Seven Ages of Western Eurasia

A brief outline of the 11,700 years from the Anatolian Farmers to the Present

In the beginning, it was cold. Glaciers covered most of North America and a large part of northern Europe and Russia. Sea levels were 120 meters lower than today, leaving vast expanses of now-drowned lands open to terrestrial life. The Sahara Desert was even vaster then than in the present. Most of mankind lived in coastal or riparian lowlands around the world, taking advantage of the nutritional wealth that flowed to them from the water.

The races of man in the Ice Age were more diverse than those of the present. While the last expansion out of Africa ~70,000 BC absorbed or exterminated all of the other hominids of Eurasia, the great mixings caused by agricultural states, metalworking tribes, and wheeled transportation had yet to occur. Societies thrived not through intense specialization allowing for exploitation of a wide range of ecological niches, but through exploitations of specific ecologies alien to their neighbors and rivals. The fishermen, foresters, or big game hunters might slay each other in battle; but without knowledge of the fish-hook, edible forest plants, or megafaunal behavior held by others they could do little to seize each other’s homes. Indeed, certain ecologies in Africa may have provided a refuge for the last remnants of non-human hominids even after the end of the Ice Age. Men evolved apart, as they had many times before.

Many Ice Age men undoubtedly dreamed of civilization - at the time perhaps understood as an orderly life with predictable and reliable sources of food and water. A few men tried to make civilization in the Last Ice Age. An underwater megalith off of the coast of Sicily and a paleolithic village in Israel are signs of such failed attempts more than twenty thousand years ago. There are undoubtedly others in the drowned lands which in time will be found by underwater exploration. The colder, sparser, and unpredictable climate doomed them all.

While the uncertainty of human life in the Ice Age appeared a curse, it was in some senses a blessing. Man was taller than he would be again until modernity, and likely more intelligent too. The human population of the world was only a few million, so there was plentiful game. While life was violent, brutish, and short - it was well fed. Evidence that genetic selection for disease resistance occurred mostly after 2,500 BC suggests that disease burdens in the paleolithic may have been have less severe for man as well.

The end of the last Ice Age coincided with the the rise of the Natufians. The Natufians were hunter-gatherers in the Levant who harvested wild cereals to supplement their diets - an important step towards a sedentary lifestyle and civilization. The Levant had become a crossroads of North Africa, Europe, and Asia towards the end of the Last Ice Age. The ancestors of the Natufians interacted with peoples as far east as Tajikistan, as far west as Morocco, and as far north as Greece. Those Ice Age contacts left little (if any) genetic impact to the east and north (genetic connections between the Natufians and the peoples of North Africa remain debated), suggesting that they were indirect and ephemeral even if they left lasting cultural influences.

The earliest known censuses date to the Bronze Age, which complicates historical population estimates. Archaeologists, geneticists, and paleobotanists have come up with a number of methods of estimating relatives prehistoric population sizes. One is the summed calibrated radiocarbon probability method. The summed calibrated radiocarbon probability method is based on the idea that the number of identified and dated archaeological sites can be used as a proxy of past population size in well studied regions. While sensibly criticized for a number of reasons, it is nonetheless a useful approach that can sometimes corroborated by other methods.

Per that method, the Natufian population grew gradually in the 2,000 years after the end of the last Ice Age (about 12,800 to 10,700 BC), as did the population of the rest of the Middle East. The Younger Dryas period (10,900 to 9,700 BC) ushered in colder climatic conditions that caused a decline in population in much of the world. The Levant was an exception. Its population, the Natufians, multiplied fivefold over that ~1,200 year period due to their successful exploitation of wild cereals expanding their food supply. Part of the Natufian success was due to the climate change’s moderation in the Levant. Elsewhere, peoples who embraced similar cultural shifts towards intensive harvesting of cereals or outright agriculture in the period between the Ice Age and the Younger Dryas died off in the renewed cold or reverted to hunting and gathering. Those almost-civilizations of 12,800 to 10,700 BC, such as the one in the Horton Plains of Sri Lanka, are only dimly known through palynology.

It was at the end of the Younger Dryas around 9700 BC that the fire of civilization was rekindled successfully. It flickered and dimmed at a number of points across the next 11,700 years, but was never altogether extinguished as it had been in the Ice Age. Indeed, the dimmest periods of the later ages are brighter than the most illuminating periods of the earlier. The forces of Progress could be retarded or destroyed in large parts of western Eurasia, but they always survived somewhere to spread again. In the Ice Age the areas that could support agriculture were quite limited, so when a civilization fell its memory and legacy was unlikely to survive on the barren periphery. In the Holocene (the last 11,700 years that have followed the Younger Dryas cold period), the warmer climate has allowed for the periphery of civilization to be large enough that it provide refuges from which it can again be restored.

