“Zeus the Father made a third generation of mortal men, a brazen race, sprung from ash-trees; and it was in no way equal to the silver age, but was terrible and strong.
Why did Greeks leave so many written records while the equally sophisticated Anatolians didn't? Same issue with Israelites and Phoenicians and also with the Greeks and Persians. Its crazy to me we get the perspective of a small Greek states but not of the Persian Empire in their wars. Its as if in the wars between Romans and the Britons, its the Britons who left all the written records.
Different ways of viewing the world between cultures lowering the odds of certain cultures keeping records, perhaps. Perhaps lack of interest from early Western scholars resulting in loss of existing records as they were not adequately preserved. Perhaps Abrahamic iconoclasm resulting in maliciously destroyed records. Who knows?
I think your first explanation makes the most sense. For the second point, I am not sure if the Anatolians ever left any records in the first place for Western scholars to start recording them a millenia later. For the third point the same, Christians and Muslims preserved the works of their own forefathers very well and a lots of works of Greco-Roman pagans. I am not sure they would destroy all the Anatolian records while preserving Greco-Roman ones.
I think the likely answer is that for whatever reason most civilizations with writing just didn't use it for much else other than basic booking and legal inscriptions.
However, I would not torally rule out the last possibility. Medieval Christian scholars did appreciate some of the philosophical points of the Greeks, particularly Plato, but I also think they were motivated by interest in the teaching and refining Greek and Latin languages for ecclesiastical purposes, similar to Snorri preserving the Eddas and Sagas primarily as a poetic teaching tool. As such, Near Eastern pagan writings would be of less interest to them. As I understand, Muslim interest in pagan thought also underwent a period of iconoclasm and stagnation after the "Golden Age".
I am not intending that suggestion as anti-Christian, either. I appreciate the contributions Christianity made to European culture even though I recognize some of the negatives.
This is true. Many people fail to appreciate the amount of resources it took to preserve ancient works until the invention of printing press. You had to physically copy each text, line for line. If a scribe didn't find a work valuable, its unlikely he would care to copy it down. So I will further add that most works of Classical Mediterranean(500 BC - 0) were probably already lost to history, by the time of Abrahamic dominance starting in 300 AD.
I’m reading Robert Drews “The End of the Bronze Age” currently. Posits an alternate hypothesis that largely changes in warfare led to the collapse. Much more engaging writing style imo (plus it’s a more exciting theory)
I swear I subbed to you before but I was unsubbed when I got this article recommended. I wonder if Substack is doing the YouTube thing where it seemingly randomly unsubscribes users from certain channels.
Umm, I don't think that's really even what's seriously claimed here. At least not as any kind of more permanent state of affairs.
Perhaps it's better to start from the original anomaly. It's true that the origin and etymology of the Modern Finnish "orja" (pronounced like 'OR-yah', English speakers!) meaning "slave", with corresponding words found in both closer and more distant Uralic languages, is indeed proposed as Proto-Uralic *orja ("slave", "servant"), a supposed loanword based on the Indo-Iranian ethnonym.
