135), rulers become more isolated seeking people directly beholden to them (p.137) leading finally to dynastic senility and wastefulness, making them ripe for eventual replacement (p.142). Decay in authority usually starts at the edges of the dynasty’s territory (p.250). He repeats the theory in different words at various places (e.g. p.246ff), usually providing historical examples of the various processes. Russian demographer Peter Turchin has developed the theory further.

A review essay on a book on tribalism in the Middle East puts ibn Khaldun's model well:

… outlying tribes tied together by traditional kinship solidarities conquer, settle, and rule a state. In time kinship loyalties loosen, the rulers urbanize and grow effete, their state loses control over distant tribes, and the cycle begins again.

Precisely because herding life is mobile, kinship and lineage provide protective and support services. This provides a strong, but constrained, source of social solidarity. As the Arab proverb goes “me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, my brother and cousin against the stranger”.

What began as a response to the demands of pastoralism can also deal with other sources of social insecurity. In the words of an enlightening review essay on Pakistan:

At the heart of Lieven’s account of Pakistan is kinship, pervasive networks of clans and biradiris (groups of extended kin) that he identifies as “the most important force in society,” usually far stronger than any competing religious, ethnic, or political cause. Several millennia of invasions, occupations, colonizations, and rule by self-interested states resulted in a “collective solidarity for interest and defense” based on kinship becoming paramount in the area that is Pakistan.

Monotheism’s advantages
The aforementioned great conquering pastoralist peoples—Iranians, Arab, Turks and Mongols—were all, with the exception of the Mongols (who came from furthest away and were profoundly affected by the long history of interaction with China), in their conquering phase, monotheist. Monotheism offers a motivating identity and framework of expectations able to operate across lineages. The common identity of believer is, in the right circumstances, able to unite people across otherwise competing lineages—Muhammad’s success in being the first person to unify most of Arabia is a striking example of this.

The common identity of believer can also unite across the pastoralist-farmer divide and do so in a way which gives an identity to cling to in adversity: both clearly important in early Hebrew history. Given that the pastoralist-farmer barrier in the Middle East can be particularly porous, depending on circumstances, an identity that can be persisted with across it has clear selection advantages.

[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer or at Critical Thinking Applied]

The Horse the Wheel and Language 3

This concludes my review of archaeologist David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World begun in my previous two posts.


Wagon life
The real explosion of steppe culture seems to have come, however, between 3300-3100BC with adoption of wagons:

As the steppes dried and expanded, people tried to keep their animal herds fed by moving them more frequently. They discovered that with a wagon you could keep them moving indefinitely. Wagons and horseback riding made possible a new, more mobile form of pastoralism. With a wagon full of tents and supplies, herders could take their herds out of the river valleys and live for weeks or months out in the open steppes between the great rivers—the great majority of the Eurasian steppes. Land that had been open and wild became pasture that belonged to someone. Soon these more mobile herder clans realized that bigger pastures and a mobile home base permitted them to keep bigger herds. Amid the ensuing disputes over borders, pastures and seasonal movements, new rules were needed to define what counted as an acceptable move—people began to manage local migratory behaviour (p.300).

If you were not part of the new life and its evolving rules and agreements you became even more clearly culturally Other, a contrast that helped define and mark identity. The steppe nomad became a people who lived on wheels:

Their new economy took advantage of two kinds of mobility: wagons for slow transport (water, shelter, and food) and horseback riding for rapid light transport (scouting for pastures, herding, trading and raiding expeditions) (p.302).

A combination that greatly increased the scale of herding:

A diet of meat, milk, yoghurt, cheese, and soups made of wild Chenopodium seeds and wild greens can be deduced, with a little imagination, from the archaeological evidence. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary tells us that honey and honey-based mead were also consumed, probably on special occasions. Larger herds meant greater disparity in herd wealth, which is reflected in the disparities of wealth of [steppe] graves. Mobile wagon camps are almost impossible to find archeologically, so settlements become archaeologically invisible where the new economy took hold (p.303).

The last point likely has wider implications: one wonders if the lack of cities and monuments has led to a subtle, or not-so-subtle, scholarly discounting of steppe cultures.

One technique for managing the new mobility was to incorporate some fluidity in social relations—notably, the guest-host connections and obligations (p.303); also a point with potentially much greater implications. The notion of the oath-bound warrior; not kin but freely undertaking a connection as strong as, or even stronger, than kinship—that, in some ways, overrode kinship—was to reach as far as knightly service in Latin Christendom, the sworn samurai of Japan and the beholden warriors of Islam. All of which likely ultimately had steppe cultural roots.

Anthony points to an intriguing gender division between western and eastern Pontic-Caspian steppes culture(s) that is also reflected in differences between western and eastern Indo-European languages. The eastern steppe life was more mobile, lacked grain imprints on pots, more male-centred in religion and ritual, have far higher percentage (80%) of male graves. The western steppe life was more settled, had grain imprints on pots, was more female-inclusive in religion and ritual. All of which may have contributed to the feminine grammatical category that was a defining innovation of Proto-Indo-European (Pp304-5).