The First Age of civilization in western Eurasia lasted from the end of the Younger Dryas in 9700 BC to the First Fall in 8300 BC. It is also known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A. The population of the northern Levant perhaps doubled in the two centuries immediately following the end of the Younger Dryas. The warmer, wetter, and more consistent climate increased plant biomass in the region much as it did elsewhere. The greater population allowed for the construction of ritual sites like Göbekli Tepe and fortified towns with populations in the thousands such as Jericho.

First Age life was still hard in spite of improved climactic conditions. Wild wheat and barley shatter upon becoming ripe, scattering their seeds around. For farmers, that is quite undesirable. They want the seeds to stay in the plant upon ripeness so that they can be harvested and eaten. In the early 10th millennium BC, only about a quarter to a fifth of harvested einkorn wheat didn’t shatter upon ripeness. By the beginning of the seventh millennium BC, about nineteen-twentieths of heads of wheat didn’t shatter. Farmers were breeding (intentionally and accidentally) tougher rachis in cereal crops to prevent shattering, but it would take thousands of years for their project to come to fulfillment. While the farmers of the First Age could grow more calories per acre than their hunter-gatherer predecessors, their crop yields were still considerably lower than their successors.

Crop development was done in parallel rather than in sequence in the First Age. Across the Fertile Crescent men experimented with the domestication of wild plants. The people of Anatolia, the Caucasus, and the Zagros were not overcome by the farmers to their south or west in the First Age. Their lifestyles continued to enable them to endure in their homelands and pursue their own paths of progress in the First Age.

The First Fall in this sequence of western Eurasian civilization occurred around the 84th century BC. The population of the northern Levant and upper Mesopotamia declined rapidly in association with a sudden shift to colder temperatures and the domestication of cattle. Numerous sites were entirely depopulated. Population in the region would remain low for the next eight centuries, perhaps due to fields once used for farms being turned into pasturelands for cattle. Land used for agriculture even then would produce a multiple of human-consumable calories that land used as cattle pasture would, so the shift in food source reduced the carrying capacity of the region. It would not fully recover until around 7000 BC.

The Second Age lasted from the First Fall in 8300 BC to the Second Fall of 6200 BC. It is also known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B. While civilization had collapsed in the northern Levant and upper Mesopotamia, it had again endured the shift to the cold in the southern Levant. There, increased crop yields in the 9th millennium BC allowed for population growth. By the middle of the 9th millennium, about 60% of einkorn wheat finds in the southern Levant did not have a shattered rachis, ensuring that farmers were getting more food per acre than their ancestors had a thousand years before. As a result, the long period of stagnation from 9500 to 8600 BC in the southern Levant ended. The region’s population at least doubled and may have multiplied ten times over the next 1,000 years, only declining again after 7500 BC.

The relatively late adoption of animal domestication also likely allowed for the southern Levantines to endure the First Fall. Cattle, sheep, and goat finds only appear in the southern Levant after 8000 BC. Whereas farmers are sedentary by their nature, animal herders are usually mobile. The social structures which bind them together are quite different from those of farmers, and have caused recurring conflict across man’s history. Because the southern Levantines of the 9th millennium BC lacked a class of herders, such a conflict never afflicted them, and no alternative to the sedentary farming lifestyle was known to them. They were forced to improve their agricultural way of life, and did. Thus they endured - for a time.

To the north and east, in the periphery of civilization, Second Age men experimented with animal domestication to supplement their slowly improving crops. The peoples of the northern Levant and upper Mesopotamia had begun to domesticate cattle and pigs as early as 8500 BC, to the eventual doom of their sedentary society. Domestic cattle spread to eastern Anatolia within a few centuries. Caprine domestication was considerably more widespread. Sheep started to be domesticated in central Anatolia in the mid-to-late 9th millennium. By 7500 BC, almost all meat in Central Anatolia was obtained from herded sheep rather than hunted wildlife. Goat herding developed in the Zagros Mountains early in the 8th millennium BC, and supplemented the locals’ cultivation of barley.

The Second Age saw the the first tentative spreads of western Eurasian civilization beyond the Fertile Crescent. The peoples of the Zagros had links to the peoples of the southern Caspian and the northwestern Indian subcontinent for thousands of years. The southern Caspian adopted the neolithic lifestyle of goat herding with agriculture under influence from the peoples of the Zagros in the early 8th millennium BC. Separated from the rest of India by the Thar Desert, the northwest of the Indian subcontinent had pursued its own path of development since deep into the last Ice Age. Their contacts with the west spread domesticated crops, animals, and luxury trade goods in the late 8th or early 7th millennium BC. At the same time, the farmers from Anatolia made their first tentative pushes into Greece and the Balkans.