That the above looks like the likeliest origin has been puzzling for the Uralicists, since generally, very sparsely-populated hunter-gatherers (also fishers, trappers, fur-traders etc.) moving through Siberia using river routes (or skis, sledges and dogs in the winter) would not be the folks you'd expect to enslave members of much more numerous and warlike pastoral steppe peoples. So I presume the author here was looking at the other cotemporaneous anomalies (climate) and phenomena (Seima–Turbino) present for at least for the brief time that could have allowed even the reversal of the more conventional expectation of interaction between such populations and thereby making the more literal etymological explanation possible, even if as maybe a bit of a tongue-in-cheek hypothesis ;)
For a popularized English-language account in much the same genre about the Uralic people and languages specifically, perhaps you could check out this one in Razib's series on the topic, since he's at least tried to update it based on the most recent details, including the new 2023 preprints on Seima–Turbino etc. reflected in this Nemets' account as well: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/rkul-hit-list-2023-from-deepest-siberia
It's perhaps not as detailed as it could be regarding the last stretch of the ancestors of the modern Finns and Estonians, i.e. the so-called Baltic Sea Finns, no longer HGs but Iron Age tribes with an effective sustenance combo, a part of whom started crossing the Gulf of Finland from the Estonian coast particularly into the nice and mild SW Finland around 0 AD, slowly losing the southern overseas language connection (finally parting ways with North-Estonians at about 500 AD, or to an extent even later for certain SW Finnish dialects) and making their way north and east, subsuming the older Germanic habitation on the coasts particularly and farming the more arable West, but eventually also advancing further inland and Lakeland, probably both integrating and pushing further the more southern of the Saami, their more distant linguistic and ethnic relatives (who were by then well into their own ethnocultural expansion into the huge expanses of northern Fennoscandia beyond modern Finland far down the Scandinavian peninsula in the west and the Kola peninsula and even shores of the White Sea in the east while, based partly on linguistic evidence of substrate language(s), also admixing with remnants of some kinds of existing "Paleo-Laplandic" people, too).
Oh wow! There is literally Ukraine spreading way way into Russia but NO Russia on the Britannica map - what year is it from? Bronze age??? What was the capital of Ukraine then and who was the Tsar? Emperor? Maybe enlighten us with the next post
Forget fairness, use logic! All large countries like India and China are there. The largest country on that map is Russia but it's not there. Instead of Russia you have Siberia. There is a deliberate decision to include certain countries which is not based on historical or geographical factors. All other non included countries are tiny drops that occupy so little land that denoting a land mass with their names would probably clutter the map. Writing Russia instead of Siberia would not.
Masterful post, well worth the time it took to make it, thank you for this.
A wonderful quote from Hesiod and overall an excellent post.
New reader here, just saying thanks.
Excellent essay. Your command over a huge breadth and depth of subjects is apparent.
Any recommendations for books to delve into specifically the spread of the Celtic peoples during this time?
Oxford Handbook of Bronze Age Europe is what I mostly relied on. Sadly most Celtic books are disastrously misguided.
Very interesting. I was particularly interested on the P and Q Celtic division and how it affected Britain and Ireland.
Why did Greeks leave so many written records while the equally sophisticated Anatolians didn't? Same issue with Israelites and Phoenicians and also with the Greeks and Persians. Its crazy to me we get the perspective of a small Greek states but not of the Persian Empire in their wars. Its as if in the wars between Romans and the Britons, its the Britons who left all the written records.
Different ways of viewing the world between cultures lowering the odds of certain cultures keeping records, perhaps. Perhaps lack of interest from early Western scholars resulting in loss of existing records as they were not adequately preserved. Perhaps Abrahamic iconoclasm resulting in maliciously destroyed records. Who knows?
I think your first explanation makes the most sense. For the second point, I am not sure if the Anatolians ever left any records in the first place for Western scholars to start recording them a millenia later. For the third point the same, Christians and Muslims preserved the works of their own forefathers very well and a lots of works of Greco-Roman pagans. I am not sure they would destroy all the Anatolian records while preserving Greco-Roman ones.
I think the likely answer is that for whatever reason most civilizations with writing just didn't use it for much else other than basic booking and legal inscriptions.
Yes, I think that is the most likely explanation.
However, I would not torally rule out the last possibility. Medieval Christian scholars did appreciate some of the philosophical points of the Greeks, particularly Plato, but I also think they were motivated by interest in the teaching and refining Greek and Latin languages for ecclesiastical purposes, similar to Snorri preserving the Eddas and Sagas primarily as a poetic teaching tool. As such, Near Eastern pagan writings would be of less interest to them. As I understand, Muslim interest in pagan thought also underwent a period of iconoclasm and stagnation after the "Golden Age".
I am not intending that suggestion as anti-Christian, either. I appreciate the contributions Christianity made to European culture even though I recognize some of the negatives.
This is true. Many people fail to appreciate the amount of resources it took to preserve ancient works until the invention of printing press. You had to physically copy each text, line for line. If a scribe didn't find a work valuable, its unlikely he would care to copy it down. So I will further add that most works of Classical Mediterranean(500 BC - 0) were probably already lost to history, by the time of Abrahamic dominance starting in 300 AD.