Anthony holds that this horse-herding wagon culture of the Pontic-Caspian steppes fits time, place, material and linguistic features to be the original Indo-European culture. It also generates the right migrations in the right direction and sequence to generate the various offshoot languages (p.306), the evidence for which Anthony discusses (Pp306ff).

The earliest identified evidence for steppe vehicles are around 3000BC, though Anthony believes they likely appeared between 3500-3300BC. As we do not know where the wheel-and-axle was invented, we have no idea from whence they came to the steppes. There is only minimal evidence for warfare as the cause of the spread the wagon cultural horizon:

Rather, it spread because those who shared the agreements and institutions that made high mobility possible became potential allies, and those who did not share these institutions were separated as Others. Larger herds also probably brought increased prestige and economic power, because larger herd-owners had more animals to loan or offer as sacrifices at public feasts (p.317).

As Anthony takes us through the historical evidence, one striking feature is that the grain content of diet appears to shrink as the horizon spreads (p.320). The wagon cultural horizon seems to have spread across the entire Pontic-Caspian steppes around 3400-3200BC; signs of a competitive advantage, aggressively exploited (hence Anthony’s confidence that the cultural horizon was wagon-based).

Anthony disputes the scholarly assumption that pastoralism is dependant on settled cultures for grain and metal. Economically, Bronze Age pastoralism seems to have been substantially self-sufficient: mining its own metal ores, leaving a few people to tend river valley barley or millet fields. It was the creation of royal bodyguards ballooning into armies that made Iron Age and Medieval nomadic states dependant on interaction with settled societies (Pp321-2).

Graves, as ever, provide important indicators. In the eastern steppes, sheep or goat bones predominated (65%), followed by cattle (15%), horses (8%), dogs (5%). In the western steppes, cattle (60%) were more numerous than sheep (29%) (p.324).

The human bones indicate people who were very tall, robust, with few signs of systemic infections and whose teeth typically entirely free of caries (like the teeth of foragers), indicating a diet free of starchy carbohydrates. In the middle period, they do show significantly more signs of childhood anaemia, indicating a diet too rich in dairy foods:

Health often declines in the early stages of a significant dietary change, before the optimal mix of new foods has been established (p.326).

Genetic research on lactose tolerance suggests it emerged in the steppes west of the Ural Mountains between 4600-2800BC (p.326).

The linguistic evidence is for a patriarchal culture that gave thanks to Sky Father for sons, fat cattle and fast horses, where kinship was patrilineal. The evidence of the kurgan graves is more complex as 20% (in the east) or more (in the west) contained adult females, suggesting some women were assigned to traditionally male leadership roles. Suggestively, a thousand years later, 20% of Scythian-Sarmatian “warrior graves” contained females dressed for battle as if they were men (p.328-9). The archaeology of kurgan graves—by far the most dramatic archaeological evidence from the period—is frustratingly suggestive (Pp329ff).

Language spread
All this is leading up to the big question: how did Indo-European languages get to be so dominant over such a wide area? Which is a matter of language replacement far more than population replacement. Language replacement is typically a process of prestige (to the new language) and stigmatisation (for the old) for which:

the possibilities are much more varied than just invasion and conquest (p.340).

Continuing to use modern examples to inform analysis of the past, Anthony notes that:

the general situation in Europe after 3300BCE was one of increased mobility, new pastoral economies, explicitly status-ranked political systems, and inter-regional connectivity—exactly the kind of context that might of led to the stigmatization of the tightly closed identities associated with language spoken by localized groups of village farmers (Pp340-1).

Anthony suggests a range of factors that could have given the horse-breeding wagon folk of the steppes status which can be summarised as:

having the largest, strongest and most manageable horses;
far greater mobility (including raiding threat);
belief in the sanctity of oath-bound contracts and in protecting clients in return for services;
the institutions that managed mobility provided ways of incorporating outsiders;
public feasts as statements of prestige and vectors of recruitment.

That is, the Indo-Europeans had wealth, connections and ways of incorporating outsiders going for them (Pp341-3). On the issue of wealth from horses, Anthony notes that, in the C16th, the Bukhara khanate exported 100,000 horses a year to the Mughal rulers of India (p.341). The scale of horse-trading from the steppes to the river-valley civilisations was immense for millennia: it was the basis of the Silk Road, for example.
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Anthony’s tentative conclusion is that:

the spread of Proto-Indo-European was more like a franchising operation than an invasion. Although the initial penetration of a new region … often involved an actual migration from the steppes and military confrontations, once it began to reproduce new patron-client agreements … its connection to the original steppe immigrants became genetically remote, whereas the myths, rituals, and institutions that maintained the system were reproduced down the generations (p.343).

Then it is on to more of Anthony’s beloved archaeological evidence for migration and cultural change (read: cultural replacement) (Pp343ff).

In particular, what became the Germanic languages likely evolved out of migrations up the Danube Valley around 3100-2800BC (Pp360-1). What caused the migrations is an open question: Anthony suggests that the pull of raiding and client possibilities was a likely cause, possibly via brotherhoods of young oath-bound warriors dressed in belts and little else (p.364). The agrarian villages, lacking central authority, provided opportunities for warrior chiefs to become the protector-patrons of client-servitors (p.366), leading to the origins of the Germanic, Italic and Celtic languages (p.370).