Life with domesticated animals came at a price. Cows can carry tuberculosis, and perhaps spread it to its first known human victim in the Second Age. Pigs in particular can carry dozens of diseases which can spread to humans - among them leptospirosis, toxoplasmosis, brucellosis, tularemia, trichinellosis, swine influenza, salmonella, and hepatitis. Nonetheless in the long run it may have proved beneficial. Those immune or resistant to the diseases carried by domesticated animals survived to reproduce while those who were not resistant did not. In time, that may have granted a decisive advantage to the farmers over the foragers in later ages.

Most settlements in the First and Second Ages had no water infrastructure. What limited infrastructure there was seems to have been limited to desert settlements walling off wadis to ensure that what little rainfall there was soaked into the ground nearby rather than evaporate. Rainfall was taken as it came, ensuring that settled societies were very vulnerable to periods of drought. Even the handful of wells found in the First and Second Ages seem to have been for human and animal sacrifices rather than for drawing groundwater.

The Second Age ended in a series of cataclysms around 6200 BC. The Doggerland land bridge connecting Great Britain with Europe was drowned in a tsunami and sea level rise over the following decades. The Danube flooded, devastating the hunter-gatherer populations that had blocked the path of the Anatolian Farmers into Europe. The central Sahara in Africa turned from a savanna into a desert, forcing the locals to flee or starve.

The cataclysm drove wanderings of peoples. While the First and Second Ages had been intensely xenophobic, the Third Age featured repeated instances of racial intermarriage in both the civilized and uncivilized worlds. The old order in the south Caucasus was broken, and the Caucasian peoples from both east and west intermarried, forging new peoples.

The Third Age, also known as the Pottery Neolithic, lasted from the cataclysms of 6200 BC until the spread of copper metallurgy and the Hunter-Gatherer Resurgence of 4400 BC. It is most notable for seeing the spread of pottery manufacture and use - an element of material culture that survives much more easily than others. The improvements of crops (almost all domesticated barley and wheat were non-shattering by 6200 BC), the devastation of the cataclysms, and perhaps animal-carried diseases smoothed the expansion of the farmers. In the first two ages, hunter-gatherers of a number of races in Africa, Europe, and Asia had all managed to hold their own against the farmers. They struggled to do so in the Third Age. Farmers from the southern Levant spread into Egypt around 6000 BC. Farmers from Iran and the southern Caspian forged the Jeitun Culture in modern Turkmenistan around the same time, and related shepherding groups reached what is now Kyrgyzstan not long after. The connections between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent continued into the Third Age, with Balochistan adopting Jeitun styles of flint manufacture as well as continuing to trade luxury goods as far west as Iran.

In Europe, the vanguards of the Anatolian Farmers mixed with some of the local hunter-gatherers in the Balkans before being absorbed in the masses of their following countrymen. Their descendants, the Early European Farmers (or EEFs) split into two branches. The first branch, the Linear Ceramics, was intensely xenophobic and migrated into Romania, Ukraine, Hungary, and southern Germany and Poland over the next thousand years. The other branch, the Cardial Ware, was more willing to mix with local hunter-gatherers (but was still quite violently xenophobic) and advanced along the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts. The Cardial Ware EEFs made it to Portugal by 5600 BC.

The EEFs as well as farmers in the Middle East, Central Asia, and India were able to exploit only a limited number of ecologies. The Linear Ceramic EEFs for instance settled almost exclusively in areas with loess soils. The result was that hunter-gatherers were able to survive or even thrive in the periphery - particularly in certain coastal areas with abundant fishing.

The Third Age saw major advances in water infrastructure. Irrigation began to be used on a wide scale and terraces were built to improve water efficiency. Civilization had advanced to the point where improvement on land would allow for greater production of wealth and food, and thus a greater population.

Metalworking began in the Third Age, with copper tools beginning to be made as early as 6000 BC. Nonetheless, metalworking didn’t become very widespread until the mid-to-late 5th millennium BC some 1500 years later.

The EEF societies in Europe had reached their Third Age peak around 5000 BC. Unable or unwilling to settle new lands, they turned on each other, becoming one of the most violent societies in history. Their prehistoric mutual slaughters, only matched in historical cruelty by the Aztecs, were not sufficient in thinning out their population to manageable numbers. Their lives were unhealthy enough that they evolved to be shorter.