I found the Cline book pretty dry. He seemed to end up saying Bronze Age collapse was mainly environmental.
I did enjoy learning more about the Hittites which I wasn’t too familiar with.
I’m reading Robert Drews “The End of the Bronze Age” currently. Posits an alternate hypothesis that largely changes in warfare led to the collapse. Much more engaging writing style imo (plus it’s a more exciting theory)
I swear I subbed to you before but I was unsubbed when I got this article recommended. I wonder if Substack is doing the YouTube thing where it seemingly randomly unsubscribes users from certain channels.
Is there any history to the Uralic peoples? After reading that the indo-Aryans were originally slaves to the Uralics I need to know more
Umm, I don't think that's really even what's seriously claimed here. At least not as any kind of more permanent state of affairs.
Perhaps it's better to start from the original anomaly. It's true that the origin and etymology of the Modern Finnish "orja" (pronounced like 'OR-yah', English speakers!) meaning "slave", with corresponding words found in both closer and more distant Uralic languages, is indeed proposed as Proto-Uralic *orja ("slave", "servant"), a supposed loanword based on the Indo-Iranian ethnonym.
That the above looks like the likeliest origin has been puzzling for the Uralicists, since generally, very sparsely-populated hunter-gatherers (also fishers, trappers, fur-traders etc.) moving through Siberia using river routes (or skis, sledges and dogs in the winter) would not be the folks you'd expect to enslave members of much more numerous and warlike pastoral steppe peoples. So I presume the author here was looking at the other cotemporaneous anomalies (climate) and phenomena (Seima–Turbino) present for at least for the brief time that could have allowed even the reversal of the more conventional expectation of interaction between such populations and thereby making the more literal etymological explanation possible, even if as maybe a bit of a tongue-in-cheek hypothesis ;)
For a popularized English-language account in much the same genre about the Uralic people and languages specifically, perhaps you could check out this one in Razib's series on the topic, since he's at least tried to update it based on the most recent details, including the new 2023 preprints on Seima–Turbino etc. reflected in this Nemets' account as well: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/rkul-hit-list-2023-from-deepest-siberia
It's perhaps not as detailed as it could be regarding the last stretch of the ancestors of the modern Finns and Estonians, i.e. the so-called Baltic Sea Finns, no longer HGs but Iron Age tribes with an effective sustenance combo, a part of whom started crossing the Gulf of Finland from the Estonian coast particularly into the nice and mild SW Finland around 0 AD, slowly losing the southern overseas language connection (finally parting ways with North-Estonians at about 500 AD, or to an extent even later for certain SW Finnish dialects) and making their way north and east, subsuming the older Germanic habitation on the coasts particularly and farming the more arable West, but eventually also advancing further inland and Lakeland, probably both integrating and pushing further the more southern of the Saami, their more distant linguistic and ethnic relatives (who were by then well into their own ethnocultural expansion into the huge expanses of northern Fennoscandia beyond modern Finland far down the Scandinavian peninsula in the west and the Kola peninsula and even shores of the White Sea in the east while, based partly on linguistic evidence of substrate language(s), also admixing with remnants of some kinds of existing "Paleo-Laplandic" people, too).
Thanks!
Oh wow! There is literally Ukraine spreading way way into Russia but NO Russia on the Britannica map - what year is it from? Bronze age??? What was the capital of Ukraine then and who was the Tsar? Emperor? Maybe enlighten us with the next post
And yet! Ukraine is definitely on that map! 🤔
Oh of course pure innocence LMAO, who cares about all that big land anyways 😅
Forget fairness, use logic! All large countries like India and China are there. The largest country on that map is Russia but it's not there. Instead of Russia you have Siberia. There is a deliberate decision to include certain countries which is not based on historical or geographical factors. All other non included countries are tiny drops that occupy so little land that denoting a land mass with their names would probably clutter the map. Writing Russia instead of Siberia would not.