Chariots
The oldest chariots found anywhere were in a fortified settlement at Sintashta, east of the Ural mountains in the northern steppes (p.371). The radiocarbon dates range from 2800-2700BC to 2100-1800BC, likely due to a later culture using a site used by a previous culture (Pp374-5).

The find was something of an archaeological marvel:

The details of the funeral sacrifices at Sintashta showed startling parallels with the sacrificial funeral rituals of the Rig Veda. The industrial scale of the metallurgical production suggested a new organization of steppe mining and metallurgy and a greatly heightened demand for copper and bronze. The substantial fortifications implied surprisingly large and determined attacking forces. And the appearance of Pontic-Caspian kurgan rituals, vehicle burials, and weapon types in the steppes east of the Ural River indicated that the Ural frontier had finally been erased (p.375).

All of which raised lots of questions, Anthony taking us through the historical evidence (Pp371ff).

This is very much a warrior culture:

Warfare, a powerful stimulus to social and political change, also shaped the Sintashta culture, for a heightened threat of conflict dissolves the old social order and creates new opportunities for the acquisition of power (p.393).

In the case of the chariot warrior culture, climate change seems to have been a factor, as it was in other times and places:

during the climactic crisis of the late MBA [Middle Bronze Age] in the steppes, competing steppe chiefs searching for new sources of prestige valuables probably discovered the merchants of Sarazam in the Zeravshan valley, the northernmost of outpost of Central Asian civilization [which] … created a new relationship that fundamentally altered warfare, metal production, and ritual competition among the steppe cultures (p.393).

The markers of increased warfare being:

the regular appearance of large fortified towns; increased deposit of weapons in graves; and the development of new weapons and tactics (p.393).

The extra weapons being (on the evidence of the surviving points) javelins and chariots (Pp395-6).

A chariot is:

a two-wheeled vehicle with spoked wheels and a standing driver, pulled by bitted horses, and usually driven at a gallop … Chariots were the first wheeled vehicles designed for speed, an innovation which changed land transport forever. The spoked wheel was the central element that made speed possible (p.397).

Anthony’s thorough definition of a chariot brings out how many different elements had to come together. Accepting a steppe origin for chariots overturns the established view that chariots were invented in Near Eastern societies around 1900-1800BC. Anthony takes us through the debate and evidence, arguing for javelin-throwing warrior-drivers who could throw javelins further than a man on horseback (Pp397ff).

I find a steppe origin for chariots highly plausible, given that the steppes were the source of later innovations in horses (e.g. the stirrup). Anthony assembles considerable evidence and reasonable inference for his view.

Chariots fit right in with a chiefly warrior culture:

Chariots were the supreme advertisements of wealth; difficult to make and requiring great athletic skill and a team of specially trained horses to drive, they were available only to those who could delegate much of their daily labor to hired herders. A chariot was material proof that they drive was able to fund a substantial alliance or was supported by someone who had the means (p.405).

So:

the evidence from fortifications, weapon types, and numbers, and the tactical innovation of chariot warfare, all indicate that conflict increased in both scale and intensity in the northern steppes … after about 2100BC.

With chariots playing an important role. Anthony connecting the archaeological evidence of prestige feats and sacrifices with the linguistic evidence of the Rig Veda and Avesta to identify these chariot people as the original “Aryans”:

Between 2100 and 1800BCE they invented the chariot, organized themselves into stronghold-based chiefdoms, armed themselves with new kinds of weapons, created a new style of funeral rituals that involved spectacular public displays of wealth and generosity, and began to mine and produce metals on a scale previously unimagined in the steppes (p.411).

It is one thing to identify an origin time, place and culture for the Indo-European “explosion”, the trick is to provide a coherent analysis—congruent with the evidence—that ends up with the historical spread of Indo-European languages from Sri Lanka (Sinhala) to the far edges of Europe.

This is the subject of the penultimate chapter, The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes. Anthony starts by looking at the archaeological evidence for the Near East after Sargon of Akkad imposes the first unified rule over the first cities of Mesopotamia from the perspective of looking for steppe connections (Pp412ff). Including, the first evidence for the appearance of horses in the Near East around 2100BC (Pp416-7). With the tin of Sarazm (tin being the most important traded good of the Bronze Age) being likely the connection that brought horses, chariots and steppe cultures to the river valley civilisations of the Near East and the Indus, based on examination of the archaeological evidence (Pp418ff). Anthony concludes that:

The steppe world was not just a conduit, it also became an innovating center, particularly in bronze metallurgy and chariot warfare. The chariot-driving kings of Shang China and Mycenaean princes of Greece, contemporaries at opposite ends of the ancient world at about 1500BCE, share a common technological debt to the LBA [Late Bronze Age] herders of the Eurasian steppes (p.435-7).

The “settling down” in fortified settlements of the Middle and Late Bronze Age in the steppes Anthony ascribes to defending the best winter forage and copper mines in a period of extended climactic crisis (Pp440ff). Steppe metallurgy included lost-wax casting and hollow-mold casting (probably learnt from the BMAC culture) producing products that included socketed spearheads (p.444).