Unlike the First and Second Falls of 8300 and 6200 BC, there is no obvious climactic source of the Third Fall of 4400 BC. It may be that the spread of copper metallurgy integrated previously isolated hunter-gatherer populations on the periphery of EEF society into the EEF economy with disruptive effects. Regardless, it is clear that history was on the move. Across almost the whole of the EEF-held parts of Europe, local hunter-gatherers living in the periphery conquered their EEF neighbors and installed themselves as their new rulers. The hunter-gatherers replaced from as little as 15% to as much as 40% of the EEF population in the centuries following the conquest, but invariably replaced an outright majority of EEF male lineages. Only in Croatia did the old EEF rulers endure - perhaps because there were no local hunter-gatherers to conquer them. To the northeast, the Comb Ceramic people from the what is now northern Russia invaded the Baltic, replacing perhaps half of its population. In Greece, the EEFs were conquered not by hunter-gatherers, but by a new wave of Anatolian migrants crossing the Aegean Sea.

The word conquest may be too simple to describe these events. Indeed, what seems to have happened in northwestern Europe is that the local hunter-gatherers conquered a handful of EEF groups, synthesized a new culture capable of exploiting a wider range of ecologies (ie more than just loess soils), then grew exponentially while its conservative EEF neighbors remain stagnant in population. Such exponential population growth has been seen in recent history, with the Afrikaners growing from about 6,000 people in 1754 to about 27,000 in 1806 to about 1.1 million in 1936 despite little immigration. Cultural syntheses in prehistory such as those formed in the aftermath of the 4400 BC hunter-gatherer resurgence in Europe opened up access to entirely new food sources that enabled societies to grow far beyond their conservative predecessors.

The Fourth Age lasted from the Hunter-Gatherer Resurgence of 4400 BC to the beginning of the third wave of the great Indo-European conquests in 3000 BC. The first 800 years of the Fourth Age were a golden age that at least in Europe would not be surpassed until the Sixth Age. The absence of the wheel and sail ensured that trade was slow enough that there was no unified Eurasian germ pool. Disease was less common as a result, and when it did appear it stayed in its home region rather than spreading to devastate the whole world as it would later.

The synthesis of the hunter-gatherers and the farmers brought an end to many of the peripheral peoples. In France, homogenization between north and south as well as large-scale colonization of Britain is suggestive of late 5th millennium BC state-building. The last true hunter-gatherers in France seem to have been absorbed by the 39th century BC. The hunter-gatherers of the Caucasus were either extinguished, settled, or absorbed in the Fourth Age as well. The future of the Caucasus was fortifications, not foragers.

Cardial Ware EEFs had pressed into northwest Africa during the latter part of the Third Age. After initial failures, they ended up mixing with the locals (the almost pure descendants of the Iberomaurusians). One branch of the resulting synthesis shifted to pastoralism, spreading across the Green Sahara as the Tenerean culture and eventually becoming the Leiterband culture in what is now western Sudan and eastern Chad by 3700 BC. In time, their descendants would migrate to northern Nigeria and become the Hausa.

The Fourth Age saw the fateful failure of two fronts of civilization to conquer the western steppe. The EEF Cucuteni-Trypillian culture had also experienced the hunter-gatherer resurgence, and pressed into the steppe towards the Dnieper River from its heartland along the Dniester River. Some of its cities held tens of thousands of inhabitants. Across the Black Sea, the also agricultural Maykop culture arose in the North Caucasus around 3700 BC.

While earlier farmers had lacked the technical capability to grow crops on the western steppe (what is now Ukraine and southern Russia), the Fourth Age farmers lacked the ability to conquer its inhabitants. The Indo-Europeans of the early 4th millennium BC were capable fighters, able to conquer parts of the coastal plain in modern Romania in spite of their primitive lifestyle. While the Cucuteni-Trypillians were able to counter their tactics for a time (it appears that they enslaved Indo-Europeans at various points in the 4th millennium BC), their successes were not to last.

The Indo-Europeans changed their lifestyle around the 34th century BC. While previously they had stayed close to rivers, their new lifestyle involved greater dairy production. Mares and cows were grazed on the steppe, then milked. That milk was then converted into one of a variety of dairy products. What had been a marginal people in a cold and inhospitable land quickly became a rapidly growing threat to their neighbors. No longer was the steppe a desert to the Indo-European - it was a pasture, and soon a highway.

The wheel was invented in the middle of the 4th millennium BC, and spread so rapidly across the Caucasus, Middle East, and Europe that it is impossible to know its point of invention. The sail is also first attested in the middle of the 4th millennium BC, in predynastic Egypt.

The wheel and the sail revolutionized transportation, for better and for worse. Trade became much cheaper and markets were enlarged. Settlements in the lowlands of Central Asia expanded in population as a result. With wheeled carts, the locals could transport their goods to commercial centers for sale. There, they mixed to become what is known today as the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex.

