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Oh really? I was honestly unaware, my impression was very little had survived from that era at least in terms of writing.
I guess I'd misspoken here: I wasn't referring to Bronze Age peoples justifying their pillaging and looting, but others...the Romans, the British, the French, the Spanish. The Vikings. Plenty of documentation there, much of it in English, about exactly what these people thought as they pillaged and looted. It doesn't seem that much of a stretch to say that people in the Bronze Age were also pillaging and looting shamelessly.
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Modern museums have so many cuneiform tablets that most of them have not been published.
If you want literature, check Gilgamesh or the Enuma Elisha (Sinuhe has already been mentioned). If you're interested in morality, check law codices, like the Stela of Hammurabi.
But these are totally different places and eras. I'm talking about the society depicted in the Iliad, Greece around the 1100s. Maybe we could get hints at it from more contemporary literature from other places, but Gilgamesh is about a society 1000 years earlier.
I thought you wanted insight into the Bronze Age. My bad.
Sorry I should have been more specific I'm talking about Greece. At least my impression is that when far right folks invoke the Bronze Age, they are also mostly talking about Greece and using the Iliad vs Odyssey as primary material instead of Gilgamesh or the the Story of Sinuhe
I don’t have details on this, but I believe that there are a few Mycenaean Greek primary sources and that historians who study them broadly agree that the most high-status job in the society they depict was… pirate.
Haha what a resume padder. I would definitely be interested in reading more.
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I mean a lot of fedora tipping atheist scholars will try and date most of the Old Testament to slightly before or during the Babylonian Captivity at the earliest (so around 600 BC) but if you believe that Moses wrote the five books of Moses then that dates them solidly within the Bronze Age. And the books of Moses and Joshua are all about conquering the holy land because God gave it to them. That was their motivation, but their actual actions often involved completely eradicating the local populace, which isn't too far off from what we see bronze age morality as. Mind you I'm religious and have no issues with the Israelites wiping out the Canaanites but without the divine justification it would be pretty awful.
That's fair and to be clear I certainly wouldn't claim that ancient morality was the same as ours. But I'd also be skeptical that there was no change in culture or values across regions and time periods, and likewise would think there's a limit to what records from one era in Babylon could tell us about a different era in Greece. And if the books were actually written in the 600s then this would be fairly close to the time period the Iliad was written in itself, and I would even have the same questions about a (comparatively) modern culture writing moral narratives about a more ancient one.
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