Connecting material evidence and language is inherently difficult, nevertheless Anthony seeks to trace a series of “daughter cultures” across the steppes based on:

an extraordinary burst economic, military, and ritual innovations by a single culture—the Sintashta culture (p.450).

Certainly, the congruence between Rig Veda passages Anthony cites (and Mycenaean culture as revealed by archaeology and preserved in Homer) with the Sintashta archaeology is striking; Anthony reinforcing the point with discussion of the evidence on extensive trade across the steppes and evidence of “proto-Vedic” cultures (Pp450ff).

Anthony is seeking to change our view of the steppes from:

a remote and austere place, poor in resources and far from the centers of the civilised world

To:

during the Late Bronze Age the steppes became a bridge between the civilizations that developed on the edges of the continent in Greece, the Near East, Iran, the Indian subcontinent, and China. Chariot technology, horses and horseback riding, bronze metallurgy, and a strategic location gave steppe societies an importance they never before had possessed (p.456).

Turning the steppes into a “corridor of communication” which “permanent altered the dynamics of Eurasian history” (p.457).

This was the start of a dynamic that was not going to end until the Romanov and Qing Empires conquered and devastated Central Eurasia, creating the Central Eurasia-as-poverty-struck-backwater of the last few centuries which has done so much to hide its history from Western understanding: including the understanding of how much of it is the history of our (i.e. Western/Anglosphere) origins.

In his final chapter, Words and Deeds, Anthony asserts that the fall of the Iron Curtain, making steppe archaeology much more accessible, recent archaeological discoveries and advances in linguistics have made questions about the origins of the Indo-Europeans answerable in the way they were not previously (p.458). The wheel and the horse matter because:

Innovations in transport technology are among the most powerful causes of change in human and social political life (p.459).

From private automobiles creating suburban life to turning the Eurasian steppes into connector of cultures across Eurasia. Anthony summarises his central argument and contentions with admirable clarity (Pp460ff). In particular, that the steppes being a corridor of communication was far from “automatic”: on the contrary, transmission of ideas and cultures was blocked by persistent cultural frontiers that lasted for millennia (p.463).

The full story of the spread of Indo-European languages (a continuing one, with the spread of English) is far too long and complex to be pinned down to a single set of causes:

If we can draw any lessons about language expansion … it is perhaps only that an initial expansion can make later expansions easier (the lingua franca effect), and that language generally follows military and economic power (the elite dominance effect …) (p.464).

Network economics and status, in other words. Anthony’s model is based on the spread of steppe chiefs with a set of institutions that could incorporate outsiders:

Long after the genetic imprint of the original immigrant chiefs faded away, the system of alliances, obligations, myths, and rituals that they introduced was still being passed on from generation to generation. Ultimately, the last remnant of this inheritance is the expanding echo of a once-shared language that survives as the Indo-European language family (p.464).

A pattern that works, incorporates, accrues prestige and is mobile is an inherently plausible mechanism for such language spread.

Briefly considering past misuse of the notion of 'Aryan', Anthony sets out his methodological approach—create an explanatory narrative congruent with the facts and not-contradicted by facts outside the narrative—rather nicely (Pp464-5). In doing so, we cannot retrieve the names of individuals from so long ago, but we can retrieve much of how they lived and thought. Anthony provides an apposite quote from the Rig Veda:

That man is no friend who does not give of his own nourishment to his friend, the companion at his side. Let the friend turn away from him; this is not his dwelling-place. Let him find another man who gives freely, even if he be a stranger. Let the stronger man give to the man whose need is greater; let him gaze upon the lengthening path. For riches roll like the wheels of a chariot, turning from one to another (p.466).

It is a very sad historical irony that an ancient work that incorporated this firm statement that people should be judged by the content of their character and lauded open-minded generosity was used to support racist fantasies of genetic supremacy.

Archaeology relies on many ironies of survival (e.g. that wooden structures are preserved by burning). In his closing words, Anthony points to:

another irony rarely appreciated: that in the invisible and fleeting sounds of our speech we preserve for future generations of linguists many details of our present world (p.466).

Provided, of course, scholars and their audiences are willing to listen to what linguists have to say.

The Horse, the Wheel and Language is a splendid journey through the difficulties and possibilities of archaeology, especially an archaeology open to what other disciplines (notably linguistics) have to say. It is also blessedly free of jargon and the burdens of Theory, allowing the evidence to speak in all its possibilities and ambiguities. (Though a list of acronyms would have been helpful.) It provides engaging and vivid insight into the evidence about our distant progenitors, those who created where we came from.

The Horse the Wheel and Language 2

This continues my review of archaeologist David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World begun in my previous post and which will conclude in my next post.


Part Two The Opening of the Eurasian Steppe begins with explaining Anthony’s approach to archaeology in the chapter “How to Reconstruct a Dead Culture”. The division of prehistoric time into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages began with a C19th Dane (Christian Thomsen) hired at aged 27, with no degree but noted for practicality and industry, to arrange Danish Museum items for display (p.123). The Bronze Age began when bronze made of an alloy of copper with a bit of arsenic began to be used; later tin replaced arsenic. It starts in Europe in the Caucasus around 3700-3500BC, appears in the Pontic-Caspian steppesand the lower Danube around 3300-3200BC but not in Western Europe until around 2400-2200BC. Before the Bronze Age in the steppes was the Eneolithic period—the Copper Age—a stage Western Europe did not go through, moving straight from the Neolithic (New Stone Age) to the Bronze Age (p.125).