Some of the peoples around the Black Sea benefitted greatly from advances in sailing technology towards the end of the 4th millennium BC. Metalwork was traded between the people of what is now northern Turkey and eastern Bulgaria, and Maykop pots from the North Caucasus were shipped to what is now southwestern Ukraine. Similarities in the design of stone stelae in Tuscany, Troy, and Crimea suggest cultural contacts in addition to material contacts.

While there was peaceful trade and cultural exchange, there was tremendous violence too. Around 3200 BC people from the Black Sea coast of northern Anatolia invaded Greece by sea. They replaced about a third of the population, and their descendants on Crete became the famous Minoans. To the northwest, sea reavers from the Orkney Islands just to the north of Scotland devastated the coasts of Britain before setting up coastal settlements as the Grooved Ware culture and gradually pushing inland. The first two waves of Indo-European invaders of Europe had penetrated into the Balkans as the Suvorovo Culture (early 4th millennium BC) and the Usatovo Culture (late 4th millennium BC).

The devastating Minoan and Grooved Ware sea invasions were just part of a general trend of decline in late 4th millennium BC Europe. A cooler, wetter climate from 3600-3100 BC caused crop yields to decline - in part by forcing a shift from more productive wheat to more robust but less productive barley. Some farmers even abandoned cereal agriculture altogether and changed to a lifestyle based around hazelnut and cattle. The old political structure based around sedentary wheat agriculture broke down, ushering in an era of population decline and endemic violence.

The six centuries of decline of EEF Europe at the end of the Fourth Age offered an opportunity for the rising forces of the Fifth Age. In Scandinavia, the local hunter-gatherers drove the farmers out of Sweden and gradually moved to spread south deeper into the European continent. But it was the Indo-Europeans who would shatter Old Europe entirely.

Apparently united under some terrible warlord in the 30th century BC, the Indo-Europeans swept into Europe with cart-supplied armies of mounted infantry. The Cucuteni-Trypillian and Funnelbeaker EEFs were exterminated in a series of wars that lasted less than two centuries. With the help of Globular Amphora allies or subjects, the Indo-Europeans ended civilization from the Dnieper to the Rhine. The new culture, the Corded Ware, was about 70% Indo-European and 30% Globular Amphora in ancestry, although it varied by tribe and class.

History was again on the move. Egypt was united in the century before that great and terrible third wave of Indo-European conquests. Sumer emerged from obscurity to become the most famous of the early civilizations due to its cuneiform writing. The Indus Valley Civilization, largely spared the tortures of 4th millennium BC Europe by its blessed climate, rose to even greater heights with large planned fortified cities and new sea trade links to Mesopotamia. Durable bronze was replacing soft copper as the metal of choice.

The Bell Beaker culture was originally a civilized Iberian culture, but it greatly influenced the Indo-Europeans beyond the Rhine and Danube. Taking up seafaring and agriculture, the resultant population growth drove a renewed wave of Indo-European conquests in the mid-to-late 3rd millennium BC. The EEFs of Britain and Ireland were almost exterminated, with only the Orkney Islands remaining unconquered. In time, the people of the Orkneys would join the Indo-European world, but on their own terms. France, Britain, the Balkans, and Iberia were all overrun by the end of the millennium.

Indo-European refugees of the Catacomb Culture, fleeing their defeat at the hands of the ancestors of the Slavs and Iranians in what is now Ukraine, invaded Greece and the south Caucasus. Those refugees would in time spread their language to their new neighbors (Greece) or subjects (Armenia) - forming the Greeks and Armenians. The peoples of Greece and the south Caucasus were more sophisticated than those of northern and western Europe, so the invasions were not as apocalyptic there as elsewhere.

While the Indus Valley Civilization had suffered from a devastating bout of warfare at a point between 2800 and 2600, it had recovered and advanced to an even greater extent in the following four to six centuries. Like their Minoan contemporaries, the Indus Valley Civilization was well aware of the importance of urban sanitation. Even their smaller settlements were built with drains, which perhaps reduced the risk of major salmonella outbreaks such as those which may have killed many in the Mediterranean around 2200 BC. Nonetheless, the 2200 BC crisis affected India too, and drove a north to south migration of what were possibly Dravidian speakers into Karnataka.

While the climate change around 2200 BC caused chaos around the world, it did not end the Bronze Age. Instead, metallurgical sophistication - driven by peripheral peoples such as the ancestors of the modern Uralics - continued to advance through the 2nd millennium BC. Advances were accompanied by increased international trade, which in turn drove more series of conquests - this time for metal mines rather than farm or pastureland.

