From Peter Nimitz's Nemets substack:
Across the last 11,700 years there have been a number of civilizational collapses. In them, both socioeconomic complexity and human population decline dramatically. The earlier civilizational collapses are inferred from archaeology and palynology. While a collapse around 2200 BC may possibly be referenced in the Bible, the last two collapses are certainly known historically - the Bronze Age Collapse of the 12th century BC and the Fall of Rome in the 5th century AD.
In those two known cases, the scale of the collapse was considerably vaster than historical records suggest. At least the Celts, Germans, Iranians, Semites, and Finno-Ugrians launched series of wars that ended with substantial population replacement during the Bronze Age Collapse. Places such as the Don River Basin in what is now southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine lost access to metal, and reverted to working with stone and bone. The Fall of Rome saw the die offs of civilized urban populations as well as the rise of the Germans, the Slavs, the Berbers, and the Arabs. Even places as far from Rome as the Congo were deeply affected by the collapse.
Did those collapses delay human progress? Or were they necessary to allow the development of new and more progressive socioeconomic systems? Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome suggests the latter.
The latter part of the Bronze Age (roughly 1800-1200 BC) involved, as can be expected from the name, armies armed and armored with bronze. Bronze is made from copper (of which there are many easily accessible deposits) and tin (a metal with only a limited number of sources). While iron ores are far more accessible than tin, the temperatures required to make iron were higher than what was attainable in most areas in the Bronze Age. Bronze, with its considerably lower (by about 600 C) melting point, could be forged into useful tools by many of the peoples of Eurasia in the Bronze Age, while iron could not.
The result was that weaponry in the Bronze Age was more expensive than it became later, and warfare was more of an elite affair. Chariot riders and chosen warriors dominated the battlefields of the time. It was an age of kings and priests. They needed to win the loyalty of their elite warriors, not the masses of the people. Thus the ideologies that allowed for the state to mobilize the masses for war or infrastructure to the degree of later ages never developed. The pyramids and the megaliths stood out in the sky as lone peaks of developments rather than parts of entire mountain ranges erected in the course of civilizational progress. The “hydraulic despotisms” had yet to form - irrigation and water storage was organized from the bottom up rather than top down. Instead, the ideologies glorified tiny numbers of elite warriors - like the men of the Iliad or King David’s thirty-seven mighty warriors.
The spread of iron metallurgy from the south Caucasus in the early 1st millennium BC ushered in the Iron (or Classical) Age. With the ability to turn plentiful iron ores into weapons and armor, equipping armies became considerably cheaper than it had been in the Bronze Age. Societies that could mobilize large numbers of men and equip them with iron survived and conquered, those which could not died. That process involved a great deal of social, economic, and political evolution.
One path of evolution was that of the polis - the Greek city-state. People had their identity and citizenship tied to a specific city, which in turn represented their interests. That city could join a league of other cities, contributing its wealth and men to a common defense. If it tired of the burdens of membership in that league, or found its unifying ideology repugnant, then it could leave and join another league - often starting a war in the process.
Another path of evolution was empire - such as Persia under the Achaemenids. An emperor or king of kings would demand tribute, obeisance, and men from his subjects. In return, they would receive his protection, aid in domestic struggles, economic integration, and broad domestic autonomy. There was no pretension of cooperative governance, although the subjects - who had states of their own, sometimes with considerable resources - could lobby the court, ally with other claimants to the throne, or revolt.
There were also the slave-oligarchies such as those of Sicily and Carthage. Huge numbers of battle captives or enslaved locals would be forced to labor in agriculture and industry to provide for an urban oligarchy which hired armies of foreign mercenaries to fight its wars. Such societies were capable of tremendous mobilization of labor and men, but were vulnerable to shocks dislocating the entire social structure....
....MUCH MORE