In Western archaeology, Neolithic is defined by the means of production—the arrival of farming or herding—while the Mesolithic is defined by the arrival of pottery. In Soviet and post-Soviet archaeology, Neolithic is defined by the arrival of pottery: the usage Anthony follows (Pp125-6).

Then comes the vexed notion of culture: due to internal variety hard to define except in contrast to some neighbouring culture. Culture involves shared patterns of life and a sense of a common past (however invented). Archaeologists have to define culture by material leavings, so it is networks and clumpings of similar material leavings they use to identify distinct cultures. This includes the notion of horizon, a small clumping of traits that spreads quickly and widely without presaging basic cultural changes (Pp130-2).

Domestication
Cattle and sheep were probably introduced into the Pontic-Caspian steppes from the Danube valley and Balkans, where a network of farming settlements were “the most technologically advanced and aesthetically sophisticated culture” in Europe from about 4000-2000BC, creating a frontier between native foragers and immigrant farmers that lasted for about 2,000 years (p.132). The introduction of cattle to the steppes was crucial, as cattle promote social differentiation that created the chiefly culture central to Indo-European history (p.133).

There is no evidence of domesticated animals in the steppes before 5200-5000BC. The great limiting factor for human habitation is the bitter cold of winter, which can get down to -37oC. The dominant steppe mammals were various forms of equids (wild horses and onagers), which were hunted (typically by driving them into ravines) (Pp135-6).

Domesticated cattle and sheep began a transformation of how humans used and lived in the steppes. They were identified and used as currency and gifts and covered in poetry, songs, tales and art. (Anthony starts the chapter with two archetypal Indo-European myths that connect cattle to life, warrior culture and the gods [p.134].) Herd animals are “grass processors”: they turn grass into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk, yoghurt, cheese, meat, marrow and bone. Herds can grow rapidly but are threatened by disease, bad weather or theft, creating a boom-and-bust economy encouraging flexible social organisation. That herd animals are easy to steal encouraged brothers to stay together; hence the patrilocal and patrilineal family systems of herding cultures (p.137).

The replacement of foraging by farming culture (and peoples) is a long historical pattern, which continues to this day:

Forager languages were more apt to decline in the face of agricultural immigration. Farmers had a higher birth rate; their settlements were larger, and were occupied permanently. They produced food surpluses that were easier to store over winter. Owning and feeding “cultured” animals has always been seen as an utterly different ethos from hunting wild ones (p.146).

It is likely the Danubian-Balkan settlement culture spoke an Afro-Asiatic language (p.147). Anthony describes in loving detail the archaeological evidence from the farming and adjacent forager cultures (Pp147ff).

Chiefs first appear in the archaeological record of the Pontic-Caspian steppes with the domestication of animals in 5200-5000BC; marked by sacrificial feasts, ornaments and stone maces (p.160). Pottery is required for metallurgy but the strangeness (and value) of what metalsmiths produce encourages magical status for what they do (p.163). Anthony covers, in more loving detail, the archaeological evidence for the Danubian-Balkan farming culture interaction with the steppes of cows, chiefs and copper; the latter a pattern of life still largely confined to river valleys (Pp164ff).

There is evidence of trade networks of impressive geographical reach. Trade, gift exchange and new cults of sacrifice and feasting provided means of social power. Herding, being a volatile pattern of production, requires and creates networks of herd animals lending; encouraging networks of hospitality and clientage while creating increasingly divergent societies depending on whether they adopted herding or not (Pp190-1).

About horses
The classic animal of pastoralist power is the horse: but when and where the horse was first domesticated is still not well understood (p.192). So Anthony takes us through the evidence, including teeth evidence concerning the use of bits (Pp193ff).
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In particular, the genetic evidence is compatible with horse domestication being based on a single domesticated wild stallion (p.196). Wild stallions are headstrong, violent and instinctively declined to challenge by biting and kicking. Docile mares could be found at edges of herds: a docile stallion was rare and unlikely to reproduce in the wild:

Horse domestication might have depended on a lucky coincidence: the appearance of a relatively manageable and docile male in a place where humans could use him as the breeder of a domesticated bloodline. From the horse’s perspective, humans were the only way he could get a girl. From the human perspective, he was the only sire they wanted (p.197).

The true horse, Equus caballus ranged across the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Domestication probably started by controlling lead mares, using horses as good source of winter meat, around 4800BC; long after sheep, goats, pigs and cattle had been domesticated in various parts of the globe (Pp200-1). A range of evidence suggests both domestication and horse-riding (Pp219ff).

Horse riding makes herding far more efficient—a man on foot can herd about 200 sheep with a good herding dog: put the man on horseback with the same dog and they can herd about 500. Horse-riding greatly increased the efficiency, so greatly intensified the patterns of, herding economy and culture: larger herds meant more social differentiation while easier stealing and expanded hunger for pastures increased warrior status (p.222).