The Bronze Age Collapse of 1200 BC was initially caused by droughts in the Middle East and East Africa. States which were spared the drought were nonetheless terribly affected - possibly because they obtained a significant part of their revenue from customs rather than land or head taxes. The globalization of the Bronze Age had spread many advances across Eurasia, but it ensured that the fates of societies were tied together.

Bearing advanced bronze weapons, the Finno-Ugrians crossed the Ural mountains and conquered Russia north of the forest line as well as the Baltic and Finland. The Germans sailed south from Sweden to the Baltic coast of modern Germany and Poland. The Semites crossed the Red Sea from Yemen into Eritrea and Ethiopia, destroying the pygmy kingdoms only dimly remembered through Egyptian records. The Aryans, already ruling the ruins of the Indus Valley Civilization, spread across the rest of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The Greeks, comprising the bulk of the Sea Peoples, ravaged the eastern Mediterranean.

While some peoples such as the Greeks dimly remembered the Bronze Age (the Iliad and Odyssey reference events that took place between the 15th and 12th centuries BC), the Roman and Iranian forgetfulness were more typical. The Fifth Fall, the Bronze Age Collapse, had shattered civilization and memory. The resulting fragmentation was so total that even disease spread dramatically declined. Previously widespread strains of hepatitis faded away, only again spreading after 800 BC when international contacts became more frequent.

The Sixth Age lasted from around 800 BC until around 800 AD. It is called the Iron Age, the Classical Age, and its later parts Late Antiquity. It is known considerably better than the Fifth Age due to the shorter passage of time, as well as the endurance of parts of civilization even after the fall of Rome.

The spread of ironworking caused tremendous social changes. Because the tin that was required to add to copper to make bronze was expensive, the Fifth (Bronze) Age was dominated by elite warrior classes - first as mounted infantry, later as chariot riders. Iron is considerably more widespread than tin, and thus enabled soldiers to be armed and armored with metal more cheaply. Ideologies and political-economic structures that allowed for mass infantry armies thus spread, while those that favored small elites of warriors declined.

Rome in its republican era was a center of a broader alliance network in central Italy. Rather than paying taxes to Rome, allies were instead obligated to provide soldiers in wartime. The allies kept their own local systems of government with little interference from Rome. Thus the very structure of the Roman super-state encouraged militarism. War alongside allies made friends and showed comrades their similarities against alien Celtic, Greek, Iberian, German, or Semitic foes. Peace brought the usual disputes of law and wealth, with class against class and ally against ally.

The Roman political structure gave it an advantage over its neighbors who organized their armies on a mercenary basis (such as Carthage) or as city-state leagues based on tribute collection and ideological conformity (such as Greece). The former was strong but fragile - defeat or poverty would doom it. The latter was weak but robust - defeats could shift the center of a league to a new city-state, but its ability to mobilize men and material was inferior to that of Rome.

To the north, hydrology and climate ensured that the Germans, Balts, or steppe Iranians such as the Sarmatians or Iazyges would be the great threat to Rome. The Vistula, the Rhine, and the Elbe flow from south to north, so he who ruled the northern coasts controlled the access of all Germany and Poland to the world ocean. The cold climate of the north drove the Germans to rely heavily on cattle pastoralism as much as agriculture. Thus their society was mobile, and intensely militaristic due to the unending conflicts driven by cattle rustling. Driving south, the Germans conquered most of Germany, Poland, and western Ukraine by the second century AD.

The Sixth Age saw dramatic improvements in hydraulic engineering. Aqueducts carried hundreds of millions of liters of water to Rome every day. Enormous dams tens of meters in height were constructed to hold water to sate the Rome’s demand for water. Watermills were used to grind grain and cut timber. Qanats spread from Iran to neighboring arid regions, enabling once wild lands to be irrigated and farmed.

The political structure of Rome and Persia prevented them from advancing to modernity. Slavery in Rome drove extractive rather than productive economic development in large parts of the empire. In addition, the imperial structure’s roots in the republic left it with a lower state capacity than that of European states of the early modern era. Internal political processes in the empire drove not improvements towards either bureaucratic efficiency or public participation in government, but towards personalization. A successful general or politician after all was more of a threat to an emperor than any of Rome’s neighbors. Loyalty mattered to an emperor more than competence.

While Zoroastrianism long predates both Christianity and Islam, its history proceeded very differently because of its close ties to the Persian states. Cyrus the Great and Cambyses II severely curtailed the independence of the Zoroastrian priestly class. The relationship between the Zoroastrian religion and the Persian state resembled that of the later Orthodox Church and the Russian state in the 18th century. As a result, Zoroastrianism evolved to become tightly integrated with state structures. It rose and fell with the state. When Alexander the Great overthrew the Persian Empire, the Zoroastrians fell into obscurity in most of the old Persian Empire for centuries. While Zoroastrianism had provided the Achaemenid dynasty with legitimacy and guidance, it was not well embedded in the masses of the people and possessed only a weak independent structure that could enable it to regenerate. When Zoroastrianism was regenerated, it was done so by the new Sassanid dynasty in the new form of Zurvanism. Zurvanism was similarly closely tied to the state, and worked with the state to suppress Manichaeism - a religion that was tied to local and independent structures, and perhaps which could have allowed an indigenous Iranian religious tradition to endure to the present had it replaced the Zurvanists.

