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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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We know very little directly, but what we do have from the bronze age in terms of written inscriptions is mostly kings boasting about how many thousands of people they killed in various inventive and horrifying ways, how many they carried off into slavery and how many they sacrificed to various deities. This was the propaganda being put out to impress the populace, which says something about the public morals of the day. And the fact that there were several empires maintaining major standing armies, all our evidence points to a time of significant, regular state violence on a mass scale. Many of our remaining bronze age-era human remains were killed, and many of the ones that weren't have healed wounds from repeated violence. Even Pharaohs were sometimes bashed in the head with a mace.

It may be the case that in the smaller societies which left much less historical footprint, violence was less than in settled cities. No way to really tell for sure. What we have says that these people were far more violent than most modern states before the collapse. Then things got worse.

A sample inscription from an Assyrian king:

In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of the heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.

I believe you and I fully accept that morality was highly different back then. But notably the two areas you referenced are Egypt and Assyria. What do we know about the Greeks? I would honestly totally accept just being pointed to archeology from then, I just haven't found much in my own casual online research.

The short answer is that greeks arguably don't exist in the bronze age. The language group moves down from the black sea mid-bronze age, shore hopping colonies into the Aegean onto Greece proper, but there were already people there. We can trace the language a bit, and we can trace the archaeology of various durable goods and burial practices, but we don't have a cohesive group of people we can call "greek" until perhaps late in the Bronze age, but even that is wobbly. It is not until after the Bronze Age Collapse that we get clear evidence of classical greeks (even then, half or more were in the Balkans, Turkey, Italy, etc.). Their myths (Troy, etc.) take place during the Bronze age, but at that stage, there weren't many of these people in Greece itself. At least parts of the greek migration south may have been the "Sea Peoples" of the collapse. There is a theory that the biblical Philistines were a proto-greek invasion/migration that was turned back by the Egyptians and settled in one of their hinterlands (the Gaza strip).