The invention of the short, recurved compound bow (more power with less length) around 1000BC meant bows were powerful yet compact enough to shoot over the horse’s rear. Socketed bronze arrowheads replaced the previous split-shaft arrowheads, and could deliver far more power. The possibilities of horse-based power were greatly increased. Technology was not sufficient on its own, however:

The technical advances in bows, arrows, and casting were meaningless without a matching change in mentality, in the identity of the fighter from a heroic single warrior to a nameless soldier (p.224).

The ideology of personal glory was no longer enough. Once someone on the edge of the civilised world organised the new horse archers into disciplined units (apparently around 1000-900BC), cavalry swept chariots from the battlefield (Pp222-4).

Decline and fade
Around 4300-4200BC, the settled farming culture of the Danubian valley and Balkans was at its peak, with thousands of permanent settlements. Then, around 4200-4100BC, the climate got colder and floods became more frequent. From about 3960-3820BC, there was a bitterly cold period. Between 4200-3900 over 600 settlements were burnt and abandoned. The milder weather then returned, but the Danubian-Balkan culture did not: female figurines stopped being used regularly while metallurgy, mining and ceramic technology declined sharply. At least part of the story of what happened includes warfare (Pp227-8).

In the Balkans, in what had been a well-cultivated, densely settled landscape, no permanent settlements can be dated between 3800-3300BC. The culture declined elsewhere, with the exception of a late-blooming expansion towards the Dneiper, in contact with the steppe cultures. Anthony takes us through the archaeological evidence (Pp229ff).

This is a frontier interaction, and frontiers:

can be envisioned as peaceful trade zones where valuables are exchanged for the mutual benefit of both sides, with economic need preventing overt hostilities, or as places where distrust is magnified by cultural misunderstandings, negative stereotypes, and the absence of bridging institutions (p.236).

The rampaging nomad on horseback being the archetypal “dangerous frontier warrior”, yet prior to the technology and mentality of horse archers developing, any raiding on horse-back was at most a matter of small tribal bands. Evidence strongly suggests that some steppe people rode horses by about 3700-3500BC: horse-riding may have begun before 4500BC (p.237).

This frames discussion of the archaeological evidence on the end of the Danubian-Balkan culture (Pp238ff). Then it is the beginnings of contact with the urban civilisations of the Middle East and the final period of the steppe Copper Age (Pp263ff).


This review concludes in my next post.

The Horse, the Wheel and Language

Archaeologist David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World is a book about how archaeology and linguistics, working together, can reveal much about our past as well as a major contribution to the long-running scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) debate about the Indo-Europeans.

That Anthony—who clearly loves his discipline; his book conveys in loving (but accessible and engaging) detail how archaeology seeks to unveil and understand the past—holds that linguistics can tell us useful details about the past apparently puts him in something of a minority among archaeologists.

A name used to describe the original Indo-Europeans is Aryan, a term taken from the Rig Veda and used in the conflation of language group with racial group:

In the 1780s J. G. Herder proposed a theory later developed by von Humboldt and elaborated in the twentieth century by Wittgenstein, that language creates the categories and distinctions which humans give meaning to the world. Each particular language, therefore, generates and is enmeshed in a closed social community, or “folk” that, at its core, is meaningless to the outsider. Language was seen by Herder and von Humboldt as a vessel that molded community and national identities (p.8).

This leads naturally to a notion of cultural “authenticity”. Apply Darwinian notions of selection to the notion that language was central to national identity and a dangerous, indeed clearly potential lethal, reified conflation of language with race was set off, which included a search for the original homeland of the “Aryans” (Pp8ff).

As with many noxious ideas, the problem was that there is something to this. The evidence is that language does create “cognitive maps” which encourage enduring cultural traits (Pp19ff). The trouble comes when one conflates language with race or ethnicity (as linguist Max Muller put it in 1872, languages do not have skin colour or skull types) and ignoring, downplaying or denying the powerful commonalities of human existence: particularly if one starts assigning superiority to one race, ethnicity, culture or language over another. As Anthony writes:

The mistakes that led an obscure linguistic mystery to erupt into racial genocide were distressingly simple and therefore can be avoided by anyone who cares to avoid them. They were the equation of race with language, and the assignment of superiority to some language-and-race groups (p.10).

Muller was not the only prominent linguist who protested against this noxious nonsense:

While Martin Heidegger argued that some languages—German and Greek—were unique vessels for a superior kind of thought, the linguistic anthropologist Franz Boas protested that no language could be superior to any other on the basis of objective criteria (p.10).

The Rig Veda itself treated being Aryan as a linguistic-religious category, not a ethnic descent one. Anthony rejects any notion of an analytically useful connection between language and race (p.11).

So, if the focus is language, what can linguistics—the study of language—tell us about the past?

Anthony sets out with admirable clarity the ways linguists classify and group languages, including how languages change over time. Which permits “looking back” at the history of language according to standard patterns of how languages change over time (Pp11ff). The trick is connecting that to archaeological (i.e. material culture) evidence. However:

Where we see a very clear material-culture frontier … that persists for centuries or millennia, it tends to be also a linguistic frontier … such ethno-linguistic frontiers seem to occur rarely. But where a robust material-culture frontier does persist for hundreds, even thousands of years, language tends to be correlated with it (p.17).