By contrast, Christianity and Islam developed structures independent of states - Christianity by virtue of evolving from an apocalyptic cult into a secret missionary religion that survived repeated state persecutions, Islam by virtue of the loose state structure of the caliphates allowing for a number of virtually independent and largely tribal-based power structures that provided opportunities for heterodox or reformist Islamic movements. Both Islam and Christianity had influential religious orders who were financed either by small donors or by lands held by order rather than by the state, in both cases spurring closer integration between as least a part of the masses and the clerical classes. If the state fell - as the Roman Empire and Abbasid Caliphate did - the religious structures would endure or even thrive.

The Sixth Fall saw a dramatic population decline in western Eurasia, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the collapse of the Gupta Dynasty, and the collapse of Sassanid Iran. The diverse urban populations of the principate had declined during the Crisis of the Third Century, and were largely wiped out during the Fall of Rome. Their successors were mostly the descendants of barbarians as well as of local farmers from the hinterlands whose lifestyles were robust to economic and political shocks, unlike the urban populations who relied on a grain dole. As promised by Jesus, the meek inherited the earth - humble Slavs in the Balkans, peripheral Berbers in northwest Africa, Basque holdouts around the Bay of Biscay, and Celts in Brittany and Wales. In India, large parts of the northwest were so depopulated by the invading Huns that Chinese visitors a century and a half later still commented on the desolation.

The beginning of the Seventh Age (~800 AD to present) saw the political fragmentation but religious consolidation of western Eurasia. The feudal German, Slav, and Latin states of Christendom reigned in Europe while the Berber, Iranian, Turkic, Caucasian, and Arab states reigned in the House of Islam. Europe’s favorable hydrology, dense fortifications, rough military equality, and international class cooperation of Catholic clergy and feudal nobility encouraged capital over labor investment starting in the 13th century - water mills in particular became hugely important. By contrast, the decisive Arab conquests centuries earlier as well as the later Turkic migrations into the Middle East encouraged investment in slaves over capital - the peoples of the Caucasus and East Africa were military inferiors to the Moslem slavers, and the Middle East’s unfavorable hydrology precluded construction of water mills in many areas. Additionally, the flood plains of Mesopotamia and Egypt were disease ridden, further encouraging institutions to use slaves as freemen would tend to cluster in healthier areas.

In spite of political-economic differences, religious innovations in both Christendom and the House of Islam were remarkably similar in the Middle Ages. Martyrs, saints, mystical wanderers, and holy wars animated the believers of both faiths and guided them to accomplishments admired even to this day.

It was in the 15th and 16th century that the religions took quite different paths. In Christianity, the corruption of the Catholic Church as well as its alienation from the masses offered an opening for religious reformers who among other things desired to preach the Gospel in the vernacular rather than in Latin. Pious nobles unhappy with the corruption of their religion were increasingly joined by nobles who saw political and economic opportunities in Church reform. The resultant Reformation saw Christendom divided on sectarian grounds, beginning a series of intense conflicts which drove a broad historical process towards economic and military mobilization. While that process was originally rooted in the efforts of sectarian polemicists to win the souls of the masses for the True Faith, it eventually evolved into state, ideological, and national forms. Seizures of Church property allowed the smaller and less populated Protestant states such as Sweden and England to contest the forces of the larger and more populated Catholic states such as Spain and Austria by mobilizing a larger part of their economy. The Little Ice Age forced reforms even in those Catholic states, with absolutism spreading not on basis of ideology but as a necessary precondition for state survival. States which failed to centralize authority and mobilize a large part of their resources for international conflict, such as Poland-Lithuania, were dismembered by those that did such as Prussia, Russia, and 18th century Austria.

By contrast the Ottomans of Turkey and Safavids of Iran were forged from horseriding raiders rather than sedentary nobles backing religious reformers. The nomadic and semi-nomadic Turkic peoples of Anatolia and the Iranian plateau were pastoralists who gained wealth through raiding for slaves and cattle. Religion was a powerful inspiration for those raiders, for whom failure would mean death in either battle or starvation. As a result, a number of heterodox Islamic sects thrived among the Turkic peoples of the Middle East.

While both the Safavids and Ottomans had heterodox origins, they both pursued their own and directly opposing paths of a new orthodoxy. The Safavids were a revolutionary state which based its legitimacy on an interpretation of Shia Islam brought to Iran by Arab jurists from the Levant that was embraced by a fanatical Turkic tribal army - the Redheads - who followed their messianic leader Ismail into a series of successful military campaigns which successfully united Iran. The Ottomans by contrast ruthlessly worked to suppress pro-Shia sentiment, sensibly fearing Safavid subversion in Anatolia while also sincerely desiring to crush a rapidly spreading heresy. The Ottomans seized the sword and mantle of Mohammed the Prophet during their conquest of Egypt in 1517, and proclaimed themselves the new Caliphs. They went to great efforts in the next century to shore up their legitimacy in the House of Islam, successfully winning support in places as far apart as India, Indonesia, and Somalia.

The triumph of Turkic nomads in both Iran and Turkey was likely inevitable due to the hydrology of the countries. Iran’s forests are mostly on the Caspian coast - separated from the World Ocean by two mountain ranges, making it difficult for them to construct a trade fleet or navy. Similarly, Turkey’s rivers, while numerous, are mostly non-navigable. Thus in both regions it was beasts rather than boats which transported goods and men. Instead of shipbuilders, stockbreeders were the class that dominated discussion of transportation and state. Mathematics and learning were neglected, and cattle raiding was common. Whereas a number of European and Indian states were able to respond to the crises created by the Little Ice Age in the 17th century by improving their state capacities, both the Turks and Iranians slumped into a long decline. Their power, while not broken, was unable to be reformed or revived, paving the way for the Iran’s catastrophic period from 1717-1828 and Turkey’s catastrophic period from 1831-1922. Nonetheless, their size and lack of threats to their heartlands ensured that they remained independent states. The vicious process of state evolution in southern India and Europe was driven in part by state extinction.

Advances in state capacity, finances, military organization, and bureaucracy allowed European states of the 18th century to finally surpass their classical age counterparts in military size. However, bureaucratization and secularization broke down the networks that bound rulers to their subjects. Remnants of the old feudal estates were essential in the French Revolution, and appeals to English liberty in part animated the American War of Independence. Ideological and national causes were not new to the late 18th century, what was new was the scale on which societies could be mobilized on the basis of those appeals. Participative forms of governments which had never truly died or had been only recently extinguished found new support among the masses who saw participative government (as opposed to top-down bureaucratic government) as a way to advance their favored cause.

The spread of New World crops as well as advances in sanitation generated a tremendous population boom in Europe, doubling from about 150 million to 300 million in the 19th century. Improved education, increased wealth, and cheap print media all served to increase political consciousness. Coal was exploited on a large scale to provide mankind energy that fueled industrialization. The old concept of using the water mill for energy was not made obsolete - it became more important than ever as it evolved into the steam turbine.

The collapse of the old bureaucratic empires in the First World War as well as continued population growth threatening already declining life quality resulted in the rise of the total states. The Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany, organized on national-ideological and party structures, mobilized a proportion of their society for war only ever matched by the greatest of nomadic empires such as Chingis Khan’s. They were the culmination of the five-century long process of economic and military mobilization that had begun in the 15th century AD. The Germans, Japanese, and Soviets failed to realize that advances in chemical fertilizers as well modernity’s socially & pharmaceutically-induced birth rate decline would obviate their fears. Rather than modernity ushering in an era of unprecedented bloodshed, the fertilizer industry and Green Revolution ensured a prosperous early 21st century - even if state capacity seems to have fallen as the memory of the total states recedes from experience into culture.

How will the Seventh Age end? Global warming offers new challenges, though advances in biotechnology may inadvertently release diseases that could devastate our species.

In summary:

First Age 9700-8300 BC - permanent revival of agriculture

First Fall 8300 BC - colder climate caused famine

Second Age 8300-6200 BC - animal domestication

Second Fall 6200 BC - floods around the world

Third Age 6200-4400 BC - hydrology and irrigation, the mixing in the Middle East

Third Fall 4400 BC - hunter-gatherer resurgence in Europe and North Africa

Fourth Age 4400-3000 BC - Copper and urbanization

Fourth Fall 3000 BC - plague and Indo-European conquests

Fifth Age 3000-800 BC - Bronze and globalization

Fifth Fall 1200 BC - Bronze Age Collapse

Sixth Age 800 BC-800 AD - Iron, Classical Age, and Late Antiquity

Sixth Fall - Fall of the Roman Empire, Avars, spread of Islam and Christianity

Seventh Age 800 AD-present

Seventh Fall ???? AD - bioerror? nuclear war? robot insurrection?

Eighth Age ???? AD - ????