So, some linguistic patterns can be connected to the archaeological evidence.

Anthony further identifies migration as something weakly understood in contemporary archaeology; an over-reaction to previous simple equating of (for example) changes in pot manufacture with changes in people. As migration is hugely important in understanding the path of human cultures, Anthony applies modern migration theory to the evidence. He also attempts to incorporate Soviet and post-Soviet archaeological literature in his analysis. (Pp17-8).

Then there is the difficult issue of horses. Where were they first domesticated? Chariots were the favoured weapons of rulers from Greece to China from about 1700BC to 700BC, before being replaced by “disciplined troops of mounted archers, the first cavalry” from around 800BC. Anthony argues that he and his research partner and wife Dorcas Brown have established where horses were first domesticated, and that horse-riding preceded chariots even though chariots preceded cavalry (Pp18-9).

The chapter How to reconstruct a dead language looks at “working backwards” from current languages to their predecessors (Pp21ff). Which raises the question of how long do languages last. Including notions of core vocabulary, how long resistant they are to change? The evidence of linguistic construction suggests that the original Indo-European language probably existed around 3000BC and lasted no longer than 2,000 years (Pp39ff). From the evidence of daughter languages, Indo-European probably stopped being a living language no later than 2500BC. Part of the evidence for this being the Avesta and the Gathas of Zoroaster who, on the evidence of where he named, seems to have lived in eastern Iran around 1200-1000BC, developing his moral and religious perspectives partly in reaction against the warrior-and-blood-sacrifice vision of the Rig Veda (p.51).

Working through the logic of the daughter languages and evidence on when various languages “split off” from their Indo-European “mother tongue” (Pp52ff), Anthony develops a helpful diagrammatic “language tree” that suggests that proto-Indo-European probably existed around 4500BC while Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic were the last “split offs” (p.57).

The language of wool and wheel dates proto-Indo-European to being spoken after 4000-3500BC, that is after sheep were domesticated, and wool textiles first used, and after wheeled vehicles developed (Pp59ff). The evidence on sheep and wool is limited, that on wheeled vehicles much clearer:

We can say with great confidence that wheeled vehicles were not developed until after 4000BC; the surviving evidence suggests a date closer to 3500BC. Before 4000BC there were no wheels or wagons to talk about (p.63).

By about 3400BC, there is widespread evidence for wheeled vehicles, the oldest well-dated image of a wheeled vehicle being from Bronocice in southern Poland (Pp66-7).

The wheel changed basic dynamics of human existence. Previously, barges, rafts or hauling things along with large groups were required to haul heavy or bulky items such as:

harvested grain crops, hay crops, manure for fertilizer, firewood, building lumber, clay for pottery making, hides and leather and people (p.72).

Living in large group villages was sensible just for being able to move things. Wheeled vehicles changed possibilities:

Although the earliest wagons were slow and clumsy, and probably required teams of specially trained oxen, they permitted single families to carry manure out to the fields and to bring firewood, supplies, crops, and people back home. This reduced the need for cooperative manual labor and made single-family farms viable. Perhaps wagons contributed to the disappearance of large nucleated villages and the dispersal of many farming populations across the European landscape after about 3500 BC (p.72).

The effect on the steppes was possibly even more profound:

Here wagons made portable things that had never been portable in bulk—shelter, water and food (p.73).

Herders could now move out into the great plains, permitting dispersal of communities:

across interior steppers that earlier had been almost useless economically. Significant wealth and power could be extracted from larger herds spread over larger pastures (p.73)

Bundling together the wheel, plough, wool sheep, dairying and the beginning of horse transport becomes the “secondary product revolution” which swept across European societies around 3500-300OBC:

“Secondary products” are items like wool, milk and muscular power than can be harvested continuously from an animal without killing it, in contract to “primary products” such as meat, blood, bone and hides (p.73).

We have no idea where wheel-and-axle technology originally developed, only that it spread rapidly. Mesolithic and Neolithic sleds were a possible prototype—and remained the better form of transport in snow and ice of Winter in Eastern Europe up to the C20th (p.74). Wagons and wheeled axes do, however, help date later Proto-Indo-European as probably being spoken after 3500BC (p.75).
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Since pioneer farmers have been established as a major vector for language spread, the “first-farming then language dispersal” theory suggested an Anatolian origin for Indo-European, since that is from whence farming spread across Europe (p.75). There are, however, numerous problems with such an origin for Indo-European. Having, however, fixed a reasonable time-frame for when Indo-European was spoken, that provides a basis for working out where (Pp76ff).

But the notion of an Indo-European “homeland” has various problems, which Anthony outlines and considers, arguing for a Indo-European homeland in the Caspian steppes from the Dnieper to Urals and down to the Caucasus in 3500-3000BC, taking the reader carefully through the evidence and reasoning involved (Pp83ff). Including questions of frontiers:

Language is strongly associated with persistent material-culture frontiers that are defined by bundles of opposed customs, what I will call robust frontiers (p.105).

Anthony illustrates the concept with British examples—such as the Welsh frontier, which has persisted since the C6th. (That is, 1500 years and counting.) So:

Persistent, robust premodern ethnolinguistic frontiers seem to have survived for long periods under one or both of two conditions: at large-scale ecotones (forest/steppe, desert/savannah, mountain/river bottom, mountain/coast) and at places where long-distance migrants stopped migrating and formed a cultural frontier (England/Wales, Britanny/France, German Swiss/German French) (p.108).

Part of what is going on here is that geography constrains and enables possibilities at a given level of technology. The patterns of life for living in forests or desert are not the same as for steppes or savannah. This is an obvious basis for persistent cultural (and thus linguistic) difference.

While historians accept migration as a cause of persistent cultural frontiers, based on ample evidence, contemporary archaeology is much less keen, reacting against previous glib association of people movement with shifts in technology and aesthetics. Anthony examines ethno-linguistic frontiers within the US as evidence for the existence and persistence of such things. This leads into a discussion of the patterns and implications of migrations (Pp108ff).

Anthony points out that “ecotones coincide with ethno-linguistic frontiers at many places” (p.114). He cites the work of linguists Daniel Nettle (Oxford) and Jane Hill (Arizona) that the geography of language reflects an underlying ecology of social relationships:

Social ties require a lot of effort to establish and maintain … People who are self-sufficient and fairly sure of their economic future tend to maintain strong social ties with a small number of people, usually very much like themselves. …
But people who are moderately uncertain of their economic future, who live in less productive territories and have to rely on multiple sources of income … maintain numerous weak ties with a wider variety of people. They often learn two or more languages or dialects, because they need a wider network to feel secure. They pick up new linguistic habits rapidly; they are innovators (Pp115-6).

The former is a localist strategy, and fits with the patterns of many university educated people in the modern West. (There are some fascinating resonances with work on the differences between liberals and conservatives in the US.)

The upshot is that:

Where an ecological frontier separated a predictable and productive environment from one that was unpredictable and unproductive, societies could not be organised the same way on both sides. Localized language and small language territories were found among settled farmers in ecologically productive territories. More variable languages, fuzzy dialect boundaries, and larger language territories appeared among mobile hunter-gatherers and pastoralists occupying territory where farming was difficult or impossible. In the Eurasian steppes the ecological frontier between the steppe (unproductive, unpredictable, occupied principally by hunters or herders) and the neighbouring agricultural lands (extremely productive and reliable, occupied by rich farmers) was a linguistic frontier through recorded history. Its persistence was one of the guiding factors in the history of China at one end of the steppes and of eastern Europe at the other (p.116).

To see the power of Anthony’s point, consider how both China and Eastern Europe have strong patterns of centralised, autocratic rule in contrast to the more dispersed political structures of Western Europe and Japan.

As for the spread of language, that need not follow folk migrations, it can be a matter of small-scale, elite migrations. So

Out-migrating Indo-European chiefs probably carried with them an ideology of political clientage … becoming patrons of their new clients among the local population; and they introduced a new ritual system in which they, in imitation of the gods, provided the animals for public sacrifices and feasts, and were in turn rewards with the recitation of praise culture—all solidly reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, and all effective public recruiting strategies. Later Proto-Indo-European migrations also introduced a new, mobile kind of pastoral economy made possible by the combination of ox-drawn wagons and horseback riding. Expansion beyond a few islands of authority might have waited until the new chiefdoms successfully responded to external stresses, climatic or political. Then the original chiefly core became the foundation for the development of a new regional ethnic identity (p.118).

This is a pattern which seems to have occurred in Mitanni, for example, a case Anthony had discussed earlier (Pp49-50).

There is a further factor:

Chronic tribal warfare might generally favour pastoral over sedentary economies as herds can be identified by moving them, whereas agricultural fields are an immobile target (p.119).

Which, of course, encourages centralised rule to defend and expand farming lands, using numbers assembled by concentrated organisational power to counterbalance mobility, as dicussed by Christopher I. Beckwith in his Empires of the Silk Road.

But before any such pattern can emerge, a herding economy has to be established, probably around 5200-5000BC across the river valleys from the Dnieper River and then across the Pontic-Caspian steppes:

a revolutionary event that transformed not just the economy but also the rituals and politics of steppe societies (p.119).

Having set the analytical scene in Part One Language and Archaeology, it is one to Part Two The Opening of the Eurasian Steppe.

Geography also constrains and enables technological possibilities. An isolated group has to invent or make everything itself. A group in contact with others can trade resources and acquire ideas and techniques. A larger group has more potential discoverers and internal trade possibilities than a small group. A socially complex group has more problems to solve, and possibilities to explore, the more socially differentiated it is. Literacy makes it easier for knowledge to be retained and diffused across time and space. Political stability encourages trade (internal and external), social differentiation and literacy. Given all this, the dominance of the Fertile Crescent in invention prior to c.500BC, and the dominance of China in invention from then until about 1500AD, is not surprising. Except, of course, for anything to do with horses, all of which seems to have between invented in Central Eurasia. Working out the basic history of humans and horses is a major focus of Part Two (reviewed in my next two posts).